Abstract
Reviewed by: Stefano Bellin, University College London, UK
Thinking Italian Animals? Do animals have a nationality? Who is thinking who? In their compelling introduction, Deborah Amberson and Elena Past outline Italy’s particular contribution to human-animal studies. Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s argument in Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy, they stress that, given its propensity for ‘contamination’ with the ‘nonphilosophical’, Italian thought has managed to incorporate ‘the living or embodied human within its conceptual scaffolding’ (pp. 3–4). This transdisciplinary attention to the biological or ‘animal’ part of humans has resulted in a sustained engagement with biopolitical and environmental issues, evident in the work of authors such as Giorgio Agamben, Rosi Braidotti and Serenalla Iovino. Following the sociologist Franco Cassano, Amberson and Past also highlight that the Mediterranean is a historic place of hybridization of peoples and cultures, characterized by a struggle between a ‘primordial and deep relationship with the earth’ and a Judeo-Christian tradition that favours an exploitative approach to nonhuman animals and nature (p. 6). The result is a geopolitical space of extraordinary complexity, which offers a privileged stage to study the interlocked questions of humans, animals and ecosystems.
To give a theoretical backbone to its broad posthuman and ecocritical concerns, the volume opens with a foreword by Roberto Marchesini, ‘The Heterospecific as Ontopoietic Epiphany’. The Italian philosopher and ethologist argues that human beings incorporate otherness through mimesis, a process that shapes both our biological life and our cultural sphere. Mimesis as knowledge and hybridization unhinges the idea that culture is the exclusive domain of humankind. This insight serves as a springboard for Marchesini’s central claim: human beings must work to ‘anthropodecentre’ themselves, acknowledging the other as a nonextraneous companion, as something that participates in the dialogical process of human self-making. This claim gives coherence to the collection of essays that follow, though Marchesini’s argument is somewhat weakened by his tendency to employ heavy-handed jargon and abstract words (a fact that might account for his current lack of success in the English-speaking world).
The 13 essays of the volume are organized into three parts: ‘Ontologies and Thresholds’, ‘Biopolitics and Historical Crisis’ and ‘Ecologies and Hybridizations’. Although the variety of authors (Tozzi, Pavese, Montale, Landolfi, Luzi, Cavani, Pasolini, Morante, Volponi, Pugno, Wu Ming, Carlo Levi, Calvino, Diritti, Frammartino) and themes (animality, multiple ecologies, flesh consumption, etc.) discussed is great, all contributors insist that the profound relations and exchanges between human and nonhuman animals radically call into question the philosophical underpinnings of ‘humanism’. Little attention is paid, however, to the multifarious strands and meanings of humanism, championed by different artists, philosophers, politicians, colonizers and priests (see Tony Davies, Humanism). ‘Humanism’ thus tends to become a self-fashioned concept that facilitates the rise of the posthuman. This betrays some critical blindspots. How can we tally an absolute postanthropocentrism with the fact that, at least at the level of environmental impact, human beings play a central role in our planet? Does a postanthropocentric perspective involve an overcoming of subjectivity? Is this really possible and what would be the risks and benefits? While the aporias of posthumanism are not always fully examined, the volume effectively reveals and denounces the violence generated by what Agamben calls the ‘anthropological machine’. Operating both within and outside humankind, this biopolitical mechanism creates, reproduces and maintains an artificial distinction between human life and animal life. Among the problematic effects of this distinction we find the ‘animalization’ of some groups of human beings and the capitalist exploitation of nonhuman animals. A further strength of the volume is the innovative and transdisciplinary way in which the contributors analyze key figures of modern Italian culture. To illustrate the richness of the authors and themes explored, I shall summarize one essay from each part of the volume.
In her contribution, Elizabeth Leake discusses Cesare Pavese’s enduring anxiety about the female body and its association with the natural world. By combining gender studies with posthumanist theory, she demonstrates that the violence visited on women in Pavese’s oeuvre reflects an attempt to erase the maternal function by equating the female body to nonhuman animals and natural elements. This operation is fuelled by a ‘fantasy of male self-generation, to arrogate reproduction to the sphere of masculinity’ (p. 9). Giuseppina Mecchia’s essay, ‘Elsa Morante at the Biopolitical Turn: Becoming-Woman, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible’, shows how the Roman writer’s fictional works anticipate many poststucturalist insights on biopolitics and the human-animal divide. In particular, Morante’s masterpiece, History (La Storia), set during the Second World War in Rome, explores the way in which the machinations of power produce forms of exclusion and oppression that resemble Giorgio Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, a human being reduced to ‘bare life’ in such a way that it can be disposed of without any legal proceedings. Indeed, the characters of Morante’s novels are involved in processes of becoming-animal that mark the struggle between biopolitical violence and a positive affirmation of ‘creaturely’ life. Finally, Serenella Iovino’s posthumanist reading of Calvino examines how figures such as the Cosmicomics narrator Qfwfq or the observer Mr Palomar call into question any rigid boundaries that separate humans from other animals. Drawing on the emerging field of material ecocriticism, Iovino argues that Calvino’s ‘hybriditales’ represent a ‘relational ontology’ in which reality itself is a continuous flow of crossings. The Cosmicomics depict indeed a porous universe of evanescent thresholds, where beings and matter coevolve through metamorphoses and osmotic exchanges. The result is a ‘biography of the world’ that emphasizes the essential interdependence and permeability of every being.
Overall, Thinking Italian Animals is a rich and innovative volume that prompts the reader to reflect on the relationships between human beings, nonhuman animals and nature, and consequently to question our engagement with the world and the role we play in the Darwinian cosmos.