Ten Theses on Monsters and Monstrosity

Abstract

IThe Demiurge was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material. -Bruno Schultz (1977:61 -62) [This epigraph serves as my first thesis.] IIIn the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant shows how the aesthetic domain exists without any regulatory a priori whatsoever. This principle could be summed up and radicalized in one word: monsters. What the unformed is to the sublime, the deformed is to monsters. IIIIn the Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae (1579), Cosmas Rossellius describes a memory theatre that contains an all-inclusive category, suggesting that any monster of any sort may be used to signify any thing whatsoever, through totally idiosyncratic associations. We might supplement this axiom with its converse: a true monster will be remembered for the shock it produces, breaking all chains of association. IVThe logic of monsters is one of particulars, not essences. Each monster exists in a class by itself. Monsters may, however, generate entire classes of beings. V Monsters are variously characterized by accident, indetermination, formlessness; by material incompleteness, categorical ambiguity, ontological instability. One may create monsters through hybridization, hypertrophy, or hypotrophy;

Queering ‘Successful Ageing’, Dementia and Alzheimer’s Research

“…One may create monsters through hybridization, hypertrophy, or hypotrophy; through lack, excess, or multiplication, through the substitution of elements, the confusion of species, or the conflation of genders and genres. (Weiss, 2004: 124–5; see also Cohen, 1999; Shildrick, 2002)…”

“…One may create monsters through hybridization, hypertrophy, or hypotrophy; through lack, excess, or multiplication, through the substitution of elements, the confusion of species, or the conflation of genders and genres. (Weiss, 2004: 124–5; see also Cohen, 1999; Shildrick, 2002)In short, the monstrous has been characterized by bodily variations from the norm, and these variations have been viewed as signs of an uncontrollable (sometimes divine) and often unwanted future (Shildrick, 2002).…”