Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism ed. by Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy (review)

This collection of essays is not for the critically or theoretically faint of heart. Its ambitious central concern is to see if specific moments in premodern texts can usefully interrogate the postmodern, making the book another contribution to our recent scholarly "posthuman turn." At issue is not only humanism and humanities, but also the human itself. As Stephen Greenblatt once asked of the word "culture," we now question how the term "human" can work better for us. In some ways, there cannot be a more daunting and wide-ranging topic, seemingly doomed to failure. After all, we humans are attempting to tease out our own definition, with blithe optimism or ignorance, blending subject and object without error. Still, the book sparks questions about how ancient and medieval notions of the human are at times revelatory in what we might call their postmodern effect. The "Vanishing Humanism" of the title can be seen to be a return to the less sure, more fluid, more honestly discursive moments of the past. In that pursuit, it seems we have almost come full circle, with the surety of modernism at fault in reducing these mammoth categories.

In a sense, the challenging Introduction by the editors is the most opaque part of the book. In an attempt to bring together the differing perspectives of the thinkers who write the essays, the editors produce a lengthy list of "guiding questions" that span the chapters, but the issues may indeed lose clarity for those not involved in this kind of work. They do imply the need for a new "critical humanism" (p. 13), which this volume may help supply. The collection, they assert, consists of "fragments toward a history of a humanism that could never be rendered in any sort of monolithic totality, especially if one is convinced (as we are) by the value of a discontinuist historicism in which history is always unfinishable and each temporal period is noncoincident with itself" (p. 15). With far more lucidity, they tell us that since "the past always inhabits the present . . . part of the aim of our volume is to make this state of affairs more visible, especially with regard to the supposedly postmodern genesis of the post/human" (p. 15). They end their Introduction by posing and answering a query: "Did the post/human imagination always exist in explicit, self-aware and mainstream ways? To that question, we offer a resounding 'yes'–not least because much of post/human thought seems to correlate with an ethical imperative to not diminish and avariciously contract the world, but rather to expand the scope of human sympathy and ethical being" (p. 30). Thus the impressive intent here is to find how the premodern inadvertently teaches us how ethically to reassess humanism, humanities, and the human so we can navigate our postmodern sensibilities.

The essays are indeed fragments, as the title suggests. No effort is made to construct a history or linearity, but all chapters, more or less successfully, probe moments in which the human or humanism is questioned and often deconstructed. The editors include in their initial essay a comprehensive summary of each chapter that delineates the various and variant readings in far more detail than I provide here. Very briefly, we experience Jeffrey Skoblow's close reading of Paleolithic representations of the human in cave drawings (pp. 43–45), only to find that "the very notion of 'the human' becomes a makeshift affair, ever-fluctuating in its parameters" (p. 41), parameters including gender and species. Eileen A. Joy's work on Thomas Malory's account of Balyn and Balan brings us into the Middle Ages and the "faceless" world of men in helmets—concealing armor that results in Balyn and Balan each mortally wounding his unrecognized brother. This "terrible slippage of faciality" in the "fully exchangeable...