The Wilderness of the Human Other. Italo Calvino's "The Watcher" and a Reflection on Third-Wave Ecocriticism.

In a time when the “palimpsest” of ecocriticism is being constantly enriched, and that a “third wave” (Slovic, Adamson) is largely consolidating, it is more and more compelling to re-address the question about the human. For “human” I mean here the “pure” human, conceived both as a general category and as an individual: deconstructing the idea of humanity-qua-normality is in fact a further way to question the oppositions between culture and nature, domesticated and wild, center and periphery. By placing the focus of the dualism not outside, but inside the human being, ecocriticism can contribute to a critical reflection on humanism, in which the category of radical otherness as an attribute of the human plays a pivotal role. Issues such as madness or disability, for example, both radically challenge and provoke the very idea of human, regardless of social contexts, of race, religion or ethnic group. Madness and disability create in fact a wilderness zone inside the tamed area of normality, of humanity-as-normality, of human as a norm and a measure of itself. Placing the question of otherness within the taxonomy of the human subject, madness and disability introduce a radical fracture in this taxonomy, showing that “the other” is not only nature (as the other-than-human), but it can be the human itself. Calvino's short novel The Watcher (a political story set in a hospital for mentally and physically disabled) is interesting in this respect. Questioning human “normality,” it questions in fact the totalizing ideology of historismus and linear progress, introducing an idea that could be labelled a “dark enlightenment,” or, an enlightenment based on the awareness of reason’s “tragic” limits and unpredictability rather than on reason’s glory. I take this novel as an occasion to reflect on the current trends of ecocriticism and the possible development toward an ecological form of humanism. The essay ends with a foray into literary works that deal with madness and the idea of humanity.