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Foucault and the Enigma of the Monster

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Abstract

In this paper Foucault’s thought on monstrosity is explored. Monsters appear whenever and wherever knowledge/power assemblages emerge. That which eludes the latter, and which threatens to subvert them, is the monstrous. Foucault distinguished the production, throughout history, of juridical-natural monsters, moral monsters, and political monsters. In this paper it is argued that Foucault must have sensed that monstrosity eludes all notions of identity and difference, and therefore also the notion that places it ‘outside’. It is the space of emergence itself, i.e. the location where sheer potentiality becomes the possible of and in the event. All monstrosity is therefore deeply, and inevitably, political. It is the promise of unsettling subversion.

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Notes

  1. Aristotle. Poetics, 145 8°, 26.

  2. C. Bologna, Mostro ad vocem [5].

  3. For a review of the meanings of crisis see Reinhart Koselleck, Krise [45].

  4. Since antiquity the monster has occupied a liminal position. It indicates a spatial limit, which signals with its presence the distinction between the inside and the outside, see Pliny, Historia naturalis [VII] which, taking up the Greek tradition, places the monstrous races in the East; and a temporal limit, which signals the distinction between the before and the after, see Hesiodos, Theogonia, where the world, before it received its form and order, was populated by monsters.

  5. About monstrosity and philosophical categories, see Filippo Del Lucchese, Monstrosity and the Limits of the Intellect [20].

  6. On this point see Réne Girard [41]. In the text the author shows how the physical infirmities and deformities constitute criteria for the selection of the victims. When the choice of victims falls within a certain social, ethnic, or religious category, the attribution of infirmity or deformity to the members of these categories functions as a strengthening of the victimizing polarization [p. 38]. At the same time the disorder threatened by the thus ‘monsterized’ victim can be neutralized only through the persecution episode which becomes the religious and cultural point of departure—on this point see also Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger [22].

  7. On this point see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Culture [13, pp. 6–7].

  8. Aristotle spoke of the monster in the Fisica [II (B), 8, 199b, 5] where he affirmed that monsters are errors of the given final cause, and therefore imply an incapacity to reach a given end due to the corruption of some principle as in the case of the seed of the monsters. In his exts on animals and in particular in the De generatione animalium [IV, 3, 767 a 13] Aristotle analyzed the different consequences that can derive from a resistance of matter to being placed in form.

  9. Isidore Geoffroy Saint Hilaire son of Etienne, founder of modern teratology, wrote the Histoire générale et particulière des anomalies de l’organisation chez l’homme et les animaux [39] in which, taking up and systematizing the teachings of his father, he enumerated monstrosity among the anomalies and above all as Canguilhem [11, pp. 179–180] observes he established a relationship between the concepts of anomalies and varieties, a relationship which is of great importance for the theories of evolution at the end of the 19th century.

  10. ‘La monstruosité’, says Canguilhem, ‘c'est la menace accidentelle et conditionnelle d'inachèvement ou de distorsion dans la formation de la forme, c'est la limitation par l'intérieur, la négation du vivant par le non-viable’ [11, pp. 172–173].

  11. Foucault in L'ordre du discours [31] identifies the centrality of the relation between discourse and power that is explicated in the will to knowledge which is the desire for truth. The discourse of the truth becomes pervasive for every type of discourse that must find its authorization in truth. From that it follows that "le discours n'est pas simplement ce qui traduit les luttes ou les systèmes de domination, mais ce pour quoi, ce par quoi on lutte, le pouvoir dont on cherche à s'emparer" [31, p. 12].

  12. In his installation lesson at the Collège de France [31], Foucault traces the genealogy of the will to knowledge and above all identifies in the genealogical work that he would have undertaken in the following years the instrument to gather the affirmative power of discourse, that is the capacity of discourse to constitute environments of objects with respect to which it would then be possible to affirm or deny true or false propositions [31, pp. 71–72]. They are those positivities of which he had spoken in L'archéologie du savoir [30].

  13. Particularly meaningful, for purposes of our discussion, are Préface à la transgression [27] in which, reflecting on the text of Georges Bataille, he places at the center of his analysis the relationship between transgression and limit and the essay on Maurice Blanchot, La pensée du dehors [28]. The literary essays perform a non-marginal role in the work of Foucault—see on point the essay by Bruno Moroncini, Foucault e il pensiero del fuori [48]. But, above all, these essays are helpful to comprehend the Foucauldian laboratory—see on point Judith Revel, Foucault. Le parole, i poteri [50].

  14. For an interpretation of the Foucauldian archeology and genealogy as philosophy of the limit see Peter Hallward, Out of This World [43, p. 160].

  15. The literature on the theme of the monster in Foucault is concentrated principally on the course Les anormaux, and does not take into consideration the treatment of the monster in Les mots et les choses, see e.g. Andrew N. Sharpe, Foucault’s Monster and the Challenge of Law [52].

  16. For a reconstruction of the centrality of the dwarf in the painting of Velásquez and more generally in pictorial representation see Leslie Fiedler, Freaks [24, pp. 64–89].

  17. José Gil [40, p. 47] states that the dwarf Pertusato placed in the foreground overturns the laws of pictorial representation in many ways. First, concerning perspective: the dwarf has the same height as the infant in the middle ground and is smaller than the servants and the painter that are further away; secondly, concerning the anatomical details: the dwarf who is the smallest presents the face that is richest in details, lights and shadows, expressions of the lips and of the gaze.

  18. Camille Dareste is the founder of experimental teratology. According to Dareste, it is in the ascetic space of the laboratory that teratology produces its own object. See Dareste Recherches sur la production artificielle des monstruosités [14]; on this point see also Canguilhem [11, p. 180].

  19. On this point see Canguilhem, who recalls explicitly Michel Foucault on Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique [25]. In fact, as the insane serves to show what is reason, so the monster is found in the jar of the embryologist to show what is normal [11, p. 178]. From the same author see also Le normal et le pathologique [12].

  20. Les anormaux [37] is part of a particularly important series in Foucault’s production. Beginning with the earliest courses held at the Collège de France, in fact, in Théories et institutions pénales (1971–1972), in La société punitive (1972–1973), and then with Le Pouvoir psychiatrique (1973–1974) [36] the analysis is oriented toward the modalities that political technologies work on the entire social body. In Volonté de savoir [33, pp. 121–129] Foucault will speak of his research method as an analytics of power, i.e. an analytics that has as object the relations of power and the instruments that permit its analysis. For an analysis of the function of law in Foucault’s analytics of power see the text by Hunt and Wickham, Foucault and Law [44] and the recent text by Golder and Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s Law [42]. For a reconstruction of the Foucauldian itinerary see Giuseppe Campesi, Soggetto, disciplina, governo [9].

  21. Foucault takes up the teaching of Canguilhem, who had discussed—in Le normal e le pathologique [12]—the very existence of physiological invariants. In the last essay written shortly before his death, Foucault affirms that the originality of Canguilhem is that of having brought the history of the sciences to become interested in fields in which knowledge has remained tied to suggestions of the imagination—see Foucault, La vie: l'expérience et la science [35, pp. 768–769]. For a reconstruction of the concept of normalization in Canguilhem and Foucault see Giuseppe Campesi, Norma, normatività, normalizzazione [10, pp. 5–30]. On the concept of norm in Canguilhem and Foucault see Pierre Macherey, Da Canguilhem à Foucault, la force des normes [47].

  22. According to an ancient literary tradition monsters are found outside the confines of the known world. The East and in particular India becomes, in ancient literature, a place populated by monstrous races. This is a very ancient tradition of which traces are found in Herodotos [III, 97–107/IV, 44], and later in Strabone, [XV, 1, 25 (696)]. The Greek tradition was taken up in the Latin world by Plinius, Naturalis Historia [VII]. For a reconstruction of the geographic dimension of monstrosity see Rudolf Wittkower, The Wonders of the East [53]. The term monster, in this treatise, keeps its ambivalence of that which is both terrifying and wonderful. On the etymology of the term monster see Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-eurpéennes [4].

  23. With the figure of the hermaphrodite begins a change in the perception of the monster and a shift from the legal-natural conception of monstrosity to a legal-moral type of conception instead. In the examination of certain cases, Foucault shows us how this change came about. If until the 1600s the double nature of the hermaphrodite, the being man and woman at the same time, was automatically considered as an indication of legal monstrosity, from the 1700s onwards natural monstrosity does not imply directly legal or moral monstrosity. The malformations of nature do not constitute a per se manifestation of violation of juridical-social norms. Nature against nature suggests but does not determine rule-breaking behaviour [37, pp. 64–70].

  24. On the theme of political monstrosity, of the bestiality of the sovereign or of the people, see Jacques Derrida, La Bête et le Souverain [21].

  25. For a reading in the biopolitical as key to the relation between state and nation see Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer [1].

  26. On the issue of the relation between transgression and limit, see Foucault, Préface à la transgression [27].

  27. In rereading Spinoza, Deleuze underlines the relation between ontological consistence and political resistance—see Che cos'è la filosofia [18]. For reading the monster as resistant flesh because consistent, and the monster as figure of existence, see Antonio Negri, Il mostro politico. Nuda vita e potenza [49].

  28. In the preface of the first French edition of Histoire de la folie [26] Foucault says: “on pourrait faire une histoire des limites –de ces gestes obscurs, nécessairement oubliés dès qu’accomplis, par lesquels une culture rejette quelque chose qui sera pour elle l’Extérieur” in Foucault, Dits et écrits t. I [26, p. 161].

  29. On this point see Andrew N. Sharpe, Foucault’s Monsters [52, pp. 34–38].

  30. For a reconstruction of the relation that runs between the figures of political tradition and monstrous bestiality see Jacques Derrida, La Bête et le Souverain [21].

  31. In antiquity the degeneration of the political forms was manifested through the metaphoric transformation of man into beast, or of the beast that becomes man. The image of the wolf-man as a metaphor for political degeneration constitutes a true and proper tropos of political discourse. On this point, see Plato, Repubblica, [VIII, 566a]. See also Ovidius, Metamorfosi, [I, 209–252], in which is taken up the myth of Lycaon of which Plato speaks in Repubblica. In the same way is underlined the being outside the law of the political monster. The being outside the law means not being human. Apolis is a God or a Beast, in any event it is not a man; on this point see Aristotele, Politica [I, (A), 2, 1253 a, 25].

  32. On the political as war see Michel Foucault, Il faut defendre la société [38].

  33. The expression body without organs was used by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux [17], to indicate the indetermination of the flesh as an accumulation of potential. On this point see also Gilles Deleuze Felix Guattari, Come farsi un corpo senza organi [19]. For an interpretation of the body without organs as the revolutionary monster of post-modernity see Antonio Negri, Il mostro politico [49]. About the relation between monster and post-Fordism economy see Marco Bascetta, Verso un'economia politica del vivenete [3].

  34. On the ethical–political dimension of the thought of Foucault see Judith Revel, Michel Foucault: An Ontology of Actuality [51]; and recently S. Luce, Fuori di sé [46] and Cosimo Degli Atti, Soggetto e verità [15].

  35. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Che cos'è la filosofia [18, p. 106]. For a Delezeuzian and feminist analysis of monstrosity see Braidotti, Metamorphoses [8].

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Acknowledgments

I wish to express a deeply thank to Prof. Ronnie Lippens for supporting my research and for his helpful suggestions and comments. Thanks to IJSL’s reviewers for comments on earlier version of this paper.

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    Luciano Nuzzo

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Nuzzo, L. Foucault and the Enigma of the Monster. Int J Semiot Law 26, 55–72 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9275-8

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