Politics of Edibility: Reconceptualizing Ecological Relationality

Taking the Infinity Burial Project (IBP) as its inspiration, this essay theorizes a politics of edibility by way of decomposing the discursive boundaries erected between human bodies and environments. In particular, this essay reads the IBP as a deconstruction of another dualism—eater/eaten—that permeates and informs cultural practices from birth to burial. Mobilizing a rhetoric of carnality, the IBP decomposes the human body's relation to its environments, merging its statuses as eater and eaten. At the same time, this rhetoric of carnality also emphasizes the irreducibly productive nature of consumption as an articulatory practice in its own right. As this essay argues, a politics of edibility not only recognizes the superficiality of the body/environment and eater/eaten dichotomies but it also respects the relations generated in the wake of their deconstruction.