Overview

Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of personhood has become essential—to debates about providing corporations human privileges, limiting access to abortion, giving algorithms free speech protections, releasing elephants from zoos, and permitting trees the standing to sue. The Personhood Problem reveals the unsettling connections between these imagined persons and their sought-after rights, in a bracing and nuanced examination of the versions of personhood proliferating today. Synthesizing the political and philosophical debates on personhood, the book uncovers the unexpected, disturbing, and dangerous alignments between them. Telling the true and engaging story of the oldest version of “fictional” personhood—the corporate one—this book helps us rethink that history and its use, or threat, to us now.

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9781804293447

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Reviews

In this brilliant interdisciplinary study, Lisa Siraganian brings complexity to the conventional ethics and politics of personification. Not all people have always been considered persons, and nowadays many non-humans are - from corporate entities to AI conversation partners. Denying claims is as fraught as expanding the circle of rights, and Siraganian helps think past the most obvious stances, going to the heart of our moral and legal debates. -- Samuel Moyn, author of <i>The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History</i>

In this brilliant interdisciplinary study, Lisa Siraganian brings complexity to the conventional ethics and politics of personification. Not all people have always been considered persons, and nowadays many non-humans are - from corporate entities to AI conversation partners. Denying claims is as fraught as expanding the circle of rights, and Siraganian helps think past the most obvious stances, going to the heart of our moral and legal debates. -- Samuel Moyn, author of <i>The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History</i> Siraganian's book offers not an apology for anthropocentrism, but rather, a clear-sighted compass for thinking through personhood in its newest, broadest, thorniest guises. Transdisciplinary in approach, the book demonstrates how much rides politically on ""who"" and ""what"" make a successful claim to personhood status, and it identifies dangers, ascendant since the 1990s, of personhood's enhanced legal and extra-legal traction. -- Emily Apter, author of <i>Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability</i> Most of us on the left are deeply opposed to the decision in Citizens United that conferred on corporations the right to freedom of speech; Lisa Siraganian is too. But her brilliant The Problem of Personhood argues that the damage done by the idea of the corporate person goes far beyond the difficulties it has created for fair elections. From the description of the fetus as a person through claims made on behalf of the personhood of animals, rivers and trees up to the emerging notion of the ePerson, she shows how the corporation has provided a model for the invention of new persons each of ""whom"" embodies the privileging of property and the impoverishment of the public sphere. And against such expansive personhood she argues for a commitment to solidarity not reducible to the solidarity between legal entities. -- Walter Benn Michaels, author of <i>The Beauty of the Social Problem</i> Important reading in the burgeoning age of AI. -- Most Anticipated Books of 2026 * LitHub *

Author Information

Lisa Siraganian is the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and Professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland, USA). Her work has won multiple awards and has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Siraganian has written award-winning scholarly monographs that bridge literary criticism, art criticism, and legal and philosophical scholarship. More recently, she was the Editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 10th edition, Volume D (1914-1945) (2022).

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