Book of Malcontent

These are some new prints I've been making that might be part of a book called "Journal of Malcontent"

The idea is to cast a spell through the act of print-making itself.  Each print is an incantation, initiated through the process of laying out the words, carving the rubber block, stamping the paper, and pressing (smashing) the block down into the paper as hard as possible.  It's an activity meant to exorcise frustration, relieve tension, and to re-balance the psyche.  It's a satisfying form of self-therapy and nice to look at when they're finished.   

Drawings 2012

New Pics

new work

Senior Thesis

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GENEALOGY OF MONSTER

BENJAMIN MONROE STARR OGINZ

I. Table of Contents

Acknowledgements, Preface, Introduction………………………………………..3-10

Ch. 1: Creating……………………………………………………………………..11-48

Ch. 2: Imagining…………………………………………………………………...49-73

Ch. 3: Remembering……………………………………………………………….74-106

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………107-108

II. Acknowledgements

This project sprung forth from a lush variety of sources: the textual spectrums—early Russian and Post-Soviet literature, contemporary European novels; to obscure tomes of the 16^th to 18^th centuries, describing mythical monsters; and hermeneutics of forgotten alchemies. These old books haunt the shelves of the Hampshire College Library Center seemingly untouched for years, and my natural inclination to the arcane beckoned me to unearth them. Hand in hand with these readings are the guiding philosophical conceptual modes of thinking and theories that I utilize as an analytical framework to examine literary bodies. Many of the texts assigned for readings in courses throughout my studies sparked my interest and acted to galvanize the ideas of this project, eventually leading me back to those weird books in the library, helping me find some fantastic primary sources.

Rare and prodigious discoveries, read in relation to my points of interest in my coursework, created inertia for a cross-textual (across many texts) modality in reading and thinking, moving across a difficult and expansive terrain. The completion of this treacherous expedition would not have been possible if not for the oversight and support of my academic advisory committee—Professors John Drabinski and Alicia E. Ellis. I also extend my gratitude to the teachers throughout my time at Hampshire and their indispensable guidance—Professors Polina Barskova, Jeffery Wallen, Cristoph Cox, Brown Kennedy, and Kara Lynch. Finally, I thank my family and friends for their support, invaluable conversations, criticisms, and advice.

III. Preface

Before we begin, let us be very clear about its parameters—what this project is and what it is not. It is not an exploration in teratology—a study and systematization of imaginary beasts and mythical monsters. In fact, before we go any further, let us clarify a definitive description of what we mean by “monster.” The quotidian usage of the word “monster” and its variants are thrown around incessantly, even carelessly—“My ex-girlfriend, ugh, what a monster,” “This movie was so violent, not to mention long; what a monster,” or, “Frank Gehry’s new building is absolutely monstrous.” At a basic level, we use the word to describe anything big, bad, ugly, violent, mean, or scary. On this level, “monster,” is merely a part of the normative vocabulary—a cliché that always seems to surface in various forms. It is blatantly obvious our usage of the word “monster,” in all its forms—“monstrous,” “monstrosity,” along with all its synonyms and relatives—occurs everyday both in verbal conversation and in writing.

Keep in mind these descriptions are usually centered on the nature of a body, an object animate or not; psychic or physical—something perceived—it could even be a feeling, an emotion (“I’m in such a bad mood, I feel like a monster today”)—and the state of its existence in the extreme sense that it persists in being presenced—a building, book, film, person, etc.—all persist in being present, even in death or disrepair. To take it to a more literal level, the word “monster” even looks big and menacing—MONSTER—the physical characteristics of the word, its body and the letters that make up its anatomy; who could deny the power of this word (“You’re a MONSTER!”), even in how it looks and sounds? Later discussions on the etymology of the word “monster” are forthcoming in the following essay, but for now, we must continue in a process of clarification for addressing the terms of this project.

What hides behind these expressions of description—spoken, written, depicted? Why is a monster so monstrous? I’ll attempt to answer this, but in order to do to so, my mode of analysis for this project must be selective, illuminating only a few reflective dimensions that are foundational for an understanding of the idea of the monster that exists within a rough landscape of textual and imagistic bodies.

This project is an excursion over a vast and treacherous terrain—where monsters lurk everywhere—in any situation, in any area. Thus, let us think of these selective dimensional illuminations as a sort of trail that prevents generalization, which would only disrupt our focus. So, again, to be clear, this project is not an attempt to enumerate the staggering varieties of monsters throughout mythology as well as in popular culture. If you want to read about all the different types of monsters and stories that go along with them, I highly recommend Borges’ Book Of Imaginary Beings, H.R. Giger’s illustration books (artist/designer who created the monsters in the James Cameron Alien films), any collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories, and any pulpy science-fiction novel you find being sold for under three dollars (Raven Books, Northampton—they have a dollar rack of pulp science-fiction, horror, mystery, and fantasy).

Conversely, this project is an attempt to illuminate the conceptual nature of the monster framed within a multifaceted, fragmented landscape, and, in that sense, it is truly a study on the monstrous itself, through a focused lens; which utilizes a modality of cross-textual reading and analysis to interrogate the idea of monster.

IV. Introduction

To get at the essential ideas behind monster, or the monstrous, a descriptive terminology that attempts to illuminate different frames of analysis must be crafted. I have titled this project Genealogy of Monster as an ironic homage to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, first published in 1887. An homage to Nietzsche because, unfortunately, this work will not figure into this project, save for the word in the title “genealogy,” as the difficult terrain demands a focused approach to a limited amount of texts at hand. The title Genealogy of Monster contains two ironies that overlap and reflect each other. The dictionary on my computer defines the word “genealogy” as such: “a line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor.” The word’s origins are traced back to the Greek word genealogia via genea—meaning race, or generation. The irony, that we will eventually come to see throughout this project, is that monster—as we have defined it—through an interdisciplinary analytical rendering, lacks an authentic genealogy. A genealogy implies a hierarchical system, “a line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor,” a family tree.[1]

Is there a traceable line of ancestral descent that explains continuously the origins of a dragon—a common mythical monster? Some may say yes to this question, spewing forth some nerdy theory of genesis in how the dragon became a universal cultural symbol as representative for an ancient, universal, mythical beings.

Excuse this digression, but for the sake of example, I have heard one outlandish theory that a twelfth planet (Planet 12 conspiracy) in our solar system exists, inhabited by reptilians who once landed on earth for lack of resources on their own planet and created a new race—humans—as slaves to help them mine for gold. Proponents of the Planet 12 conspiracy insist that the reptilians, essentially our gods, will return to earth in 2012.

Their evidence and genealogical trace is the ubiquitous figure of the dragon, along with other reptilian deities, and artifacts, depicted in art throughout the history of world cultures. They also more obliquely draw connections from the Planet 12 theory to the Illuminati conspiracy—the all-seeing-eye at the top of the pyramid—the omnipotent knowledge that comes from above—the aliens, the monsters. Is this the New World Order? Is George W. Bush really a reptile from Planet 12, whose mission it was to bankrupt the world’s greatest super-power, making resistance futile when the rest of his kind come down to do whatever menacing thing they have in store for us humans?

Compelling? Sure, why not, given that we have but two more years before our creators come down for judgment day—not to mention, the Mayan calendar ends in 2012—also, most everyone agrees that George W. Bush is a monster. Enough of this, let us return to the point at hand. Although they point to these common cultural artifacts as traces of an ancient, immemorial ancestral history, this genealogy is clearly incomplete, and thus unconvincing—left with gaps that inspire the naturally narrative imagination that seem to supplement a forgotten or erased collective memory.

Try to picture, if you will, a genealogy of the dragon, a family tree. This family tree is broken into pieces on the ground, missing crucial branches and parts of its trunk, barely alive as it lacks the leaves that help it grow (e.g. “Where did the reptilians land?” Did they build the pyramids?” “Is that why we have a double-helix for DNA, because we’re part lizard?” These questions go on endlessly unanswered, yet constantly theorized.) The irony is that the dragon has no family tree—the hierarchical tree-system of ancestry is not continuous, it is ruptured, broken, fragmented, and therefore incompatible for our purposes. This does not mean, however, that its incompatibility is completely useless to us—it gives us an important basis to uncover the nature of the monstrous and its infinite reflections—a sort of trailhead at the beginning of our expedition, so to speak.

In the sense that a genealogy of the monster, a line of ancestry, is untraceable because of its lack in continuity, a new method that breaks from normative, hierarchical, family-tree paradigms must be utilized and adapted for this project to uncover what is left un-represented in our normal idea of the monster—what lies hidden in those gaps, and how they inform our idea of the monster. Using these very ruptures, as they are the spaces that mark erasures and gaps, will create a divergent analytical energy that transgresses the normative hierarchy of genealogy and into a new ontology altogether—a new concept of being that accounts for the monstrous, in multiple dimensions.

The first dimension, or Chapter I, if you will, involves an encounter with phenomenology; the philosophy of lived experience, and the question that technology poses towards the possibility of being. Through this encounter with phenomenology and its interrogation of the implications of technology for existence, an analytical reflexivity propels our analysis towards a reading of Frankenstein—a reading that focuses on the phenomenologically informed, inter-subjective relationship between the creator and creation. Our analytical reading of Frankenstein, in turn, forms a nice breaking point—a space where the idea of the posthuman, in its representations through two contemporary performance artists, becomes a resonant reflection—illuminating both Frankenstein and our phenomenological analysis of it as a text.

The next dimension, Chapter 2, examines the foundations for normative systems of rationality that originate in the writings of Medieval Christian theology—specifically exemplified in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica (1265-1274). Aquinas’ Summa is of great importance to us because it gives explanation to the causality of monstrosity through a rational language ordained by theological philosophies. In an effort to uncover this inconsistent genealogy of the monstrous, we appropriately focus in on Aquinas’ discussion of copulation; on generation—on whether it is sinful or not. This entails addressing the features of a moral code inscribed on the body of the observed—the diseased, malformed, infectious body—to explain, for example, why a baby was born with two heads, the reason one body has a penis and vagina, or if one body connected to another at birth should be considered one person or two. From here, we arrive at a new threshold—for normative, theologically based systems of rationality illustrate the limit posed by reason. Unreason, the opposite of reason—its ultimate monster—is a parallel line of analysis. In tracing a history of insanity, describing its systems of containment and treatment—the monster of reason—Michel Foucault’s History of Madness also employs the parallel line, as a selective narratological history that must be incorporated into our analysis due to its levels of reflexivity, illuminating a crucial feature of the monstrous—the imagination.

Finally, the third dimension, or Chapter 3, envisions a new analytical conception of body—as a compilation of different anatomies and features, limbs, limps, and prostheses—a body of bodies—a body of anatomies—an anatomy of bodies. From the Soviet Blokade Diary of Lydia Ginzburg, to Claude Lanzmann’s documentary, Shoah, a new ontology, found in memory, narratives, textual, and visual representations, accounts for the multifarious and tautological reflections of bodies and anatomies inherent in the monstrous. Accompanied by a hermeneutics, a way of cross-textual reading and analytical writing, this new conception of body will illuminate the idea of the monster as an essential element of the human mind. Straddling the limits of rationality, persistent in representing what cannot be represented in memory, history, literature, and art, the monstrous never ceases to completely disappear.

This project is an attempt to trace and illuminate the reflections that occur across several representations of the monstrous and the ideas hidden within. It should be thought of as an analytical anatomy—a body made up of manifold bodies—texts that interweave with film and art through a constant and reflexive dynamism.

Chapter I,

Creating the Monster

Phenomenology, the “Question of Technology,” and the limits for ontology of the monster: Frankenstein and the posthuman

I. Introduction—how to represent and interpret the monstrous. Greek myth: Medusa and the etymology of “monster”—reflexivity towards a phenomenological philosophy of experience—towards a new ontology.

This chapter devotes itself to the task of how the unrepresented must necessarily be represented. The concept of monstrosity is a phenomenon—hiding almost invisibly in the fragments that lie between human and animal, between the subjective and objective, conscious and unconscious states of being, the healthy body and the diseased body. Monsters, according to common sense, are imaginary beings, outside the realm of real lived perceptions—they exist as they are represented in artistic depictions, texts, but mostly, they are beings that live inside our head, as fragmented representations and apparitions, as images and associations that require special processes to be understood and revealed. The monstrous always takes form in ways that reflect back onto its viewer, but its bodies and shapes are so various within human imagination and etymology that it becomes impossible to distinguish and represent it as a whole. How then, is the monstrous to be represented and interpreted if its location and imaginings are so entrenched within cognition, as phenomena within the fissures of reality that are not easily seen objectively? Navigating through several texts and analyzing the route of this journey will answer the questions here—those which concern this essay.

The phenomenological philosophy, based on lived experience, conceived by Husserl and taken beyond by Heidegger, are textual imperatives in this analysis which attempt to describe and comprehend fragmentary layers of cognition, and the pressurized implications placed upon “being” by technology. Through an inter-textual examination and interrogation—bringing us from Greek myth to an analysis of the question of lived experience posed by phenomenology and its fundamental problematization of technology, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein points towards a new conception of ontology.

Frankenstein contains the most commonly mentioned monster of modernity—universally recognizable, incessantly repeated, and modified—the hybrid creation of an eccentric mind. However, it cannot be denied that the inherent characteristics of the monstrous, most explicitly exemplified through the literary lens of Frankenstein, transgress beyond the limits of modernity—pushing towards the possibility of new conceptions of being in itself—new frameworks that combine the subjective and objective perceptive spheres. This new ontology necessitates creation, borne from an insatiable urge of curiosity. It, the act of creation, must be analyzed along with what has been created, in order to illuminate the elusive nature, body, consciousness, and reflections of the monstrous that still continue to live within fissures of human cognition.

Let us recall the myth of the Medusa, for it may help point us in the right direction if we are to begin an interrogation with the monstrous, in how it comes to be created, represented, and interpreted simultaneously as a symbol, figure, and tool.

Medusa was a gorgon, a common figure in Greek mythology, deriving from the word gorgos, meaning dreadful. Although once a beautiful woman with golden ringlets of hair, the jealous goddess Minerva turned her into a monster, transforming those golden ringlets into venomous snakes. The nature of this monster being so hideous and ugly, anyone who so happened glanced at her turned to stone—petrified from the visual witness of pure horror.

Perseus, the hero who overcomes Medusa, is sent away to kill her by king Polydectes who seeks retribution from Medusa after she destroyed his country. Aided by Minerva and Mercury in an effort to defeat Medusa, Perseus is given a mirrored shield, in order to keep him from seeing Medusa. This allows him to cut off her head without being turned to stone. When he presents Medusa’s severed head to Minerva, she makes it a weapon in itself, by attaching it to the breastplate of her suit of armor.[2]

The mirrored shield of Perseus and his use of the head of Medusa as a weapon, provides for a rhetorical and literal description of the monstrous in its ekphrasis—a device that employs art and the image to allude to narratives of lived experience that transcend the limitations of the work of art as an object in itself. Spectatorship, the gaze, is utilized by Medusa, later by Perseus, and finally, by Minerva in incorporating it into the newly salvaged weaponry attached to her body. In this way, the monster becomes utilized as a technological weapon—the head of Medusa becomes an instrument of aggression against its holder’s enemies.

A fleeting glance at the Medusa myth points us directly toward the essence of the word “monster.” Tracing this etymology backwards, the word “monster” comes from Old French, monstre; which in turn, has its origin in the Latin monstrum, meaning “portent or monster,” and its derivative monere, or warning.[3] Thinking analytically, in terms of the relationship between art and utility, a warning is when something of a horrific nature is perceived—seen, heard, felt, smelled. A warning is a sign, or signal; rendered as a symbol, given life through text and image, it becomes the monster.

Reflexivity of this symbol, the monstrous, occurs on every level of consciousness—an infinite multiplicity of reflections that are tied inextricably to lived experience. An analogy to this reflexivity would be Perseus using his mirrored shield to kill Medusa—Minerva using Medusa’s head as a weapon in turn, fastened to her breastplate. A mundane analogy would be the act of looking at yourself simultaneously in two mirrors, one in front and one behind—your reflection is reflected back and forth between both mirrors infinitely, to the point that counting the reflections of yourself is completely impossible.

In many ways, phenomenology, as a philosophy that locates the primacy of being at the foundations of lived experience in itself—in its perceptions, judgements, emotions—resonates reflexively with the myth of Medusa, pointedly the mirror, in that it moves ontology towards an inter-subjective relationship. This complex web of reflections in the world between the subject and object becomes increasingly fragmented as it collides with the possibilities for being in the world—of how it functions as a being, and how its being is received by the world that surrounds it.

II. The Beginnings of Phenomenology as a Scientifically Rigorous Philosophy and as a New Understanding of Cognition—between Husserl and Heidegger—relating to the question of how to interpret, represent, illuminate, and reveal the monstrous as phenomena of consciousness.

Phenomenology, a natural progenitor of the existentialist movement, was initially developed by Edmund Husserl in early 20^th century Germany, after he was influenced by psychologist Franz Brentano and other philosophers alike to create a philosophical method that stood on its own, mirroring the rigors of scientific investigation without having to answer or pertain to psychology or any of the other sciences. Husserl explicitly defines that his philosophy of phenomena ironically makes a point of putting scientific facts, common sense, and dogmas, off to the side, or “bracketing” them in the same way as a parenthetical would in a sentence or equation. It is ironic that Husserl designates “phenomena” so specifically and exclusively, in the sense that his philosophy of phenomenology attempts to be completely inclusive in describing every multifaceted layer of conscious lived experience.

…[W]e hear that psychology is designated as a science of psychichal “appearances” or phenomena; likewise on occasion historical phenomena are spoken of in the science of history, cultural phenomena in the science of culture… No matter how varied may be the sense of the word “phenomena” in such locutions, and no matter what further significations it may have, it is certain that phenomenology also relates to all these “phenomena” and does so with respect to all significications of the word “phenomenon.”

In his own words, Husserl introduces this idea of “phenomena,” psychologically located, as needing to be freed from the constrictions of scientism, historicism, and all other limitative categorizations—modulated and adapted to philosophical thinking in order to function in a phenomenology of lived experience—a philosophy of everyday perception—continuing in his introduction, saying that,

…phenomenology relates to them in a wholly different attitude whereby any sense of the word “phenomenon” which we find in the long-known science becomes modified in a definite way. To understand these modifications or, […] to bring about the phenomenological attitude and, by reflecting, to elevate its specific peculiarity and that of the natural attitudes into the scientific consciousness […] is the first and by no means easy task whose demands we must perfectly satisfy if we are to achieve the realm of phenomenology and scientifically assure ourselves of the essence proper to phenomenology.[4]

It becomes apparent here that Husserl was concerned with the creation of a new philosophical endeavor through a scientifically rigorous and reflective system of analysis that sought to reveal structures of consciousness as they appeared not only to the viewer but also the to the viewed—bridging a gap between subjective and objective consciousness. In his conception of phenomenology, Husserl locates his philosophy at the foundation of experience and perception, where, through a scientific method which interrogates the essential, multiple levels of phenomena within lived experience; the subjective qualities of existence become objective realities within a new phenomenological system of awareness. These objects of subjectivity, the perceptions of lived experience, made intentional objects of consciousness through a phenomenological method, point beyond the single mind of the philosopher and extend into a consciousness of something that simultaneously represents the familiar while revealing something other than itself.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), one of Husserl’s most competitive students who eventually superceded his teacher in popularity and is known for his controversial ties with the Third Reich, moved outside the phenomenological system that Husserl developed by locating the primacy of one’s existence over consciousness itself; one’s state of mind as only an “effect” rather than a determinant of existence. In this way, Heidegger propels the phenomenological practice even further away from an internally focused psychology, with which Husserl was so concerned with differentiating his phenomenology from, towards an ontology—a question of being (Dasein), of being-in-the world; as the constituent of lived experience.

Intentionality, as a guiding force that exists within the framework lived experience, stretches out towards the object of what is perceived—desperately grasping at its “aboutness.” The phenomenological concepts of Noesis and Noema are central to understanding “intentionality” (the act of stretching-out, as defined by Heidegger), as they explain areas in which the dynamics of cognition—of judgment, emotions, etc.—are in a constant state of flux. Noesis refers to the part of the act that gives it a particular sense or character; it implies a certain amount of judgment. Noema is the ideal meaning of that act.

The monstrous hides within the fissures of cognition, in between the spaces of Noema and Noesis, however; it comes to be represented through an act of creation—a technical and artistic act of mastery which crafts the shape of the monstrous. In this way, we have come to see the figure of the monster in an intertwined relationship with technology, in how its creator used technological methods for its production. Because the interrogation focuses on how the monstrous comes to be represented and interpreted, our analysis must answer to the question of its creation and the technical method by which it is produced, its ideal meanings and the characters, bodies, forms, etc. that spring forth from technical processes of creation. Husserl’s phenomenology must be enhanced and expanded by Heidegger to deal with the modern problem of technology and how its essence relate to the fate of the human being and the world.

III. Phenomenology and Heidegger’s Problematization of Technology—the dangers of total “enframing” and the “standing-reserve,” instrumentality—salvation through Art and creation.

Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology” seeks to illuminate the essence of technology as a movement of revealing—evoked by the Greek word aletheia—truth, the totality of beings. A framework, a structural apparatus controlled by the culture of industry, mediates this movement of revealing—it is a framing that supports the occasioning of how technologies should be utilized, what they should produce, and how they should benefit the human being. Within this movement, Heidegger points to a danger inherent in the common, instrumental conception of technology, or, what he calls, an “enframing” (Gestell) that threatens a revealing that could potentially eclipse or overwhelm being (Dasein) and all other forms of revealing.

There is a certain hidden monstrousness in Heidegger’s words, especially in the fact that the word “enframing” alludes to a sort of monstrous bodily system—a skeletal system that could potentially overpower and imprison being itself—the ultimate fear; that technology will take over—that it will “enframe” us as humans, confiscating our control over our creations.

Enframing means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve…[it] means the way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that is itself nothing technological…all those things that are so familiar to us and are standard parts of assembly, such as rods, pistons, and chassis, belong to the technological. The assembly itself, however, together with the aforementioned stockparts, fall within the sphere of technological activity…[it] merely responds to the challenge of enframing…it never comprises enframing itself or brings it about.

The word stellen [to set] in the name Ge-stell [enframing] does not only mean challenging. At the same time it should preserve the suggestion of another Stellen from which it stems, namely that producing and presenting, which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into unconcealment. This producing that brings forth […] and the ordering that challenges now under consideration are indeed fundamentally different, and yet they remain related in their essence. Both are ways of revealing, of aletheia. In enframing the unconcealment propriates in conformity with which the work of modern technology reveals the actual as standing-reserve.[5]

This danger of misinterpretation lies in an attempt to enclose all beings in order to control their availability through a mastery and manipulation of the “enframing” (Ge-stell), making man and nature itself, subject and prisoner to the “standing-reserve”—as objective material that loses the human essence and takes on the instrumental essence of technology. This type of enframing presents a danger, however; in ultimately circumscribing the essence of technology, it can also potentially be used as a path toward revealing something of worth—toward aletheia, truth.

In this respect, Heidegger’s question is about the possibility of art as a way of salvation for human beings from the danger of the total enframing of being, threatened by a misunderstanding of technology’s essence. For Heidegger, understanding the essence of technology depends on its comprehension as co-dependently a means to an end and a human activity—a “contrivance,” or an instrument. “…[T]he instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man to the right relation to technology.”[6] In this way, mastery over technology combats the fear of technological power slipping from human control. Uncovering the instrumentality—the means of technology—reveals truth and points toward technology’s essence. However, the issue of means and ends in the context of technology puts the ancient concepts of causality, developed by Aristotle and Plato, into question because it places the power of creation into the hands of humans rather than omnipotent gods. Heidegger supposes that if causality is “veiled in darkness,”[7] then the question of technology and its essence ultimately remains groundless and obscure. Therefore, a process of revealing is needed to understand the essence of technology—a process of unveiling and illuminating.

To exemplify this process of revealing, Heidegger describes the chalice—the silver goblet used in the ritual of the Eucharist. The purpose of the chalice after production is circumscribed into the occasioning of its use as a sacrificial vessel. However, the silversmith holds a responsibility to “consider carefully” how this vessel is to be brought forth and made use of. The German word for “consider carefully,” “überlegen,” comes from the Greek apophainesthai—to bring forward into appearance—to reveal and show the chalice, lying ready and presenced before the user.

The silversmith has the dual responsibility of bringing the chalice into presence along with revealing its usage—both bringing it into appearance and ascribing a certain meaning to its instrumentality or its technical meaning. Bringing the chalice forward into appearance relates to Plato’s concepts of poiesis and physis. Poiesis refers to bringing-forth and, as Heidegger describes, is physis—the arising of something from out of itself.

Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. For what presences by means of physis has the irruption belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossom into a bloom, in itself. In contrast, what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist, e.g., the silver chalice, has the irruption belonging to bringing-forth, not in itself, but in another, in the craftsman or artist.[8]

This bringing-forth is a movement not only inherent in the chalice itself, but also in the craftsman or artist. It is a movement that progresses from concealment to revelation, a moment, which uncovers truth or aletheia. Technology, understood instrumentally, stemming from the Greek techne, refers to the activities and skills of the craftsmen and the “…arts of the mind and fine arts.”[9] Through bringing-forth, a process of “opening-up”, techne forms a relationship with episteme in its connection to the creation of mastery, of expertise—knowing in the widest sense—an epistemology. To understand and become an expert in the sense of episteme involves being “entirely at home in something”—an understanding that opens-up and reveals. Fundamental to understanding technology is the challenge placed upon being and the world that puts the process of revealing into practice. This challenging poses an “unreasonable” demand on nature to provide energy. Heidegger describes this as a “setting-upon” that challenges nature.

The example of this is the hydroelectric plant set into the Rhine River. In this sense, the river’s essence becomes a power station, and because of this, Heidegger sees a “monstrousness,” in that its original essence is subverted and corrupted by a challenging, that places it within the “standing-reserve”—enframed irrevocably as a totality that eclipses being:

In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station. In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that is spoken by the two titles: “The Rhine,” as dammed up into the power works, and “The Rhine,” as uttered by the artwork, in Holderlin’s hymn by that name. But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.[10]

The unconcealment of the Rhine involves revealing the “standing-reserve” or “stock” that is challenged by the fact that it no longer stands as a poetic object, but an object subject to technological demands by industrial and consumer culture. In this way, the Rhine is ready to be ordered for industry, but man himself does not have control over that technological unconcealment—he is ordered by the masses, the industry that is in control of the “standing-reserve” to supply the demands of mass culture. The danger for Heidegger lies in the fear that man is challenged more than nature in this process of ordering—driving technology forward through ordering as a way of revealing:

When man, in his way, from within unconcealment reveals that which presences, he merely responds to the call of unconcealment, even when he contradicts it. Thus when man, investigating, observing, pursues nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.[11]

Through investigation, man is already claimed by a revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object until nature itself becomes nothing but the “standing-reserve,” ready for its uses to be circumbscribed by technological culture. Heidegger’s word “enframing,” gestell in German, refers loosely to an apparatus, a frame, but more obliquely, a skeleton. “Enframing” implies a certain bodily strangeness that resonates with monstrous creation in that its creator, as well as what is created, are both claimed by a revealing that challenges his relation to nature in the use of the “standing-reserve”—the process of “enframing” is that of an assembly that reveals a concealed essence. Again, we must refer back to Heidegger’s essential definition of enframing for clarification:

Enframing is the gathering together which belongs to that setting-upon which challenges man and puts him in position to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. As the one who is challenged forth in this way, man stands within the essential realm of enframing.[12]

“Enframing” through revealing, as a primary relationship to man, becomes an act of destining that circulates around and holds men. In this way, it is a connection to the essence of freedom as it governs a free space within the clearing, whereby objects of perception wait to be revealed. That which is revealed is always concealing itself in mystery. In that freedom conceals in a manner that opens up to an illumination, destining, as a process of revealing, can be an endangering process to being itself—a “monstrousness” in Heidegger’s words. The danger is to misconstrue the unconcealed and misinterpret it, forgetting the essential. “As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer…he comes to the point were he…[is] taken as standing-reserve.”[13] Enframing through destining may obstruct and endanger what is concealed in the technological essence. Technology itself is not the danger, although it is mysterious—its essence is the danger.

On the other hand, the essence of technology can also “save” by bringing something home into its essence for the purpose of its appearing. In this sense, Heidegger asserts that technology must harbor the growth of its saving power through a return to an understanding of its essence, saving it from the homelessness of technological instrumentality through art and creative processes.

Socrates and Plato explain essence as an unfolding from itself of what remains or endures. The permanent essence is the idea, whereas the actual thing, e.g. the house, is a derivative of that idea and belongs to what does not endure as a residue. Heidegger explains that technology unfolds and endures only as enframed by the destining of revealing. “Only what is granted endures. What endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants.”[14] Enframing endures as the essence of technology, but the process of destining that may reveal that essence requires a certain dignity—a responsibility in watching over the process of unconcealment—taking the time to notice how essence unfolds as the destining of a revealing.

On the one hand, enframing challenges forth into the frenziedness of ordering that blocks every view into the propriative event of revealing and so radically endangers the relation to the essence of truth.

On the other hand, enframing propriates for its part in the granting that lets man endure—as yet inexperienced, but perhaps more experienced in the future—that he may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth. Thus the rising of the saving power appears.[15]

Although Heidegger has given us a valuable, dual examination of the dangers and redemptive powers of uncovering the essence of technology, there is a measure of uncertainty and ambiguity that accompanies it, rendering it obscure and mysterious. Art, Heidegger tells us, is also a techne—a revealing through mastery and expertise that brings forth and makes a presence. Poetry, originiating in the word poiesis, points toward Plato’s word ekphanestaton (from Phaedrus)—“that which shines forth most purely.” In this way, the essence of technology is not technological, it is only a reflection on technology—and thus, a confrontation with technology must occur on both the essential level and on the level of what technology, along with its master, is capable of creating through art.

Ultimately, the more one questions the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of artistic creation becomes. The closer we are to the danger of enframing, the greater the tension there is in the revealing and destining that constitutes the possible saving power of technology. Phenomenology, in its own interrogation of consciousness and lived experience, pushes us towards the intersubjective—a reflexive relationship that simultaneously illuminates both the object and the subject.

Heidegger’s problematization of technology pulls us further towards this reflexive relationship, explaining the dangers of enframing as a “monstrousness,” a danger that threatens being itself. In this way, Heidegger offers a tentative and obscure explanation of the monstrous, the result of the technological challenge forced upon man and nature that subverts their essence of being into the “standing-reserve.” In this sense, we can assert that Heidegger’s argument for the importance of understanding the essence of technology is rooted in a humanism that places primacy on the well-being of human essence through a correct understanding of the essence of technology. However, to move forward, we must understand that Heidegger’s question of technology explains the monstrous within the humanist limitations of a modernist cultural enframing—how modern industry and the consumer circumscribe the essence of technology to arrive at the instrumentality of its uses.

Once outside these modernist, humanist cultural limits, how are we to formulate a new ontology that accounts for the monstrous as it comes to be represented in our age—in post-modernity—through the figures of monsters, cyborgs, and the posthuman, in literature and film? How is art involved in an interrogation with the question of being and technology as it emerges out of modernity? Where do these encounters take us and what do they reflect? Finally, how do post-modern bodies and new methods of representation, such as posthuman and post-structuralist analyses illuminate what Heidegger cannot about how to interpret and represent the different conceptual frames that reveal different parts and bodies of the monstrous?

IV. From Phenomenology to Frankenstein—textual examinations of the monstrous.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein initialized a process of analysis in answering these questions that will bring the phenomenological concepts of intersubjectivity into play with technology, and how these reflective relationships create an ontological tension that explains the monstrousness and the fear that is evoked through it. Victor Frankenstein is engaged in an act of pure artistic creation by the possession, through technological mastery, of the essence of life itself—his ideal intention. His only desire stems from an intrepid curiosity for an understanding of how life functions, he reaches for the mysteries of nature as his objects of intentionality to become a creator of life. Victor Frankenstein’s process towards an understanding of the phenomena that make life possible as an enframing of being and technology. However, Victor only grasps the noema of that object, the question of life itself—only its ideal meaning—in order to understand and create life, while forgetting to understand the consequence of that meaning and its enframing.

One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the structure of the human frame, and indeed, any animal endued with life. Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery;…To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death…I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body…I was led to examine the cause and progress of decay and forced spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of human feelings. I saw how fine the form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analyzing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wonderous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius […] I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret…After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.[16]

To examine the causes of life is Frankenstein’s goal. However, he has no foresight into

what events and creations could follow if those causes were understood and utilized successfully—his focus rests solely upon the act of creation itself as an exclusively noematic goal. As his toils come to fruition and his creation is finally completed, the phenomenological concepts of empathy and intersubjectivity come into play. Through the act of bringing forth, an act of intentionality that reveals the creation, Frankenstein experiences this new body he has created as much more than an amalgamation of fragmented, dead parts—as not simply an object or collection of objects, but as a new subjectivity altogether—a new form of being that reflects back on its creator.

This new subjectivity, that of Frankenstein’s monster, originally composed of objective perceptions understood, utilized, and achieved through scientific discovery and the analysis of natural phenomena, has now become available to other subjects through the act of revealing that reflects dually on what is created and its creator. The creation of the monster in Frankenstein not only illuminates a new conception of ontology in the representation of the instersubjectivity of the monstrous, but also a new ontology in the representation, of how this monstrousness came into being through its creator. This is an apperception, a reflective double-movement of interlinking subjectivities, which applies to Frankenstein’s recognition of the other, and his creation—a conflation of the objective materials that arrive at a new, anxious, and unthinkable subjectivity.

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet…I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.[17]

As Frankenstein’s noematic subject of experience becomes subsumed under the noesis of what it is—judged and interrogated as a living subject, fashioned in a particular sense and character—horror is created through the monster’s gestures of intentionality within lived experience that confuse human and inhuman binaries—between the biological limits of life and death—as the monster reaches out towards its creator; an intersubjective reflection that speaks to a stretching out towards an “aboutness”—towards an intentionality of both perception and how that lived experience comes into being:

I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs.[18]

Once his monster confronts him, reaches out towards him and speaks unintelligible words, Frankenstein forgets about the noema of his creation—the ideal meaning of the act, to understand and master the essence of biological life—and enters into the sphere of noesis, where this act is judged as a new subjectivity in an emotional and empathic capacity—a horrific collection of dead parts that constitute an entirely new and unthinkable organism.

As the monster opens his eyes and mouth, outstretches his hand, fear of the other—of the limits of death and the self—coalesces with the strange sensation of familiarity in the dynamics of the noetic —where the essence of biological life itself must be reconceived, re-judged to account for this new, monstrous existence. The source of this horror is not simply the dead elements, the salvaged body parts of its creation; it is the experience of its being alive—as both being perceived and perceiving—that throws the readers, as well as Frankenstein himself, into an intersubjective loop of reflections that questions the foundations and possibilities for life itself. Through the monster’s own voice we learn of his lived experience and his desire to share and reflect in this experience with other living beings—to be a part of society without being a victim of his own monstrousness:

“I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers—their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions; but how was I terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification… I looked upon [the cottagers] as superior beings who would be the arbiters of my future destiny. I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour and afterwards their love… My organs were indeed harsh, but supple; and although my voice was very unlike the soft music of their tones, yet I pronounced such words as I understood with tolerable ease. It was as the ass and the lap-dog; yet surely the gentle ass whose intentions were affectionate, although his manners were rude, deserved better treatment than blows and execration.”[19]

This narrative told by the monster reflects on the experience of first contact with his creator—a moment of fear. When Frankenstein’s monster first emerges with outstretched hand and unintelligible utterances, the fear evoked in Frankenstein stems from the fact that when the monster calls out to him, reaching out with his arm, he cannot understand what it says. Since there is no level of communicability between monster and creator, the creator instinctively experiences fear, believing that the monster’s intentions lie in direct opposition to his—aiming to destroy rather than create.

In an inverted sense, as is the case with the mirror and the physics of reflective images, the monster reflects his master’s fear in the sense of its incommunicability—the ultimate fear is that he should be hurtfully repulsed if he cannot speak through language and share his lived experience with the cottagers. The monster’s desire to learn how to communicate is an intentional act that has the potential of allowing him to integrate with society, without evoking fear from other people and creating violence. Unfortunately, the monster’s attempt to establish contact with the cottagers goes opposite to his intentions, and is foreshadowed in the narration that predicts his own beating and exile.

Thus, Frankenstein’s act of creation establishes a new subjectivity that complicates the notions of what is alive and what is dead, what is perceived and who is perceiving, and the nature of fear itself—reflecting on both his creation and himself in his intentionality to uncover the phenomena of biological life and how to use these phenomena for his own purposes.

V. Towards Posthuman and Post-Structuralist Analysis—Arboreal vs. Rhizomatic—reframing Heidegger’s conception of Technology—performances of the monstrous; relationship between the human body and the technological.

Frankenstein illustrates a moment in science, as well as a moment in literature and literary production, which straddles a boundary between modern and archaic technologies—between the ancient practice of alchemy and the modern promise of galvanism and electricity. Mechanical machines of the past were organized into structures—this is how most things are organized and categorized—placed within a systematic hierarchical stratum, whether these things are societal, biological, or technological. Biological systems are subject to the categorization of hierarchy—asserted by some of the earliest philosophers such as Aristotle who hierarchically systematized the three primary types of biological life: mineral, plant, and animal.[20] The monstrous always upsets these hierarchies because it is inherently a reflective figure that bounces in between categorizations and eludes systematization.

In Frankenstein, the dividing boundaries between the categories of biology and technology become confused and seemingly merge into one another through a messy ordeal of creation temporally situated at a pivotal moment of science—the industrial revolution. Frankenstein, as a novel, radically de-constructs and modulates the literary standard contemporary with Shelley—that of the Gothic novel. The analytical literature on readings of Frankenstein is expansive and multiple—constantly pointing to its status as a radical departure from the genre in which it was borne into—a creation unfaithful to its roots.

Penetrating into the text itself, as Dr. Frankenstein’s knowledge of biology grows—an understanding of the essence of life—he begins to understand the technology of biology itself; the machinery that allows for life, gives way to death, which in turn promises life once again—a circularly balanced nature. Because of this conflation of terms—between life and death—a radical understanding of being is created—given proof in the creation’s own existence—and thus, a completely re-envisioned existence is produced through manipulating the circularly balanced nature of life and death.

Similarly, in our age, new technologies seem to take on monstrous lives of their own, much like Frankenstein’s monster, functioning without the need for human intervention and control, while simultaneously reflecting the intersubjectively of its creators. An example of this is the Internet, in that it does away with a structural hierarchy and adopts a non-centralized control system.

Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus uses the emergence of the Internet as an exemplary indicator of radical divergence between two systems of knowledge—between the arboreal; the familiar family-tree image, and a more submerged, scattered image of the rhizome.[21] This, indeed, is a radical divergence—the Latin origin for “radical”—radix, or “root.” Beginning from an analysis of the vertically arranged arboreal structure of knowledge, Deleuze and Guattari’s intention here is to uproot the tree structure—a crucial exposure of a cultural shift from the vertically arranged, tree-like structure of categorizations; a hierarchical system that gives reference to its origins or roots, to the rhizomatic—“…a nomadic, multiple, decentered…”[22] horizontal orientation that operates laterally, without reference, unfaithful to a point of origin, breaking off into scattered forms and escaping mastery. The Internet metaphorically reflects onto Frankenstein’s monster—as we will soon come to see. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome.[23]

Heidegger’s hydroelectric plant described in “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953), lies in direct opposition to the multiplicities of the rhizomatic orientation—against the post-structural, deconstructive stance of the rhizomatic orientation described in A Thousand Plateaus. The reason for this opposition existing in the fact that Heidegger’s Question remains rooted in the arboreal hierarchy of humanism and a criticism of mass culture. Although Heidegger initiates an interrogation with the monstrous in describing the beauty of the Rhine as subsumed under the “standing-reserve” of the technological, eclipsing the poetic beauty of the river itself, his assertions fall within certain limitations in that they are located within a humanist, cultural framework and are structured in an arboreal fashion—limited to the category of hydroelectric machines.

Guattari, in Chaosmosis, describes a “heterogenesis” of machines located outside the humanist framework of description in The Question Concerning Technology. In the same way in which the post-structuralist philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari rethinks the arboreal structure of knowledge, Frankenstein can be read as a rethinking of technology that escapes Heidegger’s concept of “enframing” and moves towards a reframing of technology within the body, foreshadowing the post-human, the harbinger of cyborgs, networks, and bioengineering. Through this, and more pointedly through our analytical reading of Frankenstein and phenomenology, the growing pressure of the technological should be taken to represent a continual dialogue between machine and human.

In the endeavor to see the monstrous as it becomes a represented reflection performed through the body via technological mastery, Heidegger’s explanation of monstrosity falls short in its arboreal systematization of technology, not accounting for the post-modern forms of technology that uproot the arboreal system and become rhizomatic—branching out unfaithfully to their origins. This is where posthuman and post-structural analyses take us beyond the modern sphere to illuminate what Heidegger cannot about representations and manifestations of the monstrous contemporary with our time. Reading Frankenstein through a phenomenological lens reveals a source of fear at the monstrousness of Dr. Frankenstein’s creation. To fully understand the fear evoked by the monster, technology’s essence must be reframed within the body.

Mark Poster’s essay, “High-Tech Frankenstein,” rethinks Heidegger’s question in the context of technologies that challenge the enframed order of revealing, unconcealed in Heidegger’s text. With regards to the post-human body or cyborg, Heidegger’s assertions are unable to address new information technologies like the Internet and must be rethought. Poster contends that some information technologies not only participate in enframing, but also in forms of revealing that implore subjects into a relation with being conceptualized as freedom: “…these [revealings] do so not as a return to the Greeks but as a departure, as [a] new…configuration of human and machine, ensconced with a new space-time continuum eliciting new combinations of body and mind, object and subject.”[24] Heidegger’s conceptualization of technology as culture implies that the essence of technology depends on culture to define and reveal its use.

In this way, technology is taken as a unified field, incapable of seeing its newer, more rhizomatic forms. Technology, seen in the light of its multifaceted applications within culture, is not so unified as Heidegger postulates. We know this now, for certain—in the multitude of options, plethora of devices, instruments that are situated so close, and even sometimes, within the body itself. Despite the dilemmas of visibility, opacity and transparency, that humans face in their relationships with technology, this much is clear: technology is interwoven with lived experienced.

An everyday example: no one on their way to work would leave the house without an identification card, credit card, keys, cell phone, etc.—these devices, are engrained within everyday experience—they enframe existence and are constant mediators of experience. Understanding the homogeneity of technology is the key to the limits of Heidegger’s line of thought. Being essentially a cultural enframing, technology’s possession by the social masses is dangerous for Heidegger—it is the fearful indicator of a monstrous challenge placed upon nature to fulfill the demands of human culture.

Is it possible for enframing to work in an understanding of post-modern technologies such as digital information machines? In a world where we heeded to Heidegger’s warnings, digital computerization would be abolished, as it does violence to the alphabet, rendering it to the standing-reserve through enframing and obscuring its poetic, artistic value—a, “monstrousness” in that all letters are subject to their reduction into a binary form—1 or 0. In the hypothetical Heideggerian world just mentioned, this is a monstrousness that would not be tolerated—so you would have to say goodbye to your computers, mp3 players, cell phones, and anything else that would turn a beautiful stanza, or photograph, into a sequence of 1’s and 0’s.[25]

In the sense that technology is placed in the world and its meaning for those who use it is inscribed in its creation, the machine challenges being through the instrumentality which takes nature for object—the standing-reserve. Thus, Heidegger enframes technology’s essence within a cultural humanism, disallowing being, an authentic set of characteristics used in the world, to be given to the machinic, which, “…inscribes meaning, enunciates, but it does so within its own register, not as a human subject would. It is a form of presencing…of the object.”[26] Information machines defy instrumental enframing, especially complex technologies that interface with humans such as the Internet.

Let us retrace some steps, to cover areas that have been skipped over but are still important to us. Originating in the Cold War, the Internet began as a Department of Defense appropriated telephone system that connected computers together in a de-centralized, rhizomatic way. Enhanced with the virtual; video, images, hypertext, and so on, the Internet begins to change our relation to time and space through overlapping dimensions of information, “to the point where Cartesian configurations of space/time, body/mind, subject/object—patterns that are essential components of enframing—are each reconstituted in new, even unrepresentable forms”[27]—perhaps into the form of the monster.

The electronic café is one example of a virtual space where the presencing of an individual asserts an agency in revealing and concealment—a redefinition of what it means to be human. In this sense, aletheia becomes an irrelevant possibility, allowing for new modes of authenticity. Following Frankenstein, Poster explains that the Gothic tale of technology as analogous to a nameless creature from nowhere could be retold as, “a monster who is already none other than ourselves,” a romance with a cyborg creature.[28]

This monstrous romance with the self and other is echoed in the post-human, cyborg projects of Stelarc, an Australian performance artist whose works integrate technology and the body in provocative and disturbing ways. His various essays speculate on the fate of the human body in the unstable context of contemporary technology. In many ways, Stelarc propels Heidegger’s implication that technology brings the human essence into question. In two separate performances, “Fractal Flesh—Internet Body Upload Event” (1995) and “Parasite: Involuntary Body and Internet Upload” (1998), Stelarc attached a robotic third arm he created to his body and wired himself to the internet through inputs that are sent to sites on his body. These bodily sites, including the third arm, are wired to remote computers that randomly monitor activity on the net and send signals that are relayed to the body, creating a feedback loop that causes movement in a seemingly chaotic and uncontrolled pattern. These performances are broadcast all over the web and are archived on Stelarc’s extensive website.[29]

Stelarc, his body populated, surrounded, and inhabited by various technological machines, is equipped to perform an intimate exchange between the body of technology and the human body. Thus, he performs literally the connection between the body and the system of global communication—an extended sensorium that represents our current technologically embodied condition. In this way, the human body no longer stands on its own as a sacred object that is exclusively biological, it has entered into an intersubjective relationship with technology.

Accordingly, Stelarc asserts in his writings that skin is no longer impermeable—the division between the elusive inner and outer worlds of body and technology is obscured and merges into one, new organism—the posthuman. Along this vein, the Internet entertains an image in which, “[p]henomenologically, our bodies are out there extended through the infinite wires and radio waves that criss-cross the planet continuously and in ever-increasing density. Our being-in-the-world, to echo Heidegger’s term, is now as a body draped over the globe.”[30]

In his essays, Stelarc complains about the limits of the body, calling it “obsolete” and “outmoded”—incapable of coping with the demands of a rapidly changing technological environment without evolving. Skin, Stelarc says, must be shed first: “Invading technology eliminates skin as a significant site, an adequate interface, or a barrier between public space and physiological tracts.”[31] This suggests a culture that bridges a fissure between the human and the machine and is a new bringing-forth or revealing of human being, making not only the body, but also the culture of technological instrumentality into one subject. The performances make a radical departure from the modern concept of the hierarchical nature of the body where structure is its ruling force, and moves towards reconfigured relationships:

…human to nature, body to mind, individual to society, man to machine…The new Gothic tale ends not with Heidegger’s narrative closure but with a much broader question of human essence: what place will the humans have in a world of bio-engineered nature and information machines?[32]

Poster’s “High-Tech Frankenstein” theory represents a figure for the relationship between humans and machines in an online setting, one which interrupts the notion of the subject. The Internet, a new monster in the style of Frankenstein’s creation, estranged from its military origins (its parents/creators, like Victor Frankenstein), reconfigures, or revives the body through a mess of wires and hardware, substituting a deterretorialized or unmarked body in relation to a composed identity typing at a computer—logged into a chat room.

In this way, Stelarc’s utilization of the Internet in his performances destabilizes pre-existing systems of identification such as nationality, gender, and race. Fear comes from the fact that words float in a oblivious dimension that does not correspond with our sense of space and time—monstrous because their associations are endless and exist on their own, moving and twisting chaotically like Frankenstein’s monster, as subjects: “…high-tech Frankenstein therefore functions as an opening to globalized, machinic post-humanity, one who will stare backwards at us, his/her historical ancestors, like Benjamin’s angel, as if observing a monster.”[33]

Julie Clark, in “The Human/Not Human in the Work of Orlan and Stelarc,” attempts to trace the boundaries between a human and non-human binary by referring to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster as an example of a transitional state of being inscribed into the human body. In ever-increasing integration of technologies embedded into and circulating around the body, the act of bodily modification implies a “pollution” of the body by technologies and points toward the post-human body. In this sense, much of the locus for the fear that we encounter in our confrontations with the post-human mirrors the same site of horror in Frankenstein—the space of the body that has been altered and changed by technological mastery—the body polluted by technological modifications which is then perceived as monstrous.

Understanding the post-human body as such involves grasping the concept of liminality. Liminal beings are stuck in limbo between transitional states—caught in ambiguous zones that elude classification—deformity, decomposition, disease—like Frankenstein’s monster. Existing on the margins of existence and society, “Liminal beings are thus perceived as polluting, since they are neither one thing nor the other, and are more often than not characterized as monstrous, diseased, queer, marginal, black, insane or female.”[34] Paraclesus relates that monstrous states of being—deformity, disease, hermaphrodism, androgyny, etc.—were physical evidence that the mother and father sinned. Outside of conception, Paraclesus follows, there is also a possibility that the mother contributed to a monstrous birth through the power of her imagination—“…a fear or fright.”[35] Currently,

…to be perceived as monstrous, or consciously to construct oneself as monstrous, is to have an affinity with disorder, chaos, mutation and transformation, in an attempt to work against logic, rationality, normality, purity and science. It can often be seen as a way of both undoing and resurrecting the past and its fictions: in order to create some new forms, connections, leakages and abstractions. As Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein, said, ‘Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of the void, but out of chaos; it can give for to the dark, shapeless, substance but cannot bring into being the substance itself’(8).[36]

The figure of the cyborg, so often imagined in science-fiction texts and films, is the most powerful example of a liminal creature that connects us to Frankenstein’s monster. In the same way that the cyborg body, created as a fusion between the organic body and cybernetic technology, can be both fragile and strong depending on its use, the monster of Frankenstein represents a proto-cyborg because its parts, harvested from lifeless bodies, are made to coalesce in the exhibition of inhuman strength.

As the technological invention of the prosthetic limb, a distinctly different and unnatural material as compared to the human body, represents both a loss sustained to the body and also to the self—it is a covering of a wound that marks an absence. Prosthesis as a cybernetic trope portrays the cyborg as a metaphor for a body polluted by technology[37]—a messy and dangerous mixture of synthetic and organic parts.

Computer technologies as non-organic, clean and functioning prostheses are transformed by their coupling with the human body. Likewise, the human body is perceived as augmented and enhanced by its attachment to technology. Prosthetic body parts herald loss and expose the human body as a structure that may be disassembled. The abject, which may be associated with the amputated body through the prosthetic attachment, is thus assimilated.[38]

Prosthetic enhancements of the body—arms, legs, hands—emphasize the necessity to maintain the concept of identity in self-image and a unity of the body. This integration of the human body with its technologies marks an epiphany that reframes the traditional humanist perspective, espoused by Heidegger, of technology as it relates to the human. Stelarc’s prosthetic third hand, controlled by muscle reflexes in the stomach area, enters into a mimetic correlation with the prosthetic substitution of the body through technical means. Although Stelarc affirms that the prosthetic third hand represents excess in the additive extension of the body through technology, this excess is simultaneously accompanied by a sense of loss. Stelarc’s projects in prostheses—the third hand, extended arm, and extra ear represent, says Clark, are:

…psychic extensions of the abject, in that technology—in its historical connections with the fear of the other, of difference and pollution—may symbolize the object that needs to be expelled…Given that the abject is defined as ambiguous and liminal, and is usually associated with the female gender, technology and its apparent integration into both the interior and the exterior of the body represent the assimilation of the other.[39]

Stelarc’s pairing of the mechanical with the organic points to an attempt to contain the liminality of being within the space of the un-nameable other—addressing concepts of mortality, birth, re-birth or evolution through technology’s integration into the body both on an interior and exterior level that represents an assimilation—a romance—with the other.

Through this process of assimilation, in romancing the other, Stelarc alludes to the problem of sexual difference by making example of the hybrid relationship between masculine and feminine made possible through computer technology. At the same time, Stelarc also forms a correlation that connects the machine and body together for the purpose of emphasizing the parasitic and symbiotic relationship that exists between humans and technology. Using metaphors and tropes that evoke the machinic, Stelarc describes the human self as a fundamentally cybernetic entity: “Extending life no longer means ‘existing’ but rather being ‘operational.”[40] In this sense, Stelarc proposes a self fabricated from and inextricably tied to technology. The prosthetic extensions and his performance of them/with them, reveals a provocatively fearful sense of horror in Stelarc’s audience.

In his illustration of the collapse of the organic body into the synthetic space of the cyborg, the image of Frankenstein’s monster is evoked. The body, insists Stelarc, may be “demystified” or “pacified” through the interrogations, displays, and dissections made possible through technology, but it still has yet to be “deactivated.” Although Stelarc believes in the body as obsolete, he asserts that it is still capable of “instigating an evolutionary dialectic” by synthesizing the organic and mechanical elements to create a new hybrid human—in the same way that Frankenstein’s monster represents a new conception of life and the human being.[41]

Stelarc, as well as Orlan, a French performance artist whose newest work consists of routinely having plastic surgery to modify her face, exemplify the posthuman condition in a manner that reflects back towards Frankenstein as a way to illuminate our historical and hysterical reactions to the fragmented body and the impact of medical technologies on the body. In a chimerical way, the un-named and liminal figure of the monster is hauntingly present in their performances—echoing the societal fear of technology depriving us of our sense of agency and control over our world. Orlan’s performance operations—completely uncensored and explicit—broadcast on the Internet and shown in galleries spread across multiple continents, engage with cyberspace through a romance with a multiplicity of other personas—refashioning her face surgically to manifest her imaginary self that is first expressed in a digitally composited construct of female faces in art history ranging from Medusa to Mona Lisa.

Through this appropriation of alternative identities collected from history, Orlan exhibits the concept of self as a constantly fluctuating construct, like the rhizomatic form of knowledge. Parallel to Orlan’s chimerically constructed self is Frankenstein’s monster—created through the assembly of organs and limbs collected from male and female bodies. In that these disparate body parts originate from cadavers, they literally come to represent the dregs of humanity—the trash that no one wants—disposable and abject.

While in the midst of this monstrous assembly, Frankenstein considers each piece he collected for its instrumental value as taken from the most perfect part of each respective cadaver. Unable to foresee the outcome of this gruesome experiment, he unknowingly creates a body of monstrous deformity, describing the reanimated being as a “demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life.”[42] Terror, for the reader or viewer of the many film adaptations of Frankenstein, is not only located within the chimerical construction of the monster—stitched together from fragments—but also from the awareness that the monstrous body refutes the normative concepts of the body as we know it—a united structure, whole and pure, faithful to its origins. In this way, the monstrous body portrays the function and structure of the body as machine-like and inhuman. “The monster represents a human/not human being that is both ‘like us’ and ‘not like us,’…it this recognition that elicits our sympathy and repulsion. Death…creates an aura even after the monster has been reanimated, thus rendering the object both dead and undead.”[43] Both the figures of the monster and the cyborg appropriately evoke the Freudian concept of the uncanny in its association with bodily mutation and fragmentation. The uncanny is a species of fear that reacts to the sense of the alien and other, while simultaneously harkening back to the familiar. The intellectual uncertainty of whether an object is dead or alive, or when the inanimate object takes on the attributes of the animate, is where the sense of the uncanny arises.

VI. Conclusions.

The Frankenstein story challenges our understanding of the processes of life as entailing that the dead do not return to life. Within this trope of death, Freud tells us that the corpse evokes a fear that it will become the enemy of the survivor and take him away with death.[44] These allude to the taboos that surround touching a corpse and the proximity of death—that touching death means to be inhabited by it—infected by it. Orlan, through her performances, enters into dialectic with the cosmetic industry and addresses the unwanted, undesirable, and excessive female body—pointing towards the role of medical technology, especially prostheses, that constitute the construction of our artificial selves and bodies.

The female body, as controlled and modified through media images and medical technologies, becomes a subject itself in the processes of plastic surgery, IVF, superovulation, and foetal scanning. Using these technologies as a means to an end, the female body has been fragmented and reconstructed repeatedly to form the composite of the ideal woman. Just as Frankenstein chose the perfect parts to create his monster, Orlan builds a new self-identity through a combination of ideal features found in women depicted in paintings throughout the history of art. In accomplishing this, Orlan also broaches a science of physiognomy, where the face is a potential location for terror—echoed in Frankenstein, where we learn that the face of the monster is more terrifying than its actual body to Victor Franknstein.

Orlan’s monstrous birth, producing a new self created from reconstructed flesh, along with Stelarc’s production of the human body as an adaptive hybrid responding to the demands of technology, mirrors Mary Shelley’s analogy between herself and Victor, in that she referred to her novel as her “hideous progeny.” Through an inter-textual interrogation of phenomenology in relation to the monster reflected by the aforementioned artists and authors, along with the reframing of Heidegger’s technological question into the body, we begin to see an obscuring of polarities—between human and not human, the organic and the synthetic, horror and empathy, monster and self.

Chapter 2,

Imagining the Monster: a Historical Anatomy

If someone told you that they had seen a dragon flying earlier that day, you most certainly would not believe them. This is a matter of simple common sense—we know that dragons, or any other imaginary monsters, do not exist in reality. Reason, a system that is structured by the normative moral codes of society, has been built up, torn down, reconstructed, and rewritten throughout history. From our perspective, this sense of common rationality seems a stable root, holding society’s normative values in place. However, when one begins to closely examine history and unfold the systems of thought behind these histories, structures of reason and their moral foundations destabilize. They rupture into fragments, creating gaps, and forming secret histories. The figure of the real monster (the dragon, etc.) lies beyond our foundations for common sense—beyond rationality, as we know it, in the realm of the imagination.

Nevertheless, the mysterious and horrifying specter of the monstrous incessantly haunts the histories of religion, politics, science, and culture. Thus, to reveal the monstrous, we must not only understand, but also transgress our normal sense of rationality and strive to conceptualize the irrational with new systems of analysis. The term “anatomy” must be used to describe the analytical tracing of the multifaceted corpus of information that describes the monstrous as real elements of human consciousness, not merely phenomena. An anatomy is a description of a body, an analyzed illustration of its form and structure,[45] but this one body never stands completely alone. There are always relationships to other bodies. The informatic description of the body that makes up its anatomy is always understood in comparison to other bodies, thus necessitating the fact that an anatomy is consistently rhizomatic, multiple—an example of similarities that constitute a commonality across a certain set of categories.

Histories along with the modes and expressions used in their narrations, though they may differ in various dimensions, constitute multiple anatomies, both interconnected and divided. This chapter endeavors to imagine an anatomy of the monstrous; to theorize a corporeal system that accounts for monstrosity described in moral, religious, and scientific accounts; these multiple elements themselves forming a historical anatomy. An anatomy of multiplicity, a divergent web of bodies seen through images and texts, enables an understanding of the monstrous not merely limited to vague memory or mythology, but as a phenomenologically collective experience that extends across multiple histories.

History, in this sense, consists of the causal relationships that constitute a historical narrative. By examining these narratives together in an attempt to analyze them, we create an imagined dimension of history—an anatomy of the monstrous that blends readings of political, moral, legal, and medical histories. The bodies described in these histories share a common ground—they have been selected, marginalized, cut-open, examined, feared, and inscribed. They are written by cultural myths, religion, and eventually science and medicine; even as they are envisioned in art. Monstrous bodies are subject to increased observation within the sphere of social reality—criminals, the mad, prostitutes—these bodies are enmeshed in the illicit and marginal—on the outskirts of culture, occupying the limits of humanity. An anatomy of the monstrous will illuminate this landscape we are to explore, tracing a kind of map that charts the appearances and disappearances of these bodies.

Christian theology offers a narrative that constructs the boundary dividing the monstrous apart from the natural, rational system ordained by God and interpreted by philosophers and theologians throughout history. These boundaries represent the liminal barrier that separates the human from other forms of life. Validating this boundary is the special status of the human being as created in God’s image, endowed with a divine right—the ability to reason, to create meaning out of a chaotic natural reality.

In the Middle Ages, alchemical philosophy divided nature into four kingdoms: mineral; the inanimate, plant; the animate, animal—sentient but lacking reason, and man—an animal endowed with God’s reason.[46] These divisions, of course, were not novel—ancient philosophers theorized hierarchies and their essential constituents long before. Notably, Aristiotle, in On the Soul, describes the concept of the soul as the essence of any living thing, possessed by different types of bodies, distinguished by their operations. Plants possess the minimum operations required to be considered animate—the capacities for nourishment and reproduction. Lower animals have the powers of sense perception and self-motion. Humans, at the top of the hierarchy, possess all of these capacities in addition to the uniquely differentiated ability for intellect and reasoning.[47]

Without the status of humanity conceptualized as special—its location in the hierarchy in closest proximity to the divine rationality of God inscribed through theology—humans are nothing but lower animals who possess the powers of sense perception and self-motion, devoid of a morality fashioned from the theological understanding of God’s divine rationality. Seen through the lens of medieval theology, the passing on of sins, taken as a sort of contaminant, is directly associated with procreation and the inappropriate forms of sexual activity that lead to moral deformities and produce monsters. These moral monsters--adulterers, masturbators, those who partake in bestiality—their sins are represented through their bodily mutations; monstrous and horrific, evoking a warning—a symbol marking the punishment afforded by sin.

Explicitly, the Summa Theologica (1265-1274) of St. Thomas Aquinas, although posthumous and unfinished, is considered one of the greatest works produced by medieval moral theology. This is due to its synthesis and interconnection of previous works, doctrines, ideas, and arguments whose relationships were never fully realized before. Part II of Book II addresses the sins associated with lust in general, however the most pertinent detail is Question 154 of Article 2, asking whether the act of procreation—the venereal act—can be without sin. Aquinas’ argument asserts that if reason utilizes certain things (the sexual organs) appropriately for the end to which they are adapted, and if this end is truly good (procreation), then the use of these things in an appropriate way and order is not sinful. Just as the preservation of the body for an individual by means of eating food and the use of medicine is a true good, so is the preservation of the nature of the human species through the correct implementation of the venereal act.[48]

Aquinas differentiates between six types of lust—fornication, adultery, incest, seduction, rape, and the vice contrary to nature. All of these sins of lust exemplify the incorrect implementation of the venereal act, not providing for the preservation of the nature of the human species. The most important of these types of sins, however, is the “vice contrary to nature”—a distinct species of lust because it produces visible deformities in bodies. Vices contrary to nature are not only against reason, as are all sins of lust, but are contrary to the natural order of the veneral act as becoming to the human race—natural order being the generation of children.[49] Aquinas distinguishes four categories of vice contrary to nature: bestiality, sodomy, self-abuse (masturbation), and not observing the natural manner of copulation. In this, he asserts that these four categories of vices contrary to nature are worse than any other lustful sin because of their specific deformities, the worst of all being bestiality, since the use of the right species is not observed. About these vices contrary to nature, Aquinas writes;

…just as the ordering of right reason proceeds from men, so the order of nature is from God Himself: wherefore in sins contrary to nature, whereby the very order of nature is violated, an injury is done to God, the Author of nature.[50]

Thus, to act against nature is to act directly against the will of God, the author of nature. This threat of bestiality, the unnatural closeness between the human and animal that represents the ultimate sin against nature as authored by God, produces monstrous forms that blend the human body with other animal bodies or body parts. These composite, hybrid mixtures of human and animal parts, are reflections of the chimera—the mythological beast composed of multiple animal forms. Sexual communion with the animal constitutes the ultimate sin against nature and God’s dominion over all things and knowledge.

In this light, we see that the hybridized images of the human-animal monster are prohibitive—they illuminate a moral boundary by explicitly representing the negation of morality itself. Linked to, and a product of the sins of bestiality, sodomy, and masturbation, the monstrous is made real by the descriptions of abnormal bodies; why and how they are they way they are. The monster in the 15^th century was seen as a prodigious sign from God that signaled an impending doom or change. In this way, characterizations of monsters became a polemical device taken as a symbol for God’s wrath, and as punishments to those who have sinned. This wrath stems from the concept of the monster as contrary to nature, as well as the will of God, who is in control of nature.[51]

Upsetting the normative structure created by Christian theology, the monster threatens the principle of the human as special, created by God in his image, and hierarchically separated from the rest of nature by being imbued with divine reason. Ambroise Paré, writer of the text Des monstres et prodiges (1573), endorses the principle that nature always strives to create its likeness; since nature always preserves its kind and species, when two animals of different species copulate, the result be a creature that combines both species.[52] The monster, as contrary to nature, is the embodiment of human sinfulness—a prodigy of nature that emerges when sinful acts against nature occur, such as bestiality or sodomy.

Monsters are things that appear outside the course of Nature (and are usually signs of some forthcoming misfortune), such as a child who is born with one arm, another who will have two heads, and additional members over and above the ordinary.

Prodigies are things which happen that are completely against Nature, as when a woman will give birth to a serpent, or to a dog, or some other thing that is totally against Nature, as we shall show hereafter through several examples of said monsters and prodigies…

Maimed persons include the blind, the one-eyed, the hump-backed, those who limp or [those] having six digits on the hand or on the feet, or else having less than five, or [having them] fused together; or [having] arms too short…or those who have thick, inverted lips or a closure of the genitals in girls…or because they are hermaphrodites…or anything that is against Nature.[53]

Monstrous bodies are unreasonable in that they are created in ways contrary to the natural structure of normative Christian theology—thus, they inspire punishments from God in their incompatibility with the system of reason ordained through the right theological and moral understanding of natural laws. This hybridization of human and animal in the monster is directly linked to the sins of bestiality, sodomy, and masturbation.

The system of rationality written by medieval theology—a hierarchical system of limits grounded in the belief of God and the separation of humans from other animals—is not sufficient enough to craft and understand an anatomy of the monstrous, since it lies beyond the confines of reason as we know it. To fully grasp the concept of the monster and its unreasonable qualities, we must understand what makes it so unreasonable. This is possible through an analysis of what stands opposite to reason—madness, for it may account for what reason calls unintelligible and unrepresentable—which are concepts indispensable to the understanding of monstrousness for it insists on making visible the unbearable to see.

Exploring the territory of mental illness outside and beyond the system of rationality originally written through medieval Christian theology is Michel Foucault’s project in his impressively detailed History of Madness (originally published in 1961 under the title Folie et déraison. Histoirie de la folie a la l’age classique). In his preface, Foucault calls for a new history that examines the divisions between reason and unreason without any preconceptions:

It is, no doubt, an uncomfortable region. To pass through it we must renounce the comforts of terminal truths and never allow ourselves to be guided by what we might know of madness. None of the concepts of psychopathology, even and above all in the implicit play of retrospection, can be allowed to play an organizing role. The gesture that divides madness is the constitutive one, not the science that grows up in the calm that returns after the division has been made. The caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason is the origin; the grip in which reason holds non-reason to extract its truth as madness, fault or sickness derives from that, and much further off. We must therefore speak of this primitive debate without supposing a victory, nor the right to victory, we must speak of these repeated gestures in history, leaving in suspense anything that might take on the appearance of an ending, or of rest in truth; and speak of that gesture of severance, the distance taken, the void installed between reason and which it is not, without ever leaning on the plentitude of what reason pretends to be.[54]

Foucault’s intention here is to examine the spaces, “silences” or “caesuras,” between reason and unreason—a division between the sane and the insane that separates rationality from madness. Insanity poses a monstrousness that reason cannot account for—insanity is unreason—contrary to normative structures that rest on the foundations of hierarchical systems and philosophies. Ultimately, they are unreasonable—the insane, the retard—the mentally deformed, as well as the physically monstrous.

It is in this sense that our anatomy of the monstrous and Foucault’s anatomy of madness coalesce in resonance—for both anatomies must reframe history and reason itself to illuminate these unreasonable bodies in a new light. As we depart from the historical dominion of the medieval age, a shift in epistemology, in the hermeneutics of the body occurs. Historical changes in Europe, notably the Reformation at the beginning of the Renaissance, marks this shift from superstition—fear of mutilation from sins of lust, and their monstrous repercussions—to observation, confinement, and treatment. Foucault’s description of these transitory, often forgotten, and disturbing spaces of history charts an anatomical body that reflects in harmonious vibration with our anatomy of the monstrous.

A stark difference separates pre-modern and modern understandings of reason and un-reason, and tracing this shift is important to note. In the modern situation, where mental illness is recognized, “…modern man no longer communicates with the madman,” thus, there is no longer a vernacular or language that is common to both the madman and the sane man:

The constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.

My intention was not to write the history of that language, but rather draw up the archaeology of that silence.[55]

The process of drawing archaeology mirrors that of tracing an anatomy—finding the missing pieces of a hidden structure that has been erased or obscured from a rupture in dialogue, where barely any traces remain intact. Laying out this incomplete historical topography, Foucault begins to draw his archaeology, starting at the end of the Middle Ages when Leprosy began to disappear from the western mainstream. Although for the most part it had been wiped out, leprosy continued to infect those at the margins of society—at the edges of city gates and on the outskirts of communities, a residuum of the disease still remained. The liminal spaces where the infection spread belonged to the people that were refused by society, seen as inhuman and recognized as the contaminated bodies possessed by disease. For centuries these bodies remained here, occupying a marginal position—as monstrous outcasts.

However, from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, these sites, “conjured up a new incantation of evil, another grinning mask of fear, home to the constantly renewed magic of purification and exclusion.”[56] Foucault is referring to the systems of confinement set in place for lepers whose numbers began increasing, their infection spreading inevitably into the centers of society. In France, under Louis VIII, statutes were enacted that began organizing leper houses, whose numbers had rose to more than 2,000. These measures of containment seemed to work, and leprosy slowly disappeared; however, the methods of containment, the status of the liminal being—diseased and monstrous, along with the systems of thought that governed their reasoning as such, remained unchanged.

The role of the leper was to be played by the poor and by the vagrant, by prisoners and by the ‘alienated,’ and the sort of salvation at stake for both parties in this game of exclusion is matter of this study. The forms of this exclusion would continue, in a radically different culture and with a new meaning, but remaining essentially the major form of a rigorous division, at the same time social exclusion and spiritual reintegration.[57]

In this way, we may begin to see the historical anatomy of madness—a monster of unreason—as a social, moral, and spiritual structure of containment and the observation of the outcasts of European society.

Venereal disease eventually took the place of leprosy in the late fifteenth century, when, under Francios I, the disease was treated at several leper hospitals in France. Subsequently, many institutions erected separate confinement areas for those who were infected with venereal diseases. In differentiation from leprosy, venereal diseases became a medical issue earlier, treated exclusively by doctors. Whereas leprosy, on the other hand, was treated in the spiritual, religious sphere. For although lepers, along with the insane and incurably sick, were socially excluded from the community of the “visible church,” their existence still made God manifest as they showed both His anger and His bounty, “in a strange reversal quite opposite to merit and prayers, they are saved by the hand that is not offered.” Furthermore, “the sinner who abandons the leper to his fate thereby opens the door to their salvation…Abandonment is his salvation, and exclusion offers a different form of communion.”[58]

Conversely, in treating venereal diseases, medical treatments such as sweat cures and the use of mercury were implemented. Although venereal disease and its treatment were rooted in a similar position within the moral anatomy at the time—in the same network of moral judgments of exclusion, observation, and horror as was leprosy, “but that horizon brought only minor modifications to the essentially medical apprehension of the disease.”[59]

Some two hundred years later, in the 17^th century, venereal disease had become subject to the domination of total confinement—bracketed from society, “and like a madness entered a space of social and moral exclusion. It is not in venereal disease that the true heir of leprosy should be sought, but in a highly complex phenomenon that medicine would take far longer to appropriate.”[60] The phenomenon Foucault is referring to is madness—a focus on insanity, and how it represents the ultimate monstrosity to reason: unreason.

Almost two centuries passed before the obsession with madness substituted the fear that leprosy evoked among society, causing similar reactions of purification, exclusion, and division. Nonetheless, before madness was contained and under control towards the mid-seventeenth century, literary and artistic motifs began to surface—most symbolically of which was a literary and allegorical vehicle depicted in art and texts: the Ship of Fools. This strange boat was described as filled with every dimension of weird—drunks, the insane, adulterers, thieves, etc. who would wander down the rivers of Europe. Foucault points out that this literary motif was appropriated from the ancient Greek tales of the Argonauts, and had been reinvigorated through an attraction to mythology.

Ships with crews of imaginary heroes, moral examples, common criminals, the deformed, the insane; all who set out on symbolic adventures to find fortune, truth, and destiny, were fashionably common in the literary vocabulary of narratives and images, especially in the humanist tradition of the Renaissance. Sebastian Brant (1457-1521), an Alsatian humanist and satirist, depicted the Ship of Fools famously in Das Narrenschiff, published in 1494, with illustrations engraved by Albrecht Dürer.[61] As a satirical work, Brant is critical of the Church at the time, and allegorically highlights the evils that haunted society.

Though they are rife in images of monsters, demons and fools, this work and others like it are not simply the symbolic representations or moral allegories that explain systems of expulsion—they are based in the actuality of history as a practice of the first half of the fifteenth century, especially in the German states, where madmen were exiled from the city walls and entrusted to the care of river boatmen, who themselves often put difficult passengers ashore earlier than expected. Thus, the arrival (along with departure and subsequent return) in European cities of ships filled with fools, exiles, criminals, and the general dregs of society, was a common occurrence. Following Foucault, “This constant circulation of the insane, the gesture of banishment…was not merely aimed at social utility, or the safety of its citizens. Its meanings were closer to rituals, and their trace is still discernible.”[62] If you were a dock worker living in a European city around this time, you might see a few ships of fools a day and think nothing of it—a sight no more uncommon than the exchange of goods in the European trading economy. Likewise, a captain of a fishing ship pulling into port with a meager catch would surely take up the opportunity to earn some extra money to take some outcasts aboard.

Although the practical dimension of entrusting a madman to the care of boatmen ensured that he could not roam freely around the fringes of the city, and was ensured to be a prisoner of his own exile, there is more to this system than simple practicality—there is a hidden ritualistic element in the riddle of this sea-faring journey:

…water brought its own dark symbolic charge, carrying away, but purifying where each is left to himself and every departure might always be the last. The madman on his crazy boat sets sail for the other world, and it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. This enforced navigation is both rigorous division and absolute Passage, serving to underline in real and imaginary terms the liminal situation of the mad in medieval society. It was a highly symbolic role, made clear by the mental geography involved, where the madman was confined at the gates of the cities. His exclusion was his confinement, and if he had no prison other than the threshold itself he was still detained at this place of passage. In a highly symbolic position he is placed on the inside of the outside, or vice versa. A posture that is still his today, if we admit that what was once the visible fortress of social order is now the castle of our own consciousness…Locked up in the ship from which he could not escape, the madman was handed over to the thousand-armed river, to the sea where all paths cross, and the great uncertainty that surrounds all things. A prisoner in the midst of the ultimate freedom…the prisoner of the passage…he knows not whence he came…Perhaps this ritual lies at the origin of the imaginary kinship common throughout the culture of the West. Or perhaps it was this kinship that for and then fixed the ritual of embarkation whose origins are lost in the mists of civilization.[63]

In this sense of freedom, as prisoner of “absolute Passage” in the open ocean of water, Foucault illuminates a fundamental change in the world of imagery—the multiple meanings of the image freeing it from “rigorous order”—from structures of power along with their rational foundations that have relinquished their dominion. This propagation of manifold meanings that hid beneath the surface of the image allowed for what was visible to become exponentially more enigmatic, constantly under suspicion and scrutiny for its invisible elements. No longer solely instructive and didactic, the image became an object of pure fascination—an elusive passageway to secret, arcane knowledge.[64] Foucault demonstrates this transition in the world of images in tracing the representations of the mythological gryllos, a familiar monstrous figure in the Middle Ages symbolizing the punishment of men who are ruled by their desires, their souls held captive in the body of “the beast… These grotesque faces found on the bellies of monsters belonged to the world of the grand platonic metaphor, denouncing the abasement of the spirit in the madness of sin.”[65] In other words, monsters and other fantastical creatures were always instructional figures, indicating the vices of society and the human character. However, in the 15^th century, referencing the Temptation by Bosch[66], Foucault discovers that,

The hermit’s tranquility is assailed not by objects of desire but by demented forms locked into their own secrets… This nightmarish silhouette is both the subject and the object of the temptation, captivating the hermit’s glance: both of them are prisoners mirroring interrogative process, where response is indefinitely suspended in a silence broken only by the restive growl of the monsters that surround them.[67]

This fascination, the temptation for a glimpse of monstrous unreason, comes from a “secret vocation” of the human imagination. It represents an undeniable attraction to the secret knowledge of unreason to which Foucault locates in the gaze of St. Anthony in Bosch’s Temptation. Cloaked in secrecy by reason, madness unfurls itself and asserts an esoteric wisdom—echoing a conflated, confused composite of real and imagined bodies that exist within our historical anatomy of the monstrous.

In the theological thinking and philosophy of the Middle Ages, the animals that were named by Adam in the Bible possessed symbolic human values; for example, the snake symbolized the evil of Satan. However, Foucault asserts that, beginning in the early Renaissance, this system of symbolization underwent an inversion as a fantastic anatomy of imagery depicting hybridized, monstrous creatures began to emerge. No longer were these imagined creatures subservient to mythological allegory and moral instructions, allowing them to figuratively leap from the parchment and take on a life of their own.[68] The temptation, the gaze, of St. Anthony as depicted by Bosch—in his allure of madness—represents a monstrously fearsome knowledge that the madman already possesses. While the rational system sees only fragmentary, fearsome figures, frightening in their incomplete composition, the madman sees a whole “unbroken sphere” of the world where the fantastic is possible.

The knowledge that madness brings is forbidden, concealed, and fantastical—it predicts the arrival of Satan, The Last Judgment, the apocalypse, ultimate happiness as well as supreme punishment; omnipotence on earth and the fall into hell—an anatomy of the multiple, an anxious collision of contradictions that arrives at the ultimate end.

The Ship of Fools passes through a landscape of delights where all is offered to desire…This false happiness is the diabolical triumph of the Antichrist, the End…In the vaguely fantastical iconography of the fourteenth century, where castles could be knocked down like houses of cards, and the beast was always the traditional dragon that the Virgin could keep at a safe distance, the coming of the kingdom of God was always visible. But the following century brought a vision of the world where knowledge and wisdom were destroyed…This end was neither a passing moment nor a promise, but the coming of a night in which the ancient season of the world finally passed away. The four horsemen of the apocalypse in the Dürer engraving have indeed been sent by God, but they are no angels of Triumph or reconciliation, nor heralds of serene justice; they are bloodthirsty warriors out for mad vengeance.[69]

In this respect, Foucault marks a shift between the mythological understanding of madness as directly connected to divine will—as a punishment from God, and the startling realization that when the hidden delirium of madness emerged, the animal that haunted nightmares had always existed within the nature of human cognition. Dürer’s four horsemen are the harbingers of human wrath, the extermination of reason—eclipsing God and his theologically constructed rationality. “The symbol of madness was to be a mirror, which reflected nothing real, but secretly showed the presumptuous dreams of all who gazed into it to contemplate themselves.”[70] Moving further, madness here is not about the truth or the world, but rather about the human urge to uncover the hidden truth of the self within perception.

It is in this modality of understanding that madness extends out into an entirely moral universe. Evil, understood within humanist perspective of self-knowledge and discovery, becomes a mere fault or flaw in character rather than a punishment or the apocalypse.[71] In the poetry of Brant’s Das Narrenschiff, there is a great amount of description of those on board: misers, liars, drunks, prostitutes, adulterers, those who read scripture incorrectly, and so forth. In creating these literary illustrations, the intention was to display what variety of evils were aboard among each passanger, and to categorize them through narratives according to their diverse sins. This is a process of systematization that measures evil appropriately to each case.

[Quoting Brant in translation from the Latin] (the unholy, the proud, the greedy, the extravagant, the debauched, the voluptuous, the quick-tempered, the gluttonous, the voracious, the envious, the poisoners, the faith-breakers)—in short, every possible irregularity invented by man himself.[72]

Seen in this dimension, “madness is no longer the familiar strangeness of the world, but a spectacle well known to the observer from outside…”[73]—categorized and inscribed by a rationality that ignores its reflection. The multiple anatomy of madness becomes ever more visible: one that is simultaneously constructed from the perspective of a phenomenology—an experience of madness (a secret, hidden knowledge only possessed by the madman and glimpsed at in fragments by the sane)—and one that is a critical experience of that same madness as formulated, categorized, named in literature, visually depicted in artistic representations that accompany it, and treated symptomatically.

On one side of the spectrum is the Ship of Fools, where the mad gradually disintegrate into “landscapes that speak of strange alchemies of knowledge, of the dark menace of bestiality, and the end of time.” On the other side, is the, “ship of fools that is merely there for the instruction of the wise, an exemplary, didactic odyssesy whose purpose is to highlight the faults in the human character.”[74]

Exemplified in the work of Bosch, Brueghel, and Dürer, and explained by Foucault’s exhaustively expansive historical anatomy (which cannot be fully accounted for, since such an analysis of his work necessitates its own, separate project), the phenomenological experience of madness depicts the powerful images of fantasies and dangers, fragments of the subconscious dream world, and the concealed destiny of the world, where madness constitutes a primitive, prophetic force. This imaginative experience is a re-affirmation of the dreamlike and fantastical as constituents of the real—existing within the human character and continually insisting on being represented.

We must draw a parallel here between the monstrousness posed to reason by madness, and the monsters described by Paré in On Monsters and Marvels. To understand the monster, we must reframe history and reason itself so it may reveal the monstrous in a new light. Accordingly, Foucault proves through a reframing of history that madness creates its own, unique form of reason (secret, esoteric knowledge) differentiated from a normative understanding of God’s divine rationality.

In tracing the permutations and perceptions of madness throughout a history of literature, art, and institutional confinement and expulsion, Foucault creates a historical anatomy that imagines the force of madness as a real element of consciousness as well as society, dealt with at the basic, intrinsic levels of cognition, and represented through artistic depiction. In that madness is an element that is located at the very foundations of consciousness, it continually persists in becoming present, never ceasing to express the fantastic and frightening bodies that lie waiting in dreams.

Similarly, Paré’s work also traces a historical anatomy of the monstrous grounded in the study of reproduction, spanning from ancient accounts of monstrous births, medical treatises contemporary with him in the Renaissance, to first-hand accounts of deformed, extraordinarily unique bodies encountered on location as a surgeon. On Monsters and Marvels, in attempting to provide a causal explanation of these fantastic deformities, oscillates between myth and a form of scientific rigor—a pseudo-medical narrative that combines classical antiquity with a Renaissance surgeon’s knowledge, along with Paré’s own outrageous hypotheses developed through solid empirical observation while influenced by common superstition of the times.

Through reading, it is obvious that Paré’s empirical evidence, his treatments and methods, along with his explanations, do not even compare to the kind of science we are accustomed to reading. Some of his chapters are so bizarre that they are barely intelligible without getting accustomed to his loose vernacular.[75] This is because the work is grounded in the system of rationality of its time—intertwined and tied down by superstition and myth—inextricably stuck to its own rational anatomical logic that is grounded in the historical period in which it was created.

That being said, Paré’s attempt to explain and hypothesize the causal relationships that produce monsters through the crafting of a historical anatomy is an important factor in understanding the theoretical movement of the monstrous—an effort that is unique in its displacement of horror as a result of causal explanation for its time. Through both Paré and Foucault’s anatomies which blend history, myth, and observation, we begin to see the possibility of monstrosity as a reasonable proposition, understood in its own terms as an anatomy that has the capacity to stretch beyond unintelligibility, that is intricately connected to human experience, but not a grounded, static rational system of morality. To totally conceptualize the monster as a real, phenomenological, historical, and experiential element of consciousness, we must re-imagine and reconfigure the normative structures that circumscribe reason; we must construct a new reason while dismantling what rational constructs proceeded. Only in this capacity can we arrive at a new anatomy, a new ontology, and a new hermeneutics of epistemology.

To return to the anecdote that began this essay, a dragon may not exist in the sense a dog or cat does, but if that is the case then how do we know that a dragon looks like a dragon? We know that a dragon looks the way it does because of its repeatedly represented forms and interpretations throughout history—we are familiar with its cultural anatomy. Thus, the performance of the monstrous in its multiple representations is the most real thing we have available. The monstrous, like its cousin madness, no matter how ugly or horrifying, insists on presentation, and it is through this insistence on being revealed, that the monstrous becomes a realization of what lies hidden within the human mind—within the deepest recesses of our most foundational animal memory. A realization that is tightly interwoven with the most basic human instincts—food, water, shelter, clothing—bare survival.

Chapter III,

Body, Ruins, Trauma: Remembering the Monstrous

At this point, it becomes apparent that the monstrous comprises many bodies in its anatomy, and that through observations; we recognize that they are the elusive entities residing in our philosophy, literature, art, science, and history—but most importantly, our minds. Implicit in this recognition is the significance of the body, in that our idea of the body, as developed in this project, transcends its normal, ideal meaning as a word, and becomes a framework for further analysis by containing anatomies that are inherently reflexive.

That being said, the previous chapter; along with the other chapters that constitute the entirety of the project itself, presents a similar set of inter-textual analyses composed in the orientation of an anatomy. This orientation, the analytical anatomy, exhibits pure reflexivity—a collision of literature, philosophy, and art, each illuminating different features of the monstrous through continuous reflection. In this way, let us inter-weave ourselves into this chapter—a re-threading that will expose a different, yet interconnected, dimension of the monstrous.

In the first chapter, phenomenology, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the art of Orlan and Stelarc, are merged together for analysis; forming a synthetic, created body; an amalgamated anatomy that conflates life and death, the organic and inorganic elements of lived experience—an anatomy that locates and explains the monstrous, its ideas, and representations, moving through selected sources.

Continuing on this anatomical theme that navigates, reflects, and illuminates features of the monstrous, the second chapter exposes the limits of constructed rational structures of containment written through the theology of Aquinas, and realizes an imperative to address what madness lies outside our created, rational boundaries—leading us to encounters with the unreasonable, yet insistently present monstrous bodies discovered in Renaissance France.

In both cases, these monstrous anatomies are simultaneously created and creating. Framed, made visible, “created,” and traversed through the inter-textual terrain, they also are in a process of creating—forming anatomies that hide a spectrum of bodies, manifold bodies within bodies. Understanding body in this analytical, synthetic sense, as a continually extended anatomy, allows us to move forward into the next dimension of this adventure to expose essential features of the monstrous.

Plunging deep into the abyss of the human mind and the hidden space of memory where the monstrous is located, this dimension uses the destructiveness of trauma within narratives of war as a textually reflective surface—exposing vestiges of the monstrous; it’s residues and monuments. Remembering the importance of the body, these narratives of trauma are to be thought of as bodies too, in that they are simultaneously created and creating, reflecting a multiple anatomy that exposes a tortured landscape littered with the varied relics of the monstrous.

In that any narrative utilizes a language to express itself and all its features, a narrative of the violence of war has its own special language—this is a language of melancholy, a schematic of pain and suffering inseparable from the specter of death, and the object that causes this distinct pain. In Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917), he explains that mourning, as distinct from melancholia, gives identification to what has been lost—it has a language to name what is lost and its significance. Human suffering, as an expression of pain and loss, is attached to a discourse of the language of that suffering—this makes suffering meaningful by giving it name. This movement of naming is what Freud calls cathexis—an energy of emotion, and an attachment of that energy to an object in the psyche as in life. In mourning, an effort is made to reattach cathexis, emotional or psychic force, to the object lost, in an impulse that becomes aware of its need to understand its pain and give name to the lost object.[76]

In this sense, mourning is kept alive through the tombstone—the names of the dead inscribed on what cannot die, and through this, mourning becomes a feature in the landscape of lived experience—a ruin. We retain a certain power over mourning because it is only possible through the use of language, and thus, we can control its meaning and know the lost object it points to. By mourning for another person, we come to learn their story through this distinct language—their personal narrative, someone’s story. This is a process of abstraction by which the listener becomes attached to that personal narrative through an empathic impulse that solicits a sense of meaning, creating a cathectic attachment through language.

Because mourning is only possible through language, it exposes vulnerability in that objects of pain are subject to constant naming and signification, always under the scrutiny of the rational language of loss. This vulnerability, a fragility, is further occasioned by another form of sadness accompanied by mourning—this is melancholia, an emotional phenomenon that is vulnerable in the very fact that it cannot find a language to identify the object that causes pain and suffering.[77]

While we have no language to deal with melancholia, it is precisely this, which causes its pain—its namelessness. To truly understand melancholy, we must go back to what occasioned its existence—this is trauma, the experience of events in the narrative of memory that are so powerfully violent they cannot be remembered fully within the limitations of everyday language. This trauma inherent in narratives of war becomes a psychological language dependant on distance. WWII involved the use of distance between opposing forces—bombing from planes, shelling from far-off artillery positions, mortars fired from siege lines and aimed at buildings within the city. However, the face to face combat experiences of Vietnam veterans speaks to a shifting relationship with trauma, in close proximity to other human bodies, witnessing first-hand their dismemberment and disintegration. Despite the psychological language of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the therapeutics of “you were just following orders”—an attempt to re-cathect through abstraction—melancholia still remains because they have suffered trauma inexplicable in normal language.[78] Accordingly, Freud describes trauma in saying that,

…any excitations from the outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield. It seems to me that the concept of trauma necessarily implies a connection of this kind with a breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli. Such an event as an external trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy and to set in motion every possible defensive measure. At the same time, the pleasure principle is for the moment put out of action. There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead—the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of.[79]

The traumatic occurs when the normative boundaries of psychological experience are transgressed and “flooded” by external stimuli—going outside and beyond an ordinary understanding of suffering as mediated through language. For soldiers fighting in a war, this normal boundary of experience is shattered, and trauma breaks out, forming the transparent envelope of a total psychological reality, completely distinct from the reality they once knew before they became soldiers. During the Vietnam War, soldiers killed children, massacred entire families, and incinerated villages—some of them say they enjoyed it. This is because the psychological space of war creates its own reality, a space where trauma remains unnamed, invisible, forgotten, until after the fact, where soldiers operate beyond the limits of societal morality, where there is no suitable language for description. Trauma becomes visible when the transition between two realities takes place—when the soldier becomes the veteran and is thrust back into the forgotten, unfamiliar reality of civilian life.[80] In this way, the trauma of the veteran, fully distanced from its origin where even there it existed unnoticed, becomes ever more unintelligible as it gets pushed out of context, only becoming more painful in its meaninglessness.

The traumatic memory and the narration of that memory are constitutive of a certain type of literary body—the tortured, fragmented, and ruined body. As an analytical body—an anatomy of the monstrous—it is a series of reflections that are illuminations of multiple bodies in continual states of transposition and transfiguration. In this way, we must begin to conceive of body not only as a singular physical structure, but also as an analytical format through which to understand experience as multiple and de-centered. A house is also a body—comprised of an anatomy structured by synthetic and organic elements—the wood beams that support the roof as well as the people that live inside this building make it what it is and give meaning the name, “house.” Just as ruin is embodied in the bombed house, so do bodies become ruins themselves through the disaster of war.

Lydia Ginzburg’s Blockade Diary, written during the Siege of Leningrad, chronicles a spectrum of mundane to grave events that describe daily life in a form similar to a journal or diary. This piece of text should be examined, for our purposes, as a writing vehicle—a strange, moving literary body that takes us to this space of the monstrous, where the ruin haunts every aspect of reality’s war-torn landscape. Composed as a diary of the disappearance of both the human body and the decay of the artificial structures that surround this body, the text approaches the ruinous landscape of buildings and people with a set of devices that complicate the relationship of the body existing within a space of violence, of war. In an effort to better illustrate the fragmented, melancholic relationships between people and things during the Siege, Ginzburg uses a literary method that attempts to represent an unamable nature of the body amid the landscape of war through the speech and imagery of a few characters.

It’s important to note that the Siege of Leningrad lasted close to 900 days, from September of 1941 to January of 1944—the longest siege in history. Altogether, nearly one million died from artillery shelling, and bombing raids; but most of all, starvation—possibly the most severe bodily affliction. The Germans understood that starvation, “[was] the most powerful underminer of resistance[…]Because hunger is a permanent state, it can’t be switched off…constantly present…”[81] Leningrad was in a precarious position—vulnerable to attack, it was like an unclothed, unshielded body held prisoner by the Germans who encapsulated it from outside and at a distance. This landscape of war, written through Ginzburg’s literary techniques, becomes an anthropomorphic metaphor for a different sort of body that mirrors the human—in a tortured posture, delicate, yet struggling to hold itself together for the purpose of survival.

The continual struggle for sustenance and warmth, to avoid starvation and keep the fire burning, was the primary occupation of all Leningraders during the Siege. This constant struggle on the part of Leningraders was the product of the Nazi war tactic of distance from the enemy, employed strictly and exclusively. The Nazis never invaded Leningrad, they only isolated it from the rest of the world from the outside, conducting their siege from removed positions. From the obscurity of the sky they dropped bombs out of planes; from remote hills in the countryside they fired shells from artillery batteries. Breaking through this barrier of distance structured by the attacker, Ginzburg focuses her attention towards a vague notion of individual—towards a visible interior, rather from a removed, mysterious and ghostly exterior.[82]

Ginzburg’s character, the man, ‘N,’ amid the siege, however, takes on a de-individuality in the sense that the word “man” in Russian has a dual meaning—referring both to the individual and to humanity taken as a whole.[83] This textual device employed by Ginzburg functions as a way to describe a collective experience while still retaining an internal individuality. Using this method, descriptions of an estranged body in multiple senses begins to surface in the text:

A whole series of foul processes is going on inside the alienated body—a degeneration, a drying-out, a swelling up, not like a good old-fashioned illness, because it’s being carried out on a seemingly moribund material. Some of these processes were imperceptible even to the person stricken by them.[84]

This new illness is one that encompasses an alienation of the body—an observation of the other that extends across a multiplicity of bodies and describes this estrangement intrinsic to any occupation—internal or external. Following this, speaking of the gums, “He feels them with his tongue, terrified…then prods them with his finger…He lies with an intense feeling of something hardened and slippery…a layer of non-living tissue in his mouth.”[85] This hard, foreign substance indicates a phenomenon of alienation that occurs in one’s own body—an instance of individual’s body becoming invisible, unfathomable, and foreign. The indescribable pain of discomfort in not recognizing one’s own body and its sensations as belonging to one’s self is an entirely new encounter with a corporeal reality.

Entering into this new area of the alienated body, by winter of 1942, the survivors of the besieged city had no energy to dispose of their dead—they left them shoddily wrapped, partially mummified—a feeble attempt at covering the ghostly ruins of death that suffused the daily life of Leningrad citizens during the siege. In an image that evokes Alexei Ushin’s print of a morgue also from the siege, Ginzburg writes these ghostly, shrouded bodies as, “[…]corpses in the gateways, corpses on sledges, lanky and thin—more like mummies than normal human bodies.”[86] While these mummified bodies are covered over with materials that will obscure them, making them alien and strange, there is also a revealing taking place, a visibility in the process of dying within the living going about the mundane routine of survival.

Everyday, people wake up at the crack of dawn simply because they are hungry—they spend their day moving from one canteen to the next along the precarious streets and ruined buildings, bringing home meager rations to stay alive. Along the way, if an air raid siren goes off, everyone walking on the open street collects in a public bomb shelter hurriedly—inside the guts of a bombed house or office building, they wait until the coast is clear. Death, in the space of the siege, is a constant companion to the survivor, haunting every corner, every wall, anything that could suddenly be blown apart or fall down, leading to someone’s unfortunate demise.

A hostile world was on the offensive and pushing its outposts forward. The closest of these outposts had suddenly turned out to be one’s own body. Now there was a respite, but during the winter it had been a constant source of potential misery—with all its new ribs and angles, especially irksome for those inclined to stoutness and who relied on a milk-and-apples diet […] In the winter, while people were discovering bone after bone, the alienation of the body proceeded, the splitting of the conscious will from the body, as from a manifestation of the hostile world outside. The body was emitting novel sensations, not its own.[87]

The daily routine for the survivor, though it eventually loses its initial horrific shock, becomes automatic and instinctive—the body goes about its business of surviving, while a person’s mind slowly divorces itself from the unthinkable pain of the conditions for that survival. This makes death itself, and its processes of degradation, visible—the absence of coffins or graves makes visible not only the progression of dying, but the figure of death itself—a specter that is normally covered over by societal rituals, invisible to everyday existence.

The human necessity for water is one example of a seemingly mundane daily routine—much like grocery shopping in the normal sense. However, during the siege this everyday need for water became a dance with death—for bodies would need to strain to reach into a deep crevice of a broken water main for their water—a reaching that was a dual implication for either survival or death—falling into one of these crevices could be deadly, but one needed water to stay alive.[88] The dance of death was not exclusive to any one activity—for any endeavor undertaken in the siege was a matter of life and death—at any moment something could kill you. This is why no one did anything except provide for their survival—doing whatever they could to stay alive.

The frightening human process of dying is mirrored in the besieged urban landscape of Leningrad. The wounded buildings reflect a visible body’s reaction towards the destruction of war—a reaction that silently utters monstrousness in the pronouncement of lack, absence, and disfigurement. In this way, as the buildings burned and crumbled, an organic conception of pain is transfigured into the inanimate object. Ginzburg illustrates this movement by introducing the concept of the house, and the entire system of the city, as, “[…]apprehended synthetically”—

A new attitude to houses developed. Each house was now a defence and a threat. People used to count the storeys, and it was a double calculation—how many storeys would fall on them….Houses began to be regarded analytically. They were divided into vaults, ceilings, stairwells—that had a specially grisly sound…Which would be better if anything happened—to lean against right wall here or the left? Sometimes people would try and imagine the unimaginable: suppose these projections and steps, suspended aloft, actually were to collapse in an instant and fall on your head or your chest. The stairwell crushing the ribcage…Ribcage—that too was special and shivery […] [The city] is no longer a series of instantaneous combinations of streets, houses, and buses. The city is a synthetic reality. It is the city which struggles, suffers, repulses the killers. We perceive the city now as if from an aeroplane, as if on a map. It is an objective whole delimited by a visible border.[89]

Much like human narrative in its effort to express the traumatic memory of living in such close proximity to death, the ruin—the bombed out house, the crumbling apartment building—also evokes a narrative that articulates an inaudible cry of pain and disfigurement in its struggle to survive. In understanding the city as a synthetic reality, its structural system becomes a sort of living organism through a mutation of space, a shifting perspective—from up above, as “a map.” The besieged urban landscape takes on a bodily physicality—a sort of monster in the Frankensteinian sense—an empathic object that has taken on the features of subjectivity. This suffering of the building, the transformation inherent in ruination, is a mutation—through this change of spatial and physical perspective the ruin becomes monstrous and unknown through its subjugation.

Ginzburg portrays the evidence of this mutation by explaining that the urban landscape, “…took on new qualities…Sometimes, crossing a bridge meant entering a zone of altered possibilities…The city’s rivers had become a military fact…The rivers divided the regions with their special characteristics…the city had begun to sprout unusual details.”[90] Thus, the city becomes a mutated, organic entity—it’s former functions subsumed by new arrangements and growths, subsequently creating an altered space of traumatic reality.

Besieged from great distance, unable to see its attacker, Leningrad takes on a life of its own—extended, enhanced, and evolved by the prostheses of war—supply bridges, anti-aircraft batteries, and the machinery of war. Simultaneous with this evolution of the siege city—its reaching out with defensive weapons—there is also a movement inwards, exposing a landscape of dismantled houses, wounded buildings; and finally, the absolute internal description of the human body whose existence depends solely on finding a way to survive.

Blockade Diary presents the complicated notion of two bodily manifestations—the body as ruin, and the ruin as a body itself. The intricate blending of narratives within the text interweaves these two conceptions of body together, mutating into a melodrama of ruin. This melodrama is predicated on ambivalence between life and death—an unpredictability that saturates both the consciousness of Leningrad’s citizens as well as the buildings and artifices that are under the subjection of the siege. The ambivalence, this in-between-ness of life and death, is in turn structured by an elusive architecture of horror, disgust, and disfigurement—evoking the imagery of something ghostly and unintelligible.

What we are left with is a drastically changed, mutated, “synthetic,” perception of reality—of something neither dead nor alive, a specter that haunts the memory, forever clinging to this ambivalence between life and death, organic and inorganic—constituting the ruin. What we are left lacking from Blockade Diary, however, is a language to describe the emotional landscape of trauma. Built upon methods of description and analysis, Ginzburg leaves an empty, silent space of ruins that swallows meaning and creates an impossibility of intelligible testimony.

This fissure, at the limits of intelligibility appears because the traumatic memory of the experience itself in the survivor is split from the actual narrative given, in that the disaster lies outside of common experience, structured by language. Personality and subjectivity become separated in the concept of traumatic memory—the schismatic nature of testimony indicating a gap between the sufferer of trauma and the language used as a survivor who stands outside the disaster in order to narrate it.

Meaning, along with its structural categorizations, are connected to theories of language; however, trauma violently disrupts these structures of meaning, causing language to rupture, forming a fragmentation of language that occurs between the traumatized self and the self after the experience of trauma. Occurring in one subject, this rupture constitutes a disassociation; breaking all forms of signification that lies within the linguistic infrastructure.

Through the narrative of trauma, as distinctly broken off from the traumatic experience and the memory of it, significations that elude naming begin to appear. These un-namable, silenced significations contained within testimonies of survivors take on the figure of the ruin, too—murmuring a cry that indicates both the ghostly absence of representation and the constant persistence to represent the unrepresented.

Beginning to explore the figure of the ruin, a monstrous amalgamation of different bodies, as a fragmentary landscape, extends before us. We have traveled through the ruins of the besieged city, a mutated body in a posture of defense as well as vulnerability. There is another reflection of this dimension that plunges ever deeper into the narrative of traumatic memory, taking us into an internalized landscape where trauma echoes what Maurice Blanchot, in The Writing of the Disaster, calls the “silent cry” of testimony that is also depicted in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary on the Holocaust, Shoah. These two sources further illuminate a space of the monstrous that lies hidden, secreting what is not supposed to be visible.

Blanchot’s text evokes the space of this impassable line, or gap, as what lies in between what can be known and what is unknowable through his process of “fragmentary writing.” This method of writing forms a way to comprehend the silence that lies in between the subjective narrative of disaster and the traumatic memory of it—that which disassociates from the infrastructures of language and meaning. Empathy—to feel from the “inside” does not recognize this fragmentation, this gap, that disassociation plays at the limits of. Within this, Blanchot broaches the issue of what it means to write and the nature of writing about the disaster of the holocaust as, “The unknown name, alien to naming:”

The holocaust, the absolute event of history—which is a date in history—that utter-burn where all history took fire, where the movement of Meaning was swallowed up, where the gift, which knows nothing of forgiving or of consent, shattered without giving place to anything that can be affirmed, that can be denied—gift of very passivity, gift of what cannot be given. How can it be preserved, even by thought? How can thought be made the keeper of the holocaust where all was lost, including guardian thought? In the mortal intensity, the fleeing silence of the countless cry.[91]

The disaster as “alien to naming” consists of something more than unnamable in that it lies outside the capacity to identify, not an object beheld by the intellect or senses—an unintelligibility; a silence that cannot bear to be remembered—the immemorial. Claude Lanzmann begins his over ten hour long documentary, Shoah, with an Old Testament passage from Isiah—“I will give them an everlasting name,”[92] indicating that this name, although unidentifiable and unspecified, is linked to memory in that it is a continuing, spectral utterance of an elusive narrative—much like a ruin that continues to occupy a spacio-temporal position while maintaining a certain silence, while crying out towards memory.

As Blanchot writes “holocaust,” lacking the capital “H,” he is referring to an absolute history—occasioned by processes of dating and numbering—that have been destroyed. This burnt offering, a constituent of disaster, indicates a loss of intelligibility—a “gift of what cannot be given.” Implicit in this is the question of how thought and writing can preserve meaning when meaning itself has been subsumed under the flames of disaster. For thought and writing to be dedicated to the disaster that has swallowed up meaning, Blanchot must rethink the very meaning of thought and writing in a post-structural method.

The disaster of the holocaust, in this sense, is immemorial—that which escapes the normative narrative of memory and evokes the concept of death:

Human weakness, which even affliction does not divulge, penetrates us on account of our belonging at every instant to the immemorial past of our death—on account of our being indestructible because always and infinitely destroyed.[93]

This idea of “human weakness” connects to the concept, or figure, of the totem—that which gives a name and is an edifice to represent a grouping of humanity. In Blanchot’s case, within fragmentary writing, the structure of the totem comes to represent the paradoxical nature of the memory of death and how we come to terms with it as a memory that lies outside itself—immemorialized—a totem that stands amid the ruins, refusing to collapse as it remains in alienation among the masses of humanity.

The ruins of human civilization, remnants of war and genocide, are a silent proclamation that point back towards a swallowing up of meaning. The figure of the ruins, a totem in its utterance that escapes comprehension, is a connection to the testimonies contained in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah—narratives that are only the vestiges of immemorial experience that have swallowed up all meaning.

This is apparent in the scene when Filip Müller, a Jew made to run the gas chamber (Sonderkomando), is interviewed, explaining that when he began singing the Czech anthem and Hatikvah with compatriots whom he readied for annihilation, he realized that his life had lost all meaning—“That was happening to my countrymen,” he says, “and I realized that my life had become meaningless. Why go on living? For what?”[94] When Müller’s life loses meaning, he resolves to die—the unintelligibility, the immemorial of trauma, completely silenced his will to survive. However, he was convinced to live by those doomed people he put inside the gas chamber: “One of them said: ‘So you want to die. But that’s senseless. Your death won’t give us back our lives. That’s no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering, and to the injustice done to us.”[95] In this sense, in his being called to survive, Müller becomes a ruin—a figure that must necessarily remain for the purpose of narrating the immemorial from the outside, after the disaster.

The silent cry, echoing a loss of intelligibility in remaining alive, becomes a complicated issue in Blanchot’s The Writing of Disaster, taking up a paradoxical position in the sense that silence is a word that contains an inherent duality. The silent cry in the decision to survive is indicative of the inaudible voice of ruination:

Silence is perhaps a word, a paradoxical word, the silence of the word silence, yet sure we feel that it is linked to the cry, the voiceless cry, which breaks with all utterances, which is addressed to no one and which no one receives, the cry that lapses and decries. Like writing…the cry tends to exceed all language, even if it lends itself to recuperation as language effect. It is both sudden and patient; it has the suddenness of the interminable torment which is always over already. The patience of the cry: it does not simply come to a halt, reduced to nonsense, yet it does remain outside of sense—a meaning infinitely suspended, decried, decipherable-indecipherable.[96]

Blanchot’s fragmentary writing is a post-modern motif—silence as a word that is supposed to erase itself. “The cry” of pain that is both loud and silent ruptures from the utterance in that its not communicating a specifiable message—it is undirected. This forms a lapse between what we hear and the silence of the cry. It is haunting because of its unintelligibility, evoking the incommunicable pain of trauma that lies outside of language—all the while it refuses to collapse, to let up. Mirroring the ruins of Auschwitz and the other concentration camps depicted in Lanzmann’s Shoah, this silent cry is marked by an absence of meaning yet still remains standing—silently crying out to the immemorial.

One of the primary aims of Shoah is to break the viewer’s conception of “normal”—the normative discourse structured by an everyday language of narrative. This breaking of the normative especially surfaces in Lanzmann’s interviews with Nazis. The only way to achieve this fragmentation from the normative is through a dynamic movement of presenting these Nazis as normal people engaged in a seemingly normal dialogue with the interviewer, who is Lanzmann himself, constantly smoking a cigarette on screen. These interviews are filmed secretly in the interviewee’s apartment—we know because Lanzmann shows us his crew watching the interview take place on monitors in a van parked discretely outside. This way, the Nazi being interviewed experiences a sort of comfort in the steady elaboration that spans from the day-to-day routine to an explanation of his job at the concentration camp.

Slowly emerging from this conversation, much like the concept of silence that Blanchot iterates, is a subtle sense of evil, of the monstrous as the interview goes on. Lanzmann initiates the conversation with the SS Franz Suchomel, the secret interview, by asking him, “How’s your heart? Is everything in order?” To which Suchomel replies, “Oh, my heart—for the moment, it’s all right…The weather today suits me fine. The barometric pressure is high; that’s good for me.”[97] This normal conversation is initiated with the normal features of everyday dialogue, but subtly, as Suchomel begins to elaborate in being questioned about the events Lanzmann directs him towards, a sense of evil begins to float towards the surface.

Slowly but surely, Suchomel’s narrative drifts past the triviality of the weather and moves toward a scientific explanation of the mechanics of death he participated in—explaining the ghetto and the process of moving its inhabitants to where they would be annihilated. Fragments of monstrous evil surface more as he describes his arrival at Treblinka, narrating, “So Stadie, the sarge, showed us the camp from end to end. Just as we went by, they were opening the gas-chamber doors, and people fell out like potatoes.”[98] These fragments of evil that continually surface, swinging from visible to invisible, can be conceived of as reflections of the sprectral figure of the ruin that refuses to completely disappear. The disaster is located outside, as Blanchot tells us—it only enters in the little slips of speech of Nazis, in their secret interviews—fragmentarily, as if ghostly.

Fragmentary writing, as opposed to cinematic writing, deconstructs the system of the latter to form a rupture—a fragment. This functions to preserve the outside—which the disaster is, in itself, a process of fragmentation:

The fragmentary imperative signals to the System which it dismisses…and also ceaselessly invokes, just as the other term in an alternative cannot altogether ignore to the first term which it requires in order to substitute itself. The correct criticism of the System does not consist…in finding fault with it, or interpreting it insufficiently…but rather in rendering it invincible, invulnerable to criticism…inevitable. Then, since nothing escapes it because of its…unity…there remains no place for fragmentary writing unless it come into focus as the impossible necessary: as that which is written in the time outside unity by, precisely, not breaking it, but by leaving it aside without this abandon’s ever being able to be known…[F]ragmentary writing does not belong to the One…it denounces thought as experience…no less than thought as the realization of the whole.[99]

This double movement of preservation and destruction in forming the fragmentation is apparent in Lanzmann’s interview with Abraham Bomba, a Jewish barber who was ordered by the Nazis to cut the hair of Jews before they were sent to their deaths. Taking place in the barbershop, Lanzmann urges him to move outside in his description, away from normal language, to elaborate on his proximity to death and express the immemorial despite its horror. Bomba tries to answer Lanzmann, making a reach here: “[…] when his wife and his sister came into the gas chamber…” but then falters, saying, “I can’t. It’s too horrible. Please.” Lanzmann pushes him, “We have to do it. You know it.”

“I won’t be able to do it […],” Bomba protests again, “Don’t make me go on please.” Eventually, Lanzmann convinces him to finish the story, a description of how, “They could not tell them this was the last time they stay alive, because behind them was the German Nazis […] they knew they would never see them again.”[100] By urging him to move outside in the elaboration of fragmentation, Lanzmann initiates a movement that necessitates Bomba’s responsibility to his own memory, manifested in this silent cry of “I can’t,”—and moving towards the fragmentary narrative of the immemorial; the figure of the ruin.

Like the concept of evil aforementioned, Shoah portrays this concept of evil as an embodied, silent element that allows the holocaust to happened while transcending language. Similarly, Blanchot constantly reminds us that the disaster is beyond naming—moving away and outside of something systematic and into the disaster itself.

A rupture of the system and entry into fragmentation constitutes the ruin—the silent voice that speaks the disaster by being empty—no longer utilized for its intended function. This space of ruin, as a form that negates itself, is the location where meaning has been swallowed up and silenced.

Blanchot begins his book with the sentence, “The disaster ruins everything all the while leaving everything intact.”[101] Buildings, gravestones, Auschwitz—the ruins of the death camp as depicted in Shoah—they all emanate this silent cry that figures so prominently in Blanchot’s text. In many ways, Shoah, as a film, represents a ruin in itself in that the ruinous-ness of what we see and hear constitutes a theme, a part of the language of the film as well as the language of the survivor. Blanchot’s “everything” is of great importance in that as the disaster ruins everything for everyone—meaning, representation, etc.—it simultaneously leaves “everything intact.” This is a call to remember the immemorial, to re-write, to re-invent writing and thought itself. The paradox of life moving on while everything is ruined moves us into a different space—an exterior that is impossible to reach but simultaneously affects “me.” In this way, there can be no particularity in how the disaster impacts us—you do not have to be a survivor to understand the disaster. As viewers and readers, the disaster is affective, in that the ruin with its silent cry produces the mood of melancholy. This affect is what connects us all to the disaster, as we strive to comprehend what silent cry of ruin murmurs.

In several respects, the language of Blanchot’s fragmentary writing becomes a way to assess, understand, and read Lanzmann’s Shoah: “It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.”[102] This, moving hand in hand with Blanchot, is what Lanzmann asks of us as viewers—that we recognize silence not as a refusal to speak, but indicating where and when words break apart from the disaster, after saying as much as possible. It’s clear that Lanzmann is obsessed with the factual data of the disaster; however, it is not his purpose for us, the viewers, to attempt to understand these facts. On the contrary, Lanzmann’s aim is an ascension of these facts—to glimpse and listen to what lies beyond them: the silence of ruins, the fragmentary narrative, and the reflection of extermination that will continually cry out in the voice of the immemorial. In this way, the disaster eternally speaks in us through the voice of silent cry that is echoed in the ruins of immemorial testimony.

We have come to see that remembering, especially when it comes to the traumatic memory, is a complicated and delicate terrain—littered with fissures and cracks that echo the ruin—a haunting loss. This loss is exemplified in memorials of all sorts, but more pointedly, war memorials. Besides the shiny exterior, the bold display of names, or the grand architecture, there is another, more monstrous, side of the memorial that always accompanies its narrative of memory—forgetting. This other side necessitates a dismantling of the edifice of memory itself that lies behind the actual memorial—exposing what has been left out of the objects narratological body.

In Jean-Françios Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews,” an ethics of forgetting—in regards to the Holocaust and how one represents it artistically—brings the Heideggerian notion of “deconstruction” into a wider critical discussion. Any memorial stands out alone—differentiated from history, however; the memorial also possesses its own history—a memorial history. Implicit in this is the double meaning of the French word for “history”—a combination of “story” and “history” that implies a direct connection to memory.[103] How one remembers the event of the Holocaust through art, poetry, film, fiction, etc. is a correlation between history and memory that creates and carries narrative. In “memorial history,” history becomes subordinate to memory. In this way, any memorial has a historical significance that entails a forgetting. This is because it is an intensely selected narration of memory. The selective memory of memorials (e.g. funeral, or monument) is part of an ethics of forgetting—it is justified in some ways, but not in others. Like Blanchot, who theorized on how to write the monstrous disaster through fragmentation, Lyotard’s ethics of forgetting theorizes a way to understand and judge the possibility for creating artistic representations that stem from the disaster inherent in Holocaust experience, working as another textual mirror through which to enter into the monstrous space of the ruin that Shoah approaches.

In Lanzmann’s secret interview with former SS officer Suchomel, he makes a memorial of the perpetrator. Making Suchomel forget certain while inducing his memory at the same time, Lanzmann subtly pushes him to forget the personal and remember objective facts of the extermination. While interviewing Abraham Bomba in the barbershop, Lanzmann asks him to forget the normal language for the narration of his personal experience and obligates him to continue speaking on the horror he does not know how to speak. This movement is part of making a memorial scene. As viewers, thinking what he thinks, we must forget Abraham Bomba of the present, within a therapeutic dimension, and remember the memorial of his narrative.[104]

The memorial is, therefore, an aesthetic instrument. Within Lyotard’s ethics of forgetting, however, we must look at memorials with suspicion for they require a forgetting to function as an edification of the community. There is a certain awkwardness, the strange secretion that surfaces when something gets revealed, exposed, or suddenly heard—this is a moment when the forgotten is realized and given voice.[105] A revealing becomes perceptible when the memory of trauma is un-silenced and given voice. All memorials utilize different strategies to harness a remembering of some sort and also a certain forgetting: “…as far as forgetting is concerned, this memory of the memorial is intensely selective; it requires the forgetting of that which may question the community and its legitimacy.” [106] For example, the Vietnam War memorial in Washington D.C. isolates the singularity of each who died, drawing us away from community and causing us to question ourselves within the community itself. Remembering the singular requires a forgetting—putting the legitimacy of community at stake in the process of both remembering and forgetting.

The memorial of the disaster, as a representation of trauma, involves a certain sublation—Lyotard’s translation of Hegel’s term after a dialectical resolution:

As re-presentation it is necessarily a sublation (re-léve), an elevation…that enthralls and removes. We might say in today’s idiom: an elevation that wraps up (emballe) in both senses of the word: every politicization implies this getting all wrapped up in something…that is also a being wrapped up, packaged, this elevation that is an enthrallment and a removal.[107]

This motion of “lifting up,” of elevation or levitation, that doubly enthralls and removes, implies a packaging (a “wrapping up”) of memories that are simultaneously representational and removed from memory. Thus, the principle of any representation is a fundamental removal; a levitation that exposes what has been forgotten. Temporalization allows for the memorial to be lifted out of the event itself—capturing and protecting it. This illustrates a relationship between conventional narrative and the traumatic memorial—a “flooding.” Narrative testimony controls this flood by undoing social bonds:

…temporalization implied in memorial history is itself a protective shield…That is its ‘political function’, its function of forgetting. One expends…to minimize and control absolute expenditure, the threat of liquification (the flood), the undoing of the social bond. This desire to remember, to come to oneself from below, is inhabited by the desire to reach oneself from above.[108]

These concepts of “below” and “above” are devices that elevate or subsume features of an event for the purpose of their memorialization. This is an “ek-static” movement that stands outside of history, homogeneous through the self, and constitutes a simultaneous forgetting and remembering. However. “This politics forgets the heterogeneous, which is not only heterogeneous to the Self but heterogeneous to itself, foreign to this sort of temporality.”[109] As homogeneity forgets the heterogeneous of the Self, the testimony of the survivor re-establishes the social bond between listener and narrator in a way that is

familiar yet disturbingly alien. Exposing the difference between the story and the experience of trauma, the homogeneous controls the flood of narrative. Memorials, as problematic and complex edifices of societal architecture, function at a homogenous level while forgetting the heterogeneous. Reading into the ethics of forgetting, the ethical memorial must be both—a fragmentary movement, like Blanchot’s fragmentary writing, that is homogeneous yet also heterogeneous—unable to be wrapped up in one or the other. This fragmentation constitutes the immemorial; that which eludes both the homogeneous element of common language and the heterogeneous feature of subjectivity that escapes common language.

Lanzmann’s Shoah presents a homogenous narrative where the heterogeneous is elusively apparent. The otherness of heterogeneity, of an alien subjectivity, hantingly finds its way into the narrative structure and allows the film to function as a unique memorial. The classic idea of history, subject to a forgetfulness in its claims to be something real, presents a problem:

…[T]he ‘this is how it was’ is impossible at least in the same sense as the ‘this is how it is’ is impossible that one attributes to scientific knowledge and which is nothing but the doing of scientism. The question here is that of the referent. The referent is not the ‘reality’…[it] is invoked there through the play of monstration, of naming and of signification, as proof…[110]

Within the referent of storytelling, it is hard to remember that there is a language for pain that is forgotten by the scientism of history. The threat of homogeneity pulls one closer towards identification—towards a location that is impossible to locate within the memory and narrative of traumatic experience. The narrator produces a referent by making decisions a priori in a discourse about any event. Both fictive and non-fictive elements create a sense of reality within a historical narrative, and this implies a simultaneous forgetting and remembering that stands against the elusive memory of trauma itself.

The paradox of the immemorial is shock’s “affect,” a term that Lyotard borrows from Freud to explain the feeling of trauma—a feeling or mood that is not conceptualized by Lyotard in the conventional sense: “It is thus a shock, since it ‘affects’ a system, but a shock of which the shocked is unaware, and which the apparatus (the mind) cannot register with[…]its internal physics; a shock by which it is not affected.” [111] Trauma, characterized as a fundamental point of heterogeneous difference, illustrates that shock is not fully realized by the one who experiences it. This shock is unaware—its “affect” lies outside the physics of mid because trauma refuses to be registered in the physical sense:

…[T]he silence surrounding the ‘unconscious affect’ does not affect the pragmatic realm…it affects the physics of the speaker. It is not that the latter cannot make himself understood; he himself does not hear anything. We are confronted with a silence that does not make itself heard as silence.[112]

In this way, the concept of the outside, of something that is silent, as constitutive of the trauma of disaster, affects the system in a different way—separate from merely suppressions or repressions of memory. We, as listeners, are never part of the immemorial—this is where an invisible line is drawn—for we have no ability to assimilate this information within the logic of our own psyches. Thus, we are distanced from the survivor and their testimony. Trauma as narrative, a “monstration”[113] of some sort, demonstrates the difference between what the survivor tells us and ho the blow or shock of “affect” becomes a severed element of that narrative.

Through a special attentiveness to narrative testimony, we may approach this invisible line through emotions that attempt to unify the heterogeneous realm with the homogeneous. Sadness is one of these emotions that bring us closer to the line—a magnetic empathy which points towards a re-integration of listener and speaker. This emotion of sadness is elusive to language, but never completely forgotten—“Its ‘excess’ (of quantity, of intensity) exceeds the excess that gives rise (presence, place, and time) to the unconscious and preconscious. It is ‘in excess’ like air and earth are in excess for the life of a fish.”[114] This excess, which lies within the traumatic experience, is excess that exceeds to mean death. The traumatic blow as un-witnessed by the survivor speaks to the fact that the Nazis intended to create a catastrophe void of witnesses. In this respect, the trauma of the disaster is that it creates a monstrous event without witnesses—a space where one is unable to witness one’s own pain.

How can we save and memorialize the crime to which there are no witnesses? Art attempts to answer this question by capturing a trace or residuum of witnessing that gets left behind and is hidden. This constitutes the discovery of a silence that must be made heard—presenced, performed through a movement of re-presenting what has been subsumed by flames.

Without the subject’s ability to recognize the blow or shock of trauma, art, allows for us to glimpse fleetingly at the traumatic blow as a symptomatic element—an “…unsettling strangeness, which ‘from the exterior,’ lies in reserve in the interior, hidden away from where it can on occasion depart to return from the outside to assail the mind as if it were issued not from it but from the incidental situation.”[115] In the case of Lanzmann’s Shoah, when the symptom is bold, you, the viewer, also become a witness to trauma through the very act of witnessing. The symptom, in its unequivocal nature, brings us closer to the survivor.

The question of art in the space of disaster is one of symptomatolgy, then. Rather than a direct question of remembering, it is an indirect dialectic. Shoah is about memory, but the disaster does not pass through it, it is not localizable within memory. Rather, the disaster and trauma that connect to each other through narrative become symptoms of this “unsettling strangeness” that is all the more uncomfortable because of its familiarity. The symptoms of the memorial and immemorial are the criterion for judging within an ethics of forgetting theorized by Lyotard. For example, in Anne Frank’s memoir, her narrative cuts off where the disaster begins—when she is found by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp. This cut-off point indicates that gap between the familiar and the outside or heterogeneous nature of the disaster. In that the trauma of the Holocaust erases the origin of that trauma, it also leaves traces of the “affect.”[116] Tracing and rendering this residuum, mapping what has been forgotten, listening closely to what has been silenced, constitutes a responsibility in the symptomatology of witnessing and creating art of the disaster.

The word of art that attempts to represent the unrepresentable nature of the Holocaust is a matter of necessity—a condition for representation of the disaster that is necessary despite its impossibilities. The work of art must show the separation between the shock of trauma and the pain of memory. In that this shock is not a part of the physics of mind—lying outside the logic of normal memory and language—it is a forgotten silence that must be made audible somehow. Access to the forgotten is achieved through a symptomatology—a reading of the absent elements of representation. Because the work of art can never make the disaster fully present, it must make an attempt to represent it despite the paradoxical impossibility within memory.

The necessity for this art stems from the shock and trauma of the disaster that produces no witnesses, and thus, no essential meaning. To struggle against the success of the Nazis to produce extermination with no witnesses means an employment of the necessity in attempting to represent and remember our responsibility to witness a failure of witnessing—to witness what has been forgotten and silenced. “What art can do is bear witness not to the sublime, but to this aporia of art and to its pain. It does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it.”[117] This “aporia,” an unspeakable pair of statements of pain, is indicative that the survivor’s pain is divorced from its origin. The traumatized self and one’s shock are mutually implicated, but do not intersect.

Lyotard’s second sentence in the last passage iterates that the task of the work of art is to harbor a responsibility to make the best effort possible to say the unsayable. Referencing Adorno, of the post-War Frankfurt School of philosophers and social theorists, Lyotard continues: “In the world where ‘everything is possible,’ where ‘nothing poses a problem,’ where ‘anything can be arranged,’ writing that declares the impossible and exposes itself to it also remains possible.”[118] In a world where anything can be arranged, “writing that declares” along with all artistic endeavors that do the same, are possible but must never be typically arranged—it must be a new kind of art altogether. As Blanchot’s fragmentary writing exposes limits, boundaries, and the cracks in between them that become problems of representation, it is an example of this new, radical art.

Lyotard maintains that this new form of art cannot be for mass consumption if it will be effective. It must interrupt this deafening “bustling” of mass culture with a silence that is made audible.

Art and writing can make this silence heard, in the noise and by means of it; they can make this noise, the multiplication, and neutralization of words, because it is already a silence, attest to the other silence, the inaudible one.[119]

The unheard and forgotten heard by way of art and writing as an attempt to represent the unrepresentable produces some kind of symptom—an “…’archaic’ anxiety, and one that is precisely resistant to the formation of representations.”[120] This “archaic anxiety,” resistant to any form of representation, does not take on a fully developed form or frame.

The broken frame is also symptomatic—like Lanzmann’s moving camera, panning over the forgotten, fragmented ruins of concentration camps while the voice of the survivor carries us closer to the boundary between memory and the immemorial. The frame, like a body, takes on both figurative and literal characteristics—it transmits the illusion of cohesiveness in memory while breaking open the frame in which we view that cohesiveness.

Taking from Shoah’s example, this radical and new form of art must have an anxios psyche—broken and transmitting an archaic anxiety. The risk of these artistic representations lies in whether the work of art itself is broken. By translating these works of art for mass culture consumption, the essential power of its broken anxiety is confiscated, homogenized, and forgotten—it becomes a meaningless and unbroken piece of entertainment with no referent to the voice of silence that must be made heard somehow.

Making historical and scientific sense in representing the Holocaust for mass consumption obliterates the trauma of the disaster—forgetting it. This is how fiction functions within the causal narrative of history. The necessity of representation in the art of the disaster is to fundamentally dismantle itself—saying that cannot say what it wants to say, it speaks of a forgotten silence. Lyotard refers to Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History as a way to conceptualize the work of art that comes from the disaster. This reference is Biblical—Jacob, in his wrestling with an angel, resists in the angel’s command to become a prophet; figuratively, resisting history itself. Jacob’s confrontation with the violence of the divine, the violence of history, leaves him with a broken leg—a limp. Needless to say, he is still a prophet—although one with a limp—who cannot escape a bodily engagement with history and memory. This wound to the leg makes it difficult for Jacob to stand, and frames his power as fragmented—broken and anxious. The archaic Biblical story and its figures serve as an example for the new work of art and plays into Lyotard’s ethics of forgetting—that the work of art must be broken, fragmented, and anxious for it to uncover what has been forgotten; to utter silences that must be heard—it emerges from the disaster with a limp.[121]

Conclusion

What I’ve tried to do in these chapters is to trace an anatomy made up of multiple anatomies—bodies cut open, observed—bodies of text that conflate the dead human body and the living body—histories that together form anatomies and contain other bodies observed through narrative—bombed-out houses that are bodies—the bodies inside those houses who base their survival on the body of their houses—cities that are bodies, that grow unusual anatomical features—the bodies that navigate those unusual and horrible features—the bodies of those who survived an event with no witnesses—the bodies of their testimonies—all of these things reflect through an intersubjective lens rooted in experience and human consciousness, and their reflections are endless, timeless, never ceasing in their monstrousness. What I’ve done is illuminated three dimensions of the monstrous. Each illumination, each dimension is accompanied by several reflections—texts and images that add to this anatomy of the monstrous by reflecting off each other.

These series of illuminations, along with their reflections, create inverse tautologies: the body as a ruin, the ruin as a body—the creator as created, the created as creator. I think this is the natural product of this project, that the idea of the monster, even going straight back to its etymological roots, is the essentially human projection of fear, misunderstanding, and the uncanny that embodies itself in everyday life and language, constantly being represented throughout all means of expression. The point that this project raises is that the monster is a projection of the most original human consciousness, a reflection of real human life—a residue of memory unable to recall, ruins that stand although they can’t be recognized.

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[1] Oxford American English Dictionary (Digital version). Entry for “Genealogy.” Accessed 4/16/10

[2] Bulfinch’s Mythology: The Age of Fable, or Stories of God’s and Heroes, by Thomas Bulfinch, 1855. Chapter XV. “Perseus and Medusa.” http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/bulf/bulf14.htm. Accessed 3/28/10.

Perseus was the son of Jupiter and Danae. His grandfather Acrisius, alarmed by an oracle which had told him that his daughter's child would be the instrument of his death, caused the mother and child to be shut up in a chest and set adrift on the sea. The chest floated towards Seriphus, where it was found by a fisherman who conveyed the mother and infant to Polydectes, the king of the country, by whom they were treated with kindness. When Perseus was grown up Polydectes sent him to attempt the conquest of Medusa, a terrible monster who had laid waste the country. She was once a beautiful maiden whose hair was her chief glory but as she dared to vie in beauty with Minerva, the goddess deprived her of her charms and changed her beautiful ringlets into hissing serpents. She became a cruel monster of so frightful an aspect that no living thing could behold her without being turned into stone. All around the cavern where she dwelt might be seen the stony figures of men and animals which had chanced to catch a glimpse of her and had been petrified with the sight. Perseus, favoured by Minerva and Mercury, the former of whom lent him her shield and the latter his winged shoes, approached Medusa while she slept and taking care not to look directly at her, but guided by her image reflected in the bright shield which he bore, he cut off her head and gave it to Minerva, who fixed it in the middle of her Aegis.”

[3] Oxford English Dictionary. Entry for “Monster.” Online edition.

[4] Husserl, Edmund. “Introduction.” Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (First Book). Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague; Martinus Nijohoff, 1982. p. xvii.

[5] Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology (1953), Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York; HarperCollins, 1977. pp. 325-326.

[6] Ibid. p. 313.

[7] Op. Cit. p. 314.

[8] Ibid. p. 317.

[9] Op. Cit. p. 318.

[10] Op. Cit. p. 321.

[11] Ibid. p. 324.

[12] Op. Cit. p. 329.

[13] Ibid. p. 332.

[14] Ibid. p. 336.

[15] Op. Cit. p. 338.

[16] Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). New York; Bantam Dell, 2003. pp. 37-38.

[17] Op. Cit. p. 43.

[18] Op. Cit. p. 44.

[19] Op. Cit. pp. 101-102.

[20] Cf. Aristotle. On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath. Trans. W.S. Hett. London: Loeb Classical Library, 1957.

[21] “Rhizome” is defined as a continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots at intervals. Compare with “Bulb,” “Corm.” Oxford American

English Dictionary, online edition.

[22] Poster, Mark. “High-Tech Frankenstein, or Heidegger Meets Stelarc.” The Cyborg Experiments: The Extension of the Body in the Media Age. Ed. Joanna Zylinska. London; Continuum, 2002. p. 16.

[23] Deleuze, Gilles. Felix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis; University of Minnesota, 1987. pp. 5-6.

Deleuze and Guattari initially explain this shift from arboreal to rhizomatic using their two examples of the book—between classical (family tree-style) and rhizomatic (multiple, de-centered). Emphasizing the idea of the book itself as a technological creation subject to change:

The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble signifying, and subjective organic interiority… The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. The law of the book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two… That doesn’t get us very far. The binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced by biunivocal relationships between successive circles. The pivotal taproot provides no better understanding of multiplicity than the dichotomous root. One operates in the object, the other in the subject.

The radicle-system, or fascicular root, is the second figure of the book, to which our modernity pays willing allegiance. This time, the priniciple root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing development… This is as much as to say that the fascicular system does not really break with dualism, with the complementarity between a subject and an object, a natural reality and a spiritual reality: unity is consistently thwarted and obstructed in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject… The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—always n-1…

[24] Poster, Mark. “High-Tech Frankenstein, or Heidegger Meets Stelarc.” The Cyborg Experiments. Ed. Joanna Zylinska. Continuum; New York, 2002. p. 22.

[25] Op. Cit. p. 25.

[26] Ibid. p. 26.

[27] Op. Cit. p. 27.

[28] Ibid.

[29] http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/

[30] Poster, Mark. “High-Tech Frankenstein, or Heidegger Meets Stelarc.” The Cyborg Experiments. Ed. Joanna Zylinska. Continuum; New York, 2002. p. 29.

[31] Stelarc. “Triggering an evolutionary dialectic.” Obsolete Body Suspensions. Compiled and edited by James D. Paffrath with Stelarc. Davis, CA: JP Publications, 1984. p. 102.

[32] Poster, Mark. “High-Tech Frankenstein, or Heidegger Meets Stelarc.” The Cyborg Experiments. Ed. Joanna Zylinska. New York; Continuum, 2002. p. 29.

[33] Ibid. p. 30.

[34] Clarke, Julie. “Orlan and Stelarc: Human/Not Human.” The Cyborg Experiments. Ed. Joanna Zylinska. New York; Continuum, 2002. p. 35.

[35] Paraclesus. “Concerning the nature of things.” Book The Ninth, Alchemical Writings of Paraclesus the Great. Ed. Arthur Edward Waite. Temple Chambers, Fleet Street, London: James Elliott & Co., 1894. p. 173.

[36] Clarke, Julie. “Orlan and Stelarc: Human/Not Human.” The Cyborg Experiments. Ed. Joanna Zylinska. New York; Continuum, 2002. p. 36.

[37] n.b. William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, along with many other science fiction novels published in the 1980’s and ‘90’s, illustrates explicit examples of cybernetic body modification and human embodiment in the virtual realities of vast cyber networks.

[38] Ibid. pp. 36-37.

[39] Op. Cit. p. 37.

[40] Stelarc. “Prosthetics, robotics and remote existence: postrevolutionary strategies.” SISEA, Groningen, the Netherlands, Leonardo 24:5 (1991). p. 595.

[41] Stelarc. “Triggering an evolutionary dialectic.” Obsolete Body Suspensions. Compiled and edited by James D. Paffrath with Stelarc. Davis, CA: JP Publications, 1984. p. 52.

[42] Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (1818). New York; Bantam Dell, 2003. p. 56.

[43] Clarke, Julie. “Orlan and Stelarc: Human/Not Human.” The Cyborg Experiments. Ed. Joanna Zylinska. New York; Continuum, 2002. p. 39.

[44] Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” (1919). http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html. Publication date unknown. See also:

The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1989.

[45]

http://www.kaylabs.com/product/6KKIMGCHT1.jpg. Accessed: 3/28/10

[46] Cf. Scumacher, E.F. Chapter 2. A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Harper, 1978. (Offers a general explanation of the four kingdoms.)

[47]Aristotle. On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath. Trans. W.S. Hett. London: Loeb Classical Library, 1957.

[48] Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologica (1265-1274). Pt. II of II, Treatise on Fortitude and Temperance, Question 154, Article 2, “Of the Parts of Lust.” http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa/SS/SS154.html#SSQ154OUTP1, Publication date unknown*

…wherefore just as the use of food can be without sin, if it be taken in due manner and order, as required for the welfare of the body, so also the use of veneral acts can be without sin, provided they be performed in due manner and order, in keeping with the end of human procreation.”

*(Author’s note: although advised to find a proper book citation for the Summa, the online edition linked above is far easier to navigate. Crawling through the pages of a real live Summa may be exciting for some, but for our purposes it would be monstrous, seeing as our focus must limited to a certain specificity.)

[49] Davidson, Arnold I. “The Horror of Monsters.” Humans and Animals. p. 43. Publication information unknown.

[50] Aquinas, St. Thomas. The Summa Theologica. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers. Second Part of the Second Part, Question 154, Article 12, Rep. Obj. 4.

[51] Davidson, Arnold I. “The Horror of Monsters.” Humans and Animals. p. 50. Publication information unknown.

[52] Paré, Des monstres et prodiges (On Monsters and Marvels), [1573]. Trans. Janis L. Pallister. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Ch. XX, pp. 65-67.

[53] Op. Cit. p. 3.

[54] Foucault, Michel. A History of Madness. Ed. Jean Khalfa. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. New York: Routledge, 2006. Preface to the 1961 edition, pp. xxvii-xxviii.

[55] Op. Cit. p. xxviii.

[56] Op. Cit. Part I, “Stultifera Navis,” p. 3.

[57] Ibid. p. 6.

[58] Op. Cit.

[59] Op. Cit. p. 7.

[60] Ibid. p. 8.

[61]

Brant’s Das Narrenschiff ad Narragonia, with Dürer’s engraving. This page coming from a copy published by Olpe in 1499, from Basel.

[62] Foucault, Michel. A History of Madness. Ed. Jean Khalfa. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. New York: Routledge, 2006. Part I, “Stultifera Navis,” p. 10.

[63] Ibid. p. 11.

[64]

Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), German. Supersensual Soul from Philosophia Revelata 1730.

Alchemical works of the Renaissance exemplify the multiplicity of hidden meanings that are contained within the image, evoking an invisible presence of an esoteric, secret knowledge.

[65]

St. Pierre di Louvain St. Michel cathedral, Brussels

[66]

Bosch, Hieronymus. The Temptation of St. Anthony. c. 1500, center panel of a triptych describing the ordeals of St. Anthony. Museu Nacional de Arte Antigua, Lisbon.

[67] Foucault, Michel. A History of Madness. Ed. Jean Khalfa. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. New York: Routledge, 2006. Part I, “Stultifera Navis,” p. 18.

[68]

Lochner, Stephan (Meersburg, 1400—Cologne, 1452). The Last Judgment, ca. 1435. Willraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne.

Foucault writes, “…the work of Stefan Lochner pullulates with winged insects, cat-headed butterflies and sphinxes with mayfly wingcases, and birds with handed wings that instill panic…” (p. 19).

[69] Foucault, Michel. A History of Madness. Ed. Jean Khalfa. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. New York: Routledge, 2006. Part I, “Stultifera Navis,” p. 20.

[70]Ibid.

[71] Op. Cit. p. 23.

[72] Ibid. p. 24.

[73] Ibid. p. 25.

[74] Op. Cit. p. 26.

[75] The translator of Of Monsters and Prodigies explains in his introduction that Paré wrote in French with informal style, so commoners who were fortunate enough to be literate could understand him. Normally, a surgeon contemporary with Paré would write in Latin, as was the professional vernacular.

[76] Freud, S. “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1989. pp. 584-589.

[77] Op. Cit.

In melancholia, the unknown loss will result in a similar internal work and will therefore be responsible for the melancholic inhibition. The difference is that the inhibition of the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing him so entirely. The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning—an extraordinary dimunition in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale…He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy. He is not of the opinion that a change has taken place in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares that he was never any better. This picture of delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to take nourishment, and—what is psychologically very remarkable—by an overcoming of the instinct which compels everyliving thing to cling to life. (p. 584)

[78] Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1995. pp. vi-3.

[79] Freud, S. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1989. p. 607.

[80] Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1995. pp. viii

[81] Ginzburg, Lydia. Blockade Diary. Trans. Alan Myers. London: Harvill Press, 1995. p. 36.

[82]

“Berlin sources claim that this is a long-distance camera view of Leningrad, taken from the Germans’ siege lines October 1, 1941. Berlin also identifies the dark shapes in the sky as Soviet aircraft on patrol”

(Associated Press Photo)†

† All photographs taken from AP Images in accordance with the Hampshire College Online Resources policy.

[83] Barskova, Polina. Lecture on Blockade Diary, from her class Gorgon’s Reflections at Hampshire College (March 4, 2009).

[84] Ginzburg, Lydia. Blockade Diary. Trans. Alan Myers. London; Harvill Press, 1995. p. 10.

[85] Ibid.

[86] Ginzburg, Lydia. Blockade Diary. Trans. Alan Myers. London; Harvill Press, 1995. p. 28.

[87] Ibid. pp. 8-9.

[88]

“This photo, taken in the winter months of 1942, shows citizens of Leningrad as they dip up water from a broken main, during the 900-day siege of the Russian city by German invaders” (Associated Press Photo).

[89] Ginzburg, Lydia. Blockade Diary. Trans. Alan Myers. London; Harvill Press, 1995. p. 25.

[90] Op. Cit. p. 26.

[91] Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. University of Nebraska Press; Lincoln, 1995. p. 47.

[92] Isiah 56:5—the epigraph that begins Shoah.

[93] Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. University of Nebraska; Lincoln, 1995. p. 30.

[94] Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust, The Complete Text of the Film. English translation subtitles by A. Whitelaw and W. Byron. Pantheon Books; New York, 1985. p. 164.

[95] Ibid. p. 165.

[96] Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. University of Nebraska; Lincoln, 1995. p. 51.

[97] Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust, The Complete Text of the Film. English translation subtitles by A. Whitelaw and W. Byron. Pantheon Books; New York, 1985. p. 52.

[98] Op. Cit. p. 54.

[99] Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. University of Nebraska; Lincoln, 1995. p. 61.

[100] Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust, The Complete Text of the Film. English translation subtitles by A. Whitelaw and W. Byron. Pantheon Books; New York, 1985. p. 117.

[101] Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. University of Nebraska; Lincoln, 1995. p. 1. (my italics).

[102]Ibid. p. 4.

[103] Drabinski, John. Lecture on Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews,” discussion on wider implications for an ethics of forgetting. From his class, Signs of the Unrepresentable. March 10, 2009.

[104]

Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah. Paramount Video, 1986. (Screenshot of Abraham Bomba).

[105]

Ibid. (Screenshot of secret interview conducted with Walter Stier, who had been a director of train traffic during the war—responsible for making sure the trains ran on time, bringing human cargo from ghettos to death camps. See this interview exclusively at ).

[106] Lyotard, Françios. Heidegger and “the jews.” Trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts. University of Minnesota; Minneapolis, 1990. p. 7.

[107] Op. Cit. pp. 7-8.

[108] Op. Cit. p. 8.

[109] Ibid.

[110] Op. Cit. p. 9.

[111] Ibid. p. 12.

[112] Op. Cit.

[113] As we have seen in the first essay, the etymological origins of the word “monster” imply an insistent representation. Similarly, we can draw a parallel with the word Lyotard uses to describe this necessity to be present despite its unintelligibility within normal cognition.

[114] Lyotard, Françios. Heidegger and “the jews.” Trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts. University of Minnesota; Minneapolis, 1990. p. 12.

[115] Ibid. p. 13.

[116] Rosenfeld, Alvin H. “Introduction.” A Double Dying. London: University of Indiana, 1980.

[117] Lyotard, Françios. Heidegger and “the jews.” Trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts. University of Minnesota; Minneapolis, 1990. p. 47.

[118] Ibid.

[119] Ibid. p. 48.

[120] Op. Cit.

[121]

Delacroix, Eugéne. Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. 1854-61. Oil and wax on plaster, 751 x 485 cm. Collection of the Saint-Sulpice, Paris. http://www.lib-art.com/artgallery/9046-jacob-wrestling-with-the-angel-eug-ne-delacroix.html Accessed 4/15/10.