Classical Literature and Posthumanism by Giulia Maria Chesi;Francesca Spiegel;

Author:Giulia Maria Chesi;Francesca Spiegel; [Spiegel, Edited by Giulia Maria Chesi and Francesca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350069510
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 19.1 Combination of personification and reification.

Comparing this combination of personification and reification (Figure 19.1) with the figure of animalism in Ep. 113 reveals a complex relationship.

Personification and animalism fall on a philosophical continuum even as Seneca rhetorically denies their continuity.35 The broken line between them marks this inconsistency. At the same time, the direction of the arrow between them indicates the attribution of increasing reflexivity and complexity in a figure: consistent with Stoic panpsychism, animalism is a lower, less organized form of personification.36 The solid line between reification and animalism marks, in contrast, a continuity between animals and things; Seneca emphasizes this continuity to distance personification from animalism and by implication persons from animals. Figures of animalism can move, as we’ll see in Seneca’s farcical supposition of a Vergilian verse-animal below, and personal figures may also move, but unlike personal figures, figures of animalism are mobilized by ‘feelings’ that have no proper (read: cognitive) object, falling short of proper (read: personal) emotion.37 The ‘feelings’ of the virtue animals that hunger, thirst, and hurt entail no judgement about the states in which they find themselves; they exhibit ‘intensity’, and probably resemble ‘affect’.38

In this schematization of Seneca’s practice, there is no continuity between personification and reification, but only the break marked above by the double line. Personifications comprise figures who may have bodies but are not themselves (exclusively) bodies.39 Even if they exhibit ‘intensity’ of the kind that characterizes the ‘lower’ figures (when, for instance, Philosophy ‘herself’ appears imperious in some of Seneca’s other letters), they ‘speak’ and ‘act’ on the basis of judgement: ‘Philosophy exercises her own dominion [regnum suum] … she is not a part-time thing [res subsiciua].’40 The break between Philosophy and the ‘part-time thing’ is the horizon of figuration, marked again by the double line between reification and personification, ‘crossed’ by metaphor (translatio).41 Thus, in the example above, the hands of virtue are not animals, let alone persons, but parts of a person, and hence things.42 Rhetorically, then, animalism and personification become opposites, and hence binary, ‘Platonic’.43 The relationship of animalism and reification is, in contrast, more ‘posthuman’: its dynamic is not the dualism of presence and absence, habitually deconstructed by post-structuralists and fully apparent in ancient literary theory, but rather the configuration of pattern and randomness celebrated by post-post-structuralist posthumanists.44

By obscuring the continuity between animalism and personification, Seneca obscures the animal part of the human being and so relegates animal figures (along with animals) to the side of things (De vita beata 14.2):

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