Posthumanism in Literature and

Ecocriticism
Introduction
Serenella Iovino
Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Turin
[email protected]

“Where does the posthuman dwell? At what address? And in what type of house?”

These questions, borrowed from the opening of Deborah Amberson and Elena Past’s essay on
“Gadda’s Pasticciaccio and the Knotted Posthuman Household,” tickle our eco-accustomed ears—
ears that more often than not like to take ideas back to their earthly dwelling, something that the
Greek all-too famously called oikos. In our case, however, to provide the right answer to these
questions is definitely challenging and might require a little “veering.” The reason is simple: situated
by definition in a mobile space of matter and meanings, the posthuman does not seem so prone to
dwell. In fact, it moves, relentlessly shifting the boundaries of being and things, of ontology,
epistemology, and even politics. And these boundaries, especially those between human and
nonhuman, are not only shifting but also porous: based on the—biological, cultural, structural—
combination of agencies flowing from, through, and alongside the human, the posthuman discloses a
dimension in which “we” and “they” are caught together in an ontological dance whose choreography
follows patterns of irredeemable hybridization and stubborn entanglement. In this mobile and
uncertain dwelling, furthermore, the posthuman might not have a stable “address,” but it does address
important issues: it addresses, for example, the alleged self-sufficiency of the human, the purported
subsidiarity of the nonhuman, and the consistency of categorical essences and forms that hover over
our visions and practices as if they had been demarcated ab aeterno by the hand of an inflexible
taxonomist. Taking a closer look, finally, we can see that the posthuman’s house is not only mobile
and a bit shambolic, but also operationally open: open to transformations and revolutions, ready to
welcome the natures, matters, and cultural agents that determine the existence of the human and
accompany it in its biological and historical adventures. It is a collective house for “nomadic”
comings and goings, and most of all for belonging-together and multiple becomings: its inhabitant
and “name-bearer,” the posthuman subject is, in fact, “a relational subject constituted in and by
multiplicity”—a subject “based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community
building,” as Rosi Braidotti says in her beautiful interview with Cosetta Veronese. In other words, as
its house is itinerant and accessible to numerous guests, including the elements, the posthuman subject
is a restless and sociable agent, allergic to limitations and boundaries, and ontologically full of stories.
A biocultural Picaro, one might say.
Thinking the posthuman and following the stories it allows us see is the task that we have
undertaken in this special issue of Relations. Deliberately, we editors have decided not to limit our
exploration to the philosophical conceptualizations marking out the debate’s theoretical map, but to
also delve into the critical and narrative potential of this illuminating ontological framework, which
has found so much room in literary studies—especially those areas related to ecocriticism and the so-
called “critical posthumanities.” 1 If there is a basic premise of posthuman thinking, in fact, it is that

1
In the posthumanist lineage of ecocritical studies can be situated collections such as Material Feminisms,
edited by S. Alaimo and S. Hekman, Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2008, Prismatic Ecology, edited by J. J.
Cohen, Minneapolis: Minnesota U P, 2013, Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern
Italian Literature and Film, edited by D. Amberson and E. Past, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014,
Material Ecocriticism, edited by S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2014, Elemental
the idea of the human is not Platonic in itself, but is always already plotted: interlaced with the
nonhuman in a warp and woof of intricate, joint performances of “storied matter.” The posthuman is,
to put it otherwise, the ontological narrative of the human in its infinite paths of entangled becoming
with its others. Hence the idea of “narrative ontologies and ontological stories” that we have chosen
as the collective title of this double issue, featuring a first part on Literature and Ecocriticism (guest-
edited by Serenella Iovino) and a second part on Theoretical Approaches (guest-edited by Roberto
Marchesini and Eleonora Adorni).
But, before we enter our respective rooms, let us wander a bit longer in this posthumanist
house, whose blueprints were sketched in the last two decades of the 20th century by Donna Haraway,
Rosi Braidotti, N. Katherine Hayles, Bruno Latour, and Andrew Pickering, and whose construction
continues into the present thanks to the work of other prominent thinkers such as Karen Barad,
Roberto Marchesini, Cary Wolfe, Stacy Alaimo, Manuela Rossini, Serpil Oppermann, Heather
Sullivan, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen—to quote just a few names. The major novelty in this cooperative
edifice is that, finally putting the humanities in a rigorous conversation with technology and life
sciences, animal and gender studies, posthumanism shows the radical incompleteness of the human,
thus marking “a refusal to take the distinction between ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ for granted, and to
found analyses on this presumably fixed and inherent set of categories” (Barad 2007, 32). In stating
the intention to move onto-ethico-epistemological discourse past the human, however, the project is
not so much that of debunking the human altogether, but rather that of discarding the dogma of human
exceptionalism—an exceptionalism which is connected to various forms of mastery, including of
gender, species, and matters. As Serpil Oppermann has poignantly pointed out, in posthuman terms
“agency, subjectivity, and intentionality are not sole attributes of human beings. Hence, the most
obvious manifestations of posthumanism are in movements against the exploitation of women,
animals, and the natural environment” (2013, 28). If humanism has therefore—perhaps beyond its
initially liberating premises—turned into a discourse of verticality and power, posthumanism offers
the chance for a “bioegalitarian turn” (Braidotti 2009, 526), allowing us “to move beyond the
paradigm of humanist condescension and to engage meaningfully with animality, both human and
nonhuman” (Amberson and Past 2014, 3). This seems to fully accomplish an incitement once
launched by David Henry Thoreau, who said: “Man is altogether too much insisted on. The poet says
the proper study of mankind is man. I say study to forget all that—take wider views of the universe.
That is the egotism of the race” (Thoreau 1962, 369).
The way posthumanist studies help us take wider views of the universe beyond “the egotism
of the race” is, however, not simply by finding refuge in a wilderness “out there,” but by exploring
the recesses of the “in-house” wilderness within and across the human. An easy example is the alien
symbiosis of our microbiome: a composite landscape residing inside our bodies, where “human” cells
are outnumbered by thousands of species of fungi, archaea, and anaerobic bacteria, that—by digesting
our food, cleaning our blood, counteracting toxins, and hydrating our skin—are simply indispensable
to our being alive. To see this co-presence is not just a way to “bypass the metaphysics of substance
and its corollary, the dialectic of otherness” (Braidotti 2009, 526); it becomes the incontrovertible
sign that existing as humans means, literally, going past the boundaries of human “nature.” This
implies rejecting the essentialist separation between the human and the nonhuman, and emphasizing
their hybridizations, their co-operative configurations, and their active interplay. But that every
human experience depends on and produces hybridizations is true on many levels, even beyond the
onto-cultural shock of admitting that we host “strange strangers” (Morton 2010) inside our bodies. It
is evident in the “evolving interfaces between humans, machines and prosthetic extensions” (Callus,
Herbrechter and Rossini 2014, 103) or, more in general, if we look at the complex predicaments of
material entities and discursive practices that are stratified in what we call “culture”—something

Ecocriticism, edited by J. J. Cohen and L. Duckert, Minneapolis: Minnesota U P 2015. A key addition to this
burgeoning bibliography will be the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman,
edited by Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini. On “critical posthumanities” see, among others, Neimanis,
Åsberg and Hedrén 2015.
which, structurally and co-evolutionarily, is “the outcome of a process of hybridization with an
otherness” (Marchesini 2002, 15; translated by S. Iovino). Not only the human, but also culture and
nature are confluent, co-emergent, and defining each other in mutual relations. With its onto-
epistemological “irony” (Sullivan 2014), the posthumanist approach dodges therefore the “Great
Divide” of nature and culture by exposing their co-construction: there is no simple juxtaposition or
mirroring between the two terms, but a combined “mesh,” an interplay, a tangle. Donna Haraway’s
powerful term natureculture says it all.
Such vision pictures a wildly dynamic world: a world not only characterized by the steady
“negotiation of our bodily boundaries in relationship to other bodies and the surrounding matter in
the environment” (Sullivan 2014, 92), but also a world whose ontological categories are performed
rather than given, and where mixing with “anotherness” is the dynamic destination of being. In this
communitarian space, different forms of agency and materiality feed each other, and humans are parts
of a constellation of beings, things, events, concepts, and signs. Existence is thus composed of the
“force of collective life” (Wheeler 2006, 30), and this force is expressive: if culture is an ongoing
process of hybridization with nature, a continuous formation of naturecultures, the force of life is
also a force of signs and information, a semiotic force. It is a potential of stories inbuilt into matter.
This world is not only a world of material emergences, but is also a world that becomes meaningful
because meaning co-emerges with matter, as the confluent discourses of biosemiotics and the new
materialisms have also shown. 2 The narrative landscape of posthumanism is thus a landscape of
encounters, where “the organism-environment coupling is a form of conversation” (Wheeler 2006,
126), and where the human is constitutionally responsive to “a universe which is—and perhaps
always has been—‘perfused with signs’” (Wheeler 2006, 155). The fact that there is information and
communication within every fragment of existing materiality implies even more that, at all levels—
from cells up to complex collectives—our relationship with the world is one of conjoined
determination: “The world makes us in one and the same process in which we make the world,” as
Andrew Pickering wrote (1995, 26).
In this knotted dimension of exchanging natures, the human is no longer at the origin of the
action, but is itself the result of intersecting agencies and meanings. Its very gist is that of a material-
discursive con-sociability, built “through the pleasurable connection with the other, with the different,
with whatever is able to produce new states of instability, thus reinforcing the human strive to
conjugate with the world” (Marchesini 2002, 70; translated by S. Iovino). And this connection, this
“sequence of conjugative events between an evolving subject and a selective otherness” (Marchesini
2002, 49; translated by S. Iovino) is the plot of the stories we now want to tell.

The encounter of posthumanism with literature and ecocriticism is almost spontaneous. As Serpil
Oppermann writes in her essay, “With their intersecting stories and theories, posthumanism and
ecocriticism have something in common: they introduce changes in the way materiality, agency and
nature are conceived.” This is particularly true after the opening out of material ecocriticism.
According to this perspective, inspired by the onto-epistemology of the new materialisms, material
phenomena are knots in a broad web of agencies, which can be interpreted as producing narratives:
“All matter … is a ‘storied matter.’ It is a material ‘mesh’ of meanings, properties, and processes, in
which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying
forces” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 1-2). That this is necessarily confluent with a vision that, like
the posthumanist view, is meant to overcome our “historic” solitude, is evident: in line with
posthumanism, in fact, this ecocriticism and the literary imagination it heeds augment the population
of our cultural world, relocating the human in a wider web of connections by staging a “performative

2
First developed in the works of Charles Sanders Peirce and Jakob von Uexküll, biosemiotics is “the study of
signs and significance in all living things” (Wheeler 2006, 19). As Timo Maran put it, “sign processes take
place not only in human culture but also everywhere in nature […] Meaning is the organising principle of
nature” (Maran 2006, 455; 461). Therefore, “all living things—from the humblest forms of single-cell life
upward—[…] are engaged in sign relations” (Wheeler 2012, 271).
metaphor that allows for otherwise unlikely encounters and unsuspected sources of interaction,
experience, and knowledge” (Braidotti 2013, 38).
But, from the very body of material ecocriticism, a “posthuman” one has recently made its
appearance. As Jeffrey Cohen writes, “the project of posthuman ecocriticism is to attend to animal,
water, stone, forest, and world—and not to deny force, thought, agency, emergence or thriving to any
of these entities, all of which act, all of which are story-producing” (Cohen 2016, n. p.). The essays
included in our first issue are the perfect epitome of this project. In their different styles and with their
different foci, in fact, they all share this sense of distributed agency, of hybrid subjects and matters,
which are “story-producing” in that they expressively challenge the idea of mute distinctions and
inflexible boundaries between human and nonhuman matters. All these essays, written by
internationally recognized theorists and critics, share the same preoccupation, namely, that “We need
new genealogies, alternative theoretical and legal representations of the new kinship system and
adequate narratives to live up to this challenge” (Braidotti 2013, 80).
In the opening contribution, “From Posthumanism to Posthuman Ecocriticim,” Serpil
Oppermann explores more closely the impact of the posthuman turn on ecocriticism. Combining the
perspectives of the new materialisms and posthumanism, her essay proposes posthuman ecocriticism
as an engaged and “diffractive” mode of reading the co-evolution of organisms and inorganic matter
in their hybrid configurations. By becoming posthuman, ecocriticism expands and enhances material
ecocritical visions, considering such material agencies as biophotons, nanoelements, and intelligent
machines that are expressively agentic, story-filled and co-emergent with homo sapiens. Oppermann
reads these agencies against examples taken from literary works that she defines as “posthuman
novels,” integrating the role of bio-technologies and life sciences in the humanities debate and
performing an immersion in territories within which to think about human/nonhuman/inhuman
natures.
The second contribution, “Threatening Animals?” by Heather I. Sullivan, explores the double
meaning of “threatening” that comes from and towards us, as our industrial practices and energy use
present the greatest threat to all multi-celled species today. Considering our animal bodies and
agencies as part of the earth’s corporeality, Sullivan addresses German texts presenting human-
animal interactions in the Anthropocene’s span. These authors’ animal portrayals, she maintains,
unsettle our expectations of who is threatening whom and how. In Goethe’s Novella, for example,
the escaped circus tiger is shot after fleeing a threatening fire in the bustling marketplace—
emblematic for emerging modern capitalism—while the lion is tamed by music. Stifter’s Brigitta
presents an apparently pastoral peace threatened by wolves in the winter, whereas Kafka’s
Metamorphosis re-shapes the idea of “becoming animal.” Karen Duve’s Rain Novel and Ilija
Trojanow’s Melting Ice, recent cli-fi narratives, oddly juxtapose the human threat to the world’s
climate with endlessly proliferating slugs and biting penguins that impact the novels’ final outcomes.
Finally, the resurgence of wild boars in Berlin’s urban space in the past few years provides a material
textuality of human and other-than-human-animal agents interacting in an urban ecology that
threatens, in compelling fashion, our bodily, species, and urban boundaries with posthuman
renegotiations.
With the third essay, “The Posthuman that Could Have Been: Mary Shelley’s Creature,” we
are in the context of classic English literature, here explored by Margarita Carretero-González. The
essay concentrates on the problematic meeting between the Creature and his maker—a meeting
marked by both ethical compassion and ontological fear. By closely analyzing the central part of
Shelley’s novel, Carretero shows that in the encounter of these two species, however, only one seems
to have truly “met” the other: the Creature has indeed become with his maker in a way that Victor
fails to reciprocate. Following the Creature’s own account and not only Dr. Frankenstein’s
anthropocentric narrative, readers have the opportunity to see—and meet—this performing
“Otherness” outside the category of “monster,” thus establishing an ethical connection with him.
Interestingly, Carretero’s analysis also sheds light on the coexistence of transhuman and posthuman
discourses in the novel: in expressing his desire to create an improved species, Victor indeed echoes
the transhuman discourses of improvement of humankind, while remaining unable to make the
transition to the posthuman phase which would grant humanness to his Creature.
With the fourth essay, “Gadda’s Pasticciaccio and the Knotted Posthuman Household,” the
attention is drawn to Italian literature. The authors, already mentioned in the beginning of this
editorial, are Deborah Amberson and Elena Past, whose co-edited book, Thinking Italian Animals, is
reviewed by Emiliano Guaraldo at the end of this issue. Moving from the final scenes of Carlo Emilio
Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, taking place in a dilapidated Roman house, the
authors use this weird oikos as a dynamic lens for viewing the unremitting tension between interiority
and exteriority, anthropic and geological time, human and posthuman in the Gaddian universe.
Penetrating the protagonist’s porous body and entangling him with his surroundings, this lowly
house’s nomadic “squalor” helps uncover a “dirty” nonhuman universe, where alongside the tragedy
of individual human death, decomposition actively recomposes the landscape and nourishes literary
composition. As Amberson and Past cunningly show, the articulate beings, spaces, and forces that
cross Gadda’s writing—from Fascism to jewels, clucking chickens to lightning strikes—inhabit a
tragic world, tainted by the burden of our finite solitude, where nevertheless creative entanglement
with all that is chaotic and eternally vital reveals—as posthumanism know—that we were never
alone.
And that we were never ontologically alone is also the tenet of the last essay, “Posthuman
Spaces of Relation: Literary Responses to the Species Boundary in Primate Literature,” by Diana
Villanueva Romero. An expert in primatology literature, Villanueva Romero stresses the importance
of contemporary literary representations of primate relationships in our way of thinking about the
“animal.” Here, again, the interlacement of ontology and narrative plays a major role. Since the
beginning of the animal liberation movement in the 1970s and thanks to the development of cognitive
ethology, primatology, and trans-species psychology, fiction writers have produced works that
develop alternative ways of thinking about the nonhuman primate. Contextualizing literary animal
studies within the horizon of the posthuman turn, Villanueva’s article presents an overview of the
main ape motifs that populate Anglophone literatures. Thanks to its imaginative power, the author
finally maintains, literature compels us to transcend the category “human” and enter into a posthuman
age that is more in tune with the hybrid and porous nature of our species.
This first issue culminates with a final, crowning piece: “Can the Humanities Become
Posthuman?,” the splendid interview that Cosetta Veronese conducted with one of our Muses of many
posthuman years, the philosopher Rosi Braidotti. The review section is also very rich, featuring three
book reviews and a comprehensive review essay, which are all in fruitful conversation with the issues
raised in the essay section.
But, before we move from this eco-literary room to the nearby theoretical space, allow me a
final narrative reference, taken from one of the champions of literary immanence, Jorge Luis Borges.
In his tale “The Immortal” Borges wrote: “They knew that, over an infinitely long span of time, all
things happen to all men. […] Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, hero, philosopher, demon and
world—which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not” (Borges 2000, 14). The posthuman
subject, in its plotted being, is not immortal. Quite the opposite: it is a transitory form amidst endless
other forms. But at the same time and for this very reason, like Borges’s immortal, it is everything.
Or better, it is all things in their “differential becoming” (Barad 2007, 353), including the human. If
Borges keeps subjectivity as a transcendental form of experience, regardless of individuality, the
posthuman breaks the ties of subjectivity as a fixed category and extends the field of experience
beyond the ego. What makes experience possible is the inner co-implication of matter and meaning
which characterizes the universe's creativity. This co-implication is narratable not only “all the way
up: from cell to society” (Wheeler 2006: 120), but even from the level of matter’s organization before
cells even existed. Therefore, every living being is not just metaphysically, but physically and
structurally connected with “all things.” It is “all things,” it is the world in its differentiating
complexity. Enhancing both our literary imagination and our critical insights, the posthuman is a way
to contain, and give voice to, all these things. Crowded, pervious, and nomadic as it might be, this is
the house in (and of) which we are.

“Trouble the boundaries and enmesh the cosmos, but even a posthuman ecology remains
housebound.” (Cohen 2016, n. p.)

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