Posthuman Dante: Reading the Commedia as a Proto-Cyborg Narrative

Abstract

This article reads Dante Alighieri’s Commedia as a proto-cyborg narrative in a qualified medieval sense, arguing that Dante’s pilgrim becomes capable of salvation through a distributed network of human, angelic, divine, liturgical, cosmological, and textual agencies. Rather than claiming that Dante anticipates modern technology, the article uses posthumanist theory to clarify how the poem imagines personhood as relational, mediated, and progressively transformed. Drawing on Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, N. Katherine Hayles, and Bernard Stiegler, the study reinterprets trasumanar as a passage beyond unaided human capacity achieved through grace, participation, and ordered relation. The article focuses on three linked moments: Paradiso’s transformation of vision, intellect, memory, and desire; Purgatorio’s collaborative reshaping of memory through the Griffin, Lethe, and Eunoe; and Ulysses in Inferno as a counter-example of self-authorized transgression without grace. Virgil, Beatrice, Bernard, angels, ritual practices, and poetic form function not as modern prostheses but as medieval mediations that extend the pilgrim’s capacities. The article concludes that Dante’s beyond-human is not autonomous enhancement, but the perfection of human possibility through love, humility, and participation in divine order.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Italian Culture, 2026 · DOI ↗