This is the third of the interview series initiated by the PENTACLE team. The preparation, translation, and the revision of the questions are done collaboratively by Öykü Burçak Ortakcı, Başak Ağın, and Önder Çakırtaş. Türkçe versiyon için buraya tıklayınız.
Dr. Orsola Rignani is Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Parma. Her main fields of research include comparative history of ideas, philosophy of the body, philosophy of the post-human, and the relationship between philosophical, literary and scientific thought.
Dear Orsola, thank you for accepting the interview with PENTACLE. Many of us, those who are interested in the posthuman as a concept and posthumanism(s) as a set of theories, come from different backgrounds such as science and technology studies, English departments, and philosophy. You have your background in the history of philosophy. How do you relate your work with posthumanism? What is your take on the posthuman as a concept?
Yes, indeed I have trained on medieval (history of) philosophy with reference to the relations, in the Middle Ages, between philosophy and ‘sciences’ in relation specifically to anthropological perspectives. I studied for several years the process of affirmation, within a purely religious horizon as medieval, of, so to speak, worldly knowledge inter-implicated with the bodily dimension of man (medicine, astrology, alchemy etc.) and gradually realized how ‘problematic’ and problematizable was the soul-body relationship and the man-nature relationship. In the wake of these issues, I pursued my research by delving into the theme of relations between knowledge in relation (also) to man, and I happily came across the inter/trans-disciplinary reflection of Michel Serres who, from this perspective, brought forward instances of anthropo-eccentric repositioning of the human. From here the step to posthumanism was a short one…! I then began to detect obvious isomorphisms between the anti-dualist, anti-anthropocentric and non-humanist proposals of Serres and the orientations of the posthumanist constellation, and, at the same time, I grasped ‘correspondences’, from a perspective of comparative history of post-medieval ideas, between medieval alchemical-medical instances of prolonging lifespan and restoring bodily health and hyper- and trans-humanist perspectives… I could say then, in summary, that I have pursued my research interests on the posthuman from a perspective of comparative history of philosophical ideas…!
Then as for my view on the concept of the posthuman, I understand it as an inchoative process of rethinking and repositioning the human, with a character, to use Haraway’s term, sprawling, that is, involving the human and the other-than-human. A process, inter-trans/disciplinary, that is ontological, epistemological, and ethical in scope and that feeds on increasingly articulated kinship in a perspective that promises itself, neither anti-human nor post-human, as much as it is likely to be more-than-human.
But, on closer inspection, is it so foolish to say that we have always been more-than-human?
You have been a part of Global Posthuman Network (GPN) and you organize a lot of events with GPN. For instance, there has been a recent summer camp in Italy. Could you briefly comment on your experience with the core GPN team and its affiliates on a larger scale? How would you evaluate the summer camp?
I had the first contacts with the GPN in 2018 following the acquaintance of Francesca Ferrando; I participated with a paper in December 2018 at the New York Posthuman Winter Summit, at NYU in New York and on that occasion, I met Yunus Tuncel and the other members of the organizing group. I breathed an atmosphere of great openness, collaboration and interdisciplinarity; impressions that found confirmation in the continuation with the establishment of a constant collaborative relationship, as well as with Francesca Ferrando, with Stefano Rozzoni (who edits the GPN newsletter), with whom we founded, in 2020, the Italian Posthuman Network, so to speak officially inaugurated with a widespread event, Posthuman Week, in October 2022. What I notice is a continuous and fruitful expansion and thickening of local Networks, with a proliferation of interactions at the local level precisely but also with the GPN, in the perspective of the establishment of a kind of ‘global posthuman community’.
As for the Posthuman Summer Camp held in August 2023 in Italy, I took part in all organizational stages, but was unable to speak in attendance due to a health problem, although I did hold an online workshop on a more-than-human art experiment. In the face of very varied and interesting interactive contributions to posthumanist studies and practices as well as intense and rich moments of sharing, I can only note that there are still some steps to be taken on the organizational and logistical level. Steps that could perhaps consist in, among other things, the abolition of parallel working sessions, the division of tasks (organizational, scientific etc.) and the assignment, to the different organizers, of their own space of competence to be managed ‘autonomously’. Next summer, however, another event will be organized based on these new ‘parameters,’ with the prospect of then being able to succeed in setting up a full-fledged posthuman Summer School.
Posthuman studies is now a worldwide phenomenon expanding beyond borders, race, gender, age, language, and class. But how about the interest in those studies in Italy, where you are based? How does the later generation of scholars and learners approach the fundamental matters of posthumanism?
When I started to deal with Posthumanism (about ten years ago), this field of study in Italy was in its infancy; I remember that the works of Roberto Marchesini were considered pathfinders. In academia, then, the situation was even ‘worse’: the posthuman was viewed with suspicion and considered a ‘science fiction’ practice of overcoming the human. Later, over the years, through the work of Roberto Marchesini and his group, but also Ferrando, Balzano, Sorgner and others, interest in the posthuman (in the philosophical sphere) began to take root and even enter some academic courses, although there is still a long way to go. However, interest has been stimulated in particular by the urgency of reflections on the Anthropocene, which has given rise to the creation of Laboratories, such as the Environmental and Social Humanities Lab at the University of Parma, of which I am a member, and to the implementation of activities such as Summer Schools etc. in which posthumanist issues find a space. For my part, I deal with posthuman in my Course on Approaches to Contemporary Humanism at the Master of Philosophy Degree Course at the University of Parma and coordinate a University Research Group on ‘More-than-human Art’. However, I would say that, in my experience, the posthuman is overall approached by the younger generation of scholars starting essentially from eco-feminist/ecological issues.
In your paper “The (According to the) Posthuman Body,” you ask a series of ‘What-if’ questions relating to the ability of modern technology and if it will ever achieve what the body can do. What would your answer be to those questions? Can we use ‘the body’ as a ‘bridge,’ as you stated, to advance more in technology? Or will it always be superior to what networks and software are able to do?
Taking it for granted that as answers to these questions one can only speculate, from my background in Serresian and posthumanist studies, I am convinced (and hope I can continue to be!) that, despite everything, the human body is technologically irreproducible/insubstitutable/insuppressible. As I said, my positions in this regard adhere to those of posthumanism and not to those of a certain transhumanism advocating mind uploading etc… My idea is that of a body as (s)node/catalyst of a network of ‘kinship’, not that of a ‘bridge’ to a ‘disembodying’ technological progress. Despite advances in AI, augmented reality, NFTs etc., I want to continue to believe that, as Serres states, without the body one can do anything but something essential, and to believe that the body is an adherence, an irreducible excess!
As you also refer to in your paper, “Tests of a Posthumanist (Franciscan) Religion: The Case of Michel Serres,” Serres argues that “the body . . . makes body and makes the world” (Rignani 205). Do you think, in a way, this idea brings us back to the ideas of Renaissance Humanism by somehow reiterating the narcissistic routes of humanism that posthumanists try to redefine? Doesn’t it mean that ‘the body’ is in the center of the world?
No, I absolutely do not think so. The statement that the body makes body and, in this way, makes world means, in a posthumanist sense, that the body is, as Roberto Marchesini says, a threshold of passage, a ground of exchange, one of the nodee of a reticular, fluctuating, a/pan-centric reality. There is absolutely no room for centrism or essentialism in this statement! The body is a hybrid, hybridizing, hybridized psycho-physical dimension, like all other entities that compose and recompose themselves in relationships or to use a term very dear to posthumanism, in intra-actions! In this sense, therefore, the body constructs the dimension of the human, that is, the ‘place’ of subjectification, the place where federative humanism, which has nothing to do with Renaissance humanist humanism, is revealed and comes to light.
Works Cited
Rignani, Orsola. “Excess, Unavoidability, Reverberation: The (According to the) Posthuman Body.” Philosophy Study, vol. 11, no. 9, 28 Sept. 2021, https://doi.org/10.17265/2159-5313/2021.09.002.
Rignani, Orsola. “Tests of a Posthumanist (Franciscan) Religion: The Case of Michel Serres.” Philosophy Study, vol. 12, no. 4, Apr. 2022, https://doi.org/10.17265/2159-5313/2022.04.003. Accessed 21 Oct. 2022.
