Festa, Lynn. <i>Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture</i>.

Read from the brink of ecological disaster, the title of Festa’s fascinating new book echoes popular works like The Uninhabitable Earth or The World Without Us that have sought to picture an Earth depopulated of human beings. But in fact, humans are everywhere in Fiction Without Humanity. Festa explains that her title describes two ways of reading—”reading literary texts and artworks that do not feature human figures, and . . . reading without treating humanity as an established rubric”—but it is the second that more closely fits the bill: this is a book less interested in the absence of humanity as such, more in how the category of the human was produced through the absence of a well-defined referent. The legacy of the Enlightenment’s conception of “Man” has been grim, but Festa’s aim is not to re-expose its scars (racial, gendered, colonial, technological, or environmental). Instead, tracing the troubled figure of the human as depicted through the perspective of non-human beings, she shows how humanity’s lack of a clear definition enlivened the period’s modes of artistic, philosophical, and scientific awareness. Festa is “not ready to give up on humanity just yet,” and her compelling account of humanity as process rather than as thing provides a fresh perspective on Enlightenment art and thought.Stylistically, the wittiness, erudition, and charm of Fiction Without Humanity take cues from the irreverent collection of minor aesthetic objects that supply the analyses of its various chapters, including trick paintings (chapter 1), microscopic images (chapter 2), riddles and fables (chapters 3 and 4), and the non-minor exception, Robinson Crusoe (chapter 5). In Festa’s hands, this quirky assembly flaunts an Enlightenment-era absorption with animals, insects, commodities, and other non-humans that furnished modern concepts of humanity, not simply by way of contrast, but through the operation of reading and its practical implication of a uniquely human reader. Thus the vainglorious fly whom Francis Bacon borrows from Aesop (“The fly sat upon the axle-tree of the chariot wheel, and said, ‘What a dust do I raise!’”) is more than a miniature of human conceit. In pointing to human qualities via extra-human projection, the fable punctures the very humanness it purportedly represents. As Festa puts it, “you’re so vain, you probably think this fable is about you—as indeed you must, to get the point” (175). Here and throughout the book, the human is less to be found in a set of recognizable features than in the very act of recognizing humanness—a tautological definition, yes, but one we find authorized by numerous Enlightenment thinkers. If Locke doubts the existence “of precise and unmoveable Boundaries of that Species,” Ephraim Chambers’s 1728 Cyclopedia defines “humanity” self-referentially as “the Nature of Man, or that which denominates him human.” Likewise, Vico detects humanity’s defining feature in language’s penchant for anthropomorphism, suggesting “that man becomes all things by not understanding them,” and Linnaeus distinguishes humans from other primates by their self-imposed command, “nosce te ipsum” (know thyself). For Festa, these thinkers are co-discoverers of the human being as one who “sees from a human point of view” and thus constitutes itself through the purchase of a self-differentiating perspective. More and less than a featherless biped, the human is literally in the eye of the beholder—not in what it sees, but in the perspective occupied by a viewing subject who, in viewing, seeks species definition.Without qualities and tautologically defined, the human being in Fiction Without Humanity offers an enigmatic point of convergence for recent discussions in animal studies, posthumanism, and other critical-theoretical fields. But the real payoff lies in Festa’s telling of how this anti-mimetic conception of the human animated the realms of Enlightenment art, literature, and science. The (mostly) literary history that results defies the still dominant framing of the period that we derive from Ian Watt as a movement toward psychological realism centered on the autonomous individual. Insisting, in contrast, that “mimesis is an inadequate explanation for art,” Festa turns to “experiments with nonhuman perspectives” that displace the relation between subject and object. Appropriately for a book that sees humanity as a matter of perspective, her first two chapters approach the human-animal distinction by way of experiments in seemingly impossible optics. The first dissects human ambitions to achieve a “bird’s-eye view” through trompe l’oeil paintings that feature, among other things, dead birds. In the second chapter, the enlarged louse of Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia embodies a vision of human perfectibility that is parasitically dependent on scientific instrumentalization. Both chapters articulate a non-mimetic account of an Enlightenment visual culture that reveled in the artificial estrangements inherent to human perspective.Chapters 3 and 4 carry forward these estrangements from the optical to the verbal, reading the period’s ubiquitous riddles and fables as “devices that wrest familiar objects from the preordained constructs that make them immediately recognizable by dislodging the eye from the its accustomed point of view.” But the full narrative arc of these interventions comes clear in the concluding chapter’s treatment of Robinson Crusoe, which displaces Defoe’s novel from its position (since Watt) at the fountainhead of literary mimesis, resituating it instead within the minor tradition of fictions without humanity. Constantly struggling to bend his surroundings to his particular human ends, Crusoe is preoccupied with questions of fit (the bagginess of a goat-skin, the shape of a footprint); these concerns, Festa argues, are emblematic of Defoe’s skepticism regarding the very possibility of literary description, or the fitting of words to things. Taking up the most interesting aspects of what Heather Love called the “descriptive turn” (while—mercifully—sidestepping debates about “surface reading” and “the postcritical”), Festa reveals how Crusoe’s fitting of names to things activates description’s power, not simply to represent an existing reality, but to “shoehor[n] the recalcitrant raw material of the world into ideas or concepts.” It is in this virtue of Crusoe’s descriptions’ extra-mimetic capacities that Festa places novelistic realism in a new lineage, as “an inheritor of the estranging virtual vantage points offered by the bird’s-eye view, the microscope, the riddle, and the fable.”What does this misfit literary history of the human offer for our moment of anthropogenic ruin? One answer is that the representational practices gathered here provide a wealth of historical models for imagining ethical and juridical responsibility. The quality-less abstraction of the human concept has been useful for the perpetrators of ecological violence: corporate and state actors responsible for global warming continue to evade responsibility, leaving universal “human nature” holding the bag. But the works in Fiction Without Humanity extend from a period before legal personhood hinged on species distinctions. In laying bare the processes through which diverse forms of agency were included and excluded under the human umbrella, they exemplify the urgent demand “to imagine collectivities that are able to act and that can be held to account,” connecting with recent efforts to defend the legal personhood of rivers and other non-human things. Humanity will not be redeemed for the harms done in its name, but it is not really humanity that Festa seeks to rehabilitate; it is rather the practices of “estranging, nonverisimilitudinous representatio[n]” that were necessary for its invention. Fiction Without Humanity is essential reading for anyone interested in the prehistory of the posthuman.

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