This paper introduces the Monstrous Conclusion, according to which, for any population, there is a better population consisting of just one individual (the Monster). The Monstrous Conclusion is deeply counterintuitive. I defend a version of Prioritarianism as a particularly promising population axiology that does not imply the Monstrous Conclusion. According to this version of Prioritarianism, which I call Asymptotic Prioritarianism, there is diminishing marginal moral importance of individual welfare that can get close to, but never quite reach, (...) some upper limit. I argue that Asymptotic Prioritarianism faces a theoretical cost, that I call the Absolute Priority Principle. However, the Absolute Priority Principle is an extreme version of what I call the Trade-off Condition, an already noteworthy problem facing other (more widely endorsed) versions of Prioritarianism. I conclude that it is better for a theory to imply the Absolute Priority Principle and avoid the Monstrous Conclusion than to imply the Monstrous Conclusion and the Trade-off Condition. The potential for Asymptotic Prioritarianism is substantial. (shrink)

Bounds consequence provides an interpretation of a multiple-conclusion consequence relation in which the derivability of a sequent is understood as the claim that it is conversationally out-of-bounds to take a position in which each member of Γ is asserted while each member of Δ is denied. Two of the foremost champions of bounds consequence—Greg Restall and David Ripley—have independently indicated that the shape of the bounds in question is determined by conversational practice. In this paper, I suggest that the standard (...) treatments of bounds consequence have focused heavily on the matter of veridicality at the expense of ignoring other features by which conversational bounds are set, prime among them being the matter of content or subject-matter. Furthermore, I argue that the semantic behavior of propositions containing “monstrous” content—content whose introduction is inappropriate to a context independently of veridical considerations—leads to a weak Kleene account of bounds consequence. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 212 Seiten: 239-258.

In its hegemonic definition, biopolitical governmentality is characterised by a seemingly infinite capacity of expansion, susceptible to colonise the landscape and timescape of the living present in the name of capitalistic productivity. The main trait of biopower is its normative, legal and political plasticity, allowing it to reappropriate critiques and resistances by appealing to bioethical efficacy and biological accuracy. Under these circumstances, how can we invent rebellious forms-of-life and alternative temporalities escaping biopolitical normativity? In this essay, I interrogate the theoretical (...) presuppositions of biopolitical rationality. I provide a deconstruction of the conceptual and temporal structures upholding the notion of biopolitics, in view of laying the ground for new forms of resistance. The articulation between life and power has a long philosophical history, which has been largely ignored by social theorists and political thinkers using biopolitics as an interpretative model. I re-inscribe this model within the tradition of critical materialism, by articulating Foucault’s ‘critical ontology’ to recent philosophical works on biological plasticity (Malabou). In these discourses, the logic of biopower depends on a representation of life – ‘the living’ – as living present. Biopower finds itself anchored in the authority of the present, that is to say, of being-as-presence (ontology); it sustains presentist definitions of life and materiality, be it under the form of a ‘plastic’ ontology. By drawing on Derrida’s notions of ‘spectrality’ and ‘life-death’ and Francesco Vitale’s work on ‘biodeconstruction’, I deconstruct these discourses on life and materiality and attempt to dissociate them from their ontological grounding, in order to suggest new paths of resistance to biopower. In particular, I follow the tracks of “the monster” in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Malabou. Foucault tells us that the monster is a singular figure, parasitic and subversive, beckoning a life beyond life, at once organic and non-organic, located at the limit between the normal and the exceptional, and exceeding the scope of biopolitical normativity in both theoretical and practical terms. It exists at the intersection of what Foucault names “the symbolics of blood” and “the analytics of sex”. As such, it materialises a self-transformative dimension of the living which remains, I argue, inadequate to Malabou’s representation of plasticity. The monstrous is a self-deconstructive motif calling for another biopolitical rationality, before or beyond ontological reductions or reconstructions. (shrink)

Philosophers have accused locke of holding a view about propositions that simply conflates the formation of a propositional thought with the judgment that a proposition is true, and charged that this has obviously absurd consequences.1 Worse, this account appears not to be unique to Locke: it bears a striking resemblance to one found in both the Port-Royal Logic (the Logic, for short) and the Port-Royal Grammar. In the Logic, this account forms part of the backbone of the (...) traditional logic expounded in the text. As a result, the account’s alleged faults seem to seriously threaten the coherence and value of the whole approach to logic. And to the extent that Locke’s core philosophical commitments, in particular his .. (shrink)

Kaplan (1989a) insists that natural languages do not contain displacing devices that operate on character—such displacing devices are called monsters. This thesis has recently faced various empirical challenges (e.g., Schlenker 2003; Anand and Nevins 2004). In this note, the thesis is challenged on grounds of a more theoretical nature. It is argued that the standard compositional semantics of variable binding employs monstrous operations. As a dramatic first example, Kaplan’s formal language, the Logic of Demonstratives, is shown to contain (...) monsters. For similar reasons, the orthodox lambda-calculus-based semantics for variable binding is argued to be monstrous. This technical point promises to provide some far-reaching implications for our understanding of semantic theory and content. The theoretical upshot of the discussion is at least threefold: (i) the Kaplanian thesis that “directly referential” terms are not shiftable/bindable is unmotivated, (ii) since monsters operate on something distinct from the assertoric content of their operands, we must distinguish ingredient sense from assertoric content (cf. Dummett 1973; Evans 1979; Stanley 1997), and (iii) since the case of variable binding provides a paradigm of semantic shift that differs from the other types, it is plausible to think that indexicals—which are standardly treated by means of the assignment function—might undergo the same kind of shift. (shrink)

This paper offers an historical introduction to Pere Alberch's evolutionary thought and his contributions to Evo-Devo, based on his unique approach to experimental teratology. We will take as our point of reference the teratogenic experiments developed by Alberch and Emily A. Gale during the 1980s, aimed at producing monstrous variants of frogs and salamanders. We will analyze his interpretation of the results of these experiments within the framework of the emergence of evolutionary developmental biology (or “Evo-Devo”). The aim is (...) understand how Alberch interpreted teratological anomalies as highly revealing objects of study for understanding the development of organic form, not only in an ontogenetic sense—throughout embryonic development—but also phylogenetically—throughout the evolution of species. Alberch's interpretation of monsters reflects the influence of a long tradition of non-Darwinian evolutionary thought, which began in the nineteenth century and was continued in the twentieth century by people such as Richard Goldschmidt, Conrad H. Waddington, and Stephen Jay Gould. They all proposed various non-gradualist models of evolution, in which embryonic development played a central role. Following this tradition, Alberch argued that, in order to attain a correct understanding of the role of embryological development in evolution, it was necessary to renounce the gradualist paradigm associated with the Darwinian interpretation of evolution, which understood nature as a continuum. According to Alberch, the study of monstrous abnormalities was of great value in understanding how certain epigenetic restrictions in development could give rise to discontinuities and directionality in morphological transformations throughout evolution. (shrink)

In the Western cultural imaginaries the monstrous is defined – following Aristotelian categorisations – by its excess, deficiency or displacement of organic matter. These characteristics come to the fore in the field of bioart: a current in contemporary art that involves the use of biological materials (various kinds of soma: cells, tissues, organisms), and scientific procedures, technologies, protocols, and tools. Bioartistic projects and objects not only challenge the conventional ideas of embodiment and bodily boundaries, but also explore the relation (...) between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, as well as various thresholds of the living. -/- By looking at select bioartworks, this paper argues that the analysed projects offer a different ontology of life. More specifically, they expose life as uncontainable, that is, as a power of differentiation that traverses the divide between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, and, ultimately, life and death. In this way, they draw attention to excess, processuality and multiplicity at the very core of life itself. Thus understood, life always already surpasses preconceived material and conceptual limits. -/- Finally, while taking Deleuzian feminisms and new materialism as its theoretical ground, the paper suggests that such a revision of the ontology of life may mobilise future conceptualisations of ethics that evade the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Introduction -- Karl Marx's concept of alienation -- Objectification, alienation, and estrangement -- Other origins of alienation and objectification -- Marx's account of alienation : from early to late -- The alienated object of production : commodity fetishism -- The alienated means of production : machine fetishism -- Machines and the transformation of work -- Marx's energeticist turn -- The first law of thermodynamics -- From arbeit to arbeitskraft -- The second law of thermodynamics -- Machines in the communist future (...) -- Technology and the boundaries of nature -- Material wealth and value : the Grundrisse's fragment on machines -- The strife between technology and capital : the fall in the rate of profit -- Enjoyment not value : challenging the logic of exhaustion -- Man himself as fixed capital -- Class kinship and the redistribution of the means of production -- Machines in the capitalist reality -- Between thermodynamics and humanism : approaching capital -- Machinery as an historical category of production -- Machines, trains, and other capitalist monsters -- Rough, foul-mouthed boys : women's monstrous laboring bodies -- Wage labor and race -- Wage labor and sexuality -- Machinery and revolution -- Alienation beyond Marx -- Science and technology in Marx's excerpt notebooks -- Karl Marx and Charles Babbage -- Machines and temporality : the treadmill effect and free time -- Technophobia and technophilia -- Technophobia and twentieth-century theory. (shrink)

For the West … China as a land in the Far East becomes traditionally the image of the ultimate Other. What Foucault does in his writing is, of course, not so much to endorse this image as to show, in the light of the Other, how knowledge is always conditioned in a certain system, and how difficult it is to get out of the confinement of the historical a priori, the epistemes or the fundamental codes of Western culture. And yet (...) he takes the Borges passage seriously and remarks on its apparent incongruity with what is usually conceived about China in the Western tradition. If we are to find any modification of the traditional image of China in Foucault’s thought, it is then the association of China not with an ordered space but with a space without any conceivable arrangement or coherence, a space that makes any logical ordering utterly unthinkable. Significantly, Foucault does not give so much as a hint to suggest that the hilarious passage from that “Chinese encyclopaedia” may have been made up to represent a Western fantasy of the Other, and that the illogical way of sorting out animals in that passage an be as alien to the Chinese mind as it is to the Western mind.In fact, the monstrous unreason and its alarming subversion of Western thinking, the unfamiliar and alien space of China as the image of the Other threatening to break up ordered surfaces and logical categories, all turn out to be, in the most literal sense, a Western fiction. Nevertheless, that fiction serves a purpose in Foucault’s thought, namely, the necessity of setting up a framework for his archaeology of knowledge, enabling him to differentiate the self from what is alien and pertaining to the Other and to map out the contours of Western culture recognizable as a self-contained system. Indeed, what can be a better sign of the Other than a fictionalized space of China? What can furnish the West with a better reservoir for its dreams, fantasies, and utopias? Zhang Longxi, author of A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theories of Literature , is currently writing a dissertation in comparative literature at Harvard University. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry is “The Tao and the Logos: Notes on Derrida’s Critique of Logocentrism”. (shrink)

This paper explores how whiteness as the transcendental norm shapes the meaning structure of Black-being-in-the-world. If home is a place, a site, a dwelling of acceptance, where one is allowed to feel safe, to relax, to let one’s guard down, then being Black in white supremacist America is anathema to being at home for Black people. Indeed, to be Black is to be a stranger, something “strange,” “scary,” “dangerous,” an “outsider.” To be Black within white America belies what it means (...) to dwell, to reside, to rest. In other words, one’s sense of racialized Black embodiment remains on guard, unsettled, hyperalert. Phenomenologically, there is a profound sense of alienation, where one’s racialized body is ostracized and shunned. On this score, I examine, within the mundane context of an elevator, how the dynamics of intersubjectivity and sociality are strained through the dynamics of the white gaze. The white gaze, among other things, functions to police the meaning of the Black body and attempts to de-subjectify Black embodiment. In this way, the only real perspective is white. Black bodies are deemed devoid of a perspective on the world as there is no subjectivity, no sense of agential meaning making. One might say that Black people, on this view, constitute an essence, a typified mode of being. Unlike the existentialist thesis where existence precedes essence, Black people are locked into an objecthood, a fungible and fixed essence. This racial and racist myth is what, for Schutz, would collapse the importance that he places on intersubjectivity and sociality. Indeed, within this paper, I delineate the threatening, necro-political dimensions of whiteness that I experienced after writing the well-known article “Dear White America.” That experience cemented, for me, and for many other readers, what it means to occupy the residence of whiteness, an abode that can take one’s life in the blink of an eye. The experience of the racialized stranger means walking a tightrope, a precarious situation where one flirts with death, where one’s body is deemed hypersexual, inferior, frightening, and monstrous. Based upon this construction, the white body is deemed the site of virtue, safety, deliverer, protector of all things white and pure. Think here of “the white man’s burden” or the idea of “white manifest destiny.” Stain, blemish, taint, and defilement are indelible markers of the stranger. And based upon the logics of racial purity, one must extinguish the “vermin,” the “criminals,” the “rapists.” While I don’t explore this within the paper, Schutz scholars will immediately recognize the genocidal implications of what would have been at stake for Schutz had he not escaped Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic gaze and his Anschluss of Austria. My sense is that Schutz would have understood not just the horrors of white racism but would appreciate the necessity of theorizing the need to rethink home as existentially capacious and intersubjectively vibrant. I conclude this paper by thinking through the concept of “breakdown”, delineating its spatial, phenomenological, and subjectively embodied implications. Breakdown, as I use the term, upends forms of white racialized habituation, creating possible embodied psychic space for what I term un-suturing, which involves undoing the machinations of white safety in the face of alterity, where the stranger invokes wonder and self-critique. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:All was this land full fill'd of faerie," or Magic and the Past in Early Modern EnglandLauren KassellI.In 1625 Gabriel Naudé (1600–53), student of medicine and up-and-coming librarian, wrote a history of magic.1 Paracelsianism had been debated in France for decades, and in 1623 Naudé had lent his pen to the controversy following the hoax appearance of bills posted in Paris announcing the arrival of the Fraternity of the (...) Rosy Cross and the wonders they could provide. The impetus for Naudé's history of magic was a pamphlet that described Homer and Virgil, abusively, as magicians. As Didier Kahn has shown, Naudé's 1623 intervention against the Rosicrucians wrested a brewing dispute about Paracelsianism from the hands of theologians and settled it in the name of reason, not religion; his medical training no doubt informed his intervention.2 In his history of magic Naudé complained that everyone who ever did anything clever was now reputed to be a magician, which meant in league with the devil. His project was to clear the ground of the [End Page 107] false histories that had been written for the previous two hundred years. Adopting a mode of historia litteraria, he redeemed the reputations of several dozen learned men—including Zoroaster, Socrates, Roger Bacon, Agrippa, and ultimately Virgil—whose names had been sullied by the term magician.3The branding of natural philosophers and especially mathematical practitioners as magicians had been an enduring problem.4 As John Aubrey would later reflect in notes on the life of the Oxford scholar Thomas Allen, "In those darke times Astrologer, Mathematician, and Conjurer, were accounted the same thing."5 But Naudé provides an elaborate account of why these accusations initially might have been fabricated—jealousy, incredulity, malice, fear of technology—and demonstrates a method for unmasking these errors. Follow the simple rules of good scholarship, he insists: read the best authors, think logically, and acquire "a certain familiarity with the most profitable Sciences, and the most universal and general account of the affairs of this World that may be had, which is to be gained partly by our own industry, partly by the endeavors of those who have gone before us, such as may be those of Historians."6 That is, through hard work and the help of other historians, understand the context in which these texts were written. Perfect historians are indispensable; false historians should be read with caution.7 If one encounters a fabulous tale, locate its textual sources, read critically, and remember that (many) historians vend rubbish.8 Naudé surveys a vast literature dating from antiquity through the sixteenth century, demonstrating that misreadings of tropes and irony, for instance, have led to the labeling of poets and natural philosophers as magicians.9 Likewise, where people have professed their magical powers, Naudé is careful to show that writing books about magic and boasting about one's expertise are not the same thing as practicing magic.10 These fables persist because authors repeat what others have written without applying the above principles of good research; they write for their own glory instead of doing proper research; and they show off their polymathic skills by assembling great [End Page 108] heaps of examples instead of making sense of them. Thus the noble name of history is built upon a monstrous edifice of fables.11In short, prompted by festering occultism and religious controversies in Paris, Naudé wrote a history of magic in order to release the great men of learning from the label of magician. This is a history of the "first appearance of learning, the first rising of the great wits, the time they flourished, the ages which have brought forth most, and take notice by the way, how that ignorance hath always persecuted them with this calumny"; he defines magic historically.12 Great learning and suspicion of its demonic sources are inseparable. Through pragmatic reading, Naudé redeems scholars who have been called magicians, and shifts the onus of explanation away from these learned men and onto historians and their incredulous readers.13 Poor histories are written by men guilty of pride and malice. These fables persist because... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Seven Poems NICOLAS CALAS (Translated by Avi Sharon) hellenizing surrealism: a greek door to europe Nicolas calas (Kalamares) may be considered merely a minor Greek poet, but he had a major global persona and influence. In the middle of the last century he played a catalyzing role in the international avant garde: He was a Zelig-like polemicist in three languages (Greek, French, and English) and across three cultural (...) capitals (Athens, Paris, and New York). But he always fought on a singular front: surrealism. Born in Lausanne in 1907, he grew up in Athens and by the later 1920s began to stand out in literary circles (he was over 6' 4") for his modernist if not revolutionary views. Starting from an interest in Freud and Marx, the subconscious and the revolutionary, Calas soon arrived at their natural synthesis—surrealism. Around the time when a distinctly Greek form of surrealist poetry emerged, with the 1935 publication of “Blast Furnace” by Andreas Embiricos, Calas was on his way to becoming its unofficial spokesman. He moved to the epicenter of the movement in Paris and with the 1938 publication of Foyers d’Incendie became the “most lucid and audacious” of founder André Breton’s acolytes, both prophet and demagogue of the group. Carried along in the current of European artists and thinkers leaving Europe for New York, he would continue the fight on the western wing of the faction (literally, coming to blows at a cocktail party with Clement Greenberg, representing the opposing Abstract Expressionist side). In 1942 he published another clarion pamphlet, Confound the Wise, giving the movement voice in English and befriending its most visible local supporters and practitioners, from Peggy Guggenheim to Marcel Duchamp. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 The Wyndham Lewis of the operation, Calas was a cross-border catalyst, evangelizing the role of surrealism as a liberating and generative force in modern literature and art. For him and other writers and poets, the weapon that would most effectively derange the reader’s habitual conformism into revelatory and revolutionary perception was the surrealist image, poetry’s lingua franca. For Greek practitioners it was completely natural for that magical representation to arise out of their god-infested, sun-filled landscape. Here they had a force that was both blinding and enlightening, penetrating and transformative, local and universal. For Calas, the primary echo or reflection of that essential image was the island of Santorini, referenced in several of the translations here (and reminiscent of his fellow national Nikos Gatsos’s use of the island of Amorgos in a similar context). It stood as the very symbol of fiery transformation, an image monstrous enough to shock the reader into a super-rational embrace of its own form of logic. This Hellenization of surrealism, like the Hellenization of modernism itself, was to become an important, transformative power in its own right. For many, the origin (and likewise, for many, the enclosing border ) of surrealism was France. “But it is French. It is their invention,” was how William Carlos Williams saw it, to his chagrin. Williams was convinced that the objective concentration on the image itself (“no ideas but in things”) could offer a salutary corrective to American poetry of his time. “It is the surrealists who have invented the living defense of literature,” he wrote in a 1929 essay. But for a poet so at one with the American Grain to be reconciled with surrealism’s ‘Francite’ he needed some way to cross the divide. His admiration for Calas’s work in clarifying and promoting the group’s ideas enabled the Greek poet to serve as a mediator, to allow the creative transference of its rebellious wisdom into Williams’s poetry. To borrow the title of one of his early American essays, Calas provided Williams a “Greek door to Europe.” In translating four of Calas’s French poems into English, published in 1941 with a frontispiece by the surrealist painter and magician Kurt Seligman, Williams leveraged Calas as the vehicle through which the “enabling foreignness” of surrealism could be grafted into the grain of his American modernist work, just as he set out on his magnum opus, Paterson. In a similar way... (shrink)

On 22 July, 2011, we were confronted with the horror of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. The instant reaction, as we have seen with similar incidents in the past—such as the Oklahoma City bombings—was to attempt to explain the incident. Whether the reasons given were true or not were irrelevant: the fact that there was a reason was better than if there were none. We should not dismiss those that continue to cling on to the initial claims of a (...) wider Jihadist plot behind the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as Islamophobes (or merely lacking common sense): for, it is often easier to rely on reason—no matter how fictional—than not to have anything to cling on at all. In many ways, it is even better if the reason is fictional: for, if grounded in a certain fact, or reality, it can then go away. However, if it is in the realm of the imaginary, it is then always already metaphorical: thus, can be applied to any and every situation. And it is this, if we echo Friedrich Nietzsche, that gives us our “metaphysical comfort”; that we can know what is going on. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular: underlying them is the logic that someone—no matter how implausible—is in control of the situation. One would rather believe that all acts of terror stemmed from Osama bin Laden (and the narrative worked even better when he was in a ‘cave in Afghanistan’) than if they were the actions, and decisions, of singular individuals. For, if there is a head organizing everything, it can be cut off; there is no controlling a mass of singularities. As Jean Baudrillard continues to teach us, the term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpen-analytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with ‘more subtle’ categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like ‘mana’ once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts ‘class’, ‘social relations’, ‘power’, ‘status’, ‘institution’, and ‘social’ itself—all these too-explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake—it is to provide meaning for that which has none.1 And it is this lack of meaning—this nothingness of not only the mass, but our inability to know in general—that truly scares us. For, if we are never able to legitimately make a generalizing statement, this suggests that we can never actually posit beyond a singular, situational, moment. Hence, we can never claim to know anyone: at best, we can only catch momentary glimpses. It is for this very reason that the insanity plea Breivik’s lawyer will attempt is the one that horrifies us the most. For, if Breivik is insane, this foregrounds our inability to understand, know. And as Aristotle has taught us, it is more important that something is plausible than if something were probable—in this context, we would rather have Breivik as a calculating mass murderer than someone who was completely out of his mind. This is especially ironic in the light of the fact that none of us would say that we have any similarity with Breivik. If that were so, the declaration that he was mad should be no more than a logical consequence. However, we also want Breivik to be accountable for his actions. And in order for that to be so, we need him to be of sound mind. But if that were true, we can then no longer distinguish ourselves from him. And it is precisely this that scares us. For, we are horrified not when there are abnormalities to our way of life. There are usually two different reactions to this—either oppose and destroy it; or subsume it under the dominant logic. We see this most clearly in reactions to immigration: there are either calls for immigrants to ‘pack up and leave’ or pseudo-liberal notions of ‘we are all alike’. Both of which are merely version of “all men are brothers”—the brutal translation of which is that you are my brother if you live the same way as me; otherwise not only are you not my brother, you are also potentially not part of mankind (you might as well be, to echo Giorgio Agamben, bare life ). This is played out in our age of what is commonly termed post-political bio-politics —an instance of horribly awkward theoretical jargon that Slavoj Žižek channeling Agamben unpacks rather elegantly: “ post-politics is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus[es] on expert management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”2 Žižek continues: Post-political bio-politics also has two aspects which cannot but appear to belong to two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’ to Homo sacer , that so-called sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded, like prisoners at Guantanamo or Holocaust victims, from all rights; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments [….] What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. That is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and […] the extreme expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .3 This is why the ones that are harshest towards new immigrants are the recently naturalized citizens of any country. For, if there is no longer any “ideological struggle” and all life is reduced to mere automaton-living, there is the realization that we are all the same—not in a tree-hugging hippie sense—but that the immigrant is the same as us precisely because we are all immigrants. And since all nations, and by extension peoples in a nation (especially those who believe in the notion of nationality, and national identity), have to find some manner, no matter from where or what it is, to distinguish themselves from those around them, the other (in spite, and especially in the light, of its absence) is the most crucial aspect of the discourse of nationality. More precisely, in the interests of what Baudrillard calls “preserving a certain code of analysis” (nationality in this case), what has to be maintained is the absolute otherness of the other. Very rarely is Boris Johnson right: “it is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad.”4 However, much like Breivik in his manifesto, he should have stopped whilst he was ahead. By attempting to diagnose Breivik—“the fundamental reasons for their callous behavior lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause … that gives them an excuse to dramatize the resentment … and to kill.”—Johnson falls into the same trap that he accuses others of: “to try to advance any other explanation for their actions … is simply to play their self-important game.” More crucially, and this is the point that Johnson completely misses, attempting to rationalize Breivik’s actions—to rehabilitate reason—is a desperate attempt at maintaining his otherness. In fact, we’ll end up going one step further, insist on Breivik’s sanity, put him on the stand, and hope that he will display such a difference from all of us that we can rest safe that we are unlike him and his kind. That, in itself, is a dangerous game to play. One should not forget that the turning point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the central part of her novel where she lets the monster speak. At that moment, the monster moves from an ‘it’ to a fully subjectivized person; with his own stories, historicities, emotions, and so on. In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Frankenstein , this is the moment where “the ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.”5 But, in the case of Breivik, this goes beyond just a risk of us feeling for him: for, no right-minded person should ever deny another the opportunity to put forth her or his own case. The problem lies with us trying to deny the madness of Breivik’s act by putting him back under reason. The problem is in our inability to differentiate the act from the person; the singular from the universal.6 In our desperation to preserve the notion that we are rational beings incapable of becoming monsters, we’ve had to deny the meaninglessness—in the strict sense of it lying outside of reason—of Breivik’ act; we’ve had to “provide meaning where there is none.” For, if this act were a moment of madness—a moment that comes from elsewhere—we cannot say that it will not descend upon us one day. If Breivik’s actions were that of a sane person, one who is in control of his being, his self, we can then locate the otherness in his being. More importantly, this would allow us to distinguish ourselves from that said being. Breivik’s sanity is the only thing that allows us to say that ‘this act of terror is borne out of one with an ultra-right ideology’; and ‘since I am not of that ideology, I would never do such a thing’. By doing that, we attempt to protect ourselves by claiming that people who share Breivik’s ideology are foreign to us, other to us. However, if Breivik’s act was a moment of insanity, his otherness is no longer locatable: and the notion of ‘us and them’ shifts from a geographical, physical, religious, or cultural notion, to one in the realm of ideas. And this is what truly scares us. For, if what is foreign is not phenomenological, then it cannot be seen, detected, sensed. Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, terrify us not merely for the fact that they were white in a white society, but more pertinently that their skin color did not matter: we would not be able to spot them even if they were blue, even if they were right next to us, even if we had known them all our lives. Even as we are grappling with holding Breivik accountable by declaring him of sound mind, what truly terrifies us is that deep down we know that Breivik’s act is a moment of madness; beyond all comprehensibility. And this means that we would not be able to spot the idea; even if it were in our heads at this very moment. We have gone to lengths to rehabilitate Breivik, McVeigh, Nichols, and such perpetrators of massive incomprehensible violence, in order to preserve our difference from them. What we have really been trying to deny is the fact that everyone, at any given moment, could have a moment of madness. And this is the true radicality of Mary Shelley: in allowing us to momentarily enter the head of the monster, she shows us not just the fact that he is like any one of us, but that any one of us could, in the right (or wrong) circumstance, be like him. Perhaps here, there is a lesson to be learned from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . The most dangerous thing that one could do on Elm Street was to mention Freddy’s name—once you had knowledge of him, you were open to the possibility of a visit during your dreams. This suggests that Freddy is a combination of externalities (after all, when you die, he survives) and your self (if you have never heard of him, he cannot come for you). In this sense, Freddy would be the manifestation par excellence of what Avital Ronell calls a “killer text”—it is one’s relationality with the text (and the ideas, notions, in the said text) that opens oneself to it, to the lessons of the text, to being changed, affected, even to the dangers of the text. After all, one should never forget Plato’s warning that ideas can corrupt, can be perilous. To compound matters, as Ronell reminds us, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”7 Thus, in attempting to differentiate ourselves from Breivik by concocting some reason(s) why we are not like him, we have done nothing but read him, open a connection to him. *** Bang bang, he shot me down Bang bang, I hit the ground Bang bang, that awful sound Bang bang, my baby shot me down. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” Sonny Bono, 1966. This is the part that we all know and remember. Whilst never quite remembering that this is a song that is not so much about violence, love, but about remembering. For, after the bridge comes the accusatory stanza: “Now he's gone, I don't know why/ And till this day, sometimes I cry/ He didn't even say goodbye/ He didn't take the time to lie.” Bang Bang is a game that the two lovers used to play; and all she has now is the memory of the game to remember him by. And the only reason she has to recall this game is: he never provided her a reason for his leaving, his death. Not that she will, can, ever get that satisfactory answer. This is precisely the game we are playing with Anders Behring Breivik. Even though he has left a 1500 page manifesto, even though we will allow him to use the court-room as his platform, we will continue screaming at him “tell me why …” For, what we want him to say is that we are not like him: what we really want him to do is, “take the time to lie …” Perhaps here, we should allow the echo of the infans to resound in baby . As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the infans is one that is pre-language, pre-knowing, pre-understanding: it is the very finitude, and exteriority, of relationality itself.8 And thus, it is a position of openness to the fullness of possibility—and nothing else. This would be, in Ronell’s terms, a “connection to the other” that knows nothing other than the fact that it is a connection. The true horror of 22 July, 2011, is the fact that it is not Anders Behring Breivik who is mad, but the act itself that is. And this is precisely why only “my baby” that could have “shot me down.” For, it is an act that is from beyond, a sheer act of madness that—as Plato warns us—is whispered into our ears (and can so easily be mistaken for inspiration, and even wisdom), an act that can both seize, and cease, us at the same time. And what can this utter openness to an other, the other, be but a moment of love, a true ‘falling in love’. At the moment of whispering, nothing can be known as we are babies as our baby shoots us down …. Hence, all attempts at analyzing this event (including this one) are not only futile, but border on the farcical. The real tragedy is that we forget that all of us have the possibility of becoming Breivik. NOTES Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. p. 37. Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p. 34 Ibid: 35-36. Boris Johnson. “ Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer .” The Telegraph . (25 July, 2011): Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p.39. What is killing us is the notion that Breivik’s act is beyond reason, beyond knowing, outside understanding itself. This is why Boris Johnson’s plea was for us to ignore Breivik as a madman. But to do so, Johnson conflates the notion of the act and the person; the singular and the universal. This is exactly the same gesture as insisting on his sanity: the ‘madman’ is merely the absolute other, one that we are not. Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989: 380. Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"And Her Substance Would Be Mine":Envy, Hate, and Ontological Evacuation in Josephine Hart's SinA. Samuel Kimball (bio)Envy involuntarily testifies to a lack of being that puts the envious to shame.—René Girard, A Theatre of EnvySin, offspring of snt-ya, "that which is," in Germanic sun(d)jo, "it is true," "the sin is real," and ultimately from es-, "to be," source of am, is, sooth, soothe; of the Sanskrit roots sat- and (...) sant-, "existing, true, virtuous"; of the Latin, esse, "to be," from which is derived such words as essence, presence, absence, and represent; of the Greek roots einei, "to be" as well as ont-, "being," which provides the name for the philosophical study of being itself, ontology.—Adapted from The American Heritage Dictionaryof Indo-European RootsI: Ruth Garton's Envious NarrationThe etymology of sin suggests that the evil it names reveals something fundamental about being, something ruinous and yet unavoidable, something that endangers or even nullifies being and yet is inseparable from it, even essential to it. In Josephine Hart's second novel, Sin, this something is a species of Girardian desire in the form of a monstrous envy, which impels the first-person narrator, Ruth Garton, to a lifelong hatred of her cousin and stepsister, Elizabeth. The focus of Ruth's confessional narrative, envy, drives Ruth to take covert and increasingly virulent revenge against her quasi-sibling in a self-deluding attempt to appropriate not only the objects of Elizabeth's desire but ultimately Elizabeth's desire itself and the apparent ontological fullness that Ruth attributes to it. Over the course of her life, then, Ruth loses the promise [End Page 239] of her name in her ruthless pursuit of her enemy. As she becomes increasingly frustrated in her efforts to destroy her sister's life, Ruth finally turns her hatred of her nemesis against herself as well as the readers to whom she appeals for understanding. If envy heightens Ruth's consciousness to the point where she can perceive that her desire signals her ontological emptiness, nevertheless, it so captures her, so dominates her emotional and cognitive life, that she is unable to find a way to affirm her own—or anyone else's—being in the world. The result is a spectacular narrative record of the cost of recognizing but being unable to resist the mimeticism of desire.1II. The Girardian Dynamic of SinAs Girard has demonstrated, one of the most difficult existential challenges is to understand that desire is mimetically mediated. The result is that we come into our desire only through someone else's and always want something more and other than we think we want. Behind every move to possess a particular object is a largely unrecognized and in principle unsatisfiable desire for absolute satisfaction in the form of ontological completeness, self-sufficiency, intactness. On the one hand, Girard writes, "by the example of his own desire…the model conveys to the subject the supreme desirability of the object" (1977, 146). On the other hand, since to desire mimetically means to come into desire through the other rather than through oneself, by this same example the model conveys to the subject the contingency, the dependency, the secondariness, hence the emptiness of the subject's desire, even the subject's lack of desire, the lack that, paradoxically, constitutes his or her desire. Therefore, to be subjected to the other's want ultimately has the effect of signaling the seeming priority, fullness, and self-origination of this other person's desire. For this reason Girard asserts that "man... desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess" (146).If at first the other person models the desire that the subject lacks, it is in the logic of mimesis that the other will become a rival and, unless the rivalry is somehow interrupted or abrogated, inevitably an enemy to be destroyed. The subject will become locked into a potentially deadly game of trying to obtain the same object that the model desires, so as to experience the satisfactions—ultimately, the sense of being—that the object in question seems to provide... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 125.3 (2004) 456-459 [Access article in PDF] Jon D. Mikalson. Herodotus and Religion in the Persian Wars. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xiv + 269 pp. 5 maps. Cloth, $45. One should pay attention to the title of this book. It is not primarily intended as a study of religion in Herodotus, like Lachenaud (1978), Harrison (2000), and others, to whom Mikalson (...) gives due credit throughout, but rather as an exploration of Greek religious practices and attitudes in a specific historical context. Herodotus is, evidently, our main source and an especially illuminating one because, says Mikalson, his approach to religion is less bound to the conventions of a particular genre than that of epic poets, tragedians, or even, for different reasons, Thucydides, who tends to exclude religion from his account. At the same time, Herodotus' religious views are in great part not peculiar to him but probably shared by many of his contemporaries.On this last point Mikalson agrees with Harrison, as he also does when he maintains that scholars have frequently underestimated the importance of religion in Herodotus' history. Religious causes and motivations represent, to be sure, only one level of explanation among several others that Herodotus uses. But they are important, and the supplementary sources on the topic (especially the later authors Plutarch, Pausanias, and Diodorus Siculus) uncover no evidence that Herodotus exaggerated general Greek notions about the role of the gods in the Persian Wars or the number and prominence of cultic acts connected with these events.The book is composed of three chapters. Chapter 1 is entitled "A Religious account of the Persian Invasions." Chapter 2, "Greek Gods, Heroes and the Divine in the Persian Invasions," discusses the role of individual divine figures. With chapter 3, "Some Religious Beliefs and Attitudes of Herodotus," the focus shifts from Herodotus as a major source for Greek religion to Herodotus' own views about the gods and their cult. This approach continues in the Appendix, "Herodotus on the Origins of Greek Religion," which provides a welcome and lucid examination of the more scholarly side of Herodotus' religious thought.There is a considerable degree of overlap among the three chapters, and more space is devoted to summary and compilation than to analysis. The first and longest chapter (ninety-five pages, almost half the text of the book) is a history from the fall of the Pisistratids in Athens to the aftermath of the battle of Mycale that foregrounds all attested religious actions and events as well as the character utterances and authorial comments that mention the gods or the divine. It follows for the most part a chronological order (or, sometimes, the order of Herodotus' narrative), with an abundance of direct quotations and frequent spacing between paragraphs. The overall effect is somewhat fragmentary, and there is very little discussion of individual items. We would like to hear more, for example, about the earthquake of Delos, with Herodotus' extraordinary interpretation (and Thucydides' conflicting report), or the role of the Aeacidae, who were ineffectual allies of the Thebans against the Athenians in 506 but helped the Greek coalition at Salamis (22-23, 77, 129-30). [End Page 456]Neither does Mikalson impose a logical order on the string of events, although his occasional syntheses along the way touch upon a number of general points. Most importantly, he argues that Herodotus treats religion in two different ways: in popular/cultic terms or, less frequently, according to the literary conventions of epic or tragedy (45-47). The latter form of discourse includes words such as atasthalos, "rash" (which Herodotus notably uses in lieu of the popular term anosios, "impious," to describe Xerxes' whipping of the Hellespont), dreams and monstrous omens as signs of misfortunes (41-44), pious prayers that are normally answered (47-49), and oracles that always come true. Conversely, the rejection of the literary conventions of epic helps to account for the fact that in Herodotus and other prose authors, as in artistic representations of battles of the Persian wars, divine intervention may feature the occasional epiphany of... (shrink)

What relationship is there between violence and language?* What happens when language is the main target of attack? We should perhaps begin by defining the inner logic of violence, and then tackle the question of the monstrous hybrid it has created with language. In one of the texts that make up the collection entitled Difficile Liberte’, Lévinas remarks that violent action is an ‘action where one acts as if one were the only actor: as if the rest of (...) the universe existed only to receive the action; thus every action is violent that we suffer without wholeheartedly collaborating in it’. So violence has two characteristics. On the one hand, it is fed by a fundamental illusion, that is, a fiction of the will that imagines it is so super-powerful and autonomous that it thinks that by itself it can decide the fate of ‘the rest of the universe’. On the other hand, it is never an authentic action, because it prevents others from owning it and becoming co-actors themselves. Thinking perhaps of Spinoza, Lévinas suggests that violence comes into being from the moment when individuals decide to stop being part of the ordinary world of actions and think, ‘like an empire within an empire’, they are the unique cause of their acts and gestures. This subjective decision is clearly a control decision that contradicts the requirement of common sense, which is to be understood here as a sense of the community. It leads inexorably to consigning others to the world of effects in order more easily to turn them into eternal victims. In Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Prince Mishkin perfectly embodies the figure of the other who continually ‘receives’ the action. But when interplay between the will and its own mirrors becomes excessive, individuals always end up confusing the reality of the world with the exaggerated trust they put in their own prejudices. Since the analyses of the psychiatrist Minkowski at least, we know quite well that the more the certainty naturally accompanying the prejudice increases and expands until it borders on madness, the more violence is likely to grow. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the medical study of “monstrous birth” as a site of race-making in the nineteenth-century United States. It argues that the medical theorization of monstrosity was structured by multiple logics of race, which both shaped and emerged from medical authorities’ efforts to classify and interpret anomalous newborn bodies. Materialized at the intersection of these logics, the biological monster theorized a racial order that was hierarchical, temporalized, and vulnerable to the dangers of women’s reproduction. In this context, monstrosity (...) became a way to advance claims about the nature of racial hierarchy, articulate the threat and mechanism of racial degeneration, and negotiate the contradictions of shifting racial imaginaries across the nineteenth century. Exploring the medical engagement with monstrosity thus sheds light on entanglements of medical science and race-making in U.S. history, showing how practitioners produced and elaborated unstable concepts of scientific race, and revealing how race was linked to reproduction in the emergence of modern biomedical discourse. (shrink)

RE-ISSUED WITH INDEX 'Therapy may be mad,' declares Rob Weatherill in this outspoken volume. Therapy here means particularly psychotherapy and counselling, but should be also taken to signify the universal logic of the post-modern therapeutic culture of well-being, happiness and enjoyment. More and more people want to believe in therapy who have lost belief in anything else. Counselling and therapy increasingly inform all human interaction. The dominant ethos is a holistic one. This book aims to refute, primarily through the (...) prism of modern psychoanalysis and key theorists like Baudrillard, Levinas, Lyotard, Paz, Steiner, Reiff as well as Žižek, the fashion for a return to a pre-Cartesian ideal of harmony and integration. On the contrary, there is something monstrous, something excessive, that Freud termed the death drive, at the heart of the Real upon which ordinary reality, so to speak, rests. Enlightenment thought, in which we in the West in particular are caught, is entirely incapable of going beyond the ideal humanist version of man – our last great illusion. (shrink)

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary conglomerate of various research fields and disciplines, which increases the risk of fragmentation of cognitive theories. However, while most previous work has focused on theoretical integration, some kinds of integration may turn out to be monstrous, or result in superficially lumped and unrelated bodies of knowledge. In this paper, I distinguish theoretical integration from theoretical unification, and propose some analyses of theoretical unification dimensions. Moreover, two research strategies that are supposed to lead to unification (...) are analyzed in terms of the mechanistic account of explanation. Finally, I argue that theoretical unification is not an absolute requirement from the mechanistic perspective, and that strategies aiming at unification may be premature in fields where there are multiple conflicting explanatory models. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of HumeVicki J. SappThe Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume, by Adam Potkay; xii & 253 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, $36.95.With the memory still fresh of Jerome Christensen’s Practicing Enlightenment, I experienced no small anxiety on reading Adam Potkay’s first acknowledgment, to Prof. Christensen and his “provocative seminar” on Hume. I finished a third of The Fate (...) of Eloquence in the Age of Hume before the overt nod, when Potkay spotlights the essayist Hume’s appeal to a female readership: “Within this doux commerce, the figures of classical eloquence are entirely too priapic—too ‘swelling... monstrous and gigantic’—to be admitted” (p. 75). However, Hume’s self-castration wound is mercifully left unprobed, and the priapus doesn’t come up again until Potkay’s own prosopopoeia, “ancient eloquence’s priapic energy” (p. 158). Although he follows Christensen’s equation of polite letters with effeminacy, Potkay treats gender more materially than metaphorically. Although attending to his poststructuralist debts with such observations as “Hume, the unmoved mover, observes the spiritual implosion of one whose passions cannot, like his own, be alleviated through voyeurism” (p. 125), Potkay ultimately fulfills his promise to draw his insights from “a history of eighteenth-century reading and reception” (p. 22). In a clear prose he conveys his focused argument, about “the fate of eloquence” in the modern [End Page 244] reconfiguration of society, through a variety of illustrations; as a result, the book has broad appeal to readers interested in literary contexts of rhetoric, gender, and culture.Situating Hume as the center of shared interest and assumption, Potkay defines an “Age of Hume,” a constellation of writers responding to and producing a tension between an ideal of classical eloquence and modern codes of politeness. Boldly establishing this tension “as the characteristic theme of the era,” Potkay makes a compelling case for politeness as the primary means of class stratification for emergent capitalist society. (Paul Fussell has also applied an eighteenth-century literary mind to contemporary sociology in his Class: A Guide Through the American Status System.) In his epilogue, Potkay brings his thesis home, to the ironies of academic publishing elitism and the “peculiarly American commitment to civic equality.”Several ruling assumptions guide Potkay’s treatment of the eloquence/politeness dualism. Reading high-canon writers and moral philosophers, Potkay defines eighteenth-century Britain as an age “that does not want its passions inflamed” and suspects eloquence of aiming to seduce the masses with rhetorical figures and physical gesture. Equated with popular government, eloquence threatens to manipulate “our untutored responses”—passions unmediated by moral and social education—within an exclusively “masculine” political economy. Echoing Christensen, Potkay finds “a characteristic irony” of the new “sentimental commerce” in the “polite restraint of the sexual passions that covertly fuel it” (p. 147). Writers must adapt to the paradigm shift of a new commercial and literary economy which included a sentimental ideal of woman as social sovereign—a model of polite literacy and civility which Hume described in his initial piece, “Of Essay Writing.”Potkay diffuses his gender-based thesis over a broad political and philosophical perspective. Politeness redressed the conflict between masculine populism (Bolingbroke) and effeminate luxury (Walpole) and “served to compensate for virtue lost through commercial progress” (p. 194). Potkay points out the ultimately political association of eloquence with vulgarity: savages, children, and the insane speak a language “thought to abound in figures”—a convenient habit in those whom a ruling class would exclude from “mature, rational discourse” (p. 68). (Here, Potkay elides the more complex “woman” from the above marginalia, for immediate reasons of either obviousness or neatness.)On the philosophical front Hume variously affirmed and problematized a “topos of eloquence as error.” Treatise-lovers may regret that he simmered this passionately figurative text down into the duller and drier Enquiries in order to fulfill a polite—and commercial—demand for the replacement of oral with written culture, of emotional gesticulation with “rationality, abstraction, logic” (p. 63). Potkay’s arguments suggest a ruling irony in this paradigm-shift: the association of eloquence (masculine) with emotionalism and politeness (feminine) with rationality and... (shrink)

This article focuses upon monstrously generous teaching styles, enacted in neocolonial educational contexts, where the interactions between students and teachers are sometimes tense and mistrustful. The tensions between students and teachers are explained by discussing the ways in which schools—in the theoretical perspective of Roberto Esposito—operate to immunize the society against youth deemed improper. Utilizing the theories of Antonio Negri, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. Du Bois, the characterization of students as monstrous is discussed and an inversion is suggested, whereby (...) students deemed to be monstrous are considered the source of reinvigorating visions of society. The pedagogical approaches of teachers who seek to welcome and nurture monstrous students are described, relying upon the accounts of great teachers offered by educators and sociologists. In practice, monstrously generous teachers make supererogatory gestures in their interactions with students, as a way of signaling to heavily-armored youth that they are willing to enter reciprocal relationships with them. Once youth drop their armor and begin to share their perspectives, monstrously generous teachers develop multiple means of helping youth develop their worldviews, without surveillance or censor. (shrink)

This article explores the political meanings of a relatively unexplored dimension of Edmund Burke's thought: the monster. After first showing the extent to which the figure of the monster appears throughout Burke's work, the article speculates on some of the political reasons for Burke's use of the metaphor of the monstrous. These reasons are rooted in the categories of the aesthetic developed in the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and also in (...) his political fear of a new collective entity only beginning to emerge on the historical stage: the proletariat. The article therefore has three aims: first, to contribute to the developing body of literature on Burke's aesthetic ideology; second, to deepen our knowledge of the Gothic tropes in Burke's writings; and third, to broaden our conception of the way conservative ideology conceptualizes order and the threats to that order. (shrink)

In France between 1780 and 1815, doctors opened a broad correspondence with medical faculties and public officials about foetal anomalies . Institutional and legal reforms forced doctors to encounter monstrous births with greater frequency, and they responded by developing new ideas about heredity and embryology to explain malformations to public officials. Though doctors achieved consensus on pathogenesis, they struggled to apply these ideas in forensic cases, especially with doubtful sex. Medical networks simultaneously allowed doctors to explore obstetrical techniques, as (...) licensing regulations forced practitioners into emotional encounters with child anomalies. Doctors thus developed a new ethics for treating monstrosities, viewing them as pathological specimens, forensic objects, and obstetrical tragedies. (shrink)

Given that they are chance events, there can be no scientific demonstration or knowledge of monsters. There are still, however, many recognizable elements of scientific explanation in Aristotle's Generation of Animals Book IV chapter 4. What happens in cases of monsters and deformities occurs in the process of generation, and there is much that we can know scientifically about this process—working from the animal’s essential attributes outward to factors that influence these processes. In particular, we find Aristotle looking for and (...) investigating whether “for the most part” correlations are causally relevant and linked to essence. Even though the birth of monsters is scientifically inexplicable, the features of animals that tend to produce them can be known about. I will explain how it is that producing more than one offspring per birth is a knowable feature of a kind. This feature, along with others, can then give us a much better grasp on what happens in particular instances of monstrous birth. (shrink)

What is the political function of monstrosity? What is the nature of our political relationship with the dead? Why are the undead so threatening? In _The Monstrous and the Dead_, Mark Neocleous explores such questions as they run through three major political traditions: conservatism, Marxism and fascism. One of the things uniting these otherwise opposing traditions is that they share a common interest in the dead. This is therefore a book about the politics of remembrance, showing that how and (...) why the dead register in our political lives constitutes a major dividing line for the political traditions in question: are the dead to be reconciled with the living in a conservative fashion, resurrected for the cause of fascism or are their hopes and struggles to be redeemed for a communist future? Exploring these issues reveals that, as well as leaving traces in memories, dreams and unfulfilled wishes, the dead also generate fears, most notably the fear that they are not really dead: they are undead and thus monstrous. The book therefore simultaneously considers the function of monstrosity as a rhetorical political device: in Burke’s response to the monstrous revolution, Marx’s use of the vampire and fascism’s concept of the Marxist-liberal-Jewish menace. The outcome is an original reading of key thinkers and movements in western politics, a provocative account of the role of political metaphor and an eclectic argument concerning the place of the dead in historical struggles. (shrink)

The monster and the woman thus find themselves on the same side, the side of dissimilarity. “The female is as it were a deformed male,” added Aristotle . As she belongs to the category of the different, the female can only contribute more figures of dissimilarities, if not creatures even more monstrous. But the female is a necessary departure from the norm, a useful monstrosity. The monster is gratuitous and useless for future generations. Aristotle’s seminal work on the generation (...) of monsters posited a rigorously physical definition that was not necessarily linked to deformities: “Monstrosities,” he wrote, “come under the class of offspring which is unlike its parents” . Further, while a “monstrosity, of course, belongs to the class of ‘things contrary to Nature,’ … it is contrary not to Nature in her entirety but only to Nature in the generality of cases” .The monster, defined repeatedly by its lack of resemblance to its legitimate parents, is also monstrous in another important way, one that Aristotle described as a false resemblance to different species: “People say that the offspring which is formed has the head of a ram or an ox; and similarly with other creatures, that one has the head of another.… at the same time, in no case are they what they are alleged to be, but resemblances only” . The monster is thus a double imposture. Its strange appearance—a misleading likeness to another species, for example—belies the otherwise rigorous law that children should resemble their parents. Further, monsters offer striking similarities to categories to which they are not related, blurring the differences between genres, and disrupting the rigorous order of nature. Thus, if the monster were defined in the first place as that which did not resemble him who engendered it, it nevertheless displayed some sort of resemblance, albeit a false resemblance to an object external to its conception. Marie-Hélène Huet is William R. Kenan Professor of Romance Languages at Amherst College. She is the author of Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat’s Death, 1793-1797 and is currently completing a book on literature and tetratology. (shrink)

This article interprets David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) to argue for the morphological influence cinematic images have on modernity's monstrous identity. It shows how Lynch's tactic of interweaving apparently discrete spaces of dream and reality – one often inverting or uncannily ironising the other – relies on the virtual space of cinema, which leaves a mark on understanding, irrespective of its apparent truth. To do so, I employ Peter Sloterdijk's philosophy of space – especially the spherology developed in his (...) Spheres trilogy – and Bernard Stiegler's approach to cinematic phenomenology to consider the transferential force of cinema, and its power to cultivate and shape popular consciousness. Mulholland Drive is acutely aware of this force, and its interplay with the expectations and disappointments of Hollywood monstrosity inserts itself into the sphere-forming traffic of modern meaning-making. In doing so, I argue, the film takes up Lynch's familiar approach to irony and the weird to unwind the destructive uniformity of Hollywood hegemony. The productive bifurcations that result, inscribed in between cinema and consciousness, and forgettable as the very spheric intimacy of memory, gesture to what might live beyond discrete forms. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that “monstrous” women – violators of both moral and gender norms – mark the limits of acceptable behavior through such violation and thus provide particular insight into the workings of gendered power relations within contemporary western societies. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s 1975 College de France course titled Abnormal , I begin by arguing that gendered power relations in western societies can be characterized as “normalizing.” Next, I refer to Foucault’s discussion of “natural” and “moral” (...) monsters in order to provide a sketch of the monstrous woman, and then show how specific monstrous women violate moral and gender norms. By way of conclusion I argue that the figure of the monstrous women is not wholly negative but rather ambivalent. As Foucault asserts, monsters are “limit figures;” monstrous women challenge limits – including prevailing norms governing the feminine and the human – in ways that render them explicit such that they are denaturalized and ultimately opened up to critical interrogation. (shrink)

Monstrosity has its recognized place in cultural narratives but in philosophical discourse it remains mostly untouched. In my paper I make an attempt at phenomenological inquiry into the experience of the Other’s monstrous body. I am beginning with some remarks concerning Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, the philosophers who devoted some attention to the problem of monstrosity and the monstrous, but my analysis is mainly based on the works of Bernhard Waldenfels, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Waldenfels emphasizes (...) that the corporeal self is somehow perceived as alien, always somewhat distanced and not totally graspable. He also argues that the closer the Other, the stronger activation of the boundary between the spheres of the ownness and the alienness is caused. A promising framework for the analysis of the ambivalent reaction brought about by the encounter with a monstrous human body can be provided by Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry into the process of pairing, developed in his Cartesian meditations. It seems that in this experience the pairing process is frustrating and deranged because the process of apperception is disturbed by a cluster of untypical or quite unique characteristics of the monstrous body. In result, its sense remains unclear, puzzling and challenging. Interesting light on the experience of the Other’s monstrous body could shed Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, especially the ideas of flesh and chiasm outlined in his last work. The radical character of the monster, while does not render it something totally different from the own, elucidates, however, the contingency of the order under which the human corporeality is subsumed. (shrink)

This paper is an investigation into writing that describes, and in many ways objectifies and marginalises, the queer. Specifically, the paper looks at the fairytale, and discusses how such narratives might be rewritten by authors informed by Queer Theory. This analysis is undertaken to reflect on, theorise, and position the creative writing strategies and practice of queer writers working within the field of fairytale fiction. A major proposition of this paper is that many fairytales feature what will be defined as (...) “Monstrous Queer” figures. A further delineation of this paper is to foreground the moment of narrative closure – the fairytale ending. This is done because fairytale endings routinely involve the Monstrous Queer being destroyed or punished. This paper is concerned with how queer writers have undertaken a positive rewriting of these figures of the Monstrous Queer and how a critical engagement with Queer Theory might further inform this rewriting. It will be shown that writers of queer fairytales have utilised the very familiar figures of the fairytale – narrative clichés as it were – in familiar settings, with familiar plot devices but, significantly, with a shifted emphasis, a revaluation, that has a considerable deconstructive potency. (shrink)

In this article I consider instances in visual culture in which artists and filmmakers aestheticize women with damaged, missing or anomalous limbs. I focus upon Joel Peter Witkin’s photomontage Las Meninas (1987), Peter Greenaway’s film “A Zed and Two Noughts” (1985), Alison Lapper Pregnant a statue by Marc Quinn, Mathew Barney’s film “Cremaster” (2002), David Cronenberg’s “Crash” (1996), Luis Buñuel’s “Tristana” (1970) and David Lynch’s short film “The Amputee” (1973). I argue that although the artists and filmmakers reveal, rather than (...) disguise the damaged, anomalous or missing limb(s) of the women, thus valorising their particular embodiment, these women are paradoxically still portrayed as deviant and monstrous. (shrink)

Certain artworks appear to have multiple meanings that are also contradictory. In some instances they have attracted so much attention that they are effectively out of the reach of individual monographs. These artworks are monstrous.One reason paintings may become monstrous is that they make unexpected use of ambiguation. Modern and postmodern works of all sorts are understood to be potentially ambiguous ab ovo, but earlier--Renaissance and Baroque--works were constrained to declare relatively stable primary meanings. An older work may (...) have many "layers" of meaning, but it is normally expected to declare its principal message or subject matter, together with its allegiance to one idea or theme. Contemporary historical interpretation expects those stable starting meanings, even as it relishes the exfoliating ambiguities that may come afterward. So when the interpretive apparatus of art history runs up against premodern paintings that intentionally work against unambiguous primary meanings, it can generate a potentially incoherent literature.Some of the most monstrous pictures are Leonardo's Last Supper, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, Watteau's fête galante paintings, Botticelli's Primavera, and Giorgione's Tempesta. The interpretive trichotomy of "Subject," "Not-Subject," and "Anti-Subject" is employed to talk about the ambiguity and polysemy of these monstrous works.This interpretive trichotomy helps order unruly accounts of the most complex artworks. In so doing it illuminates not only some monstrous pictures but a general area of historical interpretation: how to speak of the meaning of a created work in a way that does justice to its complexity and internal tensions. (shrink)

While the presence of monsters in popular culture is ever-increasing, their use as an explicit or implicit category to frame, stigmatise, and demonise the other is seemingly on the rise. At the same time, academic interest for monsters is ever-growing. Usually, monstrosity is understood as a category that emerges to signal a transgression to a given order; this approach has led to the demystification of the insidious characterisations of the (racial, sexual, physical) other as monstrous. While this effort has (...) been necessary, its collateral effects have reduced the monstrous to a mere (socio-cultural) construction of the other: a dialectical framing that de facto deprives monstrosity from any reality. 'Monstrous Ontologies: Politics, Ethics, Materiality' proffers the necessity of challenging these monstrous otherings and their perverse socio-political effects, whilst also asserting that the monstrous is not simply an epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological reality. There is a profound difference between monsters and monstrosity. While the former is an often sterile political and social simplification, the end-product of rhetorical and biopolitical apparatuses; the latter may be understood as a dimension that nurtures the un-definable, that is, that shows the limits of these apparatuses by embodying their material excess: not a 'cultural frame', but the limit to the very mechanism of 'framing'. The monstrous expresses the combining, hybridising, becoming, and creative potential of socio-natural life, albeit colouring this powerful vitalism with the dark hue of a fearful, disgusting, and ultimately indigestible reality that cannot simply be embraced with multicultural naivety. As such, it forces us towards radically changing not the categories, but the very mechanisms of categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies the profound ethical dimension that monstrosity forces us to acknowledge; here lies its profoundly political potential, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing monstrosity, and rather requires to engage with its uncomfortable, appalling, and revealing materiality. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, PostDocs, and academics alike in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, humanities, sociology and social theory, criminology, human geography, and critical legal theory. (shrink)

According to Kemp Smith, Descartes believed that animals were devoid of feelings and sensations. This is the so-called ‘monstrous thesis,’ which I explore here in light of two Cartesian approaches to animals. Firstly, I examine their original treatment in function of Descartes’ early metaphysical approach, i.e., all natural phenomena are to be elucidated in terms of mental scrutiny. As pain would only exist in the understanding, and animals have neither understanding nor souls, Descartes held that they did not suffer. (...) Secondly, I look at the Cartesian late naturalism; specifically, at how animals are subsequently regarded as machines that may suffer. Lastly, I conclude that the ‘monstrous thesis’ is not Cartesian because animals are machines with feelings and sensations. However, Descartes’ surprising indulgence towards humans who kill and eat animals supposes that empathy for beings who may suffer is not necessary. This may raise doubts as to another ‘monstrous thesis.'. (shrink)

The world perceived by a person undergoing vision without inversion of the retinal image has traditionally been described as inverted. Drawing on the philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the empirical research of Hubert Dolezal, I argue that this description is more reflective of a representationist conception of vision than of actual visual experience. The world initially perceived in vision without inversion of the retinal image is better described as lacking in lived significance rather than inverted; vision without inversion of (...) the retinal image affects the very content of the perceived world, including, importantly, its expressions and conducts, and not merely the orientation of this content. Moreover, I argue that the enactive approach, rather than a representationist approach, is best able to account for the perception of the world, after prolonged vision without inversion of the retinal image, as both normal and upright, yet still different from the world seen previously. Finally, in their attention to the perception of other people’s facial expressions, I argue that Merleau-Ponty and Dolezal draw out the existential significance of the enactive approach. In encountering another person, the most pressing task is generally not to observe this person’s features but, instead, to engage with this person’s expressions. (shrink)

From his long years of experience as a local executive until he was ushered into the presidency, Duterte was able to master the masses’ longings. He understands what the public expects in a leader-- gathered from information he collected in unorthodox fashion. He plunges into the grassroots even (at times) resorting to disguises; and sometimes he maintains his own intelligence group that feeds him necessary information. The shock that he generates in all corners, factions, sectors and even countries would qualify (...) him (perhaps) to be the unnamed monster that can disrupt the realm of Philippine politics. But despite his monstrous image, quite surprisingly, Duterte remains popular and appealing to the electorate. This essay foregrounds the ambivalent monster that the Philippine president wittingly or unwittingly assumes; a monster that is ready to devour victims while protecting those he (supposedly) loves. The essay argues that Duterte is a monster that represents a rapture—a kind of abrupt transition. He represents a monster leader that does not care about the elite’s and traditional pundits’ definition of a leader. He represents a leader that is hindi-iba (sa masa) but at the same time iba sa marami (trapo/traditional politicians). (shrink)

1. Complex demonstratives (noun phrases of the form ‘that F’) often behave in devious ways which do not fit well with their traditional understanding as devices of direct reference. Namely, there a...

‘Do you see this egg? It is with this that all the theological schools and all the churches of the Earth will be overturned.’Diderot, Entretien avec d'Alembert (Conversation with d'Alembert)About fifteen years ago I took a journey through the famous work of Mary Shelley, and the interpretation of her warning call. Let me say briefly why I am interested in Mary Shelley.At the beginning of the 80s I was invited by a journal to reflect on what was totally new at (...) that time: the birth of children conceived asexually and outside the body by in vitro fertilization. At that time very little work existed on these issues, though they were soon to generate a great deal of ink. The only publications to have appeared were Jacques Testart's very first book, De l'éprouvette au bébé spectacle (From the test tube to the miracle baby), and René Frydman's L'irrésistible désir de naissance (The irresistible desire for birth). (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to look at the ethical concerns and sensibilities that emerge out of Hegel and Heidegger’s respective interpretations of Antigone. Curiously, both of them turn to this ancient Greek tragedy in order to lay out the foundations of ethical life and the complexities of such a life in the present historical moment. The argument here in the end is that both Hegel and Heidegger find the lesson of the radical singularity defining ethical life to be (...) a key to what one sees in Antigone. Both see this above all in the role of death in the tragedy. Both focus upon questions of mourning, burial, and of the dead body. My suggestion is that birth too needs to be understood as confronting us with the problem of our being in the singular, our being an idiom among other idioms. (shrink)

In England, higher education institutions, together with the schools whose staff they train, are being required to incorporate synthetic phonics as one of the key approaches to the teaching of reading. Yet even if synthetic phonics can be identified as one of the component ‘skills’ of reading, an assumption vigorously contested in this paper, it does not follow that it can or should be taught explicitly and independently of reading for meaning. Imposing such a ‘method’ is, at a deep level, (...) incompatible with teachers acting as teachers and potentially constitutes a kind of abuse of early readers. Moreover, because of the conceptual difficulties confronting any attempt to specify synthetic phonics as an approach, there cannot exist, in principle, empirical research that actually supports its value. Current policy in England since the Rose Report, at least, assumes the opposite. All this cannot be dismissed as a little local difficulty for England concerning the teaching of reading English with all its spelling irregularities: there are broader implications for the relationship between research and teaching, together with continuing tendencies to impose ‘teacher proof’ approaches on schools and their staff in many countries. (shrink)

The fact that monstrous births were not represented in independent learned publications of the eighteenth century, except for the case of hermaphrodites, does not mean that the interest in them had disappeared or that they were no more considered proper objects of inquiry. This paper focuses on the medical understanding of monstrosity at the Royal Society of London. I point to the use of monstrous births in strengthening the authority of medical practitioners and lecturers. I also show some (...) of their uses in providing new questions for the scenes of medical inquiry of the period and as crucial evidence in the understanding of regular physiological phenomena. I discuss some of the reasons why monstrous formations continued to defy an 'Enlightenment' approach to nature based on the search for order and regularity. (shrink)