Thesis title: Fictio vel Persona: thresholds, frontiers, genealogy
This work traces a genealogy and a cartography of personhood and its interlacement with fiction. It follows the perpetually shifting outlines of this relationship, tracing its fractures, its extensions, and the mechanisms by which it is upheld and displaced. It does not ask what a person is, but rather where, when, and why a person emerges, stretches, and dissolves in a framework of governmentality. To do so, it follows its juridical, theological, and bio-political cartographies, unearthing the moments in which personhood acts as a threshold rather than an essence or an immutable category.
The work is divided in two parts. The first one examines the instances in which persona appears as the classical opposite of things in Roman law, as well as its development in the realms of grammar, theology, politics and biology, as well as the tensions it creates in terms of pre-eminence, dignity, agency, subjection and subjectification. The second part explores a relatively recent phenomenon, namely the extension of personhood to animals, forests, rivers, and even artificial entities. It wonders what it exactly implies in philosophical terms, posing how the reproduction ad nauseam of fictitious personae ends up by erasing whatever trace of eminence and dignity it could provide, but also how a frame of articulation and a reading of the Foucauldian concept of parrhesia may respond to the underlying problem of co-existence with non-human entities.
Between law and literature, philosophy and theology, theatre and grammar, this work is not a theory of personhood but a genealogy of its uses, an interrogation of its necessity, a query of its products and of the way in which it is itself produced and reproduced. It moves not towards a conclusion but towards a question: whether persona may ultimately signify nothing, and whether fictions may however open a pathway for a different way of understanding the actuality of the events that emerge in the governmentality we share and inhabit.