In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The "Poor Thing"The Cosmopolitan in Alasdair Gray's Poor Things
  • Dimitris Vardoulakis (bio)

A humanist politics sees its fulfilment in individual liberation. As Kant argued in "Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose"—a text I will examine later—the perfect operation of reason will result in autonomy. But, as Descartes had already argued, the animal needs to be excluded from this project of individual liberation because it acts without reason, that is, it acts automatically (139). Autonomy and automaticity structure the subject through the division between an intelligence inside and an outside mechanical body.

Such a division becomes unstable as soon as it is recognized that it will always be impossible to determine who is in control.1 As Catherine Liu puts it: "The figure of the automaton mediates the representation of a catachrestic imperative: how has Enlightenment represented that machine as its infernal Other, while at the same time adopting a principle of mechanical reason to justify the giddy optimism of its expansionist project?" (xi.). In other words, how can the automatic operation of reason lead to autonomy and cosmopolitanism, when automaticity is linked to animality and therefore excluded from freedom?

I will argue that a different cosmopolitics can embrace this contradiction. Then, the division between the inner intelligence and the outer automaticity will be posed in a relation of perpetual instability. I will broach this with recourse to Alasdair Gray's novel Poor Things, which presents the image of a subject divided between an inner mind and its outer mobile part. On two occasions, the main character exclaims "I am a woman of the world!" (47, 142). This exclamation is significant because it is linked to the figure of the "poor thing," which allows for two different extrapolations of the relation between autonomy and automaticity—two different extrapolations of cosmopolitanism—neither of which can ultimately be privileged. The extraordinary figure of the "poor thing" will be shown to deconstruct the division between animality and autonomy, thereby leading to a post-humanist cosmopolitanism. [End Page 137]

Poor Things is a complex novel that resists a straightforward synopsis. It is easier to start by describing it in terms of its structure: In an introduction, Gray announces the discovery of a nineteenth-century memoir detailing the life of Bella Baxter, written by her husband. The narrator of this book suggests that Bella was a surgical creation—a kind of Frankenstein creature.2 This memoir is followed by a letter in which Bella vehemently decries her husband's memoir as fanciful, and denies that she was the product of surgical experimentation. Poor Things concludes with Gray's annotations to the previous two narratives.

The content of Poor Things can best be summarized by indicating that it allows for two different accounts of the story, both related to cosmopolitanism. These two accounts reproduce the division highlighted above between automaticity and autonomy. One account relates the revitalization of a young lady's body by a brilliant surgeon, Godwin Baxter. However, her original brain is replaced by that of the nine-months child in her womb. The other account claims that the young woman was merely trained into politics by Godwin Baxter. In both accounts, the young woman has been created. Thus the creature, named "Bella Baxter," presents the subjugation of a body to a new brain—regardless of whether the brain is new because of surgery or training. Although, to the extent that the body also carries a memory of itself, it can also be argued that the new brain is subjugated to the old body. This corporeal memory will of necessity disturb the neat division between mind and body.

As already intimated, in Poor Things there are two moves towards autonomy.3 The first insists on retrieving an origin as genesis, on finding the past secret in the future based on a principle of exclusion. This is an oppositional or antithetical arrangement in which the animal is excluded. The second is an attempt to progress towards an ideal, to create the future based on a past foundation, an underlying natural origin. Here the animal—or more precisely the "political animal," that is, man—is supposed to rise higher according...

pdf

Share