Being at Threshold: Reading The Vegetarian Before Power and Beyond Human

by Tina Qian

          When metamorphosis takes place in the mind rather than the body, the understanding of both madness and being itself are unsettled. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian traces a psychic metamorphosis through Yeong-hye’s refusal to consume meat, catalyzing her withdrawal from socio-familial and ultimately, humane orders. As her psychic metamorphosis renders her increasingly intelligible within normative frameworks, Yeong-hye becomes a subject to moral and ethical condemnation, psychiatric confinement, and biopolitical regulation.
          Drawing on theories from Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Julia Kristeva, this paper will discuss how Yeong-hye’s psychic metamorphosis produces an epistemic disjuncture between the world and her, and how such a rupture renders the human form itself unbearable to itself?. Beyond staging familiar oppositions (madness/sanity, human/nonhuman, speech/silence), The Vegetarian reveals how being actively seeks alterity by remaking its psychic-ontological constitution when it can no longer inhabit coherent or imaginable forms. Yeong-hye’s being in The Vegetarian might appear deviant, dysfunctional, collapsed, or even annihilative, yet it is precisely through such withdrawal and disengagement that her ontology is reconstituted. Through this negation of normalized personhood, her character radiates a radical, paradoxical vitality that evades the social, moral, and bio/thanatopolitical parameters of human. The Vegetarian reorients the question of resistance: if madness is anchored as a site of resistance in the discourse of biopolitics, its full potency is reduced to an absolute other that is, indeed, integratable into the normative order. Reading The Vegetarian thus poses a possibility to resist the recuperation of madness as resistance.

I. Madness from Prodromal Stage to Onset: A Foucauldian Reading
          The first two sections in the novel, “The Vegetarian” and “Mongolian Mark”, traverse a Foucauldian paradigm in which madness is recognized through moral structures, whether in Yeong-hye’s disobedience of familial order or her non-volitional departure from sexual ethics. The finale “Flaming Trees” presents what happens in the aftermath of episodes of madness and irrationality: silence and the residues of an anthropological life. 
          The onset of deviance starts from within rather than externally. In The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye’s behavior is interpreted as deviance and dysfunction only after she remains unresponsive under interrogations. Standing in front of the fridge at midnight, Yeong-hye is found by her husband “barefoot, in thin summer nightwear, ramrod straight as though perfectly oblivious” to his questions (Han 13). What unsettles the husband (who remains unnamed in the novel) is not only Yeong-hye’s refusal to serve him breakfast and her cessation of consuming all kinds of meat, but her “unnaturally serene face” and her “incongruously firm voice” maintained under his interrogations, as well as the echoes in her speech— for example, her repetitive mention of a dream, which he selectively dismisses (17). The dream, depicted from Yeong-hye’s point of view, appears through fragments and is never fully ascribed meaning by either Yeong-hye or the author. Yeong-hye’s dream directly engages scenes of violence and murderer/murdered, containing blood, a painfully vivid shot of joyful meat consumption, and cannibalistic scenes soaked in guilt and uncanniness. 
          The husband is not the only figure who is unsettled. When Yeong-hye’s family (with her parents, husband, sister In-hye and brother-in-law) gather for a casual lunch, she still refuses to eat meat. After rounds of mild and harsh persuasions, her father “mashed the pork to pulp on [Yeong-hye’s] lips as she struggled in agony,” struck her with force and fed her with the pork. Yeong-hye “growled and spat out the meat” with an “animal cry of distress” (46). Yeong-hye then turns to cut herself with a fruit knife instead of directly fleeing this distressful family gathering. This act that might be seen as borderline symbolic in contemporary clinical psychology—the impulsivity, the emotional dysregulation and her social incongruity presented early in this novel—does not lead to Yeong-hye’s hospitalization. Is this act an active suicidal attempt, to put it in clinical terms, or a gesture of resistance? And can the absence of clinical significance justify hospitalization, force regulation, and the denial of her right to abandon life? The question appears particularly relevant from In-hye’s perspective, as she later becomes Yeong-hye’s legal guardian. What finally prompts hospitalization is the incident in “Mongolian Mark,” where In-hye discovers a tape of Yeong-hye lying naked with flowers painted across her body, entwined with In-hye’s husband (Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law), who had filmed the scene. Here, Yeong-hye’s suggestibility to vegetal life is exploited by her brother-in-law, who aestheticizes her impulses and converts them to an ethically transgressive sexual act. If her disobedience—her vegetarianism—was regarded as the prodromal stage of madness, then her detachment from the anthropological configuration marks its formal onset. 
          What Yeong-hye experiences recapitulates the classical paradigm Michel Foucault outlines in the History of Madness. Michel Foucault argues the inter-networked power of a psychiatric institution in the classical age, stipulating that it is not only capable of administering commerce and economics, but also morality. The essential justification for confinement, according to Foucault, is moral constraint and improvement that obliges one to work. Foucault’s work on the General Hospital reveals one important aspect of modern psychiatric ethics: the General Hospital was not simply a refuge nor a “forced labour workshop” but “a moral institution destined to punish and castigate a certain ‘void’ of conscience, which was not serious enough to be brought before a human court, but which the severity of penance alone was insufficient to correct” (Foucault, 73). The “void” of conscience emerges not as a judicial offense severe enough to merit criminal conviction, but as a scandalous deviation that justifies hospitalization. The General Hospital is thus transformed into an ethical institution, a moral and material apparatus of repression—“a moral ascesis, a punishment, and the sign of a certain disposition of the heart” (Foucault, 73). This logic of madness carries into the nineteenth century, where, as Vieda Skultans observes, families themselves directly meddle with institutionalization through moral judgment and condemnation. According to Skultans, the morally insane describes those who “persistently disregards the obligations of [their] position and family” were “consigned to institutions not because they were violent, but because their conduct disrupted the harmony of the household” (Skultans, 121-123). 
          The family gathering in The Vegetarian captures Yeong-hye as an ethically condemned subject that fails to operate the moral functions—agreeableness and obedience—in a family setting. Her behavior was initially interpreted as moral deviance, rather than clinical pathology, that provokes panic and angst culminating in her father’s disciplinary violence. Forcefeeding, what follows discipline and recurs later in the novel, mirrors a classical, corrective function. It is noteworthy that the fundamental reasons why Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism requires correction is her lack of a legible motivation Her dream of violence and murder is not heard and acknowledged by the cannibalistic structures of patriarchy. A cognitive asymmetry bars possible interpretations of Yeong-hye’s nightmarish flashbacks: a normative notion of vegetarianism often links to an ethical-ecological commitment instead of a preconscious, trauma-induced avoidance. A normative comprehension of sexual ethics, likewise, cannot account for the vegetal impulse that draws Yeong-hye toward a resurrective, non-human life. 
          In “The Correctional World”, Foucault proposes that a “new sensibility” emerges within familial structures, where family is abided by an ethics of sexual and matrimonial laws that draws a dividing line between reason and unreason (Foucault, 90). This new sensibility designates family as an ethical tribunal to interpret deviance in terms of sexual propriety, marital duty, and reproductive obligations—all of which Yeong-hye discards after her turn toward vegetarianism. Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism exhibits a quality exceeding dietary refusal: she imagines a total vegetal mode of being, where she is able to relinquish the human body and inhabit an arboreal existence, which her physical form disallows. Once she adopts the imaginary vegetal form of life, everything outside this realm recedes into meaninglessness and constitutes the “void” of her conscience. What Yeong-hye reduces to null, which nonetheless carries a real, moral weight, centers on two major pillars: sex and death, with the former precipitating her hospitalization, and the latter rendering her entirely unintelligible and external to orders. 

II. Flaming Trees: Traversing Madness, Rebuilding Sovereignty

                  ​

​

​​​​​

​

          After being hospitalized in Ch’ukseong Psychiatric Hospital, Yeong-hye goes missing. Before In-hye’s arrival, she is found “in an isolated spot deep in the woods covering the mountain slope, standing there stock-still and soaked with rain as if she herself were one of the glistening trees” (Han 129). She imagines herself as a plant and refuses to ingest any food but water. In “Society Must be Defended”, Foucault argues that sovereign power no longer contains an equilibrium in the right of life and death like the old sovereignty that “take[s] life or let live”; instead, it inverts to  “ make life and let die” (Foucault, 1441). Yeong-hye exists within such a biopolitical imperative where her life is constantly regulated, constrained and managed, and her anthropological withdrawal a pathological symptom to be neutralized. Her being endures through the enforcement of living, through intravenous forcefeeding, injections, and medical routines that override her psychic recurrence—refusal. 
          In the psychiatric hospital, Yeong-hye becomes a body, a veined machine to be kept alive. The enforced persistence of life—or more precisely, the compelled endurance of human life that can be acted upon without limit—constitutes what Giorgio Agamben identifies as “bare life,” “life that may be killed but not sacrificed,” a judico-political condition in which law and violence become indistinguishable in relation to the subject (114). Building upon Foucault’s biopolitics, Agamben argues for a thanatopolitics that dissolves the boundary between decisions of life and death: the line between life and death no longer appears as “a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones,” and the sovereign now enters into an “intimate symbiosis” dealing with all aspects of the everyday (122). While Foucault’s biopolitics explain how Yeong-hye’s life becomes the object of medical preservation—through discipline, monitoring, and force-feeding—it does not fully account for the other side of her existence: the suspension of her agency, a form of abandonment that resembles exclusion and exception without granting exemption. She is made to live but barred from deciding either her life or her death; she is maintained whole by biopolitical procedures, while symbolically excluded as an illegitimate subject. In this sense, Yeong-hye inhabits both modalities of modern power, biopolitically and thanatopolitically, yet neither framework is sufficient to encapsulate her ontological condition. 
          Agamben might come closer to capturing Yeong-hye’s ontological constitution by pointing to a zone of indistinction that manifests not only the coalescence of care, coercion, and control, but also the dissolution of forms. Agamben provides an alternative explanation for the relation between bare life and power. In Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, where being itself becomes unified and irreducibly its own, Agamben points out there are certain states of being that is not available to sovereign decision:

​

​

          In The Vegetarian, the body becomes a battleground of power and bio-/thanato-politics, yet Yeong-hye’s being, her turn toward a vegetal form, eludes sovereign power completely. This is the moment when the “state of exception become the rule”—she slips out of all potentialities assigned to her and enters into a realm outside all relational, political, and symbolic meaning. What should be noted here is that the novel is intentionally rendered to be disorienting?: Yeong-hye’s voice never reemerges in the final section. 
          What readers encounter comes from a negative space where a single truth of madness remains convoluted. Yeong-hye never says “yes” to either life or death. She struggles between life and death and becomes legible neither as subject nor as object in all sense of meaning. The primary questions to be addressed are not what she is, but how she is structured so that she is able to evade meaning, relationally, politically, and symbolically. This concurs with what Julia Kristeva describes “the lapse of the Other” that shows through the breakdown of objects of desire, where Yeong-hye becomes the abject:
       

In Kristeva’s framework that unsettles the status of both subjects and objects, Yeong-hye may find her place as an abjected Other—inseparable from the anthropological configuration she has already disrupted, contaminated by the traumatic encounter with and reflexes of patriarchal violence, condemned by the moral-familial, psychiatric regime, and positioned at the boundary of what is (and is not) assimilable and thinkable. Kristeva’s abject appears after violence and annihilation: “The abject is the violence of mourning for an ‘object’ that has always already been lost… Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new significance.” (Kristeva, 15) 
          This paper is not solely concerned with the topography of madness or its ethical landscape. Both Foucault and Agamben presuppose a subject who has already internalized symbolic rules and occupies a recognizable human teleology—one who can be normalized, excluded, or abandoned so that any refusal will be read as resistance or rebellion. Both offer powerful accounts of Yeong-hye as a subject situated either in opposition to or within the realm of power, such that her non-cooperation, her cognitive asymmetry, and her withdrawal appear as evidence of resistance. Kristeva unsettles the symbolic order that permits this framing. She challenges the assumption that Yeong-hye’s behavior must be read through the language of resistance or opposition. 
          In Kristeva’s theory of abjection, Yeong-hye, to begin with, is never fully anchored in either biopolitical or thanatopolitical structures. She moves through the world asymmetrically—cognitively, morally, and affectively—so that her refusals cannot be seen as acts against power but rather as the residuals of an ontological failure to register within the symbolic order. It is this pre-symbolic indifference, captured by Kristeva’s notion of the abject, that offers a potential account for Yeong-hye’s mode of being. She exists as abject before meaning and before the distinctions that make subject and object intelligible. 

III. Back to Life: Abjection & Arboreal Fantasy
 

​

​

          During her time at Ch’ukseong Psychiatric Hospital as Yeong-hye’s legal guardian, In-hye comes closer to understanding her sister’s psychic breakdown and metamorphosis. As the one who had sent both her husband and Yeong-hye into hospitals, she undergoes a drastic epistemic shift as she confronts the biopolitical violence enacted against her sister—acts carried out entirely against her will—and can no longer see the world through her previously normative standards. Toward the end of the novel, when the staff force feeds Yeong-hye again and attempts to inject her with tranquilizer, In-hye intervenes and voices the “no” that Yeong-hye had uttered innumerable times to no avail. Shortly after, In-hye recalls the moment in which she saw Yeong-hye’s and her husband’s bodies—that they seemed “no longer belonged to human beings” and “as though they were trying to shuck off the human” (Han 182). What In-hye captures is exactly where the epistemic disjuncture emerges. 
          In-hye eventually grasps the unstable subjecthood that is never able to land a concrete form in the symbolic order that reigns the female body, behavior, desire, and utterance. Indeed, Yeong-hye returns to a primordial psychic state in the novel’s opening, where her nightmares surge in and overwhelm her. The blood, violence, animality, and indistinguishable bodily forms mark the moment where the symbolic order first intervenes upon her psyche; this traumatic encounter with the abject—where she becomes horrified, estranged, and unmoored—grounds her subsequent unraveling. Within this dream-space, where violence is omnipresent, the body endangered, and the self-permeable, Yeong-hye has already begun a pre-conscious, pre-symbolic turn toward vegetarianism as a way back to the Kristevan purity as a necessary reaction to abjection and away from the violence in flesh. The vegetal impulse—the desire for transformation, transcendence, and an inverted mode of perception—constitutes Yeong-hye’s metamorphic identity. Her arboreal fantasy signals a withdrawal from the Symbolic Order: not a full departure but a liminal positioning in which she has “ceased to be circumscribed, reasoned with, thrust aside” (Kristeva 15). She occupies the threshold where the distinction between life and death collapses into a more radical indeterminacy between being and un-being. What remains in the wake of this unintelligibility is not liberation nor emancipation through meaning but an erosion of it—meaninglessness, wor(l)dlessness, that reverberates In-hye’s unfinished question on their way out from Ch’ukseong Psychiatric Hospital: 

​

​

          Perhaps this is all kind of a dream. In the end of The Vegetarian, Han may be implying the resistant nature of Yeong-hye’s being, yet the object of resistance is never illuminated. To locate and anchor Yeong-hye through narrativization and textual configuration, then, risks enacting another form of violence—one that overwrites her trace under the demand for intelligibility. The Kristevan notion of abjection, rather than posturing Yeong-hye’s withdrawal as resistance within contemporary biopolitics, names the moment during which the act of reading itself begins to falter. To read Yeong-hye as abject is not to situate her within another theoretical category, but to confront the persistent temptation to reinscribe her within structures that reflexively refuse her. In this sense, abjection does not offer a framework capable of symmetrically receiving her withdrawal or rendering it fully interpretable. Instead, it exposes the instability that precedes meaning, intention, and ethical positioning. To read The Vegetarian at this threshold is to enter a space where interpretation risks becoming complicit in violence. Any attempt to stabilize abjection as theory is already a betrayal of its force. What remains is the untenable finitude of explanation.
          The Vegetarian presents a circumstance where interpretations consistently fail as life starts to deviate and the human form ceases to be a viable form of existence. It signifies the disintegration of the surrounding world: when Yeong-hye ceases to eat meat, she becomes the locus of blame, an object of kitsch desire, and a site of interpretation that renders her deviant, mad, and ultimately non-human—an existential metamorphosis enacted through the scrutiny of others. Yeong-hye’s acts of deviation unexpectedly endow others power to define her and, more importantly, open up spaces of immense potential to explain, interpret, and analyze her condition. However, others’ attempts to interpret Yeong-hye’s transformation constantly fail. Throughout the novel, Yeong-hye’s voice is seldom heard. It is submerged beneath and suppressed by the patriarchal-familial order, refracted and mediated by an aestheticized phallocentric gaze and misread by those who inhabit the normative symbolic structure that cannot register her refusal. Han selectively allows Yeong-hye’s voice to surface across three sections of the book: while the first two sections allow readers to glimpse her interiority through a third-person limited point of view, her voice recedes into silence entirely when it comes to the last section. Despite Yeong-hye’s repeated refusal to be force-fed and injected, she remains almost motionless and inaudible. Han intended to show “how she [Yeong-hye] is observed, hated, misunderstood, pitied and objectified”, and Yeoong-hye’s truth “emerges from these misunderstandings” (Han). 
          What remains at stake is not whether clear distinctions can or should be drawn between these conceptual pairs—between deviation and madness, reason and unreason, being and unbeing. The question is not primarily descriptive, but metaphysical. Yeong-hye’s world is a metonymic and mimetic one—one that resists capture, translation into symbolic meaning, and reception by interpretive structures that insist upon making sense of her. She appears instead as a cessation of the demand for meaning. 

​

Works Cited

​

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, California Stanford University Press, 1998.

Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. 1961. London, Routledge, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended. Translated by David Macey, reprinted in The Norton Anthology of Theory           and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al., 2nd ed., W.W. Norton, 2010, pp. 1440-1450. 

Han, Kang. The Vegetarian. Translated by Deborah Smith, London, Granta, 2018.

Han, Kang. “I Never Imagined The Vegetarian Would Find So Many Readers.” The Booker Prizes, The Booker Prize                     Foundation, 28 July 2023, https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/han-kang-interview-i-never-imagined-the-vegetarian-would-find-so-many

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York, Columbia University Press, 1982.

Skultans, Vieda. Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth Century. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.