This panel intervenes in an emerging critical discussion about the ways that writers from the fin de siècle onward have used decadence as a literary strategy for rejecting or critiquing the ideological underpinnings of liberal humanism. It will debate not only the possibility of “dehumanizing” decadence—of extricating it from humanism’s commitment to progress and the claims of reason—but also the potential for a literary decadence that “dehumanizes” its readers, offering them intellectual resources for decentering and reconfiguring what it means to be human. The panelists share an investment in exploring what lies beyond reigning paradigms that view decadence either as an inversion of humanism (a skeptical humanism acutely aware of the limitations of reason and human agency) or a negation of it that declines to offer an alternative vision. To that end, the panelists will debate the literary ethics and ontologies that would best reveal decadence’s inhumanist, posthumanist, and nonhumanist possibilities.

In recent years, decadence scholars have shown renewed interest in writers outside the canon of usual suspects like Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Wilde. At the same time, scholars have shifted their emphasis away from such hallmark stylistic and thematic markers of decadence as the anxiety of social decline, artifice, ennui, morbidity, and fixation on ornateness and subtlety of detail. Recent criticism has increasingly attended to overlooked questions about the ethical and political implications of decadent aesthetic practices, especially where they allow decadent writers to explore new configurations of gender, sexual, and racial identity.

This panel topic is in conversation with a group of critical texts that exemplify this purview-expanding impetus in recent decadence studies, including Alex Murray’s Landscapes of Decadence (2016), Dennis Denisoff’s recent works on decadent paganism and animality, Matthew Potolsky’s The Decadent Republic of Letters (2012), David Weir’s Decadent Culture in the United States (2008), and Kirsten MacLeod’s Fictions of British Decadence (2006). These works—and this panel—share the aim of complicating or challenging longstanding truisms about decadent literature, from its reputed hostility to all things natural to the seemingly apolitical detachment of its authors and characters.

Despite the exciting new avenues paved by recent scholarship, decadence studies has left the issue of decadence’s relationship to the claims of liberal humanism somewhat undertheorized. Though Weir’s most recent work (2018) provocatively theorizes decadence as a “dark humanism,” an anti-progressive, defiantly irrationalist riposte to the rose-tinted meliorism and sober rationality of traditional humanism, such a framing comes with as much risk as reward. To understand decadence first and foremost as the inversion of its object of critique is to center that object, rendering decadence inarticulable except in relation to it. Humanism and its limitations would thus continue to structure the decadent literary field—a shadowy, skeptical humanism, but a humanism nonetheless.

It is precisely this centrality of the human in decadence studies that this panel seeks to debate and, at times, displace by envisioning modes of decadence that are not only critical, “dark,” or anti-, but revisionist, reimaginative, and reconstructive. By seeking out and affirming these alternatives to the humanist paradigm, the panelists articulate new models of decadence centered on novel, hitherto-overlooked ways of inhuman, posthuman, and nonhuman being.

The session will begin with a brief opening statement during which the presider will introduce the three panelists, who will deliver 18-minute presentations detailing their arguments and interventions. This arrangement will ensure that at least fifteen minutes remain at the end of the session for unstructured discussion between the audience and panelists.

David Fine will open the discussion by making the case for Muriel Spark’s inclusion in the canon of Catholic decadent literature through a reading of her 1970 novel The Driver’s Seat and a contemporaneous speech, “The Desegregation of Art.” Fine will argue that Spark’s strategic denial of the humanist reader’s desire for catharsis elucidates an important ethical limitation of secular humanism, namely that its impoverished account of human desire prevents it from recognizing its own complicity in violence and aggression. This refusal of catharsis not only functions as a critique of liberal humanism but also anticipates the ongoing ethico-political interventions of queer theorists like Lauren Berlant. Fine will conclude by arguing that Spark’s cultivation of decadent inhumanity helpfully situates decadence outside of the humanist tradition, opening up a space for critics to evaluate the prejudices and biases of a humanities on the verge, too often, of the inhumane.

Next, Tim Clarke will develop a link between decadent inhumanism and a posthuman conception of death in James Huneker’s short story “The Lord’s Prayer in B,” which reimagines Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher of life, as Baruch Mendoza, a Schopenhauerian nihilist who suffers the death of a martyr at the hands of the Portuguese Inquisition. Drawing from Rosi Braidotti’s recent work on posthumanism and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty’s concept of the “presence,” Clarke will discern a perversely death-suffused vitalism in Mendoza’s Christ-like death that demands a decadent alternative to traditional humanist subjectivities. Torture transforms Mendoza into a strangely passive, dehumanized agency—a dispersed happening, a mere presence—that derives its power not from the free-willed action of an individual human subject but from an indiscernibility and immanence that defies the inhuman(e) tortures that produce it.

Finally, Christopher Robison will move the discussion from the posthuman to the nonhuman, examining the under-explored relationship between decadence and its animal others in his analysis of Octave Mirbeau’s 1913 autobiographical novel Dingo, an account of the life and death of the author’s dog. Mirbeau’s characterization of his animal companion in explicitly decadent terms—as a radical individualist and as possessing both a feral elegance and an acutely developed artistic sensibility—points the way toward a reconceptualization of decadent animality. By interweaving his close reading of Dingo with more synoptic references to the animal sympathies of decadents like Huysmans and Rachilde, Robison will detail how Mirbeau’s dog challenges and reconfigures the distinction between the human and nonhuman in an innovative, uniquely decadent manner.