One thing that is very striking in early authors such as Hans Staden—whose book featured perhaps the most famous sixteenth-century woodcuts of cannibalistic feasts—is the easy elision of a cluster of things that Europeans consider uncivilized in the extreme, usually cannibalism, communal property, and incest. Why do they see these as a sort of package?

For two reasons. First is the influence of classical sources. To some extent, modern travel literature follows the conventions of the authors of classical antiquity such as, for instance, Herodotus, who describes the androphagoi as savages, nomads, cannibals, and as acknowledging no law. The second reason is theoretical. Natural man is, by definition, outside the bounds of the state. This means that whenever philosophers have imagined such a being, they arrived at this concept by eliminating the features that defined the experience of the citizen: property, law, domestic order.

The original Romanian title of the book, Filozoful crud, involved a play on words suggesting that philosophers themselves have been both the victims (to the extent that they are “raw”) and the perpetrators (to the extent that they are “cruel”) of cannibalism. This dual sense of the Romanian adjective crud cannot be carried over into English, but I’m left wondering what exactly you meant by it in the original. Is there a sense in which you think philosophers in modern history have found themselves in both of these two contrasting roles?

Modern philosophy co-exists with the specialized sciences. These are polished, sophisticated, “civilized,” if you wish. Philosophy has always had a hard time legitimizing itself in this context. As a discipline, it was cannibalized by sociology, logic, aesthetics, physics, economics, anthropology, and political science. For some, it has already melted into literature. For others, it could survive only inasmuch as it is focused on the game of language. My project was to recover—to capture—a tone, a standpoint more “primitive” than that of modern sciences. Philosophy was once the art of asking extreme, dangerous questions. The task of the philosopher is not simply to argue, as much of contemporary academic philosophy would want us to believe, but also to convince, to move, to stir and, eventually, to shake us to the core. This is the point where the cannibal enters the scene. He asks questions about the identity of the individual when the subject is on the verge of dissolution. He explores the possibility of an ethics without morals. He is the operator of anarchy on the background of social order. Philosophers have often entered the city under different guises, as foreigners, travelers, cynics, or unbelievers. The cannibal is just a part of a larger and complex history. He is not pleasant to look at. Yet, he opens for us the possibility of thinking anew about our values. To be on the cutting edge of thinking: that was the uncomfortable trade of the philosopher. That, I imagine, is to be a free spirit. It is to find food for thought where no one is looking. Or where everybody has been turned away.

What is next for cannibalism studies? Are there themes from the book that you would like to see developed further, by yourself or by someone else?

I am reluctant to advance a program. Scholarly research owes more to chance encounters that it often admits. I must say, though, that I would be interested to read a systematic analysis of how the non-Europeans have perceived, from a moral point of view, the diet of the Europeans. As for myself, I am now working on a different but related project, on the idea of anarchy and order in the Enlightenment.

In the book, you seek to draw a connection between, on the one hand, the transition from the figure of the cannibal to that of the filthy mendicant on the margins of society, as we move from the early modern period to, let’s say, the high modern period, and, on the other hand, the transition from natural-law theory to legal positivism. What is it about the shift in legal philosophy that explains the disappearance of the cannibal as a meaningful menace?

Classical, medieval, and early modern legal philosophy were more concerned with questioning the nature and the source of law. Is it of divine origin? Is it unchangeable? Universal? That is why the experiences of individuals or nations that seem not to live under the government of laws were as fascinating as they were productive from a theoretical point of view. Today, legal philosophers are more concerned with how laws are interpreted, by whom and to what effect. Laws are perceived like public goods that are always available for our consumption. Our predecessors were more skeptical in this respect.

In this connection, one cannot help but detect a fairly strong strain of remorse in the book for the loss of a natural-law framework for thinking about the various transgressions human beings make against one another, and arguably against themselves. Would you care to make more explicit than you do in the book your reasons for feeling that modern legal positivism marks a turn for the worse?

The goal of my book is not to make a decision in such venerable disputes as the one between universalism and relativism, but rather to refine our knowledge as to the context and the nature of some of these theoretical developments. But I also raise the question of the significance of the decline of natural law theories, and that led me to reflect on the status of the state as a moral subject. When sovereignty is liberated from the constraints of a higher law, then there are two options left: amoralism or the belief that the Good is immanent. The idea of the welfare state, for instance, seems to me such a perversion made possible by the instrumentalization of the idea of sovereignty. At its heart is the faith that the state is better than its citizens.