The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
taste is taken to mean common sense. In 1970 Hannah Arendt gave a series
of lectures on Kant in which she formulated a political interpretation of the
Critique of Judgement and linked the notion of common sense to that of
community. She reminds us that until 1787 the work was called Critique
of Taste, and indeed taste is central to the whole work, which, even though
not overtly political, picks up on the revolutionary climate in Europe after
the French and American Revolutions, a climate in which critical thought
had political implications (Arendt 1982: 61). ‘Thinking critically,’ she
writes, ‘carving out a path between unfounded prejudices, opinions or convictions,
is an age-old concern of philosophy’ (59). Kant himself was obviously
well aware of the origin of philosophy in critical thought, and Arendt
believes that he extended this philosophical prerogative to the public, communicative
sphere (69).
In Arendt’s reading of Kant the relation between taste and common
sense is actuated through language as public communicability. The communicability
of taste lies not in the content of a judgement, but in the form
of a representation; in other words, it is a condition of the possibility of
representation itself. Arendt here plays with the meaning of the word
‘taste’ as related to the five senses, and argues that while sight, touch and
hearing perceive things in a direct and ‘objective’ way, smell and taste
convey internal sensations which are difficult to communicate (1952: 98).
So how is it, Arendt asks, that the sense of taste – starting with Graciàn,
but above all in Kant – has been elevated to the spiritual faculty of judgement?
The answer is to be found in the fact that taste, like the palate, gives
free reign to the imagination, to the faculty of ‘making present what is
absent’, an operation defined by Kant as ‘reflection’ (1982: 99). And imagination
is only possible through inter-subjectivity: ‘one has to be alone in
order to think, but one needs to be in company to enjoy [sic: taste] a meal’
(Barthes 1975 xxxix).
The ‘dialogue’ between Arendt and Kant is particularly interesting from
a semiotic perspective. Imagination, as the faculty of making present what
is absent, which is triggered by common sense, indicates the possibility of
something functioning as a sign: semiosis, sign-work. Taste as physical sensation
is described by Barthes, in his reading of Brillat-Savarin, in terms of
the relation between taste and language:
Brillat-Savarin speaks, and I desire the things he speaks of (especially if I’m
hungry). Since the desire stimulated by the gastronomic utterance is apparently
simple, the utterance presents the power of language in all its ambiguity: the sign
evokes the delights of its referent the very moment in which it charts their
absence. (Barthes 1978: xxxix)
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