Susreti sa ksenotkivom

Abstract

This essay introduces the concept “xenoflesh” with reference to three recent celebrated novels that are concerned with the consumption of meat: Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat (2008), J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007). The essay shows xenoflesh in these novels to be a troubling encounter with abject corporeal matter. Interrogating the classical distinction between bios and zoē (political and “bare life”) described by Giorgio Agamben, the essay theorizes xenoflesh as an unspeakable and occluded form of corporeality that is violently excluded from discourse by infrastructures and epistemes of meat consumption. The essay shows how industrial farming and meat constitute a fundamental mode of enforcing this division of the flesh across various economic and cultural spheres, and demonstrates how even in recent materialist philosophy meat functions as one of the most deeply inscribed modes of silencing the uncanny call of xenoflesh. Drawing from Deleuze’s concept of “aesthetic sensation”, the chapter shows how disorienting encounters with xenoflesh in D’Lacey’s, Coetzee’s and Han’s novels exemplify an emergent political and ethical poetics of the flesh.

Keywords

• flesh
• biopolitics
• meat
• poetics
• the uncanny