Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film

Boundaries and Identity

Enrica Maria Ferrara, Enrica Maria Ferrara

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030393670
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria europea

As humans re-negotiate their boundaries with the nonhuman world of animals,

inanimate entities and technological artefacts, new identities are formed and a

new epistemological and ethical approach to reality is needed. Through twelve

thought-provoking, scholarly essays, this volume analyzes works by a range of

modern and contemporary Italian authors, from Giacomo Leopardi to Elena

Ferrante, who have captured the shift from anthropocentrism and postmodernism

to posthumanism. Indeed, this is the first academic volume investigating narrative

configurations of posthuman identity in Italian literature and film.

© The Author(s) 2020

E. M. Ferrara (ed.)Posthumanism in Italian Literature and FilmItalian and Italian American Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: How Italians Became Posthuman

Enrica Maria Ferrara¹

(1)

University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Enrica Maria Ferrara

Email: [email protected]

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

PosthumanismItalian literatureItalian cinemaPosthuman identityCartesian dualism

End Abstract

In 1945, one of the most influential intellectuals in twentieth-century Italian culture, Elio Vittorini, published a novel entitled Men and not Men [Uomini e no] which was an account of the partisan struggle in the city of Milan occupied by the German troops before its liberation by the Allies in June 1945. The protagonist of the novel is an intellectual named Enne 2 whose philosophical reflections on the nature of humans and nonhuman others, good and evil, love and betrayal, singular and collective identity, and other antinomic couples, are central to the development of the story. Vittorini explores key themes which had already been introduced in his cult novel Conversation in Sicily [Conversazione in Sicilia] (1938–1939); this time, however, he seems to be particularly troubled by what he regards as the fluid boundaries between human and animal behaviour. This is why, along with Enne 2, his partisan accolades and his beloved partner Berta, three dogs feature among the main characters of the novel. These are Greta, Gudrun and Kaptän Blut who are trained by their German commander to attack and kill human prisoners. In particular, when the dog Greta becomes one of the casualties during a fight between partisans and German military forces, the man responsible for killing the dog is fed to the other two, Gudrun and Kaptän Blut. Notwithstanding the horrific cruelty of the whole scene, Vittorini goes to great lengths to underline the humanity of the dogs who are even described, in a brief and slightly surreal passage, as speaking to one another. It is a very short exchange, consistent with the experimental nature of the novel and one of its main, albeit possibly not very effective, innovative features (Bonsaver 2000, 111). However, what this expedient of the speaking dogs achieves is to emphasize, even if just on a subliminal level, the dissolving margins between human and nonhuman animals. If language has always been considered a distinctive feature of the humans and a cornerstone of “human exceptionalism” in its “fetishization of difference” (Cronin 2017, 68), Vittorini feels that it is important to highlight this aspect for the purpose of what he is ultimately trying to demonstrate: namely that “otherness,” the nonhuman, is consubstantial with human beings. In a crucial passage, after the dog Kaptän Blut has killed and eaten the prisoner, the narrator wonders whether the killing instinct is shared by humans and nonhumans alike, a feature which could be considered intrinsic to animality and therefore part of the human essence.

While there is definitely an attempt to define the nature of human beings from an essentialist perspective—through a relentless dialogue with an implied reader to whom the narrator’s italicized commentaries are addressed—Vittorini distributes this essence equally between human and nonhuman animals and seems to reject the idea of a definitive difference between the two species. What he is ultimately concerned with is that “we, men, can also be ‘not men’ … there are, in each man, many inhuman possibilities,” but he does not aim to “divide humanity in two blocks: one of which is all human while the other is inhuman” (Vittorini 1977, 124).¹ This approach seems to confirm the hypothesis, advanced by Amberson and Past and based on Esposito’s argument, that “Italian thought stands as a tradition that, unlike much of Western philosophy from Descartes to Heidegger, does not seek to suppress the biological or ‘animal’ part of man in its construction of human identity” (4).

Problematic as it may be, Vittorini’s representation is groundbreaking in its provocative dissection of what constitutes human and nonhuman behaviour, pushing the boundaries further ahead compared to the conclusion he had reached in his previous novel. In Conversation in Sicily he had advanced the hypothesis that grief and vulnerability (“the woes of the outraged world”) as well as the humans’ ability to transcend and perform these emotions through language are key aspects of humanity; in Men and not Men, less than ten years later, a first-hand experience of war and destruction led him to extend this concept of vulnerability, and the articulation of language as an expressive medium, to other nonhuman species. However, his question as to whether the ability to kill and hate, to be a Fascist and a National Socialist, a perpetrator, an assassin, is partly or exclusively a prerogative of the human remained open as he intended it to be: “We have Hitler today. What is he? Is he not a man? We have those Germans of his. We have the fascists. And what is all this? Can we say that this is not, even this, inside the man? Does this not belong to the man? … We have Gudrun, the bitch. What is this bitch? We have the dog Kaptän Blut. … What are they? Are they not a part of man? Don’t they belong to the man?” (Vittorini 2005, 876–877).²

In the context of the present book exploring the theme of posthumanism in Italian literature and film, Vittorini’s novel is exemplary for a few different reasons. Firstly, it demonstrates that the need to reconsider the place of the human vis-à-vis the nonhuman other, not only in terms of ontological and epistemological hierarchies but also, more specifically, from an ethical perspective, was accelerated by the devastating encounter with the merciless face of humanity during World War I and, even more so, World War II. I am not suggesting that posthumanism originated at this time; indeed, one of the theses of this volume—in agreement with recent scholarly work on this topic³—is that the second half of the nineteenth-century and the first two decades of the twentieth-century, the period widely known as modernism, was the time in which the premises for a decentring of the anthropos were laid out. However, the two world conflicts, which were unprecedented for their scale and deployment of technologically advanced weapons and machinery, provided the concrete opportunity during which, as illustrated by Vittorini, humans could come face to face with the human and nonhuman other (environment, animals and technological artefacts) in traumatic circumstances which forced them to re-think their identity.

Secondly, I find Men and not Men particularly interesting as an early contribution to a theory of the posthuman subject in Italian literature because the identity of the intellectual Enne 2 is negotiated through a performative dialogue between the narrator and the character which is confined to a particular locus of the text, the so-called corsivi [sections in italics]. This means that, on the one hand, identity is staged as relational, that is dependent on dialogue and on the account of oneself (Enne 2) given by another (the narrator) (Cavarero 2000). Thus, the “we” of the dialogic subject becomes a precondition for the birth of the “I.” As Judith Butler sums it up: “I cannot muster the ‘we’ except by finding the way in which I am tied to ‘you,’ … You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know” (Butler 2004, 49). Such identity-building practice has a crucial role in literature at times of massive social changes, when storytelling is used for the creation of new social interactions that emerge from the debris of old communities. One classic example in Italian literature is offered by Boccaccio’s The Decameron in which the ten young men and women escaping the Black Death of 1348 resort to interactive storytelling not only as a cathartic medium—to kill time and defy the threat of catastrophe—but also, and more importantly, as a powerful performative tool which enables them to rescue aspects of the society they left behind and build a new identity for themselves and their community. Here, like in other texts that emerge in times of natural and manmade disasters, language captures—through dialogic interaction—the very nature of human identity, its relational element. This in turn underlines the interdependency and vulnerability of the humans, exposed to the “gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence” in our precarious lives (Butler 2004, 26).

On the other hand, in Vittorini’s novel, as the character Enne 2 inhabits the metanarrative dimension of the text and comes to life in the corsivi written by the autodiegetic narrator, we witness the entanglement of writing with a “theory of the human subject” (Alfano 2016, 45), which in Italian literature can be traced all the way back to Petrarch. In Petrarch, subject identity becomes the object of an extensive reflection that has the expression of self-in-time through writing as its privileged focus. From Petrarch through to Montaigne and all the way to Descartes, written language articulates a discourse on the human subject which brings into focus how the uniqueness of each individual existence is inextricably linked to the fluctuation of inner feelings and thoughts as developed over the course of a lifetime through the powerful expressive and “stylized” medium of language (Alfano 2016, 35–100).

Let us then pause for a moment to ask a couple of research questions which inform some of the chapters included in this volume, allowing us to capitalize on the discussion conducted so far on the basis of Vittorini’s introductory example.

If human language, especially in its written form, grants us a privileged access point to understand and perform identity, from Petrarch to Vittorini and beyond, is it possible to channel through it the voice of nonhuman others? If so, how can this be achieved without the paradoxical representation of dogs parroting human language? Assuming that identity is indeed relational and therefore shaped and performed in dialogue with other humans but also with nonhuman animals and other entities, is it morally and ethically sustainable to continue expressing such identity through the linguistic medium? Is it not true, instead, to paraphrase a famous provocative statement by Karen Barad (2003, 2007) that language has been granted too much power?

Cogito ergo sum: the very root of the Cartesian humanistic conceit of human primacy that has shaped Western consciousness has also been the crux around which the concept of human identity has ...