Death: Becoming Edible as an Act of Love

If Eros is constant transformation, surrendering to Eros means making peace with dying. An erotic ecology describes living relationships as love processes, but some of those relationships consist in individuals becoming edible to others.

What many perceive as the ‘violence’ of nature is the fact that in order to live we must accept death, both our own and the death of others. Without death there is no life. This is not a theoretical statement about biological objects: it is a biological necessity. If the identity of the self can only come about as a continuous transformation, it needs to constantly shed its form and emerge anew.

Paradoxically, self must become another in order to remain a self. This is the shortest description of death as an erotic process. It shows that death is a transition, not a clear-cut conclusion. It is the way a self keeps itself alive through the reformation of identity. We become soil which becomes plant matter which becomes food to another. The best way to understand death as a erotic transformation is by viewing it from the perspective of the gift: death enables me to give what has been part of myself away so that it can serve others. Every outbreath is a little death, as in it my embodied self sheds part of its carbon substance as CO2. An organism is dying, all the time, through its aliveness. It gives itself away and receives the gift of life from others. To be truly alive therefore means that we have to become edible.