Post-Humanism and the Origin of Dante’s Universality: With Special Reference to Canto 1 of The Paradiso

Abstract

If we can say that Dante’s universality surpasses European universalism, it will be because it does not exclude the Other. What matters now is whether otherness can be maintained or not when we undertake a study of Dante’s universality in the context of a humanism developed Eurocentrically, to what extent it can be maintained, and how. I argue that Dante’s literature provides us with a solution to this impasse. It does so including the ‘other’ reader in the literary process while allowing the reader to maintain his or her otherness. This is possible insofar as Dante’s literature possesses the capacity of opening itself to the heterogeneous other by continually negating and de-homogenizing itself. Certainly, this capacity provides the power to sustain his literature’s universality. The idea of man as a contradictory in the context of literature, particularly in relation to the problem of ‘ineffability’, is indispensable for understanding Dante’s literary enterprise to pursue and include otherness. The tripartite symmetry among the writer, the pilgrim and the God in the first canto of the Paradiso, through the process of repeated surpasses that it operates, leads us to understand positively the concept of man as a contradictory being. Furthermore, the “trasumanar” simultaneously implies transcendence and non-transcendence of man. The writer Dante is the center of the Commedia; however, he is also the non-center or the center to operate the orbit of de-centering in his literary enterprise. This is so because he builds a ceaseless transversal communication with the Other wherein he negate ceaselessly his status as the center of the literary enterprise. By ceaselessly reconstructing himself, the writer Dante opens the text and invites the readers to his enterprise of literature, so that he paradoxically kills himself. In the place of his death, by virtue of its non-place-ness, his communication with the readers and further communication among them occur. In the Commedia I find the ethics of literature to make such communication possible. In this interpretation, I would say that the ethics of literature resurrects Dante in our post-humanist stage.