Persons and Things (review)

The conjunction of persons and things names, for Barbara Johnson, a fundamental ethical problem: if it's the case that the relation between them structures the way we live, if we tend to treat persons as things and our "humanness is mired in an inability to do otherwise," then how is it possible to disentangle them, to imagine living "in a world where persons treat persons as persons" (2)? We dream of things (Pygmalion's statue, Frankenstein's creature, an automaton) becoming persons, and in slavery and its myriad informal forms we treat persons as objects of our will. What's normal is the entanglement of personhood and thinghood, an ambiguity spelled out in the passage between the four sections of the book: "Things," "The Thingliness of Persons," "The Personhood of Things," and "Persons."

The relation, and the ambiguity, can be understood in terms of three divergent and perhaps incommensurable dimensions of analysis: "the reality of desire, the reality of materiality, and the reality of rhetoric" (3). A series of figures running through the book corresponds, although never explicitly, to each dimension: to the reality of desire, the figure of narcissism and its constitutive lack; to the reality of materiality, the figure of the statue and its cognate forms, the doll, the puppet, the automaton, and so on; and to the reality of rhetoric, the figure of address. Of these, the dominant dimension is that of rhetoric, and one way of reading the book is simply as a set of meditations on that encounter "with something inanimate at the heart of what we think is ourselves" (229) that so constantly provoked Paul de Man's attention in the act of reading. But rhetoric is, before this, a way of bringing inanimate things to life. Emile Benveniste's argument that only the "I" and the "you" are grammatical "persons" is grounded in the assumption that "the notion of 'person' has something to do with presence at the scene of speech and seems to inhere in the notion of address" (6). The converse, then, holds true: that the way to treat a thing (the "it") as a person is to address it, to treat it as an interlocutor in the scene of speech.

Four key tropes effect the transformation of things into persons. Two of them—prosopopoeia (which Johnson associates with the epitaph, the feigned speech of the dead to the living) and apostrophe—are figures of address; anthropomorphism and personification, by contrast, are direct assertions of being. The question of personhood takes place in the interstice between these two pairs: we assume that the human self is a person rather than a thing, but—in an argument that has also been central to Charles Taylor's thinking about selfhood—"if the 'self' becomes an object of knowledge, it can only be known as an object among other objects" (47).

The figure of Narcissus condenses some of the complexity of what's at stake here. On the one hand, it plays out a confusion of the self with the other and of selfhood with aesthetic form. On the other, it dramatizes the question of whether the self can have a content, since Narcissus's self-recognition is constitutively a misrecognition that gives form to that self that seems to precede it: "The image offers a fiction of wholeness that the subject will strive to resemble" (58–59), a thing that the self will always, necessarily, fail to become.

That otherness of the mirror image is akin to the exemplary otherness and thingness of Kleist's puppets, the embodiment of a superhuman grace, and it may thus be the case that the structure of human subjectivity must be thought in terms of our ability to be or to be like a thing, that "identity is an object … without which there would be no subject" (181). The book explores this insight through a range of types of animated thingness. Each chapter brings together, in an argument that is essayistic rather than linear, a complex of thing...