cohen7theses.pdf

1 Monster Culture (Seven Theses)

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

What I will propose here by way of a first foray, as entrance into this
book of monstrous content, is a sketch of a new modus legendi: a method
of reading cultures from the monsters they engender. In doing so, I will
partially violate two of the sacred dicta of recent cultural studies: the
compulsion to historical specificity and the insistence that all knowledge
(and hence all cartographies of that knowledge) is local. Of the first I
will say only that in cultural studies today history (disguised perhaps
as “culture”) tends to be fetishized as a telos, as a final determinant of
meaning; post de Man, post Foucault, post Hayden White, one must
bear in mind that history is just another text in a procession of texts, and
not a guarantor of any singular signification. A movement away from the
longue duree and toward microeconomics (of capital or of gender) is as-
sociated most often with Foucauldian criticism; yet recent critics have
found that where Foucault went wrong was mainly in his details, in
his minute specifics. Nonetheless, his methodology—his archaeology of
ideas, his histories of unthought—remains with good reason the chosen
route of inquiry for most cultural critics today, whether they work in
postmodern cyberculture or in the Middle Ages.

And so I would like to make some grand gestures. We live in an age
that has rightly given up on Unified Theory, an age when we realize that
history (like “individuality,” “subjectivity,” “gender,” and “culture”) is
composed of a multitude of fragments, rather than of smooth episte-
mological wholes. Some fragments will be collected here and bound
temporarily together to form a loosely integrated net—or, better, an
unassimilated hybrid, a monstrous body. Rather than argue a “theory of

3
Monster Theory : Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
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4 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

teratology,” I offer by way of introduction to the essays that follow a set
of breakable postulates in search of specific cultural moments. I offer
seven theses toward understanding cultures through the monsters they
bear.

Thesis I: The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body

Vampires, burial, death: inter the corpse where the road forks, so that
when it springs from the grave, it will not know which path to follow.
Drive a stake through its heart: it will be stuck to the ground at the fork,
it will haunt that place that leads to many other places, that point of in-
decision. Behead the corpse, so that, acephalic, it will not know itself as
subject, only as pure body.

The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodi-
ment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place.1

The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and
fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny in-
dependence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a
projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymo-
logically “that which reveals,” “that which warns,” a glyph that seeks a
hierophant. Like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something
other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap be-
tween the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it
is received, to be born again. These epistemological spaces between the
monster’s bones are Derrida’s familiar chasm of differance: a genetic un-
certainty principle, the essence of the monster’s vitality, the reason it al-
ways rises from the dissection table as its secrets are about to be revealed
and vanishes into the night.

Thesis II: The Monster Always Escapes

We see the damage that the monster wreaks, the material remains (the
footprints of the yeti across Tibetan snow, the bones of the giant stranded
on a rocky cliff), but the monster itself turns immaterial and vanishes, to
reappear someplace else (for who is the yeti if not the medieval wild
man? Who is the wild man if not the biblical and classical giant?). No
matter how many times King Arthur killed the ogre of Mount Saint
Michael, the monster reappeared in another heroic chronicle, bequeath-
ing the Middle Ages an abundance of morte d’Arthurs. Regardless of how
many times Sigourney Weaver’s beleaguered Ripley utterly destroys the

Monster Theory : Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gwu/detail.action?docID=310376.
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 5

ambiguous Alien that stalks her, its monstrous progeny return, ready
to stalk again in another bigger-than-ever sequel. No monster tastes of
death but once. The anxiety that condenses like green vapor into the
form of the vampire can be dispersed temporarily, but the revenant by
definition returns. And so the monster’s body is both corporal and in-
corporeal; its threat is its propensity to shift.

Each time the grave opens and the unquiet slumberer strides forth
(“come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all”), the message pro-
claimed is transformed by the air that gives its speaker new life. Monsters
must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cul-
tural, and literary-historical) that generate them. In speaking of the new
kind of vampire invented by Bram Stoker, we might explore the foreign
count’s transgressive but compelling sexuality, as subtly alluring to
Jonathan Harker as Henry Irving, Stoker’s mentor, was to Stoker.2 Or we
might analyze Murnau’s self-loathing appropriation of the same demon
in Nosferatu, where in the face of nascent fascism the undercurrent of
desire surfaces in plague and bodily corruption. Anne Rice has given the
myth a modern rewriting in which homosexuality and vampirism have
been conjoined, apotheosized; that she has created a pop culture phe-
nomenon in the process is not insignificant, especially at a time when
gender as a construct has been scrutinized at almost every social register.
In Francis Coppola’s recent blockbuster, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the homo-
sexual subtext present at least since the appearance of Sheridan Le Fanu’s
lesbian lamia (Carmilla, 1872) has, like the red corpuscles that serve as
the film’s leitmotif, risen to the surface, primarily as an AIDS awareness
that transforms the disease of vampirism into a sadistic (and very me-
dieval) form of redemption through the torments of the body in pain.
No coincidence, then, that Coppola was putting together a documentary
on AIDS at the same time he was working on Dracula.

In each of these vampire stories, the undead returns in slightly differ-
ent clothing, each time to be read against contemporary social move-
ments or a specific, determining event: la decadence and its new possi-
bilities, homophobia and its hateful imperatives, the acceptance of new
subjectivities unfixed by binary gender, a fin de siecle social activism
paternalistic in its embrace. Discourse extracting a transcultural, trans-
temporal phenomenon labeled “the vampire” is of rather limited utility;
even if vampiric figures are found almost worldwide, from ancient Egypt
to modern Hollywood, each reappearance and its analysis is still bound

Monster Theory : Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
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TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

in a double act of construction and reconstitution.3 “Monster theory”
must therefore concern itself with strings of cultural moments, con-
nected by a logic that always threatens to shift; invigorated by change
and escape, by the impossibility of achieving what Susan Stewart calls
the desired “fall or death, the stopping” of its gigantic subject,4 mon-
strous interpretation is as much process as epiphany, a work that must
content itself with fragments (footprints, bones, talismans, teeth, shad-
ows, obscured glimpses—signifiers of monstrous passing that stand in
for the monstrous body itself).

Thesis III: The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis

The monster always escapes because it refuses easy categorization. Of the
nightmarish creature that Ridley Scott brought to life in Alien, Harvey
Greenberg writes:

It is a Linnean nightmare, defying every natural law of evolution; by turns
bivalve, crustacean, reptilian, and humanoid. It seems capable of lying
dormant within its egg indefinitely. It sheds its skin like a snake, its carapace
like an arthropod. It deposits its young into other species like a wasp It
responds according to Lamarckian and Darwinian principles.5

This refusal to participate in the classincatory ” of things” is true of
monsters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose externally inco-
herent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic struc-
turation. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between
forms that threatens to smash distinctions.

Because of its ontological liminality, the monster notoriously appears
at times of crisis as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of
extremes—as “that which questions binary thinking and introduces a
crisis.”6 This power to evade and to undermine has coursed through the
monster’s blood from classical times, when despite all the attempts of
Aristotle (and later Pliny, Augustine, and Isidore) to incorporate the
monstrous races7 into a coherent epistemological system, the monster
always escaped to return to its habitations at the margins of the world (a
purely conceptual locus rather than a geographic one).8 Classical “won-
der books” radically undermine the Aristotelian taxonomic system, for
by refusing an easy compartmentalization of their monstrous contents,
they demand a radical rethinking of boundary and normality. The too-
precise laws of nature as set forth by science are gleefully violated in

Monster Theory : Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gwu/detail.action?docID=310376.
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 7

the freakish compilation of the monster’s body. A mixed category, the
monster resists any classification built on hierarchy or a merely binary
opposition, demanding instead a “system” allowing polyphony, mixed
response (difference in sameness, repulsion in attraction), and resistance
to integration—allowing what Hogle has called with a wonderful pun “a
deeper play of differences, a nonbinary polymorphism at the ‘base’ of
human nature.”9

The horizon where the monsters dwell might well be imagined as the
visible edge of the hermeneutic circle itself: the monstrous offers an es-
cape from its hermetic path, an invitation to explore new spirals, new
and interconnected methods of perceiving the world.10 In the face of
the monster, scientific inquiry and its ed rationality crumble. The
monstrous is a genus too large to be encapsulated in any conceptual sys-
tem; the monster’s very existence is a rebuke to boundary and enclosure;
like the giants of Mandeville’s Travels, it threatens to devour “all raw &
quyk” any thinker who insists otherwise. The monster is in this way the
living embodiment of the phenomenon Derrida has famously labeled
the “supplement” (ce dangereux supplement):11 it breaks apart bifurcating,
“either/or” syllogistic logic with a kind of reasoning closer to “and/or,”
introducing what Barbara Johnson has called “a revolution in the very
logic of meaning.”12

Full of rebuke to traditional methods of organizing knowledge and
human experience, the geography of the monster is an imperiling ex-
panse, and therefore always a contested cultural space.

Thesis IV: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference
The monster is difference made flesh, come to dwell among us. In its
function as dialectical Other or third-term supplement, the monster is
an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond—of all those loci that are
rhetorically placed as distant and distinct but originate Within. Any kind
of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous
body, but for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural,
political, racial, economic, sexual.

The exaggeration of cultural difference into monstrous aberration is
familiar enough. The most famous distortion occurs in the Bible, where
the aboriginal inhabitants of Canaan are envisioned as menacing giants
to justify the Hebrew colonization of the Promised Land (Numbers 13).
Representing an anterior culture as monstrous justifies its displacement

Monster Theory : Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gwu/detail.action?docID=310376.
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8 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

or extermination by rendering the act heroic. In medieval France the
chansons de geste celebrated the crusades by transforming Muslims into
demonic caricatures whose menacing lack of humanity was readable
from their bestial attributes; by culturally glossing “Saracens” as “mon-
stra,” propagandists rendered rhetorically admissible the annexation of
the East by the West. This representational project was part of a whole
dictionary of strategic glosses in which “monstra” slipped into significa-
tions of the feminine and the hypermasculine.

A recent newspaper article on Yugoslavia reminds us how persistent
these divisive mythologies can be, and how they can endure divorced
from any grounding in historical reality:

A Bosnian Serb militiaman, hitchhiking to Sarajevo, tells a reporter in all
earnestness that the Muslims are feeding Serbian children to the animals
in the zoo. The story is nonsense. There aren’t any animals left alive in the
Sarajevo zoo. But the militiaman is convinced and can recall all the wrongs
that Muslims may or may not have perpetrated during their 500 years of
rule.13

In the United States, Native Americans were presented as unredeemable
savages so that the powerful political machine of Manifest Destiny could
push westward with disregard. Scattered throughout Europe by the
Diaspora and steadfastly refusing assimilation into Christian society,
Jews have been perennial favorites for xenophobic misrepresentation, for
here was an alien culture living, working, and even at times prospering
within vast communities dedicated to becoming homogeneous and
monolithic. The Middle Ages accused the Jews of crimes ranging from
the bringing of the plague to bleeding Christian children to make their
Passover meal. Nazi Germany simply brought these ancient traditions of
hate to their conclusion, inventing a Final Solution that differed from
earlier persecutions only in its technological efficiency.

Political or ideological difference is as much a catalyst to monstrous
representation on a micro level as cultural alterity in the macrocosm. A
political figure suddenly out of favor is transformed like an unwilling
participant in a science experiment by the appointed historians of the
replacement regime: “monstrous history” is rife with sudden, Ovidian
metamorphoses, from Vlad Tepes to Ronald Reagan. The most illus-
trious of these propaganda-bred demons is the English king Richard III,
whom Thomas More famously described as “little of stature, ill fetured

Monster Theory : Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 9

of limmes, croke backed, his left shoulder much higher then his right,
hard fauoured of visage. . . . hee came into the worlde with feete for-
ward, . . . also not vntothed.”14 From birth, More declares, Richard
was a monster, “his deformed body a readable text”15 on which was in-
scribed his deviant morality (indistinguishable from an incorrect politi-
cal orientation).

The almost obsessive descanting on Richard from Polydor Vergil in
the Renaissance to the Friends of Richard III Incorporated in our own
era demonstrates the process of “monster theory” at its most active: cul-
ture gives birth to a monster before our eyes, painting over the normally
proportioned Richard who once lived, raising his shoulder to deform
simultaneously person, cultural response, and the possibility of objectiv-
ity.16 History itself becomes a monster: defeaturing, self-deconstructive,
always in danger of exposing the sutures that bind its disparate elements
into a single, unnatural body. At the same time Richard moves between
Monster and Man, the disturbing suggestion arises that this incoherent
body, denaturalized and always in peril of disaggregation, may well be
our own.

The difficult project of constructing and maintaining gender identi-
ties elicits an array of anxious responses throughout culture, producing
another impetus to teratogenesis. The woman who oversteps the bound-
aries of her gender role risks becoming a Scylla, Weird Sister, Lilith (“die
erste Eva,” “la mere obscure”),17 Bertha Mason, or Gorgon.18 “Deviant”
sexual identity is similarly susceptible to monsterization. The great me-
dieval encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais describes the visit of a her-
maphroditic cynocephalus to the French court in his Speculum naturale
(31.126).19 Its male reproductive organ is said to be disproportionately
large, but the monster could use either sex at its own discretion. Bruno
Roy writes of this fantastic hybrid: “What warning did he come to deliver
to the king? He came to bear witness to sexual norms…. He embodied
the punishment earned by those who violate sexual taboos.”20 This strange
creature, a composite of the supposedly discrete categories “male” and
“female,” arrives before King Louis to validate heterosexuality over homo-
sexuality, with its supposed inversions and transformations (“Equa fit
equus,” one Latin writer declared; “The horse becomes a mare”).21 The
strange dog-headed monster is a living excoriation of gender ambiguity
and sexual abnormality, as Vincent’s cultural moment defines them:
heteronormalization incarnate.

Monster Theory : Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gwu/detail.action?docID=310376.
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10 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

From the classical period into the twentieth century, race has been
almost as powerful a catalyst to the creation of monsters as culture, gen-
der, and sexuality. Africa early became the West’s significant other, the
sign of its ontological difference simply being skin color. According to
the Greek myth of Phaeton, the denizens of mysterious and uncertain
Ethiopia were black because they had been scorched by the too-close
passing of the sun. The Roman naturalist Pliny assumed nonwhite skin
to be symptomatic of a complete difference in temperament and attrib-
uted Africa’s darkness to climate; the intense heat, he said, had burned
the Africans’ skin and malformed their bodies (Natural History, 2.80).
These differences were quickly moralized through a pervasive rhetoric
of deviance. Paulinus of Nola, a wealthy landowner turned early church
homilist, explained that the Ethiopians had been scorched by sin and vice
rather than by the sun, and the anonymous commentator to Theodulus’s
influential Ecloga (tenth century) succinctly glossed the meaning of the
word Ethyopium: “Ethiopians, that is, sinners. Indeed, sinners can rightly
be compared to Ethiopians, who are black men presenting a terrifying
appearance to those beholding them.”22 Dark skin was associated with
the fires of hell, and so signified in Christian mythology demonic prove-
nance. The perverse and exaggerated sexual appetite of monsters gener-
ally was quickly affixed to the Ethiopian; this linking was only strength-
ened by a xenophobic backlash as dark-skinned people were forcibly
imported into Europe early in the Renaissance. Narratives of miscegena-
tion arose and circulated to sanction official policies of exclusion; Queen
Elizabeth is famous for her anxiety over “blackamoores” and their sup-
posed threat to the “increase of people of our own nation.”23

Through all of these monsters the boundaries between personal and
national bodies blur. To complicate this category confusion further, one
kind of alterity is often written as another, so that national difference (for
example) is transformed into sexual difference. Giraldus Cambrensis
demonstrates just this slippage of the foreign in his Topography of Ireland;
when he writes of the Irish (ostensibly simply to provide information
about them to a curious English court, but actually as a first step toward
invading and colonizing the island), he observes:

It is indeed a most filthy race, a race sunk in vice, a race more ignorant
than all other nations of the first principles of faith…. These people who
have customs so different from others, and so opposite to them, on mak-
ing signs either with the hands or the head, beckon when they mean that

Monster Theory : Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gwu/detail.action?docID=310376.
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 11

you should go away, and nod backwards as often as they wish to be rid of
you. Likewise, in this nation, the men pass their water sitting, the women
like an arthropod. It deposits its young into other species like a wasp It
legs stuck out on each side of the horse.24

One kind of inversion becomes another as Giraldus deciphers the alpha-
bet of Irish culture—and reads it backwards, against the norm of English
masculinity. Giraldus creates a vision of monstrous gender (aberrant,
demonstrative): the violation of the cultural codes that valence gendered
behaviors creates a rupture that must be cemented with (in this case) the
binding, corrective mortar of English normalcy. A bloody war of sub-
jugation followed immediately after the promulgation of this text, re-
mained potent throughout the High Middle Ages, and in a way contin-
ues to this day.

Through a similar discursive process the East becomes feminized
(Said) and the soul of Africa grows dark (Gates).25 One kind of differ-
ence becomes another as the normative categories of gender, sexuality,
national identity, and ethnicity slide together like the imbricated circles
of a Venn diagram, abjecting from the center that which becomes
the monster. This violent foreclosure erects a self-validating, Hegelian
master/slave dialectic that naturalizes the subjugation of one cultural
body by another by writing the body excluded from personhood and
agency as in every way different, monstrous. A polysemy is granted so
that a greater threat can be encoded; multiplicity of meanings, paradoxi-
cally, iterates the same restricting, agitprop representations that nar-
rowed signification performs. Yet a danger resides in this multiplication:
as difference, like a Hydra, sprouts two heads where one has been lopped
away, the possibilities of escape, resistance, disruption arise with more
force.

Rene Girard has written at great length about the real violence these
debasing representations enact, connecting monsterizing depiction with
the phenomenon of the scapegoat. Monsters are never created ex nihilo,
but through a process of fragmentation and recombination in which
elements are extracted “from various forms” (including—indeed, espe-
cially—marginalized social groups) and then assembled as the monster,
“which can then claim an independent identity.”26 The political-cultural
monster, the embodiment of radical difference, paradoxically threatens
to erase difference in the world of its creators, to demonstrate

Monster Theory : Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
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12 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

the potential for the system to differ from its own difference, in other
words not to be different at all, to cease to exist as a system— Difference
that exists outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of
the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its mortality…. Despite what is
said around us persecutors are never obsessed with difference but rather
by its unutterable contrary, the lack of difference.27

By revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating,
mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just
individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through
which individuality is constituted and allowed. Because it is a body
across which difference has been repeatedly written, the monster (like
Frankenstein’s creature, that combination of odd somatic pieces stitched
together from a community of cadavers) seeks out its author to demand
its raison d’etre—and to bear witness to the fact that it could have been
constructed Otherwise. Godzilla trampled Tokyo; Girard frees him here
to fragment the delicate matrix of relational systems that unite every
private body to the public world.

Thesis V: The Monster Polices the B s of the Possible

The monster resists capture in the epistemological nets of the erudite,
but it is something more than a Bakhtinian ally of the popular. From its
position at the limits of knowing, the monster stands as a warning
against exploration of its uncertain demesnes. The giants of Patagonia,
the dragons of the Orient, and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park together
declare that curiosity is more often punished than rewarded, that one
is better off safely contained within one’s own domestic sphere than
abroad, away from the watchful eyes of the state. The monster prevents
mobility (intellectual, geographic, or sexual), delimiting the social spaces
through which private bodies may move. To step outside this official
geography is to risk attack by some monstrous b patrol or (worse)
to become monstrous oneself.

Lycaon, the first werewolf in Western literature, undergoes his lupine
metamorphosis as the culmination of a fable of hospitality.28 Ovid re-
lates how the primeval giants attempted to plunge the world into anar-
chy by wrenching Olympus from the gods, only to be shattered by divine
thunderbolts. From their scattered blood arose a race of men who con-
tinued their fathers’ malignant ways.29 Among this wicked progeny was
Lycaon, king of Arcadia. When Jupiter arrived as a guest at his house,

Monster Theory : Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gwu/detail.action?docID=310376.
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Monster Culture (Seven Theses) 13

Lycaon tried to kill the ruler of the gods as he slept, and the next day
served him pieces of a servant’s body as a meal. The enraged Jupiter
punished this violation of the host-guest relationship by transforming
Lycaon into a monstrous semblance of that lawless, godless state to
which his actions would drag humanity back:

The king himself flies in terror and, gaining the fields, howls aloud, at-
tempting in vain to speak. His mouth of itself gathers foam, and with his
accustomed greed for blood he turns against the sheep, delighting still in
slaughter. His garments …