The Rendering Operation: Decapitation Theory and the Construction of Meat on the Human Factory Farm
摘要
In this chapter I am interested in three dystopian novels—Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, Meat by Joseph D’Lacey, and Animals by Don LePan—each of which presents us with an immodest proposal: a world in which human beings have become the food animal of choice and the victims of industrial slaughter. For novelists to anthropomorphise the horror of factory farming and to subject human beings to the same Cartesian decapitation that separates us from animals is to write industrial slaughter as if they had invented it. Such a world begs difficult questions of an author, who is placed in the perverse position of having to justify its logic to an incredulous reader. By performing the construction of meat in front of us, each invites the reader to occupy the utopian thinking of the meat industry, and to resist it. Whether or not these novels also invite us to make the dreaded comparison, and to see in the logic of human slaughter the familiar logic of animal slaughter, is an open question, and one I consider in detail.