We are what we eat:

considerations on the limits between human and non-human in Cadaver Exquisito by Agustina Bazterrica

Abstract

The present work seeks to analyze the boundaries that differentiate humans and non-humans in the dystopia Cadaver Exquisito (2018), by the Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica. This interest takes place insofar as the work is organized around the complete dissolution of what characterizes the human being as such with the intention of relegating him to the animal world and thus enabling the central issue of fiction: institutionalized cannibalism. For this, the ways in which the book imposes this reduction on the animal will be analyzed, both through the production mechanisms of the meat industry - which can even, in a certain way, be seen as a form of necropolitical operation - and through of the re-signification of language. Based on these analyses, the objective is to show how Bazterrica's work dialogues with the way in which humans currently consume themselves, metaphorically, within the capitalist system, and how the limits between human and animal can be rethought as constituents of this system.