This essay defines the concept “xenoflesh” and the related aesthetic and critical terms “vegan poetics,” and “Capitalocene meat.” It does so by exploring three recent celebrated novels that are concerned with the consumption of meat: Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat, J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Building from the classical distinction between bios and zoē (political and “bare life”) described by Giorgio Agamben, the essay theorizes an occluded flesh that is violently excluded from discourse: xenoflesh. It shows how industrial farming and meat constitute a fundamental mode of enforcing this division of the flesh across modernity. The essay argues that D’Lacey’s, Coetzee’s, and Han’s novels forge a new mode of flesh poetics: an ethical, speculative, and ecological aesthetics that investigates how meat is one of the most deeply inscribed modes of silencing the uncanny call of xenoflesh. Prefixing the flesh of creaturely being with the Greek “xeno-” (from xenos, meaning “stranger,” “other,” “foreign,” “alien,” and “guest”), xenoflesh conceptualizes the strange and obscured continuum of our own fleshy alterity-to-ourselves with that of other flesh creatures. Developing cross-species kinships, as Donna Haraway theorizes, is a vital task of the Capitalocene.
