INTRODUCTION he Work, or the Agency, of the Nonhuman in Premodern Art ANNA KŁOSOWSKA and EILEEN A. JOY he “human,” we now know, is not now, and never was, itself. —Cary Wolfe LACRIMAE RERUM: PREMODERN SOURCES FOR A THEORY OF NONHUMAN SENSIBILITY In a famous ballad on the theme of ubi sunt (in a sense, “where has everything gone?”—the classic lament for the passing of time and the inevitable fading of life), iteenth-century poet François Villon chose for his refrain the image of the snows of yesteryear. Snow’s transformative and impermanent miracle could be a Northern European version of cherry blossoms: “But where are yesteryear’s snows?” [“Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?”]. Lending snow, beautiful and ephemeral, the same intensity as that which inhabits the names of vanished queens and beauties, Villon alchemically turns melted snow into lacrimae rerum, or “thingly tears,” making explicit the agency of things and the important role things play in the human realization, performance, and 1 2 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY reliving of existential, sweet, and inescapable sorrow, to the point that sorrow and things become one with each other. When Aeneas weeps at the depictions of the Trojan War in Carthage, he enjoins his companion Achates to rally and let his fears dissolve, since even this faraway nation will empathize with their plight: these, he says, “are thingly tears, and the mortal things touch the mind” (Virgil, Aeneid, 1.462: “sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt”).1 Since Virgil, the expression lacrimae rerum [“thingly tears”] has marked that sweet and sad entanglement of the mind and emotions with things—not necessarily warlike things, although the line is oten quoted on military monuments. Virgil’s passage is famously multivalent, and its gnomic half-line is usually cited out of context. Symptomatically, one classicist explicating lacrimae rerum called upon Ezra Pound’s observation that truly great literature is “language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree,” concluding that “the passage, of course, cannot be translated.”2 All agree that this famous line’s enigmatic nature lends it a “sense of wondrous beauty and pathetic dignity,” and “many would be disposed to quote [it] as the best verse in Latin poetry.”3 Here are some readings that have been given to the Latin verse over the years: Tears for things, tears of things, tears that the things shed, things worthy of tears. Tears are powerful and their efects are material, so that tears can as well be called material things and considered real. he universe of material things sheds tears for us in the face of our acute misery. hese images would wring tears out of stone. Sorrow and tears are implicit in men’s afairs or things. Nothing (or no thing) is free of tears. Depicted on the wall are events (things) that bring on tears; these are tear-inducing things. We all cry at the same things; great tragedies move us whether or not they happen to us and ours or to distant others. he line’s fruitful multiplicity of meanings is exactly what inspires the later echoes. Lacrimae rerum—the classical, premodern, and modern precursor of our speculative materialisms, post/humanisms, and pasthumanisms—are not a narrowly premodern European concept. Take mono no aware [“the afective 1. David Wharton, “Sunt lacrimae rerum: An Exploration in Meaning,” Classical Journal 103 (2008): 259–79. 2. John Wright, “Lacrimae rerum and the hankless Task,” Classical Journal 62.8 (1967): 365–66 [365–67]. 3. Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, Latin Poetry: Lectures Delivered in 1893 on the Percy Turnbull Memorial Foundation in John Hopkins University (Boston: Houghton Milin, 1895), 147; partially cited by Arthur L. Keith, “A Virgilian Line,” Classical Journal 17.7 (1922): 398 [398–402]. T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 3 and aesthetic force of things in the world”], a theoretical concept and practical precept that permeates Japanese culture of the Heian period (794–1185). he sensitivity, empathy, or enchantment to, of, and by things [mono] is used as a critical term describing the heightened awareness of the ephemeral nature [mojo] of things, combined with a sense of wistfulness and an almost glad sorrow inspired by the consideration of transience evoked by objects, where understanding and feelings merge.4 Aware is the ability to be moved. Sorrow, pathos, or sadness are associated with aware (where aware = “alas!”), but primarily the term refers to an intense impression (where aware = “sigh,” “Oh!”, and “Ah!”).5 he viewings of the moon and picnics of the cherry blossom season [hanami], a tradition noted as early as the third century, are permeated with mono no aware, as the cherry blooms [sakura] move like a fantastical, impermanent, earthbound cloud across the archipelago in a stately and inexorable wave. Since the rise of modern scholarship on Japanese literature, especially the contributions of Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), examples of mono no aware are oten drawn from the eleventh-century Tale of Genji, whose author, Lady Murasaki, oten used the expression nominally, as when we say, “He has a certain je ne sais quoi.” It was also Norinaga who emphasized the Heian period commonplace that, when the awareness of things is particularly intense, only sharing poetry or narratives that result from this feeling, and moving others as powerfully as one is moved, may bring relief.6 For us, the themes of mono no aware and lacrimae rerum participate in a premodern genealogy of the nonhuman as a work of art and the work or agency of the nonhuman in art, the topic of the essays assembled in this volume. POST/HUMANISM AND THE CRISIS OF THE HUMAN/ITIES he idea of enchantment with the world, and with its vibrant materialities, and with thingly tears guided us as we approached this collection, conceived 4. Tomiko Yoda, “Fractured Dialogues: Mono no aware and Poetic Communication in the Tale of Genji,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59.2 (1999): 524 [523–57]. Yoda adds: “Mono no aware refers to a profound feeling with which one spontaneously responds to a myriad of things and occurrences in the world. To ‘know mono no aware’ refers to one’s ability to have such a feeling for certain objects on an appropriate occasion” (526). See also Kazumitsu Kato, “Some Notes on Mono no Aware,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 82.4 (1962): 558–59, and Mark Meli, “‘Aware’ as a Critical Term in Japanese Poetics,” Japan Review 13 (2001): 67–91. 5. Motoori Norinaga, he Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey, trans. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 174. 6. Yoda, “Fractured Dialogues,” 527. 4 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY as one possible answer to Judith Butler’s question, “What qualiies as a human, as a human subject, as human speech, as human desire?”7 and also to Edward Said’s provocation, in the context of the humanities, that as scholars and teachers we believe we are right to call what we do “humanistic” and what we teach “the humanities.” [Yet,] are these still serviceable phrases, and if so, in what way? How then may we view humanism as an activity in light of its past and probable future?8 For a long while now, there has been a signiicant turn both to and beyond the human (or, the liberal humanist subject) in aesthetic, historical, philosophical, sociological, and more scientiic studies—a turn, moreover, which is also oten accompanied by a nod to post-histoire, or the “end of history.” hus, we might revise Butler’s question to something like, “What qualiies as a post/human and what is at stake in this qualiication?” his poses a great challenge to those concerned with the future of humanistic letters and education, especially when, as John Caputo writes, “one has lost one’s faith in grand récits,” and “being, presence, ouisa, the transcendental signiied, History, Man—the list goes on— have all become dreams.” As Caputo writes, “We are in a ix, except that even to say ‘we’ is to get into a still deeper ix. We are in the ix that cannot say ‘we,’” and yet, “the obligation of me to you and both of us to others . . . is all around us, on every side, tugging at our sleeves, calling on us for a response.”9 Caputo expressed these sentiments (which are also worries) in 1993, but they accord well with the anxieties of the editors of the 2007 issue of he Hedgehog Review on “Human Dignity and Justice,” who were concerned that “transcendent accounts of why the lives of all persons should be valued” no longer “make sense,” and therefore, “one might ask whether a rhetoric of human dignity can be sustained and whether calls [in numerous human rights discourses] to honor the dignity of every individual can gain traction.” Is it possible any longer “to sustain justice without the idea of human dignity, or a similar concept?”10 In relation to these concerns and anxious questions, multiple post/human (and nonhuman, inhuman, ahuman, and even post-posthuman) disciplines 7. Quoted in “Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Resigniication” (interview with G. A. Olson and L. Worsham), in he Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sarah Salih (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 356 [325–56]. 8. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 7. 9. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 6. 10. “Introduction: Human Dignity and Justice,” Hedegehog Review 9.3 (2007): 5 [5–6]. T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 5 have (for a while now) been in full swing in the ields of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences.11 In 2006, the National Humanities Center (NHC) announced a three-year project, “Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity: he Human and the Humanities,” which sought to “crystallize a conversation already begun” by “a small but growing number of philosophers, literary scholars, and other humanistic thinkers” whose thought and studies have “turned to the work of computational scientists, primatologists, cognitive scientists, biologists, neuroscientists, and others” in an attempt to “gain a contemporary understanding of human attributes that have traditionally been described in abstract, philosophical, or spiritual terms.”12 he NHC wanted to consider the possible ramiications of the approaching “posthuman era” by bringing into conversation with these humanists the scientists who have been turning their attention to questions typically reserved for the humanists—questions, moreover, that have to do with “the nature of human identity; the legitimate scope of agency in determining the circumstances or conditions of one’s life; 11. See, for example, most recently, Rosi Braidotti, he Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); Claire Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press/MPublishing, 2014); Noreen Gifney and Myra J. Hird, eds., Queering the Non/human (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008); Richard Grusin, ed., he Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Patricia MacCormack, ed., he Animal Catalyst: Toward a Human heory (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and Joanna Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press/MPublishing, 2014). he recent turns to “new materialisms,” “speculative realism,” and “object-oriented” studies have given fresh impetus as well to the longer-standing post/human turn. See, for example, Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of hings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a hing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Levi Bryant, he Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011); Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds., he Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011); William E. Connolly, he Fragility of hings: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009) and he Quadruple Object (Hants, UK: Zero Books, 2011); Quentin Meillassoux, Ater Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press/MPublishing, 2013) and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology ater the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Steven Shaviro, he Universe of hings: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and Tom Sparrow, he End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 12. National Humanities Center, “Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity: A Project of the National Humanities Center,” National Humanities Center, May 2007, http://onthehuman.org /archive/more/. 6 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY the relation of cognition to embodiment; the role of chance, luck, or fate; the deinition of and value attached to ‘nature’; and the nature and limits of moral responsibility.”13 From 2006 through 2009, the NHC ofered residential fellowships and convened symposia and seminars that brought together humanists and scientists to engage in a more comprehensive dialogue on the following three “distinct but related areas”: (1) Human autonomy, which entails the capacity for self-determination, self-awareness, and self-regulation that is central to our conceptions of free will and moral accountability; (2) Human singularity, on which our privileged place in the order of being, distinct from animals on the one hand and from machines on the other, is premised; (3) Human creativity, through which mankind demonstrates its capacity for representation and expression, and which many take to be the distinctive feature of the human species.14 hese objectives make clear that the NHC focused its energies on three areas that are distinctly related to what might be called an ongoing “crisis” of the (supposed) stability and centrality of the liberal, sovereign human subject within the realm of so-called human afairs (having to do with morality, governance, sovereignty, freedom, the arts, etc.), which are also traditionally held to underpin the mission and projects of the human/ities, and the university more largely. According to Katherine Hayles, who helped to usher in the post/human turn15 and who served as a Senior Fellow in NHC’s Project, “he humanities have always been concerned with shiting deinitions of the human,” so “the human has always been a kind of contested term.” But for Hayles, “what the idea of the posthuman evokes that is not unique to the twentieth century, but became much more highly energized in the twentieth century, is the idea that technology has progressed to the point where it has the capability of fundamentally transforming the conditions of human life.”16 As Hayles elaborated: 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), among other works. 16. Quoted in Don Solomon, “Interview with N. Katherine Hayles: Preparing the Humanities for the Post Human,” National Humanities Center, May 2007, http://onthe human.org /archive/more/interview-with-n-katherine-hayles/. T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 7 Even though “one of the deep ideas of the humanities is that the past is an enduring reservoir of value, and that it pays us rich dividends to know the past,” there are some things “that have never happened before in human history. . . . We’ve never had the possibility for manipulating our own genome in a generation as opposed to 150 generations. We never had the possibility for individually manipulating atoms as in nanotechnology, and so forth.”17 he post/human condition, then, in some respects (and according to some), is thoroughly modern because of its dependence, partly, on technological and medical innovations that could not have even been imagined in the past. It has to be stated that in many post/humanist discourses that have been circulating within the university, whether in the humanities or the sciences, the scholarship of those who work in premodern periods (such as classical antiquity, late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance) is oten not considered relevant to the discussion—even when that scholarship is concerned, as some of it deinitively has been, with issues of the human and the animal, self and subjectivity, cognition and theory of mind, singularity and networks, corporality and embodiment, bare life and sociality, lesh versus machine, and so on. In more recent years, this has been changing, however, with monographs, essay collections, and journal issues in premodern studies that play a prominent and inluential role in the post/human turn.18 Nevertheless, the question of historical diference remains something of a problematic. 17. Ibid. 18. See, for example, Jefrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2012); idem, Inhuman Nature (Brooklyn: punctum books, 2014); Jefrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, eds., “Ecomaterialism,” special issue, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 4.1 (2013); Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, eds., he Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callas, Posthumanist Shakespeares (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Eileen A. Joy and Christine Neufeld, eds., “Premodern to Modern Humanisms: he BABEL Project,” special issue, Journal of Narrative heory 37.2 (2007); Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne, eds., “When Did We Become Post/human?” special issue, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1.1/2 (2010); J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human: he Matter of the Medieval Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); he Petropunk Collective [Eileen A. Joy, Anna Kłosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and Michael O’Rourke], eds., Speculative Medievalisms: Discography (Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2013); Laurie Shannon, he Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Karl Steel, How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: he Ohio State University Press, 2011); Karl Steel and Peggy McCracken, eds., “he Animal Turn,” special issue, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2.1 (2011); Henry S. Turner, Shakespeare’s Double Helix (London: Bloomsbury, 2008); and Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 8 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY So, for example, in an early prospectus (circa 2007) for the Posthumanities book series at the University of Minnesota, series director Cary Wolfe argued that post/humanism cannot be glossed with reference to terms like “post-industrialist” or “post-structuralist” or “post-modern,” for “the question of ‘posthumanism’ is more complicated than any of these [other ‘post-isms’], because it references not just chronological progression (what comes ater the industrial, the modern, and so on) but also takes on fundamental ontological and epistemological questions that are not reducible to purely historical explanation.” Indeed, it was Wolfe’s hope when inaugurating the series that the books would draw “renewed attention to the diference between historicity and ‘historicism’ that seems to have been largely elided or avoided in much recent work in the humanities.”19 he series, then, is “not ‘against’ history, of course, but against historicism in its more unrelective and problematic forms.” he imprint has since published 33 books, none of which are exclusively focused on premodern subjects, although some of the books do tangentially touch upon those,20 and thus, regardless of its claims to reject the overly simplistic construct of “what comes ater” and to aim for a more complex historiography, the series nevertheless remains somewhat stuck in the chrono-landscape of contemporary thought and life, and its “historicism” is not very deep. Its prospectus also overlooks the fact that for quite a while now, in premodern studies, but also in cultural and historiographical studies, much work has actually been done to attend to the diferences between historicity and historicism.21 19. he prospectus for University of Minnesota’s Posthumanities book series, authored by Cary Wolfe, is no longer available online, but was irst accessed and transcribed by us in October 2007. 20. Such as Tom Tyler, Ciferae: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 21. See footnote 28 for the relevant works in premodern studies, and in the ield of cultural studies and history, see (as just a small sampling) F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Roger Chartier, On the Edge of a Clif: History, Language, Practices, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1996); Andreas Huyssens, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) and Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Peter Osborne, he Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995); Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Hayden White, he Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). It should be noted as well that practically the entire oeuvre of the historians initially attached to the Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales journal (founded in 1929)—such as Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Fernand Braudel, among others—also attended to the divide between historicity and historicism, although this is not always acknowledged in current work on chronicity and historiography. T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 9 Nevertheless, it is precisely to Wolfe’s hope of a theoretical post/humanism that would pay better attention to the diference between historicity and an unrelective historicism, and to Hayles’s assertion that certain aspects of the post/human can only ever be modern (or, driven by certain post-nineteenthcentury technologies), that our volume of essays, Fragments For a History of a Vanishing Humanism, addresses itself. Ater all, Wolfe himself has argued that “the human is not now, and never was, itself,”22 and scholars in medieval studies have explored the question of the relation between the post/ human (or never-human) and the past—a question that has been explored, for example, by Jefrey Jerome Cohen in his book Medieval Identity Machines, where he writes that even in the Middle Ages human identity was, “despite the best eforts of those who possess[ed] it otherwise—unstable, contingent, hybrid, discontinuous.”23 In all times and places, as Cohen has argued elsewhere, being human really means “endlessly ‘becoming human.’ It means holding an uncertain identity, an identity that is always slipping away from us,”24 and this resonates with Hayles’s idea that human subjectivity emerges from and is integrated “into a chaotic world rather than occupying a position of mastery and control removed from it.”25 More speciically, we want to continue illing in (and further complicating) what we believe has been a deinitive lacuna or gap in post/humanist studies more generally: the absence of a theoretically rigorous longer (premodern) historical perspective. Many of the contemporary discourses on post/humanism have mainly focused on the ways in which new indings and developments in ields such as biotechnology, neuroscience, and computing have complicated how we believe we are enacting our human “selves,” ushering in the language of crisis over the supposed destabilization of the category “human” in its biological, social, and political aspects (the futurist-dystopic view).26 Or, they have concentrated on a theoretical reform of 22. Cary Wolfe, “Introduction,” in Zoontologies: he Question of the Animal, ed. Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xiii [ix–xxiii]. 23. Jefrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xxiii. 24. Jefrey Jerome Cohen, “Aterword: An Uninished Conversation about Glowing Green Bunnies,” in Queering the Non/human, eds. Gifney and Hird, 373–74 [363–75]. 25. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 291. 26. For one of the best examples of the “crisis,” or dystopic, perspective, see Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). See also Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000); Benjamin Bratton, he Stack: On Sotware and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015); Kenneth Gergen, he Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic Books, 1991); Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Hants, UK, 2014); Eugene hacker and Alexander Galloway, he Exploit: A heory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Paul Virilio, he Information Bomb, 10 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY a humanistic tradition of thought (from the Renaissance through modernity) believed to have produced, in Iain Chambers’ words, an oppressive “history of possessive subjectivism” (the critical philosophical view).27 Or, inally, in some circles (primarily scientiic but also cultural studies), the same post/human turn has led to a language of hope and (even occasionally giddy) elation over all of the ways in which we—whatever “we” might be—might inally be able to escape or somehow make less vulnerable or more extensively enjoyable the death-haunted “trap” of our all-too-human bodies (the futurist-utopic view).28 But what is missing from most of these discourses, even when they claim to address the question of history, historicism, or historicity, are the incorporated dialogue of scholars who have a deep expertise in premodern studies (antiquity through the Middle Ages). While the past is oten invoked and (oten crudely) drawn in contemporary theory, it is rarely visited via the route of, or unsettled by, actual scholarship in premodern studies—scholarship that in recent years has been deeply concerned with issues of the status of the human and, in a theoretically sophisticated manner, also calls into question the “straight” teleologies and causal explanations of a traditional, or in Wolfe’s trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2000); and Langdon Winner, he Reactor and the Whale: he Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 27. Iain Chambers, Culture ater Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2001), 4. For an excellent overview of “critical humanisms,” see Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). See also Tzvetan Todorov, he Imperfect Garden: he Legacy of Humanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 28. On the futurist-utopic (or more airmative) view, in both scientiic and cultural studies, see especially Jean Baudrillard, he Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard and Caroline Schultze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988); Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and “Why I Want to Be a Posthuman When I Grow Up,” in Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, eds. Bert Gordijn and Ruth Chadwick (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 107–37; Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist heory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, A housand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, “Introduction: Posthuman Bodies,” in Posthuman Bodies, ed. Halberstam and Livingston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1–19; Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Cyborgs, and Women: he Reinvention of Nature, ed. Haraway (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–82, and When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Eduardo Kac, Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Ray Kurzweil, he Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999) and he Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005); Hans Moravec, Mind Children: he Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988); Lee Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World (New York: Avon, 1997); and Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (Boston: Houghton Milin, 2002). T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 11 terms an unrelective, historicism.29 Neither is this is a scholarship that Hayles worries might adopt the “attitude that there’s nothing that has happened or could happen that has not already happened in the past,” but rather, that these studies pose the Middle Ages, in the words of Jefrey Jerome Cohen, as an “interminable, diicult middle” that stresses “not diference (the past as past) or sameness (the past as present),” but “temporal interlacement, the impossibility of choosing alterity or continuity.”30 Although seemingly wholly “Other,” the past in these studies is “lodged deep within social and individual identity, a foundational diference at the heart of the selfsame” and could even be described as a kind of “unbounded” space-time that is generative of human identity through a “constant movement of irresolvable relations that constitute its traumatic efect, an ever-expanding line that arcs back through what has been even as it races toward what it shall be.”31 But these are lines of critical thought that, for a while now, have been mainly conined to conversations among premodernists (who might be discussing with each other, for example, 29. Regarding a medieval studies that subverts traditional historicist teleologies, see Kathleen Biddick, he Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, introduction in Queering the Middle Ages, eds. Burger and Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), xi–xxiii; Jefrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” in he Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Cohen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 1–17, and “Time’s Machines,” in Medieval Identity Machines, 1–34; Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith, eds., he Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of heory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, eds., Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: he Idea of the “Middle Ages” Outside Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Preand Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999) and How Soon Is Now? Amateur Readers, Medieval Texts, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacriice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Diference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Bruce Holsinger, he Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of heory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Bruce Holsinger and Ethan Knapp, “he Marxist Premodern,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.3 (2004): 463–71; Eileen A. Joy, “Like Two Autistic Moonbeams Entering the Window of My Asylum: Chaucer’s Griselda and Lars von Trier’s Bess McNeill,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2.3 (2011): 316–28; Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly Bell, and Mary Ramsey, eds., Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico, eds., he Post-Historical Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); D. Vance Smith, “Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves,” New Literary History 28.2 (1997): 161–84; and Paul Strohm, “Postmodernism and History,” in heory and the Premodern Text, ed. Strohm (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 149–62. 30. Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” 5. 31. Ibid. 12 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY “old” versus “new” historicist approaches to their subjects of study), and they do not always productively connect with the work of humanists (or scientists) working in disciplines concerned with more contemporary or post/human subjects, and who might view the too distant past as either beside or opposite the point. his is not to say that scholars working in premodern studies are not ever seeking a more cross-disciplinary or contemporary-minded audience. Some of them are, and in pointed fashion, especially in the past several years.32 It was partly with the idea of both a post/human Middle Ages and an approaching post/human era—neither of which can be free of concepts, identities, and social forms that are always both dead and alive at once—that this volume was initially conceptualized. We also formulated the following as initiatory and guiding questions for our contributors: • How does the concept (or reality) of the post/human impact the ways we develop our notions of humanism, both past and present? • How do the various historical traditions of humanism (classical, medieval, and early modern) productively and antagonistically intersect with more modern antihumanisms? • In what ways might premodern and more modern studies, with respect to the vigorous debates over the value (or lack thereof) of the liberal humanities, form productive alliances across the Enlightenment divide? • What is the role of the individual, singular person in relation to concepts of humanism, past and present? • What is the role of language and literature in relation to being, body, and mind, past and present? • Is it true, as some have argued, that the individual (and a concomitant emphasis on phenomenological inwardness) is a product of modernity (or, at least, of the post-Enlightenment), or has the human self, constructed in philosophy and other arts, always been “deep”? Or, conversely, has the “depth” of human persons always been an illusion? 32. For example, the mission and projects of the BABEL Working Group (http://babel workinggroup.org) have been pitched in this direction. See, for example, the journal postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, edited by Eileen A. Joy, Myra Seaman, and Lara Farina, which dedicated its inaugural issue in 2010 to the post/human turn and is in continual dialogue with scholars across a wide variety of ields and temporal periods (see footnote 17). See, also, in recent medieval cultural studies, Jefrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?; L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Staying Alive: A Survival Manual for the Liberal Arts (Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2013); he Petropunk Collective, Speculative Medievalisms; Cole and Smith, eds., Legitimacy of the Middle Ages; and E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 13 • How does the interplay between singular corporealities and social “bodies” afect our understanding of what it means to be human, both in the past and in the present? • What is the role of the Other (or, more generally, alterity) in our conceptions of humanism and “being human,” past and present? • Is humanism a philosophy, or set of ideas, or a historically situated sociocritical practice that has lost its raison d’etre, such that it is time for a new humanism or no humanism at all? Or is it time to reclaim a new “critical humanism” in new modes of address and analysis? his last question has special prominence in our collective project. here is no doubt that humanism—especially of the variety in which, in Iain Chambers’s words, “the human subject is considered sovereign, language [is] the transparent medium of its agency, and truth [is] the representation of its rationalism”—has a terrible reputation and has been responsible for some of the worst atrocities perpetrated in history.33 Furthermore, we are aware that any attempt to recuperate humanism now may always come too late if, as Foucault supposes in the conclusion to he Order of hings, “man” has already been “erased,” like “a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”34 Yet even the most compelling antihumanist texts—such as Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? or Karl Steel’s How to Make a Human—continue, in Kate Soper’s terms, to “secrete” humanist rhetoric.35 here is a certain dependence of anti- or post/ humanist discourses upon the space (and languages) of the university humanities, where, as Derrida has written, the principle of unconditionality “has an originary and privileged place of presentation, of manifestation, of safekeeping” as well as its “space of discussion and reelaboration.” And all of this passes as much by way of literature and languages (that is, the sciences called the sciences of man and culture) as by way of the nondiscursive arts, by way of law and philosophy, by way of critique, by way of questioning—where it is a matter of nothing less than rethinking the concept of man, the igure of humanity in general, and singularly the one presupposed by what we have called, in the university, for the last few centuries, the Humanities.36 33. Chambers, Culture ater Humanism, 2–3. 34. Michel Foucault, he Order of hings: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1966), 387. 35. Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism (London: Hutchinson, 1986), 182. 36. Jacques Derrida, “he University without Condition,” in Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 207 [202–37]. 14 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY In this sense, we might practice what Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley have termed a critical or “baggy” humanism that “takes the human to be an open-ended and mutable process.”37 And like Halliwell and Mousley, we might develop a new or post/humanism that is “both a pluralistic and a self-critical tradition that folds in and over itself, provoking a series of questions and problems rather than necessarily providing consolation or ediication for individuals when faced with intractable economic, political, and social pressures.”38 his is a humanism that acknowledges, with Chambers, that “being in the world does not add up, it never arrives at the complete picture, the conclusive verdict. here is always something more that exceeds the frame we desire to impose.”39 A heretofore underdeveloped consideration of the deep past in the post/ humanist project is where we locate our point of entry into the ongoing conversation, but the (post/human) present always provides for us the pressing questions. We are therefore intensely invested, as Fernand Braudel was in the 1950s, in the idea that nothing is more important, nothing comes closer to the crux of social reality, than [the] living, intimate, ininitely repeated opposition between the instant of time and that time which lows only slowly. Whether it is a question of the past or of the present, a clear awareness of this plurality of social time is indispensable to the communal methodology of the human sciences.40 As regards our more narrow purview in this volume—literature, history, philosophy, narrative and critical theory, and the arts—we are especially concerned with developing, from a long or “slow” historical perspective, a critical post/humanism that would explore: (1) the signiicance (historical, sociocultural, psychic, etc.) of human expression, and afectivity, especially as that expression is enmeshed in various ecologies; (2) the impact of technology and new sciences on what it means to be a human self; (3) the importance of art and literature to deining and enacting human selves; (4) the importance of history in deining and re-membering the human; (5) the artistic plasticity of the human; (6) the question of a human collectivity or human “join”: what is the value and peril of “being human” or “being post/human” together? and 37. Halliwell and Mousley, Critical Humanisms, 2. 38. Ibid., 16. 39. Chambers, Culture ater Humanism, 2. 40. Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociale: La longue durée,” trans. Sarah Matthews, in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, ed. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (New York: he New Press, 1995), 117 [115–45]. T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 15 inally, (7) the constructive and destructive relations (aesthetic, historical, and philosophical) of the human to the nonhuman. Following the example of the important three-volume collection edited by Michel Feher in 1989, Fragments for a History of the Human Body,41 our volume is styled as a gathering of fragments toward a history of a humanism that could never be rendered in any sort of monolithic totality, especially if one is convinced (as we are) by the value of a discontinuist historicism in which history is always uninishable and each temporal period is noncoincident with itself. his is to say, no era can be perfectly captured in our hermeneutic nets as there is never any “pure” or “whole” period to be captured that isn’t already riven by its own contradictions and lack of self-knowledge, especially with regard to the active suppression of the fact that the past always inhabits the present (oten in uncanny ways), and that the “contemporary” is never really the radical “break” with the past that it oten believes itself to be. As Dominick LaCapra has cautioned, each period is always “beset with its own disruptions, lacunae, conlicts, irreparable losses, belated recognitions, and challenges to identity,”42 and part of the aim of our volume is to make this state of afairs more visible, especially with regard to the supposedly postmodern genesis of the post/human. Similar to Feher and company’s aim to provide the broadest and most temporally and geographically varied coverage of the human body’s discontinuist history, while also insisting that that same human body is always constructed, always a social formation, and always representational, we too insist on the always provisional and contingent formations of the human, and of various humanisms, over time, while also aiming to demonstrate the diferent ways in which these formations emerge (and also disappear) in diferent times and places. here can thus be no “total history” of this state of afairs as it plays itself out in difering historical contexts, but nevertheless, we can see at the same time that deining what “the human” is has always been an agon— always an ongoing, never inished social-cultural-political project. We say also a “vanishing” humanism, mainly to denote the ways in which, as noted above, the foundations of the liberal humanist subject have been roundly critiqued and dismantled in many university discourses, and thus, appears as a “vanishing” igure in the contemporary scene. Indeed, following Foucault’s assertion in he Order of hings that “man” is an invention of a more recent date than most believe, our volume aims also to demonstrate that the contours of the human igure and the humanisms attached to that igure have always 41. Michel Feher, ed. (with Ramona Naddaf and Nadia Tazi), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1989). 42. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory ater Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 24. 16 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY been—on both sides of the so-called Enlightenment divide—indeterminate, contestable, slippery, and ephemeral. Post/humanism, as philosophy and also methodology, would best be framed, we believe, by an attention to longer and discontinuist, historical perspectives. he volume is divided into two sections: the irst part (Singularity, Species, Inter/faces) focuses on critical issues that circulate around questions of human “singularity” and human “species,” with faces, visages, facades, and/or interfaces serving as the most explicit thought props through which each author approaches the question of human being and human becoming, as well as the undoing of the human. he second part of the volume (Human, Inhuman, Spectacle) concentrates on the relations of the human to the inhuman and the diiculties attendant upon maintaining any sort of line between the two, especially vis-à-vis the analysis of certain aesthetic (and oten surreal) spectacles designed to provoke wonder and horror, and to also destabilize the human as a igure of so-called “rational” and/or “humane” impulses. Although all of the essays in the book can be read productively in relation to each other (because each essay, in one form or another, takes up the question of the status— epistemological, ontological, psychic, historical, cultural, aesthetic, and so on—of the human being), the division of the book’s contents has been structured to highlight, in the irst section, the historical and critical problematics surrounding the attempts (both in the past and the present) to delineate “the human” as a singularity (whether as an individual or as a unique species), and in the second section, to foreground the ethical and cultural dilemmas that arise when the human is marked of from, but also merges with, what is supposedly nonhuman or inhuman. Each section begins with what might be called the most historically mute period—the so-called “prehistoric” (the chapters by Jefrey Skoblow and Jefrey Jerome Cohen, respectively)—and then includes chapters that consider instants and events of modern critical thought and/or culture (such as, for example, Claude Romano’s “evential” hermeneutics, the surrealist biology of Roger Caillois, the iPod, Freud, Derrida’s turn to the animal, biopolitical theory, George Lucas’s THX 1138, and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy) in relation to the slower currents of premodern thought and culture that still inhere in the present (such as, for example, the heroic quest, the devotional manual, the Oedipus myth, the chivalric romance, historical saga, and the idealized Lady of troubadour poetry). Finally, the essay by Craig Dionne on Shakespeare, the post/human, and aesthetics constitutes the cautionary cultural-materialist coda to the volume, alerting us, ater immersion in the contents of this volume, that while we “must not turn our backs to the subaltern stories outside the manor” (the post/human), we “must [also] be mindful not to aestheticize . . . bare life.” In other words, to speak of the T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 17 post/human (if even in literary texts) is to call attention to forms of life more broadly, and also to liveliness and processes of living, and thus we must be careful to consider the material (“on the ground”) conditions that undergird our theorizing, for living itself (human and otherwise) is at stake. PART I: SINGULARITIES, SPECIES, INTER/FACES Jefrey Skoblow opens his discussion of palaeolithic images at Chauvet and Rouignac in France with a timeline. he paintings and engravings, some 13,000 years old, resemble others extant from the period throughout Europe that are 35,000–40,000 years old. By comparison, the earliest tools, such as a symmetrical hand ax, are 100,000 years old, and Skoblow judiciously suggests we should include them in the catalogue of human representations. Also, 80,000-year-old burials that associate ochre with human remains imply the existence, at that time, of the belief that there is another, or a parallel, life in addition to the present one. All these manifestations exist in a near-vacuum: we know little about the contexts that surround them. hus, these human representations are not unlike things or animals: as Georges Bataille phrased it, “Whatever has no meaning for itself is a thing.”43 However closely we attend to them, the results of our eforts are meager. And yet, some paradigms emerge. For instance, the vast majority of portraits bear “no apparent iguratively human dimension: the delicate and expressive muzzles of horses, aurochs and lions, bison and mammoth eyes, horses’ manes and bison beards and so on” predominate (48). With more schematic images, such as dots or V-shapes, interpretation is guesswork. A pointy shape can be thingly, animal, or female: “an arrow, a bird track, or a vulva” (49, quoted from Bahn, 159–60). What does that teach us about the human? Skoblow warns that even the modest categories—male/female, animal/human, whole/fragment—used to group these images may be anachronistic. But, as he consoles us, at her most vulnerable, the prehistoric human is also the most recognizable: we can easily embrace undecidability. Skoblow describes what it was like to be in the caves themselves: Mammoths, horses, bison, rhinos, and ibex required us to walk around in circles and backwards with our heads back, looking up and spinning to keep the images straight, to see them in their orientations as they crisscrossed and 43. Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo, trans. Mary Dalwood (New York: Walker and Company, 1962), 157. 18 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY overlapped and spread across in their rough arc. All are illed with calm, even the ibex running with legs at full stretch, many with eyes that look back at you. Our guide answered questions and by way of wrapping up on the way back, he said, as I understood him, that “of the people who made these things we know nothing but one thing: they are us”—or he may have said “we are them” which, if not exactly the same, amounts to the same thing: what could only be called human. (47–48) We might say that the cave visitors, then and now, as in Japanese literary contexts, “look like they know mono no aware”—that is, they look like poets. We can imagine that cave space illed with sighs: aware cho [“to sigh ater being stirred by something”]. Eileen A. Joy’s “Eros, Event, and Non-Faciality in Malory’s ‘Tale of Balyn and Balan’” never departs from that sigh-poem space of shared awareness. In De civitate dei, Augustine wrote that, unlike all other living creatures and animals, God chose to create the entire race of man from only one individual to bind humans “not only by similarity of nature, but . . . afection.”44 Against Augustine’s optimism, Joy argues, most contemporary social theorists—for example, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash—regard the late modern individual, as opposed to the premodern person, as cut loose from social bonds. She does not even retain, as a remainder, her own intact selhood—whatever “intact” might mean. Lash calls her “a combinard” who “puts together networks, constructs alliances, makes deals,” and lives in a world of risk and precariousness.45 Joy argues that the human has always been in the process of coming unstuck from the consolations of local times and places, and tightly woven family groups, partly because the idea of the heroic individual mastering the world—whether the knight in Camelot or the inancier on Wall Street—has been essential to the valorization of the human subject, while at the same time, that same heroic individual can only ever really succeed or fail on the terms set by the group from which she is always coming undone. In Malory’s Morte darthur, Joy’s test case, Balyn, “the knight with two swords,” is a medieval combinard just as multi-local and non-linear as Bauman’s “liquid modernity.” Joy asserts that this contradicts the accounts of the supposedly monolithic and 44. Robert Flint, he Philosophy of History in Europe, vol. 1. London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1874. 45. Scott Lash, “Foreword: Individualization in a Non-Linear Mode,” in Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences, eds. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim and trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Sage Publications, 2002, ix [vii–xiii]. T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 19 uniied premodernity that acts as a backdrop against which, to paraphrase Carolyn Dinshaw, the modern and postmodern “groovily emerge.”46 Joy argues that “almost all of our notions of time and temporality are insuficient to [its] weirdness and ungraspability . . . what might be called time’s continual and dissonant ‘forking’” (55). She reaches out to philosopher Claude Romano’s “evential hermeneutics” to argue for a conception of the human person as a type of queer location (a “highly localized site of awareness” in the terminology of medieval historian David Gary Shaw47) that is always in the process of “becoming” through the “impersonal events of the world” that never cease “happening” to it (60). In this scenario, Balyn becomes “a nascently (or proto-)modern human individual” who is “thrust, through aventure, into the ‘compulsive and obligatory self-determination’ of a certain alienating pastmodernity” (56). Balyn is not so much a preexisting (and stably human) identity, as he is “a break within the low” of the “absolute consciousness” (60) of the assemblage of Camelot, especially when caught in the lux of the events of his narrative, which he can never know in advance. Here, there is no becoming-human, only a “taking place” in a becoming-world (64). Tim Spence’s “he Book of Hours and iPods, Passionate Lyrics and Prayers” weaves parallels between two media platforms—the medieval prayer book and the personal music device playlist. For Spence, the overarching issue that brings the prayer book and iPods together is “the personal veriication and comfort that stems from the habitual use of devotional technologies” (80). Prayers and contemporary songs are also alike in that both rely on a limited vocabulary of personal sufering, particularly in love and love-longing,” both forms are intentionally composed in a highly lyrical manner, illed with pathos, and both can be used at will by individual agents to manipulate moods. Spence divides history into three periods— medieval, modern, and digital—as he compares prayer manuals and mp3 players, devotional songs and rock-n-roll lyrics, all as technologies that individualize us and “allow us 46. Dinshaw writes: “Radical hybridity of postmodern identities is bought at the cost of the medieval. Merely displacing rather than eliminating totality (as Paul Strohm has remarked in relation to other postmodern theorists), [Homi] Bhabha produces via a convenient and simpliied Benedict Anderson a binary modernist narrative of history—produces a dense, obvious (and white) Middle Ages against which the arbitrary modern groovily emerges—though he routinely critiques such binary narratives in decrying ‘teleology and holism.’ And this totalizing force applies pressure elsewhere in Bhabha’s work; it is no coincidence (at least to this queer medievalist) that his treatment of an undiferentiated, homogeneous distant past intersects with his treatment of sexuality”: Carolyn Dinshaw, “Queer Relations,” Essays in Medieval Studies 16 (1999): 93 [79–94]. 47. David Gary Shaw, Necessary Conjunctions: he Social Self in Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 12. 20 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY immediate access to our private passions” (91). he twelth-century Victorines (Hugh, Adam, and others) were instrumental in composing and propagating prayers on Christ’s Passion and other practices, later anthologized in the Books of Hours, allowing practitioners to interact “with their prayer books to discover appropriate material for their prayers and meditations, either scripted or original” (69). hese practices involved “complex technologies—some cognitive, some concrete,” including books, decorations, architectural spaces, calendars, and clocks (69). Just beyond the edge of the historical density of these technologies, ca. 1500, Spence locates the birthplace—or perhaps more accurately, the College House—of Mr. Cogito, the character in Zbigniew Herbert’s poems who embodies “the ironic contrast between an individual borne alot in an untimely manner by his inner thoughts and the chaotic circumstances in which he inds himself, a world always just outside of the thinking being’s control” (71). As Spence argues, “Mr. Cogito replaced Mr. Oratio—or the medieval deference to devotional prayer—at the moment introspective meditation stopped producing prayers and began producing subjective analysis for the self-relective individual’s independent self ” (71). To console herself in her untimely predicament, today’s Mlle Cogito participates in a ield of technologies that mirror the medieval Mr. Oratio’s: “a network of technologies . . . woven together to form a very intimate and sensual relationship between the individual user and a larger, corporate body of being” (72). If for Mr. Oratio that corporation was ecclesiastic, for Mlle Cogito it is, perhaps less glamorously, capitalist. Spence skillfully and dizzyingly juxtaposes the Beguines and the band the Weather Underground, the rosary and the iPod, Goliards and college students, Carmina Burana and the band Public Enemy, the mystic Richard Rolle and the band Modest Mouse, dying in a tavern and overdosing, the Word made Flesh and the Digital Age Word that “has become electric.” Spence concludes that the study of medieval prayer rituals renders more accessible certain aspects of the digital age that are obscured because of our immersion in them, especially the corporatization of private emotions and the role of the conveyances in habituating our emotions to function within a larger corporate structure that is both “omnipresent and invisible” (88). Daniel Remein and Anna Kłosowska, in “What Does Language Speak: Feeling the Human with Samuel Beckett and Chrétien de Troyes,” read Perceval (ca. 1165) and Molloy (1951) near to each other. Following Heidegger and structuralism, they ask: if language speaks, what is the status of the human— human desire and subjectivity? Perceval and Molloy both have an interesting time naming themselves: their similarities rit the space-time of literary and T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 21 intellectual history, but the essay is still careful to “not wrest what it calls away from the re/moteness.”48 Remein and Kłosowska argue that it is the very moment when Molloy and Perceval realize and say aloud their names that a strange infatuation or erotic ixation on an object emerges, recalling the Japanese principle of mono no aware, or the Virgilian lacrimae rerum, mentioned earlier in this introduction. In Molloy’s case, this ixation “amounts to a potential incident of public inanimaphiliac intimacy with a bicycle that seems mechanically impossible” (99). Rather more sublimely, Perceval is transixed by the procession of a candelabra, a bleeding lance, and the grail. Again, in a striking parallel to the principles of mono no aware, Perceval is punished for failing to ask questions about the condition of the Fisher King and thus failing to share his story, the sharing of which is portrayed as the only form of relief for what ails not only the king but also an entire kingdom, turned into a wasteland. Passing from Heidegger to Lacan, Deleuze, and Graham Harman’s speculative materialism, Kłosowska and Remein borrow from Reza Negarestani the phrase “complicity with anonymous materials”49 to point out three similarities between Perceval and Molloy. First, the narrative structure and content, from the description of the objects (radiance and light) to the hero’s naming. Second, the objects in the narratives are not part of nature but rather they are semiautonomous, “somewhere in between tool and matter” (106). hird, these same objects short-circuit the grand isolation of humans from the world of nonhumans. Remein and Kłosowska use Graham Harman’s term allure, a “touch without touching,” to describe the object’s fetching agency. No longer inert or inhuman, Harman’s object is radiant matter that, as in medieval physics, sends out beams that efect a cure or provoke longing, passion, and madness. Kłosowska and Remein ask what allure/relation is between the radiant matter, and the being, at the moment of naming—in terms of how they relate to what we would want to call human, and they conclude that poetry is the “erotic radiance of language caught on and besotted by fragments” (125). Second, they claim that Chrétien writes enough episodes of erotic co-operations or hybridizations with nonhuman matter to be reclaimed as a Beckettian modernist avant la lettre. Reading Chrétien, they submit, is the best training to take pleasure in Beckett—to laugh, frolic, and absurdly giggle as we imagine Molloy with his red rubber bicycle bulb, instead of shrinking from this and other Beckettian texts as if they were grey clouds dripping dour pessimism. 48. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, hought, trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper, 1971), 196. 49. Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008). 22 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY PART II: HUMAN, INHUMAN, SPECTACLE In “Aninormality,” Jefrey Jerome Cohen asks: what is the role of nonhuman agents in art? Take, for example, the three drops of blood on the snow in Chrétien’s Perceval or the famous winter scene in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: no amount of research on “Ricardian kingship or contemporary WelshEnglish relations” (132) (the human and historical context) can explain their intensity, but neither can research on snowlakes or goose blood (the nonhuman context). Cohen turns to Roger Caillois’s 1934 essay on the praying mantis: intrigued by the mantis that plays dead, Caillois notes that her behavior inspires a strange situational lyricism in the driest entomological accounts.50 Caillois concludes that myths are not only inspired by social phenomena but also by striking natural ones: a slight instance of nonhuman agency, but agency nonetheless. his serves as Cohen’s departure point for a consideration of the nonhuman as it is bound up with the human in medieval fabulist art. Cohen highlights a passage in Caillois’s writing on stone,51 where Caillois talks of the intensities of various agents in three “kingdoms”—geological, vegetal, animal. To each kingdom’s particular density corresponds a particular wavelength, speed, or frequency of its art, and since the art is set at diferent speeds, the mutual reading of each kingdom’s art produces the efect of a blurred presence. If we really concentrate our attention, as Caillois and Cohen urge, that presence can be brought out in sharper relief. hey both invoke the term commonality to represent this network of mutually recognizable (if blurry) yet also imperfectly perceived signals of nonhuman agents that together make up the “aesthetics of the universe.”52 For Caillois, the “mobilizing element” of this commonality across kingdoms is beauty, a general “innate lyricism,” a shared “universal syntax.”53 “Natural fantasy” is another name Caillois gives to that nonhuman agency.54 Caillois does not propose an “evolutionary, cultural or symbolic use value” (140) for nonhuman agency; instead, suggests Cohen, Caillois’s idea is that impulse, mobility, or agency are the normal states of the three kingdoms—what Cohen labels their aninormality, a suitcase word that brings together the ideas of the animal and the anomalous to break up the deinition of normalcy. 50. Roger Caillois, “he Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis,” in he Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 66–81. 51. Roger Caillois, he Writing of the Stones, ed. Marguerite Yourcenar, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985). 52. Ibid., 49. 53. Ibid., 104. 54. Ibid., 84. T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 23 Against the anxiety that thinking in terms of the nonhuman is tantamount to thinking unkindly or unethically, with “pessimism, even misanthropy” (139), Cohen argues that posthumanism is not less but more caring in trying to “view the world through a less anthropocentric lens” (139). Cohen locates “medieval aninormality” (140) at work in Geofrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (ca. 1136) and also in the work of Marie de France (ca. 1160), who weaves a lyrical world of human-animal and human-object hybrids: man-wolf, man-osprey, talking deer, not to mention adventure plots that turn on bits of cloth, knots, and sticks. Cohen’s attention to the inal image of the earth, in whose porous cavities the heroine of Marie de France’s Yonec discovers slumbering lovers ready to spring into action in yet-unnarrated stories that mirror her own, helps us to see what Cohen means by inhuman art: the transformative potentiality of stories that always already inheres in the geological crevasses of their landscapes. In “Humanist Waste,” Michael A. Johnson challenges the periodization where Renaissance humanism overcomes the medieval, and postmodern posthumanism overcomes the Enlightenment humanist subject. he Middle Ages, in this periodization, bears persistent material traces of “concepts, identities, and social forms that are always both dead and alive at once” (152). Because “dead and alive at once” has a decidedly excremental ring to it, Johnson’s critique of periodization logically focuses on waste. Johnson cites two sides of one particular debate over periodization: representing the medieval troubadour tradition as “proto-humanist,” or as antihumanist or inhuman—a tradition, as Johnson points out, “in which a persistent metaphorics of excrement troubles the question of the human” (152). Johnson looks, in medieval and more modern contexts, at technologies of waste disposal, literary and philosophical metaphors of waste, the complex interplay of individual and community “haunted by animal excrement” (152), and waste as a metaphor for a loss of meaning. Johnson irst takes us through the psychoanalytics of excrement. He explains that according to Lacan (via Žižek), the problem of waste disposal is linked to interiority and the distinction between human and animal: humans face shit disposal as a problem, while for animals, lacking an ‘interior’ of the sort humans experience, shit—this exteriorization of what was once interior—poses no problems. For Freud, the degree of separation from waste—through diferent means of disposal, repression, and sublimation—is a measure of civilization. Repression may go too far, as in the science iction dystopian commonplace of the food pill that eliminates eating and waste, perceived negatively as the “imposition of an inhuman exteriority” (154) that is accompanied by other measures that erase interiority and individuality. 24 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY A similar example that Johnson turns to is George Lucas’s ilm THX 1138, where the protagonist “inserts his wages, in the form of a colored dodecahedron, into a toilet-like device, as though to eliminate the process of consumption and waste altogether” (154), the “toilet” serving as “a vestigial trace of its original function,” an absurd scenario that explains why later THX cannot mourn his mate: THX and others have “no interior, no ‘private self,’ because they do not shit” (155). Parallel to Karl Steel’s discussion of the superlative deliciousness of human lesh (see below), Johnson studies texts that laud the superiority of human excrement. his excellence notwithstanding, waste also stands in metaphorically for a collapse of diference, hierarchy, and value. Johnson guides us through Baudrillard, Freud, and Alenka Zupančič’s reading of Lacan, to focus on Lacan’s Seminar VII on sublimation, a point (many scholars agree) when Lacan moves from mostly abstract and structuralist language to a more embodied image of subjectivity. Johnson shows that troubadour poetry frequently combines the excremental, the animal, and the feminine, while at the same time these poems “plug up” the Lady’s “explosive and ilthy materiality through the technological prosthetics of writing” (166). With Lacan, Johnson uses the “scene” of in’amors as a pattern that may help us rethink the human in and against this late-capitalist paradigm we currently inhabit. Karl Steel’s “How Delicious We Must Be / Folcuin’s Horse and the Dog’s Gowther, Beyond Care” looks at medieval discourses of anthropophagy as a ground of distinction between humans and animals, demonstrating that the binary is never successfully ixed in place. While most treatments of medieval anthropophagy use it as a metaphor—of profanation of the Host; of excessive cruelty or illegitimate government; of the painful formation of subjectivity, allowing psychoanalytic discussions—such metaphorical readings partly eface the visceral horror that Steel aims to restore. he distinction between lesh and meat is like the distinction between human and animal, the animate—literally, “ensouled,” or possessed of a soul or anima—and the inanimate. To show how blurry that distinction is, Steel summarizes Christian theories of life, including the commonplace understanding brought to the fore in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer that animals possess mere biological life, zoe rather than bios.55 he distinctive human characteristics that animals lack are usually deined as reason, language, and soul. Paradoxically, since the humans are superior to animals, their lesh must taste 55. See Agamben’s introduction to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 25 better than animal lesh. his rather too literal appreciation for human superiority is explicit, as Steel shares, in many medieval texts, including Poggio Bracciolini’s tale of a teenage serial killer, a iteenth-century hunting manual of Edward of York, the story of king Cadwallo in Geofrey of Monmouth’s History, the Middle English romance Richard Coer de Lyon, the Chanson d’Antioche, Marco Polo’s account of Japanese customs, and John Mandeville’s similar account of the people of Lamore, which all describe human lesh as “the most restorative and most delicious” of meats (176). Steel asks: what work does the distinction between eating animal and human lesh do? He suggests that the distinction is not intrinsic but rather constructed, a “carnophallogocentrism,” as Derrida called it in he Animal hat herefore I Am.56 his makes the horror of anthropophagy seem less noble: not a horror of violating the human, but a horror of violating the human privilege, human “exemption from routine violence.” Next, Steel examines medieval alternatives, wherein “medieval people could imagine other relations to the animal, less concerned with violence and saving human privilege” (185). Noting that Cary Wolfe in Animal Rites discounts the meaning of such examples for the cultural paradigm because they are exceptions that conirm the rule—“the logic of the pet . . . the individual who is exempted from the slaughter in order to vindicate, with exquisite bad faith, a sacriicial structure”57—Steel argues against Wolfe by focusing on two texts where exceptions to the sacriicial economy are never explicitly claimed to serve some purpose, but rather seem to be “interruptions of economy” (idylls or utopias, even stories of companionship): Folcuin of Lobbes’s story of a horse that led the funeral procession of its saintly master and aterward refused to carry anyone, and also the Middle English romance Sir Gowther, whose hero commits heinous crimes, ater which the Pope prescribes as a penance a diet of food snatched from a dog’s mouth. A greyhound feeds him “whyte loafe” until Gowther is ready to “forthe gon”—ight and snatch food forcibly from other dogs—in a three-day “hillside idyll” (188). In such stories, says Steel, we learn to “suspend ourselves between two impossibilities: the unjustiiable need to defend ourselves from the appetite of others, and the dizzying fact of temporary mattering, our own and others, within a near universal indiference, where we must make cuts to care, even if what we protect takes no notice of us at all” (192). 56. Jacques Derrida, he Animal that herefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 93. 57. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist heory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 104. 26 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY Daniel Kline’s essay, “Excusing Laius: Freud’s Oedipus, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Lydgate’s Edippus,” shows how the focus of Lydgate’s story, diferent from Sophocles’, can allow us to read the story of Oedipus diferently from Freud, more along the lines of Emmanuel Lévinas’s critique of Freud. Kline examines the genesis of Freud’s theory of the Oedipal complex, citing Lévinas’s critique of psychoanalysis as the “end result” of a rationalism—in other words, a humanism—that fails to account for realities more profound than ourselves and that are, ultimately, beyond our intentions. For Kline, Freud’s Oedipal complex isolates aggression in the child and obfuscates parental responsibility for that violence in much the same way Oedipus Rex seems to condemn Oedipus. hus, the father’s violence against the child and the necessity of that violence in constituting the patriarchal family is relocated from age to youth, from external world to internal fantasies, and from the social realm to the intrapsychic. (194) And yet, in the Oedipus story, “the Sphinx’s riddle inheres in the paradox of aging and of retaining identity or sameness within temporal diference” (194). To push against this forgetting of the riddle and against making actual violence in Oedipus only a symbol, and at that, the relatively benign symbol of the social apprenticeship of the healthy individual, Kline underlines that “the Oedipus narrative begins not with the child’s violence against the parents, but with attempted infanticide” (195), and he thus shows that Freud’s account of Oedipus was a very particular choice, given his knowledge of other versions of the story. Unlike the Sophocles version that assumes our knowledge of the backstory, medieval versions provide “prologues” to the episodes of patricide and incest, somewhat decentering the latter episodes crucial to Sophocles and Freud. Freud dismissed postclassical versions as religious rewritings that were supposed to inspire piety. Kline walks us through Freud’s library in London, stopping at Léopold Constans’s 1881 volume on twelth-century French renditions of Oedipus that Freud heavily marked on almost every page, indicating that medieval versions of the story inluenced Freud’s thinking on the Oedipal Complex. As Kline explains, Lydgate’s Siege of hebes is likewise based on these French renditions, and Kline attends to the ways in which Lydgate baroquely expanded the encounter with the Sphinx. his provides Kline grounds for a Lévinasian reading that “dismantles the hierarchy of father over son, of parent over child, by observing that the father’s exteriority, most clearly present in T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 27 the other who calls the father to responsibility, is found in, but is not reducible to, the child” (221). Lydgate’s “generous and humane” (216) account of Oedipus emphasizes the responsibilities inherent in the parent-child relationship. Conversely, in Lydgate, somewhat surprisingly to modern critics, the horror of incest and patricide committed by Oedipus is not emphasized as much. As Kline suggests, that again allows us to think of Lydgate along the lines of Lévinas and not Freud: “If Freud sees Oedipus as the universal human subject, the autonomous individual who acts in history, Lydgate’s Edippus is the exemplary individual who is tethered to” history (222). Lydgate’s Lévinasian Oedipus is a creature of “change, not stasis; is embedded in culture, not isolated; adapts to the vagaries of age and change; and remains irmly wedded to the warp and woof of history” (222). In the volume’s cautionary coda, “he Trick of Singularity: Twelth Night, Stewards of the Posthuman, and the Problem of Aesthetics,” Craig Dionne relects on the crisis of the humanities and asks, how are literature and culture relevant if they do not “directly speak to the complexity of the modern world?” (224). Dionne closes with an indelible image from Trevor Nunn’s ilm version of Twelth Night: Feste is banished to the dark world outside. he spectator, placed in the same dark space as Feste, observes the wedding feast through the glowing warm windows of the manor. Dionne enjoins those of us invested in the posthuman turn to not “turn our backs to the subaltern stories outside the manor” (243). We must be mindful of our responsibility to shape a more just society in economic and practical senses. Dionne opens by evoking Robert Scholes’s 2004 MLA presidential address, “he Humanities in a Post-Human World,” concerned with religious fundamentalism and the so-called “pragmatic” or “real” neoconservative politics, as well as economics not invested in practices of care. Against the association of the term posthuman with these neoconservative political and fanatical religious values that go against the humanities, Dionne deines posthumanism as a label for a constellation of theorists and social critics working on the same problem but from positions within diferent critical discourses, including cyborg theory, informatics, systems theory, queer studies, the turn to the body and to animal rights, new materialism and the turn to ontology, theories coalesced around the BABEL Working Group, and scholars such as Cary Wolfe, Katherine Hayles, Cora Diamond, Ian Hacking, Ralph Acampora, Judith Butler, and others. In Twelth Night, Dionne sees an already postmodern play that hinges on the problem of deining a singular identity in the face of modernity’s blurring of identities, as opposed to a humanist reading of the play as a rehearsal 28 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY of “Renaissance melancholy or self-consuming love” (228). Among others, Dionne reads Malvolio as “a crude parody of Tudor humanist learning that is meant to bolster traditional venues of social ascension through courtly service” (234) and shows that Malvolio is the exponent of the unorganic, posthuman concept of the subject. Lastly, Dionne sees Malvolio’s story as a parable of the academic. Malvolio’s contradictory use of materialist language that “speaks us” and individual agency at the same time presages our own plight: “the problem of establishing an aesthetics of diference during a time of great economic, political, and ecological instability—a strangely familiar reminder for humanists that our own professional longing to return to aesthetics might replay something of a return of the repressed” (227). Dionne closes with an image of reversible consciousness, like the chamois glove that can be turned inside out. If Frederic Jameson’s A Singular Modernity attributes to ilm as a medium the rise of the postmodern experience of and preoccupation with contingency—a moviegoer emerging into the bright light experiences the shock of contingency—Dionne notes Twelth Night’s obsession with this problem. We may have brought it to new heights—for example, “in a world of digitalized textual production—out-sourced and team-written texts that appear on the computer screen in a stream from a placeless nowhere”— but the problem was always already there in Orsino’s “manic love,” “a miming of the itinerant identity that appropriates its oscillating emotional states and shiting standpoints as a form of courtly pastime” (240). It was already there in the igure of Feste and the play’s obsession with contingency and bare life, which should force us to examine the conditions of our posthumanist work in our own “manor.” ALL THE WAY TO THE VEGAN DEMON Jean de la Fontaine (1621–95) once wrote: “If a lute played by itself, I would run away, although I passionately love music.”58 La Fontaine says this à propos of a scene in Apuleius’s Psyche, which he translated, where the young woman, Psyche, marries a powerful man whom she cannot see, Cupid, and lives in a castle surrounded by a post/human kind of opulence and love: a castle illed with invisible servants and musicians. he tableau of post/human musical performance is so insuferable for La Fontaine that he adds harp-playing nymphs to explain where the music comes from. But anyone who has seen Jean 58. Jean de la Fontaine, “Preface,” Amours de Psiché et de Cupidon (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1669), n.p. his phrase is picked up in André Gide’s Journal (13 October 1927). T H E NON H UM A N I N PR E MODE R N A RT ∙ 29 Cocteau’s 1946 ilm La Belle et la bête is aware that charm and grace, desire and pleasure don’t need human agents: a partly human beast, rows of moving disembodied hands, and other human fragments all contribute to a breathtaking love story. In La Fontaine’s own seventeenth century, extended thought experiments relegated humans to insigniicance, as in a relection on cabbage in Cyrano de Bergerac’s famous science iction novel, State and Empire of the Moon (1657). Bergerac’s protagonist encounters a vegan Demon so particular that he will only eat those vegetables that died of natural causes. Harvesting a live cabbage, wounding it with a knife, would have been unconscionable and unnatural: Is not this cabbage, as you are, a part of Nature? Is she—Nature—not the mother of both of you equally? It even seems to me that she made provisions with a greater urgency for the vegetative rather than for the reasonable kind, since she let the engendering of men to the caprice of their fathers who can, as they please, engender them or not: a stricture with which she did not, however, choose to alict the cabbage: because instead of leaving the germination of the sons to the fathers’ discretion, as if she were more apprehensive that the cabbage race might die out than the human race, she constrained them willy nilly to give being to one another, and not at all as it is with men, who only engender children by caprice, and who can only engender twenty at the most throughout their lifetime; while cabbages can produce four hundred thousand per head. To say that Nature loved man more than cabbage is to tickle yourself to make yourself laugh. . . . add that man cannot be born without sin . . . while we know full well that the irst cabbage had never ofended its Creator.59 And then, in the Demon’s imaginary account, the cabbage speaks. hat, as Joanna Zylinska insists, is a neat way to think about the ethics of the post/ human turn. “What if x responded?” can be a useful touchstone in theorizing the ethics of the nonhuman. As Zylinska says, when we dismantle the hierarchy, we open the possibility of a better ethics. An ethics that is open ended, based on “a prior demand on those of us who call themselves humans to respond to the diference of the world critically and responsibly, without taking recourse all too early to pre-decided half-truths.”60 As we follow Zylinska, 59. Cyrano de Bergerac, Histoire comique des etats et empire de la lune, in Oeuvres, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Jacques Desbordes, 1709), 83–85. 60. Joanna Zylinska, “Bioethics Otherwise, or, How to Live with Machines, Humans, and Other Animals,” in Telemorphosis: heory in the Era of Climate Change, vol. 1, ed. Tom Cohen (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press/MPublishing), 2012. (203–25). 30 ∙ I N T RODU C T ION , A N NA K ŁO S OWSKA A N D E I L E E N A . JOY let us take comfort in the familiarity of the thought exercise that allows us to imagine “x” responding, a post/human exercise that by far predates what we call modernity, as this volume well attests. hought experiments, texts, narratives, and other ways to think with, and not merely about, nonhumans are collected in the chapters of this volume. hese chapters amount to something like cognitive engineering, because they allow us to think a little farther beyond ourselves. And, we inherit these thought experiments from a premodern world that extends all the way to the bear nests in prehistoric caves. Moving closer to the present, these thought experiments extend to vegan Aristoxenus and succulent vegetarian Pythagoras; moving closer still, to the medieval Marie de France, whose protagonists fall for avian boyfriends; to the three drops of goose blood that make Chretien’s Perceval think about Blanchelor; to the greyhound who feeds a knight; and all the way to the scientiic revolution of the 1650s when Bergerac’s supervegan Demon converses with cabbage. Was there resistance to these thought experiments? Yes, as La Fontaine’s alteration of the myth of Cupid and Psyche shows. Did the post/human imagination always exist in explicit, self-aware and mainstream ways? To that question, we ofer a resounding “yes”—not least because much of post/human thought seems to correlate with an ethical imperative to not diminish and avariciously contract the world, but rather to expand the scope of human sympathy and ethical being.