Congist'26: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Crisis

“Thoughts Were Had”: Cannibalism and the Crisis of the Human Subject in Post-apocalyptic Narratives

D1-S2-A7

13 May 2026, 16:35

20m

A7 (Istanbul University Faculty of Letters)

Oral Presentation Session 2.2 (Day 1)

Speaker

Bilge Ece Çizmeci (Brock University)

Description

Drawing on “the anthropological machine” (Giorgio Agamben) and “arrogant anthropocentrism” (Lori Gruen), this article scrutinizes the crisis of the “Human”. Following Val Plumwood, crisis here is understood as the crisis of a cultural mind that is extractive, exploitative, and ecologically irrational (Environmental Culture 2013), manifesting itself, among other ways, in the ecological collapse, demanding attention to our ecological embeddedness and the necessity of care. Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Tender is the Flesh (2017) and David Macaulay’s graphic novel BAAA (1985) employ cannibalism as a trope, much like Jonathan Swift’s "A Modest Proposal" (1729), to shock and defamiliarize readers, provoking reflection on how certain bodies are rendered exploitable, killable and consumable. Informed by critical animal studies and posthumanist theory, I argue that in these post-apocalyptic novels, cannibalism functions as a critical device that unsettles readers and compels them to rethink the Human subject; its presumed singularity and relations with other beings. As Plumwood argues, this relationality has been historically constructed in hegemonic and dualistic ways that efface the nonhuman others on which human life depends. Read through Carol J. Adams’s concept of the “absent referent” and Agamben’s anthropological machine, I contend that these narratives expose the normalization of violence and the crisis of the Human, while opening possibilities for post-anthropocentric relationality. While bleak in their portrayal of humans, both works gesture toward thinking and perceiving beyond anthropocentric paradigms. As Patricia MacCormack notes, “What matters is how we can still care for and in this world” (The Ahuman Manifesto 9), highlighting the urgency of change and ethical perseverance in the crisis of the Human. Cannibalism thus becomes “food for thought” to reimagine the "Human" and cultivate “entangled empathy” (Gruen) toward lives otherwise deemed expendable.