The "Poor Thing": The Cosmopolitan in Alasdair Gray's Poor Things

Abstract

A humanist politics sees its fulfilment in individual liberation. As Kant argued in Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose?a text will examine later?the perfect operation of reason will result in autonomy. But, as Descartes had already argued, the animal needs to be excluded from this project of individual liberation because it acts without reason, that is, it acts automatically (139). Autonomy and automaticity structure the subject through the division between an intelligence inside and an outside mechanical body. Such a division becomes unstable as soon as it is recognized that it will always be impossible to determine who is in control.1 As Catherine Liu puts it: figure of the automaton mediates the representation of a catachrestic imperative: how has Enlightenment represented that machine as its infernal Other, while at the same time adopting a principle of mechanical reason to justify the giddy optimism of its expansionist project? (xi.). In other words, how can the automatic operation of reason lead to autonomy and cosmopolitanism, when automaticity is linked to animality and therefore excluded from freedom? will argue that a different cosmopolitics can embrace this contradiction. Then, the division between the inner intelligence and the outer automaticity will be posed in a relation of perpetual instability. will broach this with recourse to Alasdair Gray's novel Poor Things, which presents the image of a subject divided between an inner mind and its outer mobile part. On two occasions, the main character exclaims I am a woman of the world! (47,142). This exclamation is significant because it is linked to the figure of the poor thing, which allows for two different extrapolations of the relation between autonomy and automaticity? two different extrapolations of cosmopolitanism?neither of which can ultimately be privileged. The extraordinary figure of the poor thing will be shown to deconstruct the division between animality and autonomy, thereby leading to a post-humanist cosmopolitanism.