Dining as a ‘Limit Experience’: Jouissance and Gastronomic Pleasure as Cinematographic and Cultural Phenomena

Abstract

It is with this gustatory pleasure, the soft crumbling of a delicate shell-shaped citrus tea cake upon the tongue, that Marcel Proust launches his magnum opus, In Remembrance of Things Past, his narrator transported untold distances in memory by the extraordinary, incomprehensible and exquisite pleasure of the senses visited upon him. But while both the excessive and unexpected pleasure of this iconic moment and the exquisite pain of memory and loss invade Proust’s narrator, the dangerously orgiastic potential of true jouissance remains nevertheless contained — rare is the occasion when a literary character surrenders himself to the uncontained joy and pleasure of gourmandise. Yet this is precisely the topic of Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande Bouffe where four friends reunite for a weekend of unadulterated pleasure — their plan is to dine themselves to death; their unlimited jouissance, in the true Lacanian sense, takes them from the pleasures of the feast to the intended fulfilment of their collective suicide. Highly controversial at the time of its release, the film remains unabashedly excessive, marking one of the most unmediated cinematic relationships between food, pleasure and death.

[…] mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.

(Proust, 1982: 48)