Is corporate personhood really different from regular personhood?  What is the relationship between the body — the corpus — and the self? How were the technological and economic circumstances of the 17th and 18th centuries involved in imagining what it was like to be a subject.  What elements of human life are left out of the standard Enlightenment subject?  How is that related to actual people who are not afforded full subjectivity?

In this episode, we’re talking to three scholars working in the humanities:

Jill Casid, Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discusses the way in which contemporary projective technology was implicated in imagining both the ideal Enlightenment self and its Other.

Her book, Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject, is available from the University of Minnesota Press.

John O’Brien, Professor of English Literature at the University of Virginia, talks about John Locke’s involvement in British economic policy and management of a colonial corporation, and how these are related to his enormously influential philosophies of politics, law, and the mind.

His book, Literature Incorporated: the Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650-1850, is available now from the University of Chicago Press.

Jeannine Murray-Román, Assistant Professor of French and Spanish Literatures at Florida State University, discusses the way colonial and postcolonial subjects find themselves excluded from the allegedly universal categories of Enlightenment personhood, and the way in which subjectivity might be expanded in the direction of real universality, or universal particularity.

Her new book, Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature from Alexis to the Digital Age, from the University of Virginia Press, is set to be released at literally any moment.