Posthuman Narratives, Italian Style


Posthuman Narratives, Italian Style

Emiliano Guaraldo
PhD Candidate, University of North Carolina 

 guaraldo@live.unc.edu 

Amberson, Deborah, and Elena Past. 2014. Thinking Italian Animals: Human 
and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film. New York: Palgrave 
Macmillan. 263 pp. $ 90.00 ISBN 978-1-137-45475-1

Among other things, the 2014 American Association of Italian Studies con-
ference in Zurich will be remembered for its meaningful conclusion. After 
her exceptional keynote address speech (Posthumanist Paradoxes), the ital-
ianist scholars in the audience applauded Rosi Braidotti in a long, heartfelt, 
and regenerating standing ovation. This event marked an important step 
in a more general trend within the Italian Studies scholarship. It is a well-
established fact that in recent years there has been a proliferation of confer-
ence sessions, scholarly articles, and academic production aimed at the re-
reading of Italian literary and cinematic traditions in the light of posthuman, 
ecocritical, and new-materialist studies. In Zurich, Braidotti acknowledged 
this trend and complimented the italianist academics for their contributions. 
By enthusiastically adopting the post-human “navigational tools”, the world 
of Italian literary studies seems to be finally taking the environmental turn 
towards a deeper understanding of post-humanism and towards an open, 
and inclusive attitude regarding non-human subjectivities.

Later in 2014, Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in 
Modern Italian Literature and Film was published as part of the Italian and 
Italian American Studies series by Palgrave MacMillan. This book stands 
as proof of the found interest in posthumanism by the North American 
Italian studies academia. Scholars of Italian departments from the United 
States wrote most of the contributions that compose the book, making 
Thinking Italian Animals exemplary of the renovation and hybridization 
of Italian studies in the North American departments. Roberto Marches-
ini and Serenella Iovino, who are currently the most prominent scholars 
for post-humanism and ecocriticism in Italy, also contributed with two 
remarkable essays, respectively The Heterospecific as Ontopoietic Epiphany 
and Hybriditales: Posthumanizing Calvino. The participation of scholars of 

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global importance for the environmental humanities such as Iovino and 
Marchesini adds up to the excellent collection of essays that Amberson and 
Past put together in their ambitious project.

The volume is structured in three parts: “Ontologies and Thresholds”, 
“Biopolitics and Historical Crisis”, and “Ecologies and Hybridizations”. 
Each part includes a handful of essays that focus specifically on the works 
of one or more author, being those literary texts or film. The diversity of 
the essays that compose Thinking Italian Animals is profound and, as a 
result, it offers a panoramic view on how scholars operating from literary 
departments are currently approaching themes such as animal ethics, the 
animal question, and the human/nonhuman animal divide, starting from 
literary analysis. 

The essays of Thinking Italian Animals share several points of contact. 
Many possible “reading paths” can connect the fourteen contributions that 
constitute the volume. Most of the works analyzed in Thinking Italian Ani-
mals are from the 20th or 21st century, with the exception of Del Principe’s 
enticing essay The Monstruous Meal: Flesh Consumption and Resistance 
in the European Gothic. Exposing the relationship between works such as 
Collodi’s Pinocchio, Tarchetti’s Fosca, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Stoker’s 
Dracula, Del Principe indicates the monstrous “transhuman body as a key 
site for articulation of the construction of species and national identity” 
in 19th century Europe (179). According to Del Principe, gothic monsters’ 
bodies function as resisting objects against speciesist desires of meat con-
sumption and as a tool to destabilize the fixed boundary between human 
and nonhuman animals. Meat consumption and cannibalism are also at the 
center of Valentina Fulginiti’s excellent essay The Postapocalyptic Cook-
book, which focuses on the dystopian/cyberpunk novels Free Karma Food 
(2006) by Italian authorial collective Wu Ming and Laura Pugno’s critically 
acclaimed Sirene (2007). Literature and cinema have widely adopted post-
apocalyptic, sci-fi, and dystopian themes to not only titillate the audiences’ 
imaginations, but also as narrative devices to destabilize the anthropocen-
tric gaze of capitalist mass culture. In this sense, Daniele Fioretti claims 
that Paolo Volponi’s dystopian allegory of Il Pianeta Irritabile (1978) 
“foresaw the main point of the contemporary debate on animality: the 
idea that human beings are not something separate from animals” (154). 
This is an idea that the readers of Thinking Italian Animals will find in 
many of the essays that comprise the volume, as in several of the authors’ 
works examined seems to emerge some sort of embryonic anti-speciesist 
self-consciousness. Of course, this self-conscious thought by authors such 
as Tozzi, Montale, Pavese, Luzi, Landolfi does not necessarily imply an 
advanced understanding of the nonhuman other, but rather a “posthuman 

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foreshadow”, to use Fioretti’s term, an acknowledgment on the ontological 
limitations of a human centered awareness of life.

Posthumanism often resonates also in other theoretical traditions, for 
example in feminist theory and the analysis of biopolitical structures of 
power. In Cesare Pavese, Posthumanism, and the Maternal Symbolic, Eliza-
beth Leake places Pavese’s literary production under the theoretical scrutiny 
of feminist theory and post-humanism more specifically at the intersection 
of both. In particular, Leake is interested in Pavese’s dedicated attention to 
the woman’s body and the biological nature of maternity, the relationship 
between violence and sexuality, and the mythos of male parthenogenesis.

In Montale’s Animals: Rhetorical Props or Metaphysical Kin Gregory Pell 
individuates animal depictions in Montale’s poetry that seem deeper and 
more complex than “trivial anthropomorphism”, thanks to the poet’s self-
aware engagement with the animal otherness (57). The author’s engagement 
is essential also in the case of Luzi’s work, as pointed out by Matteo Gilebbi 
in one of the most memorable essays of the entire book, Animal Metaphors, 
Biopolitics, and the Animal Question in which Gilebbi states, “the presence 
of animal figures in poetry does not always serve the animal question in an 
ontological sense”. (95) More specifically, it is the appearance of animal met-
aphors that undermine anthropocentrism (the so-called “theriomorphisms”) 
that can make possible a dialogue between poetry and animal ontology. 
Such a dialogue is also the fundamental structure of Gilebbi’s text, in which 
Luzi and Agamben interact with surprising complementarity.

The analysis of literary texts and authors takes up most of the pages of 
Thinking Italian Animals, as Elena Past’s (Re)Membering Kinship: Living 
with Goats in the Wind Blows Round and Le Quattro Volte and Alexandra 
Hill’s Creatureliness and Posthumanism in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter 
and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò are the only two essays dealing with film. In par-
ticular Past’s contribution considers two extremely interesting recent films 
that deal with innovative strategies with the relationship between human and 
nonhuman life and landscapes they inhabit, demonstrating contemporary 
Italian independent cinema’s attentive gaze on nonhuman subjects.

The posthuman foreshadowing that gradually materializes reading the 
examples of Italian literature presented in the book answers also other 
questions, this time on the nature itself of a volume like Thinking Italian 
Animals. How is relevant for a de-localized critical debate on animal-
ity and the animal question a work apparently nested within the national 
borders of Italy? In an increasingly interconnected academia, where 
boundaries between disciplines seem to collapse exposing the complex 
networked nature of contemporary humanities, this seems a relevant con-
cern. Intuitively, we could think that the ideas of Italian national entity 

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and language that on a superficial level are serving as trait d’union of the 
volume are anthropocentric and far from an anti-speciesist understanding 
of the humanities. But even keeping in mind these concerns, the distinctive 
“posthuman feel” that transpires from these re-readings of Italian literary 
texts is real and undeniable. The sense of anticipatory cognizance towards 
the animal other’s ontological existence becomes the real link between 
the works analyzed in Thinking Italian Animals, rather than their national 
origin. Furthermore, as pointed out by Roberto Esposito and cited by 
Amberson and Past in the introduction, we are reminded that there is a 
uniqueness if Italian thought, as “Italian philosophy has been thinking the 
human and, more specifically, the living or embodied human with marked 
intensity for many centuries” (3). In this sense, the Italian framework that 
defines the scope of the book takes a deeper meaning: 

Italian philosophy differs from other Western currents of thought in that 
it moves beyond the horizon of language to traverse the disciplinary and 
lexical boundaries of the strictly philosophical, positioning itself across the 
spheres of politics, history, and life. A propensity for “contamination” with 
the “non-philosophical” allows Italian thought to incorporate, as it were, the 
living or embodied human within its conceptual scaffolding. (3)

Thinking Italian Animals’ collection of essays represents a clear leap for-
ward from previous works on the animal presence in Italian literary and 
film culture. On one hand, the contributors share a common theoretical 
and methodological framework composed by the pivotal works of authors 
such as Agamben, Derrida, Foucault, Haraway, Braidotti, Lyotard, and 
seem to be deeply invested in the wider epistemological project of the envi-
ronmental humanities. On the other hand, the contributors and the editors 
of the volume explicitly point out that they are not simply interested on 
the mere passive presence of animals in Italian texts and film, but rather in 
the ways in which Italian literature seems to be a fertile soil for the seeds of 
posthumanist and anti-speciesist thoughts. 

The ultimate objective of an ambitious project such as Thinking Italian 
Animals is obvious. Amberson and Past’s unearthing of the hidden crea-
tive ways in which Italian literature and film have embraced the nonhuman 
subjectivities and the posthuman horizon will eventually initiate a debate 
on topics that cannot be ignored anymore. Finally, this volume has the 
merit of consolidating Italian literary academia on the map of current envi-
ronmental humanities, potentially initiating transnational, interdisciplinary, 
and comparative efforts within the humanities departments of Italy. Quot-
ing Amberson and Past, Thinking Italian Animals earns itself a place on a 
larger anti-speciesist project as it “invites further efforts to hybridize, and 
de-anthropocenter the creaturely world around us” (13).

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