#seven theses

[dustydilf]

"Thesis VII: The Monster Stands at the Threshold . . . of Becoming"

"Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind,"

"...but they always return"

[motherfuckinglanguages]

The monster signifies something other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap between 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 uncertainty principle, the essence of the monster's vitality, the reason it always rises from the dissection table as its secrets are about to be revealed and vanishes into the night.

Seven Theses (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen)

[seven-theses]

Fred Moten, Stefano Harney

Social Text, 79 (Volume 22, Number 2), Summer 2004, pp. 101-115 (Article)

[surroundedbyselcouth]

...the future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by species of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would already be a predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant, to welcome it, that is, to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange, but also, one must add, to try to domesticate it, that is, to make it part of the household and have it assume the habits, to make us assume new habits. This is the movement of culture.

http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/monster.html

[surroundedbyselcouth]

A monster is a species for which we do not yet have a name, which does not mean that the species is abnormal, namely, the composition or hybridisation of already known species. Simply, it shows itself [elle se montre] - that is what the word monster means - it shows itself in something that is not yet shown and that therefore looks like a hallucination, it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure.

“prepare yourself to experience the future and welcome the monster”

[ivorytowerofpisa]

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture 3-25. Definitive work on monster theory and the “monster” as a cultural body.

[surroundedbyselcouth]

[Monsters] manifest the plasticity of the imagination and the catastrophes of the flesh.

Allan Weiss, “Ten Theses on Monsters and Monstrosity”

Very cool stuff. Especially thesis X.

[surroundedbyselcouth]

The saw that We Have Seen the Real Monsters and They Are Us is neither revelation, nor clever, nor interesting, nor true. It is a betrayal of the monstrous, and of humanity.

China Mieville

*has mixed feelings about monster theses*

*wonders of mixed feelings are making monsters of themselves*

*gives up*