DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.5| TAVAKOLI: BUTTA LA PASTICHE!_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 36 hetics or affect rather than their material output—allows for an exploration of how efforts to protect the local instead come to reassert and reify the national without cy­nically reducing such technological systems to the result of, at best, false consciousness or, at worst, outright chauvinism. I don’t mean to say that we are not at risk of fee­ding nationalism on a diet of protected food. Indeed, I would like to suggest that the danger of feeding na­tionalism is greater for the fact that it can be born out of—as Camp would indicate—“harmless fun”. A Race to the Finish Ending his recitation of 14th century poetry, Cecchini addresses his audience directly with an urgent mes­sage.“In a world ever more filled with supermarkets”, he says from behind a butcher’s block topped with a stomach, a liver, and a bone saw,“and with butchers who are practically considered a race in extinction, and perhaps they actually are, I am convinced that butchers instead are actually the most delicate ring in the food chain, the most delicate link[…] But I am here as well to tell you that I do not want my world to end. I am here to tell you that butchers are an es­sential part in the world of food. They are my race.” 15 ciotechnical systems affords the inclusion of a kind of dangerous politics stripped of its own warning signs. There is an irony to Cecchini’s verse of choice. Found at the end of the fifth canto, the lines are drawn from a response given by the soul of Francesca da Rimini to a troubled Dante who asks“in the time of gentle sighs/ with what and in what way did Love allow you / to recognize your still uncertain longings?” 16 This is the second circle of Hell, containing the souls of those damned for their lustfulness. In contrast to its modern connotation, to be lustful in the Republic of Florence was not to be driven by lecherous desire but to love recklessly. To put contemporaneous ideas into contemporary words, what Dante asks the no­blewoman is how we know ourselves to be smitten when love is a sentiment that exists beyond reason, and with what language we might express affection when, as a feeling, it exists beyond the realm of ex­planation. My own questions here have not been ent­irely dissimilar: How do we know ourselves to be ad­vocating for exclusion when our advocacy takes on the celebratory affect of Camp, and in what manner do we dismantle structures that would further facili­tate xenophobia and national insularity when com­memorating community? To treat categories of race and profession as like kinds, is, needless to say, simplistic if not downright offensive. Sliced and arranged between paragraphs of theory in a scholarly paper, the unhomeliness of the statement is clear. In a different context, howe­ver, the message might be more alluring. Despite its carnage and its problematic equivalences, Cecchi­ni’s performance is joyous and nonthreatening. One could choose to interpret Carne e Spirito as saying nothing more than that a local butcher’s craft is only meaningful in a specific context. Camp allows affecti­on and danger to exist side by side. Camping our so­15 See n. 2. 16 Divine Comedy , 80(see n. 4).