Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film Boundaries and Identity Enrica Maria Ferrara All Chapter

Posthumanism in Italian Literature and
Film: Boundaries and Identity Enrica

Maria Ferrara
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ITALIAN AND ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
Posthumanism
in Italian Literature
and Film
Boundaries and Identity
Edited by
Enrica Maria Ferrara
Italian and Italian American Studies
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Hofstra University
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Posthumanism
in Italian Literature
and Film
Boundaries and Identity
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To my family
Acknowledgements
This book grew out of a double panel titled “Posthuman impegno in

Italian literature and film” which I organized and co-chaired with Eugenio
Bolongaro at the 2016 Themed Conference of the Society for Italian
Studies in the UK and Ireland, held at Trinity College Dublin. I am very
grateful to the conference organizers Daragh O’Connell, Cormac Ó
Cuilleanáin and Corinna Salvadori Lonergan, who welcomed my initia-
tive. Some of the papers delivered on that occasion are now included in
this volume, which has been growing steadily and organically over the past
three years as further contributors and topics were added to the original
set of papers. My deepest appreciation goes to Stanislao Pugliese, Director
of the Italian and Italian American Studies series, and Lina Aboujieb,
Editorial Director at Palgrave Macmillan, for their wonderful support. I
am particularly grateful to Joseph Francese and Grace Russo Bullaro for
their encouragement and advice during the initial stages of the editorial
project. I am also in debt to a number of friends and colleagues who
helped me define my field of enquiry or otherwise gave me inspiration
through scholarly conversations, discussions, e-mail exchanges and relaxed
chats around dinner tables. Among them, in addition to my brilliant con-
tributors, I would like to mention: Giancarlo Alfano, Marcello Barbato,
the late Roberto Bertoni, Clodagh Brook, Chiara De Caprio, Emma Del
Vecchio, Tiziana De Rogatis, Ursula Fanning, Kevin Foskin, Anne Fuchs,
Stiliana Milkova, John Sheil and Maria Tirelli. My heartfelt thanks go to
my colleagues of the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at
University College Dublin, and Head of School Bettina Migge, who have
provided a welcoming environment for my research. For her meticulous
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
work, I would like to acknowledge my professional indexer, Grainne

Farren, who has provided a precious consultation tool for this volume.
Her indispensable work has been funded through a research grant awarded
to me by the UCD College of Arts and Humanities in the academic year
2019–2020. High praises should go to the editorial staff in Palgrave, par-
ticularly Rebecca Hinsley, and to the anonymous peer reviewers whose
advice has been instrumental to enhance the appearance and content of
this volume. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to express my deep-
est gratitude to the distinguished scholars who have taken the time to
read, review and endorse this book ahead of its publication: Pierpaolo
Antonello, Michael Cronin, Serenella Iovino, Roberto Marchesini, and
Charlotte Ross.
My interest in posthumanism was born out of my research on Italo
Calvino, whose important role in the development of posthumanism in
Italian literature I have acknowledged in my introduction. However, my
passion for the topic peaked around the early 2010s, thanks to a number
of films I watched, and passionately discussed, with my husband Paul
Coffey. While none of those films (mostly non-Italian productions) are
analysed in this book, the passion of our daily conversations—as well as
our love for each other and for our children, Dylan, Nina and Seánpaolo—
constitute a steady source of inspiration for me.
Praise for Posthumanism in Italian Literature
and Film
“This very welcome book adds new voices and compelling critical perspectives to
the burgeoning interest in philosophical posthumanism and the representation of
the post-human within Italian Studies. A captivating assembly of analysis which
justifies the editor’s claim that Italy is ‘the nest of post-humanist culture.’”
—Pierpaolo Antonello, Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages, University of
Cambridge, UK
“This volume of essays makes a powerful argument for the distinctiveness of the
Italian contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. The contributors
to Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity show
how the culture that gave the world modern European humanism has also pro-
duced some of the most radical and searching critiques of what it is to be human
in the modern and late modern age.”
—Michael Cronin, Professor of French, author of Eco-translation, Trinity
College Dublin
“Brilliantly edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara, Posthumanism in Italian Literature

and Film expands the canon of posthumanist literary studies, enriching it with
unexpected topics and voices. In a dazzling sequence of chapters on Leopardi,
Pirandello, Elena Ferrante, Gianni Celati, Michelangelo Antonioni, and a number
of contemporary storytellers and filmmakers, the authors of this fascinating book
follow the human as it emerges from a tangle of organic and inorganic substances,
DNA and energy sources, mobile phones and microbes, technology and politics.
An engaging read, it is yet another testimony to the established presence of Italian
culture on the scene of posthumanities.”
—Serenella Iovino, Professor of Italian Studies and Environmental Humanities,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Electing continuity and hybridization with alterities as the main cradle of existen-
tiality, posthumanist thought may well be considered as a distinctive feature in the
Italian culture of the last few decades. The re-evaluation of Giacomo Leopardi’s
work, with the underlying legacy of Giordano Bruno’s panpsychism, inspires a new
fascinating literature, more extrovert and emphatic than traditional intimist narra-
tives, and in many ways more welcoming towards relationships and otherness. In
this context, the present volume has the merit to offer a punctual panoramic view
of Italian literary posthumanism.”
—Roberto Marchesini, Philosopher and Ethologist, author of Over the Human:
Post-Humanism and the Concept of Animal Epiphany
“This wide-ranging volume seeks to expand our knowledge and understanding of

the varied and intriguing ways in which Italian literature and film have engaged
with the complex relationships between humans, technology, animals and non-
human phenomena. The essays, which are located productively in relation to exist-
ing scholarly debates, draw effectively on recent and more classic theoretical
reflections to explore a range of issues relating to posthuman embodiment, social
alienation, and existential and ethical concerns. They offer original and compelling
contributions to scholarship that enrich and expand ongoing debates about this
increasingly crucial topic.”
—Charlotte Ross, Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham, UK
Contents
1 Introduction: How Italians Became Posthuman 1

Part I Becoming Posthuman 29
2 Giacomo Leopardi’s Book of the Future: The Zibaldone

as an Encyclopedia for the Ecosophical Posthuman 31
Gianna Conrad
3 Thresholds and Tortoises: Modernist Animality in

Pirandello’s Fiction 51
Alberto Godioli, Monica Jansen, and Carmen Van den Bergh
4 Post-Anthropocentric Perspectives in Laura Pugno’s

Narrative 73
Marco Amici
5 Posthumanism and Identity in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan

Novels 93
xi
xii Contents
Part II Technology and Identity 117
6 The Stuff We Are Made Out Of: Contemporary Poetry in

Italy and Our World Model in the Era of Digital
Reproduction119
Giancarlo Alfano
7 “Ancora non raggiungibile”: Mobile Phones and the

Fragmented Subject in Italian Fiction141
Kristina Varade
8 Mechanized Women and Sentient Machines: Language,

Gendered Technology, and the Female Body in Luciano
Bianciardi and Tiziano Scarpa163
Eleonora Lima
9 (Technologically) Fallen from Grace: Abjection and

Android Motherhood in Viola Di Grado’s Novel Bambini
di ferro (2016)185
Anna Lisa Somma and Serena Todesco
Part III Boundaries of the Human 209
10 Unbearable Proximity: Cognition, Ethics and Subjectivity

at the Borders of the Human in La vita oscena by Aldo
Nove211
Eugenio Bolongaro
11 Lose Your Self: Gianni Celati and the Art of Being One
with the World233
Enrico Vettore
Contents xiii
12 The Living Dead and the Dying Living: Zombies, Politics,

and the ‘Reflux’ in Italian Culture, 1977–1983255
Fabio Camilletti
13 New Materialism, Female Bodies and Ethics in

Antonioni’s L’avventura, La notte and L’eclisse275
Paolo Saporito
Index295
Notes on Contributors
Giancarlo Alfano is Professor of Italian at the University of Naples

‘Federico II.’ His recent books include La cleptomane derubata.
Psicoanalisi, letteratura e storia culturale tra Otto e Novecento (2012);
Introduzione alla lettura del “Decameron” (2014); Ciò che ritorna. Gli
effetti della guerra nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (2014); and
L’umorismo letterario. Una lunga storia europea (2016). He contributed
to the annotated editions of the Decameron and I promessi sposi for the
ADI-BUR editions (2013 and 2014). He coordinated a four-volume his-
tory of the Italian novel for the publisher Carocci (2018).
Marco Amici is a Lecturer at the Italian Department of University
College Cork, where he teaches Italian culture and language courses at
undergraduate and postgraduate level. He graduated at “La Sapienza”
University of Rome, and completed a PhD funded by the Irish Research
Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences at University College
Cork. His research interests include Italian genre literature, dystopian nar-
ratives, and posthuman theory; he has published several articles in schol-
arly journals and edited volumes on Italian noir and crime fiction. His
current research focuses on the representation of the future in contempo-
rary Italian literature.
Eugenio Bolongaro is Associate Professor of Italian Studies in the
Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University
in Montreal. A native of Italy, he was trained at the University of British
Columbia and then at McGill University where he has taught since 2003.
His book Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature was published by the
xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
University of Toronto Press in 2003. In 2009, he co-edited the volume

Creative Interventions: The Role of Intellectuals in Contemporary Italy. His
literary contributions include several articles on Italo Calvino, post–WWII
Italian cinema, and contemporary Italian fiction.
Fabio Camilletti is Associate Professor and Reader at the School of
Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick. He is the author,
among others, of Italia Lunare. Gli anni Sessanta e l’occulto (2018) and
Guida alla letteratura gotica (2018).
Gianna Conrad is a PhD student and Research and Teaching assistant to
Professor Tatiana Crivelli Speciale for Italian Literature at the Institute of
Romance Studies, University of Zurich. Her research interests include
Italian and English literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, with a particular focus on interdisciplinary approaches to texts
(gender studies; psychoanalysis; ecocriticism; cultural theory). She
has published and presented on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Igino
Ugo Tarchetti and Giacomo Leopardi, among others.
Enrica Maria Ferrara is Assistant Professor of Italian at University
College Dublin where she lectures in Italian literature and film. She is the
author of Calvino e il teatro (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011) and Il realismo
teatrale nella narrativa del Novecento: Vittorini, Calvino, Pasolini
(Florence: Firenze University Press, 2014). Recently, she has co-edited
the volume Staged Narratives/Narrative Stages. Essays on Italian Prose
Narrative and Theatre (Florence: Cesati, 2017) on the intersection of
theatre and narrative in Italian literature.
Alberto Godioli is Assistant Professor in European Culture and
Literature at the University of Groningen, and Programme Director of the
Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL). His main
research areas include humour and satire across media, modernism, post-
humanism, and Law and Literature. He has authored the books Laughter
from Realism to Modernism (MHRA, 2015) and La scemenza del mondo
(ETS, 2011; Edinburgh Gadda First Prize), as well as several articles and
book chapters on humour from the eighteenth century to the pres-
ent. He is currently co-editing a volume on modernist posthumanism
(with Carmen Van den Bergh; 2020, under review).
Monica Jansen is Assistant Professor in Italian at Utrecht University. Her
main research interests are contemporary Italian literature and culture,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii
modernism and postmodernism, cultural memory studies and precarity

studies. Publications include Il dibattito sul postmoderno in Italia (2002);
co-edited volumes such as The History of Futurism (2012), Le culture del
precariato (2015), Televisionismo (2015) and Narrazioni della crisi.
Proposte italiane per il nuovo millennio (2016). She co-directs the book
series “Mobile Texts/Testi mobili” for PIE Peter Lang. She is coordinator
of the ‘Italian Bookshelf’ for Annali d’Italianistica and member of the
editorial board of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies.
Eleonora Lima is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the
Italian Department at Trinity College Dublin. Her research investigates
the interconnections between Italian literature and electronic media from
the mid-1950s up to the present day. Previously a Postdoctoral
Fellow at the University of Toronto, she holds a PhD in Italian and
Media Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she
investigated the impact of information technologies on the work of
Italo Calvino and Paolo Volponi. Her research interests include lit-
erature and science, the impact of cybernetics on the Italian culture of
the mid-twentieth century, and film and media studies.
Paolo Saporito has recently completed a PhD in Italian Studies at McGill
University. His research focuses on posthumanist theories, especially in
relation to the manifestation of nonhuman subjectivities and agencies in
contemporary literature and cinema. He is also interested in transmedial-
ity, innovative forms of political activism in digital media, and memory
studies. He has presented his work at several conferences and his articles
have been published in Modern Italy, Quaderni d’italianistica, and Forum
Italicum.
Anna Lisa Somma is completing her PhD in Italian Studies at the
University of Birmingham (UK). She holds an M.A. in Modern Philology
from “La Sapienza” University of Rome. Her research interests include
Gender Studies, Lesbian and Queer Studies, Italian Literature, and
Comparative Literature. She has penned several articles on the cultural
and literary relationships between Italy and Japan from the end of the
nineteenth century to the present.
Serena Todesco is an Independent Scholar and a Literary Translator. She
completed a PhD in Italian Studies at University College Cork in 2013.
She has published several articles on contemporary Italian women writers
and the South, analysing texts by Cutrufelli, Attanasio, Ferrante,
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Ortese, and Murgia. She has also authored Tracce a margine (2017),
a monograph on genre and gender in Sicilian contemporary feminine
historical fiction. Her research interests include feminist literary the-
ory, Meridione and issues of gender and identity, narratives on mother-
hood, and Kristeva’s abjection theory.
Carmen Van den Bergh is Assistant Professor of Italian Literature at the
Leiden University Centre for Arts in Society (LUCAS) in the Netherlands,
where she is director of the Italian Language and Culture Department.
Simultaneously she works in Belgium at the University of Leuven (KU
Leuven) as a postdoctoral researcher for the Flemish Council for Scientific
Research (FWO) with a project on the role of writers in newspapers and
magazines of the Italian Novecento. Her specializations include Italian
modernism, prose writings during the Italian interwar, (neo)realism in
film and literature, the literary canon and the function of anthologies.
Kristina Varade is an Associate Professor of Italian at Borough of
Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York. Her
research interests include contemporary fiction from Italy and Ireland,
Anglo-Irish travel writing concerning Italy, and Cultural Studies. She has
published in Annali d’Italianistica, Forum Italicum, Irish Studies Review,
and New Hibernia Review, among other journals, and has been awarded
numerous grants for her interdisciplinary research. Among Varade’s most
recent publication is a book chapter regarding consumer culture and the
fragmented subject in Patrick McCabe’s Ireland: The Butcher Boy, Breakfast
on Pluto and Winterwood with Jennifer Keating, Ed. (Brill/Rodopi, 2018).
Enrico Vettore is Professor of Italian Studies at California State
University, Long Beach. He has published articles on Petrarch and
Schopenhauer, Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, Sciascia and Manzoni,
and Schopenhauer’s concept of “eternal justice” in Borges and Sciascia.
His most recent output are a book chapter on an alchemical and Jungian
reading of Pasolini’s Medea, and a Zen rendering of Pirandello’s One, No
One and One Hundred Thousand. He is currently working on Emmanuel
Lévinas’ concepts of Otherness in Gianni Amelio’s The Stolen Children.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: How Italians Became

Posthuman
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
E. M. Ferrara (*)
University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: enrica.ferrara@ucd.ie; ferrarae@tcd.ie
© The Author(s) 2020 1

E. M. Ferrara (ed.), Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film,
Italian and Italian American Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_1
2 E. M. FERRARA
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 pos-
sibly not very effective, innovative features (Bonsaver 2000, 111).
However, what this expedient of the speaking dogs achieves is to empha-
size, 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 exception-
alism” 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 nonhu-
man, 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 pos-
sibilities,” 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 conclu-
sion he had reached in his previous novel. In Conversation in Sicily he had
1 INTRODUCTION: HOW ITALIANS BECAME POSTHUMAN 3
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 articu-
lation 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 posthuman-
ism 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
4 E. M. FERRARA
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 disorienta-
tion 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 interac-
tions that emerge from the debris of old communities. One classic exam-
ple 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 pow-
erful performative tool which enables them to rescue aspects of the society
they left behind and build a new identity for themselves and their com-
munity. Here, like in other texts that emerge in times of natural and man-
made disasters, language captures—through dialogic interaction—the
very nature of human identity, its relational element. This in turn under-
lines 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 inhab-
its the metanarrative dimension of the text and comes to life in the corsivi
written by the autodiegetic narrator, we witness the entanglement of writ-
ing 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 lan-
guage 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 representa-
tion 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 provoca-
tive 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 been revolving and
expressing itself as power discourse in the humanist era. The Cartesian
cogito posits the centrality and the omnipotence of the human, his or her
ability to rule the irrational and chaotic ontology of passive matter, and
give it a shape and a voice through linguistic articulation. Thus the
Cartesian cogito validates man’s4 centrality and his superiority over other
beings in light of his ability to reflect upon the self and express identity
through language.
If we think about the influence that Descartes’s philosophy had on the
rise of the English novel, a genre that placed the representation of the
modern individual at its core, we will be able to grasp the enormous
impact that the presumed dichotomy between the individual and its con-
sciousness must have had on how humans thought of themselves and
described their own identity over the next subsequent centuries. Indeed,
the process of self-examination that splits the self into a written subject—
whose interiority becomes the object of the tale—and a writing subject
(the conscious cogito) is central in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719),
Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) as well as in Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy (1759–1767). Giving a written account of one’s
thoughts, emotions and reflections—as they develop over the course of a
given time span—is a founding moment in the definition of the modern
6 E. M. FERRARA
individual as “the identity of a self is based in the consciousness of being the

same thinking subject as someone in the past, i.e. in the memory of his
successive conscious states” (Descombes 2016, 84). Additionally, the act
of writing about the self succeeds in joining together the “two rival phi-
losophies of subjectivity”: that which defines the subject based on “mental
interiority”—with its solipsistic attitude—and the other which, instead,
focuses on “personal expressivity” (Descombes 2016, 72–73), accessible to
others and therefore objective.
In Italian literature, which is the primary field of investigation chosen
by the editor of this book—albeit from an interdisciplinary and compara-
tive perspective—the rise of the novel will not happen until about a cen-
tury after the publication of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Indeed, the first
edition of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed [I promessi sposi] was pub-
lished in 1827.5 Thus, it may be appropriate to say that the privileged
means of expression selected by Italian artists and intellectuals to represent
human identity after Descartes’ revolutionary theorization about the self
were still the theatre—which emphasized the relational aspect of identity
through dialogue—and poetry. It is not surprising then if the first shakes
and blows to the Cartesian method underpinning the image of a human
self separated from language and consciousness, a body separated from its
mind, and therefore a human separated from other living forms and inani-
mate beings by virtue of his or her reflective and linguistic abilities,
emerged in Italian literature from the world of poetry—with Leopardi in
the nineteenth-century—and from the world of theatre, with Luigi
Pirandello (1867–1936) at the turn of the twentieth-century. Giacomo
Leopardi (1798–1837), who, on the one hand, can be seen as the classic
Romantic poet filtering landscape aesthetics through his interiority and
giving voice to the exceptional identity of the artist and his sensitivity, on
the other hand, was a ground-breaking thinker who challenged the idea of
a neat separation between human and nonhuman forms, and believed in
the ontological continuity and porosity of matter/nature and culture/
language as illustrated in his monumental diary Zibaldone. As noted by
Gianna Conrad in her chapter on Leopardi which opens the first part of
the present volume, Leopardi’s humanity is “no longer closed in upon
itself but open and in ontological continuity with animals and nature. This
concept, while reducing all species to the same degree of vulnerability,
simultaneously focuses on the ‘continuum between nature and culture,’
pointing to a form of egalitarianism of species which is both contiguous
and reciprocal in nature.” It is remarkable that Leopardi’s journal, written
between 1817 and 1832, persuasively described by Conrad as anticipating

posthuman concerns, predates by a few decades Charles Darwin’s On the
Origin of Species, first published in 1859 and unanimously seen as the work
that undermined the following cornerstones of anthropocentrism: “(1)
disjunctive essentialism … (2) the idea of scala naturae or hierarchy of liv-
ing beings … (3) the oppositional dialectics of nature and culture, and
especially the dualistic ontology” (Marchesini 2016, 54).6 As humans feel
threatened by having to share the same genealogical line with other spe-
cies, they also perceive that central concepts of humanism such as free-
dom, self-determination, autopoiesis, interiority, may be eroded by
proximity with other beings whose behaviour, until then, has been consid-
ered mechanically determined. As a result, the immediate human reaction
is “to objectify the non-human … and let man emerge as protagonist”
(Marchesini 2016, 56). This entails “to reduce the animal content of
human beings and confine them nearly exclusively to a cultural dimen-
sion”; to underplay the extent of such proximity by depicting the animal
as radical alterity; and, finally, “to re-launch the model of animal as
machine”: an entity “so immersed in the world that can no longer con-
template the world” (2016, 56–57).
As we enter the modernist arena, we can witness a destabilizing and
de-centring of the humans as well as their attempt to hold on to their place
in the “here and now” of a cultural–natural sphere dominated by a hyper-
virilized version of the Nietzschean Übermensch. I am referring to the
Futurist movement by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) which
simultaneously incarnates what have been termed as the “two modes of
the modernist posthuman formulated as a series of linked antitheses:
heroic versus anti-heroic, egotistic versus post-anthropocentric, conflic-
tual versus peaceful, loud versus quiet” (Wallace 2016, 43). It is as if only
in the tension of the binary, which has however lost its ontological value,
can the individual be re-born and regain their place in nature by eradicat-
ing the “I” as it used to be, with aggression and determination. Despite
their loss of a privileged place in the hierarchy of species, the new Futurist
humans will still dominate nature and the environment; they will do so by
severing their ties with the old humanist humans and their academic cul-
ture whose museums, “absurd slaughterhouses for painters and sculp-
tors,” are compared to graveyards (Marinetti 2009b, 52).7 Aside from the
bombastic and propagandistic tone of Marinetti’s manifestos, a posthu-
manist programme is certainly visible in his commitment to modify the
human language so that it can express its interaction with matter and
8 E. M. FERRARA
technology without the filter of human feelings.8 What the leader of

Futurism aims to achieve is to “substitute for human psychology … the
lyrical obsession with matter” (Marinetti 2009d, 122).9 As if in anticipa-
tion of Barad’s disempowerment of language as a human-centred, egotis-
tic and subjective tool, Marinetti launches his poetry of “word-in-freedom”
which bans the use of adjectives, adverbs, tenses other than the infinitive,
punctuation. And yet, despite this destructive force—or possibly because
of it—the individual reinvents itself and “let man emerge as protagonist”
(Marchesini 2016, 56). We have to wait for Pirandello to develop, also in
modernist times, a critique of anthropocentrism. His theory of humour in
literature and his adoption of a digressive and “intransitive” style
(Mazzacurati 1987) of writing served to question the centrality and stabil-
ity of the human already in his narrative work, which pre-dates his major
plays. In fact, Pirandello’s concern with the nonhuman other, which can
be gleaned through his narrative, is a feature that permits to align his work
with that of other Italian modernists such as Tozzi, Svevo, Gadda and
Palazzeschi, and European artists such as Joyce, Woolf and Eliot. Godioli,
Jansen and Van den Bergh make this central argument in their chapter that
“by questioning the anthropocentrism underlying novelistic clichés and
conventions … Pirandello reframes human events within a much broader
biological continuum, where the hierarchical relation between human
calamities and the ‘lives of worms’ cannot be taken for granted anymore.”
Thus the human species is contemplated from a cosmic distance, by way of
a methodology termed as “long-range aesthetics” that leads to a relativiza-
tion of its centrality. It is in Pirandello’s theatre, however, that the so-
called “epic I” (Szondi 1987, 6)—the solid and unitary self of the
traditional storytelling human, and the omniscient author of the nine-
teenth century (and eighteenth century) novelistic tradition—comes
explicitly under attack. The author sought by the Six Characters in Search
of an Author [Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore] (1921) disintegrates under
the siege of his own ghosts, figments of his imagination produced by the
power of language. The human “other,” with whom the traditional the-
atre interfaced the human in a constant dialogue, has become a linguistic
“other.” The characters are fictional and therefore reveal the linguistic (i.e.
fictional) nature of all aspects of reality, including and especially that of
the human.
These modernist premises of posthumanism, discussed in the first part
of this book, are an important threshold from which it is possible to con-
template the process of becoming posthuman at its inception whereas, on
the one hand, Leopardi’s philosophy paves the way to a bio-egalitarian

understanding of species, involving creation of hybrid human–nonhuman
identities; on the other hand, Pirandello’s critique brings to the forefront
the struggle between nature and culture, ontology and language, taking
us back to those central questions which we have previously formulated. If
human language is the main tool for the (literary) representation of human
identity, what happens when the meaning of that identity is altered by
interaction with other agents that become central in the posthuman era,
including nonhuman animals, inert matter and technological artefacts? Is
it true, as recently argued, that literature is inherently posthuman, as “it
gives access to the essence of things, the stoniness of stones, because it
bypasses conceptual thought and operates directly on and via sensation?”
(Askin 2016, 172). Conversely, can it not be argued that the realms of
posthumanism and literature “might be mutually exclusive” if we consider
the literary as a “cultures of the letter as distinct from increasingly domi-
nant cultures of code and the digital?”(Callus and Aquilina 2016, 122).
* * *
One of the first Italian intellectuals to address these or similar questions

in his non-fictional and fictional work was Italo Calvino who began to
theorize about the combinatory nature of literature in the mid to late
1950s. Calvino’s understanding of the repetitive and formulaic nature of
storytelling during his classification, transcription and re-writing of the
Italian fairy tales for the publisher Einaudi (1954–1956), and his concur-
rent exposure to structural and post-structural linguistics (particularly
the work of Lévi-Strauss and Barthes), led him to reflect upon literature
as repetitive “becoming”: a device powered by functions, structures and
linguistic units that might not even need a human to operate. In 1966,
when he first delivered the talk titled Cybernetics and Ghosts ([Cibernetica
e fantasmi] published one year later, in 1967) Calvino seems to antici-
pate (or comment upon) some of the main concepts which underpin the
critical re-examination of humanism by thinkers such as Roland Barthes,
Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. As he humorously proclaims the
imminent death of the human author whose storytelling performance
will soon be carried out by computer devices, Calvino simultaneously
explores the idea of the performative nature of language and reality,
and of reality as a linguistic construct. Having reached the conclusion
that literature is a combinatory machine which could be run by
10 E. M. FERRARA
artificial intelligence, Calvino proceeds to wonder about the role of the

human in the new epistemic process. His conclusion is that repetition of
linguistic formulas and narrative functions is vital in literature to disclose
what he calls “a language vacuum” (Calvino 1987, 19), an untold area of
reality which is unexplored because we have no words to define it yet.
Calvino describes this process as a tension or aspiration displayed by the
human to thread the margins between what is real and what is not,
between conscious and subconscious, natural and supernatural, human
and nonhuman. We may argue that it is precisely in this “language vac-
uum” hypotesized by Calvino that the new posthuman human is born in
Italian literature.10 In fact, over the 1960s and 1970s, Calvino will attempt
to narrow the gap between human and nonhuman by widening the lan-
guage and filling that “vacuum” through the Cosmicomics stories [Le cos-
micomiche] (1965) of the humanized mollusc Qfwfq, or the stones and
paths of that hybrid culture–nature formation that are his cities in The
Invisible Cities [Le città invisibili] (1972). By exploring the boundaries of
language and its ability to re-negotiate the borders between the humans
and various other forms of life, either through creation of hybrid figura-
tions or through stylistic experiments of repetition (The Invisible Cities
and The Castle of Crossed Destinies [Il castello dei destini incrociati, 1973])
aiming to make identity surface through a sort of epiphany of “differen-
tials” (Deleuze 2014), Calvino opens the way to a different form of intel-
lectual engagement. Though, Calvino was not alone in his quest.
After the failed experiment of the Gramscian “organic intellectuals”
who were expected to bridge the gap between privileged middle-class with
underprivileged working-class humans during the enthusiastic period of
post-war reconstruction dominated by left-wing cultural politics, many
Italian (and European) intellectuals lost faith in organized Communism in
the late 1950s and were made to confront the painful realization of the
discursive self-regenerating nature of political power. Based on these
views, art was one of the instruments that political power had been using
to re-create itself under different guises and shapes throughout the centu-
ries: neorealism, which was the cultural reification of the work undertaken
by organic intellectuals, was just one example of the multifaceted incarna-
tion of power discourse.
Pier Paolo Pasolini vehemently denounces this state of affair between
the 1960s and the 1970s, through films such as The Hawks and the
Sparrows [Uccellacci e uccellini] (1966)—whose protagonist is famously a
talking raven, zoomorphic representation of the author as engaged
intellectual—and even more so through his largely neglected plays. For

example, the play Calderón (drafted in 1966 and published in 1973) is
partly set within Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas, the artwork which, in
Foucault’s view, serves to visualize the de-centring of the human subject
by unveiling the dualistic logics ruling representational realism: “We are
observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his
eyes by the same light that enables us to see him. And just as we are about
to apprehend ourselves, transcribed by his hand as though in a mirror, we
find that we can in fact apprehend nothing of that mirror but its lustreless
back. The other side of a psyche” (Foucault 1994, 6).
Impegno then becomes, in Pasolini’s mission, a call to unmask and chal-
lenge the inherent dualism that rules Western thought, and its representa-
tion in literature and film, by pursuing a crusade against capitalism and its
commodification of the body. Capitalism, as argued by Pasolini, is a self-
regenerating power discourse, one which has taken several shapes and
forms in the history of humanity, a manifestation of “rational” thought
able to turn against its own human (and animal) body by victimizing indi-
viduals perceived as “others” based on their race, gender, species and
social status. However, with Pasolini we are largely still in a phase of
antithesis during which intellectuals were grappling with the traditional
meaning of human identity from an oppositional perspective.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the anti-humanist posture adopted
by anti-hegemonic groups such as the Feminist and Queer movements,
the Anti-racial and Post-colonial movements, the Environmentalist and
Animal Rights movements, contributed to undermining the traditional
human subject—Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, symbol of Western human-
ism—through a systematic rejection of its dominant place in society and its
normativity. This also entailed a rejection of the dialectical scheme of
thought which perpetuates the dichotomy between Same and Other.
Based on this scheme, of Marxist descent, identity (and knowledge) would
be generated through the opposition of otherness (antithesis) to sameness
(thesis) and this would cause entire categories of beings to fall into the
broad negative categories of the “sexualized others (woman), the racial-
ized other (native) and the naturalized other (animals, the environment,
the earth)” (Braidotti 2013, 27). For these beings, identity would be a
mark of difference; their subjectivity would exist and acquire a meaning
only in opposition to the dominant subject (male, heterosexual, white). As
Plumwood has recently illustrated, the iteration of a rationalist culture
grounded on human/nature dualism is definitely the big culprit in Western
12 E. M. FERRARA
society as it links supremacy of reason to the human via an “identification

of humanity with active mind … and non-humans with passive, tradeable
bodies” (2002, 4). The effect of such “otherization of nature” are fully
apparent in our contemporary “ecological crisis” which is “the crisis of a
cultural ‘mind’ that cannot acknowledge and adapt itself properly to its
material ‘body’” (2002, 15).
And it is precisely through the announcement of a “crisis of reason”
that Italian philosophers gave a decisive impulse to the struggle against
oppositional binarism with the publication of the anthology Crisi della
ragione [Crisis of Reason] by Aldo Gargani in 1979. As illustrated by Peter
Carravetta, this volume,
which contained “position papers” by the most distinguished thinkers at the

time, clearly demonstrates that reason, and its methodological certainties,
are no longer trustworthy. This sets the premises for breaking the dominant
methodology-driven paradigm, which had gained favour for nearly two
decades. Thinkers show that the claims of reason and the procedures of vari-
ous disciplines (anthropology, linguistics, epistemology, political science)
are metaphysically and rhetorically flawed, and must be questioned anew.
(2015, 125)
Over the next subsequent decades, representatives of the posthuman turn,

at least from the 1980s onwards, have proposed a number of philosophical
solutions reflective of this blurring of the boundaries between human and
nonhuman which reshapes the ever-widening category of that which is
perceived to be human.
The inevitable reference is first and foremost to Gianni Vattimo’s
(1936–) “weak thought,” grounded on Heidegger’s existentialism (that
first undermined Cartesian dualism through a notion of the human being
as “Dasein” or “becoming”) and on Nietzsche’s nihilism; Vattimo’s
anthology Il pensiero debole [Weak Thought] published in 1983, “brings
to the foreground the limits and dilemmas of ontology and of Western
metaphysical thinking in general” while, at the same time, “is devoted to
rethinking and reshaping the question of mankind’s essential being”
(Carravetta 1988, 22). Despite their nihilistic approach, the philosophers
of “weak thought” attempt to salvage the human subject (notwithstand-
ing its “weakness”) by representing its experience of suspension over a
threshold beyond which there might be nothingness, or else just an
“imperceptible becoming, establishing contact with itself [the subject] as

it dissolves” (Rovatti 2012, 71).
And it is precisely this notion of “suspension” that allows us to bring
together the philosophy of Vattimo and Giorgio Agamben (1942–), both
reflecting upon the concept of “renunciation,” inherited from Heidegger,
as an affirmative rather than destructive principle. In Agamben’s biopoli-
tics, “suspension and destruction do not mean unlearning … and forget-
ting how to be human” (Bartoloni 2009). Conversely, “moments of
suspension are precisely the moments when humans and animals become
suspended in indistinction, and when animality and humanity are momen-
tarily reconciled … on the threshold that the anthropological machine …
comes to a halt” (Bartoloni 2009).
Other important alternatives to male-centric, heteronormative, logo-
centric humanism emerged within the area of feminist thought with Luisa
Muraro’s (1940–) “feminist thought of difference,” stemming from Luce
Irigaray’s philosophy, and her invention of the new symbolic order of the
mother. As illustrated by Ferrando, during the second wave of Feminism,
“the theoretical contribution of Feminism to Posthumanism is crucial.
The fact that Feminism brought into question male symbolism as univer-
sal has been fundamental to the posthuman effort of decentring the
human and its anthropocentric logos from the centre of the discourse”
(2016, 5). In other words, the crisis of reason stemming from the death
of Man brought along the deconstruction of Woman (Braidotti 2013,
28–30) and her impulse “to destabilize this unitary vision of the subject
and open up instead to internal alterity” (Braidotti 2015, V),11 as observed
by Kristeva (1991). The critique of humanism—centred around the tradi-
tional notion of human as man, which we have discussed—would lead to
a progressive erosion of the boundaries with the technological, animal
and environmental other: “Thus if the decline of humanism ushers in
posthumanism by encouraging sexualized and racialized humans to eman-
cipate themselves from the master-slave dialectic, the crisis of anthropos
paves the way to a sudden irruption of the evil force of the naturalized
others. Animal, insects, plants and the environment—even the planet and
cosmos as a whole—now come into play” (Braidotti 2015, XV).12 One of
the first constructive proposals to negotiate the transition to a post-
anthropocentric posthumanism comes precisely from the feminist arena
with Donna Haraway’s powerful theory that provocatively posits the
image of the cyborg as an ontological and epistemological tool to explore
new alterities, capable of “building and destroying machines, identities,
14 E. M. FERRARA
categories, relationships, space[s,] stories” (Haraway 1991, 181). It is not

surprising if Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985) constitutes an important
point of reference for several of the chapters included in this volume
which take inspiration from its anti-dogmatic and playful deconstruction
of the binary associated with traditional humanism. Haraway’s influence
on posthuman thought has been crucial for many philosophers from the
1990s onwards; to remain within the Italian domain, which is the one we
are principally exploring for the purpose of this volume, I would like to
mention Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic and bioegalitarian philosophy (2013),
aiming to re-negotiate the boundaries between human, nonhuman ani-
mals and inert matter by challenging the dualistic articulation of same-
otherness in what is perceived to be human identity; Iovino’s
non-anthropocentric humanism, recognizing worth and dignity to all
forms of human and nonhuman life (2016; Iovino et al. 2018), linked to
Katherine Hayles’s “cognitive embodiment” (1999) and Barad’s perfor-
mative or agential realism (2003, 2007). Already mentioned over the
course of this chapter are Adriana Cavarero’s relational ontology (2000)
inspired by Irigaray and Hannah Arendt, and Roberto Marchesini’s reflec-
tions on mimesis as a dialogical hybridizing process of two entities (human
and nonhuman), that generate new knowledge through temporary onto-
logical aggregations (2016, 2017). All these theoretical approaches to
re-thinking the human in its relatedness to alterity are ultimately grounded
onto what the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls a “co-ontology” or “plu-
ral ontology”: human identity as the oxymoron of “being singular plu-
ral,” where the “essence of singularity … is not individuality” but rather
“the punctuality of a ‘with’ that establishes a certain origin of meaning
and connects it to an infinity of other possible origins” (2000, 85).
It should not come as a surprise that many of these philosophers who
have been attempting to grapple with the definition of posthuman iden-
tity, from an ontological, sociological and epistemological perspective, are
Italian; as “Italian philosophy has been thinking the human and, more
specifically, the living or embodied human with marked intensity for many
centuries” (Amberson and Past 2014, 3). Thus, it has been argued that
Italian philosophers, such as Muraro and Agamben (followed by Cassano
and Iovino), were among the first to re-think the human condition within
the new posthuman framework, so much so that we can argue for Italy as
the nest of posthumanist culture. One does not have to espouse a nation-
centred belief to acknowledge that “humanism was, by definition, marked
by the contexts in which it found a voice” (Callus et al. 2014, 104). One
such context was Italy which, as recently argued, because of its “exposure
to vast, intersecting migratory movements” and its peripheral position
within Europe, provides an ideal hybrid “‘in-between space,’ capable of
‘queering’ fixed notions of a national sovereignty and cultural hegemony”
(Brook et al. 2017, 387–388).
During the transition between the anti-humanist times of the 1960s
and 1970s and what is commonly agreed as the start of posthumanism in
literature (Ihab Hassan, “Prometheus as Performer,” 1977) a crucial role
has been played by transhuman representations of technologically
enhanced and augmented humans in Science Fiction. This is a statement
which is valid not only for the Italian context, of course, and it will be
worth noting here that reflections on bio-engineered beings that explore
the limitations and potential hyper-human abilities of the human body
date back as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In Italy, despite
being dignified by several literary embodiments of the genre—in the work
of Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Dino Buzzati and Paolo Volponi, for exam-
ple—Science Fiction continued to be seen largely as a sub-genre, mainly
due to the overwhelming influence of Croce’s idealism in Italian culture
and “its lack of interest towards anything concerning the world of sci-
ence … that is, anything alien to the logic and perspective of humanism”
(Antonello 2015, 8); but also as a result of a rejection by highbrow left-
wing intellectuals for cultural objects of mass consumption “largely
indebted with anglo-american models” (Iannuzzi 2015, 96). Indeed, the
dismissal of techno-science by representatives of the humanities was the
consequence of that divorce between nature and culture resulting from
the reaction to evolutionism which has been highlighted earlier on in this
introduction. In a sense, then, we have to agree with Antonello that such
dismissal is “an epistemic product of modernity” as it perpetuates and
fosters a dualistic mentality in which science and nonhuman nature are
opposed to culture and humans:
… Confining nature to a quintessentially contemplative dimension, regard-

ing it as a datum external to the human, in its abstract otherness, typical of
the idealistic and Cartesian division imposed by modern thought that has
acted as a screen to all those mechanisms of hybridization between nature
and culture which modernity, on a factual level, was in fact continuing to
build. (Antonello 2012, xxiii)13
16 E. M. FERRARA
Thus, Science Fiction’s attempts to engage with the representation of a

posthuman subject endowed with new forms of agency and ultimately
expressing the need to re-engage with socio-political entities on new-
found racial, ethnical, gender and environmental grounds, have largely
been neglected by academic criticism. While this volume is not proposing
to address that gap which is gradually being filled through a number of
studies that have appeared over the past few years (Antonello 2008, 2015;
Bertoni 1979, 2015; Brioni and Comberiati 2019; Iannuzzi 2015), it
shows however some fertile directions of posthuman fiction in its creation
of hybrid techno-human and animal–human identities that certainly put
to good use the legacy of Science Fiction and some of its central tenets,
such as Darko Suvin’s notion of cognitive estrangement (1979).
Akin to mass fascination with the “exoterical paradigm” and “occul-
ture” in the 1960s and 1970s—pointing towards disorientation of the
individual when confronted with the opacity of political powers—
(Camilletti 2018) the attention to the topos of the zombie, widespread and
nearly ubiquitous in 1980s films and popular literature, highlights how, in
a period of political hedonism and alleged pacification following the end
of 1970s terrorism, people’s concern and fear re-surface in this quintes-
sential representation of the posthuman subject. From the 1990s onwards,
exploration of the boundaries between humans, technology, nonhuman
animals and the environment, has enabled writers to articulate a political
discourse around the humanness of humans, resulting in the representa-
tion of techno-dependent/technologically enhanced subjects, zoomor-
phic or hybrid human–animal figurations, and in the creation of complex
humans that refuse a neat separation between nature and culture or any
essentialist classifications of gender, race, ethnicity, etc. One of the land-
marks of such posthuman turn in Italian literature may be identified in the
anthology Gioventù cannibale [Young Cannibals] (Brolli 1996) which was
the launching pad of writers such as Niccolò Ammaniti, Aldo Nove,
Tiziano Scarpa whose work is analysed in some of the chapters included in
this volume. The Cannibali initiated a “radical evolution in the form and
the very ethics of modern Italian literature,” as they promoted a “narrative
where the notion of ‘borderline’ has been perforce obliterated, ‘mixed’ in
a powerful cocktail with blood” (Lucamante 2001, 13–17).
* * *
So far, I have referred briefly to some of the contributors’ chapters. At this

point, I would like to focus more specifically on the three parts in which
this volume is subdivided: Becoming Posthuman, Technology and Identity
and Boundaries of the Human.
My aim is to tackle the issue of the posthuman from different angles
and through several theoretical frameworks, exploring a number of sce-
narios that have been imagined by Italian authors in literature and film in
an attempt to give voice to the new posthuman human, with a particular
attention to the repositioning of the intellectuals as creators of knowledge.
The first part, Becoming Posthuman, aims to investigate the reflective
process anticipating and underlying the transformation of consciousness in
the posthuman era. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, the
fractured self of the Cartesian cogito became self-conscious and attempted
to overcome the fracture between reflective and reflected subjectivities.
Contributions included in this part not only elaborate on this process from
a historical angle (through analysis of Leopardi and Pirandello’s work, for
instance) but also propose two case studies taken from contemporary lit-
erature in which authors aim to bridge the gap between the human and
the posthuman subject by consciously writing the process of “becoming”
posthuman.
Conrad’s chapter explores Giacomo Leopardi’s universe as described
in the Zibaldone: an ecological system of infinite possibility and multiplic-
ity of absolutes, swarming with hybrid identities generated by interactions
of human and nonhuman entities. Leopardi reflects upon the existential
relationship, the social organization, the evolution and the history of all
species, simultaneously meditating upon the political structures that
accompany them. Based on Conrad’s argument, Leopardi’s model func-
tions as a tool of collective and performative politics that reduces all living
matter to the same degree of vulnerability, bringing to light a new form
of egalitarianism of species which is both of contiguity and mutual
influence.
The next chapter by Alberto Godioli, Monica Jansen and Carmen Van
den Bergh takes us into the early twentieth century, with a specific focus
on Pirandello’s understanding of animality. The texts analysed highlight
Pirandello’s awareness of a zoological continuum encompassing human
and nonhuman beings, with particular emphasis on his posthumanist gaze
that conveys a sense of “cosmic” detachment from human events. As hap-
pens in Leopardi’s case, Pirandello’s posthumanism is expressed via the
creation of human–animal hybrid figurations charged with displacing
18 E. M. FERRARA
potential and capable of putting in question, on a political and ethical

level, the overpowering role of the human. This attitude to hybridization
reaches its full potential in twentieth and twenty-first century literature:
here, the exploitative and colonialist attitude of the human vis-à-vis the
animal world and the environment is unmasked as a capitalist process of
commodification (Plumwood 2002, 143–166). Exemplary in this respect
is the narrative of Laura Pugno analysed by Marco Amici in the third chap-
ter of this section. Focusing on recurring elements identified in novels
such as Sirene [Mermaids] (2007), La caccia [The Hunt] (2012) and La
ragazza selvaggia [The Wild Girl] (2016), Amici demonstrates how
Pugno’s hybrid form of realism can be related to a discourse on anthropo-
centrism and its polarity, non-anthropocentrism. The tension between
entangled human and nonhuman identities is also central in the following
chapter written by Ferrara who illustrates how dualism is overcome by
means of an active process of “becoming posthuman” in Elena Ferrante’s
Neapolitan Novels. Drawing on Barad’s notion of the world of phenom-
ena as “intra-acting agency,” Ferrara describes the emergence of the inter-
connected plural identity of the characters of Elena and Lina as they
confront their fear of merging with the environmental and technological
“other” precisely by losing their singularity. The act of writing in Ferrante
may be seen as the enactment of that “agential cut” (Barad) which enables
the individual to maintain a sense of identity whilst embracing their
enmeshment with human and nonhuman alterities. Thus human lan-
guage, the cornerstone of human exceptionalism as pointed out by
Leopardi, Pirandello (and also by Pugno), becomes the means by which
the posthuman subject may successfully become “singular plural” (Nancy
2000) and bridge the gap with the world of phenomena.
The second part of this volume titled Technology and Identity considers
the impact that techno-science and technological innovations have had on
the construction of subject identities in the posthuman era. In particular,
it explores the work of Italian authors who have explicitly dwelled upon
the interaction between machines, digital and technical devices (such as
computers, mobile phones, smartphones, videogames, etc.) and the
human. Topical questions addressed in this section concern the transition
from singular to relational identity of the new posthuman subject shaped
by media and digital devices. Has the new web-enabled, constantly con-
nected individual of the posthuman era abdicated his/her own agency in
favour of a collective agency determined via the interaction of many inter-
connected consciousnesses? Also, what type of knowledge is produced
through enmeshment with technological artefacts? Since the decisive

decade of the 1980s in which the “communications revolution” may be
located, have humanity and their knowledge been driven by “technologi-
cal determinism” or is it the case that antideterministic positions still
“leave scope for human intention, freedom, and rational calculation”?
(Russo 2005, 8).
In the first chapter of this part, Giancarlo Alfano sets the historical
scene in which the epistemic turn is located by launching an investigation
about Italian contemporary poetry, its circulation on the web and the new
processes of dissemination and self-canonization. Alfano argues that the
web posits with renewed strength the issue of the canon while, in the
meantime, the widespread use of electronic tools, and their attendant
practices and cultural conceits, demand us to question the traditional con-
cept of “originality.” Some very intriguing research questions emerge
from this chapter’s discussion: has the web changed our traditional per-
ception of what constitutes poetic work? In the world of quick response, has
the lyrical language undergone a profound change? The major shift which
Alfano underlines, however, regards the transition from the era of
“mechanical reproduction” of the work of art (Benjamin) to the era of
digital reproduction of its author whose identity is not unique and unre-
peatable any longer because the new posthuman individual is not per-
ceived as embodied, rooted in flesh, incarnated. This is a critical aspect of
the relationships between humans and technology, amply discussed by
Hayles in her seminal work How We Became Posthuman where she states
that “the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material
instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an
accident of history rather than an inevitability of life” (1999, 2). And yet,
the constant connectedness with other identities via the digital media and
smartphone technology produce both a sense of fragmentation and of
deeper embeddedness of the posthuman human. This is one of the points
made by Kristina Varade in her chapter examining the relationship between
mobile phones and fragmented subjects in narrative texts by Aldo Nove,
Andrea De Carlo and Giuseppe Culicchia. In Nove’s short story
“Vibravoll” (1996), the mobile phone succeeds in providing a false sense
of sexual emancipation and gendered power to the woman narrator; in De
Carlo’s Pura vita [Pure Life] (2001) all human relationships are expressed/
negotiated through the means of SMS and mobile phone conversation;
finally, Culicchia’s Brucia la città [Burning City] (2009) shows how the
cellphone provides an impermanent sense of self, specifically through
20 E. M. FERRARA
consumer culture. Varade concludes that contemporary Italian fiction

reveals “how technology and narratives encompassing technology act as
primary elements in the contemporary quotidian.” Furthermore, the
ubiquitous presence of mobile phones in literature contributes to reshape
and reimagine traditional literary forms producing “narrative expression
appropriate to post-millennium society.”
The next two chapters in this section are a primary example of how
Haraway’s theory of the cyborg still functions as a subversive tool to ques-
tion traditional gender norms, patterns of sexuality and reproduction,
binary oppositions of cultural versus natural behaviours. Eleonora Lima’s
study investigates how Luciano Bianciardi in La vita agra [It’s a Hard
Life] (1962) and Tiziano Scarpa in “Madrigale” [Madrigal] (1998) frame
their discourse about the impact of technologies on the naturalness of the
female body. Despite sharing a similar expressionist language and a taste
for the grotesque and bodily humour, the two texts nevertheless attribute
opposite roles to technology: Bianciardi sees it as an alienating and anti-
feminine force, whereas Scarpa, believing in the discursive nature of gen-
der, rejects any substantial difference between natural and mechanical
essence. Lima’s chapter aims to examine the negotiation process taking
place in each text, which ultimately demonstrates how literature actively
shapes the social meaning and cultural role of technologies rather than
merely reflecting—either by welcoming or contesting it—the posthuman
shift. The following chapter by Anna Lisa Somma and Serena Todesco
focuses on the novel Bambini di ferro [Iron Children] (2016) written by
multi-awarded writer Viola Di Grado, whose work is little investigated by
scholars. Set in Nepal between the sixth and the fifth centuries BC and in
a futuristic Japan, Bambini di ferro provides a stimulating insight into a
posthuman world where maternity has been reduced to an android pro-
cess, its “loving gestures are no longer spontaneous, yet need to be artifi-
cially recreated.” By adopting a critical framework inspired by Kristeva’s
abjection theory and Braidotti’s thoughts on maternity, monstrosity and
machines, this chapter aims at reading Bambini di ferro’s representation of
an android maternity able to challenge the biological one.
The third and final part of this volume titled Boundaries of the Human
deals with texts exploring the re-definition of boundaries between the
human subject and the other beings or entities endowed with agency in
the posthuman era: animals, inanimate entities and technological artefacts.
These are subjects that were traditionally labelled as “others” within the
confines of a Cartesian logic which functioned on the premises of
binarism. By replacing the dualistic philosophy of humanism with a monis-

tic ontology which can be traced back to Spinoza, the posthumanist
thought posits an interconnection of all life (Braidotti’s zoe) in which the
human subject is constantly united with the traditional “others” in unin-
terrupted autopoietic flow of energy. Questions posed in this section con-
cern the ability of the human to adjust to his/her shifting position vis-à-vis
all remaining matter. Ethical questions are also addressed as issues of
impegno and ideological commitment come more prominently into focus.
For example, in the first chapter, Bolongaro argues that at the root of
contemporary posthumanist theories lies an ethical and cognitive impera-
tive which cautions us against presupposing the sovereignty of the human
as the necessary condition for the articulation of meaning and value.
Through a close reading of Aldo Nove’s La vita oscena [The obscene life]
(2010), Bolongaro seeks to demonstrate how this fictional text compel-
lingly explores the limitations of the human perspective and broaches a
posthumanist horizon which, however, remains tantalizingly beyond the
reach of the narrator. This cognitive impasse is interpreted as an ethical
failure which sheds light on the steep challenges faced by the posthuman-
ist project.
Next, Enrico Vettore blends Zen Buddhism and Ecopsychology to
explore the intertwined topics of identity and the environment in Gianni
Celati’s 1980s fiction. Ecopsychology blurs the boundaries between
human subject and the environment and illuminates the innate emotional
bonds between person and planet; Zen Buddhism claims that the self and
the world are coextensive, impermanent and non-substantial. Through a
close reading of Celati’s narratives, Vettore shows that many of Celati’s
characters exhibit a posthuman, impermanent “identity” inextricably
interlaced with that of the environment. Celati seems to posit that humans
and environment are not only interdependent but profoundly enmeshed,
and therefore his texts may be suggesting that to heal humans means to
heal the environment, and vice versa.
The following chapter by Fabio Camilletti takes us into the realm of
cinema and other media, which offers me the opportunity to specify that,
notwithstanding the existence of important films anticipating aspects of
posthumanism in Italian culture—from Pasolini’s Porcile [Pigsty]
(1969) to Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) or Gabriele Salvatores’s
Nirvana (1997), and so on—the purpose of this volume is to propose
some exemplary case studies which provide the readers with an initial
understanding of the complexity that the vast and mostly unexplored
22 E. M. FERRARA
subject matter of posthumanism in Italian literature and film entails.

From this perspective, I am hoping that the last two chapters by Fabio
Camilletti and Paolo Saporito will contribute to open up a debate around
some key questions waiting to be researched and on which some fascinat-
ing work is being published as I am writing the current introduction (Past
2019). For instance, what was the role of Italian popular films tradition-
ally classified as belonging to the horror or science-fiction genre in the
reinvention of the human? How far did these movies push the boundaries
of their spectatorship’s perception, enabling them to catch on screen a
glimpse of the future posthuman human? On the other hand, is it true
that “there is a congruence between the posthuman and the post-literary”
(Clarke and Rossini 2016, xix), so that audiovisual techniques and digital
art would be better equipped to capture representations of the posthuman?
Fabio Camilletti’s chapter, in this respect, is exemplary as it uses several
typologies of texts—songs, films and novels by Gianfranco Manfredi, Pupi
Avati and Tiziano Sclavi—to analyse the figure of the zombie, which may
be considered a quintessentially posthuman icon. As previously men-
tioned, in Italy zombies enter the imaginary between the end of the years
of political terrorism and the beginning of the so-called age of “reflux.” In
his chapter, Camilletti explores the multifaceted presence of zombies in
Italian pop culture of the 1980s arguing that the theme of the “living
dead” obliquely metaphorizes the disappearance/persistence of social
conflict in the decade of “hedonism” and post-modern disimpegno.
The final chapter by Paolo Saporito discusses the relationship between
the female body, the material environment and the camera in Antonioni’s
famous trilogy of alienation (1960–1962), drawing on Barad’s theory of
agential realism. Anna’s disappearance in L’avventura [The Adventure]
(1960) establishes both the camera and the environment as agential sub-
jects, calling for a posthumanist reading of their relationship with the
female body in later films. Lidia and Valentina, in La notte [The Night]
(1961), enter trans-corporeal time-spaces that open their bodies to vibrant
matter. However, this opening is still affected by a logocentric approach.
L’eclisse [The Eclipse] (1962) problematizes the material–discursive divide,
opposing Vittoria’s open-ended attitude toward matter to financial discur-
sive practices. In the ending of L’eclisse, the camera enacts the female char-
acters’ embodied ethical sensibility, investigating the material environment
from a posthumanist perspective.
The above three parts have been designed with a view to trace a pro-
gression, both from a diachronic–historical and from a synchronic
perspective: from the proto-notion of a doubled or fractured self which is

tentatively rebuilt through a process of storytelling to the concept of a
relational subject whose sense of singularity has been shattered mainly
through the impact of technology, web-enabled devices and social media,
and, finally, to the full emersion of a posthuman identity that is construc-
tively re-negotiating its boundaries with other concurrent agencies. It
might not be superfluous to mention that some of the chapters, if not all
of them, could have been placed in other parts whose boundaries, in keep-
ing with the nature of the subject-matter, are inherently porous and
flexible.
Notes
1. “vi sono, nell’uomo, molte possibilità inumane. Ma non divide l’umanità
in due parti: una delle quali sia tutta umana e l’altra tutta inumana.” My
translation.
2. “Noi abbiamo Hitler oggi. E che cos’è? Non è uomo? Abbiamo i tedeschi
suoi. Abbiamo i fascisti. E che cos’è tutto questo? Possiamo dire che non
è, questo anche, nell’uomo? Che non appartenga all’uomo? Abbiamo
Gudrun, la cagna. Che cos’è questa cagna? Abbiamo il cane Kaptän Blut. …
Ma che cosa sono? Non dell’uomo? Non appartengono all’uomo?” My
translation.
3. See the chapter by Godioli, Jansen and Van den Bergh in this volume.
4. The use of the sexist word “man” in this paper, to denote “human”, merely
acknowledges its traditional use in the study of Humanities.
5. This is not to say that Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis by Ugo Foscolo,
completed in 1798 may not be considered a novel. However, given its
distinctive epistolary form, it did not function as an archetypical model in
Italian literature, unlike Manzoni’s work which, however, was published
almost three decades later.
6. All translations from Roberto Marchesini’s Italian texts are my own.
7. “assurdi macelli di pittori e scultori” (Marinetti 2009a).
8. According to Ferrando, if Futurism may definitely be considered in the
genealogy of posthumanism, along with Dadaism and Surrealism, there are
two aspects by which the two philosophical trends diverge; firstly Futurism
wished to break with the past while posthumanism “does not disregard the
past … in an academic attempt of inclusiveness that opens to other species
and hypothetical life forms” (3); secondly, Futurism’s fascination with
machines and technology, as well as its celebration of war, does not align
with posthumanist concerns towards the environment and all forms of
human and nonhuman life.
24 E. M. FERRARA
9. “Sostituire la psicologia dell’uomo … con L’OSSESSIONE LIRICA

DELLA MATERIA” (Marinetti 2009c).
10. On Calvino’s contribution to mapping posthuman ontologies via his nar-
rative, see Iovino 2014a, b, among her other studies on Calvino and
ecocriticism.
11. “destabilizzare questa visione unitaria del soggetto e di aprirsi all’alterità
interna.” My translation.
12. “Così se il declino dell’umanesimo inaugura il postumano esortando gli
umani sessualizzati e razzializzati a emanciparsi dalla relazione dialettica
schiavo-padrone, la crisi dell’anthropos spiana la strada all’irruzione delle
forze demoniache degli altri naturalizzati. Animali, insetti, piante e ambi-
ente, addirittura pianeta e cosmo nel suo insieme, vengono ora chiamati in
gioco.” My translation.
13. My translation.
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PART I
Becoming Posthuman
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Posthumanism in Italian Literature and

Film: Boundaries and Identity Enrica

More information about this series at

Italian and Italian American Studies

Cover illustration: © peepo /Getty Images, Image ID: 1169321902

This book grew out of a double panel titled “Posthuman impegno in

work, I would like to acknowledge my professional indexer, Grainne

“Brilliantly edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara, Posthumanism in Italian Literature

“This wide-ranging volume seeks to expand our knowledge and understanding of

1 Introduction: How Italians Became Posthuman 1

Part I Becoming Posthuman 29

2 Giacomo Leopardi’s Book of the Future: The Zibaldone

3 Thresholds and Tortoises: Modernist Animality in

4 Post-Anthropocentric Perspectives in Laura Pugno’s

5 Posthumanism and Identity in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan

Part II Technology and Identity 117

6 The Stuff We Are Made Out Of: Contemporary Poetry in

7 “Ancora non raggiungibile”: Mobile Phones and the

8 Mechanized Women and Sentient Machines: Language,

9 (Technologically) Fallen from Grace: Abjection and

Part III Boundaries of the Human 209

10 Unbearable Proximity: Cognition, Ethics and Subjectivity

12 The Living Dead and the Dying Living: Zombies, Politics,

13 New Materialism, Female Bodies and Ethics in

Giancarlo Alfano is Professor of Italian at the University of Naples

University of Toronto Press in 2003. In 2009, he co-­edited the volume

modernism and postmodernism, cultural memory studies and precarity

Introduction: How Italians Became

Enrica Maria Ferrara

In 1945, one of the most influential intellectuals in twentieth-century

© The Author(s) 2020 1

commander to attack and kill human prisoners. In particular, when the

capitalize on the discussion conducted so far on the basis of Vittorini’s

individual as “the identity of a self is based in the consciousness of being the

between 1817 and 1832, persuasively described by Conrad as anticipating

technology without the filter of human feelings.8 What the leader of

the one hand, Leopardi’s philosophy paves the way to a bio-egalitarian

One of the first Italian intellectuals to address these or similar questions

artificial intelligence, Calvino proceeds to wonder about the role of the

intellectual—and even more so through his largely neglected plays. For

society as it links supremacy of reason to the human via an “identification

which contained “position papers” by the most distinguished thinkers at the

Over the next subsequent decades, representatives of the posthuman turn,

“imperceptible becoming, establishing contact with itself [the subject] as

categories, relationships, space[s,] stories” (Haraway 1991, 181). It is not

… Confining nature to a quintessentially contemplative dimension, regard-

Thus, Science Fiction’s attempts to engage with the representation of a

So far, I have referred briefly to some of the contributors’ chapters. At this

potential and capable of putting in question, on a political and ethical

through enmeshment with technological artefacts? Since the decisive

consumer culture. Varade concludes that contemporary Italian fiction

binarism. By replacing the dualistic philosophy of humanism with a monis-

subject matter of posthumanism in Italian literature and film entails.

perspective: from the proto-notion of a doubled or fractured self which is

9. “Sostituire la psicologia dell’uomo … con L’OSSESSIONE LIRICA

Bertoni, Roberto. 1979. Alcune tendenze della fantascienza italiana. Trimestre 12

———. 2009b. The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909). In Futurism.

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Part I Becoming Posthuman 29

2 Giacomo Leopardi’s Book of the Future: The Zibaldone

3 Thresholds and Tortoises: Modernist Animality in

4 Post-Anthropocentric Perspectives in Laura Pugno’s

5 Posthumanism and Identity in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan

Part II Technology and Identity 117

6 The Stuff We Are Made Out Of: Contemporary Poetry in

7 “Ancora non raggiungibile”: Mobile Phones and the

8 Mechanized Women and Sentient Machines: Language,

9 (Technologically) Fallen from Grace: Abjection and

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10 Unbearable Proximity: Cognition, Ethics and Subjectivity

12 The Living Dead and the Dying Living: Zombies, Politics,

13 New Materialism, Female Bodies and Ethics in

University of Toronto Press in 2003. In 2009, he co-edited the volume