“The Human Flesh – cru ou cuit?”: aesthetico-culinary dimensions of the corpse

Abstract

The article treats the corpse, in the sense of dead human meat, as a culinary object, by trying to place it in the western culinary register; the assumption underlying this move implies a certain reduction, which changes the “naked body” into “naked meat”. As a demonstration of the thesis, artistic examples of exhibiting human meat are discussed that also show a certain symptomatic repulsion of the western subject towards its own naked meat, a repulsion which cannot be reduced to mere ethical, legal, or political dilemmas. The scope of the article is quite the contrary: to think human flesh reduced to its Shakespearian “pound of flesh”.