Embodying the Monster Theory, Culture & Society Theory, Culture & Society caters for the resurgence of interest in culture within contemporary social science and the humanities. Building on the heritage of classical social theory, the book series examines ways in which this tradition has been reshaped by a new generation of theorists. It also publishes theoretically informed analyses of everyday life, popular culture, and new intellectual movements. EDITOR: Mike Featherstone, Nottingham Trent University SERIES EDITORIAL BOARD Roy Boyne, University of Durham Mike Hepworth, University of Aberdeen Scott Lash, Goldsmiths College, University of Aberdeen Roland Robertson, University of Pittsburgh Bryan S. Turner, University of Cambridge THE TCS CENTRE The Theory, Culture & Society book series, the journals Theory, Culture & Society and Body & Society, and related conference, seminar and postgraduate programmes operate from the TCS Centre at Nottingham Trent University. For further details of the TCS Centre’s activities please contact: Centre Administrator The TCS Centre, Room 175 Faculty of Humanities Nottingham Trent University Clifton Lane, Nottingham NG11 8NS, UK e-mail:
[email protected] web: http://tcs.ntu.ac.uk Recent volumes include: Society and Culture Principles of Scarcity and Solidity Bryan S. Turner and Chris Rojek Modernity and Exclusion Joel S. Kah Virilio Live John Armitage The Experience of Culture Michael Richardson The Sociological Condition Chris Shilling and Philip A. Mellor Embodying the Monster Encounters with the Vulnerable Self MARGRIT SHILDRICK SAGE Publications London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi . electronic. California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd 32.I New Delhi 110 048 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7619 7013 4 ISBN 0 7619 6549 1 (pbk) Library of Congress control number available Typeset by SIVA Math Setters. transmitted or utilized in any form or by any means. No part of this publication may be reproduced.© 2002 Margrit Shildrick First published 2002 All rights reserved. SAGE Publications Ltd 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks. Guildford. stored in a retrieval system. M-Block Market Greater Kailash . mechanical. recording or otherwise. without permission in writing from the Publishers. Surrey . India Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd. photocopying. Chennai. The Relational Economy of Touch 103 7. Monsters. Monstering the (M)Other 28 3. Contagious Encounters and the Ethics of Risk 68 5.CONTENTS List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Marvels and Meanings 9 2. Welcoming the Monstrous Arrivant 120 Notes 134 Bibliography 142 Index 149 . The Self’s Clean and Proper Body 48 4. Levinas and Vulnerable Becoming 87 6. lib. the Siamese Twins.2. natura. et differentis (Licetus 1634) 18 The Monster of Cracow in De monstrorum caussis.3 and 3. Dublin. VI (Munster 1554) 15 The Monster of Ravenna in De monstrorum caussis. 3. Figures 1.1. London.1 3.2 with the permission of the governors and guardians of Marsh’s Library.3 and 3.1 courtesy of Liverpool Medical Institution.LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. et differentis (Licetus 1634) 52 Chang and Eng. Vol. is reproduced courtesy of the International Society for the History of Medicine (ISHM) and supplied by the Wellcome Library. .2 3. copyright ISHM.2 1. Figure 1. Dublin. natura. Figures 3. 1 14 Some members of the Monstrous Races in Cosmographiae universalis.4 4. photographed in 1860 (Source unknown) 57 Lazarus and John Baptista Coloredo from The Gentlemen’s Magazine (1777) 64 The Bengali Boy (Basire) from The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 80 (1790) 65 Conjoined twins from Still Life (Karl Grimes 1997) 70 Figure 1.4 are reproduced courtesy of the Wellcome Library. London.1 1.1 courtesy of the artist and the Gallery of Photography.1 Human twins conjoined at the head. 1993.3 3.3 3. born at Worms in 1495 (Sébastien Brandt) from Aesculape. Figure 4. then as a parttime lecturer. initially as a student of bioethics. Thanks too to the feminist academics in Australia who welcomed my participation at their own conferences and seminars and provided some invaluable responses to my ideas. however. while others have given equally valuable emotional backup. and finally as an honorary research fellow. On the formal level. and for providing sufficient funding for me to attend several important conferences where initial papers were tested out. who has been heroic both in her willingness to read a complete draft on top of previous exposure to several of the discrete papers that became chapters. but I hope that all those involved feel acknowledged. and other current colleagues. It would be too restrictive to name any individuals here. to enduring friends Liz MacGarvey and Grindl Dockery who always bring fresh perspectives. and in her unwavering friendship. to Sara Ahmed for several years of difficult but productive questions. making it difficult to give exact acknowledgments. As I’ve indicated. Thanks variously to Maggie O’Neill and Ruth Holliday. Incorporated work has previously appeared in the journals Body & Society. I’m not sure it’s possible to make a firm distinction between intellectual and personal engagement. some of the text has already appeared as discrete papers or chapters in books edited by others.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The genesis and successful completion of Embodying the Monster relies. so I’ll mention indiscriminately several others who’ve given their backing one way or another. who unknowingly set the whole project in motion. Most. Lis Davidson too has probably heard almost every word. who eased my way in a new job. on a wide number of colleagues and friends – though some may remain unaware of its existence – as well as on various forms of institutional support. it is perhaps even harder to supply any list that does full justice to the many people who provided critical and supportive input. Some have been directly involved with aspects of the text. Turning to more personal matters. and my thanks to her extend far beyond the academic. I should also like to thank the organisers of a number of seminar series and conferences held under the auspices of the Institute of Women’s Studies at Lancaster University where I have had the opportunity of many stimulating discussions about both my own work and that of others. have been heavily reworked and often split between two or more chapters in the present book. . Journal of Medical Humanities. as does every publication. On a more practical level. to Joanna Hodge. to Ailbhe Smyth for those all-important invitations. though in a less organised way. and to Mike Featherstone who published some early papers and asked for the book. I am very grateful to Staffordshire University for giving me a three-year research fellowship that has allowed me to concentrate full-time on this and related projects. I’d like to register my gratitude for continuing support from the Department of Primary Care at University of Liverpool where I have come and gone over many years. I particularly want to thank Janet Price. Thinking Through the Skin (Routledge 2001). and in the edited collections Transformations (Routledge 2000). Body Modification (Sage 2000). and Rethinking History. . and Contagion: Cultural and Historical Studies (Routledge 2001). Beliefs.viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. Bodies and Being (Rowman Littlefield 2001). have identified the erasure of the corporeal from the founding moment of western modernity – I refer to the take-up of the Cartesian split between mind and body – as a paradigmatic element in the oppression not only of women. It is somewhat paradoxical. As such it is. Moreover. neither vulnerability nor the monstrous is fully containable within the binary structure of the western logos. that opens the self to the potential of harm. from the classical era to the present century. The confusion arises. the body – expressly the differential body – is not incidental to the ontological and ethical processes of the self. is that of vulnerability. it is in its operation as a concept – the monstrous – that it shows itself to be a deeply disruptive force. like the notion of the monstrous. The link that I want to make is that we are always and everywhere vulnerable precisely because the monstrous is not only an exteriority. and what would it mean to reflect on. from the earliest recorded narrative and plastic representations through to the cyborg figures of the present day and future anticipation. an existential state that may belong to any one of us. My second concept. from the mistake of thinking that postmodernism must take only one form. a failure of self-protection. I believe. the masculinist retreat from the body and from embodiment has denied to those others access to subjectivity itself. but of a range of other others. as the sustained deconstruction of the seminal texts of philosophy has shown. that deconstruction and its companion discourse.INTRODUCTION What are the figures of difference that haunt the western imaginary. Within the context of a more general elevation of the body as a focus for contemporary scholarship. then. postmodernism – on which my project relies extensively – reputedly have no place for the corporeal. by contrast. the . rework and valorise them? My project here is the limited one of reconfiguring two such devalued domains that are interwoven one with the other in both predictable and surprising ways. Although the image of the monster is long familiar in popular culture. on a plane where conceptual logics cannot be distinguished from the corporeality of becoming in the world. and particularly those who are feminists. Moreover. many theorists. then. largely projected on to the other and held at bay lest it undermine the security of closure and self-sufficiency. I turn to the monster in order to uncover and rethink a relation with the standards of normality that proves to be uncontainable and ultimately unknowable. On the one hand. but which is characterised nonetheless as a negative attribute. Both are in play. but intrinsic to their operation. From the common ground of problematising the modernist project. As I shall argue. but signal a transformation of the relation between self and other such that the encounter with the strange is not a discrete event but the constant condition of becoming. In both cases what is at issue is the permeability of the boundaries that guarantee the normatively embodied self. in contradistinction to the dominant convention. and of the relationship between self and other. and for feminism in particular. I shall suggest that the reincorporation into our terms of reference of what might be called monstrous bodies – by which I mean those bodies that in their gross failure to approximate to corporeal norms are radically excluded – demands a fundamental re-evaluation of the selfsame. all seem to me to have failed to engage with the issues arising from morphological diversity that are not reducible to questions of sameness and difference. and a corresponding corporeal inscription of femininity/otherness. In recent years. conjoined twins. the body in question must be read primarily through its capacity to instantiate new norms of sexuality. or the racial other. and ethics. feminist take-up of the insights of poststructuralism and postmodernism. In this work. and thus of what counts as reality.2 It is not that some bodies are reducible to the same while others figure as the absolute other. what is monstrous in all its forms – hybrid creatures. but rather that all resist full or final expression. I shall extend that reassessment to take account of differently excluded others with a focus on those who are categorised as monstrous. the task is to reject biologism – with its appeal to prediscursive natural givens – at the same time as recuperating the possibility of embodiment. the body that is recovered in its difference. I sense – with relatively few exceptions – that for all the emphasis given in recent and current thought to embodied difference as the grounds for a specific reappraisal of the conventional paradigms of ontology. though by no means exclusively. epistemology.2 EMBODYING THE MONSTER trajectory of postmodernisms is multiple. cyborg embodiment and others – disrupts the notions of separation and distinction that underlie such claims. Where normative embodiment has hitherto seemed to guarantee individual autonomous selfhood. By engaging with a characteristically. but of rethinking the nature of embodiment itself. to notions of the body as a social construct. Given that masculinist dominance has characteristically entailed the disembodiment of the exclusionary masculine subject. but also those who are physically disabled or whose bodies radically disrupt morphological expectations.1 It is as though in the desire to establish an adequate alternative to masculinist standards of disembodied subjectivity. epistemological and above all ethical – of viewing all bodies as unable to comply with the norms through which they enter the space of discourse. the body remains a politically necessary site of contestation. production or reproduction. what I want to do in this book is to address the consequences – ontological. remains highly normative. So long as the monstrous remains the absolute other in its corporeal difference it poses few problems. Whether the feminist approach has appealed to a more or less nuanced form of essentialism. in other words it is so distanced in its difference that it can clearly be put into an oppositional category . Although feminist theory has long since moved on from an exclusive concentration on gender issues. In contrast. The security of categories – whether of self or non-self – is undone by a radical undecidability. then. many feminist theorists have looked again at the indifference to the corporeal and have developed new insights which mobilise a reinstatement of the feminine. not just as the feminine. or to a phenomenology of the body that emphasises corporeal beingin-the-world. human clones. The issue is not one of revaluing differently embodied others. though. the category has taken on very specific cultural and historical forms with regard not simply to anomalies of embodiment. The implicit danger of my transhistorical approach – which must be acknowledged lest it play out the very ethical erasure that I am contesting – is that the specificity of any singular instance should be betrayed by reference to a generalised category of the monstrous. however. be negotiated. then. the pertinence of the monstrous. I would argue. What I propose is a new form of ethics that answers more fully to the multiplicity of embodied difference. the self and the other. It is a move that acknowledges both vulnerability to the other. as disrupted. that the place of the other is fully accountable from the ‘outside’. but to the operation of racist or sexist paradigms that have deployed the notion of the subhuman for highly political purposes. except as the passive object of moral regard. and as such. There is plentiful archival evidence of the destruction or persecution of those considered monstrous. but the being in the body of us all.INTRODUCTION 3 of not-me. stretching from the natural science of Aristotle through to present day medical discourse. But insofar as my task is to deconstruct the strategies of a morphological imaginary that covers over the differences within and across terms. In short. then it is a risk that can. Clearly. carrying the taint of all that must be excluded in order to secure the ideal of an untroubled social order. but my point in this work. it begins to resemble those of us who lay claim to the primary term of identity. Moreover. whilst universalising the differences between terms. then. and certainly the monster has often functioned as a scapegoat. suspended in the face of an encounter that cannot be known in advance. the greater violence would be to assume that the particularity of the other is within our grasp. I turn away from such normative ethics to embrace instead the ambiguity and unpredictability of an openness towards the monstrous other. the permissible and the prohibited. and must. despite a persistent desire. it is precisely my intention to undo the singular category of the monster. The hermeneutics of the monstrous focus. or to reflect back aspects of ourselves that are repressed. and the vulnerability of the self.3 Nonetheless. is to challenge the parameters of the subject as defined within logocentric discourse. normal and abnormal. but by the always already problematic ontology of human being. which seeks to categorise and explain monstrosity through . The use of the term ‘monster’ or ‘monstrous’ to describe such liminal beings has extensive historical precedents. is to contest the binary that opposes the monstrous to the normal. Once. simultaneously unsettling it by being all too human. To valorise the monster. for they alone can confirm the normalcy and closure of the centred self. then its indeterminate status – neither wholly self nor wholly other – becomes deeply disturbing. Moreover. far from being to reiterate the negative charge of that ascription. Such monsters are both necessary and feared. as I shall go on to discuss. what is at stake is not simply the status of those bodies which might be termed monstrous. and yet effectively have been denied a place in the domain of ethics. In place of a morality of principles and rules that speaks to a clear-cut set of binaries setting out the good and the evil. on quasi-human beings. The question of value here is not so much made irrelevant. is determined not only by the contested terrain of a particular historical moment. then the potential of corporeal irruption into consciousness – an irruption that is a feature of all bodies – constitutes an understandable threat to . I take on the often somewhat abstract theorisations of postmodernism to contest the dominant body image of modernity. and at the same time always haunting its margins. that does not stand alone. there is another more disruptive intuition that the monstrous cannot be confined in the place of the other. are deeply disturbing. Although they are always there in our conscious appraisal of the external world. What matters is the way in which each breaks with any given form. Combining those points of view strongly suggests that the standard body is not only being superseded in practice. what we see mirrored in the monster are the leaks and flows. then. not self or other. At the same time. It is not simply that monsters – strangers in general – disrupt the usual rules of interaction in that their cultural distance may be offset by physical proximity. those who escape normative identity. but that all bodies are in some sense phantasmatic. On the contrary. In other words. refusing to stay in place. The question of the ‘reality’ or otherwise of such monstrous creatures is not one that will concern me as such. my intention to mark my primary concern as being with the meaning of the corporeal. as marginal and dangerous. transsexual surgery. Nonetheless. neither good nor evil. That same process is at work with regard to the body itself. Indeed. simultaneously seductive and threatening? What is clear is that the strength of the western logos as a symbolic system depends in large part on defining those who are other. and to concur with Liz Grosz that ‘(bodies) are materialities that are uncontainable in physicalist terms alone’ (1994: xi). and those whose differential embodiment is lived out in our own experience. initially through archival texts. the speculative. When I first started thinking about the notion of the monstrous body.4 EMBODYING THE MONSTER the pathology of abnormal corporeality. They disrupt both internal and external order. why is it that like the feminine or racial others for example. through such techniques as cloning. My approach is unashamedly postmodernist in that I understand all bodies to be discursively constructed rather than given. and I have no hesitation in bringing together the undoubtedly mythological. should not be taken to exclude the substantial and tangible. they are also the other within. Although from one perspective. two things are at work in my approach. Monsters. it was to ask just what it is that the monster signifies – monstrare itself means ‘to show forth’ – that gives rise to a transhistorical and ubiquitous intermingling of fascination and fear. transgressive and transformative. my focus on certain aspects of materialisation engages with not only the monstrous bodies of the past. It is not simply that corporeality is a dynamic process that belies the static universalisation of the body image. but has been unstable all along. genetic engineering and xenotransplantation. and overturn the distinctions that set out the limits of the human subject. inside nor outside. but that they may not be outside at all. they are always liminal. but the radically new possibilities of embodiment that are emerging in the era of postmodernity. monsters are both the unspoken of western discourse. In seeking confirmation of our own secure subjecthood in what we are not. if they successfully resist total exclusion. the vulnerabilities in our own embodied being. and functions beyond predetermined limits as a fluid signifier. In those discourses where corporeality is scarcely considered a proper component of identity. the very force of rejection of such otherness cannot but suggest a level of disturbing familiarity. when in addition that threat is associated with women. or of the becomingcyborg – evoke opposition to the paradigms of a humanity that is marked by selfpossession. Moreover. any being who traverses the liminal spaces that evade classification takes on the potential to confound normative identity. to abject. then. the subject is marked by its excluded other. supposedly fully present to himself. the persecution of those who are classed as . or those of disordered maternal impressions. As Derrida has shown. As such. and who is due moral consideration and who is not. At the least contentious level. as with the feminine. and monsters paradigmatically fulfil that role. the force of normalisation that is directed towards them should never be underestimated. But despite the foundational claims. in animals. And yet. And it is that trace. as my analysis will uncover.INTRODUCTION 5 self-containment. can be maintained only on the basis of a series of putative exclusions. If identity is founded on what Butler calls ‘a radical concealment’ (1991: 15). what is at stake in a politics of identity and difference is the security of borders that mark out the places which are safe and which are unsafe. the monstrous is never simply negative because it is never fully outside. On the contrary. and the hope that oppressive identities might be interrupted. In the face of the potential vulnerabilities exposed by the embodied other. implying a denial of any likeness between self and other such that a barrier is put in place between the two. comes to embody those things which an ordered and limited life must try. My concern. the spectre of the other who haunts the selfsame. the absent presence which primary identification must deny. is. indeed cannot. which ensures that change is not only possible but perhaps inevitable. in the congenitally disabled. not because the claims of the excluded may become too insistent to resist. in general. and finally fail. monsters – whether those already cited. who are already embodied differently to existing norms. those boundaries are never finally secured. however. the monster. in foreigners. that invites recognition. is to uncover the extent to which the western notion of the sovereign self. the supplement. the undecidable signifier at the heart of différance. in black people. The monster is not just abhorrent. self-sufficient and rational. That which is different must be located outside the boundaries of the proper. For all their conceptual fluidity. and in women. the ideal of the humanist subject of modernity. of science-fiction literature. then it is considerably heightened. and of the bounded body. it is also enticing. At the very moment of definition. or other others. and I am far from suggesting that successful resistance to the standards of sameness and difference is assured. Moreover. The monster is irreducible to the selfsame but it is also within. a figure that calls to us. but always a figure of ambiguous identity. but because exclusion itself is incomplete. both guaranteed and contested by those who do not. then the encounter with the monstrous other opens up both the putative risk of indifferentiation. in short in all those who might be seen as monstrous. Although the very word ‘monster’ is a common term of abuse. Simultaneously threat and promise. and on which it relies. even similarity. unproblematically occupy the embodied subject position. the uncontested belief in full selfpresence at the heart of the logos cannot be maintained even by the violent hierarchy of the binary. I intend to go beyond the specific disciplinary receptions – as history. all may be effective in mobilising new ways of thinking not simply the binary encounter between self and other. In particular. at least to the ethics that I propose. my aim is to effect a double reading that opens up the problematic to unanticipated insights. but it is as persistent as it is intolerable. as anthropology. and to the discourses of philosophy. already vulnerable. and circulate between hitherto disconnected sites of enquiry. I want to wrench those texts away from their conventional readings. In turning. Alongside the capacity to evoke anxiety and loathing. it always claims us. and so on – that are taken to mark the limits of their intelligibility. psychoanalysis and feminist theory. in researching this project. ‘that the articulation of the heterogeneous voices among themselves both causes one to think and causes the language to think’ (1995b: 375). a mutually productive manner. the juxtaposition of models of thought that are more usually kept apart can serve to throw new light on each in what is. always touches us and implicates us in its own becoming. It is not my claim that every form of the monstrous effects the same counter-logic. it is in the very negativity that the monstrous provokes that we may begin to discern different ways forward. the notion of vulnerability emerges precisely as the problematic. as I do in the chapters that follow. moreover. By asking what metaphors and rhetorical devices such texts carry. In many instances I have unashamedly forced the issue. and on its confusion of boundaries. and what forms of imaginary are put into play. And. my intention is to disrupt the binary between practice and theory. what has struck me time and again is the richness and relevance of various postulates drawn from theorists who have nothing to say directly with regard to the monstrous. or indeed to each other. variously to historical archives and to contemporary cultural and biomedical sources. the vulnerability that may seem to belong to it is also our own. and in exploiting multiple layers and registers is. It is not that the fears are offset by fascination – for that too may be intercut with a certain shame – but rather that we cannot finally locate the monster as wholly other. It is often the case that the insights that I draw on are scattered throughout poststructuralist and postmodernist works. And it is here that the theme of vulnerability begins to take shape as the somewhat unanticipated yet irreducible companion of the monstrous. but the very impossibility of such a determined location. where ideas flow and overflow into unexpected configurations. Yet. The responses of disavowal of and identification with the monstrous arise equally because we are already without boundaries. but in opening up new channels of exploration. not so much in refashioning ideas to fit my own ends. disability or vulnerability. I want to be quite clear from the start that in bringing together empirical material of various sorts with what is at times a highly theoretical discourse about the nature of embodied subjectivity. Rather than accepting any at face value. but that in demanding a deconstruction of the strategies by which the self is secured. as we reflect on the meaning of the monstrous. At the same time. and that the most provocative and ultimately most illuminating inspirations are commonly denied currency outside their own disciplinary boundaries. . Though it remains excessive of any category. I hope.6 EMBODYING THE MONSTER monstrous may operate within historically changing parameters. Nonetheless. The outcome that I hope for in interweaving such differential source material. as Derrida puts it. then the final issue that I want to mention here is less contentious than it might otherwise be. I demonstrate the fragility of the clean and proper body. I run the risk of encouraging a kind of voyeurism with respect to monstrous bodies. By explicating the discursive context of the illustrations I hope. The theme of vulnerability as a quality of the self in the encounter with the other is extended in the next chapter. I reconsider the psychic dimensions of corporeal rejection. With specific reference to some recent cases of conjoined twinning. at the very least. and mounts a challenge to the separation of mind and body through a reflection on the conjoined and concorporate body. The following chapter brings together the phenomenological stress on corporeality with modernist conceptions of the self. with a critical historical survey of monsters and the monstrous – taken always to include the modern category of disabled bodies – and introduces the always ambivalent nature of our response to the problematic. In focusing on the phenomenology of touch – with particular reference to the work of Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – I reintroduce the question of conjoined twinning and suggest it figures a relational economy that is better able to accommodate embodied difference than conventional models that privilege specular detachment. Chapter 2 continues with those issues firmly in mind as it focuses on the close connections between the monstrous and the female body. racist and ableist connotations which must be constantly challenged and undone. Chapter 6 goes on to reincorporate the lived body in its consideration of the tangible relation with the monstrous. The final chapter both encompasses the materiality of Donna Haraway’s promising monsters. By reflecting on both a recent photographic exhibition of radically deformed foetal and infant bodies. If my project is successful. which gives an account of the partial satisfaction of Levinasian ethics. is freighted with sexist. undecidability and hence vulnerability are the irreducible components of any ethical becoming. who haunts the whole book like the spectres he evokes. whether they be the cyborgs of the future or the tricks of an always unpredictable nature. the deployment of visual imagery also requires delicate negotiation. The boundaries of the modernist subject are further contested in Chapter 4 where the notion of vulnerability is firmly linked to the encounter with the monstrous other whose very presence signals the threat of contamination. Over the period of research for this book. I am acutely aware that in choosing to include a limited number of illustrations throughout my text.INTRODUCTION 7 The book begins. I conclude with a reminder that ethics is not about finding solutions. and to question our investments in textual ‘truths’. I go on to raise the question of what is at stake in our reading of texts as history. By tracing out the trajectory of maternal imagination. but about creating openings in and through the uncertainty of strange encounters. to counter the negativity associated with those who are differently embodied. In response to those limits. both in the past and in contemporary popular culture. For Derrida. I have perused countless images both historical . Just as the use of certain terms. and on responses to other forms of disability. and the more abstract insights of Derrida. then. but that is too modest an aim. I introduce the notion of a cultural imaginary that differentially constructs monsters in response to both socio-political and psychic anxieties. such as ‘monster’ itself. and his hope for the future is precisely that it should be monstrous. but to the nature of the terrain of the monstrous as a whole. I can only claim that as a virtue. and I want to be clear that none of us is innocent. or the projected reader. of sexual difference. but a politics. however. I hope. but out of that rending of the ontologically and ethically known and certain. I would concur strongly with John Caputo who comments on his own challenge to mainstream philosophy: ‘To question philosophy and its ethics…is not to jettison them altogether. where things…may even seem a little mad’ (1999: 84). such an apparent lack of logical rigour has often been the only way out of the stranglehold of masculinist models of intellectual and academic propriety. What exactly is it that we are looking for? And even as I question my own motives in looking. space is created for movement and transformation. but to let them be rocked by a shock or trauma of something other. that will be shared. of course. I am acutely aware that the structures that I contest are those that have been authorised by phallologocentric discourse. It is not. Inevitably the repulsion and fascination that I analyse is as much my own as that of either the abstract modernist subject. imply that they can or should be rejected in their entirety. but opens up the question of how to develop – provisionally – other more adequate structures that can accommodate corporeal undecidability without compromising the conditions for an ethics. a more reflexive engagement will provoke just those questions that I want to ask of the ambivalent nature of the encounter with the monstrous. only to methodological concerns that Caputo’s remarks could be applied. the task does not end there. I make no promise of answers. . but also provocative of the positive realignments that my own strategy intends to mobilise. I am struck – especially in the face of video and photographic material – not by any academic insight into vulnerability but by the overspilling of my own slow tears. The prospect is certainly risky. to expose them to a view from somewhere else. For an academic this is a scandalous admission. For feminist thinkers.4 The radical challenge that such an unsettled and unsettling terrain offers to the scene of the embodied self is indeed traumatic. overtly fantastic and ostensibly accurate representations of reality. Some paradigms remain useful as a basis for critical thought and others will always reassert themselves. The trick is to let neither settle. but offer the belief that it is only by reconfiguring thought that we can move on to potentially more creative modes both of becoming in ourselves and of encountering others. Though the very incoherence of the monstrous exposes the vulnerability at the heart of all becoming. Although my methodological approach may at times seem dis-ordered. while we may all teeter on the brink of a voyeurism that in its lack of (self-)recognition would reduce the object of our gaze to merely one of excitement for the forbidden. and remind the reader that our discursive conventions need not determine. as I explore the theorisations that will move my thinking out of the boundaries that seem to structure what is possible. Indeed it is difficult to imagine any contestation of modernist normativities that did not entail not simply an awareness. The deconstruction of hitherto unproblematised conventions does not. the paths that deconstructive thought can travel. and one.8 EMBODYING THE MONSTER and current. whatever form those others might take. Nonetheless. and certainly outside the strict bounds of logical analysis. or be allowed to limit. and although this work is only tangentially a contribution to feminist theory as such. among other things. and though a descriptive reading of historical texts may yield successive reformulations of inappropriate/d others. the very insistence on a series of binaries that define the otherness of the monster should alert us to the instability of the categories that ground the normative human subject. or in the more rarefied context of the medical theory of the classical ages. what Donna Haraway (1992a) calls ‘inappropriate/d others’ in that they challenge and resist normative human being. Monsters of course show themselves in many different and culturally specific ways. racist and colonialist attitudes. Indeed. I want to point the way to the fractures and insecurities which render the discourse of the monstrous both so engaging and disturbing. the discomforting question of boundaries may be discerned. I want to look both at some persistent themes in the western imagination. the European Enlightenment. but what is monstrous about them is most often the form of their embodiment. in the first instance by their aberrant corporeality. The varying and sometimes contradictory explanatory accounts to which I refer take in both the notion of monstrous races and individual monsters. In this chapter. to open up the meanings which both order and disorder the historical discourse.1 MONSTERS. Nonetheless. but even in the most objectified of accounts. and at some specific instances of monstrosity. but as will quickly become clear in later chapters. what is at issue primarily is the epistemological significance of that discourse. They are. described and expounded by the supposedly impartial voice of the historian. or contemporary high-tech biomedical science. Whether in the popular cultural legacy of ancient Greek myth. a range of sexist. My explicit intention in using archival and other sources is to challenge the conventional disciplinary limits set on their use and meaning in order to discover what underlying . I want to stress from the outset that the ‘reality’ of the various forms is not at issue. in travellers’ tales of early imperialist and colonialist encounters. in beginning with a relatively unproblematised delineation. Although my purpose is not to present a socio-history of monstrosity as though it were already there waiting to be catalogued. the epistemological is intimately entwined with ontological and ultimately ethical dimensions. in the so-called freak shows. The status of the subject and of human personhood may often remain unspoken in the projection of the monstrous as a wholly external phenomenon. the category of the monster is of enduring fascination. MARVELS AND MEANINGS The concept of the monstrous and the figure of the monster have haunted western history from its earliest records. and serve to justify. in an important sense. and the enduring tradition of horror stories and films. what concerns me is that monsters operate primarily in the imaginary. The biological is no guarantee of a predictable given structure of reality. then. and as such fluid and unstable. the site of contested meaning. an instance of nature’s startling capacity to produce alien forms within. What links the monstrous others. are materialised through a set of discursive practices. even Paré’s monster of Ravenna1 – or man-made creations like Sil in the film Species (to which I shall refer later) or the replicants in Blade Runner. as productive of ontological uncertainty. is the givenness of any body. The point – in the sense intended by Judith Butler (1993) – is that bodies. against an ideal bodyliness – that is the being of the self in the body – that relies on the singular and the unified. growth and adaption. conjoined twins. The body. but rather a locus of production. rather than reiterate a nature/culture split. is their unnatural and often hybrid corporeality. Despite the convention of taking the body for granted. never given and fixed. of the natural. And moreover. on the contrary. the simultaneous rejection and recognition. What disturbs is that for all that it is extra-ordinary and widely characterised as unnatural. . should have ever been overlaid with the imagery of the static and determinate. the monsters that most effectively complicate our preconceptions are precisely those that are blatantly organic. surfaces and boundaries that mark out the material. And although I am interested primarily in wholly organic monsters. rather. As Haraway reminds us: ‘Biology is discourse. but there is more to it than that. the sense of a foundational and certain form which may be compared to an ideal template. It is. whether those of human birth whose bodies fail to match the normative standard – encephalitic infants. that grounds ontological unease. as though some monsters are natural where others are not. rather than being material and graspable from the start. it would be more appropriate perhaps to recognise from the outset that techne plays a part in the construction of all monsters. monstrosity in its various forms offers a gross insult. not the living world itself’ (1992b: 298). In other words. where everything is in its expected place. Moreover. it is clear that embodiment is always a dynamic process of development. It is perhaps odd – explicable only in terms of the binary either/or of constructivist culture versus essentialist nature – that the dynamism of the biological. it does not so easily account for the normative anxiety that they invoke. a capacity that equally constitutes identical twins and even pregnant women. the monster is not outside nature. At very least.10 EMBODYING THE MONSTER forms of imaginary are mobilised by their expressive strategies. indeed all bodies. is not a prediscursive reality. horror and fascination. Although that differential and strange embodiment might explain the enduring fascination of the monstrous as an object of knowledge. but what is at stake more importantly are the contested relations between self and other. It is over a period of time that the process comes to instantiate the effects of the solidity. the issues raised are often equally relevant to techno-organic monstrosity such as the cyborg envisioned by Haraway (1990). then. as Butler claims: ‘there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body’ (1993: 10). What I am disputing. it destabilises the grand narratives of biology and evolutionary science and signifies other ways of being in the world. for example. The differential interpretations of monstrosity may speak clearly to the mapping of specific socio-historical anxieties and interests. deficiency or displacement. however. biological process itself does as a matter of course continually frustrate the desire for certainty. the question of the concrete existence of specific monsters is not one that need concern us. the crucial marker for him being that such deformities transgressed the law of generative resemblance (Generatione Animalium 1953: 767b. And . The issue is not so much that monsters threaten to overrun the boundaries of the proper. cannot be thought. of whether past narratives speak to realisably embodied and gross peculiarities. although for my own part. nature is at best base and unruly – that which must be controlled – and at worst that which is deeply disruptive and uncontrollable. The reverse terminology is even less straightforward. and also the disruption within that destabilises the standard of the same. Nonetheless. as such. And that negativity is clearest in the conventional association of the female with the natural. not any and every kind of nature. 5–10).’ is how Spivak puts it (1989: 149) – it makes little difference whether or not we redefine all bodies as social and psychic constructs. the scene of cultural degradation or the abnormal. The body. Before following through that thought in later chapters. they speak to both the radical otherness that constitutes an outside and to the difference that inhabits identity itself. then. In any case.MONSTERS. it also threatens to overspill the boundaries of the proper. then. I am clearly persuaded that the materiality of bodies is inaccessible and is known only as mediated – ‘(t)here are thinkings of the systematicity of the body. As he put it: ‘Monstrosities belong to the class of things contrary to nature. as that they promise to dissolve them. and the desire for clear distinctions either between nature and culture. In other words. The relationship between monstrosity and what might be deemed the natural was one which greatly exercised the classical mind. or to the effects of a powerful personal or social imaginary. it is the very excessiveness of monsters that places them at the forefront of what Haraway calls ‘queering what counts as nature’ (1992b: 300). organic bodies are as it were naturalised post hoc. not just in those bodies which were malformed by disease. accident. What is at issue is the transformatory power of the body. and whatever credit is given to the pre-existent reality of nature. but Nature in her usual operations’. I want first to trace some historical representations and explanations of the monstrous. no account can be disinterested or merely descriptive. for whom the problem was how to account for the unnatural within a God-given universe. An appeal to nature is. always ambivalent. When set against culture as that which is managed and regulated. there are value codings of the body. If then all bodies are capable of frustrating those binaries. Unlike many of his contemporaries who posited wholly supernatural explanation. where the primary term confers value. MARVELS AND MEANINGS 11 Regardless. Aristotle used the term ‘monstrosity’ to describe forms of corporeal excess. or between the appropriate (where everything is in its place) and chaotic aspects of the natural are constantly disrupted. although that might sometimes signify the marvellous. such that women’s bodies are especially untrustworthy. and later the Church fathers. although as will become clear. for although nature may be accorded positive value as the site of the pure and uncontaminated. to simple category mistakes. but more widely to depict all beings that are a deviation from the common course of nature. where the epithet ‘unnatural’ implies a location that is literally out of place. The point is that monsters can signify both the binary opposition between the natural and the non-natural. or birth. suggesting both monstrare – to show. the Middle Ages. whereby the seed of Man is made weak and unperfect. The search for the causes of monstrosity is. gross deviations from the norm were not simply horrifying. while Ambroise Paré.Another cause is. Although the commentary offered by Aristotle remained influential. ostenta. begins his list of the causes of monstrosity: ‘The first whereof is the glory of God. albeit with a more naturalistic tone: these apparitions that be contrarie to Nature. it was Cicero’s list of synonyms – monstra. happen not without the providence of Almighty God. that Aristotle regarded any deviation from the morphology of the ‘normal’ male body as a type of monstrosity – he famously characterised the birth of girls as the most common form of deformity (GA. but also marvellous. for inordinate Lust is drawn in as a Cause of these Events. the ominous markers of good or ill to come. that God may punish men’s whickednesse. as the putative failure – signalled by both monstrous and female birth – of the male seed to replicate itself. monsters ‘are created for the adornment of the universe’ (1992: 113). 42) – which anchors meaning in later ages. as marvellous signifiers of God’s will. these things by just judgment are often permitted. not so much a philosophical enquiry into significance. (Quoted in Glenister 1964: 17) . not but Man hath a great hand in these monstrosities. however. or show signs of punishment at hand’ (1982: 4). Accordingly. as an enquiry into a puzzling aspect of everyday biology. was widely reflected in subsequent texts. but in a similar vein. that his immense power may be manifested to those which are ignorant of it…. writing in 1573. however. 737a 27) – then what is at issue is not so much the unexpected disruption of corporeal limits. and both lay and scholarly texts concur in their understanding of the meaning of monstrosity. or as a commentary on contemporary mores. Given. signs both of nature’s fecundity and God’s power. political and religious comment.12 EMBODYING THE MONSTER insofar as Aristotle marked excess and deficiency more generally as conditions of moral failing. 728a 18. to reproduce paternal likeness. deficiency or displacement suggests not only bodily imperfection. The Latin roots of the word ‘monster’ are rich in associations. Such interpretations were seized upon in medieval and Renaissance Christian Europe as a means of offering social. Thus. John Bulwer. for Aristotle. also acknowledges the traditional explanations of God’s influence and man’s own sin. it appears from the surviving texts that the important questions for the classical world. prodigia (De Divinatione 1920: 1. portenta. and privileges a teleological rather than aetiological approach. the traditional characterisation of monstrosity in terms of excess. whose encyclopaedic Anthropometamorphosis (1653) deals in the main with the monstrous appearance and contaminatory potential of other races. Such natural science aside. What Cicero firmly marks out is the trajectory of the monstrous as a supranatural signifier of coming social and political calamities. and the early modern period were often the more abstract ones focused on the meaning of the monstrous. in the thirteenth and fourteenth century works of the pseudoAlbertus Magnus. Somewhat later. rather than opposed to it. but it does not preclude a parallel history in which monstrosities are understood as prodigies. and for the most part it was these connotations that were the focus of scholarly interest. but an improper being. The Aristotelian insistence that such beings are curiosities of nature. but for the punishing and admonishing of Men. and monere – to warn. and for a time after the commercialisation of printing in the sixteenth century. which raiiseth more his senses. MARVELS AND MEANINGS 13 What is more interesting. sincerely recommends his own monster book. which doth more amaze him. and the textual authority of classical authors such as Hippocrates. or ingendereth a greater terror or admiration in all creatures. In his view. Any supposedly monstrous birth could be called upon to support both political and moral exhortations. biblical. but in fact the subsequent text is almost entirely taken from a work by Conrad Lycosthenes (1557). Edward Fenton’s introduction to his free translation of the French author Boaistuau (1560) is similarly typical of the period: there is nothing to seeme. often into several different and usually idiosyncratically updated editions. but instead faces on their chests. is still being supplemented almost a century later when Jean Palfryn’s French translation of 1708 appeals to topical interest by marking on its title page a monstrous birth that had occurred in Flanders just a few years previously. is Bulwer’s further claim that man frequently has a part in deliberately creating such abnormal features as deformed heads. animal or hybrid – are clearly intended not as exact. ‘(t)o whose painefull studie I have putte nothing…saving that whyche I myselfe have seen in my own time. for not only do the same . Aristotle or Galen. which is one of the most comprehensive surveys of that period of human malformations. much as the tabloid newspapers might publish such stories today. not just for purposes of fraud – which many writers allude to – but for reasons of differential cultural norms. misseshapen and deformed. taking in both classical references and topical accounts. the testimony of respected professionals. however. Fortunius Licetus’ original work of 1616. who reputedly had no heads. observation as such was not the motive force of such texts which sought rather to position monstrosity within a familiar network of epistemic associations – mythological. Stephen Bateman. men of good credite’ (1581: Preface). for example. elongated ears.MONSTERS. may represent an early recognition that monstrous difference is a matter of cultural production. heavily illustrated popular texts circulated with more or less fantastic versions of monster stories. (Fenton 1569: Preface) What matters in these highly coincident texts is that they speak both to pedagogic intent and to a human curiosity about what lies outside the bounds of the known. De monstrum. but as iconic. but (which is more) they do for the most part discover unto us the secret judgement and scourge of the ire of God. classical. regular appeals to the authenticity of eyewitness accounts. however. which more stireth the spirite of man. or have received of my special friends. medical and symbolic. quasi-mythological races such as the Blemmyae. than the monsters. not only turned arsiversie. although highly intolerant of what he takes to be insults to ‘the Regular Beauty and Honesty of Nature’ (1653: title page). there is little internal attempt in pre-modern works to cite singular evidence in ways that would be understood today. Despite. caussis natura et differentis. But it mattered little. wonders and adhominations. wherein we see the workes of Nature. representations. Even when books appeared initially in Latin – a strategy conferring authority and respectability – translations into the vernacular commonly followed. Bulwer’s detailed explanations. and the marks of scarification. The various images of monsters – human. are real people who have fashioned their own monstrosity over generations. 1 narrative descriptions reappear across a range of works spanning many decades. one of whiche was with Child. hairy men. Monstrous births – hermaphrodites. . born at Worms in 1495 (Sébastien Brandt) from Aesculape.1). one-eyed giants. Bateman was evidently aware of the doctrine of maternal imagination. and those in the text whose stories are illustrated. hydrocephalic infants. two Women spake together. 1933.2 as his account of twins joined at the head makes clear: The cause of this Monster was this. dog-headed humans. human-headed pigs and conjoined twins – and other freak events such as meteorological peculiarities are related with gusto. and the thirde coming upon them sodayne knocked both their Heades together as they were talking. But where causative explanation is offered. for example. wherewith the Woman with Child being afrayd made a token of the Knock in her Child. as well as showing no regard for congruence between the apparent age of the figures in the drawings.14 EMBODYING THE MONSTER Figure 1.1 Human twins conjoined at the head. Vol. The connection is purely emblematic (Figure 1. Bateman’s The Doome Warning all Men to the Iudgemente (1581). but the selfsame image may be used within a single book to illustrate accounts of several different creatures. characteristically reiterates both text and pictures already popularised in earlier works. (1581: 287)3 But the event flows seamlessly into his reference to a battle between Christians and Turks in the same year as the birth. it is invariably overlaid with portentous meaning. or wonder books as they are often known. first circulated in AD77. A more important link is in the pedagogic purpose of the bestiary whereby each creature was assigned an allegorical significance in terms of its putative good or evil features. and the Panotii whose enormous ears serve not only as blankets. to the morphological confusion of two other notable Indian races. the description of such races conveys a sense of wonderment at the diversity created by nature’s ‘power and majesty’. In his hugely influential Natural History (1961). the Cynocephali. and fabulous creatures of mythology are all lumped together. lib.2). both bestiaries and wonder . VI (Munster 1554) Like many other writers of the great period of monster texts. the Roman writer and traveller Pliny the Elder lists over fifty such races.MONSTERS. MARVELS AND MEANINGS 15 Figure 1. such as the short-statured Pygmies of interior Africa or the one-legged Sciopods of India. In this there is some continuity with the medieval tradition of bestiaries – catalogues of animal lore – which occasionally. which range from the recognisably human. included both individual hybrid human forms and the so-called monstrous races as part of their treatment of the animal world. In contrast. so that deformed human beings. The longestablished belief in the existence of monstrous races at the outer margins of the known and habitable world was itself an important element in the composition of wonder books. Bateman makes little distinction between one category of monster and another. who have dogs’ heads and communicate by barking.4 For Pliny himself. but provide the means of flight (Figure 1. and he does not characterise corporeal difference as indicative of moral failings. though not invariably. newly discovered and strange animals of land and sea.2 Some members of the Monstrous Races in Cosmographiae universalis. escapism.6 Above all. The monstrous images – alternately terrifying and fascinating – of the primitives supposedly inhabiting lands unconquered. Their appeal to medieval men was based on such factors as fantasy. as Cohen reminds us. Nor are such responses limited to distant history. and – very important – fear of the unknown’ (1981: 24). Travellers’ tales provided a rich source of images. Present day racism thrives on such long-established connotations. by the colonialist powers have been a mainstay of the European imaginary. but by corollary is dependent on its monstrous other. What seems to emerge from the accounts referred to above. perception was framed in highly fanciful terms. the representation of geographically and imaginatively distant peoples is beset by questions as to their human or animal status. The human/animal hybrid signalled not just absolute otherness. is that the existential status of that humanity does not stand alone. Accordingly. other races were situated not simply as monstrously different. He then goes on to describe several instances in which races of Cynocephali have been discovered. conquest. but as ontologically and existentially dependent on the unquestioned humanity of the civilised races. delight in the exercise of the imagination. in which individual as well as racial examples were equally common. crusade and pilgrimage – increasing encounters with the racial other provided a complex vehicle for the expression of inner desires and anxieties. Friedman’s remarks on the earlier travel narratives are no less apposite: ‘there appears to have been a psychological need for Plinian peoples. Although Bulwer himself believes that such monstrosities could be the result of longstanding human manipulation of nature. Bulwer is still writing of the monstrous races as a present reality: ‘For although this Nation of Men hath been accounted by many among the Types and Fabulous Narrations of the Ancients. ‘a purely conceptual locus rather than a geographical one’ (1996: 6). but the corruption of human form and being. but nonetheless crucial. Although the margins of the known world were held to be the pre-eminent location of monsters. or at least unaccessed. with the latter in particular loading the non-normative with negativity. Despite Aristotle’s deep scepticism about the probability of hybridity – he argued that differential periods of gestation made interspecies generation impossible – monstrosity was frequently manifest in the popular imagination in just such a guise. Even when expressed within the prevalent and historically persistent discourse of the supernatural. yet in these latter Times we have received credible Intelligence of such kind of Nations newly found’ (1653: 18). it was. supranatural and supernatural are far from distinct. is that the categories of natural.7 The monster occupies an essentially fluid site where despite its putative otherness. the monster is taken to reflect back at least some contingent truths of the . Narrative accounts such as that given in the fourteenth-century manuscripts called Mandeville’s Travels (1967)5 indicate that far from actual contact with unfamiliar ethnic groups resulting in a reduction of illusory expectations. his text nonetheless feeds into a well-established popular tradition of quasi-anthropological writing. Nearly three centuries later. then.16 EMBODYING THE MONSTER books explicitly use difference to draw out moral lessons. As travel expanded throughout the medieval period – for reasons of trade. What is less obvious. it cannot be separated entirely from the nature of man himself. but rather a mirror of humanity: on an individual level. It would be misplaced to see our predecessors as simply credulous. The images that we have all show an infant of reputedly human birth. I want now to look in some detail at one of the most ubiquitous hybrid monsters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which speaks eloquently to the way in which such figures operated simultaneously on several different levels. MARVELS AND MEANINGS 17 human condition. by having a clear sense of self and other. wholly fantastic. but arouses always the contradictory responses of denial and recognition. which might engender fear and horror of the unknown. it has a far more paradoxical status. But even in those historical moments where the issue of monstrous corporeality may seem to be primarily about form. in its apparent separation and distinction. Given that all human beings were seen as more or less corrupted from a state of pre-lapsarian perfection. then. and the moral failings that it signalled. Although Aristotle had defined monstrosity in terms of bodily excess and deficiency. that it is possible to mark out the parameters of self-identity. then the other. Given that the western logos is structured according to an infinite series of binaries that ground all knowledge in the play of sameness and difference.MONSTERS. disgust and empathy. it is not simply alien.d. the monstrous represents an indisputable case of otherness. the external manifestation of the sinner within.: 40). whose body nonetheless displays a variety of transgressive elements. ‘without doubt some of the stories of monsters are fabulous’ (n. exclusion and identification. were a sign of the vulnerability of all men and women to a loss of humanity. the surface manifestations of a much deeper uncertainty and vulnerability of the self. Indeed in many early manuscripts and printed books. for as the early seventeenth-century author of the apocryphal Aristotle’s Works admits. The point is not whether such figures were taken as really existing. at first sight. The rather charming Monster of Ravenna is one of the most widely reproduced figures in monster texts of the early modern period. there is a characteristic indifference to the putative modernist boundary between reality and fantasy. for though countless medical historians have indulged our own age’s disciplinary desire for categorisation with explanations based on modern knowledge of congenital deformity. many monsters seem to us. is not the truth value. and may have been. the legacy of Pliny in particular threw up the question of hybridity where the division between human and animal was indeterminate. What was thrown into question was the stability and predictability of human existence. but what significance can be attached to the accounts. it is only by making such distinctions. then. The dislocations of hybridity are.3). about the difficulty of reconciling in a single body those things which should not go together. The monstrous is not thereby the absolute other. but that does not diminish their pedagogical value. Although. And yet time and again the monstrous cannot be confined to the place of the other. If we know what we are by what we are not. and multiple illustrations of its appearance are still in existence (Figure 1. and whose human status is surely complicated by its . then the visible disorder of the monstrous body. what can be read there too are all sorts of ontological anxieties about what exactly the human subject consists in. What interests me. then. serves a positive function of securing the boundaries of the self. The working out of God’s scourge as signified on the body of the child indicates to Bateman the wider lesson. sometimes feathered. Writing in the mid-sixteenth century. and. the corporeally inscribed letters carry their own contrary message of salvation should Italy turn to virtue. the legs are fused to form a scaled. Paré (1982) offers a relatively unmediated account of its existence. unsteadfastness. cross-like letters or marks – confusingly symbolising Christian virtue – appear on the torso.8 the Monster of . In addition a third eye peers out at knee level. In short. counting it among the examples of those monsters caused by the wrath of God. Nonetheless.3 The Monster of Ravenna in De monstrorum natura. fish and bird). In contrast. Bateman more specifically explains each of the corporeal peculiarities in terms of pride. between virtue and vice. buggery. but he also makes the link to the political situation of popery at Ravenna. the monstrous body ostentatiously crosses the boundaries between male and female. caussis et differentis (Licetus 1634) resemblance to both an angel and a devil. having both penis and pudenda as well as breasts. on the interpretive level. though the convention refers only to an ‘it’. ‘that for these vices Italy shold be beaten down with the sword’ (1581: 295). and other such vices. The figure is evidently intersexed. the monster’s birthplace. between human and animal (itself hybridised as simultaneously mammal. Despite a startling number of modern attempts to reclaim the creature as the ‘real’ outcome of several distinct congenital deformities.18 EMBODYING THE MONSTER Figure 1. and in some illustrations. mermaid-like tail which terminates in a giant avian or reptilian claw. the arms are replaced by feathered or in some cases reptilian wings. reptile. The head bears a single horn. And this is true. 1972: 662)9 By the early seventeenth century. and baptism the necessary gateway to salvation. and what it signified of inner being. the seventeenthcentury cleric Thomas Bedford characteristically stresses that ‘all monstrous and misshapen births. and at length (after he had uttered these Wordes. The monsters that engage us most. Moreover. Although the purely animal monster might also be an object . that ‘those having human form can and ought to be washed by holy baptism and those truly monstrous. an utterance in its own right. which lack rational souls. that command intricate explanation. If the monster is more than appearance. the very hybridity of the infant speaks to a series of transgressions with regard to sexuality. however extraordinary such a creature may appear to our senses in bodily shape. for example. It is as though the monstrosity is materialised precisely in order that it might speak. youre Lorde is a comming) to have dyed’ (1581: 337). or utterance. and speak. both literally and metaphorically. though dead. then the Church faced a very real dilemma about the appropriate response to those monstrous births which confounded the putative boundaries of the human. The problem of radical hybridity. the prodigious nature of the event is not only apparent in the peculiarity of the birth. a favourite with Renaissance and early modern chroniclers. And monsters do always signify. a human language.MONSTERS. (City of God 16. deficiency and displacement. the canonist. yet speak for the instruction of the living’ (Bedford 1635). Augustine laid down a remarkably tolerant formula that remained influential for many centuries: But no faithful Christian should doubt that anyone who is born anywhere as a man – that is as a rational and mortal being – derives from that one first-created human being. that is. or quality.10 reputedly born in 1543. in colour. Its monstrous form is marked by the classical attributes of excess. then. a matter of the rational soul rather than of appearance. is as much constructed by the discursive strategies of the political and religious climate as by any account of an actual birth. If the soul were an attribute of human beings alone. and personhood. MARVELS AND MEANINGS 19 Ravenna is a highly symbolic figure constructed at the confluence of several discourses – in this instance political. As Foucault among others has shown. strictly speaking. Perhaps because the qualifier for baptism was. Watche. are those which are closest to us. species. but is voiced directly by the monster itself: ‘he is said to have lived foure houres after he was borne. is it that of the brute animal or is it that of a sense of self? More pertinent for the historical context was the question of whether such a creature should be baptised. the subsequent Enlightenment interest in more naturalistic explications of human monstrosity did not settle the issue of what was appropriate. dominus deus vester adventat. if it does have an inner life. the body is the ‘inscribed surface of events’. sutured together in a hyperrealisation of ambiguity. When Bateman turns to another multiple hybrid. or part. religious and superstitious. however. Alphonzo a Carranza. In the early Christian period. What is notable again is that the Latin-spouting infant. remained. those which display some aspect of our own form. or in any natural endowment. Vigilate. a text to be deciphered and read (1977: 148). In his sermon on the birth of conjoined twins in his parish. the equally infamous Monster of Cracow. 8. The real or imagined fate of the Monster of Ravenna is not recorded. not’ (quoted in Friedman 1981: 182–3). or motion. offered a more ambiguous version. during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. however. In line with Foucault’s concept of an emergent norm for the human body itself. what is certain is that the grasping after an order of explanation in the face of extraordinary corporeal disruption is an enduring feature of historical record. or intercourse on the Sabbath. Moreover. many commentators have claimed that a preoccupation with monstrosity seems to be a regular feature of periods of social and political uncertainty. Enlightenment scholars largely abandoned abstract speculations on monstrosity in order to impose instead a medical discourse – increasingly focused on embryology and comparative anatomy – which served to normalise and domesticate the marvellous and prodigious. the human body in all its forms represented variously.11 Whether such an externalisation of motivation is justified or not. transspecies coupling. of providing a material marker of divine affect. and has a similar history of heralding events to come.12 In short. but that does not settle meaning. that for many centuries. monstrous affronts to nature always demanded interpretation. With a reinvigorated interest in practical science. of cosmology. The pioneering methods of Francis Bacon were particularly influential. Although I am wary of a too simplistic periodisation of the past that lines up the epistemological significance of the monstrous with specific external events. And even when the longstanding belief in the supposedly portentous nature of monstrosity lost favour among the learned in the face of the more biologistic explanations of Enlightenment science. or indeed to punish individual immorality such as sodomy. it does not thereby unsettle the security of human being. consorting with the devil.20 EMBODYING THE MONSTER of curiosity or fear. in the popular and sometimes in the scholastic imagination. including the early modern period. Whether narrated in popular monster books or in the somewhat later proliferation of street ballads and broadsheets. They invoke vulnerability. moreover. It is with regard to this inherent ambiguity that we should understand attempts made to fix the epistemology and ontology of monstrosity. that . and of the wider natural world. or later of signifying evolutionary diversity. but in its lack of humanity it cannot appeal directly to the heart of our own being. the very telling seems also to speak to an ontological vulnerability in which the ambiguously unnatural otherness of monsters may serve as the focus of abjected fear. the body was freighted with symbolic meaning. We should remember. To summarise briefly the empirical parameters of the debate. monstrous difference became more regularly defined as deviant – abnormal – rather than as wholly distinctive. their supposed purpose could cover a number of options: to foretell macro-calamities. and his Novum Organum of 1620 explicitly sets out to categorise ‘deviant instances. For those births attributed to divine or supernatural intervention. Those monsters that are at least in an ambivalent relationship to humanity. are always too close for comfort. the history of monstrosity took. Each instance is related to an external cause. an index and analogy of the political state. which operate as much within the realm of entertainment as moral admonition. the requirement of exegesis remained. to impose order on the disordered. a decidedly normative and positivist turn. to express God’s wrath or vengeance on a morally negligent population. anxiety and guilt. The animal is the other in the comforting guise of absolute difference. the monstrous was studied as ‘the prototype for a new kind of scientific fact’ (Daston 1991: 95). (Quoted in Jacob 1989: 124) The operation of power/knowledge here. to maintain credibility’ (2000: 149. the newly coined science of teratology seemed to promise the certainty of explanation. and ultimately to control nature. Their greater aim was to throw light on the origin and development of differential species themselves. For Bacon and his successors. and the illusion of potential if not actual mastery. an aberration that would throw light on the normal.MONSTERS. Wilson takes as paradigmatic the work of nineteenth-century scientists such as Etienne and Isidore Geoffroy St-Hilaire who were especially concerned with investigating the monstrous as a stage in the development of the foetus. It was particularly in the field of reproduction that the scientific approach to monsters played an influential role in grounding and contesting a range of speculative theories. and every novelty. By the nineteenth century. Monstrosity was simply the normal which had been hindered or had deviated into a parallel yet equally explicable course. In the view of many commentators. it promised insight into the nature of life itself. The sense of mystery and awe that had characterised the response in earlier periods was reduced by the scientific gaze in such work to the desire to unravel a set of natural laws that were as yet imperfectly understood. and the post-Enlightenment will to impose rational meaning and determinate form. the simultaneous presence of two states that ordinarily succeed one another. but the value of the monstrous as the other caught in the gaze of the beholder was more than that of entertainment or moral instruction. The question of whether such births were predetermined or the result of accident was itself relevant both to the possibility of repair of the abnormal body. and dominance of either preformation or epigenesis13 as models of generation were all debated in a context which explicitly sought to account for monstrous births. But this must be done with the greatest discretion. As Isidore Geoffroy St-Hilaire wrote in 1832: Monstrousness is no longer random disorder. The relative importance of the sperm and egg. Aphorism 8). equally regular and equally subject to laws: it is the mixture of an old and a new order. such as Dudley Wilson in his detailed book. where nature deflects and declines from its usual course’ (Bacon 2000: 148. where the monstrous marked a kind of transition stage. If. The gathering of collections of monstrosities as part of the fad for a gentleman’s personal ‘cabinet of curiosities’ was a familiar feature in an age of expanding travel and commerce. As Bacon notes: ‘we must make a collection or particular natural history of all the monsters and prodigious products of nature. there are no exceptions to the . and to the prospect of creating monsters experimentally. As the body in general became an object of intense scrutiny. Signs and Portents (1993). attempts to strip away the disturbing and indeterminate status of the monstrous body. there is a clear epistemological break between the preEnlightenment focus on the supranatural status and symbolic significance of the monstrous. The point was to thereby better understand common forms. freaks and monsters. the role of the uterine environment. as Geoffroy St-Hilaire asserts. Aphorism 8). rarity or abnormality in nature. but essentially transparent. MARVELS AND MEANINGS 21 is errors of nature. but another order. moreover.14 The narrative of a set of explicit cultural transformations that constitute the emergence of western modernity. the operation of both historical and contemporary biomedical discourse is never exempt from deconstructive scrutiny. then. but. illustrates not so much the strength of the scientific endeavour as the need to stabilise the uncertainty that the monstrous creates at the heart of human being. where its threat was – and is – relational rather than autonomous. In introducing a new system of classification to the natural sciences. or the like – that function to delimit their significance and meaning. The desire for mastery over the excessive other. In discursively constructing the objects of its concern. whilst at the same time emphasising a hierarchical ordering of species that privileged white Europeans over darker skinned peoples. Taking up the Foucauldian theme. It is perhaps in what remains overtly unspoken. According to Thomson. In consequence. producing and reinforcing the concept of an unmarked. levelled body as the dominant subject of democracy’ (1996: 12). and which produce a corresponding change in the response to the monstrous. normative. the very fact that any epistemological category – such as that which constitutes the proper form of humanity – works on the basis of exclusion. legal. from wonder to error (1996: 3). The same desire is. it must be both compared and contrasted to corporeal norms in a way that reduces difference to a matter of pathology. that is. moral. the resulting formalisation and authorisation of a racial hierarchy based in the apparent neutrality of science has been deeply shaken. only to the laws of the naturalists. In the face of the valorisation of uniformity and unity. Although in one sense the domain of science at least appears to treat the anomalous body with a new degree of moral neutrality. but not entirely dislodged. In an epoch of increasing faith in rational and secular explanation. The task. from portent to site of progress. rather than simply reporting on a pre-existing state of affairs. from revelation to entertainment. to congenital disabilities. for example. no less a motivating force in the present day response to corporeal difference. then science has laid claim to its own invulnerability. who were in turn superior to the merely monstrous in form (Linnaeus 1759). though often apparent in the rhetorical and metaphorical devices that mark all discourse – scientific or otherwise – that we may discern the workings of an imaginary that responds with anxiety to the monstrous. Linnaeus was enabled to demythologise human-born monsters and include them in a common genus with other human beings. decoupling them. from the predetermined disciplinary frameworks – medical. is taken up in Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s analysis of the genealogy of what she calls ‘freak discourse’.22 EMBODYING THE MONSTER laws of nature. so explicit in Baconian taxonomies. the progressive shift from the mode of the marvellous to the mode of the deviant can be discerned in a series of sequential moves: from prodigious monsters to the pathological terata of medical discourse. as I shall go on to discuss. from awe to horror. the monstrous was incorporated into the quintessentially modernist paradigm of the normal/abnormal. Thomson asserts that ‘modernity affected a standardization of everyday life that saturated the entire social fabric. . with regard not only to skin colour. is to displace such texts from familiar and preferred readings. for example. should alert us to its questionable ethical underpinnings. Almost 250 years later. The twins. For individual children and adults who survived a monstrous birth. and to a large extent by Thomson. A late seventeenth-century report to the Royal Society. and freak shows as such were a particular feature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. reconstructive surgery. And yet. despite the enormous public and scientific interest in monsters in the early modern period. observers could endeavour to ignore the disquieting questions that monsters raised about the human condition in general. which she sees as providing the present day coordinates of monstrosity or ‘freakery’. to report in detail every instance. but there is a much longer standing tradition of showing monsters for gain. Rather than the sequential model that I have outlined above. Paul Semonin (1996) traces the .) which must be recontained by strategies of normalisation – institutionalisation. Certainly the crowds came to gasp with horror and to admire.MONSTERS. which very self-consciously promoted scholarly impartiality. I propose instead an interweaving of elements where the deviant and the marvellous are always imbricated one with the other. but the very extent of the desire to witness monstrosity first hand. MARVELS AND MEANINGS 23 the monstrous body ‘represented at once boundless liberty and appalling disorder’ (ibid. and individual identity in particular. the work of the learned societies. Alongside. then there is little textual evidence of it (Todd 1995: 154). tells us little of the enduring and disruptive power of the morphological imaginary. and indeed within.. it has also been a period during which the organised freak show – the display of human monstrosities for profit and entertainment – has flourished. The word ‘freak’ seems to have been used to indicate corporeal anomaly only since the mid-eighteenth century. It is an anxiety. If the hundreds – and they were as likely to be sophisticated and educated urbanites as unschooled peasants – who flocked to each new monster attraction on display in the large cities were made conscious of their own vulnerability. By focusing on the monster as an object of knowledge. taken at face value by Wilson. on dissection where possible. this is perhaps not surprising. moreover. Thomson herself is particularly concerned with issues of corporeal disability. ‘are likely to Live. there is plentiful evidence from all periods that selfdisplay was a common strategy of subsistence. Although the last two centuries have seen a massive acceleration in biomedical knowledge. I suggest. that persists in our own time. on the ‘strange birth’ of conjoined twins testifies to the persistent fascination of the monstrous.15 a sense of wonder remained undisturbed. and on the importance of corroborating accounts creates a distance that serves to obscure less acceptable concerns. and to circulate a prodigious literature indicates. to be frightened and amused.P. it is difficult to find evidence of any self-awareness on the part of the observers.P. but the emphasis put on measurement. And yet the standardising impulses of modernity and the positivism of science. to signal an epistemological break in the response to the monstrous. For bodies like the Royal Society. 1705: 303). limited now to the abnormal. reports Mr A. an inner anxiety about the relation between the creatures on display and normative form and identity. an indication that the monstrous signified rather more than simple corporeal difference. prosthetic aids and so on. Daston. for example. if the Multitudes that come to see them (sometimes 500 in a day) do not occasion the shortening of their Lives’ (A. and in every way bypassing the putative handicaps of their extraordinary bodies. plays a prominent role. Barnum himself allows in his autobiography. feeding children. and for the ways in which they construct and authorise such binary systems as racist discourse. the freak show. The question of authenticity is redundant. and continued to be. they were performers engaged not only in showing off their anomalies. Again like science which. dancing. mimicked strange behavioural traits and made up suitably exotic backgrounds. Those divisions. is that the label of freak relates not to a particular physiology. not the real one. who personally received many well-known show figures such as the diminutive ‘General’ Tom Thumb. however. but more or less meticulously contrived spectacles. national or historical significances which emphasised difference as inferiority. Like the biomedical gaze which manages monstrosity either by examining the bodies of the dead or by reducing the living to categories of knowledge. I prefer to think in terms of the discursive construction of all bodies and selves in which the gaze. the display of abnormality served to normalise the viewing public at the same time as marking the performer as a deviant type. as Robert Bogdan makes clear. As the most successful of the nineteenth-century showmen. In creating such a distance. freaks have traditionally been. for as Susan Stewart notes: ‘it is the imaginary relation.16 although private appearances before the wealthy and titled were also popular as late as the reign of Queen Victoria. for all its play with the flexibility of the boundaries between them and us. Rather than accepting Bogdan’s assumption of an underlying ‘true’ state of being. sewing. The point is that freak shows were productions which staged not ‘real life’ as such. of the performer. When. moreover. Such shows have attracted much scholarly analysis of late both for their demonstration of the function of the gaze. that we seek in the spectacle’ (1993: 111). whether of science or entertainment. a ‘dynamic of attraction and avoidance structures the internal economy of monster exhibits’ (1995: 156) such that sameness and difference are simultaneously evoked. As Todd puts it. he goes on to remark that everyone exhibited was misrepresented. the crucial factor. shown in such a way as to offset their non-normative natures and bodies with an appeal to their recognisable everyday or cultured attributes that drew in the spectators at the same time as astounding them. .24 EMBODYING THE MONSTER tradition of such public shows back to Bartholomew’s Fair which was held annually in London from the early 1100s until it was finally suppressed in 1855. but in singing. which encouraged viewers to think and see in terms of various binary distinctions between ‘them’ and ‘us’. he means merely that showmen and performers exaggerated physical features. What the spectators actually believe of what they see and hear seems scarcely to matter. is finally no more than a safely contained and distanced display that seeks to sanitise the contaminatory potential of the anomalous other. racial. P.T. or mental capacities. Relatively few of those displayed were passive objects. but to ‘a way of thinking about and presenting people’ (1988: 3). Although many other shows did of course stage real anomalies. took on cultural. the spectacle was often based on a fraud in that there might be little or nothing out of the ordinary with the body. conversing in foreign languages. As the evidence of advertisements. ballads and handbills from an earlier period demonstrates. Not only has horror become a popular genre in both literature and film. its disruptive signification persists. the freak represents the naming of the frontier and the assurance that the wilderness. but raised too the question of the supposedly ‘missing link’ in human evolution. the widespread investment in the monstrous as a matter of ambivalent repulsion and attraction remains powerful.On display.MONSTERS. the otherness of the monster remains containable neither in its gross materiality. during the early part of the nineteenth century was displaying and later dissecting the body of Sarah Bartmann. speaks eloquently to the instability of both material and ideological frontiers. It is with all this in mind that the question of the monstrous resists reduction to the conventional historical pattern of credulous superstition supplanted by rational scientific explanation. And though it resists classification. the freak show made explicit links between cultural otherness and monstrous form. even intimate. and of the self. In Barnum’s highly popular ‘What is It?’ show. it is always both strange and external. It is the marker. The significance of the monstrous lies not in explanatory and causative accounts of materialised phenomena.19 Far from fitting neatly into the new epistemological categories constructed by the taxonomies of postEnlightenment science. Insofar as neither the attempt to pin down nor the repudiation of the monstrous is ever complete. the distance created by the gaze is frustrated by its own object. For Susan Stewart: (t)he body of the cultural other is…both naturalized and domesticated in a process that we might consider to be characteristic of colonization in general…. both in the overdetermined use of non-white performers. contrary to Stewart’s view of the freak display as a ‘horrifying closure’. the United States – in the putative invasion of alien beings. gestures towards an opening up of signification. and familiar. nor as the radically other which sets the limits of the human. then. but of the impossibility of securing such boundaries. It is not simply that the narrative of progressively more adequate understanding of corporeal anomaly is cross-cut continually by conflicting beliefs and observations. The safety of entertainment and putative education about the anomalous or racial other is undermined by the persistence of a troubling familiarity. but that ‘reality’ and fantasy are always in tension. not of the successful closure of embodied identity of the selfsame. the so-called Hottentot Venus. the outside. it does not thereby represent simply what Butler calls ‘a domain of unlivability and unintelligibility that bounds the domain of intelligible effects’ (1993: 23). MARVELS AND MEANINGS 25 for example. the shifting of boundaries. (1993: 109–10) But in that precisely lies the problem. for. is now territory. Though frequently cast as the absolute outsider. and in the practice of ‘blacking up’ to produce a more exotic image.17 Racial stereotyping was extremely common. but the apparently widespread belief – in the world’s most scientifically sophisticated nation. and their interference in the human body. but in the discursive production of those . Although freak shows themselves had largely disappeared by the 1950s. and the ability of monstrous difference to enter into the space of identity. the spectacle of the supposed man-monkey did not just evoke feelings of cultural and racial superiority in the viewing public. for example.18 In making such a connection. (1984: 16) In other words. a limitation that operates even when it is acknowledged that the past remains irretrievable to presence. a text produced. What is called for is a performative analysis of the language of the monstrous. for as Dominick LaCapra warns: The archive as fetish is a literal substitute for the ‘reality’ of the past which is ‘always already’ lost for the historian. not just in terms of ideological interests. reiteration is never simple repetition. When it is fetishized. If we accept that the archival impulse is as much a matter of authorative command – ‘Believe this!’ – as it is of the objective to record. but that is only a starting point. it is constituted both in the texts of the past and in the subsequent reiteration of those texts. what is at stake for a postconventional approach is not. the complexities of meaning are not limited even to a recovery of the implicit as well as explicit content. (1985: 92) There would be little disagreement that the contemporary context of any operation of recording demands consideration. The status of a historical account is never straightforward. that any expectation of pinning down meaning by investigating source material on a basis limited to either. that they too are agents of the making. and particularly feminist historians. fears and desires that underlie those meanings. or indeed both. then.20 In opening up my enquiry in this way. rather. To the extent that history is a discursive product. should forestall a merely descriptive reading of the historical sources. and narrative manipulation that constitute any archive. and the repressions. Nor are archival sources to be unproblematically privileged. read and interpreted in a single instant without duration. I want to sketch out my own unwillingness to limit the significance of historical texts to their constative content. in addition to ideological incitement. a matter of truth or falsehood. have been rightly engaged. In contrast. Moreover. but as a matter of psychic investments. but according to the tenets of traditional models. as Suzanne Gearhart puts it: A text whose sense would only be that determined by the explicit context of its ‘own’ era (as in a historicist reading) would be a text without a history. although those are concerns with which historians. neither the present day writer nor reader of history should reflect. of course. rather than a reproduction faithful to some assumed original. and in an acute pun Derrida urges us to ‘interrogate the hierarchives’. is the question of subconscious desires and fears. but are fully imbricated with our own present reading context. still less acknowledge. As Derrida (1988) makes clear. is one of taking the further step of querying the adequacy of analyses which focus solely on conscious or intentional motivations. authorial intent and historical context cannot succeed. The issue. then what is raised. suppression.26 EMBODYING THE MONSTER accounts. It is a stand-in for the past that brings the mystified experience of the thing itself – an experience that is always open to question when one deals with writing and other inscriptions. but rather the production of meaning through a process of reiteration that reinforces the supposed ‘veracity’ of the event whilst simultaneously destabilising it. but a continuing operation in which the interval itself . It seems to me. And yet it is not simply a matter of going on to acknowledge the processes of selection. The shifting meanings alone. the archive is more than the repository of traces of the past which may be used in inferential reconstruction. self and other. my preliminary analysis of the concept of the monstrous refers extensively to the texts of the periods in which it was most debated. I see history as process. inner and outer. normal and abnormal – are at stake. contradictions. body and mind. MARVELS AND MEANINGS 27 constitutes an alteration that belies the fixity of any event or text. located in a post-Freudian interpretive landscape. then. As such. I want to resist closure of meaning and urge a reading that is deliberately open-ended and undecidable. The fissures. but opportunities to reconfigure first impressions. and indeed unexpected continuities in the received meaning of the monstrous are not then problems to be resolved. . breaks. With that in mind it is easier to see how what seems to be a simple narrative of progressively more rational approaches to the issue of monstrous form obscures a far more complex process of contestation in which a whole range of modernist parameters of knowledge – truth and fiction.MONSTERS. Although. inevitably become part of that production. in which my own concerns as a feminist. impure. abnormal. the normative standard. as we have already seen. however. an oppositional category that is never of equal value. The point. Thus. it carries the weight not just of the other. What precisely occupies the site of the other at any given time is always discursively mobile. All this is highly familiar in deconstructionist thought as the first step of an analytic that goes on to show not simply the mutual necessity but inequality of the binary pair. is not to equate the operation of sexual difference with monstrous difference. for example. but to mark those places where the two signifiers are doing similar work. in more or less explicit terms. the operation of sameness and difference disguises the intertextuality of the pair in which each is dependent on the other for definition.2 As will become clear. it is marked against the primary term. but also the way in which simple difference yields up to différance. In every case. racially other and so on. Far from being the absolute other and therefore effectively unknowable. so too it may be monstered. and recognise that we cannot reduce the monster to a singular .1 they were cast as others whose anomalous bodies served to fix the normalcy of the standard (European) model. as degraded or lacking. and. In the case of those born closer to home – as part of western society – where the failure to provide a copy of the original was the proximate indicator for the ascription of monstrosity. but of différance. is characterised variously as unnatural. it is important to look more critically at the place of the monstrous within that system. again such creatures functioned ideally as the other of the same. In other words. is always encompassed by the order of self and other. although the question of the humanity of human-born monsters and indeed of non-western races was widely debated from the medieval through the early modern period. of course. The figure of the monster is particularly rich in binary associations. That link between the monstrous and the feminine runs as a thread throughout the varied historical accounts and explanations. in both supporting and contesting the structure of the western logos. As with all such constructions. but just as the marked term may be feminised. the monster. however alien it may appear to human consciousness. in terms both of meaning and of boundaries. like the sliding signifier of the feminine. as boundary markers that secured rather than threatened the integrity of the normatively embodied subject. the monstrous speaks always both to radical otherness and to the always already other at the heart of identity. So long as we resist the temptation to stabilise otherness. inhuman. and forms a nuanced but consistent motif in my theorisation of what is at stake in our understanding of monstrosity.2 MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER Given the postEnlightenment organisation of knowledge into a series of binaries that structure both the relationships between external elements and between ourselves and the world. In his paper ‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous’ Canguilhem suggests that what gives value to the individual life may be both the maintenance of a protective bodily integrity. The transhistorical interest in teratology. Though my emphasis in this chapter is on the female body as a transgressive signifier. then. as Canguilhem puts it. What monstrosity demonstrates is the interior operation of the accidental that thwarts and limits sameness and repetition. nonetheless. that Canguilhem dismisses. not simply the possibility of the morphologically aberrant body that disrupts the boundaries of the normative subject. ‘on life’s ability to teach us order’ (1964: 27). and assigning it to binary difference. that is the counter-value to life’ (1964: 29). whatever the specifically ascribed meaning. but what it does seem to speak to is a deep and abiding unease with female embodiment. At the very simplest level. It is not. clear and distinct shapes as that which marks the contour of the body. but by fixing it within a network of degraded qualities. As he observes: ‘It is monstrosity. has characteristically defined the monstrous as being intrinsically opposed to the familiar course of nature. astrological and popular forms. which has taken philosophical. It is. anthropological. and on the uncertain aetiology of monsters – a response that speaks to a more general anxiety about origins.MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER 29 meaning. both implicitly in relation to the masculine subject. of visible. is a highly complex one. The relationship between the monstrous body as other and the feminine as other. The monstrous. but it is one. that the disabled body on the one hand and the black body on the other are positioned in a similar relationship of threat to the putative norm. an affront to the expected that ‘throws doubt’. but rather that one way of stripping a putative threat of its danger is by pointing up not only its non-identity to the dominant standard. it is by no means the exclusive focus of normative anxiety. not death. then. then. but the being of any/body that signals difference. As Braidotti puts it. and indeed as monstrous. and indeed with the corporeal in general. the dissolution of the body and final negation of life by death might seem the greatest threat. And yet that precariousness of value is simultaneously the very thing which bestows value on the normative life in that it has resisted deformation and fulfilled the principle of generative resemblance. that is ‘the negation of the living by the non-viable’ (1964: 29). the monster is something beyond the normative. recognizable. for example. She is morphologically dubious’ (1994: 80). Although what counts as normative. Moreover. of a self that is constructed . Against such goods. what matters here is that those two concepts remain locked in a mutually constitutive relationship. and the relationship between maternal and foetal bodies. is a necessary signifier. that stands against the values associated with what we choose to call normality and that is a focus of normative anxiety. is always caught up in historically and culturally specific determinants. and the capacity to reproduce it over time. a matter of actual women or monsters standing in some simplistically oppositional relationship to men or to normatively embodied human beings. the woman’s body is ‘capable of defeating the notion of fixed bodily form. transhistorical horror and fascination with the monstrous seems to centre both on the disruption of the corporeal limits that supposedly mark out the human. a signifier that is of normality. There is no doubt. medical. then the overlaps between the feminine and the monstrous can be highly productive. the feminine. For all our cultural and technological sophistication. Although the main body of historical material that I go on to analyze in this chapter is concerned primarily with issues of pregnancy and childbirth. As Bram Dijkstra puts it in his study of the theme of the woman as vampire. Given their necessary reproductive access to male bodies. as I have indicated. and yet. and political prejudices converged during this period to make the sexual woman into one of the most terrifying human monsters of all time’ (1996: 253). sex was equated with a form of cannibalism in which the male was devoured post-coitally. accrued by right-living men. the supposedly excessively sexuate nature of women is an implicit assumption throughout. it was only the most superior and continent of men who could hope to achieve such a union. as a highly discursive category. . particularly in the spheres of sexuality and maternity. And even where maternity is seen as the salvation of potentially wayward women – as it was for much of the Victorian period and the early twentieth century – there is no guarantee that women’s social and familial recuperation is secure. both economic and bodily. have often represented both the best hopes and the worst fears of societies faced with an intuitive sense of their own instabilities and vulnerabilities. and the personal health and integrity of each individual man.3 The social context to which Dijkstra (1986. an ideological burden that explicitly associates women with danger. the disordered sexual desires that lay beneath the civilised veneer of every woman threatened both the future of the dominant race. in many contemporary and highly respected biological texts. and the racial other were highly intertwined – to their mutual and enduring detriment. For the rest. The apparent security of the binary self/non-self that guarantees the identity of the selfsame is irrevocably displaced by the necessity that the subject be defined by its excluded other. in western countries. sexual. ‘racial. we have inherited. that is nonetheless unstable. women represented a deadly threat in the struggle between the forces of progress and of primitivism. Given that an overall theme of my argument is that security is in any case an illusion. Like other women.30 EMBODYING THE MONSTER discursively against what it is not. mothers. In the light of the longstanding association of the feminine with disorder. As Dijkstra points out. whose monstrous appetites could drain the life from their victims. In popular culture women were widely represented as vampires or as predatory animals. Although a woman properly controlled and contained in a reproductive relationship in which she was otherwise passive was welcomed as the mother of race purity. Accordingly. Both women and non-white peoples were seen as regressive agents capable of dragging down white civilisation by feeding off the precious resources. in terms both of the irrational mind and the leaky body (Shildrick 1997). but it might be instructive nevertheless to look briefly at the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a period in western history when notions of the monstrous. the conflation of women with monsters should come as no surprise. 1996) refers was of course intellectually mediated by the doctrines of Social Darwinism which pitted the successful evolution of humanity – or more properly of the Aryan races – against the constant threat of degeneration to the lower forms of life figured in our animal past. it would be spurious to point to any one era above others as especially exemplary in this respect. The monstrosity of such creatures – and here they are unlike their racial counterparts such as the Jew who was represented as both animal-like and scheming – was that they were driven. the theme of the essential excessiveness of women can be traced like a leitmotif throughout western history. but actively and visibly deformed from within. the pregnant body is not one vulnerable to external threat. and more commonly today. not by malice. and by elision. women with (or better yet. and…other gaping-mouthed predators…were thus to become the most lasting cultural heritage of turn-of-the-century biological “science”’ (1996: 146).767b. there could be no guarantee of the repetition of masculinist ideals of selfsameness. cobras.4 Set against the more familiar and unthreatening parameters of feminine passivity. As I have already indicated. the propensity of the mother – herself an innately deviant model of humanity – to produce the monstrous marks the potency and . black panthers. In a tradition dating at least from the Pythagorean Table. but simply one specific way of attempting to represent the unrepresentable otherness that adheres to the same. and he famously identified the birth of female babies as the most common form of deformity (GA 728a 18. pregnancy.3. 1953: 401).MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER 31 ‘snake-bedecked women. nor of the paternal principle. lactation and such supposedly characteristic disorders as hysteria. in other words. human progeny was always subject to the threat of the maternal. of the law of resemblances. Women are out of control. the pregnant female body itself is always a trope of immense power in that it speaks to an inherent capacity to problematise the boundaries of self and other. The explicit Renaissance interest in ‘human’ monsters is no mere historical curiosity. an unaccountability beyond the grasp of instrumental consciousness. since in these cases Nature has…strayed from the generic type’ (GA 4. women themselves. the influence of Aristotle pervades western discourse. Whatever the manifest outcome at birth. Moreover. a more specific problem was that with women at the centre of the reproductive process. In particular. Certainly the standard of perfection was the ‘normal’ male body – but by that token the less-than-perfect was scarcely unnatural. the masculine has been associated with the limit. the feminine with the limitless. In less febrile terms. but by an uncontrollable and excessive desire for sexual expression and maternity. in which the father’s part was held to be the dominant factor. not least in his assertion that ‘anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way a monstrosity. where the latter implies a failure of the proper. anorexia and bulimia. 737a 27). And for many centuries. turning into) wolves. uncontained. monstrous. exemplify an indifference to limits evidenced by such everyday occurrences as menstruation. bats. perfection was never secured. paradigmatically. such that the proper order of paternal power was compromised. leaky: they are. in short. In a remarkable reversal of the accepted relationship of influence in reproduction. Women’s bodies. As the paradigmatic example of the other within the same. the anxiety provoked by the female body with its putative power to disrupt must alert us to the inadequacy of any attempt to confine corporeal difference to the place of the other. gorillas. pregnancy marks a monstrous insult to the order of the proper. unpredictable. so that despite an enduring belief during the Renaissance and early modern period in the generative privilege of the male seed. What was at stake was a failure. And insofar as Aristotle marked excess and deficiency more generally as conditions of moral failing.6 The woman herself would have none of it. and whether the convicted woman herself really believed her own claim. unjointed arms. the mother was accused by some of ‘having been guilty of some Practices both unnatural and unlawful’ (Sheldrake 1747: 314). held that the disordered thoughts and sensations experienced by a . Whether the supposedly eyewitness account of the newborn’s appearance is accurate. Later chapters will deal more extensively with present day issues. but casts doubt on the moral constitution of the subject. In 1735. but the strange apprehensions that her Sentence had put her under [and here’s the clincher] from the uncommon Creatures the Country to which she was sentenced might bring to her Sight.5 In it he recounted how a pregnant woman named Elizabeth Spencer. As a result of this ‘strange production’. These odd Ideas that she had formed to herself. reputedly having two noses. and only the rudiments of feet joined directly to the lower part of the body. in citing her prospective fear of Australian animals. As Sheldrake notes. and offered an alternative explanation that would have found equal favour with both Maubray and Culpeper. that had occasioned so great a Change from the natural Form the Child might otherwise have had. having been sentenced at Norwich Assizes to transportation to Australia for shoplifting. which according to the popular and roughly contemporaneous midwifery manuals of John Maubray (1724) or Nicholas Culpeper (1762) might mean anything from ‘commixture of humane with brutal seed’ to copulation during menstruation. ontological impropriety. or maternal impressions as it was more often known. The concept of maternal imagination. we have no way of knowing. What is certain is that Sheldrake’s audience of learned men would be fully familiar with the historical precedents and contemporary arguments that apparently allowed to pregnant women a remarkable influence over the plasticity of their infants. the mother appealed – although Sheldrake does not use the term – to the much debated and controversial notion of maternal imagination. were all and the only Thing. the traditional characterisation of monstrosity in terms of excess. or was simply acting expediently. (1747: 314) In other words. but an improper being. one Timothy Sheldrake submitted a report to the Royal Society of London. and the link with the feminine – form a shifting epistemological pattern that is as likely to emerge in our contemporary society’s response to disabled people as it is in periods when the concept of the monstrous was uncritically applied to a range of bodily differences. lack of resemblance.32 EMBODYING THE MONSTER danger of unbridled female imagination. The disordered body is not merely an affront to form. successfully utilised the not uncommon ploy of ‘pleading her belly’ and was given respite until her baby should be delivered. deficiency or displacement suggests not only bodily imperfection. and indeed with much informed medical and lay opinion of the eighteenth century. no lower limbs. Spencer: said that she knew nothing that could give any Change to the natural Form of this creature. All these elements – corporeal disorganisation. Sadly the resultant infant was born congenitally deformed. but for now I want to turn specifically to the historical belief in monstrous imagination which draws together many of the themes that I have been outlining. in context. As a historical event. the archivist of the Royal Society possibly edited the story. for example. denote a simple craving for strawberries on the part of the pregnant woman. The brief story of Elizabeth Spencer’s travails serves well as an example. constitutes all scientific knowledge. the psychic attribute of imagination itself. The issue of truth must remain undecidable. and a close reading of relevant material of earlier centuries. And where Foucault displays a certain indifference to gender concerns. These might be anything from the relatively common and insignificant incidence of scarlet birthmarks to the grossly disordered morphology of what were known as monstrous births. relies at every stage on differential discursive and narrative strategies. was marked by corresponding signs. Although other explanations were available. and I have certainly chosen to recall those parts which best illustrate my purpose – not to mention my selection of that account above many others to hand. The mother had good reason to muster sympathy. At its height. I have already outlined in Chapter 1 my wish to read history against its constative content. enthusiasm for the notion of maternal imagination corresponded with a period in western Europe roughly between the late sixteenth and first half of the eighteenth century. More importantly. however. And where the former might. resists authentication from the very start. Moreover. simply because Timothy Sheldrake is a close namesake of my own. the way in which the elements of the tale might be retold subsequently by readers of my own present reiteration signals an equally open-ended future process. However extraordinary it may appear now. a country lay-person may have embellished to impress the members of a metropolitan learned society. it was. power and desire which.MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER 33 prospective mother during pregnancy were somehow transmitted to her foetus such that at birth the child’s body. The point of my enquiry. cannot alone settle the question of significance. almost any sort of neonatal nonconformity.7 No less importantly. what is at stake. as Foucault asserts. or generation as it was more properly known. when there was great speculative interest but very little firm understanding of the processes of reproduction. is not to fix a moment of progressive medical developmental history – I shall resist the simplistic assertion that the concept of maternal imagination was either bad science or misguided folk belief – but in part to investigate an epistemic model very different to our own. the latter were taken as evidence of far more dangerous and disruptive passions. however. what interests me is that network of truth. and even more the form of its putative cause. The process of dismantling the Chinese-boxlike structure of the account may clarify the process of history making. but it cannot uncover an ultimate referent. and to open it up to a fully discursive contextuality not limited to a moment of original production. . both historical and contemporary. corporeal or mental. the content of the monstrous birth. and sometimes its mind. a belief fully consonant with other prevailing forms of knowledge. though necessary. I shall draw out in particular the implications for sexual difference. could be attributed to the power of female imagination which seemed to offer a plausible explanation for anomalous births without recourse to divine or supernatural causes. in terms of the specific set of beliefs under consideration. From a late modernist perspective rooted in the episteme of scientific rationality. but Hippocrates saves her by pointing out the imaginative effect of a portrait of a Moor that was hung over her bed. accounts of generation and foetal development. ‘Nature always tries to create its own likeness’ (1982: 62). such that in the sixteenth century Ambroise Paré. nevertheless for its adherents it was taken to mark. As Jacob puts it: ‘generation…was to some degree. at a similar scientific level of hypothesis. text-based. Paré recounts a father’s explanation for the birth of a frog-faced child: . who attempted to bridge the gap between a simple listing of the unusual and fabulous and a more organised enquiry. any understanding of the widespread popularity of maternal imagination as an explanatory model for birth defects in the early modern period must relate in part to a broader intellectual history. The most famous example. Although the reasons cited for the occurrence of monstrosity varied over subsequent ages. and which is widely recirculated throughout the next two centuries. for the Christian world at least. independent of any other creation. On Monsters and Marvels. but. In his 1573 text. had been.34 EMBODYING THE MONSTER With these provisos in mind. was the practising surgeon. the first chapter ‘On the Causes of Monsters’ lists thirteen such possibilities. concerns a child ‘black as a Moor’ born to a white-skinned royal couple. but as the result of a mysterious mechanism that was subject to the intervention of divine power. replication was not seen as a necessity of nature. Through the ubiquitous influence of Aristotle in particular. a unique isolated event. On the other hand. the effect of assaults on the mother’s body or her own physical inadequacy – too narrow a womb or an inappropriate posture during pregnancy – which might reasonably account for deformity. often very self-consciously. for example. and the hitherto shadowy idea of maternal impressions re-emerges in authoritative texts. as with all the possible causes.8 It is not until the mid-sixteenth century that alternative explanations begin to gain ground. existent texts indicate that the naturalism favoured by Aristotle was. largely overridden by the belief in divine and supernatural intervention. which Paré claims to have taken from Hippocrates. the text asserts equally that either God or demons may have intervened in the natural process. could confidently insist. One influential writer on the subject. up until the seventeenth century. and especially the rule of generative resemblance – the expectation that like would produce like – were widely accepted as the basis for knowledge of the reproductive process. Paré goes on to devote a short chapter to examples. The development of biological knowledge. and. The explanation of the effect of imagination is also explicitly cited. an assertion of the primacy of the male seed. in time. making no distinction between types. The princess not surprisingly is accused of adultery. a move towards more naturalistic. Ambroise Paré. largely divorced from contemporary empirical enquiry and reliant on the Church fathers or ancient Greek and Roman writers for its ultimate authority. as a subdivision of what was called natural philosophy. rather like the production of a work of art’ (1989: 19). Nonetheless. In another example from his own century. On the one hand it proposes some accidental abnormality of the male seed – too much or too little is equally problematic – or. the turn to maternal imagination may seem no better founded than the appeal to God’s will. even scientific. I shall turn to the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche. Writing a hundred years later than Paré. Malebranche expands on and analyses the concept in a way that clearly marks it as a product of an emergent Enlightenment scientism. As he puts it: . For a more closely argued exposition of the cause and effect phenomenon. to the ende she might marre the fruite of women with childe. one of her neighbours advised as a cure that she should take a live frog in her hand. for Malebranche and many of his contemporaries. (1982: 37) The constant retelling of such stories. so-called wonder books in circulation which dealt with miraculous and monstrous births. Aristotle. As a follower of Descartes. That such explanations were not simply retrospective. made a living by showing herself from door to door. Paré’s text was by no means the first to emphasise the power of imagination. but was eventually ‘chased through the Duchie of Bavarie. who was ill of a fever. albeit within the ultimate context of divine will. thus this monster…was born by virtue of her imaginings. The crucial factor that regulated imagination within the appropriate confines was judgement. while at the same time attributing to it the capacity to transmute sense impressions into the ideational content of the incorporeal mind. during which time exemplary accounts of maternal impressions had burgeoned. what counts as a rational explanation relies on the ascription of a certain irrationality to women. is evident in Fenton’s contemporaneous account of a two-headed woman who. It should not be supposed that imagination was inherently negative in its effects. The Search after Truth (1980 [1674]). rather that its supposed function of mediating between the materiality of the natural world and abstract thought could shift dangerously out of control. but with the emphasis now on rational explanation. the ability to order thought rationally. but to explain the mechanical workings of the human body. the question of imagination in general and its dangerous implications is given full consideration. or the Bible. And paradoxically. The mind/body split authorised by Descartes and taken up by Malebranche at once positioned imagination in its ‘naive’ form on the side of the corporeal senses. but what is somewhat different to the existing tradition is that he places maternal imagination among the mechanical rather than supernatural causes of monstrosity. or the insistence that the author or other respectable figures had seen the case with their own eyes were constant features of both serious texts and the many popular. for the apprehension which remaineth in the imagination of the figure of this monstrous Woman’ (1569: 135). he says. As before there is the same anxious desire to find reasons for human abnormalities.MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER 35 he thought that it occurred when his wife. but gave rise to proscriptive behaviour. and nor did he attempt to explain how such a corporeal process might actually work in the body. the appeal to classical authorities such as Hippocrates. imagination was regarded with suspicion as a faculty that might frustrate the proper distinction between mind and body. the imagination is an especial characteristic of all women that confounds the rationality of clear and distinct ideas. Where earlier writers had presented the dangerous power of imagination as being as it were accidentally stimulated in pregnant women. her and her husband embraced and she conceived. In Malebranche’s major work. Nonetheless. Malebranche is concerned not only to describe. and this is what gives them great understanding of everything that strikes the senses…but they are normally incapable of penetrating to truths that are slightly difficult to discover…the style and not the reality of things suffices to occupy their minds to capacity. Women are essentially irrational. need not be excited by a real occurrence for maternal impressions to leave their mark. The monstrous signifier effaces the father as that which should be rightfully signified. the ideal of masculinity. A mere image – Malebranche mentions a child born resembling St Pius after his mother had gazed too closely on a portrait of the saint – is sufficient to produce the trace of a trace. In other words. What has passed between mother and child then is both a mental affect. unable to maintain a proper distance between subject and object. For all the strangeness of such material. the rationalism of the explanation cannot fully recoup the irruption of the undecidable within the principle of life itself. (1980: 130) In the light of this intellectual shortcoming in women. provides a plausible answer to the puzzle of monstrous birth. In admitting that an absent object – represented only by an image in the mother’s mind – can be inscribed as a trace on the body of the foetus. subsequently gave birth to a child ‘who was born mad. reflective. Nonetheless. whether of terror or desire. whereby the woman’s animal spirits have passed in physical imitation of the broken body of the executed man into that of the foetus. the belief in maternal impressions – ‘that mothers are capable of imprinting in their unborn children all the same sensations by which they themselves are affected. Whilst the capacity of women to transmit impressions. during her pregnancy. both mental and physical. Nonetheless. the intellectual underpinnings of Malebranche’s accounts are the familiar gendered motifs of the early modern period. whereby the mother’s ‘compassionate imagination’ has been so disturbed that it has produced madness in the womb. and all the same passions by which they are agitated’ (1980: 113) – both mirrors and produces a complex of ideas about sexual difference. to their unborn children. Now it might be supposed that the very idea that paternal influence could be so easily interrupted . and whose body was broken in the same places in which those of criminals are broken’ (1980: 115). detached figure of the male philosopher. there is more to Malebranche’s exposition than the operation of masculinist power/knowledge. In illustration of his thesis Malebranche offers his famous example of a Parisian woman who having witnessed. rooted in a determinate bodyliness. then for the child still in the womb. and into a masculine fear of women’s procreative power. In theorising just how anomalous birth markings might occur. and not fully agents of their own will. The contrast with the rational. could not be clearer. ‘the delicacy of the fibers of their flesh being infinitely greater than that of women and children. reference to the primacy of the male principle is overwritten. and the representation of an actual sight. the flow of spirits is bound to produce…considerable changes in them’ (1980: 115). as with Paré’s examples. it also plays right into a deep-seated human anxiety about proper paternal origins. Malebranche again surmises a physicalist explanation. Given that delicate people are more susceptible to ‘compassionate imagination’ than robust ones. the violent passions of a woman. the horrific sight of a criminal executed on the wheel.36 EMBODYING THE MONSTER (the) delicacy of the brain fibers is usually found in women. but what they testified to was not the power of women. for one hardly takes their proposals seriously’ (1980: 131). traditional explanatory models would have pointed to a case of actual bestiality. As Huet goes on to show. appearances as such are a dangerous source of error. But even at the height of philosophical. At very least the superiority of the masculinist mind is in tension with its vulnerability. In more popular texts at least. any being (the mother) engenders’ (Huet 1993: 55). he says. Malebranche retreats from the disturbing implications by an equal insistence both that most afflicted foetuses die in the womb (1980: 116). we may sense perhaps an unease that relates not simply to women’s role in generation. In. the corruption of not just the monstrous body. or even more radically that. truth could be manifest only in abstract ideas which are. and ultimately for Malebranche at least. male superiority could be partially retrenched. as MarieHélène Huet puts it in her book Monstrous Imagination. ‘there must be very few children whose minds are not distorted in some way. but their inherent weakness. feminine imagination gives material expression to the hidden desires and passions of women that threaten always to corrupt. for example. popular lay and medical support for the notion of such an effect. the mind of God is the source of abstract truth. but to their very sexuality.MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER 37 by a quality of the mother would position the concept of maternal imagination as a rare acknowledgment of female power. ‘(t)he monster is thus a maternal language’ (1993: 53). And the resultant monstrous creation testifies to the failure of the pure mind to master the body. an appeal to the imaginative power of an image alone could be used to provide an ‘innocent’ rationalisation. Without the mediation of critical judgment of the type that a man might exercise. the reason was the mother’s predilection for a painting . and that in any case at birth. but ‘to a lesser degree. the significance of maternal impressions is less easily dismissed. for what is surely at stake in the excessive imagination of women is. the incident of a girl born ‘furry as a bear’. incomprehensible to women (Malebranche 1980: 130). The threat of monstrous births was a real and disturbing danger. While the rational masculine mind. it is not the case that women are looked on with new respect. Although a woman might be caught out in her hidden infidelities by the unexpected or abnormal appearance of her child. It is as though the full import of his own thesis is too anxiety-provoking. Having admitted that as a result of women’s weakness. all but the strongest maternal passions will be overridden by the child’s own direct impressions (1980: 120). in the intellectual circles of the early modern period at least. As Malebranche himself makes clear. and who are not dominated by some passion’ (1980: 119). But while Malebranche reassures his readers in general that since women ‘are not involved in seeking truth…their errors do not sustain much prejudice. Indeed what maternal impressions signal is precisely that feminine propensity which fails to distinguish between mere appearance and the deeper abstract ideas that an image represents. Despite the attempts by Malebranche to neutralise the implications of maternal imagination. but for Paré and the others who remarked on it. the potential of foetal markings equally to reveal and to conceal the exercise of a mother’s unregulated sexual desire is a matter of both serious and ribald discussion. as Huet suggests. in his much reprinted tracts of the late seventeenth century. Nonetheless. upon the tender Body of the Infant she was then conceiving. and all the Characteristics of the Soul. there is. transhistorical source of masculinist anxiety. but rather that what is not said – like the absent objects of maternal admiration – leaves its own trace in the texts. actually absent. to a this or a that which one supposes to be identical to themselves. not simply to explain away the failure of an infant to resemble its rightful father. As Venette notes. and more generally virtual archives)? (Derrida 1995a: 64) Should we not be alerted. then. she prints the Features of the Body. for. by thinking always on her Husband. with sublimation and repression…no hint of the Freudian notion of sex as the secret spring of everything’ (Porter 1984: 238). as Roy Porter somewhat disingenuously remarks of Venette. (Venette 1712: 303)9 In short. by concentrating instead on the conundrum of the potential clash between a putative female capacity and the existence of a divinely ordered generative process? And if God is representative of the male principle par excellence. an errant woman might use the supposed power of maternal imagination. the operation of maternal imagination opened up a chasm in which. as Venette astutely recognised. Not surprisingly. might we not say that the strategy is precisely one of repression and sublimation? In the decades following the publication of Malebranche’s book. in matters of sexuality. no woman was above suspicion. our contemporary reading has much to gain from the gaps and silences. was concerned among other things to address the juridical issue of filiation. actually present. the implications of maternal imagination were thus doubly disturbing. the possibility that accusations of adultery and the like might be circumvented was quickly noted by writers such as Nicolas Venette who. if not relying on classical norms (presence/absence of literal and explicit reference to this or to that.10 the debate around maternal imagination became ever more intense. if they are not simply present. an endless. As Derrida puts it in a slightly different context: How does one prove in general an absence of archive. as Marie-Hélène Huet notes. which went through five editions in the mid-eighteenth century alone. take into account unconscious. It was not of course an isolated concern. but was usually tied in with changing knowledge of other aspects of generation.and anti-imaginationists. the in-betweens that fundamentally undermine the binary divisions that supposedly characterise the debate between pro. to the fact that with respect to desire more scholarly speculation managed the issue by avoidance. in the western world. and why not. It is not of course that one is able to pinpoint direct and unequivocal evidence of such fears of sexual otherness. and simply absent. when in the Arms of her Lover. how can one not. The real danger was that the gap between truth and appearance could be critically undermined.38 EMBODYING THE MONSTER of John the Baptist in his animal skins. Embryology remained a highly speculative science with limited . Given that the question of female desire has been. Although populist texts frequently had a robust approach to the discussion of sexual mechanics. ‘no inkling of modern preoccupations…with unconscious desire. but equally to forestall altogether the tell-tale occurrence of such a lack of resemblance. any woman might easily have hidden adultery: for. of him she fixed her Thoughts on. Turner refers to the effect of the imagination as an undeniable fact. is that for those on both sides of the argument. I want to look at some of the issues in circulation through a brief consideration of the Turner–Blondel debate which raged for several years during the 1720–30s. and insists on the characteristically post-Cartesian separation of mind and body. and supports his claim with a wide variety of examples. but even after the invention of such instruments as the microscope. All that happened in intercourse was that an existent fully formed being was transferred to a growth environment. he believes. The advantage of microscopic examination was that it seemed to confirm expectation.MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER 39 technological resources. if the form of the foetal body was already given and fixed in advance? For some theorists. Both men were members of the College of Surgeons in London. and marks those mechanical processes as subservient to the exercise of an immaterial force set in motion by an unknowable Creator. Even so. But how could maternal imagination so radically alter foetal development. Turner is reluctant to relinquish entirely the older paradigm of divine intervention. and both could claim vocal support from other eminent scientists and philosophers. as he saw it. his rival. it is clear from his book and subsequent pamphlets that Turner rejected preformationism and is referring to a foetus ‘formed completely’ during an earlier stage of pregnancy. and to make large and bloody Wounds upon the Body of the Foetus. In contrast. such that profound discontinuities operate between such data and theoretical beliefs. but for many others – including Malebranche. from the operations of maternal imagination: which have had not only Power sufficient to pervert and disturb what the Ancients called the Plastick or formative Faculty…but to stamp its Characters. by mechanical processes which in effect transmit impressions between the maternal mind and the foetal body. What concerns us more. Prominent among these during the period in question was the doctrine of preformation which held that the embryo which grew in the womb was already present in all its parts as a minute animalcule either in the sperm.12 Although merely repeating received opinion in many respects. as Hartsoeker’s famous ‘drawn-from-life’ illustration of an animalcule within a spermatozoon shows (Hartsoeker 1694). the apparent incompatibility of the two theses was sufficient to support rejection of maternal imagination. conceived long since and formed completely. both strongly espouses preformation. however.11 and was subsequently continued by others. the input of more experimental data was read within existing meanings. Daniel Turner’s medical treatise on diseases of the skin – first published in 1714 and reprinted in the 1720s – was the proximate cause of the debate. pamphlets and letters. The subsequent changes in the womb are produced. or less commonly in the ovum. In it Turner devoted a chapter to the spots and marks of the skin which arose. to dismember and dislocate. Although no adequate explanation of causation is offered. many of whom were engaged in an energetic battle of claim and counterclaim conducted largely through the print media of books. James Blondel. who was a committed preformationist – there was no conflict. the gendered nature of the disruption that imaginationism seemed to suggest was a major point of contention. (Turner 1726: 169) Despite the somewhat misleading expression here. The tension between epistemic models operates then both between opposing . and subsisting. could almost be a direct response to Blondel. as ‘contrary to EXPERIENCE. Interestingly. which were pre-existent to conception.14 He nevertheless wants to stress the relative unimportance of the mother in the whole process. (1729: Preface. for . encased either in successive male seed or in the female ovary. Blondel’s insistence that a belief in preformation uniquely ruled out maternal imagination – whilst allowing multiple other insults to the godgiven form of the foetus – betrays unacknowledged concerns. or simply interrupted development. force or violence on the foetal body. XII Conception is independent on the Mother’s Will. or consent. for without them there arose the unacceptable prospect of a female capacity so powerful that it could undermine the purpose of the divine Creator himself. Given the undeniable reality of monstrous births. At first sight there seems much to commend Blondel’s arguments to modern eyes in that he not only sets out to disprove the ‘vulgar error’ of maternal imagination. As he puts it: ‘if [the mother] cannot make a determinate alteration in her own body. and Animals. however. Moreover. are from the beginning of the World. XIV The Foetus has a Sensation and a Circulation of the Blood independent on the Mother. why should we believe that she is able to do it in the Child?’ (1729: 97). with the reproductive capacities of women serving as the objectified ground of debate. from the creation of Adam and Eve. and ANATOMY’ (Blondel 1729: 5).)13 It is not only that Blondel is a preformationist. Alongside this appeal to reason. he puts forward fifteen propositions which include several unequivocal assertions: XI The Rudiments of all Plants.40 EMBODYING THE MONSTER scholars and within each man. asking: ‘By what means can the mother’s imagination on a sudden. and contrary to her inclination. What he categorically denies is that imagination alone has any such power. but for all his rationality. Blondel was perfectly at ease with other less threatening explanations of counter-action on the animalcule: accidents arising from the usual laws of motion.p. disease in the uterus. allows Blondel to explain some foetal deformity as a kind of wear and tear. his stated belief that ‘there’s not a single foetus at this time. by a determinate imagination. other preformationists used the imaginationist theory precisely to account for congenital anomalies. but has been successively in the ovary of 250 persons at least’ (1729: 141). These are clearly appealing arguments to a rationalist yet God-fearing audience. One learned paper by the French physician and experimentalist. but he supports the theory of emboitment which sees all living beings as having existed. perpetuated either by cheating parents or inept midwifery attendants. REASON. some explanatory model was indeed required. Despite his incredulity at such a thought. Accordingly. without her knowledge. n. Daniel de Superville. obliterate the lineaments of the foetus. Blondel points out both that most foetuses are subject to imagination without being marked or deformed – although he ignores Malebranche’s explanation. even since the creation of the world…?’ (1729: 111). but also concedes that some physical changes in the mother’s disposition – even if caused mentally – could affect the foetus. castigating the latter’s approach as ‘mere enthusiasm and bigotry’ (1729: 27) – and that the mothers of deformed children may deny any unusual passion during pregnancy. (1740: 310) As for how the passions of the mother are passed to the child. The point now. for example. but adds airily: ‘(I)t does not follow from thence. however. In a discussion in 1668 of a human-born hairy monster. [but] if not. It would seem to follow then that the progeny at conception must be unquestionably human and thus the possessor of an indestructible soul.’ Moreover. James Blondel. much of its capacity to do damage prospectively on a not yet existent embryo was dropped. was not simply ‘whether this creature was endowed with a human soul. That the status of women was central to the historical debate around maternal imagination is well supported by the archival texts. and certainly to their detriment. as always. and receive from the Mother a Humour. and provoking. . what became of the soul of the embryo. The issue. Superville admits ignorance. that the disordered and disturbed Imagination of Women often hurts the Infants’ (1740: 311). there was still uncertainty. and shift the responsibility for imperfection to a more credible source: ‘Daily observations demonstrate to us. Strangely. it is being played out with respect to the agency and corporeality of women. for one cannot deny. members of the Royal Society debated the power of maternal imagination. that we ought to reject as false all that our Reason cannot penetrate into. the underlying themes seem to be a desire either to point out the dreadful consequences of a putative female power. which by the Navel-string it remits to the Foetus…. but what is actually at stake remains perhaps unspoken. And. whose mother had seen an ape during the fifth month of pregnancy. Whatever the putative focus of the imaginationist debate. for though an infant at birth might be human in appearance and/or provenance. That the deformatory power of maternal impressions was a serious matter is evident in relation to the age-old question of the human soul. 86). but they could deny them salvation. there was no guarantee of a rational soul. the monster itself defies explanatory closure. 1. and on the accidents that might change or destroy it. about maternal imagination – both to supporters and detractors – and indeed about some other suspected naturalistic causes of monstrosity. while appealing to common sense. In answer to the assertion of foetal independence.Accordingly one may say. that those Whom God Almighty has endow’d…with an extraordinary Love and Tenderness for the Children. than to suppose. that the Foetus owes part of its Being to the Mother. such as an ill-formed womb (Maubray 1724) or accidental insults during pregnancy (Daniel de Superville 1740).MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER 41 it systematically refutes his arguments against maternal impressions while agreeing both on the origin of the foetus. many of the disputants – and they are almost invariably men – present their material as supportive of the feminine. and all that this implied in terms of baptism. that the Secundines are closely related to the Matrix. Although at the surface level on both sides. that was 5 months old?’ (Baldam 1738: Vol. the hypothesis of an active maternal–foetal link allows Superville to preserve the notion of an original perfection in all creation. Superville comments: this is ridiculous. or a Liquid. Not only then could mothers impart monstrous form to their offspring. As the concept of maternal imagination developed in the scientific discourse of the early modern period. however. was that the precipitating factor occurred post-conception. or to deny that such a power is possible. shows a lurking anxiety about what he sees as natural to women: What can be more scandalous. but an intrinsic lack of self-restraint that marked women as actively dangerous others. Both Turner and Blondel offered fairly circumspect practical advice on the care of mothers-to-be.p.) However. are frauds perpetrated by cruel mothers hoping to excite ‘Charity and Benevolence’(1727: 22). husbands and to intending mothers on how best to avoid the dreadful possibility of monstrous or deformed births. Both medical texts and those intended for lay consumption were. Above all it was the excessive appetites of women that were to be feared. which have taken effect. for even where a potentially damaging external event had occurred. since all such tend to impress a Depravity of Nature upon the Infant’s Mind. n. there was virtually no aspect of pregnant women’s lives which could be considered safe. maternal imagination worked like a ‘pre-Freudian fetal psychology’ in which ‘offspring visibilized concealed or surrogate passions on their surfaces…mottled by an alien pattern of interiority’ (1991: 313). Given that maternal impressions could be activated by anything from the pious contemplation of a saintly portrait to the terrifying sight of a murder or mutilation. somewhat vitiates his apparent defence of women’s god-given virtue. then. the issue of maternal imagination faded in medical . The Female Physician. do bread [sic] Monsters by the Wantonness of their Imagination? (1727: Preface. Passion. even a long Time before she came into the World’ (1729: 142). full of advice to doctors. while Blondel advised that expectant mothers should avoid fear and apprehension when faced with those sights that were thought to produce marks and deformities. As convincing new theories of reproduction began to emerge towards the end of the eighteenth century. But it was not only the mental and physical weakness of the female constitution that invoked the disordering of the foetal body. More direct disciplinary power is evident in the exhortations of John Maubray’s popular text. whose very nature could disrupt generative regularity. There is little doubt that such a burden did in fact exist. but the extent to which women were in need of policing and control. at least. as far as possible. from a longing for a particular food during pregnancy – shellfish was especially liable to produce horrendous facial features – to a hidden and lascivious desire for unnatural sex. and avoid entertaining too serious or melancholick Thoughts. the effect was characterised in general as a malign power which.42 EMBODYING THE MONSTER instead of answering the End they are made for. it was the woman’s over-indulgence of fear or pleasure that was at the root of subsequent problems. Blondel claims to remove from women both the unnecessary worry that accompanied pregnancy and the unjustified burden of guilt for deformities that were in reality ‘owing to remote Causes. with each counselling calm.15 In the face of Turner’s representation of his own argument as one for rightful recognition of the ‘Objects of our Admiration’ that demonstrate the power of the mother’s imagination (Turner 1730: 22). his later opinion that some monsters. and other Perturbations of Mind. It was not just a scientific understanding of the female body or of the mysterious process of generation that was at stake. As Barbara Stafford notes. in which he places on pregnant women the responsibility to ‘suppress all Anger. for if maternal impressions were acknowledged as real. and Deformity on its Body’ (Maubray 1724: 375–6). should be circumvented. Turner urged women to resist particular cravings and to avoid becoming frightened (1730: 137). precisely because they were in fact harmless (1727: 58). 18 It was not that the link between imagination and reproduction was wholly unacceptable.17 and long continued to rationalise an implicit fear of female interiority. moral. In both instances.16 Moreover. and a desire for mastery of. Although some writers recommended that women’s irrational desires should be acceded to in order to lessen the possible ill-effects on their foetuses. the evil scapegoat’ (1987: 98).19 As a moment of historical enquiry. accepted. In reflecting on the putative threat of imagination in the context of the early modern understanding of reproduction. And as late as 1792. although it was never convincingly resolved in either direction. and to ground demands for the close surveillance and regulation of women’s pregnancies. Whilst the power of imagination is widely. philosophical. What is evident throughout the debates is the operation of power/knowledge over. but that ‘they might. the Swiss theologian Lavater speculates on the potential eugenic implications of programming maternal imagination. However the links between maternal and foetal bodies are theorised. as a popular belief. then. and physiognomical revolutions’ through which each child has to pass. its power is not alone in defying the supposed immanence of the female body. What the Enlightenment debate around maternal imagination fixes is. never entirely neutral or innocent. in which a reading of the past is acknowledged as a matter of production rather than replication. in common with all discourse of either past or present. it remained strong. power and desire that mobilises all authoritative accounts – of which biomedical science is a prime example – raises complex . where like should produce like. intellectual. and certainly in many contexts since. The nexus of truth. postmodernist historians may be alert to the parallels with the unease which greets the overt exercise of a historical imagination. but that in the context of the feminine it ran the risk of spilling over into an uncontrollable and dangerous enthusiasm. be enabled to fix beforehand the principal epochs of the life of their children’ (1810: 186. male authors have widely used procreative metaphors to figure their own creativity. It is not only that an exact register of the incidents of pregnancy might enable women to ‘forsee the physiological. Indeed it is notable that during the period in question. All those processes of procreation which speak to change rather than to replication are similarly suspect. perhaps.MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER 43 and philosophical texts. the dangerously affective nature of women is deemed responsible for any corruption of the form of their offspring. and whether the place of the mother is seemingly empowered or degraded. my emphasis). Although the supposed operation of maternal imagination exemplifies a tangible point of crisis. but far from being a simple matter of descriptive interest. it is nevertheless seen as corruptive of the proper end of male generative sexuality/traditional historical research – a monstrous aberration that must be explained but not embraced. the more usual response was to impose some form of control. the procedures of reproduction insofar as they are the domain of an unstable other. ‘the insidious assimilation of the pregnant woman with an abnormal creature… the great culprit. it is. as Boucé claims. if reluctantly. a conservative desire for ideal reproduction is fundamentally challenged by the notion that undecidable forces are at work. the debate around maternal imagination remains fascinating both for its monstrous subject matter and for the richness of illustrative material. now assuming monstrous proportions’ (1990: 169). The aspiration to fix the uncertainties and to override the unruliness and excessiveness of women and their reproductive powers remains undiminished. what is at stake more fundamentally may be less variant. the capacity to confound definition all on their own that elicits normative anxiety. But the resulting increase in clinical intervention has both enhanced control in general and undermined it in specific instances. popular culture today plays out many of the anxieties associated with the female body and its monstrous (re)productivity. Would it be too incautious to suggest that the motivating anxieties that fuelled the controversy are with us still? In her Reith Lectures20 of the mid-1990s. I want finally in this chapter to look more closely at the inherent monstrosity of the maternal body. me is displaced by techniques such as cloning or simple lesbian parenthood? As Mary Ann Doane suggests: ‘(t)he story is no longer one of transgression and conflict with the father but of struggle with and against what seems to be an overwhelming extension of the category of the maternal. In particular. our predecessors were deeply concerned not just with the moral and indeed legal status of women. once the Oedipal scenario of daddy. the new reproductive technologies with their complication of the lines of paternity (and maternity) have opened up anew the horror of indeterminacy. I want then to bring my theme right back to the present by looking at a recent monster film that enjoyed high popularity. of disputed paternity. Behind the ‘facts’ of the issue. but that she is monstrous in herself. Marie-Hélène Huet (1993). and on cloning – all of them grounded on women’s bodies. and of the perfect child are hinged today on advance reproductive technologies. In turning away from the ‘natural’. Marina Warner was able to declare: ‘Ungoverned energy in the female always raises the issue of motherhood and the extent of maternal authority [and] fear that the natural bond excludes men and eludes their control’ (1994: 4). mommy. several feminist writers – Barbara Maria Stafford (1991). has taken on new forms with the advent of high-tech medicine. the fear of what goes on unseen in the recesses of the body may be relocated to uncertainty about origins and foundational narratives. In contrast to the unproblematised historical accounts of maternal imagination offered by Philip K. With this in mind. the attempt to regulate and normalise the body. which far exceeds a postnatal retrospective marking of error on the part of the mother. the symbolic order itself. Just as the narrative of maternal imagination occupied an earlier age. we may ask.44 EMBODYING THE MONSTER ethico-political and ontological questions. It is above all the very fecundity of the female. Wilson (1992) and Dudley Wilson (1993) for example. Julia Epstein (1995). though . the concepts of foetal independence. At the turn of the millennium. What. Rosi Braidotti (1996) – have speculated over and against received meanings. the dangerous nature of the feminine. but with questions of the aetiology of monsters. the disciplinary nature of the clinical encounter. on genetic engineering. It is not just that the mother is always capable of producing monstrosity. becomes of the Law of the Father. and when sperm and ovum may be processed prior to fertilisation. and the vulnerable boundaries of the human. Just at the moment when technological advances have enabled the extension of surveillance to the womb itself. Although the representations of female form and function are culturally specific. The band of humans. As I indicated before. Species is an altogether less knowing and sophisticated film than Alien. Sil displays a phallic worm-like writhing structure that complicates the boundaries not just of her putative humanity. giving the satisfied survivors a rare moment of reflection and the opportunity to pronounce the epithet: ‘She was half us. leaving the human pursuers to force their way through what amounts to the slime of amniotic/semiotic fluid. half something else. but that it threatens to interrupt difference – at least in its binary form – such that the comfortable otherness that secures the selfsame is lost. but of her femininity. her devastating drive to procreate serves to remind us that the reproductive identity of all women is similarly out of control. but for that reason its motivating anxieties are writ large. The same point is also taken up by Barbara Creed. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen puts it most pertinently: ‘Feminine and cultural others are monstrous enough by themselves in patriarchal society. Sil. all of whom have strictly normative appetites. Beneath her skin. What lies beyond the unproblematic horror of the absolute other is the far more risky perception that the monstrous may not be recognised as such. so too monsters are liminal creatures which cannot be transcribed within the binary. of how alien genes mixed with those of a human being produce a voracious. always out of place in the paradigms of sameness and difference. For the human males. but when they threaten to mingle.’ And it is precisely that ambiguity that lies at the heart of what makes the monstrous body transhistorically both so fascinating and so disturbing. the entire economy of desire comes under attack’ (1996: 15). whose corporeality threatens to overflow boundaries and engulf those things which should remain separate. standing in her way and intent on exterminating her threat. never be trusted. After much predictable carnage. as we have seen. of course. the vast uterine chambers of the mother alien’s lair. her monstrous offspring. the necessary locus of worship and disgust. though resemblance should.MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER 45 rather less critical success. the monster. Just as the feminine haunts the margins of western discourse. all reproduce the maternal as monstrous (Creed 1993: 18–20). what is directly at issue is the perception that Sil at very least resembles one of us. A similar move characterises the denouement of Species where Sil retreats to the sewers to give birth to. the female body just is monstrous in the western imagination. who outlines how in turn the inner space of the mother ship in which the alien lurks. comprise four men representing a variety of masculine stereotypes. Species (1995) is the story of a clinical experiment that goes wrong. Nonetheless. Moreover. literally to pro-ject. Her surface appearance is that of an attractive and nubile young woman. and whose abjection leaves always the trace within. for it is not so different after all. and the finale in which the escape capsule is ejected from the malevolent mother ship with explosive force. Far from the heterosexually desirable woman she appears to be. the AIDS era link between sex and . In Doane’s reading of the film Alien (1979) the monstrous feminine merges with the environment such that the space of the narrative is the space of the maternal body itself (Doane 1990). Sil is rather the feminine principle in its archaic and repressed role of the phallic mother. female-identified monster whose sole aim is to mate and reproduce. It is not that the monster represents the threat of difference. and some impressive bodily transformations. and a token woman. is eventually hunted down and destroyed. only for the other within to re-emerge. The extent to which we feel it is necessary to defend our investment in the sovereign self is a measure surely of an unacknowledged apprehension that it is always too late: the other is already half us. It is not only pregnant women who confuse the boundaries of the selfsame. Significantly. the move has been to effect strategies of exclusion and vilification that deny full humanity to those who are ostensibly different. The Law of the Father is recuperated. and in threatening to merge strikes at the patriarchal economy of desire. the external threat of the absolute other is vitiated. disintegrates before the power of the phallus. of the maternal body that ‘disturbs identity. With Sil’s extinction. that is. that fails to respect ‘borders. both in its potential dependency and in its loss of morphological boundaries. rules’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). blasted by the gun-toting male.21 Moreover. the location then of an inherent ambiguity. the fear of the loss of differentiation between self and other. she exceeds instantiation as the absolute other. The monstrous feminine frustrates distinction. as the conventions of the genre and of a more nuanced understanding of monstrosity make clear. is far too simple to effect closure. reaches its climax when Dan – whose previous face to face encounter with Sil is protected by the speech act of separation: ‘It’s you’ – risks immersion in the metaphorical amniotic fluid. the threat of Sil eludes corporeal boundaries. The complicity of the normal and abnormal. But that. What is at stake is that the normative claim to self-present autonomy and bodily distinction should be sustained against the putative threat of any being that represents the self as intrinsically insecure or unstable. the bond between the mother and child in the semiotic is monstrous in its refusal of the separations demanded by the paternal order (1982: 72). It is a moment of recognition of what is repressed.46 EMBODYING THE MONSTER death is fairly explicit – ‘What about protection?’ gasps one just before he is overwhelmed by the monstrous embrace – but it is not sex itself that obliterates the boundaries of selfhood. Despite her sometime human form. the pure and the impure. the impossibility of holding apart distinct categories of self and other is the omnipresent condition of being. vulnerable. The final gunshot cannot resolve the complicity of the identity and separation that typifies the maternal space. and more particularly the monstrous mother. and in opening up to an alarming and engulfing viscosity beneath the skin. The assignation of the term to all those who are devalued in western society speaks to a determination to hold in place a precarious system of binary difference that is always undermined by différance. and the monstrous mother. . but the limitless fecundity of the maternal presence. system and order’. In the final sewer scene. inside and outside. For Kristeva. has figured an anxiety about the disorganisation of the embodied self. male and female. mother and child. Where the monstrous other. Her splattered remains produce a tasty snack for a sewer rat which instantly begins its own process of monstrous metamorphosis. and above all the self and the other. the apparent ‘happy ending’ of the film where Dan’s bodily autonomy is restored relies on a rebirthing scene in which the remaining patriarchal couple haul Dan out of the by now flaming slime to take his place as part of the Oedipal triad. as Kristeva makes clear. is a theme that must haunt any postconventional understanding of the monstrous. of the Kristevan abject. the abject is centred on the maternal body as simultaneously the origin of life and the site of insertion into mortality. positions. half something else. The task. is to take up the explicit challenge to normative categories of being and to reconceive the monstrous.MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER 47 It is not my purpose to suggest that the reading of the monstrous which I propose here is the only one or without risk. the occasion for a radical rearticulation of the symbolic horizon in which bodies come to matter’ (1993: 23). the anxieties generated by corporeal difference have most often resulted not simply in assimilation but in a violent policing of boundaries. then the encounter with the monster need not mark the place of external hazard. then. but rather the interruption of the dead-end of full presence. it is irreducibly an ethical project. both practically and metaphorically. As a move that speaks inevitably to the imperative to reformulate the relations of self and other. and may continue to do so. If the monstrous is indeed half us. ‘not only as an imaginary contestation…but as an enabling disruption. Moreover. . as would Butler I think. and the emergence of the imaginative and embodied complications within. the issue ‘is one of leaky boundaries. my purpose in this chapter is to investigate further the precarious place of the body. nothing has been taken away from my mind’ (1968: 164). exempt from the laws of natural science that determine the nature of the body. As the masculinist subject surveys his . What is at stake is not only the categorical integrity of bodies that matter. is an indivisible thinking substance. if a foot. In one major tradition. transcended. but also the hitherto taken for granted stability and autonomy of the singular human subject as the centre of the logos. women are the non-subject other. yet. is separated from my body. The human has been of interest then not as a biologically defined category. conventionally. unrepresented. the body itself is simply the mechanical housing of the subject. to which it is also supplemental in the Derridean sense. of a self that is foundational without being embodied. on that account. and as such may be bracketed out. the embodied. embedded in the structuration of the western logos. of course. the excluded. the confused and essentially fluid corporeality of monsters makes them an ideal location for an enquiry into the closure of both subjects and bodies that characterises modernist philosophical discourse. or an arm. vision and vitality. Against this. It is not. or any other part. both feminist scholarship and postmodernist philosophy have opened up afresh an interest in monstrous corporeality that moves far beyond a well-established clinical concern – where therapeutic modification is the major issue – to an altogether more discursive reading.3 THE SELF’S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY In order to shed more light on the predicament of the monstrous in western thought. transcended. of a sense of self as a continuing subject of its own experiences. and to bring it into relation with dominant conceptions of the self. and a body whose integrity is so unquestioned that it may be forgotten. but only to the extent that the term is elided with that of ‘person’ – the possessor. the monstrous. During the last few years. I will not rehearse here the by now well-known arguments identifying the subject of the western logos with the human male. the monstrous is somehow both excessive to and yet. that modernist philosophy has shown any great interest in the organic substantial body as such. in a Lockean formulation (Locke 1975). it is certain that. as I shall show. wherein the leakiness of the logos…is mirrored by the collapse of the human itself as a bounded being’ (Shildrick 1996: 1). Like the well-established configuration of matter and mother. As Descartes puts it in the Meditations: ‘although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body. in short. As I have suggested elsewhere. The mind.1 but will simply mark that insofar as their difference is specified. but rather in the human as the abstract universal marker of the site of foundational voice. There is too a related problem in that despite the nature of embodiment being a fundamental component of phenomenology. in being symbolically associated with the disruption of the subject. there is a sense in which embodiment. touching and listening – that the body is constituted as meaningful. It is what Drew Leder (1990) refers to as ‘the absent body’. in phenomenology abstract selfhood is seen as inseparable from material being-in-theworld. a sharp searing presence threatening the self ’ (1990: 91). it is broken – that is diseased. It is a model that calls for a radical rethinking of the concept of embodiment. but is constituted in the ‘organic relationship’ between the self and the world. the confirmation of his own wholeness and completion. The body is now perceived. Moreover. the finite material site of the bounded individual. More importantly. Above all it is in the application of corporeal schema – habitual ways of seeing. Although in our active relation to the world we remain open in principle to transformation. but is experienced as other. in other words. In consequence. and experience oneself and the world as such.THE SELF’S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY 49 world he sees only that which reflects his own self-presence. Once. runs the same risk of being ontologically devalued. I turn it without thought. As Leder puts it: ‘The body is no longer alien-asforgotten. the order of perception is from the first an interdependent relation between the perceiver and the perceived. The two are intertwined such that it is in the spatial and temporal extension of our bodies that we become our selves. Unlike the mind–body split effected by the Cartesian tradition. and between subject and object. In consequence. the status of the self as a sensible-sentient being collapses the rigid distinctions both between mind and body. and integral to our sense of self. As one alternative among the multiple histories of thinking ontology. As I read to the end of a page. but precisely as re-membered. for example. being seen as potentially monstrous. damaged or otherwise unwhole – the body forces itself into our consciousness and that comfortable absence is lost. Merleau-Ponty stresses the reversibility of every body as a visible-seer or tangible-toucher. the underlying question of what it is to be a subject. there is nonetheless a certain solidification of perception such that we can reflexively experience our embodied selves in more or less consistent ways. What matters is the practical competence in relation to our material context that enables us to act appropriately prior to conscious reflection or intent. which is perhaps more in keeping with our commonsense understanding of our embodied selves. there remains a breach between self and body to the extent that the latter can betray us as that which is beyond logic and reason. Yet. perception is no longer the inner representation of an outer world in the mind of a distinct perceiver. is scarcely experienced at all. in which the seeing ‘I’ is decentred. however. Even in the phenomenological tradition of Merleau-Ponty which stresses in particular the unity of matter and mind expressed through the dynamic being-in-the-world of bodies. as Merleau-Ponty (1962) understands it. and the point of interface with a social world. is addressed increasingly through a phenomenological approach. the healthy body – as I have analyzed in more detail elsewhere (Shildrick 1997) – far from being consistently present to us. even when our own bodies are taken as that of which we can be most certain. in phenomenology as it does in more conventional philosophies. the method nonetheless assumes as . what rarely happens – and then it is defined as a special type of madness – is that we should either inhabit the body of another. not the perception that another subject might occupy that body.50 EMBODYING THE MONSTER standard a ‘normal’ model of corporeal development.2 And while the narcissistic pleasure to be derived from perceiving our image from the outside. it is the unfamiliarity of the material body and the space it occupies that strikes us. to be ordered and discrete. marked differences in embodiment are seen a priori as deviations from a singular model rather than as equally valid alternatives. but as an-other way of being. Clearly there are many corporeal forms which signal an acute loss of previous bodily integrity and corresponding function. and finds it difficult to theorise from the grossly disordered body. negative comparison to a putative model of normality seems more a matter of disciplinary regulation and control than of pragmatic value. To be a self is above all to be distinguished from the other. it is not my intention to offer a phenomenological account. Although from time to time we may experience ourselves out-of-body. ageless and universalised body as the centre of lived experience. In other words. The question that haunts the western imagination – ‘Who am I?’ – and its implicit companion – ‘Where did I come from?’ – has been answered conventionally by reference to a sense of self having a transcendent detachment from the material business of the world. In short. But what if the focus were on the ‘abnormal’. Given that the western logos is at best ambivalent about the ontological status of the body. Moreover. but just as feminist phenomenologists such as Iris Marion Young (1990b) and Ros Diprose (1994) have moved to disrupt the assumption of a gender-neutral. may also evoke the sensation of strangeness and misrecognition. or find our own bodies shared – invaded we would say – by another. but it is precisely the mapping of the boundaries between singular selves and bodies and those of others that authorises our being-in-the-world as subjects. Self-identity may always and necessarily be a case of misrecognition as Lacan would say. so too we may gain further insights by theorising nonnormative morphology. the putative split between mind and body that it puts into play has . trauma or congenital disorders – but rather that the integrated and fully functioning body remains an implicit standard. though the integration of mind and body may be contested by a western discourse of transcendent subjectivity. or at least effective autonomy within it. The existence of monstrosity may serve to define by comparison and opposition the delimited corporeality and secure subjectivity of the majority. I don’t mean to suggest that the phenomenological perspective has not already figured prominently in staging the ontological and epistemological consequences of corporeal anomalies – be they the result of illness. the non-self. the inherent exclusivity of such a closure is marked. as I have noted already. not as a failure of form (inviting therapeutic modification). who defines himself against the other. but in the case of congenital conditions in particular. describes an intrinsically masculine subject. secure within the well-defined boundaries of the body rather than actually being the body. on the explicitly monstrous? At this point. most commonly in the mirror. there are few doubts as to which minds and bodies go together. by the realisation that the sovereign ‘I’. but what is important is the realisation that the standard is not normal but normative. is that normative discourse. To the extent that the western notion of subjectivity in general is both guaranteed and contested by those who do not. skin and scale. Accordingly. we are obsessed with bodies. What is more notable. Despite such a plethora of antithetical lived forms. indiscriminately transspecies in appearance. cleft palate. even intractable. the self-present subject who defines himself against all that is non-self need scarcely acknowledge his own corporeality. but are realised quite literally in the material of the body. One need only look at the many representations of the Monster of Cracow (Figure 3. Now those lines of separation are not merely symbolic. the disabled. the physically vulnerable. epistemology and ethics. then those who are ‘inappropriate/d others’ cannot occupy unproblematically the subject position. any compromise of the organic unity and self-completion of the skin may signal monstrosity. sets itself against such a blurring of distinctions and attempts to maintain physical and moral detachment from those for whom the boundaries of embodied selfhood are uncertain or plainly breached. is that the non-normative development of the surface phenomenon can be taken to denote. are all the result of a lack of material closure. but by an inhuman mix of fur. relations between self and body’ (Epstein 1995: 4). In terms of modernist ontology. the skin is both the limit of the embodied self and the site of potentially transgressive psychic investments. the ideal is beyond reach. while for a substantial minority who experience some form of corporeal breakdown or congenital anomaly. such that the desire to know oneself. In setting up a model of such invulnerability. . both in the present day and historically. in effect. Spina bifida. and autonomous.THE SELF’S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY 51 not resulted in disinterest in or disengagement from questions of corporeal being. however. horn. the ideal parameters of thought and action in the social world point to an inviolable self/body that is secure. for example. normative morphology that engages the greatest attention. in other words. however. but those bodily forms – the monstrous. Many fairly common congenital conditions are counted as deformities precisely because they breach the external margins of the body. then. What happens. it is inevitable that for all of us there is a struggle to maintain the necessary boundaries. It is not. In consequence. which is propelled by the notion of discrete and autonomous sites of being and agency. distinct. the congenitally different like conjoined twins or hermaphrodites3 – which most clearly challenge the distinctions both between mind and body and between body and body. involves always both the interface between singular bodies and the ‘difficult.1) – a sixteenth-century favourite displaying both excess and displacement – to appreciate how violently monstrosity might breach the borders of humanity. the more serious arising initially from the failure of the infolding primitive streak to establish ever new but securely consolidated boundaries in the increasingly complex organisation of the early embryo. and exomphalos. unproblematically occupy the subject position. The assumption is that if sovereign minds are housed in appropriate bodies. to establish identity. The human-born infant is beset not only with manifold excrescences which burst through the surface membrane. a far more significant disturbance to the structure of being. It is. closed. Contra Descartes. as the most visible boundary of all. indeed cannot. morphological difference continues to figure the monstrous. 52 EMBODYING THE MONSTER Figure 3.1 The Monster of Cracow in De monstrorum natura. and cats’ eyes under the navel (Bateman 1581: 337). Although it plays no part in the Cracow monster’s form. The attention given to the forms of the mouths. the creature being described as having apes’ faces instead of breasts. The emphasis on the points of exchange between inner and outer marks the creature’s monstrosity as a matter of being as much as of appearance. noses. As breaches in the body’s surfaces – points of vulnerability for us all – such sites. as with the Monster of Cracow. it is perhaps worthy of note that racial difference too has often been reduced to a focus on the sites of the body where there is an open intersection between inside and outside. Moreover. mark an uncertainty about the putatively self-contained human being. but I would suggest that even more is at stake. in their evident or supposed difference. toads’ feet. caussis et differentis (Licetus 1634) Moreover. to an eroticisation of the racial other. dogs’ heads at both elbows and knees. their contaminatory potential is clear. breasts and genitalia4 may well speak. . in its concentration on erogenous zones. the deformities constitute a multiplicity of additional orifices. or as a result of divine punishment for collective or individual sin. In Bateman’s account of the Monster of Cracow he makes clear that the creature is born to ‘honest and gentle’ parents. but rather that whatever other explanations and interests are predominant at any particular time and cultural location. As we have seen.THE SELF’S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY 53 That unusual bodily form has a long history of provoking fear. response of erasure. the very same characteristics by which Aristotle defines monstrosity. It is as though the characteristic split between mind and body that marks modernist discourse enables us to bracket out the lived materiality of the flesh. The disruption of corporeal integrity and the open display of bodily vulnerability is always a moment for anxiety and very often for hostility. In the case of AIDS in particular. The elision of ethical and physical affronts to the norms of human being has its roots in classical antiquity. The inference that people with disease or disabilities are morally at fault is clearly evident in the blame and stigma attached. And despite the partial turn in subsequent centuries towards more scientific forms of knowledge. Where disabled people in contemporary developed societies are. In his history of the monstrous races. more generally. and reminds the sixteenth-century viewers of the coming judgment of the Lord. there is nevertheless a persistent unease occasioned by corporeal difference. to cancer and subsequently to HIV/AIDS in the twentieth century (Sontag 1990). who is a monster. for example. especially when it threatens our sense of what Kristeva calls ‘the self ’s clean and . Given the highly negative historical value accorded the monstrous. morphological difference represented the corruption of the species either by miscegenation. If Aristotelian virtue is that which strikes the harmonious balance between the vices of excess and deficiency. thus allaying the suspicion of parental transgression. for medieval Christianity with its belief in human descent from the bodily perfection of the single progenitor. as well as individual. Friedman cites customary Roman Law which states: ‘A father shall immediately put to death a son recently born. or who has a form different from that of members of the human race’ (Friedman 1981: 179). then it is a simple step to corporeal disorder inviting moral condemnation. Adam. there does seem to be a continuous thread of anxiety. the monstrous birth has portentous value in that it warns of the general dangers of sin. speaks to the notion that those affected were paying for sins in their past. accorded all sorts of legal and social rights which overtly challenge discrimination against them. sometimes along with their mothers. I am not suggesting that those are the only responses. and indeed the institutional. rather than by full acknowledgment of them. while wonder books and broadside ballads give endless accounts of infants being destroyed at birth. those exist alongside a persistent belief that non-normative bodies of all kinds are marked by moral deficiency. for example. repugnance and frequently condemnation is widely evidenced in a variety of western texts. That such differences are more likely to be addressed by measures that are designed to minimise or cover over their effects. Nonetheless. does little to allay dis-ease. from which blameless heterosexuals were exempt. the term may be suppressed today as an explicit description whilst still functioning implicitly in relation to those whose bodies transgress normative standards. as I indicated in Chapter 1. the initial widespread public reception of the condition as figuring a gay plague. as a semimythological construct that stands in contradistinction to the ‘natural’ possibilities of the human body. beings whose difference is always already evident. Even the Monster of Cracow’s gross violation of external order. for example. In short. such congenital monstrosity – especially as it pertains to my later focus on conjoined twins – facilitates an understanding of the processes of normalisation that underpin the so-called natural body. then. rather than being simply an instance of otherness. Nonetheless.54 EMBODYING THE MONSTER proper body’ (1982: 71). as Bakhtin describes it. The basis of the image is the individual. nor yet of self-willed modification. For all that the monster may be cast as a figure vulnerable in its own right by reason of its own lack of fixed form and definition and its putative status as an outsider. the concept of corporeal modification implies reference to a biological given that might be denaturalised. as in the novel Geek Love (Dunn 1989). It remains a figure of both horror and fascination. the so-called normal and natural body – and particularly its smooth and closed up surface – always remains to be realised. what causes anxiety is that it threatens to expose the vulnerability at the heart of the ideal model of body/self. the normal body is materialised through a set of reiterative practices that speak to the instability and leakiness of the singular standard. then. is one of normalisation: ‘That which protrudes. strictly limited mass. Yet the divisions which operate between body and body and between mind and body are under pressure from the very liminality of the monster – in whatever form it might take – and by its refusal to stay in the place of the other. it should be recalled that techne is never absent from the construction of monsters. and indeed from bodies more generally. or moderated. but rather the very condition of life. its suturing together of surfaces that should remain apart. or of intentionally transgressive conjunctions and displacements of body parts. its excrescences and orifices that ‘lead […] beyond the body’s limited space or into the body’s depths’ (Bakhtin 1984: 318) cannot disguise its claim on the human. sprouts or branches off…is eliminated. or at very least to the notion of a standard morphology which might then be altered or transgressed. the result of accident. And as Kristeva (1982) makes clear. the impenetrable facade’ (1984: 320). the abject is never completely externalised: alongside their external manifestation. monsters constitute an undecidable absent presence at the heart of human being. The monster. bulges. Although we might think of the Monster of Cracow. As a model of the proper in which everything is in its place and the chaotic aspects of the natural are banished. The task. All orifices of the body are closed. But once such a standard of bodyliness is understood as an impossible ideal in itself – as something to be achieved rather than as a given – then it makes good sense to take the monstrous as the starting point rather than the end point of any enquiry . monsters leave a trace embedded within. degeneration or disease. As I understand it. hidden. but for the remainder of this chapter I want to look at the epistemological and ontological status of wholly organic. reminds us always of what must be abjected from the self’s clean and proper body. The monstrosity they evidence is not. In collapsing the distinctions between self and other. The monstrous may of course be the openly crafted result of techno-organic creation like Haraway’s cyborg (1990). unquestionably human. warts removed. that response is never unproblematic. or the breakdown of auto-immunity. noses are reshaped. both fulfil the necessary function of the binary opposite that confirms the normality and centrality of the accultured self. but there is already evident in historical texts an understanding that regular morphology could not be simply taken for granted. I shall be looking. Human monsters. albeit one fraught with anxieties. that ordinary body is not given. In short. which she defines as: ‘what disturbs identity. Thomas Bedford argued that what is demonstrated by ‘monstrous and misfeatured births’ is ‘that it is a singular mercy of God when the births of the womb are not misformed. however. rules. but is on the contrary a matter of managing – often clinically – what is inherently unruly. And in such cases. disabilities. That the standard may be achieved. the normal body is materialised through a set of reiterative practices that speak to the instability of the singular standard. It is a body that requires constant maintenance and/or modification to hold off the ever-present threat of disruption: extra digits are excised at birth. at the issue of body modification as an intervention into the always already unstable corpus. for example – is at least as much concerned with the restoration of normative forgetfulness. It is a process of normalisation. The construction and maintenance of the self’s clean and proper body is not. The clinical encounter. it is the unmodified body which is seen as unnatural. In the modern day we are less likely to attribute flawless morphology to God. though clearly that may be perceived as monstrous – as the metaphors of cancer and AIDS in particular make clear – but the ‘normal’ body itself. Although the monstrous may provoke both the fascination and horror accorded the absolute other. Writing in the seventeenth century. though putatively directed towards the relief of supposedly fragile bodies – those affected by viral illnesses. whereby what is intended is not the practice of transgression. that which is abjected is never completely externalised.). it is hardly the broken body that is fragile and vulnerable. but spills over into the anxiety and repulsion which is occasioned by the violation of internal order. then. the ambiguous. positions. but is fully imbricated with the discursive mechanisms that constitute psychic unity. It is. then. a matter of material practice alone. when they receive their fair and perfect feature’ (1635: n. system and order. in need of ‘corrective’ interventions.p. but we may well expect the gynaecologist or surgeon to eliminate or tidy up any defects which offend against the narrow canons of normality. in their failure to wholly and only occupy the place of the other that such monsters betray the fragility of the distinctions by which the human subject . by material intervention is of course highly dependent on levels of technological expertise developed during the last hundred years. Although the monstrosity of chronic disease or disability overtly undermines any notion of a securely embodied subject. but is always an achievement. Indeed.THE SELF’S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY 55 into the lived body. HRT prescribed. And as Kristeva makes clear. As I have indicated already. prosthetic limbs fitted. or at least approximated. the composite’ (1982: 4). then. the security of human being is unsettled constantly by what Kristeva calls the abject. tongues are shortened in Down’s Syndrome children. then. and at the same time threaten to disrupt that binary by being all too human. ‘healthy’ diets recommended. The in-between. What does not respect boundaries. 56 EMBODYING THE MONSTER is fixed and maintained as fully present to itself and autonomous. In collapsing the boundaries between self and other, monsters constitute an undecidable absent presence at the heart of human being. Alongside their external manifestation, they also leave a trace embedded within, that, in Derridean terms, operates as the signifier not of difference but of différance. What is at stake throughout is the risk of indifferentiation. In illustration of the operation and force of such theoretical considerations, I want to look specifically at a set of embodied forms which radically challenge normative standards of human selfhood. The phenomenon of conjoined twins has been recorded throughout history, and it is estimated that, even prior to the development of present day surgical techniques of separation, several hundred have lived to adulthood.5 As a thread that runs through the socio-history of monstrosity and teratology, the material manifestation of the body that is not one – whether as functioning adults or dying neonates – demands specific epistemological and ontological reflection in which the issue of the boundaries of subjecthood, and in earlier periods of a soul, is particularly acute. I will leave aside the very many recorded instances of the supposed conjunction of human and animal bodies, to concentrate on what remains to this day an area of deep-seated fascination. Unlike the hybrid variety which leaves room for a wholly exclusionary approach, the incidence of corporeal doubling in which both bodies are visibly human is highly disruptive to western notions of individual agency and personal identity. Rather than such twins being absolutely other to ourselves – and that response as I have indicated is in any case finally untenable – they are in effect the manifestation of the mirroring process that underlies and founds identity in the doubling of the selfsame (Lacan 1977a). Textual evidence suggests that conjoined twins have always counted among the monstrous, though their portentous value was sometimes positive rather than negative.6 Although most undoubtedly died at birth or soon after, they are often portrayed in archival texts as fully formed children or adults, thus throwing up not simply the urgent question of which twin has the soul, but also whether one or both should be considered autonomous persons. Medieval and early modern theologians adopted a kind of fail-safe with regard to baptism, which required the priest to baptise one, and then turn to the other head or body with the words: ‘If you are baptised, I do not baptise you, but if you are not yet baptised, I baptise you’ (quoted in Friedman 1981: 180). It remains unclear how great a degree of separation was required for the formula to be invoked, but the doubling of limbs alone was not sufficient. Excess is merely monstrous, whereas the conjunction of that which could and should be separate invites and requires discursive normalisation. The significance of morphology, and the relationship between the body and the subject is put centre stage by the wide range of forms that conjoined twins may take. The simplest from the point of view of understanding them as separate individuals are those whose bodies appear relatively self-complete externally, albeit joined by fleshy material and shared circulation, though they might also lack two complete sets of internal organs. The anomaly of conjunction is overridden in such cases by the commonsense judgement that in all other respects such twins are two autonomous beings. The famous nineteenth-century Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, for example, were indeed sufficiently independent of each other THE SELF’S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY 57 Figure 3.2 Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins, photographed in 1860 (Source unknown) to contract marriage to two sisters and for each to father several children. The conjunction of Chang and Eng was relatively simple, consisting of a five-inch band of cartilaginous material between their chests, with the liver as the only shared internal organ – although even that was not apparent until post-mortem examination (Figure 3.2). Although surgical intervention was considered and rejected as too dangerous, it is not surprising that they were each accorded full social and legal identity. Nonetheless, despite such strategies of normalisation, the unmodified corporeal excessiveness of the twins’ condition labelled them as freaks, who existed only as a unit, and they were frequently exhibited as such. The fascination for the viewing public, and for the wider media who followed Chang and Eng throughout their long life, was the simultaneous possibility of objectifying them as the monstrous other and identifying with them – in their role 58 EMBODYING THE MONSTER as upright American citizens – as the same. The twins themselves on the one hand endured conjunction and are known to have insisted on the semblance of autonomy, by maintaining two marital households for example, yet on the other they were so identified with one another that the idea of separation is said to have filled them with dread. The perception that separation is in the best interests of conjoined twins rests on the prior assumption that two distinct persons with distinct identities have, as it were, become trapped in a single morphology. Whatever the visual form, there is an overriding need to find distinctive selves. As Hillel Schwartz writes: ‘That it or he or she or they might be neither exactly one nor exactly two [is] too logically distressing or emotionally unsatisfying to be true’ (1996: 52). In the nonclinical sphere, even a writer as non-judgmental as Fiedler seems to concur with the common cultural anxiety of losing individuality. Of Chang and Eng he remarks, ‘nothing but death could deliver them from this lifelong bondage’ (1981: 217); and of Daisy and Violet Hilton, the conjoined vaudeville and film stars of the early twentieth century, ‘they remained slaves to each other to the end of their lives’ (1981: 209). Modern medicine wholly reflects such attitudes, and the issue of surgical intervention and modification is taken as settled in principle, and subject only to technical feasibility, as though there is nothing at stake except an inappropriate body. But what is not taken into account is the complex interrelationship of body and self, the phenomenological sense of being-in-the-world, in which corporeal extension is indivisible from subjecthood and identity. In short, there is no clear distinction to be made between corporeal exteriority and psychical interiority. Nonetheless, in western discourse, the evident privileging of singularity and autonomy implicitly premised on the bodily separation, and the value accorded bodily self-determination combine to erase any consideration that there might be other ways of being. I am not suggesting that conjoined twins, and others whose morphology defies normative categories of embodiment, should be denied personhood; rather it is the defining parameters of the self, still more of the subject, that are inadequate to embodied difference. Moreover, the question of identity, which is commonly taken to indicate what is the unique core of each person, may equally well express that which is the same. In any case, if, as Merleau-Ponty (1964) asserts, identity is realised only as the lived body is immersed in the lived bodies of others, then concorporation is scarcely hostile to that model. In contrast, the dominant discourse of the singular and bounded subject, together with the privileging of corporeal self-completion, where exclusive property rights in one’s own body stage the meeting with the other, enact a closure that suspends more open and ambiguous modes of existence. Though in the majority of cases the drive is to see conjoined twins as two persons, it might be more appropriate to say instead that the symbolic distinction between self and other that is taken to found identity in difference is deferred by the persistence of identification. For conjoined twins, the other-self is indivisible, not just as a facet of early infanthood, but as the very texture of experiential being. And where in general the Lacanian mirror stage marks ‘the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity’ (1977a: 4) and inaugurates an illusory corporeal integrity and singularity,7 for conjoined twins the undecidable other-self is and as the Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it: ‘(s)uch double malformations probably arise following the less than complete separation of the halves of the early embryo. however. and still less identity. or from partial separation at later stages’ (New Encyclopaedia Britannica 1992: 367).10 Clinical understanding is far from decisive. Burlingham herself is in no doubt that the twin relationship is every bit as important as the mother–child bond. Even though some of it may be scientifically dubious. without ever adequately addressing the issue of whether family-based pairs might produce different results. for example. For external observers. speaking together as one – and it should not be surprising that conjoined twins. in both types. the one consistent factor that overrides differences in morphology is the reiteration of their essential separateness. it is broadly cultural’ (1996: 61). nevertheless. What conjoined twins have in common with other monozygotic twins is not that they are visually identical. Mirror images are especially confusing to them. which followed the lives of three sets of identical twins in a wartime boarding nursery over a period of many months. is rigorous in its observation of behaviour. there is here and elsewhere plenty of evidence that monozygotic twins in general habitually blur the boundaries between one and the other – simultaneously thinking the same thoughts. for many are not. both modern historical and contemporary. an exceptional number of instances where an individual twin seems genuinely uncertain as to his or her own unique identity. the question with regard to all conjoined twins is rarely if they should be separated. making the same choices. with the evident difference that in that moment they may refuse identity in its symbolic sense and choose identification. The (mis)recognition of the mirror stage is in a sense the permanent condition of such twins. the incommon materiality of such twins disconcerts the discriminating gaze. but what is equally confusing is that they may. What this suggests to me is a difference between putative twins who remain anomalously joined at birth. all the twins are unable to cope with separation.THE SELF’S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY 59 figured in a very different kind of reflection. As Schwartz puts it: ‘The pressure to cleave them is not narrowly medical. and I have yet to see the implications of such specificity addressed. What is at stake with the latter case is perhaps even more ontologically disruptive than the former. The . Burlingham does record. In being separated from their mothers. Instead.8 Given that twin studies have often been notorious for their question-begging assertions of mental and behavioural coincidence which seem to point to some peculiar quasi-telepathic power. they should be approached with some caution.9 If being-in-the-world. Dorothy Burlingham’s psychoanalytically based study (1952). who share experiential being. but rather how and how soon. it seems highly likely that close siblings would forge substitute relationships with each other in which both intense love and hate formed a large part. Most telling of all is that despite episodes of intense anger and (self ) rejection. is not a given. but that they cannot be told apart. then might not a different morphology ground other ontological and ethical relationships between self and other? In non-autobiographical accounts of conjoined twins. and a putative singleton whose body has unfortunately begun to divide prenatally. do not make the separations that are commonly taken for granted. experience a kind of internal merging. can donate a living organ (a kidney) to her sister. he and the medical advisers could conceive of the twins’ lives only as being on hold until they were separated. The stress on such factors cannot but carry. In contradistinction to the acceptance shown by the girls’ mother who expresses her joy at seeing them laugh and play together. just as other children of their age might do. The father is quoted as saying: ‘We have made up our minds to look on the bright side and focus on having two lovely girls who will eventually lead normal separate lives’ (Guardian 11 October 1996: 5. I feel. my emphasis). A similar emphasis is evident in a recent television documentary entitled Separate Lives (BBC TV 1999). while a clearly unsympathetic reporter interprets the same behaviour as ‘involving struggle. and in the implicit allusion to the racialised chain of being that moves from apes through stooping black bodies to the upstanding white figure. When Nida fails to survive . each touching the other. but not to reflect on the phenomenological difference of such a body. So deeply is the ideal of corporeal and mental autonomy written into the western understanding of what it is to be a person. This is indeed a pertinent consideration. sparring away with their tiny hands’. but it is couched in the characteristically western terms of the ownership of body parts. as a child. the occasion for a spate of articles reviewing similar cases and looking at the prospects of the present pair. Ironically his desire to construct ‘normal functioning’ is spoken over shots of the twins playing happily with building bricks. who. Most telling of all were the attempts of the prospective parents to normalise the birth. Hira and Nida. In the absence of any real discussion of the ethical issues of separation surgery itself. are joined at the scalp in such a way that they are unable to stand upright. which raises the issue of whether the twins can be regarded as one or two. that any suggestion that the infants could function as a merged unit was swiftly rejected. for example. the major question that they must consider is the bioethical and legal one of whether Hira. the strain on the kidneys and the heart in ‘Hira’s’ body which are doing the work for both twins is sufficient in itself to justify surgical intervention. In the view of the medical specialists. Even a sympathetic observer such as the attending paediatric surgeon was constrained to find signs of independent personhood: ‘They are exploring each other. discomfort and distress for each half of this bizarre whole’ (Observer 17 October 1996: 12). we are told and shown. stripped as it were of their power to disrupt. the Canadian neurosurgeon who examines the twins treats them primarily as a clinical problem.60 EMBODYING THE MONSTER expected birth of conjoined twins in Manchester in 1996 was. As an audience we are implicitly invited to empathise with the professionals’ dilemma in their treatment of a perplexing vulnerability in the body of the other. which in turn evokes the Christian notion of the human being as ‘upright. and their father when he says ‘I see them as one life that God has given to two children’. erect’. Right from the beginning the commentary sets the tone with the assurance that ‘they had come halfway across the world…for the chance of a normal life’. however. Quite clearly. albeit one with an interwoven but unacknowledged value judgement: ‘There’s a possibility of cutting this into two normal children’ (my emphasis). and understandably. The programme focuses on a pair of Pakistani twins. certain racist overtones both in terms of the superior civilisation of the west. The voice-over suggestion that ‘although we value individuality. however. whose early childhood and subsequent separation features in two television documentaries shown initially in 1993 and 1995. clearly distinct from a more complex and contradictory understanding of what constitutes normality in the specific case of the twins. As they are not one. then they must become two. giving them just two legs and two functioning arms – with two other residual upper limb stumps having been already excised in the expectation of future separation surgery.11 I want now to look in greater detail at the story of the Irish conjoined twins. then. an other mode of being that defies the binary of sameness and difference into which medical intervention is designed to recuperate them. at least there is now one. the phenomenological and epistemological questions remain unexplored in the face of an overriding concern with the material risks of surgery. that there is any recognition that the concorporation of the twins might speak to new and more fluid forms of embodied subjectivity. They might prefer togetherness’ (Yorkshire Television 1993: Katie and Eilish: Siamese Twins) is. The clear implication is that where no properly constituted subject could exist in the unmodified twin body. The twins’ embodiment is. that Hira is thriving. the sense that being-in-the-world might imbricate with body and environment is not explored. Although at that moment the commentary may reveal an unresolved tension in our response to the normative operation of self and other. they might not value it. Katie and Eilish already operate as two ‘normal’ children. without any sense of doubt. but all other organs are single. Their successful negotiation of their environment largely depends on their acting as one. while for his part. and a reminder of what the normative regime of individuality must repudiate. The twins’ body is merged from the upper thoracic area. For the parents. the commentary reassures viewers. even in such small matters as unscrewing a bottle. a monstrous insult to the norms of human corporeality. I think. Katie and Eilish. the discrete subjectivities of the twins are already given and simply awaiting release. both a disturbing glimpse of other ways of being. The characteristic western split between mind and body is mirrored in the assumption of an existential normality that is merely obstructed by the abnormal morphology of the children. There are separate hearts and lungs.THE SELF’S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY 61 separation (‘her brain was not enough…to keep her alive as an individual’). The issue of corporeal normalisation. but rather that the ideal of the autonomous subject is contested by the twins’ concurrent and co-operative intentionality. its reflection of a nostalgia for togetherness does not challenge what we take to be a developmentally necessary split. Although both parents and doctors are sensitive to the implicitly ethical question of potentially disrupting the twins’ current contentment. It is not. to those who must decide their future. Following a visit to some ‘successfully’ . having individual personalities which they do much to encourage. Nonetheless. What is at stake throughout for both the parents and the medical team is how best to balance the risk of separation – and it is made clear that the twins’ degree of conjunction exceeds any in which surgical intervention has been previously attempted – with the normative desire that each should have a functionally autonomous existence. then. is. the consultant surgeon is constrained to stress that he cannot promise the twins a ‘normal’ life if they are separated. the splitting of her (subject) body has produced an effect somewhat akin to the phenomenon of the phantom limb. That implicit rewriting of the twin relationship as obstructive is reiterated in an interchange between Eilish and her sisters. she will think some part of her is being taken away. the doctor worries that in losing her first prosthesis.62 EMBODYING THE MONSTER separated conjoined twins. she does appear happy and talkative in the second documentary shot over the next two years. in recognition of the absent presence of her self/other. it remains undecidable whether they are one or two. are all properly caring and reflective12 – but to illustrate the power of ontological anxiety. the attempt to radically reconstruct their bodies speaks eloquently to the notions of closure and containment assumed to be at the heart of being. despite the four months spent in hospital post-operatively in which she is described as traumatised. the conventional understanding of the only proper form of subjectivity requires a clarity of boundaries between self and other. Eilish gets what she calls her ‘Katie kisses’. body modification must be continued throughout life: her prosthetic leg and body harness must be periodically replaced to ensure scopic normalisation. but although Eilish recovers. As Merleau-Ponty explains it. and a body that matters. The operation is undertaken with some real confidence. When asked what she remembers of her sister. In contrast. but even that observation is normalised in the remark that the ritual happens ‘in a healthy way. her social and physical recovery is a matter of relief. Despite the death of Katie. but it is evident too that for Eilish herself. and indeed. then. The phenomenological specificity of concorporate being-in-the-world is addressed by no adult in the films. At bedtime. The impossibility of the ideal is made clear. What is finally unacceptable about the twins is not the degree of their disability – and indeed it is uncertain that a successful outcome would have increased function – but the ambiguity of their concorporation. matters of procedure become paramount. she is realised as an intelligible subject. Against the corporeal excessiveness of Katie and Eilish. For her own part Eilish renames her new leg ‘Katie’.’ What matters to the family is that Eilish should be well adjusted. In fashioning Eilish’s body so that she may comply with normative ideals. the father of the twins is constrained to justify the operation by remarking on the surviving twin’s enhanced quality of life after separation: ‘She’s free of being joined to another human-being’ (Yorkshire Television 1995: Eilish: Life without Katie). only to be interrupted by an older sibling who declares: ‘Eilish couldn’t go wherever she wanted. It is ironic that although no-one seems able to articulate the real extent of Eilish’s corporeal disruption. an affective and effective autonomy that is fully realised only by singular embodiment. to experience such a phantom is to remain open . not in any way that is holding Eilish back’ (YTV 1995). Eilish replies: ‘She used to bring me round everywhere’. The point of turning to this often very moving narrative is not so much to critique the current medical practice – for in this case the participants. For all the discursive efforts to normalise their life in terms of assigning dual individuality. whether detached professionals or closest family. in the acknowledgment that for Eilish. Katie unexpectedly dies. For her parents. however. except perhaps in the psychologist’s halfrecognition that Katie is still incorporated into the life of her surviving twin. 13 When Teresa. albeit imaginary. it is the very subjection of the body to the forces of normalisation which enables the emergence of the subject herself. the other is also the self – a transgressive and indeterminate state in which corporeal.’ Katie both is and is not there. What separation surgery attempts then – aside from cases where it is medically indicated to preserve life – is a reconstitution of autonomous subjecthood as the only proper way of being in the world. paramount within the genre of Gothic monster fiction. of separation into self and other. The clarity of corporeal boundaries is what grounds existential and moral personhood. unacknowledged. It is a moment of semiotic confusion in which inner and outer are indistinguishable. precisely because of its imagined phenomenological unintelligibility must be intolerable’ (1996: 351). [pushes Teresa]. and is. The conjunction of two consciousnesses is characterised only in terms of a meeting of self and other. particularly in extreme instances. The appearances of the seventeenth-century Coloredo brothers – the . the elder sister. the other concerns the mirroring of heads on a singular body. a shifting body memory and continued inscription on the flesh of her twin. Of the cases of monstrous excess considered here. a severe disruption to the unified.14 But for conjoined twins. theoretical or material. Biomedicine in particular proceeds on the basis that any intervention into the materiality of the body can be divorced from the patient’s own sense of self and from her phenomenological engagement with the world. a source only of impediment or advantage to the subject. the response from Eilish is both confused and defiant: ‘So did I. The wound she experiences. I want finally to look briefly at other forms of concorporate twins whose monstrous bodies do not afford the contemplation. ‘She had freckles’. ‘an internal not an external danger that Gothic identifies and attempts to dispel’ (Halberstam 1995: 15). only that a somehow foundational subject – or rather two – is thwarted by a monstrous body. In non-literary sources. In a move that strongly calls to mind Foucault’s theorisation of assujettissement. And one might add. Judith Halberstam claims in her book Skin Shows. one is specifically called parasitic twinning where the very naming speaks to a putative insult to an ideal of bodily self-determination. says of Katie.15 In both instances the infants involved survived birth and lived for several years in a state of monstrosity. while the meeting with the other is premised on bodily self-determination and property rights in one’s own body. As Clark and Myser put it. the assumption is ‘that conjoined life. ontological and ultimately ethical boundaries are distorted and dissolved. so do I. properly mediated by contract or the calculation of individual best interests. bodies are both doubled and diminished. There is no sense here that corporeality might constitute the subject. intolerable to society rather than to the twins themselves. and meanings flow into one another. body map that founds the ego. I still do. although less radical modification may be possible.THE SELF’S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY 63 to the presence of what is lost (1962: 80–6). What these stories emphasise is a dominant postEnlightenment discourse in which our psychic investment in the corporeal is covered over by the illusion that the body is merely instrumental. the same concerns are in operation with regard to concorporation. The horror of losing one’s singular identity to a parasitic other is a powerful motif in monster narratives of all kinds. is as much psychical as material. What the trope of parasitism expresses is an ever present threat within. The following is an account from a pamphlet of 1640 referring to Lazarus. when he was killed. reputedly. the existence of so extraordinary a body raised worrying questions.3 Lazarus and John Baptista Coloredo from The Gentlemen’s Magazine (1777) wholly formed Lazarus.] as they have distinct lives. contemporary ballads and official documents (Figure 3. yet destitute of reason and understanding: whence methinks a disputable question might arise. who: from one of his sides hath a twin brother growing. (1640 A Certain Relation of the Hog-faced Gentlewoman quoted in Rollins 1927: 8) The second case was even more extraordinary. though having sence and feeling. the more so in that the child involved survived until he was four years old. which was borne with him. or have but one imparted betwixt them both. so they are possessed of two souls. and living still. Although for the most part they were viewed benignly as marvels.3). whether[. by . and his parasitic twin John Baptista – are extremely well documented in popular histories.64 EMBODYING THE MONSTER Figure 3. as it might have been in the past. except that the second head grew not from his neck but was attached upside down and back-to-front on the top of the child’s scalp (Figure 3. having well-formed facial features. not as the site of contested subjecthood. The significance of the craniopagus skull to the British scientific community of the day was not. As Evelleen Richards notes in her detailed analysis of that debate: . was fused where crown met crown and. having a complete partition between them’ (Home 1790).4).4 The Bengali Boy (Basire) from The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 80 (1790) a cobra bite. and a crop of hair. as a contemporary post-mortem report to the Royal Society put it. ears. The bone casing of the craniopagus skull. Nonetheless. but merely as an object of biomedical enquiry. and separate affect. an occasion for reflection on the notion of maternal imagination – though the initial report from the East India Company was clearly obliged to assert that the mother had suffered no fright or accident during her pregnancy – but rather as ammunition in a wholly medicalised controversy regarding the process of evolutionary development. the bodiless head during life was not in itself unusual in appearance. The so-called Bengali boy was born with two heads – not unusual within the context of conjoined twins. the anxiety that such an occurrence might be expected to generate was effaced by regarding the skull. as it was known. ‘the two brains were…separate and distinct.THE SELF’S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY 65 Figure 3. Moreover. Ears. In such cases. sweats. In her understanding of what she calls ‘political anatomy’ Richards is reluctant to pursue a Foucauldian deconstruction of what she sees as ‘concrete historical events’. posits a continuum of . however. and indeed each was baptised according to report. both internal and external. the Bengali boy is already singular. and moves. is there one subject or two?’ (1991: 34). which became and remains a prize exhibit in the Hunterian Museum. and had a little beating in the Breast. I want to return to those very questions. since he sleeps.Lazarus is of a just Stature. and sweats not…. and how does the monstrous corporeality of my examples imbricate with the sense of self? Where Liz Grosz. is that whereas the Coloredos are always referred to and named as two distinct people. For my own part. he had two Arms. and Ears. however. and. the exceptional case that secures the normative standard. 8. courteous Deportment. Although surgical intervention was not a possibility in either case. This little Brother voided no Excrements but by the Mouth. monsters were – as before – a primary ground for competing discourses. The widespread scientific interest excited by the craniopagus skull. Liz Grosz remarks: ‘it is no longer clear that there are two identities. So what type of subjectivity or identity could fit such a range of differences. The inherent confusion of embodied identity is apparent in William Turner’s depiction which describes first the ‘little brother’: his left foot alone hung downwards. indicates too that by the rationalist mideighteenth century. a decent Body. Contemporary descriptions of the Coloredo brothers often touch on such a point. but stripped now of questions of personal agency. If the issue of subjectivity or identity is at very least problematised in the indistinct corporeality of those conjoined twins with two relatively well-formed bodies. In her essay entitled ‘Freaks’. in her paper ‘Freaks’ (1991). like the distinctive affect of the two heads of the Bengali boy which Everard Home recorded. That the singularity of all subject bodies is similarly constructed and reiterated by regimes of normalisation that defer the slippage of excessive embodiment is obscured by the insistence that monstrosity is radically other. The question haunts the historical accounts of the cases I have mentioned. and is nourished by that which the greater takes: He has distinct Animal and Vital parts from the greater.66 EMBODYING THE MONSTER ‘historical monsters…may be understood at one and the same time both as anatomical objects and as the embodiments of different strategies of power’ (1994: 405). Nose. he covers the Body of his Brother with his Cloak: Nor could you think a Monster lay within at your first Discourse with him. even if the bodily functions of the parasitic twin occur independently of the will or awareness of the other. only three Fingers upon each Hand: Some appearance there was of the Secret Parts. or more remarkably where two heads append the same body. and gallantly Attired. he moved his Hands. 8) What marks a difference between the two cases. make frequent reference to the independent physical sensitivity of the parasitic body. and Lips. when the other wakes. then it is radically challenged by such incomplete instances of doubling. a discursive normalisation of the excessive subject has taken place. but nonetheless her account does point up the discursive construction of the meanings inscribed on the monstrous body. (Turner 1697: Chap. rests. Where monsters blatantly blur the parameters of being. The desire for full self-presence is. its very practice alerts us to the crisis at the boundaries of the body which is never one. As I understand it. and reflect our own ultimately insecure and unstable identities. to a non-differentiated. that underlines the instability of the ideal. And it is the move to forcibly impose the norm of one body/one mind. self-complete and individuated subject. might we not refigure it as an alternative. they invoke in us all – and this seems particularly true of the doubling of twinned bodies – both a nostalgia for identification and the horror of incorporation. Rather than attempting to recuperate the monstrous. and results only in a phantasmatic structure of subjectivity. I think. Though bodily modification may hope to avert the overtly transgressive. As Rosi Braidotti puts it: ‘the monstrous other is both liminal and structurally central to our perception of normal human subjectivity’ (1996: 141). It is the necessarily incomplete abjection of monstrosity that guards against the successful closure of what Derrida has called ‘an illegitimately delimited subject’ (1991b: 108). an alterity that throws doubt on the singularity of the human and signals other less restrictive possibilities? As such the monster might be the promising location of a reconceived ontology. the attempted limitation of the monstrous body by both surgical and discursive means is doubly doomed to failure. or the two that mark difference as opposition and relationship as the quasi-contractual exchange between autonomous beings. As the in-between. is chiasmatic. Promise and risk lie equally in the move beyond/before – it is undecidable – the one that determines ontological and corporeal unity. mode of being. and an ethics centred on a relational economy that has a place for radical difference. as différance. quasi-collective subject in which the symbolic moment of distinction between self and other is endlessly deferred – I am inclined to caution. . the move to erase difference either by exclusion or by processes of normalisation.THE SELF’S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY 67 identity – ranging from the autonomous. enmeshed and mutually constitutive. They demonstrate that the relation between self and other. as with body and body. such closure is merely a myth of modernity. If. never realised. but equally valuable. the monstrous shows us that neither the one nor the two is proof against deconstruction. then. which western discourse assumes as the standard for all. overflowing. monsters both define the limits of the singular embodied subject. precisely insofar as corporeality and subjectivity – body and mind – are themselves folded back into each other. and the potential leakiness across borders. In view of the lack of definition. covered over in the self. is in part to arrest such a process by fixing the other at a safe distance. capable of spreading its own confusion of identity. Nonetheless. the strength of the normative standard is so powerful that our society is constrained to go to extraordinary lengths to perpetuate a clear distinction between what is considered normal and acceptable. the monstrous other. it fails continually to exclude the tensions and slippages that point to a very different model of embodied being. It is not the case that what constitutes the standard remains static over a period of time. in some cases after partial dissection. exposed spines. of whom most were preserved in vast glass containers. normal and abnormal. the force of denial directed both at the radically other that cannot be subsumed by the binary. And yet for all its putative lack of integrity and closure. ‘us’ and ‘them’. The function of the gaze. then. There were several concorporate twins. and many bodies with hydrocephalic disorders. but is characteristically metaphorised as dangerously contagious. while I was researching representational forms of historical monsters. that same other – monstrously embodied – poses the greatest risk to the self’s clean and proper body. vulnerability must be managed. Some time ago in Dublin. their corporeal . the monstrous body is not just deviant in itself. I visited the highly regarded Gallery of Photography to see a new exhibition by Karl Grimes. and what is abnormal and intolerable. the monstrous is no respecter of boundaries. and at the excessive elements that threaten to burst out of the model of the same. or other gaping orifices. Still Life records the chance visit by Grimes to the specimen room of an Italian hospital at which he was working on a different project. I want to build on an autobiographical moment that illustrates the implausibility of constructing a self untouched by. and invulnerable to. and repositioned as a quality of the other. but even so. In this chapter. creates an illusion of stability. however. Moreover. ontology and ethics alike. closure and autonomy is in a sense as imaginary as the monsters that threaten it. Above all. for all that the ideal is reiterated both discursively and materially. human and animal. despite a certain fluidity of definition. Within modernist paradigms. stubbornly founded as they are on a binary structure that shapes epistemology.4 CONTAGIOUS ENCOUNTERS AND THE ETHICS OF RISK In the last chapter. I outlined the extent to which the western ideal of the self’s clean and proper body with its attributes of integrity. there remains always an oppositional relationship between the relevant categories of self and other. but that. The exhibition comprised a couple of dozen large photographic portraits of late foetal and neonatal infant bodies with gross congenital deformities. The collection was deeply disturbing. as though they were contagious. our bodies opened up to the forces of disintegration. There is nothing particularly contentious in any of this. As Grimes (1998) himself notes. The significance of contamination is not limited to the physical effects in and on the body. it touched me and many others who saw it. nor the epidemiological defence of attempting to isolate the vectors by behavioural regulation. in large part. It was as though the aw(e)ful vulnerability of those bodies put us. it was possible to acknowledge a siblingship which claims us all (Figure 4. or infected human bodies – but also between ourselves and the mere potential of risk. the viewers. And once the initial shock of confronting what is usually excluded had passed. then. parasites. but nonetheless our well-being is seen to be enhanced by the erection of protective barriers. to theorise these autobiographical moments in the interlocking context of vulnerability and contagion without betraying the shock of recognition? Among the several meanings of the word ‘contagion’ – all of which are deeply negative in their import – is the notion of a disease process spread by touch. or even by proximity.2 I shall go on to explore more . voyeuristic. relies. and at the macro level. We understand that a contaminated object is one to be avoided or kept at a safe distance. our very lives. some of the press reviews constructed the staging of Still Life as exploitative. The discourse around HIV-AIDs is a particularly good example. Contagion is a familiar term in medical discourse. but moved to tears by the unaccountable beauty of the bodies. but also to avoid the threat of an other that would expose our underlying vulnerability to bodily degeneration. the vaccination of children.1 Is it possible. an interval not only between ourselves and evidently dangerous others – be they microbes. public health. and discursively to the category of abnormality. but I want to move away from the notion of contagion as a material effect alone in order to consider its wider discursive import. ‘Images of what we have denied turn towards us’. or the practice of safe sex all make good sense. Thus the prophylactic strategies of. Similarly immunology explains at the cellular level the internal processes by which the body counters intrusion by potentially damaging non-self organisms. both materially to specimen jars. both opaque and reflective. as it concerns not just the clinical breakdown of the immune system in the face of a proliferating virus. The encounter with the others who define our own boundaries of normality must inevitably disturb for they are both irreducibly strange and disconcertingly familiar.1). I found myself not repulsed. Beyond the marks of a violent and violating science that were evident in their confinement. They enable us to recognise ourselves. antimalarial drug regimes for travellers. at risk.CONTAGIOUS ENCOUNTERS AND THE ETHICS OF RISK 69 borders dis-integrated. except perhaps in the calculation of risk. are dependent then on the maintenance of a self-protective detachment. In clinical terms they would be classed as monsters. in lay terms as freaks. As might be expected. on the success of epidemiological measures designed not simply to control. The probability that any one threat might materialise may be extremely low. they are our own abject. lest we too become affected. for example. as something that should not be put on public show. But that was and is to miss the point. but enmeshes with our understanding of what it is to be a self. for example. but the perceived disintegration of the bounded and singular self exposed to an alien and engulfing other. Our well-being. 70 EMBODYING THE MONSTER Figure 4.1 Conjoined twins from Still Life (Karl Grimes 1997) closely the implications of attempting to cover over the vulnerability of human bodies, and indeed of human being, and to suggest that far from being a simple matter of prudent protection, what is at stake in our vulnerability to non-self factors is an ethics of relationship. My argument is that in western discourse, the notion of the diseased, the unclean or the contaminated is never just an empirical or supposedly neutral descriptor, but carries the weight of all that stands against – and of course paradoxically secures – the normative categories of ontology and epistemology. CONTAGIOUS ENCOUNTERS AND THE ETHICS OF RISK 71 In short, as the realisation of a contaminatory threat, contagion can figure any transgression of the categories of sameness and difference, any breach in the unity of the embodied self. As postmodernist theory makes clear, the normative construct of the self’s clean and proper body is under constant threat, on the one hand from the potential of internal leakage and loss of form, and on the other, from the circulation of all those dangerous bodies – of women, of racial others, of the sick, of the monstrous – who both occupy the place of the other and serve to define by difference the self’s own parameters. At particular times and locations, when two or more forms of threat come together, what may be menaced is not just the singular self, but a normative category as a whole. The fear of species degeneration and contamination which has played so large a part in recent history, from the eugenic movement of the early twentieth century to contemporary notions of ethnic purity, is a powerful example of the latter. The conflation of the diseased and the racial and sexual other, in a paradigm of contagious monstrosity, may have reached its peak perhaps in the genocide of World War II, but the exclusionary impetus – which, taken to extremes, motivated that murderous fervour – both preceded and survives the historical moment. The desire to protect the unity of the ideal social/racial body is instrumentalised always through a programme of measures that speak not to strength but to uncertainty, to an implicit recognition that vulnerability is not on the side of the other, but is embedded in the heart of normativity. In this chapter, I shall be looking more closely at the microcosmic effects of a notion of contagion, and specifically at the condition of physical disability3 as the site of modernist discourses that figure the human body, or at least the white male body, as ideally closed and invulnerable. That is not to say of course that disabled people have not been the collective object of macrocosmic initiatives which have been both eugenic and genocidal, and indeed they were explicitly targeted during the period of National Socialism, but what I want to point up here is the way in which we are all implicated on an everyday level in a process of discursive othering that serves to establish and perpetuate standards of normativity. From historical archival material through to current research into the prenatal genetic manipulation of potential congenital abnormalities, the stress throughout has been on controlling or eliminating the conditions of vulnerability as though science could settle ontology. But what, precisely, is at stake in the western imaginary with its dream of containment, and what marks the disabled body as a threat, as though it could contaminate? My concern is to suggest new ways of conceptualising disability that demand a deconstruction of existing ethical parameters in the light of an always already vulnerability as the disavowed condition not only of all bodies, but of all embodied selves. I want first to set out the ground on which, in western modernity at least, vulnerability is figured as a shortcoming, an impending failure both of form and function; a predicate that marks its subject as potentially beyond normative standards of being. It is not exactly that vulnerability is denied in and by the normative subject, but that the ‘proper’ unfolding of human life, and the exercise of selfhood, is taken to overcome such dangers. Those who too readily admit or who succumb to vulnerability are either weak or unfortunate, beset by moral and/or 72 EMBODYING THE MONSTER material failure. Although the heroic narrative of individual transcendence over corporeal adversity – the triumph of mind over matter – is highly familiar, and constitutes the greater part of auto/biographical accounts of illness and disability (for example Couser 1997), its claim to our admiration exists alongside contrary tendencies. More usually vulnerability is feared as a condition of both mind and body, an ontological as well as physical state, an embodied being in which those familiar mind/body distinctions enacted by postEnlightenment thought are suspended. As with the traditional view that women are ruled by their biological processes, the anomalous body contaminates the will. Instead of triumphant transcendence, the compromised body may invite the assumption of intellectual insufficiency – those with physical disabilities are all too commonly denied access to standard education as children and find themselves spoken for as adults – or alternatively the outward appearance of an ailing body may be taken as the sign of an inner deficiency of will, or prior moral dereliction. And while the first of those more negative responses might be evidence of the unsettling dis-ease occasioned by the non-normative body such that engagement is avoided, the latter speaks to a sense of moral superiority in the face of the other’s vulnerability. It is not my suggestion that our response to disabling conditions is always as crude, or sets up so blatant a division between the categories of the ‘normal’ and the ‘deviant’, between the supposedly whole-bodied and those whose bodily boundaries have in some way been breached or distorted. And nor are ‘healthy’ bodies seen as uniformly invulnerable: for infants and children whose bodily well-being is largely dependent on others, for older people facing the finitude of death and bodily decay, and for women whose intrinsic leakiness marks a body that is always already breached, the ideal of a closed, powerful and self-defined corporeal schema is never less than compromised. Nonetheless, at the beginning of a new millennium in which ever more detailed biomedical accounts of the body are passing into lay usage, and in which we are invited to marvel at the capacities of biomedical technologies to remake the body, reminders of uncontrolled corporeal vulnerability are highly unwelcome. The cultural theorist Rosemarie Garland Thomson recounts her own shock at being given a copy of Robert Bogdan’s scholarly study Freak Show – ‘“Freak” disturbingly summarized the accusation I had most dreaded my entire life’ – and she goes on to describe how owning her personal and very visible physical disability was akin to coming out: Indeed, pressures to deny, ignore, normalize, and remain silent about one’s own disability are both compelling and seductive in a social order intolerant of deviations from the bodily standards enforced by a quotidian matrix of economic, social and political forces. (1997: xvii) What I would want to add to Thomson’s matrix is the power of psychic and ontological anxiety that must itself be denied. Where the fully self-present sovereignty of the modernist subject is taken for granted, there is an expectation, and indeed biomedical discourse encourages us to believe, that our bodies are similarly under control, predictable, determinate, and above all independent in form and function. The mapping of the human genome, which promises both a measure of individual uniqueness and a template Although such a potentially dangerous entity must be kept at a distance. in the freak shows of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. not of links of sameness. may carry no infectious agents. As he puts it: ‘People with disabilities are ritually defined as dependent on the moral fitness of nondisabled people’ (1997: 136). The noticeable paucity of academic interest. It is of course precisely the failure of the monstrous body to observe a material and metaphorical cordon sanitaire. the underlying anxiety of the encounter with the corporeal anomaly needs further explanation. is that they may elicit the contradictory responses both of horrified disengagement. but the invitation – like the freak show barker’s pitch – appeals. but of difference. as Susan Wendell (1996) points out. The present day staging of disability may seek to avoid the offensive excesses of the past by flying the banner of education or social concern. is available to all. beyond the capacity to touch. and yet – regardless of gender investments – it is treated as though it were contaminatory. that in contesting the traditional identification between women and their supposedly unruly bodies. Longmore (1997) demonstrates both the distancing effect of the gaze. to the model of the abnormal viewed from a safe distance. the greater the anxiety that is generated by the evidence of vulnerability. What is striking about such spectacles. Where he would see vulnerability – which he characterises in terms of dependency – as fixed by the gaze as the property of the differentiated other. for example. Longmore sees as the prime motivation the conspicuous display. signals that the perfect body. but I suggest it plays into the wider issue of our perception of non-normative corporeality. whether as the result of the accident of disabling conditions. and. predictability and self-transparency. the body that resists the conscious control of the will. as many commentators have already pointed out. What is evoked at worst is a kind of revulsion and dehumanisation. It is. and the way in which the apparently altruistic structure of the events authorises the contemporary equivalent of finger pointing. feminist theory has itself often displayed a certain somataphobia. Paul K. further strengthens the othering of those whose bodies fall short. or today. Although agreeing with the outlines of his analysis. for example.CONTAGIOUS ENCOUNTERS AND THE ETHICS OF RISK 73 for enhanced control and manipulation. or in the form of those routine biological processes of change in which the feminine is overdetermined. more or less explicitly. The disabled body. both chronic and acute. it is nonetheless a privileged object of the gaze. in disability studies4 may look like indifference. then. by the enfreakment of corporeal extremes – especially of the ‘fattest’ or ‘heaviest’ variety – on many American television daytime talk shows. In his fascinating analysis of US charity telethons in aid of various illnesses and disabilities. and of fascination and recognition. that is effectively out of control. both there and elsewhere. as Andrea Dennett (1996) suggests. I believe the relationships are more complicated than Longmore allows. In such orgies of public ‘compassion’. characterised historically by the public display of human ‘monsters’ – both dead and alive – as. The more we believe that we can control our bodies. marked by its consistency. Such a standard serves to deny corporeal vulnerability. however. somewhat ironic. The challenge to what have been seen as masculinist values with regard to embodiment has been a particular concern of feminism as part of its general project to revalue women. its failure to wholly occupy the place of . it is evident that the triple confinement of the unruly foetuses. in death. for example. regularity and cohesion of the body politic. but it is not about opening oneself – becoming vulnerable – to an encounter with irreducible strangeness. a 1966 provision of the Municipal Code states: No person who is diseased. It is as though the metaphorical organic unity of the socius. (1966 Chicago. fundamentally .74 EMBODYING THE MONSTER the other. rules of inclusion and exclusion. was nonetheless insufficient to allay the uncomfortable feeling that there was risk of contagion in the encounter itself. mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person to be allowed in or on the public ways or other public places in this city. we might say that no real encounter takes place. at a number of levels. the corporeally deviant may be secretly despised. then. and widely considered to be marks of inferiority. Municipal Code. Thinking. Indeed. for the emphasis is not on exchange in which mutual transformation might occur. Clearly the artist was well aware of the power of his images. for example. In Chicago. under a penalty of not less than one dollar nor more than fifty dollars for each offense. And even when at best there may be an attempt at empathy. insofar as the gaze remains operative.. the putative fear of contamination mirrors the psychic structure of phobia in general in that what is feared marks the site of projection for an intrinsic condition. poorly understood. as Susan Wendell reminds us. Nonetheless. then. with the Air Traffic Conference decreeing that member companies should not carry persons with ‘gross disfigurement. with its system of well-controlled functions. effective in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the ascribed content of that vulnerability may vary from one psychoanalytic interpretation to another. Monstrously embodied selves are. a more usual and seemingly positive response is that of compassion. (or) shall therein or thereon expose himself to public view. actually banned those with visible disabilities from appearing in specified public places. yet the gallery was constrained to give a written warning to visitors that they might be disturbed. or other unpleasant characteristics so unusual as to offend fellow passengers’ (1962 Air Traffic Conference of America). Although. which were intended to breach the immunity of the gaze. The psychological category of mysophobia – the excessive anxiety occasioned by the real or imagined risk of contamination – works. but a public desire to defend the wholeness. 36–34 [repealed 1974]) Similar restrictive rules were imposed around the same period on travellers. to find the grounds of sameness. but precisely on forestalling such a move. though it is clearest in relation to the individual. that grounds anxiety.5 what is consistent is that the self’s own vulnerability cannot be spoken. that empathy is about trying to smooth out differences. What these examples seems to speak of is not just the individual fear of contagion. the desire to eliminate ‘differences that are feared. in this case vulnerability. has come to express an actual bodyliness that is at risk from corporeal dissidence. as a result. Ill. and in the photographic image. easily masquerades as the compassionate desire to prevent or stop suffering’ (1996: 156). and protective boundaries. in glass containers. In its operation. maimed. of the negative responses to the pictures in the Still Life exhibition. So powerful is the impulse to avoid actual contact with anomalous bodies that certain city ordinances. In the western imagination. that dependency is often taken to justify paternalism6 towards those in ill health. In such a system the interaction between subjects is mediated by implicit contract. seeping liquid: as formless flow. As Liz Grosz notes. they transgress boundaries in being simultaneously too close. despite an intuitively phenomenological experience of being-in-the-world. we do still see our bodies almost as though they are suits of armour protecting a core self. entrapping. It follows that each man is considered to be master of his own body’ (Natanson v. In principle. And as becomes repeatedly evident. What is really unsettling about non-normative embodiment is not simply the reminder of the empirical instability of all bodies. an interval between self and other that covers over the putative threat of engulfment by the other. bodies that appear unable to maintain the distinction and definition required by the sovereign self. In practice. and revulsion from. I want to retrace briefly the aporias within modernism itself. as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-containment…a formlessness that engulfs all form. nonetheless. Moreover. then. Kline 1960). in being irreducibly other to the binary itself. a fear of. an openness to the assault of the other. The transhistorical hostility towards the feminine expresses. As a corollary of such formulations. as viscosity. those who are mentally ill. Before going on to theorise that in more clearly postmodernist terms. our embodied selfhood is a matter of complex interweaving. secreting. Nonetheless. pregnant women. biomedical law and ethics.CONTAGIOUS ENCOUNTERS AND THE ETHICS OF RISK 75 disturbing in that they cannot be accounted for within the binary parameters of sameness and difference. which assumes the independence of each. vulnerability is positioned not as an existential state. in which the latter is measured in terms of the former. reflect that ideal of distinction and separation and characterise individual bodies primarily as the property of autonomous selves. and moreover there appears to be a whole class of others – the very young and old. and this is as true of bioethics as elsewhere. people with disabilities. In short. The rights I hold in my own body are both protective and must be protected against the incursions of others. As might be anticipated. as is evident in a seminal judgment of the sixties: ‘Anglo-American law starts with the premise of thoroughgoing selfdetermination. Instead. Whenever the body is at risk. the postEnlightenment ideal of autonomous subjectivity and agency relies on a spacing. We are unsurprised and unembarrassed by references to the ‘real me’ inside. but as a contingent physical dependency. Any breach in the ideal impregnability of the surface flesh signals potential contamination. uncontrollable. and so on – who are in any case deemed incapable . the dominant systems of western ethics. but the intuition that despite the privileging of mind in western discourse. it is ‘inscribed as a mode of seepage’ characterised as ‘a leaking. even though constituted in part to secure the rights of persons at points of self-evident vulnerability – in illness or disability – devolve on the assumption of autonomy. and in being excessive. that threat is rarely gender-neutral. a disorder that threatens all order’ (1994: 203). the necessary locus of worship and disgust whose corporeality threatens to overflow boundaries and engulf those things which should remain separate. it is the stability of the self that is threatened. the female body just is monstrous. corporeal and ontological anxiety are inseparable. too recognisable (threatening merging and indifference). 76 EMBODYING THE MONSTER of fully autonomous agency, and in whom vulnerability is intrinsic. Given the extent of the exclusions from the ideal of self-determination, what is thrown up, as Thomson puts it, is ‘the troubling question of whether any person is independent of physical limitations, immune to external forces, and without need of assistance and care from others’. Taking up her own particular focus, she goes on: ‘The disabled body exposes the illusion of autonomy, self-government, and selfdetermination that underpins the fantasy of absolute able-bodiedness’ (1997: 45–6). It is just such resonances, however, that remain largely unacknowledged, and the source of a persistent anxiety in the face of the corporeal other. What causes unease is not that those named as disabled are helpless – indeed the majority are far from it – but that the inviolability of their bodies, the inviolability that confers an aura of self-mastery, appears to have been breached. They are in other words visibly vulnerable. Given, however, the failure to successfully separate off lack of integrity and completion as a wholly oppositional category, the western logos finds its very structure under contest. Alongside a mainstream bio/ethical discourse saturated with the notion of vulnerability as the property of the other, where vulnerability signals dependency (and in ethical terms a claim on the duties of beneficence and non-maleficence), it is paradoxical that both biomedical and lay discourse see the normatively embodied self as vulnerable to contamination by proximity to those same others. Insofar as what we characterise as disability as opposed to disease is not in itself literally contagious, then could it be that the desire to deter the approach of those who are thus labelled, through limiting access, through isolation and silencing, speaks not to the reality of an external threat so much as to a simultaneous apprehension and denial of our own inherent vulnerability.7 It is not a vulnerability to some(thing) other, but rather the incommon vulnerability of self-becoming. Few such ontological reflections or psychic complications trouble the persistence of binary models of understanding, and vulnerability remains positioned as some kind of falling short which is attributed to others – in one strand among others – by virtue of their devalued embodiment. In their failure to reflect normativity, such figures may be seen as the objects of the benevolence of securely embodied subjects, where the moral traffic is taken to be one way. Accordingly the dominant ethical response is to suppose that those who are in any degree unable to fulfil normative standards of self-care may, for that reason, have special claims to care from others. Indeed, benevolent concern for the vulnerable is one of the hallmarks of the highly influential ethics-of-care strand of feminist ethics. Yet curiously, such claims arising from a perceived vulnerability may serve not to alleviate but rather to mark the position more clearly relative to the other. In her analysis of the use of disabled female figures in ‘sentimental’ novels of the nineteenth century, for example, Thomson remarks that such women – often poor and black – are deployed as ‘icons of vulnerability’ (1997: 82), whose relative powerlessness creates a bridge of sympathy, acceptance and identification to their more privileged – that is middle-class and white – sisters. Nonetheless, it is an affiliation which empowers not the disabled women themselves, but their benefactors, who are confirmed in their own capacity to act as the agents of liberal society.8 The relations of power at work are similar in effect CONTAGIOUS ENCOUNTERS AND THE ETHICS OF RISK 77 to those of the present day telethons to which I referred earlier. Regardless of ethical intent, those on the receiving end of (limited) beneficence are never able to claim equal agency while their vulnerability remains. Vulnerability is positioned, then, as that which impairs agency in the ‘damaged’ other while inspiring moral action on the part of the secure self to make good the perceived lack. In line with an analysis of vulnerability that grounds what is intended as a normative ethics, the philosopher Robert Goodin has developed a model of moral responsibility that derives from the wholly negative notion that to be vulnerable is to be open to harm. As he puts it: ‘You are always vulnerable to, and dependent upon, some individual or group who have it within their power to help or harm you in some respect(s)’ (1998: 79). Although Goodin goes on to acknowledge some degree of vulnerability in us all, it is strictly speaking, in his view, an empirical and contingent, rather than ontological, condition of human being. In consequence, what he has in mind is an intrinsically asymmetrical model in which some are called upon to respond to and protect, ideally, the vulnerability of others. This is made particularly clear in his claim that there may be ‘analogous responsibilities…for protecting animals and natural environments’ (1998: 73). Although he is explicit, and at least partially successful, in his contention that the principle of protecting the vulnerable involves a move beyond special moral obligations – which are individual, case specific and usually a matter of personal involvement, Goodin’s inclusion of certain classes of strangers does not contest the attribution of vulnerability as a misfortune of individual or collective others that may be countered by appropriate response. Indeed he goes on to argue that the degree of responsibility that arises out of obligation is proportionate to the level of dependent vulnerability suffered by the other. Even though the exercise of responsibility is intended to mitigate the asymmetry of the power dynamic, there is little sense in which those who are positioned as the objects of concern, as recipients of attention, are acknowledged as participants in a mutual ethical encounter. It may well be that the particular condition of an individual disabled woman, for example, prevents or constrains her full engagement, but my concern is that the model is one in which the unlikelihood of mutual exchange is not merely anticipated, but scripted in advance. It is precisely this kind of binary thinking, which supports existing power relations, that I want to unsettle. There are, of course, already within the terms of conventional discourse, strategies implicitly resistant to such reductionist thinking, one such being the claim that we are all just temporarily able-bodied (TAB) in the sense that disabling illness, accident and old age are the possible or certain fate of all. Useful though such accounts are in challenging the stigma of disability, however, they remain locked into a positivist account of embodiment which may itself be disturbed by reading the body and vulnerability through a postconventional perspective. In such a spirit, Megan Boler’s critical consideration of the supposedly radical call for empathy with the other – a kind of caring for the other by the effort of putting oneself in her place – more adequately breaks with the convention (Boler 1997). Unlike many other feminist ethicists who work within a liberal humanist framework and see such ethical responses very positively, Boler concludes that empathetic identification remains trapped within a self/other binary that ultimately 78 EMBODYING THE MONSTER consumes and annihilates the other. It is, in effect, a refusal to hear the other’s voice as uniquely her own, a refusal to acknowledge irreconcilable difference. Moreover, if we accept that the form of embodiment cannot be split from selfhood, such that issues of sex, age, race, physical ability, and many more – the very historicity of the body – are irreducible, then we cannot simply enter into the experiential being of an other. But is the alternative of an attentiveness of listening without assimilation necessarily as free of its own ethical difficulties as Boler seems to imply? As Foucault (1979) has pointed out, the one who elicits all from the other, as in a confessional, is in a dominant position of power. The act of speaking itself can heighten vulnerability in the asymmetry set up or perpetuated by the power/knowledge relation. Instead, like Boler herself, I prefer a testimonial response that requires the encounter with vulnerability to rest on an openness to the unpredictably strange and excessive, an openness that renders the self vulnerable. It is not to reduce the response to a fear for one’s own vulnerabilities, so much as to take the risk of working through the incommensurable layers of power and emotion that mediate the relational economy. This seems to me an altogether more fruitful approach that recognises both that the self and the other are mutually engaged, and yet are irreducible the one to the other. What meaning, then, would vulnerability have if we stepped back from the relentless binaries of western epistemology that set health against illness, conformity against disparity, the perfect against the imperfect, the self against the other? What would it mean in other words to address the issue of vulnerability not without recourse to normative standards, but with a critique that exposed not simply the limits set by the cultural specificity of normativity – as opposed to the claim of a general if not universal validity – but more radically yet that the dichotomous structure is itself unstable? One immediate effect would be to place less emphasis on vulnerability as the dependency of others, and more on the notion of vulnerability as the risk of ontological uncertainty for all of us. And what if the question of contagion, of contamination were found to reside not only in the supposed materialities of bodies, but in the structure of discourse itself? I propose to reread the body as a discursive construction, by now a widely familiar move to poststructuralists, but one that still often seems to stymie those who work in the health care disciplines. The problem is that aside from a thoroughgoing deconstruction of the discourses of sexuality, such as Judith Butler’s work on queer bodies (1993), and a relatively small number of specific studies like Catherine Waldby’s book on AIDS (1996) or some of my own previous work with Janet Price on disability (1996, 1998), it is hard to find many postmodernist texts that address the body of biomedicine not just as a concept but, the body as it is lived, in pain as well as pleasure. Although I am highly sympathetic to the notion of corporeal inscription, that approach tends to ‘flatten out’ the problematic such that certain issues concerning the fully three-dimensional, mobile, breathing, excreting body that encompass the interplay of internal and external space cannot be adequately addressed. What is called for is a rethinking that challenges the conventional opposition of the material to the discursive, and marks them as fundamentally intertwined. It is a matter of mutually constitutive modes of becoming, where ‘(t)he flesh CONTAGIOUS ENCOUNTERS AND THE ETHICS OF RISK 79 and blood givenness of the physical body is not a passive surface, but the site of sensation and libidinal desire…in continuous interaction with textual practices’ (Shildrick 1997: 178). Moreover, in the area of biomedicine in particular, the problematisation of the distinction between what claims to be a transparent science and its social implications results not just in the blurring of that distinction, but in a more thorough reconceptualisation around the concept of a biomedical imaginary. The supposed objectivity of scientific knowledge is itself inevitably contaminated by its specific cultural construction such that what is both spoken and acted on refers not to some given truth, but to a slippery chain of re-presentations. The imaginary anatomy of the body – a term used by Lacan, but reflecting too the ‘philosophical anatomy’ of earlier centuries – operates not simply at the level of lay speculation, but is intrinsic to the discipline of biomedicine.9 Any understanding of the form and functioning of the body is always shot through with metaphor, with psychic significances, with idealisations and ideologies that continually shape and reshape that which is presented, nevertheless, as a stable entity. However strongly bioscience might resist the deconstruction of its own belief system, the importance of making such a move, for me, is not just whether we can successfully retheorise the taken-for-grantedness of bodies, for clearly feminist theory in particular has generated many such reconfigurations, but whether those can be carried forward to make a difference in practice. The project is, I think, ultimately an ethical one of being enabled to act differently because we can also think differently. But how does this all relate to bodies, and more particularly to disabled bodies? Where the convention insists that some bodies are or become vulnerable by default, the postmodernist understanding of discursive instability speaks to the intrinsic vulnerability of all bodies and indeed all embodied selves. Moreover, the corpus to which I have been referring as though it were a given materiality is more properly a body schema, a psychic construction of wholeness, that – in most cases – belies its own precariousness and vulnerability. I want to look briefly, then, at some psychoanalytic models before turning to consider the implications of a linguistic approach. In Lacan’s account of the mirror stage in infant development, it is clear that the emergent sense of embodied and bounded selfhood is phantasmatic to the extent that the infant’s actual experience of ‘motor incapacity and nursling dependency’ is covered over. But it is more than merely physical inadequacy that is disowned. From the time of birth, as Lacan postulates, the infant is psychically exposed to ‘images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body, in short… imagos of the fragmented body’ (1977c: 11) that it is necessary to disavow. This is how Lacan characterises the process: The mirror stage is a drama…which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality…and lastly to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. (1977a: 4)10 The stability and distinction of normative embodiment relies then, from the first, on a re/suppression of the dis-integration which belongs to the subject as embodied, The unified embodied self is faced not with an unknown other. albeit in a state of instability. but the indeterminate physicality of touch and being touched. very few theorists of disability have been prepared to engage with the psychic roots of our sense of embodiment. the predictable. and to be recognised as a unified and stable self. I want to stress that similar moves operate in relation to all forms of monstrosity. then any risk to those processes is fraught with danger for the embodied subject. and the denial of the impure and uncontrollable materiality in which all of us find our existence.The ‘normal body’ is actually the one that we develop later. with whose analysis I largely concur. and the sensations of early infancy must remain unacknowledged and unacknowledgable. who must then be avoided. who is concerned with how disability occupies a field of vision and ‘translates into psychodynamic representations’ (Davis 1997: 52). then it is not simply the psychic dimensions of the body that are repressed. It is in effect a Gestalt – and therefore in the realm of what Lacan calls the ‘imaginary’. In investing. but rather with its own being stripped of the ‘armour of an alienating identity’. for fear of contamination. is Lennard Davis. the issue is less about the qualities and nature of the observed object than about the investments of the observing subject. In consequence. that marks the monstrous as a site of disruption. far from being the body of some small group of victims. and above all not touched. the corporeal ambiguity and fluidity. It is. but rather of the psychic evocation of a primal lack of unity as the condition of all. As he astutely recognises. what constitutes the inherent vulnerability of the self embodied as normative is projected on to the other. indeed. The specular moment that juxtaposes the ‘whole’ and the ‘fragmented’ body is not about an absolute difference. One exception. but on the contrary about an unnerving doubling of the one in the other. name and exclude the monstrous other. repression is the price of self-identity. or have taken up the implications of Lacan’s analysis. given that the unified sense of self is constructed. as I have been arguing throughout. and that . precedes the subject as such. the shock is not that of the unknown or unfamiliar. in a specific identity for disabled people that is as powerfully protected and policed as its able-bodied counterpart. What is at stake is the impossible desire for transcendence. If. What Lacan’s insight suggests to me is that any body which manifests signs of insecurity may become the repository of both corporeal and ontological anxiety. for political and social ends. The realm of the ‘real’ in Lacanian terms is where the fragmented body is found because it is the body that precedes the ruse of identity and wholeness. The originary lack must be made good by a lifelong desire to recognise oneself.80 EMBODYING THE MONSTER and. in the visual image and detachment of the mirror. On the question of physical difference. (1997: 61) Yet. knowable body with which we think ourselves familiar is a construction secured only by the processes of normalisation that must seek to abject.11 Moreover. Davis writes: The disabled body. is an entity from the earliest of childhood instincts. above all. In the encounter with the disabled or damaged body. a body that is common to all humans…. the troublesome lack of fixed definition. as Lacan makes clear. While it is not difficult to recognise the mechanisms at work in the response to disabled bodies. at least initially. in its incomplete abjection. then. What makes the other monstrous is not so much its morphological difference and unfamiliarity. the unclean – who resist both arrest as the other of the same. They are most notably those sticky. we ‘do not cease looking…for the desirable and terrifying. as the disturbing threat of its return. For Kristeva.12 At a similar level of analysis of the psychic constitution of the subject. and throw into doubt the project of selfcompletion. the other others – the feminine. As Kristeva puts it: ‘It is something rejected from which one does not part. It is. breast milk. the monstrous. that crosses corporeal boundaries – pus. it is properly neither subject nor object in the binary sense. which both repel and attract. and between one body and another. then. a sense of our openness and vulnerability that western discourse insists on covering over. nourishing and murderous. not because they represent an external threat – and indeed some are benign – but because they stir recognition within. It is as though subjectivity is always already contaminated by its own archaic memories. as the anxiety-provoking double that haunts the margins of self-presence. Any substance. but it nurtures new life which must itself eventually cross the boundary from interior to exterior existence. It is in its failure to fully occupy the category of the other. ‘arouses dread and creeping horror’ in our selves. In other words. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat. and. carrying with it the contaminatory potential of meconium. and threat to. viscous. or amorphous things which are associated primarily with the female. blood. faecal matter – is a significant focus of cultural anxiety and regulation. who inevitably contest the closure of self-identity. and more particularly with the maternal. Moreover. it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us’ (1982: 4). but occupies a liminal space in between where it partakes of both. cervical mucus. The abject. then. the abject is never fully expelled. as Kristeva puts it. but remains as both reminder of. Monsters. the precarious status of the closed and unified self. Monsters haunt us. then. that the monster marks the impossibility of the modernist self. fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body’ (1982: 54). The disgust and anxiety invoked by the abject is that felt by the clean and proper subject faced with the memory trace of her own origins. In other words. unreflected as itself. the abject is the term for all those things which a subject must disavow in the attempt to secure ‘the self’s clean and proper body’ (1982: 71). from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. the abject exists prior to self–other differentiation. Freud says. saliva. .CONTAGIOUS ENCOUNTERS AND THE ETHICS OF RISK 81 renders the subject always already vulnerable. the monstrous may remain the other. the Kristevan notion of the abject puts into play an even clearer explanatory model of the contaminatory potential of non-self materiality. placental material and so on. figures a highly ambiguous response to the maternal body. Like the feminine. amniotic fluid. are what Freud would call the uncanny which he defines as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (1919: 220). and successful exclusion as the absolute other. the abject never really leaves the subjectbody. but it is nonetheless evident as das Unheimliche. The womb is especially dangerous for not only does it produce the outflow of menstrual blood. for. It is through the dynamic of abjection that the subject must distinguish both between inside and outside the body. body. the symbolic order forces a separation of mother and infant that is necessary to guarantee its power and legitimacy’ (1993: 69). As such the subject is in an unstable and highly vulnerable relation to its supposedly exterior others. as she puts it: ‘integrates within the assumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolic and becomes an integral part of the same’ (1990: 181). then it becomes clear why the marked disabled body should threaten contamination. for fear it will ooze through. As Barbara Creed puts it in her discussion of the monstrous feminine in film: ‘by constructing the maternal figure as an abject being.82 EMBODYING THE MONSTER It is precisely the threat of engulfment with its breaching of boundaries and loss of self-containment that makes clear the psychic function of abjection. of the monster. that is it cannot be wholly one’s own. then how much more so when the product itself is a morphological aberration. even pleasurable. among those things which may represent abjection. Kristeva develops her early concept of the abject to give a psychical account of the often negative and fearful human relationship to the irreconcilable other. a powerful phantasm in the dynamics of everyday life. as Kristeva indicates. In her more recent book Strangers to Ourselves (1990). the mechanism of the return of the abject is made acceptable. is an effect of the gap between our understanding of ourselves as whole and . the subject must break the power of the mother–child bond by disavowing all those things which belong to the state of primary indifferentiation. but it remains. nonetheless the disabled body is. and order. What is at issue is that our ambivalent response to the external manifestation of the strange. The powerful images of Still Life again come to mind in Iris Marion Young’s description of the dangers of return: The expelled self turns into a loathsome menace because it threatens to re-enter. (1990a: 143–4) In her long discussion of the notion of abomination in biblical texts. obliterating the border…. system. to obliterate the border between it and the separated self…. In marking its debt to nature – the supposedly violent tearing away from the maternal insides – on its own flesh. Just as Derrida sees différance as the trace within. such a body cannot be proper. Rather.The abject must not touch me. Within overtly literary sources. In order to enter into the symbolic as a proper self.The abject provokes fear and loathing because it exposes the border between self and other as constituted and fragile. If the process of giving birth is in all cases a matter of abjection. And if. so Kristeva understands the phenomenon of strangeness to be the interior presence of what she calls the ‘other scene’. that. In consequence. by virtue of its corporeal nonconformity. it is the disavowed trace of the maternal body that grounds the concept of the abject. Kristeva argues that while it is not lack of health itself that ‘causes’ abjection. by its sublimation in fantasy. the potentially catastrophic encounter with that which appears foreign to us – the stuff of violent aversions of every kind – is the expression of the disavowal of the ‘improper’ facet of our own unconscious. nevertheless. The emotional intensity of the loathing directed at those who display unacceptable differences is never a matter of external factors alone. but rather the confusion of identity. what signals the monstrous is any sign of the failure of the paternal order to enforce and maintain the break. of course. but it is a vulnerability that can be overcome not by repression but by acceptance. it is this double status that opens up the possibility of a radically ethical response. able-bodied against disabled. it is clear to see that if. Each term is. It is from the start inherently contaminated by its discursive others. simultaneously both integrated with and irreducible to the self. I am thinking in terms of the linguistic register. In owning ourselves as dis-integrated. Iterability is the process of resaying. the level of theorisation involved often makes it difficult to see where or how their abstract insights could be applied to lives as they are lived. in the sense both of meaning and outline. And at a more complex stage. they are opened up to one .CONTAGIOUS ENCOUNTERS AND THE ETHICS OF RISK 83 separate. biomedicine itself is structured by a culturally and historically unstable series of metaphors imbricating with a wide range of other discourses. as I have outlined. that otherness within remains unheimlich. which she calls ‘an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable’ (1990: 182). the move of deconstruction has been to demonstrate that both primary and marked term are mutually dependent. however. Presence defines itself against absence. but as the moment of slippage inherent in repetition. The analytic of the uncanny. then it can make no claim to purity. In contradistinction to the binary system that seeks to divide self from other so completely that each may have mutually exclusive properties. to alternative readings that contest received truth. what difference does a consideration of iterability make to our understanding of contamination and vulnerability? But first I want to recall briefly what the primary moves of the deconstructive approach already entail. in other words. or to put it more materially. Moreover. and always vulnerable. and particularly of the analytic offered by Jacques Derrida and the way in which it has been taken up in Judith Butler’s more recent work. For Kristeva. or to persecute them as absolutely different. a process which functions not simply as the repetition that seeks to authorise and sediment meaning by repeated reference to a prior context. and so on. At a relatively simple level. in Kristeva’s view. My question is. as Butler (1993) has it – then the problematic of language cannot be ignored. Compelling though I find such psychoanalytic accounts. what seems to me to warrant further thought in particular is the structure of iterability. It is. As critics of both are all too ready to claim. good against evil. and the psychical experience of the always already incorporation of otherness. unified against fragmented. I want to push the argument into territory which breaks entirely with biologistic explanation. and measured against a single standard in terms respectively of wholeness and lack. we can give up both the urge to reduce others to the selfsame. which seem to resonate with a wide variety of cultural practices and beliefs whilst giving due regard to their specificity. therefore. one major insight of poststructuralism is that each term is fundamentally reliant on the other for its definition. that destabilises meaning even as it establishes it. the rearticulation that introduces the interval of transformation. If. In place of the closed and complete boundaries that ostensibly mark difference and separation as absolute. as Spivak puts it. ‘an accomplice of the other’ (Derrida 1976: lxviii). the claim that bodies and subjects are discursively constructed – materialised rather than material. ‘sets the difference within us in its most bewildering shape and presents it as the ultimate condition of our being with others’ (1990: 192). we take seriously. as postmodernists surely must. which Derrida later spells out. among the many synonyms of différance. There is in consequence no way of securing the purity of the subject. Derrida proposes the term pharmakon. to the extent that the constitution of the subject and the materialisation of the body are performative and discursive. But what that description misses perhaps is that because the constitutive interdependency – that is. as themselves discursive constructions? In other words. we are already alerted to a certain anxiety at the borders of both concepts and bodies. while rendering its rigour and purity impossible. but just is implicit in ontological and epistemological structure. and Butler for one turns . and he is explicit that this is as true of common parlance as of philosophical discourse. a more appropriate expression of the relationship might be that each term is contaminated by the other. then. the ideal invulnerability that we intend to perform is breached in the very repetition. It is then a small step to see that very same undecidability in the figure of the pharmakos – the scapegoat – that both cleanses and is cast out by the community as the nominated carrier of contamination. What is at work here is something like a law of undecidable contamination’ (1988: 59). more is needed to explain the coming-into-being of that subject. The implication. “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation’ (1993: 3). In other words. Not surprisingly Kristeva (1982) marks the scapegoat as a figure of abjection. but must be repeated constantly: it must be reiterated. those paradoxical expressions that interweave opposites without settling on either. which can denote both poison and cure. it seems to me that the very same trajectory is at work in bodies. in the iterative structure itself. Now although Derrida here and Butler in her later work Excitable Speech (1997) are concerned primarily with the analytic of the speech act. the process is never complete. as I have suggested elsewhere (Shildrick 1997). but the scene of its difference from itself. untroubled. it is the very process of exclusion that ‘produces a constitutive outside to the subject. not least because in the mode of becoming. or what Derrida calls différance. contaminating parasitically what it identifies and enables to repeat “itself”’ (1988: 62). is that iterability ‘troubles the binary and hierarchical oppositions that authorize the very principle of “distinction”’ (1988: 127). it must be stressed. is to be understood more as constitutive than as the operation of an already established subject. The scapegoat after all may only speak for the ideal of a secure. And moreover. vulnerability comes not from the outside. which is after all. that the inherent leakiness of meaning in the logos is paralleled by a necessary uncertainty about bodies. In understanding how the deconstructive move operates. As Derrida insists: ‘Iterability alters. Derrida again: ‘[iterability] limits what it makes possible.84 EMBODYING THE MONSTER another. However much we speak our being in the body as closed and secure. But as Judith Butler reminds us in a much-quoted phrase. bounded order after it has been excluded. Moreover. there is always slippage such that the ‘standard’ effects its own internal othering. And the implication of that mutual contamination. Nevertheless. Can we not say then. is that all claims to purity are radically destabilised. an abjected outside. the trace of the one in the other – is overlain in western discourse by a binary structure of sameness and difference. iteration is not simply the repetition that ‘fixes’ what is performed. the operation of the trace that defers and detours meaning. The iterative process. both . In consequence. that preserves the subject – is a rare insight indeed. outside of it. not as an intrinsic quality of an existing subject. Gayatri Spivak refers to deconstruction ‘as a radical acceptance of vulnerability’ (1990: 18). and the parallel feeling of recognition. and in a telling phrase. for me. Her insight does not supplant that of Nussbaum. it is not a once and for all process that fixes our status as embodied subjects. Always more than mere abstract considerations. That violence. and neither can it deliver the radical autonomy that modernist models take for granted. The deconstructive enterprise does not of course aim to change things in and of itself. it is worth noting. what is at stake is the instability of the boundaries that divide ‘whole’ bodies from ‘broken’ ones. As Butler puts it: ‘There is no way to protect against that primary vulnerability and susceptibility to the call of recognition that solicits existence. and to recognise the interrelatedness of social life. the western imaginary is remarkably resilient. In contrast. but as an inalienable condition of becoming. Martha Nussbaum’s observation that ‘(t)he peculiar beauty of human excellence just is its vulnerability’ (1986: 86) – a remark. but to provide a critique which gives some account of the violence with which the process of othering different forms of bodyliness is conducted. In emphasising once more the discursive nature of embodiment. and as material violence to which the eugenic programmes of sterilisation or even extermination of the ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘feeble-bodied’ bear witness. the subject to be is inaugurated in the address of the Other such that ‘the address constitutes a being within the possible circuit of recognition and. accordingly. the undecidability. In view of our mutual immersion in a discursive realm that continues to make and unmake us. And clearly. what is at issue. Yet again. All this poststructuralism understands. operates on both a discursive and a metaphorical level – as the violent hierarchies of the binary system that Derrida refers to. in abjection’ (1997: 5) Whilst it is not entirely clear what relation this abjection bears to the ‘constitutive outside’ that Butler refers to in her earlier book. those perceptions together add further explanatory depth to my own face to face responses to the images of the Still Life presentation in Dublin. at the heart of becoming. Even within that tradition. As should now be established. to that primary dependency on a language we never made in order to acquire a tentative ontological status’ (1997: 26). Bodies That Matter. the deconstructive turn serves not to occlude lived experience. although interpellation must precede subjectivity. note. the putative threat to my own wellBeing that the figures seem to offer. The shock. my purpose is to reconfigure vulnerability. similar fears of the contamination of a notional purity are operative in the response to racial others. but to further attest to the necessary vulnerability. is a radical undoing of the very notion of embodied being as something secure and distinct from its others. In her somewhat transformed version. but gives it rather more depth and urgency.CONTAGIOUS ENCOUNTERS AND THE ETHICS OF RISK 85 back to the Althusserian concept of interpellation. Although the postEnlightenment standard of a wholly autonomous body and mind can be critiqued for its failure both to accommodate – at very least – the patina of a functional or emotional vulnerability due to us all. her formula emphasises again the inherent vulnerability and instability of our existence regardless of whether we are assumed to be within or beyond discursive normativity. our morphology can never be certain. and it calls finally for the willingness to engage in an ethics of risk. Not only is my own unity of being uncertain. but what has seemed intolerable. The notion of an irreducible vulnerability as the necessary condition of a fully corporeal becoming – of my self and always with others – shatters the ideal of the self’s clean and proper body.86 EMBODYING THE MONSTER spring from the unavoidable realisation that as an embodied subject. is precisely constitutive of my self. even unthinkable. I too am fragile. . together with the concentration on terms such as encounter. a further understanding of the issues that concern me. in which ethics is understood largely as the study of morality as a system of principles. There is.5 LEVINAS AND VULNERABLE BECOMING The question of vulnerability. but he is engaged with the stranger. At no point does Levinas speak of the monstrous. however. I believe. the work of Levinas is highly abstract and difficult to apply outside a conceptual frame. but with the difference that it is not so much the occasion of a deconstruction of the subject as of a construction. ethics has been considered as a subset only. at least in the sense that I have been using it. Like Derrida. the one whose appearance may seem to threaten me. an area of specialist enquiry that does not emerge until the issue of ontology has been settled. Throughout the western tradition. or of moral behaviour in a substantive framework. According to Levinas. it is only through our pre-ontological face to face encounter with the other. I have tried to unsettle the . Levinas wishes to stress the ethical necessity of response and responsibility. I want to look at it at some length as a model in which the concept of vulnerability is opened up in just the way that advances my own project. as I have developed it in the last chapter.1 a situation of the utmost vulnerability. Rather than seeing ethics and ontology as mutually constitutive and inextricable – as I have so far done – Levinas suggests that we should reverse entirely the order of the western convention in which an already self-identified subject engages as an agent in the moral landscape. In terms of conventional philosophy which has pre-eminently concerned itself with the question of Being. in the work of Emmanuel Levinas a thoroughgoing attempt to position vulnerability as the mobilising feature of an ethics that precedes and thus constitutes the ontological moment. and still less has it been explored in any depth in ontological philosophy. So radical is his approach that. the privilege that Levinas gives to ethics signals an extraordinary realignment of the central problematic. and yet whose own vulnerability calls out to me. may provide. Throughout this work. that we may become subjects enjoying selfconsciousness and freedom. As with much postconventional theory. proximity. despite some misgivings. As such. Nonetheless his insistence on vulnerability and responsibility as the modalities of the existent. but as an alterity whose strange(r)ness is absolute. In a similar way. not so much in a difference which may be reduced to the same. it may be possible to think further such empirical circumstances as those of the Still Life encounter. and above all the face. what concerns me is the other. It has been a theme only in an already thematised context. is one that has played a strictly limited part in normative ethics. What is implicitly commanded is that in the response the one should take responsibility for the other. of the ego at home with itself. the purity of the sovereign subject. does Levinas characterise the originary relation? In his two major words. His point is that in conventional discourse. the widow. Aside from its positioning as a pre-ontological moment. recurs as a trace that challenges the sedimentation of stable subjectivity and determinable moral agency. such considerations are beside the point for all they do is return the self to itself. and what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence. but rather a constant interruption in which ethical response – the Saying – disturbs the thematisation. however. virtue or utility might command. such as that which duty. but as the one-for-the-other. always intrinsically ethical. The one who finds herself not alone in the world must forfeit her sensuous enjoyment. that Levinas intends a chronological sequence that culminates in a fully formed subject. It is from the start an asymmetrical relationship. the one is called upon to respond to the vulnerability. to act not for-oneself. rather than one between putative equals. in other words. he develops a quasi-phenomenology of self and other that grounds ethics and thus ontology in the inescapable encounter between the putative need or demand of the other and the hitherto undisturbed pleasurable solitude of the self. first published respectively in 1961 and 1974. It is expressly the alterity of the other. Although we may fall short of or wilfully ignore the moral good. in which. Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. in other words. It is a moment not of being. of interiority in the face of the other. then. Levinas sees the relation with and response to the other as that which founds the self as a subject. is not a loss as such but the threshold of freedom and self-conscious subjectivity. the orphan. . that mobilises ethics: ‘The strangeness of the Other. then. In his own turn to ethics. of the Said. but otherwise than being. the regulatory moral apparatus. that instantiates its very being. and the absolute dissymmetry between us. we are unlikely to be unaware of the ethical principles that are designed to mediate response. what Levinas calls ‘the very possibility of the beyond’ (1989b: 179). but on a process of becoming that is always relational. a call for an ethical response to an other who cannot be recognised within any shared cultural or political context. as Levinas puts it: ‘Life is love of life. How. It should not be supposed. as ethics’ (1969: 43). to my thoughts and possessions. sleeping. assumes an inescapable priority that overturns the ‘proper’ order of things. focusing instead not on a state of being. warming oneself in the sun’ (1969: 112). eating. destitution and nakedness of the other. a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than my being: thinking. For Levinas. for equality is a modality of the Law which is yet to come. then.2 It is as though the ethical moment. working. Yet to relinquish that state of sensibility and immediacy.88 EMBODYING THE MONSTER plausibility of the apparent detachment between ontology and ethics. where ethics is subordinate to ontology as first philosophy. there is at first sight little to distinguish this relation from many other such formulations that pose vulnerability as a condition that might be expected to evoke an ethical response. in its originary form. however. whom Levinas habitually refers to as the stranger. reading. is precisely accomplished as the calling into question of my spontaneity. his irreducibility to the I. From a situation of egoistic self-sufficiency. It is. preserving. Ethics. given up to my knowledge and power. and to the selfpresence of a pre-determined knowing subject: ‘Knowledge is re-presentation. We will be reminded. everything is reduced to self-consciousness. language breaks up unity and continuity and establishes a relation of separation and transcendence: The fact that the face maintains a relation with me by discourse does not range him in the same. unknown other demands a response which is not that of knowledge. On the contrary. Levinas wants to suggest that which is resistant to the grasp of appropriation. for Levinas. but rather the figurative moment of the face to face with ‘the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself’ (1969: 39). Removed. it puts the I in question.To approach the Other…is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I. an opening to. In contrast. is not so much a phenomenological experience. recognition. therefore. strip away her difference. in Levinasian . is not so much to look at it as to have a regard for it. or even of communication. The face is always incommensurable with my own. we do no more than grasp the other. and nothing may remain other to it’ (1989a: 77). in his suspicion of vision. The normative subject exercises moral agency by taking itself as the model to which others must be made analogous. Moreover. we here name face…. The encounter. the absolute difference. then. Levinas privileges language – albeit a nonverbal language of sensibility – as the medium that necessarily presupposes plurality and difference: ‘The other is maintained and confirmed in his heterogeneity as soon as one calls upon him’ (1969: 69). (1969: 50–1) This is a very different mode to that in which an object is given to sight. to regard the face. and assimilate her to our selves: ‘It is not a relation with the other as such but the reduction of the other to the same’ (1969: 46). is no part of Levinas’ project for it fulfils the demand of the other by stripping it of alterity and making it commensurable with my self-fulfilment (1995: 43). the engagement with radical otherness. reliant on vision or contact. As he explains: The way in which the other presents himself. Moreover. (1969: 195): The irreducibly different and incommensurable. a communicative ethic. it establishes that identity begins in.LEVINAS AND VULNERABLE BECOMING 89 moral response speaks to a model of power and domination. excessive to representation. from its alterity. and always beyond any mutual recognition. In a gesture of symbolic violence. In the encounter with the strange. between the one and the other can be recuperated. It is a breach in the self-sufficiency of the one. In his use of the term ‘face’. which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. As interpellation or expression. difference is put to the service of the same and becomes lost in the totalisation of being. of the uncanniness of the monster to which I have already referred. To locate ethics as prior to ontology. enables a very different reading of the encounter in which the distinction. a return to presence. and acceptance of. As Waldenfels points out. exceeding the idea of the other in me. of representation to oneself. such as might be implied by the turn to language. as Cathryn Vasseleu points out. to display a generosity towards it (1998: 88). in another register. he remains absolute within the relation…the ethical relationship which subtends discourse is not a species of consciousness whose ray emanates from the I. exteriority. and relies on. is opened up to exteriority and to the infinite. the suffering. is. such that responsibility for others could never mean altruistic will. In being subjected to the needs of the other in ‘a passivity more passive still than the passivity of matter’ (1998: 113–14). it is as an artefact of a necessarily ontological language. but simply by virtue of the face to face relation. a persecuting obsession. is yet to come. Indeed. rationality. it would be misleading to conclude that the response to the encounter is empty of more or less preferable . an ethics of responsibility posits the other as a unique and irreplaceable individual. Insofar as Levinas speaks of or implies being before the ethical moment. insofar as the call is directed to me alone. I cannot gather the other into myself. nonetheless. for Levinas. And moreover. has been made. No-one. as one must. It is not. Moreover. In place of the calculability of moral duty which theoretically at least treats everyone alike. Moreover. Rather. instinct of “natural benevolence”. the one who must respond to the vulnerability. the question of being. Levinas insists. may take my place. it is precisely as the one called. a state of unfreedom. I have already been offered without any holding back. and thus of agency. The very singularity of the face precludes any form of identification. it establishes me as singular and unique. not as a demand for the satisfaction of pre-existing rights but as a personal reaching out. in a non-present. between Levinasian ethics as they open onto infinity. and self-identity – have no part in Levinasian ethics. and calls instead for a response to its unique need. But where the latter schemata are clearly normative. I become a subject. no choice at all. the response is compelled. and the need of the other who meets me face to face. Rather. but as Levinas insists before any demand by the other. that I am instituted as a subject in my own right. or love’ (1998: 111–12). but makes clear that to ‘be’ ethical is ‘otherwise and better than being’ (Levinas 1989b: 179). far from exercising moral agency on one’s own behalf – with all the connotations of autonomy and rationality which that intends – the response to the other is.90 EMBODYING THE MONSTER ethics. we could ask whether Levinas offers prescription or simply description. then. The finite parameters of conventional moral agency – freedom. and without commencement or initiative (1998: 75). To be responsible for an other without limit. to become the hostage of an other. In transforming the semantic meaning of ‘ethics’. not in respect of a predetermined moral duty. as Levinas pointedly names it. As he puts it: ‘The recurrence of the self in responsibility for others. for in his ethics the will does not yet exist. not even in recognition of a spoken or sensed demand. The one is infinitely obligated before the transcendent other. In the sensibility of my exposedness to the other. There is a very significant difference. to be a self-for-the-other. To respond to the call. is to be inaugurated into responsibility. goes against intentionality. a capturing of the will. even though the call may come only from a silent face. and the more usual conception of morality with its totalising schema organised around the ontologically given. and should always be read sous rature. it is from me alone that the other requires response. in the face of the unavoidable call to responsibility. or commitment of the self. my unselfconscious enjoyment of the world. he refuses the ascription of value as such. My interiority. to answer ‘Here I am’. It is my very election as a hostage that establishes my freedom. In encountering the stranger-neighbour. The other who calls to me in . and perhaps it is up to the reader in the encounter with the text to disabuse herself of assumptions of meaning. opens onto infinity. besides. we would kill what seems to threaten us. in the pre-ontological. it arises not through the exercise of force. Whatever the status of my initial response. It should be remembered. and to ignore her. I believe. At first. I may be called back to the ethical from my immersion in the ontological. Although the criticism that Levinas is being merely utopian carries some weight. Nonetheless. the face to face constitutes an ethical moment which forbids murder. To kill the other. it is not the case that one will necessarily take responsibility: the opportunity to enter into ethics may be passed over. but the point Levinas wants to make is that the threat is apparent only. but with something absolutely other: the resistance of what has no resistance – the ethical resistance’ (1969: 199). the originary encounter – prior to an ontology that opposes self to other – is pre-eminently peaceful. To whom or what do they pertain? The question is especially acute given that Levinas makes clear that the face. Certainly his language implies that in the face to face encounter things could not be otherwise. is not after all to fail to respond. asks why violence rather than welcome should suggest itself as the first proclivity. is always beyond my grasp. then. a problem both for Levinas’ rethinking of the ethical. Such a reaction chimes with the encounter with what we call monstrous. The point is not that I cannot respond with violence. but an ethical impossibility: ‘There is here a relation not with a very great resistance. Though the other infinitely exceeds my power. to annihilate. In contradistinction. rather than displaying finite characteristics. a more generous approach cannot fail to appreciate the novelty of a project that demonstrates how ethics might be constituted otherwise. As Levinas insists. that which is non-self. Despite a remaining hesitation. an overcoming of otherness that secures the same in a gesture of violence. that the one has no choice but to respond. and for Jantzen’s critique: it is difficult to understand why. that the call or demand is inescapable. violent or welcoming. Levinas sees the ontological impulse as founded in mastery. To hear the call. her question. this seems to make good sense. because the absolute other is inviolate. the violence is all mine. the initial response to the unknown stranger may be no less than murderous. Indeed as Levinas makes clear. In the pre-ontological moment. Murder is a real possibility. nevertheless. As several commentators have pointed out. is literally without meaning.LEVINAS AND VULNERABLE BECOMING 91 alternatives. then. Grace Jantzen (1998). he is well aware of the shortcomings of humanity. As Jantzen rightly points out. misses the mark. the other. but there is. alterity displaces violence. there should be ascriptions such as violent or peaceful at all. it is the move to responsibility that matters. Totality and Infinity. in absolute alterity. that the face to face relation is both an-archic and recurrent. is beset by the complications of writing the pre-ontological in the language of self and other. the philosopher of religion. in which the discussion of violence develops. In her critique of Levinasian ethics. I may be interrupted in my being. but by the overflowing of every idea I can have of him (1969: 87). and although she provides a partial answer with reference to Levinas’ own understanding of the western logos. but that it will fail in its aim. to meet the other face to face. it is the defenceless transcendence of the other that stays my hand. it becomes clear that his notion of vulnerability is one which will answer to my own use of the term to mark a state which is as much that of the one as of the other. one might wonder. the certainty of my own existence thrown into doubt. I am claimed by an an-archical and ‘persecuting obsession’ that remains always nonreciprocal. proximity signals neither presence nor yet absence to/of the other. nor to the simple “representation” of a neighbour. this sacrifice is also suffered as an effacement of the female self’ (1995: 84). and the focus on what seems to amount to a form of self-annulment raises serious misgivings. ‘an abyss’ as Levinas remarks. As Cynthia Willett remarks: ‘however much ethical sacrifice brings honor to the mother. Although it is primarily an auratic and not a tactile relation. As Vasseleu puts it: ‘Prior to any sensation and irreducible to it. reducible neither to the simultaneity of objects in time. At the level of my corporeity. rather than for-myself. but it is in that that I become. there is no exchange of words. and yet the relation – if it can be called that – is intensely personal. As Levinas develops his model. that response itself – or rather the irrestistibility of the call – pitches me also into vulnerability. Certainly I am for-her. What is clear is that my suffering as one-for-the-other effectively ties together the concepts of maternity. proximity is a sensibility which is distinguished from the conjunction which occurs in experience and knowledge’ (1998: 98). it is already an assignation…an obligation. anachronously prior to commitment’ (1998: 100–1). In responding to the need of the stranger-other with a hospitality without limit. . but as a pre-ontological maternal hostage. poor. Although Levinas might respond that there is as yet no real self as such to efface. who is figured as homeless. I enact a donation without return which positions me not as a beneficent subject. that instantiates me as a subject. nor yet that she is dependent on my prior existence for her own. vulnerability and proximity. In other words. but an openness or exposure that traverses the space of difference. This is not intended to denote that I give birth to the other. widowed. The one and the other are not known to each other. In proximity. whether the subject who emerges from the ethical encounter could ever be a feminine self. Strictly speaking.92 EMBODYING THE MONSTER unprotected openness. for Levinas. It is my moral subjection to the other. nonetheless. nor even mutual awareness. I am alone and singular in my exposure to the call to responsibility. be it verbal or tactile. ‘to any modality of distance or geometrical contiguity. Although initially it is the other who is vulnerable. the relation with the other – before any conscious determination – is characterised by Levinas as maternal. nor as Levinas says. and whose suffering humanity invokes response. It is rather a non-phenomenal state of vulnerability. no-thing is grasped in the here and now. Proximity is an an-archic concept. orphaned. ‘quite distinct from every other relationship’ (1998: 46). It is hardly surprising that for feminist critics the lack of concern with maternity as birth-giving. I am exposed before the nakedness of the face. by giving shelter and nourishment. ‘does not limit but promotes my freedom. my vulnerability in exposure to her vulnerability. and is very different to the closeness of two beings in communication. of my incarnation ‘before being tied to my body’ (1998: 76). by arousing my goodness’ (Levinas 1969: 200). The proximity of the encounter is. In substituting myself. beyond the usual binary of active and passive. and prior to any act of will. In short. as it is usually understood. but an absolute passivity. does not arise. Unlike the selfconscious being-for-himself who ‘washes his hands of the faults and misfortunes that do not begin in his own freedom or in his present’ (1998: 116). an intentionality towards the other. The question of agency. I am summonsed to expiation before any fault of my own. I am ethical because ‘I am’ only in response to all the others. as being-in-one’s skin. It is precisely the relationship of non-reciprocity on which Levinas insists that theorists such as Cynthia Willett (1995) – who is equally concerned to reconfigure the dialectic of self and other – have found deeply problematic. there is as yet no willing I. If I am persecuted by the other. but in the place of her responsibility. At the level of the ethical. the appeal to reciprocal exchange . Yet substitution is not an act. Although. what Levinas calls ‘otherwise than being’. Indeed. in a proximity unmediated by any principle. so much as I am occupied by it. no expectation of the return of my gift of responsibility. I am guilty. there are no grounds on which I can judge the transcendent other. I do not put myself in the place of the other.The psyche can signify this alterity in the same without alienation in the form of incarnation. the just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the Other. which otherwise is ‘for nothing’. There can be no reciprocity. neither a form of respect in the Kantian sense for an equal and autonomous other. I am called to suffer not only as the hostage of the other. neither she nor any other may substitute for me. And yet the originary relationship remains deeply asymmetrical in that although I substitute for the other. It is not simply that I must respond to the other. in my limitless responsibility for her and in her place. the self is ethically liberated. but rather the mark of the irreplaceability and uniqueness of my self. even to the extent that she causes me to suffer. ‘(t)hese are not events that happen…to an ego already posited and fully identified. nor an empathy that would collapse difference into the selfsame. In specifically feminist ethics. then. It is. As Levinas understands it. the substitution is not a submission to an-other ego.LEVINAS AND VULNERABLE BECOMING 93 Moreover. as a trial that would lead it to be more conscious of itself’ (1998: 115–16). ‘I exist through the other and for the other. my task is responsibility alone. I open myself to the utmost vulnerability. the substitute – who responds without prior commitment opens on to human solidarity. can take on a meaning: ‘the suffering for the useless suffering of the other person. Levinas unfolds the concept of substitution as the crux of his understanding of the ethical relation between the one and the other. It is only in the mode of substitution that suffering. In Otherwise than Being. having-the-other-in-one’s-skin’ (1998: 114–15). but without this being alienation…. I must substitute myself for her and take on both her suffering and her responsibility. In consequence of my openness to the other. but that happen to the being in-oneself-for-the-other. the one-forthe-other – the hostage. opens upon suffering the ethical perspective of the inter-human’ (Levinas 1988: 159). the problematic of the pre-ontological being-in-itself disrupts the philosophical question of why others concern us.3 for that would be to enter into an economy of exchange which Levinas considers to be post-ethical. then. then. even with a postmodernist slant. is suspicious of the ‘unmeasured generosity’ of Levinasian ethics and perceptively remarks: ‘the gift given without regard to the particular context of the other. the whole of humanity. Certainly Levinas’ implication that the gift occurs before any specific demand has been made would seem to support such a concern. but for him the gift nevertheless always takes the form of a response. it cannot easily be extended to the ethical encounter between strangers. subtends the political. Were response indeed dependent on the expectation – if not the calculation. in which judgement and reciprocity play no part. ethics. Though. Although the notion of a pleasurable. and though it forecloses the ontological split between the one and the other. such a reading entails an understanding that renders the gift without return as untenable. On the contrary. to one that engages with justice in the socio-political sphere? It is just such a question that Simon Critchley (1992) addresses when he claims that Levinasian ethics do lead back to politics insofar as I find myself to be an other like all the others. interpersonal exchange that Willett develops with regard to the paradigm relation between caregiver and infant is appealing. Willett. First is the point that in the face to face relation with the other. the gift given ex nihilo. There is little reason to suppose that it is. and to other ‘victims of the same hatred of the other man’. Levinas could scarcely be described as a social or political philosopher. rather he is responding to the horrors that had already been perpetrated. for Levinas. in the eyes that look at me’ . The extent to which Levinas is willing to forgo the safety of mutual response. moreover. ethics cannot be grounded in either a pre-given ontology or in universal reason. Rather than being already political. imposed.94 EMBODYING THE MONSTER is paradigmatic. What mobilises the crucial move relies on two things. a wilful form of misrecognition or misattunement’ (1995: 82). Except perhaps for Luce Irigaray who fully embraces a Derridean notion of the gift (Irigaray 1992: 73). and refigures vulnerability away from negativity. then at least the erotics – of mutual exchange. then there would be little incentive in enter into any unfamiliar encounter. and to general laws. is precisely the measure of the potential inclusiveness of his ethical imagination. I am also in ‘the presence of the third party. We must concede that his text is intended to have substantive import. as Critchley contends. and yet he is not detached from the prevailing climate of postwar. Otherwise than Being is dedicated to the memory of those affected by National Socialism. the priority. it is difficult to see how to progress to the socio-political world in which we must live together. But how are we to move from a severe personal ethic of infinite responsibility. Although it is hard to agree with Critchley that the ethical relation never takes place in an a-political space outside the public realm – for surely it is just such interruptions to the polity that Levinas intends – it is clear that ‘the relation to the face is always already a relation to humanity as a whole’ (Critchley 1992: 226). post-Holocaust Europe. immediacy and particularity of obligation itself gives rise to the community of subjective meaning. may be regarded as an insult or violation. or could be. as I see it. and like the Levinasian model does not presuppose the meeting of full subjects. and embrace the vulnerability of unknowingness. Nonetheless. Indeed. this is an extremely harsh understanding of ethics. it is a matter of risk. a reaching out to the unknown other that is not conditional on an appropriate return. that it remains open to the trace of the originary relation and to absolute difference. then.Justice is impossible without the one that renders it finding himself in proximity. but making no personal call to me above that to moral decency? There is room. Even as I am able to move to another dimension beyond the exacting nature of the asymmetrical relation. This means concretely and empirically that justice is not a legality regulating human masses…. is also in a relation to other others. I am aware that because it arises from that original proximity. but that resists totalisation. (1998: 159) What justice enables is ‘a society where there is no distinction between those close and those far off’. In it justice is shown from the first. justice arises. justice itself can preserve the non-indifference to difference that proximity demands: All the others that obsess me in the other do not affect me as examples of the same genus united with my neighbor by resemblance or common nature…. signification.LEVINAS AND VULNERABLE BECOMING 95 (Levinas 1969: 213). the realm of the Said. in the concluding sections of Otherwise than Being. to return to my earlier theme. it is thus born from the signifyingness of signification. Far from turning away from the specific. must be thought back to the Saying of the ethical moment of proximity. And second. regard the images of the Still Life exhibition as those of undifferentiated beings deserving of respect for their vulnerability.The one for the other of proximity is not a deforming abstraction. The recurrence of the face to face disturbs the complacency that fixed principles and rules of behaviour might effect. my neighbour. then. but one among a multiplicity of others. laws. that Levinas is fully committed to an account that resists the assimilatory power of the same and relies on the continuing alterity of the radically . Moreover. precisely because the Said. but that in the plurality of such relations. the third party allows for ‘the thematization of the same on the basis of the relationship with the other’ (1998: 158). I am not alone in my singularity and vulnerability. who mark. It is these other others. the formalisation. of universal laws and principles that erase difference? Could I not. In opening up to a multiplicity of others. the obligation placed on me in proximity to the other – even though I cannot be replaced – is addressed too to everyone else in their uniqueness. The entry of the third party is not an empirical event so much as a realisation that the other. as Levinas puts it. It is not just that the third stands against the danger of closure and complicity in the interpersonal relation. but not totalising. it is the presence that mitigates the originary asymmetry and links me to a community of equal others. But are we not then returned to the sphere of totalisation. It is not that the non-reciprocity of the relationship with alterity should be reversed. where justice is ‘an incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity’ (1998: 158). ethical discourse in the Levinasian mode is neither determinate nor definitive. It is because of the evolution of ethical discourse in the face to face. the limit of responsibility and the birth of the question of justice. the one-for-the-other. vulnerability and responsibility. It appears. for an alternative approach within the concept of justice. and ensures the ongoing development and adequacy of universal. I believe. In other words. Levinas insists that justice ‘must not be taken for an anonymous law of the “human force” governing an impersonal totality’ (1998: 161). the realm of justice. do I not simultaneously efface any intuition of my own need. Even before the Law. to suffer for the other. But does this not suggest a self who is unable to acknowledge the limitations of finite being. it is difficult to avoid confusing the abstract and the empirical register. (1997: 110) As Wood sees it. the Levinasian self can at times sound almost messianic in its putative capacity to substitute. for negotiation. who. his ethics encompass all forms of radical alterity? I shall move on to consider briefly some critical responses to his work. as I outlined in Chapter 2. but there is some validity in David Wood’s comment: our exposure to the other is not some huge. but it should be remembered too that Levinas does not in fact set up the binary which Wood discerns. but as a regulatory power it is always non-indifferent in its operation. is supported in at least two different forms. Although Levinas may seek to save the stranger – which is surely another form of the monster – how far do. As always with Levinas. Rather. and ultimately for recognizing both opportunities and limitations. whilst admitting that Levinas’ work is temporarily useful and partially . The second charge of egoism is best exemplified by Luce Irigaray (1991a). and second that he betrays the claims of sexual difference as perhaps the most radical difference of all. but because. The accusation that there remains a fundamental egoism at the heart of Levinasian ethics is serious indeed for it would seem to challenge the very priority of ethics over ontology that is the crux of his approach. His rejection of the ontological moves that return the other to the self signals the need for an acceptance of the irreducibility of otherness. Nonetheless insofar as the self becomes a subject only through proximity to and by substitution for the other. And yet despite the concentration on an irreducible alterity. demands. justice is necessary for compassion. or could. for interpretation. it is evident that the two are not strictly bounded or divided one from the other. the restricted and calculative nature of rule-bound morality should not be put in an either/or opposition to an excessive responsibility. excessive obligation. and erase the sense that the demands and needs of the other may be local and specific? In the focus on infinity. which call not just for acknowledgment of my obligations. he wishes the empirically active moral agent to be called back to infinite responsibility as an interruptive and corrective trace that continuously repositions ethics as prior to ontology. pleas. the trace of that proximity remains as the guarantee that the community of equals is one sensitive to difference. The charge. in the putative opening on to infinity in the place of the other. I take my self to encompass both nothing and everything. critics of Levinas make two major claims against him: first that his ethical position is deeply egoistic. co-existence and co-presence. although it is less clear that his model serves to mark the otherness within the self. Certainly. as I understand it. the feminine and the monstrous are habitually conflated the one with the other. who imagines that she is entitled to answer the call of the infinite? Moreover. As Levinas puts it.96 EMBODYING THE MONSTER other. not because it constitutes an explicit theme in my approach. The latter point is of interest here. but rather a complex openness to requests. The first arises precisely from the move that would seem to negate the selfsame in the acceptance of infinite responsibility for the other. but for scrutiny. . Irigaray is highly critical of Levinas here. collapses the other into the same. then is not the same true of the other? In the register of the face to face. But what then is it that keeps itself apart. he expresses the view that in attempting to write without a thematised philosophical language and context.L. leaving the circle which encloses my solitude to meet in a shared space. but reads only his own desire through her. however. as he himself avers. still less an intertwining as it would do with Irigaray. As Derrida remarks. is also highly critical. It is precisely that ethical moment which interrupts the ego. E. have no hesitation in referring to the work of Levinas as ‘prurient. in Totality and Infinity. to replace them finally by the fully fledged ‘elle’ the dissident feminine voice that has hitherto been missing. Levinas has more successfully pre-empted ontology.LEVINAS AND VULNERABLE BECOMING 97 worthy of respect. solitary love does not correspond to the shared outpouring. as it were. but in a characteristic move that recuperates the emphasis given to alterity. which is thus subordinated to a supposedly more fundamental division between self and other. Levinas fails to escape the grip of an ontological discourse that. make similar points. to the loss of boundaries which takes place for both lovers when they cross the boundary of the skin into the mucous membranes of the body. It should be noted. the caress fails to open on to a future for both the one and the other (Irigaray 1993a: 188). such as Gayatri Spivak. but positively repressive of the feminine. What he intends in his account is that the ethics should be organised around an alterity before the mark of sexual difference. it is an approach. however. But this surely is to beg the question. male-identified ethics’ (Spivak 1992: 77). that his concept of proximity does not imply contact as such. of the caress – which is somewhat different from the indeterminable face to face – Levinas seems to Irigaray to maintain distance and be concerned only with ‘the elaboration of a future for himself’ (Irigaray 1991a: 179). The question of egoism cannot of course be separated from the more sustained charge that Levinas himself is not merely indifferent to sexual difference. (1991a: 180) The complaint is that as an ‘approach’. She goes on: This autistic. egological. who has himself been accused of anti-feminism (though mistakenly in my view). . By the time of Otherwise than Being. in the recurrence of proximity. even as it is given up to the other? Even in his account. for Levinas. and although clearly attracted to Levinasian ethics.4 Rather. the ego. and plays on his initials. critics like Derrida. that priority is under strain as gendered terminology threatens to swamp any claim to neutrality. Where other feminists also. The lover (whom Irigaray identifies as male) does not truly encounter the other in her own specificity. but his new work too is subject to a Derridean critique. for if my own identity is not yet formed. Instead. In his earlier work in particular. Totality and Infinity could not have been written other than by a man (1978: 321). she turns the Levinasian model around so that a radical sexual difference is the very threshold of ethics (Irigaray 1993a). or is in any case set aside. She accuses him of depriving the other of identity in the notion of substitution. is not yet an identity as such. In ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’ (1991a) Derrida mimics the voice of Levinas. the one seeks transcendence at the expense of the other. as subject. has suggested forcefully that the problem lies in Levinas’ failure to problematise the face of the one who responds. (1998: 75) Unlike the subject of ontology who would incorporate and consume difference. she claims. as Levinas clearly identifies the infinite responsibility and vulnerability of the one with the concept of maternity. the face of an adult male with sufficient ability and privilege to be able to choose its response’ (1998: 241). And yet there remains an unease that his terminology is marked by binary sexual difference. It is not a relationship of mastery. As John Caputo notes. unknown. the unknown. Yet this presents a further moment of hesitation for the feminist reader. which. Certainly his deployment of terms associated with a traditional view of the feminine as ‘less than’ – in which guise it has been associated with the strange. Moreover. subjected to an unanswerable demand. The pre-ontological maternal body is one that suffers without limit for the other. Levinas has already identified the one who responds with the maternal figure. and ‘any romantic notions of the mysterious. ‘the instantiation of the Same and the Other par excellence is the Macho Man and the Modest Maid’ (1997: 151). Grace Jantzen. the supposed neutrality of that project is undermined by the evident masculinity of the one. If not. or misunderstood woman’ (1989c: 49). and by his use of the feminine metaphor. the substitute: In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others. bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor. the Levinasian response to the suffering other is not one of power. as he uses it. revealed. often to characterise otherness as such. to offering the gift of oneself-for-theother without return. and on the other. the oneself is called into question. for Levinas. But in contrast to the traditional model of dominance which it might seem to evoke. the vulnerability and frailty of the other is clearly marked as feminine. Levinas has in other work pointedly denied any substantive connection between the feminine. Maternity. she may overlook the priority of Levinasian ethics over ontology. which is bearing par excellence. is yet again effaced. if the face of the oneself were that of a woman? But surely this cannot express the problem. If this is sex specific. and violence of the western symbolic – in which the unknown other is perceived as a . the monstrous in general – works to give the impression of a masculinist philosophy in which radical alterity is constantly subverted. One commentator. When Willett (1995) complains that the mother. mastery. but expresses a legitimate anxiety that the feminine is as ever the marked term. for on the one hand. What. in its own utmost vulnerability. but of infinite ethical responsibility. Despite his frequent use of the term ‘woman’ in Totality and Infinity. as we have seen.98 EMBODYING THE MONSTER What is really disturbing to most feminist readers of Levinas is that although he may intend to posit an originary humanity before sexual division. ‘is indeed his face. maternity is devoted to feeding the other. exposed before the other. In particular. then he has effectively disrupted the negativity associated with woman. to the point of substitution for others and suffering both from the effect of persecution and from the persecuting itself in which the persecutor sinks. the question of choice has been deferred. a destitution that can be relieved only by the one. in short. that always already bears the full weight of the hostage. then the purpose must be that in being called first to ethics. the virility. she asks. of those who do not. In illustration of the difficulty. and violence towards. might there be some other violence involved? Given that Levinasian ethics. The voice of the ethical hostage is strongly personal in Levinas’ work and suggests the struggle of the writer to produce a delineation of ethics that is adequate to his own experience. appear to me? As Levinas characterises it. it must be the starting point – but how can it go on. without supplement. and of breaking the hegemony of sameness over difference. It is more a case of failing to think the radical alterity between all the others. he describes the latter in its general form as ‘a movement going forth from a world that is familiar to us…from an “at home” (“chez soi”) which we inhabit. or even monstrous? At the beginning of Totality and Infinity. does that not pose a risk of forgetting the other others. The ontological anxiety that underlies the assumption of dominance over. we can accept that ‘(t)he otherness with which the feminine has always been associated is rethought by Levinas’ (ibid. There is nothing wrong with that as a starting point – indeed in the absence of pre-determined values. it remembers ‘the millions on millions of all . toward an alien outside-of-oneself (hors-de-soi). who remain truly alien. but it is precisely this sense of the not-yet approachable that seems to disappear from the ethics. Because the I in its singularity is instituted in the summons by the other. More fully. the other is displaced. cannot. may unwittingly assimilate the unencountered others to what the face to face already gives up to the thematisation required by universal law. even when opened out to encompass the arena of justice in a universal sense. to account for the complexity of other relations? As Spivak remarks: ‘An ethical position must entail universalization of the singular…. then I am inclined to agree with Tina Chanter when she says: ‘we cannot understand Levinas’s account of the otherness which “accomplishes itself in the feminine” as a restatement of the traditional domination of the Other by the same’ (1988: 36). It is not a matter of knowledge as such. is rooted in the immediacy of the face to face encounter. to a neighbour. but what. or could. let me recall briefly the dedication of Otherwise than Being to which I referred earlier. Although I am willing to accept that the gesture of subsuming the other under the ontological category of the same has been avoided. The assumption is that justice and the law will refer back to – be interrupted by – my own originary position in proximity to the other.But if there is one universal. for to know the other is already to be unethical. I will leave aside further consideration of whether Levinas has given an adequate account of sexual difference in its radical Irigarayan sense. or at least a stranger in my neighbourhood. toward a yonder’ (1969: 33). What I am suggesting is that Levinas.). we should remember. the departure from myself is explicitly the approach.LEVINAS AND VULNERABLE BECOMING 99 threat – is suspended in favour of those qualities associated with the feminine. it cannot be inclusive of difference’ (1992: 75). is successful. present themselves. where Levinas identifies ethics with metaphysics. to ask instead the question more pertinent to my own immediate project of whether the other has really been recuperated in a specific and absolute alterity. in his concentration on the encounter as the wellspring of all ethics. then. the proximity. though that. all those who never do. is necessarily limited. If the Levinasian project of radically rethinking the other. Again Ahmed suggests an answer. and the here and now need for a finite response within the particular encounter. otherness is fetishised to the extent that it conceals the particular other in her difference. the same anti-semitism’. but unless it can bear some substantiality. and about what it is of the other. Indeed to exceed the singular moment is precisely to open oneself to ethics. Ahmed argues that it is misplaced to assume that in the name of ethics we could or should seek to gain access to an other at the level of individual specificity. it is more problematic when dealing with material situations in which power and other differentials are already established and have a history. in a move that would account for a multiplicity of others. The difficulty with the Levinasian model is that while it convincingly expresses the originary moment of ethics. and thus to ontologise the other as a being. that ‘is surely to fill the other in. or a mentally disabled person – even to stay within the circuit of those persecuted under National Socialism – recognise themselves as experiencing the same hatred of their otherness as that directed towards Jews? Would the Still Life neonates. As such. it is not clear to me that all hatreds take the same form. to know the other as being in a certain way. but the particularity of my response cannot fulfil my responsibility’ (2000: 147). I would need to ask about the conditions of possibility for the encounter itself. and provides an answer to the classic puzzle of why be ethical. for example. have demanded the same ethical response as any of the foregoing? With the problem of the possible erasure of specificity in mind. The effect of such a shift of focus would be to open up the encounter to the question of elsewhere and otherwise. victims of the same hatred of the other man. albeit an alien one’ (2000: 142). Ahmed claims. that exceeds the presence of this face to face. Nonetheless. Would. then. The encounter that Levinas describes both is and is not a phenomenal event. Whilst the general appeal against the murderous violence of intolerance is irreproachable. As Ahmed comments: ‘One’s infinite responsibility begins with the particular demands that an other might make. As she puts it: ‘introducing particularity at the level of encounters (the sociality of the “with”) helps us to move beyond the dialectic of self–other and towards a recognition of the differentiation between others’ (2000: 144). She suggests that once ‘otherness’ is ascribed as a quality of the neighbour-stranger. Instead she suggests that we turn our attention to the particularity of modes of encounter. it remains too abstract to deal adequately with the issue of difference in its multiple forms. In short it is an opening on to broader social processes. The problem in relating this to Levinasian ethics is that the emphasis on finite and particular of modes of encounter may fall short of the demand for infinite responsibility. and. Levinas’ ethical project defeats its own terms. Rather than holding the other in place.100 EMBODYING THE MONSTER confessions and all nations. moreover. Sara Ahmed has raised the question of whether we need to examine how the other is figured as such in the very process of being designated ‘the other’. as objects of fascinated repulsion rather than hatred. and the other others. By drawing some distinction between responsibility for and response to the other – as indeed I have already done with regard to the question of violence – we might reasonably satisfy both the infinite call to responsibility. One area that is of . a homosexual man or woman. about its historicity and its future. At its simplest level. as well. and to standards of equality. I am not suggesting that there are no instances in which the protective function of distinctive boundaries is necessary. In the next chapter I shall address some other ways of thinking the contact between bodies which both rely on their fleshy corporeality and withstand the possessive impulse that would overwhelm difference and specificity. the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum – the adequate idea’ (1969: 50–1). for Levinas. but the more radical realisation that exposure. by noting the particularity of its expressive features. pain. but it may be possible to extend his approach precisely by fleshing out the face. In addition. a vulnerable openness in the face of alterity. then it risks being grasped to the selfsame. In eschewing a calculative morality tied to pre-determined principles. opens up to a reconceived concept of difference. but by a double movement that encompasses the abstract form. it appears that they do not figure any material entity. is always a matter of risk. nakedness. This is especially clear in relation to Levinas’ conception of the face. which he wants to remain separate from that which can be seen – apprehended – by a perceiving consciousness which would return it to the same and thus defeat its absolute alterity. skin. as Ahmed suggests. But can the abstraction of the transcendent face without features ground an ethics that is able to differentiate between a multiplicity of specific others? Levinas maps out no explicit route to move from one to the other. the resistance to totalisation. despite this and other serious reservations about what is inherent in his work. as the mode of the encounter. as for Derrida. Despite a plethora of corporeal terms such as face. as Levinas puts it: ‘The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me. for clearly some approaches are hostile in intent. to expectations of balanced exchange. intolerance and fear in the face of the strange encounter – all of which seek and necessarily fail to preserve an impossible separation – we might see that greeting and welcome are more appropriate. it seems to me that the body eludes expression or slips away even as it expresses. focuses in on the ‘real’ face of a whole body in a particular context. birth and so on. but if it is taken to be only phenomenal.LEVINAS AND VULNERABLE BECOMING 101 particular concern to me is whether or not the ethical. What is at stake here speaks to a central conundrum with regard to the encounter: unless it is described to an extent at least in the language of bodily materiality the relation is no more than an ideal abstraction. Nonetheless. there is much in Levinasian ethics that is of value and relevance to my own project. In the place of the reactions of violence. and opens out again to being otherwise. Although critics such as Critchley refer to an ethics grounded in a flesh and blood sensibility (1992: 179). Rather it is a matter . body. Instead. the notion that the encounter with the other precedes self-presence and self-determination marks not just the points about becoming-in-the-world-with-others that I develop in the next chapter. is embodied. and to the impetus of assimilation that characterises the western logos. My response in proximity to the faces of the Still Life series is explained best not by the austerity of strictly Levinasian ethics. is the very condition of becoming. To enter into an embodied and sensuous engagement will entail a return to the analytic of the ‘real’ bodies from which Levinas seems distanced. ethics. for Levinas. The encounter touched me deeply both in its finite specificity and in its infinite implications. that is the provocation of ethical subjectivity.102 EMBODYING THE MONSTER of forswearing judgment in advance. To hold open the idea of the other. is to enter into the risk of mutual becoming. of the one and of the other. of refusing to place pre-determined limits on my ethical response. in whatever form she takes. it is vulnerability itself. In short. . or to limit the other to the categories of the known even as she is unfamiliar. and the responsibility that it engenders in the one and for the other. it is scarcely an adequate image of relational economies that are lived in phenomenological complexity. In analysing the gendered exercise of the gaze.6 THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY OF TOUCH The issue of what is at stake in the relational economies of self and other – in effect the question of difference – has been taken up in feminist thought as possibly the most urgent and critical focus of postconventional theory in general. . In contrast I shall look instead at the issue of monstrosity as a manifestation of the always already unstable corpus. and the minimisation of interconnection are all aspects that could flourish only where the materiality and voluminosity of the flesh is reduced to a surface phenomenon that ideally reflects back the unity and completion of the viewing subject. the very thing that signals potential danger in a specular economy that privileges separation. both as a category and in some specific examples – again turning to the instance of the Irish conjoined twins – not just to problematise further the relation between the non-normative and the normative subject as they are embodied. whose fluidity resists the closure of the skin. As paradigms of clear-sightedness. In focusing on those organic beings whose difference is always already apparent at the surface. to reflect on matters of judgement. the lack of affective engagement.1 To look into the mirror of nature or of the soul. the perceived risk of contact is not limited to the realm of the ab-normal. constitute a familiar trope in western metaphysics. images and metaphors of the mirror. Is it possible that the encounter with the other can be mediated such that the interval of distance – the spacing that separates self-complete subjects and that makes possible the objectifying and disciplinary operation of the gaze – will lose its determining power? In this chapter I shall reflect on monstrous corporeality. in both its speculative and its self-reflective capacity. I want to open up the question of touch. and as a difference that defies distinction and separation. is to exercise a distinctly human capacity in which the enquiring mind constitutes distance and objectivity as the mark of truth. While the notion of contamination figures an other whose anomalous body is leaky and noxious. The value put on the clarity and distinction implied by clear sight. but encompasses too the coming together of those normatively embodied subjects who are supposedly marked out by closed boundaries of the skin. but to reconsider the issue of subject relations in general. Although it may express the operative nature of those relations between autonomous subjects most valued in the dominant discourse. it has seemed to many feminist theorists that the emphasis on the detachment of the specular at the expense of the immediacy of touch is a characteristic of a masculinist logos. 104 EMBODYING THE MONSTER Moreover. man. the already familiar composite of matter and mother through which feminism in particular has staged a critique of the dominant forms of western discourse. of what is other than the same. and still less interchange. the whole and unified self is affirmed by reference to an ideal of unvarying sameness that demands the disavowal of the dynamics of becoming. In the work of Luce Irigaray. Moreover. the risk of splitting off as other those things. or more specifically the human male. shadows. Contact. is structured by a series of exclusions. self and other are inextricably co-dependent. the monster. Against a subject who sees only that which reflects his own self-presence. has been enabled to gain mastery over all things external to him. such intertwined relations cannot be acknowledged. which is positioned either in terms of identity as the selfsame. nonetheless. may be read most fruitfully alongside. By gazing on the natural world. the parameters of knowledge. such as ever-changing bodily substance. Rather than working within a model that positions all epistemological phenomena either in terms of identity or as the other of the same. reflections. and as supplemental to. These cannot be separated from the core appearance which would make them possible. which seem to carry no ontological consistency. Irigaray’s project demands recognition of the radical other. in the structuration of the logos. and yet at the same time – as feminism has come to recognise – they are quasi-foundational. despite the lack of acknowledgment for its radical difference. The self cannot come into being without the other. As it constitutes its other. those conditions of matter and maternity are both irrecuperable in themselves. and the logos it supports. And it is the very move of excavating that structural . For the subject of the masculinist logos. as she shows in ‘Hystera’ (Irigaray 1985a). As I indicated earlier. Irigaray’s work has been highly influential in uncovering the paradoxical relation that underpins the ambivalent reception of the mother/matter/monster configuration. for they make what one takes to be the core appearance visible…the reality that engenders the phantasm is engendered by it. it is claimed. As Alphonso Lingis puts it: A thing is by engendering images of itself. finds no place in the stasis of abstract being. in the specular economy. In this context. The self-certainty of the Cogito in the abstract mode of self-reflection carries with it. Irigaray proposes a third term uncontained and unreflected by the binary of self and other. and the ethics of modernity are predicated on the separation and independence of subjects. as it incites both nostalgia and fear in the interplay of sameness and difference. once the absolute domain of God. the excluded other is the necessary support of the whole system. are fixed in the (self)reflective mind of the human being. halos. while at the same time looking into himself for knowledge of his own being. or in terms of difference as the other of the same. the image of reflection is central to her understanding of how the history of philosophy. as a figure of the imaginary. Within the masculinist forms. (1994: 41) Nonetheless. In both cases. or which confirms his own wholeness and completion. in the period of modernity in particular. albeit unacknowledged. the speculative gaze is sustained only insofar as it is reflected in its own exteriority. however. I believe her insights can be extended to the linked term of the anomalous and monstrous body. and although her focus is on the place of the gendered woman. Though the two-dimensional plane of the mirror may seem to faithfully reiterate the original. Just as Irigaray’s analysis recalls the exclusionary operation of (self)reflection and the denial of maternal origin. and experiences only fragmentary and uncoordinated motor impulses. Although Lacan explicitly saw his account of the formation of the subject as counterposed to the disembodied Cogito. is merely the reflective surface. is how the unreflected excess. at worst to their erasure. whilst apparently inaugurating wholeness.2 it has in its unrepresented excess always the potential for subversion. the mirror stage founds the ego as ‘both a map of the body’s surface and a reflection of the image of the other’s body’ (Grosz 1994: 38). The closure and distinction of normative embodiment pivots on a (mis)recognition. But this re-source is also rejected as the waste product of reflection. and yet both the corporeal unities that it posits. It is an image that at best speaks to the passivity of women. the bodyimages that are (mis)recognised in his model enact their own exclusions. and by extension of all who share their exclusion. or between inside and outside. in other words. It is the image of the mirror as a hard reflective surface that is taken up too by Lacan. the move is one to a scopic drive that heralds differentiation. as the marked term of the masculine/feminine binary. As Baudrillard warns. In Lacan’s account. ‘(t)here is always sorcery at work in the mirror…. the regular doubling of the selfsame. the other of the same whose only function is the reproduction – in all its senses – of masculine subjectivity: ‘Mother-matter-nature must go on forever nourishing speculation. a singular self in a singular body. cannot be taken for granted. which. and as Irigaray is very well aware in her own strategy of mimicry. it makes something fundamental vacillate’ (1988: 182). Where the early infant is unable to recognise the distinctions between self and other. nonetheless destabilises the system and points up its inadequacy as a model of existential relations. it sets the scene for the infant’s ‘jubilant assumption of his specular image’ (1977a: 2). In short. and which rely on the physicality of unmediated touch. Lacan too uses the metaphor of the mirror to figure the infant’s turning away and repression of its early experience of ‘nursling dependency’ (1977a: 2) in favour of a sense of bodily unity and selfhood. in fact relies on a splitting at the heart of subjectivity. Throughout her deconstructive critique Irigaray asserts that the quality of reduplication that sustains the logos is predicated on and perpetuates a move in which the feminine. and the succession to ‘the armour of an alienating identity’ (1977a: 4). What interests Irigaray. and identity itself are fictional. It is. But it is not simply that the feminine is represented only as a lack – the nothing to be seen with nothing of itself to reflect – it is also the site of an unruly excess that must be repressed. who sees it as that which metaphorically and literally inaugurates the accession to being-in-the-world as a subject. the apparent clarity of the mirroring process. The conventional . that which is other than the same. Instead of the circuit of bodily exchanges that characterise the early maternal/infant bond. and concerns me here. the point at which a subject becomes distinguished from its objects. cast outside as what resists it’ (1985b: 77).THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY OF TOUCH 105 function that disrupts and throws into doubt the modernist phantasy – for no such figure exists – of a bodily closure and self-completion. again most particularly of the feminine.Reproduction is diabolical in its essence. The phenomenological and especially psychic dimensions of embodiment are scarcely considered. that the subject must claim autogenesis. the shock. ‘consciousness is always consciousness of the other…without the reflected image of the other. The implication is that as self-identity and self-image are fundamentally unstable. in selflikeness. inaugurally. in a process that closes up/off past time’ (Irigaray 1985a: 289). evaporate. So powerful is the need to protect itself against the threat of dissolution inherent in the gross materiality of the maternal body. there is much in Irigaray’s themes that resonates with the ‘descriptive’ element of Lacan’s work. to flow out of him and into another who cannot be easily be held on to’ (1985a. she asserts that the horror of fluidity is characteristic of the male: ‘All threaten to deform. ‘(r)eproducing itself instantly and in(de)finitely. a breach in the boundaries of selfhood that blurs the distinctions between self and other. The (mis)recognised template of the body that maps the ego can only be secured by a set of exclusions of the excessive other – most notably the feminine and the anomalous body. ‘Volume-Fluidity’: 237). as Lacan implies. in the inconstant. then. so too must the disturbingly fluid corporeality of the monstrous. As such. invoked by the monstrous and more particularly the conjoined body is not so much that of an extraordinary morphology. On the contrary. profoundly wounded in the human relation to the world’ (1988: 169). consume him. as of a psychic reawakening of an originary confusion of form and lack of singularity as the condition of all. their emphasis is more usually on establishing that extraordinary forms of embodiment are no obstacle to the full participation of the subjects involved in an ethics of autonomy that privileges clear distinctions between self and other. and between one corpus and another. The specular interval that holds apart the autonomously embodied subject from the body without clear boundaries is less a staging of difference than a moment which risks the reflection of the disunity inherent to the self. or that threatens to fracture or expose the corporeal and ontological vulnerability of the singular subject. they must be protected from any/body that is either insecurely bounded in itself. the unity of the self relies on the reflective unity of the specular other. As Lacan remarks: ‘There is something originally. a threat to well-Being. Yet if. then that dependency is radically shaken by any mark of disunity in the external image.106 EMBODYING THE MONSTER model of subjectivity – be it Cartesian or Lacanian – has no room for corporeal being that is either uncontrollable or less than perfect. It is a model that disavows existential vulnerability. For Irigaray. And just as uncontainable feminine excess must be erased from the clean and proper masculinist subject. As I have already remarked. the ego is nothing’ (1993: 73–4). As Samuels notes. In her potent analysis of the denial in the masculine imaginary of matter and of the mother. mutable and excessive materiality of the maternal body. even horror. Regardless of a fundamental divergence in approach to the question of sexual difference. In its . its own initial place of embodiment. The supposedly intrinsic leakiness of female – and monstrous – bodies is. the masculinist subject can flourish only by disavowing its own origins. smooth reflective surfaces that reduplicate but never vary the subject. theorists of disability – with which bodily conjunction is classed – have been reluctant to take up such themes. What are lost are the hard. propagate. but a twin. Given that persistent sense of ambivalence which seems to ground a deepseated anxiety not simply about the monstrous other. As such. the modernist subject would figure the other as an object that might be possessed. in an unavoidable duality’ (1970: 326). nor in man. ‘I’ will be born afterwards. which I want to develop. it is through touch that we may come face to face with our other selves. but which thereby serve to emphasise the contingency and vulnerability of the symbolic. and remains on the side of the unthought. not of man. that institutes and perpetuates an indifference that is deeply alien to the notion of a disembodied subject. nothing must remain for the subject as a reminder of the indeterminate form of its origin. security and separation in the others from whom we are ideally distinct. but about the corporeal as such. It is neither reflective of the ‘proper’ subject nor reflected in itself. . but that duality is the condition of becoming. is that notion of an ineradicable touch. As such. Describing the unthought of western culture. born. precisely upon leaving infancy…[but] when the law comes to me. the monstrous is always with us. I have already outlined how Kristeva’s concept of the abject refers to those things – such as the originary envelopment of the maternal bond – that must be kept at bay lest they threaten the subject’s extinction. our own embodied being. A similar point is made by Lyotard when he comments that entry into the symbolic is never complete: It is not ‘I’ who am born. And in looking for a reflection of our own autonomy.3 This is the selfsame in its constituent parts. If the price of a unified self-image. It is. in an identical newness. as our own necessary ontological excess. with language. It is not simply that the self is split. illusory though it may be. But while the mirror remains resistant to such possibilities. it is easier to understand modernist attempts to fix the epistemology and ontology of the monstrous. what she calls ‘the frailty of the law’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). it is too late. then the subject must be in a relationship of mastery over all that is alien to the clean and proper self. And the turn of the law will not manage to efface the first turn. and the vulnerabilities within. the image that looks back at us could mirror our own disturbing and half-recognised selves. that which is monstrous evades the limits of classificatory and representational systems. but an unnerving double that is yet irreducible to the bounded subject. and yet it is not entirely absent nor present. they are the other within. Can we then reconfigure the (ethical) relation between self and other. but beside him and at the same time. is repression. who is given birth to. the corporeal ambiguity of touch that disrupts the distinction between self and other. Despite the best endeavours of the disciplinary and regulatory impulses.THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY OF TOUCH 107 quasi-transcendent form. Far from entering into engagement with the strange(r). evident in the gaze of both popular culture and science. That ambiguity figures an uncanny such that it is not simply that monsters are always there in our conscious appraisal of the external world. who would see in the mirror not the authorised reflection that constructs and defines the parameters of self-presence. and yet such a project must necessarily fail. in short. Things have already taken a turn. with the ego and language. this first touch: the one that touched me when ‘I’ was not there. (1993: 179) What Lyotard introduces here. it is as though we were to see instead the leaks and flows at the boundaries of. Foucault refers to the Other as ‘not only a brother. and self-definition are the attributes of the father’s production…. singular subject. but also the psychic investments that accrue to body image and the significance of a phenomenological sense of beingin-the-world-with-others. They encourage us to pose the unthought question of what would emerge if instead of the interval of separation and distinction. such twins do have a clear history of being regarded as freaks. by no means redundant to a consideration of ontology and ethics. What is primarily at stake in such an account is the conceptual separation between subject and object in which property in one’s own body is the ground of selfhood. In the attempted recuperation of the anomaly of conjoined twins as nonetheless potentially conforming to the western standard of singularity and self-determination. but as a moment of contiguity where the boundaries are necessarily blurred? I want now briefly to renew my focus on the phenomenon of conjoined twins. I am not suggesting. Yet though that model would seem to position the unmodified corporeal excessiveness of concorporation as only skin deep. who exist only as a unit. as Foucault suggests. In non-autobiographical observations. Despite their highly unusual morphology. for conjoined twins. each with their own identity embodied in a shared morphology. It is as though the body were merely instrumental and the shared organ of the skin – which is the minimum condition of conjunction – bore no relation to the ‘real’ persons beneath. for whom the cotangibility of the other is of particular significance. or other similar figures of the early modern period. Indeed. ownership. Their doubled and shared bodies point up an extraordinary disturbance that problematises. then. the disturbance at the level of the skin does not. As Luce Irigaray puts it: ‘Property. an understanding of the discursive nature of both could scarcely . As I understand it.108 EMBODYING THE MONSTER not in terms of a reflective interval. To own. the much repeated claim that beneath the skin such twins are essentially separate and autonomous – as though concorporation were merely a surface effect – acts almost as a necessary strategy of ontological reassurance. ‘an unavoidable duality’. such twins are. but rather serve to crystallise what is at stake in a normative economy of self and other. What is missing. the phenomenon of conjoined twins provides a kind of limit case in our perception of the self/other relationship. then. we were to experience the other. as it is mediated in this case by mutual touch. at least insofar as it is assumed that there are two separate persons. there can be no acknowledgment that a radically different form of embodiment might ground other relational economies and demand a rethinking of our limited parameters of ethical being. ‘not only the protection of one’s own body from encroachments. is not only the affective complexity of perception. that Foucault intended his remark to be taken literally. but given his own interest in the theoretical import of the anomalous body – such as that of Herculine Barbin (Foucault 1980a) – I have no hesitation in moving between material and abstract registers. in which the uncertainty that lurks always at the edges of being is exemplified in a particularly acute form. from the ‘commonsense’ version. To be one’s own’ (1985a: 300). Unlike the Monster of Cracow. of course. necessarily signal an inner transgression of normative humanity. and its appeal to the modernist privileging of the selfidentical. but a denial of the leakiness between one’s self and others’ (1997: 178). as I have put it elsewhere.To be. always as a twin. and the skin itself is of ‘both an organic and an imaginary order. cutaneous sensations introduce the young of the human species into a world of great richness and complexity. In Anzieu’s words. For conjoined twins. and between itself and the maternal body. As Didier Anzieu puts it: From before birth. But. is an essential component of the infant’s well-being. there is. as Anzieu makes clear in his psychoanalytic reading of what he calls the ‘skin ego’. a unifying envelope for the self as it were. I want. but alongside that literal materiality. and more specifically the coextensivity of the skin. Touch. as the conceptual interval between self and other is established. and transmits. (1989: 12–13)4 Postnatally. no distinction between internal and external corporeality marked by the epidermal membrane. The task for the developing infant is to move beyond corporeal and psychical indifferentiation to a state where what is experienced at the surface of the skin serves to constitute a distinct and increasingly self-aware ego. ‘(t)his common skin ensures direct communication between the two partners. but rather a coextensivity with the mother in which they seemingly share a common skin.THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY OF TOUCH 109 demand otherwise. to sketch out a quite different way of grasping the significance of concorporate bodies. but which awakens the perception-consciousness system. then. Before returning to some relevant narrative material. through and on its surface. the intermediary role of the skin loses ground. as he explains it. forms the basis for a general and episodical sense of existence and opens up the possibility of an originary psychic space. But in the light of the sensory . or perhaps more accurately is repressed in the drive to enact normative and symbolic self-identity. and as a protective barrier between that self and a potentially threatening outside. information as to the baby’s own state of being. for the early infant. Alongside the apprehension of the skin both as a containing sac for physical and psychical apparatus. And yet. the baby’s initial inability to distinguish between inside and outside. In the first months of life. it is apparent that the skin is also the primary organ of communication. then. with its clarity and distance. is progressively displaced as the intermediary and communicative nature of mutual touch gives way to self/other differentiation in which the skin functions more as a barrier than as a permeable interface. the cotangibility of the other is an ever present reality. the skin is an extraordinarily sensitive surface which both registers sense impressions of the external world. mental images and vital rhythms of the two’ (1989: 62–3). It is as though a hierarchy develops in which the enveloping function of the skin is privileged. I will review the existing development of the notion of tactility in some psychoanalytic and philosophical texts. however. rather than the reciprocity of cotangibility having continuing value alongside the protective function. touch is recognised as the originary sense through which we begin to interact with the world. In short. In comparison with the visible. the tactile – a sensation that both frustrates detachment and compromises objectivity by reason of its reversible nature – is thoroughly devalued. both a system for protecting our individuality and a first instrument and a site of interaction with others’ (1989: 3). the condition may suggest a theoretical pathway in its staging of an economy of touch. reciprocal empathy and an adhesive identification: it is a unique screen which comes to resonate with the sensations. a world as yet diffuse. Merleau-Ponty’s project focuses on the phenomenology of the lived body in which the interface with others – both objects and living beings – constructs a dynamic sense of self in which abstract singularity plays no part.110 EMBODYING THE MONSTER richness and psychic significance of the surface flesh. In contact itself the touching and the touched separate. He writes: ‘To be in contact is neither to invest the other and annul his alterity. Nor can I forget the order of precedence in which ‘tactile experience occurs “ahead” of me. As I outlined in the preceding chapter. the taking up or completion by us of some extraneous intention or. proximity figures an attentiveness and responsibility to the other who meets me face to face. In the focus on co-presence and in what is effectively a decentring of the subject. Despite her strong critique of Merleau-Ponty’s text. and is not centred in me’ (ibid. our nearness and contact with the other is inescapable. he makes clear that the two always and necessarily overlap at every moment of existence (Merleau-Ponty 1962).). . an encounter that precedes being as such. Nonetheless. and for Levinas grounds an explicitly ethical relation that contrasts with the impersonal distance required by the realm of conventional morality and the law. each signals a way forward in the exploration of touch. that we experience self-becoming. on the other hand. and: every perception is a communication or a communion. the separation of the subject from its objects (Irigaray 1991b: 108. that we are made aware of the limitations of reading the world through sight alone. was always already other. Merleau-Ponty 1962). For both. but it is especially through touch. of our body with things. In a forthright rejection of the Cartesian split between psychological and physiological modes. the body and the world are inseparable. the complete expression outside ourselves of our perceptual powers and a coition. I cannot simply objectify external things: ‘Tactile experience…adheres to the surface of our body. Moreover. touch constitutes. the originary sense. it is important to note that Levinas has a very different understanding to Merleau-Ponty on the question of touch. The Visible and the Invisible (1968). particularly with regard to the latter’s concept of proximity. we cannot unfold it before us and it never quite becomes an object’ (1962: 316). did not have anything in common with me’ (Levinas 1998: 86). in Cathryn Vasseleu’s words. for its apparent privileging of sight – which in her view consigns the other to passivity – Irigaray concurs with him in marking the tactile as that which not simply precedes. (1962: 320) This intertwining is by no means limited to the tactile. Taken as a whole. It is through the habitus and comportment of the body.5 Despite their very different theoretical agendas. but more accurately defers. as well as in the imaginary and in desire. Most importantly. ‘a scene which defies reduction to the discriminations of vision’ (1998: 17). could there be a quite different imaginary order in which a sense of self did not depend on the distancing of separation. Above all. or on the mode of reflection in/of the other? Both Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray seem to me to offer a means of understanding the significance of cotangible bodies that makes redundant the interval of the Lacanian mirror. nor to suppress myself in the other. as the subject of touch. there are clearly some resonances between Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. so to speak. as though the touch moved off. which Irigaray claims both as characteristic of the feminine and as the substratum of all the senses. in frustrating the knowing grasp. there is for Levinas no sense of an interchange. flesh is the dimension in which ‘things simultaneously envelop or copresently implicate each other (1993: 28). His insistence that we are all part of the same flesh functions. almost as forcefully as she criticises Levinas for his egoism – but that it is above all the reversibility that he posits that opens us onto a world of others. for Levinas it is contact that. instantiates the individual uniqueness of self and other. It is important to note that the reversibility is never such that the two participants merge. is the point of both convergence and divergence. that inaugurates the move to an ontology of being. there is always an excess. The move he makes is to claim that touch is always reversible in that the hand that touches is also touched. As I have already noted. within a unified medium. in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form toward a future never future enough in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet’ (1969: 257–8). nor substance. nor mind. even in the mode of the caress. Moreover. What Merleau-Ponty enables here is a new opening on the question of responsibility. as with all forms of proximity. As he puts it. not to the extent that subject and object are redundant. but an elemental medium – like air or fire – in which self and the world are constituted in mutual relation (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 139–40). . I am not suggesting that in contrast Merleau-Ponty gives equal weight to both sides of the touch – and in fact Irigaray rebukes him for it. then. there is little sense of bodily materiality in proximity. proximity is the asymmetry of the relationship that marks it as the site of the responsibility of the self for the other. It expresses a way of undoing the binaries that structure our knowledge of ourselves in the world. but such that we experience distance through proximity. In other words my own expressive body is in a chiasmatic and pre-reflective relationship with other bodies. and second ‘to accommodate difference (between perceptible phenomena in themselves and between that which is perceiving and that which is perceived) and distance (as the ‘form’ or possibility of perceiving) in an ontology of perception’ (1993: 58).THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY OF TOUCH 111 Indeed. to establish ‘other landscapes besides my own’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 141) yet woven together with mine by the reversibility of perceiver/perceived and subject/object. however. a double sensation that is especially evident in the contact between two animate surfaces. On the contrary. the notion of flesh enables us first ‘to think through embodiment beneath sub-ject dualism by developing a radically unified ontology’. the significance of that reversibility becomes far more central as he elaborates his concept of flesh ontology. The task for Merleau-Ponty is to set out the fundamental unity of existence while at the same time not reducing it to a matter of the knowing subject. Although in his early work. it is not a loss of distinction. but a coming together in difference. but never vice versa. flesh creates openings and the possibility of difference. By folding over on itself. As an undifferentiated medium in itself. but ‘consists in seizing upon nothing.6 As Sue Cataldi explains in her commentary on that aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s work. The chiasm. intertwined one with the other through touch. the cross-over. Merleau-Ponty’s focus on touch is relatively underdeveloped. by reversals in its own voluminosity. The subject accordingly is in a mutually constitutive relationship with its objects. an erotics of touch does not grasp. The term ‘flesh’ is used in The Visible and the Invisible to designate not matter. MerleauPonty shows how the sensations of the individual body are themselves chiasmatic. the significance of tactility is not simply that it is the first sense. and he explicitly cites the maternal/foetal bond as an example of chiasmatic identity-in-difference: ‘the two bodies are enfolded together. I think. sharing one pulsing bloodstream’ (1999: 206). visible and tangible. the form never definitively completed’ (1985b: 217). its own movements incorporate themselves into the universe they interrogate. It cannot stand in for the living body as a whole. But what of the body that is not one? By taking the human corporeality as a structure which exemplifies the flesh in itself. speaks to an ontology of perception alone. the flesh ontology is limited by its failure to address the visceral dimensions of the body: ‘Beneath the surface flesh. It is not my claim. This is far indeed from the narcissistic gaze or the possessive touch that characterises dominant discourse. in her own take-up of the themes of the flesh ontology – which mesh with an understanding of the feminine as always (self)touching. I am coincidentally both subject and object to myself. In other words. feminine morphology is never singular and self-complete: ‘the birth that is never accomplished. Moreover. the body never created once and for all. lies a hidden vitality that courses within me. containable as neither one nor as part of the subject/object pair – Irigaray sees the originary relationship as precisely that which must be suppressed in a specular economy. he recognises nevertheless that ‘this bodily intertwining is never fully effaced from adult life’ (ibid. a form of hierarchy remains in the external relationship in that the reversibility is never in the form of indeterminacy: ‘I am always on the side of my body’ (1968: 148). not in the negative Sartrean mode of vulnerability to the other. that conjoined twins or other concorporate bodies are similar to intrauterine forms.112 EMBODYING THE MONSTER It is in contradistinction to the disjunction intrinsic to the specular image that the significance of the chiasmatic nature of touch becomes apparent. not on two surfaces that are always already touching. he does not. In short. as well as being of it in the wider sense. As Merleau-Ponty says of the tactile hand: ‘through the crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible. Nonetheless. As Leder goes on to insist. Although acknowledging that gestation and natality are lost to us. But although he analyses at some length the tactility between one’s own two hands or lips. are recorded on the same map as it’ (1968: 133). In her view. If I reach out my own hand to the other. but as a co-functioning. my relation to the other is a relation of flesh and blood. I think. The irreducible flip that he proposes between the active and passive is premised on the image of one hand reaching out to touch the other. “Blood” is the metaphor for this viscerality’ (1999: 204). on which Merleau-Ponty focuses. The point for Merleau-Ponty is that I am able to see and touch only because I am seen and touched. offer an account that satisfies questions about the extraordinary bodies with which I am concerned. but that it remains primary for those who . of course.). For Irigaray. in a point made by Drew Leder who claims that the sensible/sentient surface. but as Leder’s point makes clear there are certain metaphorical and material correspondences. in which ‘our corporeal depths are perceptually elusive’ (Leder 1999: 203). I can experience a reversibility between touching and being touched such that ‘the world of each opens upon that of the other’ (1968: 141). Part of the difficulty lies. For the body Irigaray proposes. from which it is possible to derive an account more adequate to the issue of concorporation. which she calls ‘a touching more intimate…. what is mobilised is the plasticity and intimacy of cotangibility. a blood relation between the two. and to the particular context of conjoined twins. She prefers the image of two hands touching as though in prayer. the three-dimensional and fluid contact privileged by Irigaray abolishes the split between subject and object. she understands Merleau-Ponty’s doubled touch as an intentional and exteriorised moment that neglects the chiasm of bodily surface and depth. Irigarayan corporeality is positive precisely insofar as it is mediated by touch.THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY OF TOUCH 113 are excessive to the binary division of self and other. Irigaray specifically displaces Merleau-Ponty’s active hand that takes hold of another. always already concorporate – ‘the birth that is never accomplished’ – is highly pertinent to the problematic of (self)identity. For Irigaray. reflective surface that Irigaray sees as a weapon that wards off touching and holds back fluidity (1993b: 65). the mechanism that forces separation between self and other. Irigaray calls for a sensuous engagement both with the other and with the world. It is only those who are locked into the dominant models of masculinist subjectivity who can overlook the fact that the world of which they are a part is (de)structured by continuous change. not of being. She commends instead: ‘Nearness so pronounced that it makes all discrimination of identity. The thematics of touch have a place of great importance in Irigaray’s work. Between us. . It is an image that indeed suggests an other mode. Instead of the flat.A phenomenology of the passage between interior and exterior’ (Irigaray 1993a: 161). that blurs the dichotomy of active and passive. has been overcome by the inherent power of attraction of those very same elements. or more literally of the cut. Like Leder. no purchasers. or to Merleau-Ponty’s tactile switch between the toucher and the touched. the imaginary that Irigaray postulates is the site of a fluidity. In stark contrast to the normative insistence on the independent and proper body sealed into singularity by its own skin. It is as though the regulative negativity of the abject. but of the dynamic of becoming. the interval of the mirror. by mucus. yet there are no transactions. impossible…. In place of the detachment and control associated with the disembodied gaze. The masculinist economy of subject and object finds no place here: ‘Everything is exchanged.7 is displaced. the flux and flow of material form. Nonetheless. in a sense. In her detailed reading of ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm’. there are no proprietors. and thus all forms of property. just as it might be for conjoined twins in an alternative cultural discourse. but in the imaginary. Our bodies are nourished by our mutual pleasure’ (Irigaray 1985b: 213). a viscerality that is not limited to the body. no determinable objects. Instead of an active subject reaching out.This puts into question all prevailing economies’ (1985b: 31). where the one – however briefly – is in a relation of mastery over the other. her evocation of the woman’s body as. no prices. it is the notion of a specifically feminine desire that is addressed through the image of bodily contact. not necessarily as an anatomical event. In contradistinction to the two-dimensional reflective surfaces that institute the Lacanian subject. and by the mingling of blood. inside and out: ‘The joined hands perhaps represent (the) memory of the intimacy of the mucus’ (1993a: 170). 9 But even as we institute a specular model of being. the flows where we would expect unbreachable boundaries. which is itself of no more than utilitarian value and significance. In a condition of unmodified corporeality. that I referred to in Chapter 3. voiced. The recurrent refrain that Katie and Eilish are nevertheless two individuals is. It is a moment of Cartesian disarticulation that belies any sense of both the phenomenology of the lived body and of becomingwith-others. Once the decision to go ahead with surgery is taken. the psychic location of introjected sensation – touching and being touched – at the surface of the skin? For Katie and Eilish. it is routinely asserted that under the skin they are certainly two. the skin is seen not as an organ of perception. Rather than itself suffering the cut. but at the underlying assumption that the autonomy that is deemed preferable can be fully realised only by singular embodiment sealed by the flesh. but rather as concorporate a term that more strongly signals the complexity of their embodied being. the bodily exchanges between the twins. blur the distinctions by which we usually make sense of living beings. to developing the ethical implications that Merleau-Ponty leaves inadequately addressed. then. Nonetheless. I think. Despite their lack of distress and the very evident pleasure that Katie and Eilish take in their mutual and reversible touch – they are shown stroking and kissing each other’s faces – the trope of liberation from the body. The loss of the interval between self and other.114 EMBODYING THE MONSTER What Irigaray envisages. by virtue of its non-normative positioning. I want to ask whether. In turning now to the issue of literal concorporation. suggests that we can. would it cut to establish self and other?8 My critique is not directed primarily at the practice of heroic medicine represented by the surgeon’s knife. the ambiguity at the heart of concorporation. it might help us rethink the interval of difference and make sense of an economy of touch. but the putative threat of monstrous engulfment. is repeatedly. the initial procedure is to implant expanders under the skin which will artificially extend its surface area. who at the time of the operation are three years old. where. a refusal of undecidability. frustrates the mapping both of the singular subject and of the pair. an attempt both metaphorical and ultimately literal to see them as both existentially and corporeally distinct. with discrete subjectivities already given and simply awaiting release from the fleshy bondage of their shared skin suit. And yet. Following the death of Katie. if the hand that held the knife were that of the concorporate body itself. It is not simply ontological anxiety in the face of corporeal excessiveness that is being allayed by the material and discursive strategies evident in the television documentaries. the contact between them as conjoined twins . Given the nature of their particular morphology it is perhaps more accurate to describe them not as conjoined. then. if not entirely uncritically. that is. then. but as no more than the manipulable covering-over for the wound to come. is a necessary reconfiguration of ontology in which she comes closer. Katie and Eilish. Can we make sense of Irigaray’s imaginary in the context of actual bodies as they are lived? The case of the Irish conjoined twins. we might ask. the measure of success for Eilish depends on the resealing of her body and the recontainment of her self. is it not contested by Freud’s remark that ‘the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego’ (1923: 26). which is a common motif in narratives of conjoined twins. existing alongside or perhaps overriding their bond with the maternal body. and directly echoes Irigaray’s take-up of the fluid and undecidable relationship between. But where that latter bond is temporary and variable. their mutual concorporation sets the parameters for their phenomenological sense of self. The point is rather that until there is a more in-depth analysis and understanding of all the implications and issues involved. As I outlined in the introductory chapter. In this very positive recollection. to which I am certainly not immune. like my skin’ (1985b: 216). it is as though for Eilish the corporeal memory of her twin stands against – guards against. as her own poignant words attest: ‘She used to bring me round everywhere. and in other instances. As talkative . Just such a moment of opening up alternatives does in fact occur in Eilish: Life without Katie when the Irish family go to the US to visit a pair of unseparated twins and their parents. perhaps one should say – the closure of the self. by a more discursive approach. epistemological and ethical questions that are so often repressed in the accounts of both popular culture and biomedicine. women when the feminine is freed from the binary of same/difference: ‘I carry you with me everywhere…. To each other they are as one.’ The normative voice is clearly disrupted here. one of my aims is to juxtapose theoretical and material discourse in such a way that each will be informed by the other in new and mutually productive ways. Recall for a moment the telling interchange in which an older sister declares: ‘Eilish couldn’t go wherever she wanted. or motives as participants. a move that would merely perpetuate another often unhelpful binary. In deconstructing those very reactions.’ For Eilish the memory of Katie is quite different.THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY OF TOUCH 115 has surely constituted their primary experience of touch. Given the heavy social constraints and resistant philosophical heritage of the society in which we live. but of seeking out new pathways. I am by no means certain that the current treatment of those with conjoined bodies is misplaced. and even after the crisis of separation. Brittany and Abigail also have a single body from the neck down.You are there. such as in the hierarchical distinction made between separation and contiguity. Katie remains incorporated as an absent presence in the life of her surviving twin through the psychic endurance of mutual touch. but nevertheless enjoy a high degree of mobility and are filmed participating in a number of activities common to children of their age. or overridden. It is not that I believe that the highly complex practical concerns of narratives such as that of concorporate twins should be set aside. we cannot begin to seek more adequate responses. So much at variance with the accepted standards of selfhood is the bond between concorporate twins that even those closest to them find it beyond comprehension. The positivity of the indivisible tactility of their co-existence as self/other survives to contest the continuing stress on concorporation as an existential impediment. It is not a question of rejecting any course of action as either right or wrong. my intention is not to criticise but to open up the issues to a more fluid approach. are rarely analyzed. but that alternative modes of action might be suggested by a consideration of the ontological. anxieties and fascination as viewers. Although the emotive force of the narratives is usually acknowledged in the former at least – and indeed may mobilise an unsavoury voyeurism – the underlying reasons for our fears. and of. for perhaps the first time. which we have all experienced. very unusually. but that like that most everyday state of pregnancy. In its indeterminacy it speaks eloquently to the need to recover not intercorporeity as such. I think. both for the self and towards the other. To be oneself only and always with and in the other. we are always already “out-side” of our “selves”’ (1993: 126). with her own anxieties and perhaps shock that such a life is possible. In their concorporate state. and both they and their parents appear to have little difficulty in accepting their concorporation. not surprisingly. and undermines the ethics of the interval. but a recognition of the embodied mutuality of becoming. tells another story: ‘the experienced ambiguities. and actual instances of bodily conjunction are assumed to be intolerable. the tangible reality of contact. moreover. to note that it is not that I believe conjoined twins should be understood as fully merged or indistinguishable. The merged nature and mutuality of the American twins’ experiential body is presented. epistemological and ethical boundaries are all implicated. and the interval between self and other is shown to be a convention. both radically contests the determinate separation of self and other as the only proper form of ontology. and on individuality. in the contact of flesh. Eilish herself. Not surprisingly. She is adamant. for they can exhibit differential behaviour and affect.116 EMBODYING THE MONSTER and alert eleven-year-olds. Moreover. Through our flesh and thanks to tactility. we experience our other/self not only as surface feeling. as simply another way of being-in-the-world. the twins are considered mature enough to be consulted about their own wishes for the future. given the strength of our discursive stake in constituting and maintaining clear boundaries. that to separate the twins would introduce a set of handicaps where currently there is none. leak and flow into one another. The precise nature of physical contact is of course quite exceptional in the case of concorporation. with an image of concorporation that belies the negativity usually associated with it. But as Susan Cataldi notes. a passage or crossing point. who in the father’s words have anticipated being ‘rocked a bit’. ontological. off camera. . the doublings and reversibilities of touch confuse the sharp distinctions philosophers try to draw between what is “internal” and what is “external”. Brittany and Abigail literally. the image of corporeal indistinction arouses great anxiety. as well as metaphorically. but as an emotion: we are touched. the visit is clearly highly emotional as they are faced. the double embodiment cannot be unravelled without loss to what constitutes the phenomenological self. yet it does. comes at the cost of masking our psychic investments in the flesh itself. not a necessity. Where the flesh is literally co-extensive. as in concorporation – which I use again as a metaphor for what is lost to us all – the other is at the same time the self. in a condition of undecidability in which corporeal. It is important. For the Irish parents. The emphasis on the closure of separation.10 The physiological and psychological processes come together such that the skin is less a boundary than an organ of communication. and it is not clear how far her parents engage. then. The mother in particular expresses the family’s reluctance to sanction separation for the sake of what ‘society thinks is normal’. remains more or less silent throughout. blurring the boundaries that are taken to secure the subject body. indicate very strongly what is at stake in normative efforts to treat the body as little more than instrumental. our flesh is in flux’ (Cataldi 1993: 126). in the space of shared vulnerabilities. mobilises the uncanniness of the abject. and as neonatal death is not inevitable. Not only does reiteration always signal a shift. the world of others. and immersion in. For the normative mind-set. may trouble our expectations. the inevitability of union with a corpse – ‘that most sickening of wastes’. such as the seventeenthcentury Coloredo brothers. and to the capacity to be moved beyond reason. not through the subject’s conscious efforts but through its ability to conceive of itself as a subject and to separate itself from its objects and others to be able to undertake wilful action. which continues to ground female-to-female relationships but is repudiated in the male.THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY OF TOUCH 117 The puzzle and fear of merging arises more strongly yet in cases of corporeal conjunction where it is not simply that the organ of the skin fails to differentiate one body from another. but the insistence that such monstrosity is wholly other is indicative of the strength of our discursive investment in clear and distinct boundaries. Regimes of normalisation must be constantly reiterated to defer the slippage of an excessive embodiment that threatens always to overwhelm. but that the embodiment seems to speak to incorporation rather than concorporation. bowels and faecal matter. will never participate in life. and the inherent instability of corporeality in its always incomplete process of abjection. (1994: 43–4) It is perhaps precisely in that urgent need for renewal of the normatively embodied self that we can see the gap that allows for another way of being and relating to others. As Liz Grosz puts it: the stability of the unified body image…must be continually renewed. The space of tactile interaction is never a static given. or even if an other exists as such. it too raises questions as to the closure and integrity of the self. Kristeva calls it (1982: 3) – is the ultimate and ever-present threat of abjection. It is in the openings of touch that ‘our bodies overstep their bounds. but it opens up the potential of more radical transformations in which a sense of self need not depend on separation. The resulting irresolvable confusion as to where the boundaries of the self lie. Yet both Irigaray’s play on the originary mother-matter. while the second may show physical affect but no evidence of rational thought. as with other conjoined twins. Nonetheless.). To touch and be touched speaks to our exposure to.11 one body may be fully endowed with mental and motor capacity. the monstrous must always remain the exception. And where for all such double bodies. for the specifically incorporative types. we might instead begin to understand it as the promise that our embodied vulnerability and lack of closure signals not insecurity but rather an openness to new forms of becoming and to new relational economies. testify to a different scenario. the parasitic material. As before. with their shared blood. It is in the embodied gesture of touch that we may sustain a reciprocal sense of solicitude and intimacy that is grounded in the mutual instabilities and unpredictability of our corporeal becoming. Such an anomaly is certainly rare but by no means unique. In parasitic twins. that. but what Cataldi calls ‘the embodied space of copresent implication’ (ibid. In place of seeing material contact as a risk to be averted. for all the . though living. the ideal of a clean and proper body is visibly disordered by what appears to be an eruption from within bursting through the skin. as she recognises. not according to a fixed ideal but in a transformatory encounter in which neither self nor other is a predictable. Not all tactile contact is benign. Despite her own emphasis on the significance and importance of recovering the maternal bond. In place of the model of the selfsame. moving border’ of the body. for example – that Merleau-Ponty posits. but as a term of tangible coming together. then. Instead of a solid enclosure. between-subjects: I caress you. without unity – neither yours. No longer the site of a frozen. which. The crucial issue for her is that it should be not only the masculinist subject who is able to say ‘I’. calculable entity with inviolable boundaries. no suggestion that the contact between bodies signals indifferentiation. to mobilise new configurations of the subject that do not rely on the static mirroring that marks the masculinist symbolic. This does not mean that we are merged…. you caress me. There is. physical ability or age. it is the strange(r)ness of embodiment. Far from privileging a dissolution of the self or a fusion that erases difference. where two subjects reflect each other. for in that lies only the violence of colonisation. may result in paralysis. and that there should be a non-hierarchical relation in which radical difference is recognised and no self could appropriate the other. where the subject–object relation might be rewritten as the contiguity. then. The envelope. is to develop a mode of intercorporeality without a complete dissolution of personal identity. as a certain undecidability even. and the differential ways in which each of us lives our body that must be preserved. is that in place of the inflexible and distancing reflection of modernist discourse. nor mine. Rather the task for all of us. not as an interval. fades away. our bodies become living mirrors. (1992: 59–60) The point. we must be aware too of the dangers of foreclosing difference and opening up the other to violence. The doubling of the mirror could be reclaimed. What is called for rather is a move to difference otherwise. Sense mirrors where the outline of the other is profiled through touch. and which encourages a sense of familiarity. which locks both subject and object into the binary of the selfsame. As Irigaray puts it: ‘if being means permanent advent between us. Rather than the somewhat universalised anonymous body – without the markings of gender. however we are embodied. our selves could form in the dynamic contact with others. race. which separates and divides us.118 EMBODYING THE MONSTER potential positivity of touch. and the crossing of boundaries may be not so much the occasion of acknowledging shared vulnerability as a kind of corporeal colonisation that exploits the specific vulnerability of the less dominant partner. as I see it. fixed appropriation and expropriation’ (1992: 77). or the masculinist economy that reduces difference to a property relationship. A responsible ethic must be sensitive to the need to be with others in a variety of different ways that do not erase the specificity on either side. Irigaray too is far from recommending indifferentiation. it becomes fluid: which is far from nothing. Irigaray is insistent that what matters is that we . nor ours. Her dream is of recognition and responsibility between subjects where neither is able to assimilate the other to its own self-image. the mediating presence of cotangibility holds open difference at the ‘living. or a stultifying nostalgia for the lost pre-subjectal plenitude of undifferentiated infant/maternal corporeality. Her project is to uncover new horizons of growth. but rather a space of holding together in which radical difference replaces pale reflection. and our bodies never one. There is no certain reduplication. and internal to. As such. there is licence for Irigaray’s vision: ‘The internal and external horizon of my skin interpenetrating with yours wears away their edges. ‘like my skin’. Creating another space – outside my framework. The threshold of ethics is. It is to relinquish the determinacy of the bounded body and open up the possibility of reconfiguring relational economies that privilege neither the one nor the two. it mobilises an ethical economy in which our specificities. their limits. Instead of an ‘anaesthetic’ ethic that works by separation and division. . but gain access to a more sustaining mode of becoming with others.THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY OF TOUCH 119 should acknowledge radical difference as that which is irreducible and yet not absolutely other. and invulnerable subject. In the move away from the phantasy of the wholly unified and self-complete embodied subject. us all. An opening of openness’ (1992: 59). their solidity. What the monstrous in all its forms reflects is that the singular disembodied subject is in any case a construct of modernity that cannot be fully achieved. as I see it. In that sense I read monstrous corporeality as potentially figuring the site not just of a reconceived ontology. in favour of undecidable and fluid forms of embodiment that frustrate the mirroring of the selfsame. Those forms that are and always remain excessive to our selves are not thereby out of touch but participate in the mutuality of contact that changes and reshapes both elements of the encounter. then the (monstrous) other is always there. One significant achievement of postmodernism and its feminist uptake has been to deconstruct the rigidity of both the mind/body split. inseparable from an acceptance of bodyliness in all its forms. It is a space where the double relation between the normal and the monstrous does not hold. but of a new form of ethics. we may lose the illusion of autonomy. To embrace a chiasmatic relation to the other does not imply a merging in which all sense of self is forfeit. rather than haunted by. and that instead our necessarily embodied identities are never secured. Once the surface of our bodies is understood not as a protective envelope that defines and unifies our limits but as an organ of physical and psychical interchange. and the postEnlightenment model of an autonomous. fully self-present. are in communion with the differences between. a space that no one of us can fully occupy. etc. the securely embodied and autonomous subject has become increasingly insistent. Is there. There is. As I see it. the question of value always remains open. but is at the point of collapse. contemporary and projective techno-science has opened up new possibilities not merely for change. by and large. forces.7 WELCOMING THE MONSTROUS ARRIVANT Throughout my project to reclaim the notion of vulnerability and its relation to the embodiment of difference. but in the context of the theoretical limitations of the determinate human. I emphasise this point particularly to counteract the perception of postmodernism as being deeply antithetical to any concept of embodiment. progressively. it is not a matter of denying that the medium of the body has reality. and of a humanism centred on the subject. I welcome not the putative negativity of anti-humanism. what can replace. materials. after all. then. but by reinstating the centrality of the human? To the extent that my own project is an ethical one. concurred with the assaults made on humanism by recent continental philosophy. The radical critique of humanist certainties is never without its risks.’ (1980b: 97). On the one hand. however. that materialisation is never value-neutral. but the positive openings and aspirations of posthumanism. and the vertigo of the deconstructive abyss. and indeed any unified category as such. and the anxious and nostalgic question of what is to replace. bounded and autonomous nature of the human being is not simply contested. The task as Foucault puts it is ‘to discover how it is that subjects are gradually. two things are happening. poststructuralism has provided the analytic tools to theorise instability and vulnerability. still less perfectly natural. and by postmodernist cultural studies. given the theoretical insights of deconstruction. while on the other. As I have made clear throughout. really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms. Moreover. thoughts. it remains to ask whether our own postmodern age might not speed up transformation to the extent that the unitary. body outside of cultural configurations. but of affirming that there is no essential corpus upon which meaning is inscribed. but that does not preclude attending to the here-and-now moments of embodiment . but for transformation. is no longer the issue. might be averted not only by reconstituting value. energies. Certainly the body as such. My claim is that as the body is discursively materialised in both language and practice. a very legitimate interest for the postmodernist not just in how new bodies are constructed in discourse. it is no longer possible to separate out the abstract and the material: both are discursively produced and they are equally unstable. some way that anti-humanism. desires. but in the material constitution and effects of those bodies. I have. If there is never an essential. however. And it is when we understand definition in terms both of meaning and of distinct boundaries that we can grasp the full transgressive implications of postmodernism. so much as a constant process in tension with the very need to reiterate the boundaries of the subject. nostalgic for the humanism so long denied them. something without which we cannot do anything’ (1989: 129). a way of rethinking bodies and subjects. ever pragmatic. In any case despite the foundational claims. irruptive manifestation of the monstrous is not just an inventive trope of postmodernism. writing in an edition of Zone entitled Incorporations. masculine subject. of a body that is fixed and transparent to the knowing gaze. becoming-bodies. provide just those ‘I-slots’ that Spivak insists on (1988: 243). I wish to celebrate – along with Donna Haraway (1992b) – the promise(s) of monsters. Spivak. The dissolution of the subject is not an achievable telos. ‘Any Theory of the “Subject”’. the body that can be safely forgotten by the transcendent subject. in other words. that necessary move which has enabled the erection of a completed autogenic disembodied subject – convincingly charted by Luce Irigaray (1985a. prediscursive subject will not hold. it is admitted that both social and biological bodies are not given. To uncover the inherent vulnerabilities at the heart of being – or becoming. is not anti-humanist as such – and indeed such an approach would simply reiterate the binary structure of modernity – so much as posthumanist. The taken-for-granted stability of human bodies. I want to stress again that the disruptive. but for the category of humanity itself. Crary and Kwinter. rather – is not to dissolve the ontological anxiety that has driven the modernist project. like many feminists. and passim) – relies on the notion of corporeal stasis. Before moving on to look more closely at Haraway’s highly productive feminist deployment of the monster in contemporary times. cyborg bodies. the question becomes what is at stake not just for personal identity. The task is not to destroy the foundations of the logos so much as to open them up to take account of all that has hitherto been excluded or disavowed. and to the category of the human itself. and spatiality and presence are the characteristic achievements of the western subject. universal. characterises deconstruction as a ‘critique of something that is extremely useful. but a transhistorical site of challenge to the rational. among other things. vulnerable bodies. And although the critique of modernism and the trajectory into postmodernism may still draw cries of alarum from those. it is the realisation that no boundaries are ultimately secure that marks out postmodernity. but to begin to understand it. bodies. But once. as existent and potential bodies are increasingly complicated. Nonetheless. still less the demise of the body as the site of subject positions. that always resist definition. Deconstruction. express it this way: ‘Neither human subjects nor the conceptual or material objects among which they live are any longer thinkable . What postmodernism makes clear is that the specific humanist understanding of a stable. for example. then. The interface between what is human and what is monstrous is an age-old concern. has flourished only in conditions of denial and exclusion. The erasure of maternal/corporeal origin. autonomous. both discursive and material. then there are only hybrid bodies.WELCOMING THE MONSTROUS ARRIVANT 121 that may. but exist only in the constant processes of historical transformation. identity is a matter of process. but that does not necessarily entail no subjects at all. and permeable. although it is scarcely developed. I wonder why the feminine should disappear rather than re-emerge as the radically other. with regard neither to sex nor other categories of difference. For the editors of Zone. My argument is that boundaries are fluid. postmodernism as a set of critical theories is inseparable from postmodernity as a historical epoch. and on the other of an appropriative assimilation across boundaries that erases the specificity of the hitherto liminal. Whether the cyborg has a sex is perhaps rather more complicated. What should be stressed is that with the collapse of the binary. but they too implicitly acknowledge a wider canvas. I. seeing in incorporations not the provisional hybridity of temporary alliances. though I find poststructuralist analysis an indispensable starting point. and I consciously use the term ‘incorporations’.122 EMBODYING THE MONSTER in their distinctness or separation from the dynamic. but on the contrary by recurrent flux and transformation. I am thinking specifically here of Derrida’s apparent desire to ditch sexual difference along with the tiresome humanist male subject who is caught up in the metaphysics of presence. What matters is that the classical mechanisation of life – Descartes’ conception of the body as a machine for example – should merge with the vitalisation of the machine (Crary and Kwinter 1992: 14). Clearly. too. the response a dual one: on the one hand – as I have made clear already – the fear of endless fragmentation. It is an experience fashioned not by rigidly prescribed limits. I remain wary of certain deployments that paradoxically result in closing down on some conceptions of otherness. neither process is new. not that they cease to exist altogether. In short. My own concern for bodies and for the becoming of the not-yet reflects one provisional set of possibilities. have no wish to forfeit difference nor abandon entirely the concept of the feminine. the feminine I refer to is not that of conventional gender. For those who see postmodernity as a threat. Feminism in particular has been wary of such a move. I suspect. In consequence. Moreover. a concern with the question of the animal is apparent in ‘“Eating Well”. Derrida’s project. I want to make the point again that the feminist take-up of postmodernism does not claim to be the only path. Though he doesn’t name them. as I understand it. just as surely as does the binary. or with its repositioning as a discursive construct always open to resignification. What the term ‘feminine’ does insist on is the specificity of corporeal difference which may take the form of material but never determinate bodies. and especially of sexual difference. but the final loss of alterity. has a place for the uncanniness of monsters. humanism and the human are irrevocably decentred. but as a plural noun to denote becoming-bodies. not verbally as a cannibalistic process. correlated. indeed permeability implies difference. and certainly in his turn to the ethical he is concerned to mark the irreducibility of the other to the same. or the Calculation . but perhaps it is only in the last few decades that the move has come to seem irresistible. but rather a thing to be achieved. and even within feminism we should not expect uniformity. Donna Haraway makes the point succinctly when she writes that the cyborg – her paradigmatic figure for postmodern hybridity – speaks to ‘an intimate experience of boundaries’ (1990: 223). multiple systems within which they arise’ (1992: 15). Whilst I have no argument with the undercutting of gender as a foundational category. where both are other to the masculine subject of modernity. authenticity and universality. technological and biological narratives. Haraway must acknowledge a siblingship with Derrida on those central questions of humanism concerning origin. the equally strange FemaleMan and Oncomouse serve similar purposes. As she puts it: ‘what counts as human and as non-human is not given by definition. which Haraway pursues most particularly by challenging the concept of the natural as it seems to authorise discrete location and spatiality. Now that term ‘blended’ implies to me not an ethical recognition of the incalculable other – in this instance the feminine – but a dream of absolute sexual indistinction. If western ontology and epistemology are founded on the fixed and the proper.WELCOMING THE MONSTROUS ARRIVANT 123 of the Subject’ (1991b) which seems explicitly to broach the way in which incorporation – as I have already warned – can mark as it were the ingestion of the other. we all already inhabit. then her aim is to celebrate the inappropriate/d others. . cyborgs and women – who evade both sameness and difference. What Haraway proposes in her iconoclastic ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ paradoxically speaks unambiguously for feminism and yet seems to have no place for sexual difference. applies to Woman metaphorically. It has little connection with the familiar and mythical secure world of humanism where nature is a given. those liminal figures – people of colour. Indeed for all their differences of approach. and it is the cyborg in particular that serves to destabilise evolutionary. it has long been taken up by Haraway as a central binary whose undoing puts in motion a multiplicity of differences that profoundly contest western humanism. none is in opposition to reality: their constructedness is the condition of their reality (1997: 120). though as she is at pains to point out. where boundaries take shape and categories sediment’ (1994: 64). of ethical responsibility as the obligation to ‘protect the other’s otherness’ (1991b: 111) does not apparently extend to sexual specificity. as Haraway maintains.3 Where the reference in Derridean texts to the relationship between the human and the animal remains fairly oblique. Haraway deploys the monstrous figure of the cyborg as that which is neither woman nor even human. It is at least odd that the delineation. a world which.1 The valorisation of the monstrous. In providing a highly evocative vision of feminist politics in a technological age. Yet when it comes to sexual difference we find Derrida advocating in ‘Choreographies’ not simply the polysexual signatures of the dance. in ‘Eating Well’. human and machine. but a fabricated hybrid of ‘machine and organism’ (1990: 191). but only by relation. As Derrida puts it. in other words. worldly encounters. but ‘this indeterminable number of blended voices’ (1985: 184). simians. cyborgs ‘populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted’ (1990: 191). The project for both is to dissolve categorical distinctions. as the unknowable and the incalculable. All are boundary creatures. by engagement in situated. the structure of the humanist subject ‘implies carnivorous virility’ for which he coins the term ‘carno-phallogocentrism’ (1991b: 113). but seems to stop short at flesh and blood women. In later manifestations in her work. I turn now to Donna Haraway whose ironic adventures2 into cyborg ‘reality’ may throw new light on the relation between the feminine and the monstrous. In representing a complex intermerging of animal. the autonomous agent of production. where the leaks and flows across categories signal not so much the breakdown of security as the always already impossibility of fixed definition. is to show up the faultlines in the closure of normativity. a shape-shifter encompassing both imagination and material reality. becomes of crucial importance. the half-dead. The conventional concept of the human as the actor. Haraway’s monsters are. Like Haraway. then. Are we. but of powerful hopes. Although she is in no doubt about the radicality of such a vision. a trickster. to go through the confines of the ‘normal’. What happens at the boundaries. collapses in Haraway’s re-vision in which the technical. playing on half-hidden fears of vulnerability. and in which monsters as the excluded other speak for the ideal of an untroubled. Against the depiction of a natural order in which science and culture play out their normative impulses. Gloria Anzaldúa too locates the point of contestation for a deconstruction of the natural order in what she calls the borderland: a vague and undetermined place created by…an unnatural boundary…. now. other present’ (1992b: 295). those who cross over. the perverse.Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed.). the questions. But it is not the alterity of the absolute other that beckons. not so much the uncanny but essentially organic others which haunt the margins of what is known and can be controlled. and to gesture towards other modes of existence. nature itself is characterised as artefactual. the mongrel. but the far more disturbing figure of the in-between that is already both self and other. whether in a wholly organic form or as a techno-organic hybrid. To be out of place. in short. (1987: 3) The possibility of such transgressions has long occupied the cultural and individual psychic imaginary. Her question throughout is what exactly gets to count. Any being occupying the liminal spaces or moving across putative classifications takes on the potential to confound and fracture normative identity. then. the site of man’s purpose which alone has constitutive power. but more the construct of an ‘impure’ and undecidable nature that itself encompasses techno-science as ‘a practice of materializing refigurations of what counts as nature’ (1994: 60). but perhaps possible. But where once distinctions appeared self-evident and defensible. Haraway celebrates what she calls the material-semiotic as ‘protean embodiments of a world as witty agent and actor’ (1991b: 201). the troublesome. It is not that Haraway is either for or against such a nature in its reconceived form – a potential threat respectively to the rational transcendent subject and to nostalgic essentialists – but rather that she sees her primary aim as ‘queering what counts as nature’ (ibid. and in which all spheres are actively involved together in construction. and the agency of both human and non-human actors. mythical and political are inseparable (1992b: 300). at the point where the only option is to embrace . They are sites not only of the enhanced policing that accompanies anxiety. of what is to count as natural or as normal can no longer be separated: both are equally constructs of the human propensity to set up boundaries of domination.124 EMBODYING THE MONSTER originary location. organic. pass over. For her. In the brave new world envisaged by Haraway. nature is always elsewhere and simultaneously nowhere. natural order. textual. the mulatto. the queer. ‘an absent. and whom does it profit. the alternative conception offered by Haraway cannot be fully grasped or even thought in its refusal of classificatory systems. it must be stressed. the suspicion that it may prove as damaging to the embodied other as has the masculinist subject of patriarchal humanism? Certainly many feminists critical of Haraway’s project have suggested as much. The much celebrated Deleuzian body-without-organs has too often been taken to figure a being free of the restraints of physicality. or of the robotic heroes of recent science-fiction film is hardly feminist-friendly. For all the apparent celebration of cyborg ‘reality’ is there not. And yet that fictional depiction of the unanticipated breakdown of the attempt to normalise and discipline monsters by the male gaze is only the antithesis of Geoffroy St-Hilaire’s near-contemporary controlled experiments to induce foetal monstrosities. who are like and unlike. be it artistic or scientific. It is when that ethical dimension is missing that we have reason for apprehension. not as bounded. after all.WELCOMING THE MONSTROUS ARRIVANT 125 monstrous transformations and enter into those other possible worlds. female-inspired and (un)natural monsters of the early modern period were to a large extent superseded – particularly during the Romantic age – by man-made hybrids which signified not a devalued place beyond rational control. look set to escalate in the twenty-first century. an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency. particularly where she addresses not so much the not-yet realised cyborg. her project depends on ‘nurturing and acknowledging alliances with a lively array of others. but as cyborg actants? Though such a thought may be seductive. The reconfigurations of knowledge and practice required by contemporary bioscience especially. the questioning of the meaning of ‘life itself’. but the power and authority of the male imagination. With regard to the first point. invulnerable to the processes of disease. The disruptively organic. Haraway herself – for whom. The image of the isolated. having nothing to do with the body as it is lived day by . computer nerd surfing the Net. there are of course good historical precedents for such a fear.4 and there remains also the issue that I raised earlier of what becomes of sexual difference. as the present-day constructions of high technology operating on a global scale. one wonders what is to stop a reconceived Cartesian subject from annexing cyberspace. And in the twenty-first century.6 Both seem woefully without ethical engagement on the part of the master scientist. it is far from unproblematic. ultimately disembodied. unitary human(ist) subjects. but to intervene in them responsibly. and for Haraway the task is not to make the futile attempt to oppose such reworkings of the known.5 The same tension is evident throughout her later work. Haraway allows that the cyborg could be ‘the awful apocalyptic telos of the West’s escalating dominations of abstract individuation. deterioration and decay. autonomous man. a man in space’ (1990: 192). As she puts it. human or not. inside and outside what have been the defended boundaries of hegemonic selves and powerful places’ (1997: 269). and of the implications of its boundary-changing practices. a certain irony is always intentional – is fully aware of the contradictory and perverse nature of the cyborg. Moreover. the anxiety is that the techno-science animal/human/machine composite might be simply a dangerous reification of the humanist dream of autogenic. as Marie-Hélène Huet makes clear in Monstrous Imagination. We might well read the chaotic outcome of Victor Frankenstein’s creation as Mary Shelley’s own comment on the refusal to take responsibility for the monstrous other. In noting the risk. seeing in them the opportunities for new connections and alliances that cut across the monolithic certainties of the western logos. and moreover ones in which hitherto liminal creatures are equal actors. Such an outcome could not be further from Haraway’s own view of life as a window of vulnerability which we should not try to close. rather than. In a question that will recall the concerns of Irigaray. as not simply the location of the abnormal. that ‘vague and undetermined place’. It is not that I want to deny the transformatory aspects of the new technologies. As many commentators have noted. a place where the unexpected may always come together and be mutually transformative. follows the characters on a screen. then the potential for centres of domination is dissolved. In consequence. any body. Yet the question of identity is played out at one remove. a cat’s cradle of undecidable but determinate possibilities. but as the place where all binary distinctions are undone. as I have argued. or who dons the apparatus of virtual reality. ‘Why should our bodies end at the skin?’ (1990: 220). it is precisely against such a scenario that Haraway explores the promises of monsters. but rather to warn against the danger of replacing one set of boundaries with another. or in the case of virtual reality overriding existing affect to manufacture new sensations and desires. ignoring the very pertinent issue of the embodied nature of the one who operates the keyboard. The slippage and insecurity of the embodied self may indeed be left behind. at very least. It is as though the categories of mind and body. not because of an enhanced awareness and acceptance of an in-common vulnerability. but because the detached mind is taken to be in transcendent control.126 EMBODYING THE MONSTER day. Haraway asks. always and everywhere inseparably interwoven. but it is not resolved. The world that Haraway proposes is the locus of continual regeneration. the humanist subject can neither annex nor reinvent himself if what is irretrievably lost to him is the assurance of distinction and separation. In the mode of the cyborg. It is perhaps the epitome of corporeal mastery: the final overcoming of the uncertain body in its conclusive disappearance. Indeed. in cybertexts it is the body itself. Rather than rereading the inherent instabilities of the embodied self as the take-off point for a re-evaluation of the concepts of vulnerability and difference. the popular image of the communication technologies of postmodernity. though for the latter it is as much a case of signalling the need to encompass prosthetic devices as of the meeting of two or more organic entities. Moreover. What matters is that where boundaries are in a constant state of flux. that is given the derisive term ‘meat’ and seen as ultimately dispensable. the differences that are generated in cyberspace – even where participants deliberately choose ‘deviant’ performances – are ultimately non-threatening. such mediums risk reinforcing existing binary splits by denying the felt body altogether. The real task for the postmodernist theorist is surely to take up Anzaldúa’s concept of the borderland. Contrary to critics such as Vicki Kirby (1997) who argues that . as offering an escape from the body sits uneasily with the perception that they are the location of wholly positive transgressions of and transformations to the humanist subject. and it is Haraway’s ironic hope that out of what she calls these ‘dangerously unpromising times’ (1992b: 319) we may build new collectivities. real and virtual were always and everywhere opposed. natural and technological. just as Cartesians might have wished. If the cultural meanings attached now to bodies are set to disappear. her suspicion that supposedly ethical objections to the relevant practices . and Haraway would scarcely disagree. Kirby and Haraway concur. but remain responsible to women of many colors and positions’ (1991a: 20).She is a girl who’s trying not to become a Woman. As a clear rejection of the masculine propensity to metaphorise Woman as the sliding signifier – a move that can be attributed to Derrida – Haraway’s remark underlines her commitment to the specificity and the multiple differences of women.WELCOMING THE MONSTROUS ARRIVANT 127 the vision of hybridity and impurity celebrated in ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’ implies a time of unity before difference.I hear a mystification of kind and purity akin to the doctrines of white racial hegemony’ (1997: 61). Haraway herself explicitly intervenes in current worlds as a woman. Although she is specifically discussing transgenic organisms at this point. and capitalism’ (1990: 197). my emphasis). At very least. As Kirby puts it: ‘The complex identity of originariness already incorporates the monstrous impossibility of the cyborg’ (1997: 148). but the crafting of a device that demonstrates precisely what the western logos has been concerned to conceal: the irreducible difference at the heart of being. but along with race or class consciousness is ‘an achievement forced on us by the terrible experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy. of other others. There is no doubt at all about the fate of binary sexual difference in Haraway’s ‘utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender’ (1990: 223) As she makes clear in ‘Manifesto’. Despite some very necessary reservations of her own in the face of the disciplinary and regulatory potentials of the new technologies and information sciences. colonialism. bliss and terror’ (1990: 192. fullness. including the monstrous. As she explains: ‘An origin story in the Western humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity. gender is not a given. But to reject a totalising theory of categorical difference is by no means the same as a rejection of differences as such.7 not to mention their profit-driven motivation. in the insight that we are monstrous from the start. deeply concerned with the implications of the changing practices that science studies traces. and she goes on to postulate ‘a quite different grammar of gender’. may yet emerge as valorised figures. then. it seems clear to me that Haraway is not guilty of such an oversimplified periodisation. I don’t want to push Haraway’s deliberately ambiguous texts too hard in the direction of specific answers. As she puts it: ‘I cannot help but hear in the biotechnology debates the unintended tones of fear of the alien and suspicion of the mixed…. as she puts it in ‘The Promises of Monsters’: ‘(t)he functional privileged signifier in this [new] system will not be so easily mistaken for any primate male’s urinary and copulative organ’ (1992b: 301). and her monstrous world without gender is precisely the location of the not-yet feminine. racism. but simply note that in an interview with Andrew Ross she asserts ‘(the cyborg) is a polychromatic girl…. Although she is undoubtedly a materialist. then that is the hope that all those inappropriate(d) others. as a feminist. Her deployment of the cyborg suggests not a break with a past integration. Haraway is well aware that not just conservative but liberal appeals to what is natural are often racially inflected. she employs the metaphorics of postmodernity to point up the fragility and vulnerability of all identity claims. and by derivation. It is not that a cyborg world is without risks: monsters and their kin are always dangerous. but they may also be our best hope. or even egg donation. for all her playfulness. and one where the move beyond the paradigms of modernism leaves open the question of how posthumanity will figure outside the narratives of humanism (1992a: 88). however. are all open to fears of miscegenation. however. Whatever the vector of transformation. As she sees it. much less sophisticated practices like surrogacy. an anxiety lest the boundaries of separation be breached. the advent of a world made possible by new technologies – in which the monstrous can no longer be hidden from view – is one that may figure a changed understanding of our own vulnerabilities. and of monstrous loss of the selfsame. to suppose that such innocence were possible. Moreover. where the impetus is little more than a libertarian masculinist fantasy. The point about her cyborg bodies is that they embody connection and responsiveness. It is about finding both pleasure and responsibility in the constant merging and reformation of bodies and boundaries. and they result not from a power play within the laboratory of the masculinist mind. Where the prospect or reality of the cyborg. The celebration of difference as an absolute is hardly positive if what it covers over is a fear and rejection of contact with the other. persecution and the putative mastery of strange and unfamiliar others. it exposes the fallacy. as many critics of postmodernism suppose. or even of transplant surgery between human beings. not as biologism.128 EMBODYING THE MONSTER may be founded in a distinctly counter-ethical nostalgia for purity could equally be extended to some feminist analyses hostile to technological interventions into the body. To resist calculability. and it begins to answer the well-placed impatience voiced by Kirby among others that we rarely question the humanness of the subject whom we critique. of xenotransplantation. are no less vulnerable to the sense of contamination. but from the interactive participation of collectivities. and in the flexibility and unpredictability of nature. It will be apparent that. Indeed it would be to ignore a whole history of western racism and imperialism. mixed up’ with ‘a long tradition of genetic exchange’ (1997: 61). but not impossible. For Haraway. then. In place of the security of a rigid categorisation that has bred intolerance. the impossibility. there is the opportunity of positive transformation in our ontological and epistemological models. human biological history is in any case ‘ cobbled-together. To embrace the monstrous in its multiple forms. to open oneself to that which most clearly throws . of purity. I am not suggesting that such approaches display a bad will. but for the hope of livable worlds’ (1994: 60). ‘the self-present identity of humanness to itself is the closed container within whose limits the breaching of limits (difference) can be risked’ (Kirby 1997: 153). of transgenic organisms. is not necessarily to resist accountability or responsibility. and a cultural imaginary that privileges the split between sameness and difference. Haraway’s project is a deeply ethical one. I have given some time to Haraway precisely because she recognises the ultimate futility of boundary violation for its own sake. The move is difficult. but as trickster. It is in some senses a utopian vision of a possible future. As Haraway puts it: ‘Queering specific normalised categories is not for the easy frisson of transgression. as Haraway reminds us. particularly in the area of reproduction. but neither are they innocent. as the trace of the other in the self. full presence. On the contrary. whose acute appreciation of the necessary aporias of ethics belies the suggestion that the deconstructive move results in destruction and negativity. but an altogether more complex figure that calls to mind not so much the other per se. those reconfigurations would claim no more than temporary spatial location. Although what I propose is in the fullest sense a bioethics – that is an ethics for and of the body – my strategic wish to emphasise embodiment is not intended to conceal any nostalgic longing for either ontological or corporeal security. yes’. Just as Haraway and Anzaldúa in their own more materialist ways turn to the disruptive nature of the borderlands to express the intrinsic strangeness of what seems to be securely known. the ‘yes. precisely to breach the limit of the limits. Certainly. Monsters signify not the oppositional other safely fenced off within its own boundaries. And the point here is that although final meaning. it is Derrida who spells out the power of the double affirmation. that allows us to embrace both the unending task of deconstructionist critique and the risky welcome for who or what is yet to come. the unknown and unknowable other.WELCOMING THE MONSTROUS ARRIVANT 129 the spatial and temporal solidity and calculability of the human into doubt. or political efficacy. purpose. but they are not thereby indeterminate. Monsters clearly cannot exist apart from ‘normal’ bodies. the monster is not simply a signifier of otherness. the promise is not one of unproductive. The take-up of the problematic of the monstrous as a pathway to a posthumanist ethics is exactly the move intended in this book. in short they are labile. as I understand it. but of dynamic new incorporations. Can we then name what is monstrous as just such a parergon? As I have argued throughout. In the same way that the feminine has been deployed as the undecidable signifier of excess. As so often in this text I find myself coming back to Derrida. but the otherness of possible worlds. as to linger within the shadow of its open portals where the distinction between inside and outside is lost. is. He encourages us not so much to cross the threshold into the domain of the absolute other. The modernist focus on a humanist politics of norms and identity gives way to a politics of hybrids and transformation. so Derrida offers the concept of ‘parergonality’ to figure a practice of uncovering liminal phenomena as those which expose – make vulnerable – the main corpus (ergon) to its other(s). uncontained by any fixed category of exclusion. What has hitherto been silenced but never finally excluded is shown to occupy a paradoxical space that is both beyond and necessary – supplemental – to the primary term. about the feminine: ‘I want to recall that undecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities’ (1988: 148). On the contrary I am on the side of the monsters as signifiers of the radical destabilisation of the binary processes of identity and difference that devalue otherness. and fixed substance are all deferred. Like women. or possible versions of ourselves. but at the same time they are excessive to the binary. they refuse to stay in place: they change shape. not yet realised.8 so too the catachrestic term ‘monster’ both escapes binary closure and displaces simple difference. And as Derrida reminds us in relation to the similarly uncanny figure of the spectre: ‘they are always . in the ‘Afterword’ to Limited Inc. they combine elements which should remain separate. The monstrous bodies that I propose mirror Derrida’s remark. limitless fragmentation. the boundary itself is displaced. then it cannot be assigned to either a fixed time or place. all the distinctive signs of a prior identity. although the encounter. that the strange or monstrous can be understood also as enabling. To mark the monstrous. At the same time. Yet it is on this reading which marks again the fundamental vulnerability. that the monstrous beckons to a more open future. but nor can it be deferred. that should not imply any comfortable assimilation. Rather than there being a simple crossing from one defined and identifiable location to another. Just as the other – and indeed the self – escapes . the implied refusal of linear temporality is no mere play on words. as only the abject is to miss that further dimension of what is always already beyond. calculable and programmable tomorrow. in the other in oneself’ (ibid. an unclassifiable miscegenation that signals the coming of the other as the possibility of ethical decision. then. Moreover. the event is always in one sense awaited. although the interruption of the oppressive closure of identity that characterises the postmodernist (and feminist) project must surely profit from Derrida’s suggestion that we should learn. a necessary surprise. If the other is both excessive and constitutive to the self. in Derrida’s terms. to resist final intelligibility. ‘how to let it [the monster] speak…or how to give it back speech. it encompasses both my own becoming and the coming of the other who has been there from the first. or identity with. then. it is in the very power to disturb and unsettle.9 the very undecidability of the monstrous may signal a way forward: A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future. and in the context of radical doubt as to one’s own identity. (Derrida 1995b: 307) And it is not just that the arrivant is undecidable in itself. beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage’ (1993: 34). All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant.130 EMBODYING THE MONSTER there…even if they do not exist. it would be already a predictable. as he puts it in Aporias. it is also unexpected. of being. The arrivant – who will come. in the other. Derrida goes so far as to suggest that the decision (in his sense) can only be made by the other in myself. the violent occasion – both in actual practice and symbolically – of inclusion in the identity of the selfsame. the unexpected arrivant ‘effects the very experience of the threshold’ (1993: 33). but a marker that what is yet to come is paradoxically already here. Bearing in mind Derrida’s naming of the calculable and the determinate as fundamentally unable to deliver ethical content. the impossibility of completion. to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate. even if they are not yet’ (1994: 176). it is a confrontation with what is both a ‘constitutive outside’ and an impossible. if the welcome is to have ethical valency. The sense of what is yet to come – the à-venir that Derrida insists on – is a powerful incentive to rethink the adequacy of a humanist ethics. The arrivant surprises the host ‘enough to call into question.). irreducible excess. even if it is in oneself. On the contrary. Rather than the encounter being the moment of a recuperation of alterity. The call to responsibility cannot be determined. As with Levinas. it is the at-homeness with oneself that cannot be taken for granted. who cannot be kept apart – has the quality of the unheimlich. both in the absence of any foreknowledge that would establish either identity of. One must welcome the unknown other. Nevertheless. even if they are no longer. but in a policing of boundaries that effects both real and symbolic violence.WELCOMING THE MONSTROUS ARRIVANT 131 conceptual definition. Although some commentators have argued that our own age is particularly characterised by a pervasive unease about the instability of all bodies. Responsibility lies rather in an openness to the radically. As such I read the monstrous. as he stresses. Whatever its form. the movement of acculturation. unknowable other. In the light of the potential of late twentieth-century biotechnology to radically vary the body. but not absolutely. As Derrida warns. but remains. as though the one and the other could be brought into the same category. the need to decentre my own identity and accede to the realisation that I am not the focal nor stable point of reference. Two things are required by the otherness of the other: first. the processes of normalisation that are correlative to the stable bounded subject are potentially even more powerful. their very alterity and strangeness is there to be recuperated within the known. then. and thus call for greater resistance.10 those claims – even if well supported – should not be taken to mean that anxiety has not always been ready to break out in the face of anything which threatens disintegration or confuses categorical limits. As I have already outlined. To let go of determinacy and of the impulse to master the undecidable is to embrace the possibility of reconfiguring relational economies. there are alternative ways forward. the potential site of both a reconceived ontology. And yet. It is an opening onto becoming-in-the-world-with-others which sustains alterity as différance. an unwelcome reminder of inherent vulnerability. the experience of the impossible. I am not claiming that morphological difference has become more acceptable. but of the encounter with the irreducibly different. not in re-cognition as an appropriative move. the need to reconfigure relational economies may be of special urgency. I must find a way to inhabit that impossible point poised between assimilation and rejection where both signal the ethical bankruptcy of indifference. in which I also encounter myself. for that would be to annul entirely the possibility of an ethical relation. it could well be the future role of techno-science to impose conformity. and second. ‘from the moment they enter into culture. so the ethics that he speaks of can never be systemised. on the contrary. and a new form of ethics. Rather than promoting transformation. Where the modernist project has sought to disentangle the inherent ambiguity and uncertainty . the continuing potential of which cannot be ignored. As the ability to read and understand organic structures becomes ever more sophisticated – I am thinking particularly of enterprises such as the mapping of the human genome or the Human Genome Diversity Project – it may be that however unidentifiable monsters initially are. the unease and fear generated by morphological difference has found expression historically not only in an assimilative grasp. Instead. the other is always the signifier of a difference that speaks to the non-self-sufficiency of the singular subject. the acceptance of a decentring of the human as such. precisely of domestication. The other in its strangeness may elude any such familiar designation and remain beyond the limits of intelligibility or representation. Responsibility lies. along with Haraway and Derrida. The call to ethics is not a question of more or less adequate knowledge. nor yet in an insistence on absolute difference. as I have suggested. as hopeful. of normalisation has already begun’ (1995b: 386). which understands that neither the one nor the other can exist apart. cannot be fully expressed in conceptual terms alone. and the strident claims to the closure of self-identity. it will be apparent that identities are never singular and always embodied. but one in which both psychic interaction and phenomenological connection play an equal part.132 EMBODYING THE MONSTER of organic beings and to impose the constraints of taxonomic definition. my purpose throughout has been to reclaim the pervasive significance of embodied difference to all and every encounter. It cannot be the objective. affective and physicalist dimensions of being-in-the-world. has not only resulted in the deconstruction of the deeply entrenched modernist tendency to split corporeality from subjectivity – thus greatly enhancing the myth of an invulnerable autonomy – but has also made possible the placing of bodily difference at the centre of enquiry. The ways in which embodied beings touch on one another draws together the abstract. particularly by those feminists who have turned their focus to embodiment. and it commands us to give up the comfort of familiarity and willingly embrace the risky ethics of uncertainty. the other that is both self and irreducibly alien in its excess. for to do so would be to extend the grasp of the known and the certain. disavowal and abjection. or by the operation of a calculative rationality. It is the very possibility of our becoming. the assurance of a self-complete. nonetheless. The deployment of postmodernist insights. . As long as we resist the impulse to recapture. In place of the interval. In tracing the eruption of the monstrous into a western discourse posited largely on the increasingly fragile certainties of liberal humanism. and the limits of what and who are to count. but as a perpetual horizon of possibility that reminds us always of our own inherent vulnerability. moreover. they do so only at the cost of a violent and exclusionary ethic that can encompass neither other modes of being. Though the constructs of modernity might seem to promise a limited security. to be open to the trace of the other within. The force of both the personal and cultural imaginary with its strategies of identification and inclusion. to resist the normalisation of the strange. those undecidable and fluid forms of embodiment that mark out the monstrous. not just between self and other. not as a determined site. but demands an attention to corporeality and the felt contact between living bodies in the process of mutual becoming. there is only a location and time otherwise where multifarious differences frustrate both the pretension to categorical knowledge and mastery. nor yet internal change and indistinction. not only constitutes the boundaries of selfhood. is to accept vulnerability. That encounter is no longer one between individuated. To resist closure. but at the same time undermines the narrative of rational engagement. Our relationship with the other. for ourselves and with others. as it were. If what is at stake for an ethics of embodiment is both the transformation of the masculinist metaphysics of presence – that is. to enter into that domain as such. then the encounter with the strange(r) will be the grounds for a radical rethinking of the concept of the selfsame. more recent theorisations have celebrated that same ground as the basis on which to open up to the productive possibilities of uncontained and multiple differences. In place of any ideal or final point of achievement for embodied selves. but between one category of being and another. selfpresent subjects who meet one another as though on an abstract plane mediated by pre-determined rights and duties. On the contrary the point must be to safeguard its very otherness. however. but the very condition of becoming. and of present day cultural practices. not least because it leads us to question the certainty and centrality of human being itself. and grounds the deconstruction of both. Moreover. For a postmodernist ethics that acknowledges the inevitability of aporia and refuses the false security of closure.WELCOMING THE MONSTROUS ARRIVANT 133 self-authorising subject set against the other – and the transformation of the normativities of the body. It is only those who have no wish to cede the authority and power that they hold under the sign of modernism who need fear the monsters. is a step of profound significance. to acknowledge that vulnerability is not a debased condition of the other. then the analytic of the horror and fascination of the monstrous must indeed be promising. slipping away even as they are encountered. always in flux. but with the hope of finding innovative and creative openings on to the world. we may approach the problematic not with destructive intent. and in the speculative thought of contemporary theorists – it is the discourse of the monstrous that mounts a challenge to humanism and the interlinked category of the human. By taking up the invitation of postmodernism. monsters are a pertinent trope: they are always on the move. . particularly as it has been deployed in feminist thought. As I have traced out – in my analysis of archival and historical texts. in philosophical interventions that dispute the convention. See Park and Daston (1981) for an opposing view. And Cohen himself makes clear the links with contemporary preoccupations: ‘Ultima Thule. 3. and of her thoughts and desires. Marvels and Meanings 1. and was subsequently the subject of rigorous debate for at least another 150 years. and the English language version of the work is a translation of a French author who himself draws on several prior sources such as pilgrim guides to the Holy Land. Ethiopia. carries the argument up to date: ‘Even in our own time. Bateman’s plagiarising of Lycosthenes (1557) is closely mirrored in Fenton’s 1569 translation of Boaistuau (1560) who in turn had referenced Sebastian Munster who claimed to have witnessed the monster in 1501. I look more closely at the figure later in this chapter. 1510–90). Believers held that the pregnant woman might transmit to her foetus a mark both of her own somatic experiences. Sir John Mandeville. See Pallister’s Appendix to her translation of On Monsters and Marvels (Paré 1982). Each is highly specific and deserves extensive attention in its own right. I have done little more than consistently flag the analytics of race. For a comprehensive summary and analysis of Pliny’s account. 6. In this one tale. The Renaissance Monster of Ravenna is best known today through the work of the French surgeon and writer Ambroise Paré (c. the doctrine of maternal imagination was widely accepted in the latter half of the sixteenth century. and the Antipodes were the medieval equivalents of outer space and virtual reality. is not simply a matter of language. The work of Butler (1993) and Grosz (1994) clearly qualify as exceptional in this respect. 3. Discourse. nonetheless. imaginary (wholly verbal) geographies accessible from anywhere. 7. and in the present work I hope to extend and complicate the framework in which that might take place. and other discourses of difference. disability. . The tale was. 2. 1 Monsters. yet there is little sense that either speaks directly to the body as it is lived in its flesh and blood materiality. It is unlikely that the putative traveller. but always waiting to be explored’ (1996: 18). Leslie Fiedler. we have not given up trying to persuade ourselves that monstrous races inhabit the remote places of this earth. see Friedman The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (1981). 8. extremely popular and by 1500 had been translated into many European languages. (1993).NOTES Introduction 1. 5. but is beyond the scope of my necessarily limited enquiry. sexual difference. 2. citing twentieth-century tales of the Asian yeti and North American sasquatch. As I discuss in the next chapter. and Walton et al. as I use it. See Marie Hélène Huet (1993) for a detailed exposition of the connection between maternal imagination and monstrosity. ever existed. The question of the specific social and political contexts in which the term ‘monstrous’ is and has been deployed is far from insignificant. but a set of what Haraway calls ‘materialsemiotic practices through which objects of attention and knowing subjects are both constituted’ (1997: 218). never meant to be discovered. and similar moves in Longo (1995). Derrida makes the apt and approving suggestion that the hybridisation of heterogeneous textual bodies ‘may be called a monster’ (1995b: 385). In Freaks. In choosing to focus on ontological and ethical issues. rather than of our own deep psyches’ (1981: 239). 4. 4. As Sawday remarks. together with those of a similar group of San people known as the ‘Bosjemans’. For a fuller account of the flexibility of categorisation evidenced by ‘What is It?’ and of its relation to the volatile racial politics of mid-nineteenth-century America. and that the process required the input of both sperm and egg. I am aware that many contemporary theorists and activists would prefer the word ‘impairment’. But as Anne Fausto-Sterling (1995) makes clear. chartered in 1660 and operative in Great Britain. Also Tudor (1995) who links specific developments in the cinematic monstrous with transformations in late modern society. God would restore monsters in perfect human form (City of God. whose review of ethnographical show business details Bartmann’s British appearances. 11. 10. Other influential groupings of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries include the College of Physicians (later the Royal College). nor the Cartesian model of the mechanistic body which partially replaced it. See also The Shows of London (Altick 1978) for a broader historical and cultural view of the monster as spectacle. 12.. 13. After being brought to Europe from southern Africa. I am grateful to Janet Price for bringing Derrida’s speech ‘The State of the Lie. leads me to prefer the more familiar terminology. The point was that the material condition of monstrosity did not in itself preclude redemption. the world and the heavens into a pattern of replication. ‘Aztecs. see Shildrick and Price (1996) and Price and Shildrick (1998). 1972). for reasons that would be too lengthy to explain here. the unfortunate Sarah Bartmann was displayed both as a freak for entertainment. In each case. publishers of the Athenian Gazette.NOTES 135 9. the Athenian Society. Aborigines. Park and Daston (1981). when various individual candidates appeared both in freak shows and in scientific forums. The missing evolutionary link between apes and human beings was a preoccupation of the later part of the century. 18. Each of these groupings was concerned to investigate the monstrous from an initially Baconian perspective. For a more detailed exposition. set up in 1666. for example. and as an object of scientific study. It is known that the figure of ‘What is It?’ was played by at least two different actors. Nigel Rothfels. 1997). who notes: ‘Imitation. and The Mystery and Lore of Monsters (Thompson 1930). 16. See also Bernth Lindfors (1996). differences in appearance and in speech from European norms were taken as evidence of racial degeneracy. while epigenesis held that the embryo developed structurally in utero from the progressive differentiation of cells. see James W. Augustine believed that at the Resurrection. 17. Cook (1996). and Ape-People’ (1996) for an account of the phenomenon in Germany. for example. was sufficient to ensure certain corporeal knowledge. Her body was extensively investigated both in life and after her death. The doctrine of preformation held that the infant body was already present in all its parts – in miniature – in either every sperm or every egg. 14. and what was at stake in the scientific gaze was an insecurity about race and gender. 20. In furtherance of his case. and the group around Le Journal des Savants in France. Pingree (1996). See for example Carol Thomas’ discussion in Female Forms (1999). In using the term ‘congenital disability’. The prestigious Royal Society. Nonetheless. Daston (1991). Yet neither the system of affinities. See Chapter 6 for further commentary on this figure. one black and the other white. 15. in which each component of the system finds its precise analogical equivalent in every other component’ (1995: 23). ‘(the) triumphant overthrow of body-fear never took place’ (1995: 37). See Park and Daston (1981) for further details on the setting up of the Royal Society in explicit part response to Bacon’s tripartite schema for a natural history which gave the investigation of the monstrous co-equal ranking. and Thomson (1996. reprinted in 1996 as The History and Lore of Freaks. her bodily differences were constructed in line with existing paradigms of knowledge. in an attempt to pin down and categorise her otherness.orders the body. my own postmodernist approach. See. See Jonathan Sawday. 19. For an account and critical analysis of such beliefs see Aliens in America (Dean 1998). The Lie of the State’ (1997) at Delhi University to my attention. was preceded and paralleled by the French institutions of Bureau d’Adresse (1633–42) and the subsequent Académie Royale des Sciences. . For historically varying yet situated explanations see.. combined with the desire not to obscure the phenomenology of the lived body as a social and psychical/material experience. If the Father could not cause…any change in the animalcule which was originally in his Body. See Porter 1984. that the discussion of maternal impressions occupies a relatively small part of a wider discussion of the imagination in Malebranche’s work. The notorious case of Mary Toft who. The incidence of such frauds is well documented. 3. for example. A similar move. Venette himself was actually an anti-imaginationist. Although Culpeper (1616–54) and Maubray were not contemporaries.. and Counsel and Advice to Child-bearing Women. accident. 10. The problem for believers was that emboitment in the spermatozoa implied an enormous wastage of potentially viable foetuses. see Nina Auerbach (1995). and the extent to which ‘each allegedly “simple term” is marked by the trace of another term. 9. ‘by showing on what thin strands of coincidence. 63–85. the apocryphal Aristotle’s Works: Containing the Masterpiece. and was in addition translated into four other languages. who sees the image of the female vampiric predator as ‘relatively respectable’ in turn of the century culture. The same list also appears in Blondel’s first response to Turner. See Alice Yaeger Kaplan (1990: 104) ‘Working in the Archives’. Out of Mind?’ pp.. It should be remembered. the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority’ ( Derrida 1981b: 33). Stephen Bateman The Doome Warning all Men to the Iudgemente: Wherein Are Contayned for the Most Parte All the Straunge Prodigies hapned in the Worlde (1581). 14. in its English version (1828). with Various Useful Remedies (n. as the quotation I use in my text makes clear. The account subsequently appeared in the Society’s abridged publication of its own proceedings. 13. the latter is strongly implied. first published in 1651. as Kaplan notes. 4. and was merely outlining the views of others. is made in relation to black bodies whose very presence is contaminatory. Wilson (1992) ‘Out of Sight. In his 1727 text.. 11. 6. claimed to have given birth to seventeen rabbits by reason of maternal passions before . 2. I mention this in illustration of the point that the coherence of archival narrative is threatened. 5. lay interest in the very same issues persisted in the media of popular midwifery books and natural histories. in Body Criticism (1991: 313–14). ownership. It is somewhat unclear whether Blondel’s belief in emboitment was spermist or ovist. 8. went through several editions in the eighteenth century. See. geographical proximity. See Timothy Sheldrake (1747: 313–14) ‘Concerning a Monstrous Child Born of a Woman under Sentence of Transportation’. nonetheless. he favoured Antoni van Loewenhoek’s spermatic explanation.d. Roy Porter claims that Venette’s manual of sexual practice and mores was the most popular of its kind in the French-speaking world of the eighteenth century.136 EMBODYING THE MONSTER 2 Monstering the (M)Other 1. in 1726. it appears that although Blondel toyed with ovism as suggested by Regnier de Graaf’s work on the ovarian follicule. again. the former’s manual. Alongside such learned disputes. the discoveries (are) based’. or on what unfair forms of friendship. I desire to know why the Mother should plead that privilege’ (1727: 47). See for example: Augustine City of God (1972). Directions for Midwives. The centring of the AIDS epidemic as a phenomenon that has leaked out of Africa (originally Haiti) is just the latest expression of the imagery of infection and pollution that spreads from the other to disrupt the same. See Friedman (1981) for a detailed discussion. 7. For a somewhat different view of the horror of vampires. whereas by 1729. The Strength of Imagination in Pregnant Women Examined (Blondel 1727). Nonetheless. I use the word différance in its Derridean sense to signal the deferral of meaning and identity. indicating its continuing popularity. 12. 15. he seems to accept the former: ‘By what right has the mother’s fancy any influence upon the body of the foetus when it comes from the Semen virile. See Barbara Stafford’s account of Malebranche’s influence. Both learned and lay works were often translated into several languages. and in broadsheets and ballads sold on the street or at fairs. and Buffon’s Natural History of 1767. For a detailed account of the debate see Philip K. A good summary of shifting accounts is offered by Lorraine Daston 1991.). Conrades Lycosthenes Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon quae praeter naturae ordinem (1557). ). 3. and some of us. 2. Thijssen reminds us: ‘By monsters. See for example. Indeed the whole genre of horror stories. In justification of this apparently extreme position. as evidenced by random letters to respected medical journals. which was borne the same day that the Genervois and Venicians were reconciled’ (1569: 135). that there is something odd about a fear that effectively denies the maternal–foetal connection. 18.p. the credulous letter headed ‘Maternal Impressions’ in the Lancet.000. and on their death at the age of thirty-four endowed a charity for the needy of the parish. See Todd 1995 and Huet 1993. specifically his father being torn apart by lions. The Reith Lectures.T. 3 The Self’s Clean and Proper Body 1. We all once were concorporate with another. is one of our greatest fears. not least the function of the trace. much more generally. Aristotle does not just mean creatures which. Many further parallels might be explored. 5. Certainly one popular explanation for the appearance of the so-called elephant man. are misshapen. 16. to which the monstrous is clearly related. but. This is no small matter. that the monstrous does not always imply negativity. Julia Epstein (1995) offers an extensive discussion of the significance of hermaphrodism and related genital ‘disorders’ in the early modern period. 21. The theme of bodily contamination is in any case neatly turned on its head when the scientists decide that Sil has rejected one would-be mate on the grounds that he has a congenital defect. (My thanks to Alun Munslow for suggesting the initial link. see Dennis Todd 1995. Surprisingly. See Fiedler 1981: 167. It should be remembered too. Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (Gould and Pyke 1897: 81). which are broadcast every year by the BBC.) 20. ‘A Wonderful Historie of a monstrous childe. It will strike us. then. Estimates of the incidence of conjoined twins vary from 1 in 50. Thomas Bedford’s sermon on the birth of conjoined twins eulogises their metaphorical relation to the Christian body: ‘Surely these are not more nearly conjoined in breast and belly than christians ought to be in heart and affection’ (1635: n.NOTES 137 confessing to fraud was widely satirised and is said by Blondel to have inspired his original pamphlet. 17. As Creed puts it: ‘The possessed or invaded being is a figure of abjection in that the boundary between self and other has been transgressed’ (1993: 32). John Merrick. as mothers.000 to 1 in 100. The argument is established in feminist critique as diverse as Genevieve Lloyd’s The Man of Reason (1984) and Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a). Aristotle implies in De generatione animalium that all twins are monstrous. towards the end of the nineteenth century was that his mother had been startled by a circus elephant. 4. Yet it is precisely that archaic link that constitutes the abject. nonetheless. even in the nineteenth century. The first successful operation in which both twins survived was not carried out until 1953 in the US. Fenton’s reference to a child with doubled limbs is. 19. . Remnants of the belief persist. For a full account and convincing analysis of the implications and significance of the case. might be said to be fundamentally about invasion. Tradition has it that they led an exemplary Christian life. In a similar vein. the Biddenden Maids – reputedly born in Kent in 1100 – may be the exception to the rule that conjoined twins are certainly monstrous. are a series of six lectures usually addressing contemporary issues and aimed at lay-people. for example. 6. Lionel the lion-faced man – a famous exhibit of P. for invasion. and in common with many other freak show performers. entitled. either corporeal or psychic. In a similar vein. Barnum – assured audiences that his mother had witnessed a terrible sight. all creatures which are out of the ordinary in the sense that they are not the result of the common course of Nature’ (1987: 240). See Londa Schiebinger (1993) on the social and medical fascination with such differences in the context of racial categorisation. 4 July 1863: 27. See the account in the popular and somewhat salacious Victorian text. have experienced the sharing of bodies in pregnancy. however. The monster too appears to have fragile boundaries. due to some pathological process. It would be difficult to say that the power of maternal imagination was ever entirely discounted in lay discourse. feature in many early ‘monster’ books. by which the infant comes to see itself as separate and distinct. Thompson (1930) details many other occurrences. Since I finished this chapter. the resultant body map is precarious. Licetus (1634). the mirroring process (both literal and metaphorical). having ‘a psychical interior. and are described by Lycosthenes (1557). and some has been very deliberately given wide circulation.. Nonetheless. as for example in Barnum’s freak shows. In psychoanalytic terms. the pair have been consistently treated as separate beings. While the staging was called officially ‘The Show of Life’. while professional bioethicists added in cost/benefit considerations. Known as Jodie and Mary. and a corporeal exterior which remains labile. however. albeit uneasy. traced through handbills. and/or to self-defence. extremely complex and I do not presume to judge it. but to investigate the nature of the ontological and ethical responses. has been widely debated – both in lay and legal contexts – not for reasons of doubt about the ontological status of the infant body. and the disputed rights of the parents. Paré (1573). Neither of these cases is in any way unique. in which the inauguration of difference is always offset by a continuing mutuality of being-in-the-world with others. 13. Aldrovandus (1642) and Bartholinus (1654). 12. As an ego ideal. the issue is not to offer judgement on any of those involved in the varying accounts. and personal appearances. 9. but because it was clear that Mary was parasitic on Jodie and would inevitably die if she were unable to share her twin’s vital functions. Boaistuau (1560).. The point I would make. I remain conscious that the significances I wish to elicit may be in tension with authorised interpretations. has brought some of the issues I discuss to a wider audience. Although on one level the oneness of such twins may appal. 14. in which the concerns of the clinic were overriding.138 EMBODYING THE MONSTER 7. eyewitness accounts. reminder of the lost pre-subjectal plenitude of undifferentiated infant/ maternal corporeality. the idea of bodies that leak and flow into one another is a familiar part of the modern language of embryology. The ‘need’ for separation surgery in this case. 11. hinging on the right to life. but in addition to safeguards already incorporated into the original texts. For a rather different documentary narrative of medical intervention. born in the UK in 2000. with the possibility that the weaker foetus is absorbed into its twin in the early stages of pregnancy. on another they may be an attractive. allows accession to a self-image of corporeal unity that covers over the reality of the fragmentary and uncoordinated motor experiences of the child (Lacan 1977a). 8. and is only gradually displaced by reference to the apparent certainty of organic boundaries. it was calculated that failure to operate would result in the deaths of both after a few months. which requires continual stabilization. Emphatically. 4 Contagious Encounters and the Ethics of Risk 1. and want to stress that my primary concern is not with the specific material circumstances of the twins as such. despite an extensive degree of concorporation. Merleau-Ponty (1964) takes a less deterministic view of the mirror stage. In analysing a number of recent accounts of conjunction and concorporation. among others. is that the debate was conducted in almost exclusively modernist terms. open to many meanings’ (Grosz 1994: 38). It is interesting that Fiedler refers to the freak show tradition of displaying human foetuses in glass jars. At the same time. Schwartz indicates research which suggests that as many as a quarter of singleton births may originally have been twin conceptions (1996: 20). the highly publicised case of the Maltese conjoined twins. it was known by carnival people . I am aware that my approach traverses ground that will have highly personal meanings to surviving twins and their families.) The situation was then. Indeed. I have taken the step of withholding potentially identifying surnames. what Schwartz labels ‘the myth of the vanished twin. and to a lesser extent supernumerary heads.S. 15. See Foucault 1977. see Clark and Myser’s account (1996) of the separation of the Thai conjoined twins. 10. nonetheless. C. Dao and Duan. Parasitic twinning. however. The question of what constitutes a self and its relation to the body was not addressed. and for which the filming itself realised ‘a certain technologized medical gaze’. None of the material I use is outside the public domain. Interestingly.the notion that each of us may once have had a living copy’ (1996: 24) appears to have some clinical justification. (The operation did in fact go ahead in November 2000.J. familiar. for Klein. The implication is that a ‘real’ self is frustrated by the attribution of an improper status. What he does not adequately explain is why he would wish such forms to remain hidden. which opens up every possibility of displacement. an ‘ultimate invasion of privacy. Such ontological anxiety is part undercut by the turn. for others in its social world. 4. this anarchy.That is in fact what so many different experiences show one. ‘philosophical anatomy’ refers to the supposedly transcendent significance of the human body in reflecting the order and harmony of the created universe. As with feminist studies. The meaning of heimlich is both that which is homely. intimate. and Phelps’. Although the idealised perfection of Vitruvian Man rapidly lost influence after the Renaissance. often advocated by activists. but that they are largely seen as the responsibility of academics who themselves have disabilities. 8. Davis. 5. . this essential lack of adaptation. public health and individual ontology in the context of HIV-AIDs. for a culture as a whole). 10. Lacan’s analysis better explains the dominant conception of western selfhood. teach or research. 11. It will strike us that the uncanny carries much of the force of Derridean différance. and might be better expressed as (un)heimlich. . revealing what travesties of the human form even the most normal among us are at two. or four months after conception’ (1981: 18). this fundamental discordance. a denial of the actual powerlessness of the phallus (Lacan 1977b). for examples. . See Oliver 1996. I am deliberately using the term broadly. this fragmentedness. and Shakespeare and Watson 1997. Lacan’s reading of the mirror stage and its emphasis on the narcissistic construction of selfhood is challenged by (among others) Cynthia Willett who claims: ‘The mirror holds the attention of the infant not because it provides a static image of wholeness but because it recalls the interactive qualities of subjectivity’ (1995: 68). 2. Liz Grosz summarises imaginary anatomy as ‘an internalized image or map of the meaning that the body has for the subject. As Lacan remarks: This disarray. three. The point is that the biomedical representation of corporeality is always sutured with complementary discourses which are evident in the metaphorical structure of science and self-consciously imaginative texts alike.NOTES 139 themselves as ‘pickled punks’. their limited impact may in part reflect a certain self-policing of boundaries. but that only serves to confirm the binary thinking at an institutional level. and for Lacan. to a social model of disability which insists that disabling effects are produced by society rather than being the property of individuals. 9. I want to take up the sense in which those specific categories are collapsed into a generalised icon of improper embodiment in conventional discourse. the words heimlich/unheimlich are by no means simple opposites. See Thomson 1997: Chapter 4. The phobic projection of vulnerability onto the (feminine) other signals for Freud an unresolved castration crisis (Freud 1933). (1988: 169) 12. By paternalism I mean making decisions on behalf of others. ‘Benevolent Maternalism and the Disabled Women in Stowe. the idea that the body holds the key to the laws of nature is still fully evident in the early nineteenth-century studies of teratology conducted by Geoffroy St-Hilaire. and for the symbolic order conceived in its generality (that is. Nonetheless. The complication introduced by Thomson is that in the historical context of nineteenth-century patriarchal United States. for example. It is not that disability studies are non-existent. and that which is concealed and hidden from sight (Freud 1919). religion and natural science. . that is of error. of who is and who is not entitled to speak. as a term that undoes binary difference. The earlier term. literature. is characteristic of the instinctual life of man. and calling them psychopathological conveys nothing since they lie on a continuum with many experiences which themselves are regarded as normal. the middle-class women themselves are highly constrained by the cult of domesticity and far from being the autonomous and invulnerable agents they wish to be. It is an individual and collective fantasy of the body’s forms and modes of action’ (1994: 39–40). the rage and confusion occasioned by the loss of the mother’s breast (Klein 1986). art. because although there are multiple ways in which disability is experienced. Jonathan Sawday (1995) for a highly evocative analysis of Renaissance and early modern anatomy in the light of contemporary philosophy. Fiedler sees it as a form of pornography. without their fully informed consent. Catherine Waldby (1996) has written succinctly on the connection between immunology. 7. 3. 6. As Freud is at pains to stress. or acting in their supposed interests. See. the issue has been shelved. I am reminded that ‘cleave’ is one of those words. It presupposes neither the donor nor receiver as separate identities. Saying holds open ‘its openness. Moreover. Limited Inc (Derrida 1988) and Judith Butler Bodies That Matter (1993) for a detailed exposition. Accordingly. the voice that signifies’ (ibid. I am grateful to Janet Price for posing this question to me. exchange. It is ‘a statement of the “here I am” which is identified with nothing but the very voice that states and delivers itself. and less than eight weeks old. 6. I am using the term ‘gift’ in the postmodernist sense of that which is given with no goal. . I have referred to the ‘other’ in my own text without capitalization. to which Derrida has alerted us. While the latter refers to themes. 4. which he links with the notion of the fold that produces an interiorisation of the outside. countergift or debt. offers the following: ‘When the embryo is less than an inch long from crown to rump. Throughout this chapter. In Otherwise than Being. 8. evasion or alibis.140 EMBODYING THE MONSTER 5 Levinas and Vulnerable Becoming 1. a difference. See note 3. for example. He further discusses the matter of the cut. the embryo has neither eyes nor ears. judge. Levinas is concerned to emphasise not mutuality. I find the other in me. what he calls the ‘cleavage’ in relation to the me–other exchange (1968: 215). and the potential opening onto sociality. . If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I will give him or her.). As Derrida puts it: ‘For there to be a gift. The Saying and the Said are aspects respectively of pre-ontological and post-ontological language. . I take up this theme more fully in Chapter 6. Anzieu’s view is no mere rhetorical gesture. then there will not be a gift’ (1992: 12). 6 The Relational Economy of Touch 1. delivering itself without saying anything Said’ (Levinas 1998: 143).). . there must be no reciprocity. and that is not the prelude to exchange. return. without excuses. light stroking of the upper lip or wings of the nose will cause bending of the neck and trunk away from the source of stimulation. 7. that other cannot be fully assimilated. but is widely accepted in both physiological and psychological literature. But where for Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray the encounter is mediated by touch. Interestingly. admits that he has had to sacrifice ‘the possibility of reproducing the author’s use of capital or small letters with both these terms in the French text’ (Levinas 1969: 25n. and lower case is the general form. but in offering him one’s being’ (1969: 183). . Ashley Montagu. his translator. The first cut is of course that of the umbilical cord interconnecting mother and infant. 4. See Richard Rorty (1980) and Rodolphe Gasché (1986) for detailed analyses. Deleuze insists that Foucault’s work is haunted by the theme of the double. Yet its skin is already highly developed’ (1971: 1). 5. . but a responsibility beyond ourselves: ‘The surpassing of phenomenal or inward existence does not consist in receiving the recognition of the Other.It resembles exactly the invagination of a tissue in embryology’ (Deleuze 1988: 98).I do not encounter myself on the outside. I follow all quotations as they are given in translation. Although Levinas makes a distinction. especially in Totality and Infinity between ‘autrui’ and ‘autre’ as personal Other and general other respectively. that means two apparently contradictory things. since the world is flesh?’ (1968: 138). As Derrida remarks: ‘Words of this type situate better than others the places where discourses can no longer dominate. reiteration is not in any case a faithful copy. propositions and meanings that are a conscious communication between subjects. ‘the double is never a projection of the interior. 3. One is reminded of Foucault’s expression of the folds that constitute the doubling of the self. 3. there is always a ‘snag’. as in (a) split apart and (b) cling to. Levinas too insists that the face to face encounter ‘is not a play of mirrors’ (1969: 183). 2. the former is the event of the risky exposure of the one to the other in the ethical encounter. 2. Merleau-Ponty makes a similar point with regard to his flesh ontology: ‘Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world. See. decide: between the positive and the . Alphonso Lingis. As Derrida has made clear. in the operation of the fold. for example. either individually or as a socius. At this stage in its development. For a fuller analysis of Derrida’s position. is one such example. So a decision has to go through some impossibility in order for it to be a decision. the emotion may be independent of actual contact. the post-operative strategy of positioning a mirror next to the bed of each recovering twin both served to reflect back a ‘whole’ and separate self. 9. Chapter 6. This is particularly true of Derridean discourse. the true and the false’ (1995b: 86). To aid the former’s recovery after separation. in 1826 (cited in Wilson 1993). If you don’t experience some undecidability. There are frequent allusions throughout Derrida’s work to the ethical emptiness of a rule-bound. in ethics. . and by documentaries about concorporate twins. and was seen to minimise distress at the loss of the other-self (ITN report. Justice and Responsibility’ where Derrida remarks: there would be no decision. about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. OncomouseTM is the commercial name of a special laboratory-manipulated strain of mice which bears oncogenes. no decision and thus no responsibility. for the bodily reconstructions that are at the heart of global biotechnology are driven. (1999: 66) 10. by the search for power and profit (1997: 61). for a fuller analysis of such concerns with regard to the advanced reproductive technologies available in the western world. should we think twin bodies in the mode of cleavage? 9. as Haraway recognises. Lee Quinby’s reservations in Anti-Apocalypse. See. For Haraway. 4. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published in 1818. 1999). where the clearest use of the feminine as the privileged figure of undecidability can be found in Dissemination (1981a). calculative morality that takes no account of undecidability. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method. (1990: 190) 3. See Chapter 3 for an initial discussion of the Coloredo twins. see Shildrick 1997: 160–7. the therapist has no doubt of what is required: ‘Right away we got a mirror and showed her she was just her’ (BBC TV. for example. 8. an account of Etienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire’s experiments. In another well-documented case of conjoined twins in the UK. 2. 11. without the experience of some undecidability. the consequence of a premiss or a matrix. 21 July 1998). Considérations générales sur les monstres. 5. for a transgenic hominid creation of techno-science and informatics. precisely because we share the same elemental. As Haraway explains: Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes. then the decision would simply be the application of a programme. FemaleMan© is Haraway’s own term. the twins discussed in Chapter 3. 7. Where ‘flesh’ is used in the sense intended by Merleau-Ponty. Specifically he uses film to exemplify ‘contemporary experiences of disorder and incoherence in social life’ (1995: 39). I am touched by the images of the Still Life exhibition (see Chapter 4). See Shildrick 1997. 10. 6. originally derived from Joanna Russ’ novel The Female Man (1975). Irony is about humor and serious play. mutually enfolding space. On the less abstract level too there is reason for caution. 7 Welcoming the Monstrous Arrivant 1. and was marketed by the Du Pont medical products division in the 1990s as a cancer research tool. even dialectically. in politics. each is both potentially promising and apocalyptic. 1994: 91. Perhaps the clearest exposition is found in the question and answer session published as ‘Hospitality. How. intercorporeal. in the strong sense of the word. the good and the bad. which arises where boundaries cannot be recuperated. Andrew Tudor’s analysis of what he terms ‘paranoid horror’.NOTES 141 negative. 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Paul-Gabriel 43 boundaries 5. 5. 18. 54. 54. 135n Bakhtin. 72 Boler. 81. the Siamese Twins 56–8. 71. 25. 105. 20–22. 51. 136n Aristotle 3. 132 abnormality 4. 37. 69. 24. 45. 71. 99. 55. 104. 113. 10–11. 10. 65 bestiaries 15 binary oppositions 3. 130. 105.INDEX Entries in Bold indicates illustrations A abject. 76. the/abjection 5. 119. 20–1. 38. 81–2. 107. 98 Cataldi. 78. Pseudo 12 Aldrovandus. 68. 138n body. 9. 84. 114. 68. 66. 107. 23. 134n Coloredo. 38. Stephen 13. 76. 125 Blondel. 78. 9. 75. Mikhail 54 Barnum. 63. 7. 85. 62. 85. 45–6. Sara 100. 83. Francis 20–21. 135n B Bacon. 106–119 passim body image 4. 115 Ahmed. 69. 28. Thomas 138n Bartholomew’s Fair 24 Bartmann Sarah 25. Thomas 19. 75. 14–15. 48. Jean 105 becoming 6. 115. 111 biology 10–11. 56. 23. 114. 55. 117 body modification 54–5. 138n as property 58. 97. 137n Bengali Boy. 131 Bedford. 107. 47. Didier 109. 45. Rosi 29. 81. Georges 29 Caputo. 45. Sue L. 87. 116. 72. 47. 54. 53. 137n Bartholinus. 128 biologism 2. 137n see also Turner–Blondell debate Boaistuau. 35. 113 Cicero. 136n Auerbach Nina 136n Augustine 19. Marcus Tullius 12 Clark. 84. the 48–67. Tina 99 chiasm 67. 67 Bulwer. 36. 132 becoming-in-the-world 101. 84. 137n Aristotle’s Works 17. 78. Dorothy 59 Butler. 85. 24. 72. T. 53 Baudrillard. John 8. 131 ontological anxiety 10. 26. 34. 79. 113. 111–12. 101–02. 68. 64. 117 concorporation 58. 139n Anzaldúa. 117 Chang and Eng. 63. 137n. 81. Ulyssis 138n Altick. 38. 141n . 130 Braidotti. 25. 126 Anzieu. 117. 83 biomedicine 22. 24. 116. 30. 24. 11–12. 6. 130. 76. 50. 73 absent presence 5. 67 as constructed 4. 138n cloning 44 Cohen. 63. Richard F. 72. 126 structure of knowledge 17. 67. Gloria 124. Megan 77–8 Boucé. 24. David L. Lazarus and John Baptista 63–4. 83–4. 72. 62. 44. 114. 107. 72. 52. 28–9. 52. 47. 73. 139n bio(medical) science 9. 135n anxiety 29. 120. 115. 24. 65. 55. 107. 86. John 12–13 Burlingham. 106. 124. 77. 20. 117 women’s bodies 28–47 passim. 73–4. 43. 140n archives 9. 117. 82. James Augustus 136n. 54. 86. Pierre 13. see also pregnancy Bogdan. 116. 64. 63–66. 17. 109. 31–2. 135n reiteration 140n C Canguilhem. 108 clean and proper 53. 103. 44. 78–9. 108. 31. 122–4. 113. Robert 24. 117. 73. 120 as fluid 10. 30. 19. 57 Chanter. 68. 108. 106. 116. 68. 106. P. 78–9. Judith 5. 28. 11. 8. 114 as leaky 4. 101 Albertus Magnus. 135n Bateman. the 64–6. 25. Jeffrey Jerome 16. 116. 114. 61. 16. 116. 55. 84. 20. 106. 53–5. 112. 107. 84. 75. 75. 46. 18. 83. 111. 34. Thomas 72 Crary. 57. 126. 80 Dean. 69. 123. human 72–3. 73. 132 Epstein. 47. freak show 22. 72. 122. 71. Jonathan 121–2 Creed. 125. 71–7 passim. 121. 52. 122. 128 Levinasian ethics 87–102. 63. 23. 139n difference 2. 84. 129. 8. passim contamination 70–1. Robert E. 127 Fenton. 22. 79. 118 Doane. 28. 106. 119. 128 linguistic contamination 83–4 see also contagion Cook. 140n Goodin. 4. 137n ethics 3. 36. 105. 73. 125. Simon 94. 23. G. 60. 107. 10. 141n as monstrous 28–31. 68. 125 Gearhart. 91. 79–80. 72. Gilles 140n body-without-organs 125 Dennett. 108. 73. the 107. 101. 135n social model of 139n distance 4. 85 exclusion 5. 28. Jacques 5. 118. 92. 82. 105. 106. 89. Anne 135n feminine. 122 différance 5. 33. 83. process of 24–5. 135n as ironic 123. James W. 138–9n Foucault. 51. 92. 104. 93 encounters 5. 123–128. 78. 94. 35. 100. 78. 67. 141n . 53. 33. Rosalyn 50 disability 2. 52. 27. 84. 29. 82. 24. 137n. 38–9 empathy 74. 77. 85. 140n archives 26. 82. 127 Dijkstra. 101. 114. 121. 29. 122–3. Michel 19. Julia 44. Barbara 45. 123. 45. 113. 75. 111 distancing. 76–8. 137n Critchley. 8. 82. 105. 78. 135n. 122–3. 134n. 103. 116. Nicholas 32. 73. 82. 129. 95. 88. 122. 104. 97–9. 115. 7. 114. 132 F Fausto-Sterling. 131. 51. 54. 51. Rodolphe 140n gaze. 100. 73. 48. 103. 136n cyborgs 10. 93. 138n Couser. 10. the 2. Donna 9. 120 double. 110 posthumanist ethics 129–33 eugenics 43. 5. 125. 66–7. 136n. 6. 20. 137n Fiedler. 84. 84. Leslie 58. Suzanne 26 genome. 107. 75. 76. 10. 108. 101 Culpeper. 45. 103. 106. 74. 54. 131. Edward 13. 141n the monstrous arrivant 130 (re)iteration 26. 113. 122. 38 ethics 122–3. 129–31. Jodi 135n Deleuze.150 EMBODYING THE MONSTER conjoined twins. Lennard J. 106. 112–13. 131 Geoffroy St-Hilaire. 134n. 135n Davis. 46. 109. 97. the 24. 61. Etienne and Isidore 20–1. Elizabeth 4. 53. 111. 77. René 35. 74. 140n E elephant man 137n ego 63. 104. 120–21 emboitment 40. 82. 93. Andrea Stulman 73 Derrida. 22. 67. 88. 28. 79. 80. 87. Karl 68–9 Grosz. 47. 98. Bram 30–1 Diprose. 66. 135n. 86. 75. 97. 108. 81. 110. 49–51. 51. 69. 44–6. 111. 23–25. 38. 53. 105. 119. 129–131. 80. 73. 68–71. 138n Freud. 7. 127–8. 78. 77 Grimes. 103. 103. 20. 118–19. the 81. 83. 136n G Gashé. 105. 122. 103. 135n. 94. 104. 110. 136n embryology 20. 67. 96. 36. 97. 6. 106. 97–8. 116–17. 134n. 135n corporeality 1. 132 sexual difference 8. Lorraine 21. 48. 44. 73. 75 see also women feminism 2. see twins contagion 24. 80. 97. 139n (un)heimlich 81. 8. Sigmund 27. 119. 125–8 D Daston. 109. Mary Ann 44 double. 140n freaks. 51. 85. 140n Descartes. 117. Judith 63 Haraway. 73. 71. 11. 130. 74. 127. 93. 51. 125 gift 93. 56. 138n H Halberstam. 139n Friedman. 138n skin ego 109 embodiment 2. 46. John Block 16. 108. 56. 68. 121. 11. 15–16. 105. 65. 125 see also maternal imagination indifferentiation 5. 134n human 3. 128–9 hybridity 16. 55. 121. 106. 136n self identity 17. Genevieve 137n Locke. 23. 39. 108 Monster of Ravenna 10. 112. 140n assymmetry of self-other 88. 84. 130. 28. 74. 134n. Drew 49. 9–10. mirror stage monsters Monster of Cracow 19. 118–19. 131. 123. 73 Longo. Alphonso 104. 117. 140n substitution 93. 112. the. 139n. 140n. 132 imaginary. self. 132 imaginary anatomy 79. 113 mirror stage 56. 105–06. 46.INDEX Hartsoeker. 136n. 77–8. 138n Lyotard Jean-Francois 107 M Malebranche. prodigies or wonders 12. 53 . 99. Paul K. 32. Melanie 139n Kristeva. 95. 127. 109. 67. Nicolaus 39 HIV-AIDS 53. 66–7. 52–3. 56. John 32. 108. 39. 48. Lawrence 134n Lycosthenes. 108. 117 Kwinter. Nicolas 35–37. 23. 98 justice 95. 115 Kirby. 118-19 interpellation 84 Irigaray. Conrades 13. 35. 118 flesh 111. 128. 17–19. 81. 63. 105. 24. 79. 25. 98. 136n Merleau-Ponty. 112 Levinas. 95. 53–4. 44. 32. 59. 128 Klein. 17. 139n 151 LaCapra. 55. 111. 51. 72. François 34 Jantzen. 44. 124. 87. 50–1. 38. 138n Lindfors. 119 mirror (images) 50. 124. 80. the 3. 32–43. 16. 50. 97. 80. 38. 137n iterability 83–4 J Jacob. 54. Luce 94. 137n as fraud 41. 119. 57–9. 97. 22. John 48 Longmore. 140n Linnaeus. 98 proximity 87. 90. 110. 28. 17–19. 42. 104–5. 126–7. 113. 18 as excessive 11. 58. 79. 126. 103–4. 19. 140n 141n see also Lacan. 46. 13–23 passim. 112–14. 130. other Licetus. 22. 98. 93. 113–14. 113. Emmanuel 87–102. 108. 96. 48. 114. 104. 95. 43 Huet. 11. 56. 109. Maurice 49. 75. 107. 125. Vicki 126–7. 110–11. 139n Hira and Nida 60–1. 17. 105. 93. 61. Julia 46. 89. 129 as sign of moral failure 12. 138n. 79. Dominick 26 Lavater. 136–7n Maubray. 6. Sanford 121–2 L Lacan Jacques 50. 113. 115. 41. 120–25. 141n history as discursive 26–7. 98 third party 94–5 see also ethics. 121. 57–9. John Caspar 43 Leder. 97. 104. 107. 56. 129 I identity 5. 109. 62–3. Marie Hélène 37. 51. 96. 25. 111 the face 87. 82. 111–12 mind-body split 35. 118. 99 the maternal 92. 64 as other 2–3. 110–11 Saying. 132 as marvels. 114–116 Katie and Eilish: Siamese Twins 61 Eilish: Life Without Katie 62. 43. 71. 81–3. 80. 131 humanism 120–22. 91. 108. 53–4. 29. Alice Yaeger 136n Katie and Eilish 61–3. 129 as fluid 5. 134n maternal imagination/impressions 14. 125. Fortunius 13. 118. 55. 53. 85. 20. 25. 68. 110. 110. 113 identification with 6. Carolus 22 Lloyd. 90. 109. 89–90. 138n. 96–7. 79. 125.141n reversibility thesis 49. 106. 20. 139n imagination 33. Grace 91. and the Said 88. 99 K Kaplan. Bernth 135n Lingis. 92. 73. 51–2. 48–9. 110–12. 107. 7. 122. 79–81. 94. 58–9. 40 Mandeville’s Travels 16. 101 the hostage 90. 103. 52. 54. 117. 46. 46. Lee 141n R race 30. 50. 116. 95. 136n preformation 39–40. 96. 103. 49. 107. 124 Nussbaum. Catherine 138n N Natanson v. 45–6 Shakespeare. 25. 78.152 EMBODYING THE MONSTER monsters cont. 119. 56. 29–30. 116. 115–19 passim. 82–3. 114 Q Quinby. 106. 131 normativity 2. 138n self. 15–16. 71. 42. 28. 33. 122. 141n in Levinas 88–97 passim selfsame 5. 40. 85. 32. 141n skin 51. Kline 75 nature 10. 45. Martha 85 O Oliver. 41. Tom 139n Sheldrake. 108. 132 Semonin. 85. 135n S Samuels. 141n . Nigel 135n Royal Society 23. Paul 23–4 Separate Lives 60 sexuality 30–1. 49. Mary Wollenstonecraft 125 Shildrick. 28–9. 99. 20. 18. 100. 131 in Levinas 85. 11. 21. 128. 119. 116. 117. 93. 22–3. 37–8. 58. 128 normality 29. Janet 78. 66–7. 134n Montagu. 139n mysophobia 74 Pliny. 50. 83. 5. 82. Michael 139n ontology 9. 9. 31. 123. 115–119 passim. 115. 109–10. ambiguity of 3. 106. 86. 58. 135n.113. 83. 131 other. 71. 20. 135n psychic dimensions of the body 11. 97. 65. 116. 93. 17 Porter. 96. 124 as irreducible 5. 123–4. 11. 75–6. 25. 103. 107. 76. 72. 101. 87. 135n phantom limb 62–3 phenomenology 49. Jonathan 135n. 17. 4. 70. Ashley 140n Munster. 16. 35 historical accounts of 9. 71. 54. 75. of the monster 26 of the other 82–3 of the self 55. 130. 99. 135n pregnancy 10. 114. 59. 114. 88–102 within (the self) 4. 139n Schiebinger. 119. 31. 127–8 response 87. 87. 5. 68. 104. 111. 61 normalisation 20. 41. Hillel 58. 30–6 passim. 30–1. 135n. 56. 69–71. 100. 34–5. 78. 65. Sebastian 134n Myser. 80. 89. 51. the 2. 110. 136n Stewart. 106 Sawday. Margrit 48. 45. 91. Susan 24. Katharine 134n. 44. 92. 137n racism 3. 100 responsibility 87. 121 Stafford. 74. 69. Susan 53 soul 19. 50. 13. 39–43 passim. 130. 108. 138n psychic dimensions cont. 131. 92–3. 96. 14. 12. 60. 116. 81. 88. 24. 55. 51. 130. 60. 56. 22. 46. 25 Still Life 68–9. 84. 107 eye-witness accounts of 13. Timothy 32–3 Shelley. 69. 111. 61–2. 50. 67. 135n. 53 monstrous races 9. 43. 19. 11–24 performativity of 26 monstrous births 12. 129–31 P Paré. 104. Richard 140n Rothfels. 45. 126 Sontag. 68. 64 Species 45–6 Spivak. 113. 42. 52. 60. 53. 105. 118. 48–9. 138n Park. 37–8. R. 12. 95. 59. Evelleen 65–6 Rorty. 54–5. 107–110. 63. 79–80. 85. 75. 141n of mothers 41–43 Richards. the 17. 85–6. Roy 38. 91. 46. Gayatri 11. 46. 110. 83. Barbara Maria 42. 32. 78. 51. 25. 28. 62. 82. 114 phobia 74. 90. 84. 29. 15. 43–4. 80. 128. 98. 30. 101. Ambroise 12. 119. 94. 108. 106–11 passim. 104. 60. 137n Price. 20. 79. 71. 33–8. Londa 137n Schwartz. the Elder 15. 98. 117. 108–9. Carol 135n Thompson. Cathryn 89. 136n Vasseleu. 116. 79. 110 visible 109 voyeurism 7–8. concorporation U uncanny. 108.T. 71. 83.INDEX subject. Bernhard 89 Walton. C. Daniel Turner–Blondell debate 39–42 Turner. 60–3. 107. 17. 27. 44 see also feminine. Nicholas 139n Wendell. the 153 V vampires 30. 56. Daniel de 40–1 T Thijssen. 82–95 passim. 92. Nicolas 38. 74 Willett. Andrew 135n. 132 Tudor. 117. 70. the 3. separation of 58. 11. Dennis 24. Marina 44 Watson. see also: Bengali Boy. Iris Marion 50. 29. 135n. 71–3. 114. 30. 92. 84. 20. 8. Susan 73. 112. 30. 109–14. 66. 110 Venette. 126. 98. J. 106. 134n Warner. the 81. 66–7. 112. 138n Thomson. 88. 48. Rosemarie Garland 22–3. 5. J. 141n unheimlich 130 see also Freud. 139n Wilson. 141n Turner. 69. 105–07. 114. 103. 136n women 5. David 96 Y Young. 76 Todd. 138n. 4. Philip K. 75–8. 120–21. M. 30–45. 103. Catherine 78. 101–02. 111. 139n Waldenfels. 74. 16. 136n viscerality 112–13 vision 89. 60. passim. Cynthia 92. 19. 132 Superville. the Wood. 121. Coloredo. 81. uncanny. 115 vulnerability 3. Hira and Nida. Lazarus and John Baptista. 118. 69. 116–119. 37. 85. 129. 117–18. 124. 82 . 51. 98. 107. M. 111. 131. 117. 138n. 105. 137n. William 66 twins 59. 80. 85. 137n touch 73. 139n undecidability 2. 61. 137n Thomas. 63. 56–63. 98. 6. 107. 43 as objects of disciplinary power 42–3. 72. 68. 93–4. Dudley 20 Wilson. 128–33 passim W Waldby. S. 115. see also: Chang and Eng. 123. 72. 137n conjoined twins 14. 104. 62. 120. 119. 127 irrationality of 35–6. 53–4. 113. 52. 122. Katie and Eilish parasitic twinning 63. 50–1. 114–116. 23.