"An animal that has tasted human flesh is not safe"

Body, anthropophagy and becoming-animal in Julia Ducournau's Grave

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the film Raw (France-Belgium, 2016) by director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau through some theoretical coordinates that guide us towards the problem of animality and the question about the posthuman condition. Articulating scenes from the film, fragments of interviews with the director and conceptual categories, we propose a reading that emphasizes the way in which the becoming-animal represented by the film questions the existing limits between what we ascribe to the category of human and what remains outside. The film provides critical elements to articulate possible answers to the interrogation left open by the end of the anthropological dream diagnosed by Michel Foucault. In this context, the Deleuzian-Guattarian notion of becoming-animal emerges as a posthuman figuration capable of disarticulating the position of inequality-promoting sovereignty assumed by the anthropos. The becoming-animal illustrated by the film challenges the carnophalogocentric universal that structures Western subjectivity as well as the dualisms that are subsidiary to it. The anthropophagy embodied by the protagonist of the film proposes an alternative mode of bonding that consists in the hybridization with those non-human affects, forces and intensities that the modern subject insists on abjecting with the aim of enthroning reason. Thus, the possibility suggested by the film leads us in the direction of a manner of being-in-the-world that problematizes the sacrificial bond established with otherness.