Liberation, like love, is never abstract. It refers to relationships of mastery and subjugation; it refers to political mastery, to class and gender mastery, to forms of abuse that involve both humans and nonhumans. But there is another ontologically radical form of liberation: the liberation of things from their silence, the consideration of things as ‘full- fledged actors’ (Latour 1999: 174) in a ‘political ecology’ which involves all material beings. Authors and thinkers such as Ovid, Lucretius, Spinoza, Darwin, Goethe, Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Kafka, Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and many others demonstrate how the human is not the apical element of an ordered creation, but rather an expression of the world’s morphological irony. In their own fields and styles, they provide creative tools that liberate us from the obsessions of anthropocentrism, pulling the human back into the wider horizon of being. More in general, the authors and genres entering this lineage of imagination – from Lucretius to Philip K. Dick and Margaret Atwood, from magical realism to science fiction, from toxic autobiographies to cli-fi – have something in common: they help readers (and critics) to build narratives about the world that are therapeutic against the isolation of the human self.
Literature of Liberation
Serenella Iovino
2017-01-01
Abstract
Liberation, like love, is never abstract. It refers to relationships of mastery and subjugation; it refers to political mastery, to class and gender mastery, to forms of abuse that involve both humans and nonhumans. But there is another ontologically radical form of liberation: the liberation of things from their silence, the consideration of things as ‘full- fledged actors’ (Latour 1999: 174) in a ‘political ecology’ which involves all material beings. Authors and thinkers such as Ovid, Lucretius, Spinoza, Darwin, Goethe, Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Kafka, Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and many others demonstrate how the human is not the apical element of an ordered creation, but rather an expression of the world’s morphological irony. In their own fields and styles, they provide creative tools that liberate us from the obsessions of anthropocentrism, pulling the human back into the wider horizon of being. More in general, the authors and genres entering this lineage of imagination – from Lucretius to Philip K. Dick and Margaret Atwood, from magical realism to science fiction, from toxic autobiographies to cli-fi – have something in common: they help readers (and critics) to build narratives about the world that are therapeutic against the isolation of the human self.
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