Persons and Things »

Barbara Johnson taught in the departments of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University and was the Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society. She is the author of The Critical Difference, A World of Difference, and The Wake of Deconstruction.

Moving effortlessly between symbolist poetry and Barbie dolls, artificial intelligence and Kleist, Kant, and Winnicott, Barbara Johnson not only clarifies psychological and social dynamics; she also re-dramatizes the work of important tropes—without ever losing sight of the ethical imperative with which she begins: the need to treat persons as persons.

In Persons and Things, Johnson turns deconstruction around to make a fundamental contribution to the new aesthetics. She begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence.” She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds.

The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space. The entire process operates via a subtlety that only a critic of Johnson’s caliber could reveal to us.

Bob Lane - Metapsychology

A most readable and interesting book filled with insightful comments on everything from Toys R Us to lyric poetry...The book has rich interpretations of the usual suspects (Derrida, Foucault, Paul de Man, Nietzsche, Baudelaire), rich and comprehensive notes, and a useful index.

Prologue     1
Toys R Us: Legal Persons, Personal Pronouns, Definitions     3
Things
The Poetics of Things: Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge     27
Monuments     34
The Thingliness of Persons
Ego Sum Game     47
They Urn It     61
Puppets and Prostheses     83
Using People: Kant with Winnicott     94
The Personhood of Things
Romancing the Stone     109
Surmounted Beliefs     131
Artificial Life     153
Real Dolls     163
Animation     168
Persons
Face Value     179
Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law     188
Lost Cause     208
Epilogue     229
Notes     235
Acknowledgments     251
Index     253