Ten Theses on Monsters and Monstrosity

Allen S. Weiss

Dedicated to the Memory of Carmelo Bene I The Demiurge was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material. Bruno Schultz (1977:61 62) [This epigraph serves as my rst thesis.] II In the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant shows how the aesthetic domain exists without any regulatory a priori whatsoever. This principle could be summed up and radicalized in one word: monsters. What the unformed is to the sublime, the deformed is to monsters. III In the Thesaurus Articiosae Memoriae (1579), Cosmas Rossellius describes a memory theatre that contains an all-inclusive category, suggesting that any monster of any sort may be used to signify any thing whatsoever, through totally idiosyncratic associations. We might supplement this axiom with its converse: a true monster will be remembered for the shock it produces, breaking all chains of association. IV The logic of monsters is one of particulars, not essences. Each monster exists in a class by itself. Monsters may, however, generate entire classes of beings. V Monsters are variously characterized by accident, indetermination, formlessness; by material incompleteness, categorical ambiguity, ontological instability. One may create monsters through hybridization, hypertrophy, or hypotrophy;
The Drama Review 48, 1 (T181), Spring 2004. Allen S. Weiss 2004

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Monsters and Monstrosity through lack, excess, or multiplication; through the substitution of elements, the confusion of species, or the conation of genders and genres. VI Monsters symbolize alterity and difference in extremis. They manifest the plasticity of the imagination and the catastrophes of the esh. VII Monsters exist in margins. They are thus avatars of chance, impurity, heterodoxy; abomination, mutation, metamorphosis; prodigy, mystery, marvel. Monsters are indicators of epistemic shifts. VIII The total catalogue of rhetorical tropes and gures doubles as a catalogue of monstrous types. This structural feature serves as the articulation of visual and sonic monsters. IX The invention of sound recording technologies inaugurated the possibilities of both hearing the voices of the dead and manipulating the voices of the living beyond their physical limits. Whence the origins of modern sonic monsters, and the exponential increase in the for ms of monstrosity. The point-of-view of the dead establishes a countertaxonomy, where perpetual putrefaction and amorphousness reign, while the cutting knife of montage creates unspeakable and impossible anatomies. X Imagine a disembodied blood-curdling scream. This is my nal thesis.

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Reference
Schultz, Bruno 1977 Treatise on Tailors Dummies, or The Second Book of Genesis. In The Street of Crocodiles, translated by Celina Wieniewska:51 71. New York: Penguin.

Allen S. Weiss has written and edited over 30 volumes, most recently Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime (State University of New York Press, 2002).