A Genealogy of Personhood

Considers how fiction – the summation of our cultural narratives, belief systems and political ideas – has shaped the distinction between human and non-human dignities, rights and freedoms

The attribution of personhood to rivers, animals, and now artificial intelligence, has challenged how we think about the boundaries of the human. But is this a new phenomenon?

This book examines the shifting boundary between persons and non-persons and its entanglement with fictions. From Roman law, theatre, and theology to contemporary debates surrounding animals, forests, and AI, it reveals that the frontier between persons and things has never been fixed, and that personhood has never been an exclusively human attribute nor a fixed or timeless essence. Rather, it emerges through historically specific practices of attribution, fiction, and exclusion in an open and contested frame determined by legal, theological, and biopolitical practices.

Before examining its attribution to animals, rivers, forests, ecosystems, and artificial intelligence, the book presents a genealogy of personhood in Western culture. It explores how the same (juridical) fictions that make new forms of personhood possible also establish the conditions under which entities become subjects, acquire agency, or remain excluded from legal and political recognition. In a dyptich structure the six chapters map a deep relationality between the politics of humanization and dehumanization, between fictions that both protect and exclude, subjectify and subject; historical layers that have provided the groundwork for modern juridical and biopolitical conceptions of personhood, granted with rights, agency and freedoms, but also with none of the above.

By tracing the fictions through which persons are constituted, differentiated, and denied, through a genealogical approach and with the keen eye of a critical philosopher, Sebastián Rodríguez-Cárdenas challenges the assumption that personhood simply reflects what an entity is and asks instead what makes an entity count as a person and what forms of power this attribution makes possible.