Cannibalistic Capitalism: Societal Collapse in Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh
Cannibalistic Capitalism: Societal Collapse in Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh

Summary/Abstract: This article examines Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh as a dystopian allegory that challenges speciesist hierarchies and re-conceptualizes relationality within contemporary systems of consumption, commodification, and social transformation. The novel presents a post-apocalyptic world where a virus has supposedly contaminated all animal meat, leading to the normalization of breeding and consuming humans, known as “heads”. The analysis first connects Bazterrica’s grotesque vision to broader critiques of capitalism, arguing that the novel literalizes Nancy Fraser’s concept of cannibal capitalism, a system that devours its own social and ecological foundations. This aligns with Jason W. Moore’s notion of the Capitalocene, which frames capitalism as a system that devalues nature, labor, and life itself into expendable resources. The article then highlights how the society presented in the novel employs a chilling bureaucratic and linguistic system to render human beings as mere commodities, a process representing the mechanisms of denial inherent in a carnistic ideology. Through its exploration of linguistic sanitization and bodily mutilation, the novel exposes how violence is normalized when it is made morally and economically convenient. The article further argues that this manipulation of the human-animal division is a powerful tool of control, reinforcing societal hierarchies and reflecting historical instances where power dynamics dictated who was deemed fully human. The protagonist’s internal struggle with the treatment of “heads” reflects how individual morality and consciousness can endure against systemic dehumanization. The article analyzes this by referring to Rosi Braidotti’s perspective on biopolitical control, where advanced capitalism penetrates life on a biological level, turning the genetic code of living matter into a form of capital. Ultimately, the novel compels a posthuman reading, challenging human exceptionalism and revealing a shared vulnerability among all organic beings within an exploitative system.

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