Re-reading Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images: The Global Politics of (Not) Eating

Abstract

The many meals and food metaphors of Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images have hitherto (and only incidentally) been discussed as implicitly critical representations of various forms of 1960s bourgeois bad faith including unquestioning consumption, swallowing of media myths and flight from responsibility. However, this article shows how the novel can be re-read through images of (not) eating as a strikingly prescient reflection of how today's global marketplace is predicated on exploitative cycles of consumption. Demonstrating the untapped interpretive potential of eating, food is shown to link advertising, conflict in self-Other relations and domestic political wrangling with French co-implication in the slave trade, colonialism and neo-colonialism. Considering how the unanswered questions revolving around (not) eating which punctuate Les Belles Images intersect with Lacan's figuring of lack and the return of the repressed, this re-reading of the text shows how food-related trauma at once fuels the novel and, enduringly, the inequities of global food supply.