Hunger: Humiliation as a weapon of war

Abstract

The use of hunger as a means of humiliation in contexts of war constitutes a possibility that arises from the originary corporeal condition of human dignity. This thesis unfolds in three stages. First, I develop a description of hunger from the perspective of Husserlian corporeality. In the second section, this description leads to an anthropological analysis of satisfaction, drawing on the phenomenological concept of secondary sensibility and Marx’s notion of the conscious instinct. Within this framework, the intrinsic link between hunger and dignity becomes evident, revealing how it can be instrumentalized as a mechanism of torture and humiliation in the contemporary machine of war. The third and final section examines this dimension in detail.