The Necropolitics of Linguistic Indoctrination in Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh

Necropolitical control is fundamentally sustained through political rhetoric and engineered through the gradual erosion and redefinition of quotidian terms. Dystopian fiction is especially rife with imagining worlds where language is weaponized to subvert common topoi: from Orwellian doublespeak to Atwood’s scriptural euphemisms and Burgess’s invented slang. A contemporary novel that intensifies the linguistic tradition is Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh (2017), which depicts a society where cannibalism is a legally and socially accepted norm. In this novel, the state-sanctioned clinical vocabulary that reduces human beings to meat, heads, or products functions as a mechanism of systemic indoctrination that legitimizes the consumption of human flesh and universalizes the morally unacceptable. Through a discursive analysis of the text, this paper demonstrates how the establishment of this distinct linguistic mode enforces a necropolitical hierarchy. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s “necropolitics” to illuminate the structural sovereign mechanisms of state-sanctioned death and Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of “bare life” to explain the ontological reduction of consumable subjects, this article argues that engineered language, in tandem with institutional means of control, structurally stratifies society between the consumers and the consumed, and renders systemic violence morally permissible.