In the introduction to their 2019 edited collection Antiquities Beyond Humanism, E. Bianchi, S. Brill and B. Holmes suggest that, contrary to popular assumption, ‘antiquity gives rise not only to a humanist tradition but also to lines of thought that are better understood as non-humanist’ (p. 1). Classical texts ‘reveal themselves as teeming with competing narratives’ (p. 2), in contrast to the clean outlines of the classical ideal put forward by Renaissance humanists. Several such collections have attempted to unpack this assertion, and from different geographical locations and schools of thought. Antiquities Beyond Humanism emerged from a North American conference. With more than 30 wide-ranging chapters and a continental, European academic context, Classical Literature and Posthumanism is a welcome addition to this project.
The book is divided into six broad sections: a series of general theoretical introductions and frameworks, four themed sections that each consider a different facet of the posthuman embodiment, and a critical conclusion or ‘Schlußwort’ by S. Goldhill (p. 331). The theoretical introductions address animal studies, monster studies, cyborg feminism and the study of posthumanism, through the works of Aristotle, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, and Gunter Anders and Gilbert Simondon respectively. Though all provide quite basic, traditional discussions of these frameworks, they offer uninitiated readers a helpful preface to the following chapters, where all but Anders and Simondon make frequent reappearances. Each of the four following sections also loosely corresponds to one of these theoretical frameworks – a helpful structural choice for those looking to use this collection for teaching at an undergraduate or postgraduate level.
Most of these chapters are fairly standard in terms of what one might expect to see in an edited collection on posthumanism, and for this reason many readers will again find the volume helpful from a teaching perspective. Part 1 considers ‘De/Humanization and Animals’ and includes chapters on non-human subjectivity, the animalisation of the human subject and the ‘animality’ of warfare. ‘The Monstrous’ forms the focus of Part 2. This is likely the theme that has already seen the largest body of dedicated research within Classics, and it is also the most eclectic section, with chapters on illness and disability, regression and (d)evolution, and ‘The Monstrosity of Cato in Lucan's Civil War 9’ (J. McNamara). Many of the chapters in this section also share the previous section's interest in animal studies, including A. Kachuck's chapter on elephants and ‘humane monsters’ and M. Gerolemou's chapter on Aristophanes’ Birds.
Given the messy enterprise of posthumanist research and the variety of approaches often brought together in its methods, it is perhaps unsurprising that many of the most successful chapters can be found in Part 3, ‘Bodies and Entanglements’. In this section fresh and current debates in the field of critical posthumanism are most clearly articulated. A. Dressler's chapter on Seneca is the first chapter to really reflect on the conflicting branches of posthumanist thought and their wildly varying implications for reading classical literature, and V. Burrus's analysis of ‘Hagiography without Humans’ builds beautifully around G. Deleuze and F. Guattari's work on ‘becoming-animal’ (p. 241). In Part 4, ‘Objects, Machines and Robotic Devices’, there are also several contributions that manage to both read classical literature through a posthumanist lens and articulate what the benefits of such a reading might be for the discipline of contemporary Classics. G. Liveley's chapter on sex robots (pp. 324–30) is particularly nuanced in the way in which it negotiates both ancient and contemporary power relations, drawing new and productive parallels between these two technocultures.
Any collection of this scope and on the topic of posthumanism and the posthumanities has a number of issues to contend with. The first issue is a disciplinary one and comes from trying to adapt a posthumanist framework (developed and still most often deployed in cultural studies) to other disciplines and methodologies. Most of the essays are very much structured according to academic conventions of Classics. Given that its audience is ostensibly made up of Classicists, this is a logical choice, but it does render some chapters less accessible to the interdisciplinary audiences of critical posthumanism. Large parts of each chapter are devoted to exhaustive close reading of the chosen case studies, while relatively little space is given over to contextualising or reflecting on the conclusions derived. The decision to put endnote references at the end of the book is also puzzling, particularly as they are not headed by chapter or page numbers (only chapter titles). This means locating references not given in-text (i.e. to primary texts) is often cumbersome.
The second issue such a collection faces is with novelty. The volume sets itself apart from other recent forays into Classical Posthumanism by taking embodiment as its focus, asking ‘if, and to what extent, a Posthuman decentred view of the human forms part of a Humanistic inquiry’ (p. 3). Taking a critical posthumanist framework, in their introduction Chesi and Spiegel suggest that ‘Posthumanism should oppose the centrality of man without disregarding his/her humanity in the first place’ (p. 7). When we think of ‘the posthuman’, we might initially envision cyborgs, aliens and monsters, but the theoretical framework of critical posthumanism takes a more metatextual approach to these figures. As S. Herbrechter points out (in ‘Critical Posthumanism’, in R. Braidotti and M. Hlavajova [edd.], Posthuman Glossary [2018], pp. 94–6), the ‘post’ in posthumanism on the one hand ‘signifies a desire or indeed a need to somehow go beyond humanism (or the human), while on the other hand, since the post- also necessarily repeats what it prefixes, it displays an awareness that neither humanism nor the human can in fact be overcome in any straightforward dialectical or historical fashion (for example, in the sense: after the human, the posthuman)’ (p. 94). As a result of this double vision, looking forward and back at the same time, acts of critical posthumanist imagining remain firmly grounded in the present moment (as K. Fleming productively reflects in her chapter on the Sphinx).
In Herbrechter's words, a critical posthumanism ‘functions more like an anamnesis and a rewriting of the human and humanism’ than an erasure, explicitly resisting transhumanist or apocalyptic visions of the future through which humans might ‘“argue themselves out of the picture” precisely at a time when climate change caused by the impact of human civilization (cf. Anthropocene) calls for urgent and responsible, human action’ (p. 95). In addition to searching for posthuman figures and themes, works of critical posthumanism need to rework the basic humanist assumptions of textual and academic inquiry. Similarly, Chesi and Spiegel cite B. Clarke and M. Rossini's recent edited collection on Posthumanism and Literature (The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman [2017]), in which truly ‘posthumanist discourses’ are thought to ‘promote neither the transcendence of the human nor the negation of humanism. Rather, critical posthumanisms engage with the humanist legacy to critique anthropocentric values and worldviews’ (p. 7). Is Classical Literature and Posthumanism entirely successful in this attempt? No – but the collection itself also acknowledges that it is only able to move in ‘inches towards uncovering the notion of a heterogeneous self in Classical literature, of an ontology of the human as inhabited by difference, and a subjectivity that embodies this alterity’ (p. 2).
Helpfully, S. Goldhill's conclusion historicises the book's central questions and anticipates many of the criticisms that might be levelled at the collection. His critique is exhaustive and incisive, at first glance a surprising coda to a collection that is often highly optimistic and (at times) over-ambitious. A final issue, which Goldhill hints at but does not name explicitly in his subsection ‘Whatever happened to politics?’ (p. 339), relates to studies of identity and anti-colonialism. As Goldhill writes, ‘Homer's animal studies are fine and dandy, but if they are to be analysed under the aegis of posthumanism, then how such an analysis constitutes a responsive and responsible recognition of the anthropocene [sic] should at least be hazarded. Or we will be doing business as usual’ (p. 339). For the editors ‘Post/humanism critically traces the history of the relational subject – as inherently decentred and defined by difference – … and takes it one step further, by introducing the idea of the subject as the heterogeneous self’ (p. 7). A more explicitly intersectional framework might have helped the collection in convincingly exploring and arguing this idea. Notably absent from this collection, with the exception of a few chapters, is any meaningful engagement with identity politics. Given the collection's reliance on animal and monster studies as well as feminist criticism, this is an odd omission. As often happens in interdisciplinary collections, only a selection of the important work being conducted in each field is selected for import, and the Whiteness of both fields is inadvertently amplified as a result. Acknowledgement of race studies’ ongoing (and often explicitly posthumanist) interventions into animal studies would have been welcome here, as would its long and often vital history of engagement by monster studies. This might also have helped to moderate the collection's optimism. As Goldhill points out: ‘Even the most disruptive and challenging texts also have their normative complicities. So when, then, are the texts that represent the wildest transgressions, most complicit with normativity? When are monsters no more than a delighted shiver from the imaginary of reason?’ (p. 337).
Criticisms aside, I am inclined to be more generous with many of the contributions to this collection than Goldhill: posthumanism outside of Classics is also grappling with many of the issues he highlights, and I take it as a positive sign that Classicists are taking note of this theoretical framework in the first place. Goldhill's conclusion also forces the reader to grapple with these struggles, reframing the entire collection in this light. Despite its issues, or perhaps precisely because the collection acknowledges that many of them exist, the volume takes an important step in initiating and furthering discussions between the field of Classics and the theories of critical posthumanism.
