Renaissance Posthumanism

By Fordham University Press

Connecting Renaissance humanism to the variety of “critical posthumanisms” in twenty-first-century literary and cultural theory, Renaissance Posthumanism reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human, not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. What if today’s “critical posthumanisms,” even as they distance themselves from the iconic representations of the Renaissance, are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? What if “the human” is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice, contributors to this collection focus on moments wherein Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny “contemporary”—and ally—of twenty-first-century critical posthumanism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780823269570

Book preview

Renaissance Posthumanism

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

Never, it seems, has there been a better time to take stock of the the humanities as a curriculum, or the humanist, one paid to teach this curriculum, as a vocation. In venues as varied as The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education, hardly a day goes by without yet another voice clamoring for or against the value of these areas of study or those of us paid to teach them. As Gary Gutting put it in November 2013, ‘Crisis’ and ‘decline’ are the words of the day in discussions of the humanities.¹ The humanities and the humanist are products of the Renaissance, when universities first created salaried positions for professors of humanity—grammar and rhetoric taught through classical authors such as Ovid and Terence (whose "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto or I am human, and nothing human is alien to me gave the curriculum its name)—but a growing number of scholars within the humanities are orienting their research variously toward posthumanism, the posthuman, and the posthumanities. This move toward posthumanism and the posthumanities would seem to confirm the crisis in the humanities and, by extension, imply the obsolescence of touchstone texts and defining practices of the Renaissance. Do we live in an age in which the art, literature, and culture of the Renaissance have nothing to teach us? To the contrary, as this introductory chapter will show, the two most popular and seemingly disparate versions of posthumanism"—the fantasies (or nightmares) of cybernetics and informatics in which human consciousness is downloaded, digitized, and disembodied, as described by N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman (1999) and the kind of critical animal studies that advocate against anthropocentrism in both ethics and aesthetics, as articulated by Cary Wolfe in What is Posthumanism? (2009)—are already contained within and can be elucidated by John Milton’s two epic poems: Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671). Thus, twenty-first century posthumanism proves far from unfathomable by or at odds with centuries-old Renaissance humanism. As our title suggests, this is not a book that takes contemporary theory and applies it to a distant and discrete historical period called the Renaissance; instead, we argue that theoretical and critical posthumanism, whether knowingly or not, has its roots in and remains an offshoot of Renaissance humanism.

Renaissance humanists demonstrated how close reading and careful restoration of ancient texts could be an effective means of situating and addressing, if not solving or answering, the pressing philosophical problems of the present. Thus, Renaissance humanism underscored the significant advantage that expertise in grammar, rhetoric, ancient languages, and literature gave to any thinker or maker. In other words, the thinkers we associate with Renaissance humanism put an emphasis on textual criticism and historical context and championed the idea that old authors and texts remained full of new (or at least potential, not yet discovered or actualized) insights and ideas, concepts, and mindsets that might very well illumine even the most obscure and intractable problems of politics and life in general. Despite many claims to the contrary from contemporary critical posthumanists, Renaissance humanism was never a coherent or singular worldview, much less a rallying cry for man as the measure—or the center—of all things.

This collection of essays by an impressive array of established and emerging scholars argues that contemporary critical posthumanisms, even as they distance themselves from particular iconic representations of the Renaissance (for example, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man), may in fact be moving ever closer to ideas of the human as at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality in works from the 14th to the 17th century. As posthumanists and early modernists alike now turn to address this weird tangle with the help of a series of thinkers associated with object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, and new materialisms, one recommendation might indeed be that rather than importing the insights of a panoply of posthumanist approaches committed to righting the wrongs of humanism, we might think more clearly about the emergence of humanism in the Renaissance and whether it calls for correction, conversation, emulation, or some combination of all of these. What if critical posthumanisms of all varieties understood themselves as adopting the methods, practices, and temporal orientation of Renaissance humanism?

Too often, instead, contemporary work in posthumanism presents itself as a rejection of Renaissance humanism when what it rejects is a straw man—albeit a straw Vitruvian Man—that bears little, if any, resemblance to Renaissance humanism qua the skeptical, critical, and irreverent close readings of ancient texts and cultures. A few recent examples will suffice to substantiate this claim. Pramad Nayar begins his book Posthumanism by claiming that Literary texts that have since the Renaissance always shown us how humans behave, react and interact—indeed it has been said that literature ‘invented’ the human—have now begun to show that the human is what it is because it includes the non-human.² Rosi Braidotti kicks off the first chapter of her book The Posthuman with a similar invocation: At the start of it all there is He: the classical ideal of ‘Man’, formulated first by Protagoras as ‘the measure of all things’, later renewed in the Italian Renaissance as a universal model and represented in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.³ Finally, Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism? uses its introduction to allude to ideals of human perfectability, rationality, and agency inherited from Renaissance humanism, before explaining that posthumanism names … a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon.⁴ Ironically, what is being repressed, fantasized, and evaded in these accounts is nothing other than the historically specific phenomenon of Renaissance humanism itself. By reducing Renaissance humanism to a handful of icons and caricatures (for example, da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man or Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare), which it then vehemently opposes, the critical posthumanism of Nayar, Braidotti, Wolfe, and others denies any connection to literary texts, artwork, or ideals of the past. But why?

Critical posthumanists thus far have tended to accept and to adopt a particular historiographical narrative—an ideology—that posits modernity as a radical break, an irreversible rupture with the past. At the same time, they have largely conflated and confused Renaissance and Enlightenment humanisms so that a singular humanism has become almost synonymous with modernity. In this formulation, humanism also marks a break with the past, a break that we are now enjoined to break with in turn. One way to bridge the temporal gap separating the Renaissance from Posthumanism, which maintains this model of history, is to read the postmodern as a return of the repressed premodern (or early modern) and, similarly, posthumanism as a belated acknowledgement of—and rapprochement with—all those ways of thinking and being in the world that have been occluded and othered by humanism itself. This model of periodization results, for example, in claims that Galen’s pre-Cartesian embodied psychology resembles Antonio Damasio’s post-Cartesian neurobiology. Once we denounce the Enlightenment, we discover an affinity with those the Enlightenment denounced. This account of historical progress, development, and change, indebted to Michel Foucault, implies that history consists of successive mentalites or worldviews ushered in by a series of epistemological ruptures.

Another approach to the cognitive dissonance and temporal dysphoria conjured by the phrase Renaissance Posthumanism would follow the lead of Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern: that is, modernity never happened; there was no (Cartesian or Copernican) revolution that suddenly put an end to everything that came before it. Thus, we do not need another revolution now; we do not need to denounce the moderns and the post-moderns and declare ourselves post-post-modern; or, more to our purposes, we do not need to distance ourselves from every vestige of Renaissance humanism in order to promote work in posthumanities. This alternative approach would suggest, as a corollary to we have never been modern, that "we have always been posthuman." That is, we can find companion species, systems theories, and critiques of anthropocentrism in the very same works that, for Wolfe and others, serve as the exemplars of Renaissance humanism and early modernity. In other words, what we thought was humanism or modernity turns out to be just a case of highly selective reading (or, more provocatively, a failure to close read). Latour says his use of the past perfect tense suits his project, which he describes as a matter of retrospective sentiment, of a rereading of our history.⁵ Latour’s call for a retrospective rereading of historical sources echoes the ad fontes—or to the sources—admonition of the Renaissance humanists themselves.

If one has never really read or looked closely at works of Renaissance humanism, then one’s (impoverished) view of it might look like nothing more than a decontextualized version of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Donna Haraway notes, in When Species Meet, "I cannot count the number of times Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man appeared in conference brochures for genomics meetings or advertisements for molecular biological instruments and lab reagents in the 1990s."⁶ But Haraway herself is savvy enough to know that these contemporary appropriations of Renaissance humanism are simplistic and reductive and in no way capture the messy complexity of Da Vinci, the painter, sculptor, anatomist, geologist, botanist, architect, mathematician, engineer, and poet. Nor of course would Da Vinci really have been all of these different things at the time; so-called Renaissance men weren’t really working in many different (specialized, autonomous) disciplines.⁷ Ironically, according to this account, the very works and authors critical posthumanists have been critiquing and denouncing for their naïve and obsolete Renaissance humanism turn out to anticipate the critiques and to agree with the denunciations. Suddenly, the naïveté and obsolescence appear to be on the other foot. If Renaissance humanists were always already posthumanist, then the indignation expressed at the false consciousness inherited from them dissipates. As it turns out, critical posthumanists have never been the unwitting dupes or victims of someone else’s ideas; thus, we don’t need to throw off the mental shackles of an ancient elite culture in order to embrace a brave new world. We just need to read a bit more closely and to see that critical posthumanism has ideological allies and philosophical resources in Renaissance humanism itself.

Even as some posthumanists have distanced themselves from a straw Renaissance humanism, a few Shakespeare scholars have made the case for a Posthuman Shakespeare. In Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare, Henry S. Turner recommends that we approach the early modern theatre as a kind of machine with which to fashion or to project artificial life, and that these forms of artificial life provide an example of what N. Katherine Hayles and Timothy Lenoir, among others, have described as a posthuman condition. This approach enables Turner to discover Shakespeare, "the programmer and the coder, developing brave new software to be run on the early modern platform stage or what he calls the ‘new media’ of the late-sixteenth century."⁸ Meanwhile, in Posthuman Shakespeare performance studies, W. B. Worthen sees a precursor to the ubiquitous transience of virtual [digital] writing, part of the posthuman condition as described by N. Katherine Hayles, in the constitutive instability of [live] performance. On mobile electronic devices, Worthen explains, Writing is everywhere and nowhere, and like performance itself, seems constantly to be vanishing from view.⁹ Again, twenty-first-century new media is presented as either a return to or an intensification of Renaissance modes and platforms. Finally, Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus’s collection Posthumanist Shakespeares, sporting the exposed circuitry of a cyborg’s head on its cover, also defines its project largely in terms of informatics. The first footnote to Herbrechter’s own essay, a footnote summarizing the argument of N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), puts the matter this way: It is the present chapter’s and, indeed, the entire volume’s claim that this twentieth-century transformation from human to posthuman via (information) technology needs to be historically challenged and recontextualized.¹⁰

All three of these deployments of posthuman borrow the term from N. Katherine Hayles’s historical account of how information lost its body from the mid-twentieth-century Macy Conferences on cybernetics to Hans Moravec’s turn-of-the-twenty-first-century futuristic visions of a digitized and downloadable consciousness. This technological definition of the posthuman, however, is far from what most scholars, including but not limited to the aforementioned Nayar, Braidotti, and Wolfe, have in mind when they research, write about, and rally around posthumanism and the posthumanities. Indeed, writing a decade after Hayles, Wolfe laments that the net effect and critical ground tone of her book, as many have noted, are to associate the posthuman with a kind of triumphant disembodiment. According to Wolfe,

Hayles’s use of the term … tends to oppose embodiment and the posthuman, whereas the sense in which I am using the word here [the sense in which Braidotti and Nayar subsequently use the word] insists on exactly the opposite: posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being after our embodiment has been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy inherited from humanism itself, that Hayles rightly criticizes.¹¹

We’ve come to a pretty pass when the very arguments made for Posthuman Shakespeare[s] risk confirming, for critical posthumanists, the usual misconceptions of Renaissance humanism and its supposed ideals of free-floating code and ubiquitous but immaterial information. But, one might ask in response to Wolfe, what humanism, particularly, promotes fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy? Or is this merely another swipe at Descartes, whose historical fate of late has been to embody all that is wrong with Enlightenment thought? If so, it should be noted that Descartes, who philosophized as if he were not taking recourse to (let alone commenting on) any Greek or Latin sources, deliberately distances himself in this way from humanist precursors such as Montaigne.

Both Turner and Worthen crystallize two interlocking tendencies that thus far have characterized work bringing the questions and concerns of posthumanism to bear on the Renaissance and vice versa. The first highlights a temporal paradox embedded in invocations of the posthuman and the premodern. Indeed, Worthen’s essay was one of many to appear in the inaugural special issue of postmedieval, a journal affiliated with the BABEL Working Group, edited by Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne (with an invited response by N. Katherine Hayles) titled When did we become post/human? As they move back and forth between interventions in the posthumanities and premodern phenomena, Joy and Dionne argue that the question of why and how, exactly, the study of the premodern past might shed critical light on the post/human future remains open and even problematic.¹² The second tendency is a related querying of the state, status, and definition of the human. Indeed, Joy and Dionne pin their claims for the importance of the humanities to this problematic when they claim what might be at stake here is not only the future of the human itself, but also of the humanities.¹³ Thus, much of the work on pre-Enlightenment posthumanisms seems to range somewhere between two poles of almost irresistible attraction: we were always posthuman and we were never human. The temptation, one this collection struggles with as well, becomes merely to backdate the innovations of the posthumanities, finding Renaissance or earlier iterations of computers, viruses, cyborgs, and code, or to indicate the fuzzy contours of the so-called human in premodern eras and how the resulting uncertainty might impact contemporary thinking about contemporary things. Such gestures, neither erroneous nor outmoded, might be just the beginning of a conversation that leads, at least to our minds, to a larger conversation about what Renaissance humanism is, was, and could be in the future.

Surely it is also no accident that as a certain engine of posthumanizing has roared to life, so too has a certain re-humanizing of the Renaissance. In the introduction to The New Humanists John Brockman quotes his own 1991 essay The Emerging Third Culture, which harkens back to C. P. Snow in its title. Brockman lavishes scorn on so-called humanists who have missed out on a veritable sea-change in culture:

In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person today. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often non-empirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.¹⁴

Lost in spiral jetties of their thoughts, most intellectuals are obsolete, made redundant by scientists who make up a new third culture. This new culture, Brockman continues, consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, have taken the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives.¹⁵ The real humanists of the fifteenth century, Brockman argues, knew to take science seriously, whereas most academics don’t. Here’s another great moment of scorn: In too much of academia, intellectual debate tends to center on such matters as who was or was not a Stalinist in 1937, or what the sleeping arrangements were for guests at a Bloomsbury weekend in the early part of the twentieth century.¹⁶ Renaissance Italy licenses yet another narrative about the human and its (supposed) values with science now the legitimate inheritor of humanism and the custodian of the human. In his role as popularizer of others’ cutting edge thinking, especially when comparing these innovators to Da Vinci, Brockman’s bombastic invocations of Renaissance humanism are akin to the conference brochures and magazine ads analyzed by Haraway. Nor is Brockman alone in this attempt to hold up the banner of humanism. Robin Headlam Wells’s Shakespeare’s Humanism trumpets on its dust jacket that the idea of a universal human nature was as important to Shakespeare as it was to every other Renaissance writer. Elizabethans were not, he insists, postmodernists before their times. Andy Mousley’s recent publications Critical Humanisms, Towards a New Literary Humanism, and Re-Humanising Shakespeare ask what might happen if we abandon certain dominant narratives about intellectual progress. In Critical Humanisms, Mousley articulates the problem as follows: Critical theory, ran the narrative, was the brave new world, and all that went before it old, bad, usually bourgeois and most often humanist.¹⁷ While trying to avoid the excesses of both traditionalism and anti-humanism, Mousley prefers an approach that returns to values, ethics, and the relationship between literature and life amongst other things.

Indeed, the critical posthumanism of Nayar, Braidotti, Wolfe, and others does just that. Only now values and ethics no longer derive exclusively from, nor apply exclusively to, humans. Likewise, the relationship between literature and life encompasses more than merely human life; moreover, the relationships humanity has, or might have, with other life forms are equally important as interpersonal relationships between or among humans. Wolfe insists that when we talk about posthumanism, we are not just talking about a thematics of decentering the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates, but, instead, we must take yet another step … and realize that the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist.¹⁸ More specifically, Wolfe observes that too often important work in the fields of critical animal studies or disability studies relies on the same philosophical and theoretical frameworks used by humanism and, therefore, unintentionally reproduce[s] the very kind of normative subjectivity … that grounds discrimination against nonhuman animals and the disabled in the first place.¹⁹ To those unfamiliar with Wolfe’s work, the elision of critical animal studies and disability studies—or nonhuman animals and the disabled [humans]—might cause some unease. His point, however, is that a certain autonomous, able-bodied, even optimally reasoning and speaking subject has been privileged among philosophers and theorists to the point where perspectives or experiences of the world that differ in any way from this ideal are marginalized, if not excluded.

Wolfe locates "the decisive turn of a thinking that is genuinely posthumanist in the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann but in the history of philosophy the completion of this other thinking that abandons subjectivity is more often associated with the turn" (die Kehre) in the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger, especially his 1947 Letter on Humanism.²⁰ Heidegger censures humanism—including both the "Humanitas, explicitly so called … first considered and striven for in the age of the Roman Republic"²¹ and the studium humanitatis of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance—for situating the essence of humanity in the self or subject of the individual human being, which modern science had increasingly defined as just one being among others. Andy Mousley summarizes Heidegger’s turn away from humanism thus:

In partial response to Sartre’s lecture, Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism (1947) represents an attempt to distance his own work from the French thinker and, more generally, from humanist-based philosophy. Heidegger argues that it is not justifiable to locate human beings at the centre of the universe or as the basis for all action. His attack is on metaphysical humanism as the unassailable vantage point for all understanding, which also includes the priority of the individual in Sartre’s thought … The crucial difference between Heidegger and Sartre is that the French philosopher begins with the concept of the human self, whereas Heidegger bases his philosophy on Being (Sein).²²

For Heidegger, in his own words, what is essential is not the human being but being; and being, he says, is the the open region itself. Just as Heidegger had used the word Dasein—Being there or, literally there Being—instead of humanity in Being and Time, thus distancing his philosophy from the traditional language of metaphysics and subjectivity, his Letter on Humanism uses openness and the open interchangeably with Being, as in this sentence: The self-giving into the open, along with the open region itself, is being itself.²³

Renaissance Posthumanism, too, reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human but it does so not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. Seeking those patterns of thought and practice that allow us to reach beyond the pre- and post- of recent thought, the contributors to this collection focus on moments where Renaissance humanism seems to depart and differ from itself. In this, we follow the lead of John Milton who returned to and reread the same passages from scripture, which hitherto had been used to prohibit divorce in order to argue that—when proper attention was paid to Greek diction, tone (notably hyperbole), and rhetorical context—Jesus, in fact, intended to license divorce on the grounds of spousal incompatibility for everyone except the literal-minded and hard-hearted Pharisees who opposed him. In returning to Milton, the embodiment of three centuries of Renaissance humanism, we find that his retelling of the Genesis story and his account of salvation through Christ, the loci classici of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, agree with critical posthumanism that the human is what it is because it includes the non-human; rejects the idea of man as the measure of all things; and levels the vaunted pretensions of the self-proclaimed rational animal. More importantly, while Renaissance Posthumanism might be seen as marking a return to theory as a lingua franca for conversations across historical periodization, our challenge is not to import current theoretical vocabulary into an earlier historical period (for example, Medieval Posthumanism, Romantic Posthumanism, and Victorian Posthumanism) but, instead, to show how this particular historical period, the Renaissance, has shaped and continues to shape the prevailing and pervasive terms, concepts, and discourses of twenty-first century critical posthumanism, including the open.

Ad Fontes: The Open and Humanity as Disability in Paradise Lost

Heidegger’s notion of the open is quite different from mine.

Donna Haraway, When Species Meet²⁴

The question of the animal has been widely debated in critical posthumanism with philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway all invoking Martin Heidegger’s the open. Agamben takes the title of his book, The Open: Man and Animal, from Heidegger’s theory of openness (offenbar) as what is special and unique to humanity, what separates humans from all other animals, and what ultimately makes possible foundational philosophical notions of Truth and Being. According to Heidegger, nonhuman animals encounter countless beings but not as beings and they never encounter Being itself, or the open, or the world as such. Instead, nonhuman animals remain captivated to and spellbound by bundles of stimuli, such as the scent of the flower or the light of the sun, which at once provoke and place limits on their awareness, excitement, and movement. But, as Agamben notes, Heidegger borrowed his term, the open, from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. He also changed its meaning completely. As Agamben clarifies "in the eighth [Duino] Elegy it is the animal (die Kreatur) that sees the open ‘with all its eyes,’ in distinct contrast to man, whose eyes have instead been ‘turned backward’ and placed ‘like traps’ around him. For Heidegger, by contrast, it is not the animal that sees the open" but only humans.²⁵ Derrida notes that both Rilke and Heidegger, despite their diametrically opposed views, speak in terms of the abyss, and thus of the vertigo that confronts every human attempt to think the animal.²⁶ Haraway, as the epigraph that opens this section attests, faults Heidegger—and perhaps by extension Rilke—for assuming such an abyssal, vertiginous and unbridgeable rupture separating humans from what she calls their companion species and focuses, instead, on the ways in which humans and other animals have coevolved from the beginning of their respective existences on earth and continue to live, love, practice and compete (for example, in canine agility training) together. For the open to signify an enhanced, authentic, or heightened state of Being, as it did for both Heidegger and Rilke, it must refer, argues Haraway, to a multispecies contact zone rather than a realm reserved exclusively for either humans or non-humans.²⁷

For all the ink spilt over the open in journals, books, blogs, and syllabi of late, little has been said about a more primordial sense of the open that has figured the separation of humans from animals—for better or worse, as Rilke and Heidegger respectively would have it—since Genesis. There a speaking serpent promises Eve, "God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil; two sentences later the narrator tells us how Adam and Eve, after following the serpent’s advice, experienced something unlike every other animal in Eden: And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked (KJV 3.5, 3.7). Heidegger, a former Jesuit novitiate who had lectured on St. Paul and St. Augustine, consistently deployed a lexicon—including what he alternately characterizes as the ruinance or fallenness of Dasein—that is shot through with influence from the Genesis tradition. As such, he would have known that Rilke’s use of the open to suggest that, as Kari Weil has recently put it, human consciousness is an obstacle to a knowledge we may have once possessed—a larger, less circumscribed, less rational way of knowing—is ultimately traceable to the rabbinic and patristic attempts to make sense of this originary contact zone, to borrow from Haraway, where species meet" and eyes are opened.²⁸

Agamben to his credit frequently looks to the Garden of Eden and to the Italian Renaissance in chapters covering Augustine, Aquinas, Pico, and Titian in The Open. But he never mentions John Milton. That is unfortunate because in none of his examples is the question of what philosophers in the Heideggerian tradition call the open as clearly at stake or as complexly figured. Heidegger proclaimed that not even the lark sees the open, and thus reserved ontological freedom and exposure to the world as such for humanity alone.²⁹ Milton’s God, on the other hand, insists that not even humanity sees the open. God describes to Adam in Book 7 how he created humans to live on Earth, not in Heaven, till by degrees of merit raised / They open to themselves at length the way / Up hither, under long obedience tried (7.157–9). Just as Haraway argues that agility training makes it possible for humans and animals to enter the open together, God insists that much remains shut even to the perfect, prelapsarian Adam and Eve, whom he endowed with reason and free will and made in his own image, and that they will only experience—or open to themselves—heaven as the result of a long program of obedience training. We might characterize the relationship between God and man the way Heidegger characterizes the relationship between man and animal: an abyss lies between them.³⁰

Indeed, a close examination of Raphael’s oft-cited conversation with Adam, in which he explains the monistic continuum uniting all entities, reveals how Milton continued to insist on abyssal ruptures not only between God and man but also between angel and man. Time may come, says the archangel, when man / With Angels may participate … / … or may at choice / Here [in Eden] or in heavenly paradises dwell (5.493–4, 499–500). In the meantime, he counsels the newlyweds to "enjoy / Your fill what happiness this happy state / Can comprehend, incapable of more (5.503–5, emphasis ours). Just as Heidegger (like Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant before him) equated animality with disability or incapacity (to speak, reason, and use tools), Raphael defines humanity—relative to the heavenly host—as a disability. But Raphael reiterates God’s stipulation: Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit, / Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend / Ethereal, as we … / If ye be found obedient (5.498–9, 501, emphasis ours). Sounding a bit like a salesman pitching timeshares in heavenly paradises," Raphael lets these first-time homeowners in on a little secret: Eden, the only Paradise they have ever known, is but one among many. At some point in the future, however, they might have a choice about whether to dwell on earth or in heaven but not until their bodies … turn all to spirit (5.497) From this short speech, Adam and Eve learn three things: There are more Paradises than just this one; they presently do not have a choice about where to dwell; and their bodies not only prevent them from seeing the other paradises, let alone choosing to dwell in one, but make it impossible for them to participate with Raphael and the Angels. Like Haraway, who criticizes Heidegger’s suggestion that profound boredom and detachment from beings in the world frees the human mind to contemplate Being itself, or the open, and posits instead that profound engagement in the world and immersive attempts to bridge the abysses or ruptures between species makes possible the kind of spontaneity, freedom, and mutual respect which she identifies as the open, Milton places humanity in the role of companion species, meeting and breaking bread with an angel, and in the process edging closer, in terms of a capabilities approach, to human flourishing. In Raphael’s promise that their bodies … [would] turn all to spirit, Milton’s Adam and Eve do confront the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy that Cary Wolfe attributes to Renaissance humanism, but disembodied consciousness and human autonomy remain just that: unrealized fantasies about what might have been if only our Grand Parents in that happy state (1.29) had exercised obedience.

Instead, of course, our Grand Parents (1.29) flunked obedience training. From Augustine onward, the doctrine of original sin meant that the defining essence of humanity, the image of God in man, had been ruined, possibly beyond repair. Martin Luther’s commentary on Genesis 3 indicates that "the slaughtered will, the corrupted understanding and the wholly defiled reason have changed man into an utterly altered being" (emphasis ours).³¹ With this proto-speciation and devolution in mind Milton’s prose tract Of Education, one of the last great works of Renaissance humanism, asserts that the purpose of schooling is to repair the ruins of our first parents.³² Exegetes have long puzzled over the talking serpent as well as what happened—and what it meant—when human eyes were opened and thus they knew. In the rabbinic and patristic commentaries this line signals the moment that humans, hitherto as blissfully ignorant of their nudity as all other animals in Eden, became self-aware and ashamed. Hence clothing. Augustine in De Genesi ad Litteram and Aquinas in Summa Theologica maintain in the words of the former, quoted verbatim in the latter, that we must not imagine that our first parents were created with their eyes closed, especially since it is stated that the woman saw that the tree was fair, and good to eat. Accordingly the eyes of both were opened so that they saw and thought on things which had not occurred to their minds before, this was a mutual concupiscence such as they had not hitherto.³³ This concupiscence, or libido, vitiates the human will and results in its loss of control over the sex organs, which rebel against the intellectual soul, the image of God in man, in the same way that Adam and Eve rebelled against God himself. Thus, in Paradise Lost what Wolfe calls the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy inherited from humanism itself never were—and never will be—part of the human condition.

Luther’s insistence that original sin changed man into an utterly altered being fits the definition of post-human in the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun referring to a member of a hypothetical species that might evolve from human beings.³⁴ By this definition, it seems that the human, for Milton, is merely a way station en route to one of two possible posthuman futures: one that was realized because of sin and one that was not. In retrospect, Raphael’s visionary promise that Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit resembles nothing so much as what Hayles describes in the opening anecdote of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999) as a roboticist’s dream that struck [her] as a nightmare, namely Hans Moravec’s prediction that, in Hayles’s words, it will soon be possible to download human consciousness into a computer. Hayles’s book, as we have noted, tells the story of how information lost its body, beginning with the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When information loses its body, Hayles explains, equating humans and computers is especially easy, for the materiality in which the thinking mind is instantiated appears incidental to its essential nature.³⁵ Both information and consciousness get figured as disembodied patterns or codes rather than as embodied presences. Indeed, when we consider that the Ethereal future Raphael foretells for Adam and Eve has no place for Death, which enters Eden through humanity’s disobedience, then this projected posthuman future bears a striking resemblance to the notion of the ‘singularity,’ a concept first proposed by Vernor Vinge and taken up by Ray Kurzweil in the 1990s: the singularity refers to the moment that human evolution makes the leap from biological bodies to silicon software, a moment eagerly anticipated by those, like Kurzweil, who plan to live long enough to live forever.³⁶ Unlike Agamben, Derrida, Haraway, and Wolfe, all of whom look forward to and attempt to articulate a post-anthropocentric worldview, Moravec and Kurzweil exercise an unabashed anthropocentrism, which sees humans as leaving the dust of this world, our companion species, and our finitude or mortality behind as we become posthuman. Nor is such a vision of paradise or the afterlife confined to technophiles: At the end of 2014, at the request of the Vatican, the New York Times published a formal retraction of a report that Pope Francis had consoled a boy by telling him that he would see his dog in heaven. Contrary to original reports, Catholic Church doctrine does not hold that One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ, nor that Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.³⁷

In Paradise Lost, however, Milton’s Satan transforms the abyssal rupture that Raphael has posited between humanity and the angels into the basis of