Teratopolitics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The termterato, or monster (from Latin monstrum, Greek teras) in its wider meaning evokes the astonishment produced by an irregular and wonderful phenomenon. In this sense, neglecting its significance is not only to ignore one philosophical question among others, but rather to miss one of the main philosophical problems. In fact, if philosophy arises from astonishment and wonder (theorein and thaumazein), as Plato argued, the monster raises questions at the core of the human experience of knowing, with important implications for the understanding of political life.

The discovery by modern anatomy that monsters belong to regular orders and laws of constitution challenges Christian metaphysics, which saw monsters as a free divine creation, used by God to make a kind of revelation to men, as discussed by Augustine of Hippo. In the modern age, the monster becomes the key figure to reflect on norm and anomaly, within both ontological and human order.

The permanence of the metaphor of the monster in Western culture and political thought extends from ancient times to the modern day and shows that the monster has not been domesticated. Rather, the monster continues to produce displacing effects and to redefine the relationship between the normal and the pathological, questioning also order and hierarchies within the universe of political ideas.

For conservative philosophers who seem to envisage order and life as a set of fixed and transcendent laws, the metaphor of monster is employed to blame the “other,” to construct deviance and political pathology. The best-known example is Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), in which Hobbes likens the state to the monster evoked by God in order to silence Job, symbol of rebellion. One can also refer to Edmund Burke’s monstrous multitude in his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France or Francis Bacon’s An Advertisement Touching an Holy War (1586–1589), which uses Hercules’s fight against the many-headed hydra as a metaphor for the necessary extermination of rebels. The metaphor of monster can be used in other ways as well, to denounce and uncover the inhumanity of reality, as Karl Marx does in The Communist Manifesto (1848), by employing the Gothic character of the vampire to describe capitalism, or the disturbing banality of monstrosity, as Hannah Arendt does in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

From a theoretical point of view, however, the monster can also leave the realm of metaphor: Removed from the dialectic of deviation and conformity from the norm, the monster becomes an autonomous concept that challenges the idea of norm itself. Such autonomy of the monster can be found in the works of Niccolò Machiavelli; not, as his adversaries claim, in the monstrosity they call Machiavellianism, but in his use in The Prince (1513) of Cesare Borgia, supposedly a moral monster, as a new paradigm of political action. Machiavelli sees social conflict as a positive and productive phenomenon that produces good law and prioritizes political and social conflict over the traditionally enshrined values of societal harmony and concord. In the heart of the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza is the only philosopher to see Machiavelli as a thinker of freedom. More recently, in his 1969 article “Plato and the Simulacrum,” Gilles Deleuze invokes the monstrous character of the simulacrum against the Platonic metaphysics of the model-copy relation. Contemporary feminist theorists have made powerful use of the monster to analyze anomaly as an active and autonomous insubordination against the male normative model.

Bibliography:

Braidotti, Rosi. “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines.” In Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. New York: Picador, 2003.
Haraway, Donna. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, 295–337. London: Routledge, 1992.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Lunger Knoppes, Laura, and Joan B. Landes, eds. Monstrous Bodies: Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Neocleous, Mark. The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales, 2005.
Wolfe, Charles T., ed. Monsters and Philosophy. London: King’s College Publications, 2005.
Schmitt, Carl. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

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