About the Book
Humanimality is a confrontation, a hybrid monster of a book that interrogates humanity's troubled relation with its animality, and so its relation to animals, the earth and, ultimately, the cosmos.In driving not only many species to extinction, but also endangering its very own existence, as well as imperiling the life of the planet, homo sapiens seem to be the most foolhardy species to have evolved since the dawn of time. Will the species drive itself to extinction, or will life itself, for evolution has not ceased, bring about the demise of that species through natural selection in order to preserve the planet? If other species have come and gone since the formation of life on earth, the persisting of homo sapiens is considerably dubious.Philosophy, religion, and science spiral through this book like chemicals to cross, charge, and finally detonate in an astonishing denouement.Humanimality is a bastard child, a book with nothing but the logic of physics to map the ecstasy of life.
About the Author :
Rainer J. Hanshe is a writer and the founder of Contra Mundum Press and the journal Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics. He is the author of two novels, The Acolytes (2010) and The Abdication (2012), and the editor of Richard Foreman's Plays with Films (2013) and Wordsworth's Fragments (2014). He is also the author of the hybrid entity Shattering the Muses (2016), Closing Melodies (2023), a phantomatic encounter between Nietzsche & Van Gogh, Dionysos Speed (2024), and Humanimality (2025). Work of his has appeared in Caesura, Sinn und Form, ChrisMarker.org, Asymptote, Black Sun Lit's Vestiges, and elsewhere. In 2016, Petite Plaisance published an Italian translation of his second novel, The Abdication. Shorter and longer works of his have been translated into other languages, and in 2021, the journal Po&sie staged an event at Maison de la poésie in Paris to honor his work. His own translations include Baudelaire's My Heart Laid Bare (2017; 2020), Belgium Stripped Bare (2019), and Paris Spleen (2021), Évelyne Grossman's The Creativity of the Crisis (2023), Antonin Artaud's Journey to Mexico: Revolutionary Messages (2024), and Léon-Paul Fargue's High Solitude (2024), as well as longer and shorter works by other authors. His translation of Léon-Paul Fargue's The Stroller of Paris is forthcoming from Eris Press in 2024. Beyond Sense, a vatic exploration of the aphasiac disintegration of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Artaud, is due out in 2026, The Accumulating Wreckage: Poems, Essays, & Other Texts in 2027, and Paris Without End: Assorted Translations From Giacometti to Artaud: 1914-1964 in 2028. He is at work on a new book entitled Axis Fasci: Burn Poet Burn. Author site: literaryabsolute.com
Review :
Once in every century, a work of this caliber arrives. Like Diderot's D'alembert's Dream, or Kafka's "A Report to an Academy," Hanshe's Humanimality inverses comedy into tragedy, and vice versa. The result is a visceral breakdown of the word and of the flesh. In a gesture of involuting, as an undoing, the writer here reverses the spell of the civilized homo sapiens. - Dejan Lukiç, IDSVA
A cross between a supremely erudite Planet of the Apes and a lightning-swift tackle of the great books of Western civilization from the Bible and Ancient Greeks on, Rainer J. Hanshe's Humanimality is a biting (often in the literal sense) satire of everything but the cosmos, itself viewed strictly (if exuberantly) as naught but the explosive, untouched energy of the natural universe. A "mortal comedy" setting out to invert Dante's journey and heralding Nietzsche as its guide to a fully grounded, despiritualized realm, this highly sapient yet vibrant and compelling tale shreds the texts of countless thinkers and writers ... no matter their discipline, tribe, or creed. In a stunning array of fragmentary quotations and allusion after allusion, Hanshe savages the world of letters to bits so as to lay bare its part(s) in humanity's autodestruction - a catastrophe, which, left unchecked, threatens the whole of life on earth. - Mary Lewis Shaw, author of The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry and Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé The Passage from Art to Ritual
