The Problem of Personhood

In this brilliant interdisciplinary study, Lisa Siraganian brings complexity to the conventional ethics and politics of personification. Not all people have always been considered persons, and nowadays many non-humans are - from corporate entities to AI conversation partners. Denying claims is as fraught as expanding the circle of rights, and Siraganian helps think past the most obvious stances, going to the heart of our moral and legal debates. -- Samuel Moyn, author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
Siraganian's book offers not an apology for anthropocentrism, but rather, a clear-sighted compass for thinking through personhood in its newest, broadest, thorniest guises. Transdisciplinary in approach, the book demonstrates how much rides politically on "who" and "what" make a successful claim to personhood status, and it identifies dangers, ascendant since the 1990s, of personhood's enhanced legal and extra-legal traction. -- Emily Apter, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability
Most of us on the left are deeply opposed to the decision in Citizens United that conferred on corporations the right to freedom of speech; Lisa Siraganian is too. But her brilliant The Problem of Personhood argues that the damage done by the idea of the corporate person goes far beyond the difficulties it has created for fair elections. From the description of the fetus as a person through claims made on behalf of the personhood of animals, rivers and trees up to the emerging notion of the ePerson, she shows how the corporation has provided a model for the invention of new persons each of "whom" embodies the privileging of property and the impoverishment of the public sphere. And against such expansive personhood she argues for a commitment to solidarity not reducible to the solidarity between legal entities. -- Walter Benn Michaels, author of The Beauty of the Social Problem