Xeno-Economy

Xeno-economy is the economy of assimilation in which an ingested object transforms the subject without becoming wholly identical to it. Robin Mackay and Reza Negarestani assemble the concept from Dorothée Legrand's phenomenology of anorexia, Manabrata Guha's account of the alien transplant and Sándor Ferenczi's model of assimilation. Food can be classified neither solely by absorption as nutrient nor solely by expulsion as waste; it installs a polyvalent, nested chemical relation inside the consumer (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 26–27, 37).

Digestion without resolution

The xeno-economical object resists full assimilation. It produces the subject from inside while preventing the subject from completing its return to self. Food is vague in Guha's account and ambivalent in Legrand's; in both, digestion cannot conclusively decide where the object ends and the subject begins (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 27–28). Repletion is therefore not closure. The eater devours the object and is internally devoured by it.

This model destabilises the culinary cogito I am what I eat. If eating incorporates extra-subjective chemistry, the first-person identity asserted by the formula is an effect of relations it does not own. Alien traces remain as encrypted routes into the culinary continuum, so even apparently completed digestion carries a chemical ancestry forward (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 27–28). In this limited sense the body is an archive of unfinished meals.

Legrand's anorectic sharpens the problem by attempting to produce an integrated identity through controlled non-eating. Eating ordinarily foregrounds a body experienced at once as subject, object and anonymous material; refusal seeks a victory over this constitutive tension, but thereby reveals how strongly identity depends on dietary administration (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 24–26). Xeno-economy is not a clinical explanation of anorexia. The editorial uses anorexia as an extreme phenomenological disclosure of a relation present in eating generally.

CONTRADICTION The introduction contrasts Hegel's account, in which digestion overcomes the foreign body and restores animal individuality, with Guha, Ferenczi and Legrand, for whom digestion interiorises an object that remains chemically transformative and partly alien (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 26–28). Xeno-economy names the latter model; it does not reconcile the two.