The end of human history is an event that has been foreseen or announced by both messianics and dialecticians. This is the fifth of his books published by Stanford previous titles are Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), The Man Without Content (1999), The End of the Poem (1999), and Potentialities (1999). Giorgio Agamben is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona. In The Open, contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben examines the ways in which, throughout the history of Western culture, man has been distinguished from animal, and in his inquiry discovers that the human arises not from the conjunction of a natural, living body and a divine or rational element, but rather through the workings of the Ã¢â¬Åanthropological machineÃ¢â¬? which produces man by means of a strategic, practico-political separation of humanity from animality. By challenging the human exceptionalist narrative of homo culinaris (the idea that “to cook is to be human”), this chapter proposes that The Devil’s Larder presents meat as a constellation of human, animal, vegetable and mineral forms that in turn advances a cross-elemental and inter-species paradigm of eating. This rhetoric of disgust is contextualized alongside the cultural history of the concept of “meat”, which has been used to bolster the ontological status of the human by figuratively transforming raw flesh (coded as abject, inedible and disgusting) into fodder for the anthropological machine.

Examining Crace’s “alimentary materialism” in a series of tableaus that produce digestive upsets, this chapter argues that by crossing the barriers of taste, Crace’s sensuous book utilizes disgust as an affective mode to rethink nonhuman and edible objects and environments. British author Jim Crace’s seventh novel, The Devil’s Larder, uniquely portrays food objects as materially agential forces.

Devils Larder by Jim Crace