The Secret of Taste: Derrida on Non-Appropriation
The Secret of Taste: Derrida on Non-Appropriation

Summary/Abstract: This article investigates taste in the corpus of Jacques Derrida, focusing on its emergence across published works and unpublished seminars. Starting from A Taste for the Secret and Economimesis, and through a close reading of Manger l’autre (1989–1990) and Rhétorique du cannibalisme (1990–1991), it follows the ways in which taste appears as an experience of auto-affection that maintains a structural relation to what exceeds and resists consumption. Rather than presenting taste as a pure alternative to appropriation, the article interprets it as a limit-experience in which contact, incorporation, and knowledge encounter what cannot be fully assimilated. It thus proposes to understand taste as a nonappropriative posture, capable of orienting the relation between aesthetics and ethics without resolving it into a normative synthesis. Approaching the seminars as a theoretical laboratory, the contribution shows how taste operates in Derrida’s thought as a critical instance with respect to any economy of appropriation.

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