The Posthuman Becoming of John Banville’s Copernicus

This article offers a posthumanist reading of John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus (1976) based on the onto-epistemological shift central to the narrative. Drawing on Francesca Ferrando’s philosophical posthumanism, the article argues that the novel enacts a radical displacement of the autonomous, rational human subject. Ferrando’s triad of post-humanism, post-anthropocentrism, and post-dualism frames the analysis to show how Banville’s narrative destabilises the humanist subject and redistributes agency across human and nonhuman materialities. Accordingly, three distinct registers of destabilisation in Copernicus are identified: the post-humanist dismantling of the unified subject into a fragmented entity; the post-anthropocentric undoing of human cosmological privilege; and a post-dualistic co-constitution of observer, observed, and the material environment through intra-action, based on Karen Barad’s agential realism. The article concludes that Doctor Copernicus, situated at the fault lines of Renaissance humanism, prefigures concerns of philosophical posthumanism by making onto-epistemological instability constitutive of its protagonist’s becoming.