Genealogy of Personhood

Are the boundaries of human life fixed or open to interpretation and reinvention, and is personhood just a fictional construct? The recent attributing of human dignity to rivers, robots, and now AI, has challenged how we think about the frame of the human. But is this a new phenomenon? This book examines the shifting boundary between human and non-human dignities, rights and freedoms. From Roman law to today’s debates surrounding animals, forests, and AI, the book reveals that the boundary between persons and things — between what is human and what is not — has never been fixed, but is an open and contested frame determined by legal, theological, and biopolitical practices.The book presents a cartography of personhood in Western culture — from Roman jurists and theatre to theological ideas — followed by a consideration of how these same ideas have extended or challenged human definitions. Within this two-part 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.Combining a historian’s scope with the keen critical eye of a philosopher, Rodríguez-Cárdenas reveals how personhood works in two ways: it can be both forged by cultural narratives as well as denied. Rather than a timeless essence, personhood is a historical and contested formation, produced through shifting fictions of inclusion and exclusion.