It's Always Sunny in the Marquis de Sade's Ass: Of Cannibalism and Hospitality

Oh it's you again.. welcome back!

So today it's always sunny in Philadelphia again, this time we're (loosely) talking about the first episode of Season 4, Mac and Dennis: Manhunters (2008).
Jake found  in it a certain brilliance, by which I mean a glowing excuse mainly to talk about de Sade... oh, and to push his Cannibalist agenda.

The cannibal appears originally as an ethnic reference, identified by the European colonist, before mushrooming into a particularly nasty (and suspiciously useful) metonym of the  good ol' 'savage.' With them good ol' Christians rushing to bring civilizing  light to the darkest continent, humbly accepting the enormous gains in Real Estate that such a charity mission necessitates (but only until such times as it can be re-entrusted to the reformed savages). In short, ripping land away from the savage mirrors itself in the limb-tearing savage, where one ripoff claims superiority over another: the cannibal becomes the "modern" foil to the andro-euro-fantasy  that underwrites modernity.

"We" also discuss the Marquis de Sade's Juliette, where we find Minski, the wholly-depraved "white cannibal," who holds on to the virtue of hospitality so tightly that he squeezes out its vicious underbelly. What is absolute hospitality in the case of the cannibal?  What does it mean to be a "white cannibal" (i.e. a cannibal who legitimately owns Real Estate)? Is it ok to play with your food?
Serious stuff over here.

Another theme that came up and refused to go down was  how cannibalism originally seems to be a homo-social activity, a transaction between men that carries meaning (like the incorporation of a defeated enemy). We left this strand hanging because we noticed that placing the burden of a civilizing foil on a taboo against maneating, begs to question what happened to the (supposedly central) taboo of 'civilization,' namely the sexual one (incest).

Next time we plan to come back to this strand.

Stars abused this time around: Beast and Sovereign; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; WWJD (a bit, something about the Eucharist and why the real Jesus didn't ask to be eaten after death).