Daniel Birnbaum & Anders Olsoon, As a Weasel Sucks Eggs. An Essay on Melancholy and Cannibalism, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008.
Birnbaum and Olsson probe the (melancholic) dispositions of artists, poets and writers who search for a type of nourishment beyond the ordinary, beyond the rules and requirements of the community-binding meal — “either because they are outside the community, or because they have an appetite or hunger that consistently exceeds the boundaries of a culture’s sacrosanct regulatory scheme”.
“Laws apparently exist in order to prevent access, not only to the truth, but also to the blind beauty beyond consumerism”. Kafka, as Birnbaum and Olsson write, forced himself, in a way that proved fatal, beyond the law — in order to acheive that small bit of freedom that is needed to write — to find sustenance from the unseen nourishment of art. And thus we must understand the law in a broader sense than usual: as all the more or less obscure bonds or passwords or secret codes that have the power to create a community. It may have to do with food, sexuality, language, or social life as a whole.