Every culture knows the phenomenon of monsters, terrifying creatures that represent complete alterity and challenge every basic notion of self and identity within a cultural paradigm. In Latin and Greek culture, the monster was created as a marvel, appearing as something which, like transgression itself, did not belong to the assumed natural order of things. Therefore, it could only be created by a divinity responsible for its creation, composition, goals and stability, but it was triggered by some in- or non-human action performed by humans. The identification of something as monstrous denotes its place outside and beyond social norms and values. The monster-evoking transgression is most often indistinguishable from reactions to the experience of otherness, merging the limits of humanity with the limits of a given culture. The topic entails a large intersection among the cultural domains of law, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and technology. Monstrosity has indeed become a necessary condition of our existence in the 21st century: it serves as a representation of change itself. In the process of analysis there are three theoretical approaches: psychoanalytical, representational, ontological. The volume therefore aims at examining the concept of monstrosity from three main perspectives: technophobic, xenophobic, superdiversity. Today's globalized world is shaped in the unprecedented phenomenon of international migration. The resistance to this phenomenon causes the demonization of the Other, seen as the antagonist and the monster. The monster becomes therefore the ethnic Other, the alien. To reach this new perspective on monstrosity we must start by examining the many facets of monstrosity, also diachronically: from the philological origin of the term to the Roman and classical viewpoint, from the Renaissance medical perspective to the religious background, from the new filmic exploitations in the 20th and 21st centuries to the very recent ethnological and anthropological points of view, to the latest technological perspective, dealing with artificial intelligence.
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The Monster’s Mystique: Managing a State of Bionormative Liminality and Exception
Note: This essay is part of a research project exploring the ontological tensions embedded in the process of secularization and their impact on the Law’s presentification, that is the way in which Law is worldly communicated. The synthetic title of the project is “Icons of Law. From mondanization to mondialization of Law.” In particular, in the following pages the attention is posed on the concepts of monster and monstrosity, as they have been transposed from Theology to Law and Politics. Monster is originally conceived as a critical paradigm of investigation. It is meant as the mark of an irredeemable difference; as the subversive device apt to unveil what exceeds the possibilities of the real; as the sign that disfigures every kind of taxonomy. Monster terrifies Law: living a zone of liminality, it shows the fictionality of order and representation. In this perspective, the essay, making use of the idea of “monster,” is proposing an iconic lecture of the relationship between Law and Exception; the Sovereign and the Beast. The monster is a secularized item which allows us to rethink the content of transgression with respect to Law. The arguments discussed are emplotted in an interdisciplinary discourse, at the confluence of theological and philosophical domains. The version of exception proposed by Giorgio Agamben and here reinterpreted as the product of the monstrification of Law, can be thought as a mondanized form of the sin defined by Paul in his Epistle to the Romans. Here it is said: “What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” (7.7). Exception is like sin a concrete form of transgression, and, once again, like sin is indispensable to constitute Law as Law. The “monstrous” violence of Exception suspends the force of Law pushing it towards its ontological limit. A special emphasis has been given to the words and terms specifically designed to innovate the lexicon of comparative law theory.
[…] etwas Morsches im Recht. W. Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt22
We were trapped […] completely stranded for all practical purposes, in a region of the country, and of the entire world, where all the manifestations of that bleak time of year, or rather its absence of manifestations were so evident in the landscape around us, where everything was absolutely stripped to the bone, and where the pathetic emptiness of forms in their unadorned state was so brutally evident.23
While I was in the throes of my gastrointestinal episode at the hospital where I was treated I descended, so to speak, to that deep abyss of entity where I could feel how this shadow, this darkness was activating my body. I could also hear its movement, not only within my body but in everything around me, because the sound that it made was not the sound of my body – it was the sound of this shadow, this darkness, which is not like any other sound. Likewise I was able to detect the workings of this pervasive and all-moving force through the sense of smell and the sense of taste, as well as the sense of touch with which my body was equipped. Finally I opened my eyes, for throughout much of this agonizing ordeal of my digestive system my eyelids were clenched shut in pain. And when I opened my eyes I found that I could see how everything around me, including my own body, was activated from within by this pervasive shadow, this all-moving darkness. And nothing looked as I had always known it to look.24
With these words, Reiner Grossvogel, a second-rate artist turned onto a murky, crepuscolar philosopher after a traumatic physical illness, proposes a journey towards the pervasive shadow, the insubstantial darkness monstrously concealed at the centre of the world’s ontology. In a disrupted geography apt to destroy the distinction between the real and the imaginary, in a perverted region where the vigil meets the dream, the primordial Shadow is and persists. In its consistency dark matter is exuding from every apparently substantial and existing thing, it is rising “as if a torrent of black blood had begun roaring through its pale body”25; it is resisting in its enigmatic epiphany. This is the metaphysical strategy enacted by the gloom, auratic darkness: finally, it reveals the sense of its phenomenological camouflage. In the absence of light, it keeps its inner, constitutive force, that “moves all the objects of this world, including those objects which we call our bodies.”26 The myth of Plato’s cave is under question: the gloomy umbra is not a projected, derivative or, even worse, false entity, but on the contrary the true face of the real. The world is merely a gothic mask, the ontic instrument used to cover it, to disguise and keep secret the powerful nothing at the origin of the Beginning.
This fascinating and disturbing novel written by Thomas Ligotti (not by chance entitled The Shadow, The Darkness) is deliberately chosen to introduce a philojuridical thought about Law’s Monstrosity and Law’s secularized ontology. In this perspective, Ligotti’s hallucinatory and hypnotic style, intellectually assembled in order to traduce in words the unstable ontologies of derangement, deformation and disease, is one of the most brilliant creations apt to open a speculative window over a constitutive abyss, to tell through literature the philosophical story of the presence of an absence.27 Such an evocative and dramatic aesthetics can be recalled to reveal a kind of metaphysical swindle, so to provide Law with a metamorphic healing.
As in the theological domain, the paradigm encrypted into the announced formula of the “Ecce Homo”28 has disrupted the conventional image of God’s nature,29 in a secular perspective it seems to be momentous to claim for an “Ecce monstrum” with respect to the Law.30
To cultivate this perspective, it could be intellectually provoking to pose and solve these questions: what is a monster? What constitutes its deeper sacrality? And how can we assess the monstrification of Law, or the process through which the Law comes to be confronted with its transformative Other?
The Latin etymology of the word “monster” is at the basis of its meaningful ambiguity. On the one side, it moves from the verb monstrare, meaning “to show and display”: the monster is inherently demonstrative, it is that which appears, a sign, a signifier.31 The monster is also that which occurs for the first time and for which we do not yet have a name, as Derrida has punctually noted: “it shows itself in something that is not yet shown and that therefore looks like a hallucination; it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared to identify this figure.”32 On the other side, the name traces its roots back to the form monēre, that is “to warn,” “to advise”; therefore the monster is a divine omen, a portent, a mark or a signature of what is yet unexpected and unforeseeable.33 Linking together the possible archeologies of the term and the concept it names, the monster becomes the incarnated and concrete threshold turning towards the Excess, what outweighs phenomenological ontology. For these profound reasons, according to Bataille, the presentation of monstrosity provokes a sacrificial experience: it entails the sacrifice of form.34 The vision of monster incites a paradoxical combination of contrastive and extreme affects; it produces the same rupturing experience of both life and death, joy and anguish, that defines what Bataille calls “religious sensibility” and offers the grounds for an evolving conception of the sacred as tied to transgressive heterogeneity.35
Recalling to the mind these intrinsic perversions, the concepts of “monster” and “monstrosity” can be reinterpreted as the double contents of a new critical paradigm, which is aimed to question the conventional assumptions of ontology, epistemology and ethics.
From an ontological standpoint, the monster is a figure of break, discontinuity and difference; in its proper formless being, it makes permeable the boundaries that guarantee the normatively embodied self, subverting and blurring the frozen ideas of separation and distinction.36 Monster disrupts morphological expectations and undermines the strategies of ontological representation: it contravenes unity, stability, singularity.37 Monster originates beyond limits as the mutable son of an excess that continuously permutes, distorts, disfigures.38 It enacts an ontological anxiety made flesh.39
From an epistemological perspective, the monster attacks the binary structure of the western logos, presenting itself as the trespasser between abstract and concrete, specific and universal.40 It is the untold and the unspoken within the normativity of the discourse, haunting its margins with a simultaneously seductive and threatening force. Monstrosity issues an epistemic challenge.
From an ethical point of view, monsters are denouncing the inadequacy of the assumed frames of references; they are detecting their internal gaps and inconsistencies or even their insufficiency.41
All these arguments suggest putting the idea of monster in strict relation with the very idea of Law. The concept of monster comes to destabilise the grand narrative of Law; it performs its sacrificial profanation; it abuses the norm.
The monster appears as Law’s catachresis.42 In fact, in its specific declination this figure of speech, which comes where there is no longer a proper name for a given idea, functions as a clear opening in language extending meanings against the common usage and producing new rules of exchange, new values. Once again, according to Derrida’s thought, “catachresis concerns first the violent and forced, abusive inscription of a sign, the imposition of a sign upon a meaning which did not yet have its proper sign in language. So much so that there is no substitution here, no transport of proper signs, but rather the irruptive extension of a sign proper to an idea, meaning, deprived of their signifier. A secondary origin.”43 Like monsters with respect to things and beings, catachresis epitomises the system’s defiance of the ontological primacy of sequentiality.44 In this perspective, the concept of monster can be introduced as a potent device apt to dethrone the illusion of Law’s ontological consistency and, conversely, to lay bare its substantial impurity. “To monstrify” the Law means to penetrate its deep and obscure abyss, disclosing its fictionality and abjection. It means to contest the metaphysics of the Law’s presence, giving consistency to the disturbing and uncanny and bringing to the surface its fragility and radical indeterminacy. It finally exposes the Law to its inner violence and obscene dimension.
According to the vision proposed in these pages, it becomes compelling to explore where we can pose the monstrous exhibition of Law and how we can perceive the troubling fascination provoked by its gothic choreographies.
In an original perspective, one could argumentatively maintain that the process of monstrification of Law enacts a battle between different systems of representation and is concretely figured out by the means of a clash, if not a collision, between contending bodies. Law is presentified, that is comes to be present into the world, in its tidy and polite aspect, rigging its complex and problematic nature, putting a well-ordered make up on its counter-face. Nevertheless, there is something that continues to lurk behind the outer appearance, Exception. Exception comes “to monstrify” the Law: it shows (monstrat), insofar as it pulls out the excluded ontology of Law of the crypt where it has been enshrouded; at the same time, it ad...
