Monsters Cannot be Announced

Some time ago I promised a post on monsters. Well, it exists as a draft. I'll post it next week when back from Yorkshire. So, in the meantime, here are some select quotes and images, starting with Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters:



'Hell and night must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light'

John Evelyn's Diary, 1660:

I saw in Southwark at St. Margarites faire, a monstrous birth of Twinns, both femals & most perfectly shaped, save that they were joyn’d breast to breast, & incorporated at the navil, having their armes thrown about each other …: It was reported quick in May last, & produced neere Turne-style Holbourn: well exentrated & preserved till now:
We saw also a poore Woman, that had a living Child of one yeare old, who had its head, neck, with part of a Thigh growing out about Spina dorsi: The head had the place of Eyes & nose, but none perfected. The head monstrous, rather resembling a greate Wenn; and hanging on the buttocks, at side whereoff, & not in the due place, were (as I remembred) the excrements it avoided …

Lyotard:

a libidinal monster with the huge fat head of a man full of warrior's thoughts and petty quarrels, and with the soft body of young amorous Rhenane--a monster which never achieves the realization of its unity, because of this very incapacity, and it is this 'failure' which is marked in the interminable theoretical suspense. .... the hermaphrodite, another monster in which femininity and masculinity are indiscernibly exchanged, thereby thwarting the reassurance of sexual difference"

To begin with, what is a monster? Etymology has a bit of a shock up its sleeve there:
‘monster’ comes from ‘monstrare,’ ‘to show.’ A monster is something which is shown,
pointed at, exhibited at fairs, and so on. [---] If you don’t want to be a monster, you’ve got to be like your fellow creatures, in conformity with the species.

"Monsters cannot be announced.
One cannot say: 'here are our monsters',
without immediately turning the monsters into pets."

Deleuze:

I would imagine myself approaching an author from behind, and making him a child,
who would indeed be his and would, never- theless, be monstrous. That the child would be his was very important because the author had to say,in effect, everything I made him say. But that the child be monstrous was also a requisite because it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slidings, splittings, secret dis- charges which have given me much pleasure.


Habermas: The monstrous act itself was new. And I do not just mean the action of the suicide hijackers who transformed the fully fueled airplanes together with their hostages into living weapons, or even the unbearable number of victims and the dramatic extent of the devastation. What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation.

Zizek:

But Christianity, and in its own way already--maybe, I'm not sure, I don't know enough about it--Buddhism, introduce into this global balance, cosmic order, a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that, measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion, the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to the universality of nirvana, or the Holy Spirit,



Hegel:

“The activity of distinction is the power and labor of understanding, of the most
wonderful and greatest, or rather of the absolute power. The circle in which it remains enclosed and contains its moments as substance, is the immediate and for that reason not wonderful relationship. But that accidental things separated from their own realm, things bound up which are truly real only in their context with others, that these achieve a genuine existence and a particulated [abgesonderte] freedom, is the monstrous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure I.”