Monsters, monstrousness, and monstrous nature/s

摘要

Questions around the materiality of, and differences between, human and non-human life have beset the natural and social sciences since the 18th century, and are at the center of a lively, contemporary discussion around the nature of matter, the matter of nature, and the politics, not to mention ethics, of ontology. And yet there are few works outside of a history of science that have explicitly engaged the monster and the monstrous as analytical devices to explore the variety of ways in which such ontics, and their associated insides and outsides, have been variously constituted, dismantled, reenacted, re-imagined and transgressed. This despite the fact that the figure of the classical monster - the hydra, harpies, gorgons, Cerberus - is there to warn of the promises and pitfalls associated with the transversal of all manner of borders, especially those which mark the differential nature of human and animal, life and death. More often than not chimerical beings, monsters such as the lawless Cyclops, who, Homer (2005) relates, have no established legal codes, and the cannibal Grendel, who 'moves beyond the pale' (Heaney, 1999, lines 1351-55) become the physical manifestation of the ever-present threat to order from that which lies outside of a civilised body politic.