Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law

ions, has in fact permeated not only legal but also literary history. Nervousness about the agency of the personified corporation echoes the nervousness Enlightenment writers felt about the personifications dreamed up by the poets. As Steven Knapp puts it in his book Personification and the Sublime: Allegorical personification-the endowing of metaphors with the agency of literal persons-was only the most obvious and extravagant instance of what Enlightenment writers perceived, with a mixture of admiration and uneasiness, as the unique ability of poetic genius to give the force of literal reality to figurative "inventions." More important than the incongruous presence of such agents was their contagious effect on the ostensibly literal agents with which they interacted."' The uncanniness of the personification, then, was derived from its way of putting in question what the "natural" or the "literal" might be. What the personification of the corporation ends up revealing, paradoxically enough, is that there is nothing "natural" about the natural person often taken as its model. The natural person, far from being a "given," is always the product of a theory of what the given is. This point may be made more clearly through an extreme version of corporate personhood. In a study of corporate rights, Meir DanCohen goes so far as to create the notion of a "personless corporation," a corporate "person" entirely controlled by computers, which would nevertheless still possess a "will" and a "personhood" of its own."2 Similarly, we might now ask how it has come to seem "natural" that the "natural person" with which the corporate person is compared is somehow always a "genderless person"; that unnatural genderless person who serves to ground both anthropomorphism and rational choice. We have finally come back to the question of whether there is a difference between anthropomorphism and personification, which arose at the end of the discussion of the essay by Paul de Man. It can now be seen that everything hangs on this question. Anthropomorphism, unlike personification, depends on the givenness of the essence 111. STEVEN KNAPP, PERSONIFICATION AND THE SUBLIME 2 (1985). 112. MEIR DAN-COHEN, RIGHTS, PERSONS, AND ORGANIZATIONS: A LEGAL THEORY FOR BUREAUCRATIC SOCIETY 46-51 (1986). 1998] 25 Johnson: Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 1998 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 10: 549 of the human; the mingling of personifications on the same footing as "real" agents threatens to make the uncertainty about what humanness is come to consciousness. Perhaps the loss of unconsciousness about the lack of humanness is what de Man was calling "true 'mourning."'113 Perhaps the "fallacious lyrical reading of the unintelligible" is exactly what legislators count on lyric poetry to provide: the assumption that the human has been or can be defined. The human can then be presupposed without the question of its definition being raised as a question-legal or otherwise. Thus the poets truly would be, as Shelley claimed, the "unacknowledged legislators of the world,"'14 not because they covertly determine policy, but because it is somehow necessary and useful that there be a powerful, presupposable, unacknowledgment. But the very rhetorical sleight of hand that would instate such an unacknowledgment is indistinguishable from the rhetorical structure that would empty it. Lyric and law are two of the most powerful discourses that exist along the fault line of