The Monster as War Machine

Mabel Moraña

Translated by Andrew Ascherl

Cambria Latin American Literatures and Cultures Series

General Editor: Román de la Campa
 Copyright 2018 Cambria Press

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Cover design by Carlos Zamora.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Moraña, Mabel, author. | Ascherl, Andrew translator.

Title: The monster as war machine / Mabel Moraña ;

translated by Andrew Ascherl.

Other titles: Monstruo como maquina de guerra. English

Description: Amherst, New York : Cambria Press, 2018. |

Series: Cambria Latin American literatures and cultures series |
Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017031552 |

ISBN 9781604979862 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Monsters in literature. | War in literature. |

Monsters--Symbolic aspects. | Allegory.

Classification: LCC PN56.M55 M66413 2018 |

DDC 809/.9337--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031552
To my editor and friend Klaus Vervuert,
In memoriam
 Preface
This book began at the end: with the intention of exploring the meaning of the
monstrous in peripheral areas that are historically framed by an external (and
then later internalized) gaze that constructs them as places of excess, anomaly,
and demonization. In both Latin America and Africa, but also within national
spaces, zones occupied by subaltern segments of society, marginalized for
reasons of ethnicity, culture, social class, sexual orientation, corporeality, etc.,
were and continue to be monstered as residual spaces whose rationality assumes
unrecognizable forms from perspectives that consider themselves to be epistemic
sites of authority. At the same time, the margins produce their own monsters in
their attempt to name the Other, the dominator, the persecutor, the master, the
landowner, the invader, the torturer, granting it an abject form that allegorizes his
attitudes, behaviors, and values.
Monstering is thus a two-way street, a dialectic without synthesis, a form of
asymmetrically representing the symbolic exchanges that make up and shape the
social. The dichotomous operation that guides these processes of construction of
the Other conceal beneath an apparent Manicheism complex developments that
are rife with ambiguity and paradox, where the borders between I and We are
dissolved and the ends become contaminated. This does not mean that the
monster inhabits the shifting space of relativism but rather that its wandering
constantly frames a fertile and polyvalent territory. Nor does it signify that the
production of the monster is equivalent to the construction of identity, although
these processes are intrinsically presupposed. Accordingly, this book moves
from centers to mobile peripheries, from canonical monstrosity to its progenies.
Monstrosities proliferate in the countryside, in the mountains, and in dark and
recondite urban environments. Thus, these pages follow anomalous entities that
inhabit theoretical discourses, contributing to the definition of concepts, projects,
and positions through which the counterfeit figure of the monster exhibits its
emotional charge and its ideological connotations.
Because the notions of center and periphery are relative, instrumental, to a
large extent ideological, and idiosyncratic, and because, it must be said, they are
mostly obsolete concepts, any attempt to use them requires one to recognize at
the very least that they designate localities and degrees of power/knowledge
from which specific models for the organization of knowledge and social
experience have taken form in modern times. Such politico-hermeneutic designs
(which include the definition of the normal versus the anomalous, the modern
versus the primitive, the harmonious versus the monstrous) impose, at a
supposedly universal level, what Foucault called “regimes of truth” that extend
to cultural and ideological levels. What began during the composition of this
book as an exploration of the meanings and representations of the monstrous in
postcolonial societies also entailed a study of the paradigmatic moments from
which the monster arose, of the textures and textualities, of the languages and
visual images in which the alterity of this figure has been expressed in different
cultural registers, from the most canonical to the most marginal.
This book continued to develop, taking as its point of departure the idea that
the monster is above all biopolitical: relative to the polis and to the processes of
socialization, linked to the relations of power over the body and the
representation of the place of the human with respect to nature, history,
temporality, transcendence, and everydayness. An apparatus of social
immunization, a simulacrum that spectacularizes its artificiality, a shifter that
activates social dynamics, an assemblage that threatens the machinery of power,
the monster symbolizes the heroic resistance of the slave and the sinister
excesses of the master. Thus, it is essential to contextualize, even though it may
seem fallacious, even the universality that the monster evokes in every one of its
apparitions and attributes. In spite of its extreme empiria, and although it
frequently lacks rationality and language, the monster is in its own way always
philosophical. This book proceeds as a critical exercise that follows the
meanderings of the monster’s “negative aesthetics.”
The construction and deconstruction of the monster additionally entail a
reflection on the material and symbolic world of the commodity understood as a
constellation of knowledges, interests, emotions, and desires. This topic is
essential for understanding the ideological processes (the production of false
consciousness) and the forms of (self-)recognition that, on the collective,
popular, social, and community levels, develop ways of conceptualizing the
social as a heterogeneous, contradictory, and unstable totality.
To study the monster, I attempted to capture its links with sovereignty, the
state, the citizen, the nation, modernity, emotions, philosophy, the market,
gender, the popular subject, the spectacularization of everyday life, and death.
This approach entailed developing an understanding of the relation between
capitalism and fear, and the functions that Marx and post-Marxism assign to the
symbols of the “cosmic horror” (the “fear and trembling” of modernity) as part
of the critique of capitalism and in relation to the basic concepts of the
commodity, exploitation, alienation, and surplus value.
The monster is studied here as a limit and as a nexus, as the cultural
apparatus or artefact that drives a reflection on life beyond hierarchizations and
demarcations between the human and the animal, the material the natural, the
cultural, and the biological. Situated at the crossroads of these domains, the
monster advances in all directions, assuming contradiction and paradox, giving
form to the impossible in a multidirectional, fluid, and ambiguous movement,
animated by the incommensurability of the living. The monstrous is thus
uncontainable, it exceeds categories and models, it points to the grotesque and
the sublime, it announces and interpellates.
This study focuses on critical and theoretical material in dialogue with
different discursive textures: popular beliefs, myths, literary works, film, and
performance, with occasional references to music and painting, although only to
the extent that they contain signifying plots linked to the book’s teratological
theme. This book develops through an experimental and tentative mode, turning
in on itself through avenues that were marked by the research and disciplinary
purviews that the monster has penetrated over the centuries in its irreverent and
incessant wandering. A large part of this multidirectional exploration has
consisted in the tracing of representational and interpretative models that have
taken on the theme of monstrosity, discovering in it unexpected contributions to
the critique of modernity. Eminently communicational, the multifaceted nature
of the monster is located at the very limits of representation. When the latter is
confronted by sublimity, abjection, and atavism, by the experiences of pain and
death, by the limitations of cognition, and the dragging of emotionality,
monstrosity provides a language that expresses what exceeds rationality. In the
monstrous, meanings explode and recompose themselves; the monster is event
and pachacuti, end and beginning.
It its eight sections, The Monster as War Machine attempts to cover the
broad theme of monstrosity from a historical, philosophical, biopolitical, and
aesthetico-ideological perspective. The breadth of its task and the intellectual
ambition that guides it undoubtedly point to much more than this study could
achieve, given the extent of the ground to cover and the unevenness of the
terrain. In this sense, the book appeals to the reader’s indulgence and curiosity,
that he or she may be inspired by what this analysis is able to suggest in order to
develop new paths and to correct its bearings when necessary.
After an introduction that establishes the foundations of a critico-theoretical
approach that could contribute to a poetics of the monster, the book sets forth on
a necessarily selective historico-cultural itinerary that covers the colonial period
to the present, pausing at moments/texts that are representative reflections on the
monstrous and its literary and filmic expression. At key moments, mainly in
“The Monster in History,” the study pauses to reflect on foundational European
works and traditions that were essential for the emergence of the neo-Gothic, as
well as for the modern resignification of horror, sublimity, and the like. In this
way, even though Latin America constitutes one of the foci of this investigation,
the study drifts toward other cultural spheres without which we would never
understand the transnationalized and transhistorical trajectory of the monster.
“Monsters and the Critique of Capitalism” concentrates on the tropes of
monstrosity utilized by both Marx and post-Marxism in connection to their
analysis of world systems and their social and cultural effects. This chapter
attempts to offer a vision of the way in which this “Gothic Marxism” has been
read and interpreted, particularly with regard to the use of figures like vampires,
cyborgs, zombies, and ghosts, which are integrated into the critique of political
economy. Although the Deleuzean concept of the war machine came well after
Marx, the uses of monstrosity that frequently appear throughout Capital, the
Communist Manifesto, and other writings reveal lines of thought that are
compatible with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about the dynamics of power and
resistance and the way in which subjectivity is affected by the rearticulations of
hegemony and sovereignty.
Expanding toward other areas of Western thought, the chapter dedicated to
“Monsters and Philosophy” explores some specific concepts and developments
around the ideas of the sinister, the abject, difference, the normality/anomaly
binary, the notion of event, sublimity, anamorphosis, and posthumanism, the
relations between monstrosity and machine, monstrosity and gender, etc.
Because it has been a persistent concern of modern thought, the theme of the
monstrous and the semantic field associated with it can only be approached in a
cursory way, as an introduction to innovative and productive conceptual
strategies for the exploration of the role of horror and monstrosity in settings
impacted by power struggles both at political and cultural levels.
Then, extending this line of inquiry, “Monstrosity and Biopolitics” reflects
on some modulations of biopolitical thought in which the monstrous is
consolidated as a fertile catalyst of the conceptualization of hegemony and
(bio)resistance and in connection to the metaphorization of the popular, the
common, and the social. Because the body is one of the principal components of
the aesthetico-ideological assemblage of monstrosity, from both the
psychoanalytic perspective and from the point of view of cultural archaeology,
different biopolitical orientations offer a broad spectrum of hermeneutic
strategies and provide a language directed toward discussion of the monster and
its particular forms of social interaction and political activity.
“Monstrosity, Representation, and the Market” is concerned with the
spectacularization of monstrosity, which is to say, the carnivalization of the
discourse of anomaly and fear in relation to the dynamics of supply and demand
that make a symbolic commodity a fetishized and marketable product. In its
various forms, the monstrous competes with multiple aesthetic registers for the
attention of mass audiences who witness the unfolding of its countercultural
message and the emotions it unleashes. From freak shows to David Bowie,
passing through the figure and the performances of Michael Jackson and the
cinematic works of George Romero (which reformulate the representation of the
zombie and its politico-ideological meanings), the topic of consumption is
articulated to the mass forms of interpellation generated by monsters. As a
representational and interpretative tour de force of collective experience and
social consciousness, the attributes of monstrosity have filtered into all
discourses, staging difference and making simulacra and artificiality into
glamorous forms of the epiphanic. Monstrosity’s repressed, extravagant,
grotesque, and delirious contents push up against the system’s limits of tolerance
and defy its ordering principles, suggesting something beyond dominant
rationality.
 The chapter titled “Monsters on the Margin” studies the radical hybridity that
the monstrous supposes in relation to the processes of the formation of the
popular subject and the expressive devices through which collective subjectivity
expresses its fears, anxieties, and desires in peripheral areas, particularly in Latin
America. The topic of corporeality (the individual body, sexualized, subjected to
violence, indigence, and marginalization, the colonized and subalternized
collective body from colonial days to modernity, its enslaved, migratory,
deterritorialized, resistant, subverted, fragmented, and disorganized constitution)
is an element in discussions about the monster in all its multiple manifestations.
Moreover, in the case of postcolonial societies, corporeality constitutes an
imperative, both due to the network of meanings in which it is inscribed, linked
to labor, exploitation, and sacrifice, and for its metaphorical value. Indeed,
corporeality refers to the body surpassed or diminished by the state, the prolific
corporeality of the multitude, the sick or mutilated body, the juridical body, the
corpus delicti, the body politic. From this organicist fixation, this chapter
explores the relation between the real monstrosity of authoritarianism and
exploitation, as well as the popular imaginaries that illustrate the precarious
positions of each segment of society in relation to systemic violence. Multiple
stories and images allegorize the relation between the communitarian body and
the monstrous body as well as the symbolic mediations that emerge from popular
narratives to allegorize social conflict. Chupacabras, jarjachas, pishtacos, and
sacaojos inhabit a dark domain that expresses the feelings that real violence
unleashes in rural and even urban communities. The stories of their apparitions
and crimes are unable to overshadow testimonies of the real history of torture,
genocide, and territorial devastation to which indigenous, peasant, and Afro-
descendant communities have historically been subject.
Finally, the “Coda” brings together some general elaborations on the
different topics dealt with in the book, attempting to articulate critico-theoretical
directions that can be instrumental in the recuperation of debates and positions
on the monstrous and its significance in the world today.
Throughout the book, concepts like coloniality, the (neo-)Baroque,
modernity, nation, postmodernity, posthumanism, biopolitics, affect,
heterogeneity, hybridity, transculturation, etc. appear again and again, although
they are not discussed in and of themselves but rather assumed to be understood
in their most general senses. Any one of these concepts would deserve, or have
actually been given, particular attention in other works. For this reason, I provide
references to specific studies of these topics which may complement what is
included in the present book.
The notion of the “war machine” guides this book’s analysis, largely in an
implicit way. As Deleuze and Guattari write:

The war machine is that nomad invention that in fact has war not as its
primary object but as its second-order, supplementary or synthetic
objective, in the sense that it is determined in such a way as to destroy
the State-form and city-form with which it collides. (A Thousand
Plateaus, 418)

Through opposition to the state, the war machine points beyond the discourse
of violence and terror: instead, it seeks to escape the violence of the state
apparatus, its order of representation, although sometimes it exercises that same
violence as part of its function of resistance and the redefinition of power.
Together with the philosophical foundations with which this book attempts to
shed light on the figure of the monster from different aesthetico-ideological
perspectives, this study also integrates an abundant bibliographical corpus of an
interdisciplinary nature, elaborated from a variety of theoretical and political
standpoints. Because the critique of the themes this book touches on is copious
and challenging, I wanted to do justice to this body of ideas, explicitly
incorporating them into my own reflections. These always refer, in one way or
another, to the way in which Latin American culture is situated in global
intellectual space and to the historico-cultural specificity of the region, a feature
that conditions to a great extent the reshaping of themes, the challenging of
aesthetic paradigms, and the proposition of new and innovative models of
thought and representation.
Finally, I would like to mention that this book has three biographical
foundations that may have played some role in my motivation to write it. The
first is a strange journey I once took through the mountains of Transylvania
which included a brief and unsettling stay in a Gothic castle. The second is my
Pittsburgh home, which had once belonged to George Romero, where, in the
living room, I saw scattered murals, masks, and other remnants that belonged to
the cinematic paraphernalia of the zombie world that Romero’s work redefined
in a well-known filmic saga. The third anecdotal element has to do with an
unexpected visit from a bat that entered my house late one night when I was
writing about Dracula. I have witnesses.
 Chapter 1

Introduction
Teratological Preface: Thinking the Monster
For many reasons, thinking the monster has a liberating effect; it opens doors, it
connects with specific zones of the social and with broad swathes of critical
thought. Perhaps because we unconsciously situate within this historical,
thematic, ideological, and aesthetic labyrinth a series of contents that seem to be
unreachable in other archives of rationality and memory, thinking the monster is
an exercise that is both defiant and polemic, and it certainly abounds with more
questions and ambiguities than the topic suggests at first glance.
In The Monster as War Machine, I am interested more in theoretical
reflection than in teratological classification. I recognize the inescapable
fascination inherent to the investigation per se of literary works or visual images
in which monsters appear in the clear light of day or in the shadows, between
lines, hidden behind metaphors, hyperboles, and allegories, testing the limits of
language and figurative devices from different eras, media, and cultures.1
However, I have taken the time to reflect on these materials when they were
essential to the advancement of my hypothesis, recalling that, throughout
literature, film, and art in general, the representation of the monstrous traverses a
number of symbolic mediations. In effect, in the registers of literature and visual
art, the monstrous—preexisting as a cultural concept, as a dreamlike device, as a
dispersed element in collective imaginaries—is recaptured by symbolic
production and submitted to the codifications that are specific to the medium in
which it is inscribed. The monstrous is reproduced, taking up a pact of reading
or visual reception which modifies the meaning that this cultural operator has in
myths and legends, where supernatural beings are considered part of factual
reality. In the fields of popular culture or philosophy, the production of the
monstrous is not, strictly speaking, “fictitious.” In the former the monster exists
as a fact of a given reality, whether concrete or immaterial, that inspires feelings,
motivates reactions, and impacts daily life. In philosophy, what matters is, on the
one hand, the epistemic value of the monstrous as a critical and theoretical
category that constitutes an alternative to dominant rationality. On the other
hand, what stands out for philosophy is the paradigmatic dimension through
which the monstrous is constituted as a cognitive model, functioning as a trope
that connects the fields of ethics, politics, and religion. In literature and the arts,
the monstrous has been clothed in attire that is appropriate to each particular
situation. In other words, it has been constructed as an aesthetic simulacrum re-
signifying once and again its traditional meaning. In the interstice that separates
idea and representation, other levels of signification and ideological
manipulation become relevant. The monstrous serves, then, diverse masters, thus
becoming just one additional figure in the rich and heterogeneous gallery of
fictional characters.
My interest in the monster is situated at the most basic conceptual level, in
the idea of the monster as an epistemic apparatus: in its singularity as a cultural
artifact, in its ideological virtuality, and in its political ubiquity. I have been
seduced by the uses to which it has been put, as if the extenuating corporeality of
the monster extended multiple shadows across the reality of thought which both
obscure and illuminate the spaces of knowledge. I view the monster, in a
Benjaminian fashion, as a constellation of meanings, which is to say, as part of a
field of significations which comprise it without determining it, without diluting
its particularity, which neither conditions it nor distorts it, which does not
determine it or erase it from within a discursive totality but rather empowers and
inflames its fragmentary and polemical nature due to the contact between related
fields.
According to this line of interpretation, the monster is recovered here as a
semiotic artifact, that is, as the moment and the place at which the movement of
life and history pause, provisionally, fixed in an iconic image which crystalizes a
multiplicity of meanings projected over the real. The monstrous—its image and
its shadows—is constituted as the semantic space in which, according to Walter
Benjamin,

what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a
constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For
while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal,
continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical:
 is not progression, but image, suddenly emergent.—Only dialectical
images are genuine images (that is, not archaic), and the place where
one encounters them is language. (The Arcades Project, 462, emphasis
added)

In this way, the character of the monster stands out as a cultural apparatus
that is oriented toward a productive interruption of the dominant discourses and
the categories that govern them. Always in a Benjaminian manner, the monster
reveals in reality what the ideologemes of Western rationality have obfuscated,
creating a field of significations that denaturalizes the known world, submitting
it to other logics, testing the limits of its tolerance, defamiliarizing it.
Paraphrasing what Benjamin wrote in “On the Concept of History” (1940), what
appears to us as a chain of events is transformed by the effect of the monster into
“one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls
it at [our] feet” (392). Like the angel of history, with whom it shares its
supernatural condition, the modern monster struggles against the storm of
progress and against conceptions of history as a linear and necessary progression
that do not interrogate their own course or the wreckage that the ceaseless
passing of time produces. The monster ruins the status quo, the “triumphal
procession” of modernity, as it reveals something that should have remained
hidden, as Freud suggests with his notion of the uncanny (a notion that, together
with alienation, also has threatening, ominous, and unsettling connotations).
It is necessary to recall, nevertheless, that the traffic of meanings that
surrounds the monstrous is subject (as is the case with any cultural product) to
the history in which it appears and from which it emerges both as a symptom and
a diagnosis of its time. To historicize the monster is thus not to oppose the
theorization of its specific functions and attributes. To the contrary, it is precisely
in the course of social struggles and politico-economic developments that its
nature attains its full meaning and its shadows acquire a particular form.
The monster is, above all, a narrative, and as such, it is language, image,
discourse. It is also soma, corporeality, both zoē and bios, immanence,
vulnerable and unfinished raw material, opera aperta, impossible and present
(id)entity, negative affirmation, substance in search of its form.
Together with the obligatory references to classic monsters, I take some time
at the end of this book to reflect on Latin American materializations of the
monstrous because the specificity of these peripheral settings of cultural
production incorporate particularities and substantial changes to the project of
universal monstering that has developed throughout the Western world from
antiquity to the present. These stops along the way attempt to illustrate the
theoretical—essayistic—development that informs this study. I have generally
remained on an abstract terrain, at times desolate and at others as complicated as
the habitat in which the monster inscribes its intermittent and terrorizing
presence. I am especially interested in the monster’s oblique view on themes
that, although they emerged in different eras, are all part and parcel of
modernity: identity, nation, territory, individuality, power, desire, interiority,
imagination, history, borders, repression, resistance, and social change. The
monster’s crafty procedures, the ways in which it devastates communities and
institutions and disturbs the status quo and bourgeois good taste, its ability to
unleash crises that express or obviate the tension of major conflicts and help to
create illusions of heroism and redemption in common, ordinary people, its
particular talent for announcing catastrophes, its enigmatic, oracular existence,
which remains to be interrogated from the most varied perspectives—all this is
sufficient to capture the attention of any critic situated at the crossroads of
philosophy, political thought, aesthetics, and language. In this sense, I have
followed the route indicated by the development of the theme of the monster
itself, guided by the eminently transcultural trajectory of my object of study. One
crucial element of this study has been the existence of an impressive critical
corpus that has explored the principal works from multiple theoretical
perspectives. Literary criticism, cultural theory, philosophy, and political thought
have in effect posed a series of topics and problems that constitute an
indispensable basis for the study of the role and characteristics of the monstrous
from a contemporary and transdisciplinary perspective that is focused on the
symbolic representation of biopolitical issues linked to symbolic production,
especially on the margins of capitalism.
The malleable and excessive personality of the monster is a both
sophisticated and naïve resource that presents itself to us with a disorienting and
deceptive obviousness. As a complex entity disguised as simplicity, the monster
exhibits a certain self-complacency and irony in the face of the repressive and
arrogant rationality of the Western world. In fact, its mere existence provokes
disparate reactions and interpretations in different audiences, appealing to the
individual’s proclivity toward the ludic, the oneiric, the melodramatic, and the
sinister, running along a spectrum that goes from “high” culture to mass culture,
from elite to popular consumption, from classical mythology and the medieval
worldview to camp and pastiche, from philosophical reflection to entertainment,
playing with the desire of knowledge-power that guides thought and frequently
leads it through intricate and uncertain trajectories.
I have appealed to essayistic resources through which the critic (myself
included) is submerged in interpretative possibilities, tentative practices of
thought and language, measured unfoldings of subjectivity, bibliographic
dialogues, and reflections that involve and combine disparate disciplines in order
to say otherwise everything that one knows or intuits or appropriates in the
practice of reading. Nevertheless, beyond the solitary reception of the monster
and the practices of imagination and language that inspire its existence, the
monstrous appeals to collective and transhistorical hermeneutic practices and
always inspires the work of synthesis, collage, bibliographic resignification, and
interdisciplinary, intermediatic, and intercultural articulation.
Every process of interpretation regarding the monster heads in the direction
of the same. The monster is always a new but also constant (id)entity: the
inexhaustible renovation of the message of the Other that slides in and out of
neighboring symbolic domains in order to be discovered, covered over, and
recovered again, that knocks at the door while rationality observes it through the
peephole, from within the system, turning the key one more time.
In addition to the aesthetic aspect of the monstrous, which some authors
elevate to the upper levels of cultural interpretation, what particularly stands out
to me is the critical and philosophical speculation that makes the monster into an
appropriable object in which every thinker can find support for his or her beliefs.
In a world dominated by commodity fetishism, the monster is one of the most
malleable and fascinating consumer goods of the entire symbolic market because
it communicates across language and image, religion, politics, science, and
technology. It appeals to multiple audiences, it is available to numerous levels of
reading, it says very little about itself, and it never goes out of style. It has been
exalted, venerated, desacralized, vituperated, commercialized, feared,
cheapened, mechanized, and reproduced with and without an aura in the most
disparate cultural spaces and ideological domains. It has inscribed in them its
language of gestures, its peculiar eating habits, and its unthinkable avatars,
interpellating diverse audiences that saddle it with all their anxieties, conflicts,
and expectations.
As with the human being, the monster’s desire is infinite. It remains mostly
latent and sometimes materializes in an incomplete way, recycled over and over
again into different formats. However, it is always representative of the more or
less distant echo of traditions, legends, and beliefs that keep it alive. The monster
is at one and the same time object and subject, mind without a soul, body
without organs, a hypertrophied, overflowing, unhinged corporeality that is
outside-itself, unrooted. It is presence and absence, ambiguity, hyperbole, hiatus,
metonymy, synecdoche, and catachresis.
Capitalism, psychoanalysis, and gender studies have been the most fertile
fields for the study of the monster, which connects with the processes of
production, reproduction, and accumulation of capital (in both its material and
symbolic senses), with exploitation, inequality, repression, and trauma, with Eros
and Thanatos. It is archetypical and thus atemporal, although, paradoxically, it is
branded by the imprint of history, politics, and philosophy. It is voraciously
consumed in both centers and peripheries, although appetites for the monster
differ from an ideological and geo-cultural point of view, which affects the
monster’s signification and functionality in every context.
It is a signal, a sign, and a symbol. Every monster has its own structure,
habits, bodily form, and preferences, but a common substance runs through and
unifies the entire lineage, connecting all its members, creating a separate species
that is conceptually endogamous and unified by difference. Hence its
vicissitudes are always resolved in the undulating line that goes from the
particular to the universal, from the synchronic, the carnal, and the concrete to
the diachronic, the rhizomatic, and the abstract.
I am primarily interested in the optic regime in which the monstrous is
inscribed. As an eminently performative being, the monster lives for the gaze of
the other and at the same time constructs its Other on observing it. The gaze of
the monster is a fundamental iconic element because it refers to the interiority of
desire, to the power of feeling, suggesting intentionality or teleology. Thus, we
see it in cinematic representations, for example in the captivating gaze of
Dracula as portrayed by Bela Lugosi, or in the oscillation between fury and
tenderness that appears in King Kong’s eyes, and even in the vacant eye sockets
of zombies. This gaze can paralyze, seduce, attract, or terrify the other, but in
any case it creates a force field that protects and projects, that demonstrates both
power and vulnerability. The monster makes every viewer or reader into a
voyeur upon whom it unleashes its obscenity.
But if the study of monsters were to concentrate solely on aesthetic,
historical, or thematic aspects it would still only address part of the problem.
Heuristically speaking, the question of the monster requires an interpretative
analysis that can, from within the contexts I have mentioned, attend to its
constitutive ambiguity, which is essential for comprehending the field of
connotations that are opened and mobilized by the figure of the monster. The
idea of the monstrous and the specific images that illustrate it have been
produced and/or appropriated in different eras, both by popular imaginaries and
by the discourses of power. The monster has been employed to demonize and
exclude certain subjects, segments of society, and counter-hegemonic projects in
order to discredit cultural and ideological alterity, to dehumanize the unknown or
the misunderstood, to channel suspicion, doubt, and melancholia. Also, the
figure of the monster is related to systems of control. It embodies repression and
catharsis, subversion and marginality, identity overwhelmed by the interior and
exterior otherness that besieges it and threatens its unicity. For this reason, the
study of the monstrous connects with the fields of psychology and
communication, with the “linguistic turn” that analyzes discursive textures and
representational strategies and with the “emotional turn” that deals with affect,
desire, and the construction of subjectivities.
The monster can therefore be positive or negative, hegemonic or subaltern,
aristocratic or popular, sacred or profane, because what defines its meaning is the
type of articulation that it produces between power and representation, which is
to say, the constellation of political and ideological meanings that catalyze its
apparitions. In this way, the monster can be understood as an incarnation of the
social being that determines forms of consciousness and direct (although not
mechanical) representation related to the conditions of production and cultural
reception in different contexts. It is in this sense that Halberstam, for example,
has spoken of “technologies of monstrosity,” following Foucault’s concept of
power, resistance, and discourse as networks and strategies of socialization and
knowledge that affect the production of identities and its historical interrelations.
The production of monstrosity thus creates symbolic constellations of gender,
race, sexuality, class, etc. which refer in turn to specific forms of socialization,
discourses, identities, and behaviors, that is to say, to imaginaries and
representational strategies through which particular forms of social
consciousness are expressed.
Finally, the figure of the monster is intimately connected to consumption,
which is both what the monster needs to define itself, survive, and proliferate as
well as what it imposes on those who receive its impact, either as victims or as
receivers of its unusual habitus of self-sustenance and maleficent propagation.
The monster is a good—an evil—of symbolic consumption as well as an artifact
that consumes the other. The monster is consumed while it consumes, reproduces
—as is also the case with zombies and vampires—the same in the other, in an
onanistic dynamic that reduces the vital to a vicious, self-referential, and
redundant circle.
Various major theoretical contexts have proven useful for thinking the
monster. The first, concerning philosophy and biopolitics, offers the possibility
of analyzing the condition of the monstrous from domains connected to
reflection on the topic of the social control of bodies and communities. The
second, the study of affect, provides a repository of concepts that offer not only a
way to approach the impact that the monster has on the community but also the
desires and drives that animate it. In a Deleuzean sense, the monster can be seen
as a desiring-machine, as a generative nucleus of intensities, and as an apparatus
for the “rhizomatic processing of desire.” The third theoretical field that has
provided essential questions and areas of focus for the topic of the monster has
been the critical work focused on otherness, particularly the contributions of
gender studies. Within this space of analysis, which privileges representations of
alterity, the monster has been studied from various angles; some recuperate it as
an alter ego, others associate it with the Name-of-the-Father, with the superego,
with the topic of (divine and maternal) creation, repression, sexuality, trauma,
and censorship. In any context, the presence of the monster creates intensities,
which is to say, emotional expressions with cathartic, sublimating, and
illuminating effects.
Regarding the theme of identity/otherness, the monster has also been
analyzed as an outsider: drifter, kidnapper, invader, alien, foreign entity that
serves as a pretext for paranoiac and xenophobic fears, as a scapegoat for
internal community conflicts, or as a metaphor for external threats. In this
context, it has been associated with the devastation of land, colonization, cultural
diversity, differences of race and gender, alternative sexualities, imperialism,
technological transformation, scientific discoveries, the cosmic, the illegitimate,
and the unknown.
Fredric Jameson has insisted on the positional nature that guides the
construction of discourses of identity/alterity, which are closely linked to those
of good and evil and applicable to the spheres of gender, race, ideology,
sexuality, etc. Such discourses refer to forms of belonging to the social and to
specific relations between subjectivity and power, hegemony and marginality,
normality and anomaly. Jameson points out that, in our shrinking and
interconnected world, the notion of otherness is used for the strategic definition
of subjective space, which is to say, as a discursive and ideological defense of
the dominion of the Self:

Evil, thus, as Nietzsche taught us, continues to characterize whatever is

radically different from me, whatever by virtue of precisely that
difference seems to constitute a real and urgent threat to my own
existence. So from the earliest times, the stranger from another tribe,
the “barbarian” who speaks an incomprehensible language and follows
“outlandish” customs, but also the woman, whose biological difference
stimulates fantasies of castration and devoration, or in our own time,
the avenger of accumulated resentments from some oppressed class or
race, or else that alien being, Jew or Communist, behind whose
apparently human features a malignant and preternatural intelligence is
thought to lurk: these are some of the archetypal figures of the Other,
about whom the essential point to be made is not so much that he is
feared because he is evil; rather he is evil because he is Other, alien,
different, strange, unclean, and unfamiliar.” (The Political Unconscious
114-115)

The theme of the monster is inscribed within the parameters of these

constructions of identity/alterity, belonging/foreignness, good/evil,
hegemony/marginality, but it also transcends such distributions of meaning and
ideological value. One might even say that the significance of the monster can
only be fully understood on the basis of that transcendence that links it to
ambiguity, uncertainty, polysemy, doubt, mutation, and resignification. The
monstrous describes the dominance of power and metaphorizes it, but it is also
reshaped as an expression of resistance, subversion, transformation, an omen of
catastrophe or of productive and revolutionary inversions of the social order. The
monster is external, foreign to the Self, but it also inhabits the latter and defines
it from within. It threatens knowledge and its certainties, but it primarily exists
in the political unconscious. For this reason, it cannot be definitively confined to
exterior spaces. This complexity derives from its anomalous, transgressive, and
rebellious character.
Thus, it is appropriate to think the monster from a nomadic perspective, as an
itinerant, deterritorialized, constantly floating signifier. This foreign quality, this
mutant and wandering externality and non-belonging is essential to the
monster’s ability to produce a terrifying yet fascinating effect on individuals and
communities where it is always perceived as an event, which is to say, as a
transitory but catastrophic deadlock that turns the individual into a prisoner, a
victim, a survivor, or a hero. In this way, the spatio-temporal coordinates
(territory, history, community Weltanschaung) confront an unavoidable turning
point through the monstrous: an instance of inflection on the level of action,
thought, or imagination that motivates radical revisions of beliefs and social
practices. Interiority is also marked by the monster, who frequently clings to its
virtual condition, its latency, although eventually it exists in actu as a
mobilization of the repressed and as a manifestation of the unconscious.
Therefore, the monster can be understood not only through negative
categories (externality, subversion, disturbance, threat, repression, chaos) but
also as an affirmation of choice, as a search, as a resurgence. It constitutes a
resistant zone of irreducible alterity, of impenetrability and untranslatability, a
form of opacity that confronts the order of language, pushes it to its limits, and
takes it to the edge of the abyss of the unsayable. It is pure figuration: a
(de)monst(e)rative, emblematic sign, a coded message that opens up to
hypotheses and absorbs aporias. It is out of place, unhinged, dislocated, “out of
joint.”

Notes on the Poetics of the Monster

As old as human imagination, as real as the fears that it engenders, feeds, and
exacerbates, the many-faced image of the monster accompanies the processes of
social (self-)recognition in all cultures and wedges itself into the heart of
Western rationality. With deep roots in classical mythology and links to both the
cultural traditions of the Old World and the transoceanic imaginaries that have
been identified as “primitive,” “savage,” and “barbarous” since the time of the
Conquest, the figure of the monster is a repository of contents that do not
conform to traditional interpretative models and thus defy humanistic paradigms.
A metaphor of both hybridity and difference, the figure of the monster has
been used as an illustration of anomaly, which is to say, as the non-normative
form which reveals an excess, a pathological form that is disproportionate,
irregular, and deviant. If social normality was conceived as the quality that
represents the unification and homogenization of individual and communities
around conventions and values, the impure and degraded condition of the
monster is marked by exceptionality and eccentricity. The monster constitutes an
identitarian counter-discourse and a paradigm of threatening, hidden alterity. Its
very image, the visual and epistemic challenge that derives from its
extraordinary appearance, violates the laws of nature and exists as an
excrescence of culture and at the same time betrays both law and culture. Often
made up of deranged yet recognizable human remains or of animal species that
are synthesized in unexpected ways, or, exhibiting machinic elements that
connect it to science and technology, the monster is constructed as a collage in
which disparate origins and qualities come together.
In fact, the monstrous incorporates a disturbing epistemic anxiety: it affects
common sense, it defamiliarizes everyday experiences, and it destabilizes the
knowledge and beliefs that govern social operations.2 Its existence confirms the
bases and principles of the human insofar as it reaffirms the value of life and the
recognition of both the limitations of reason and the excesses of fantasy.
According to Allen S. Weiss,

Monsters are variously characterized by accident, indetermination,

formlessness; by material incompleteness, categorical ambiguity, and
ontological instability. One may create monsters through hybridization,
hypertrophy, or hypotrophy; through lack or excess, or multiplication;
through the substitution of elements, the confusion of species, or the
 conflation of genders and genres. (124-125)

The monster’s activity is always performative, carnivalesque, with elements

of pathos that inspire contradictory feelings: fear, curiosity, jealousy, sometimes
compassion and desire, emotions that reveal irrational drives of attraction toward
the complexity of the sinister. The monster’s erratic behaviors make it
unpredictable. The anomalous logics by which it operates, its possible meanings,
its reason for existing, all lend themselves to debates and polemics and colonize
modern consciousness.
The monster comes from no one and belongs to everyone. It is subject to a
nomadism that not only constantly relocates it spatially but also displaces and
connects adjacent but distinct realms of thought and sensibility: reason, fantasy,
memory, perception, emotionality, desire. It connects with the realm of magic
but it is also in conversation, to a greater or lesser extent, with the world of the
strange, the supernatural, and the fantastic. It is a wonder that exceeds the human
in lower realms of existence and either mimics humanity or obsessively stalks it.
The word “monster” etymologically derives from the Latin word mostrare
(to expose, to reveal, to unfold), and it is also linked to the verb monere (to warn
or to admonish). The monster displays its difference and thereby tests the
system’s limits of tolerance; it exhibits the contradictions of the world in which
it occasionally inserts itself, challenging with its extreme contingency the regime
and projection of the social. For the monster, neither progress nor utopia nor
purity of class, race, or gender exists, because its being consists of a
contaminated material in which human qualities have been definitively or
partially displaced, erased, or substituted by spurious, out-of-place
characteristics. This ubiquitous quality constitutes the essence of the monster.
The remains of its soul reside precisely in this ambiguous, fragile, and unstable
condition. Zombies, vampires, pishtacos, chupacabras, demons, phantasms, and
other representatives of the broad family tree that shares the characteristics of the
monstrous or the supernatural are all beings that benefit from solitude and
isolation. However, they also share, within their domains, family resemblances.
The monster generates itself—regenerates, degenerates—mechanically, in order
to survive as a distinct concentration of irrationality in a world ruled by
monstrous but legitimated principles of exclusion and reification.
According to Hector Santiesteban Oliva, all monsters are, to a certain extent,
one and the same (57). In fact, in the extreme and paradigmatic physicality of the
monster, diverse perspectives are brought together in a sort of chaotic
accumulation that saturates and sutures the domain of meanings. At the same
time, this rich convergence of elements opens that complex image as a
constellation, in the Benjaminian sense mentioned above, where every element
maintains its individuality while being strengthened by all other components.
Every monster is in this sense an opera aperta. Polymorphic, polysemic,
polyphonic, the monster is defined by the pluralization of its qualities and by the
multiple relations that it establishes within the semantic and semiotic
constellation that contains it without delimiting it.3
The quality of the monstrous invades the monster, makes it disappear so that
the halo of monstrosity can shine incandescently, demonically, bearing the echo
of the mythico-religious bonds that brought (and still bring) the monster closer to
the sacred even in its secularized existence. Every monster is a montage, a
composition, an assemblage. Each part, each appearance is completed in the
sequence that it follows. Every monster is incomplete, a partial and provisional
synthesis, destined for destruction, a “dialectic in repose.”
In Jorge Luís Borges’s words, one should recall that the monster “...no es
otra cosa que una combinación de elementos de seres reales y que las
posibilidades del arte combinatorio lo lindan con lo infinito” (Libro de los seres
imaginarios 8). This quality of subsuming plurality in an id-entity that surpasses
—or does not achieve—unity and coherence, that retains fragmentation and
disparity as attributes of being, makes the monster an invincible creature, an
apparatus called to endure in culture without spatio-temporal limits, a renewable
resource of ideology.
The monster moves from the spheres of mythology and Judeo-Christian
thought toward the areas of politics, visual arts, fiction, and technology, but the
monstrous always retains in these avatars elements of previous stages and a
tangential relation to the sublime, that level accessed through terror, which
connects with the transcendent. According to Weiss, in his “Ten Theses on
Monsters and Monstrosity,” what the amorphous is to the sublime, the deformed
is to the monstrous (124).
In the context of his study of the neo-Baroque, Omar Calabrese has referred
to the figure of the monster, highlighting two characteristics:
 Primero: la espectacularidad, derivada del hecho de que el monstruo se
muestra, más allá de una norma (“monstrum”). Segundo:
“la misteriosidad” causada por el hecho de que su existencia nos lleva a
pensar en una admonición oculta de la naturaleza, que deberíamos
adivinar (“Monitum”). Todos los grandes prototipos de monstruo... son
al mismo tiempo maravillas y principios enigmáticos. (107)

As Calabrese himself points out, the foundational principle of teratology is

the study of irregularity and excess (107). This latter feature generally can be
seen both in physical materiality and in the axiological sphere, linked to the
actions of the monster and to the cultural and ideological sense they attribute to
it, because “[e]l modo de imaginar los monstruos, de hecho, esconde los modos
de imaginar las categorías del valor” (116).
In the introduction to Writing Monsters: Essays on Iberian and Latin
American Cultures, Adriana Gordillo and Nicholas Spadaccini correctly claim
that the concept of monstrosity is fluid, not only because of the meanings that it
connotes in different cultures but also because of its historical variations (9). In
any case, many characteristics seem to have been maintained across epochs and
contexts. The most notorious is the protean and transgressive nature that
characterizes these creatures, because the monstrous can take on infinite forms
and equip itself with innumerable meanings according to the parameters by
which it is interpreted. The monster must be decoded, as the editors of Writing
Monsters argue, which is to say, it ends, like all stories do, at the instance of
reception. The monster is, in effect, discourse, textuality, texture, a symbolic
surface, an aesthetico-ideological construct, an icon, and a roadside sign.
In his overview of the rhetoric of monstrosity, Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat
discusses the semantic slippages that emerge from the hybrid nature of the
monster, primarily the ideas of coupling and degeneration that point to bodily
simulacrum. His critique also calls attention to the theme of metamorphosis,
which is essential for comprehending the monstrous because it involves the
notions of evolution, temporality, and (id)entity, substituting them for the ideas
of synthesis, becoming, mutation, and incompleteness. “The grotesque body,”
Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us, “is a body in the act of becoming” (The Bakhtin
Reader 233).
The monster turns incoherence into a fundamental quality, definitive and
distinctive; it materializes aporia, it defies the rules of verisimilitude, and it
greatly exceeds the notion of heterogeneity because its difference exceeds the
different and the unequal, replacing them with the experience of incongruence
and discordance—the experience of discord—that is unleashed by the absurdity
of its presence. In the monster, the final product is more, and also less, than the
sum of its parts. Its abjection is outside the canon, which the monster outstrips,
suppresses, and impugns from the margins.
Monstrosity is irrefutably built on the basis of corporeality: the primacy of
the material, the exaggeration of certain features (strength, instinct, senses) and
the liminality of others. The monster is a limit-corporeality that always recalls
something more or something less: a hypertrophied nature or a lack, a precarity,
or an excess. Such materiality problematizes the limits of the bios and launches
an anguished search for the Other. But like all identity, the monster is colonized
by an irreducible alterity in which exterior foreignness is sinisterly
complemented by an interior anomaly:

In its function as dialectical Other or third-term supplement, the

monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond –of all those
loci that are rhetorically placed as distant and distinct but originate
within. Any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed
through) the monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous
difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.
(Cohen, “Monster Culture” 7)

In this way, the figure of the monster emits significations that reach and
interpellate the social at all levels. The monster constitutes a vortex of emotional
and ideological energy that organizes its field of signification. It is loyal to the
distant origin that links it to the community that created it and which expresses
itself in an oblique, deranged way. For the same reason, it always returns to the
social space from which it emerged, even if it is in order to besiege it and
destabilize it. In this sense, it possesses an instinctive memory, a heliotropism
that makes it monothematic, obsessively equal to itself.
In order to construct the monstrous, it is necessary to break with organic
unity, fluidity between body and soul, psycho-somatic harmony, replacing it with
the pastiche that makes every monster a simulacrum of humanity. Nevertheless,
ontologically speaking, “se trata de una pluralidad que apunta a la unidad”
(Santiesteban Oliva 29; emphasis in original):

[t]he fragmented body of the monster is said to be “made up of pieces

of a reassembled reality” that according to Freud, constitutes a set of
displaced emotions that are at the core of the creative process, making
the monster a contradictory entity that incarnates fear, repression, and a
growing impulse that is “indispensable in dealing with the challenges
of life.” (Gordillo and Spadaccini 4-5)

The monster constitutes an (in)organic provocation that materializes in its

othered, irreducible, ethically incommensurable being and generates an intense,
discontinuous, and chaotic activity. Its being exposes, in being itself, conditions
that contradict biological, emotional, and sensory existence, causing opposed
characteristics to coexist in a tense and unstable equilibrium. Its foreignness
constitutes the key element of its symbolic value because it is through this
foreign quality, in the empty spaces that are produced between its appearances
and vanishings, that the social confronts its essential precarity, its vulnerability,
its exhaustion.
The monstrous is thus not so much that which the human pushes away but
what it evokes: the being that lurks and appears through ghosts, the exacerbated
man who lay beneath the animal grandiosity of King Kong or Godzilla, the
cadaver degraded by the oscillating verticality of the zombie. The monstrous
points to a beyond that exceeds the instance of death in which the final character
dignifies the life that has been extinguished. The monster incorporates other
forms that denigrate both body and soul, it feeds on the body—as the vampire
does with blood, or the pishtaco with its victims’ fat—in order to give human
substance to illicit applications that establish parallel forms of existence beyond
the conventional borders between life and death. This recycling that takes place
between the normal and the monstrous, between the human and the animal,
grounds an anomalous and disturbing biological cycle that extrapolates identity
from alterity and transgresses supposedly fixed borders, altering the natural
equilibrium. Nevertheless, it is this inter-species movement that defines the
teratological space and sustains the production of meanings.
The monster constitutes by its very existence an examination of the status of
the human, its animal origin, its intermediary location between the divine and the
demonic, between particularism and universality, between the contingent and the
transcendent. At the same time, the monster is artificiality, simulacrum,
construction, and deconstruction of life.
In his “Introduction” to the Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and
the Monstrous, Asa Simon Mittman writes:

Above all, the monstrous is that which creates this sense of vertigo,
that which calls into question our (their, anyone’s) epistemological
worldview, highlights its fragmentary and inadequate nature, and
thereby asks us (often with fangs at our throats, with its fire upon our
skin, even as we and our stand-ins and body doubles descend the
gullet) to acknowledge the failures of our systems of categ orization.
(8)

In his analysis of the symbolic meaning of the monstrous and the terrors it
unleashes, David Gilmore examines this dynamic of interchangeability that
confronts the human with radical alterity, which the individual must at the same
time explore and interrogate in accordance with Nietzsche’s aphorism from
Beyond Good and Evil (cited by Gilmore) in which he advises, “He who fights
with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And
when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” (106). It is in
this interplay between different forms of being and perceiving the world,
between positions and degrees of consciousness, that the presence of the monster
enters, transferring its qualities or revealing those that would appear to have the
power to oppose it when in reality they mock it. Perhaps this is why Gilmore
claims that “The mind needs monsters” (1).4 In fact, it is in the practices of
reflection and contemplation (with both words understood as referring to both
meditation and the observation of an aesthetic representation in a funhouse
mirror) that the mind accesses, at least to a certain extent, the mystery of the
human, its achievements, and its psychological, biological, ethical, and epistemic
limits.
The monster is radically and irremediably solitary, but at the same time it is
always guided by a heliotropism that returns it, like a boomerang, to the social,
either in order to satisfy the community’s basic, unavoidable need to survive, or
as a vain pursuit of transcendence and spiritual projection, or in order to carry
out the practice of evil as an act of perversion, excess, or abjection, as an activity
that almost always takes place as monotonous routine, as an insatiable symbolic
onanism.
In the first of his seven theses on the monstrous, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
correctly claims, “[t]he monstrous body is pure culture” (“Monster Culture” 4):
the figurative expression of a certain conjuncture in which times, places, and
feelings (fear, anxiety, desire) intersect and are visually codified in a body that
exceeds experience and appeals to the intricate resources of fantasy. If, as the
etymology of the word indicates, the monster is a warning about the limits and
the unavoidable divisiveness of certain (social, cultural, subjective) realities, its
very existence constitutes a line of flight: a transitory sublimation that is as
defiant and fleeting as a nightmare. The specter of a monster, or even the mere
suspicion of its possible existence, engenders an acute mistrust of one’s
knowledge of the status and nature of the real. Its emergence, its presence, and
even its memory all create a hiatus in temporality and social knowledge, a
profound rupture of the certainties which make it possible to comprehend the
world and the definitions of goals, behaviors, and values. After the experience of
a monster, reality is never the same again. It has been tainted by mistrust and
incredulity: a suspicion that affects not only the world around us but also our
own ability to replace it, through either imagination or reason.
Cohen argues that “the monster only exists to be read” and that all culture
can be understood via the monsters it engenders (4). The monster must thus be
decoded through a semiotico-ideological hermeneutics that encompasses the
general order of culture, its values, projects, and representational resources.
Obviously, Cohen’s definition of the word “reading” is broad and not limited to
textual investigation. Rather, it refers to the multifaceted contemplation of the
monstrous image and to the recognition of the scopic regime that exists among
us. As a written discourse or image, as a semiotic space, and as an aesthetico-
ideological construct, the monster appeals to the senses and to reason in order to
surpass them, to become the bearer of messages that are open to unforeseen
responses in the cultural repositories of socialization and symbolic consumption.
The monster is inherently interstitial. It occupies the in-between-space, the
fissure that separates and connects norms, logics, and spatio-temporal
coordinates. It does not explain the unexplainable, but it suggests the necessity
of accepting the impossibility of rationally domesticating the real and
extinguishing everything that resists normativity in that domain. It blocks
totalization and does not glorify the fragment it exhibits as the symbol of the
identity of an alterity that it never stops reducing to the dominant norms.
According to Timothy Beal, the monster is “otherness within sameness” (6),
which is to say, a difference that is encoded within sameness and thus confirms
and destabilizes it.
Situated between life and death, between the human and the non-human,
between cultures, races, and species; between sleep and wakefulness, in the
cracks that divide and unite reality and fantasy, between time and space, between
reason and faith, between hegemony and subalternity; between textual forms and
oral and visual regimes, between identity and alterity, between silence and
discourse, between hierarchies, aesthetic registers, taxonomies, and social and
political systems, the monster perseveres in its precarious forms of existence. It
possesses a ubiquity that protects it and makes it unpredictable. As Weiss puts it,
“monsters exist in margins. They are thus avatars of chance, impurity,
heterodoxy, abomination, mutation, metamorphosis; prodigy, mystery, marvel.
Monsters are indicators of epistemic shifts” (125).
The monster is transhistorical, transcultural, trans-generic, interracial, post-
identitarian, antihuman, pre-and postmodern, an interclass product (although it
sometimes specifically represents certain sections of society). It inhabits the
space opened by prefixes as modifiers of concepts that are considered fixed in
the canon of Western modernity. It is from this pre-fixation that the monster
refutes paradigms of identity and notions of order and linear progress, cultural
frontiers and disciplinary protocols that attempt to push to the margins—and into
the past—elements that are foreign to regulation and bourgeois discipline. It is
repressed, invisibilized, and nearly suppressed by society, but it always
reemerges, reestablishing the chaos that, left unattended, is likely to be
reabsorbed into routine.
According to Franco Moretti, the monster—and the horror genre that
consolidates its agency—emerges precisely from the panic caused by the
possibility of social division and the desire for social unification. According to
Moretti, Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, for example, are “totalizing”
monsters that displace and externalize social antagonisms, exposing a struggle
between humankind and its fear of being destroyed. They make inequality and
discrimination explicit and thus demystify political and scientific myths.
Regarding Mary Shelley’s famous character, Moretti argues: “the monster is man
turned upside-down, negated. He has no autonomous existence; he can never be
really free or have a future. He lives only as the other side of that coin which is
Frankenstein. When the scientist dies, the monster does not know what to do
with his own life and commits suicide” (71).
Apart from being incorrigibly marginal, the monster is usually also nomadic,
itinerant, diasporic. It exists in a deterritorialized way, as if it could only access
residual (recondite, obscure, unexplorable) spaces. The monster is itself a body-
in-ruins, a surplus in which the social and the political are expressed in absentia
or in a cryptic, degraded, elliptical, over-coded way. Its hybrid and fragmentary
nature has its correlate in the way in which the monster occupies geocultural and
symbolic spaces, inhabiting decentered—eccentric—compartments, always as a
foreign element, as an exogenous factor that exposes the distance between
normality and exception. The monster’s hidden subjectivity is subsumed in its
quality as cultural object. The monster is, in effect, the object of debates,
investigations, and theories that keep it under scrutiny and attempt to prove its
lack of essence, instead accepting it as an epiphenomenon of desiring logic,
which gives a dreamlike form to the delirium of an insufficient and authoritarian
reason.
Consistent with this marginal status, the monster’s legibility resides precisely
in the deciphering of its ambiguity: in the possibility of interpreting the
signifying saturation that characterizes it and the flow of significations that it
engenders. As Antonio Negri argues, every monster is political (as is every non-
monstrous creature). But the monster’s transgressive ethos is undeniably situated
in the sphere of subversion, on the border of the abyss that is opened up by the
decline of reason and the loss of all certainty. And even though the monster does
not positively constitute a line of change, it represents forms of collective
knowledge through the portrayal of an extreme, radically other social existence,
like a backdrop against which grotesque figures are projected. The monster’s
primary function is thus disturbing the status quo, establishing a symbolic
disorder that can be read as a semiotic system that breaks away from the
dominant norms and requires a new hermeneutics of the social. In this way, as a
negative aesthetics, monstrosity babelizes languages and destabilizes the logics
on which they are based, exposing the precarity of the social, its extreme
porosity, its unstable epistemic equilibrium. It is precisely this thanatic quality
which explains the widespread rejection the monstrous inspires. At the same
time, it also allows us to understand the fascination it holds and to access the
representativity of the sublime: the line that separates and unites the human and
the super-human, the natural and the supernatural, that is to say, the duality that
constitutes us culturally and psychologically. As we will see, Negri explains
precisely this turn in the connotation of the monstrous, which he converts into an
expression of the multitude and its supposed potential resistance: “If the monster
exists, the rest gets transformed and doesn’t remain” (“The Political Monster”
200).5
The monster is the visible indication of an alternative cartography. It points
toward other spaces of social existence, insubordinate, residual worlds inhabited
by the missing links of aborted races, pariahs in a world dominated by others.
The non-place of the monster reveals by its very existence the fissures and gaps
in maps constructed by different civilizing projects in which the dominant
groups determine and confirm the centers of power and the domains of reason.
The alternative cartography of the monster thus refutes the cultural geography of
social spaces ruled by hegemonic epistemologies and by technologies of social
control that regulate the flow and consumption of symbolic capital. In this way,
throughout history, the monstrous functions as a spectral reminder of lack, of
what has been suppressed, repressed, annihilated, or invisibilized. Sometimes the
monster represents the opposite: the rage of the displaced, the disappeared, the
unnamable. In this case, it is the enemy of impunity, it constitutes the guttural
voice of a silenced but looming knowledge that has returned with a vengeance.
In this sense, the monster’s lineage goes back quite some way. One of the
earliest texts to systematically describe fantastic and monstrous creatures is the
profusely illustrated Natural History by Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE), which
recognizes the importance of the perception of phenomena that have been
categorized as monstrous.6 According to Aristotle, the monster for Pliny is not
only a product of nature but also a result of culture, and it often embodies moral
aspects connected to values and behaviors. Pliny’s Natural History makes
reference to monster people or monstrous races that indicate the existence of
strange civilizations in unexplored lands and seas within the confines of the
Empire.7 According to Pliny, many of these monsters had strange tastes,
including cannibalism, preference for raw meat, etc.—appetites that modern
monsters would adopt to varying degrees. He recognizes a great variety of
monstrous races, unexpected and marvelous forms that inhabit the periphery of
the known world. Among these he includes pygmies, people with only one leg,
beings with dog heads, giants, and individuals with disproportionately large ears
or feet. The hybridity that exists among this immense variety of exotic races
(which, according to Pliny, populated both the lands and the imaginaries of his
time) places in doubt the fixity of the boundaries that delimit what is properly
human and separate it from other animal species.
Monsters were represented in the maps of antiquity, as well as in the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance, in its legends, bestiaries, travelogues, and popular
stories, because its religious connotations were a fundamental part of the
monster’s symbology. To this the Baroque period will add a taste for excess,
syncretism, and monumentality. As David R. Castillo argues: “the modern
fantastic is born in the context of the culture of curiosities of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, at the meeting place between certainty and doubt, and
between apprehension and fascination” (“Monsters for the Age” 162).
As part of the logic of colonialism, the mythical figure of the monster
inhabits the non-place of utopia. It provides a representational model that makes
it possible to interpret and situate new realities within the epistemic atlas that
governs the processes of the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the
Americas. The Other becomes assimilable through a recognizable figure
connected to the archetype of the adversary (the Moor, the infidel, the heretic,
the Indian), images that occupy an epistemic space void of knowledge but
replete with stereotypes, desires, and passions.
The monster does not seek redemption in a systematic way, nor does it
present any form of legitimation, because salvation is not a problem for this
(id)entity that is bound to its own contingency. Nevertheless, the monster always
bears a nostalgia for unity and organicity. In this sense, it is a content in search
of a form; it simultaneously embodies desire and the impossibility of ever
achieving a structure capable of defining and establishing its nature. A radical
melancholia emerges from its constitutive alienation and its irredeemable
exceptionality, a feeling inspired by the combined states of euphoria and
hyperactivity that permeate the social space occupied by the monster. The
monster is thus constantly engaged in a dialogue with the frustrations of the
civilization that gave rise to it and that it hopelessly evokes, as if it were always
elaborating a primordial trauma that has left an irreparable scar in the deepest
levels of consciousness.
Although the monster can be the product of a mutation (like Frankenstein’s
monster), what is proper to it is not change per se, but rather the permanence,
persistence, and inevitability of the mutations that constitute its form of being.
Although the present is plagued by monsters linked to natural catastrophes, the
excesses of technology, illusions of omnipotence, hybridizations, and cloning, it
would be mistaken to say that the monster has returned from its mythological or
gothic horizons because it actually never left. Rather, the history of the West is
the history of its metamorphosis and of its avatars, of its becomings, and of the
simulacra that it has engendered in order to survive, adapting to the varying fears
and fantasies of each era.
In fact, the monster perseveres in its being and remains outside of time,
identical to itself in essence, condemned to live within its own register.8 It is
contingent, immanent, although it points to a beyond that can be situated in the
past (thus maintaining the idea that the monster is associated with the primitive,
the arcane, the pre-modern) or in the eternity of the supernatural (referring to the
conceptualization of the monster as an indication of the sublime rather than an
error of Creation). In this sense, the monster functions as a missing link, a
broken bridge between well-determined polarities. As Persephone Braham
points out: “In monstrous terms, the Baron von Frankenstein’s creature is
perfection itself: an insolent concatenation of abject and hybrid parts whose very
creation transgresses the sacred frontiers between life and death, the human and
the divine” (From Amazons to Zombies 12).
The relation between the figure of the monster and the configurations
assumed by power at different levels (economic, social, cultural, political) is
undeniable. Sometimes interpreted as a metaphor of unhinged and irrational
force, the monster has also been seen as the embodiment of resistance or
rebellion, as the irascible expression of radical protest against the system and, in
this sense, as a metalanguage that, along with visual support, exposes the
fragmented and fetishized subjectivity of the modern human being. Extreme
excess or radical lack naturally indicate monstrosity because they break with
norm(alitie)s in some way or other. They suggest the insufficiency of accepted
classifications and open the space of exceptionality, which is to say, that which
escapes everyday, normal, predictable experience.9 They unleash a torrent of
relativism that incorporates abjection, excess, and perversion into individual and
collective reality.
In analyzing the relations between horror and everyday life, Philip Nickel
has referred to the fact that the reception of the monstrous and the generation of
fear always forces the viewer into an ethical commitment whereby repudiating
the anomalous and supernatural message provoked by horror entails taking
positions with regard to the actions and nature of the characters. At the same
time, for Nickel, horror has an effect similar to that of philosophical skepticism
(exemplified by the film The Matrix (1999), which destabilizes ordinary
knowledge by introducing relativism and doubt about the very nature of the
real).
Often the monstrous resides not so much in the characteristics that writing,
images, or oral tradition have judged to be extraordinary but in the surplus
figures or experiences that collective interpretation incorporates, canonizes,
ordains, discards, or includes in which the social is expressed in an oblique,
denaturalized way. The process of monstering exposes above all the tense and
contradictory relation between nature and culture, between human beings and
other animal species, between nature and technology, between subject and
object, between the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial, between the world of the
living and the world of the dead, between gods and humans, offering unforeseen
syntheses that explode preexisting associations and affinities and tests the limits
of the degrees and modalities of material and symbolic combination within the
known world.
The monstrous is outlined against the backdrop of political, cultural, and
religious institutionality and expresses various forms of politico-economic
repression, censorship, marginalization, or the endangerment of life. It
proliferates in totalitarian regimes, in classical colonial contexts, in modern
imperialism, in segregated, impoverished, and super-exploited societies in which
otherness is expelled by the dominant powers to the margins of the system, to an
indeterminate zone of neglect and hopelessness. This expulsion is dramatized in
the deranged figure of the monster that, as it materializes around a series of
aesthetico-ideological characteristics, radiates an ambiguous and paradoxical
ethics out toward its surroundings, thereby obliging a revision of moral canons,
hierarchies, privileges, social positions, and exclusions. In its own supernatural
way, the monster develops a pedagogy that exhibits the irrationality of a world
besieged by anomaly. Its representation is essential as a counter-image of notions
like order, normality, regulation, and social discipline.
Although it lacks the gift of speech, every monster has its own language, a
singular lexicon full of silences, reservations, and hiatuses. In addition, every
monster corresponds to a particular social environment, has a specific cultural
level, and reaches a singular audience. Monsters inhabit different spaces: urban
popular culture, traditional communities, the scientific world, mass culture,
“highbrow” literature, folklore, religious doctrine, rural, coastal, or mountainous
regions, magical thinking, history, ethnography, politics, filmic discourse, and
the arts. They are therefore subject to different forms of representation and
consumption. The culture of monsters is highly regionalized, although in some
cases monstrosity comes to be universalized and takes on local variations.
Therefore, it is subject to constant re-readings, adaptations, translations,
additions, and portrayals that frequently end up caricaturizing and thus
weakening the monster’s foreignness. When the monster becomes familiar, it
loses its mystery and its ability to seduce.
As with any cultural product, the monster is subject to the laws of the
marketplace. It is absorbed, coopted, and domesticated by commodification. The
demand for monsters, far from decreasing, seems to be exacerbated in the
postmodern era, that stage characterized by hypertrophied markets, advances in
technology, the supremacy of virtual worlds, resurgent fundamentalisms, the
weakening of traditional forms of the political, and the decline of the “grand
narratives” that provided totalizing explanations of modern societies. Instead, the
monster feeds on fragmentation and hopelessness, and although it is connected
through its magical and religious origins to cosmogonies and grand
philosophical concepts, it has gone on to inhabit a disenchanted, broken world
replete with fear and besieged by multiple forms of exclusion and violence.
In El legado de los monstruos: Tratado sobre el miedo y lo terrible, the
Mexican writer Ignacio Padilla has noted that we are the sum of our fears, which
is to say, that this emotion defines us on both individual and collective levels and
constitutes an indispensable survival mechanism. According to Padilla, panic
constitutes a social fuel that ignites collective reactions and is commercialized
by those who know how to exploit it. This fuel feeds the social, political, and
aesthetic machinery, as well as the domestic and public spheres.
Every monster is inscribed in a symbolic field. It forms part of the practice of
the cultural production of horror, a practice that is linked to popular imaginaries
and which often becomes part of the spirit of festivities: Carnival, religious
celebrations, representations in public theaters, the circus, ethnic rituals, fairs,
and celebrations like Day of the Dead or Halloween, all situations in which
people attempt, through layers of simulacra, to contain the expansive capacity of
the monstrous by domesticating it.
In this way, despite its delirious and sometimes melancholic nature and its
tragicomic or melodramatic derivations, the horror induced by the monster is
always connected to intuitive and cognitive aspects with ethical and political
connotations. In his analysis of horror as a path toward moral reflection, Philip
Tallon argues:

Despite its frequent kinship with dark humor and its tendency toward
vulgarity and schlock, I will suggest here that horror as a genre is
worth taking seriously (at least for a while) because of how well it can
inform and enlighten our vision of the world by reminding us of our
inner moral frailty and by forcing us to take seriously the moral reality
of evil. (36)

Every monster and every monstrosity is organized as a system of

signification that has the gaze as its governing principle. The gaze constitutes the
monster as such and grants it a place in the realms of belief, socialization, and
quotidian life. In fact, the gaze emphasizes and differentiates the space of the
everyday. Thus, it has a foundational, constructive value.

Aquello que hace del monstruo una forma irreconocible y

eventualmente irrepresentable son las reglas de percepción, los modos
de la mirada y del ser-mirado, sobre los que una comunidad establece
las bases de sus semióticas grupales, y el ejercicio corporal de su
‘identidad’. ‘Ver’ al monstruo, identificar lo monstruoso, es en estos
 contextos una verificación y un refuerzo de los pactos comunitarios de
un ‘nosotros’ que coincide con la nación –‘nosotros’ que incluye
principalmente al lector, que es quien debe ver al monstruo y aprender
a reconocer lo monstruoso en sus formas más evidentes o más o menos
secretas. El monstruo como performance es el pre-texto para la
afirmación (tácita o silenciosa: interpretativa) del ‘nosotros’ en sus
reglas de percepción y enunciación. (Giorgi “Mirar al monstruo” 249)

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin refers to grotesque realism as a

specific form of representation which he defines as a system of images in which
“[t]he cosmic, social, and bodily elements are given […] in an indivisible whole”
(19). Although Bakhtin uses the concept to refer primarily to the context of
popular festivals, the idea of the grotesque (from grotto, meaning cave) has a
more general application related to aesthetics which exposes forms and relations
that the author considers degraded (corporeal, related to the body’s inferior
elements, such as sexuality, appetites, and various residues). According to
Bakhtin, the material and bodily principle is perceived as universal and popular,
and “[a]s such, it is opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of
the world; it makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthy, or of independence
of the earth and the body” (19).
The grotesque feeds on the carnal and the inferior through opposing itself to
“noble” and sublime forms. According to Bakhtin, this inferior level always
implies a beginning. The monstrous is situated within this domain in which
spiritual values (which correspond to feelings and rationality) are replaced by an
instinctive and insatiable primal carnality through which desires repressed by the
social order are expressed.
The grotesque style (which Thomas Mann characterizes as the most
genuinely anti-bourgeois) contradicts all ideals of harmony, order, and
equilibrium, establishing in their place deformation, strangeness, and farce. For
this same reason, it is associated with the dark side of society, with the vulgar,
excessive, and distorted. Tzvetan Todorov suggests that the fantastic (and by
extension, the monstrous) emerges when belief is weak and certainty is
suspended, creating a bridge between horror and comedy. According to Miguel
Ángel Náter,
 El mundo trastornado que es el grotesco aparece en el infierno
existencial del gótico, una deformación del mundo cristiano. En ese
sentido, la novela gótica puede verse como una intensificación del
género psicológico; los desórdenes mentales pueden ser interpretados
como ruinas del espíritu. La mente gótica está fascinada por la psicosis.
Así, la inestabilidad del mundo exterior está relacionada con el caos
interior. (78)

This fusion of religious and psychological elements that is translated into an

aesthetico-ideological and countercultural proposal becomes a distinctive feature
of works of gothic literature that stylized these positions and formalized them in
a series of methods, themes, and motives. These were made more obvious,
formulaic, and caricaturized in some satirical, parodic, or simply unsophisticated
versions of the gothic, while some of its more developed forms project
themselves toward a search for transcendence and symbolic universality.
In his study of the grotesque, Philip Thompson writes:

The present tendency is to view the grotesque as a fundamentally

ambivalent thing as a clash of opposites, in some forms at least as an
approximate expression of the problematic nature of existence. It is no
accident that the grotesque mode in art and literature tends to be
prevalent in societies and eras marked by strife, radical changes or
disorientation. (11)

As an expression of alienation and estrangement, the grotesque constitutes an

attempt to control and exorcize the demonic elements that inhabit the real. In this
way, the grotesque is exhausted neither in absurdity nor in comedy, nor in the
revolting effects it can cause, nor in the performativity through which it
manifests itself. Instead, the imprecise and proliferate field of the monstrous,
which includes ludic, stereotypical, and even melodramatic elements, reveals
multiple and complex levels of signification. In this sense, as a grotesque being,
the monster is always a mediator: the caricatured synthesis of a major drama,
which its presence both exposes and obliterates, creating a game of funhouse
mirrors that involves the observer.10
The monster’s prophetic quality, which has been recognized since classical
antiquity, has to do with this paradoxical combination of revelation and sleight-
of-hand that maintains meaning in the murky zone of understanding and
affectivity. The monster’s activity presupposes an illumination through obscurity
with regard imminent disasters, whether natural or cultural. In his book On
Ugliness, Umberto Eco discusses the monster’s connection to the heralding of
marvelous events, such as blood falling as rain, fire in the sky, or the birth of
anomalous (particularly androgynous) beings. The monster’s ugliness—which is
in reality the countercultural form of an aestheticism carried out by an other
aestheticism—thus has a social function. The monster is always irregular,
opaque, it calls attention to itself, it retains the gaze of the Other, which clashes
with its corporeality as against a wall of contention that makes its symbolic field
impervious. At the same time, its ugliness and strangeness make it inescapable,
they expose it as a sign that should not be ignored because it refers to a major
disturbance in the world, in nature, history, or culture. Although it can have a
parodic, satirical, or farcical sense, it stands out in the field of the sensible. The
monster awakens sympathy, fear, repulsion, curiosity, or shame, but never
indifference.
The monster always possesses an attitude of conquest (territorial, bodily,
emotional, sexual), but the relation it establishes between means and ends is very
violent and not always effective: its actions reveal desperation and anxiety, its
bodily ineptitude almost always ends in catastrophe, frustration, and chaos. The
theme of recognition is central to monstrosity. To (re)cognize the monster
implies, first, overcoming its horrific appearance in order to initiate some type of
cognitive relationship with it that will make it possible to understand its message
or at least its presence, to grasp the basis of its identity and the specificity of its
difference, to decode its semiosis, to calculate the distance that separates us from
its desire.
Eco refers to the monstrous as an “aesthetics of the incommensurable” (On
Ugliness 111). That which presents itself as monstrous does not fit into the
regular models of representation. It needs other structures, other languages, other
processes of reception, other readings. Above all, it demands that we renounce
any complete (or even sufficient) understanding of its meanings and that we
accept the fundamental mystery that constitutes and surrounds us. Ultimately, it
requires partial and modest practices of deconstruction and re-assemblage. Like
the baroque fold, the monster constantly folds and unfolds with a machinic
rhythm that does not diminish its humanistic profile but rather overcomes it. In
this regard, Alonso Miranda writes:

El monstruo, me dicen, se parece a la máquina. El monstruo compone,

suelda, anuda partes de diferente naturaleza y origen, hasta coagular la
figura final multi-estilística de un organismo complejo. La arquitectura
morfológica barroca se contrapone a una arquitectura funcional
deslumbrante: una máquina de matar, una máquina de aterrorizar, una
máquina de desear, de ser deseado, de odiar, de amar, de no morir. (1)11

The monster lives in labyrinths, on top of skyscrapers, in attics, dungeons,

tunnels, catacombs, “behind the scenes,” in cemeteries, jail cells, caves, dead-
end streets, desolate places, aristocratic salons, forests, jungles, oceans,
inaccessible mountains, towns, or plantations. It lives among the multitude,
among the savage and the wise, in markets, with the lower classes, the poor, and
the infirm, in libraries, among intellectuals, madmen, and abject peoples. It
exists in old age, in the space of genealogies, in childhood, in the mind, among
family photos, in the mirror (except for vampires), in memory, or ultimately, in
places we will never see the same way again after experiencing the monster, who
reminds us of the existence of these sites we would otherwise forget.

Notes
1. Teratology is the treatment or study of human anomalies or abnormalities from the multiple perspectives
of biology, medicine, mythography, etc. In connection with the present theme, cryptozoology is the
discipline concerned with the study of fictional animals. Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire is considered the
founder of modern teratology (Histoire des anomalies de l’organization [1832], Histoire naturelle
generale [1860]). Of particular interest for the present study is his book Des monstruosités humaines
(1822).
2. According to Nöel Carroll, “monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitively
threatening. They are threats to common knowledge” (qtd. in Mittman 8).
3. The concept of opera aperta comes from Umberto Eco’s book Opera aperta (1962) and refers to the
interpretative process that invigorates and strengthens the instance of reception. Every sign is
“produced” by the one who receives and decodes it within a determined system of significations. Every
work, insofar as it is a system of signs, exists “in movement” and rejects the fixity of meaning in favor
of a polysemy that incorporates the reader/viewer in an active and creative way. See Eco, “El papel del
lector” in Lector in fabula, 73-75.
4. At the beginning of their preface, Gerard Unterhurner and Erik M. Vogt make a similar claim: “society
needs monstrosity” (7).
5. See also Gabriel Giorgi, Ensayos sobre biopolítica.
6. Pliny the Elder’s encyclopedic work is a compendium of knowledge across a vast range of inquiry, from
astronomy and mathematics to geography, anthropology, zoology, botany, and physiology. It also
broaches the fields of agriculture, mining, and the arts. Divided into thirty-seven books, part of the
work (the prologue of which was written by the Roman emperor Titus) was published during the
author’s lifetime, and it has widely been seen as a model of totalization and humanistic organization
 and as a source for the study of the linguistic customs and beliefs of the era.
7. Regarding this, see Guy Rozat 74 and passim, and Persephone Braham 5-6. This latter writes: “Pliny
made no moral assertions about monsters, suggesting that Nature had created them more as a diversion
than an admonition: “These and similar varieties of the human race have been made by the ingenuity of
Nature as toys for herself and marvels for us […]” (From Amazon to Zombies 6).
8. Some authors, such as Elaine Graham, insist that in the monster’s “illicit beginnings” one can locate a
sin or deviation that causes monstrosity, an offense that explains its condition, which introduces the
themes of causality, responsibility, and guilt. Nonetheless, not all authors who discuss the topic of
monsters focus on its philosophical implications (e.g., Foucault).
9. Regarding the topic of classification, Unterhurner and Vogt remark: “Monstrosity presents thought with a
preeminently modern problem: classifications begin to fall apart, order turns into disorder, normality
bleeds into abnormality and the very ground of the human starts to give way” (7).
10. On the psychological effects of the grotesque, see Wolfgang Kayser and Michael Steig.
11. See Alonso Miranda, “Máquinas.”
 Chapter 2

The Monster in History

The semantic field of monstrosity is discursively constructed through multiple
representational strategies. Descriptions, stories, or images expose the monster’s
anomaly, portraying it in allegorical situations or as the protagonist of narratives
which refer to instinctive, mechanical, and repetitive actions that reveal its
disruptive relationship to its surroundings. In many cases, the monster takes the
shape of avatars that change its appearance, increasing its capacity for ubiquity
and unpredictability. The monstrous always indicates some kind of synthesis,
combining informational elements, emotional connotations, behavioral
characteristics, and the conditions of the socio-cultural spaces in which the
construct of monstrosity originates and in which its meanings unfold. The
monstrous is connected to different domains of culture and thus takes on
different functions.
For example, religion manifests itself in relation to the monster,
incorporating into it, to a greater or lesser extent, a sense of transcendence that
surpasses its circumstantiality. The monster is often linked to diverse
cosmogonies, to the cult of the dead, to ideas about the beyond, and to syncretic
legends and beliefs in which the lines between the sacred and the profane are
blurred. Consistent with the idea of the supernatural and the sublime, the
monstrous both defies and confirms the concept of divine Creation as an
expression of perfection and as the principle of life connected to natural
harmony and to a cosmic design that comprehends and transcends earthly
matters. The monstrous introduces the idea of the marvelous and of all that is
uncognizable or incomprehensible to the human being. In other contexts, it also
presupposes a demonstration of the eventual errors of Creation or a coded
warning about the demonic potential that lies beneath the natural order. At the
same time, the monster can only be defined by that which already is part of
cultural experience. The monster’s sole novel aspect is actually the kind of
synthesis it offers, as well as the manner and degree to which it exercises its
effects on the real.
 Herodotus’s Histories (c. 430) include numerous descriptions and
ethnographic reports that make references to monstrous beings that inhabited
exotic lands and provided models for representing strange and unconquered
cultures. In Plato’s Phaedrus (370) there are also references to the monstrous
encapsulated in reflections on animals and wondrous phenomena, such as
centaurs, chimeras, gorgons, and Pegasuses. Plato considers the problem of the
limitations of knowledge and of the verisimilitude of the available information
about realities outside one’s own culture and notes that, given such obstacles to
the total comprehension of the real and the imaginary, he would rather try to
know himself better: “I investigate not these things, but myself, to know whether
I am a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and
simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature” (Phaedrus
230a).
In her “Introduction to Monstrous Imagination, Marie-Hélene Huet outlines
the appearance of monsters in the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions and
locates one of the earliest representations of monstrosity in Aristotle’s History of
Animals (350), in which monstrosity is attributed to any being that does not
resemble its progenitors but is instead separated from them by accident, for its
dissimilarity to them (3).1 This notion establishes one of the explanations of
monstrosity that attributes responsibility to parents as the cause of their
progeny’s monstrosity. According to some theories, one of the main reasons for
this biological occurrence has to do with the mother’s imagination, namely that
her morbid thoughts might be one possible source of congenital deformities,
rerouting the biological through an aesthetics of the grotesque. Other potential
causes advanced during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance included having
sexual relations with the devil and conceiving a child in a deformed womb or
with defective sperm (Huet 6-7).2 Thus, the “human monster” is theorized in a
parallel way to the processes of the artistic production and representation of
monsters for their allegorical, pedagogic, or decorative (e.g. gargoyles) value,
whose signification encompasses ethical, historical, and mythico-religious
domains.
Dragons, angels, and demons populate the pages of holy books and serve as
a means to convey moral content and doctrinaire principles, such as the fear of
God, the power of Evil, and the difficulties humans confront in trying to resist it.
Classical antiquity and sacred texts are inexhaustible sources of eschatological
thought and representation in which the figure of the monster expresses the
fears, anxieties, and desires that are present in different cultures. Isidore of
Seville’s (c. 560-636) encyclopedic summa, particularly his Etimologías, is
considered key to the transmission of knowledges and interpretations from
classical antiquity in the Hispanic world. In this work, which covers a good
number of monsters and prodigies, he writes that in the construction of the
monstrous, language functions as a central and constitutive element because it is
through language that the monster’s specific qualities are expressed. Language
also constitutes the means for its conceptual integration into the rational order.
The word does not only name an exterior reality but rather produces the thing
itself and frames the manner of its insertion into the collective imaginary.3
The Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque period are replete with
monsters that point not only to an imagination repressed by the omnipresence of
faith (the constant threat of sin and the fear of divine punishment) but also to the
terror that the excesses of earthly power, natural disasters, plagues, and social
conflicts generated in the world.4 The changes that were provoked by European
territorial expansion, scientific advances, and the development of imaginaries
through contact with new cultures propelled a significant transformation in the
modes of understanding reality and of producing and interpreting the fantastic as
an alternative to or amplification of the known world. Ambroise Paré’s (1509-
1590) sixteenth-century treatise Des Monstres et prodigies (1573) is another key
text. In it, Paré analyzes physical deformations and fantastic animals, and
portrays marginal individuals such as beggars and criminals as examples of
“monstrosity,” which is to say, as grotesque deviations from the social norm.5
From the point of view of a physician with strong culturalist inclinations, Paré
maintains a relativist position capable of perceiving that ancient wonders and
fantastic beings, which by the time of the Renaissance were already recognized
as products of fantasy, were at one time conceptualized as part of the real.
The monster is directly connected to the construction of modern forms of the
supernatural and the fascination that horror produces as a challenge to reason,
and it acts as an eschatological opening that inspires a broad spectrum of
emotions and desires. The monster was redefined in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, flourishing in the overflowing and multifaceted culture of
the Baroque period. In the post-Renaissance inflexion of the monstrous, it went
on to represent areas that were prohibited or inaccessible to meaning and
understanding, in which arcane subjects were connected with the conflict
between passion and reason and with the social threats caused by pre-existing
excesses of power or by the state and the Church’s repression and
marginalization of the poor.
One of the more extreme and unsettling paradigms of the monstrous,
beginning in the early seventeenth century, is the figure of Erzsébet Báthory
(1560-1614), a Hungarian countess whose horrifying practices of torture and
murder consumed more than six hundred victims. Although she clearly
exemplifies a “human monster,” her imaginative methods of torture and the
Baroque theatricalization of her bloody rituals, which centered around the
symbolic and erotic value of spilled blood, also illustrates the perspective that
would come to establish itself in subsequent centuries in vampirism and in the
culture of the monster as a distinct form of the grotesque in horror fiction. As
Laurence Rickels notes, Báthory fits the stereotype of monstrosity as originating
in the East and reinforces the image of Western cultures as societies assailed by
otherness and primitivism (12-14). Obsessed with beauty and youth, Báthory
was said to have bathed in her victims’ blood, which she believed had
rejuvenating qualities. Her life’s trajectory was a constant pursuit of this organic
element, which she extracted through rituals involving “donations” from
servants and young noblewomen from the surrounding region. Her practices
included mechanical apparatuses that “technologized” the process of dismantling
the Other.
In The Natural History of the Vampire, Anthony Masters refers to Báthory’s
use of narrow cages suspended from the ceiling, which had nails on the bottom
that penetrated the victims while the countess, positioned beneath them, rejoiced
in the rain of blood that spilled onto her white dress. Masters also mentions the
use of a robotic doll whose mortal embrace stabbed the unfortunate young
woman who provided the cosmetic material Báthory desired (Rickels 14). The
“bloody countess,” who inspired Alejandra Pizarnik’s terrifying story of the
same title, articulates narcissism and monstrosity, the aesthetic object and the
exercise of power, anomaly, and bodily consumption, central elements of the
genre of the monstrous across different cultural contexts, thus bringing the
morbid streak within the Baroque canon to one of its most hyperbolic, perverse,
and spectacular forms.
 In far less extreme ways, the Baroque construction of the monstrous was
rooted in its tendency toward decorativism and its inclination toward allegory,
both for its pedagogical possibilities and its ability to encompass conflict,
dissent, and rebellion against established power. In fact, in the conquest of the
Inquisition, the symbolic preeminence of the demonic frequently took the form
of monstrosity as a semiotic condensation of collective fears and the struggle
between Faith and Reason, which led to innumerable epistemic conflicts. As a
symbol, the monster becomes an effective synthesis of counter-normative
contents in which repressed forms of subjectivity, belief, and desire reside.
Both physical exceptionality and cultural differences have been considered
characteristics of monstrosity (the use of foreign languages, customs, beliefs,
and unknown forms of social organization), and they are used to conceptualize
Latin American experience in the process of integrating images from or
attributed to the New World in European imaginaries. Descending from
mythology, travelogues, chivalric romances, tales of witchcraft, bestiaries, and
treatises that discuss wondrous phenomena as an expansion of everyday
experience and as an exploration of the divine plan, monsters are part and parcel
of colonialism. They are established in historical discourse, generating a
fantastic geography that is inscribed in maps and in the marks of desire and fear
of the unknown in historical accounts. Renaissance monsters roam the oceans,
jungles, and deserts, they occupy islands that are recorded on maps, and they
also populate both pagan and Christian imaginaries. Additionally, they serve to
draw spaces outside of Christendom as territories that have been conquered by
sin, witchcraft, and ideological dissidence.
In fact, images of monsters in the Renaissance are used to illustrate the world
of belief and the relation of the individual to sin, the signs of the apocalypse, and
other catastrophes imagined by religious worldviews, such as one sees in the
paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) (for example, The Garden of
Earthly Delights and The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things) as well
as in the work of Pieter Bruegel (1525-1569), particularly The Fall of the Rebel
Angels (1562). In these works, the representation of monsters opens up the route
to allegorical thought, moralization, and evangelizing didactics.
In their wide-ranging study on wonder, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park
argue that this notion includes and underlies the monstrous along with the
historical transformations of the concept of wonder since the Middle Ages:

Wonders tended cluster at the margins rather than at the center of the
known world, and they constituted a distinct ontological category, the
preternatural, suspended between the mundane and the miraculous. In
contrast, the natural order moderns inherited from the late seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries is one of uniform, inviolable laws. (14)

Like wonder, the monstrous has in these contexts a textual reality, a

discursive and visual materiality that affirms it as a signifier, which is to say, as a
system of signs that needs to be deciphered because it contains portents of the
future and warnings of the wrath of God and His divine punishment.
The dark zones of the real and the unexplorable or prohibited areas of
knowledge are conducive spaces for the proliferation of monstrosity, which
expresses frustration, disenchantment, melancholia, confusion, or resentment,
such as the case may be, eventually constituting a premonitory apparatus of
social decomposition and/or of the aggressive and threatening potential that
makes up the social, even in times of peace.
In this way the topic of the monster has historically guided and represented
changes in mentality, worldviews, symbolic languages, beliefs, and aesthetic
models in every epoch, which demonstrates that following the path of the
monster is a form of constructing a cultural history and archeology of the image.
Referring to these recodifications, Náter writes:

El barroco privilegió el claroscuro, mientras la Ilustración volvió a la

pareja de opuestos para referirse a la razón y al conocimiento versus la
ignorancia y la irracionalidad. El vínculo con lo metafísico y con lo
irracional en un espacio oscuro vino a ser, además, uno de los tópicos
más importantes de la poética gótica, en tanto y en cuanto es oposición
a la religiosidad cristiana, a la razón cartesiana y a la estética de lo
sublime que presentó el clasicismo. Esas oscuridades fueron, a su vez,
rearticulaciones del espacio ctónico, telúrico y sagrado de las religiones
mistéricas. La mente humana se asimiló al infierno, es decir, al espacio
de lo demoníaco, de lo condenable y atormentador. (79-80)

Monstrosity and Colonialism

In his book América imaginaria, Miguel Rojas Mix refers to the fact that
monsters associated with the Americas are situated at the “frontiers of the
world,” which coincided with the frontiers of knowledge (66). The Americas, as
the edge of the known world, came to configure the natural space of the
monstrous, bringing together traditions and knowledge from Europe and
classical antiquity. According to Rojas Mix,

[e]l descubrimiento de América significó un enorme trasvasijamiento

del imaginario europeo en las nuevas tierras descubiertas. Los mitos,
las leyendas, el mundo teratológico, las quimeras, todo va a adquirir
cata de ciudadanía en América, y todo va a ser buscado allí con ahínco
[…] se produce un enorme desplazamiento geográfico del fantástico
medieval, un resurgimiento del fantástico clásico e incluso un
fantástico originario. (125-126)

In his references to the Atlas Mercator (1569), José Rabasa writes that this
key element of universal cartography in itself constitutes a world in which all
possible “surprises” have been codified.6 As the “simulacrum of a totality,” the
Atlas provides a taxonomic pragmatism that historicizes space without failing to
make note of mysterious areas characterized by the lack of knowledge about the
features of its territories and or of its at that point unknown cultures. Some of
these areas appear on the maps as populated by monsters, although, as Rabasa
clarifies, “this population […] does not simply correspond to a lack of
knowledge. The presence of the monstrous also points to sedimented symbolic
associations of topographical regions with the fantastic and the demonic” (199).
The texts in which Columbus reported on his arrival in the Caribbean
(particularly the “Carta del Descubrimiento” but also his navigation journals), as
well as the chronicles and reports of the Conquest and the descriptions written
by missionaries and scientific explorers, integrate the monstrous as a probable
fact of reality in the New World. Columbus admits that he has never encountered
supernatural beings, although he has found cannibals in his journey through the
Indies. For example, in his Diario de a bordo del primer viaje, he writes in the
entry of Sunday, November 4, 1492 that, according to information he has
received, “lejos de allí había hombres de un ojo y otros con hocicos de perros
que comían los hombres y que en tomando uno lo degollaban y le bebían su
sangre y le cortaban su natura” (55). References such as this abound in
Columbus’s writings, as well as in the writings of other colonists and
conquistadors. They establish an image of American monstrosity that, even
though it defines the New World as radically other, is also similar to the
observations that Renaissance explorers made about the East, Africa, etc. Some
of these foundational elements of the New World (such as, for example,
mutilation and the extraction of blood) will be maintained as a dark and
persistent aspect in the collective imaginaries of many regions and will reappear
in modernity as atavistic elements.7
The beliefs of the time—which relied on information from treatises on
natural sciences or ethnographic compendiums as well as narrative strategies
from the travelogue tradition, such as the writings of Marco Polo and other
Renaissance travelers and explorers, as well as Columbus and other chroniclers
—describe varying and atypical species: men with tails, with only one eye, or
with dog faces. Marco Polo, for example, writes in his Book of the Marvels of
the World, “And I assure you all the men of this Island […] have heads like
dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise; in fact, in the face they are all just like big
mastiff dogs! They have a quantity of spices; but they are a most cruel
generation, and eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race”
(445).
Amazon women are frequently mentioned: a race of warrior women with
only one breast, bloodthirsty and strong, around whom innumerable stories are
woven, exalting their ferocious autonomy and their bellicosity:

The Amazon women present a multifaceted challenge to social and

natural orders, freely roving their inhospitable territories, sacking and
pillaging, and demonstrating unmaidenly sexual agency. Their martial
solidarity originates and persists in homicide. An object of fear and
desire, the Amazon demands a confrontation with the Hero,
challenging not only his manhood but his very subjectivity. This
feminized New World invited ravishment, but threatened to unman or
engulf the unwary explorer. (Braham, From Amazons to Zombies 15)

Hernán Cortés also makes reference to Amazon women, as does Ulrich

Schmidl in his Wahre Geschichte (1567) and other chroniclers who were
fascinated by the idea of these exotic and fearsome women and their
combination of sexuality and warrior spirit.8 Cortés refers to the Amazons in his
“IV Cuarta Relación: Tenuxtitlán 15 de octubre de 1524”:

Y así mismo me trajo relación de los señores de la provincia de

Cihuatán, que se afirma mucho de haber una isla poblada de mujeres,
sin varón ninguno, y que en ciertos tiempos van de la tierra firme
hombres que con ellas han acceso… y si paren mujeres las guardan; y
si hombres, los echan de su compañía, y que esta isla está a diez
jornadas de esta provincia de Colima; y que muchos de ellos han ido
allá y la han visto. (184)

Monsters are generally manifested by their absence (we hope to see them,
we assume and fear their existence), but the persistence of these references is
both obsessive and symptomatic. The reappearance of the monstrous is a key
element in the construction of a disturbing and anomalous otherness that sparks
curiosity and the dominating spirit of the Conquest.
As Rabasa notes: “the writings of Columbus suggest the fabrication of a new
region in space. A new language, a new historical moment, and a new world are
in the offing in Columbus’ metaphors, which conjoin legends with an indigenous
knowledge of the territories” (65). The monstrous element also accompanies Old
World visual representations of the Americas and is productively included in
works by De Bry and other artists who created etchings and drawings that
introduced the image of the lands and their foreign inhabitants in the European
imaginary.9
Michael Palencia-Roth argues that the quality of the monstrous, because it is
not concretely situated in the reality of the New World, is displaced onto the
behaviors of its inhabitants and considered proper to the savage (lacking,
wayward) condition of the indigenous populations. From that point on, various
forms of the monstrous (cannibalism, sodomy, bestiality) would serve to
culturally allegorize these foreign lands. The Americas were from the very
beginning produced through a “teratological theology,” the parameters of which
allowed for the interpretation of difference as a deviation from the human, a
disturbing variation that would require the rigorous application of the civilizing
project. In the same sense, as Carlos A. Jáuregui writes in his study of the
processes of representation of otherness in the colonial world (which he calls the
“specular trap of difference”), “producir el Nuevo Mundo como lugar
epistemológico implicó la aplicación del imaginario de la mismidad a la
significación de lo desconocido” (51).
In La guerra de las imágenes, Serge Gruzinski refers to the multi-faceted
function of the image in worlds that are dominated by epistemic hegemonies.
These images show the importance of visual discourse as an interpellative
apparatus and as a representation of contents that are otherwise absent in public
spaces. The monstrous manifests as such in the interiority of culture, but it
always refers to external circumstances or principles, to structures of
domination, to collective frustrations, to processes of subalternization,
marginalization, and extreme repression. The intensification of the flows of
capital and the progressive transformation of class privileges into plutocratic
values, as well as the racial stratifications that are directly connected to super-
exploitation, the division of labor, and the imposition of massive literacy and
evangelization campaigns in metropolitan languages, caused a steady growth of
collective fears and the need to express them in a coded manner in social spaces
subject to persecution and censorship. Every era has its own conflicts, crises,
heroes, and monsters—instances which are interrelated and which expresses the
social conflict in different registers. As anticipated, the monster is dialectics in
repose: the image in which thesis and antithesis momentarily halt their dynamic,
allowing for history itself to be observed as a constellation of fragments—as
ruins.
Analyzing the representation of the colonial subject, Iris Zavala refers to the
relations between language, experience, belief, and invention, recalling Michel
Foucault’s observation that, until the end of the eighteenth century, language was
primordially representational and principally oriented toward establishing the
differences between identity and alterity, between the self and others. The new
elements belonging to foreign lands were thus evaluated according to criteria of
similarity, contrast, continuity, homology, etc.—operations oriented toward the
necessity of finding a taxonomic space for everything that in principle seemed
not to fit any of the established classifications.
Pygmies, giants, and mermaids constitute some of the more frequently used
categories in reports on the New World. Other figures, such as the cyclops, also
emerge from the European archive and serve to express the strangeness and
exceptionality, the exoticism and mystery, of these new lands, in spite of their
cultural foreignness.10 Although they do not necessarily refer to the specificity
of the Americas, their use delimits a gap in knowledge and is a sign of
advantageous conditions for implementing the civilizing mission. In particular,
mermaids can be counterposed in some senses to Amazon women as they allow
for the development (at least from a classical perspective) of the themes of
femininity, mutation, and hybridity, as well as the relation between imperial
cultures and the foreign lands in which the themes of danger, death, seduction,
and conquest are re-established.11
The depiction of indigenous peoples as having negative identities in turn
supported the concepts of degeneracy, deviation, and corruption, all of which
were part of “a borrowed language” (Zavala 332), which used to refer to human
forms that were considered aberrant, irregular, or monstrous because of their
foreignness to European experience. Such notions would also be broadly
applicable in criollo society with regard to the processes of mestizaje and in
general to the theme of inter-ethnic combinations (which, according to some,
lend themselves to degenerative processes). The monstering of indigenous
peoples borrowed from these representational strategies, which were applied
both to subjects as well as to the cultural processes and narratives in which these
rhetorical recourses originated.12
As documents from the time show, the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas
had been foretold by the appearance of monsters ten years before the
conquistadors landed. The predictions the Aztecs witnessed were later reported
on by Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1550) in his Historia general de las cosas
de Nueva España (also known as the Florentine Codex), written between 1540
and 1585. These prophecies included the image of la Llorona, natural
phenomena like fire in the sky, and fantastic yet terrifying animals.13 The
mestizo chronicler Diego Muñoz Camargo (1529-1599) also mentions similar
situations in his Historia de Tlaxala (c. 1585).
As a space of proliferating signification and symbolic saturation, the
Baroque period constituted an ideologically advantageous discursive
environment for the propagation of the monstrous, which in this context is
associated with what in the seventeenth century was conceptualized as the
modern. In his study “Historia de un fantasma,” Francisco Ortega argues that the
colonial Baroque presented a monstrous synthesis of the modern and its
negation, a dualism that has been projected into the present day.14 Furthermore,
he notes that, if modernity emerged already afflicted by a contradictory attitude
toward subjectivity, monstrosity in the Americas (characterized by its exotic
appearance, paganism, and incomprehensible languages and cultures) seemed to
require unusual forms of imperial intervention because “monstrosity calls for its
own technology of control” (Ortega 190). The supposed monstrosity of the
Americas thus provided an excuse for the devastation of conquered imaginaries
and territories inhabited by subjects who showed themselves to be unassimilable
to European civilization. New forms of social being (which are linked to the
disappearance of feudal society and to the intensification of transoceanic
commerce) continue to generate modalities of collective knowledge that
symbolically emerge from the heteroclite and often enigmatic visual quality of
the Baroque, which brought to the Americas its rhetoric of power and its
celebratory sensuality.
From the European perspective, the image of the Indian, elaborated as
monstrous in the colonial context, provides a simplified and stereotypical
version of other forms of being-in-the-world, liable to be incorporated into
European cultural archives of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By their very
existence, the indigenous populations express “the sin of being other” and
confront their time with the sudden necessity to judge this radical departure from
the norm and to absorb the excess of that alterity on both imaginary and practical
levels (Gastón Carreño).
According to Castillo, “the modern fantastic is born in the context of the
culture of curiosities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the meeting
place between certainty and doubt, and between apprehension and fascination”
(“Monsters” 162). It is in this era that the definition and functionality of the
monstrous begins to change. In his Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611),
Sebastián de Covarrubias includes a good number of terms for particular species
such as Amazons, harpies, Sphinxes, cynocephali (dog-headed men), and so on.
He defines “monster” as “cualquier parto contra la regla y orden natural, como
nacer el hombre con dos cabeças, quatro brazos y quatro piernas.” He refers to
the case of a monstrous birth, indicating that in the face of this frightful
offspring, “los padres y los demás que estaban presentes a su nacimiento,
pensando supersticiosamente pronosticar algún mal y que con su muerte se
evitaría, le enterraron vivo. Sus padres fueron castigados como parricidas, y los
demás con ellos” (812). This definition focuses on physical deformations that are
considered to be alterations of biological norms and recuperates the monster’s
prophetic aspect. This situation exemplifies the forms of social knowledge and
juridical practices of the era which made it possible to recognize the humanity of
the victim while distinguishing between monstrosity and pathology.
Within the broad characterization of the monstrous, colonial society
produced a wide range of notions linked to the demonic, from the inoffensive
practices of curanderismo to outright witchcraft, passing through the moderate
dangers of wizards, herbalists, and shamans, in which such deviation from the
strict doctrines of Christianity formed an anomalous environment linked to the
occult as the proper space of inferior races and their “irrational” imaginaries.
Amerindian or African rituals, religious beliefs, superstitions, traditions, legends,
and customs, including trances, visions, or mystical experiences were monstered,
persecuted, and punished as sacrilege. However, as Kathryn McKnight has
explained, the border between sainthood and heresy was not always clear and
was susceptible to arbitrary and often malicious interpretations. Monstering
constituted instead a strategy of political domination and social control:

In the Iberian colonies, the indigenous and African religious beliefs

and practices that the colonizers treated as sorcery and witchcraft
became both a potent phenomenon of coloniality and a powerful means
of resistance. Authorities used discourses of witchcraft to condemn,
ostracize, and strike fear into colonized and enslaved groups through
exemplary punishment in the Inquisition. (206)

Within criollo society, and within the context of a developing social

knowledge that gradually differentiated itself from European paradigms, the
concept of monstrosity constitutes a rubric for the evaluation and representation
of different forms of otherness linked to the social and economic stratification of
the colonies. These notions were used in both popular applications and in the
lettered world to characterize features that notoriously deviated from the norm.
The concept of the monstrous was applied, for example, in reference to Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz, a paragon of lettered colonial society in the Americas who
defied dominant stereotypes. In her “Romance 49,” Sor Juana reveals that she
recognizes herself in Francisco de Quevedo’s poem of the same name as “the
Phoenix” of Mexico, a self-designation that praises both her intelligence and her
exceptional position within the society of that time.15 The reference to her nature
as a rara avis entails the notion of hybridity as monstrosity. In Quevedo’s
composition, this notion is concentrated on hermaphroditism; in Sor Juana’s
poem, the same idea is expressed as cross dressing. Distinguishing between
sexuality and gender, Sor Juana refers to the praise the poetic speaker would
receive if she were to transform herself into a man, even though poetic talent is
not something that is conventionally granted to the feminine sex. However, she
also bears in mind that her symbolically androgynous character makes this
transformation unnecessary because it conjugates qualities of both sexes. Finally,
Sor Juana adds the element of the visual as constitutive of her unusual identity,
referring to the way in which society interprets intellectual exceptionality: as a
spectacle (as a freak show, according to Stephanie Merrim) in which talent
exposes its monstrous quality to a curious public who will pay to see it.

¡Qué dieran los saltimbancos,

a poder, por agarrarme
y llevarme, como monstruo, por esos andurrïales
de Italia y Francia, que son
amigas de novedades
y que pagaran por ver
la cabeza del gigante,
diciendo: Quien ver el Fénix
quisiere, dos cuartos pague,
que lo muestra Maese Pedro
en la posada de Jaques!
(Sor Juana, Romance 49, 496; my emphasis)

On the basis of this and other texts, Stephanie Kirk has highlighted the
debate around the “monstrous parthenogenesis” in Sor Juana’s work, connecting
the notion of monstrosity to concepts of the era about biological reproduction
and intellectual creation. This is an expression both of a sense of wonder and of
an opposition to and rejection of dominant models:

En la época premoderna existía una asociación discursiva entre la

(re)producción artística y la biológica. Para las autoridades masculinas
de la sociedad barroca en que vivía Sor Juana, la producción literaria
 de una mujer –y más aún de una monja– representaba un parto
monstruoso. La Fénix americana –quien se autogeneraba a través de su
obra creativa– puso en tela de juicio los rígidos conceptos sociales
sobre el género y el sexo. La elaboración de la escritura femenina
representaba algo monstruoso ya que implicaba la exclusión de lo
masculino del proceso de reproducción. Sor Juana no sólo reconoce
esta mentalidad tal como se veía aplicada a su propio trabajo sino que
también juega y se burla de la existencia de la ansiedad masculina
sobre la conexión monstruosa de sus dos cuerpos, llamando la
atención, a veces con amargura, de sus capacidades reproductivas.
(431-432)

But if Sor Juana appeals to monstrosity as a metaphor of social (self-

)recognition, she also uses the classical tradition of the monstrous as an
identitarian allegory in other works, such as theatrical pieces, in which the visual
dimension (which is essential to teratological construction) plays a fundamental
role.
In the Andean viceregal context, Juan de Espinosa Medrano, “El Lunarejo,”
decried the subalternization of the criollo population, which he conceptualized in
terms of a monstering that compromised their humanity, intellectual capacity,
and potential to act as valid interlocutors with the Spanish Empire. Referring to
the topic of the regulation of the criollo population, Espinosa Medrano writes in
his Apologético en favor de Don Luis de Góngora (1622):

Tarde parece que salgo a esta empresa: pues vivimos muy lejos los
criollos y si no traen las alas del interés, generosamente nos visitan las
cosas de España …. Ocios son estos que me permiten estudios más
severos: pero ¿qué puede haber bueno en las Indias? ¿Qué puede haber
que contente a los europeos, que desta suerte dudan? Sátiros nos
juzgan, tritones nos presumen, que brutos de alma, en vano nos
alientan a desmentirnos máscaras de humanidad. (17)

This passage illustrates the space criollos shared with monsters in the
colonial imaginary: a site that brings together marginality and disrepute, both
forms of exclusion that derive from the authoritarian and illegitimate exercise of
epistemic power by imperial culture.
 At the same time that Sor Juana was developing her work, in the context of
the Andean Baroque, the Peruvian physician, architect, and cartographer Pedro
Peralta y Barnuevo (1663-1743), who would later become Rector of the
Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, was also concerned with the subject of
monsters from a scientific and religious point of view.16 Known in particular for
his long epic poem Lima fundada (1732) (which sings the praises of the
Conquest and the foundation of the Viceroyalty of Peru), Peralta y Barnuevo had
almost forty years earlier published a lesser-known volume titled Desvíos de la
naturaleza, o Tratado del Origen de los Monstruos (1695) under the pseudonym
Joseph Rivilla Bonet y Pueyo. This text deals with pathological cases classified
as monstrous, such as, for example, that of the birth of conjoined twins, which
motivated the treatise presented to Viceroy Don Melchor Fernández Portocarrero
Lazo de la Vega, Count of Monclova, who was the twenty-ninth Viceroy of New
Spain and the seventeenth Viceroy of Peru. This unusual birth prompted Peralta
y Barnuevo to investigate the themes of identity, the soul, and the meaning of
such deviations from the biological norm. He argued that these kinds of
phenomena had found in the New World a fertile ground for emerging and
proliferating because, according to the beliefs of the time, these transoceanic
lands were vast and uncontrollable zones dominated by irregularity and anomaly.
The image of the conjoined twins analyzed by Peralta y Barnuevo is
representative of a world perceived as chaotic, excessive, and overflowing with
supernatural forces that resist the laws of logic and the analytical methods of
natural science. Because of its counter-normative character, monstrosity defies
both science and belief, posing epistemological questions related to themes from
the Golden Age that became visible in Baroque aesthetics: misleading
appearances, the sensory world as a mask of mysteries impervious to reason, and
trans-Atlantic nature as a voluptuous and strange habitat where reality and
fantasy are combined. At the beginning of his text, Peralta y Barnuevo assures
the reader that, in his interpretation of these “prodigies,” he has refrained from
vulgar considerations, turning his attention rather to the confirmation of
empirical data as support for a rational understanding of the phenomenon: “No
me valgo de alusiones frívolas…sino de observaciones, que hechas en la virtud,
precisan a la razón.”17
Also, in Spain, the Capuchin monk Antonio de Fuentelapeña had a few years
earlier published another polemic about the nature of magical creatures, ghosts,
and other “beings,” like leprechauns.18 He considered all of these to be part of
the animal world and not to the incorporeal domain of angels—although he
claimed that the “materiality” of these beings was in many cases invisible. The
work, which was titled El ente dilucidado: Discurso único, novísimo que
muestra ay en la naturaleza animales irracionales invisibles, y quáles sean
(1679), is an imaginative and exhaustive treatise that, although it is based in
relativism—indicating, for example, that monstrosity depends to a large extent
on the (intellectual, scientific, religious) perspective from which the
phenomenon is observed—also opens up a speculative and Scholastic
philosophical point of view (as the work’s title indicates).19 Praised by some
later intellectuals, like Juan de Valera, and vilified by others, like Benito
Jerónimo Feijoo, who sees in the book an equivocal compilation of superstitions
that are unacceptable to Enlightenment thought, El ente dilucidado provides a
massive amount of information about beliefs in supernatural beings, monsters,
and creatures related to the world of myth and religion. The work reaffirms the
importance of tradition but also of empirical observation, giving evidence of a
preoccupation with the existence of worlds that exceed the real-rational and
require new forms of knowledge and philosophical conceptualization.
In this era, “elucidating” these beings was a philosophical concern with
scientific and political connotations, as such investigations considerably
rearranged the status quo and the conventions of Scholasticism. As an example
of this attitude, in the same era in the Hispanic world a group of thinkers known
as “los novatores” [“the innovators”] became active. Composed of both
humanists and scientists (renovators and/or innovators), this intellectual
tendency systematically began to question previous ways of knowing, shedding
light on the exhaustion of methods and categories of knowledge that had reigned
until then but which seemed insufficient for grasping the spirit of the new
times.20 The analysis of monstrosity is also connected to these contexts of
intellectual curiosity because, as we have seen in the cases cited here, the
experience of anomaly defies rationality and exposes the limits of knowledge.
Authors like Jesús Pérez Magallón, Helena del Río Parra, and Jeremy
Robbins connect the monstrous to the interrogation of epistemic and religious
models that met with crisis in at the end of the Baroque period, preparing the
way for modern thought. In this sense, they discuss the “construction of
modernity” and the elaboration of narratives that seek to give sense to a world
that exceeds and destabilizes previous paradigms. Related to scientific and
technological discoveries that would materialize with the Industrial Revolution
but had strongly impacted collective imaginaries much earlier, these knew
knowledges and methods of knowing were combined with religious beliefs,
legends, doctrinal principles, and leftovers of mythology. This resulted in a
syncretic panorama in which the force of reason could not eliminate either the
imaginative elements or the intensity of the affects (fear, curiosity, desire) that
invaded the thought of the era.21 Paul Hazard referred to this transitional period
from the final decades of the seventeenth century to the first decades of the
eighteenth as the moment of the “crisis of the European mind,” when, after the
religious wars, Classicism’s desire for stability was threatened by the forces of
change that culminated with the Industrial Revolution and the consolidation of
capitalism. The theme of monstrosity is inscribed precisely in this intersection
between diverse cognitive models that represent the widely-studied stages of
Western culture in which the intense and frequently contradictory sensorium of
modernity would gradually be defined.
Progressively weakening its links with mythico-religious thought, although
without ever completely disconnecting from the sacred, the monster follows a
process of secularization that brings it ever closer to political power and theories
about the construction of the state and the organization of civil society. From
early modernity onward, the monster does not appear as an alien creature from a
strange, extra-human realm but rather it represents disturbing forms of humanity
that threaten the social order, thus turning monstrosity into an essential element
of what David McNally calls “the secular grotesque.” This representational key
registers continuities between medieval monstrosity (hybrid beings with
distorted bodies) and the representation of foreigners, who are considered to be
socially anomalous and threatening elements. Thus, the monster passes through
the mythical and teleological domain to the space of the social in which, more
than physical monstrosity, what assumes primacy is the danger of deviant and
inhuman behaviors (60-61).22 The concept of the monstrous is thus in modernity
part of the field of political philosophy and ethico-juridical reflection, becoming
an ideologeme used to metaphorize or allegorize both the excesses of power and
the popular forms of resistance they generate. The monstrous thus indirectly
articulates the notions of sovereignty, citizenship, and free will.
 Ideologically, the idea of the monstrous illustrates the excess or illegitimacy
of authority, the interminable proliferation of the mechanisms of domination and
megalomania, the horror of despotism, and the desire to control spaces,
individuals, and resources. Political power is conceived as a monster that
threatens and consumes the social. The Leviathan, the gigantic sea monster with
satanic associations described in terrifying detail in the Book of Job and taken up
again by Thomas Hobbes in 1651, constitutes one of the most powerful symbols
of the social contract that, through the absolute power of the sovereign, would
save society from the state of nature and the war of all against all. The idea of
the state as monster is maintained well into modernity, generating a profusion of
metaphors and allegories of the nation, the sovereign, and the popular.23

Reason and the Monster

Enlightenment thought promoted new forms of conceiving the relationship
between the individual and society, as well as the connections between different
fields of knowledge. Nevertheless, although it is supported by universal models
of knowledge, the domain of reason that it establishes is far from homogeneous
or stable. The figure of the monster is outlined against the backdrop of the
processes of the re-hierarchization of knowledge and the centralization of
scientific thought that correspond to the economic transformation of the West
and the disarticulation of dynastic power. In the desacralized, post-
Enlightenment social universe one detects a growing uncertainty and perplexity
based on the recognition that reason cannot reach domains previously covered
by faith and religious doctrine. The gaps in reason are occupied by superstition
and the reemergence of atavistic fears and unexpected terrors unleashed by the
unsettling yet transformative achievements and possibilities of science and
technology. This disenchantment with the world opens up new models for
representing and imagining the social that substitute the space of belief with a
fascination with the occult, the enigmatic, and the prohibited. It also engenders
nihilism or agnosticism as part of an erratic search for laws, taxonomies, and
regulations that would be able to give order to an officially disillusioned social
space that has been liberated from its own drives and desires.
Regarding the topic of superstition, Daston and Park argue that in the
Enlightenment the monstrous was used to refer to wondrous or terrifying
phenomena, although the concept of superstition continued to be redefined. If it
originally indicated “excessive or superfluous” religious practices, in the Middle
Ages, the monstrous generally referred to practices of paganism and idolatry, in
which demons disguised themselves as gods in order to seduce the naïve.
According to the same authors, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the
figure of the monster was used to designate satanic cults or products of
witchcraft. Toward the end of the Baroque period, superstition was considered
more specifically to be a popular form of belief expressed as an irrational fear of
non-existent phenomena or entities, that is, as an “illness of the imagination” that
affects one’s perception of reality. By the time of the Enlightenment, superstition
had come to be seen as a more powerful force than atheism and thus became a
preoccupation of theologians, philosophers, and statesmen.
With the spread of Enlightenment thought, the monsters of imagination
began to supplant natural monsters. Physical degeneration and deformation, as
well as different criminal modalities (incest, cannibalism, pedophilia), were
considered threats to the community and thus added to the fears awoken by the
increased power of technology, which was understood as an omnipotent system
of control and automatization capable of constituting itself from an
uncontrollable source that had unforeseeable limits and effects on life itself. New
classificatory paradigms, new notions of normality, new forms of understanding
excess and anomaly, and new ways of conceptualizing chaos and social change
propelled the production and dissemination of a hyperbolic and sinister
imaginary wracked by anxiety about the unknown.
The modern monster is linked to the changes produced in collective
sensibility in response to scientific advances, the modernization of war, the
consolidation of new forms of social discipline and the institutionalization of
power. The refinement of biopolitical mechanisms radicalizes the relation
between authority and the population. The monster followed a series of
transformations that spanned from distant fantasies and aesthetically refined
forms of ancient and medieval mythology to grotesque and mysterious neo-
Gothic figures.
Starting from the notion of the prodigy, which articulates magico-religious
implications, the monster is transformed into a subject of biological and legal
studies. It displaces the narrative of the miracle with that of the error, as
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes. The pathologization of the monster replaces
its mythologization: wonder is revealed to be anomaly. With the scientific
advances of the eighteenth century, the “human monster” came to be examined
as an object of study in laboratories and exhibited in museums, treatises, and
expositions, thereby providing evidence of different forms of deviation that help
to consolidate the norm. It was integrated into scientific discourse but at the
same time exceeded its limits. In effect, in a century dominated by the dictates of
reason, the monstrous transgressed the parameters of the acceptable, normative,
appropriate, presentable, comprehensible, and socially suitable. Sheltered within
the safety of science, the monster nevertheless survived as a specimen
subordinated to reason and capable of channeling imagination into often pseudo-
scientific trajectories that also explain and spectacularize difference.
The process of racialization of monstrosity in the eighteenth century
constitutes an important instance of conceptual consolidation. The Swedish
naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1708-1778), also known as “The Pliny of the North,”
included in his Systema Naturae (1735) the category of homo monstrosus as a
relative of homo sapiens (Braidotti, “Signs of Wonder” 295), thereby closely
associating the notions of race and monstrosity, but assigning them a marginal
and inferior significance within the hierarchical and exclusionary paradigms of
modernity.24
Foucault and many other scholars of biopolitics have analyzed the processes
of disciplining the body that began in the seventeenth century and crystallized in
the biopolitical regulations of the eighteenth century. In this period, the notion of
power over life extended to new concepts of eugenics which had a broad social
impact and long-ranging historical effects. This transformation of the politics of
the body (both individual and collective) has its roots in industrial society itself
and is connected to changes in the configuration of the state and in the
implementation of law. In this cultural and ideological context, the monster
captures the imagination as a materialization of earthly fears and as an element
that challenges technological advances while signaling the biological and
epistemic limits of modern reason.
As Marcos Neocleous has argued, “El siglo XVIII fue de hecho un período
de un interés sin precedentes por los vampiros” (3). This century was replete
with numerous “vampire epidemics,” especially in central Europe, which
established vampirism as one of the most popular topics of the era. This
development can be seen in the evolution of the term itself as well as in the way
it has circulated within academia:

La palabra “vampiro” entró en el idioma inglés en la década de 1680

(no en 1734 como el Diccionario Oficial del Inglés, OED, pretende) y
en francés en la década de 1690, convirtiéndose en una palabra común
después de 1746. Según Laurence Rickels, entre 1728 y comienzos de
la década de 1840, las universidades alemanas y francesas publicaron
unas cuarenta investigaciones y tratados sobre vampirismo. No resulta
sorprendente, por ello, que la cuestión de los vampiros se convirtiese
en un tema importante para los pensadores ilustrados. Como afirma
Christopher Frayling, la época de la razón estaba perpleja ante el
vampirismo. (Neocleous 3)25

Characterized by a stereotypical nostalgia for the Middle Ages and the era’s
supposed affinity for mystery, darkness, and the sinister, the neo-Gothic style
emerged as a countercultural movement in the second half of the eighteenth
century and the beginning of the nineteenth century and constituted a response to
the balance and sobriety of neoclassicism. The new ways in which the neo-
Gothic produced and interpreted visual and literary images emerged as a reaction
to the principles and aesthetics of modernity. As indicated before, Bakhtin noted
that the grotesque acquired in the neo-Gothic a particular meaning, which
restrained festive and satirical elements in favor of dark and mysterious worlds.
The passion for the grotesque, the representation of funeral rites and
mysterious places (caves, cemeteries, remote castles, dungeons, catacombs), as
well as the notorious tendency to defy bourgeois aesthetic preferences, all
converge in a lugubrious thematic in which macabre settings and plots
proliferate. Unusual characters with connections to Satanism, witchcraft, and
secret rites express a generally implicit opposition to the status quo, particularly
with regard to law, religious canon, and the habits and social rituals of the
bourgeoisie and aristocracy. Witches, wizards, madmen, vampires, and demons,
beings who physically or psychologically deviate from the norm, extreme
situations connected to extrasensory realities, powers, and perceptions that
exceed common experience—these all constitute the basis of an alternative form
of representing the human and the mysterious and irrational spaces that surround
and threaten everydayness. This is the irrational side of Enlightenment thought
which expresses the alienation of the real and the veiled connection it maintains
with the unconscious, the contents of which torment and intrigue modern
consciousness. In contradiction to the conventional conception of the
Enlightenment as dominated by scientific logic and humanistic reason, the neo-
Gothic and Romanticism are both firmly based in this perspective. Such an
affective landscape of disturbing chiaroscuros and extreme emotionality created
a fertile terrain for the proliferation of the monstrous.
One characteristic of the monstrous that is directly related to Enlightenment
imaginaries is its universalist portrayal of the monster which, in spite of its
always precise location, also is always provided with a cosmic, transhistorical
dimension. As Bakhtin points out:

the grotesque body is cosmic and universal. It stresses elements

common to the entire cosmos: earth, water, fire, air; it is directly
related to the sun, to the stars. It contains the signs of the zodiac. It
reflects the cosmic hierarchy. This body can merge with various natural
phenomena, with mountains, rivers, seas, islands, and continents. It can
fill the entire universe. (The Bakhtin Reader 234)

Taking as one of its starting points Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
(1764), the neo-Gothic style, which flourished in the eighteenth century,
promoted other forms of beauty and aesthetic sublimity, concepts analyzed by
Edmund Burke in his classic and influential study, Philosophical Enquiry into
the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756).26 In this analysis
(which preceded Kant’s study of these topics), Burke emphasizes the importance
of fear as a catalyst of passions and projections that go from the contingent to the
transcendent, making it possible to perceive the limits of reason and
understanding: “No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of
acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it
operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible,
with regard to its sight, is sublime too” (Burke 53).
Burke also refers to the relationship between pain and pleasure as a human
reaction to the victory over life-threatening obstacles. The monster thus makes it
possible for the Enlightenment to confront both the fear of death and the joy of
survival, including the sublime experience of coming close to a limit situation
and contemplating the triumph of the heroism that defeats monsters and
reestablishes collective harmony. The monstrous approaches the individual and
the community through emotional intensity, facilitating contact with those
obscure and disgraceful zones of humanity haunted by the restrictions and
unfulfilled promises of modern reason.
In his article “Gothic Sublimity,” David B. Morris attempts to correct
Burke’s essentialist tendencies with regard to the sublime by including in his
analysis of the Gothic a necessary historic perspective. This strategy makes it
possible to distinguish the features of the Romantic sublime, with its more
visionary and hermeneutic qualities, from the more affective and pictorial
conception of the sublime applied to eighteenth-century culture and literature
(Morris 299). Beginning with the Gothic novel, the concept of the sublime is
modified to include, along with emotional factors (terror in particular), elements
that reject the procedures and principles of realism and bourgeois morality.27
The Gothic sublime incorporates social critique into the emotional intensity of
the genre without excluding psychological elements. These aspects complement
Burke’s vision, which, without providing a context for the primacy of affectivity,
maintains that the substantial importance of terror is based on the fact that this
feeling constitutes a sensorial and rational experience that takes evil to a
transcendent level, thus generating the revelation of the sublime.
Along with this affective argument, Morris analyzes the concrete stylistic
forms Walpole uses in The Castle of Otranto, highlighting the techniques of
exaggeration and repetition as concrete procedures for the production of terror.
He complements Burke’s essentialist perspective with observations from
Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny,” which, basing itself in the fundamental
concept of repression, develops a combined theory of the sublime and the
terrifying that metaphorically approaches what is by nature unrepresentable
(Morris 307). Elements that are inaccessible through language are often
expressed, as Morris notes, through visual images. Edvard Munch’s (1863-1944)
painting The Scream (1893), for example, captures and expresses everything
outside the domain of the word. This painting brings us closer to the idea of a
terror that settles into and overtakes the individual: it fills the world, paralyzes
language, and invades both subjective space and surrounding reality, blurring the
lines between them.
 On this same path toward the comprehension of the sublime, Terry Castle
refers to the invention of the ominous (once again, Freud’s uncanny) as an
eighteenth-century expression of a world of shadows haunted by the phantoms
of the Inquisition, the excesses of colonialism, and the fears generated by
secularization. According to Castle, who reads other investigations of
eighteenth-century secret societies, witch hunts, and macabre superstitions
against the grain, “The ‘new’ eighteenth century is not so much an age of reason
but one of paranoia, regression, and incipient madness” (7). This ideological
atmosphere is crystallized in the image of the panopticon, conceived of at the
end of the eighteenth century by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), a symbol of the
eye of power that captures, reifies, and destroys subjectivity. At the same time,
the uncanny that emerges from these extreme circumstances of social control,
alienation, and fear of punishment represents the return of the repressed (the
darkness that exits into the light and fills it with shadows). In this process what
has been lost returns out of its submersion within the unconscious onto the
surface of social consciousness and intervenes in it (Castle 8-9). This “toxic
effect” of the dark, the monstrous, the uncanny is made invisible by the
canonization of the eighteenth century as the Age of Enlightenment, thereby
burying under a shroud of totalizing rationality all that escapes the dominant
models of intellectual and affective knowledge.
From the sophisticated and poetic tales of classical antiquity full of centaurs,
minotaurs, griffins, and mermaids, the neo-Gothic moves on to stories of
werewolves, vampires, and hybrid beings that bring together the notion of the
human in the face of the limits set by death, alienation, madness, and radical
alterity, thus encouraging reflection on the frontiers of humanism. The neo-
Gothic style recuperates popular legends and beliefs that combine a profuse and
striking visualization of the monstrous with hyperbolic narratives that
deconstruct the ideals of balance, harmony, moderation, and bourgeois “good
taste.”
The industrial age thus generated its own versions of vampires and ghosts as
well as a broad repertoire of hybrid beings that express the anxiety of a world
increasingly unfamiliar with itself to the extent that it is captivated by the
machinery of progress. In this context, it is not necessarily superhuman forces
external to the individual that generate incomprehensible and uncontrollable
realities but rather the human being him or herself, who becomes a mechanized
(id)entity discovering its own potential with fear and astonishment. The notion
of the monstrous continues to be modified and adapted to new realities in which
social change and the impact of technology create an alienating environment in
which the grotesque functions as an emotional reaction to the challenges of
modernity. In this Kafkaesque world, the monstrous is associated with unease,
alienation, and the weakening of social bonds. As Wolfgang Kayser explains,
“we are strongly affected and terrified because it is our world which ceases to be
reliable and we feel that we could be unable to live in this changed world. The
grotesque instills fear of life rather than death. Structurally it presupposes that
the categories which apply to our world view become inapplicable” (185).
The concept of anomaly and the emotional effects caused by the experience
of the monstrous constitute the principal axes of the definition of this category.
To these we can add other phenomena connected to the monster’s appearance,
which reinforce the importance of the body in the production of terror. For
example, the Diccionario de Autoridades de la Real Academia Española
published between 1726 and 1739 included aesthetic elements and bodily size as
constitutive attributes of monstrosity which “by extension” added to the more
general quality of deviation from the norm: “Monstruo: Parto o producción
contra el orden regular de la naturaleza. Viene del Latino Monstrum. […] Por
extensión se toma por qualquier cosa excesivamente grande o extraordinaria en
qualquier línea […]. Por translación se llama lo que es sumamente feo” (598).
This is also the case with derivative concepts: “Monstruosidad: Desorden grave
en la proporción que deben tener las cosas, según lo natural o regular […]. Por
translación se toma por suma fealdad u desproporción en lo physico y en lo
moral” (599). And: “Monstruoso: Lo que es contra el orden de la Naturaleza […]
Se toma también por excesivamente grande o extraordinario en qualquier línea
[…]” (599).
Enlightenment thought struggled with the notion of the extraordinary as a
variant of the normative, and far from managing to avoid categorization of the
monstrous, it absorbed the model of totalizing reason, which prohibited
supernatural lines of flight or predictable departures from collective imagination.
As Vicente Quirarte argues, referring to the process of representation of
monstrosity,

el nacimiento del vampiro literario coincide con la liberación de las

 fuerzas interiores producto de la caída de la Bastilla, el surgimiento de
nuevos modos de decir y contar el tiempo. A Rousseau y a Voltaire, los
grandes faros de la Filosofía de las Luces, se deben textos donde el
vampirismo aparece bajo un objetivo científico. (23)

Voltaire (1694-1778) dedicated a significant entry to “Vampires” in his

Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) based on the treatise on vampirism published
by Augustine Calmet in 1751 which collects reports and anecdotes connected to
the appearance of and belief in these creatures. This entry culminates in a
comment in which Voltaire reaffirms the reestablishment of order and reason in a
day and age that he considers to be above superstition:

The result of all this is that a great part of Europe has been infested
with vampires for five or six years, and that there are now no more;
that we have had Convulsionaries in France for twenty years, and that
we have them no longer; that we have had demoniacs for seventeen
hundred years, but have them no longer; that the dead have been raised
ever since the days of Hippolytus, but that they are raised no longer;
and, lastly, that we have had Jesuits in Spain, Portugal, France, and the
two Sicilies, but that we have them no longer. (149)

For his part, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) opines that the topic of
vampires, which many consider to be mere fabrication, is nevertheless
legitimized by official culture: “If there is a well-attested history in the world, it
is that of the Vampires. Nothing is missing from it: interrogations, certifications
by Notables, Surgeons, Parish Priests, Magistrates. The judicial proof is one of
the most complete. And with all that, who believes in Vampires? Will we all be
damned for not having believed?” (qtd. in Fingerit 26).
In this sense, Rousseau ironically registers the way in which belief, including
superstition, is “administered” by institutions of power. Reason assimilates the
irrationality of the monstrous and naturalizes it through the principle of authority
that guarantees the proof and verifiability of the phenomenon. The monster
functions as a mediation of the connection between knowledge and power and
manages the coexistence of the irrational in a world that privileges scientific
criteria. This is a use of the monstrous that differs from the one registered in
other branches of philosophy. While Rousseau disregards the empirical truth of
vampirism, he does not reduce the trope to a mere poetic device, nor does he
regard it ironically, as if it were a popular hoax, but rather he uses it as an
operative element within a larger ideological apparatus. This philosophical and
political use of the monstrous is based on the understanding that the main
function of monstrosity is to shed light on complex phenomena that form part of
social experience and that do not always appear in obvious ways.
Gábor Klaniczay has analyzed the emergence of these new forms of magical
thinking in the eighteenth century which are connected not to the archaic
imaginaries of witchcraft but rather to the medical and technological discourses
of the time. According to Klaniczay, “The most radical counter-reaction, that of
Voltaire and some other French thinkers, had another evolution for doing away
with vampire beliefs. They have tried to shift the public attention from vampires
to the ‘bloodsuckers’ in the social sense of the term (the metaphor was coined by
Mirabeau in the 1770s)” (178).
Visual art also brings together these directions in social thought, articulating
reason and vampirism in a metaphorical reflection on the achievements of the
intellect and the forms of controlling the flights of imagination and the excesses
of affectivity. At the end of the eighteenth century, Francisco José de Goya
(1746-1828) published his Caprichos, which included in one of its etchings the
concept that “the dream of reason produces monsters” (engraving number 43 in a
collection of 80). This concept is always presented as a relativization of the
univocally positive value of reason and as an opening toward those domains that
the human mind cannot control. It is well-known that, although many of Goya’s
works had a particularly satirical and burlesque quality, others were more
dramatically directed toward showing the abuses of political and religious
power, the exploitation of people, and the perpetuation of social injustices. The
image that represents the dream of reason has a not only critical but also
philosophical quality that can be read against the backdrop of canonical
interpretations of the Enlightenment or in relation to the spirit of Romantic
thought, of which Goya was a principle exponent. This image portrays a
nightmarish scene in which man is beset by monsters (owls/vampires) that
would bring into being the threat of the negative that inhabits the depths of
thought where reason sleeps. If in this case reason is able to “awaken” and
control the world through knowledge, in other interpretations Goya’s monsters
represent the relentless pursuit of free imagination and the unfolding of all its
excesses and dangers. A third approach to the meaning of the image proposes
that the conquered disposition of the individual in the engraving who is hiding
his face behind his hands suggests his anxiety about the failure of reason.
Finally, it can be interpreted as a representation of how enthusiasm for the
powers of rationality ends up promoting the appearance of uncontrollable, life-
threatening creations. The world of the mind manifests itself not as a space of
enlightenment but as a dark realm inhabited by monsters.

“Scientific” and Neo-Gothic Monstrosity

Epistemophilia and the Performance of Difference

The nineteenth century was inhabited by ghosts and monsters that expressed
dystopian fantasies about the possibility of unrestrained combinations of nature
and technology. The anxiety that accompanied the ideology of progress, the
turbulent culmination of the colonialist enterprise in the Americas, and the
massive expansion of capitalism came to be sublimated through the monstrous.
In this context, monstrosity constituted a discourse that directly addressed the
tensions and exclusions of the social “order” of modernity in which forms of
domination and social exclusion that began with colonialism were perpetuated
and made into law. Processes like the scientific “rationalization” of the body
were based on the demonization of otherness. These practices took the form of
taxonomies of races and individuals that became part of the hierarchical and
discriminatory imaginaries of infinite “progress” in modern capitalism.
Monstrosity provided a visual and conceptual support for currents of thought
that promoted privilege and exclusion based on naturalist criteria and supposedly
demonstrable and unimpeachable truths. “Scientific racism” asserted the
superiority of the Caucasian race within a highly influential technological
structure that legitimated the political, economic, and cultural domination of
societies thought to be savage, primitive, or barbarous.28 Forms of hybridity like
mestizaje were interpreted as monstrous processes that promoted impurity and
the degeneration of “pure” races.
In the first decades of the century, the French zoologist Geoffroy Saint-
Hilaire established a place for the monstrous in human pathology and is for this
reason considered one of the founders of teratology. Of primary importance to
the field’s purposes are his works Des monstruosités humaines (1822) and
Histoire des anomalies de l’organisation (1832). According to Saint-Hilaire, the
environment directly causes transformations in the human organism; impacted
by environmental factors, monstrosity would constitute a point of inflection in
the evolution of the species, a moment at which a leap (an “instantaneous
transition”) occurs in the development of one species into another. The
monstrous body signals—shows, announces, exhibits, denounces, according to
its etymology—the disturbance of this process.
If in the field of natural sciences the monster is an iconic element that both
participates in and interrupts the discourses of evolution and progress, in the
register of literature and the arts its position continues to expand and consolidate
itself at multiple levels, configuring a series of aesthetic models through which
different forms of symbolic violence are materialized and disseminated. As one
aspect of this aesthetico-ideological system, freak shows emerged in the
nineteenth century as a form of entertainment that consisted of the visual and
symbolic consumption of otherness as spectacle, which served to confirm
dominant identities and norms through the exhibition of grotesque human
anomaly. This practice is descended from the frequent use of jesters, dwarves,
hunchbacks, and “human phenomena” of all kinds in courtly celebrations,
theatrical works, festivals, and parades in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and
the Baroque period.29
It is well-known that the spectacularization of the Other has had a prominent
place in the context of colonialism, providing evidence of the abundant
peculiarity of the New World and in general of the cultures that existed within
the confines of the great empires. In modernity, the performance of difference
came to constitute a negative demonstration of the superiority of dominant races
and a legitimization of the place that ethnic otherness occupied in Western
imaginaries. Rosi Braidotti has indicated that “it is worth noting the link between
the exhibition of freaks and the orientalist and racist imaginary that underlies it.
In the side-shows, spectators wanted to be shocked by the unsightly spectacle of
primordial races, in order to be confirmed in their assumptions of racial
superiority” (“Signs of Wonder” 294).
In many cases, as Braidotti notes, geographical determinism was also used to
“explain” the appearance of monsters or of anomalous or strange beings in areas
that had not been conquered by the European civilizing mission. Nevertheless,
the deeper causes of this modern exploitation of the anomalous body should be
sought, as Garland-Thomson suggests in her exhaustive study, in the logics of
modernity itself. The vocation of these logics is machinic, and their visual
regimen prepares imaginaries for the ritualized consumption of difference. This
makes evident the transformations that the body undergoes upon being subjected
to new forms of production, work, technology, and market relations. These
utilitarian and dehumanizing practices produced the unprecedented view of
bodies as indispensable but interchangeable pieces in the grand machinery of
capitalism. Standardization, mass production, wage labor, industrial accidents,
and so on all generate other conceptions of the individual and social body, as
well as new forms of conceptualizing difference.
When considered through the critical and theoretical models of
psychoanalysis and Marxism, extraordinary bodies are revealed to be enigmatic
repositories, inconceivable and extreme examples of alienation, illnesses,
traumas, and psychosomatic disturbances that are terrifyingly exciting and which
confirm the superiority of normality and the exclusionary criteria on which it is
based. The monstrous body remains excluded from the circuits of production and
reproduction and should be expelled from a system in which the family and the
worker are the necessary means for achieving order and progress. Concurrently,
from a cultural and ideological point of view, difference has a role to play as
well: it is essential for the construction of identities because it functions as its
opposite, as its constitutive outside.
The conceptualization of the monster is located at this crossroads,
emphasizing its character as a polysemic ideological operator.30 Braidotti
provides a concise summary of the epistemophilic imaginary of the monster,
which is both variable and permanent, positive and negative, and which reveals
itself to be a nomadic ideologeme, “a process without a stable object”: “The
monstrous body, more than an object, is a shifter, a vehicle that constructs a web
of interconnected and yet potentially contradictory discourses about his or her
embodied self. Gender and race are primary operators of this process” (“Signs of
Wonder” 300).
It is nevertheless useful to retain the idea that the epistemic oscillations of
the monstrous are inscribed in history and in economic, political, and cultural
structures that generate specific forms of social consciousness, as well as
specific representational models that are linked in a mediated (and not a
mechanical) way to these structures. The monstrous thus always stands out
against the diachrony that contains it and which the hyperbolic figure of the
monster contests and interrogates.
Exoticism, sensationalism, sentimentalism, and melodrama are only some of
the forms that the (re)presentation of the monstrous assumes according to the
classes, eras, and audiences that have produced the performance of difference.
As a spectacularization of the deformed body, the freak show is one of its most
hyperbolic and stunning modalities because it is based in the open, uncensored
practice of voyeurism. The unilaterality of the gaze is the only factor that matters
in the construction/constitution of the Other, who only acquires social existence
as a negative verification of the norm that excludes it.
This visual and social invasion of the monstrous body is another form
assumed by the biopolitical colonialism that grew stronger within the national
and transnational spaces of modernity. It included in its theatrical exhibition of
deformity aspects of race and gender as out-of-place variations that separated
them from the dominant notion of the citizen as a healthy, productive, white man
whose body is adapted to the profit-driven expectations of capitalism and the
visual paradigms of modernity.
The carnivalization of difference characteristic of festivals and spectacles
that display monstrosity as a commodity are not exempt from fraudulent or
simulacral elements that commodify otherness and circulate it through rhetoric
and visual narratives, as Robert Bogdan argues in his studies of the social
construction of freaks. Such operations owe as much to the development of the
entertainment industry that emerged in the nineteenth century as to the inequality
of social relations that makes this form of symbolic violence both possible and
profitable. Thus, “new somatic geographies” (Garland-Thomson 11) are ascribed
to the transformations of the market and audiences in the transnationalized
spaces of modernity.31
The field of literary production has registered similar developments that
promote themes, characters, and settings that, defying the representational
possibilities of realism, colonize nineteenth-century poetics with an extensive
gallery of topics and hybrid environments that combine medievalist echoes,
elements of Romantic sentimentality, traces of melodrama, aspects of mass
culture, and carnivalized segments of folklore, popular legends, and recycled
myths. As mentioned in referring to the emergence of the neo-Gothic in the
eighteenth century and its extension into the following century, this new
aesthetic agenda did not lack parodic, ironic, satirical, or grotesque elements or
the occasional stereotypical and melodramatic lyricism that gives coherence to
hyperbolic and excessively emotionalized plots. The recurring themes of violent
death, the desecration of graves, dark creatures from the demonic underworld,
anomalous situations, and beings with horrifying physical or psychological
attributes appear in theatricalized narratives in which the monstrous articulates
storylines toward the production of horror and shock.
From a social point of view, Gothic fiction is associated with forms of
resistance to and rejection of the political ideology of industrial capitalism and
the forms of “reality” that are taken up by the bourgeois novel around the
ideologemes of nation, family, heterosexuality, productivity, and social
discipline. These notions, considered indispensable pillars for the construction
and maintenance of universal order are in turn based on a totalizing conception
of knowledge and on a “scientific” subordination to empiricism. As Terry Heller
argues, “Gothic fiction expresses what industrial capitalism represses” (199). A
desire for unreality animates the Gothic, which takes pleasure in the revelation
of unexpected aspects of the real, both secular and mythical/mystical. Terror
causes both delight and trembling because it promises an other experience of the
daily world, a performance of transcendental dimensions that are displaced by
common experience and a deep internalization of individual and collective
existence that reveals the actions of forces beyond reason. Terror pushes the
limits of the representable in an attempt to find a language for everything that
surpasses our “normal,” everyday interpretative and perceptive capacity. By
extending the borders of the common and defamiliarizing our experience of the
world, terror mobilizes judgment and intuition, imagination and reason, testing
its methods and limits. Terror also defies received definitions of the real and the
knowledge that supports them. The experience of the monster, as a
materialization and concentration of horror, mediates between the quotidian and
the sublime, between the common and the extraordinary, causing the individual
to critically examine the distance that separates him or her from the nonexistent,
the inconceivable, and the unrepresentable. This experience urges the individual
to redefine these categories and to admit the existence of new regimes of truth in
the spheres of knowledge.

“Cosmic Fear”: Polidori and Lovecraft

The monster’s radically impure nature provokes paradoxical reactions of
attraction and repulsion, excitement and paralysis in the face of the
inconceivable, incomprehensible, and unclassifiable. Every reaction to the
monstrous is, for all that, always approximate because it is based in an
asymmetry of forces and resources through which the anomaly confronts the
norm and challenges its epistemic protocols and the social behaviors that support
it. The monstrous should be recognized as an apparatus that deconstructs order
and as a space of emotional intensification that invades the process of symbolic
communication. The transmission of content related to the monster is produced
in atmospheres haunted by energies, anxieties, and repressed desires that find in
the genre’s affective impetus a cathartic form of expression and solace that
emotionally purges or purifies the subject who projects onto the monster his or
her unsayable and unrepresentable feelings in a paradoxical instance of
“subjective objectivization.” For this reason, the monster’s potentially
emancipatory (questioning, deconstructive, reorganizing) quality should not be
underestimated.
The feelings of fear, terror, and horror, so obviously close to one another in
both their subjective repercussions and their physical manifestations, imply a
spectrum of intensity and an expansive drive that ranges from the punctual
reaction provoked by a present or imminent threat or intimidation, whether real
or imagined, to the most diffuse and powerful forms of horror that compound
fear with repulsion. Horror expresses the involuntary and inevitable response to
the effects of supernatural forces connected to the macabre or the sinister. While
terror or fright are concretely related to concrete dangers, or to acts or threats by
specific external agents or situations, horror is visceral and climactic, and it
encompasses the subject’s interiority in a devastating and often abstract,
sublimated way. Narrower and oriented more toward the intellect, terror leads to
the sublime, that is, it gives rise to transcendent emotions related to the border
between life and death and the relations between the human condition and the
supernatural. This is why the sublimity of terror frequently collides with
religious domains or profane beliefs. For example, as Gary Richard Thompson
notes, in the Gothic novel the element of mystery is added to the extreme fear of
pain and death, suggesting the existence of something morally repugnant,
incomprehensible, and unrepresentable that threatens the physical,
psychological, and moral integrity of the individual or the community. These
emotions are explicitly or implicitly connected to the critique of cultural and
social structures that impede the complete configuration of the self and obstruct
the expression of its inclinations and desires, imposing a systematic repression of
its drives and frustrations, all of which ends up symbolically expressing itself as
the terror of the Other.
The study of horror and its affective derivations has always accompanied the
production of the monstrous in the exploration of both the psychological and
intellectual aspects of the way in which different manifestations of fear affect the
relation between symbolic production and reality (particularly at the levels of
consumption, reception, interpretation, etc.). Thus, many artists have developed
their own concepts about the genre and the representational strategies on which
it is founded, all of which vary according to the time in which they were
produced and the specific topics in which the monstrous materializes in different
eras.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, vampirism as a theme proved to
be one of the most fertile, developing and consolidating a long cultural and
poetic tradition. In 1819, the physician and writer John William Polidori (1795-
1821), a friend of Lord Byron (to whom the story has erroneously been
attributed), published a short story called “The Vampire,” which is considered
the modern origin of vampire narratives.32 Polidori’s story was the result of a
challenge from his friend Byron during a social gathering at which Mary Shelley
and her husband Percy Shelley were present, and it has had a broad influence on
the genre of fantasy literature, including work by Nikolai Gogol, Alexandre
Dumas, and Leo Tolstoy. Polidori’s work was also an inspiration for Bram
Stoker’s Dracula, which secures its place as an important predecessor of the
genre up to the present day.
Beginning with Polidori’s story, vampirism has been one of the most popular
literary themes from the nineteenth century to today. The vampire has become
part of a vast gallery of Romantic and fantastic characters who are constructed
from realistic elements, scientific information, and dramatic devices that
combine to form hybrid narratives that are both canonical and countercultural.
These narratives dramatize the social conflicts, feelings of alienation, and
representational crises that have occurred at different points in modern history,
thereby reactivating this thematic both in literature and in the domains of
philosophy, political thought, and the visual arts. In addition, the genre has come
to colonize the canon of “high” literature by adding a measure of sensationalism
to dominant aesthetics. Ken Gelder has correctly pointed out the importance of
the ironic mode deployed by Polidori’s story, which contains numerous obscure
references to the context of the time, particularly to his friendship with Byron.
For Gelder, “The Vampire’ is in this sense a work transmitting ‘gossip’ through a
Gothic mode” (Reading the Vampire 31).33
The vampire’s particularity stands out within the lineage of the monstrous
because, even though it possesses typical features like hybridity, an inclination to
spread terror, and consumption of the Other, it departs from the norm of the
genre in some fundamental ways. As Persephone Braham writes:

Vampires are heretics and blasphemers, biological saboteurs, enemies

of nation, science, and progress, the abject and unclean embodiments
of evil, cloaked in the human form and adorned with wealth, manners,
physical beauty, and charisma. Monstrous in their hybridity, their
avidity, and their malevolence, vampires betray the most fundamental
attribute of monstrosity: they do not mostrar, they do not make
themselves seen. (From Amazons to Zombies 127-128)

One perspective that informs the neo-Gothic originated with Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-1849), whose work is closely linked to the imaginaries of nineteenth-
century horror. He proposes a literature that opens thematic doors and innovates
representational devices, thereby establishing the monstrous as part of everyday
life. Poe’s work disturbs the idea of a stable and rational order through an
aesthetics in which the grotesque, the morbid, the obsessive, and the demonic are
positioned as alternatives to bourgeois morality and customs.
It has been noted that Poe attempted to create a bridge between popular
sensibility and the “new sublime” that Gothic literature produced by combining
the medieval and the modern in an unusual synthesis (Bloom 5). Rediscovered
by Baudelaire and integrated through the path of symbolist codification of fin-
de-siecle aesthetic frameworks, Poe, as a representative of literature maudite
(which features the monster as one of its main protagonists) recognized
alternative forms for cognizing and interpreting the real in the occult and the
anomalous.
H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), an author who was strongly influenced by Poe’s
work and who is considered one of the creators of the horror genre, writes in his
essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1926) that fear of the unknown is the
oldest form of terror and the strongest one experienced by humanity. He
distinguishes between everyday fear and what he calls “cosmic” fear, which
induces a horror that transcendentally expands toward those realms outside
knowledge that have always fascinated and terrified humans. In a broad-ranging
and detailed summary of canonical horror literature from antiquity up to the first
decades of the twentieth century, Lovecraft evaluates the genre’s different
orientations as well as the most salient representatives and methods of what he
calls “weird literature.” He recognizes that literature expressing cosmic terror is
found in the folklore of all cultures to the same extent as chronicles, ballads, and
sacred texts. For Lovecraft, this style has always existed as a method for
thematizing the feelings of fear and uncertainty that overwhelm daily life and
that, in order to be expressed, require certain elements that elevate fiction above
the stereotypical scenes of the mundane grotesque. These requirements are the
suspension of both reason and the laws of nature, as well as perplexity in the
face of the inexplicable:

A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer,

unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed
with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that
most terrible conception of the human brain –a malign and particular
suspension of defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only
safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed
space. (“Supernatural Horror” 2)

This is the atmosphere that surrounds the emergence and proliferation of

monsters as extreme creatures situated on the always unstable border between
the comprehensible and the incommensurable. Contiguous with the related
domains of religion and science, cosmic fear (which is what primarily interests
Lovecraft) requires that the reader become unstuck from daily life and put his or
her imagination to work in order to have his or her productive emotionality
completely captivated.

For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of
supernatural horror provides an interesting field. Combated by a
mounting wave of plodding realism, cynical flippancy, and
sophisticated disillusionment, it is yet encouraged by a parallel tide of
growing mysticism, as developed both through the fatigued reaction of
“occultists” and religious fundamentalists against materialistic
discovery and through the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such
enlarged vistas and broken barriers as modern science has given us
with its intra-atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics, doctrines of
relativity, and probings into biology and human thought.
(“Supernatural Horror” 31)

In this sense, the Gothic has been seen as a symbolic system that responds to
the challenges and fears that afflict the individual in a secularized world. The
combination of fear, anxiety, mystery, and incertitude that accompany the
experience of terror corresponds to a spiritual state in which individuality comes
into conflict with the incommensurable, a feeling with religious, ethical, and
existential connotations. In The Gothic Imagination, Thompson writes that
“Gothic literature may be seen as expressive of an existential terror generated by
a schism between a triumphantly secularized philosophy of evolving good and
an abiding obsession with the medieval conception of guilt-laden, sin-ridden
man” (4-5).
For his part, David Punter argues that the Gothic is a reaction to the attempts
of industrial capitalism to impose a totalizing vision based in instrumental
reason, as well as in the productivism and exclusivity of dominant cultures (The
Literature of Terror 411-426). To begin, the Gothic disarticulates the solid vision
of the real and the pillars that socially and ideologically support it (e.g., family,
heterosexuality, monogamy), offering a representation of an other world rife
with invisible forces within capitalist modernity. The particularism and alterity
of the dark and unsayable energies of the Gothic setting defy the universalist
pretensions of bourgeois humanism and complicate the triumphalism of
secularization with the demonstration/monstering [mo(n)stración] of forces that
undermine the modern project and its civilizing mission. The monster does not
only serve as a portent of catastrophe. It also reveals the constitution of the real
itself as a space in which anomaly proliferates and where the repressed
encounters multiple forms of expression and historical reactivation.

Abjection, Splitting, and Pastiche: Frankenstein,

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula
Synthesizing the poetic and ideological tensions of its time, the neo-Gothic
presents itself as a parody of canonical styles, displacing and re-accommodating
them within a logic of pastiche that diminishes their aura and aesthetically and
ideologically reinscribes them. According to Jameson’s definition:

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the
wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a
neutral practice of mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without
the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling
that there exists something normal compared to which what is being
imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost
its sense of humor. (167)

The figures of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and others
that emerged from Europe in the nineteenth century were accompanied by an
ample cohort of vampires, ghosts, and split and anomalous personalities that
hover over the cultural scenes of Western modernity, suggesting the subliminal
presence of forces that had filtered into the societies of the time.
The classic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), written
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) when she was eighteen years old,
was composed as a metaphor for solitude and the inherent fragmentariness of the
human in a world subject to violent transformation. The supernatural and
destructive force of the narrative’s monster exudes pain and promotes an
emotional identification with this creature born from the unrestrained zeal for
knowledge and the hubris of reason that does not recognize its own limitations
and possibilities. Through his interactions, the monster’s trajectory reveals
aspects of his surrounding reality: contradictions, paradoxes, conflicts related to
forms of social organization and the values that inform it. The hunchbacked,
Promethean figure of the monster concentrates and metaphorizes a collective
fear connected to concrete historical and social referents but which is presented
in a sublimated form as a fear of the Other, of its strange and disturbing
presence, but also as a fear of the endeavors of the self, with its impenetrable
background.

Frankenstein’s monster traveled through the European countryside not

only retracing the Napoleonic invasions but also incarnating the
incursions of industrialism into the “harmonic” universe of peasants
and fishermen, inspiring fear and chaos by his mere presence. The
response that the monster’s intrusion elicits from the people is
reminiscent of certain attitudes toward industrialization… (Monleón
23)

From other critical perspectives, more so than other monsters of its kind,
Frankenstein’s creation bears witness to a failure: the embodiment of an ill-born
progeny destined to be demonized, a case of the failed transmission of the
Father’s qualities, a tragic destiny in which the monster is the first and primary
victim. The character’s monstrosity, as Joan Copjec has argued, is not accidental
but structural (57).34 For other critics, Mary Shelley’s work represents the guilty
conscience of the society of the time, punishing itself for having produced the
monsters that inhabited it (Monleón 23).
From the very beginning, the structure of Frankenstein presents the novel as
both artifice and simulacrum, like the process of the production of an entity that,
although it is “impossible as a physical fact,” as Shelley writes at the beginning
of the work and as Franco Moretti reminds us, it becomes a fact—an object, a
subject—real in the domain of literature, achieving an iconic and prophetic
dimension with exceptional cultural and ideological resonance.35 At the same
time, the author writes in her Preface that “The event on which this fiction is
founded has been supposed by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers
of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence.” This situates the monster within a
narrow, interstitial space between science and imagination, between reality and
fantasy, between possibility and impossibility. This location destabilizes the
conventional parameters of literary reception and places the reader in a zone of
indistinction with regard to the nature of the story and the pact of reading it
establishes. The work challenges any rigid or definitive positioning of the text
within the category of the supernatural, offering instead an internal critique of
the atmosphere and beliefs of the time in which knowledge and scientific and
technological proposals competed with intuitions about occult and inaccessible
dimensions of the real, thus revealing the dark side of the Enlightenment (Tallon
36-37).
The ambiguity inherent to the monstrous acquires a paradigmatic status in
Shelley’s novel. The monster, created by a young scientist in his laboratory, is
even up to the present day frequently referred to erroneously with his creator’s
name. This is because the creature the scientist creates lacks a name, a feature
that from the very beginning exiles the monster’s otherness to an empty space of
(re)cognition. In a conversation with Victor Frankenstein, the monster identifies
himself as “your Adam,” “your fallen angel,” invoking the theme of Creation
and signaling the monster as a mutant that from the very beginning of its
existence symbolizes lack, loss, and non-belonging. The descriptions of the
monster’s creator emphasize rejection and exclusion and indicate impatience,
cruelty, and fear of the anomalous being he has brought to life and the danger it
embodies. Victor uses the terms “monster,” “creature,” “demon,” “devil,”
“thing,” “wretch,” “vile insect,” and other similar expressions to refer to the
product of his experiments. The use of language as a technology of the
production of monstrosity has an undeniable relevance in Frankenstein because
it functions as an apparatus that both consolidates and demonizes otherness in a
vain attempt to organize the chaos that will no longer submit to taxonomies or
the disciplining capacity of the name.
Shelley’s novel opens with a quotation from John Milton’s Paradise Lost
(1667), considered a paradigmatic work of literary sublimity and which,
according to Chris Baldick, was built on two myths: that of creation and that of
transgression, which in Shelley’s work are brought together in one and the same
figure.36 References to this text appear throughout the novel in which the
scientist’s given name comes from “the Victor,” an allusion to the way in which
God is referred to in Milton’s epic poem, which also constitutes a reading of the
monster that this latter takes as a real story. The narrative of Paradise Lost is
articulated between the figures of God and Satan, and it creates a polarizing and
allegorical scenario in which the monster acts as a mediating device that
problematizes the Christian conception and the limits of reason as a fundamental
element of language and as a mediator between instinct and social
consciousness.
 Composed in the form of letters exchanged between Captain Robert Walton
and his sister Margaret Walton Saville, but also as the autobiographical tale of
the young scientist, the novel is based on the recourse of doubling and
interweaves textual registers in the same way that the monster is composed of
organic parts from different sources. In effect, Victor Frankenstein and his
monster function as a split entity; they use similar arguments, they constantly
seek and repel one another, and they are incomprehensible without one another.
Attraction and repulsion, life and death, technology and emotionality, love and
hate, all create interlocking counterpoints and give the narrative an agile
dynamic that dramatizes identities and events and causes meanings from the
realm of the real to circulate within the domain of the fantastic, from the polar
region toward which the monster flees to the fire that consumes its remains.
In her study of Franknstein and the social contexts that inform the work,
Johanna Smith draws attention to the importance of feminine writing and
interpretation as a specific angle of textual production, seeing in Mary Shelley
an author who was able to create a foundational work which consolidates the
canonical qualities of its narrative form, establishing the characteristics of a style
and a thematic with a long-ranging trajectory and intense symbolic connotations.
In addition, Smith underscores the importance of Shelley as a cultural producer
who was able to enshrine within her work the legacy of her mother, the feminist
philosopher and novelist Mary Wollstonecraft—author of, among other titles, A
Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)—who died shortly after Mary was
born, as well as the intellectual impact of her father, the anarchist philosopher
William Godwin, who introduced his daughter to the political debates of the
time.37 Mary Shelley’s work has a paradigmatic value for feminist criticism,
which has primarily examined the representation of identity in Frankenstein as
an illustration of the permanent and frustrated desire to achieve a stable and
harmonious form of being that would be able to resist the belief that every
individual is “half-made,” that the essential fragmentation of subjectivity must
be made whole.38 The character of Frankenstein’s monster is marked by this
internal rupture, which is metaphorized in his patch-work body, his body
language, and the way he acts. From an existential perspective, what additionally
stands out is the fact that Frankenstein’s monster is actually a victim, a creature
abandoned to his destiny by his creator, a quality that on some level is connected
to the author, whose mother died after giving birth to her. For his part, the
weakness of Victor Frankenstein the scientist is not, as McNally argues, his
insatiable thirst for knowledge and experimentation but rather his isolation from
social interaction, which turns his research into a neurotic, self-referential, and
alienated process. In this way, the topic of solitude stands out as one of the most
essential aspects of the composition of the monstrous: loneliness, difference,
alienation, frustration, and melancholia form an emotional constellation with
strong symbolic, ideological, and socio-cultural connotations.
More political readings see in the figure of Frankenstein’s monster a
metaphorical staging of the ideological debates of the French Revolution. For
some, his monstrous and out-of-place body represents radical projects for the
creation of a new social order; for others, it is a symbol of the frustrations of the
oppressed, of their resistance and anxiety in the face of injustice and negligence
from the dominant classes. It seems that, more than just these two positions,
Frankenstein harbors the harrowing existence of both in a social body searching
for identity and organic unity.
McNally performs an excellent reconstruction of the fundamental elements
of Godwin’s paternal influence on Mary Shelley’s work. Godwin, the
paradigmatic author of so-called Jacobin novels, used Gothic themes in his
work, particularly the motif of splitting as a device for rendering the psycho-
social complexities of his characters and plots. He integrated this “radical
Gothic” (83) into storylines like that of the novel Things Are as They Are, or the
Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), which portrays power relations and social
positions that condition the characters’ actions. If, McNally argues, in her
passionate critique of the French ancien régime Mary Wollstonecraft had
extended “the analysis of monstrosity to the oppressed classes, arguing that
despotism produced grotesque effects among the downtrodden” (82), then
Godwin contributed to a large extent to the consolidation of her defense of the
Irish cause and her denunciation of the monstering of its representatives.
According to McNally, both Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Shelley
maintained a never-ending commitment to the struggle for the liberation of
Ireland, the first British colony.
As McNally also notes, another movement that helped delineate the
ideological context from which Frankenstein emerged was Luddism, an anti-
industrialist perspective that was mainly active between 1811 and 1817.
Luddism originated in the resistance of artisans to the advance of capitalism as it
replaced human labor with machines, thus upsetting the existing regime of
labor.39 Social struggle and political confrontations caused fractures in the
organic structure of society to the detriment of the qualities and potentialities of
the human: “In Shelley’s dialectic of monstrosity, violence and oppression
rebound on the oppressors—distorting their own personalities and marring their
judgment, while also creating, as Wollstonecraft had warned, an enraged
underclass intent on retribution” (McNally 89).
Within this context, Frankenstein represents a machinic apparatus which
seeks to convince the reader of certain principles, including, as Moretti notes, the
ethics of the family, the importance of technological development, and respect
for tradition. In this same movement, the novel denounces social inequality and
the mysterious power of science, and it expresses a fear of a divided society
without coherence or organic activity. According to this interpretation, the
monster is affirmed as an ideological artifact. His appearance and behavior are
the vehicle for his message. The monster has a social mission here: he has been
coopted by the system since birth. Moretti points out that, as both a product of
history and an artifice, the monster has the power to transform himself into a
new “race” through which he would be able to return to Nature. However, the
most ideologically relevant aspect is the configuration of the monster as a
concentration of the irrationality of capitalism, which Walter Benjamin identified
as barbarism within civilization, the virtual demonization of work that produces
while it deforms, degrades, and reifies. According to Moretti’s inspired and
perhaps excessively radical reading: “By this means Mary Shelley wants to
convince us that capitalism has no future: it may have been around for a few
years, but now it is all over […] Wishing to exorcise the proletariat, Mary
Shelley, with absolute logical consistency, erases capital from her picture too. In
other words, she erases history” (72).
Laurence Rickels offers a “monstrous” reading of Frankenstein, a book born
(as the author himself remarks) from an originary chaos: from dark and formless
substances that are added together as pastiche, showing the seams that unify the
diverse fragments that make up the precarious totality of the story. Rickels
underscores the significant fact that the monster himself speaks “in the citational
mode” (278) in the story, incorporating elements of texts from different aesthetic
registers, as if language did not belong to him. Shelley uses this as a metaphor of
the artificial and pre-human nature of her character: “In her own melancholic or
antimetaphorical mode, she pieces together (just as the monster is sewn up out of
corpse parts) a monstrous novel primarily constituted out of fragments of
overhearing and overreading” (278).
Representative of a residual and countercultural aesthetic, Mary Shelley’s
monster is the result of recycling—that is, of the accumulation and
rearticulations of “found objects” that technology returns to life, resignifying
them and granting them an other, non-conventional, and counter-normative
existence.40 In this sense, Frankenstein exacerbates the qualities of the
monstrous by constructing the central figure of the novel as a precarious,
unstable, and helpless entity. His interstitial nature affords him an exogenous
position with regard to the system that cannot contain him and which the
monster occasionally interrupts, destabilizing its order with a radical otherness
that intensifies the tendencies of sensualism, emotional breakdown, melancholia,
and instability. The monster’s size (approximately two-and-a-half meters tall) is
terrifying and impossible to ignore, and it functions as a metaphor of his
excessive, hyperbolic, and out-of-place condition.
The Foucauldian expression “technologies of the self” takes on a new
meaning in Frankenstein insofar as it incorporates the philosophical meanings of
this concept with aspects related to real-world technology, thereby creating the
(id)entity of the monster as an unthinkable yet pardigmatic form of being-in-the-
world. Scientific technology is portrayed in the novel not only in the process of
the monster’s construction but also in the electrical energy used to animate the
inert material from which he is made. Mary Shelley had actually witnessed this
practice in the laboratory of Andrew Crosse, an amateur scientist who was
notorious at the time for attempting such controversial experiments that included
the attempted reanimation of corpses.41 Thus, beyond what is foreseeable,
history and fantasy feed off one another and combine with one another in the
hybrid monster and his melodramatic trajectory.42
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886) focuses on dual identity in a psychological drama that combines
ambition, fear, and the use of witchcraft. Capturing the repressive atmosphere of
Victorian society and its highly regulated social structure, the novella stages a
struggle that has been seen as a confrontation between heroic and anti-heroic
energies. In this way, the work dramatizes the conflict of human nature with all
its limits and possibilities.
Narrated through the intuitive perspective of a lawyer named Mr. Utterson,
as well as through other characters who advance the narrative (Richard Enfield,
for example), the tale concerns the incidents of the lives of two mysterious
characters: a doctor named Henry Jekyll and an unsettling individual named
Edward Hyde who together combine aspects of a split personality composed of
opposing elements that interact in a contradictory and mysterious dynamic. The
different narrative voices enhance the story’s texture, developing in a
convergence of complementary visions and versions informed by differing
degrees of psychological penetration. It has been pointed out that the story (in
which scientific, moral, legal, and even “mystical and transcendental” aspects
are expressed) defines itself in relation to the prestigious professional fields that
frame the masculine figure as the nucleus of social space, as well as the identity
politics that characterize it. The main narrators, who represent legal and medical
discourses, are involved in the discovery of aspects that always surround the
monstrous: the revelation of the mystery of being, the secrets of bodily and
psychological anomaly, and the reasons that would solidify or negate its
existential legitimacy.
The enigmatic and split figure of the dual protagonist brings together
elements connected to a capitalist society captivated by the mechanisms of
accumulation and alienation, processes that demonstrate the metaphorical quality
of Stevenson’s novella. It also represents models that have been proposed by
psychoanalysis: the splitting of the self (Jekyll and Hyde as “polar twins,”
according to the former’s own description), the idea of the double
(Doppelgänger or alter ego), multiple personalities, the notions of libido,
repression, sublimation, etc. In addition, critiques that concentrate on specific
themes linked to Victorian socialization and the distribution of symbolic spaces
(which are attributes and values associated with the genre) have detected in the
Jekyll/Hyde constellation the demonstration/monstering [mo(n)stración] of a
conflict whose epicenter is the homosocial economy of the era and the forms of
transgression that characterized it.
Subjected to the progressive accumulation of information provided by the
text, the reader is kept in suspense about the identities that coexist in the
character of Dr. Jekyll until the end of the novella. At only eight chapters long,
the brief book ends with a final section consisting of two posthumous letters—
presented as autobiographical texts which limit textual transmission and the pact
of reading that sustains it. In this way, the text constantly oscillates between the
interiority of Jekyll’s fragmented consciousness and the accounts of various
narrators, as well as between references, scientific discourses, and confessional
writings. The process of the apprehension of the self becomes a kaleidoscopic
exercise in which the truth is hidden in the intricacies of cognition and its
discursive translation. Textual body and social body, psychological, affective,
and cognitive aspects are all defined by the patchwork construction of
monstrosity.
Composed of multiple accounts supported by different points of view,
through shifts of perspective, reticent statements, and partial revelations, the
story materializes in the body an array of symbolic connotations. This
contradiction manifests as an undeniable fissure that is constitutive of human
nature and that no social convention can suture. Body, person, and gender
constitute categorical foundations that delimit the self without containing it.
Stevenson’s novella illustrates the excess of difference and its transgressive and
threatening character, which appears as rupture, metamorphosis, and
melancholia.
What stands out in the character of Hyde is his despicable, demonic, and
ape-like appearance—all features of the dehumanization and incompleteness
associated with the monstrous. His small stature, likened to that of a dwarf or
troglodyte, has been interpreted as an allusion to the fact that he has been
repressed for years and that his physicality has come to illustrate his subordinate
and withdrawn condition. His image is elusive and resists any fixity (there are no
photographs of him, and his appearance seems to continuously change), thereby
situating him as a mysterious and strange character governed by rules other than
those which define human normality. At the same time, the narrative elaborates a
series of mediations that complicates the epistolary apparatus: letters that contain
other letters, narratives that transmit opinions that are not those of the narrator,
legal, medical, and purely speculative angles all create a polyphonic web that
attempts to trap (without capturing) the mystery of human identity. The reality of
the self, its “truth,” remains inaccessible to the cognitive attempts to try to seize
hold of it.
 However, in this context it is the gaze that constructs monstrosity and
narrativizes it, textualizing cognition and making an epistemological break into a
narratable moment. In other words, monstrosity constitutes an experience that
exists to be narrated, while it is, at the same time, unrepresentable. The
circulation of the monstrous has an immanent, self-contained quality in this
work. More than a presence, monstrosity is an excessive attribute that lurks
within the intricacies of the story. Looking at himself in the mirror, Jekyll
interrogates the mystery of the self: he feels that he has lost his identity, his
home, his face, and his name, and he subjects himself to the effects of a potion
that triggers his metamorphosis. His body and his “persona” are Hyde’s alibi, the
place where evil resides, smashing the boundaries of individuality and making
the foundations of the body and the psyche precarious and unstable. What is
never revealed to the gaze is demonic, essential, and inevitably teratological.
The plot, which combines aspects of suspense, morality, medicine, and law,
develops the struggle between good and evil as forces in contention for an
individual’s soul. The character’s fragmented identity has been decoded in
different ways, with perhaps the most convincing being its interpretation as a
representation of the “gay Gothic,” that is, as an illustration of the theme of
repressed homosexuality through the metaphor of social pathology. In Ed
Cohen’s words, Stevenson’s novella, and particularly its duplication of the
masculine figure, expresses a destabilization of gender that, although it occludes
any feminine quality, exposes “the failure of masculinity as a coherent subject
position” (181). The divided subject, dominated by irrational drives and desires,
is defined by this alienating duality in which the two sides of his psyche wage
war over his body while coexisting in the common space of his memory. Jekyll
defines himself as a “double dealer” (42), suggesting a duplicity ruled by the
desire for pleasure:

And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of

disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I
found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head
high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the
public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that
when I reached years of reflection, and began to look around me and
take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already
committed to a profound duplicity of life. (The Strange Case 42)
 It is precisely this desire that gives rise to monstrosity, creating an
uncontrollable transformation in the subject: “The pleasures which I made haste
to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified: I would scarce use a
harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn towards
the monstrous” (The Strange Case 46).
Cohen refers to the sexualized political context of the end of the nineteenth
century as a discursive and ideological space in which the debate between man
and woman is staged and which recognizes masculinity as the nucleus of identity
politics.43 Dominant heterosexual normativity based in monogamy, family, and
procreative sex requires a unified masculine subject in whom corporeality,
behavior, values, and desires converge as axes of citizenship and the
organization of knowledge. Jekyll’s duplicity constitutes a fissure that
symbolically runs through the homogenizing and unifying project of modernity,
establishing instability in the very center of the system, a transgression that can
only be represented as anomaly. For his part, Stephen Heath argues that
Stevenson’s work developed in tandem with sexology, making possible
significant interdisciplinary convergences:

Stevenson’s time is the time of the pioneer sexologists: Strange Case of

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is published on the same year as Krafft-
Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis whose initial recognition of “the
incompleteness of our knowledge concerning the pathology of our
sexual life” might be taken as an insight into the difficulty Stevenson
has in his story. (235-236)

What the sexologist Krafft-Ebing called “the never ceasing duel between
animal instinct and morality” (5) would find its discursive expression in
Stevenson’s novella, in which the social, scientific, and moral problem of
masculine sexuality is narrativized in the rhetorical register of fictional self-
representation. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thus gives a
physical body to the preoccupations of the time, transmitting through visual and
discursive imagery an incipient critique of modernity and its regimes of “truth,”
which are all challenged in Stevenson’s text by the notions of partial truth,
hypocrisy, and secrecy.
More than just a moralizing sentiment, the work involves an allegorical
orientation that portrays internal struggle as the disintegration of the individual
and, by extension, the social. The individual is constructed as a queer (strange,
peculiar, counter-normative) subject/object whose social alienation ends in self-
destruction. The construction of the monstrous (transgressive, threatening,
embodied anomaly) has a prophetic quality that the Jekyll/Hyde split establishes
as a sign of impending dissolution. The contingent is overcome by a reflection
on human nature concerning identity politics and the values on which they are
based. In the movement of diegetic particularity to the universality of its
existential connotations, the text passes through intellectual, affective, ethical,
mystical, legal, and scientific levels and presents itself as a prophecy of the
conflicts of subjective development and the attempts to apprehend and contain it:

And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led

wholly towards the mystic and transcendental, reacted and shed a
strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my
members. With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the
moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by
whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful
shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because
the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others
will follow, others will outstrip me on these same lines; and I hazard
the guess that man will ultimately be known for a mere polity of
multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. (The Strange
Case 42-43)

The notion of an occult truth that can only be partially discovered and that
hides an essential knowledge about human nature is inherent in the theme of the
monstrous and in the explorations and the discoveries/concealments it generates.
The novella extends beyond its own limits and thus moves on from “the
profound duplicity of life” to multiplicity, from doubling to the proliferation of
identities, a notion that puts forth a hypothesis of the real and applies it to both
the real/social world and the world of interiority, thus promoting the idea of
reason as a principle that unifies and gives organic sense to perceptions, feelings,
and contradictory knowledges.44
While exploring the splitting of identity, the novella establishes its specific
and disillusioned approach to the monstrous as an endeavor that can only capture
identity in the deforming mirror of the Other (a notion which is expressed in the
iconic phrase that organizes the story: “He, I say—I cannot say, I”). Subjectivity
is conceptualized through otherness insofar as the latter becomes part of the
former and constitutes it, even while opposing it. Jekyll adds, in a blunt
assessment of his other half: “That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing
lived in him but fear and hatred” (The Strange Case 52).45 The discovery of the
monstrous is more terrifying if it reveals itself as interiority compromised by
evil, dehumanized but animated by emotional intensification and the will to
power.
Jekyll’s monstering is nearly metaphorical. The monster does not take hold
of him as a craving for the flesh or blood of the Other but rather as an invasion
of his inner life (his psychology, his affectivity, his cognition, and his memory)
—which nevertheless has equally devastating and destabilizing effects. Confined
to individual subjectivity and contained by the coded rhetoric of self-
representation, Stevenson’s work strikes at the heart of the canon of monstrosity,
sowing the seeds of doubt about the status of the human itself, as well as of the
monsters within it. The novella presents a “case” that illustrates an indisputable
break in the social structure as well as in the nature of the social itself. In other
words, the monstrosity embodied in Mr. Hyde is, in its own way, vampiric. He is
sinister, perfidious, instinctive, hunchbacked, and in his own way a werewolf
who prowls the scientific, moral, and legal domains of his time, a zombie who
colonizes the biopolitical protocols of modernity and destabilizes them, an
interstitial, borderlands being, illegitimate, anomalous, and threatening.
In Dracula (1897), by the Irish writer Abraham “Bram” Stoker (1847-1912),
the theme of drinking blood (established many decades earlier by Polidori’s
short story) connects diverse social strata through aggressive individuality and
the exaltation of the interpersonal, illicit, and strongly embodied relations which
are posited by vampirism—the symbolic derivations of which have made it
possible to connect this type of narrative to sexual, social, and economic themes
from the perspectives of Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic criticism.
Stoker’s work had been preceded by the lesser-known Gothic novel
Carmilla, written by another Irish writer, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873).
First published as a serial in the literary review The Dark Blue between 1871 and
1872, the story’s protagonist is a vampire-woman whose name (Carmilla) is an
anagram of her true name, Countess Mircalla Karnstein. This fictional character
is supposedly inspired by the “bloody countess” Erzsébet Báthory, whose story
has been fictionalized and rewritten multiple times over the centuries. The story
of Carmilla also inspired numerous re-elaborations in literature, film, comics,
and other media. Widely admired for his narrative technique and for the
originality of his themes, Le Fanu has been recognized for having set out the
original parameters for lesbian vampire stories (which subsequently have had a
long trajectory).46
Nevertheless, it would be Stoker’s work that would garner more critical
attention as the key story of the vampire genre in the West. The general features
of this style are well-known: constant transgression of the lines between life and
death, humanity and inhumanity, good and evil, science and sorcery, dreaming
and wakefulness, subject and object. The genre creates ambiguous characters
and atmospheres that disarticulate the certainty of knowledge, and it introjects
elements of Satanism, abjection, and mystery into modern reason. In many
cases, the genre’s inclination toward evil is assimilated into brutal mutations that
defy nature. Additionally, as Beal has remarked, the theme of the extraction of
blood is inscribed in a broad field of connotations: “For blood is not simply life
but also masculine potency, and Dracula’s blood not only threatens to
contaminate the distinction between life and death; it also endangers the
patriarchal order of familial relations, which are at the heart and soul of larger
Victorian society…” (131-132).
In any case, the vampire is a character whose monstrosity is refined and
reduced to a series of elliptical elements through which the grotesque is
sublimated. To give a few examples of this sublimation, it is worth mentioning
that the vampire’s desiring nature manifests as a contemplative and persistent
hunt for the object of anxiety. The vampiric sucking of blood, which is generally
takes place through small punctures on the neck or as a passionate kiss, prepares
the fusion of the bodies of the victim and the vampire. The attack takes the form
of an embrace that the vampire covers with his cape, and the victim’s
progression toward death involves increasing weakness and pallor and the
gradual extinguishing of vital signs. One might say that the vampire is an elegant
monstrosity with often aristocratic overtones, who disguises his grotesque
aspects under the character’s apparent sensuality and talent for seduction. In her
study “Reflections on the Grotesque,” Joyce Carol Oates argues that the vampire
effectively articulates repulsion and eroticism, minimizing the physical aspect of
monstrosity and lending it a touch of the sublime, which helps to conceal the
vampire’s truculent cannibalistic instincts.47
As Carroll recalls, in his psychoanalytic study On the Nightmare (1910),
Ernest Jones analyzes blood-sucking as a form of seduction that encompasses
the shameful incestuous desire for a dead relative, because mythical vampires
first spread their impulses within their families. Such attraction, disguised by
sadism and repulsion, makes living victims passive and subject to the power of
the dead, whose “agency” allows the living to enjoy without shame. Such a
transformation of attraction into repulsion and of the regression of genital
sexuality to its oral form (biting and sucking of blood) would come to satisfy
incestuous and necrophilic desires, lashing them together in a combination of
horror and eroticism, camouflaged by primal, unsayable, and unrepresentable
incestuous drives. Repulsion is the emotion that allows pleasure to be attained
(Carroll 169-70). In this way, monstrosity both transgresses and confirms the
norm:

[A]rt-horror is the price we are willing to pay for the revelation of that
which is impossible and unknown, of that which violates our
conceptual schema. The impossible being does disgust; but that disgust
is part of an overall narrative address which is not only pleasurable, but
whose potential pleasure depends on the confirmation of the existence
of the monster as a being that violates, defies, or problematizes
standing cultural classifications. (Carroll 186)

Stoker’s celebrated novel, considered the “first syntax of the vampire”

(Quirarte 25), was preceded by Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s short story “Good
Lady Ducayne” (1896), a work that, according to Quirarte, offers a variation on
canonical vampire narratives in which the blood of young victims is extracted by
a “sweet and generous old woman” along with the help of her physician (21).
The story reinforces the presence of this theme in fin-de-siécle imaginaries, but
there is no doubt that Dracula is the work that garnered the most attention and
consolidated both the topic and the style of Gothic vampires on a transnational
level.
Object of multiple interpretations focused on the characteristics of Count
Dracula and his habits (mainly his propensity for sucking blood, but also his
gestures, accent, attire, etc.), Stoker’s work has also been studied from socio-
historical perspectives that connect it to the international decline of the British
Empire at the end of the nineteenth century, which was the result of flagging
commerce and political problems on both the domestic and international levels.
However, the symbolic complexity of the vampire also extends to other spaces
of knowledge and social experience. In Braham’s words,

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) built on several centuries of vampire

lore, but encapsulated the concerns of late-Victorian England: the
conservation of empire, the threat of miscegenation, the changing roles
of women in industrialized societies, the question of evolution, and the
recently elaborated germ theory of disease. (From Amazons to Zombies
12)

From this perspective, Stoker’s work, along with other Victorian texts, has
been seen not only as a metaphor for the fears awoken by scientific knowledge
but also as a representation of the dangers of “inverse colonization” in which the
dark forces of instinctive, primitive, and atavistic otherness seek to dominate the
British Empire. Thus, the novel has been read as an anti-imperialist critique and
as a veiled warning about the threat represented by other European nations
competing for the global hegemony on which England was quickly losing its
grip.48
In addition, Stoker’s text, which begins with a journey by train, makes
references to the invention of the linotype (a technological device that
revolutionized the forms of the reproduction and dissemination of knowledge) as
well as the emergence of the gramophone and the typewriter (another recurrent
element throughout Stoker’s novel). These are all elements that signal the
influence of the industrial age on the book as well as the links between
individualism and capitalism which are symbolically elaborated in the
narrative.49 Rickels suggests that the figure of Count Dracula represents the
phantasmatic image of the new imaginary that emerged along with the new
technologies of the time. Other critics, like Leah Richards, follow this same
thematic line, which is developed in the novel in parallel to the central story of
vampirism. In fact, the theme of technology intersects both the main plot and the
cultural imaginaries of the era, impacting the construction of the novel itself and
effectively articulating the relations between literature, orality, folklore, and
melodrama.
According to Friedrich Kittler in “Dracula’s Legacy,” “Dracula is no
vampire novel, but a written account of our bureaucratization” (164). The
character of Mina mediates between two worlds; she represents technological
modernization and the advance of women onto previously forbidden terrain in
both the public and private spheres. More concretely, within the economy of the
novel, she functions as an apparatus that unifies and gives sense to multiple
versions and discursive registers. This allows for a cognitive approach to the
mystery of the main character and the meaning of his peculiar attributes. In this
sense, Mina is responsible for the creation of what Richards refers to as a
transnational and “transpersonal authority,” a textual and editorial task that can
only end with the monster’s destruction. For Kittler, what occupies the core of
Stoker’s novel is the representation of this techno-cultural aspect, and not the
atavistic mechanisms of evil understood as a primitive or demonic force.50
In Dracula, the compositional aspect functions as a formal counterpart to the
main character and his symbolic field because it incorporates the resources of
heterogeneity and fragmentation as constitutive procedures for the production of
meaning. Jennifer Wicke, referring to the mode of production of the text, has
pointed out that this constitutes

[a] narrative patchwork made up out of the combined journal entries,

letters, professional records and newspaper clippings, that the doughty
band of vampire hunters had separately written or collected, [which] is
then collated and typed by the industrious Mina, wife of the first
vampire target and ultimately a quasi-vampire herself […] The
multiplicity of narrative viewpoints has been well discussed, but the
crucial fact is that all of these narrative pieces eventually comprising
the manuscript that we are said to have in our hands emanate from
radically dissimilar and even state-of-the-art media forms. Dracula,
draped in all its feudalism and medieval gore, is textually completely
au courant. Nineteenth-century diaristic and epistolary effusion is
invaded by cutting edge technology, in a transformation of the generic
materials of the text into a motley fusion of speech and writing,
recording and transcribing, image and typography. (469)
 If the vampire-monster is constructed through the fusion of disparate
elements and as a concentration of radical disparity that precariously and
discontinuously resides within the body (although it overflows it in all
directions), the organization of the text reproduces and reinforces these tensions
by situating the disorganized, segmented, and anomalous nature of the main
character and the world he represents in textual fragmentation, plurality, and
pastiche. The material on which the story is based articulates dissimilarity and
de-hierarchizes it. In Dracula, the private world of the diary and personal
correspondence converges with a journalistic impersonality that represents and is
supported by the public sphere. This informational and interpretative assemblage
expresses a fissured and anxious subjectivity, belligerently opposed to the norms
that govern society. Count Dracula’s ethical and aesthetically discordant
subjectivity is also aggressive, melancholic, and melodramatic. According to
Rickels, this textual circulation mimics the circulation of blood from one
organism to another, as well as the circulation of capital (“from blood to
money”) and the ambitions of technology as indicators of social change and
epistemic defiance. This critique even interprets the work of mourning, which is
represented in Stoker’s novel and associated (via Freudianism) with
melancholia, as part of the circulation of desire and life as loss is recycled and
recovered through the incessant substitution of new victims, which does not
eliminate but rather channels the desire of the Other (26-27).
Psychoanalytic interpretations of Dracula are among the most well-known,
and they discuss themes from the novel such as sublimation, duality, the return
of the repressed, the individual and collective unconscious, the mirror stage in
the process of the construction of identity, the interconnections between
jouissance and melancholia, and the death drive, as well as different aspects of
the development of sexuality and the definition of gender.51
But perhaps the most prolific line of interpretation of this canonical novel
concerns the interrelations of capitalism and vampirism. Moretti argues that
Dracula’s capitalist pragmatism, namely his abhorrence of the waste—the
squandering—of blood rather than its consumption, its use as an exchange value,
as a symbolic commodity, as a tool whose force should be recycled in an effort
to conquer the world. As a commodity, blood circulates and supplies the
productive and reproductive channels of modernity. It is the fluid that oils
machines, that links desire and capital, life and control over the means of
production. Gold and blood are related and complementary elements. Blood is
the origin of the dynastic transmission of political and economic power, and the
purity of blood as a concept related to the privilege of the nobility is common in
vampire narratives, particularly in its classic iterations.
According to Timothy Beal, the figure of Count Dracula personifies
everything that modern England portrays as otherness.52 In the first place, his
appearance is represented as an invasion that threatens national purity through an
attack on women, who constitute a symbol of the nation and of the perpetuation
of the human species. Secondly, the contaminating quality of Count Dracula is
opposed to the purity of the culture he attacks and can only be eliminated
through re-sacralization. England is thus the sacred core and political center of
creation (Beal 124). Finally, Dracula also represents religious otherness through
his engagement in scandalous deviations from Protestant doctrine that
incorporate elements of primitivism and superstition connected to the return of
the dead and other aspects of the vampiric tradition. Nevertheless, as Beal and
other critics have argued, the Count cannot be reduced to his demonic
dimension. Rather, consistent with the figure of the monster, he constitutes a
hybrid composite in which good and evil, the divine and the demonic, coexist in
a complex proximity.53
Like the capitalist who exploits proletarian labor, the vampire sucks the
blood of the living to be able to go on living parasitically, strengthening himself
by weakening the other. The biopolitical dimension of the text is undeniable. The
will to accumulation and sacrifice of the Other saturate the narrative space and
make vampirism one of the clearest forms of the codification of modernity,
particularly with regard to its strategies for exploitation and its social costs. The
monster confronts a final destiny that drives him toward the incessant search for
the same. Dracula, condemned to be who he is, is the first victim in an anti-
heroic trajectory which is both individualist and depersonalized, marked by the
effects of alienation and by commodity fetishism. The monster is seduced by
blood, an obsession that compromises him at all corporeal and emotional levels,
that traps his body and soul, revealing the logic of permanent accumulation, the
extraction of the Other’s life-force, and the drive of infinite consumption.
The film Dracula (1931), directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela
Lugosi, used the Hungarian actor’s accent and diction to represent the external
threat that was looming over the Western world. However, perhaps the element
of the film that gives the narrative the most cohesiveness is the vampire’s gaze,
which the present study has already pointed out as an apparatus of narrative
construction. The gaze organizes and unifies the fictitious universe around the
element of desire and combines them in the Count’s vision. His stare penetrates
the Other and captivates him/her in thanatic anxiety. Libido and tragic destiny
constitute the two inseparable sides of the insatiable drive to possess and
consume, a compulsion that defines both the character and his narrative arc.54
These texts challenge the concepts of reason, totalization, regulation, and
progress, incorporating abjection in a desacralized world in which bodies move
like soulless automata and reveal the corpse that exists within every individual.
From this perspective, humanity appears as an unstable and elusive attribute that
gazes into the abyss, an event in which meanings collapse into life’s
particularism, vainly and erratically projecting itself toward an outside-of-
oneself that guides the destruction of identity and the dismantling of the social.
The will to represent the space of unreason stimulates the imagination and
guides the fantastic and parabolic configuration of the genre of which Dracula is
a pinnacle achievement. The nineteenth century could no longer appeal to the
notion of a clear separation between the virtuous and the demonic that had been
possible in previous centuries. The industrial age, with both its promises of
prosperity and its threats of destruction, created imaginaries that generated
complex and ambiguous imaginaries in which previous rules no longer applied.

Satan is a fallen angel; human beings are at the same time virtuous and
vicious, magnificent and abject. Such a portrayal of unreason, after its
banishment from reason, necessarily created a sense of confusion and
ambiguity. The old polarization between good and evil that had been
effective in the Gothic tales disappeared with the progressive
internalization of the demonic. As a result of this process, an
epistemological uncertainty arose in bourgeois thought, a crisis that
was articulated through and tamed by the fantastic and that […] very
often appeared in artistic representation in the form of madness,
hallucinations, or multiple divisions of the subject. (Monleón 24)

The extreme embodiment that characterizes these narratives points to a dis-

enchanted world that has renounced transcendence and confronts the drama of
finitude and the void of infinite consumption. This already constitutes the basis
for an in-depth critique of modernity and its economic, political, and social
foundations. The interrogation of the excesses of reason and the totalizing and
salvationist pretensions of science and technology takes on a metaphorical form
and extends itself allegorically to ethical, political, and aesthetic domains.
These aspects of corporeality captured the visual imaginaries of modernity.
Literature and the visual arts have vividly represented images of monsters with
particular delectation in references to bodily fluids, descriptions of corpses,
processes of decomposition, devastated environments, and claustrophobic and
sinister spaces. The monster has trained the modern gaze on a veritable
pornography of horror that shamelessly exposes the traumatic interiority that
saturates scenes of victimization. The monster is a tireless transgressor of limits
and borders because “every border is abject” in itself (Creed 66). Every spectator
is an insatiable voyeur who vicariously consumes his or her own dissatisfaction
through the monster’s devious desire, which can only be sated by consuming the
Other. However, even if, as other critics have mentioned, the Gothic monster was
recognizable, in the nineteenth century monstrosity became paradoxically
similar to social normality. Sometimes it appeared as a common individual,
sometimes it assumed stereotypical forms of the proletarian or a person from the
lower strata of society—beggars, indigents, criminals, the mentally ill. These
sectors of society were othered (“monstered”) through the reduction of their
difference to characteristics that denoted anomaly, marginality, and
subalternization.
In an examination of the “Gothic economy” as a metaphorical productivity,
Judith Halberstam argues that the Gothic genre constructs symbolic
constellations that articulate class, gender, race, sexuality, and capital. Marx used
these same elements in his representation of the Gothic nature of capitalism, a
system capable of generating the mutation of matter into commodities, of
commodities into value, and of value into capital. According to Halberstam,
“Dracula is indeed not simply a monster but a technology of monstrosity”
(“Technologies” 334), because he condenses a series of features and procedures
that define the genre and its main connotations around the theme of
identity/otherness in relation to race, gender, and sexuality. Halberstam
maintains that one aspect of the theme of identity elaborated in Stoker’s work is
that of Judaism as it is seen from the perspective of modern anti-Semitism. The
character of Dracula thus articulates elements that connect him to the Gothic
anti-Semitic stereotype of the wandering Jew, “a monster with bad blood, […]
unstable gender identity, sexual and economic parasitism, and degeneracy”
(“Technologies” 337). Stoker makes the Count the representation of otherness
itself, encompassing fear, rejection, and prejudice in a corporeal synthesis that
expresses the biased relation between Judaism and capital in the act of sucking
blood.
Dracula thus acquires a paradigmatic status, opening up the gates to a large
number of adaptations and re-adaptations that experiment with the possibilities
of this specific form of representation of the supernatural. The strategies that
take this figure as their basis—in order to offer a version of evil that is at the
same time complex, secularized, and transcendent—has had strong ramifications
throughout literature, music, and the visual arts. They see in the Gothic
atmosphere an alternative space for criticism and the expression of sentiments
connected to the themes of repression, affective excess, and the sublimity of
human nature confronted by its own physical, emotional, and cognitive limits.
Multiple paths are opened up by the re-elaborations of the iconic figure of
Count Dracula and the inner drama that defines him. Following the line initiated
by this work and appearing as an unauthorized adaptation of Stoker’s novel, the
silent film Nosferatu (1922), directed by F.W. Murnau in the German
expressionist style, is considered one of the masterpieces of the genre and its
earliest cinematic elaboration. Murnau’s version modifies some aspects of the
novel, passing over secondary characters and changing certain elements of the
plot. For example, Count Orlok does not replicate his kind through direct
transmission of his attributes via a bite, rather he kills his victims. Nevertheless,
the film retains the idea of the plague and situates the story in the iconic space
between Germany and Transylvania.55

Monstrosity and Modernity

In modernity, monsters have a conspicuous presence that traverses spaces and
cultural realms and draws from the oldest traditions as well as from popular
culture and the new territories of mass culture, which is closely connected to the
expansion of the market. The processes characterized by the development and
dissemination of science and technology as well as by the modernization of the
ideological state apparatuses and the development of transnational capital,
transform and disturb the collective imaginaries. The progressive
depersonalization of culture, the spread of individualism, and the predominance
of instrumental reason, devastate society’s traditional values. The disorientation
caused by these transformations and the progressive disillusionment of a world
oriented ever more toward the growth and acceleration of production translates
into sentiments that require a new vocabulary and a new repertoire of images
capable of communicating a novel and destabilizing experience of the world.
The new horizons of knowledge, the blurring of disciplinary boundaries, the
transformations of subjectivity, the changes that take place at the levels of belief,
consumption, and socialization are often expressed through images that refer to a
phantasmatic world populated by uncertainties and ambiguities. These new
horizons excite, terrify, and overtake the individual with desires and drives that
combine the certainties of a vanishing world and the discoveries of a universe
that at the same time presents itself as foreign, full of promise, and unreachable.
In philosophical, literary, and visual constructions as well as in the discourses
of political science, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and so on, the figure of the
monster expresses, on the one hand, the survival of mythic imaginaries,
superstitions, and legends that referred to an apprehensible and representable
world, full of allegories and coded messages linked to transcendent content that
defied both rationality and the imagination. On the other hand, the monster also
comes to embody emotions and fears related to the experience of modernity:
solitude, alienation, chaos, the loss of identity connected to the anonymity and
depersonalization of large cities, the fears of the multitude, machines,
deterritorialization, the automatization of life, and the effects of biopolitical
control.
Ideologically and aesthetically, the monstrous—and not necessarily a
particular monster—is articulated within the social horizons of modernity with
an impact designed to do away with the foundations of the status quo itself, or at
least to promote questioning of its principles and objectives. However, it is
undeniable that in many cases the monstrous also takes up dominant discourses
as a way to reaffirm the hegemony and disqualification of alternative forms of
conceptualizing the social. In any case, the figure of the monster explains and
metaphorizes feelings and desires that would otherwise remain repressed within
the collective unconscious. As McNally has argued,

The structures of denial that dominate conscious life in modernity are

so habitual, the intellectual and cultural web that normalizes the
repression of unconscious desires so intricate, that only images with
explosive power can break the web of mystification. This is why
psychoanalysis (at least in its most genuinely radical version) is
compelled to dramatize, to use a metaphorical language and imagery
that shocks the modern mind. (6, emphasis in original)

Monsters contribute to the creation of a “cartography of the invisible”

(McNally 6-7). The deformed and disruptive body of the monster is the site for
the symbolic displacement of the forces of capital, the functions of the
unconscious and the discriminatory and exclusionary drives of modern society. It
expresses the dynamics of an “zombie economy” that implements forms of
production and exploitation supported by advances in technology and the
expansion of markets, thereby increasing the alienation individuals experience
with regard to themselves and to nature. The transformation of subjectivity and
the emergence of new forms of political and social agency, as well as the
modifications that have taken place in the realms of the family, sexuality, gender
politics, and technology, all find monstrosity to be an adequate venue for the
representation of the disintegration and re-articulation of the social.
A study of Western monsters makes it possible to perceive the anxieties,
fears, and frustrations that haunt the era characterized by social disciplining and
the projects of modernization. In different contexts, authoritarian and
exclusionary regimes imposed various forms of systemic violence in the name of
scientific thought, progress, and social order, implementing monstrous
modalities of the practice of power, monstering the Other in order to define it as
the enemy. Seen as different and consequently disqualified either as a political
threat or as an usurpation of dominant values (usually owing to some aspect of
ethnic diversity, cultural belonging, gender difference, sexual preference,
physical disability, etc.), the Other was conceptualized as a monster in the
discourses of Nazism and apartheid, in the contexts of positivist thought and in
anticommunist ideology. Also, the Other is the triggering factor in xenophobic
discourses, in the debates on/against mestizaje, in homophobia, in the defense of
bodily “normality,” as well as in the rejection of physical disability and mental
illness. Although the criteria for exclusion here mainly concerns questions of
gender, sexuality, and race throughout history in all cultures, similar arguments
also proliferated and acquired their contemporary forms by connecting
themselves to scientific thought and modern notions of sovereignty, nationality,
and citizenship. These strategies of control and exclusion were instilled in the
institutional and ideological structures of the state and in the notions of
community/immunity, social Darwinism, and eugenics.
The strategy of “monstrification” also served to express conservative
sentiments against modernity, a project that was interpreted as an attack on
traditional values and a dehumanization of social life. In this sense, vampirism
often functioned as a metaphor of the simulacrum, of that which hides its true
nature and constitutes a latent threat to society. As a materialization of hybridity,
corruption, and decadence, the vampire is able to infiltrate the social body and
disseminate abjection like a disease that assaults the foundations of the system.
Its archaic attributes, linked to the occult, the abject, and the sinister, are
exemplary allegories of the negative forces that threaten society and the occult
drives that animate the individual.

Monstrosity and Nation

Since the nineteenth century in Latin America, representations of the nation,
particularly those that express a binary vision, such as the struggle of civilization
against primitivism and barbarism, abound in spectral images and scenes of
dehumanized savagery, as in Facundo (1845) by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
(1811-1888) or in El Matadero, written by Esteban Echeverría (1805-1851)
between 1838 and 1840 and published in 1871. In this latter work, the people are
monstered/portrayed [mo(n)strado] as a repository of qualities irreducible to the
construction of the nation-state and opposed to the values of the civilizing
European model adopted by regional oligarchies. The relation between
monstering and nationalism acquired a paradigmatic dimension in the case of
Argentina, due to the centrality of Sarmiento’s text in the imaginaries of Latin
Americanism and in the cultural history of Latin America. Therefore, it is worth
paying attention to the discursive constellation that developed out of the figure
of the monster and its ample symbology.
In her article, “La ‘máquina teratológica’ en el Facundo de Sarmiento: Una
lectura biopolítica de la literatura argentina,” in which she uses Agamben’s
concept of “inclusive exclusion,” Andrea Torrano points out that Sarmiento’s
text reveals a fluidity between the concepts of civilization and barbarism. She
emphasizes the complexity that informs the dualism of this key text of Romantic
Latin American historicism (which has often been interpreted in an excessively
simplistic and Manichean way). According to Torrano,

en el Facundo la barbarie y la civilización pueden ser leídas a través de

dos máquinas que operan de manera antagónica, pero, al mismo
tiempo, de forma complementaria: por un lado, la “máquina
antropológica”, que produce al hombre, y, por otro, lo que
denominamos “máquina teratológica”, que fabrica al monstruo. (n.p.)

The barbarism represented by the character of Facundo Quiroga is based in

his physiognomy and in his actions, in his animal nature and in his antagonistic
relationship to culture, which promotes the values of humanization, the control
of instinct, and the regulation of power. Quiroga shares with Rosas the excess
that accumulates outside the parameters of “normality” and relates it to the
insubordinate and unrepresentable space of monstrosity. It is a matter of a social
and ideological realm dominated by violence and terror, which is to say, highly
emotional and distant from both reason and restraint; a space, as Torrano argues,
situated outside the social pact and the values and principles on which the latter
is based.56
The naturalist novel also provides a broad repertoire for representing the
immigrant as the embodiment of the abjection and evil that corrode the national
body. The novels of Eugenio Cambaceres (1843-1888) take up the themes of
social fear and the contamination of national homogeneity and collective
identity, imagined as a compendium of qualities connected to the European
model that concentrates the necessary requirements for the construction of
citizenship. As David Solodkow has argued regarding the social determinism
that characterizes the narrative perspective of Cambaceres’s novel En la sangre
(1887),

[l]a escritura de Cambaceres habla del Otro del ser nacional cuya
identidad monstruosa se halla configurada a partir de una hibridación;
de una conjunción entre lo que aparenta ser humano y cierta
 “animalidad” instintual (sic) que lo desmiente, que anula sus rasgos de
humanidad […] De este modo, la imagen del espejo realista/naturalista,
al ver al Otro, no hallará sino monstruosidades: enfermos engendros
portadores del contagio, lenguajes bárbaros aún en su fase de
articulación fonética y toda una serie de elementos negativos que
configurarán el marco (etno)teratológico sobre el cual se desplegará la
mirada antropológica de Cambaceres y su Generación […] El híbrido
se constituye así como el monstruo decimonónico a conjurar. Ya no se
tratará de una superposición del discurso médico sobre sujetos
patológicos (el masturbador, la histérica, las anomalías sexuales), sino
de ciertos elementos que tiñen al contorno objetivado del cuerpo del
Otro: color de la piel, el origen de procedencia, la lengua, y que
atribuyen un repertorio de conductas a corregir asociadas a ciertas
características físicas perturbadoras. (95-96)

The allegories of the national that find one of their figurative supports in
monstrosity extend from the nineteenth into the twentieth century in Latin
America with a continuity that reveals that the monstrous has been canonized as
a symbolic space that serves to emphasize the persistence of congenital
barbarism that comes from the anomalous articulation of Eurocentric concepts
like order and progress and is transplanted to other societies whose specificity
prevents the easy assimilation of such models. The postcolonial disarticulation
of economy, politics, and society and the vernacular elements that have survived
colonial domination function as obstacles that prevent the adoption of the
civilizing paradigms embraced by elites. Translated into the terms of regional
policies, this epistemic disruption is a result of the entrenchment of monstrosity
in national institutions.
In other contexts, the regionalist novel or “La novela de la tierra” (e.g., La
vorágine, Doña Bárbara, Don Segundo Sombra [all 1926]) incorporate
monstrosity, nature, and sexual voracity in a synthesis that portrayed the limits of
the civilizing project of modernity and presented telluric and vernacular forces
as antagonistic to the European models of civility and progress. The continuity
between these conquest narratives, in which Latin American nature was seen
both as a promise of abundance and as a physical and natural threat that resisted
the advance of Western reason, is notorious in these texts, although in the
regionalist novel the national project seems to be inserted as a redefinition of
hegemony and as an exogenous force imposed on regional logics. The monstrous
generally appears in the diluted form of personal features, exceptionality,
irrationalism, or uninhibited instinct. Thus, it forms part of the indomitable
reality of Latin America and the characters who represent it. Nature, character,
and destiny also appear to be associated insofar as the monstrous is a signifier
that crosses boundaries between all these levels, incorporating the idea that this
violence is inherent to both the civilizing project and the realities that resist it.
Spectral elements, magical suggestions, and irrational factors inform this
approach to the natural world as the symbolic context of a state reason that is
unable to colonize all levels of the real, levels where what is irreducible to
civilizing logics surpasses conventional representational models and pushes the
limits of the bourgeois novel.
In a similar way, the Antropofagia (“Cannibalism”) movement, whose
principles were outlined in the Manifiesto Antropófago (1928) by Oswald de
Andrade, established (in an anthropological key) the poetics of American
exceptionalism. In the contexts of reflection on the limits and the political and
social meaning of “national culture,” this movement consolidated an alternative
position, locating in the idea of cannibalism an image that represented cultural
voracity as one of the constitutive elements of the process of identity formation,
which consisted of the incorporation of the Other in order to strengthen and
enrich one’s own cultural values.57
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Juan Rulfo (1917-1986), in El
llano en llamas (1953) and Pedro Páramo (1955), incorporated ghosts as part of
the popular imaginaries that registered the conflicts and challenges of modernity
from the perspective of marginalized populations whose epistemologies
elaborate on the themes of death, scarcity, land, nature, and power through
alternative models that are frequently antagonistic to dominant principles. The
grief-stricken souls in the desolate world of the Mexican countryside find
themselves trapped in an interstice similar to that of the social condition of the
population betrayed by the Republic and the Revolution, in which colonialist
domination is perpetuated as coloniality. The presence of spectrality—and with it
the representation of the illusory, delirious, imagined, dream-like—does not
produce a de-realization but rather, on the contrary, it accentuates the features of
a radical experience of the social that cannot find words to express itself, nor can
it find any visual images that can adequately represent the subsumed dimension
of the experience of collective alienation. This reality is (re)presented in popular
imaginaries with an over-encrypted symbolic charge, as John Kraniauskas
suggests, in which the (individual and collective) soul has been separated from
its body and floats in a limbo where there is no substantial difference between
life and death. The biopolitical flow that traverses from one domain to the other
can only be expressed in the impure register of the supernatural, the eccentric,
the excessive, and the monstrous.
In Argentina, the spirit and rhetoric of El matadero is taken up again and
rewritten in much later political contexts and elaborated through the grotesque
aspects of the language, tone, and general thematic of the poem “La refalosa”
(1839) by Hilario Ascasubi (1807-1875) and in Jorge Luis Borges and Alberto
Bioy-Casares’s story “La fiesta del monstruo.” Published under the pseudonym
H. Bustos Domecq, the story combines monstrosity, instinct, and abnormality. It
describes the events of a paradigmatic day in the Peronist movement in which
“the Monster” (Juan Domingo Perón’s nickname) addresses the Argentine
people in the middle of a collective uprising. This clandestinely circulated text
was only published after the fall of Peronism. “La fiesta del monstruo”
constitutes a “cruel, heartless, one-dimensional, over-politicized vision”
(Feinmann) of the popular barbarism resulting from a political passion in which
civic duty and monstrosity become confused. In scenes replete with racism and
classism (which Echeverría also uses in El matadero to represent the instincts of
people overwhelmed by hunger), it demonstrates the entrenchment of
monstrosity in the heart of the polis, which is to say, the corruption of social
space and the figure of the political monster as a sign of the catastrophe and
collapse of sociality.
With monstrous scenes dedicated to expressing the biopolitical excess
unleashed by the active presence of the Other who is opposed to one’s own
values or to dominant projects, Borges and Bioy-Casares’s story forms part of an
aesthetico-ideological constellation that, in addition to the texts already
mentioned here, includes narratives like “El fiord” (1969) and “El niño
proletario” by Osvaldo Lamborghini (1940-1985), which were posthumously
published in a collection edited by César Aria. In these cynical texts, satire and
parody overlap in order to offer a deranged, bloody, and allegorically
carnivalesque vision of the political and national scene. The monstrous and the
popular converge and separate in a chaotic game in which ideology turns the
mechanisms of a machine that has lost its teleology. The political monster and
the human monster are two sides of the collapse of the social pact. They are
presented in a unified way as hybrid constructions that define “the literary
unconscious of Peronism” from a teratological basis, and more generally the
unsayable system of desires, drives, and interests that constitute the most corrupt
and least visible version of the political (Kraniauskas, “Revolución-Porno” 47).
By comparing revolution and pornography, Kraniauskas emphasizes the
grotesque as a symbolic mediation that consists of the immodest and shameless
exposé of the repressed which, in determinate circumstances, acquires a political
status and forms a “perverse theater” of passions that construct, destroy, and
deconstruct the social. This is the setting for the dramatization of the excess of
“political affect” and ideology that are represented as a surplus of sexuality, a
metaphor of “a state structured by fetishism” where the social functions as a
commodity and subjects are “out of place,” decentered, unhinged, monstered,
outside themselves.
In a study that articulates both literary and filmic analysis of Manuel Puig’s
novel El beso de la mujer araña and its 1985 adaptation for the screen by Héctor
Babenco (a film which won an Academy Award that year), Dolores Tierney
discusses the progressive value of horror in contexts in which it can reveal
elements of resistance or some other aspect of repressive or marginalizing social
experiences (such as political authoritarianism, patriarchy, sexual or racial
discrimination, classism, or xenophobia), although often in a coded, enigmatic,
or self-censoring way.58 Terror thus functions as a pretext for discussing topics
that have been prohibited or relegated to the margins of public debate; therefore
it generates critical knowledge and reflexive thought. Tierney analyzes the
emotional element of terror in both the literary and cinematic versions as a
mediation between the domains of political ideology and sexual politics (more
specifically, the Left and homosexuality), which are broad conceptual fields
introduced by the characters through their own personal peculiarities in a
confrontation within a prison cell during the dictatorship in Argentina. The
characters come to know one another through retelling the storylines of movies,
some real (Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and White Zombie
(1932), with these last two combined in a fictitious film called La vuelta de la
mujer zombi) and others invented by the characters. What interests Tierney is the
use of terror as a destabilizing element of social experience, which establishes its
control through supposed certainties and regulations that make the world
predictable and “safe.” According to Tierney, “Puig, al manipular textualmente
el cine clásico de terror y su concepto clave del ‘miedo a lo desconocido’,
intenta cuestionar el estilo clásico de Hollywood como uno de los ‘modos de
conocimiento’ hegemónico/homofóbico del siglo veinte, a la vez que ofrece a
cambio una ‘realidad del placer’ como utopía” (“El terror” 357). The movies that
symbolically circulate between Valentín (Raúl Julia) and Molina (William Hurt)
create a Gothic environment accentuated by the location of the exchange (a
prison cell). However, what concerns us here is how, through the exchange of
stories, the characters become immersed in the transmission of knowledge and
life experiences that terror helps to intensify with its charge of emotional excess
and its defamiliarization of the everyday. In this way, the prison cell becomes a
place of freedom and creation that includes the reshaping of the conventions of
terror through a re-narration that results in strategic innovations of the genre.
The knowledge/ignorance dichotomy, which is a device that makes the workings
of terror more dynamic, is employed in the novel in footnotes that deal with the
topic of homosexuality. This metanarrative device also sheds light on the silence
of the characters as well as on their revelations both to each other and to the
authorities that have incarcerated them. What is at stake in the gap between
knowledge and non-knowledge is true freedom. Terror constitutes a symbolic
mediation that intervenes and guides the repressed as it emerges within
consciousness as well as within the story and its strategic and meaningful
suppressions.
The processes of codification provided by elements of the Gothic in the case
of Mexico were particularly expressed in settings and themes about identity that
in a more or less diffuse way refer to the mystery of the real, which cannot be
represented by realist mimesis and therefore must rely on other expanding and
resignifying registers of social experience. Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012)
incorporated Gothic elements into his fiction in works such as Aura (1962), Una
famila lejana (1980), “El Chac Mool,” “Tlactocatzine, del jardín de Flandes”
(published in the collection Los días enmascarados, 1954), and the six stories
that make up Inquieta compañía (2004) (“El amante del teatro,” “La gata de mi
madre,” “La Buena compañía,” “Calixta Brand,” “La bella durmiente,” and
“Vlad”), to mention only the most salient examples. Gothic themes proliferate
throughout these narratives, including vampires. Fuentes is perhaps too faithful
to the classic models of the genre, which makes his plots somewhat predictable,
although they do seem to hold their own within the context in which they were
composed. Vampires, angels, demons, pagan idols that come to life, specters,
and scenes of duplicity, delirium, and dreams and nightmares all create a
ghoulish gallery in which more than one contribution to the universal genre of
the monstrous offers thematic variations that traverse supernatural, paranormal,
and fantastic realms.
Una familia lejana integrates the phantasmagoric into the theme of identity
—both on the level of the individual as well as that of the family and the nation:
“todos somos padres de los padres e hijos de los hijos” (Fuentes 138). In this
way, the novel explores the passing of generations, their branching off, and their
secret and distant connections—as if they were rivers with infinite, impossible-
to-trace tributaries that flowed toward unknown deltas. The supernatural element
of this story consists primarily in the effect of unreality caused by the
recognition of dreams as a source of reality, as a reliable form of cognitive
approximation. From this perspective, modernity is no longer a result of the
process of secularization and disillusionment with the world but rather a
repressive structure of knowledges that rejects other forms of knowledge of the
real, which are thus reclaimed and defended by literature.
This modality of Mexican fiction, which makes use of Gothic elements in
plots, settings, or the composition of characters, often incorporates reference to
the pre-Hispanic period, thereby creating historico-cultural bridges that rework
the past and take into account the innumerable vestiges that form part of
contemporary society and whose evocation and fictionalization make it possible
to reflect on still unresolved matters within the collective imaginary. The
supernatural is situated—as in Fuentes’s Aura and “El Chac Mool” (the Mayan
god of rain) or Julio Cortázar’s “La noche boca arriba”—in the intermediate
zone between reality and dreams, between past and present, or put another way:
between the historical time mythologized by national narratives and the present
day. Organized around binary conceptual systems (outside/inside, above/below,
darkness/light, sublime/grotesque, history/fiction, reason/madness) that are
sometimes embodied in symmetrical characters (General Llorente/Felipe
Montero, Consuelo/Aura), this literature elaborates the mournful, the sinister,
and the supernatural through the transgression and erasure of the limits that give
meaning to these antinomies, placing its interests instead in the intermediate,
ambiguous, and troubling zone where these domains come into contact with and
contaminate one another.
The individual body, the environment, and history all converge in images
that allegorize the monstrous, anomalous, and supernatural within national
history. This articulation can be seen, for example, in the image of Aura: “El
detritus del cuerpo y del lugar también se extiende a los manuscritos de la
historia del General Llorente” (Fuentes, Aura 30), a continuity that affirms the
ideological value of the Gothic in its ability to infiltrate occult realms that are not
always immediately visible. In these instances, monstrosity does not consist so
much in the creation of an exceptionally strong, terrifying, or demonic entity
(such as in classic monster literature), nor of an individual who, like
Frankenstein’s monster or Count Dracula, articulates in himself a modern anti-
epic with political and transcendent connotations. Rather, these postcolonial
approaches to the Gothic exhaust themselves in the analysis of the
decomposition of identity, metamorphosis, dualities, physical transformations,
and spectralizations that dissolve the subject’s materiality without totally
annihilating it. It is as if, following Rulfo’s narrative, they were retransmitting
the idea of a reality inhabited by ghosts, especially those that represent the
colonized and marginalized segments of society that have been betrayed by the
nationalist policies that ensued from the Mexican Revolution. It is a matter of
minor monsters (or processes of monstering) that have resulted from the
corruption of myth or history, or from ghostly forms (as in the case of Aura) in
which the same narrative perspective in the second person (perhaps one of the
story’s most attractive literary devices) causes doubt about the limits between
what has been lived and what is being told.59
Combining a realistic narrative “tone” with magical elements layered
between fantasy, melodrama, and psychological narrative, these stories alter the
pact of reading by constructing themselves within uncertain aesthetico-
ideological domains that are not properly Gothic (although they incorporate
many of its resources) and that formulate an option for defamiliarization (for the
uncanny) and for the abandonment of mimetic aesthetics.
Náter has referred to the theme of ruins and their connections to both the
concept of the sinister or ominous (the uncanny) and the field of the Gothic,
indicating that the hellish space of cities or depressing, corrupt, and desolate
places express a reaction to industrialism and its faith in progress, symbolized in
the city’s energy and its value of productivity.

La relación de la estética de la novela gótica con la ruina, con la

inminente destrucción, refiere un contacto con el pasado y con la
decadencia. La preocupación por la trascendencia se resuelve
negativamente: el alma no puede ir al cielo. Las ruinas representan una
reacción al deseo de presentar una realidad temporal; ese mundo en
decadencia indica los límites del poder de la naturaleza sobre la
creación humana. La muerte y la enfermedad sirven para reconocer el
poder del tiempo y tratar de confrontar nuestra aniquilación. Las ruinas
y los cementerios recuerdan la idea de la decrepitud humana, con lo
cual se intenta resaltar la fugacidad de la vida. Curiosamente, esa
poética de la decrepitud, de la ruina, implica la valoración de la vida
incompleta o de la vida eterna: las ruinas góticas serían el punto de
partida para recrear, mediante la imaginación, el objeto de la carencia,
produciéndose la pugna entre Eros y Tanatos: “The very process of
imagination enlargement is at the heart of the gothic expansion”
(Bayer-Berembaum 28). La ruina y la decadencia, también, expresan el
repudio gótico por la belleza y la salud que privilegiaba la poética del
clasicismo. La fascinación por la enfermedad y la descomposición
representa la liberación de los confines de la belleza y de lo humano.
La mente gótica contrapone lo débil y lo putrefacto, y la agresividad a
la fuerza, al vigor y a la belleza. En ese sentido, hay una tendencia del
gótico hacia lo grotesco. (76-77)

Godzilla and King Kong: Postwar Monsters

One domain of modernity that would take up the monstrous as a way to
allegorize or iconize its procedures and its effects was war, that experience of the
radical disruption and disarticulation of sociality and the values on which it is
based. Portrayed as gigantomachy or as the advent of more abstract, exogenous
forces that are often suffused with transcendentalism or atavistic elements that
would threaten to return humanity to a pre-rational state, modern war is seen as
an organizing principle of the social disguised as politics: a matrix of
domination, a biopolitical regime of radical control of populations, and global
relations that surpass the boundaries of traditional politics.60 The catastrophe of
war is similar to the hyperbolic exceptionalism of the monster and its
supernatural dimension, and, at the same time, it evokes human qualities that
were diverted, demonized, or aborted during the process of the development of
civilization itself.
Godzilla is a classic example of both primal monstrosity and the reach of
global biopolitics. Godzilla is an enormous monster that evokes the prehistoric
violence of dinosaurs and sea monsters but emerges as a concrete effect of the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, representing the power and
danger of nuclear radiation. This combination of primitivism and
contemporaneity typical of the portrayal of monstrosity makes it possible to
incorporate affective elements connected to archaic fears, which intrigue and
intimidate us, as well as the interpretation of more recent historical events or
situations that surpass social experience and the traditional forms of visual and
discursive representation. Originating in 1945 with the eponymous film directed
by Ishirō Honda, the image of Godzilla is a terrible reminder of the atomic attack
and its biopolitical consequences. The monster, unleashing its irrational and
superhuman power on the screen, breathes radioactive fire and acts in a depraved
and indiscriminate way. In addition to immense physical power, Godzilla is also
indestructible, like a force of nature intensified and demonized through the
effects of technology. The monster’s scaly reptilian exterior mimics the effects of
radiation on the skin of the Japanese victims (at least in the original version of
the film), although several later productions introduced important changes to
Godzilla’s physical appearance and behavior. One feature that stands out is
Godzilla’s moral neutrality. The monster does not embody a deliberate project of
the annihilation of life but represents instead the aleatory destruction of what
exists as the foretelling of a rebirth. It is also notable that this monster incarnates
the unrestrained power of the environment, which is particularly relevant in
Japan due to the constant geological activity in the region, which includes
volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, and violent storms.
Godzilla’s robotic quality also constitutes an important sign of hybridity.
Some cinematic versions portray the monster as over four hundred meters tall
and as moving in a heavy, machine-like, spasmodic, and violent way. The
monster is reptilian but walks upright with a muscular torso and a humanoid
form that gives the impression of a human-animal hybrid and suggests both
indestructibility and exceptionalism. In any case, the figure of Godzilla
materializes trauma and collective fear in many of its possible manifestations
and channels the dominant apprehensions of the postwar period about the
possible repetition of nuclear attacks and the long-term effects the 1945
bombings had on the Japanese population and environment. Ishirō Honda, a
disciple of Akira Kurosawa motivated by pacifism and the apocalyptic vision of
the nuclear attacks (the ruins of which Honda had seen for himself), attempted to
offer through this monstrous image a narrative capable of capturing the
uncontainable power of the technologies of war, the social and natural disasters
it causes, and the possibilities of reconstruction—perhaps in an effort to provoke
collective consciousness toward the ending of nuclear tests (Tsutsui 33).
However, as happens with almost all monsters, the image and significance of
Godzilla has become weak and trivial through the processes of
commercialization, becoming transformed over the decades into a grotesque and
ungainly figure (some versions have even incorporated the practices of judo and
karate, as well as other postwar Orientalist commonplaces). All these elements
gave rise to a cheap and vague salvationist project that was expressed in low-
quality films and merchandise like toys and comic books which, in the 1970s
and 1980s, disseminated the image of Godzilla around the globe.
Perhaps the most iconic monster in the history of global popular culture,
King Kong premiered in 1933, giving rise to a broad spectrum of interpretations,
the most interesting of which elaborated on the character’s symbolic value in
relation to the themes of colonialism, economic depression, the
civilization/barbarism dichotomy, and the conflict between technology and
nature. In addition to the threat of mass destruction, King Kong represents the
polarized relationship between nature and urban culture and the obscure social
forces whose potential for subversion and violence threatens the stability of
modern capitalism. His actions mark him as an interstitial figure that allows us to
rethink the connections between the individual and the environment, the animal
world and the human world, savagery and civilization, power and subversion,
and to explore the exchanges and contaminations between these poles.
The traditional condition of the monster as the proclamation or
materialization of a cognitive and representational crisis also allows us to
associate the figure of King Kong with the rise of European fascism and the
threat of global war. The gorilla appears as a hyperbolic version of the human
being in a savage state, reduced to instincts and the capacity for violence, all
while suggesting a possible excess of the social subject and the consequent
saturation of public space.
Exceptionally powerful and destructive, King Kong’s purpose is to annihilate
human beings. The threat the gorilla represents comes from his displaced and
denaturalized condition and his absurd, incomprehensible presence in the middle
of civilization, a situation that intensifies when he is moved to New York. In a
more general sense, the figure of King Kong represents unrestrained otherness,
which is internal or external to everyone, inherent or exogenous to the system
that contains it. According to Carroll, King Kong exemplifies the type of plot
that combines the themes of discovery and confrontation and incorporates the
element of travel, which is fundamental to the monster in general as it brings to
the fore his marginal, unstable, deterritorialized, alien, and itinerant character
(The Philosophy 113).
The catastrophic arrival of the giant gorilla makes it evident that Western
culture is besieged by an uncontainable force that dominant reason cannot
comprehend. At the same time, King Kong expresses an overflowing
emotionality that eliminates in the viewer what the film insists on inscribing as
part of the story because it is the main feature of monstrosity: fear. King Kong
inspires above all pity and sympathy in the viewer because he is overpowered by
love and pursued by an “order” that never justifies the spectacular display of
“legitimate violence” that takes the gorilla as its object. King Kong thus
constitutes an exceptional and incomprehensible being, victimized by reason, by
whom the viewer is captivated, not so much of fear as out of commiseration. He
is a sentimental and melancholic monster, and in this sense, he is an
epiphenomenon that, in addition to numerous political and social connotations,
confronts modernity with the occult world of out-of-place feelings and desires.
From this perspective, he represents the unconscious, dreams, alienation, and
loss.
The most obvious connection the persecuted giant gorilla has with the
culture of his time is perhaps that which emphasizes his significance as a critico-
cultural apparatus that guides some approaches to interrogating the project of
modernity, specifically those aspects related to social discipline, the disregard for
the rights of animals, and the militarization of society. The placement of King
Kong in New York, the heart of the empire, and moreover on top of the iconic
Empire State Building (changed to the World Trade Center in the 1976 version),
from whose heights the monster allegorically falls to the level of man and to his
death (symmetrically reproducing, as Stephanie Affeldt has shown, the figure of
Stalin on the planned but never built Palace of the Soviets), thus acquires
concrete ideological connotations (142).
The anthropological basis of King Kong’s narrative has also given rise to the
idea that the film itself possesses a monstrous character insofar as it articulates
hybrid perspectives (ethnographic and fictional, cultural references and
teratological imagination) in order to construct a superproduction designed to
have a strong emotional impact on mass audiences. However, the readings that
have most perspicaciously explored the aspect that combines the monster’s
relocation to an unfamiliar environment, with his mediated circulation around
the globe, have been those that analyze the relations between gender and race
and the connections this subject has with the social and political conflicts of the
interwar years. Affeldt’s study offers a detailed examination of the most relevant
contexts of both the film’s production and its reception in different cinematic
adaptations, particularly in the United States. As part of the cinematic horror
genre, specifically the subgenre concerning giant monsters, and also attentive to
the readings that connect the monster to contemporary fears, Affeldt invokes a
Freudian interpretation that posits that “Kong is us,” lending the romantic figure
of the gorilla a representative capacity that encompasses different collective
subjects. These include the working classes affected by the Great Depression,
immigrants yet to be integrated by the system and considered a threat to the
status quo, the inhabitants of the colonized periphery who were rising up against
the metropoles, and above all the African American population that was
subjugated, persecuted, dehumanized, marginalized, and stereotyped by elite
political, social, and cultural power. In Affeldt’s words,

The real world diegetic reference is the latent threat to society posed by
rebellious non-whites inside the country (former slaves and recent
immigrants) as well as outside the country (global uprisings at the
colonial periphery) and the newly emerged movement of progressive
women demanding their share in self-determination and autonomy.
(143)

Out of the intersecting themes of class and race comes a reading that reveals
within the figure of King Kong a set of racist conceptualizations of black people
as simians whose dark skin color is the source of their supposed antisocial
behavior and irrational and devilish tendencies. Ann Darrow, the white and
blond protagonist with whom the gorilla falls in love, represents the woman in
search of social liberation who ends up being “contaminated” by Kong’s
forbidden desire and is reabsorbed into the system through marriage. The context
of social struggles, on the level of both gender and race, demonstrates the
prominence of these conflicts in society during the era as well as in the collective
imaginaries, saturated as they are with images of slavery, discrimination, and
lynching. According to Affeldt, white women falsely accusing black men of rape
was a rampant practice in the period when the film was made, and this sharpened
derogatory stereotypes of African Americans and created an extremely
emotionalized perspective. This resulted in a context for the film’s reception and
decoding as a symbolic product that was fraught with social conflict: The
audience heading off to see King Kong was thus manifestly prepared to
understand that this movie was not merely a horror film version of Beauty and
the Beast. They were easily able to relate images of a white woman being
threatened by an ape to the discriminatory discourses of their racial society”
(152).
However, if King Kong can be interpreted from this perspective as an
allegory of the traumas that haunt the culture of the United States, it also has
connotations that link it to the broadest idea of empire and its besieged margins,
which can also be detected in the figure of Count Dracula and other monsters
that emerged from postcolonial cultures. In this sense, Affeldt points out that
Kong connects the heart of the empire and the “heart of darkness,” the center
and the periphery of a transnationalized system of colonialist exploitation.
Descendants of Africans and immigrants from the old colonies, still seen as
bearers of a latent and ancestral savagery, constitute one of the most persistent
threats to capitalist modernity, which can find no form of productive
incorporation or social acceptance of those populations, either through
instrumental reason or social Darwinism:

When the original King Kong was shot, day-to-day politics were
informed by uprisings of anti-colonial movements in the colonies and
internal dislocations in terms of class, race, and gender, caused by, inter
 alia, the “Red Scare” after the October Revolution in Russia and the
emancipation movements of both the “New Woman” and the “New
Negro.” (158)

The figure of King Kong has been revived in comic books, musicals,
theatrical works, parodies, video games, and commodities of all types and is
frequently portrayed in battles against superheroes or rivals who share his
teratological characteristics, as in King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962), also directed
by Ishirō Honda.

Notes
1. Also of great importance, in the Middle Ages and along the line of inquiry opened up by Aristotle, is the
work of the Dominican naturalist Albertus Magnus (c. 1200-1280), known as “Doctor Universalis,” the
author of De animalibus, in which he provides classificatory criteria that include monsters.
2. Rosi Braidotti offers the following summary of the causes of biological monstrosity: “Sexual excess,
especially in the woman, is always a factor. Too much or too little semen are quoted as central causes,
as is the mixing of sperm from different sources –for instance, intercourse with animals. Hereditary
factors are not ruled out. Intercourse during menstruation is fatal. The influence of stars and planets
also matters, as does the consumption of forbidden food or of the right food at the wrong time. But the
monster could also be conceived because of bad atmospheric conditions or by divine or diabolic
interventions.” Also, “the devil is extremely resourceful when it comes to satanic penetrations and
conceptions” (“Signs of Wonder” 291).
3. In this regard, see Braham, From Amazons to Zombies 26-29.
4. The French humanist François Rabelais (1494?-1553) was also part of the Renaissance and plays a
significant role in the development of the satirical grotesque.
5. According to Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, “Ambroise Paré’s vernacular treatise on monsters and
prodigies, first published in 1573, exemplifies the attempt to appeal to a broader audience; uniting two
popular topics, exotica and portents, the volume was copiously illustrated with woodcuts lifted
unapologetically from the works of a host of authors ranging from Conrad Lycosthenes, an influential
compiler of prodigies, to the cosmographer André Thevet” (149).
6. “The Atlas thus constitutes a world where all possible ‘surprises’ have been precodified. Along with a
projection of the monsters and marvels populating terrae incognitae in the Middle Ages, categories
and images generated out of the encounter with the New World constitute a stock of motifs and
conceptual filters prefiguring any possible discovery” (Rabasa 194).
7. Carlos Jáuregui indicates how these forms of monstrosity connected to cannibalism spectrally reappear
as fear or desire, becoming reactivated in diverse contexts and forming the basis for arguments about
the trope of cannibalism in Latin America (54). In a similar sense, the figure and attributes of the
Amazon women provide elements for the codification of certain matrices of the representation and
interpretation of the feminine. The monstrous thus contributes to the definition of identity through
configuring spaces that are exterior to but contiguous with collective subjectivity.
8. We should add to this list the references Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca makes in his Naufragios to Mala
Cosa, a character described as a subterranean, bloodthirsty being with a mutant sex organ.
9. In this regard, see Mabel Moraña, “La indecencia de las imágenes” in Inscripciones críticas.
10. On the representation of monsters in and around the New World, see Maria Alejandra Flores de la Flor.
11. On the topic of mermaids and their metaphorical value, see Braham, From Amazons to Zombies,
especially chapter 3.
12. According to Zavala, “These images of the ‘other’ obey categories of natural history, which prop up the
 representation of the colonial subject in terms of artificial ‘trans-species’, ‘trans-conceptual’ entities,
linking animals, geographies and verbal constructs” (340). As we can see, hybridity was utilized as an
argument for demonization and social exclusion.
13. La Llorona is a prominent figure in colonial and present-day Mexico. Her origins can be traced to the
pre-Hispanic world. She is represented as a woman who appears on lonely roads at night, dressed in
white, with a veil and long flowing hair, calling out to her children with cries and terrifying shrieks.
Her legend is based on the mother goddesses Cihuacóatl, Coatlicue, or Tonantzín. It is said that before
the arrival of the Spanish she appeared at Lake Texcoco to herald the fall of the Mexicas. For more on
this topic, see Yólot González Torres.
14. Ortega writes: “Not surprisingly, the baroque simultaneously evokes a number of interpellatory
practices we associate with modern subjectivity, and behaviors, ideas, and cultural products we
imagine as deviant or impervious to those modern ideals. Such an agonic mediation presents the
baroque as embodying both the modern and its negation, or better yet, the reticent presence that
thorough self-negation (a double monstrosity) makes the modern possible elsewhere. Hence, its
phantasmatic nature” (189).
15. Ortega also mentions the nun Francisca Josefa del Castillo y Guevara, who defined herself as a monster
when faced with the impossibility of managing sexual desire within the parameters of Christian
doctrine: “Y ser yo un monstruo y aborto de la naturaleza” (189).
16. Peralta y Barnuevo enjoyed great popularity and recognition. Among other accomplishments, he was a
Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris and Madrid. For more on this
author, see Luis Alberto Sánchez, who nicknames him “Dr. Ocean” to highlight the Baroque
intellectual’s erudition and achievements. I thank Marcel Velásquez for his reference to Peralta
Barnuevo's Tratado.
17. As Iwasaki-Cauti notes, Fray Antonio de la Calancha had in the sixteenth century already referred to
another unsettling case indicative of deviation from nature and the development of the monstrous as an
extreme form of humanoid hybridity: “No es menos de advertir que abrá 42 años que sucedió en este
Trugillo aver quemado a una India, porque aviendo parido tres perrillos, sin más semejança umana que
no tener mucho pelo en los rostros, i ser los braços a modo i forma umana. La India confesó su delito
de averse mesclado con un perro, quemáronla” (qtd. in Iwasaki-Cauti 154).
18. For a general vision of the representation of deformity, anomaly, monstrosity, etc. in the Golden Age,
see Del Río Parra, who discusses the topic in multiple cultural scenarios, in relation to sexuality,
gender, everyday spaces, literature, and in the context of politics. On the representation and
conceptualization of the wondrous in the medieval era, see Le Goff.
19. Fernando R. de la Flor remarks apropos El ente dilucidado: “Aunque en el mismo se desarrolle una
hermenéutica no racionalista, es también cierto que se atiene a una actitud racionalizadora y está, por lo
demás, dotada de todos los instrumentos del pensamiento lógico deductivo. Tratado que se presenta,
pues, como una auténtica y vasta legislación sobre el mundo fantasmal, sobre el espectro —aquí en su
versión amable de duende—, que era una antigua recurrencia del pensamiento mitopoético y una
presencia siempre inquietante y desajustada en todas las grandes constelaciones culturales humanas”
(156).
20. The novatores contested the traditions on which European culture is based, arguing that it is reason—
and not belief or custom—that should be appealed to for explanations of reality and for bringing about
necessary change. The novator group rebelled against academicism and intellectual conformism but
kept a distance from revolutionary positions, believing instead in the benefits of gradual and rational
transformations of the status quo. On the so-called scientific revolution in Spain and the intellectual
climate of the era, including the novator movement, see Mestre Sanchis and Navarro Brotóns.
21. María Portuondo underscores the theme of the construction of narratives capable of explaining the
scientific and technological evolution of the Americas from colonial times onward, emphasizing the
hybrid character of these processes. If these American narratives combine elements of European
science with Amerindian beliefs and knowledges, then European culture itself came to be permeated
with hybrid elements. As Portuondo points out, pre-Copernican science combined with elements of
Christianity in many aspects related to knowledge and the representation of the cosmos.
22. Although McNally mentions this point in the context of English culture, his observations on the secular
grotesque are applicable to other Western cultural domains that have undergone similar transitions
from religious thought to reason and a preoccupation with other Western social and political topics
(such as the construction of the state, individual duty, and social conduct).
23. On the Leviathan, see Springborg.
24. On Linnaeus, see Lisbet Koerner.
25. On the origin and etymology of the word “vampire,” also see Mike Wilson.
26. On the topic of the Gothic and the grotesque, see Ewa Kuryluk and Gavin Baddeley. Walpole’s novel,
set in medieval Italy, establishes the narrative and thematic climate of the Gothic through techniques
such as chiaroscuro and binary structures that give primacy to morbid atmospheres with an
exaggerated, dramatic tone and a superabundance of dismal and mysterious settings and characters that
defy the conventions of earlier literary styles.
27. H.P. Lovecraft recognized Walpole’s extraordinary influence, although he nevertheless ultimately
dismissed him as “unconvincing and mediocre,” “tedious, artificial, and melodramatic” (“Supernatural
Horror” 4).
28. J.M. Sánchez Arteaga (among other scholars) has pointed out the influence scientific racism had on
even evolutionists of Darwin’s stature, about whom he writes: “Imbuido, como el resto de los
evolucionistas de su tiempo, de los prejuicios raciales victorianos, y dando por sentada una
incuestionable analogía evolutiva entre el nativo colonial y el hombre primitivo, Darwin llegó al punto
de no ver, en el exterminio real de numerosos pueblos a manos de la ‘raza caucásica’ a la que él mismo
pertenecía, más que el desarrollo implacable de las leyes biológicas del progreso” (387).
29. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explains the origin of the word “freak”: “As divine design disengages
from the natural world in the human mind, the word freak emerges to express capricious variegation or
sudden, erratic change. Milton’s Lycidas seems to have initiated freak into English in 1637 to mean a
fleck of color. By the seventeenth century freak broadens to mean whimsy or fancy. Not until 1847
does the word become synonymous with human corporeal anomaly” (“Introduction” 4).
30. In this sense, as Garland-Thomson points out, “The freak show made more than freaks: it fashioned as
well the self-governed, iterable subject of democracy –the American cultural self” (“Introduction” 10).
31. On the topic of freaks, see also Leslie Fiedler.
32. According to some critics, Polidori’s work was plagiarized from an idea originally expressed by Byron.
33. For more information on Polidori’s “The Vampire,” see Gelder, Reading the Vampire 30-32.
34. Copjec discusses the theme of Frankenstein’s failure from a Lacanian perspective. She writes, for
example, that “Frankenstein’s invention did not go awry, as the standard reading claims, it failed. It is
only insofar as it failed, only inasmuch as Frankenstein’s scientific efforts fell short of their goal that
the monster appears, the embodiment of this failure” (57).
35. In this same sense, Chris Baldick has argued that the novel’s “monstrous” quality, as well as the
monster within it, is produced as an accumulation of textual fragments that reveal disparate
connections and resist homogenization and unification. Baldick inscribes this fact in the context of the
diagnostics of the time about the disorganization and fragmentation of European society.
36. On the demonic aspects of Frankenstein, as well as the influence of Goethe on the novel and its moral
connotations, see chapter 3 of Baldick.
37. See Baldick.
38. In this sense, the film The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), directed by James Whale and starring Boris
Karloff, focuses on the theme of complementing the masculine figure.
39. According to McNally, Byron, as well as members of Mary Shelley’s family, sympathized with the
Luddite movement, which they saw as representative of the victims of the excesses and manipulations
of the dominant classes.
40. Rickels has even proposed that Shelley’s text is prophetic insofar as it announces (among other things)
the death of her son. See Rickels 279-82, where he develops a complex interpretation of Frankenstein
in relation to the theme of the double and the concepts of mourning and melancholia.
41. According to Foucault, the technologies of the self are those processes “which permit individuals to
effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies
 and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a
certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (Technologies of the Self 18).
42. The figure of Frankenstein’s monster is sometimes associated with the golem, a monster originating in
medieval folklore and Jewish mythology. Representing a being that is made from inanimate material
(mud, stone, or clay), the golem possesses a primitive vitality in a physical but not intellectual sense.
According to the legend, it cannot speak, and it behaves like an automaton. In certain versions of the
story, although it is amorphous, the golem can be brought to life if the name of God is spoken in its
presence. The name “golem” comes from the word guélem, which appears in the Bible and in Talmudic
literature and means “raw matter,” incomplete substance, in a state of gestation. Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri revive the figure of the golem in their Multitude in connection with the theme of war
(10-12).
43. See Stephen Heath for more on this.
44. Stevenson’s work contributes to the theme of the double, which recurs throughout fantasy literature and
which takes on specific modulations with regard to monstrosity in the horror genre. As has been noted
with other characters who represent duplicity, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde illustrate the division of the two
personalities rather than their coexistence. Other examples include the character of Norman (Nor-Man)
Bates in Psycho, who is both man and woman, mother and son, victim and perpetrator, thus becoming
a “powerful icon of impurity.” In addition, in another register informed by the theme of technology,
David Cronenberg’s film The Fly involves impurity at the limits of the grotesque, portraying the
coexistence (although not at the same time) of two natures in a single organism, making the unfolding
of fusion and difference the central element of the staging of identity (Carroll, The Philosophy of
Horror 39).
45. See Ed Cohen, 195-96.
46. The influence that Le Fanu had on Stoker is widely known and is especially evident in the style of
“Dracula’s Guest,” a text published as a companion story in 1914. As Stoker’s widow Florence
explained in the prologue to the posthumous volume that included this text, it is believed that
“Dracula’s Guest” had originally been part of the first chapter of Dracula. There have been many
connections drawn between Stoker’s story and Le Fanu’s work, both from a thematic and a stylistic
point of view.
47. See Oates, “Reflections.” On vampirism and cannibalism, see Jáuregui.
48. On these readings of Dracula, see John Stevenson, Stephen Arata, and Ken Gelder, Reading the
Vampire.
49. On the representation of Transylvania and the travel diary in Dracula, see Gelder, Reading the Vampire
2-6. On the importance of writing and technology in Dracula, see Judith Halberstam, “Technologies of
Monstrosity.”
50. On this aspect of “media materialism” represented in Kittler’s critique, see Nicholas Gane.
51. For more on this kind of interpretation of Dracula, see Moretti and Terry Heller.
52. On Dracula’s name, see Beal, who confirms that it connotes “dragon” or “devil” and suggests that the
name also bears biblical allusions (125).
53. According to Beal, “Stoker’s novel is, moreover, deeply embedded in the larger discourses of late
colonialism and primitivism, and his monster is in many respects a projection of modern western
representations of unfamiliar religious traditions” (126). He also suggests that the figure of Dracula can
be identified with Judaism: “Dracula may be read as a novel about the not so culturally repressed
horrors of Jewish immigration into England during the 1890s especially from Eastern Europe” (127),
thus reinforcing the notion of otherness and the implicit threat that always exists in the monster. On
Judaism in Dracula, see Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity.”
54. On the vampire (specifically Dracula) as monopolist, see Moretti 74.
55. Nosferatu itself has been readapted several times, including, for example, Nosferatu the Vampyre
(1979), directed by Werner Herzog and starring Klaus Kinski in the role of Count Orlok and Isabelle
Adjani as Lucy Harker. Other versions followed this one, such as Shadow of the Vampire (2000) and
Murnau the Vampire (2006).
56. Early Argentine films promoted the civilization/barbarism antinomy, offering representations of
 savagery within the (at that time) untested genre of cinematic horror. In this regard, Fernando Pagnoni
Berns argues that “lo primero que debería llamar la atención aún al más circunstancial de los
espectadores es que el cine argentino clásico de terror no presenta horrores sobrenaturales. No hay
fantasmas, ni vampiros, no hay licántropos ni actos de brujería. El monstruo por excelencia en el cine
terrorífico argentino durante la Época de Oro fue el salvaje homicida” (433). This same author
identifies the film El hombre bestia (1934) by Camilo Zaccaría Soprani as the first horror film
produced in Argentina.
57. The influence of the Antropofagia movement has been noted by Jáuregui, who writes: “Antropofagia—
en un espíritu avant-gardiste de escándalo, carnavalización y ruptura—revierte los tropos y la
representación ideo-cartográfica del Brazil y resignifica la tropología colonial, declara una ruptura con
la tradición literaria indianista, cancela el debate vanguardista sobre la brasilidade versus las
influencias estéticas europeas y hace del canibalismo un tropo modélico de apropiación cultural”
(Canibalia 38). Jáuregui exhaustively analyzes cannibalism as a trope which, through the connotations
of the consumption of the Other, explores the processes of cultural assimilation, foreign influence,
transculturation, hybridity, and so on. It is interesting that the notion of identity is defined precisely
through this quality that generally constitutes an attribute of monstrosity: an anomalous, transgressive,
appropriative behavior connected to survival and bodily penetration. Jáuregui studies multiple
manifestations of this concept and its many aesthetico-ideological derivations. One of the more
interesting offshoots of the concept is that which connects different senses of the term consumption,
thus linking cannibalism and commodity fetishism, cannibalism and technology, cannibalism and
modernity, and so on. Another twist that results from these reworkings of the trope has to do with the
relationship between cannibalism and the character of Caliban (from whom Calibanism is derived), a
monstrous figure, especially when considered alongside the ethereal image of Ariel, who embodies
spiritual values as they are expressed in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. These characters have become
icons of the struggle of identity in Latin America, and they have dissolved into the forces of the
vernacular and primitive on the one hand and the Europeanized values of modernity on the other. This
symbolic economy has given way to multiple debates and reconsiderations of the ideological
connotations that these iconic figures acquire in different sociocultural contexts.
58. On El beso de la mujer araña, see Giorgi, Formas comunes, chapter 6.
59. In this regard, Carmen Vázquez Arce has noted that “El tú, es la forma del conjuro, la forma en que
Fausto evoca a Mefistófeles” (qtd. in Náter 43), which is an interesting comment that opens up
possibilities for reinterpreting the importance of the discourse of reason and its relation to myth as
organizing forces of natural history in Fuentes’s novel.
60. See Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 12-18.
 Chapter 3

Monsters and the Critique of Capitalism

Gothic Marxism and Post-Marxism
The critique of political economy developed by Karl Marx (1818-1883) in the
second half of the nineteenth century includes multiple literary references and a
repertoire of metaphors that appeal directly to the monstrous, which gives his
theoretical approach to the study of social relations in industrial capitalism a
strange, defamiliarizing atmosphere.1 Consequently, the theme of terror and the
recurring motif of blood appear throughout Marx’s writings, in the description of
different forms of legalized oppression against certain segments of society, in
reference to colonialism, child labor, and so on.2 However, it is above all in the
analysis of the different ways in which the proletariat is exploited that the
greatest number of references to monstrosity are to be found, in descriptions of
the implacable forms of the extraction of surplus value and the condition to
which workers are reduced by the abuse and alienation that this extraction
causes.3
Stanley E. Hyman has called Marx an “imaginative writer” whose texts, rife
with passion, are also full of references to the universe of mysticism, mythology,
and popular culture. George Shapiro’s work has also opened up important
avenues of analysis in which rhetorical aspects, tropes, and cultural references
are incorporated into the interpretation of Marx’s texts as generative apparatuses
of meaning and as resources for the consolidation of the texts’ argumentative
“authority.” Far from limiting himself to the critique of political economy, Marx
incorporates multiple domains of knowledge and social experience in Capital,
including examples taken from biology, history, mathematics, chemistry, the
history of philosophy, and the arts, alongside references to cyclops, giants, and
vampires as well as to necromancy and sorcery.
Authors like Neocleous, Terrell Carver, Matthew MacLellan, and Amedeo
Policante have focused on the thread of Gothic references in Marx’s writings that
form a conception of capitalism as the unfolding of irrational (even magic)
forces that rule the material and symbolic exchanges in bourgeois society.
MacLellan starts by bringing to the fore the fundamental fact that Marxist theory
and its critique of capitalism did not just emerge as part of modernity but instead
generates its own concept of history, which functions synchronically with the
general system in which it is inscribed (550). In this sense, Marxism is not a
variant of historicism but rather constitutes a differentiated epistemology capable
of producing forms of consciousness that make it possible to understand
retroactively the specific systems that gave rise to it. In this sense, Marx’s
metaphors, particularly the trope of vampirism, layered in between the
diachronic and synchronic dimensions of his texts, make it possible to
comprehend both specific forms of social consciousness and the systems of
thought from which they emerge. These metaphors have a heuristic and
illustrative function with regard to topics such as value, surplus value, alienation,
and the labor-capital relation. The space of the monstrous in Marx constitutes a
place between particularism and historicity, between theory and practice.
For his part, Carver emphasizes the number of references to sorcery,
animism, tribal religions, spiritualism, magic, monsters, ghosts, and kabalistic
principles in Capital and other writings by Marx (15). Carver asks why a
representative of social science of Marx’s stature would attempt to dazzle us
with esoteric images (like vampirism) and what motives might explain his
recourse to ideas linked to the supernatural, the paranormal, the sacramental, and
the occult in his efforts to elucidate “the natural laws of capitalist production”
(15). According to this same critic, Marx’s inclination toward the supernatural
and the critical use he made of elements connected to it derive from his links to
the “young Hegelians” and the ideology of transcendentalism that developed in
that particular ideological and philosophical context. However, Carver clarifies
that, while for Marx the economy is not in itself an exorcism, these echoes of
“young Hegelianism” allow him to articulate discursive perspectives that rework
the relations between idealism and rationalism so as to end up with a conception
of capitalism as a system that is inseparable from the modern European
Weltanschauung, an ideological system in which socio-economic particularism
and the universalist dimension of philosophy coexist in a tense and productive
relationship.
In Marx’s work, the sorcery of capitalism includes monstrosity as a
forewarning of immanent catastrophe. The latent perversion within the capitalist
mode of production reveals itself to modernity not as the substitution of a world
enchanted by religious belief with the rationalized post-Enlightenment universe
but rather as the passage from religion to magic—or, stated differently, from
doctrine to superstition. According to Policante, the disillusionment of the world
perceived by Max Weber is seen by Marx as a re-enchantment that replaces faith
with the commodity. In industrial society, the commodity, converted into a fetish,
a cult object, captures anxiety and desire, offering itself as immediate
gratification in a world that has renounced transcendentalism and that defines
itself on the basis of the immediatist ethos of modernity and the market.
Commodity fetishism is an accurate name for this form of idolatry:
commodities, these objects of consumption produced by labor, provide evidence
of the transformative capacity of the human being while also giving concrete
form to the process of dehumanization inherent to capitalist modernity. They
illustrate the insatiable dynamic of extraction of profit through which capital
grows and perpetuates itself at the cost of the vital energy of the proletariat.
Marx’s references to the magical power of seduction of the commodity-object,
rather than reducing the rational value of this category, augment it heuristic
power.
In a study of the relationship between capitalism and superstition in South
America, Michael Taussig writes that elements from indigenous or pre-modern
beliefs are considered to be factors that intervene in modern rationality,
complementing or defying the purely intellectual knowledge of the real. He
argues that:

The concept of commodity fetishism is meant to point out for us that

capitalist society presents itself to consciousness as something other
than what it basically is, even though that consciousness does reflect
the superficial and hypostatized configuration of society. Fetishism
denotes the attribution of life, autonomy, power, and even dominance
to otherwise inanimate objects and presupposes the draining of these
qualities from the human actors who bestow the attribution. Thus, in
the case of commodity fetishism, social relationships are dismembered
and appear to dissolve into relationships between mere things—the
products of labor exchanged on the market—so that the sociology of
exploitation masquerades as a natural relationship between systemic
 artifacts. Definite social relationships are reduced to the magical
matrix of things. (31-32, my emphasis)

The “sorcery” exercised by the process of the reification of the commodity

introduces irrational elements (emotionality, beliefs, and desires) into the
understanding of the economic and cultural development of capitalism. In this
manner, it has disguised its strategies for accumulating and reproducing wealth,
legitimizing and naturalizing them as essential elements of the ethos of
modernity. The monstered representation of this process, rather than ideologizing
it, functions as an alternative form of rationalization that consists of
metaphorically bringing its occult mechanisms to light. It is a process of (de)
(re)codification in which the monster (its anomaly, its counter-normative
presence) is employed by the order of the real: its supernatural and demonic
character is more real than the occult reality it illustrates. As Taussig argues, the
demonic is inseparable from capitalism.
Coinciding with this, as McNally points out in reference to “Marx’s
monsters,” capitalism is both magical and monstrous (113). Magically, it hides
the dark transactions that occur between bodies and capital, between labor and
object, between life and spectrality. However, the repressed returns, monstered in
the form of vampires, zombies, werewolves, ghosts, and witchcraft, in images
that materialize within a biopolitical regime that is as terrifying and as difficult
to grasp as a nightmare.
The “invisible magic” of capitalism manifests in the appropriation of surplus
value, a process through which capitalism derives from the worker what Marx
calls the “surplus product” and relocates it in its antipode: the accumulation of
capital. At the same time, the object is presented to the market through its
symbolic value, which is resignified in social exchanges. Hence, Marx shows
that capitalist production “converts every product into a social hieroglyph”
(Policante 8). Reified, fetishized, dead labor gains power through vital forces
both in the sphere of production and in the sphere of consumption, a process
described by Tomás Moulián in El consumo me consume.4
In Marx’s view, this relationship between the living and the dead—the
substance that is killed and returned to life (the tree that is cut down to be
transformed into an object) in order to be reinserted into the living world of the
market which swallows it up—constitutes a monstrous, alchemical, and
dehumanizing process that implies the subordination of the living to the power
of the dead, as the object commodity comes to incorporate itself into the
category of accumulated labor. This development supposes a dynamic of
transformation and a subjection of the material which without the creative
activity of labor never realizes its potential. The machine and raw materials are
thus inert elements subject to death. As Marx argues, without labor, tools will
rust and wool will not be woven:

A machine which is not active in the labour process is useless. In

addition, it falls prey to the destructive power of natural processes. Iron
rusts; wood rots. Yarn with which we neither weave not knit is cotton
wasted. Living labour must seize on these things, awaken them from
the dead, changing them from merely possible into real and effective
use-values. Bathed in the fire of labour, appropriated as part of its
organism, and infused with vital energy for the performance of the
functions appropriate to their concept and to their vocation in the
process, they are indeed consumed, but to some purpose, as elements in
the formation of new use-values, new products, which are capable of
entering into individual consumption as means of subsistence or into a
new labour process as means of production. (Capital 1:289-290)

In the form of capital, the commodity (that is, labor) is kept alive, but always
at the expense of the vital energy of the worker whose blood is consumed by the
monster of capitalism. In this sense, one might think that the act of sucking
blood carried out by the vampire crudely (although also allegorically) represents
the circulatory system of capital. In turn, the transfer of blood from one organism
to another represents the search for an alternative to capitalist modernity. These
possibilities led Marx to portray the process of the transformation of labor into
capital as a form of transubstantiation, supporting the idea of capital as modern
religion:

Capital, which lies at the vampiric heart of the bourgeois order

(according to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), is at the
same time, via the analogy Marx worked in Capital, the mass or
communion in which father and son become one. The transformation
brought to us by the vampiric blood bond dissolves the uniqueness of
an individual life by releasing its social character or caricature, which
 runs alongside commodity. In vampirism (or, in other words and
worlds, in the bourgeois order –in mass-media culture) the parallel
tracks of price and commodity also release and keep separate Marxian
and Freudian ideologies. (Rickels 268)

The processes of the valorization of capital and of the proliferation of

vampirism are expressed through the magical avatars that pass from substance to
the energy that transforms it and returns it as something different that is
nevertheless at the same time essentially the same. In capitalism, as in
vampirism, that-which-is is reinscribed in the social through magical processes
of materialization and symbolic reconversion. This mechanism describes the
monstrous metabolism of the economic system that fragments, annihilates,
rearticulates, replicates, and revives in the insatiable process of reproduction and
consumption. This is the economic alchemy of modernity, a vampiric, violent,
irrational, dehumanizing, and overpowering dynamic.
The different stages of the transformation of raw material into a commodity,
the extraction of surplus value, the alienation and exploitation of the worker, and
the reinscription of death within life and vice versa are all described by Marx as
dark and brutal processes in which Gothic themes and characters efficiently fuel
the machine of meaning production. The strategy of connecting philosophical
and political topics with popular imaginaries not only dramatizes Marx’s critique
of capitalism but also increases the legibility of his political and theoretical
proposals by expressing them through a language that is haunted by symbols that
expand and project ideological questions toward different cultural fields. The
link between philosophy, economy, politics, and culture thus remains established
within a holistic conceptualization of the social whose representation revolves
around the constellations of meaning that mobilize the vast field of historical
imagination. Marx’s allusions to monstrosity, to atmospheres full of references to
the blood that flows through the immaterial but materializable body of capital,
and to the metempsychosis that manipulates and rearticulates the soul of both the
subject and the object all announce a systemic crisis in the process of production
and serve to epistemically undermine it to demonstrate its radical impurity and
innate perversion. This categorical crisis resides in the very heart of capitalism,
and the lines of flight of monstrosity objectivize the search for alternative
cognitive horizons. The analysis of capitalism is thus inseparable from the
discourse of the body because this latter is the basis of production and
consumption, the site of exploitation and resistance.
Along these same lines, McNally recuperates the connection between the
aesthetics of the body that informs the production of monstrosity as a symbolic
field and medical science, particularly anatomy. The development of this
discipline particularly because the Renaissance is connected to the practice of
colonialism: “just as body parts are being mapped, so are social parts” (31). As
McNally suggests, the languages of both anatomy and colonialism mutually
support one another in several invasive forms of incursion on the Other’s space
and the implementation of strategies of material and symbolic appropriation.
This parallel between the dissection of bodies and the exploration of territories,
which gives rise to an erotics of penetration and fragmentation, is based on the
idea of control of the Other’s integrity and of the mysteries and possibilities that
open up the violation of its organicity.
The mystery of the organic functioning of the knowledges and profits to be
obtained through the exploration of (human and territorial) bodies drives the idea
of systematic transgression and appropriation which on the level of anatomy are
manifested in the dissection of bodies, the desecration of graves, and the use of
cadavers for scientific experiments—all practices taken up by Victor
Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel, a paradigmatic example of the genre.
These practices, developed over centuries and recorded both in historical
documentation and in visual arts and literature, illustrate the predatory and
unscrupulous capitalist economy and the impositions of the market: “The corpse
economy thus became a symbolic register of all that was objectionable about
emergent capitalism, of its demonic drive to exploit human life and labour, of its
propensity to humiliate and demean in both life and death” (McNally 58-59).
The monstrosity of the nineteenth century expresses a new form of the
secular grotesque that both maintains ties to the medieval Gothic and
incorporates the scientific practices of modernity and the biopolitical models that
accompany it. Modifications of subjectivity (of the body and of the rights that
protect it) and related social and institutional changes form part of the
representation of the monstrous in Marx’s work as part of a radical poetics
through which the mechanisms of exploitation and accumulation are dismantled
as elements of a demonic design that unmasks modernity’s myths.
 This is why Marx’s Capital overflows […] with detailed narratives of
the “monstrous outrages” of capital: factories in which “Dante would
have found the worst horrors in his Inferno surpassed”; unrelenting
“traffic in human flesh”; the turning of “children’s blood” into capital;
the crippling of body and mind of the workers; “the extirpation,
enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population”
of the Americas; “the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the
commercial hunting of black skins”; “the vampire” that “will not let go
while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be
exploited.” (McNally 114)

Capitalism’s intangible quality is materialized in images of brutal violence in

which the body is the main strategic apparatus for representing the capitalist
mode of production and the processes of the appropriation of labor and the
accumulation of capital.
If the theme of blood had already appeared in the writings of Adam Smith
(1723-1790) as a symbol of the vital source that gives life to society through
capital, for Marx, in contrast, blood refers to the dehumanizing biopolitical and
bioeconomic processes of the extraction, exploitation, and disposal of human
energy. In Smith’s case, blood gives life; in Marx, snatched from the body that
contains it, blood weakens, alienates, and zombifies the individual. Smith’s
metaphorical language, both in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and in
The Wealth of Nations (1776) (a foundational text of liberalism) rests on the
bodily process as a configuration of the social body, emphasizing the metabolism
of digestion and the circulation of wealth as an operation that in most of its
stages occurs without the individual being aware of it. The most memorable
image from Smith’s work has to do with the unintentional effects of favoring the
individual over society, and the idea which the Scottish philosopher and
economist uses to explain this is the “invisible hand,” which intervenes in the
processes of the production and distribution of wealth.5
This tendency (for it is certainly not a requirement) of the free market, which
continues to be debated, is based on a spectral (nomadic, invisible) form of
interaction that takes place within the social body, just as the digestion of food
necessarily complements the circulation of blood, while remaining shrouded by
the mystery of the inner workings of the body. Charles Griswold has noted that
there is in Smith something that is also important for Marx: a marked inclination
toward the theatricalization of the social. In this staging of modernity, spectral
elements haunt the proscenium without being seen, yet their presence is felt; the
machine plays a starring role because it is part of a world marked by the
irreversible influence of industrialism. According to Sergio Cremaschi, “Smith
states that theories are like ‘imaginary machines’ or chains of ideas built by the
imagination between two disjoined phenomena. The imaginary machine is
supposed to link the observed phenomena while remaining out of sight behind
the scenes of nature, like theatrical machinery” (85-86).
This phantasmatic quality, which features prominently in Marx’s work,
articulates the occult and the invisible with scientific propositions that bring to
light, for example, the physical and natural laws that govern reality without
being self-evident, showing themselves only through their effects. This line that
unites the imaginary with the real, the occult with the scientific, the machinic
with the theatrical, has a notorious presence in Marx’s thought, not only as a
rhetorical strategy but also as an ideological matrix for a political economic
interpretation that portrays categories, actors, and processes that are invisible
from the perspective of liberalism. It is well known that Marx held views on
political economy and history that were openly opposed to Smith’s, taking an
antagonistic position that is also registered in the estimation of the power of the
machine as an innovative element in modern production. While Marx analyzed
and theorized the influence of the machinic on the modern world, Smith had
argued that its reign would be transitory.
In this sense, capitalist social relations include the constant use of violence, a
key element for understanding primitive accumulation, which was effectively a
process of dispossession and reappropriation of wealth during which bodies—
individual and collective, territorial and social—were dismantled, violated, and
reduced to the dehumanizing conditions required by the productive apparatus.
However, as Marx explains in the chapter dedicated to this topic in Capital
volume 1 (Chapter 26, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation”), this process
has been ideologically represented as a harmonic moment of the relationship
between force and labor. Marx rejects this “idyllic” explanation of the processes
through which the capitalist comes to accumulate masses of wealth and the force
of labor:
 In actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement,
robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part. In the tender
annals of political economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial.
Right and “labour” were from the beginning of time the sole means of
enrichment…. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive
accumulation are anything but idyllic. (Capital, 1:874)

Marx describes the process that converts money, labor, and commodities into
capital as a process of expropriation and dissociation that cuts off and alienates
the worker:

The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be

nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the
ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which
operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence
and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are
turned into wage-labourers. So-called primitive accumulation,
therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the
producer from the means of production. It appears as “primitive”
because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of
production corresponding to capital. (Capital 1:874-75)

The violent process that separates the worker from the means of production
and alienates his relation to the product of his labor, the exploitation of his vital
energy for the benefit of the reproduction of capital is monstrous insofar as it
definitively alters the human being’s relationship to the environment and
himself, and this is inscribed in the annals of history, as Marx indicates, “in
letters of blood and fire” (Capital 1:875).
The violence of primitive accumulation thus functions as an act of mutilation
(“primitive mutilation”) that fragments the social body in a monstrous
dismemberment of Gothic dimensions that provides the ground for the system’s
normal functioning (Policante 12-13).6 As we see, Marx responds to the
dominant, “idyllic” version of the origins of capital with an analysis that is based
on vivid imagery of the bodily torture of exploitation and the system’s irrational
voracity, creating a politically and philosophically charged aesthetico-ideological
antithesis between idealism and monstrosity.
 For example, in Chapter 25 of Capital volume 1, “The General Law of
Capitalist Accumulation,” Marx points out the resulting fragmentation of the
individual and the transformation of work into torture. He describes a process of
deformation that begins in a dialectical inversion through which the means that
ought to drive productive development end up as mechanisms of exploitation
and degradation:

within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social
productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual
worker; that all means for the development of production undergo a
dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and
exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of
a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine,
they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a
torment; they alienate [entfremden] from him the intellectual
potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is
incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions
under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a
despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-
time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels
of the juggernaut of capital. (Marx, Capital 1:798-99)

The powerfully metaphorical and emotional language of this citation

illustrates in particular the need for the critique of political economy to express
itself through a language that refers to the monstrous changes of subjectivity in
capitalism that affect body and family, the relationship between the individual
and society, and even the structure of emotions and interactions that configure
the social, turning subjects into machines passing through the gears of a
mindless system.
One notable aspect of Marx’s use of monstrosity in his writings is the way in
which Gothic elements establish an undeniable connection between the world of
political economy and emotions. This amalgamation supports a (melo)dramatic
perspective with connotations that are sometimes erotic and other times
circumscribed by emotion. Thus, the seductive and magical capacity of the
commodity stands out as a stratum of irrationality and affect that constitutes an
alternative to the rational path toward comprehending the relationship between
labor, commodity, and subjectivity. For example, Marx argues in Capital (citing
Goethe’s Faust) that production, as a process of valorization, entails an organic
appropriation of labor. It is as if it were a matter of the incorporation of workers’
blood into the production of capital, which, in Marx’s words, becomes “an
animated monster and it starts to act ‘as if consumed by love’” (Capital 1:1007)7
In this “libidinal economy” and in the codification of desire it entails
(Latham), the notions of consumption, consuming, and being consumed are
projected as a semantic field that involves both the organic and emotional levels
that accompany the bodily dynamic, opening itself up toward the social space
that contains those developments and charges them with meaning. The
monstrous functions as an instance of symbolic mediation based on the magic of
the “as if,” a strategy that Braidotti qualifies as a “relocation” or as a fetishist
representation that creates a bridge between meanings, images, and experiences.
As Braidotti argues, this practice of the “as if” both recognizes and negates
certain attributes, allowing for a fluidity, a “practice of the interval or interface or
interstice.” This is the place that monstrosity occupies as a mediation in the
process by which capital consumes labor. The “as if” gives rise to parody and
repetition, separating itself, as Braidotti notes, from the mimesis of dominant
positions in order to open up in their place new spaces for the perception and
interpretation of the real (Nomadic Subjects 6-7).
The appeal to emotional elements and references to desire constitute
“apparatuses of subjectivation” (Guattari, Chaosmosis) that indicate a molecular
level where the simulacrum (the as if of the monstrous) is installed as a cognitive
apparatus—as “nomadic energy,” as a line of flight—that illuminates aspects of
socioeconomic reality which are invisible from the perspective of the dominant
ideology.
This affective orientation of Marxist discourse, which allows us to
understand the function that individual and collective drives have in the
economic process, has been recently theorized as “emotional capitalism.”8 In her
book Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Eva Illouz defines
the concept:

Emotional capitalism is a culture in which emotional and economic

discourses and practices mutually shape each other thus producing
 what I view as a broad, sweeping movement in which affect is made an
essential aspect of economic behavior, and in which emotional life—
especially that of the middle classes—follow the logic of economic
relations and exchange. (5)

Along these same lines, Nigel Thrift (who coined the term “soft capitalism)
argues in Non-Representational Theory that affective motives run throughout the
universe of the commodity, which cannot be reduced to a complex series of wins
and losses or to the game of interests that unfold in the generation of value.
Affective, aesthetic, and communicational elements create what Thrift calls
“magical technologies of public intimacy,” which make it possible to understand
the seduction of the commodity and the competitive interactions that it goes
through on the open space of the market (“Understanding the Material” 290).
The virtual and the real, the magic and the rational, the material and the spectral,
are all articulated around the object that captures the world of passion and makes
it public and which usually belongs to the sphere of the private, the intimate, and
the occult. For his part, Brian Massumi also recognizes the transversality and
ubiquity of affect, which makes possible a new understanding of power and
ideology.
From another perspective, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari understand
affect as a counterattack, as a projectile or tool that functions through the
dispersal of energy and the intensification of experience (A Thousand Plateaus
400). Thrift asks up to what point affect is a political form in itself and how it
functions as a catalyst of transindividual dynamics. Obviously connected to the
theme of otherness as well as to the interactions between subjectivity and the
commodity, affect, as its use in Marx’s writings suggests, liberates and amplifies
the representational field. Supported by a broad repertoire of metaphors, affect
articulates ethical, aesthetic, political, and cultural aspects that channel the idea
of excess (as we see in Marxist discourse with the notion of surplus value, etc.),
which is essential for understanding economic force in capitalism and for
incorporating the question of desire as a mediation between labor and object,
production and consumption. The appeal to monstrous images and/or sentiments
(capital transforms into a monster and starts to act “as if consumed by love,” as
Marx notes) signals a limit, an “impersonal intensity” (Anderson 161) in the
configuration of the capital to come of labor: it points to a process of
incompleteness and instability, the field of biopower around which the relations
between subject and object, production and consumption orbit.

Vampires
In his classic study The History of Vampires (1924), Dudley Wright argues that
the word vampire comes from the Serbian term wampira (wam = blood, pir =
monster), meaning a dead person who comes back to life through consuming
blood and, according to central European legends, occasionally human flesh
(qtd. in Quirarte 21). The application of concepts and images related to
vampirism have established a broad metaphorical field around this figure and its
hemophagic practices which, in some cases, include other bodily substances
(flesh, organs, fat), thus linking vampirism to cannibalism.9 There are multiple
meanings and “uses” of the vampire, and the processes of resignification that
take place on different cultural levels diverge in many ways depending on the
totality of the discourse making use of the trope of vampirism. Generally
speaking, the symbolism of the vampire, which is always connected to the theme
of identity, reestablishes the relations between religion and superstition as well
as anxieties about the otherness (both internal and external) that inhabits the
depths of individual and collective subjectivity. As a sublimation of the erotic in
the morbid sensuality of the consumption of blood, vampirism aestheticizes the
ethical aspects of exploitation, dramatizes the ideological and the extreme by
subsuming them in a stereotypical (Manichean, functional, repetitive) synthesis
that articulates the notions of predestination, mutation, fatalism, and irrationality.
References to vampires, frequently found in Marx’s writing, help to
strengthen the idea of a historical continuity that goes up to the present day and
overflows with symbolic legacies, residual political and economic practices, and
references to past cultural stages that inhabit the present like the living dead.
Given its deep historical and cultural roots, the figure of the vampire continues
to bear premodern, irrational, and supernatural connotations that survive into
modernity and complicate the latter’s futurist ethos, which is oriented toward
scientific thought and the comprehension of the logics that govern society.
Running against the grain of this dominant tendency of modernity, the
generalized nineteenth-century belief in vampires channeled feelings of
skepticism about the ideology of progress and fears about the resurgence of evil
in a world that had been cut off from the salvific vision of religious faith as a
safeguard against the dangers of perversion and irrationality. According to
Gelder,

The representation of capital or the capitalist as a vampire was, then,

common both to Marx and to popular fiction in the mid-nineteenth
century. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this representation
mobilized vampire fiction at this time, to produce a striking figure
defined by excess and unrestrained appetite –whose strength increased,
the more victims he consumed. (Reading the Vampire 22)

Marx’s teratological references express the ideas of alienation and

exploitation that characterize the capitalist system as an insatiable apparatus for
the extraction of energy and the infinite reproduction of capital. For example, he
represents the cyclical relationship between capital and labor by stating that,
“Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour,
and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (Capital 1:342). Associated with
the death drive and underscoring the importance of the body as the material basis
of the labor-capital relation, the process of the production and accumulation of
capital is inextricably linked to the idea of the dehumanization of social relations
and is described as a thanatic cycle.
As other critics have noted, the kiss of the vampire, as a sublimation of the
sexual, symbolizes both the extraction of labor power and the reproduction of
capital, which transmits its qualities through contact with its victims, creating a
cycle of replication and multiplication ad infinitum. According to Policante,

The capital-vampire, hence, with the same kiss, both feeds itself on the
blood of the workers and reduces it to an appendage of its necrotic
metabolism […] It converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity by
furthering his particular skill as in a forcing-house, through the
suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations.
(14)

This consists of an annihilation of the Other that employs seduction in a dual

role similar to that of the mystical commodity: it attracts despite its disastrous
implications and despite the debilitating effects it has on the individual and
collective body in the cycle of consumption. Eros and Thanatos interact in a
dynamic that obscures its own deepest foundations. Policante argues that this
process constitutes an inversion of the carnivalesque tradition discussed in
Bakhtinian dialogism, according to which all of humanity exists behind
grotesque masks. In the carnival of capitalism, in contrast, it is monstrosity that
hides behind the mask of the human. Vampires and zombies are possessed
bodies that take on a human appearance in order to hide their monstrous nature:

When seen through the lenses of Marxian analysis, the capitalist is

nothing but a human mask behind which the monstrous appearance of
capital is kept concealed with all its obscene, excessive drives, with its
necrophilia and self-destructive desire. Behind the human, Marx shows
the vampire. Behind the ascetic protestant ethic of abstinence, the
obscene Dionysian drive to consume, devour, spoil all that is life. […]
Capitalism, then, reproduces a world where man is really a character-
mask, a façade behind which dwell objective economic categories that
govern and rule his life. […] The vampire of capital is the inhuman
subject of capitalist prehistory; men are only its conscious organs.
(Policante 17-18, emphasis in the original)

For George Panichas, Marx’s critique of capitalism is inseparable from a

moral perspective which holds that the analysis of this system must transcend its
purely economic aspect because this latter is “morally innocuous” and
ineffective for explaining notions like the extraction of surplus value and its
relation to the exploitation of the worker. The trope of vampirism incorporates
into Marx’s discourse multiple levels that enrich his economic analysis: “The
vampire provides a trap of dead labor (the constant capital resulting from past
carnage) which the werewolf, hungering for surplus labor, baits with variable
capital. Human labor consumes the bait, no doubt, but is mutilated in the
process” (227).
According to Panichas, the metaphor of vampirism introduces the relation
between constant capital and variable capital and explains the notion of surplus
value as profit that has been illegitimately extracted from the worker without any
corresponding remuneration, since the worker is paid only for a part of his or her
work but not that part which produces the surplus. Panichas argues that Marx
does not understand the capital-labor relation as an exchange but rather as an
appropriation of vital substance, as the image of the vampire would suggest.
 Marx’s writings on the exploitation of the worker also make use of elements
of monstrosity in relation to the subject of freedom and labor. Insofar as workers
are forced to sell their labor power in order to survive, their freedom is
circumscribed by the exigencies of capitalism: “For Marx, the tragic irony is that
so long as workers must work to live, their creative, autonomy-reducing powers
nurture and sustain the monstrosities which keep them unfree. The fresh blood
which could emancipate the victim quenches the vampire’s thirst” (Panichas
238).
According to Carver, in spite of its roots in folklore, the notion of the
vampire came to Marx through the Enlightenment, imbued with rationality.
However, as Neocleous correctly points out, in Enlightenment philosophy the
subject of vampirism is usually mentioned ironically and relegated to the level of
popular belief, which is subordinated to official culture’s interpretation of the
symbolic and its truth value. In contrast to this, Marx utilizes the vampire as an
ideological operator that makes it possible to intervene in the symbolic space of
capitalism and analyze its forms of exploiting and consuming individual and
collective subjectivity.10 For Marx, it is precisely the institutionalized power of
cultural and ideological authority—that is, the heuristic display of capitalism—
that vampirizes imagination and popular subjectivity. This capacity for sucking
from the Other through the infinite self-sameness of capital had already been
evoked by Marx in the Grundrisse (written between 1857 and 1858) as a
figurative approach to re-presenting the death drive of capitalist modernity and
the modus operandi of its political and economic apparatuses.11 In addition, the
figure of the vampire illustrates the transformations of a bourgeois order which
has become an insatiable monster that consumes everything in order to benefit
the reproduction of capital: “The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the
century made the state do sentry duty over the newly arisen smallholding, and
manured it with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks out its blood and
brains and throws them into the alchemist’s cauldron of capital” (Marx, The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 242).
Marx’s vampire is not the sophisticated seducer of the modern literary
tradition but rather the repulsive creation of European folklore that embodies a
parasitic and dark nature (Latham 27). Policante has argued that the vampire’s
immortality, like that of capital, is based in the constant regeneration of energy
which is achieved through the deed: in the unfolding of active extraction (of
blood, of labor) (11). Capital, like the vampire, survives as a system, as a
species, through the reproduction of the same, which is to say, as a replica:
capital creates and accumulates more capital just as vampirism is transmitted
from one body to another in an atemporal mechanism. In both cases, as we will
see shortly, the (individual, social) body is the platform for these operations.12 In
fact, the vampire moves between the domestic and the universal, thereby
functioning for Marx as an epistemic bridge that allows for an interpretation of
capitalist modernity that is both molecular and molar.
MacLellan highlights Marx’s dual use of vampirism: he employs it, on the
one hand, to demonize capitalists or the bourgeoisie; in other cases, he uses it to
directly describe capitalism itself, such as in Capital volume 1’s discussion of
the working day. In texts like the Grundrisse, Marx utilizes vampirism in his
analysis of the dual nature of capital: its fixity and its ability to circulate (on the
one hand, the permanence of value and the embodiment of capital in the object,
i.e., objectified labor, and on the other hand, its constant mutation in the form of
money or other commodities, a process achieved through the vampiric practice
of absorbing workers’ souls) (552-53). MacLellan deduces from this that there
are two hermeneutic forms of vampirism in Marx: the first is based in the
dualism of the capitalist class and the working class, and the second refers to
capitalism itself as vampiric. In either case, the dialectical perspective of the
critique of political economy hinges on the trope of vampirism that Marx uses to
thematize the occult element of capitalist exploitation and the nature of both
capital and the commodity, which act as ghostly forms of biopolitical control,
omnipresent but not always visible, both material and spectral, rational and
magical.
MacLellan disputes the claims of some critics, such as Neocleous, whose
interpretation of the metaphor as a linking of the notion of living labor to
vampiric victimization presents the proletariat as a passive popular subject that
only wants to end exploitation (that is, to kill the monster) in order to return to
the state of nature. This interpretation negates the transformative will of the
working class, which, according to Marx, didn’t just want to defeat the vampire
(the “transcendental ontological” form that appropriates the worker’s life force)
but rather was motivated by the project of overthrowing the capitalist mode of
production itself, indicating the need for a profound structural transformation
and not just a reversion to a dehistoricized conjuncture. According to MacLellan,
an interpretation of Marx’s use of the metaphor like Neocleous’s takes on
populist and even reactionary overtones that centrally contradict the spirit of
Capital and other texts by Marx. One of the problems that emerges is that the
trope of the vampire takes on different senses, sometimes representing capitalists
and other times (such as in the Grundrisse and Capital) capital itself (MacLellan
559-60). MacLellan suggests, with the support of a passage from the Grundrisse,
that the vampire is more accurately read as a symbolization of value (and surplus
value in particular), because in the Grundrisse Marx shows that capital, which
alternates between its eternal form (money) and its transitory form
(commodities), assures its continuity (the perpetuation of its life as capital)
through the incessant extraction of living labor, which capital accomplishes in a
vampiric way.13

As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of

capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize
itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of
production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour.
Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking
labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. (Capital 1:342)

According to MacLellan, the notion of value suggests the indissoluble union

of capital and labor, not the opposition of the two terms, and thereby liberates the
metaphor of all ontological and transcendental connotations, making it possible
to understand working-class struggle as directed against the systematic
contradictions of capitalism and not against a mythical external force (561).
Notable here is the desire to highlight the dynamic between the fluctuation and
the permanence of capital against the background of historical change and the
variable inscription of the commodity in the market economy. The element that
assures the continuity of capital is the extraction of surplus value, that vampiric
action, which is not presented here by Marx as an event or as an externality but
rather as a systemic element. The monster is thus part of the structure of
capitalism itself, not an external element that can be eliminated in an attempt to
restore a previous “order.”
Another point of debate has been whether the vampire in Marx’s work
represents the feudal aristocracy or the capitalist bourgeoisie. According to
Baldick, the social connotations of the vampire vary both historically and
ideologically. It was born from the monstrosity of the French Revolution taken
up as a theme by Mary Shelley, and rearticulated by authors as diverse as
Hoffman, Hawthorne, Dickens, Melville, Conrad, Lawrence, Carlyle, and Marx,
even influencing the science fiction of Stevenson and Wells (to mention only
some of the most well-known Anglophone authors who made use of the
vampiric). According to Baldick, Dracula represents “feudalism’s death warmed
up” (140), but Moretti’s influential article “The Dialectic of Fear” corrects this
interpretation by pointing out that the Count, who lacks servants, is preoccupied
with domestic tasks and maintains a lifestyle that does not include the luxuries or
the pastimes of the aristocracy. Moretti finds in Dracula instead a desire to
accumulate: he maintains and strengthens his desire by appropriating his victims’
life force.
This connection between vampirism and capitalism has survived. However,
Baldick argues that the fundamental element in the semantic field of Marxist
vampirism is situated Marx’s preoccupation with the dead, particularly the idea
that “the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead”
(Eighteenth Brumaire 149), a notion that Marx took from the Gospel of Matthew
and which he reiterates in The German Ideology and The Manifesto of the
Communist Party (Neocleous 679). The past appears endowed with a spectral
quality that continues to destroy and take control of reality, as if the monsters it
holds will return to life like zombies to contaminate the ideas of the present with
a backwards and outmoded conservatism. The idea of death, including dead
labor, completes a picture in which diverse instances of the production of
capital, from its material beginnings in labor to its transformation into a
commodity subject to accumulation and consumption, are represented as a
negative life cycle, a submission of life to death, a conversion of human energy
into a fetishized object able to exercise its black magic on the humanity that
consumes it.14
For Donna Haraway, vampires indicate the transformation of critical
categories on the level of the collective unconscious, signaling these alterations
with a dramatic and conspicuous aesthetico-ideological performance that
announces profound changes in the structure of the real:

The vampyre: the one who pollutes lineages on the wedding night; the
one who effects category transformations by illegitimate passages of
 substance; the one who drinks and infuses blood in a paradigmatic act
of infecting whatever poses as pure; (…) the one who is undead,
unnatural, and perversely incorruptible (…) For better or for worse,
vampyres are vectors of category transformation in a racialized,
historical, national unconscious. (Modest Witness 216)

Cyborgs
In using the monstrous as a representation of the power to exploit resources and
human labor at the expense of workers’ vital energy, literary criticism has shown
an interest in the hybridity invoked by Marx’s rhetorical articulation of archaic
elements (recodified for the nineteenth-century Gothic in figures like the
vampire) with the products of technology, such as these latter appeared in the
context of industrialism. According the definition provided by Lars Bang Larsen,
the relation between negative affect, power, and dramatization constitutes one of
the defining features of the Gothic, the genre that produced the monstrous
figures used in the nineteenth century as metaphors for society: “The Gothic,
understood as the revival of medieval styles in the seventeenth century and
since, is the theatrical representation of negative affect that emanates from a
drama staged around power; a pessimistic dialectic of enlightenment that shows
how rationality flips into barbarism and human bondage” (2).
This fusion of the archaic and the modern clearly shows the perspectives that
coexisted, although not without tension, at a time when the dynamics of progress
had not yet invalidated what remained of premodernity and the most advanced
methods of production were still unable to displace those of the past. Marx
exposes the irrational and demonic logics of modern capitalism through
strategies of visualization that recall Bakhtin’s grotesque realism in order to
create a shocking effect that defamiliarizes traditional forms of understanding
social relations and the logics under which they operate.
The recurrence of the topic of vampirism, for example, as well as
prefigurations of what today is called the cyborg, illustrate the processes of
industrial automation and serialization that would have a profound impact on
methods of production and on collective modern subjectivity. Marx frequently
refers to the transformations of the era caused by the experience of the machinic
assemblage as well as the reduction of working-class consciousness that resulted
from new forms of production. In addition, the combination of organic elements
and qualities of technological apparatuses gives rise to new realities in the field
of production—both of commodities and of collective subjectivities. Marx
understood mechanization as the key element that would play a central role in
manufacturing and relegate the worker to the role of an appendage subordinated
to technology in the process of the production of dead labor.
In the Grundrisse, Marx comments on the alienating relationship between
the worker and the machine and on the impact of the “alien power” that the latter
exercises over the individual, who is gradually transformed into a robot:

The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is

determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the
machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the
inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act
purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s
consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an
alien power, as the power of the machine itself. (693)

Marx insists on the idea of estrangement and alienation, and the emergence
of the automaton as a new entity that combines the machinic and presents itself
as a subjectivity altered by the processes of industrialization. The idea of the
machine’s “inanimate limbs” (zombies), the control of consciousness by an
“alien power,” the degree of abstraction of the machine’s repetitive and
mechanical movement, and the obsessive orientation toward a pre- and
overdetermined finality, all encircle the process of industrial production with a
mysterious and unsettling aura. Production is presented as a process controlled
by forces beyond the human, and at the same time it is reduced to residual forms
of (self) consciousness. Modernity, as the context of these transformations, is
represented as a dark and dehumanizing place, particularly with regard to the
capitalist mode of production.
In his study of the topic of machines in Marx, Gerald Raunig connects
reflections on technē to Guattari’s concept of the machinic, which moves the
term away from its everyday sense to refer instead to forms of socialization and
subjectivation (assemblages or systems of relating and refunctioning) that
comprise different aspects of the social.15 Referring to the “Fragment on
Machines” from the Grundrisse, Raunig writes that

Even for Marx in the Fragment on Machines…the huge, self-active

machine is more than a technical mechanism. The machine does not
appear here limited to its technical aspects, but rather as a mechanical-
intellectual-social assemblage: although technology and knowledge (as
machine) have a one-sided effect on the workers, the machine is not
only a concatenation of technology and knowledge, of mechanical and
intellectual organs, but additionally also of social organs, to the extent
that it coordinates the scattered workers.16

This anthropomorphization of the machine is reinforced in the notion that

they “are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of
knowledge, objectified” (Marx, Grundrisse 706).
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the Marxist interpretation of the linear way in
which the tool (as an extension of human skill) becomes the machine (that
automates itself as well as human skill), leaning more toward an alternative
genealogy that goes back to “the pre-modern understanding of the ‘machina,’ in
which the separation between the organic and the mechanical was irrelevant”
(Raunig). Their conceptualization of the machinic is closer to an assemblage of
man and machine, or of man and whatever other entity (animal, tool, sign,
language) he machinically/mechanically connects to and re-energizes through
material and symbolic exchange. We thus find ourselves in the domain of the
cyborg where the (id)entities of machine and human being blur into one another
in a cognitive, affective, and semiotic assemblage that can already be seen in
Marx’s reflections on the processes of automation. It has to do with a monstering
of the social that is dominated by an “alien power,” denaturalized and
dehumanized by the effects of machinic hybridization that, like the classic
monster, portends a future full of radical transformations in the understanding
and development of subjectivity.
Rickels connects the elements of the fantastic and the occult that are found in
Marx’s work to the technological advances of the time, indicating a correlation
between both levels that concentrated the apprehension caused by the extension
of meanings and human abilities to the machine. This apprehension was a
complex feeling of fascination and fear that was expressed cryptically,
phantasmagorically:

The occult, as we know it, dates from the onset of technologization,

which by the eighteenth century was literally part of socialization […]
The occult, discontinuously enough, is the afterimage of every media-
technological innovation […] The occult fantasy analyzes the techno
fantasy and, inevitably, points to the missing place of the death cult
inside technoculture. (Rickels xii)

This observation, which can be applied to the way in which monstrous

elements and reflections on political economy are fused in Marx’s work, opens
up a way to access the relationship between industrialism and the Gothic, a
combination that allows us to observe the symbolic exchanges that illustrate the
emotional impact of social and economic transformations in the culture of the
period.
In Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption,
Rob Latham argues that Marx’s references to the figure of the vampire, used to
illustrate the processes of capitalist exploitation, primarily derive from European
folklore rather than literary sources. Latham particularly focuses on the
combination of vampire and cyborg, “the cybernetic vampire,” as a hybrid
organism that combines primitive forms of exploitation with recent advances in
technology, arriving (via a dialectical process) at a synthesis that illustrates the
extraction of life force, which is achieved through wage labor and already
mediated in the nineteenth century by the intervention of the machine.
Although the term cyborg was coined as recently as 1960, earlier concepts
related to advances in technology, the mechanization of labor, and the
transformations that those changes were imposing on the level of subjectivity
provoked reflections throughout the nineteenth century, many of which
crystallized in Marx’s criticisms of the capitalist mode of production and the
force of socialization it generates. In both Capital and A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy, Marx examines the consequences of the
automation of labor, the depersonalization of human relations determined by the
production/power axis and the alienation of the worker as a producer of dead
labor—that is, as a generator of products created through action that modifies
the natural and converts it into capital. However, Marx also describes and
interprets the effects of automation in terms of monstrosity and the demonization
of social relations and the connection between the individual and labor:

Here we have, in place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster

whose body fills the whole factories, and whose demonic power, at
first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members,
finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless
working organs. (Capital 1:503)

A body overflowing with organs, the automaton surpasses the human in its
appearance, functions, and objectives. The monstrosity of the machine allows us
to visualize the inversion that is produced with regard to traditional
manufacturing, where human contact with the material and the process of its
transformation are considered in terms of human energy:

In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the

factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the
instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the
machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workers are the parts
of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism
which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its
living appendages. “The wearisome routine of endless drudgery in
which the same mechanical process is ever repeated, is like the torture
of Sisyphus; the burden of toil, like the rock, is ever failing back upon
the worn-out drudge.” (Capital 1:548)

However, Marx maintains that the monster of capitalism is capital itself, and
that the machine ultimately has the potential to liberate, to facilitate
transformative labor under a policy of the humanization of labor and the fair
distribution of resources. In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), Jean
Baudrillard insists that this position naively misrecognizes the danger that the
machine itself represents as a replacement for living labor:

Marx’s greatest error was to have retained a belief in the innocence of

machines, the technical process and science all of which were
supposedly capable of becoming living social labour once the system
of capital was liquidated, despite the fact that this is precisely what the
 system is based on. This pious hope springs from having
underestimated death in dead labour, and from thinking that death is
overcome in the living, beyond a certain crucial point, by a sort of
historical somersault of production. (15)

Commenting on this debate, and retaining the terminology and the

metaphorical value of the Gothic concepts of vampirism and dead labor, Latham
examines the ideological variants introduced by Baudrillard, whose intention is
to illustrate the concept of the “reign of the code” (50), which, as he explains in
his book, governs postmodern capitalism:

Marx wanted to salvage the industrial automaton from its conscription

by the vampire of capital, without recognizing that the automaton, in
its capacity, at once to replace and to integrate (i.e., cyborgize) living
labor, was itself the genuine vampire. Unlike Marx, Baudrillard’s
cybernetic vampire is an emphatically nondialectical image: here the
term expresses no structural contradiction between technical progress
and primitive exploitation that awaits its historical supersession in a
higher form of social organization. Rather, progress is exploitation: the
perfection of technological means serves the sole end of cementing the
reign of the code. (8-9)17

In Haraway’s definition, the cyborg is a cybernetic organism marked by the

combination of human and machinic features: “a social reality as well as a
creature of fiction” (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 149). The integration of
elements from different registers makes the cyborg an apparatus that transgresses
the limits of both science fiction and the social reality that produces it. It is the
simultaneity of contradictory features, as well as the contours of the posthuman
defined by the domain of the monster, whose existence is guided by, to borrow
an expression from Heidegger, “the conquest of the world as picture,” which is
to say, the postulation of representation as an ontological basis of modernity
(“The Age of the World Picture” 71). In effect, the monster, and the cyborg in
particular as an iconic form of posthumanity, are pure image, exhibition,
“unconcealment.”18 In unconcealment, both the (de)monstrative qualities of the
monster and the revelatory attributes of technology are allied. According to
Heidegger, technology can expose forms of truth that would not otherwise
appear to the intellect: “Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to
presence [West] in a realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where
aletheia, truth, happens” (“The Question Concerning Technology” 13).
For Heidegger, technology is above all a form of thought about reality, “a
technological interpretation of the world.” This idea can help us think the cyborg
as an alternative and innovative approach to forms of reality and to “truths” that
do not directly manifest themselves or conform to conventional rules.

Zombies
Along with references to vampires and machine-like elements, a third aspect of
the monstrous that appears in Marx’s work is that of the zombie as an image of
the living-dead whose spectral presence haunts the imaginaries of modernity.
The recurring motifs of blood and fear also punctuate Marx’s texts. As a
disguised expression of alienation, the zombie is anomalous and transitional,
stereotypical and unclassifiable:

It is not an aristocrat like Dracula or a star freak like Frankenstein; it is

the everyman monster in which business as usual coexist with extremes
of hysteria […] The zombie also straddles the divide between industrial
and immaterial labor, from mass to multitude, from the brawn of
industrialism to the dispersed brains of cognitive capitalism. (Larsen 9)

Characterized by “semiotic excess” and “speculation with affect,” “the

zombie isn’t just any monster, but one with a pedigree of social critique” that
projects itself from Marx to the present day as an ideological connector in
debates on labor, exploitation, alienation, colonialism, and xenophobia. It is a
floating signifier, a “nomadic form of social consciousness” that has adjusted to
emotional intensification and the de-realization of the real (Larsen 6-7). The
zombie is an assemblage, and for this reason it is an emotional vector that is
portrayed and resignified through the articulation of its parts because
“assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire” (Deleuze and
Guattari, Nomadology 82).
The monster thus has an apotropaic effect, since it is through its presence and
ritualized and obsessive unfolding that it orients itself toward the exorcism of
evil, which is to say, toward the exercise of a magical control over reality. The
monster’s appearance not only warns of the imminent threat of evil but also
sublimates it in some way: it catalyzes social immunity, visualizes the danger of
contagion, and injects a radical alterity in doses intended to test the thresholds of
tolerance in every age and culture.
In “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced
Capitalism,” Sarah J. Lauro and Karen Embry examine the multifaceted
presence of the zombie in different disciplinary fields: as an example of
automated behaviors that form part of our daily routines; as a name for the
processes that “maliciously” use sources of energy that do not belong to them; as
metaphors for the extreme subalternization of individuals and social groups in
different contexts of domination; as a paradigm of the irrational adherence to
certain systems or beliefs; and as unreflective modalities of material or symbolic
consumption. The political, cultural, technological, and scientific applications of
the trope of the zombie have their counterpart in the use of its image by the
spectacle industry. In this space of symbolic production the epistemic
indeterminacy and the semiotic radicality of the zombie constitute a subgenre
within the broad field of horror fiction and the culture of monsters.
According to Lauro and Embry, the zombie is a border being, anti-cathartic,
an example of negative dialectics, or better yet, of the insufficiency of the
dialectical model, because its nature is not directed toward the synthesis of the
extremes (subject/object, life/death) that constitute it. In the figure of the zombie,
the hybridization that characterizes other monsters collapses because the
binarisms that constitute it are unable to combine themselves into a new
organism. What results instead is the radical evacuation of all cognition, the
definitive renunciation of any form of totalization or operativity (93-94). The
zombie is thus more representative than the cyborg of a state of posthumanity:
neither a hybrid nor an example of schizophrenic multiplicity, “[t]he zombi [sic]
is a paradox that disrupts the entire system” (94).
In Monster Theory, Jeffery Cohen has remarked that the figure of the
monster (and, one might add, particularly the figure of the zombie) gives rise to
a double narrative: the specific history of the emergence of the monstrosity that
characterizes it, and the story of the cultural uses it engenders. This duality is
summed up in the ambiguity of the mutation, which unfolds the mechanical
avatars of a repetitive cycle of gestures and reappearances. The zombie is only
visible when it is captured in the unstable interstice of the in-between, a spatio-
temporal and epistemic limbo that many critics have interpreted as the
ideological space between the state and the multitude, or between hegemony and
resistance. In Marx’s writings, the discursive appearance of the zombie functions
as a reactivation of a trope that reveals the inherent qualities of the very structure
of capitalist modernity.
The zombie and its characteristics focus the interpretation of the socio-
economic relations of modernity into a cultural key, a strategy that assures the
accessibility and legibility of the theoretical body, analyzing the modernizing
process and its sociocultural by-products. The prosopopoeia through which Marx
represents money and capital as bodies that ooze with blood and suicide
contributes to the creation of an ethico-political discursive space. In this domain,
the functioning and effects of capitalism are dramatically exposed in accordance
with the reigning aesthetic norms of the era that connects contemporaneity and
pre-modernity, advance and regression, and science and superstition in a sordid
and thanatic alliance: “If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with
a congenital bloodstain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to toe,
from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx Capital 1:925-26).
This “Gothic Marxism” (Neocleous), whose echoes can be heard in Jacques
Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical work, revives
and resignifies myths that go back to ancient Greece, including myths of the
dead who return to life and beings that drink human blood to survive and
perpetuate their kind. The zombie not only illustrates the idea of alienation (the
lack of social consciousness and consciousness of oneself) but also transmits the
notion of automatic consumption, the image of alienated corporeality, and the
concept of the return of the repressed. In this way, the stumbling figure of the
zombie, its routine and automated style, its gaze fixed on an empty horizon, its
muteness, the signs of death and the remains of life that its body exhibits in the
process of decomposition, all constitute a biopolitical message with a strong
emotional and intellectual significance. These features trespass the border
between life and death, bios and zoē, establishing in their place (as an aesthetic
and ideological construct) a degraded, anonymous, and indifferent nature
associated with the ideas of multitude, alienation, dehumanization, decontrol,
and unintelligibility.
In this biopolitical sense, the figure of the zombie alters the relation between
the theme of death (because its very presence is evidence of the existence of
forms of being that require a redefinition of life) and the relativization of the
definitive character of physical disappearance. This configuration of the zombie
as an embodiment of an intermediate stage between life and death has been
interpreted as a metaphor of resistance and as a denunciation of the conditions
that the capitalist mode of production imposes on body and spirit, on both the
individual and collective level. Individuality vanishes in the zombie, as does the
idea of community as a conscious form of socialization since this form of
association and human organization is replaced by amorphous groupings that
behave automatically and on the basis of primary drives. The zombie horde, as a
threatening stain of irrationality that crosses social spaces, prefigures a world in
which spatio-temporal coordinates have ceased to exist and where consciousness
has been substituted by an interminable somnambulism.
One prominent meaning linked to the use of the zombie by (primarily
Marxist) political theory is its connection to slavery and colonialism, as well as
forms of capitalist production that are considered worse than death insofar as
they entail the loss of freedom, the exploitation of the body, the dissolution of
consciousness, dehumanization, and alienation. In an article intended to analyze
the resurgence of zombie culture in Africa, John and Jean Comaroff point out the
multiple meanings attributed to the zombie:

Zombies themselves seem to be born, at least in the first instance, of

colonial encounters; of the precipitous engagement of local worlds
with imperial economies that seek to exert control over the essential
means of producing value, means like land and labor, space and time. It
is in this abstract, metaphorical sense that René Depestre declares
colonialism to be “a process of man’s general zombification.” (“Alien-
Nation” 795)

Colonialist territorial appropriation and the modern forms of capitalist

production are inseparable from the exploitation and depletion of human energy
that turns individuals into the living dead in the service of the commodity,
subject-objects subordinated to the dominant system of the logic of infinite
reproduction. The figure of the zombie is not only associated with the regimes of
exploitation that serve imperial interests but also with capitalist modernity and
the concepts of “dead labor” and immaterial labor that designate processes
through which the social body cannibalizes itself in order to preserve and
reproduce capital.
The zombie has been considered through the Derridean category of
“undecidability” (that indeterminate form of being that resists assimilation to any
binarism without creating a new category independent of them) and as an
illustration of the notion of the zombie developed by Deleuze and Guattari as a
work myth (Irven, Opatić). In this sense, it constitutes the spectacularized
incarnation of the political unconscious, repressed but connected to forms of
social consciousness that, without being self-evident, have an impact on models
of representation and social practices. As a work myth, the living dead exhibit
the mutilation that forms part of the state’s strategy of domination:

Above all, the State apparatus makes the mutilation, and even death,
come first. It needs them pre-accomplished, for people to be born that
way, crippled and zombielike. The myth of the zombie, of the living
dead, is a work myth and not a war myth. Mutilation is a consequence
of war, but it is a necessary condition, a presupposition of the State
apparatus and the organization of work. […] The State apparatus
needs, at its summit as at its base, pre-disabled people, preexisting
amputees, the still-born, the congenitally infirm, the one-eyed and one-
armed. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 425, my
emphasis)

The relations between the figure of the zombie, labor, and capital, developed
in Marx’s writings in various works and continued by neo-Marxist criticism, are
complicated in the real world by variables like the situation of undocumented
migrant workers and/or that of workers who are alienated by the regimes of
flexible production (constant deterritorialization of factories, businesses, and
industrial complexes, the fluctuation of hiring demands, the inability to advocate
for workers’ rights or unionize, and the growth of the private sector). Under
these conditions, workers are transformed into “pariahs of the proletariat,”
whose productive capacity has been alienated from the social order and must go
without the shelter and protection of the law. The weakening and dislocation of
national bases of production and their replacement by transnational networks, as
well as the primacy of financial capital (which seems to follow a rhythm of
circulation and growth foreign to the dynamics of production) all structurally
separate labor and the state. Like zombies, the hordes of seasonal laborers haunt
indeterminate spaces, from the most developed to the most economically
depressed, across borders, languages, and regulations, in search of work and
living conditions that barely reach the minimum for survival. Scott Lasch and
John Urry have spoken of the “end of organized capitalism” and the emergence
of an international service class. For these authors, the structure of the capitalist
system of production that dominated modernity is being substituted by
“disorganized capitalism,” which is accompanied by substantial modifications in
social forms of the perception of space and the comprehension of the relations
between culture and production. The disorganization of industrial relations that
had prepared the fragmentation of the collective identity of the working class
indicates different stages in the development of labor: “first to the decentralized
shopfloor radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and then the shift from
national bargaining to enterprise-level bargaining in recent years that has
accompanied the demise of neo-corporatism” (285).
As Comaroff and Comaroff note, the worker is a disposable value in the
globalized division of labor in which the autonomy of the financial order and its
speculative regime are ever more separated from the concepts of manufacturing,
exchange, and the workforce. This scenario is adapted to the idea of
zombification as the loss of consciousness (of self-consciousness and class
consciousness), automation of behavior in different sectors, anonymity, lack of
leadership, submission, and the lowering of expectations.
The relation between the characteristics of developed capitalism and Marx’s
notion of dead labor, zombification, vampirism, and the demonic nature of
capital, far from being diluted or lost, survives in the economic transformations
connected to globalization, which have sharpened in the twenty-first century.
More than ever, “economic occultism” has taken up a place in collective
imaginaries where the diminished status of “grand narratives” have not been
substituted by totalizing discourses or utopic visions that would make it possible
to comprehend these transformations and give them historical, political, and
social meaning. The proliferation of informal economies, organized crime,
infrapolitical modalities, terrorist activities, and apocalyptic discourses of all
different political and ideological affiliations causes generalized anxiety about
the processes of dehumanization and the threat to the environment and to the
vast segments of society abandoned to subhuman means of survival.19
 In Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and
Political Consequences (2002), Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim
refer to the “zombie categories” that haunt the social space today in a state of
death-in-life since, even though the social conditions have substantially changed,
already-established concepts in social sciences and the humanities continue to
designate forms of collective experience that have not even been given
alternative names in contemporary life. One case is that of the family, another is
social class or neighborhood, notions that continue to play a role in the discourse
of social sciences, although they do not represent the fluidity of contemporary
societies or the social situations that derive from them (changes in the forms of
nuclear cohabitation, forms of motherhood/fatherhood affected by scientific,
technological, and social changes connected to the politics of gender, modalities
of community functioning, etc.). Beck and Beck-Gernsheim note that these
categories, connected to nationalist ideas, lose validity (although not discursive
presence) in a globalized world: “Normal science categories are becoming
zombie categories, empty terms in the Kantian meaning. Zombie categories are
the living dead which blind the social sciences to the rapidly changing realities
inside the nation-state containers and outside as well” (qtd. in Dutton 183).20
Another use of the zombie connected to post-Marxist criticism refers to
“zombie economics,” alluding to forms of production that even after losing
validity reappear again and again, negating the space of the present and the
future. In his book Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us,
Australian economist John Quiggin argues that these zombie-ideas continue to
return, even though they are killed (2), creating deadlocks and setbacks in the
processes of the conceptualization of economic development and the
implementation of changes. Referring to the 2008 financial crisis, but also more
broadly to a global macroeconomic vision, Quiggin points out that the
ideological force of economic theories that made sense in the past but are no
longer valid help explain the inefficiency of confronting structural inequality:
“The ideas that caused the crisis and were, at least briefly, laid to rest by it, are
already reviving and clawing their way through the soft earth. If we do not kill
these zombie ideas once and for all, they will do even more damage next time”
(4).
The zombie-ideas connected to liberalism and the market Quiggins analyzes
here include both notions like privatization and austerity and concepts that deal
with specific strategies, like “trickle-down economics,” the “Great Recession,”
or the “hypothesis of efficient markets.”21 For Quiggin, “unlike other monsters
like werewolves and vampires, zombies always come in mobs. Individually, they
seem easy enough to kill, but in a group their strength can be overwhelming. So
it is with the ideas underlying market liberalism” (32).
Without denying the controversial character of the arguments Quiggin
deploys in this book, which combines economic analysis and polemical ideas
about state regulation and the insufficiency of Keynesianism in contemporary
contexts, it is of more interest for our purposes to discuss his use of the concept
of zombification as an appeal to a well-established metaphor of Marxist criticism
and political economy. As an ideological trope, far from having exhausted its
symbolic potential, the zombie has expanded its radius of applicability and its
signifiers toward new domains of cultural and political theory that cross into and
surpass the economic. It is also used in relation to the topics of migration,
marginal subjectivities, consumerism, political indoctrination, and so on. As
Comaroff and Comaroff argue, the trope of the zombie is characterized by its
semiotic saturation (“Alien-Nation” 788), which is supported by a powerful
visual message that concentrates not only the monstrous corporeality of this
border figure but also its radically indefinite nature and “mobility without
movement.” Analyzing the case of postcolonial South Africa, these
anthropologists also point out the relation between the “occult economies” that
exist in this region and “millenarian capitalism,” which combines “modernity
and postmodernity, hope and hopelessness, utility and futility, promises and
perversions (“Occult Economies” 283).22
A further step in the use of the trope of the living dead was undertaken by the
political scientist Daniel Drezner in the field of political economy and
international relations. As a way to allegorically set up the debate around the
various possible approaches to a supposed international crisis, in Theories of
International Politics and Zombies (2014), Drezner imagines the limit situation
of a global zombie epidemic that would oblige different governments to respond
to and neutralize this unprecedented threat to public safety. With both didactic
intentions and sufficient academic rigor, he uses this fictitious scenario to review
a series of ideological positions (conservative, realist, idealist, constructivist,
etc.) that offer in each of their analytical and methodological categories
alternative responses to the situation created by this imagined biopolitical
transgression. Drezner defines the zombie as “a biologically definable, animated
being occupying a human host, with a desire to eat human flesh” (21), a
condition that is used to illustrate an unanticipated form of collective danger for
which no preventative measures exist. The book draws on elements from the
development of the zombie theme in popular culture (for example, the films of
George Romero and Max Brooks’s apocalyptic horror novels like The Zombie
Survival Guide (2003) and particularly World War Z: An Oral History of the
Zombie War (2006), to Michael Jackson’s choreography and “romantic zombie
comedies” (a.k.a “rom-zom-coms”) and articulates this spectrum with different
theoretical approaches, thus discursively creating a kind of laboratory for
experimental political strategy. Bringing together these elements, Drezner
analyzes the way in which international institutions like the United Nations, non-
governmental organizations (NGOs), and particular governments might act in
the face of such a devastating and exceptional crisis, one that would test the
ability of each position to account for the phenomenon and generate ways of
combating its destructive potential. The crisis requires alliances and redefinitions
as well as improvisations based on new forms of interpreting collective action.
The hypothetical situation created around the fascinating figure of the zombie
catalyzes psychological and social reactions, exposes politico-ideological points
of view, national and regional particularisms, diplomatic protocols, and
institutional agendas, opening up a comparative analysis that makes it possible to
pedagogically infiltrate the theme into political philosophy, sociology, and
cultural criticism. In this fictionalized but plausible scenario of global terror, the
figure of the zombie functions once again as a trigger for actions and reactions,
as an apparatus that exposes, radicalizes, and resets the very meaning of life and
the biopolitical forms that can develop to protect it from external and
unforeseeable forces that could attack it as well as from internal ideological,
political, and social antibodies. In addition, the metaphorical device of the
zombie epidemic reveals the lack of preparation by nations and international
institutions for the implementation of effective means of defense. The enemy
thus is not only external but also inhabits the very heart of the system. In many
cases, the local becomes the enemy of the global and vice versa. The truncated
or simply non-existent dialogue between different dimensions of the social is as
catastrophic as the exogenous threat.23
In a similar way, one can observe that the obscene growth of wealth in some
segments of Latin American society and the continued impoverishment of
others, as well as the impossibility of comprehending the mysterious
mechanisms of the globalized market, causes arcane forces to reappear and
constitute a counter-discourse with powerful and diverse manifestations.
Following Max Gluckman’s ideas in “The Magic of Despair” (1957), which
came out of his studies of witchcraft in Africa, Comaroff and Comaroff observe
that rather than a resurgence of tradition, the recourse to arcane and monstrous
elements that emerge as part of daily life indicates the production of new forms
of social consciousness which express “the discontent of modernity” (“Occult
Economies” 284).24 The monstrous figure of the zombie has a special starring
role in these scenarios. Reflecting the changes in regimes of labor, zombies
appear in many cases as part-time workers, individuals who wake up exhausted
every day from having worked all night as zombies under the control of a master
who dominates them through magic. Poverty, crime, magic, and exploitation are
all articulated in this wandering, unconscious, and catastrophic figure who is the
testimony of the unkept promises of modernity.
In the African context, the zombie appears as a paradigm of collective
subjectivity that corresponds to the postcolonial and post-apartheid periods, in
which many segments of society found themselves to be more vulnerable than
they had been before.25 Faced with the collapse of the project of modernity, the
figure of the zombie testifies to the ruin of the system. Following Marx in
Capital, Comaroff and Comaroff note the symbolism of the zombie in these
scenarios:

His absent presence suggests a link to otherwise inexplicable

accumulation. Being solely for the benefit of its owner, the toil of the
living dead is pure surplus value […] it has “all the charms of
something created out of nothing.” Zombie production is thus an apt
image of the inflating occult economies of postcolonial Africa, of their
ever more brutal forms of extraction. (“Occult Economies” 290)

Closely associated with the notion of nomadism, the figure of the zombie is
used as an illustration of a long series of subject positions that are situated
outside the productive and/or legal systems. Refugees, political prisoners, the
disappeared, tortured, dispossessed, marginalized, displaced, undocumented,
indigent, and exiled populations all exemplify a transnational form of social
fragmentation whose mere existence challenges the stability and legitimacy of
the systems from which they originated. Their monstrosity consists precisely in
the social (de)monstration/monstering of its anomaly as an irreducible quality
with the potential to threaten and destroy state control like a war machine,
exposing its perversions and internal contradictions.26 This “monstrosity”
illustrates the rupture of the bonds between the individual and community, the
relation between immigration and natural resources, the connections between the
local and the global, between the past and the future: “In this respect, the living
dead join a host of other spectral figures—vampires, monsters, creatures of
Gothic ‘supernaturalism’—who have been vectors of an affective engagement
with the visceral implications of the factory, the plantation, the market, the mine”
(Comaroff and Comaroff 796).
However, it has been noted that the zombie’s ambiguity prevents it from
being reduced to its purely negative features or from being assimilated to the
idea of alienation or the abjection of the economic system. The cultural role of
the zombie is disparate and circulates and re-circulates in various directions:

Because the zombie travels so widely, and across so many fields, it has
become a very familiar character, one that participates in narratives of
the body, of life and death, of good and evil; one that gestures to
alterity, racism, species-ism, the inescapable, the immutable. Thus, it
takes us to “the other side”—alienation, death, and what is worse than
death: the state of being undead. (Webb and Byrnand 83)

The zombie is characterized, just like capital, by its inability to completely

die. By defying the irreversible end of life, the zombie establishes the theme of
value that refuses to disappear. In Steven Shaviro’s word’s, “zombies mark the
rebellion of death against its capitalist appropriation…our society endeavors to
transform death into value, but the zombies enact a radical refusal and
destruction of value” (qtd. in Larsen 12). “Death has died,” or, as George
Romero’s film Survival of the Dead (2009) points out, “Death isn’t what it used
to be” (Larsen 13). We find ourselves in a de-realized, unrecognizable world,
condemned to a life of agony. In this way, the zombie, with its immortality,
broaches the question of what type of life awaits a dehumanized world, which is
what some theories predict will be the result of global capitalism. The zombie
represents the residue that survives after cognition disappears and self-
recognition dissolves into the air. As Peter Dendle remarks, the zombie is a
barometer of the cultural anxiety that is typical of the twentieth century:

The essence of the “zombie” at the most abstract level is supplanted,

stolen, or effaced consciousness; it casts allegorically the appropriation
of one person’s will by another. It is no coincidence that the creature
flourished in the twentieth century, a century whose broad intellectual
trends were preoccupied with alienation. (qtd. in Stratton 269)

In the zombie, the ambiguity of the monstrous is radicalized: straddling

being and non-being, “[t]he zombie resides somewhere between the ontic and
the hauntic” (Lauro and Embry 86). It represents a (non-id)entity, the emptying
out of all consciousness, sensibility, and rationality, that is, an anti-subject that
has overtaken the human without completely overcoming it, because its residual
form of existence still mimics the bodily form of inhabiting the world even in its
most degraded and desolate modality. Its capacity for contagion and its
immortality converts it into the perfect enemy, impossible to defeat. The zombie
personifies terror ad aeternum, the totalization of the monstrous that no longer
consists of the annihilation of the human species but rather of its dehumanized
perpetuation.
The myth of the zombie allows us to visualize the possibility of change
through which the docile force of the individual or the collective is concentrated
in the idea of labor, which capitalism imagines as a conditio sine qua non of
productivity. It becomes a nightmare of multiple subversions, that is, it becomes
a nomadic war machine that, existing outside the state, threatens its mechanisms
of capture (Irven).
In effect, the zombie evokes the idea of the multitude since, as several critics
have noted, it never has an individualized role as a protagonist, like Dracula or
Frankenstein’s monster, but rather is usually portrayed in amorphous, cumulative
groups that, even though they have neither voice nor consciousness nor any
leadership. Despite the fact that they are, as Irven notes, “immune to ideology”
(9), they have a prolific and inorganic presence that threatens the social order
and its cognitive models.

Marx avec Derrida: Toward a Hauntology

of the Present
The topic of spectrality and the figure of the ghost frequently appear in the
writings of Marx and Engels, where they are associated in different ways with
the analyses of these thinkers and the theoretical proposals of their writings. The
ghost and the specter form part of the representation of other forms of
consciousness and presence; they thus constitute a line of flight in relation to the
certainties of modernity, which are based in the domain of Reason and the
displacement of knowledges that surpass or defy the logics of scientific thought.
As Comaroff and Comaroff recall with respect to the subject of spectrality,
Theodor Adorno noted in his In Search of Wagner in relation to the thesis of
form as social content that “Phantasmagoria comes into being when, under the
constraints of its own limitations, modernity’s latest products come close to the
archaic” (“Alien-Nation” 792). The use of images associated with “primitive”
forms of perceiving and relating to the real demonstrates the limitations of the
modern project, its internal borders and epistemic conditions. Phantasmagoria,
like the figure of the zombie, makes the occult visible, expanding the contours of
sensible experience and proposing the ethereal or the amorphous as an other
form of materiality in which its lack of physical structure and its mutant and
evasive nature suggest social elements that exceed dominant discourses and
models of interpreting and representing the social.
Unpredictable, ethereal, and atemporal, the ghost is an event that ruptures
historicity to sow discord and doubt because its very existence unhinges the real
and fragments it. Its evental emergence in the course of the everyday dramatizes
the relations between subjects and profoundly alters forms of inhabiting space
and the mode of inscribing the particularity of existence in the historical and
vital continuum. The ghost disregards time, corporeality, and any form of
localization that would restrict its forms of occupying the present. It is a focus
that both produces and occludes signifiers, it is the mask of the truth that does
not cease to be seen; nevertheless, the mere intuition of its existence challenges
the principles and methods of instrumental reason. The ghost is by nature
reticent, alternating, marginal, although it can constitute a centrality that subverts
(even if only temporarily) the order of the real, installing in it certainties that
exceed the empirical, the material, and the normative. The ghost thus finds its
place in the realm of monstrosity. Its lack of a body places it in an ethereal,
evanescent system: it is a void, an absence, a more powerful (id)entity because
of its liminality and its ability to transgress limits and situate itself in the
interstices of exhausted dualist categories.
It is well-known that Marx and Engels considered giving The Manifesto of
the Communist Party a different title referring to “specters” that would precisely
communicate the idea of the ghostly constant of an alternative thought that
challenges modernity and defies the bases of the knowledge of the real,
generating basic transformations of the deep structures of modern consciousness
and its forms of social and productive organization. Commemorating the one-
hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the Manifesto’s publication, Umberto Eco
referred to this key text of Western thought as a literary work in which the main
character is a ghost, thus reigniting a new reading of Marxist writings, in which
the theme of spectrality acquires a profound aesthetic and ideological sense.27 In
his article “On the Style of the Manifesto,” Eco notes, with regard to the text,
that it “starts with a powerful drumroll, like Beethoven’s Fifth: ‘A spectre is
haunting Europe’ (and let us not forget that we are still close to the pre-Romantic
and Romantic flowering of the Gothic novel, and spectres are to be taken
seriously)” (24).
After referring to the transformations effectuated by the bourgeoisie, the
Manifesto expands the political and economic scene of analysis, complicating
the process of class struggle, which Eco interprets in the following way:

suddenly we find a dramatic reversal: the wizard discovers that he is

unable to control the subterranean powers he has conjured up, the
victor is suffocated by his own overproduction and is forced to bring
forth from his loins the digger of his own grave—the proletariat.

This new force now enters the scene: at first divided and confused, it is
forged in the destruction of machinery and then used by the
bourgeoisie as shock troops forced to fight its enemy’s enemies (the
absolute monarchies, the landed property holders, the petite
bourgeoisie), until gradually it absorbs the artisans, shopkeepers, and
peasant landowners who once were its adversaries but have now been
turned into proletarians by the bourgeoisie. The upheaval becomes
struggle as workers organize thanks to another power that the
bourgeoisie developed for its own profit: communications. And here
 the Manifesto cites the example of the railways, but the authors are also
thinking of new mass media (and let’s not forget that in The Holy
Family Marx and Engels were able to use the television of that age—
namely, the serial novel—as a model of the collective imagination, and
they criticized its ideology by using the very language and situations
the serials had made popular). (“On the Style of the Manifesto” 25)

This passage is notable for its reference to magic as a task that, parallel to the
task of history, nevertheless incorporates the drama of forces in struggle, which
is to say, it finds its place in the staging of a modernity that cannot administrate
the very energies that it has liberated and which explode on the Gothic scene in
the middle of the nineteenth century.28 However, along with the irrationality of
magic, Eco recalls the presence of technology (printing press, railroads) as
machinic elements that constitute the “collective imagination.” Magic and
technology once again share the stage in a world debated in the construction of
unprecedented forms of social consciousness.
Analyzing the legacy of Marx in contemporary culture, Derrida deconstructs
the forms of validation and censure that surround the work of the Prussian
thinker, proposing a new reading of his texts with the aim of analyzing the way
in which they offer commentary on our own time and the possibilities they
provide for opening up paths of thought that would resist the hegemony of
neoliberalism. In Specters of Marx (1994), Derrida elaborates what he calls a
hauntology, a neologism that refers to the dynamic of haunting that the ghost
produces as it harasses and lurks in different spaces without completely
occupying them.29 This obliges us to learn to live with ghosts and to become
accustomed to their form of inhabiting the everyday and the imaginary. The
specter’s condition constitutes an immaterial yet essential part of the real and
maintains it as a presence/absence that dominates the scene without
compromising its particularity. Being open to the existence of ghosts, “to fall
back on its voice,” thus signifies for Derrida recognizing its constant insistence
within Western thought, which obliges us to elaborate an ontology of spectrality
as an alternative to an inflexible and exclusive logocentrism.30
The ghost exists in a conceptual, aesthetic, and ideological in-between-place,
an epistemic interstice that defies all dualist conceptualizations of the real:
life/death, presence/absence, identity/otherness, thereby disqualifying the binary
formulations that reduce reality to a series of oppositions and misrecognize its
constant state of fluidity and hybridization. In fact, the phantasmatic inaugurates
a new temporality and a state of things that exceeds the possibilities of the name
as a fixation of the signifier. Referring to the appearance of the ghost of the dead
king in Hamlet, Derrida recalls the phrase that the play employs to indicate the
apparition’s impact: “The time is out of joint,” an expression that signals the
installation of an other order that radically intervenes in historical time. Derrida
is concerned with re-qualifiying this out-of-jointness, demonstrating, page after
page, the inability of language to contain the sense or the reach of the
supernatural, “‘the time is out of joint’: time is disarticulated, dislocated,
dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down [traqué et détraqué],
deranged, both out of order and mad. Time is off its hinges, time is off course,
beside itself, disadjusted” (Specters of Marx 18, emphasis in original).
The experience of the ghost is marked by repetition because the specter, as a
monster, lives through the expectation that creates the possibility of its
recurrence. Its power thus resides in eternal return, that is, in the spectral
permanence of its presence. The power of the ghost—and of the monster—
consists in the incessant expectation of its return, even though in reality it has
never left. Derrida explains this as a “question of repetition: a specter is always a
revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by
coming back” (Specters of Marx 11, emphasis in original).
According to Derrida, the specter always (re)appears, or, to use a properly
Derridean term, disseminates itself as différance. It is a presence in process,
always deferred, the same and the other in each appearance. It is an event and an
advent, it is an “apparition” that returns and disappears without disappearing.
Like the monster, the specter is one and multiple, a bundle of meaning that
disperses itself and evades any attempt to exorcise it or to “conjure” it. Derrida
uses this latter term because of its connotations with secret plots to confront a
superior power, although he clarifies that the word also indicates convocation, in
the sense of a call. Through the figure of the ghost, Derrida reaffirms the central
importance of Marxism in Western thought: “a spectre is haunting Europe.” Its
present re-apparitions escape the conjurings and exorcisms that have taken it as
their object because its influence is firmly planted in the very heart of Western
thought: “One need not be a Marxist or a communist in order to accept this
obvious fact. We all live in a world, some would say a culture, that still bears, at
an incalculable depth, the mark of this inheritance, whether in a directly visible
fashion or not” (Derrida, Specters of Marx 14).
Hence the attempts to erase Marx in order to allow the infinite unfolding of
neoliberalism have tried to kill History, because Marx and History are intricately
related (the example of Fukuyama’s “fastidious anachronism,” deconstructed by
Derrida, exemplifies these apocalyptic positions). In response, Derrida proposes
a “new international” of thought that, without yielding to the temptation to
replicate the past or to ignore the flaws and mistakes of a doctrine originally
developed in the nineteenth century, nevertheless revises the foundations of its
analysis and the ways it can be applied (particularly with regard to its heuristic
uses) in the present day.
Finally, it is significant that in Specters of Marx Derrida ends up discussing
the theme of technology as a new form of spectrality that establishes the virtual
as an overlooked dimension of knowledge and communication, redefining it
along with the meaning of the real itself. Insofar as the advances of electronics
and cybernetics establish other forms of communication, identity, and even
existence, spectrality incorporates itself into the horizon of expectations in our
time as well as into new experiences of the social. Marxism will undoubtedly
continue to hover over modern consciousness, and its spectral presence will
remind us of the fundamental terms of the most extensive and radical analysis of
capitalist modernity up to the present day. According to Derrida, the ghost is
always to-come, it is a forewarning that, in the case of contemporary society,
addresses not the desire to recreate the past or to renovate the utopian thought of
previous centuries but rather the necessity of elaborating a new historicity that
can only come to pass as a redefinition of the political and as inclusion of the
alternative, the heterogeneous, and the impure.

Notes
1. Marcos Neocleous brings together Robert Paul Wolff’s ideas about Marx’s literary and philosophical
references and his use of “religious, Mephistophelean, and political images” in an ironic way and to
express his bitterness and analytic severity. Neocleous also recalls Marshall Berman’s views on Marx’s
“brilliant images” and the argument by Stanley Hyman that what we might call Marxist poetics
presents “the revolution as drama” or as a “dramatic epic.” The presence of vampirism in Marx’s
“story” thus in a certain sense stereotypes the categories in question, as these categories function as
characters in a staging of the history and society of his era.
2. The most notorious examples of this are those referring to the law applied to peasants who, after being
dispossessed of their lands are then tortured and persecuted for vagabondage until they secure waged
 work, as well as those referring to the exploitation of miners in African colonies. For more on this, see
Stanley Hyman (145) and Neocleous.
3. In his study of Marx’s literary style, Ludovico Silva shows how, in his day, Marx had the ability to
translate abstract concepts into concrete images and to explain his ideas without oversimplifying them:
“A pesar de su enorme capacidad de abstracción, Marx nunca cayó en el facilismo especulativo; no se
inventó el capitalismo ‘pensando,’ sino estudiando fenómenos específicos y concretos. Este empeño se
tradujo maravillosamente en su estilo, que es el estilo de un escritor con gran capacidad de vuelo pero
que no pierde jamás de vista la tierra firme, que es lo apropiado en un escritor científico. ‘Todo
profundo problema filosófico’—escribía en La ideología alemana—‘se reduce a un hecho empírico
puro y simple’” (94).
4. Labor itself implies a magical relationship with the raw material that is transformed into an object, into
dead (or objectified) labor, which returns to life with a different shape and function, in the form of the
object-commodity.
5. Milton Friedman interprets the idea of the “invisible hand” as the possibility of obtaining individual
cooperation without coercion, which is to say, as the unsought consequence of the consumer’s personal
interest that results in gain or some other benefit for the producer and for society.
6. Freud describes the uncanny in similar terms: “Severed limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the
arm, feet that dance by themselves –all those have something highly uncanny about them, especially
when they are credited with independent activity” (The Uncanny 150).
7. Much has already been written about Marx’s view of Goethe’s ideas, which, according to Sacristán,
Marx considered an extension of Hegelian thought. See Manuel Sacristán, Escritos sobre El Capital (y
textos afines), 321.
8. See Moraña, “Postcriptum: El afecto en la caja de herramientas,” where I present some of the ideas and
references on affect included in the present study.
9. See Jáuregui.
10. This does not imply that irony has no important rhetorical or ideological role in Marx’s work. See, for
example, Silva, “Epílogo sobre la ironía y la alienación” (116-30).
11. Neocleous writes: “Aunque Rousseau intenta situar al vampiro en el contexto más amplio de la
autoridad en la sociedad, su posición y la de Marx son muy distintas. Si bien puede ser que ‘Rousseau
se vea atraído por la imagen del vampiro porque ofrece un medio llamativo de simbolizar modos de
dependencia mutua en la sociedad que no son benignos’, no es evidente que la utilice de la misma
manera que Marx. Su visión puede tener que ver más con una ‘dialéctica amo-esclavo, con dientes’,
pero sin las mismas implicaciones que en Marx” (4). As Neocleous points out, Marx is closer to the
criticisms made by other Enlightenment thinkers (such as Voltaire) of the vampirism of the political
and economic elites.
12. Citing an expression from The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Policante asserts that, like capital,
“The vampire…‘creates a world after its own image’” (12).
13. MacLellan also discusses the positions of Althusser and Baudrillard on this subject.
14. In an alternative Reading, MacLellan proposes that in Stoker’s novel the vampire and his victims
constitute two sides of the same coin: the creative side (liberal individualism) and the destructive side
of capital.
15. This topic is also connected to the concept of the “general intellect” developed in Capital: the intellect
as a public, collective, and mass form of cognition that combines technical and social knowledge. For
more on the general intellect, see Virno and Christian Marazzi.
16. Gerald Raunig, “A Few Fragments on Machines.” http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/raunig/en
17. According to Terry Eagleton, “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry
from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all
superstition in regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in
order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the
revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went beyond
the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase” (183). In this passage, in which the role of the
rationality of progress is excessively emphasized, Eagleton does not consider residual forms of the past
 that the world of the dead bequeaths to capitalist modernity and the ways in which those elements were
integrated into nineteenth-century imaginaries.
18. On posthumanism, see Moraña, “La cuestión del humanismo.”
19. See Jean and John Comaroff, “Labor’s Lost,” in Alien-Nation.
20. See Edward Dutton, who develops an exhaustive critique of the concept of “zombie categories” in
relation to nationalism and questions the supposed “false rationality” of this idea.
21. “Trickle-down economy” refers to the idea that politics that favor the wealthiest segments of society
eventually result in the benefit of all through the effect of “filtering down.” The “Great Recession”
refers to the period of macroeconomic stabilization after 1985 and the possibility of its indefinite
perpetuation. The “hypothesis of efficient markets” refers to the idea that the prices generated by
financial markets are the best indicators about decisions involving investments and processes of
production.
22. Manifestations of this economy of the occult include, for example, organ trafficking, the sale of children
or their use in illegal work, the appropriation or exploitation of territories and labor forces, which
causes one to think that new forms of imperialism survive today under different methods and continue
to benefit global elites through transactions carried out via the bodies of the most dispossessed
populations in the world. Comaroff and Comaroff point out that, toward the end of the twentieth
century, violence increased markedly in Africa in the same way that reports of witchcraft and ritual
killings also increased to the point that special forces were created within the police to investigate
crimes related to occultism, witchcraft, and ritual deaths.
23. Alejandro Sánchez reflects on Drezner’s book and applies it to the case of Latin America, where
biological and technological threats to both individuals and society in general (including epidemics,
radiation, water pollution, food poisoning, and natural catastrophes) have tested the effectiveness of
emergency, evacuation, and public safety plans for scenarios which, like the fictional zombie epidemic,
have unforeseeable effects and bluntly expose the precariousness of life and the vulnerability of bodies.
24. “The Magic of Despair,” published by Gluckman as an independent essay in 1957, is included in Order
and Rebellion in Tribal Africa, 137-45.
25. For more on this point, see Comaroff and Comaroff, “Occult Economies” 289. See also Ronjon Paul
Datta and Laura McDonald, “Time for Zombies.”
26. See John Stratton, “Zombie Trouble,” 267.
27. Eco’s article was originally titled “Sullo stile del Manifesto” and published in the newspaper L’Espresso
on 8 January 1998. Eco recalls in this text the Venezuelan author Ludovico Silva’s valuable work El
estilo literario de Marx (1971). Eco laments that Silva only superficially discusses the Manifesto, a text
that the Venezuelan qualifies as “apocalíptico y poemático” (94). Curiously, Silva’s interesting study
also neglects to mention the theme of the monstrous in Marx’s work.
28. In this sense, Policante argues that the Manifesto implicitly rewrites Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice, although with substantial changes (for example, making the apprentice from the poem
disappear, diminishing the importance of the anecdote in Der Hexenmeister, through which the
devastated and irrational world of capital that, unable to control itself (like the vampire), can only
follow the logic of its own interminable reproduction. Policante associates this idea with the figure of
Dracula, whom he refers to as the narrator of Stoker’s novel, remarking that “His action is based on
selfishness, he confines himself to one purpose, and that purpose is remorseless” (342). Policante also
finds a clear parallelism between this characterization of Count Dracula and the description of capital:
“capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorise itself, to create surplus value, to make its
constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour” (Marx,
Capital 1:342, qtd. in Policante 6; Policante’s emphasis).
29. [This follows Peggy Kamuf’s translation of Derrida’s French neologism hantologie in Specters of
Marx. The term used in the original Spanish version of the present book is fantología.—Tr.]
30. As an example of the philosophical presence of the ghost, which can be traced back to Plato, Derrida
refers to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Francis Fukuyama’s work, particularly The End of
History and the Last Man, which is based on Kojève’s reading of Hegel. Derrida’s objective is to
analyze the place that Marxism continues to have as a narrative of the deconstruction of capitalism and
to propose a new historicity.
 Chapter 4

Monsters and Philosophy

The relationship between monsters and philosophy has been characterized by the
instability of the meanings monstrosity assumed in different cultures and
historical periods. This entails a conscientious investigation of the origins,
epistemic foundations, and socio-ideological functionality of monstrosity in a
variety of political contexts. Monstrosity is inseparable from mythology and
literary discourse, spaces often occupied by imaginary, wondrous, or horrifying
beings bearing messages and prophecies. Through these disparate perspectives,
the category of the monstrous and its different material forms are presented as
linked to sociocultural themes such as power, community organization,
individual or collective trauma, tragedy, and death.
Intrinsically linked to religious discourse and doctrine, the construction of
the state, and reflections on community, freedom, and sovereignty, the monster
concentrates theoretical positions, beliefs, and theses about the nature of the
social and the political across centuries, thereby practically becoming a
commonplace of critical thought.
By the dawn of the Enlightenment, monsters were being resisted by
empiricism, which held a vision of the real derived from perception and
experience. Beginning with the Cartesian concept of innate ideas, John Locke
(1632-1704), whose work is considered one of the foundations of liberalism,
rejected any possible relation between the monster and nature and relegated it to
the realm of subjectivity and fantasy. In his elaborations on human
understanding, Locke reaffirmed the idea that individual interpretation is what
establishes compartmentalizations and classifications of the real, making
monstrosity a problem of judgment related to everything outside the boundaries
of physical or mental normality.1 From an opposing philosophical perspective,
authors like Leibniz accepted the existence of monsters, understanding this
category as a conceptual field that calls for a scientifically and theologically
revised theory of Man.2
The Sinister, the Abject, and the Fetishization
of Difference: Freud, Kristeva, Baudrillard
The link between monstrosity and subjectivity is undeniable and has given rise
to a profusion of critical and philosophical elaborations. Explorations of the
border between the subject and its exteriority, between subjectivity and the
unconscious, and between the extreme particularism of the monstrous and the
idea of universality that informs the notion of the subject have formed the basis
for numerous reflections on the parameters that determine normality. This
constitutes a fundamental aspect of the definition of the monstrous because its
counter-normative character stands in contrast to the notions of order, regulation,
and naturalness that each era defines in its own terms.
In the domain of psychology, and in particular the field of psychoanalysis,
the theme of monstrosity frequently appears in connection with the unconscious,
the mechanisms of repression and sublimation, and the ideas of alienation,
transference, and censorship. The notion of the “uncanny,” which Freud
elaborated in his famous 1919 essay in response to an earlier study by Ernest
Jentsch, attempts to refute the idea that the uncanny can be reduced to a simple
form of rational disorientation or “intellectual incertitude” in the face of what
strikes us as unfamiliar or unclassifiable within the categories of our experience.
To clarify the meaning of the term that occasioned his reflection, Freud refers
to the notions of the mysterious, the threatening, and the ominous. He defines the
uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long
known to us, once very familiar” and provides the Spanish definition as
“sospechoso, de mal agüero, lúgubre, siniestro” (“The Uncanny” 1-2) in order to
clarify the connotations of the term. But perhaps the most disturbing meaning of
“the uncanny” has to do with the relation between fear and familiarity, or rather
the dangerous and terrifying potential that something from our everyday
experience could nevertheless be perceived as strange and hazardous in a
different context.
In his analysis of this unsettling, “disagreeable and repulsive” feeling of de-
familiarization, Freud refers to magical and religious thought as repositories of
beliefs and processes of symbolization that emerge in response to the
impossibility of finding an explanation for certain phenomena that seem to
surpass rationality:
 Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old,
animistic conception of the universe, which was characterized by the
idea that the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings, and
by the narcissistic overestimation of subjective mental processes (such
as the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, the magical practices
based upon this belief, the carefully proportioned distribution of
magical powers or “mana” among various outside persons and things),
as well as by all those other figments of the imagination with which
man, in the unrestricted narcissism of that stage of development, strove
to withstand the inexorable laws of reality. (“The Uncanny” 11-12)

This disturbing feeling of uncertainty about the nature of the object or being
that we perceive as suspicious, strange, or different is connected, according to
Freud, to things that should remain hidden or secret but are eventually revealed
and thus destabilize the world as we know it. For Freud, the feeling that derives
from this unhinging of the real has to do with the concepts of castration,
repression, and narcissism. This latter, for example, is channeled through the
triumph of the hero who by killing the monster reestablishes the order that was
disturbed by the irruption of the supernatural.
Monstrosity and heroism function, in effect, as two sides of the same
phenomenon: the confrontation between community and catastrophe. The
monster and the hero are both united by exceptionality, and they protect this
necessary relationship. One entails damnation and the other redemption. The
former embodies one of the instances of the dissolution of the social: it
constitutes a paradigmatic moment of revulsion and the reemergence of the
occult, the instance in which disorder, anomaly, chaos, insurrection, incoherence,
anarchy, and discomfort flourish. It is located at the limit of the social, on the
edge between the ego and the superego. The hero is also the paradigmatic
apparatus for the reestablishment of order because he is always portrayed as an
agent of positive change. As Joseph Campbell remarks in his classic work The
Hero with a Thousand Faces, the hero represents the values of the community.
His function in the epic of moral character is to reestablish the balance between
nature and culture, between social orders, genders, species, and sociocultural
domains that are ruled by antagonistic forms of behavior and knowledge.
However, if the monster’s condition is necessarily indeterminate, from the
psychoanalytic point of view it is identified with the malevolent figure of the
repressive (and sometimes usurper) father, lending it, as Freud indicates, a
totemic quality. The figure of the monster marks the repressive space of
exteriority and censorship, the place of the superego, while the hero is associated
with social regulation. In effect, it is the purpose of the hero to redefine and
redirect the principle of authority and to reestablish the relationship between
freedom and order, between individual and community, and between nature and
culture.
The paradoxical and ambiguous quality of this kind of scenario sums up the
essential aspect of the monstrous. Freud describes the reaction that is caused by
the inability to determine if an object or individual (a wax figure, a doll, or a
robot) is alive, dead, or inanimate. This indeterminacy or latency defamiliarizes
the object and makes it difficult to react appropriately to its presence and its
potential threat. The uncanny refers to the object’s ability to become blurred and
dispersed within a space, moment, or atmosphere where the lack of certainty
about its origin and nature heightens feelings of apprehension and fear of the
unknown.3
Within the economy of social relations, the monster constitutes “the accursed
share”: the excess or instance of symbolic dilapidation that causes the subject to
border “on explosion” (Bataille 30). This allows the community to have contact
with its sacred aspect, with what lay beyond the productive experience that fuels
the great machine of capital and its social order, substituting it with an excessive
unproductivity—which is also machinic—that only concentrates energy at the
symbolic level, thus carnivalizing the concepts of investment, utility, and
consumption.
In his explanation of the uncanny, Freud emphasizes the visual. The fear of
blindness (a fear provoked, for example, by the Sandman) is associated,
according to Freud, with the latent fear of castration. Although monstrosity does
not accommodate itself to reality, it maintains sufficient connection with it to
create unease, perplexity, and cognitive disorientation. It is dissonant but not
completely foreign to normal experience, as even the strangest expressions of the
uncanny are composed of recognizable parts and actions that are nonetheless
incoherently arranged.
Also related to the characterization of the monstrous is the notion of
abjection developed by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1980), which stems
from Freud’s concept of the uncanny and is firmly connected to the body and its
relation to the unconscious. On all levels the monstrous stands in contrast to
conceptualizations of normality and processes of cultural institutionalization and
social discipline because its very nature is defined by the transgression of
historically delimited borders and norms.
The theme of the abject, closely linked to the emotional realm of the
monstrous and the sinister, is described by Kristeva as a radical disturbance of
the foundations of identity, an impurity that erases the tracks of culture and
abruptly returns the subject to a pre-natural state, provoking alienation. The
abject is everything that the individual must undo in order to maintain itself as an
Ego. The abject thus entails:

a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it

might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as
radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either.
A “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of
meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which
crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality
that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are
my safeguards. The primers of my culture. (Kristeva 2)

Like monstrosity, the abject alters norms and compromises order, exposing
the vulnerability and porosity of the social order, the precariousness of its
hierarchies and structures.

It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what
disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders,
positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The
traitor, the liar the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless
rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior…. Any crime, because it
draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated
crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because
they heighten the display of such fragility. (Kristeva 4)

The monstrous and the abject are already closely related in religious
discourse, which poses these elements as the inverse of virtue. Barbara Creed, in
her essay “Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection,” notes that
 definitions of the monstrous as constructed in the modern horror text
are grounded in ancient religious and historical notions of abjection—
particularly in relation to the following religious “abominations”:
sexual immorality and perversion; corporeal alteration, decay and
death; human sacrifice; murder; the corpse, bodily wastes, the feminine
body, and incest. These forms of abjection are also central to the
construction of the monstrous in the modern horror film. (64-65)

The body is the terrain where the monster’s ominous activity unfolds: the
cadaver that returns to life or brings about death, the organism that feeds on the
other’s blood or fat, or which sacrifices, destroys, perverts, or alters its victims’
integrity, that appropriates spaces, and transgresses identities. In other words, the
monster’s body incorporates an element of degradation into life through the
macabre festival of its apparitions.
A criterion related to social hygiene delimits the field of the abject. From the
point of view of eugenics, the monster is excrescence, excess, impurity, and
should therefore be eliminated. In this sense, Carroll (following Mary Douglas’s
classic work, Purity and Danger) considers impurity to be one of the essential
features of the monstrous. In his opinion, together with the notion of danger, the
idea of impurity is an evaluative category that circumscribes and brings into
focus the object that generates the emotional reaction without which the art of
horror would fall apart. Interstitial and unfinished, the monster is defined above
all as a contaminated, corrupt, and condemned being. In her chapter dedicated to
“Secular Defilement,” Douglas analyzes the different forms of confronting
anomaly, as well as its connections to the ideas of ambiguity, pollution, and filth.
According to her analysis, this latter has several points of contact with the
monstrous, because, as we have noted, filth is an out-of-place material which
should be excluded to maintain order. Filth, like monstrosity, allows us to grasp
the differences and limits between the secular and the sacred, a criterion that is
present both in primitive and modern contexts (Douglas 50).
The domain of abjection is “the place where meaning collapses,” where the I
is annulled in its being. The monster, as an abject entity, is not only a concrete
and personal but also an epistemic threat. However, this very threat (as well as
the notion of the limit it establishes between life and death, normality and
exception) helps to define life and the quality of being human. Thus, abjection
and monstrosity are “the constitutive outside” of the vital principle, the thanatic
component, the alterity that delimits the borders of the self.
In Baudrillard’s theorization, evil constitutes a radical form of the
disequilibrium and vertigo that accompany seduction. From his perspective, the
monster is an apparatus for producing the re-enchantment of the world. Its
existence creates a signifying and productive disarrangement of the real because,
as radical alterity, the monstrous alters the predictable exchanges between
identity and otherness. For Baudrillard,

difference is itself a utopia: the idea that such pairs of terms can be
split up is a dream—and the idea of subsequently reuniting them is
another. (This also goes for the distinction between Good and Evil: the
notion that they might be separated out from one another is pure
fantasy, and it is even more utopian to think in terms of reconciling
them.)

[…]

Differences mean regulated exchange. But what is it that introduces

order into exchange? What is it that cannot be negotiated over? What is
it that has no place in the contract, or in the structural interaction of
differences?

What is founded on the impossibility of exchange?

Wherever exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror. Any

radical otherness at all is thus an epicentre of terror: the terror that such
otherness holds, by virtue of its very existence, for the normal world.
And the terror that this world exercises upon that otherness in order to
annihilate it. (The Transparency of Evil 145-46; emphasis in original)

The monster is thus not the other of the human being but the disarrangement
of difference, the non-negotiable element, the radical otherness that does not
enter into the contract. Hence its power of destabilization, its retreat into the
extreme contingence of its corporeality, its sacrifice at the altar of particularism.
The monster is an irreducible “fetishized difference,” and thus it should be
annihilated.
 The monster also brings up the problem of hospitality. It only becomes
threatening when it is near, such that the central question is that of distance, the
ways of covering it and inhabiting it. The monster proposes crucial questions
about the politics of identity and inclusion: Who will receive it? To what extent
can difference and exteriority be absorbed? What are the limits of the system’s
tolerance? These questions are essential for any critical analysis of racism,
gender discrimination, and xenophobia because, as Baudrillard notes, “wherever
exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror.”4
The monster can be eliminated, but monstrosity remains as a quality of the
real, an attribute that, like otherness, is inextinguishable:

The very scale of the efforts made to exterminate the Other is

testimony to the Other's indestructibility, and by extension to the
indestructible totality of Otherness.

Such is the power of this idea, and such is the power of the facts.
Radical otherness survives everything: conquest, racism,
extermination, the virus of difference, the psychodrama of alienation.
On the one hand, the Other is always-already dead; on the other hand,
the Other is indestructible.

This is the Great Game. (Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil 166)

Normality and Anomaly: Canguilhem, Foucault

Generally speaking, Foucault’s work represents one of the key moments in the
study of the modern notions of identity, civility, and social discipline. These
concepts, which are crucial for the analysis of subjectivity and the
comprehension of the regimes of rationality that inform it, are connected to
debates on normality and pathology and supported by the biopolitical model of
modernity. But if the problem is at first conceptual and philosophical, and
engages in the archeological exploration of culture that characterizes Foucault’s
work, it also involves the linguistic and semiotic registers through which identity
is defined and made intelligible.
In Foucault’s work, as in the work of his philosophical predecessors, the
subject of the monster mobilizes epistemic and representational issues that are
fundamental for the disciplinary construction of the human sciences. This
author’s treatment of the topic of the monster articulates discussions of normality
and anomaly as well as questions connected to the symbolic representation of
these categories which reveal the ways in which the production and
institutionalization of knowledge make their way through the intricate webs of
epistemic power and solidify in traditions, cultural archives, beliefs, and medical
and juridical practices.
As Luciano Nuzzo has noted in “Foucault and the Enigma of the Monster,”
the theme of the monster has a strategic value for the study of the
knowledge/power assemblage because it allows for the articulation of alternative
moral and political perspectives. According to Nuzzo, the Foucauldian method is
diagonally crossed by “the line of the monster” (56). This initiates a space of
emergence in which political and countercultural elements incorporate a limit
experience that is essential to Foucauldian thought. The monster represents
ungovernability, the crisis of thought, and the triumph of inadequacy. It
constitutes an exteriority from which the social can be deconstructed. At the
same time, the anomaly of the monster, which combines wonder and horror,
challenges thought to a confrontation with a radical ambiguity that resists
classifications and precise definitions. The monstrous is thus relegated to a zone
of epistemic liminality because the dominant rationality cannot contain it.
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) begins
with a discussion of Borges’s short story “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins”
in which Foucault reflects on monstrosity and its ways of assimilating to modern
regimes of truth. According to Foucault, monstrosity resides not in the
heteroclite attributes from different sources that make up imaginary creatures but
rather derives from the operation developed by Borges, who incorporates them
with an ingenious and taxonomic arbitrariness into the chaotic series of fantastic
animals described in a Chinese encyclopedia titled The Celestial Emporium of
Benevolent Knowledge. In effect, monstrosity emerges from the incongruent
attempt to stabilize the irredeemable heterogeneity of the real in the non-place of
language, a space affected—colonized—by the disturbing inscription of
difference. Borges tells us in his story that “no hay clasificación del universo que
no sea arbitraria y conjetural,” a notion that Foucault adheres to in his comment
that “The monstrous quality that runs through Borges’s enumeration consists, on
the contrary, in the fact that the common ground on which such meetings are
possible has itself been destroyed” (xvi). Foucault adds: “Heterotopias are
disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they
make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common
names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance” (xviii, emphasis in original).
Nuzzo argues that in The Order of Things the monster functions as an
apparatus for the study of the relationship between variation and continuity in
living beings and for the exploration of the passage from natural history to life
science at the beginnings of the modern period. In addition, this version of the
anomalous concentrates the problem of representation, which is also expressed
in Foucault’s analysis of the figure of the dwarf in Las meninas, where this
atypical and intriguing image decenters representational perspective, breaks the
order of discourse, and defamiliarizes the human and cultural landscape
portrayed in Velázquez’s painting. The dwarf introduces an epistemic in-
between-place that, by deviating from the norm, interrupts the linearity and
consistency of the social order, inserting heterogeneity and impurity into the
register of dominant reason. Modernity is thought as the domain in which
diversity pushes the epistemic limits of the classical era: “Monsters no longer
overturn the order of things, but they contribute to it…. [the monster] no longer
signals the point of rupture in the unity between nature/reason/ law. It is no
longer external to order, nature, knowledge, power. It is malformation or
degeneration that serves to explain the passage from one species to another”
(Nuzzo 63).
The monster’s difference exceeds the normative order that contains and
assimilates diversity according to defined concepts of (re)cognition. The monster
is situated instead in an arbitrary area that ignores and surpasses the binary
parameters of identity/otherness, reality/fantasy, normality/anomaly,
hegemony/marginality, exceptionality and everyday life. It inhabits a particular,
contingent cognitive space that, while not permeated with rationality, impels a
desire for knowledge that always remains unsatisfied, unfinished.

The monster incarnates, paradoxically, a lack of differentiation, or

better, it is that non-includable difference that threatens the capacity of
knowledge and power to establish and reproduce differences within a
given order. In this sense the monster is at the same time the effect and
the bodily manifestation, and therefore the visible aspect of the crisis.
 In other words, the monster reveals a character that is contingent and
therefore arbitrary of social, political, and cultural distinctions through
which identities are constituted. It puts them in doubt and interrogates
them on their presumed naturalness. (Nuzzo 58)

Gerard Unterthurner and Erik Vogt come to a similar conclusion about the
topic of classification when they discuss the effect that monstrosity has on the
modern enthusiasm for taxonomy: “Monstrosity presents thought with a
preeminently modern problem: classifications begin to fall apart, order turns into
disorder, normality bleeds into abnormality and the very ground of the human
starts to give way” (7).
The theme of difference (anomaly, pathology, exceptionality), as well as the
inscription of difference in language is one of the central concerns of Foucault’s
thought, which necessarily leads to the problem of the monster due to its
disruptive and residual element that alters—ruins—the order of the whole. In the
fifth chapter of The Order of Things, which is dedicated to classification,
Foucault notes that monsters form “the background noise, as it were, the endless
murmur of nature” (155) and adds: “The monster ensures in time, and for our
theoretical purposes, a continuity that, for our everyday experience, floods,
volcanoes, and subsiding continents confuse in space” (156). Monsters are in
this sense a testimonial of an ephemeral and variable space and time; they can
disappear without a trace, while their materiality functions as a common thread.
In this sense, the monster constitutes an element of exceptionality that, by
defamiliarizing our perception of the real, allows us to reconstruct the future and
give meaning to our historical and natural timeframe. As Carroll has observed in
his study of the philosophy of horror, every monster is above all a heuristic
apparatus (27), “a collection of properties” (85) around which the material and
symbolic world is de/re/organized.
As Nuzzo affirms, by avoiding all taxonomy, that is, by being situated
outside the order of discourse, the monster alludes to the problem of
representation, not as the necessary imbrication of signifier and signified, but
rather as the eventual discontinuity of both levels. The monster is produced by a
discourse that upon creating it declares its foreignness, thus inscribing that
externality in the interiority of language, which the monster itself exceeds. This
ensures that the monster will remain cognitively opaque and inaccessible,
thereby heightening the effect of fascination and mystery and expanding the
emotional field that surrounds it.
According to Foucault, there is an analogy between the monster and the
fossil insofar as both allow us to read transformation and difference as textures
of the real. He argues that:

The monster and the fossil both play a very precise role in this
configuration. On the basis of the power of the continuum held by
nature, the monster ensures the emergence of difference. This
difference is still without law and without any well-defined structure;
the monster is the root-stock of specification, but it is only a sub-
species itself in the stubbornly slow stream of history…. because the
monster and the fossil are merely the backward projection of those
differences and those identities that provide taxinomia first with
structure, then with character. Between table and continuum they form
a shady, mobile, wavering region in which what analysis is to define as
identity is still only mute analogy; and what it will define as assignable
and constant difference is still only free and random variation…. as a
movement ceaselessly being outlined, then halted as soon as sketched,
and perceptible only on the fringes of the table, in its unconsidered
margins. Thus, against the background of the continuum, the monster
provides an account, as though in caricature, of the genesis of
differences, and the fossil recalls, in the uncertainty of its
resemblances, the first buddings of identity. (The Order of Things 157)

Identity, language, difference, epistemic power, representation, are all central

ideas of Western epistemology, and they are defined in relation not only to
different cultural contexts but also in relation to the (ideological, institutional)
materializations of power. Foucault was especially concerned with the normative
aspect, which is unavoidable in the social and ideological inscription of
difference. His methodology confronts the theme of the norm from the gaps in
social regulation and observes the fissures that reveal blind spots and lines of
flight, oblique avenues that anamorphically uncover a different version of the
whole and the axiological pillars that support it. On this point, Foucault is in
dialogue with the epistemologist and philosopher of science Georges
Canguilhem, whose ideas also influenced the thought of Althusser, Derrida,
Deleuze, and other contemporary philosophers. Foucault’s concerns are
connected to the theses expressed in Canguilhem’s book The Normal and the
Pathological (1943).5
The subject Canguilhem addresses, connected in more than one aspect to the
concept of monstrosity, is undoubtedly of primary importance in the context of
Nazism, with respect to which the philosophy of the subject and the philosophy
of action acquire an inevitably ideological meaning. Just as Foucault would later
find, Canguilhem’s definitions of “normal” and “pathological” express a
biopolitical position with enormous consequences not only for science and the
humanities but also for the very concept of the social itself. In the introduction to
the first part of his book, Canguilhem summarizes his position, indicating: “This
is the thesis according to which pathological phenomena are identical to
corresponding normal phenomena save for quantitative variations” (35), thus
eliminating all speculation about the divergent and even opposed nature of both
categories.6 Canguilhem reviews different positions on illness: first, the
explanation of illness as the result of external agents (viruses, bacteria, etc.);
second, the Hippocratic perspective that takes a functionalist point of view
which considers the pathological to be derived from disturbances of organic
equilibrium, a process through which the body fights to reestablish a harmony
that has been threatened—a concept that will also serve as the basis for the
notion of (social) immunity elaborated by Roberto Esposito.
In the first position, pathology is ontologized, as it is considered an external
and material (observable) element that defies the state of health, attacking the
organism that has succumbed to its assault. The second position is thus more
dynamic because it proposes the internal struggle of conflicting forces as that
which produces organic disequilibrium. How then are we to understand the place
of anomaly? Is monstrosity caused by the action of the maleficent (foreign to
human essence) on the social body, that is, the overlapping of alien, material,
historical, circumstantial, and concrete elements? Or do individuals and
collective bodies contain within themselves a radical heterogeneity that
sometimes manifests itself and destabilizes them until a new equilibrium is
established by repressing pathological elements that nevertheless remain as
latent? Is the monstrous inherent to the human, to the social, or is it an
exogenous and threatening agent that tests its resistance or ability to respond? Is
the monstrous part of a divine plan or an individual’s biological nature? Or, on
the contrary, is it a demonic force that comes to destroy it?
Responses will obviously vary depending on the monster’s particular
condition and specific attributes. In zombies and vampires, the demonic or
monstrous element manifests in very different ways from those that are
portrayed as the result of technological transformation, like Frankenstein’s
creation, or those that are represented as extraterrestrial beings with a
presumably non-human nature. The creation of monsters thus initiates a game of
multiple combinations where what is fundamental is the coexistence of elements
that evoke disparate influences and whose unthinkable articulation defies norms
and invites a rethinking of the criteria on which they are founded.
With regard to monstrosity and the monstrous, Canguilhem admits the
attraction of the uncanny that accompanies the transgression of order and the
rupture of cognitive normativity: “zoomorphic monstrosity, if one admitted its
existence, had to be considered the result of deliberate attempt at infraction of
the order of things, which is one with their perfection; it had to be considered the
result of abandoning oneself to the dizzy fascination of the undefined, of
chaos…” (“Monstrosity and the Monstrous” 37). The introduction Foucault
wrote for a reedition of Canguilhem’s book toward the end of the 1980s
constitutes a well-deserved recognition of this author whose ideas had been
widely influential throughout the French philosophical milieu of the time. The
inscription of the problem of normality in the conceptual and methodological
protocols of science, as well as the explanation of the processes that led to the
establishment of systematic models for the evaluation of ordinary and
extraordinary forms of existence and social behavior, reaffirmed Foucault’s
positions on biopolitical power and its processes of institutionalization,
providing a basic cultural and historical foundation for its philosophical
development.
If The Order of Things constitutes a broad problematization of the
connections between reality, representation, and language, the collection of
twelve seminars given by Foucault between 1974 and 1975 at the Collège de
France and published under the title Abnormal provides a more circumscribed
interpretation of the processes of disciplining and configuring modern
imaginaries, which the author calls “technologies of the self.” Foucault analyzes
the “large, ill-defined, and confused family of ‘abnormal individuals’” as it
emerged as a differentiated and stigmatized segment of the social and in relation
to the apparatuses and institutions of regulation that were established at the end
of the nineteenth century to protect society from deviations that appeared to
threaten it from within. Thus, Foucault makes use of the category of
degeneration to help understand the abnormal’s conceptual development, its
historical variations, and its scientific delimitations. What primarily interests
Foucault is the juridico-philosophical aspect that surrounds this concept, which
combines disciplinary mechanisms and emotions (fears, desires) disseminated
throughout the social, many of them connected to the understanding of sexuality
and the consolidation of a normative, biopolitically controlled society. In this
regard, Foucault points out that

The norm consequently lays claim to power. The norm is not simply
and not even a principle of intelligibility; it is an element on the basis
of which a certain exercise of power is founded and legitimized…. the
norm brings with it a principle of both qualification and correction. The
norm’s function is not to exclude and reject. Rather, it is always linked
to a positive technique of intervention and transformation, to a sort of
normative project. (Abnormal 50)

In the process of construction that Foucault calls the “domain of the

anomaly,” the first element that stands out is the human monster, a being
transgressive by nature that exceeds all of the domains that involve its being:

The frame of reference of the human monster is, of course, law. The
notion of the monster is essentially a legal notion, in a broad sense, of
course, since what defines the monster is the fact that its existence and
form is not only a violation of the laws of society but also a violation
of the laws of nature. Its very existence is a breach of the law at both
levels. The field in which the monster appears can thus be called a
“juridico-biological” domain. However, the monster emerges within
this space as both an extreme and an extremely rare phenomenon. The
monster is the limit, both the point at which law is overturned and the
exception that is found only in extreme cases. The monster combines
the impossible and the forbidden. (Abnormal 55-56)7

The monster “violates the law while leaving it with nothing to say (Foucault,
Abnormal 56). Opposed to the norm, monstrosity is supported by the paradoxical
principle of intelligibility because, even though it illuminates zones of the real,
the monstrous continues to be in itself obscure, indecipherable: this is the
tautological quality that defines it—an impenetrable self-referentiality that keeps
the ultimate meaning of the monstrous inaccessible to reason. More than any
other counter-normative figure, the monster defies both the medical system and
the legal system. In Foucault’s words, “The monster is the fundamental figure
around which bodies of power and domains of knowledge are disturbed and
reorganized” (Abnormal 62). Defined as a hybrid and transgressive phenomenon,
the monster embodies a radical disorder.8 The monstrous abandons the domain
of the biological to solidly establish itself in the legal realm. The human monster,
particularly the criminal, but also the political monster (the one that represents
despotism, illegitimate power, state violence) ceases to be an enigma of nature
and becomes a social problem to be legislated. Monstrous behavior is the
purview of law as the discipline which regulates the activities and norms of
socialization.9
One of the most important aspects of Foucault’s reflections on the monstrous
concerns the connections that can be established between the models of
classification for these disproportionate deviations from the norm and the
organization of power. As Foucault argues, “It seems to me that the sudden
irruption of the literature of terror at the end of the eighteenth century, in the
years roughly contemporary with the Revolution, are connected to this new
economy of punitive power. It is the unnatural nature of the criminal, the
monster, that appears at this moment” (Abnormal 100). Thus, the figure of the
monster becomes historicized and imbued with political content.10
The criminal, like the monster, is a “body charged with hypotheses.”
Although Foucault’s reflections here address the construction of the monstrous
itself as a technology of subjectivation and social control, his considerations are
directly applicable to the transfer of these ideas to the symbolic registers of art,
literature, popular culture, mass culture, and so on. These domains construct
their own imaginaries of the monstrous, founded on received notions about
concepts such as normality, exceptionality, anomaly, pathology, health, and
illness, and its more or less predictable effects on society. In any case,
knowledge of the cultural contexts of the production of these discursive legacies
is indispensable for understanding the symbolic capital of the monstrous and its
possible political and ideological value.11
Canguilhem’s vitalist ideas, inspired by the work of Gastón Bachelard and
Henri Bergson (among others), address an understanding of the biological that is
capable of overcoming its merely physical and scientific aspects. Canguilhem
incorporates the concept of life with factors like living beings’ relationship to the
environment and the processes of the institutionalization of medicine, which are
crucial to the processes of social classification and the treatment of illnesses.12
For Canguilhem, the monster’s “value” resides in its countercultural,
contradictory character in relation to the vital principle. For this reason, the
monster functions from a death-like position, incarnating not the non-living but
the non-viable.
The monster is not only a living being with diminished value, it is a living
being whose value is its status as a counterpoint. This vital counter-value is not
death but monstrosity. Death is the permanent and unconditional threat of the
organism’s decomposition, the negation of the living by the non-living.
Monstrosity is the accidental and conditional threat of incompleteness or
distortion in the formation of the form: it is the limitation from within, the
negation of the living by the nonviable. (Knowledge of Life 135-136)
What Foucault particularly values in Canguilhem’s work is the analysis of
the conceptual formation that has been essential to the construction of scientific
knowledge and the determination of what is normal and what is pathological—or
simply anomalous—in society. These distinctions inform Foucault’s analyses of
madness, abnormality, sexuality, and related subjects. According to Foucault,
Canguilhem “proved impossible to make up a science of the living being without
having taken into account, as essential to its object, the possibility of disease,
death, monstrosity, anomaly, error…” (“Introduction”17). The monstrous is thus
the entropic obverse which is indispensable to the definition of the social.
Inversely, the concept of normality Canguilhem analyzes is essential for reading,
in reverse, the functionality of the monstrous from the perspectives of
philosophical anthropology and theories of value.
For Canguilhem, normality is a prescriptive prototype that emerged in the
nineteenth century to refer to the state of organic health. However, other aspects,
such as individual experience and individual modes of self-perception and social
recognition are fundamental for determining the notions of reality and
community “health.” Many physical or mental illnesses considered by medical
science to be deviations from the “normal” (a concept that historically varies and
is relative to different cultures) are not perceived by the individual as pathologies
(such as cases of hermaphroditism, conjoined twins, certain forms of mental
retardation, etc.) just as sexual orientations that are “normalized” today were at
one point understood as aberrations, illnesses, or dysfunctions. In this order of
things, the qualification of “monstrosity” as relational is reaffirmed, as are its
ethical, political, and ideological connotations, which are relative to the cultural
and social contexts at hand. The monstrous is thus connected inseparably to the
notions of social hygiene, eugenics, and biopolitics that define the anomalous
and expel it from the domain of order.

Event, Sublimity, and Anamorphosis: Žižek, Badiou

In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Slavoj Žižek recuperates Kant’s
definition of the sublime as a feeling that, while clearly distinct from beauty, is
similar to it insofar as it entails an epistemic limit. Chaos, great catastrophes, the
terror inspired by wild nature or uncontrollable passions are sublime because
they constitute an experience of the transcendent, the incommensurable and
trans-phenomenal. The monster, as the sublime, constitutes a failure of
representation insofar as it resists any totalizing model that tries to apprehend it.
With the monster, all hermeneutics are approximate, unstable, provisional. At the
same time, the opposite is true. In the monster, representation triumphs as the
materialization of an abstract and itinerant attribute of the real which otherwise
would only become apparent through intellectual cognition, an ability educated
in the interpretation of noncorporeal qualities of the world. Hence, the image of
the monster causes anxiety and frustration since it resists every totalizing
interpretation and escapes rationality, even though it convokes it. The monster is
connected to transcendent forms of projection and comprehension of the relation
between being and temporality, between the contingent and the universal.
In this sense, the monster is connected to the originary question of being, its
(id)entity, its relation to existence and the status of the real. If modernity can be
thought, from a Heideggerian perspective, in terms of the “distortion” of being,
the experience of the monster appears to lead to other investigations of the
notion of the subject that begin from reflections on the rupture of order and the
modalities through which truth is apprehended.13 The monster introduces to
experience a radical multiplicity that interrupts the (re)production of the same.
According to Alain Badiou, all truth constitutes a “hazardous supplement (that)
interrupts repetition” (qtd. in Leveque 14). Thus, it creates a fundamental
discontinuity in the order of the real. The monster’s prophetic quality, the truths
that it offers in a coded way, open new possibilities for understanding the
relations between being, nature, existence, and temporality, as well as new
perceptions of social relations, the connections between the subject and power,
and so on. Its meanings are in this sense migrants, or “infinite” in Badiou’s
sense, because they can be reactivated in contexts that are heterogeneous to the
world in which they were created (Leveque 19).
In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek cites the Critique of Judgment
(1790), where Kant argues that the sublime “is an object (of nature) the
representation [Vorstellung] of which determines the mind to regard the
elevation of nature beyond our reach as equivalent to a presentation
[Darstellung]” (qtd. in Žižek 202; emphasis in original). The monster is, like the
sublime, pure presence, a “terrifying limitless” phenomenon (like a raging sea),
an experience that language or visual representation cannot grasp. The
monstrous gives rise to contradictory feelings connected to the inability of
reason and imagination to include presence and its effect, which exceeds the
limits of experience. The sublime, like the monster, confronts us with the
constant failure of representation (Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology 203):

The feeling of the Sublime is, therefore, at once a feeling of

displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic
estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and a
simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgement of
the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with
ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law.
(Kant, qtd. in Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology 203)

In a subsequent book, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political

Ontology (1999), Žižek returns to the relation between the sublime, the beautiful,
and the sinister in the context of his discussion of Kant and Heidegger’s ideas
about the modern subject. Monstrosity and madness constitute unavoidable
instances for comprehending subjectivity. Both in Schelling and in Hegel,
madness appears as “a withdrawal from the actual world, the closing of the soul
into itself, its ‘contraction,’ the cutting off of its links with external reality…as a
‘regression’ to the level of the ‘animal soul’ still embedded in its natural
surroundings and determined by the rhythm of nature (Žižek, The Ticklish
Subject 34). It is precisely this moment prior to consciousness that is
indispensable for understanding the passage from the state of nature to the world
of the symbolic. The similarity between the roles of monstrosity and madness in
the construction of the real and the subjectivity that organizes it is based
precisely in the externality of these forms with respect to the regime of
normativity, in the consolidation of an epistemic outside that makes it possible to
conceptualize, in Žižek’s terms, the passage from the “night of the world”
(understood as “the phantasmagorical, pre-symbolic domain of partial drives”) to
the everyday world governed by rationality:

the ontological necessity of “madness” lies in the fact that it is not

possible to pass directly from the purely “animal soul” immersed in its
natural life-world to “normal” subjectivity dwelling in its symbolic
universe. The “vanishing mediator” between the two is the “mad”
gesture of radical withdrawal from reality which opens up the space for
its symbolic (re)constitution. (The Ticklish Subject 35)

For Žižek monstrosity is the occult but undeniable side of the modern subject
because the monstrous is the site of a pre-ontological dimension of the real (the
“night of the world,” according to Hegel) that exhibits and preserves the gap
between reality and the sinister.14 This form of spectrality constitutes the
subject’s shadow, it is inseparable from it and indispensable to its constitution.
The monster embodies radical otherness, the nightmare that is projected onto
others, although in reality it refers more than anything to the interiority of
consciousness, the ambiguous and oscillating part of being and the real.
Žižek brings together the difference between the Kantian vision of the
impossibility of a subjectless reality and the Hegelian position for which
“subjectivity is inherently pathological (biased, limited to a distorting,
unbalanced perspective on the Whole).” According to Žižek, if in Kant the
monstrous constitutes the “vanishing mediator” between phenomenal reality and
the transcendent realm,
 Hegel’s achievement was thus to combine, in an unprecedented way,
the ontologically constitutive character of the subject’s activity with the
subject’s irreducible pathological bias: when these two features are
thought together, conceived as co-dependent, we obtain the notion of a
pathological bias constitutive of “reality” itself. (The Ticklish Subject
78; emphasis in original)

Monstrosity, understood as the deconstruction and proliferation of form,

appears as a mediation that affects whatever is observed, as if it were a lens that
reveals aspects of the real that are inaccessible to conventional, direct
perception. This monstrous quality constitutes a form of sublimity that the
Gothic incorporates in its exaggeration of the sensory and its exaltation of
experience. The monstrous moves away from the paradigms of beauty and truth
of the classic sublime to connect itself to terror and the transgression of the
borders between life and death, an excess of sometimes cosmic dimensions. H.P.
Lovecraft’s work is frequently cited as an example of this expansion of aesthetic
experience that destabilizes the paradigms of formal and compositional harmony
in favor of delirious and exorbitant creations that alter the experience of the
world and the functioning of reason. The sublime is related in this sense to
danger, fear, and pain as extreme instances of subjective alienation and
fragmentation. In his study of supernatural horror in literature, Lovecraft
comments on the role of the emotional field unleashed by the representation of
evil incarnate—that is, the monster—whose appearance disturbs Enlightenment
rationality:

Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than
pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the
unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by
conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and
more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular
supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the
fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making
any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.
(Supernatural Horror in Literature 14)

Based on this pathologization of the real, Lacan mobilized the idea of

anamorphosis that Žižek subsequently employs, explaining that it is “a part of
the perceived scene [which] is distorted in such a way that it acquires its proper
contours only from the specific viewpoint from which the remaining reality is
blurred” (The Ticklish Subject 78). The monstrous actualizes this deconstructive
operation by establishing a point of view from which what is observed reveals
structures and qualities that are inaccessible to traditional thought. The monster
is both the “anamorphic stain” and the blind spot that is activated only when the
viewer adjusts his or her gaze and becomes aware of the position from which
meaning is given to experience.
Žižek reminds us that the monstrous appears to be understood in Heidegger
(particularly in An Introduction to Metaphysics) as a form of dislocation that the
human being actualizes by installing social order through a violent (monstrous)
imposition of political, economic, and cultural logics onto nature itself (The
Ticklish Subject 49). For Lacan, as Žižek indicates, the ghost maintains the
reality of the subject and allows access to it. This is the moment of “madness”
and the unhinging of reason that makes possible the symbolic (re)construction of
reality, the link through which the pathologization of the given and the temporary
withdrawal to nature establish the idea of an other normality.15 Fantasy is
characterized, as Žižek suggests (following Lacan), by a “radical
intersubjectivity.” According to this view, the monster’s efficacy derives from its
relational and interpellative capacity, from its constant desire for the Other, and
from its ability to interpret it.
Analyzing the relation between Kant and Hegel, Žižek refers to the
connections between the sublime and the monstrous as the production of a
double violence:

The violence of the imagination in the Sublime is twofold: it is the

violence of the imagination itself (our senses are stretched to their
utmost and bombarded with images of extreme chaos), as well as the
violence done to imagination by Reason (which compels our faculty of
imagination to exert all its powers and then to fail miserably, since it is
unable to comprehend Reason). (The Ticklish Subject 42; emphasis in
original)

The monster is an advent, an event, an occurrence that disrupts the real with
its symbolic violence. Its presence, signaled by the feeling or experience of the
sublime, “marks the moment at which something emerges out of Nothing—
something new that cannot be accounted for by reference to the pre-existing
network of circumstances….The feeling of the Sublime is aroused by an Event
that momentarily suspends the network of symbolic causality” (The Ticklish
Subject 43).
The moment of the advent or appearance of the beautiful, whose symmetrical
impact is similar to that of the monstrous, is conceptualized by Kant as an
epiphany of the Good. Heidegger, through a reading of Antigone, maintains a
position that, in contrast to Kant’s, “ignores the Sublime—that is, he links
Beauty directly to the Monstrous…Beauty is the mode of apparition of the
monstrous; it designates one of the modalities of the Truth-Event that shatters
our allegiance to the everyday run of things—that is, it derails our immersion in
das Man (the way ‘it is done’)” (Žižek, The Ticklish Subject 48-49). As Žižek
notes, for Heidegger, the monstrous (the sinister, the demonic) is connected to
the fact that “man is primordially ‘out of joint,” a condition that is natural to him
because violence is inherent in the everyday world, which is governed by the
values and rules of the polis.
According to Žižek, Kant’s greatest contribution was not shedding light on
the gap that separates phenomenal reality and the domain of the transcendent but
rather revealing the “vanishing mediator” between both levels. He writes, “if one
brings his line of thought to its conclusion, one has to presuppose, between
direct animality and human freedom subordinated to Law, the monstrosity of a
pre-synthetic imagination ‘run amok,’ generating spectral apparitions of partial
objects” (The Ticklish Subject 52).
“Partial object,” “vanishing mediator” between different domains of being,
epiphany or advent that recalls logos, “the night of the world,” or “anamorphic
stain,” the monster announces, distorts, suspends the order of the real,
reaffirming the symbolic as a dis-located, interstitial space that paradoxically is
able to capture continuities and ruptures of meaning that are only visible from
certain forms of madness that reveal, uncover, and resignify through distortion.
This pre-ontological aspect, theorized by German idealist philosophy and other
modern philosophical perspectives on the subject of difference,

recognizes that it must take recourse to its other: the alien, madness,
body, gender, death, even its own blind spot or the unfathomable—in
 short, it has to take recourse to the determining indeterminateness of a
stationary fastening ground that is carried by an impulse or differential
sense corroding and subverting all (reasonable) ground. This very
movement is the site of the monstrous. (qtd. in Unterhurner and Vogt
10)

In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988), Deleuze refers to the event,
relating it to the concepts of multiplicity and chaos, defining this latter as the
sum of everything possible. The event is “something rather than nothing,” a form
of being of matter that fills space and time; an extensive series of intrinsic
properties and intensities, a “chaosmic” space whose occurrence changes the
world in a unique way. Hence, Deleuze sees the Baroque as a transition in which
classical reason is overtaken by divergences and dissonances (The Fold 81) that
open up paths to new realities.16 The Baroque, another of those symbolic spaces
where monstrosity and macabre aesthetics proliferate, monumentalizes a
rationality challenged by the difference that colonizes its principles of authority.
In Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept (2014), Žižek returns
to many of these ideas in relation to the event as a rupture in the order of the
real, as “an effect that has exceeded its causes” and which develops “without
sufficient reason,” foreign to logic, like the cornerstone of an alternative that
prior to the event was unthinkable. The event lends itself to transcendental and
ontological approaches that explore its conditions and its location in the real
from different perspectives. The idea of discontinuity returns as a “rupture of
symmetry,” a kind of ontological Big Bang in which a “concrete universality”
generates antagonisms and inconsistencies that would otherwise be repressed
under the appearance of balance and “order” (Žižek, Event 6-8).
Converging with many of the positions mentioned above, Alain Badiou has
also written about the concept of the event since the 1980s, although in relation
to earlier philosophical influences.17 In the face of what Badiou calls the
“inconsistent multiplicity” of the real, the event appears as an interruption of the
social situation that uncovers and unleashes repressed, invisible, and
unrepresented (more than unrepresentable, since they lack any representation
whatsoever) elements. According to Badiou, reality is an “inconsistent
multiplicity,” a space that is both empty and excessive, absence and surplus. This
form of the real is subordinated by the dominant order, which is to say, repressed
by institutions, ideologies, and cultural practices. This repression constitutes the
realm of the excluded, which forcefully reappears on occasion, creating a fissure
or interruption in the texture of the real. This emergence is a cognitive
occurrence in which multiplicity and contradiction are revealed as inherent
qualities of the real.
Applying Badiou’s ideas to the central theme of the present book, it is
obvious that in any event the monster makes visible truths that exist outside the
real such as it is perceived through dominant knowledges. We thus understand
event to mean a non-systemic, antinormative, unforeseeable, unwilled,
unthinkable, disarticulating, disruptive occurrence. In the same sense, the
monster is an event, a scandal, a catastrophe, a happening, an incident: an
ephemeral but dramatic apparition that impacts the social order, an accident of
irrepressible epistemic intensity that compels reconsideration of values and
beliefs.18
The monster’s presence therefore constitutes a rupture, a scandal in the order
of the everyday that reveals the profligate heterogeneity that underlies the
normative conception of the social. Tzvetan Todorov had already referred in his
studies of the fantastic to Roger Caillois’s notion in Au Coeur du Fantastique
(1965) that “The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an
irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality” (Todorov
15). The irruption of the monster bears this same liberating and revealing
character, although its profound meaning should be interpreted within the
concrete contexts in which it emerges.
As event, the monster makes its existence visible in a dramatic,
uncontestable way through an excessive, hyperbolic, and irrepressible presence
capable of interrupting the spatio-temporal sequence of history (understood as
continuity, progression, or development), leaving an indelible trace in the
imaginary.19 The monster has the principal effect of fundamentally altering the
registers of the truths of an era and, in its capacity as an event, authorizing a
reinscription of the social contract. It is part of the broad “rhizomatic resistance”
(Karatzogianni and Robinson; Anderson 265) that underlies the system and
induces social change since, by bringing to the surface elements that have yet to
be recognized, the monster constructs subjectivity and agency, gives a name to
that which does not yet exist, and becomes an irreversible tool for epistemic
intervention. In this sense, the monster is emergent in the double sense of urgent
and emerging.
What is fundamental in this process is the recognition of the event, because it
is only through this recognition that the excluded may find its place and
meaning. The irruption of the monster traumatizes the structure in which its
presence is embedded but in so doing defamiliarizes the real and suspends the
legitimacy of its regimes of truth, thereby allowing for reflections on lack and
symbolic substitution. It reestablishes the multiplicity negated by the pretensions
to consistency and homogeneity that constitute the ontologized masks of
hegemonic systems. As event, the monstrous fills a void, it allows the
anomalous, different, and disruptive to acquire (id)entity and to contribute to the
redesign of social fields. The monster constitutes a point of inflection: it permits
reflection on what Giorgio Agamben calls “the vertigo of immanence,” a
“contemplation without knowledge” that might allow for some type of intuition
of the meaning of life itself (“Absolute Immanence” 230, 233).
As with Agamben’s concept of bare life, the event has no specific qualities,
nor are the particularities of its identity the same as those that occur in the
existential plane in which it is inscribed. Its valence is generic, its relevance is
that of presence, of the interruption of dominant normality. What matters is its
praxis and the revolutionary and traumatic transformation (understood in the
broad sense of radical structural change) that it unleashes. This radical
transformation is neither managed nor controlled, and its causal relations with
the contexts in which it emerges are aleatory, which is why deciphering the
ultimate meaning of the event is subject to interpretation as well as its suitability
for varying theoretical and ideological purposes.
The monster as event is beyond the juridical, beyond determinism,
chronology, social regulation, and moral principles. Only its articulation with
certain discourses or historicity can provide its precise meaning. In any case, it is
clear that its disruptive character contains elements that point to the possibility of
an other world, to alternative values and epistemic models. After the event, just
as in the aftermath of the monster, reality is irrevocably changed, modified by
elements that reveal an alterity that should be incorporated in some way to the
social order and to collective imaginaries. From its presence emerge new forms
of subjectivity and new possibilities for political agency. The examples of events
that Badiou provides include the Bolshevik Revolution, the Paris Commune, and
Zapatismo, among others.

Monstrosity, Nomadism, War Machine:

Deleuze, Guattari, Braidotti, Maffesoli
In Deleuzean terms, the monster is a war machine: it is irreducible to the state,
and it exists both outside of sovereignty and prior to the law. The monster is an
element: a fragment or part that does not aspire to the whole, an abstract, non-
subjectivized machine whose main purpose is to harass the system, to surround
it, circumscribe it, intervene in it, disturb it—a dynamic that challenges the
centralizing and unifying practices of the state. The monster’s nature is eccentric,
dispersed, interstitial, on the border, enmeshed. Its main characteristic is
multiplicity, its space is the in-between place, the zone of contact, the border, the
microphysical dimension that suddenly expands and proliferates in an illusory
search for universality.
This machinic function of the monster moves along multiple and complex
trajectories that connect it to different contexts, from industrialism to Marxism,
from gender studies to contemporary cyberculture. Without a doubt, this
multiplicity of associations presupposes particular cultural and symbolic
domains—the spaces of classical mythology, medieval teratology, and the grand
machine of the production (and exclusion) of modern subjectivity—that is, the
articulations in which the monster’s machinic function engages (as Deleuzean
theory suggests). The question that underlies these assemblages is always the
question of reality, of its status and origin: “We do not start from a metaphorical
usage of the word machine, but from a (confused) hypothesis concerning origins:
the way in which heterogeneous elements are determined to constitute a machine
through recurrence and communications” (Deleuze and Guattari, “Balance-Sheet
for ‘Desiring Machines’” 91-92).
First proposed by Deleuze and Guattari but developed by other authors, like
Michel Maffesoli, Rosi Braidotti, Antonio Negri, and others, the idea of
nomadism designates a form of critical consciousness aimed at the analysis of
the processes of the construction of subjectivity and the forms of resistance
generated by the modern/postmodern sociocultural system. Beyond the reach of
the panopticon, the monster’s deregulated mobility manifests on the smooth
space of an alternative that is opposed to the striated territory of the state and its
mechanisms of capture. As Brian Massumi explains,

“Nomadic thought” does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered

interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not
repose on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial
division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept,
and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that
knows no bounds. The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the
eternal form of a legislating subject, to the extent that they can be said
to have one, is only secondary. They do not reflect upon the world but
are immersed in a changing state of things. (xii)20

From the point of view of its trajectories, which is to say, from its relations
with the material and existential territories in which it moves, the monster’s
drifting movement ascribes it, although it does not circumscribe it, to geography.
Regarding nomadic mobility, Deleuze and Guattari note that “It is true that the
nomads have no history; they only have a geography” (A Thousand Plateaus
393). In this sense, the monster is a “vector of deterritorialization,” a line of
flight out of the system from which it originates and which ignores, contains,
and repels it.
In relation to these concepts, the monster can be thought from Maffesoli’s
proposals about the notion of wandering (which is connected to the concepts of
tribe, pack, horde) and is defined as an “immutable, always new structure”
which is supported by the notions of resistance and deregulated mobility
(Maffesoli, Du nomadisme 14-15).
In the chapter of A Thousand Plateaus titled “1730: Becoming-Intense,
Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…” (where the authors also allude
to Lovecraft and Borges), Deleuze and Guattari describe the relation between
becoming-animal, pack, and multiplicity, arguing that

A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a

peopling, in short, a multiplicity…. every animal is fundamentally a
band, a pack.… It is at this point that the human being encounters the
animal. We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack,
for multiplicity. A fascination for the outside? Or is the multiplicity that
 fascinates us already related to a multiplicity dwelling within us? (239-
240)

This idea of being as multiple and internally inhabited by multiplicity breaks

with the notion of identity as the totalization and arrest of meaning, but it also
brings the living closer to what is separate from it, what tends toward the
outside, toward pluralization and the occupation of a space beyond ontological
self-defense. This tendency toward multiplicity is especially prevalent in
demonic creatures, such as vampires, that come about through reproduction,
infection, or contagion.
The monster’s becoming is minor in the Deleuzean sense, a metamorphosis
that continues to develop against the backdrop of a temporality that seems to
prohibit the coming about of an event. The monster communicates an enigma, an
over-encrypted knowledge that saturates the instance of signifiers and refers to
knowledges that are inaccessible to dominant forms of rationality. It is a
knowledge on the margin of the margin, an enigmatic prediction of the future, an
archaicizing reading of the past and the present. Referring to Deleuze and
Guattari’s argument, Walter Kohan explains that

cuando el Estado entra en el pensamiento, lo hace en nombre del

Sujeto Universal, para generar consenso, para unificar, reproducir y
universalizarse; al contrario, en algunos contra pensadores, el
pensamiento, como una máquina de guerra, entra en relación inmediata
con el afuera, y manifiesta una fuerza que combate imágenes, modelos
y copias de forma ametódica. El pensamiento se vuelve en este último
caso un pathos, un antilogos, pura exterioridad no universalizable. (37)

In this conception, the notion of wandering, or nomadism, indicates the

definition of a performative category that implies new horizons, both cognitive
and existential, characterized by hybridity and the deterritorialization of subjects,
ideas, and projects. Like the monster, the notion of wandering or nomadism has a
resonance with the archaic or the premodern and indicates the presence of
counter-normative, itinerant, and inorganic dynamics that resist the concepts of
unity, cohesion, permanence, hierarchy, limit, institutionality, totalization, and so
on. The open, disperse, and proliferating nature of the nomad is opposed to the
molar notions of discipline, control, confinement, permanence, legality, and
order.
The monster’s nomadic movement is an erratic becoming guided by desire,
but it is also repetitive, ritualized, and localized by its circumstances, although it
is not (de)limited by them. It displaces the symbolic order and installs in its
place an abundance of signs: warnings of danger, intensities that fill spaces with
emotion, thus resignifying them. As a line of flight, the monster flees and returns
like a boomerang or a ritornello. Its (e)migration is more like a journey or a leap
without a destination in which what matters is the drive to keep moving forward,
not the arrival or the journey itself.

Aun cuando evidentemente el nómade se mueve, no es el movimiento

su característica distintiva, para Deleuze, y por eso diferencia al
nómada del migrante: los dos se mueven, pero mientras el primero lo
hace por hábito y por necesidad, siguiendo caminos habituales como
etapas de un trayecto mayor, el segundo, en cambio, va de un punto a
otro sin tanta previsión, incluso cuando el punto de llegada es dudoso o
mal localizado. Deleuze sigue a Toynbee, para quien no es el
movimiento el que define al nómade: al contrario, el nómade es el que
no se mueve, el que se desplaza para aferrarse a un lugar, para
agarrarse a su espacio. El movimiento es extensivo en cuanto la
velocidad es intensiva, por eso los nómades no se caracterizan por el
movimiento sino por la velocidad. En todo caso, los nómades se
moverían en torbellino, girando sobre cualquier punto sin
necesariamente moverse extensivamente en el espacio. (Kohan 38)

For Maffesoli, wandering is primordial, a(n) (anti)(de)territorial(ized) drive

that is actually the form taken by the permanent quest of individuals and
communities, as well as by occult, minor, interstitial, or underground practices.
Given the Western obsession with sedentary and institutionalized structures,
wandering can only be associated with the primitive, barbarous, archaic, savage,
remote, and monstrous. Wandering is the confrontation of the subject with
multiplicity and with the fluctuation of spaces, languages, identities, customs,
and existential territories.
Thus, nomadism affirms itself as exteriority and presupposes groupings and
collective forms of practice, like hordes or bands. It implies an alternative, the
search for a smooth and decentralized space (to use Deleuzean terms) in which
the inorganic nature of the multiple is developed, resisting the centralization and
hierarchization associated with the formation of the state and more generally
with apparatuses of knowledge/power. These latter function as an exclusive
system that discards and displaces the Other to the margins of dominant
rationality. In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari affirm in A Thousand Plateaus:

Packs, bands are groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the

arborescent type that centers around organs of power. That is why
bands in general, even those engaged in banditry or high-society life,
are metamorphoses of a war machine formally distinct from all State
apparatuses or their equivalents, which are instead what structure
centralized societies. We certainly would not say that discipline is what
defines a war machine: discipline is the characteristic required of
armies after the State has appropriated them. The war machine answers
to other rules. We are not saying that they are better, of course, only
that they animate a fundamental indiscipline of the warrior, a
questioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment or
betrayal, and a very volatile sense of honor, all of which, once again,
impedes the formation of the State. (358)

In dialogue with the work of Pierre Clastres, particularly his book Society
Against the State, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the importance of these other
forms of social functioning, a recognition that can only be achieved by liberating
oneself from those models of social organization that are imposed as the only
valid ones. According to Clastres, the notion of history as a progression from
primitivism to the state formation should be revised, an approach that Deleuze
and Guattari echo when they assert:

These mechanisms cannot be understood without renouncing the

evolutionist vision that sees bands or packs as a rudimentary, less
organized social form. Even in bands of animals, leadership is a
complex mechanism that does not act to promote the strongest but
rather inhibits the installation of stable powers, in favor of a fabric of
immanent relations. (A Thousand Plateaus 358)

As we will soon see, certain forms of monstrosity, such as the werewolf

(which is taken up by Agamben and Hardt and Negri), are emblematic of these
collective forms of lurking that destabilize existing powers and appear to
constitute a collective body that is much more than the sum of its parts—such as
is the case with many other monsters that operate individually. In any case, the
element of repetition is fundamental: one wolf, many wolves, or the repetition of
actions that automatically or instinctively recreate the same behavior which
reinforces itself through multiplicity and rhizomatic development.
In these theoretical contexts, the question of the monster is inscribed in the
central thematic of subjectivity and the processes of the construction of signifiers
that take the theme of subjectivity as their mainspring. As an anomalous entity,
the monster exemplifies a radical lack and at the same time an excess, an
overqualification that distinguishes and separates it from normality and causality,
isolating it and relegating it to a non-categorical, rebellious, and nomadic level.
Given its de-totalizing, fragmentary, accumulative, and incomplete character, the
monster is the Deleuzean body in which multiple becomings constantly develop
(Braidotti, “Nomadism with a Difference” 306). Heterotopic and polymorphic,
its variable and “chaosmic” corporeality concentrates meanings that range from
the primordial to the futuristic, from the telluric to the sidereal, from the
contingent to the universal: “for Deleuze, the corporality of the subject is a
dynamic web of potentialities and intensities in constant move and
transformation. In this respect, Deleuze’s thought both displaces and transforms
the corporality of the subject” (Braidotti, “Nomadism with a difference” 307).
The monster’s nomadism is therefore not simply territorial and physical but
rather cognitive, ethical, and epistemic. Through its kaleidoscopic corporeality,
the monster opens up a multi-dimensional ethics and the possibility of constant
(and sometimes radical) political and social resignification. Its status as event, as
well as its use as an unstable, enigmatic, empty signifier, destabilizes the center
by mobilizing and pluralizing significations from the margins, from where new
forms of being, cognition, and consciousness emerge. This is the itinerancy of
the monstrous; this is its disruptive, erratic, semiotic nomadism.
To a great extent, although the monster (re)establishes the question of
humanity and the connotations of this concept for a (re)definition of humanism,
we must also admit that its existence replaces the question of identity with the
question of the entity of being itself, its “face-value” meaning, its ontic sense.
The Machinic Monster: Spectrality and Posthumanism
The monster’s artificiality is limitless. Even its grotesque mimicry of the human
relies on some type of machinic quality. The monster is above all an assemblage:
a construct that inevitably exposes the physical and emotional parts from which
it is composed, as if it were a collage that aspired not to totalization but rather to
the simple (de)monstration/monstering of its fragmented and precarious being.
The monster’s corporeality cannot hide its physical disharmony, its morally and
aesthetically offensive features, or its characteristic lack of organicity, much in
the same way that its actions are revealed to be a desperate search for the Other,
an expression of the insatiability of desire. The monster’s corporeality is
composed of heteroclite qualities articulated in unexpected, surprising, and
horrifying syntheses. The monster has a unified constitution that overflows with
attributes, although it is possible that they do not come to the surface
simultaneously but rather successively, as a becoming, a folding, unfolding, and
refolding of an identity always in the process of (de)construction.
The monster’s presence in modernity begins in the Gothic context, which, as
we have seen, consisted of reactions to scientific and technological advances that
appeared to many of the time as indecipherable and threatening constructs that
would affect collective subjectivities. The Gothic genre’s popularity in the
nineteenth century has also been interpreted as a product of the Industrial
Revolution and the average person’s fear of the new system of factories and
machines, as well as a radical mistrust of these strange new contraptions that
evidently threatened to replace human workers. Many Gothic narratives revolved
around monsters, which in some way represented the dangers of technology.
Responding to fear with fear, the Gothic elaborated the anxiety of the era but at
the same time had more abstract and transhistorical concerns related to the place
of the human and its transformations.
The monster conjoins paradoxical or contradictory conditions and operates
through the repetition of mechanical and predictable behaviors. Its lack of
consciousness itself, or at least the inscrutability of its mental capacity, connects
it to instinct and desire: it is a being (or a living thing) in a constant state of
anxiety and uncertainty. But if the monster’s constitution is already machinic, its
functionality also reveals itself to be an artificial apparatus designed to substitute
human functions or to expand an individual’s abilities with regard to his or her
surroundings. The machine effectuates a transformation of energy, it makes a
becoming possible, it is itself part of a process that turns potential into action,
that creates mutations and avatars, that operates in violation of the real, taking it
beyond the limits of the natural and originary, placing it before the abyss of the
limit and the utopian promise of conquering it.
The monster moves within the indiscernible space of becoming, which, as
Deleuze and Guattari argue, has neither beginning nor end, only a medial,
indiscernible, and unstable zone in which existence can only take the form of
deterritorialization, constituting zones of variable proximity (A Thousand
Plateaus 293). Becoming functions as a series of successive assemblages that
connect the monster, that plug it in to one register or another (the animal and the
human, the human and the machinic, etc.), which is to say, to different forms of
territorialization and desire. The monster unfolds between making and
unmaking, doing and non-doing. However, at the same time, as Deleuze and
Guattari emphasize, every assemblage is also a system of signs, a semiotic
complex, an enunciative constellation. John Macgregor Wise writes that the
concept of the assemblage entails the combination of heterogeneous parts that
come to form provisional, contingent totalities. An assemblage is not a thing or a
practice or a sign per se, but rather a collection of qualities, affects, velocities,
and densities, a flow of agency rather than a concrete practice of power (84).
The monster’s machinic corporeality is a simulacrum whose effectivity is
realized precisely by exposing the false as false, by renouncing all mimeticism.
It indicates artificiality but evokes the human, and it is this de-formed and out-
of-joint echo, this insatiable anxiety, that amplifies its impact. Its being is
catastrophic and marked by fatality. Its essential feature is hybridity, which has
obvious ontological, epistemic, and biopolitical connotations, because it
constitutes a material and symbolic rearticulation of the concept of life and its
relations to the natural (biological) and cultural (technological) worlds.
Jacques Derrida defines the state as a prosthesis that makes it possible to
enforce political control:

the state is a sort of robot, an animal monster, which, in the figure of

man, or of man in the figure of the animal monster, is stronger, etc.
than natural man. Like a gigantic prosthesis designed to amplify, by
objectifying it outside natural man, to amplify the power of the living,
 the living man that it protects, that it serves, but like a dead machine, or
even a machine of death, a machine which is only the mask of the
living…. But this state and prosthetic machine, let’s say prosthstatic,
this prosthstate must also extend, mime, imitate, even reproduce down
to the details the living creature that produces it (Derrida, The Beast
and the Sovereign 1:28)

This idea of the mechanization of the state adds a technological twist to the
biopolitical conception of the state, a twist that is taken to such a degree of
institutionalization that it destroys the humanistic imaginaries that guided a large
part of modern political theory and introduced to postmodernity the fundamental
dimension of the simulacrum as a line of flight from realist, utopian, and
instrumental imaginaries. Institutions and individuals internalize the
technological under the prosthetic form that fills gaps or covers over deficiencies
in the original structures of the individual or community or maximizes its
functioning. Electronic devices, informatic processes, cybernetic apparatuses,
the virtualization of intersubjective and interinstitutional relations, are all
constitutively integrated into the state apparatus itself, conceived as a machine of
subjectivization and social control. The functions of regulation, communication,
vigilance, and administration rest on these monstered processes which generate
normative identities and reestablish the concepts of power, the subject, and
citizenship in relation to the machinic principles of serialization, efficiency, and
reproducibility. However, if the mechanized power of the state can be seen as a
biopolitical monster, resistance to it can also be metaphorized as the monstrous
strengthening of the multitude which, by acquiring agency opposed to
institutional domination, becomes a true alternative to the status quo. The field
of the political is thus the battlefield on which monstrous powers (whose
existence surpasses the modern definition of human) are dissolved. Monstrosity
is disseminated throughout the social body, which is itself monstrous, by
containing and articulating this degree of hybridity and hyperreality. What
remains fundamental is the location of this monstrous quality, its ideological
sign, the programs of knowledge/power it is plugged into, the interests that it
defends, and the strategies it employs.
The machinic incorporates the ideas of depersonalization, hybridity,
artificiality, simulacrum, automation, and dehumanization, but it also offers the
possibility of new forms of totalization that integrate fragmentarity as a
constitutive element of a new ontological register that is in dialogue with the
epistemic realignments of postmodernity. The monstrous evokes these intrinsic
associations in which disparate elements encounter unthought forms of
articulation and action, surpassing the horizons of the human, the natural, and
the scientific as classifications proper to modern thought.
According to Dominique Lestel, the posthuman is the tendency of the
monster, such as it is perceived, for example, in the figure and trajectory of
Frankenstein’s creature, in whom biological monstrosity appears as
technological contamination. The human includes the monstrous as an
irrepressible potentiality that forms part of the nature of life itself. From a
Darwinian perspective, monstrosity is understood as a transitional instance
between different stages of mutation and adaptation to the environment.
However, when the monstrous makes the leap toward the posthuman, a rupture is
produced that qualitatively affects the equilibrium of species and disrupts
cultural understanding of these processes:

The posthuman turns monstrosity into an ecosystem of the human and

(by contamination) into the global ecosystem of the living…. In other
words, the posthuman inverts the terms of the relationship between
species and monstrosity, by transforming species into transitions
between monsters, instead of considering monsters as transitions
between species…. The posthuman is a corollary to the post-animal
and the post-machine. Cultural mutation of the human species is
accompanied by a fundamental destabilization of the very notion of a
species, which correlates to toppling the artefact as a category in a
hybrid space, which our usual categories have yet to understand in a
satisfying way. (Lestel 262)

In other, not necessarily evolutionist elaborations, the monster functions

instead as an extension of the human. The monster’s body is thus seen as a
foundation, a medium that, through nomadism, permits the creation of existential
territories that negate the idea of unity or totality while affirming the practice of
flow—the machinic connections through which the monster is revealed to be an
assemblage with other likewise fragmentary parts that are immanently
significant and indispensable to the series of elements to which they are
connected.
 The monster is a body in which heterogeneous qualities are combined, whose
contradictory status lurks as tension and latent crisis, always on the verge of
bursting forth. This is the focus of another biopower that redefines the
conception of life and recycles it as a machinic assemblage. Placed under
analysis, the monster qua simulacrum of humanity disintegrates “like mummies
in the open air” (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation 7). The search for its
truth takes away its meaning, it crashes into the (ir)reality of its (in)existence.
Opposed to the reality principle, the monster “refers to an absence,” to what is
not, to its imagined essence, to the aesthetic and ideological conventions that
sustain it as simulacrum. The monster is not will but obsession; more than
desire, it is drive, heliotropism.
As Haraway has argued, monstrosity helps to define community, because its
transgression of limits redraws them, from both the aesthetic point of view and
the perspective of the values and political principles that constitute it and which
are readjusted through the crises provoked by anomaly:

Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western

imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons or ancient Greece
established the limits of the centered polis of the Greek male human by
their disruptions of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior
with animality and woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites
were the confused human material in early modern France who
grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal,
portents and diseases –all crucial to establishing modern identity.
(Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 180)

However, what particularly interests Haraway is the monstrosity that is

enshrined within modernity itself, the forms in which the cyborg defies the
protocols of identity and affirms itself as a post-generic and posthuman (id)entity
that makes it possible to overcome the binary systems that antagonize and
hierarchize the human.

There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of

cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are
maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body
is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary
 identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the
world ends); it takes irony for granted…. The machine is not an it to be
animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our
processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for
machines, they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for
boundaries, we are them. (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 180)21

The posthuman identity conceptualized by Haraway moves away from the

subject of the Christian myth of Edenic origins, the idea of the primordial
paradise as a space of human purity, beginnings, and unification with the
transcendent in order to establish in its place an identity that integrates the
machinic as a bodily and spiritual becoming that transgresses the binary
formulas between nature and culture, as well as gender and racial oppositions.
As Torrano argues in a comment on Haraway’s contributions,

La noción de cyborg rompe con el concepto de hombre como actor

exclusivo en la naturaleza admitiendo que también otros seres —tanto
orgánicos como inorgánicos— cumplen esta función. Asimismo rompe
con el supuesto tradicional de que la máquina es un instrumento de uso
o una cosa que debe ser dominada. (“Ontologías de la monstruosidad”
6)

In “On Becoming Posthuman,” Max More refers to the transition from

human to transhuman, arguing that the oppressive idea of God, a product of
primitive and superstitious thought, should yield to evolutionary forms that have
already made their advance apparent, not only through the incorporation of the
machinic into human corporeality, but also through the use of laboratory-based
methods of conception, mind-altering drugs, and so on. Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein thus offered a version of this process by demonstrating the
possibilities and dangers of the human being acting as Creator. Again, the
monster appears as an omen: “The future belongs to posthumanity” (More).22
These articulations, which take on different particularities in different
authors, do not entail an absence of the human but rather assume a reformulation
that preserves it insofar as it connects it with elements perceived as coming from
new instances of cultural, corporeal, and emotional development in the world
today. Posthuman, transhuman, and so on do not signify inhuman or anti-
human; rather, they refer to new forms of conceptualizing both life and the
interactions in which the vital realizes its individual and collective potential. As
Margrit Shildrick indicates, for Haraway the cyborg’s machinic body is an
example of interactivity that surpasses individualism and guides and connects
personal action and community: “the point about [Haraway’s] cyborg bodies is
that they embody connection and responsiveness; and they result not from a
power play within the laboratory of the masculinist mind, but from the
interactive participation of collectivities” (128).
Commenting on Haraway’s proposed conceptualization of the machinic,
Roberto Esposito writes:

When Haraway writes that the human body is no longer a biological

given, but a complex field inscribed by sociocultural codes represented
by the hybrid figure of the cyborg, equally divided between organism
and machine, what she is referring to is a cultural or even ontological
framework of the modern period. Understanding it means bringing into
focus the apparent change in direction of technological development,
which no longer goes from inside to outside, but from outside to inside.
While up to a certain point human beings projected themselves into the
world, and then also into the universe, now it is the world, in all its
components—natural and artificial, material and electronic, chemical
and telematics—which penetrates us in a form that eliminates the
separation between inside and outside, from and back, surface and
depth: no longer content merely to besiege us from the outside,
technique has now taken up residence in our very limbs. (Immunitas
147)

As already mentioned, Hardt and Negri compare the machinic to the

multitude, which they imbue with residues of social failure and the
announcement of yet-to-be-deciphered messages. Thus, the collapse of
modernity is made into a metaphor: as a monstrosity that has fed on the flesh of
society, on the very substance that combines nature and culture, art and politics,
life and death, the natural that becomes artificial.

The living social flesh that is not a body can easily appear monstrous.
For many, these multitudes that are not peoples or nations or even
 communities, are one more instance of the insecurity and chaos that
has resulted from the collapse of the modern social order. They are
social catastrophes of postmodernity, similar in their minds to the
horrible results of genetic engineering gone wrong or the terrifying
consequences of industrial, nuclear or ecological disasters. The
uniformed and the unordered are horrifying. The monstrosity of the
flesh is not a return to nature but a result of society, an artificial life.
(Hardt and Negri, Multitude 192)

From the perspective of postmodern theory, Tania Modleski recalls that the
cinema of David Cronenberg, for example, situates the monstrous within
technology itself, as one of its becomings, as in the film Videodrome (1982), in
which the effect of a video game definitively confuses the limits between reality
and hallucination. Other Cronenberg films, such as The Fly (1986), explore the
possible mutations of an individual subordinated to technology. Cronenberg’s
work has been characterized as body horror insofar as it is particularly
concerned with changes to the body, psycho-somatic interrelations, hybridities,
and the decomposition of the human. As Shaviro argues, Cronenberg creates a
raw display of the body in its primordial materiality:

Cronenberg’s films, then, are violently; literally visceral. [He] is a

literalist of the body. Everything in his films is corporeal, grounded in
the monstrous intersection of physiology and technology” […] New
arrangements of the flesh break down traditional binary oppositions
between mind and matter, image and object, self and other, inside and
outside, male and female, nature and culture, human and inhuman.
(128)

Nevertheless, as Shaviro notes, Cronenberg’s work maintains monstrosity’s

ambivalence and confronts us with the revulsion of an almost pornographic
exposure of the body’s interior and at the same time proposes an aesthetic that
confronts the viewer with the limit of life, taking pleasure in its materiality and
renouncing all idealism and utopianism.
In the plastic arts, the work of the Greek-Australian Stelarc metaphorically
approaches the representation of the human body, whose original structure gives
way to radical hybridities connected to ecological disasters or biological
mutations in which the borders between species are erased. His use of robotic
elements, electronic simulators, implants, prostheses, and so on disconcertingly
extends the forms of the body, rejecting the concepts of unicity and physical
integrity. Stelarc’s work thus proposes new foundations for imagined identities
and refutes the idea of the body as a mediator between inside and outside, spaces
traditionally regarded as very different. This makes it possible to avoid existing
structures and their correlated cognitive habits, making presence a performative
act that is entirely connected to the incessant production of monstrosity
understood as an epistemic exploration and configuration of a future impacted
by technology.

The Monster and Gender: Haraway

Gothic poetics includes a broad repertoire of themes and motifs connected to
sexuality that are sometimes approached in a reticent, symbolic, or allegorical
way. These motifs connect, sometimes in an explicit manner, with the topics of
sin and guilt and, more generally, to the world of affects which, through the
Gothic perspective, appear as provocatively intensified with melodramatic tones
or tragic overtones.
Exploring the relations between the sexes, as well as the management of
gender, is one of the most intriguing aspects of the monster’s representative
universe and its correlative visual and symbolic imaginary. According to Tony
Thorne in Children of the Night: Of Vampires and Vampirism, until the
nineteenth century, just before John William Polidori’s Vampire (1819) was
published, in Europe vampires were most often represented as women (see
Neocleous 674). However, despite these significant female predecessors, for a
large part of its development, particularly in the nineteenth century, the vampire
genre was consolidated through a phallocentric form of symbolic organization
until the figure of the woman-vampire, expanding the genre’s transgressive
quality, returned to dispute this centrality.

Although occasionally female vampires have made their appearance in

19th century literature and, of course, the contagious character of
vampirism has turned many woman vampires in these novels and short
stories, the sex of the vampires remained essentially male. The biting,
penetrating vampire sexuality had to be conceived as a male one,
 preserving its male aspect even if transmitted to females, as
Christopher Craft demonstrated it concerning the “classic” of the
genre: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (Klaniczay 176)

As Halberstam demonstrates, Dracula has provided the terrain for the

discussion of various critical categories related to gender and sexuality:
homoeroticism (Craft), heterosexual exogamy (Stevenson), homosociality, and
so on. However, at the margins of this taxonomy, Count Dracula appears to
personify instead the production of sexuality itself, the construction of the
sexual, that is, the mechanism through which the monster consumes the other
and, in this process, reproduces itself. In connection with this, the themes of
sexuality and power become inseparable, and in the case of the monster, this
bond becomes even closer, constituting itself through the pure practice of
corporeality: “Vampire sexuality blends power and femininity within the same
body and then marks that body as distinctly alien” (“Technologies of
Monstrosity” 344). By sexualizing the feminine characters (Mina, Lucy) and
transforming their virginity into erotic desire, the bodies of the women touched
by the vampire’s kiss become alien to themselves and to the society to which
they belong. The process of becoming a vampire alienates and metamorphizes
identity in a profligate alterity. At the end of the novel, as Halberstam notes, the
heir, Quincey, appears to reinstall masculinity through his implicit paternity.
What particularly stands out here is the representation of both the sucking of
blood and the practice of writing as alternative forms of circulation, a flow that
symbolically replaces semen, breast milk, menstrual blood, blood as
synonymous with ethnicity or class (dynastic blood), establishing an other
perspective on the interrelations and traffic of meaning.

Dracula’s sexuality makes sexuality itself a construction within a

signifying chain of class, race, and gender. Gothic sexuality,
furthermore, manifests itself as a kind of technology, a productive force
which transforms the blood of the native into the lust of the other –as
an economy which unites the threat of the foreign and perverse within
a single monstrous body. (Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity”
345)

Sexuality and monstrosity appear to have been interconnected from Greek

mythology onward to the contemporary era, thereby giving the monstrous a
symbolic and allegorical quality that permits the unfolding of meanings and
interpretive strategies that can clearly be associated with the social construction
of gender. Themes such as corporeality, the constitution of the Other through the
gaze, corporeal hybridity, the disruption of difference as a disturbance of the
norm, and stylized behaviors in a habitus that is naturalized as part of identity,
have all formed part of debates on gender and identity politics in different
theoretical contexts. These critical directions also allow for an interpretation of
monstrosity as an ideologeme that cannot be contained by traditional dualisms
and fixed, essentialized identities. Some definitions of gender reaffirm this
equivalence between monstrosity and gender: “gender is the repeated stylization
of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that
congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of
being” (Butler, Gender Trouble 33).
The monster is a reified entity, the “appearance of substance.” It manifests
through the attributes and actions that strictly regulate it and that are expressed
as repetitive, ritualized, elemental, behaviors, naturalized as definitive and
immutable. As in the case of gender, the monster’s body is constructed through
discursive practices, social protocols, and culturally naturalized values that
constitute a complex and continuous social process. One cannot speak of a
prediscursive existence of the monster because the fluid and unstable
constellation of meanings that mobilize monstrosity is produced through
language and visual discourse, which have a fundamental role in the recognition
of this quality.
Due to the emphasis both monstrosity and gender place on the element of
difference, they occupy the space between the normative and the anomalous,
between nature and culture. Nonetheless, neither one is determined by these
domains; rather, both maintain a transformative capacity that relativizes and
liberates them (Shildrick 10). Monstrosity and gender are constantly
interpellated by binary structures established as a constitutive part of the social;
yet, the capacity for transgressing limits is in its very nature:

If then all bodies are capable of frustrating those binaries, it is the very
excessiveness of monsters that places them at the forefront of what
Haraway calls “queering what counts as nature.” The point is that
monsters signify both the binary opposition between the natural and the
 non-natural, where the primary term confers value, and also the
disruption within that destabilizes the standard of the same. In other
words, they speak to both the radical otherness that constitutes an
outside and to the difference that inhabits identity itself. (Shildrick 11)

Beyond sexuality, although conditioned by an insatiable desire for the Other,

the monster is a queer subject/object that problematizes the borders between the
animal and the human, the human and the machinic, the natural and the cultural,
Eros and Thanatos. At the same time, it signals the limits between different
species, as well as the boundaries that have been established between kingdoms
of nature, the natural and the supernatural. In this sense, the monster is
posthuman and post-identitarian. In this manner, at multiple levels, the
monstrous articulates the relation between identity and otherness that is essential
to modernity:

Given the post-Enlightenment organization of knowledge into a series

of binaries that structure both the relationship between external
elements and between ourselves and the world, it is important to look
more critically at the place of the monstrous within that system. Far
from being the absolute other and therefore effectively unknowable,
the monster, however alien it may appear to human consciousness, is
always encompassed by the order of self and other. As with all such
constructions, however, the operation of sameness and difference
disguises the intertextuality of the pair in which each is dependent on
the other for definition, in terms of both meaning and boundaries. The
figure of the monster is particularly rich in binary associations, and, as
we have already seen is characterized variously as unnatural, inhuman,
abnormal, impure, racially other, and so on. (Shildrick 28)

In accordance with the definition of queer as an oblique, counter-normative

form, monstrosity shares with this position an ex-centricity, a location on the
margin that separates it from the mainstream and that provides a differentiated,
anomalous, and alternative locus.
Like cyborg politics, queer politics pursues the elimination of gender. Cyber
politics proceeds through the hybridization between the self and the other; while
queer politics appeals to the deconstruction of identity through metamorphosis.
Both result in the abolition of gender identity, since the Other is multiple. In
either case, the self-other schema, the dialectic of which protects the
construction of the subject, is subverted. Queer theory seems to suggest that
being transgender, the shift from one gender to the other and the creation of
indefinite genders, is the physical solution of the weakened imaginary of a
modernity based in binary structures and the maintenance of rigid boundaries
between what is and what could be (Aguilar García 112).
The monster’s identity is its difference and its constitutive quality of
becoming. The monster is defined by dis-identification, the erasure of all fixed
meaning. Its body is written/inscribed in the marks that characterize and
circum/scribe it: “the monstrous speaks always both to radical otherness and to
the always already other at the heart of identity. In other words, like the sliding
signifier of the feminine, it carries the weight not just of the other, but of
difference” (Shildrick 28). In effect, the monster is (in a Derridean sense)
deferred meaning, the folding and unfolding of the symbolic and the inscription
of its ontological and epistemic difference within dominant discourses.
In Braidotti’s nomadic theory, the monster and the woman represent
difference because they are situated outside normality, as lack or as excess in
relation to the parameters of a (phal)logocentrically defined normality. The
monster and the woman are more or less “morphologically dubious” in a regime
of normality established on the basis of hegemonic and exclusive conceptions of
the human. They constitute the negative pole of the unstable regime of an
anthropocentric and rationalist humanism that elevates masculinity as a
paradigm of power and perfection. The monster, like the woman, is situated on
the margin of the system, the border of the abyss of unrepresentability: it is
deviant, anomalous, incomplete. If since antiquity the woman has been seen as a
simultaneously mutilated and excessive body prone to the madness of flows,
bodily deformation, and hysteria, the monster is also the site of irrationality,
obsession, and the proliferation of matter. Both overflow with and lack
corporeality and are thus fascinating and terrifying, they teem with energy and
lack balance, organicity, contention. The horror caused by the feminine body is
only comparable to that caused by the monster, a devalued, disordered,
subhuman figure:

The association of femininity and monstrosity points to a system of

 pejoration that is implicit in the binary logic of oppositions that
characterizes the phallogocentric discursive order. The monstrous as
the negative pole, the pole of pejoration, is structurally analogous to
the feminine as that which is other-than the established norm, whatever
the norm may be. The actual propositional content of the term of
opposition is less significant for me than its logic. Within this dualistic
system, monsters are, just like bodily female subjects, a figure of
devaluated difference; as such, it provides fuel for the production of
normative discourse. (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects 80)

Glossing Freud’s “Medusa’s Head” (1922), Western culture appears to

continue to ask, “What does the woman want?” or, alternatively, “What does the
monster want?”—questions that are, as Braidotti notes, completely
overdetermined but which nevertheless activate symbolic operators
(woman/monster), projecting them toward different fields of signification. As
Deleuze and Guattari claim, insofar as it is an assemblage, it is impossible to
know what the monster (the woman?) wants until one sees what it can do. The
monster is not; the monster does. As with the performance of gender, the
performance of monstrosity exceeds sex and biology and is resolved above all in
its effects: in the way in which it affects community relations and the
delimitation of social fields. Like queerness, monstrosity is “inappropriate/d”
and in-appropriable, the “improper life” of which Campbell speaks, which
allows for a biopolitical reflection on the thanatic orientation of culture.
As with re-readings of gender, the monstrous requires legibility, a new
regime of visibility that will allow it to trespass the limits of its time, to make
itself intelligible, to inscribe itself as a possibility within the real, to intersect
with the immanence of bios in zoē. Like gender, monstrosity entails a becoming,
which is to say, a performance. Judith Butler, in an attempt to situate the
question of gender outside the “metaphysics of substance,” cites Nietzsche’s
Genealogy of Morals: “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming;
‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (qtd. in
Butler 25). She adds: “In an application that Nietzsche himself would not have
anticipated or condoned, we might state as a corollary: There is no gender
identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively
constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (25). This can
also serve as a definition of the monstrous: the monster’s actions constitute its
essence, they define it, they are neither epiphenomena nor the result of a given,
prior substance. There is no monstrosity before the monster, nor does the
monster precede the discourse that constitutes it.
The monstrous is a mode of production of meanings, an apparatus for the
(re)production of the symbolic power that exceeds the fields of biology,
everyday experience, sexuality, law, politics, and religion and can only be
understood as surplus, excess, residue, remains, ruins. It is inescapably
ideological, enigmatic, and emblematic: an alienated and alienating symbolic
act. In this sense, an effective means of interpreting monstrosity emerges from
what Haraway calls (with regard to gender) artifactualism, placing emphasis on
the social construction of meaning instead of privileging a priori or deterministic
positions.
The association between femininity and monstrosity has a long history. It
stems from the interpretation of the feminine body as a lacking, mutilated body
that, like the monster’s body, demonstrates a deviation from the norm. In these
discursive contexts, the woman is defined by what she lacks. Feminine flows,
the presence of menstrual blood, the deformation of the body that results from
pregnancy, the presence of another being inside the body itself, the horrors of
birth, were all traditionally represented by the ciphers of monstrosity and
portrayed in different cultural spaces and eras as inferior, foreign to sacred space,
threatening to the social order, morphologically incomprehensible, mysterious,
and obscure. Psychoanalysis and feminism have elaborated on these associations
between the woman and the monster with regard to the themes of trauma,
corporeality, identity politics, sexuality, and difference. In a chapter titled
“Mothers, Monsters, and Machines,” Braidotti states, for example, that:

Woman as a sign of difference is monstrous. If we define the monster

as a bodily entity that is anomalous and deviant vis-à-vis the norm,
then we can argue that the female body shares with the monster the
privilege of bringing out a unique blend of fascination and horror. This
logic of attraction and repulsion is extremely significant;
psychoanalytic theory takes it as the fundamental structure of the
mechanicism of desire and, as such, of the constitution of the neurotic
symptom: the spasm of the hysteric turns to nausea, displacing itself
from its object. (Nomadic Subjects 81)
 In both the monster and the woman, abjection combines life and death and,
in this way, approaches the sacred (the excessive, the sublime), provoking
attraction and rejection, admiration and fear. This proximity between teratology
and femininity also assigns the woman to a subaltern and sometimes undesirable
location within the social order. Monsters are often the product of a mother’s
physical or psychological defect, of her sexual conduct or her thoughts; they are
accidents of birth, congenital errors arising from the turbulent and deviant nature
of the mother. As Braidotti reminds us, the gods of Greco-Roman mythology
were not born from women, which introduces an anti-maternal dimension to
teratology from the very start (Nomadic Subjects 84).
Previous considerations of the topic of gender and its proximity to
elaborations on monstrosity also extended to the conceptualization of
unconventional forms of sexuality or gender expressions, including
homosexuality, being transgender, and cross dressing, which through their very
counter-normative status problematize the ideas of nation, citizenship, social
order, and so on. As Gabriel Giorgi points out in his analysis of Argentine
literary texts, “la homosexualidad parece estar designando una suerte de frontera
interna de la nación, un pliegue del territorio comunitario concebido como
transparente y familiar” (“Mirar al monstruo” 254).
As with the woman, whose relationship to writing was traditionally limited
to “minor” genres (confessions, epistolary discourse, autobiography, memoirs,
melodrama), the monster is also discursively located in sub-literary forms
(Gothic stories, science fiction, horror fiction) that function as lines of flight in
relation to “major” discourses. These modalities of writing acquired more
visibility through the recognition of the woman as a social actor. The monster
benefits from the possibilities opened up by a market economy that favors the
emergence and diffusion of symbolic constructs that are adjacent to “high
culture” but not completely coopted by it, and which are designed for mass
audiences.
Monstrosity always includes, either explicitly or symbolically, elements of
sensuality that, via the monster’s prominent corporeality, acquire a hyperbolic
meaning with allegorical connotations and terrifying effects. These elements
point to monstrosity’s connection to instinct, repressed and condemned by
society, and its portrayal of the themes of desire, violence, power, and catharsis.
Monstrosity, like femininity and masculinity, is a floating signifier that continues
to redefine the very process of the unfolding of the sign and its multiple
contextual articulations.
Within the monster, Eros and Thanatos function as forces in constant tension
that serve as the condition through which monstrosity itself is defined and
developed through attributes, behaviors, and preferences that either evoke the
human or deviate from it, but that always presuppose it as an epistemic matrix.
Traditionally, the monster was associated with abnormal sexual behaviors like
sodomy, incest, bestiality, and so on. The monster’s physical configuration itself
is composed of elements with direct or indirect sexual connotations (e.g., horns,
disproportionate sexual organs, etc.). Modern representations refer to the
monster’s sexuality in a more sublimated way. For example, the sucking of
blood or fat from their victims suggests that vampires and pishtacos desire to
possess the victim’s body, in clear reference to erotic practices which the
monster takes to radical degrees of carnality.
In her study of the relations between feminism and monstrosity, Barbara
Creed refers to the influence of religious and historical elements on the notion of
abjection developed by Kristeva and to the fact that feminine corporeality and
sexuality are central to the modern construction of the monstrous. As Creed
asserts, this aspect has been prolifically represented in cinematic productions
around the world. Menstrual blood, the reception of semen, fluids connected to
pregnancy and birth, and breast milk inspire a notion of the feminine body as a
liquid, dispersed, dilapidated reality. Feminine organicity is understood as a
repository of abject elements that are opposed to spiritual and rational elevation
and whose representation transgresses social norms regarding the visibility of
bodily discharge. The corporeality of the monster and the woman is prominent
within and central to the construction of fields of signification and constitutes
one of the foundations of the practices that have marginalized anomaly from
antiquity to the present.
Like the monster, the figure of the woman is liminal, transgressive,
unsettling, difficult to deconstruct owing to the multiple and contradictory
meanings that are attributed to it and due to its variable ideological role within
national discourses. The body functions as the site of conflict where power
struggles are decided and strategies of seduction and possession unfold, all of
which contributes to the propagation of monstrosity as a symbolic field.
Corporeality is essential to the representation of the perversity of the monstrous
and to the association of the latter with the notions of desire, repression, trauma,
and violence—all of which are combined in certain stereotypical constructions
of femininity. Given that the woman represents the family, reproduction, the
earth, the nation, the place of desire, salvation, pleasure, the feared agent of
castration, death, and damnation, attacks on the figure of the woman and, more
broadly, the relation between the monster and the feminine character, acquire a
transcendent dimension that indelibly marks the narrative of monstrosity.
Like the monster, the woman materializes a limit and operates as the
constitutive outside of dominant discourses. Although the field of the monstrous
is defined by features that are foreign to femininity (physical strength, loyalty,
violent tendencies, solitude, disconnection from the community, the death drive),
its eventual association with the woman serves as a catalyst that helps to define
these characteristics. In cases in which the attributes of monstrosity are
concentrated within the feminine figure, the effects of its actions on the world
appear to be amplified, because monstrosity contradicts the established notions
of holiness, purity, and fertility that are attributed to femininity. For this reason,
the feminization of the monstrous constitutes a device of emotional hyperbole.
The affective element is fundamental to the construction of monstrosity: it is
constitutive of the field of signification that surrounds the monster’s central role
and projects it outside of itself.

Like suspense novels or mystery novels, novels are denominated

horrific in respect of their intended capacity to raise a certain affect.
Indeed, the genres of suspense, mystery, and horror derive their very
names from the affects they are intended to promote -a sense of
suspense, a sense of mystery, and a sense of horror. The cross-art,
cross-media genre of horror takes its title from the emotion it
characteristically or rather ideally promotes; this emotion constitutes
the identifying mark of horror. (Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror 14)

In its attempt to recuperate from horror literature the concept of vulnerability

and the relation that this latter has to the theme of difference, Shildrick discusses
the field of posthumanist reflection and emphasizes the importance of discursive
materialization, which functions through the implementation of language and
cultural practices. According to Shildrick, in Haraway, the monstrous is a
category that opens up the transformation of ontological and epistemic models.
The monster functions as a signifier of the radical destabilization of binary
approaches to identity:

Like women, [monsters] refuse to stay in place: they change shape,

they combine elements which should remain separate; in short, they are
labile. In the same way that the feminine has been deployed as the
undecidable signifier of excess, so too the catachrestic term “monster”
both escapes the binary closure and displaces simple difference.
Monsters signify not the oppositional other safely fenced off within its
own boundaries, but the otherness of possible worlds, or possible
versions of ourselves, not yet realized. (Shildrick 129)

Thus, monstrosity is given an emancipatory quality that liberates it from both

biology and cultural conditions, from both nature and technological rigidity,
situating itself in an in-between place in which anomalous nature exists in a state
of contamination with the capacity for contagion through the dissemination of
impurity, altering the dominant paradigms and their representational devices.

Notes
1. See William Uzgalis and Wolfe.
2. See Nicholas Jolley for more on this point.
3. Stephen Asma refers to this feeling, as well as to indeterminate forms of fear that communicate the idea
that the world has been invaded by an alien, monstrous condition that is both unclassifiable and
intimidating. This form of fear-provoking emotional and cognitive dissonance is in the monster’s very
nature: “Monsters are personifications of the unheimlich. They stand for what endangers one´s sense of
security, stability, integrity, well-being, health, and meaning” (Beal, “Introduction”, qtd. in Asma 188).
See also Asma 194.
4. “Racism does not exist so long as the other remains Other, so long as the Stranger remains foreign. It
comes into existence when the other becomes merely different—that is to say, dangerously similar.
That is the moment when the inclination to keep the other at a distance comes into being” (The
Transparency of Evil 146).
5. On Canguilhem’s work, see Foucault’s analysis in “Life: Experience and Science.”
6. As Élisabeth Roudinesco argues in her analysis of Canguilhem’s contributions, Lacan would come to
identical conclusions in his thesis on paranoiac psychosis in 1932: “In both cases it was a question, for
biological as for physical and mental questions, of embracing in a single essence, defining their
dissonance, the states of mind [affections] called normal and the ones labeled pathological. In this
conception, psychosis (as mental disturbance) and illness (as organic disturbance) are no longer
comparable to fixed constitutions, but reactions of the body or the personality to a life situation”
(Roudinesco 15). Translating these ideas to the field of monstrosity, the nature of this quality thus
would not be derived from a condition that is opposed to normality but rather from certain features that
 determinate conditions of existence cause to flourish. The normal and the monstrous share “the same
essence” which can manifest to different degrees, bringing about one or another aspect according to the
situation at hand. Just as the demonic coexists with the divine, evil with good, sickness with health, the
monstrous is a natural component of the human. Continuing with Roudinesco’s analysis, the conditions
of violence, such as those created by the state of war, for example, cause the relations between the
normal and the pathological to be (re)presented in different manners and allow for different
interpretations since organisms react to catastrophe in diverse ways.
7. The other two elements Foucault notes in the construction of this field of abnormality are the
incorrigible, who defies all possibility of recovery and social reintegration, and the masturbator, who
embodies sexual fears and the processes of demonization that accompany them. These juridically
formalized figures share certain features with the human monster and are combined to form a
“technology of human abnormality” (Abnormal 61).
8. With the designation of “human monster,” Foucault is referring to the degeneration or deformation that
can manifest in both the figure of the “bestial man” and in anomalous forms that were not classified by
science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Conjoined twins and hermaphrodites, for example,
were considered demonic phenomena because they defied the norm of nature. To these we can add the
notion of the “moral monster,” which combines monstrosity and criminality.
9. On the subject of the political monster, see Andrea Torrano, “El monstruo político.”
10. “There are no politically neutral or average monsters in Sade: Either they come from the dregs of the
people and have risen up against established society, or they are princes, ministers, or lords who wield
a lawless superpower over all social powers. In any case, power—the excess of power, the abuse of
power, despotism—is always the operative element of libertinage in Sade. It is this superpower that
transforms simple libertinage into monstrosity” (Foucault, Abnormal 101). In line with this
politicization of monstrosity, Foucault recognizes two principal figures of the monstrous in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the cannibal, “the monster from below” connected to the idea of
starving populations, and the incestuous monster, referring to the figure of the king (“the monster from
above”).
11. After all, because it is linked to the wondrous, the monster, like other fantastic creatures, depends on the
gaze that discovers and constructs it within culture (mirabilis—wondrous, coming from the root mir, to
gaze).
12. On the importance of Canguilhem’s relationships with other philosophers and scientists of the time, as
well as on his influence on contemporary biological and philosophical thought, see Balibar and
Geroulanos.
13. What follows is loosely based on some ideas presented by Leveque in his study of the notion of the
event.
14. On Žižek’s view of monstrosity, see Vogt, “Žižek’s Monstrous Figures” 131-154.
15. As Žižek notes, “Fantasy thus creates a multitude of ‘subject positions’ among which the (observing,
fantasizing) subject is free to float, to shift his identification from one to another. Here, talk about
‘multiple, dispersed subject positions’ is justified, with the proviso that these subject positions are to be
strictly distinguished form the void that is the subject” (The Plague of Fantasies 40).
16. On the concept of the event in Deleuze, see The Fold, 76-82 and “On Philosophy.”
17. Badiou first discussed the theory of the event in Theorie du Sujet (1982) then continued to develop it in
his major works L’être et l’évènement (1988) and Logique des Mondes: L’être et l’évènement 2 (2006).
For a simplified summary of the main concepts of the event in Badiou, see Anderson. On the notion of
the event in Heidegger, see Vattimo, Badiou, and Leveque.
18. Rosi Braidotti, however, questions the truth-value of the visible, an exception that is applied to the case
of the monster because “there is always more to things than meets the eye. There is no adequate
simulacrum; no image is a representation of the truth” (Nomadic Subjects 69). The metamorphosis,
excess, and artificiality that are essential to the monster keep it from being ascribed to fixed and
determinate truths, although they nevertheless affirm the transcendence that marks the monster’s
trajectory, the overcoming of its own particularity without succumbing to universality, maintaining
itself instead in an intermediate space that is encompassed by the idea of a warning, an intermediate
 place between fact and possibility, the past and the future, the said and the suggested, the repressed and
the exposed.
19. As Bakhtin pointed out, “Exaggeration, hyperbolism, excessiveness, are generally considered
fundamental attributes of the grotesque style” (The Bakhtin Reader 232).
20. On nomadic thought in relation to the war machine, see Deleuze and Guattari, “Treatise in
Nomadology: The War Machine,” in A Thousand Plateaus, 351-423.
21. The word cyborg means cybernetic organism (words that give rise to a new term) and was coined,
according to Naief Yehva, in 1960 to refer to organisms that have been chemically and surgically
modified in order to adapt to new environmental challenges and extraterrestrial conditions. This is
understood as part of a process of biological intervention that is oriented toward the maximization of
human capacities.
22. For a discussion of the concept of posthumanism and its relation to technology, see Moraña, “La
cuestión del humanismo en América Latina.”
 Chapter 5

Monstrosity and Biopolitics

The importance of the relationship between monstrosity and power discussed
above cannot be overstated. Among other things, it contributes to the elucidation
of the characteristics the monster assumes in different historical and cultural
contexts. The close connection between monstrosity and power allows for the
articulation of the monstrous to multiple systems of domination and to a wide
variety of political positions. It can represent both hegemonic power and the
forms of resistance it engenders. It can be interpreted either as a materialization
of subaltern, marginal expressions related to local or regional authority, or as an
expression of structures of control that function on domestic, peripheral,
institutionalized, or dispersed levels in society. It can illustrate both the character
and perception of sovereign power and that power’s fears of losing dominion or
territory. It can represent individuals, systems, time periods, and singular aspects
and visions related to the mode in which social discipline is exercised. It can be
seen as a symbol of the state, the Church, the multitude, the metropolis, the
colony, the elites, the common, the recondite, the omnipresent, the past events
that continue to haunt us, the dilemmas of the present, or the uncertainty of the
future. It can, finally, metaphorize the overcoming of binary structures and
oppositions like reason/passion, presence/absence, inside/outside,
speech/writing, man/woman, and so on, which constitute the foundation of
logocentrism, particularly those dualistic propositions Derrida connects to the
“metaphysics of presence” (Of Grammatology). In this sense, the monster
portrays the instability of these supposedly oppositional categories and promotes
their deconstruction, establishing the idea of différance, which refers to the
deferral (postponement, suspension) of difference and the signifier.

The Common, the New Barbarian, and the Multitude: Hardt and
Negri
In Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri emphasize the monster’s prophetic and threatening nature,
which expresses political anxieties: “the monster is not an accident but the ever-
present possibility that can destroy the natural order or authority in all domains,
from the family to the kingdom” (259). Commenting on this passage, Steven De
Caroli and Margaret Grebowicz analyze the influence of John Spencer’s work A
Discourse Concerning Prodigies (1663), in which the author outlines the risks
that emerge when wonder and fear are combined in a critique of the state.
Imagination can become subversive and prefigure possible forms of
transcending the existing structures of domination, thereby inspiring actions
against power. Thus, two elements are necessary for the emergence of political
monstrosity: a natural order and an abnormality that challenges it (De Caroli and
Grebowicz 261). Monstrosity (whether political or otherwise) is on the margins
of what it represents, a phenomenon of belief, because it is a matter of
interpreting the status of the real and the possible that guides monstrosity as it
enters the collective imaginary.
The work of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) appears as a central source of
inspiration for the elaboration of the concept of multitude in relation to the
notion of monstrosity, particularly with regard to its ontological, ethical, and
political aspects.1 In both Empire (2000) and Multitude, the idea of the common,
also borrowed from Spinoza, indicates the element that allows the multitude to
cohere in spite of the latter’s natural heterogeneity and inorganic, “savage” role.2
From Spinoza’s concept of multitudo comes the idea of corporeality (physical
power) and passion as constitutive elements of this new, potentially
emancipating concept that can combine and activate the qualities of the body and
of desire as a (super)human (almost sublime, indeed almost monstrous)
overcoming of what is. As Michael Goddard points out: “the most striking
conceptual innovation in Multitude is the elaboration of a corporeal account of
the multitude in terms of the monstrosity of the flesh” (192).
In the configuration of an alternative to what already exists, there is an
impulse to contravene the existing order and a need to exercise a certain
(material or epistemic) violence against the establishment. The monstrous
always includes at the very least the potential for violence, which implies the
transformation of the status quo and is manifested through the
(de)monstration/monstering and display of corporeality. It is because of this
potential material and/or symbolic violence that the monster simultaneously
produces attraction and rejection—and ultimately its own demonization. As
Persephone Braham puts it, “The monster, then, inhabits the unquiet space
between adoration and abjection” (From Amazons to Zombies 13).
In all different historical periods, monstrosity has been likened to an
unacceptable violation of the existing order, the imposition of a symbolic
disruption that affects the very foundations of society, which is threatened not
only in a physical sense but also with regard to its principles and values.
Canguilhem had already noted that what is monstrous in the monster is its
transgression of the law, a line that inspired Foucault’s studies of madness and
institutions of control. For Foucault, the monster is a “juridico-natural complex,”
a “legal labyrinth.”3 For Canguilhem it is a matter of behavior: “Monstrosity was
less a consequence of the contingency of life than of the license of living beings.
… Monstrosity occurred unexpectedly because of lack of discretion […] the
result of an animal’s carnival” (“Monstrosity and the Monstrous” 30-31).
However, within the domain of political philosophy, especially in the post-
Foucauldian era, the monster embodies another promise of the future: the power
to establish alternatives that liberate us from both skepticism and moralization:

By not fitting into the given order of things, by calling into question the
seemingly transparent notion that facts speak for themselves,
monstrous life promises to preserve the power of the imagination to
shape new futures, without transforming these futures into moral laws,
that is, into facts which are already a type of evidence.… Monsters are
those who, in being who they are, place this system of order, be it
scientific or political or religious, in doubt without succumbing to a
rational skepticism that must assume a breach between knowing and
being. (De Caroli and Grebowicz 262)

In “The Political Monster: Power and Naked Life,” engaging with the ideas
of Foucault, Agamben, Esposito, and other theorists of biopolitics, Negri offers a
rich “genealogy of the monster” in which he explores the connections between
sovereign power and the eugenicist project of the control of life.4 In this essay,
he develops aspects of Spinozan thought that now appear as predecessors of the
notion of the monster and then applies them to the concept of multitude he
elaborated with Michael Hardt. From the perspective of political philosophy,
Negri is interested in the foundation of authority in different systems of
domination, as well as in the forms of resistance that power generates. The
monster represents the exteriority of eugenic ontology: the outside of being,
Otherness, that is to say, the element that eugenics seeks to invoke and exclude.
Referring to classical antiquity, Negri points out that

The monster wanders in the dream and in the imaginary of folly: he is a

nightmare for those who are “beautiful and good”: it can exist only as
catastrophic destiny that must be atoned, or as divine event. Classical
rationality therefore dominates the monster in order to exclude him,
because the monster’s genealogy entirely exceeds eugenic ontology.
(“The Political Monster” 194)

The monster, which is classically associated with calamity and dread and is
considered to be entrenched within the irreducible confines of what is beyond
the human, has been from the beginning of modernity a metaphor of the political
that expresses the ideological energy which encompasses and transcends
individuals and communities. Hobbes’s Leviathan illustrates this process.5
According to Negri, the agglomerated mass of humanity in the body of Power
has a hybrid character, representing the mixture of races, languages, and social
strata that maintain the social order depicted in the figure of the state.

Rather than the Leviathan, what’s monstrous now are the plebs or the
multitude, the anarchy and disorder that they express: upon them and
against them the monster constructs the central sovereign Power—the
untimely event of a necessary epiphany. Leviathan stops being a
monster insofar as he is a “deus ex machina.” (“The Political Monster”
195)

The Leviathan is the machinic apparatus that executes a sovereign order that
legitimizes itself before the swarming multitude that threatens the political and
cultural order by evoking the “state of nature.” This heteroclite group is more
able than the Leviathan itself to demonstrate the latter’s monstrous character
through disorder, disorganized multiplicity, and Babelic confusion: “The
multitude upon which Power must be exercised is “Gothic,” the hybrid product
of barbarian invasions and the mixing of different races, languages, and political
orders” (Negri, “The Political Monster” 195).6
 According to Negri, the social philosophy—the “pseudo-science”—of
eugenics (including social Darwinism and “scientific” racism) reappeared in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a cornerstone of extreme nationalisms,
channeling the interests and values of the bourgeois order. Contemporary with
the consolidation of Marxist thought, the monster has gone on to represent the
voracity of capital and the (ir)rationality of its infinite reproduction. If suffering
is “monstrous” in the contexts of fascism and colonialism, then the resistance
inspired by them should likewise be considered monstrous, especially when “we
start seeing history from the point of view of the monster” that represents the
heroic resistance to power.

Indeed, he who tries to resist against the development of the capitalist

relations of production is only a monster; and it’s only a monster he
who obstructs the logic of monarchic, aristocratic, popular Power,
eugenic in all cases; it’s a monster he who refuses violence and
expresses insubordination, hates the commodity and explodes in living
labor... (Negri, “The Political Monster” 198; emphasis in original)

Negri pursues the “line of the monster,” a figure that progressively comes to
designate the multitude. In this regard, “the monster is not only an event but a
positive event” (Negri, “The Political Monster” 199; emphasis in original), a
form of self-conscious subjectivity capable of producing “monstrous
resistances.” The monster’s activity, its inorganic, discontinuous, and persistent
actions, announce unexpected forms of popular mobilization in which the word
“popular” must be resignified. According to Negri, in postmodernity “the
monster has definitely brought eugenia to a crisis” (205); “We cannot even
circumscribe his sphere of action…. He mingles with us, moves among us: to
catch him in order to hold him up is impossible, there in the midst of that
confusion, those hybridizations. To kill him would be a suicide”; “the monster is
common” (205; emphasis in original); “The monster has become biopolitical”
(206; emphasis in original); “The postmodern monster, resistant because
consistent upon another ontological foundation, is thus already, somehow,
expression of the new genealogy” (216). Reactivating the monster’s prophetic
connotations, which are already implicit in the word itself, the monster-multitude
unfolds an agency that makes it possible to imagine the destabilization of the
status quo and the advent of radical change. From this perspective, as Pierre
Lamarche, Max Rosenkrantz, and David Sherman assert in their introduction to
Reading Negri: Marxism in the Age of Empire, “Monstrosity itself is creative,
imaginative, and productive of being—productive of new bodies through which
passages from capital and Empire may be negotiated” (16).
As a metaphor of the unrepresentable, the monster is opposed to the notion
of the people (and, of course, it also diverges from the ideas of nation, society,
citizenship, and “social body”) because it connotes fragmentarity, inorganicity,
heterogeneity, desegregation, and irrationality. Hence, it is adopted by Hardt and
Negri as the image of the multitude that opens up toward new horizons of
agency and meaning: “It takes new kinds of bodies to make up social flesh”
(Multitude 196).7
The figure of the monster is thus projected from its earliest origins and
resignified up to the present day. In Empire Hardt and Negri recall Nietzsche’s
prophetic suggestion in the The Will to Power: “where are the barbarians of the
twentieth century? Obviously they will come into view and consolidate
themselves only after tremendous socialist crises” (qtd. in Hardt and Negri,
Empire 213). Hardt and Negri interpret the fall of the Berlin Wall as an iconic
moment of this crisis, and they perceive in the waves of migration that followed
it the advent of the nomadic hordes that in “the desertion from ‘socialist
discipline,’ savage mobility and mass migration contributed substantially to the
collapse of the system” (Empire 214). They unite this historical and ideological
development with Benjamin’s proposal to introduce a new and positive notion of
barbarism, which they quote at length:

The new barbarian “sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason
he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains,
there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he
has to clear things from it everywhere.... Because he sees ways
everywhere, he always positions himself at crossroads. No moment can
know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble, not
for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.”
(Hardt and Negri, Empire 215)

This is the interstitial behavior of the monster (savage, barbarian, nomad)

which disarticulates spaces and dislocates systems with an erratic mobility that
inaugurates new forms of perceiving the real. It provokes the return of the
repressed, giving public presence to what had remained hidden. Hardt and Negri
understand this dynamic as a not only existential and ideological but also bodily
redefinition, since the configurations of gender and sexuality are open to
alternative forms of manifestation and conceptualization:

Bodies themselves transform and mutate to create new posthuman

bodies. The first condition of this corporeal transformation is the
recognition that human nature is in no way separate from nature as a
whole, that there are no fixed and necessary boundaries between the
human and the animal, the human and the machine, the male and the
female, and so forth; it is the recognition that nature itself is an
artificial terrain open to ever new mutations, mixtures, and
hybridizations…. Today’s corporeal mutations constitute an
anthropological exodus and represent an extraordinarily important, but
still quite ambiguous, element of the configuration of republicanism
“against” imperial civilization…because here is where the positive,
constructive face of the mutation begins to appear: an ontological
mutation in action, the concrete invention of a first new place in the
non-place. (Empire 215-16; emphasis in original)

If, in the opinion of many critics, monstrosity is embodied in the voracity of

the market and globalized capitalism and is connected to postmodern
disenchantment with totalizing narratives, in Hardt and Negri’s point of view the
monster metaphorically expresses the sublimation of the multitude and the
utopia of the unconquerable resistance of the common. The monster has become
subject and lives in the domain of historical imagination. Empire is oriented
toward the design of a new utopia of integration that redefines the local and the
universal through the nomadic activity of the multitude. One of the ideological
foundations of this dynamic is the concept of global citizenship, and the mobility
and inorganicity of the multitude is one of its practical principles.

Nomadism and miscegenation appear here as figures of virtue, as the

first ethical practices on the terrain of Empire. From this perspective
the objective space of capitalist globalization breaks down…. The
concrete universal is what allows the multitude to pass from place to
place and make its place its own. This is the common place of
 nomadism and miscegenation. Through circulation the common human
species is composed, a multicolored Orpheus of infinite power; through
circulation the human community is constituted. Outside every
Enlightenment cloud or Kantian reverie, the desire of the multitude is
not the cosmopolitical state but a common species. As in a secular
Pentecost, the bodies are mixed and the nomads speak a common
tongue. (Hardt and Negri, Empire 362)

This passage illustrates the place Hardt and Negri assign within the utopian
design of Empire to the Third World, which is referred to in the elaboration of
the concepts of nomadism/miscegenation and the vindication of the local, but it
also exposes the use of a language that accentuates lyrical tones that infuse the
argument with a touch of spirituality (almost sublimity) which is appropriate to
the exhortative and enlightened intentions of the text. In any case, what is of
interest here is the delimitation of an existential territory (a cognitive
configuration saturated with emotional and ideological intensities) that
recognizes the coincidence of the lines of flight from the system (modernity,
capitalism, instrumental reason, grand narratives) in the configuration of new
spaces and forms of political and social action. The main features of this re-
configuration are wandering, hybridity, and the disarticulation of dominant
models. The figure constellated by the monster (perhaps a postcolonial hero?)
metaphorically concentrates many of these condensations of meaning that make
it possible to discern the inorganic, micro/infra-political proposals that avoid
systemic regulation with transgressive dynamics, the dislocation of spaces,
concepts, and values: “Indeed, the postcolonial hero is the one who continually
transgresses territorial and racial boundaries, who destroys particularisms and
points toward a common civilization…. Circulation is a global exodus, or really
nomadism; and it is a corporeal exodus, or really miscegenation” (Hardt and
Negri, Empire 363-64).
In this theoretical scenario, the line of flight is not an escape but rather an
alternative productivity; locality, the means of access to a universality-without-
attributes; deterritorialization, a form of reconfiguring and inhabiting space that
does not entail loss or lack but rather transgression, investigation, recreation; the
monster, a symptom-figure, an aesthetic and ideological dispositif that both
announces and represents a social becoming: “The new world of monsters is
where humanity has to grasp its future” (Hardt and Negri, Multitude 196).
The Werewolf and Political Power:
Agamben and Psychoanalysis
The multiple shadows cast by the figure of the monster extend across the space
of the community, creating a clandestine trafficking of signifiers that traverses
the web of society, intervenes in its operational protocols, and compromises its
teleology. In the thanatic scenario of our time, perspectives like that offered by
Roberto Esposito advocate for an affirmative biopolitics of life (not over life but
rather for life) that reestablishes the integrative bond proposed by Agamben
between bios and zoē. The monster is a critical moment, an ephemeral and
discognizant yet epistemically and emotionally intense embodiment, a punctual
instance of a becoming (animal/human), a materialized break, a rupture, an in-
between-place, an interstice through which primary modalities (forms) of
cognition and existential inclusion reveal themselves.
Torrano has studied the theme of the monster in politics, correctly drawing
attention to the figure of the werewolf deployed by Agamben in Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) in his analysis of Hobbesian theory,
particularly his idea that “man is defined as wolf-man,” a concept utilized in
Leviathan as an image that represents the danger of anarchy: the war of “all
against all” (bellum omnimun contra omnes).8 This idea informs his conception
of the state, which is represented in the frontispiece of that essential work of
political philosophy as a sea monster whose hyperbolic presence dominates the
staging of the social body. As mentioned above in the present study, the
sovereign, portrayed as a giant riddled with diminutive human figures who
clamber over his body seeking protection, is the political monster that refers to
absolute power: an icon of totalitarian and totalizing conceptions of the state and
an expression of political “sublimity.” The image, which was reformulated by
Hobbes, dates back to the Bible and supports modern conceptualizations of
political power; however, its conceptual counterpart is the more obscure but no
less traditional figure of the werewolf, who represents the monstering of the
social.
As a domain in which the state of nature (which is not prior but rather
correlative to the state of law) reigns, the modern state emerges as a juridical and
institutional response to the threat of internal war contained in the masses in
which the will to power can always materialize like an animal instinct.
Understood as the latent risk of the rupture of community order, the werewolf is
employed as an element of symbolic energy that allows the idea of “internal
war” to cohere, a notion in which the fear of the Other and his or her possible
belligerence encourages the maintenance of a state strong enough to protect the
community from the permanent dangers of social chaos.
The ideological and philosophical context that recuperates these monstrous
figures and situates them within contemporary political connotations is the
theme of sovereignty and the constitution of the political institutions that govern
civic life. Agamben focuses on the very construction of the polis as the core of
civility where power struggles are staged and where the juridical principles and
practices that regulate the relations between life and politics are consolidated.
The concept of bare life elaborated by Agamben through the ancient Greek
distinction between the notions of zoē (natural life) and bios (individual life) is
essential to defining the transition from sovereign power to modern strategies of
political organization, which Foucault places at the moment of the emergence of
biopower. According to Foucault, the eighteenth century produced the transition
from the conception summarized in the dictum “kill or let live” to “protection or
rejection of life,” which points to new conceptualizations of the political subject
and the state in the modern era. Although the relation between sovereignty and
biopower has always existed as it is inherent to the definition of the political, for
Agamben this connection grows even closer in modernity, in which bare life, a
politicized form of natural life, comes to be the main protagonist of the politico-
ideological scene.
In the relations between nature and culture, animality and humanity, instinct
and reason, Agamben sees the unavoidable articulation of political thought and
the organization of the state. He argues that “the decisive political conflict,
which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the
humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics”
(The Open 80). In his analysis of the concept of the animal, Giorgi, following
Agamben, underscores the “prácticas divisorias” of biopower, which “traza
líneas de diferenciación y jerarquías entre cuerpos y los inscribe políticamente”
(Formas comunes 22). Between these lines, the monster configures “vidas cuyas
muertes no constituyen delito.” According to this argument, the monster would
be “abandoned life,” “bare life,” that responds to a “political distribution” of the
value of life, which incorporates it as a line of flight.
 Supporting his argument with Agamben’s concepts of homo sacer and the
“anthropological machine,” Jiménez-Belmonte refers to the unstable line that
separates humanity and non-humanity, explaining that “[s]egún el filósofo
italiano, hay que entender dicha máquina como el conjunto de mecanismos
simbólicos y materiales encargados de decidir el emplazamiento de la cesura
que, en el hombre, establece incesantemente la separación entre lo humano y lo
animal y produce así, en ciertos momentos histórico-científicos, determinadas
concepciones de ‘hombre’” (Jiménez-Belmonte 378). Although this critic is
primarily concerned with the representation of gypsies and cannibals in Baroque
culture, he also alludes to the figure of the werewolf, whose predatory and
anomalous character is associated with derogatory stereotypes about gypsies,
who supposedly harass communities in order to survive.9 As Jiménez-Belmonte
argues, according to Avramescu, the wolf had for centuries been defined as “the
common protagonist of anthropophagy” (Avramescu 92): “Cruel and sly, the
wolf is more than a beast; it is, to use Jean de la Fontaine's expression, ‘the
common enemy.’ To the wolf is connected not only an amorphous universe of
fear. It is, perhaps more than any other creature apart from man, a social
creature” (Avramescu 9).10
The monster is an apparatus of connection, a link that indissolubly bonds
politics and society, state and population, law and chaos, because it causes us to
think of the human condition itself: its moment of definition and change. The
monster is the place of the intensification of the social, the moment that
produces the inclusion of the Other and tests the system’s limits of tolerance,
experimenting with new strategies for the expulsion or incorporation of alterity.
Giorgi notes that the animal’s existence calls for a reflection on the notion of the
person, which, as Esposito reveals, is eminently relational, which is to say, it is
defined as the inverse of other forms of being and existing in the world, where
human attributes do not hegemonically dominate the field of signifiers. Giorgi
takes up Esposito’s position on the notion of the person as an unequal and
unstable category:

no todo cuerpo o vida humana se corresponde con una persona; la

persona se constituye, precisamente, a partir de su relación con cuerpos
que son no-personas, y que pasan fundamentalmente por el animal para
proyectarse sobre ‘otros’ humanos (los locos, los anormales, los niños,
 los enfermos, los inmigrantes ilegales, etc., todas las figuras que hacen
a una gradación y una temporalización de la persona: aún no-persona,
ya-no-persona, etc.) […] La persona funciona así como un régimen de
dominación biopolítico, que distribuye posiciones y luchas en torno a
ejercicios de poderes, de resistencias y de desposesión sobre un mapa
móvil de relaciones con lo viviente, que son siempre relaciones de
control y de propiedad. (Formas comunes 24)

Straddling nature and artifice, the figure of the monster dramatizes the limit
between life and death, between bios and zoē, by tracing the limit, the outside of
the person understood as an ethical and juridical category that, although it seems
to belong to the domain of exteriority, crosses the boundaries of subjectivity and
the intricate webs of the social through processes of radical hybridization, which
puts into question the dominance of the human, its philosophical status, and its
limits. This can be seen in the diverse combinations of the monstrous. As
Torrano argues, for example, referring to the werewolf,

El devenir lobo del hombre no sólo muestra la inestabilidad de ese ser

que llamamos “hombre,” sino también la monstruosidad constitutiva
que lo habita y el temor que esto genera. El hombre-lobo no se
encuentra más en los márgenes de la comunidad de los hombres, sino
que está en el interior, habita en la ciudad […] el hombre que deviene
lobo no es otro que el enemigo interno, quien puede afectar el orden
social. (“El monstruo en la política” 433)

The “anthropological machine” to which Agamben refers in The Open: Man

and Animal (2002) rearticulates animality and humanity, combining both
domains in different ways, whether humanizing the animal or animalizing the
human:

The division of life into vegetal and relational, organic and animal,
animal and human, therefore passes first of all as a mobile border
within living man, and without this intimate caesura the very decision
of what is human and what is not would probably not be possible….
But if this is true, if the caesura between the human and the animal
passes first of all within man, then it is the very question of man—and
of “humanism”—that must be posed in a new way. In our culture, man
 has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a
body and a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal)
element and a supernatural or social or divine element. We must learn
instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these
two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of
conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation.
What is man, if he is always the place—and, at the same time, the
result—of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? (15-16)

Agamben is concerned with marking the fact that in Hobbes’s image

hybridity prohibits the distinction between animal and man because it is a
relation that articulates incorporation and exclusion and which is condensed in
the idea of the lycanthrope, in which the body combines the appearance and
attributes of both natures. The werewolf is an inhabitant of the city, the citizen
that Agamben defines as “the threshold of passage between nature and politics,
animal world and human world” (Homo Sacer 107). At the same time, he
emphasizes the very process of lupification, that is, the metamorphosis that
transforms the polis into an overflowing of instinct, violence, and fear. The
advent of the lycanthrope-monster (Agamben does not use the word “monster,”
preferring instead “beast” or “animal,” thus eliminating any connotations with
fantasy or the supernatural) constitutes a rupture in the social and political order
and a suspension of the state of law: “The transformation into a werewolf
corresponds perfectly to the state of exception, during which (necessarily
limited) time the city is dissolved and men enter into a zone in which they are no
longer distinct from beasts” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 107).
The figure of the werewolf, taken from ancient folklore, constitutes an
aesthetico-ideological artifact that is appropriately ambiguous, both in its
constitution and its connotations. It expresses the idea of the stalking or hunting
of the human being, but its attributes are portrayed as magical. Daniel Cohen, in
his Encyclopedia of Monsters, emphasizes the use of wolf skins by hunters as
well as its shamanic meaning, which is based in the supposed instinctive and
“intelligent” connection this animal has with the natural world. In this way, the
image of the werewolf is a part of rituals and ceremonies, creating a bridge
between diverse domains of the real. The archaic echoes that inspire modern
appropriations of the lycanthrope play an important role in the determination of
the symbolic value of this creature, and enrich its constant symbolic recycling,
thus strengthening the meaning of the werewolf as a “political animal.”
Becoming is what is proper to the wolf, which is alternatively transformed into
shaman, hunter, and hunted. It is a totemic animal, connected to origin myths as
well as to occultism and popular superstitions about the becoming-wolf, an idea
that is supported by Hobbes’s political theory.
As Cohen argues, the werewolf’s strong pagan connections were hybridized
with Christian elements when it was judged to have demonic qualities. Although
the Bible does not explicitly mention the werewolf, the interpretation of the
latter as a component of popular Christian imaginaries is symptomatic of its
symbolic value. This perspective provides Hobbesian theory with the necessary
material for converting the werewolf into the Leviathan’s final reason:

The Wolf was a particularly powerful symbol in Christian Europe…. In

addition, the wolf was a conspicuous symbol of evil in the Bible:
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep,
but inwardly they are ravening wolves… Behold I send you a sheep in
the midst of wolves… I know that after my departure, ravening wolves
will enter in among you, not sparing the flock. (Cohen 279)

The lycanthrope is thus one of the most powerful examples of the becoming-
animal and its multifaceted relations with the community, which it
simultaneously threatens and fascinates by unfolding its magical power over its
surroundings. It has strong connections to the idea of the simulacrum because
the hunter uses the wolf’s skin to camouflage himself and thus through
contamination obtain the features of the animal he invokes and hunts. According
to Cohen, ideas about the dissemination of wolf-like qualities among human
beings through being bitten are much more recent and emerged as part of the
process through which this figure became a modern signifier. However, the idea
that the individual can become a werewolf (or lobizón in some contexts) forms
part of modern imaginaries and incorporates a magical element into daily life,
condensing the emotional elements of fear, frenzy, desire, and anxiety. The
werewolf concentrates all the characteristics of the modern monster: hybridity,
the ability to spread its attributes through contagion, and its magical
connotations. It represents the uncanny, bringing together the element of
intellectual uncertainty and the emotional charge produced by the
defamiliarization of a corporeality that is simultaneously more and less than the
sum of its parts.
With this symbolic charge, the image of the werewolf deployed by Hobbes
and analyzed by Agamben is integrated as an icon within the discourses of
power in which it plays the role of an ideologeme that connotes both resistance
and anarchy, the latent power of the masses that even without self-knowledge
can unfold an inorganic energy and provoke unforeseeable reactions. The
becoming-wolf of man and the inverse ability of the wolf to appear in the guise
of a civility that has dominated its instincts and its will to power illustrate the
fluid and unstable quality of the social body and the currents that run through it.
The werewolf is event, scandal, spectacle, exceptionality, incomplete element
which negotiates its appearance and makes use of its transformations to provoke
forms of action that intervene in the social, integrating a radical alterity that
destabilizes the status quo. Hence, the figure of this “political monster” is useful
for theorizing the state of exception, which is connected to the themes of
sovereignty and the state as the source of “legitimate violence” (issues analyzed
by Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, and others).
The werewolf’s location is both central (because it is an inhabitant of the
polis) and potentially marginal with regard to power, which exists in a constant
state of internal threat. Although the image of the Leviathan, a monster of
immense proportions and almost cosmic connotations, dominates the scene, the
werewolf lurks throughout the discursive space, as is its nature: it haunts and
harasses, it stalks and hunts down. The werewolf is conceived as pure potential
and is situated in the zone of in-differentiation where men and beasts are mixed
together in civic space. Citizenship is understood as a formless mass that only
the omnipotence of the state can contain and prevent from materializing its
becoming-animal against the stability of the political. For its part, this latter
maintains an unstable equilibrium, while the two parts that compose the human
being’s animal nature are not dissociated and lead to internal war. The werewolf
embodies the classical nature of the monster: it intervenes as event in the
community and announces, even if it is in a latent state, its disruptive capacity,
thus constituting a permanent threat to the social order and civic stability.11
Torrano correctly asserts that

existe una estrecha relación entre el Leviatán y el hombre-lobo, en

tanto son dos figuras monstruosas que aparecen juntas o, para ser más
 precisos, podríamos decir que es el hombre-lobo quien da origen al
Leviatán. Se trata de una complicidad entre ambos monstruos,
complicidad que ha sido sellada por la amenaza de muerte y el terror.
El Leviatán sólo puede asegurar la vida de los ciudadanos si los
hombres renuncian a su derecho natural de ser lobos. (“El monstruo en
la política” 438)

As Torrano also notes, just as the Leviathan is located above the juridical
order, the werewolf is situated underneath it, both prior to the law and its greatest
offender. “El Leviatán y el hombre-lobo son dos figuras que se encuentran […]
‘fuera-de-la-ley,’ es decir, en una tensión entre límite y transgresión” (“El
monstruo político” 97). The werewolf makes the law necessary and transgresses
it, legitimizes the state of law and the sovereign state and threatens them, thereby
confirming the necessity of their existence. The order in which it moves is
eminently emotional, an affective space dominated by the fear of oneself as
constitutive of modern reason. The werewolf is an ideological operator, a shifter,
an assemblage, whose greatest quality is its ability to suspend all certainty and to
situate the cypher of the nature and institutionalization of the political in the
transgressive potential of the multitude.
The figure of wolf-man would come to have particular relevance for
psychoanalysis, reaching a pinnacle with the case of a Russian aristocrat and
patient of Freud named Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff (1886-1979), who,
known as the “Wolf-man,” was treated for delirium and nightmares in which he
was being stalked by white wolves, which Freud interpreted as an expression of
a childhood trauma connected to having witnessed his parents having sex. This
case study—which is polemical, and according to some psychoanalytic critics of
Freud, poorly resolved—was taken up again by Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones
in his essay On the Nightmare (1931), in which the figure of the wolf-man
condenses for psychoanalysis a series of qualities connected to the death drive,
which circumscribes and intensifies its symbolic value. According to Jones,

The most prominent attributes which we may expect to have been used
for the purposes of symbolism are thus swiftness of movement,
insatiable lust for blood, cruelty, a way of attacking characterized by a
combination of boldness and cunning craftiness, and further the
associations with the ideas of night, death and corpse. As is easy to see,
 the savage and uncanny features characteristic of the wolf have made
him especially suited to represent the dangerous and immoral side of
nature in general and of human nature in particular. (132)

Jones also found multiple points of contact between the werewolf and the
vampire:

The psychological relationship between the Vampire and Werewolf

superstitions may be shortly expressed. The former is much more
closely connected with the revenant idea, though, as we have seen, the
difference between the two in this respect is one of degree only.
Further, whereas the Vampire belief is more concerned with sucking
tendencies, both oral and vaginal, the Werewolf one is throughout
sadistic in nature. (153)

He mentions that the three main qualities that characterize the werewolf and
configure its psychological meaning have to do with the belief in the mutation of
an animal into a human (and vice versa) with a tendency toward cannibalism and
with the creature’s nighttime wanderings. Additionally, the werewolf is
considered a melancholic being who illustrates the conflict of the split
personality and represents the anti-social aspects of the individual and the effects
of the torturous repression of impulses. Carl Jung interprets the werewolf as the
repressed shadow of primary drives that are hidden beneath the mask of
civilization. Its image leads to a reflection on the binary relations of
nature/culture and instinct/reason, and connects our world to an obscure
background in which we are all monsters. Archetype of the subject’s interiority
and of the collective unconscious, the werewolf brings about the confrontation of
the individual with the mystery of being and the darkest depths of the
unconscious. As Gardenour Walter suggests, the modern werewolf connotes
abjection and isolation; its transformation illustrates the alienation of the
individual who exists outside the community he or she inhabits, as “[e]ven in a
pack, we hunt alone” (185). The possibility of a terrifying metamorphosis in
which the human being is bodily transformed into this type of melancholic and
sinister creature has always threatened us.
Jones considers the vampire to be the monster with the richest and most
overdetermined meaning and with the most connections to popular legends,
superstitions, and beliefs related to sexuality. In the chapter of A Thousand
Plateaus titled “1914: One or Several Wolves?” Deleuze and Guattari return to
Freud’s Wolf-Man and consider the case of Pankejeff an example of the “generic
multiplicity” that illustrates the schizoid disarticulation of identity. This
multiplicity, which is proper to packs, incorporates the idea of the rhizome since
in an animal group every element varies and changes the distance that separates
it from the others, creating a dynamic of identity and change, transformation and
permanence, that functions as a libidinal current—“a band of intensity”—that
traverses the interiority of the subject: “Lines of flight or of deterritorialization,
becoming-wolf, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is what
multiplicity is” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 32).
According to Deleuze and Guattari, through a fixation on a predetermined
sexual interpretation, Freud overlooks crucial elements like the silent call of the
animal conversion (becoming), which is fundamental to the attitude the patient
assumes before multiplicity. Thus, they pose a question: “Which will prevail,
mass territoriality or pack deterritorialization?” (37), an interrogation that
touches on the condition of the monster itself as an assemblage and as a war
machine. The question also addresses the monster’s effectivity as a space of
intensification and différance and interrogates its operativity as a deconstructive
apparatus of power.

Community, Immunity, and Originary Fear: Esposito

From Foucault onward, the biopolitical domain has been defined as that which
establishes the relations between life and politics (strategies of population
control, eugenics, issues connected to conflicts of race, gender, or sexuality,
public policies on health, immigration, disability, citizenship, discipline, etc.). Of
course, there is substantial disagreement about how to define these concepts,
which lend themselves to interpretations and redefinitions that reveal the
(ideological, geocultural, institutional) foundations that support the discourse of
normality and anomaly. The concepts of abjection, metamorphosis, and
posthumanity associated with the monstrous are intimately linked to the
definition of the values necessary for the configuration of the social and for the
administration of difference. This indicates the central importance of the theme
of the power that governs biopolitical discourses and practices, especially
through the emphasis on instrumental reason as the organizing criterion of
knowledge and as the basic principle that guides the notion of social order in the
Western world.
Monstrosity functions as an ideologeme that condenses the meanings of
deviation, resistance, transgression, foreignness, anomaly, and so on, which is to
say, all references to potential threats to the normative order and the health of the
community. From the biopolitical perspective, the monstrous signals the point of
maximum vulnerability of the social, when an alternative materializes. It
represents illness, rupture, contagion, disruption, chaos, or corruption of the
social body due to the actions of another, threatening body that subverts and
dislocates social spaces. However, the monstrous becomes a positive
constellation of meaning when this subversion announces the possibility of
transgressing the practices of dominant power and creating new social and
political conditions.
Biopolitics is the name of the domain of social philosophy concerned with
the relation between the individual and the community and the regulation of the
interactions that take place within the body politic or in spaces adjacent to it
(beyond national borders, outside state regulation, in transnational and global
spaces) that circumscribe and delimit the body politic. In his lectures from 1975-
1976 published as Society Must Be Defended (1997), Foucault explains the
concept of biopower as a technology of control and domination that does not
exclude violence, which like power is to be found disseminated throughout the
social body.
For our present purposes, what is particularly important is to note this
connection between regulatory force and anomaly: the state, as the bearer of
sovereign power and as a mechanism granted the “right” to exercise “legitimate
violence,” resisting the war machine of an inorganic counter-power dispersed
throughout the social and centralized in the signifying constellation of the
monster as the place of the Other, for the other—the contaminating foreigner,
terrorist, black, indigenous, woman, undocumented, communist, disabled,
deformed, mentally ill. These figures are each monstrous in their own way
because they materialize the threat to the social body in accordance with the
definitions of health and illness that defend the stability and dominion of certain
segments of society over others, stereotyping the analysis of the real in order to
adapt it to the system of exclusions and territorialisms that props up modernity.
 Esposito affirms that the monster is essential to the constitution of the
concepts of communitas and immunitas, which, much more than legitimation,
rationalization, or secularization, are considered essential ideas for the
comprehension of modernity and are traditionally cited as the key element of
post-Enlightenment societies. For Esposito, the community is negatively defined,
not as a body, a corporation, or a process of intersubjective recognition: “The
community isn’t a mode of being, much less a ‘making’ of the individual subject.
It isn’t the subject’s expansion or multiplication but its exposure to what
interrupts the closing and turns it inside out: a dizziness, a syncope, a spasm in
the continuity of the subject” (Communitas 7; emphasis added).
The monster, then, is this dizziness, syncope, or spasm, and it proliferates as
a re-staging of the primordial scene of terror that is natural to the social because,
as Esposito reminds us, “we originate in fear,” the fear of death, of that which we
are not, of the otherness that inhabits us.12 For the human being, fear is “terribly
originary” (Communitas 21), as Hobbes’s conceptualization of power as
Leviathan warned us. Fear constitutes one of the ideological paradigms of
modernity.

That the modern state not only does not eliminate fear from which it is
originally generated but is founded precisely on fear so as to make it
the motor and the guarantee of the state’s proper functioning means
that the epoch that defines itself on the basis of the break with respect
to the origin, namely, modernity, carries within it an indelible imprint
of conflict and violence. (Communitas 25)

This perpetuation of fear in modernity implies the presence of barbarism

within civilization itself, or in Esposito’s words, “the permanence of the origin at
the moment of its leaving” (Communitas 25). It is a matter, in other words, of
“the modern archaic”: the archaism of the modern and the modernity of the
archaic. These categories mutually support one another in the contemporary
social and ideological order and are constantly reinitiated and restaged in the
figure and trajectory of the monster.
Monstrosity and the scene of terror that it recreates in each one of its
apparitions are connected to the notion of immunitas, which is also central to
Esposito’s biopolitical thought. As Canguilhem demonstrated, it is monstrosity
and not death that constitutes the counter-value of life (“Monstrosity and the
Monstrous” 29). Fear is the exogenous element that is gradually incorporated
into imaginaries and communities, provoking immunitary reactions that, by
responding to social illness (conflict, threats to survival), generate forms of
resistance and defense. In this sense the monstrous constitutes an interpretive
paradigm of the individual/community relationship that unavoidably passes
through the body:

The body defeats a poison not by expelling it outside the organism, but
by making it somehow part of the body…the immunitary logic is based
more on a non-negation, on the negation of a negation, than on an
affirmation. The negative not only survives its cure, it constitutes the
condition of effectiveness. It is as if it were doubled into two halves,
one of which is required for the containment of the other: the lesser of
two evils is intended to block the greater evil, but in the same
language. (Esposito, Immunitas 8)

The immunitary process that expels the monster is its other, constitutive half.
The monster reveals the evil in society and generates resistances that ultimately
contribute to the health of the community:

For life to remain as such, it must submit itself to an alien force that, if
not entirely hostile, at least inhibits its development. It must
incorporate a fragment of the nothingness that it seeks to prevent,
simply by deferring it.… In so doing, it retains its objective in the
horizon of meaning of its opposite: it can prolong life but only by
continuously giving it a taste of death. (Esposito, Immunitas 8-9)

This “taste of death” that the monster embodies, like the terror that it
provokes, is unavoidably based in the body. The re-centering effect that
biopolitics has on bodily processes and interactions creates a new semantics of
social relations. In the lectures published in Society Must Be Defended, Foucault
concentrates on the reflection and formulation of more modern developments in
postindustrial society and the consolidation of modernity as an epistemic order.
According to Esposito, the question that haunts this analysis revolves around the
semantics of the social body as the source of the interactions and negotiations of
power.
 Contrary to a widespread theory tying the immunitary dynamics of
modernity to a procedure of gradual marginalization or emptying of the
individual and social body, the biopolitical register is actually built
around its renewed centrality. The body is the most immediate terrain
of the relation between politics and life, because only in the body does
life seem protected from what threatens to harm it and from its own
tendency to go beyond itself, to become other than itself.… By placing
the body at the center of politics and the potential for disease at the
center of the body, it makes sickness on the one hand, the outer margin
from which life must continually distance itself, and, on the other, the
internal fold which dialectically brings it back to itself. (Immunitas 14-
15)

As epistemic and counter-normative anomaly or rupture, the monster

reaffirms the centrality of the body as well as its status as the link between life
and politics, animality and culture, humanity and nature. Teratological
imaginaries locate the monster at the center of the social body, on the primordial
level of ancestral fears, prophecies, and magico-religious rituals. In so doing, the
monster marks the external margin and the internal fold of modern
consciousness, perpetuating itself as a constant immunological antibody that
both attacks and protects the social body that it has become part of in order to
survive.

Bioculture, Bioresistance, Bioproxemics: Valenzuela

According to the concepts developed by José Manuel Valenzuela in the context
of his work on youth subcultures, drug trafficking, and violence, the notion of
bioculture constitutes, as an expansion of the concept of biopolitics, a space of
analysis that recuperates the logics of the interrelation of bodies, projects, and
lifestyles in contemporary society. He defines bioculture as

el conjunto de prácticas significantes mediadas por el cuerpo, desde las

cuales se definen estilos, identidades y culturas juveniles que contienen
diversos actores e interlocutores, como sucede con los gobiernos y
poderes hegemónicos, mediante la relación biopolítica-biorresistencia,
las relaciones horizontales o que no refieren a los actores y dispositivos
de la biopolítica, como la que se presenta entre los diversos colectivos,
 crews, grupos, barrios, clicas o cuadrillas juveniles y las formas
específicas desde las cuales se conforman expresiones que integran
formas simbióticas de la relación cuerpo-espacio. (165)

Along these same lines, the concept of bioproxemics defines “la dimensión
simbiótica de la relación cuerpo-espacio, donde destacan procesos intensos de
corporeización del espacio y territorialización del cuerpo” (165). According to
Valenzuela, the biopolitical theory that emerged from Foucault and was
expanded by Esposito and other contemporary philosophers is concerned with
sociodemographic themes, as the population as a whole is the object of
biopower. This consideration reaches the human being as such: “no al pueblo
como sujeto colectivo de una nación, ni a los sujetos individuales” (Valenzuela
166). Negri’s work departs from the ancient notion of the monstrous as what is
excluded by society, even though modern reason alienates society and life in its
totality, systematically, through the politics of discipline and control that abuse
individuals’ rights and natures. Hence, monstrosity’s attributes have been
displaced to the point that it is characteristic of the multitude that becomes a
subject and elaborates forms of collective identity and political agency capable
of disobeying the existing “order.” “El monstruo es lo común, es potencia de la
ciudadanía y, en la medida en que el monstruo no es un afuera y encarna en las
luchas de resistencia, nosotros somos el monstruo” (Valenzuela 166).13 The
monster becomes an apparatus of potential bioresistance. However, Valenzuela
states that the monster’s ideological valence is in no way homogeneous or
consistent: it can question and eventually combat the logic of capitalism,
constructing itself as a positive vital or revolutionary force; it can even, through
its rhizomatic political and social recirculation, assume much more contradictory
and heterogeneous positions that do not necessarily solidify as an alternative
biopolitical energy.
For Valenzuela, the heterogeneity and contradictory nature of the social
exceeds the expectations and possibilities Negri discusses:

Encontramos monstruos mucho más diversos y contradictorios con

posicionamientos desiguales que incluyen perspectivas revolucionarias
y conservadoras y pueden estar a favor de la despenalización de drogas
y contra la equidad de género, ser católicos y estar a favor de la libre
elección sobre la interrupción de un embarazo no deseado, por mayor
 libertad en el ejercicio de la sexualidad y contra las uniones de
personas del mismo sexo. (167)

Valenzuela nonetheless agrees with Negri that biopolitical resistance—

bioresistance—is disseminated throughout society as an inorganic and
decentralized force, “como una fantasmagoría de la lucha de clases” that
simultaneously expresses the hegemony of capital and the search for alternative
paradigms and practices (167). The monster thus exists—with all the plenitude
of its ambiguous and variable, heterogeneous and heterodox, spectral and
material meanings—as that lack of definitive form which is opposed to the
system through biocultural mechanisms. These latter function through the
support of the body, the focus of the transmission of meaning and the generation
of the intercultural and identitarian processes that run throughout the web of
society. Valenzuela defines bioculture as

la centralidad corporal en la definición de relaciones, significados y

disputas sociales. La biocultura refiere a la significación del cuerpo, su
incorporación dentro de las estrategias de la política y la disputa por su
control, pero también su participación como elemento de resistencia
cultural, como expresión artística o como referente de significación
identitaria. (169)

The body plays the central role in a system of mediations and adaptations, or
bioresistances from biopolitical elements related to sexuality, bourgeois customs,
consumption and so on, constituting itself as an inescapable component of the
relationship between the individual and power, the formation of identities and
institutional processes, individuality and nation, civil society and the state,
discipline and enjoyment. It is the principal basis of the processes of social
recognition and self-recognition. It is a key element for the configuration of the
triad of politics, life, and body through which one can think biocultural and
biopolitical functioning in contemporary society. Valenzuela clarifies that this
triad is being rewritten as being comprised of the concepts of politics, life, and
death due to the politics of criminalization and the strategies of the precarization
of life that are being implemented on a massive level in diverse contexts. The
(bio)political monster embodied in the power of state violence and the dispersed
and emancipatory monstrosity of bioresistance continue to struggle in hybrid and
ethically and politically tense situations. In these perspectives, the meaning of
monstrosity seems to explode in all directions: in the archaic sense of foretelling
future misfortunes or as punishment for sins; in the form of the sublimity that
gives the popular the mission of liberating, romanticizing, and homogenizing the
irreducible complexity of the social; in the identitary torsion that stigmatizes
difference; and in the utopian modality that celebrates the fragmentation and
inorganic energy of the popular in its spectral form of expression: destructured
content, signifier without signified, capable of encouraging new directions in
political thought.
In his essay “Necropolitics” (2003), Achille Mbembe describes the relations
between life, otherness, power, and death that constitute a fundamental aspect of
modernity:

The perception of the existence of the Other as an attempt on my life,

as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination
would strengthen my potential to life and security—this, I suggest, is
one of the many imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both early
and late modernity itself. Recognition of this perception to a large
extent underpins most traditional critiques of modernity, whether they
are dealing with nihilism and its proclamation of the will for power as
the essence of the being; with reification understood as the becoming-
object of the human being; or the subordination of everything to
impersonal logic and to the reign of calculability and instrumental
rationality. (18)

For Mbembe, “the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for

contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” in a society
oriented toward “the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social
existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring
upon them the status of living dead” (40; emphasis in original).
The death drive that propels (post)modernity manifests in the zombification
of beings submitted to conditions of mass destruction that have been naturalized
in different cultural contexts. Necropolitics does not see the monster as a wall of
contention, because it is excluded from being defined as life for occupying an
interstitial and threatening position. Therefore, it can be eliminated, sacrificed
without breaking the law, as Agamben indicates is the case for homo sacer
because it involves the application of a eugenic criterion that extirpates
monstrosity as part of the strategies of defending the health of the social body.
Faced with this necropolitical direction, the emphasis on bioresistance is
fundamental for avoiding the conceptualization of a passive social subject that
submits to the thanatic drives that emerge from the reason of State—the
militarization of politics understood as the war of all against all—without ever
giving rise to productive and organized action capable of resisting the destructive
force that stalks and hunts down the social. Thus, what appears to be
fundamental is the definition of positive “monstrosity” that Negri locates in the
multitude, a counter-normative and insurrectionary force capable of subverting
the world (dis)order, which Valenzuela already identifies in a more
circumscribed way, as historically, politically, and sociologically located in fully
developed actors and social actions.

Notes
1. On the influence of Spinoza on Negri’s thought, see Michael Goddard and Caroli and Grebowicz.
2. “Insofar as the multitude is neither an identity (like the people) nor uniform (like the masses), the
internal differences of the multitude must discover the common that allows them to communicate and
act together. The common we share, in fact, is not so much discovered as it is produced” (Hardt and
Negri, Multitude xv).
3. See Andrew Sharpe (32-33).
4. See Casarino and Negri, In Praise of the Common.
5. The biblical interpretations that supported Hobbes’s choice of this figure have long been the object of
debate. According to Timothy Beal, the Leviathan is the image of the “political sublime,” military and
religious authority, “political Body” (the body of the polis). However, in the Bible (specifically in the
Book of Job), the Leviathan appears as a chaotic monster or as the personification of the enemy who
threatens order. In Beal’s estimation, “Leviathan…is the climactic figure of overwhelming and
terrifying divine power against justice. It is an imposition of order without justice that puts the
insubordinate, even subversive questioning of the individual to rest.…the awful and awesome
imposition of peace with or without justice” (96-98).
6. De Caroli and Grebowicz note that the Leviathan was already present during the Renaissance, and they
cite Steadman’s essay “Leviathan in Renaissance Etymology,” which analyzes its predecessors.
7. De Caroli and Grebowicz compare the notion of the people to what they call “social flesh,” indicating
that the concept of multitude entails a “singular multiplicity,” not an organized social body, which is to
say, a social body domesticated by structures of power and control.
8. Torrano gives the following citation regarding the maxim in question: “En la Epístola De Cive (1642),
Hobbes escribe la famosa sentencia That Man to Man is a Kind of God; and that Man to Man is an
arrant Wolfe (Hobbes, 1987: 24), que retoma Bacon Verulamio, donde en el Estado el hombre es para
el hombre un dios: ‘homo homini deus’, mientras que en el estado de naturaleza el hombre es para el
hombre un lobo: ‘homo homini lupus” (“El monstruo en la política” 433).
9. See also Antonio Serrano González on the sociopolitical and literary uses of the wolf in European
Renaissance treatises and literature.
10. As Jiménez-Belmonte opportunely notes, Agamben also takes up the hybrid figure of the werewolf in
order to explain the relation between the homo sacer and the bandit: “What had to remain in the
 collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the
city—the were-wolf—is, therefore, in its origin the figure of the man who has been banned from the
city . . . The life of the bandit, like that of the sacred man, is not a piece of animal nature without any
relation to law and the city. It is, rather, a threshold of indistinction and a passage between animal and
man, physys and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life of the loup garouy the
werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while
belonging to neither” (Homo Sacer 105).
11. See Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign.
12. On the role of fear as primal scene, see Esposito, Communitas 20-40.
13. Here, Valenzuela is glossing the concepts elaborated by Negri in “The Political Monster.”
 Chapter 6

Monstrosity, Representation, and the Market

(De)monstrative by definition (and by nature), the monster exists in the tense
and contradictory interstice of the unfolding/refolding of its presence in public
space. If this concealment is essential for public space (a form of protecting itself
from the Otherness that both intimidates and seduces it), then the monster only
exists insofar as it manifests and intervenes in the public sphere. Its periods of
hibernation, in which the metabolism of fear seems to slow down, are interludes
of latency and preparation for the next attack, moments that ratchet up
anticipation in an atmosphere already colonized by fear. Private, even secret,
clandestine, recondite, and evasive, the monster has much to hide. At the same
time, the monster only has meaning in relation to the subject/object of its desire:
it is a desiring body that extends beyond all limits—territorial, religious, ethical,
epistemic—and invades geocultural and existential spaces as if they were
unconquered lands. The monster has been guided by a colonialist impulse to
appropriate, usufruct, and reproduce its anomalous selfhood in the social body in
which it is embedded. Thus, the monster’s presence oscillates between the
concealment and the brash and shameless exhibition of its attributes. Its anti-
heroic vicissitudes include extensive and disparate trajectories. It goes from
recondite, gloomy, and inaccessible places to the almost pornographic display of
its body and its qualities. It exists to be seen; it is essentially a spectacle, a
constant retombé: a permanent, cyclical, anticipated representation. It constitutes
a predictable event that cultivates fear, a feeling that sutures the void of its
absence. It is a visual occurrence, an ostentatious event, a melodramatic
performance of difference, and the excessive, hyperbolic affirmation of an
always eccentric and out-of-joint (id)entity.
For both the imaginary beings of ancient mythology and the creatures that
populate the Judeo-Christian cosmovision (from Lucifer and the Leviathan to the
Behemoth, a mastodon mentioned in the Book of Job), which consists of a large
collection of fantastic beasts, many of which are mentioned in the pages of the
Book of Revelation, the visual aspect of monstrosity constitutes a fundamental
semiotic apparatus designed to transgress existing representational models and to
push imagination and interpretive ability toward spheres full of emotionality and
coded messages of a political, moral, or religious kind.1
In its secularized forms, the demonstrative, pedagogical, and intentionally
prophetic aspect of monstrosity is retained, although its modes of appearance
and circulation are progressively trivialized insofar as they are connected to
mass markets that commodify teratological representation and submit it to the
dynamics of supply and demand. The protocols of the culture industry impose a
spectacularity onto the monster’s image and trajectory, directed toward mass
audiences with disparate preferences and diverse expectations. Monstrosity’s
enigmatic character is appropriated by mass culture and recycled through
representational strategies that range from the grotesque to the melodramatic, to
the revival of apocalyptic narratives, sentimentality, camp, and kitsch. In each
case, the constants of classical monstrosity are maintained: an emphasis on
bodily anomaly, a preponderance of desire, extraordinary physical attributes,
countercultural value, sublimated sexuality, and thanatic connotations. The
monster’s oscillation between the intimacy of terror and the public disclosure of
signs and meanings rematerializes as a dynamic that unites and separates the
private sphere and the space of the community. The monster’s inherent mobility
(lurking, wandering, nomadism, eruptions that affirm its evental and catastrophic
character) is related to new technological scenarios, aesthetics, and settings that
elaborate the anachronism of the monster in contrast to transnational super-
modernity, which is considered the definitive feature of the contemporary world.

Monstrous (Id)Entities: From Freak Shows

to Michael Jackson
As we have already seen, freak shows constituted—particularly in the nineteenth
century in relation to changes provoked by industrialization—a ritualized form
of spectacularizing the anomalous body through which anxieties about the
defamiliarizing changes related to the accelerated urban growth and scientific
advances were expressed. However, as the studies collected by Rosemarie
Garland-Thomson in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body
confirm, the freak show also makes it possible to analyze the process of
“enfreakment” studied by David Hevey and crystallized in the “cultural rituals
that stylize, silence, differentiate, and distance the persons whose bodies” are
colonized and commercialized for these spectacles (10). Therefore, the
separation between nature and culture once again is demonstrated as artificial
and malleable. The device of monstering is the construction of a simulacrum that
condenses and metaphorizes multiple levels of the social problematic,
particularly with regard to the relation between corporeality and identity politics.

By constituting the freak as an icon of generalized embodied category

of corporeal deviance, the exhibitions also simultaneously reinscribed
gender, race, sexual aberrance, ethnicity, and disability as inextricable
yet particular exclusionary systems legitimated by bodily variation –al
represented by the single multivalent figure of the freak. Thus, what we
assume to be a freak of nature was instead a freak of culture. (Garland-
Thomson 10)

The texts in this book examine the different stages of a process that ranges
from “the social construction” of the “human monster” (Bogdan), and the
practices of “enfreakment” or monstering to the spectacularization of bodily and
cultural foreignness. The studies collected in Freakery analyze, along with the
discursive use of the symbolic constellation of monstrosity, the interesting
reemergence of the freak show in contemporary cultural phenomena like
bodybuilding, talk shows, medical documentaries, and pop music spectacles,
such as Michael Jackson. As a representative figure of the genre, Jackson
himself illustrated aspects of bodily mutilation, ambiguous identity, and the
theatricalization of difference. As David D. Yuan remarks in “The Celebrity
Freak: Michael Jackson’s ‘Grotesque Glory’”: “The theme running through
Jackson’s music videos, for example, is escape and metamorphosis: Jackson
metamorphoses from man to zombie, from man to animal, from man to cyborg
in an attempt to escape fans, reporters, or cartoon-like villains” (371).
Jackson’s performance, configured around notions of the stereotypical and
cartoonish, combines the representation of the monstrous, particularly in the
zombie dance and his transformation into a werewolf in the “Thriller” video,
with dance techniques including “the robot” and the moonwalk articulating
technological elements and bodily transformations that create a visually striking,
fluid, border, undecidable, countercultural image, especially for young
audiences.2 His thematic, situated in physiological metamorphosis, the occult
forces of society, and Gothic atmospheres, constitutes a hyperbolic
amalgamation of figures connoting abjection and eroticism. These latter are
replete with supernatural, phantasmagoric, or demonic elements that
complement Jackson’s horrifying appearance with the physical, countercultural,
and sexualized attraction that is expressed through his skill as a dancer and his
musical and choreographic abilities. Some representative examples of his music
videos in this genre are, firstly, “Thriller,” which premiered in 1983 and is based
on the title track to his album released the previous year. “Smooth Criminal”
(1988) is an electro-funk track produced by Quincy Jones, and the video presents
Jackson as an enormous robot, or “Dancing Machine.” Ghost (1996), a 39-
minute short film cowritten with Stephen King and directed by Stan Winston,
offers an atmosphere that combines monstrosity and phantasmagoria. These
works thematize the transfiguration and mutation of the human in images like
the living dead, the cyborg, or the ghost, which capture the imagination of vast
audiences around the world. The theme of fear and the appearance of anomalous
characters in groups, “families,” or hordes (ghouls) suggest an instinctive and
amorphous multitude that challenges status quo values, as do the processes of
bodily hybridization and the extreme transfiguration of the image, the treatment
of identity as a simulacrum—particularly race and sexuality as enduring spaces
of power that are deconstructed and interpellated through the parodic excess of
gothic punk. Thus, the theme of ambiguity is brought to new levels in which
biography and fiction, the monstrous and the human, are (con)fused.
In this sense, perhaps the most prominent aspect of Jackson’s teratological
production is the continuity that it establishes between the artist’s life and work.
In fact, in addition to the creative aspects that his audiovisual production
presents, artistic polemics about his public and private lives, combined with the
construction of his Promethean image, make reality and simulacrum
indistinguishable. Some of the elements of this construct include, for example:
his fear of pollution, which was notably expressed through his use of a surgical
mask in public; his fascination with real-life monstrosity; his erratic sexuality;
his use of a hyperbaric chamber (which looked like a coffin) for oxygen therapy;
and his 3000-acre Neverland ranch, located in Los Olivos, California.3 The
name of the residence combines the magical innocence of Peter Pan with the
sordid stories of drug use and child abuse that circulated, illustrating the drives
involved in the composition of this paradoxical, innovative, and malleable
counter-figure in whom many of the contradictions of our time were
concentrated.
The iconic imagery displayed by Jackson’s work refers, in a Janus-faced
way, to his own childhood traumas, to which he made frequent reference, while
it also points toward the market as a great machinery of the (re)production and
consumption of difference and anomaly. Victim and victimizer, human and
monster, childlike and terrifying, white and black, feminized and
homosexualized, sentimental and robotic, libidinous and naïve, Jackson used
pastiche to compose the pop version of the aura which faded away as an
expression of sublimity in late modernity, offering in its place the halo of
indeterminacy, mass-market glamour, and evanescent identity. His work
thematized ruin as a postmodern aesthetic by wagering the residual quality of the
self, which dissolves in a world that does not exist outside the prominence of the
monster. His face gradually disappeared beneath an incessant simulacrum, his
sexuality and his race were exhausted in unreality and an out-of-joint,
contaminated, and murky childishness that refuse to disappear and integrate
itself into a world populated by ghosts. His interminable becomings survive in
his music, and his image is glorified by the unending traffic of commodification
and consumption.
With all his originality, it is important to remember that Jackson’s work is in
some ways based in a genre with a long tradition going back to sixteenth and
seventeenth-century slavery (particularly in Haiti, the origin of the Caribbean
version of the zombie) and connected to popular legends that take up the themes
of exploitation, human trafficking, and the loss of territory as a consequence of
colonialism. These origins are also incorporated in the very etymology of the
word zombie, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, derives from
the Congolese words nzambi (god/spirit) and zumbi (fetish). However, the uses
and adaptations of the term zombie/zombi are more complex and reflect the
reincarnations and reterritorializations of this figure in different historical and
geocultural contexts.4
The interesting connection that exists between Jackson’s work and the
racialized theme of the zombie has not been studied as extensively as other
aspects of his artistic output. However, this relation makes it possible to take on
a much more political reading of Jackson’s imagery and the way in which his
own life illustrated racial conflict and the victimization of blacks in the United
States from the colonial period onward. His massively popular work brought the
topic of racial conflict out into the open (with a significant dose of glamour),
connecting his success to the whitening of his skin while obsessively
thematizing the process of his transformation, which always consisted of the
spectacularized (de)monstration/monstering of his own inner conflict. Jackson’s
dermatological condition, vitiligo, involves the loss of pigmentation and
functioned as a kind of prophecy of racial reconversion that affected his public
image, to which Jackson responded with an acceleration of the process, thereby
confusing reality and simulacrum.
Thus, the source of Jackson’s work (or at least his primary worldview) can
be reduced to the irruption of the monster hidden behind the mask of normality:
the terrifying power repressed by public identity, the apparition of vampires,
zombies, ghosts, and other monsters like an event designed to contest the social
and axiological bases of the dominant culture and to destabilize the equilibrium
of the status quo. One could even say that, more than any other theme,
repression is the primary topic Jackson continually revisited in his audiovisual
work: the repression of the black race behind the appearance of whiteness, the
repression of libido under sublimated or vicarious forms of sexuality, the
repression of personal maturity underneath the presentation of an eternal and
stereotypical childhood, and the repression of familial dysfunction and the lack
of social integration through the creation of hordes or gangs of zombies or other
similar characterizations featured in his impressive choreography, proposing
alternative forms of social presence. As we have seen, repression is a
foundational concept in the analysis of fear because it confronts us with aspects
of our personality and experience that we do not wish to face and which have
been relegated to the unconscious and disguised in the symbolic network of daily
life. Hence the combination of attraction and rejection that fear produces in us as
a partial recuperation of the repressed. The emotional and symbolic intensity of
the representation of the repressed in Jackson’s work alters the affective and
social rhythms in the fictional worlds in which those elements are inscribed,
provoking a sensorial and aesthetic impact that facilitates, and at the same time
trivializes, the concentration of this material which ends up being ideologically
coopted by the market.
Zombification and Social Consciousness:
George Romero’s Zombie World
One of the distinctive features of the zombie genre is the way it transfers the
theme of the cosmic monster to Earth, representing a degraded form of humanity
that keeps the narrative focused on this anthropomorphic quality without
appealing to more imaginative forms of hybridity and deformity. The zombie’s
monstrosity resides in its constant evocation of the human that persists in a
grotesquely residual form and in which the wondrous element that causes
attraction and sometimes delight in certain fantastic beings (mermaids, unicorns,
etc.) completely disappears, giving way to horror and disgust. In the zombie,
monstrosity is sustained ambiguity situated in an inescapable and eternal
interstice where death has ceased to exist and is replaced by a corroded and
persistent nature that suggests the possibility of humanity: existence without
consciousness, extreme alienation, the progressive decay of the body, the
decomposition of sociality, the embodiment of evil and its infinite reproduction.
Zombie culture centers on an extreme economy of devices and on the
process of the obsessive repetition of certain predictable and mechanized images
and behaviors. The production of fear is based in the similarity between the
zombie and the human, in their difference in identity. Thomas Fahy refers to the
aspect of repetition as a mechanism proper to the generation of horror and as a
device for the commodification of its products. Following Carroll, he insists on
the genre’s need to tell the same story over and over again but with variations
that make it possible to revive the conventions of the genre, de-automating the
reception and interpretation of the visual or literary narrative. This approach
supports the production of multiple (more or less effective) sequels that,
depending on the case, offer variants that confront the audience with a wide
array of possibilities for introducing difference in repetition.
In its modern form, zombie culture, which came to constitute one of the most
prominent phenomena of the culture industry of the twentieth century, takes as
one of its foundational moments William Seabrook’s novel The Magic Island
(1929), which was adapted for the screen as Victor Halperin’s White Zombie
(1932). Starring Bela Lugosi and Madge Bellamy, this independent low-budget
film maintained a connection to Haitian culture, where the story takes place.5 A
melodramatic and unoriginal production, the film’s principal merit is in having
introduced the theme of the zombie to the entertainment industry in an implicit
association with the theme of vampirism, which the film’s star Lugosi had
portrayed the previous year in his iconic interpretation of Count Dracula. In
addition, the film inscribes the theme of race in relation to colonialist
exploitation and develops a tale of love and violence in an atmosphere marked
by voodoo and supernatural elements and set in a sugar plantation worked by
slaves. The year The Magic Island was published was also the cusp of the Great
Depression, which generated a generalized sense of catastrophe and fear in the
United States—a very appropriate atmosphere for the reception of apocalyptic
narratives that reflected and sublimated collective sentiments. Once again, the
monster more or less implicitly interacts with society’s fears and connects them
to moments of crisis.
In its literary expression, the zombie theme is also connected to the work of
Richard Matheson (1926-2013), particularly his novel I Am Legend (1954), and
the narrative works of H.P. Lovecraft (as we have already mentioned), who is
considered the founder of modern horror fiction. Matheson’s novel, written
along the same thematic lines as Dracula, articulates the elements of war,
pollution, illness, apocalypse, vampirism, and the theme of the last man in an
existential narrative that analyzes survival, the meaning of life, otherness, the
dangers of technology, and so on.6 I Am Legend demonstrates the bond of blood
that exists between vampires and zombies, since in the novel the creatures
consume blood, cannot withstand sunlight, are repelled by garlic, and can be
killed by driving a stake through the heart. The process of the differentiation of
monstrosity is thus based in a series of continuities and innovations (difference
and repetition, in Deleuzean terms) that are registered within the teratological
domain, a space of moveable and porous borders.
Regarding Lovecraft’s work, his preference for representing “cosmic fear” is
particularly evident in “The Call of Cthulu” (1926), a text that presents the
canonical features of monstrosity centered on the figure of the sea god Cthulu,
which emerged out of an accidental meeting of disparate elements carried out
through the experiments of an elderly archaeologist and a young sculptor.
Utilizing the same characteristics of all monsters (hybridity, supernatural
attributes, the representation of evil, an evental, simultaneously unexpected and
prophetic condition), Cthulu constitutes the center of a world beneath the surface
that demonstrates how everyday life hides a terrifying and uncognizable reality.
This demonic creature that lives beneath the sea becomes an object of worship
with many followers, even though it constitutes a threat to humanity.
Some of the notable characteristics of Lovecraft’s work are the cosmic
dimension of monstrosity and the use of elements from science fiction in the
creation of emotionally charged atmospheres where fear and its transcendent
projection occupy a prominent place. His cosmovision, free of religious
connotations but with clear connections to mythology and scientism, contains
significant racist elements that manifest on different levels of his fictitious
world. Lovecraft’s narrative also explores the inside/outside of monstrosity, as
exemplified by his short story “The Outsider” (written in 1921 but published as
part of Weird Tales in 1926). With regard to the theme of the zombie, his novel
Herbert West: The Re-Animator (1922) functions as one of the foundational texts
of the modern phase of the genre. This book returns to the theme of
Frankenstein’s monster in its portrayal of the character Herbert West as the
inventor of a chemical solution that can revive corpses. Nevertheless, the
procedure produces violent tendencies in these beings trapped between life and
death and leads them to terrorize society.7
In 1943, under the direction of Jacques Tourneur, Val Lewton produced
another classic of the genre, I Walked with a Zombie, a film about the
experiences of a Canadian nurse in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean island
of San Sebastian.8 Set in this Dutch possession in the colonial period, the film
tells a story of racism, love, and supernatural forces connected to the practice of
voodoo. The zombie in this story is a woman whose evil condition is of
unknown origin and thus alternately attributed to a mysterious illness or to
“possession” by an Afro-Caribbean cult whose magic, according to many
interpretations, is based on the use of hallucinogenic herbs. Edna Aizenberg
approaches the zombie genre represented by White Zombie and I Walked with a
Zombie through the trope of hybridity and the analysis of the connections
between gender and class (or social condition), observing the implications of the
articulation of sexual desire, ethnic otherness, and colonialism. She correctly
notes that these films make no mention of the U.S. military occupation of Haiti,
which began in 1915 during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency and lasted until
1934, meaning that it was still ongoing during the period when White Zombie
was produced. In this context, the stereotypes of primitive, barbaric,
cannibalistic, and libertine societies in the Caribbean freely circulated as part of
the discourse of legitimizing the occupation and “civilizing mission” that
inspired it (462).9
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert observes the correlation between aesthetic and
ideological elements in Lewton’s film. Shot in black and white, the film
highlights on one hand the association between the ethnic Afro-Caribbean
element with voodoo and on the other the protagonist’s whiteness “as a symbol
of authority.” The presence of a woman in the world of sensuality, mystery, and
exoticism stands out even more with regard to the film’s setting, a place that
long suffered from colonialist depredation.

Although thematically the movie strives to shed light on the island’s

history of oppression through its representation of the realities of
plantation life, it is nonetheless dependent visually (and it is a
strikingly visual film) on black/white oppositions that leave intact the
identification of blackness with “Voo-doo” and of Vodou with what is
only half comprehensible and half frightening. And at the core of the
movie’s visual representation of blackness is a Vodou ceremony that
has a white woman zombie as its centerpiece. (Paravisini-Gerbert 44)

The erotic relationship represented in these films and the figure of the
zombie as an alienated, interstitial, instinctive, and out of control identity
crystalizes the image of a hybrid carnality with strong symbolic, aesthetic, and
ideological value that can only be read against the backdrop of colonialist
domination and the “construction” of the otherness of the dominated. As
Aizenberg emphasizes, “Hollywood’s zombie is thoroughly enclosed within a
colonialist discourse that usurps history and identity. Here, hybridity menaces,
unmasking the fear of black and white intermingling, the terror of black (male)
bodies dominating whites” (462).
The politicized atmosphere of the 1960s gave way to a renewal of the
zombie genre, as it had already demonstrated its ability to create innovations that
could assure a certain representational adaptability within the model’s rather
rigid parameters, transposing this specific aspect of narratives of monstrosity to
different venues and diverse political conjunctures that nevertheless share certain
features such as inequality, racialization, and capitalist exploitation. Irven argues
that the zombie constitutes the dream of capitalism because it represents
submission to the master, which is to say, to a force of labor without ideology,
subject to manipulation, in which alienation has turned into a second, dominant
nature that abolishes memory and will. However, it also has the ability to
transform itself into a nomadic war machine, external to the state, and
characterized by a tendency toward anarchy and subversion, as the film Plague
of Zombies (1966), directed by John Gilling, illustrates. Produced in England,
the film makes use of the device of illness and contagion and transfers the figure
of the zombie from its peripheral, “natural” environment while maintaining the
sense of fear provoked by the specter of blackness that threatens the white world
of capitalism.10 It also represents the ideological element of voodoo that
intervenes in the social space of the colonizer, who now fears a reversal of the
history of domination with its predictable economic and political consequences.
This film is regarded as another work that prepared the way for the development
of the genre in subsequent decades.
On the basis of these predecessors, which have been readapted again and
again in new cinematic versions and different commodified forms
(merchandising, comic books, literature, music), the zombie genre acquired its
present form with George Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (1968/1990)
and its multiple sequels: Dawn of the Dead (1978/2004), Day of the Dead
(1985), Land of the Dead (2005), and Survival of the Dead (2009).11 The mass
commercialization of the zombie began with its deterritorialization, which
effectuated its transfer from Haitian sugar plantations to Hollywood studios. This
process altered the zombie’s symbolic field by causing it to move from the social
space of industrial capitalism to that of contemporary capitalism, in which the
relations between productivity and consumption, and even the relations between
production and capital, have been surpassed by the acceleration and growth of
financial capital and the primacy of immaterial labor. According to Larsen,

In pop culture the zombie is a twentieth-century monster and hence

related to mass phenomena: mass production, mass consumption, mass
death. It is not an aristocrat like Dracula or a star freak-like
Frankenstein; it is the everyman monster in which business as usual
coexists with extremes of hysteria (much like democracy at present, in
fact). The zombie also straddles the divide between industrial and
immaterial labor, from mass to multitude, from the brawn of
 industrialism to the dispersed brains of cognitive capitalism. (8-9)

The zombie thus reestablishes the relation between individual and

subjectivity, existence and subject, and radically alters the life/death connection
by making the latter a form of value that refuses to be destroyed. If, by being
transformed into a spectacle, death constitutes a form of symbolic capital that
can be exploited, accumulated, and reproduced (the entertainment world is able
to “conserve” death, and as Shaviro observes, in its agonistic trajectory, the
zombie secures the possibility of an incompletable death (qtd. in Larsen 12). The
death of death is an example of overrepresentation focused on the only thing left
waiting to die—after the death of the Author, the Subject, History, Art, Man,
Ideology, and so on. Articulating these reflections, Larsen recalls a line from
Romero’s Survival of the Dead—“Death isn’t what it used to be”—with which
the representation of the zombie founds a new paradigm of horror that consists
of eternally maintaining a subhuman quality, hopelessly condemned to evoke a
condition that has been lost, just as ruins indicate the former greatness of the past
(12). The message here, while terrifying, is radically and inexorably
melancholic. Thus, we can affirm that of all monsters, the zombie is one of the
saddest and most emotional, a being that, as Žižek remarks, is immersed in
suffering and loss.12 With regard to the representational model illustrated by the
zombie, Shaviro writes:

These strange beings, at once alive and dead, grotesquely literal and
blatantly artificial, cannot be encompassed by any ordinary logic of
representation. In their compulsive, wavering, deorganicized
movements, the zombies are allegorical and mimetic figures. They are
allegorical in the sense that allegory always implies the loss or death of
its object. An allegory is not a representation, but an overt
materialization of the unbridgeable distance that representation seeks to
cover over and efface […] the “living dead” emerge out of the deathly
distance of allegory; their fictive presence allows Romero to anatomize
and criticize American society, not by portraying it naturalistically, but
by evacuating and eviscerating it. Allegory is then not just a mode of
depiction, but an active means of subversive transformation. (86)

In its paradigmatic form, the zombie film portrays apocalyptic settings beset
with destructive exogenous elements (radiation, epidemics, extraterrestrial
beings). Various social factors predominate in the cosmovision that informs the
zombie genre. The first is the fear of the destructive effects of technology, which
engenders realities that cannot be controlled. The second is the fear of subjects
who have been deterritorialized or alienated from their native environment and
thus constitute a social threat (refugees, political prisoners, people who have
been dispossessed or displaced, the marginal, indigent, and infectiously ill,
undocumented immigrants, exiles, the mentally ill, etc.), lurking in social spaces
and representing a latent challenge to security and the status quo. The third is the
fear awakened by the possibility of forms of existence in which the degree of
alienation bewilders consciousness, prolonging a state of collective, interstitial,
and degraded somnambulism that disseminates and indefinitely expands in time
until it covers the entire social body. Some authors, like Stratton, recognize the
element of racialization that appears in these scenarios as the fear of
miscegenation and the loss of the distinctive qualities of Western civilization.
This theme, associated with the genre’s salvific aspects, has begun to flourish
again recently (particularly since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks),
indicating the fear of the arrival of exogenous beings that would threaten total
destruction (Stratton, Dendle, Kyle W. Bishop).
As Larsen argues, in Romero’s films, the zombie’s radical alienation is
eloquently expressed in its inability to speak and in the fact that its presence is
not the focus of the plot, nor does it represent the essence of evil: “it is a strange,
tragicomic monster that displaces evil and its concept: the zombie isn’t evil, nor
has it been begot by evil; it is a monstrosity that deflects itself in order to show
that our imagination cannot stop at the monster” (13). Other critics have noted
that Romero’s work brings about a fundamental inversion of the establishment of
monstrosity because, instead of expelling conflict and horror from the
community as an exogenous element, it attacks culture from within. In his films,
the problem is not the zombies but the “heroes”: the police, the military—that is,
the forces that maintain the system of discrimination, social exclusion,
capitalism, and militarization and whose triumph ensures the survival of that
system.
The very simulacral quality of these low-budget films crudely exposes a
fragmented cinematic discursivity as the condition of a world that is
irremediably falling apart and can no longer hide the signs of its degradation.
The “opacity of the zombie,” its “semiotic excess” triumphs in these contexts
due to the inherent weakness of the “order” that is trying to reestablish itself
(Larsen 6). In contrast, as Shaviro observes, in many horror films it is the
monster that is victimized, and this allows the viewer to identify with its
passivity and to become overwhelmed by its anomalous destiny (62). The
monster’s individuality is diluted in the passage to becoming one more element
of the stain of zombification that contains it and in which the zombie is the most
accomplished example of depersonalization.13 The borders between exteriority
and interiority dissolve in the zombie: in it, the agonistic quality of the social has
become flesh, and in turn the zombie replicates its characteristic attributes in the
environment that surrounds it. The forms of combatting the monster are
dangerously similar to the tactics of discrimination, xenophobia, militarization,
systematic violence, and exclusion employed by contemporary society (for
example: the construction of walls to contain the advance of the monster, the use
of military force to combat it, paranoia about its difference, opportunistic
manipulation of fear for the benefit of the system, etc.).14
Romero recognizes the satirical and political aspect of his films, in which the
zombie has the potential to represent any disaster or crisis because its very figure
and meaning illustrate more than anything the idea of catastrophe.15 Dunja
Opatić also emphasizes the fact that in Night of the Living Dead the zombie is
transformed into a common individual that nevertheless (as in I Am Legend) is
affected by the exceptionality of its situation and elevated to a proactive and
heroic position in an apocalyptic environment that resembles certain actual
events of the 1960s (the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert
Kennedy), as well as racist and bellicose attitudes and behaviors. Ten years later,
Dawn of the Dead is set in a shopping mall, making a clear reference to growing
levels of consumption and the reestablishment of power relations in capitalism.
The cannibal-zombie that reproduces itself as a social infection is reincarnated as
the consumer-zombie. Dawn of the Dead illustrates yet another moment of the
process of global saturation of social space because, as the film shows, when
there’s no more room in hell, the dead end up roaming the earth.
For its part, Day of the Dead offers a critique of Reaganism in the final
stages of the Cold War (Opatić 3). Here, the zombie goes from being a
representation of the myth of labor to staging the myth of war, or to propose (as
Opatić suggests, based on a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand
Plateaus) an alliance between the two:

These “predisabled” people, preexisting amputees, the stillborn, the

congenitally infirm, the one-eyed and one-armed’, all those mutilated
to fit the needs of the State apparatus, awake from their mortified
schizo state in the terrifying figure of the zombie war machine. The
characteristics Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to the nomad war machine
could also be ascribed to the zombie horde or the zombie pack. Their
organization is numerical “quantity is everywhere.” They destroy the
striated spaces, all enclosures, turning them into smooth spaces.
Zombies decode and deterritorialize the State apparatus bringing forth
into visibility their mutilated form created by systemic violence. They
are the “deterritorialized par excellence.” (5)

In this way, the figure of the zombie is inseparable from the theme of
capitalism as a system of economic, political, and social exclusion, as a regime
of exploitation and dehumanization, as a form of reification of individuals and
communities, as the alienation of the subject/labor relation, and as the
reproduction of relations of inequality, race and gender discrimination, and the
incessant generation of consumption as a pseudo-participatory form of social
life. The zombie constitutes an iconic image that encompasses the spectrality of
capital and the unconscious presence of what Comaroff and Comaroff call the
“pariahs of the proletariat,” those subjects excluded from the productive system
and territorially displaced who, in the form of the living dead, make visible a
history that would otherwise be absent from the collective imaginary (“Alien-
Nation” 783). As Lauro and Embry argue in their “zombie manifesto,” this
character is naturally anti-cathartic—it offers no resolution, instead embodying
an endlessly prolonged conflict (94).
Land of the Living Dead (2005) is a satirical commentary on capitalism
which sharply inserts itself into the relation between race and class in an
allegorical critique of the global order and its contradictions set in the city of
Pittsburgh. John Lutz has analyzed the film and established a parallelism
between the critique of the system of privilege the film represents and the mode
in which capitalist society is conceptualized in Marx’s writings as a system of
unreconcilable interests and antagonisms. The movie reshapes the zombie’s
impact and symbolic meaning by multiplying its presence, converting it into a
mass—a multitude—of revolutionary potential capable of organizing itself
toward the end of social transformation. The zombie’s instinctive character and
its primal appetites are replaced by collective resistance to oppression
(represented in the film by the character Big Daddy). This character represents
the proletarian capacity to achieve organic forms of social consciousness and to
mobilize more effectively. Big Daddy is opposed to the character Kaufman, who
embodies the bourgeoisie and the oppressive system. The mechanistic
clumsiness of the zombie, individualized as an isolated excrescence of the
system, gives way to its ideological reinforcement, supported by numerical
increase and the qualitative leap to a cognitive and organizational level.
As Lutz argues, based on the codification of the “survival narrative,” the
movie exposes the subhuman conditions of the zombie masses that represent the
working class exploited by capital.16 As other critics (such as Carroll and Tony
Williams, whom Lutz cites) have noted, the film includes, along with a
denunciation of the complicity of the notions of race and class in capitalism, a
critique of consumerism and mass alienation, as well as a representation of the
center/periphery relation in its connection to both the interactions between the
United States and other nations and within the national and global space and in
local contexts. The idea, which the film explores on multiple levels, is that a
society based on exploitation functions as a barely living zombie mass.
Complementing this exposé is the factor of militarization, which, as Lutz notes,
refers to the consequences of the 11 September 2001 attacks and includes
elements of social paranoia like the closing of borders and xenophobia, forms of
collective dehumanization and alienation that confer onto the figure of the
zombie a clear and strongly politicized allegorical meaning. In this way,
McNally’s “dialectic of monstrosity” refers to the process by which the
unfulfilled expectations of the dispossessed create the conditions for the
emergence of a “rebel monster” that seeks to intervene in the social order,
utilizing the approach of “political anatomy” against the dominant system
(which can also be observed in Shelley’s Frankenstein) (70).17 The message of
Romero’s film is obviously not an optimistic one; rather, it is reflexive and
melancholic. What the film represents is the monstrosity of the system and its
dehumanizing legacy, which is to say, the monstrosity inherent to the structure of
capitalism. Nevertheless, the capacity of the masses to achieve forms of social
consciousness that would allow for the renewal of struggle remains latent.
 As has been noted by other critics, the attributes of the zombie substantially
vary before and after Romero. However, according to Rosana Díaz-Zambrana,
the theme of alienated will and social control continues to be present.

Si el zombi pre-Romero estaba sujeto a los caprichos de otra voluntad

tiránica, ya fuera un médico inescrupuloso o una invasión alienígena, el
zombi post-Romero sigue, en muchos aspectos, también esclavizado
por otro tipo de poderes tal vez menos aparentes pero ejerciendo igual
o mayor fuerza sobre la voluntad y conducta del individuo. (Terra
Zombi 18)

Connected to the abject, the zombie dissolves the limits between the natural
and the human, between legality and chaos. For this reason, its image is
emblematically maintained as an indicator of a crisis of civilization which is not
only conjunctural but also systematic and which appears to have reached all
levels of social experience.

Spectacularization and Consumption:

“Glam Gothic” as a Line of Flight
The consumption of the monster as a symbolic commodity is comparable only to
the voracity that characterizes it: instinctive: indiscriminate, and inexhaustible.
Enshrined within all levels of culture, vampiric monstrosity invades international
audiovisual spaces, proliferates in literature and visual arts (film, music,
videogames), and multiplies itself in a limitless series of kitsch objects that
infinitely reproduce a prêt-à-porter image that from Dracula onwards connotes
elegance, mystery, and sensuality, thus attracting diverse mass audiences.
Together with the iconic visages of figures like Einstein and Che Guevara, who
in the collective imaginary are connected to the utopian and idealist notions of
knowledge and social change, the figure of the vampire is associated with the
desire for new experiences and the opening of horizons that supposedly refer to
spaces of enjoyment and heightened emotionality.
The vampire’s hybridity is neither exhausted by nor can it be reduced to the
human and super/subhuman attributes of which it is composed. Insofar as its
overexposure in the marketplace erodes its shock value and wears out its
possible meanings, the figure of the vampire lends itself to new combinations
through which it connects with other contemporary teratological characters:
werewolves, zombies, and cyborgs, which represent potential becomings and
innovative alliances that link together different social domains. As we have seen,
these mixed constructs are liminal, border entities that metaphorically express
elements which explain modern discontent and the crisis of the generalized
explanatory systems that support it. In postmodernity, the fragmentary condition
of the social is accentuated and the totalizations that give meaning to the present
are atomized because they are founded in the primacy of instrumental reason and
its corresponding regimes of truth.
Although while experimental and alternative epistemic constructions of the
monster have a long tradition in all cultures, the new existential fusions that take
the form of the monster’s anomalous postmodern corporeality express the
categorical crisis of our time and the loss of certainty in the ability of traditional
languages to communicate, through words or images, a world of questions and
emotions that appears to surpass those parameters. These figures, which
articulate different levels of hybridity (the vampire-cyborg, the wolf-man, etc.),
represent a defiant world within the products of a culture unable to contain them
and outstripped by its own creations. Expressed in the form of simulacrum,
pastiche, or kitsch, this semiotic excess manifests the contradictions of our era, a
time in which technology appears from certain vantage points as a series of
dehumanizing apparatuses that combine salvationist inspiration with a
postindustrial anxiety that confronts us with the need to redefine social utopia
without the myths of modernity.
Rob Latham has produced an exhaustive study of the relations between the
regulatory processes of the market in the post-Fordist era and the ideologization
of youth, understood not as a clearly defined and quantifiable segment of society
but rather as a conjuncture of qualities (flexibility, durability, etc.) that must be
captured in the realms of both production and mass consumption. The
cyborgization of youth in the postindustrial era has made every young person a
terminal for the confluence of multiple networks of telematic power that are
diversified in the domains of work, play, consumption, socialization, and so on.
Because of its emotional content, and because of the preeminence of the
anecdotal and visual aspects that sustain it, the massive industry of the
monstrous finds one of its primary (and in many ways, its ideal) consumer in
young people, as it adds to their desires and frustrations a sensorial excitement, a
disbelief in the totalizing (binding and cohesive) abilities of dominant culture,
and a diversification of the horizons of expectation in the realm of
communication and consumption. The production of literary and/or visual
discourses with the emblematic images of the vampire and the cyborg offer in
essence an articulation of symbolic domains that connect the consumer to both
long-running traditions and a vision of the future in which the monster acts
(according to its nature) as an intellectually easy to absorb and affectively
charged prophecy. The alliance between the vampire and the cyborg assembles
elements of primal horror and advanced technology, and in postmodernity it no
longer (or not only) produces an apocalyptic message but also a utopian
discourse of cultural opening and transformation.18
The prototype of the “yuppie” vampire who combines sophistication,
technology, sensuality, and bourgeois consumption is a figure with innumerable
representations in contemporary culture. The paradigm of this kind of vampire is
to be found in Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire (1976), which was
adapted for the screen in 1994 under the direction of Neil Jordan and starring
Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Antonio Banderas.19 This work is formally
innovative in its portrayal of perspective through a narrative that is displaced
toward a modality of autobiography in which the vampire uses his own words to
construct his story, rather than the external point of view used, for example, in
Dracula. In addition, the movie based on Rice’s novel reproduces the setting of
plantation slavery found in early zombie narratives but relocates the narrative to
Louisiana, adorning the story with a cinematic glamour that palimpsestically
accumulates simulacrum on simulacrum, resulting in a hyperbolic narrative that
reproduces (with the help of an arsenal of special effects) the commonplaces of
the genre.20
In the same register, Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), starring Catherine
Deneuve, David Bowie, and Susan Sarandon, constitutes another classic
produced by the spectacle industry in the final decades of the twentieth century.
The film focuses on a love triangle in which feminine vampirism and bisexuality
(or, according to Latham, “homoerotic narcissism”) are explored in a visual and
narrative tour de force in the frame of a highly codified genre. Bowie’s portrayal
is considered a crucial moment in the development of vampire movies, as his
androgynous and mutant image, more than incarnating a monster, represents the
infinite panoply of monstering in which it is becoming, more than the final
product, that captures the emotional and visual intensity of the spectacle. One
could say that, as a pinnacle of the aesthetics of postmodern monstrosity, Bowie
represents the crisis of the model, with the word crisis conveying its original
sense of rupture and change. This idea is expressed in the film’s opening music,
the British group Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” (considered one of the most
iconic compositions of the gothic rock genre), which offers the promise of a new
way of approaching the themes and representational strategies of the vampire
film.21 However, now at the height of its advanced artistic and inter-mediatic
development, vampirism is not only a strong source of symbolic content; it is
also a device for channeling other elements that have to do with such varied
themes as gender politics, the relation between art and the market, public
security, space travel, and the globalized economy.
Latham underscores the importance of Anne Rice’s article “David Bowie and
the End of Gender,” published in Vogue in November 1983, where she refers to
Bowie’s elegant sexual ambiguity as containing a message about the possibilities
of a historic transformation of gender, a process that Rice interprets as a sign of
the times and as one of the elements that explains how Bowie was able to attract
and fanaticize collective imaginaries. Indeed, in composing her book The
Vampire Lestat, she followed the model represented by Bowie’s fictional and
public personas, creating an androgynous rock star protagonist who embraces
ambiguity and difference. At the same time, according to Latham, one of the
more interesting innovations of Lestat is the character’s more political
appearance, which disseminated the attributes of the vampire on such a massive
level that the pure aristocratism of the classical vampire became diluted in a
much more “populist,” democratized, and domesticated version.22
The role played by Bowie in The Hunger is only a fragment of the
performative kaleidoscope that he constantly constructed and unmade,
suggesting that the total meaning of this artist can only be apprehended through
his commitment to permanent disaggregation and not through the sum of the
parts that constituted him. Throughout his career, Bowie’s multifaceted work
generated the figure of the iconic artist as a repository of alternative and
countercultural values, behaviors, and images. The message of hope for
humanity always lay beneath the surface and seemed to be connected to a
conscious display of his mutations and to the instantaneous translation of
catastrophe into spectacle. The theatricalization of a total crisis is often revealed
as radical aestheticization, such as the promise of salvation through image, that
bearer of freedom that reveals the dark levels of reality and desire.
Through a complex oeuvre that includes music, acting (both stage and film),
fashion, and advertising, Bowie developed an experimental and ground-breaking
art that explored the possibilities of the body and the aura as a self-generated
process in which the unicity of (id)entity in multiplicity is decomposed, an
inclusive process which embraces heterogeneity and hybridity as fundamental
and constitutive features. Elements of identity can only be apprehended through
disaggregation and chaotic accumulation as a continuous process of difference
and as the intermittency of proposals that emerge and disappear in the
fleetingness of the spectacle. What is is not what has been and what continues to
be, that is, something that is self-identical, but rather that which brings being to
an end and ceases to disappear: the simulacrum of the presence/absence that
escapes spatio-temporal conditions, rejects notions of origin and finality, and
dissolves the borders between animal, human, monster, and machine, the
imaginary and the real, rejecting racial classifications and definitions of gender
and sexuality. It is an aesthetics of transubstantiation in which every state evokes
others and is self-cancelled before solidifying in a material fixity that defines and
restricts what is possible. This was expressed with particular emphasis in the
initial stage of Bowie’s career, associated with glam rock, which makes use of
extravagant costumes, makeup, and settings. This aesthetic opens ephemeral
constellations of meaning that encompass multiplicity without containing it, that
do not aspire to totality but rather to maintaining the fragmentation and radical
hybridity of a state of constant, irrepressible change. This fugitive version of
being substitutes identity with subjectivity, emphasizing the process of
(de)monstration/monstering itself, an accelerated and spectacularized trajectory
of becomings that emphasizes each moment not as a point of arrival but as a line
of flight, like a leap toward an ever-receding horizon. These cycles of change
capture the nature and substance of the monstrous: anomaly as the
theatricalization of what is not, as a rhizomatic replacement of things and beings
with phantoms.
The theme of the monster underlies all these formulations more through the
essence of the monstrous and the (de)monstrative/monstering theatricalization
than any evocation or recreation of the conventionalized forms of the horror
genre or its familiar modes of representation. The monstrous is the permanent
residence of the known forms of the human, the glorification of its anomaly, the
creation of a world in which the real stalks and terrorizes through the possibility
of its materialization, annulling the evanescent and emancipatory space of
fantasy. It has to do with a spectacularized universe in which everything is
image, the glimmer of appearance, or mask. Everything is spectacle, visual
display. Everything, even (primarily) music, exists to be seen. The theme of the
gaze, essential to the aesthetics of monstrosity, acquires a special meaning with
Bowie, fetishized in the artist’s left pupil, which was dilated in an accident when
he was fifteen years old to the point that it became another eye. This has been
interpreted as a robotic apparatus or an optical alteration that allowed him to
gaze within, to perceive occult realities and project them, as if he were a
spotlight, onto the stage of collective consumption.
It is no coincidence that the aesthetics of (de)monstration/monstering that
characterizes Bowie’s work was concentrated at the peak of his theatrical career
in his portrayal of Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man” (with whom Michael
Jackson was also obsessed, as we saw above). Bowie’s brilliant interpretation
captured Merrick’s anomalous subjectivity and recreated through theatrical
gestures the dramatic existence of (physical, psychological, affective, social)
difference, translating bodily grammar into atmosphere, rhythms, pauses, and
hiatuses that required no prosthetics or cosmetics for the transmission of that
anomalous and interstitial form of existence of a radically out-of-joint being,
victim of both nature and culture. As with Michael Jackson, the attraction of
monstrosity is connected to the elucidation of sublimity associated with the
existence of the limit and with its possible forms of symbolic representation.
However, it also refers, at least speculatively, to a more autobiographical terrain,
to the knowledge of self as the capture of difference that allows for other forms
of perceiving and interpreting the real. In these cases, monstrosity functions as
the materialization of an otherness that simultaneously produces repulsion and
attraction, horror and desire, liminal forms that defamiliarize the real and test the
limits of tolerance in contemporary society. Multiple references have circulated
regarding Bowie’s purported paranormal experiences during a visit to the castle
where the infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley lived, where, according to
his biographer Marc Spitz, he claims to have been affected by evil, demonic
forces.23
 The process of the proliferation of images which is essential to Bowie’s
monstered aesthetics also manifests in the series of personas he took on at
different moments of his career and which functioned as symbolic and visual
constellations that combined fantasies, emotional states, visionary scenes, and
technological subjugation, occasionally including historical elements and
cultural references. Standing out among these imaginative fictional characters is
the astronaut Major Tom who appears in “Space Oddity” (1969) floating in the
stratosphere, a situation that captured anxieties about interplanetary travel the
same year as the Apollo 11 moon landing. Other iconic characters in Bowie’s
repertoire include Ziggy Stardust, from his first album, The Rise and Fall of
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972). Ziggy Stardust is an
androgynous bisexual alien, and like his creator, a rock star. Stardust functions as
Bowie’s alter ego: he expresses political and cultural opinions, is sexually
promiscuous, and abuses drugs. The character dies at the hands of “the infinite,”
other extraterrestrial beings made of antimatter that attack him, obtaining
through the fragments of his body the ability to make themselves invisible. The
theme of information, related to the extraterrestrial, also appears in the film The
Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), starring Bowie and directed by Nicolas Roeg, in
which the artists portrays a humanoid from a dying and barren planet who comes
to Earth on a desperate mission to save his kind.
In Bowie’s worlds, where magical spirits, extraterrestrial beings, machinic
elements, zombies, specters, and other extraordinary creatures abound, features
of the monstrous constantly appear, as do new modes of representing the human,
with the ever-present theme of salvation conceived as an interplanetary event,
which is to say, as the “good news” that the performance repeatedly announces
and represents. In this sense, it is perhaps Bowie’s final album Lazarus, which
premiered in a digital version in December 2015, which constitutes the most
dramatic form of this relation between crisis and the fragmentation of his image.
At the threshold of death, in a choreography with autobiographical connotations,
his corporeality, on the verge of disappearing, is replaced by the virtual
permanence of his ghost, which, in its very atemporality, conquers an other,
digitized life that ensures continuity and transcendence.
As we can see, over the decades the folkloric, and localist aspect that
originally constituted one of the thematic sources of vampire narratives has
continued to give way to epic, melodramatic, or farcical combinations that
attempt to breathe new life into stereotypical stories, situating them in
contemporary capitalist settings (shopping malls replace Gothic castles and
cybernetic, electronic, or interplanetary spaces serve as alternatives to the
plantations and gloomy environments in which “ethnic” vampirism and
somnambulant zombies proliferated). This emphasizes not only the sinister
aspect of contemporary technology but also the anxiety of postmodern existence
in which ancestral fears survive, recycled through new symbolic paraphernalia.
The fears of yesteryear are integrated into the horrors of the present day
(biochemical contagion, terrorism, organ theft, ecological disaster). This
combination makes it possible to discern in many cases the similarities and
continuities that exist between premodern, modern, and postmodern forms of
terror, revealing the relations they have to political, economic, and social
anxieties.
Recent expressions of this literary and cinematic narrative have functioned as
the basis for new analyses of the relations between the trope of vampirism and
the development of consumption, as well as the relation between capital and
subjectivity. Studies of this phenomenon discuss it as a libidinal economy in
which erotic elements become interrelated with the desire to possess
commodities, drawing the connections between vampiric seduction and the
effect caused by the magic of the commodifiable object. Some studies valorize
the element of pleasure and the empowerment produced by consumption,
claiming that this latter constitutes a potentially subversive practice insofar as it
tends to transgress the dividing lines between man and woman, the domestic and
the public spheres, sensuality and rationality, and individuality and collectivity,
while giving shape to a form of participation in public space and in civil life that
crosses the borders of gender, class, and race.24 Nevertheless, evaluations that
sometimes tend toward glorifying consumption as a form of democratization and
civic integration must be contextualized and subjected to politico-ideological
analysis so that they might integrate factors connected to the consolidation and
naturalization of inequality, the reproduction of alienation, and the manipulation
of the horizons of expectation in societies of control.
In any case, it is obvious that the study of these symbolic commodities and
the extent of their massive, global circulation requires an analysis of the
audiences that it addresses and the social contexts of the production and
reception of products in different historical moments. The study of youth
cultures, closely related to mass consumption of monsters and monstrosity,
entails the consideration of the structure of social spaces, productive climates,
and alternatives to contemporary society. Young people constitute the
fundamental link between the spheres of labor and leisure, a space that monster
culture comes to fill as a prosthesis that becomes part of the social body. The
monster embodies difference and anomaly in a standardized world capable of
coopting multiplicity and converting it into the only possible form of identity in a
globalized economy. This explains the popularity of television shows (and their
corresponding extensions in films, video games, comic books, etc.) like The X-
Files (1993-2002), a series created by Chris Carter that combined elements of
drama, horror, mystery, and paranormal activity, offering a constantly changing
gallery of monstrosities from the world of science fiction. The show is based on
the interaction between factual reality and fantasy, as well as on the dichotomy
of the central characters, who represent in turn an openness toward paranormal
realities that defy the limits of the known world and a skepticism toward
everything that exceeds scientific verifiability. Monstrosity functions in the
series as an apparatus for the potential connection of these contradictory
positions. However, the series never ceased to offer extremely marked
ideological twists in relation to some themes, such as immigration, which
appears in a monstered form in an episode from the fourth season titled “The
World Turns.” In this episode, undocumented immigrants are portrayed as a
danger to society due to their status as people who live “small” lives, full of
compensatory fantasies and who resort to violence in response to a society that
rejects them. This episode connects the representation of Latin American
immigrants as evil, greedy, primitive, and promiscuous to the myth of the
chupacabras and the idea of infection spreading throughout society.25
Another example, which was particularly directed toward young audiences,
is Buffy the Vampire Slayer (created by Joss Whedon in 1997), which combined
horror, romance, melodrama, martial arts, science fiction, and musical comedy.
The theme of the monster, framed by the dynamics of a stereotypical American
high school, stages confrontations between representatives of evil and the
protagonist/heroine, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, who, besides possessing
exceptional physical strength and agility, also has the gift of seeing the future,
which she is generally able to do only in her dreams. Addressing a similar
audience is the series of four novels with the general title Twilight that Stephanie
Meyer published between 2003 and 2008 and which yielded massively
successful televisual and cinematographic adaptations. Often criticized for its
anti-feminist content, the Twilight series centers on a young woman who falls in
love with a 104-year-old vampire who survives by drinking the blood of wild
animals. It is evident that such mass market attention has subjected the myth of
vampirism (particularly by the television and film industry) to multiple
recyclings that have exhausted the teratological matrix and saturated it with
elements connected to eroticism, consumption, and youthful rebellion without
exploring in much depth the problematics that occupied the genre’s agenda in
many of its previous manifestations.

Notes
1. See Daston and Park, Beal, and Santiesteban Oliva.
2. For more on Michael Jackson, see Randi Taraborreli and David Yuan.
3. Jackson’s interest in real-life monstrosity was most famously expressed in his fascination with the
“Elephant Man”—both David Lynch’s film Elephant Man (1980) and the actual individual on whose
life it was based, Joseph Carey Merrick (1862-1890). Taraborrelli and Yuan confirm Jackson’s interest
in the film, with which he was obsessed, having gone to see it in the theater at least fifteen times. After
reading some books about Merrick and traveling to London to examine his remains, Jackson expressed
interest in acquiring his skeleton, which was in the possession of the London Hospital Medical
College. According to Yuan, the image of Jackson in his glass hyperbaric chamber is similar to that of
the Elephant Man in his glass display cabinet, and moreover, this similarity extends to their shared
condition as examples of anomaly and dis-identity and as object-beings that existed for the public gaze.
Jackson believed that his own struggle against the discoloration of his skin (vitiligo) in some way
constituted a differentiating—monstrous—feature, the effects of which increased through his constant
public exposure (375-77). Jackson’s passion for Merrick’s story also links him to another of rock
music’s greatest figures, David Bowie, who portrayed Merrick in a theatrical production directed by
Jack Ofsiss in the 1980s.
4. Some authors connect the word zombie to the Louisiana Creole word jumbie, which means shadow and
is related to the French term les ombres (shadows) (Rushton and Moreman, “Introduction” 3).
According to Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, certain orthographic discrepancies help to mark
differences in the meanings of these terms, as well as in the worldviews from which they emerged.
While the Hatian zombi came from plantations and represents slave revolts, the zombie is related to its
importation to the United States and is connected both to the critique of capitalism and the fear of
communism (as in the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1978], directed by Philip Kaufman). The
zombie also represents viral contagion (as in 28 Days Later [2002], directed by Danny Boyle). “In its
passage from zombi to zombie, this figuration that was at first just a somnambulistic slave raised from
the dead became evil, contagious, and plural” (Lauro and Embry 88). George Romero is responsible
for this reincarnation of the zombi as zombie. According to Lauro and Embry, another future form
would be the zombii, a spectral and posthuman version that follows the dictates of mechanization
proposed by Haraway in her work on the cyborg, thus articulating other forms of hybridity that include
nonhuman elements.
5. For more on White Zombie, see Ann Kordas.
6. I Am Legend has been adapted into several films, including The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega
Man, (1971), I Am Legend (2007), and I Am Omega (2007). Matheson’s novel also inspired Romero’s
film Night of the Living Dead (1968). On the basis of these works, the theme of the zombie has been
 popularized in different genres and continues to invade the market today.
7. Lovecraft’s work was the basis for the Re-Animator series directed by Stuart Gordon, as well as comic
books, video games, and music that uses the typically zombie-oriented theme of “re-animation.”
8. For more on this, see Edna Aizenberg.
9. Aizenberg bases her analysis on Michael Dash’s fundamental work, which examines the forms of
representation of Haitian culture in literature from both Haiti and the United States, starting in the
nineteenth century. Dash addresses the circulation of these stereotypes, which were crystallized in a
mysterious and primitive version of Haiti which persists even today, and examines the processes of the
rewriting of the derogatory image of national culture produced by Haitian literature.
10. On the connection between zombies and anarchy, see Elun Gabriel, in addition to Irven.
11. In Filosofía zombi, Jorge Fernández Gonzalo assesses the first film: “Vemos en este primer film de la
saga algunos de los puntos clave a la hora de manejar el fenómeno zombi. Sensación de agobio,
proximidad creciente de la amenaza, ausencia de razones que nos indiquen cuál es el motivo que ha
desplegado el apocalipsis” (20).
12. See also Larsen 16, where he takes up Žižek’s observation on the sadness of the monster (Žižek,
Looking Awry 22-23).
13. “Mimesis and contagion tend to efface fixed identities and to blur the boundaries between inside and
outside” (Shaviro 53).
14. See Dunja Opatić.
15. For example, see Romero’s statements in Cinema Blend, where he expresses his skepticism about the
new exponents of the genre, such as, for example, World War Z (2013), directed by Marc Forster and
starring Brad Pitt, in which zombies possess an accelerated mobility that contrasts with the traditional
representation of zombies as slow and unsteady. He expresses a similar opinion of the British film 28
Days Later (2002) and its sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), both directed by Danny Boyle, which
elaborate the theme of contagion and contamination in a typical post-apocalyptic setting.
16. See Tony Williams and John Lutz.
17. McNally refers to this dialectic of monstrosity in the case of Shakespeare, who, through a polyphonic
system combines elements of popular culture, belief, and classical, primarily secular, culture, involving
a broad spectrum of possible forms of social consciousness. In the Shakespearean world, the monstrous
—frequently employed as a description—refers to an excess of individualism, the rupture of the bonds
of reciprocity. “Monstrosity thus takes the form of ruptures in social convention and obligation induced
by unbridled individualism,” an attitude that extends to the relation between the individual and the
body politic, as expressed in the following notion from Coriolanus (1608): “Ingratitude is monstrous;
and for the multitude to be ingrateful, were to make a monster of the multitude” (qtd. in McNally 62-
63).
18. For an exhaustive discussion of these aspects of pop culture in relation to the vampire genre,
particularly to The Hunger (1983) and other films that deal with similar themes, see Latham’s chapter
“Voracious Androgynes,” which uses many of the same references as the present book. Latham
especially pays attention to the theme of youth consumption and its intersections with vampirism in
literary, musical, and performative representations.
19. Rice’s narrative continues in a sequence of ten novels, including The Vampire Lestat (1985), the second
book of the series, which gave rise to musical adaptations and comic books. Rice’s novels elaborate,
among other things, narrative voice, producing clearly framed stories that circulate between different
narrators, including contradictory versions of the same events and other contrasting effects.
20. Joel Schumaker’s The Lost Boys (1987) is another example of the genre that elaborates the theme of
vampirism in a narrative that does not eschew comic elements while also refusing to abandon
predictable thematic and visual clichés.
21. The Bauhaus song, which is more than nine minutes long, was recorded in England in 1979 for the
Small Wonder label. Considered a key work of the gothic genre, its inclusion in The Hunger has
caused it to be forever associated with the redefinition of vampirism. This latter has continued to move
away from its folkloric roots as it becomes a global pop product around which a long-running
subculture has formed. The cover art for Bauhaus’s single includes an image from David Wark
 Griffith’s The Sorrows of Satan (1926). These elements demonstrate the degree to which The Hunger
constitutes a concrete project of innovative inscription within the multimedia tradition of vampirism,
establishing a dialogue with key points of reference in different registers.
22. For more on The Vampire Lestat, see Latham 124-37.
23. At the time, the castle was the residence of Jimmy Page, the guitarist of Led Zeppelin and Bowie’s
friend. A similar experience occurred in the home of Glenn Hughes, the bassist of Deep Purple, where
Bowie claimed he “sensed malignant vibrations.” See Spitz and David Buckley.
24. See Anne Friedberg and Don Slater, both cited in Latham 34.
25. See Katherine Kinney and William Calvo-Quirós’s analysis, in which they examine this use of
monstrosity in relation to post-Cold War imaginaries of fear, particularly with regard to increased anti-
immigrant hostility and the demonization of the border zone.
 Chapter 7

Monsters on the Margin

Radical Hybridity and the Popular Subject
in Latin America
At the beginning of her book From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin
America (2015), Persephone Braham observes that, since the Conquest, many
places in Latin America have been named after monsters: Amazonas, Patagonia,
Caribe. This enshrined the idea of the monstrous (and with it, the primitive and
fantastic but also the abject and esoteric) within Latin American geocultural
identity. These attributes formed part of the cognitive system that from the very
beginning accompanied the enterprise of the conquest and colonization of
transoceanic territories and served as the basis for (among other things) the
othering of native populations and cultures. In the same way, the monstrous and
the supernatural formed part of the conceptualization the first Americans had of
Europeans, whose garments, weapons, ships, and customs they interpreted as the
expression of a radically different, bizarre nature that appeared to confirm
catastrophes that had been prophesied, thus provoking a paralyzing fear among
the indigenous peoples.
The categorization of the human as monstrous brings the experience of the
new closer to the sacred while conferring onto the obsessively studied and
catalogued object-subject relation an exoticism that influences the forms and
extent of its social and cultural assimilation. The device of monstrosity also
helps to explain and express the fears and anxieties generated by the cultural
encounter and by the tensions and struggles it generates. In many cases, the
devastating effects of the collision between Europeans and the inhabitants of the
transatlantic world were interpreted as a form of chaos or apocalypse (a
pachacuti in Andean culture) that turned the world upside-down, radically and
irreversibly inverting its order. The inhabitants of these new lands were in turn
begrudgingly admitted as members of the human, and their condition gave rise
to intense religious, political, hermeneutic, and philosophical polemics. Their
monstrous (different, anomalous, deviant) nature not only functioned as a
justification of the Conquest but also imbued it with necessity. This
interpretation of the indigenous condition as monstrous was also based on ideas
like the predestination of certain beings for various forms of servitude, owing to
their supposed inferiority. It was assumed that these slaves by nature required
treatment that accorded with their condition and capacity. This concept is usually
attributed to Book I of Aristotle’s Politics, which for a long time was cited as a
legitimizing argument for different forms of political domination and social
classification.1
With an iconic value that was crucial for the development of colonization
and which later served to support the exclusion of vast segments of society from
national projects, the monstrous has maintained its presence throughout Latin
American history, always associated with individuals or groups that have been
marginalized, exploited, and subalternized by the dominant powers. In the
context of colonialism, the Other, considered an irreducible remainder, needed to
be dominated in order to safeguard the values and physical security of
Christendom. The concept of monstrosity, used in a derogatory way, expressed
the idea that indigenous peoples possessed a primordial and instinctual nature
that was foreign to the protocols of European civilization. Since then, this
concept has always been associated with the pre-modern (and modern)
barbarism of Latin America and its supposed resistance to modernizing projects.
Over the centuries, Latin America has been particularly fertile ground for the
absorption of the transnational discourse of monstrosity, inspiring the creation of
new wondrous and terrifying prototypes of regional horror. However, according
to Braham, what is most peculiar is the degree to which the monstrous has been
enshrined in national cultures: “The monsters that have been the most dynamic
in Latin American contexts can be traced to archetypes found in virtually all of
the world’s sacred traditions, but only in Latin America did Amazons, cannibals,
zombies, and other monsters become enduring symbols of national and regional
character” (From Amazons to Zombies 1).
The conceptual construction of the monstrous was a leitmotif in discourses
that elaborated the idea of mestizaje as a form of hybridity that denaturalized
primary ethnic and racial types and produced models that deviated from the
norm, conceived of as the representation of a pure humanity. Monstrosity’s
biopolitical value is thus reaffirmed in the national contexts in which the
assemblage of different social levels and ethnic perspectives appears as a
threatening construct from social, cultural, and political points of view.
In her study “Globalization and the Crisis of the Popular,” Jean Franco
emphasizes the idea that it is on the margins of dominant cultures and at the
periphery of large systems where the disruptive and creative capacity of the
popular can be most clearly seen. The popular is fundamental to the
comprehension of the monstrous, not only with regard to its historical and
cultural origins but also concerning the forms of representation, circulation, and
consumption that take it as their object in contemporary culture. As Franco
correctly notes, the notion of the popular (and relatedly, the idea of a “crisis of
the popular”) refers not only to the vernacular elements of criollo cultures that
European legacies qualify as difference but also to the hybrid products that are
usually combined in the concept of the “national popular” or integrated into
processes of transculturation. The popular is in many cases defined in relation to
globalized cultures and at bottom conceived in terms of the distance that this
cultural production from the non-dominant strata of society maintains with
respect to urban culture, which is considered more developed (cosmopolitan,
connected to universality, etc.). The popular is linked to the notions of
underdevelopment, tradition, backwardness, orality, rural spaces, primitivism,
localism, and so on. Other factors have also helped to enrich and complicate the
notion of the popular:

Migrations, the mixing of high-tech and “primitive,” of mass-mediated

and oral culture, the scrambling of languages as they cross borders, the
scrambling of social classes that can no longer be securely stratified
except through taste, all this has seriously compromised any notion of
an undiluted popular culture “made by the people themselves” (to use
Raymond Williams’s phrase). (Franco, “Globalization and the crisis of
the popular” 210)

In any case, the popular is opposed to the hegemonic insofar as it channels

drives from subaltern social strata and minority cultures that residually survive,
in spite of the devastating effects of colonialism. These frequently informal and
inorganic channels of cultural transmission express alternative elements, beliefs,
and desires that show the existence of diverse forms of social experience and
unequal ways of participating in the system.
Beliefs, myths, legends, and stories that incorporate monstrosity through
very different representations in literature and the visual arts, in journalism or in
oral narratives all form part of what Franco calls “the costumbrismo of
globalization,” which refers to the cultural response to modernization that
articulates pre-modern, primitive, or folkloric features, recovers popular
imaginaries, archaisms, and anachronisms, and expresses popular fears, beliefs,
anxieties, and expectations (“Bodies in Distress” 222).
Characterized by an association with the uncanny and a broad repertoire of
representational devices, these products of popular culture, which are frequently
reconfigured and recycled by “high” literature and cinema, re-elaborate
universally circulated teratological features while rearticulating inherent
elements of monstrosity (even if its meaning and its links to specific
communities are reshaped). The local informs the appropriation of the universal;
the global is updated and appears in regional cultures that interpellate these
interpretive protocols and resignify them on the aesthetico-ideological level.
Sordid and grisly topics like kidnapping and trafficking children or human
organs (or the vampiric consumption of the body) are always represented as
metaphors for dispossession, with shades of sensuality and political
connotations. Corporeality gives rise not only to exploitation, objectification,
and commodification but also to the circulation of signifiers that rearticulate
their symbolic capital by incorporating notions of race, class, and gender as key
elements for the definition of analytical categories such as citizenship or the
national-popular. These processes make it possible to apprehend the ways in
which the social and the political are configured and organized in diverse
contexts. The monstrous plays a fundamental role in the representation of these
spaces of symbolic construction which, in Latin America, are always related to
an oblique appropriation of “central” currents or structures that express the
project of modernity and the instrumental reason that holds it together.
Nevertheless, this transcultural reconfiguration of the symbolic is certainly
not the only essential element for comprehending monstrosity and its functions
in peripheral and postcolonial contexts in which difference names the site of
unresolved political and economic antagonisms, or, to put it in Antonio Cornejo
Polar’s terms, the space of impossible harmony and non-dialectical
heterogeneity. In many cases, the monstrous provides evidence of the failure of
national projects as homogenizing and centralizing designs that tend to
assimilate the popular (meaning the segments of society that have since
colonialism been subalternized, non-productively articulated to the nation-state,
marginalized, and displaced) to the hegemonic models of political, economic,
cultural, and epistemic domination.
As Homi Bhabha argues in The Location of Culture, discussing the theme of
hybridity as the interruption and summoning of hegemony, monstrosity
configures “[c]ounter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its
totalizing boundaries” (149). It is an aesthetico-ideological apparatus that
through the insertion of anomaly disarticulates the social models and discourses
that legitimize this order. The monstrous establishes a space/time that defies
linear progress and the predictable parameters of the national, creating a
simultaneity of stories that dislocate and disturb the diachrony of History. It
constitutes the triumph of particularism and contingency, the domain of the
empiric, the corporeal, and the earthly, and the negation of the principles of
reality that homogenize and remove the specificity of the social being,
(con)fusing the worlds of civilization and barbarism.
The discontinuous, counter-modern, and residual narrative of monstrosity is
a discourse saturated with atavistic, excessively emotional echoes. It establishes
what Bhabha calls “the circulation of panic” (204), confirming an “outside” of
undecidability that divides subjectivity and affects the perception and experience
of the real. In postcolonial societies, it invariably refers to the structures of
domination and the coloniality that perpetuates them in modernity, obsessively
recreating asymmetries of power, as if the main configurations of colonialism
existed in contemporary society in a spectrally coded form.
This in-between space that links the dominator and the dominated, the victim
and the aggressor, is, as Bhabha explains, a space of cultural and interpretative
undecidability, a third space loaded with ambiguity, impossible to enunciate or
interpret per se, untranslatable and unrepresentable: “It is that Third Space,
though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of
enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no
primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated,
translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (37).
 This intermediary, interstitial position exceeds the polarities of identity and
genre, the antagonisms that mechanically connect race and power, the
dichotomies between civilization and barbarism, progress and backwardness,
development and underdevelopment, exposing complex and polyvalent zones of
interaction and contagion. These are the areas where the traffic of signifiers is
intensified, without indicating any dialectical synthesis or resolution but instead
the infinite prolongation of originary conflicts. The monstrous illustrates the
obsessive return of the Other in the Same, of the repressed, primitive, atavistic,
and ancestral in modern forms of social consciousness.
In his approach to the theme of hybridity, Alberto Moreiras takes up
Bhabha’s argument, reinforcing this quality assumed by the social in
postcolonial contexts, but analyzing its destabilizing potential without merely
reducing it to evidence of a heterogeneity that can be assimilated as a variable of
dominant culture. Following Bhabha, Moreiras refers to a nomadic, radical,
savage hybridity whose countercultural force dislocates the discourses and
practices of power:

Savage hybridity can be understood as the radicalization of the reticent

version of cultural hybridity on the basis of its constitutive negativity:
it turns a reticent understanding of cultural change into a principle of
counterhegemonic praxis and it places it at the service of the subaltern
position in the constitution of the hegemonic system. (296)

When applied to the present, this re-elaboration of the notion of hybridity

incorporates into the discussion of the category the concepts that Cornejo Polar
developed on heterogeneity and non-dialectical contradiction: the idea of an
irreconcilable (socio-political, economic, cultural, or epistemic) antagonism that
traverses the modern nation and which can only exist as a disarticulating
(fragmented, violent, and exclusive) politico-ideological construct, particularly
in the Andean region. The tense coexistence of antagonistic socio-cultural
systems within the nation-state—a condition that liberal critics have “reticently”
read as mere cultural diversity or difference—expresses its inherent and radical
contradiction through savage forms of hybridity that express content repressed
by modernity and disseminated as a nomadic energy that disjoins the dominant
“order.”
 In another analytical turn of the screw, in his discussion of the “other side of
the popular” in the contemporary period, Gareth Williams returns to the
irreducible negativity represented in the narratives, practices, and categories that
traverse national and local cultures in the Andean region. The savage and
diasporic forms of hybridity that manifest in the region reveal a fundamental
zone of unintelligibility and epistemic ambiguity that destabilizes the hegemonic
processes of signification and social (re)cognition. Through this radical
disturbance of the principles of order, progress, citizenship, and civility, unequal
modernization manifests in the Andean region as a project that contains the
forces of its own destruction. In this way, Williams asserts that “contemporary
structures of violence and hybridity formation brings us inevitably to the notion
of neoliberalism as an art and artifice of government and of governmentality”
(218).
The monstrous, subsumed in mythical popular narratives, beliefs, practices,
and interpretations of the social, constitutes a “document of barbarism” that
serves as a warning of the extreme vulnerability of the nation-state’s civilizing
projects, which emerge out of the modern version of the salvationist mission of
colonialism. As a narrative and performance of radical forms of alterity,
monstrosity founds an alternative temporality where atavistic, archaic,
grotesque, or macabre elements flourish and reveal the “other side of the
national-popular,” which is irreducible to rationality and bourgeois discipline.
These lines of flight from modernity drastically destabilize the utopian horizon
of modernity:

The fact that an absolute other side of the national-popular and of

national development never fully comes into its own, and therefore
never fully distinguishes itself from any previous order as a new stage
of development or as a distinctive mode of production within the
history of Latin American capital, suggests that the neoliberal social
order does not move toward any horizon in particular. It does not move
toward a projected and potentially utopic reality or historical stage
grounded in difference from the present or from the past. Rather, it
fuels its processes by feeding parasitically in the present off the organs,
mechanisms, and forms of the past. (Williams, The Other Side of the
Popular 219)
 Without materializing in an alternative order, the monstrous mobilizes a
material and symbolic disorder that locates hegemonic projects through a
nomadic energy that, like the mobilization of the subaltern perceived by
Gramsci, is essentially inorganic, spontaneous, and discontinuous.
In the anomalous forms of monstrosity, the “other side of the national-
popular” exposes the inherent barbarism of the system. Thus, it acts as an
apparatus for the disclosure and articulation of the nomadic and belligerent
otherness that exists outside of the material and symbolic productivity of
capitalism; making use of every possible utopian dimension, renouncing the
discourse of harmony and multiculturality, it functions instead as a war machine
external to the state, to dominant culture, to all totalizing and hegemonic
projects, to the legitimizing discourse of the criollo republic, and to Western
modernity.
As McNally argues, referring to the forms of magical realism that emerged
from the periphery of the globalized economy (as, for example, in Africa and
Latin America), the “fables of modernity” that incorporate monsters, magic, and
gruesome practices that victimize marginal populations express the discontent
and rebellion of a world monstered by capitalism. In the case of Latin America,
poverty, unemployment, and the marginalization of large segments of society are
facts that exacerbates the imagination and feeds the popular discourses that
metaphorize depredation and despair.

In the short space of two years, from 1998 to 2000, twenty million
more people fell into poverty, according to the UN Economic
Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. That brought the
number of impoverished Latin American to 223 million, almost 44 per
cent of the population. Throughout the region, close to half the
population toils in the so-called informal sector, working for meagre
wages without any form of health care, pension-plan or unemployment
insurance. Little surprise, then, that stories of rapacious monsters
hunting for body parts have found a new resonance, particularly
amongst the poorest and the most disenfranchised.…As the health and
people of whole regions of the world are consumed by vampire-capital
from the North, as hunger and destitution haunt the lives of millions, it
is hard to dismiss such fables as fantastic. (McNally 172)
The Machinic Simulacrum
The integration of machinic, cybernetic, electronic, or simply technological
elements into the organic or into the conceptualization and representation of the
human is a long-running tendency which explores possibilities for the expansion
of the natural abilities of living beings. The illusion of being able to augment the
strength and capacities of the individual and, eventually, of the community is not
simply an idea taken from science fiction but rather a constant of human thought,
which is always intrigued by the question of the limit and the possibilities of
transgressing it. As with monstrosity, the machinic has no fixed connotations,
either positive or negative. Such attributes depend on the point of view, but also
on the functions that are assigned to those technological elements within the
semiotic totality in which they come to be embedded.
Asking, “Why are we so fond of monsters?” Dominique Lestel recalls that
the ideas of monstrosity and artificiality are part of the fundamental driving
questions of culture, in which religion and science simultaneously converge and
contend for the pursuit of knowledge. Both angles integrate conjectures about
the origin of the world and the laws that govern it. As Lestel argues, already in
the eighteenth century, David Hume (1711-1776) had established, in his
posthumous work Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), that the world
is actually an artifact, a work of engineering, a machinic object that we only
know through its effects. According to Hume, there are substantial differences
between the living being and the artifact. While the human being has the
potential to produce infinite (even monstrous) worlds on the basis of his or her
own, the artifact is the prisoner of its being, of its facticity and the limits that
define its materiality. Monstrosity is inherent to the human. For his part,
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) had already asked if monsters are
themselves a different species marked by anomaly. According to Lestel, the
monster belongs to the human species while also eluding it: “The monster can be
characterized as a singular living being who does not play the species game even
though he is at the root of it.... As humans we are not only monsters, but,
moreover, vectors of monstrosity” (260; emphasis in original).2
In a more modern articulation, the machinic is frequently associated with the
world of work, which is to say, with its status as an instrument for the
augmentation or refinement of material productivity. Even in this obvious
situation, evaluations of the connection between mechani(ci)sm and human
strength, automation and manufacturing production, vary within the same
ideological domain, as with Marxism, which, despite the importance it places on
the element of the machinic in the system of production also warns of the effects
these mixed processes have on social relations linked to worker activity and its
repercussions on the level of collective subjectivity.
In the “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, Marx argues that the
machine is a means for the production of surplus value, or in other words,
something that is in no way concerned with saving the time and energy of
workers but rather with the maximization of their exploitation. According to
Marx,

once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of

labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is
the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of
machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most
adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in
motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself…
(Grundrisse 692)

Additionally, in Capital Marx describes the function of “machinery” as the

apparatus or system used in modernity to augment the use of the human being’s
labor power. Something magical seems to motivate these transformations where
objects, animated by a force and a directionality that seems to escape human
will, accomplish tasks that the rationality of the era had to struggle to
comprehend and incorporate into collective imaginaries. In the modern era,
productive systems and conceptualizations of the human rapidly changed their
traditional value. This process, which was accelerated by the Industrial
Revolution, brought about broad and long lasting economic, political, and social
effects.
Since the beginnings of industrial modernity, the optimization of energy and
resources on the one hand, and the progressive dehumanization on the other have
constituted a conceptual and inescapably contradictory binary, both ethical and
political, that has influenced the way in which we understand the machinic. In
peripheral contexts, marked by rhythms of development that are rather different
from those registered in the capitalist core, characterized by scarcity and uneven
distribution of productive resources and access to social goods and services, the
enthusiasm, admiration, and anxiety provoked by modernizing processes could
not but increase the fear triggered in the West by technological and scientific
progress.
For the purposes of the present study it should be noted that the machinic
does not necessarily function as a synonym of the monstrous, although it does
share certain features with this category, particularly in the context of the critique
of capitalism or power as systems of social control and discipline that produce
alienating and repressive strategies requiring rational development. In the
present book, the machinic is considered to have converged with the symbolic
domain of monstrosity insofar as it has been incorporated in different artistic
constructions as a form of hybridity and denaturalization of the human. The
alteration of organic compositions with technological prostheses, functions, or
abilities, causes a substantial modification of the concepts and meanings of the
previous notions of body, mind, affectivity, rationality, socialization, and so on.
Roboticization or cyborgization thus incorporates fundamental transformations
of the notions of identity, memory, and social interaction—undeniable symptoms
of profound change on the level of collective imaginaries that are organized by
technological progress itself and/or by social crises that require a considerable
expansion of the categories of cultural analysis and interpretation. As in the case
of the monster, the appearance of the robot or the cyborg announces the rupture
of the traditional (discursive, ideological, ethical, and political) networks that
constitute the social and are in turn constituted by collective dynamics in their
interactions with power.
The cyborg and the monster also share a polyphonic quality. They are sign
and symbol of the open or secret emergence of other forms of biopolitical
control and of the conception of life, death, contingence, and transcendence. The
cyborg and the monster also question the limits between the domains of the
human, the material-reified, the animal, and the divine. Like the monster, the
cyborg exposes the unimaginable; it represents a limit and materializes
disagreements, fears, concerns, and desires that cannot be conveyed by language
or images, because these communicational resources have already been
domesticated by dominant epistemologies. As a denaturalization of established
forms of corporeal attributes, the machinic operates as an ideological destabilizer
that develops the potential for a queer estrangement that invites reflection on
situations, contexts, and events that would otherwise be reabsorbed into the
social.
Like the monster, the cyborg is a border being, situated between technology
and fiction, between organism and machine, and of course, between Nature and
culture. Both amalgamation and mediation, it constitutes in itself a statement
about the limits of the human, especially the limits of its historical fluidity,
which is to say, of the fluctuations that are registered by the conceptual
appearance and substance of a living being in different historical and geocultural
contexts. In some ways, the very image of the cyborg monstrously reveals the
alteration of spatio-temporal coordinates that appear to have been suppressed by
an epistemic, ethical, and ideological tour de force.
The combination of humanity and technology has a decentering effect on
anthropocentrism, because it eliminates the idea of the human as superior,
central, and hegemonic, a notion around which collective identities constitute
and solidify themselves. In Torrano’s words:

El monstruo cyborg es la apuesta por una identidad fragmentaria, móvil

y glocal/local, que facilite las afinidades y reconozca las múltiples
experiencias que la constituyen; es el reconocimiento de que el sujeto
no es algo dado o predeterminado, sino algo que se está produciendo y
por eso mismo nos compromete y responsabiliza; es también la
integración de la lucha de clases con cuestiones raciales y sexuales.
(“Ontologías de la monstruosidad” 7)

According to Haraway, the study of biopolitics has functioned since Foucault

as a tenuous premonition of the reign of the cyborg in postmodernity, where the
classical crisis of humanism originates, giving rise to post- and trans-humanistic
explorations which demonstrate the downfall of the modern notion of the subject
and its radical decentering.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all
chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism;
in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our
politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both, imagination and
material reality, the two jointed centers structuring any possibility of
 historical transformation. (Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
150)

Like the monster, straddling both history and myth, the cyborg belongs to
both dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis, both cultural anthropology and
marketing studies, communication and the cultural industry. It is also an
(id)entity whose social function is eminently political, which is to say, the
cyborg depends on the relations it establishes with power and its ideological
apparatuses.
In Latin America, the cyborg is above all a cultural metaphor that has
acquired literary, cinematic, and discursive materiality because it captures a
moment of epistemic inflection that, instead of functioning as an atavistic
remainder (as in the case of the monster), represents a line of flight—
psychologically, a flight forward—that gains its full meaning in a world in which
utopian thought has notoriously been weakened. Without the extreme
emotionality of the monstrous, cybernetic construction alters the human
intellectually and suggests the need to explore new forms of rationality or of
accepting the enigma of a world in which reason seems to have been separated
from the human.
One of the earliest examples of the representation of the cyborg is a text by
the Argentine physician, botanist, and geologist Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg
(1852-1937), titled “Horacio Ratibang, o los autómatas” (1879). The story,
which is of an anti-spiritualist orientation and influenced by positivism, is set in
Germany (the author’s country of origin), and explores the themes of artificially
created life and the double, which would receive much greater attention in Latin
American literature in the following century. Holmberg’s work, influenced by
Poe and Hoffman, is nevertheless not designed to produce fear; instead it is
animated by philosophical intentions with regard to nature and the mystery of
life, which already seems to include in its organic processes dynamics associated
with the machinic:

¿Qué es el cerebro, sino una máquina, cuyos exquisitos resortes se

mueven en virtud de impulsos mil y mil veces transformados? ¿Qué es
el alma, sino el conjunto de esas funciones mecánicas? La acción
fisicoquímica del estímulo sanguíneo, la transmisión nerviosa, la idea,
 en su carácter imponderable e intangible, no son sino estados diversos
de una misma materia, una y simple sustancia, inmortal y eternamente
indiferente, al obedecer a la fatalidad de sus permutaciones, que
producen un infusorio, un hongo, un reptil, un árbol, un hombre, un
pensamiento, en fin! (Holmberg n.p.)

Understood as a combination of stimuli, reactions, and functions, life

includes the machinic, or at least a poor imitation of the precise functions that
produce effects and transformation that give rise to organic processes. The
materialization of an automaton, an artificial creation that imitates the human, is
thus a matter of the non-rational, the mystical, that which separates itself from
the authentic expression of feelings and moves closer to hypocrisy, simulation,
fanaticism, and ignorance:

Cuando, sumergido en el torbellino de la política, encuentres algún

personaje que se aparte de lo que la razón y la conciencia dictan a todo
hombre honrado... puedes exclamar: es un autómata.

Cuando, sumergido en las grandes batallas del pensamiento, tu

adversario científico llame en su apoyo los misterios de la fe, puedes
exclamar... ¡es un autómata!

Cuando veas un poeta que te pinta lo que no siente, un orador que

adula al pueblo; un médico que mata, un abogado que miente, un
guerrero que huye, un patriota que engaña, un ilustrado fanático y un
sabio que rebuzna... puedes decir de cada uno de ellos ¡es un autómata!
(Holmberg n.p.)

According to these definitions, the machinic is monstrous because it is

identified as the suspension of consciousness and morality and as a form of
behavioral deviation in which authentic spiritual values are abandoned. The
automaton thus does not represent an alternative for the positive expansion of
vital capacities but rather an adulteration that reduces the human to a
simulacrum, places any notion of identity in question, and can hide its true
nature behind a mask of human attributes. This incertitude includes the figure of
the narrator, whose essence is also uncertain.
Holmberg’s story is a predecessor of the tendency that formed in subsequent
decades around the brilliant glare of science, which Beatriz Sarlo identifies as
her thematic and ideological axis in La imaginación técnica. Sueños modernos
de la cultura argentina. According to Sarlo, the two poles of aesthetic desire at
the beginning of the twentieth century were the technical or constructive
possibilities that emerged, on the one hand, with advances in communications,
technology, and practical inventions, and on the other, the register of the
imagination, stimulated by photography, cinema, and communications in
general.
The forms of “the anomalous” are combined with an admiration for science
and with different registers of fictionalization which prevent the word monstrous
from being applied to hybrid constructions or laboratory scenes of the creation of
life or the transference of the psychic contents of one individual to another. This
treatment of the theme of technology cancels or reduces the effect of horror
proper to the Gothic, although it maintains aspects of defamiliarization and
estrangement that belong to the uncanny, as well as the use of disturbing settings,
atmospheres, and narrative situations.
In any case, as Sarlo argues, what is thematized here more than science are
the myths of science such as they are elaborated in popular imaginaries and
which accrue a number of innovative meanings, motives, and practices that
demonstrate a change in subjectivity and an alteration of collective imaginaries:

Para decirlo rápidamente: todo es verosímil en una mezcolanza de

ciencia, vulgarización, invención, instrucciones para hacer,
explicaciones simples y simplificadoras, noticias extraordinarias, […]
perfiles de inventores, […] imágenes del futuro, del más allá, del
universo translunar, aviación y viajes interplanetarios, televisión y
telefonía, descubrimientos geográficos y exploraciones, curas
maravillosas, cruces de parapsicología, curanderismo y superstición,
tecnología aplicada a la vida cotidiana, tecnología bélica, milagros.
(14)

Along this same line of putting “technical imagination” into practice,

Horacio Quiroga’s (1878-1937) novella El hombre artificial (1910) explores
(like Frankenstein) the theme of resurrection through a series of sometimes
successful, but ultimately catastrophic, experiments, thus contributing to the
current of “scientific fantasy.” The theme of the simulacrum, combined with the
examination of medical and technological discourses (which were very common
at the turn of the century due to the influence of positivism), creates a fertile
environment for experimenting with matters that question the limits of the
human condition. In Quiroga, the tenacious presence of death reinforces the
topic of the artificiality of life. The experiments of “tres jóvenes fáusticos”
(Sarlo 39) (whose personal histories make up the story) necessarily lead to
catastrophe because their lives are plagued by disastrous events and personal
cataclysms. One of the scientists is Donisoff, a Russian prince who redefines
himself as a revolutionary and represents the demonization of science, including
the use of hypnotism in an attempt to transfer personal memories and
experiences to an automaton. As in Shelley’s novel, electricity is the
technological element that contains the secret to reviving the inanimate.
However, in Quiroga’s story, part of the scientists’ attempt to endow their
artificial being with human consciousness requires “evacuating” the mind of a
beggar whom they torture in order to animate the creature, which they name
Biógeno. In this story, monstrosity consists not only of an antinatural creation
that would replicate and correct the monster from Frankenstein but also of the
conscious and clearly “human” actions of those who sacrifice real life in order to
manufacture artificial life. In any case, the relation that fiction maintains with
medical-forensic discourses and Promethean variations on a classical theme
continues to be relevant in Latin America:

Quiroga inventa una versión rioplatense del “moderno Prometeo”: el

sabio Donisoff es, en verdad, un doctor Frankenstein que, en lugar de
componer a su creación monstruosa con los restos de anatomías
humanas, lo forma desde las sustancias elementales: oxígeno,
nitrógeno, fosfatos. Esta diferencia es la del siglo que transcurre entre
la novela de Mary Shelley y 1908: de la anatomía como práctica que
individualiza las partes del cuerpo humano, poniendo de manifiesto su
estructura mecánica, a la química que aísla las partículas elementales
en el laboratorio y reconstruye, desde ese origen primero, la estructura
invisible de un cuerpo. (Sarlo 40)

These early narrative experiments brought a strong emotional and

intellectual charge to discussions of the ethical aspects of the automaton and the
behaviors that surround its presence in the human world, which continues to
deteriorate in the face of the deregulation of the scientific world.
The theme of scientific deviance and erratic technological developments was
one of the primary means through which the anxieties of the era were channeled.
However, insofar as historical contexts change—and along with them, collective
anxieties, fears, and desires—the inclusion of the machinic in the construction of
anomalous bodies represents other expressive necessities and is implemented
through a variety symbolic devices.
The relation between the subject and technology has been frequently
theorized. In the Heideggerian lineage, the theme of technology is considered an
inescapable condition of our time. According to Heidegger, “the essence of
technology is by no means anything technological” (qtd. in Chambers 56) but
instead reaches a transcendence beyond its mere instrumentality insofar as it is
able to replace the conventional image of the world and surpass the limitations
of our own cognition. As the representation of the ontological basis of
modernity, the foundations of classical humanism are displaced in an era when
the image is imposed as the basis of reality and as the aesthetic apparatus par
excellence. For Iain Chambers,

technology represents the apex of occidental metaphysics and its

appropriation of the world around a sovereign “I.” Occidental
metaphysics and technology co-exist in a common will to world the
world in a subjective and subjugated image. The world is cognitively
framed to appear before the subject as object, waiting to be grasped
and dominated, bought into its sovereignty and control. (56)

The presence of scientific discourse, particularly Darwinism, as well as the

obsession with technological themes, inventions, medical discourses, and
futurology in the literary works of Roberto Arlt, Macedonio Fernández, Julio
Cortázar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ricardo Piglia, and other Argentine literary
figures have been studied by J. Andrew Brown, who finds in these authors a
schematization of the subject of the cyborg that was further developed by other
more contemporary writers. This narrative trend is presented through proposing
dystopian frameworks in which science and technology reinvigorate the
representation of social conflict, the anxiety caused by the processes of
modernization, and the inequalities of civil society, all frequently connected to
political factors.3
In Bioy Casares’s “La invención de Morel” (1940), a scientist invents a
machine that can reproduce reality and perhaps even conquer death. This desire
for eternity, hallucination, and replication of the real produces a de-realization
that both dehumanizes and expresses the deepest human anxieties. In Piglia’s
novel La ciudad ausente (1992), a series of stories are interconnected to such an
extent that the narration itself becomes an intricate, polyvalent web in which a
“narrating machine” attempts to preserve memory. In this dystopian reality of
personal remembrance, the official story and others’ recollections intertwine
with, complement, and contradict one another. As part of the same thematic
constellation, reality in these texts tends toward a fantasy that explores ways of
overcoming limits and conquering spaces for the fulfillment of desire and
restitution where the machinic plays a defamiliarizing but necessarily terrifying
central role. In both cases, memory is a tormented space that seeks to reinstall
itself in a reality that must be modified in order to accommodate the intensity of
the past and its multiple unrealities.
According to Geoffrey Kantaris, the cyborg is related to collective traumas,
like colonization or the effects of authoritarianism, that affect the foundations of
civility and sociality themselves. Kantaris analyzes the relation between urban
space, mechanization, and national spaces, arguing that

The Latin American cyborg seems to condense specific anxieties

surrounding the dissolution of collective identities and collective
memories, anxieties that connect historically to the experience of
colonization on the one hand and, on the other, to the erasure of the
nation as a space of collective agency and memory, an erasure which
seems to be inscribed in the very mechanisms which affect the
transition from nation-state to global market. (52)

As Kantaris argues, the spatio-temporal disruption of the Latin American

megalopolis by the effects of urban growth and the population density,
migrations, and the erasure of the historical in favor of the new, the
transformative, and the futuristic constitutes a fertile environment for the
development and proliferation of the cyborg’s agency in visual and literary
culture. Cyberculture and its cyberpunk variant produce an inscription of
peripheral cultures in the networks of power/knowledge on the global level and,
at the same time, contribute important modifications to “central” registers as part
of the process of symbolic transculturation/appropriation.4
The critical and theoretical approaches that attempt to grasp the
characteristics of virtual spaces, of cybernetic language, and of unprecedented
forms of social experience made possible by new technologies make it clear that
the new cultural horizons represented by the cyborg, far from being limited to
their technological instrumentality, entail a series of transformations on the level
of attitude, value, and practice that create new communities and new forms of
interaction between individuals, ideas, spaces, and temporalities. The experience
of simultaneity, the multiple identities that proliferate on the global level, the
redefinition of the concepts of intimacy, friendship, public space, leisure, and
reality make modern humanism obsolete and demand a redefinition of the
human that encompasses all levels of individual and collective existence. The
cyborg’s “monstrosity” appears as such from the horizons of classical and
modern humanism in which hybridity indicates a substantial change of
normality, an anomaly that announces (as with the monster) profound alterations
of the known world.
In some cases, the cyborg represents the process of dehumanization and
automation proper to industrialized societies where the utilitarian and the
instrumental take priority. In these cases, it comes to symbolize alienation, the
loss of consciousness and memory, the attitude of programmed and indoctrinated
beings who have lost all critical faculties, the lack of objectives, sensibility, and
affectivity. The organic thus becomes an artifact or an apparatus programmed for
determinate functions by external powers and based on objectives that are not
internalized but rather imposed through authoritarianism. Depending on the
context, it comes to stand in for patriarchy, dictatorship, religious indoctrination,
or any other type of situation that deprives and oppresses free will. In other
cases, the cyborg is in contrast seen as synonymous with liberation, identified
with new forms of being, emancipated from repressive and conventional
structures that limit individual freedom. From this perspective, the cyborg is
understood as a post-family, post-community (id)entity, “a creature in a post-
gender world” (Haraway, Modest Witness 150). That is, it is seen as the
announcement of new forms of subjectivity and sociality that flourish in a world
characterized by the virtual dimension, the simultaneity of times and spaces, and
the transformation of the sensible and cognitive abilities that correspond to the
requirements of global capitalism. Haraway conceptualizes the cyborg as an anti-
model of the subject configured by Christianity, liberalism, and psychoanalysis,
and even as an anti-model of the modern monster, which is still animated by a
sense of self and by a mode of thinking social existence through stable cultural
paradigms. The cyborg is not structured by the public/private dichotomy. In it,
nature and culture are related in a different, equivalent way, without one or the
other taking primacy or being considered the originary domain of the other,
which eliminates any possibility of conflict between them. While the modern
monster (e.g., Frankenstein’s monster, Count Dracula, et al.) nostalgically
aspired to the forms of socialization proper to the human and the restoration of
sentimental and erotic bonds, this is not the case with the cyborg:

Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect
its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through
the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a
finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of
community on the model of the organic family, this time without the
Oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden;
it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. The main
trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate
offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state
socialism. But illegitimate offsprings are often exceedingly unfaithful
to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. (Haraway,
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 151)

The theme of social (self-)recognition, essential for the comprehension of

these new (id)entities, makes the cyborg’s hybridity into a liberating, non-
taxonomic element, future-oriented and open to innovations, in which the
conditions of elitist and exclusive humanistic traditions tend to disappear,
yielding to new conceptual constructions. As Teresa Aguilar García writes in her
Ontología Cyborg,

El cyborg permite a Haraway evitar lo que llama “cierre metafísico” de

identidad”, acción por la cual el género queda atrapado en un sexo y
una identidad que no favorece el discurso emancipatorio.… Huir de
 identidades clasificadas, de la barricada del sexo, de la burla del
lenguaje del código único es la propuesta del feminismo de Haraway,
para quien el cyborg, hijo bastardo del capitalismo blanco, sirve como
metáfora subversiva al androcentrismo. (108)

In this sense, the cyborg appears to announce an evolution of the monstrous,

even though both forms of the uncanny have now found parallel paths of
aesthetico-ideological existence.5 The cyborg has also been satirically
appropriated in low-budget camp films since the 1950s, as can be seen in
Mostrología del cine mexicano (2015), edited by Marco González Ambriz, José
Luis Ortega Torres, Octavio Serra, and Rodrigo Vidal Tamayo. This collection,
which we will refer to again, includes as one category of the mostroso the
“electro-domestics,” which are defined as

inhumanas construcciones de metal, fabuladas por algún científico loco

con fines bastante humanos. El aluminio, el acero y el titanio pueden
formar su tegumento exterior, aunque la mayoría de las veces no es
más que simple plástico cubierto con pintura metálica. Por dentro
constan de cables, circuitos eléctricos, transistores, bulbos o
simplemente un enano acuclillado para maniobrar el armatoste. (81)

Elements such as robots, prosthetics, paranormal experiences, cybernetic

apparatuses, combinations of animal and machine, humans with technological
accessories or attachments, and automata are utilized in a cinematic
carnivalization that combines the monstrous with other genres (the Western,
pornography, sentimental films, etc.), creating comical figures that do not
eschew vulgarity and which parodically dialogue with “highbrow”
representations of the machinic. Some examples of these creations can be seen in
movies such as: La momia azteca vs. el robot humano (Rafael Portillo, 1958), in
which a robot with a human head is enslaved to find a treasure, a process in
which it fights an Aztec mummy in an obvious confrontation between archaism
and futurism; La nave de los monstruos (Rogelio A. González, 1960), in which
the central character possesses the gift of an advanced artificial intelligence of
extraterrestrial origin; Autopsia de un fantasma (Ismael Rodríguez, 1966), with
the main character as a feminine android named Robotina; Kalimán en el
siniestro mundo de Humanón (Alberto Mariscal, 1976), which features
zombitronics, human beings with animal brain transplants that are controlled by
electromagnetic apparatuses; and El macho biónico (Rodolfo de Anda, 1981),
which portrays the story of a man who uses a prosthetic implant to increase his
sexual abilities. These titles are representative of a tendency to parody the horror
genre and the “scientific fantasy” of representing the machinic, wagering on
comedy and on popularized or vulgarized forms of the themes conveyed by
classic works like Frankenstein or Dracula, or those that were represented in
large budget films like George Lucas’s Star Wars series (the first film of which
premiered in 1977).
“Mostros” like La Llorona and the Nahual are alternative, vernacular
versions of canonical figures in European literatures and offer a broad overview
of popular fears. Different cultural traditions and audiences with less
infrastructure and fewer resources than the established centers of the
entertainment industry create forms that adapt the iconography and general sense
of classical discourses to the needs and tastes of peripheral audiences. The theme
of mimicry plays a fundamental role, crafted as part of a postcolonial
appropriation in which transculturated symbolic products acquire new meaning
and the incorporating practices of aesthetic paradigms are carried out with an
often irreverent, parodic, ironic, and/or satirical distance that, without erasing the
message of the original models, superimposes its own agendas and symbolic
procedures. “Mostrology” shows a kind of pop filmic style in the representation
of a broad cast of iconic figures, among which the cyborg receives the same
treatment as monsters. This option reveals alternative forms of thinking and
representing the theme of the (post)human and its relations with similar species,
both living and artificial, no longer in a philosophical or political key but rather
in the informal and excessive context of the cultural industry and popular
culture, where the appropriation of these themes demonstrates both their
continued validity and their exhaustion.

Peripheral Vampires
As a figure that expresses a direct contact with individual and collective
corporeality, the vampire is a monster whose classical incarnation is closely
connected to peripheral imaginaries where the integrity and organicity of the
social body constitute a symbolic domain rich in historical and ideological
connotations. As Hardt and Negri point out in analyzing “the monstrosity of the
flesh,” the vampire embodies a specific threat to the institution of the family
insofar as it represents an excessive, insatiable, and unconventional sexuality
that makes no gender distinctions nor has any regard for the norm of biological
reproduction. Vampirism spreads and reproduces through the bite between men
and women, races and individuals from different classes and ethnic backgrounds,
citizens and immigrants, legal or illegal, creating through this physical contact a
new species with an alternative lifestyle that maintains a special relationship
with death, space, and temporality (Hardt and Negri, Multitude 193-94). This
democratic promiscuity changes the rules of the order that governs the stratified
and exclusive condition of modern society. Vampires are outsiders, predisposed
to carnality, unproductive, and hedonistic.
Examining the relations between the concepts of the fantastic, the sublime,
and the popular, James Donald emphasizes how these categories converge and
overlap in the figure of the vampire, representing subjectivity as a space of
fragmentation and instability, a notion in which the consciousness of our time,
overwhelmed by the downfall of modern totalizations of the real, is able to
recognize itself. According to Donald, if many popular representations of the
vampire trivialize the symbolic contents of this classic figure of horror literature,
at the same time a certain sublimity sustains the aesthetics of vampirism as an
attempt to dissolve, or at least to destabilize, the canonical conventions of
bourgeois “good taste.” From this convergence of paradigms and categories that
articulate abjection and sublimity, the popular can be rethought as the social
domain for the expression of uncertainties, fears, and anxiety connected to
dominant social structures. As Todorov has argued, the fantastic is correctly
affirmed in the “fragility of the limits” between life and death, between the
human and the supernatural, the normal and the anomalous, the rational and the
irrational. The melodramatic register constitutes the discursive space most
capable of staging the mise-en-scène of modern sublimity, a category informed
by a nostalgia for totality and saturated by an excess of affect, ambiguity, and
uncertainty. The aesthetics of kitsch is the code most frequently used to express
these elements, illuminating the side of modernity that corresponds to the
popular, the heterogeneous, the hybrid, and the transculturated. Kitsch also
includes the use of mimicry as a representational strategy for adopting models
through simulacrum, irony, and parody.
This alternative perspective has been explored extensively in Latin America
in different aesthetic registers and with many different ideological connotations.
The theme of the vampire makes it possible to infiltrate such varied subjects as
the relation between the state and its citizens, sexuality, identity politics,
capitalism, consumption, esotericism, and scatology. It is connected to both
national contexts and migration, the status of women, social hybridity, and
mestizaje. If vampires are by definition symbolic constructions established in the
articulation of disparate realities and natures (which coexist in the same body
and whose attributes point to the human and the monster, the norm and its
transgression, to high culture and popular legends and beliefs), the adoption of
the trope of the vampire in Latin America reveals both a conjunction of disparate
elements that belie the concept’s European origins and its symbolic relocation in
peripheral contexts marked by the presence of indigenous cultures. In this
process, the classical figure of the vampire broadens its exoticism and redefines
its universality.
Ann Davies has proposed to think the vampire, in Foucauldian terms, as a
heterotopic and heterochronic construct, which is to say, as a spatio-temporal
reinstallation that, while reactivating core attributes of the concept and function
of the vampire such as they have been canonized in the cultures in which they
originated, incorporates elements associated with new contexts where the trope
is re-symbolized. Heterotopia includes the idea of the coexistence or co-
belonging of the disparate in a corporeality that adopts binaries and articulates
them for new purposes. It is a matter of the “collapse of distance” in which
clearly differentiated realities, places, or moments nevertheless converge.

The vampire functions…as an embodied entity that contains different

and sometimes conflicting levels of reality…. The vampire functions as
an embodiment of places outside all places through the ability to live
beyond death and thus persist over generations: readers and spectators
come to travel through time and space via the vampire. Vampires, in
“living” as they do, become repositories of information about other
times and places, the embodiment of the sort of information contained
in libraries and museums—for Foucault, the latter are also examples of
heterotopias, allowing for both a heterotopic and heterochronic
approach to reality. (Davies, “Guillermo Del Toro’s Monsters” 396-97)

The convergences of time, place, and reality can also be considered with
regard to racial otherness, as the literary examples analyzed above demonstrate,
since vampiric “infiltration” is achieved through cultural borders and ethnic and
gender identities, suggesting the idea that the subject’s position is neither fixed
nor invulnerable but rather unstable and fluid (Davies, “Guillermo Del Toro’s
Monsters” 398).
As part of the processes of the expansion of cultural markets and the
professionalization of the intellectual, from the beginning of the twentieth
century modernist aestheticism integrated into Latin American imaginaries
morbid and esoteric elements that defied conventional rationality, proposing the
exploration of the strange, grotesque, and demonic. These elements are
sometimes portrayed with traces of humor or in melodramatic contexts,
expanding the thematic registers and representational strategies in which Gothic
characteristics can be incorporated.
In line with currents of thought expressed in books like Edouard Schuré’s
Les grands initiés, esqueisse de l’histoire secrete des religions (1899),
modernism explored aspects of the occult, mainly Pythagoreanism, as an
alternative to Christian paradigms, recuperating symbols connected to abjection,
the macabre, and the demonic. In modernism, the figure of the vampire is
frequently utilized to connect regional imaginaries with transnational aesthetic
currents. The quest for totalization is registered on the ideological level and in
the process of composition itself, that is, in redefining the form and function of
literature as a philosophical investigation and not only as an aesthetic construct.
Rubén Darío offered numerous examples of these transcendental concerns and
the representations from which they originated. One example is his story
“Thanatopía” from 1893, in which he develops the themes of the living dead and
feminine vampirism in a Gothic atmosphere. Other authors subsequently
incorporated these topics into their narrative and poetic repertoires in the first
decades of the twentieth century.
The short stories of Juana Manuela Gorriti (1818-1892), an Argentine writer
who was based in Bolivia during the long exile she endured for her anti-Rosista
views, are also representative of the Gothic genre and exemplify the
transformations that the role of the intellectual continued to register as part of the
modernizing process. Her fantastic tales include: “Quien escucha su mal oye”
(1865), in which the author introduces elements of occultism and hypnotism in
elaborating the theme of gender and women’s rights, with the gaze that
constructs the other constituting one of the main axes of the story. Also, “El
guante negro,” “La novia del muerto,” and “El lucero del manantial” are
examples of de-realization in which love stories are articulated with supernatural
elements, specters, lost souls, or cases of dementia, which serve as apparatuses
for the establishment of erotic and sentimental themes and the exploration of the
place of the feminine in modern Latin American imaginaries.
At the turn of the century, the Argentine Atilio Chiáppori (1880-1947), who
was, as Sylvia Molloy puts it, on the edges of the Gothic genre, practiced a
horror literature in which gender, body, and monstrosity were intertwined in dark
and original anecdotes that included the figure of the vampire, sex crimes, and
the construction of sinister settings with even more unsayable and recondite
drives. His main works, Borderland (1907) and La eternal angustia (1908), are
connected through an intertextuality that links their plots and motifs, creating an
occult and passionate world that incorporates the exoticizing imaginaries of
modernism while adding psychological and scientific twists. Their plots
undoubtedly provoked emotional reactions by presenting not just terrifying
situations but also shocking visualizations. However, as Molloy indicates, they
point to a much larger and deeper problematization of the themes they cover,
lending themselves to diverse levels of understanding:

Las novelas de Chiáppori pueden leerse—y de hecho se han leído—

como otras tantas novelas sensacionalistas del fin de siglo que buscan
el escalofrío barato. Si bien tal lectura no es impertinente (ni tampoco
frívola), no toma en cuenta debidamente el cruce provocador que
propone Chiáppori entre intervención médica e intervención narrativa
en lo tocante a lo femenino. (540)

In the Andean region at the beginning of the twentieth century, the work of
Clemente Palma (1872-1946) stands out for its traces of the influence of Poe and
its modernist aesthetics, which are brought together in prose with frequently
esoteric and agnostic contents that broach themes like the grotesque, the abject,
and extrasensory exploration. Some of his most famous works are Cuentos
malévolos (1904) and Historias malignas (1925), collections of short stories that
incorporate demonic elements, vampirism, mythological characters, and
lugubrious and mournful atmospheres. His narrative defies the Christian
tradition, forcing it to compete with the demonic world, an aspect Miguel de
Unamuno criticizes in his preface to the first edition of Cuentos malévolos.
Unamuno expresses here his discomfort with Palma’s heretical irreverence and
with what he considers the Argentine writer’s mistaken approach to Christianity.
But the best explanation of the state of the relations between supernatural and
dominant knowledge is provided by one of Palma’s characters, the doctor who
explains to his patient the place of the occult in relation to modern rationality:

Eres un hombre y te lo puedo decir: eres víctima de sortilegios

misteriosos. Te mueres en sueños y tus enemigos te atacan dormido.
Aún hay, en este siglo de las luces y de la incredulidad, fuerzas
misteriosas, poderes ocultos, supervivencias de la energía,
malignidades activas de voluntades secretas, radiaciones psíquicas
desconocidas, fuerzas no estudiadas, espíritus, como se dice
vulgarmente, espíritus de muertos o de vivos que obran, hieren, y aun
matan en la sombra. El radio de acción de estas fuerzas extrañas, su
ley, no ha entrado todavía en el dominio de la ciencia oficial: son
negados por ella porque no son cosas verificables por las leyes
científicas, no se pueden estudiar bajo el ocular del microscopio. Y, sin
embargo, son cosas que existen, fenómenos que se realizan y que traen
consecuencias positivas. Quizá todo sea natural y racionalmente
explicable dentro de las leyes biológicas y psíquicas conocidas, y
dentro de la hipótesis aceptada, pero lo cierto es que aún no se ha
acertado el mecanismo y la ley de esto que, por su apariencia
extranatural y maravillosa, corresponde más bien a la mitología
popular. (“Las vampiras” n.p.)

The doctor’s explanation connects scientific knowledge and popular beliefs,

as well as the demonic behavior of vampirism, represented here by a female
protagonist whom Palma connects to the expression of amorous passion and
contrasts pure but dispassionate love with the instinctive excess that consumes
the bodies of humans and animals in an attempt to quench an insatiable thirst
that overwhelms the physical dimension. His description of the vampires’
activity connects to the universal codification of vampirism, particularly in its
Latin American expressions, in which the element of sensuality and the portrayal
of women as diabolical agents persistently appears:
De pronto oí lejanas voces de mujeres mezcladas con aullidos. Levanté
sigilosamente la cabeza hacia la ventanilla. Vi una nube informe que se
agitaba entre las rejas, una especie de remolino de líneas tenues, de
formas vagas y deshechas, de cuerpos aéreos indecisos; poco a poco
todo fue definiéndose, los ruidos se convirtieron en cuchicheos y las
formas vagas condensándose en cuerpos de mujeres. Como aves
carniceras se dejaron caer sobre los armarios y muebles. Eran mujeres
blancas de formas nerviosas y cínicas; tenían los ojos amarillos y
fosforescentes como los de los búhos; los labios de un rojo sangriento,
eran carnosos y detrás de ellos, contraídos en perversas sonrisas, se
veían unos dientecillos agudos y blancos como los de los ratones. Los
cuerpos de esas mujeres tenían el brillo oleoso de superficies
barnizadas y la transparencia lechosa del ópalo. La primera que bajó se
precipitó ansiosa sobre el joven dormido y le besó rabiosamente en la
boca; luego, con una contracción infame de sus labios, cogió entre los
dientes el labio inferior de Hansen y le mordió suavemente, y siguió
succionando su sangre, mientras su cuerpo se agitaba diabólicamente y
sus ojos despedían un fulgor verdoso que alumbraba la cara del
dormido. Bajaron al lecho otras dos: parecían hambrientas de sangre y
placer; una se apoderó de una oreja, otra sentóse en el suelo, y con la
punta de la lengua, que debía ser áspera como la de los felinos, se puso
a acariciar la planta de los pies de Hansen. Éstos contraíanse como
electrizados. Otra, siniestramente, hermosa, se arrodilló en la cama y,
con la espina dorsal encorvada, con los cabellos echados sobre la
frente, adhirió su boca al pecho de Hansen: parecía una hiena
devorando un cadáver. Todo el cuerpo del joven se retorció con una
desesperación loca que tanto podía ser la contracción de un placer
agudo o de un violento dolor: agitábase con la inconciencia de un
pedazo de carne puesto en las brasas. Y otra y otras más, diabólicas,
hermosas, perversas, bajaron y adhirieron sus cabezas a diferentes
partes del cuerpo de Hansen. Los cuerpos opalinos de esas malditas se
destacaban sobre la tela negra con toda la precisión. Veía pasar gota a
gota la sangre succionada por esas bocas infernales, veía correr esa
sangre pálida por las venas, subirles al rostro y colorear esas lívidas
mejillas de un rosado tenue… El terror me había paralizado y mis
esfuerzos por gritar eran vanos. (Palma, “Las vampiras” n.p.)
 Making use of Gothic devices and consonant with the modernist aesthetic
tradition of the poètes maudits, Palma elaborates the relation between the
demonic and the divine in both fiction (“Parábola,” “El Quinto Evangelio,” “El
último fauno,” “Ensueños mitológicos”) and essays like “El satanismo,”
included in his book Filosofía y letras (1897). Sometimes these elements are
incorporated into more conventional plots (love stories), that the element of
vampiric anomaly helps to complicate, such as in “La virgin de cera,” by
Abraham Valdelomar (1888-1919), which mixes elements of Christianity with
more profane content. This story explores the topic of the double or the
duplication of the subject (woman vampire/wax virgin) in the context of a
romantic plot.
More often than the individual monster, it is the theme of monstrosity that
accompanies the development of national culture. In the Andean region, it is
linked to the way in which the relations of dependence and civil life are
structured during the process of the consolidation of the criollo republic. The
monstering of the Other is almost always carried out in the context of
sociopolitical conflict and is particularly linked to the ethnic and racial policies
implemented by the populist authoritarian state and by the responses they
elicited among the population. The monstrous resides in indigenism as a
presence that, without losing its character as event, is related to the cosmovision
of pre-Hispanic cultures, also incorporating the collective imaginaries of
modernity as an intrinsic feature of society. Andean culture integrates the
spectral as part of a concept of time and death that, instead of erasing the past,
constantly re-presents it in the present, revives it, convokes it, and projects it as a
cognitive dimension, as an affective force, and as mythico-religious component
of reality. In the same way, the supernatural, as a metaphor of specific aspects of
social experience or as an extension of this latter toward zones invisibilized by
Western rationality, constitutes an integral part of everyday life. Literature that
evokes the indigenous world and recreates it from criollo perspectives elaborate
and transfigure these cultural aspects in the process of representing them from
outside, as it is the world of orality that most thoroughly and patiently registers
this material.
The fictional and anthropological works of José María Arguedas and
Gamaliel Churata are based in these elements, authentically testifying to a
perspective that is generally unrepresented in Europeanized criollo texts. As in
Bolivia and Ecuador, monstering combines popular discourses and
representations of these strata from the perspective of official culture. The body
is the space on which the ideas of normality and anomaly are inscribed through
technologies of power and the strategies of resistance that confront them. Along
with the adoption and adaptation of the universally circulating tropes of
monstrosity, a broad repertoire of popular creativity contributes its own sinister
and terrifying creatures. These monsters channel local elements that allow for
the historical, political, satirical, or parodic decoding of conflicts which the
monster, the ghost, the witch, or the vampire in their diverse avatars help to
make visible and submit to the judgment of the community.
Some of the problems that underlie these narratives have to do with the fears
that increase with the processes of modernization, urban growth, migration from
the mountains to the coast, foreign debt, technological advances, destruction of
the environment, exploitation of natural resources, political authoritarianism,
police repression, cultural and linguistic marginalization, racial discrimination,
labor disputes, social inequality, and poverty. Horror stories are a way of
discussing violence in any of its social manifestations through the device of
metaphor, which is used to channel the social and emotional chaos that violence
causes both on the individual and the collective level. Through narratives of fear,
the rupture of the social pact is brought out into the open, questioning the
rationality that sustained it and the ideological network that legitimized it. As
Rossana Reguillo argues, referring to the cinematic discourse of violence, “la
violencia deja de ser pre-texto de la historia narrada, para convertirse en texto y
contexto de la narración. Las barreras de contención desaparecen” (196).
In horror literature and film, the theme of victimization is thus
metaphorically or allegorically considered, making it possible to elaborate it on
the level of the community, as if fiction constituted an experimental space to test
ways of uncovering evil and strategies for comprehending its functioning and for
counteracting it. For this reason, J. Cohen begins his seven theses on monster
culture by proposing a modus legendi, which is to say, a form of reading that
analyzes culture through the monsters it produces and reminds us that history as
such, that is, the version that we accept as the official story of social
development, is nothing more than a discourse, a version with pretensions of
totality. Instead, history could instead be thought as a multitude of fragments that
form not a homogeneous whole but rather a hybrid composition, a monstrous
body (“The Monster Culture” 3).
Elton Honores Vázquez, a critic who has extensively studied the theme of
monstrosity in Andean literature and film, asserts in the introduction to Los que
moran en las sombras: Asedios al vampiro en la narrativa peruana (2010), an
anthology he edited with Gonzalo Portals Zubieta, that the trope of the vampire
is like an empty body that has been resemanticized in different contexts through
its articulation with a wide range of topics: alterity, the condition of being a
foreigner, illegitimate status, marginalization, sexual repressions and drives,
power, exploitation, anguish, war-related disasters, and violence in general.6
Honores refers to different classifications of vampirism—psychological,
folkloric, demonic, etc.—as well as its pre-Hispanic antecedents in Mexico and
the Andean region, noting that the term vampiro (vampire) first appeared in the
Diccionario de la Real Academia Española in 1843.7 His anthology collects
representative texts of the genre from “La bestia amarilla” (1908) by Manuel
Bedoya (1888-1941) to “El Consuelo de Ángela” (2008) by Alfredo Dammert.
Honores detects the presence of a parodic style in many of the anthologized
texts, as well as a consistent attention to erotic themes and political satire.
Among the most notable stories is Rodolfo Hinostroza’s “Las memorias de
Drácula” (1940), a re-writing of the Dracula myth and of Stoker’s novel that
illustrates the way vampirism has been appropriated in peripheral zones, where
its symbolic contents and thematic concerns are filtered through an irony that
desacralizes even more a desacralizing genre. According to Honores, since the
late 1990s, representations of the vampire have abandoned this lighter, more
humoristic expression and gone back to earlier connections to horror literature,
which includes practitioners of the fantasy genre. Some examples are the work
of Fernando Iwasaki (who portrays the variant of the vampire-baby in “El
balberito” [2000]), Italo Morales, Pablo Nicoli Segura, and Carlos Calderón
Fajardo, among others.8 Calderón Fajardo is the author of a trilogy consisting of
the novels El viaje que nunca termina. La verdadera historia de Sarah Ellen
(1993, 2009), La novela de Corinto. El regreso de Sarah Ellen (2010), and La
ventana del diablo. Requiem por Sarah Ellen (2011). The narrative of the series
centers on the figure of an English vampire named Sarah Ellen, who was born in
1917 and who waits to be resurrected 80 years later, in 1997. While the first
novel concentrates on Ellen’s journey from England to Peru, the second focuses
on Ellen’s engagement with the ideology of Shining Path leader Abimael
Guzmán, and the third revolves around the repercussions of the reappearance of
this vampire woman in a dreamlike environment. These appropriations of the
vampire trope articulate localism and universality, which is to say, the
representation of the particular conditions of the Andean and Peruvian contexts
with the vampire myth promulgated by some of the most well-known European
writers.9 It is also worth mentioning the fact that Sarah Ellen’s vampirism and
her expected return to the world of the living is an urban legend that surpasses
the limits of the literature that conveys the story once it has become rooted in
popular imaginaries. This process entails interesting exchanges and mutual
borrowings between literature and orality, local history and fiction, the popular
and the lettered. From an ideological point of view, perhaps the most important
element of this adoption/adaptation of the trope of the vampire is its reinscription
in a landscape that is socially and politically marked by the internal conflict in
Peru, where the topic of blood has acquired very precise connotations, giving
rise to a political and ideological decoding of vampirism as a national allegory.10
In the novel Doble de vampiro (2012), José Donayre Hoefken proposes the
figure of a vampire who reflects on his own supernatural condition but also on
the unspeakable desires that inhabit us. The figure of Sarah Ellen returns here in
a Gothic environment that is full of lyricism and philosophical speculation.11
According to Donayre Hoefken, what is most intriguing about the figure of the
vampire is

[s]u naturaleza esencialmente retadora. Es un ser que vive al margen,

que goza de la fortuna de la inmortalidad, la eterna juventud y la
belleza. Sin embargo, el no poder verse ante un espejo es su mayor
castigo. Solo le queda indagar sobre sí mismo, alimentarse de su
sombra y tratar de entender qué podría ser la felicidad ante la certeza
de que la muerte no le tocará la puerta en condiciones normales.
(Capurro n.p.)

In the Southern Cone, vampires make their appearance in the context of

modernism and remain a non-dominant, occasionally represented aspect that
registers the echoes of transnational currents that submit their aesthetic impulses
as a revitalization of the poetics that they develop in the region. In Uruguay,
Delmira Agustini’s (1886-1914) poem “El vampiro” (from Cantos de la
mañana, 1910) illustrates (in the key of a modernist aesthetics) the symbolic
connection between sexual desire (the “evil with no name”) and the “dark race”
associated with pain and death:

En el regazo de la tarde triste

yo invoqué tu dolor... Sentirlo era
sentirte el corazón! Palideciste
hasta la voz, tus párpados de cera
bajaron...y callaste... Pareciste
Oir pasar la Muerte... Yo que abriera
tu herida mordí en ella -¿me sentiste?-
¡Como en el oro de un panal mordiera!
Y exprimí más, traidora, dulcemente
tu corazón herido mortalmente,
por la cruel daga rara y exquisita
de un mal sin nombre, ¡hasta sangrarlo en llanto!
Y las mil bocas de mi sed maldita
tendí a esa fuente abierta en tu quebranto
¿Por qué fui tu vampiro de amargura?
¿Soy flor o estirpe de una especie oscura
que come llagas y que bebe el llanto? (66)

In 2013, the author Borka Sattler added another novel to the Peruvian saga of
Sarah Ellen, offering a new version of the character's appearances and
influences. The vampire clearly functions here as a figurative rhetorical form in
which its image is utilized as an expression of the pathos of romantic love,
imbued with pain and an eroticism oriented toward the consumption of the body
of the beloved. The aggressiveness of feminine sexuality and the anagnorisis
linked to desire in this modernist poem seem to illustrate Agustini’s sensual and
disruptive poetics, appealing here to an already established image in the Western
imaginary as a dark and supernatural symbol of illicit and morbid sexuality. The
vampire’s monstrosity is sublimated and expressed as a metaphor for an
uncontrollable passion in which desire and abjection are inseparable. Her
reference to the vampire’s dark nature and the ambiguity that surrounds it
provokes an emotional torrent of anomalous intensity that compromises the very
identity of poetic speech and which is expressed in the ontological questions at
the poem’s end.
 Also in the Uruguayan context, the work of Horacio Quiroga (already
mentioned above) appeals to the subject of feminine vampirism. Quiroga’s work
“El vampiro” (1927), which is marked by emotional excess, drifting rationality,
and the constant presence of death, is situated at the intersection of several
worlds: madness, science, technology, imagination, and paranormal experience.
The story combines the spectral character of a woman extracted from her
original filmic image through a process of photographic manipulation and her
progressive transformation into a vampire. As in other stories by Quiroga, such
as “El espectro” (1921) and “El puritano” (1926), the narration consists of the
descent of rationality into horror (“la fina lluvia del espanto”), which saturates
the story. During this process, the connections between perception and cognition
become unhinged from the real. Permeated with eroticism and defying the limits
of intelligibility, the effect of the ghost is made stronger by the other characters,
as if the sucking of blood were preceded and complemented by the absorption of
all rational ability to deconstruct the phantasmagoric world built by literary
creation. Allusions to madness, post-traumatic stress, nervous breakdowns, and
the agonizing prospect of approaching death tinge the story with the sort of
“hypnotic power” that is also attributed to vampires as a form of seducing and
controlling their victims.12
There is no doubt that, along with its predecessors in previous centuries,
starting with modernism, fantasy literature and the representation of monstrosity
in general went on to constitute a poetic alternative in Latin America that has
constantly remained open although with moments of intensification and different
inflections in diverse historical and cultural contexts. The Antología de literatura
fantástica published by Borges, Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo in 1940,
which assembled texts from world literature, was fundamental to the
establishment of the genre in the Río de la Plata region, as well as throughout the
South American continent.
Updating elements from earlier aesthetics and recuperating aspects of
Nietzschean philosophy and esotericism, modernist decadence emphasized the
macabre, the fantastic, and the uncanny as part of a cognitive and expressive
experimentalism that were later developed in different directions by the avant
gardes. The Surrealists vindicated the monstrous as an oblique form of the
beautiful that is not subject to any organicity or coherent aesthetic pattern unified
by earlier tendencies. In contrast to Romanticism, symbolism, realism, and so
on, Surrealism’s appeal to monstrosity constitutes a celebration of the disparate
and incongruent in constructions that do not shy from either sensationalism or
irrationalism in its effort to express a disruptive and innovative aesthetics. The
monstrous illustrates the return of the repressed, the artificial world induced by
hallucinogens, the levels of perception and imagination displaced or
domesticated by dominant rationality and bourgeois morality. In this sense, the
monstrous is part of the search for a more authentic and direct form of
expressing the impulses, feelings, and desires that symbolically manifest in
aesthetically and ideologically coded messages with malleable contents that give
shape to the non-conventional, the unclassifiable, and the countercultural.
The notorious imagery displayed in Surrealist painting through the
incorporation of elements that are traditionally excluded from intellectual
constructions is guided by a memetic rationalism that valorizes the faithful
reproduction of “the real.” Refuting this category, Surrealism opened the gates
through which “anomalous,” dreamlike, alchemical, and archetypical content
could be implemented, thereby emphasizing the mutations and reemergence of
levels buried by the principles of a formal, harmonious, and even conceptual
order. Works by the Spanish-Mexican writer Remedios Varo (1908-1963) and
the English painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), who also worked in
Mexico, her adopted home, illuminate these alternative domains from a
perspective that vindicates women’s knowledge as connection between the
spaces of cognitive and affective experience that the patriarchal order had
ejected from bourgeois cultural dominance. The monstrous opened the way for
these compositions (as well as for the photography of Kati Horna (1912-2000),
who worked in Mexico as well, and the literary production of the French writer
Anne Bachelier), heralding a transformation in the imaginaries and in the
interpretation and representation of the real that was definitively influenced by
two World Wars, Nazism, and the Spanish Civil War. As a point of reference in
this register the Surrealist sensibility of Invention of the Monsters (1937),
painted by Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), could not be more eloquent. Dalí himself
suggested that the painting expressed a prophetic portrayal of the monstrous that
foresees or announces major catastrophes after the Spanish Civil War.13
The element of monstrosity incorporates a strong performative and
aestheticizing charge through a gallery of images, concepts, and terms that form
part of the decorativism of the cultural symbology and atmosphere of the 1930s
and 1940s. Monstrosity integrates the literary and artistic repertoire that
accompanies new forms of economic, political, and cultural transnationalization.
Aesthetic representations had already been marked since the turn of the century
by U.S. hegemony and the cycle of unequal modernization that began in the
Latin American periphery with the transformation of the relations of economic
dependence. Mestizaje, on all cultural and social levels, transculturality, the
hybridity of themes and formal devices, and aesthetic experimentation
configured the basis of a poetics in which excess and anomaly convey the
unbelief in and disillusionment with modernity. The new aesthetics also
channeled countercultural impulses, and the philosophical search for a new
meaning of the social and the political. Art represents heterogeneity as an
exposé of not only the richness of the real but also of the limitations of reason’s
ability to undertake the classification and domestication of the products of the
intellect and imagination that exceed existing models of representation and
interpretation. Monstrosity, anomaly, irrationality, and instinct; the unconscious,
the mythical, the occult, the primitive, and the atavistic all find their place in the
avant-garde cult through cognitive exploration and the strange and unusual
products that it manifests to the senses. The dense and magical world of Miguel
Ángel Asturias and the effervescent narrative of Mario de Andrade (Macunaima,
1928) represent two aspects of this prolific convergence of disparate elements
that, carnivalizing and emphasizing the deep ethnic backgrounds of Latin
America, explore modes of integrating the vernacular and the foreign, the
unconscious and the conscious, the primitive and the modern, the “anomalous”
and that which is regulated by bourgeois normality. Many of these directions
were subsequently updated and reshaped in the grotesque and monstrous figures
of the neo-Baroque. The Boom also appealed to these aesthetics, sometimes
incorporating it into magical realist works as a hyperbolic device that
destabilizes the conventions of realism.
The work of Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), which abounds with extraordinary
and monstrous characters contain many references to magic, Gothic settings, and
canonical horror authors like Stoker, Poe, Lovecraft, and others. His early short
story “El hijo del vampiro” (1937), which circulated in a limited way for
decades, features as its protagonist Duggu Van, a vampire who died in 1060 and
who later falls in love with one of his victims, Lady Vanda, raping her and then
drinking her blood. The woman’s body transforms until it becomes that of the
child conceived during the vampiric embrace, revealing the kind of mutation that
is proper to monsters and that is described within the aesthetic register of the
grotesque. Gruesome, but not without traces of irony and parody, the story
shows the influence of Stoker, Poe, Anne Rice, and other practitioners of the
Gothic genre, both in literature and in film. Along those lines, Cortázar
establishes a poetic dialogue between Dracula and Ligeia in the “Soneto gótico”
included in the volume Salvo el crepúsculo (1984):

Esta vernácula excepción nocturna,

este arquetipo de candente frío,
quién sino tú merece el desafío
que urde una dentadura taciturna.

Semen luna y posesión vulturna

el moho de tu aliento, escalofrío
cuando abra tu garganta el cortafrío
de una sed que te vuelve vino y urna,

Todo sucede en un silencio ucrónico,

ceremonia de araña y de falena
danzando su inmovilidad sin mácula,

su recurrente espacio catatónico

en un horror final de luna llena.
Siempre serás Ligeia. Yo soy Drácula. (182)

Elsewhere in Cortázar’s work (particularly in 62: Modelo para armar

[1968]) there are allusions to the notorious Hungarian countess Erszébet
Bathory, whom we discussed in Chapter 2. The poetic biography of this blood-
curdling historical figure was written by Valentine Penrose (La Comtesse
Sanglante, 1957), where the author describes Bathory’s obsessions and the acts
of torture she carried out on her servants and on young women she kidnapped
from nearby villages. Based on this book, Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972)
immortalizes Bathory in La condesa sangrienta (1971), where the relation
between blood and eroticism takes on peculiar connotations. Lesbian sexuality,
to a large extent sublimated in the text through the consumption of blood, is
staged in a symbolic vampirism in which torture and enjoyment become
indistinguishable. The sadistic ritualism gruesomely aestheticized by
Penrose/Pizarnik is addressed by the Argentine author in eleven fragments that
kaleidoscopically express a narrative in the best Gothic style, capable of
captivating and terrifying readers. Other sporadic appearances by vampires can
be found in Argentine literature, for example in Luisa Valenzuela’s Aquí pasan
cosas raras (1975).
Within the literature of the Boom, it is the work of José Donoso (1924-1996),
especially his El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1987), that best illustrates the
conjunction of monstrosity, power, and desire, expressed in a prolific monologue
of voices, masks, and unrealities that meet and diverge in a dense narrative
dynamic replete with dreamlike elements. The discourse of power and the sub-
discourse of collective murmuring are articulated on the basis of a chaotic,
accumulative, and incoherent historicity. Fragmentation is one of the narrative
devices Donoso uses, most especially with regard to the collective character of
the old women, allegorized in packages that are on guard everywhere and in the
multiple levels of language, where signifiers are concentrated and objectivized
as a demonstration of the chaos and incomprehensibility of accumulation. It is as
if the monstrous form (the mask or appearance) excluded the signifier, leaving it
exposed as a proliferating and anomalous demonstration. The way Donoso
addresses corporeality constitutes another important narrative level, which
manifests itself both in the characters and in the structure of the novel. Firstly,
the body of the fictitious beings is constantly in the process of rearticulation and
dismemberment. Secondly, the body of the narrative itself monstrously changes
form and takes on modulations, languages, and masks that confer onto it an
ungraspable, mutant, and anomalous texture.14 The indefinite sexuality of
Mudito (a “monster expert”) and the constant mutations that surround him also
incorporate structural monstrosity into a narrative in which incompleteness and
ambiguity abolish the legacy of the bourgeois novel and replace it with the anti-
aesthetic style of a dreamlike grotesque that erases the borders of the real. The
imbunche (a creature with a deformed body and twisted limbs from Chilote
Mapuche mythology associated with sorcery and used as a means of vengeance)
incarnates a monstrous physicality that has been interpreted either as an allegory
of the liberatory projects of Latin America or as a symbolic expression of the
problematics of mestizaje and multiculturality. In this sense, it functions as a
reference to the spontaneous growth of a counter-normative social body (that of
Latin America) born from violence and emancipated from its own life and still in
the process of emancipation.15
Ever since the publication of his first book, Historias tremendas (1999),
which was selected as Best Book of the Year by the International PEN Club, and
Historias atroces (2003), the Puerto Rican writer Pedro Cabiya has been
recognized as an outstanding voice in horror literature, working with such
themes as corporeality (La cabeza, 2005), extraterrestrials (Trance, 2007),
zombies (Malas hierbas, 2011), dehumanization, and the disassociation of
personality. Alienated beings, broken families, societies overcome by crime and
various forms of personal abjection communicate an apocalyptic vision of
progressive and unstoppable dissolution in which the theme of individual death
opens up a broad interrogation of the future of the social. Cabiya uses the
interstitial figure of the zombie to reflect on the connections between life and
death, on the qualities that allow human beings to intellectually grasp their
reality, and on the possible modes of navigating reality and knowing oneself.
Elton Honores covers a series of new writers of zombie fiction in different
regions of Latin America, with works like Berazachussets (2007) and Pulsión
(2011), by the Argentines Leandro Ávalos Blacha and Esteban Castromán,
respectively. While the first novel, saturated with grotesque aspects, has as its
protagonists a group of widows and includes elements like cannibalism, the
second complements its representation of zombie chaos with a pornographic
twist. The novel Zombie (2010), by the Argentine American Mike Wilson, uses
this monstrous character to portray the mental and physical state of adolescents
who survive an apocalypse in which reality has disappeared and only fragments
of the past remain. In “Setenta y siete” (included in the anthology No entren al
1408 [2013]), the Chilean writer Francisco Ortega presents a parodic thriller in
which zombies have been reanimated by a Mapuche ritual performed by the
Pinochet regime. Gonzalo del Rosario, from Peru, interweaves the themes of
love and fear in Ven ten mi muerte: Una balada (2012) in a setting marked by
zombie activity. In Mexico, Alberto Chimal utilizes the zombie story to discuss
the theme of literary production, taking as a point of reference the life and work
of Roberto Bolaño, who appears as a zombie in a story entitled “Los salvajes”
(2013).16
The Monster on the Screen
Science and technology are spaces of knowledge that provoke both fascination
and fear by exercising superhuman powers that can affect all aspects of daily
life. As Benjamin shows us, photography and cinema revolutionized collective
imaginaries through their almost magical impact on the interpretation of reality.
By producing and reproducing a simulacrum of reality on a massive level, these
technologies of the image wield a strong influence on society, particularly in
peripheral areas, that connected local, marginal spaces with developed centers
and related diverse social strata by facilitating their common participation in the
symbolic realm of visual fiction. The establishment of mutual borrowings and
exchanges linked the spheres of orality and the lettered world, popular beliefs
and scientific discourses, local customs and imported fashions. This produces a
process of the disclosure and hybridization of knowledge, life experiences, and
regimes of truth that, while standardizing cognitive models, defined aesthetic
paradigms, styles, and themes adapted to multiple registers of popular taste and
the different audiences that have developed their own profiles through
interacting with what this process offers. The transculturating capacity of the
filmmaker and his or her potential for ideological dissemination and social
contagion were often considered dangerous apparatuses of cultural penetration
and as forces capable of irrationally and inevitably absorbing society’s energy
(Braham, From Amazons to Zombies 129-30). Hence, these technologies were
metaphorized in vampiric, seductive, and threatening forms.17
In Latin America, cinema serves as a vehicle of communicative
experimentation that registers the political and social avatars of the region at the
same time that it establishes productive relations with aesthetic currents from
around the world, entering into a transnational dialogue, although from a much
more limited infrastructure than what is available to the international spectacle
industry based in metropolitan centers. Closely linked to development and the
particularities capitalism has continued to acquire in different regions throughout
Latin America, and according to the disparate rhythms generated by
modernizing processes, cinema constitutes a repository of aesthetico-ideological
proposals that has shaped the collective imaginaries in a commodified
interaction of supply and demand through which one can read a significant part
of the cultural history of peripheral modernity.
 As a mechanism of the mass production and distribution of symbolic capital,
cinema solidifies paradigms and models, forms of social activity, values, and
behaviors through which hopes and desires are expressed through realism,
tragicomedy, melodrama, horror, suspense, or war stories. In each region, in
relation to the theme of the monster, cinema registers each society’s own
conflicts and represents its own ghosts, adapting and recycling thematic currents
and technologies from different latitudes to the expressive needs of the place in
question. As has already been noted numerous times, the monster articulates the
local and the universal, constituting in this sense a hybrid, transculturated
product that disseminates messages in a variety of contexts. The system of co-
production allows for the unification of different efforts, thus pushing the Latin
American film industry to ever higher levels of innovation and competition,
turning cinema into a space of encounter for literature, history, and political
discourse, as well as a terrain for the symbolic articulation and circulation of
ideas and representational models. The possibility of creating a fictitious,
manageable, and even trivialized fear serves as a counterpoint to local scenarios
of actual horror, where social experience defines the place of the victim in the
face of supernatural and undoubtedly monstrous forces that have imposed their
systems of exploitation and control on political, ethnic, and linguistic levels and
through the politics of gender and class. Cinema has thus established an
aesthetically and ideologically polyvalent bridge that allegorizes local conflicts
through widely circulated creative tendencies.
Additionally, multiple productions have connected artistic trends and
resources from both North and South America, revealing a thematic flow that
brings together different and unequal realities, elaborating on topics such as
exile, immigration, border violence, inability to assimilate, otherness, and the
effects of capitalism and social inequality. An expression of crisis, rebellion, and
oppression, of apocalyptic sentiments, utopianism, and nihilism, the monster
(depending on the circumstances) has channeled affective intensities of a very
broad emotional and ideological register and has made itself available as a
metaphorical or allegorical tool.18
Díaz-Zambrana discusses the production of “creoled zombies” in Latin
America in her edited collection Terra Zombi: El fenómeno transnacional de los
muertos vivientes (2015), as well as in Horrorfílmico: Aproximaciones al cine de
terror in Latinoamérica y el Caribe (2012), co-edited with Patricia Tomé, which
assemble a variety of works that cover different aspects of Latin American
cinema, a complex and extensive corpus that cannot possibly be adequately
addressed in the present book. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning a few
illuminating references at least.
In Cuban cinema, where the tradition of horror movies has not traditionally
been elaborated, a handful of films theorize the issues of insularity, scarcity,
censorship, and hopelessness, along with national values in productions that
make use of humor, irony, and costumbrismo. Morir para vivir (dir. Miguel
Morayta, 1954) melodramatically presents the conversion of a dead woman into
a zombie through the practice of voodoo. With a more political theme, the
animated film Vampiros en la Habana (dir. Juan Padrón, 1985) frames the era of
the Machado dictatorship in the story of a vampire who represents capitalism
and is a member of an international mafia that wants to obtain the formula for a
concoction (called Vampisol) that blocks the ultraviolet rays that can kill
vampires. The use of costumbrismo, humor, and parody along with a burlesque
form of the Gothic produces an effectively satirical version of Cuban reality.
Finally, in this brief overview, we should mention the film Juan de los muertos
(a Cuban-Spanish co-production directed by Alejandro Brugués that wan the
Premio Goya for Best Latin American Picture in 2013), a zombie comedy in the
tradition of George Romero filmed in Cuba. The film’s protagonist is a self-
fashioned zombie hunter. It has been observed that the film, in spite of its
irreverent tone, defends national values and tries to defend the country from the
zombie epidemic that threatens it. The themes of exile, political and economic
stagnation, and the different stages of Cuban history (for example, the Mariel
boatlift and the “Special Period”), scenes of rafts and allusions to scarcity and
political opportunism recreate a well-known landscape. As Brugués has
explained, the application of the zombie to the Cuban context refers to the Cuban
masses’ ability to accept their situation, manifested here as a collective character
unable to react. The appearance of zombies is presented, satirically, as “a new
Revolution.”19As Braham notes with regard to this film, which is full of implicit
assumptions and more or less veiled references to the status of the Cuban nation,

By bringing the zombie genre to Cuba, Brugués not only asserts

jurisdiction over a cultural trope that was invented to abject Caribbeans
and then abstracted for commerce by Hollywood; he asserts solidarity
 with Haiti and other Caribbean nations, and concedes that Cuba is no
longer immune to the ills born of tourism (plenty of tourists get
zombified) and other modes of capitalist exploitation that afflict the
region. (From Amazons to Zombies 177)

In the Andean region, the Shining Path’s acts of terrorism and the violence of
the Peruvian state have given rise to multiple representations in which
monstrosity assumes the form of predatory and sinister creatures already present
in popular imaginaries in which pre-Hispanic myths are reworked in
combination with contemporary conflicts. The zombie is combined with the
vernacular figure of the condenado, or the condemned soul, incorporating
mythical elements that announce crises or cataclysms with devastating effects
for the communities in which they occur. The Andean condenado incarnates sins
that have not been paid for, behavioral deviations that have left open a moral
debt worthy of punishment. Its supernatural force requires that its capture must
be a collective effort, demonstrating how this figure’s social character
concentrates a charge of negative energy that must be transformed into mass
action. La leyenda del condenado (dir. Melitón Eusebio, 2000) portrays the story
of a condenado within the conventions of horror cinema, thus giving form to a
belief that has little to do with clear descriptions of the real aspects of these
beings who have returned from the dead to expiate their sins. In La cholita
condenada (dir. Jaime and Walter Machaca Paye, 2012), a murdered woman
returns to avenge her own death. Jhonn Guerra Banda analyzes these films,
underscoring the mode in which the cinematographic reconstruction of deeply
rooted popular myths in cultural spaces ruled by orality manipulates and deforms
the original stories, which are otherwise ambiguous, variable, and unstable
because they are subject to multiple versions that continue to be transmitted from
generation to generation in non-dominant languages such as Quechua or
Aymara.20
The above-mentioned book Mostrología del cine mexicano provides an
account of a series of categories represented in Mexican national film
production, defining an aspect that clearly differentiates itself within the
canonical cinema of that country.21 Addressed to a mass audience, this
“mostrology” is defined on the basis of aesthetic propositions aligned with
alternative forms of camp, a modality defined by Susan Sontag (“Notes on
Camp,” 1964) through the concepts of artificiality, frivolity (which can include a
certain arrogance or condescension toward lower classes), naiveté, and excess.

The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the
sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp
asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists,
indeed, a good taste of bad taste.… The discovery of the good taste of
bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and
serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually
restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he
will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp
taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It
makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of
being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion. (Sontag,
“Notes on Camp” 291)

“Mostrological” production is considered to be “ineludiblemente” derived

from “la diversidad geográfica del país, su accidentada historia y su pluralidad
étnica,” conditions that had generated “una cultura oral poblada por seres
mitológicos, forajidos generosos, y otros personajes de leyenda que renacen en
cada nuevo relato, adquiriendo características insospechadas o mutando incluso
de origen” (González Ambriz, et al. 13).22 This “mostrology” has flourished in
the fertile environment created by the development of mass culture and the
cultural industry, communicational phenomena linked to specific genres like
melodrama, the thriller, detective novels, adventure stories, etc., configuring an
alternative to Hollywood cinema, cult films, and European productions. The
gesture of the cultural appropriation of representational models and paradigms
from the Gothic and from other genres, like crime fiction, can be seen in the will
to mark in the languages (mostro for monster, Franquestein for Frankenstein,
etc.) and the images that caricature the originals a new terminology that reflects
the adoption of aesthetico-ideological paradigms from the periphery. This project
demonstrates an enthusiasm for mimicry (an operation that entails parodic
imitation and ironic distance), through which the stereotypical figures of
vampires, zombies, robots, extraterrestrial beings, and so on are adapted to a
low-budget production and are complemented by a local repertoire that
incorporates indigenous elements. In many cases, the process of adaptation
transforms the dull profile of European Gothic models with comical features that
accentuate the simulacrum and deviate from the effects of monster literature’s
terror and sublimity toward cheapened and parodic versions: “vampiros de hule
que desafiaban la gravedad con ayuda de alambres claramente visibles, trajes de
peluche que sofocaban a los intrépidos dobles de acción que les daban
movimiento y alienígenas que surcaban el cosmos en diminutas naves de
hojalata” (González Ambriz, et al. 13). The book is divided into ten sections that
provide an overview of the variety of the materials analyzed in it: Vermin,
Apparitions, Witches, Demons, Blood-Suckers, Electro-Domestics, E.T.s,
Humanoids, Mummies, and Stuffed Animals. Creatures from hell are combined
with everyday artifacts that satirically demonize technology and ultimately the
modernizing processes of which they are a part. Animal species are mixed with
specters, vampires, and the living dead in a carnivalization that refuses all
seriousness and farcically uses hybridity and “la inestable esencia de la
mostrosidad” (González Ambriz, et al. 15).
The genre—in all its variants, based on a certain social revanchism that is not
immune to cultural populism—vindicates a form of sensibility that eludes the
predictable avenues of dominant rationality and “educated” taste. This sensibility
instead puts forth melodramatic scenarios, situations, and characters that are
intentionally ridiculous, grotesque, or extravagant, thus offering a vulgarized
version of the uncanny and a trivialization of transcendence (which is already an
imitation of the Gothic), now reconverted by the duplication of the simulacrum.
Apart from the volume’s practical value, Mostrología submits materials to
comparative analysis with regard to the (neo-)Gothic genre in Latin America, the
study of derivatives of horror in kitsch comedy, the investigation of
transculturating processes that take place in the commodified domain of the
culture industry, and the evaluation of the relation between the original and the
copy in postcolonial cultures. In addition, integrated within these categories are
multiple elements from vernacular, pre-Hispanic, folkloric, and regional
perspectives that provide ethnic, aesthetic, and ideological charges specific to
locations characterized by extreme hybridity and its displaced—out-of-joint—
use of foreign cultural products. The cultural infiltration effectuated by the mass
diffusion of products manufactured by the global entertainment industry is
counteracted by national production that farcically mimics it: made in Mexico.
Finally, the collection offers basic materials for a nuanced study of the tastes,
audiences, and resources of popular culture and its connections with cultural
institutions, which is to say, for the analysis of a fundamental aspect of a
heterogeneous and hybridized national culture in which cultural politics,
identities, and ideological and intellectual projects are interwoven.
Within the register of Mexican horror cinema, El barón del terror (dir.
Eduardo “Chano” Urueta, 1962) stands out. Set in the seventeenth century, the
film tells the story of Baron Vitelius, condemned to death by the Inquisition,
who promises to return to the earthly realm the next time the comet crossing the
sky on the day of his death can once again be seen. The film, today considered a
classic of Mexican horror films, includes elements of witchcraft, which frame
the Baron’s return from the dead as a monster who absorbs his victims’ brains.
However, it is mainly the work of Guillermo del Toro, which began within
the “mostrological” register, that would gain the most attention of audiences with
diverse backgrounds and tastes, eventually becoming an international
phenomenon. Del Toro’s productions offer a considerable repertoire of themes
and aesthetic proposals, as well as a technical expertise that has been widely
recognized on an international level. His films include Cronos (1992), which Del
Toro wrote and directed, featuring Argentine actor Federico Lupi in the starring
role. The film portrays an alliance between vampirism and mechanicism through
which times, cultural spaces, and historical contexts are connected. This
combination adds an unsettling element to the notion of the vampire (disturbing
in itself) because mechanization implies the enshrinement of monstrosity in
culture, its colonization of the space of science, and its transformation into an
apparatus that connotes, along with its demonic qualities, precision, planning,
and manufacture.
The film received considerable critical attention, which was notable for the
diversity of the reviews and the multiplicity of interpretative directions that laid
claim to it. For Raúl Rodríguez Hernández and Claudia Schaefer, the film
abounds with a kind of Gothic Mexicanness that functions as a new contribution
to the long tradition of vampire movies in Mexico.23 According to Héctor D.
Fernández L’Hoeste, Del Toro’s film emphasizes, in the key of film noir, the
anomalous construction of the real, which conceals many more levels than are
commonly perceived, urging a subversion of the status quo: “En Cronos, la
norma es la invitación a infringir el orden establecido, admitiendo la presencia
de lo extraño e ilícito en la vida común” (49). For Kantaris, “Cronos is a
postmodern urban vampire movie with a twist, whose title indicates an obsession
with time, and whose narrative simulates the violent compression of the archaic,
the modern and the hyper- or postmodern” (55). Other critics, like Kraniauskas,
see in the film the condensation of concepts from Marxist theory that generally
form part of the critique of capitalism, particularly with regard to its
repercussions and developments in dependent regions of the world.
For her part, Braham has emphasized that the conception of the monstrous
that sustains Del Toro’s cinematic corpus frequently portrays its creatures not as
sources of a hyperbolic terror but rather as defenders of the good against the
inherent threats of scientifically and technologically enhanced weapons and
other implements that signal the advances of modernization, which produced a
substantial change in forms of socialization and in collective imaginaries. In any
case, it is clear that Del Toro’s work is after something more than the production
of a light, entertaining product for mass audiences, and that he is oriented instead
toward the presentation of multiple levels of reception in which elements from
cultural backgrounds and different theses on Latin American history are
productively articulated. Cronos is based in the syncretism of Christian and
secular elements and incorporates Gothic features in order to represent the
vampire myth in the Latin American periphery, a space historically marked by
the effects of colonialism. The world of the film, full of antique objects, implies
the presence of colonial referents in modernity, the hybrid character of the
present in which the cultural and ideological residues of colonialism constitute
part of the cultural history of the Americas and are remnants of the systems of
domination imposed by Spanish conquest and colonization.
According to Kraniauskas, “Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos is a fantasy of the
contemporary body, technology, and of time in the accelerated age of late—
transnational—capitalism” (“Cronos and the Political Economy of Vampirism”
146). For Kraniauskas, Cronos represents through the role of the vampire the
“phantasmagoric trace” of the origins of capital and “the cultural memory of the
violent ‘subjection’ of bodies and lives to the laws of the market and the nation-
state: so-called primitive accumulation” (“Cronos and the Political Economy of
Vampirism” 149). Marx’s notion of “commodity fetishism,” objectivized in the
colonial artifact, captures the desire that leads to annihilation. The symbolic
capital that, surrounded by elements linked to the power of Christianity, tests the
protagonist’s modern conscience, constitutes a biopolitical apparatus that
traverses time, cultures, and cultural spaces. Its transculturating dynamic
corresponds to the transnationalization of capital and is expressed as a process of
the real and symbolic circulation of the blood that sustains the machine and the
individual who submits to it, which, from colonialism to the present day, oils the
gears of capitalism at the expense of life itself. Blood refers here not only to the
sense in which Marx used it as a symbol of the worker’s vital energy being
sucked out to benefit the reproduction of capital, but rather it is also a reference
to blood as a criterion of social classification and the legitimation of the
dominant sectors of society (purity of blood, bloodlines, the dynastic
transmission of power, etc.).
The inscription of the “Cronos” apparatus in modernity also connects with
the very familiar context of neoliberalism as a space of transformations that
accelerate and radicalize the disintegration of the bonds between the individual
and the community, producing changes marked by transnationalized politics that
center on market relations. Ignacio Sánchez-Prado has pointed out in relation to
both Cronos and Somos lo que hay (dir. Jorge Michel Grau, 2009) that

El neoliberalismo, en tanto régimen de modernidad, representa un

cambio en la noción de subjetividad cultural en México, produciendo
una economía simbólica que deja de lado al sujeto cultural del proceso
posrevolucionario, el espectador urbano popular, y permite la
emergencia de una nueva audiencia burguesa que se disocia de los
discursos de la nación y comienza a operar en espacios culturales
distintos a los de otros sujetos culturales mexicanos. (49)

In this sense, according to Sánchez-Prado, Del Toro articulates not only the
predictable anxiety caused by U.S. capitalism but rather, more precisely, the
sense of uneasiness that comes from the fact that “todos los lenguajes culturales
disponibles para dar sentido a la modernización neoliberal son
fundamentalmente anacrónicos” (Sánchez-Prado 54). For Fernández L’Hoeste,
Cronos instead sets up a fundamental tension between the search for eternal life
(the film’s central character is named Jesús, and not in vain) and accelerated
modernization.24
Jesús Gris, the film’s protagonist, is transformed into a vampire when his
blood is sucked from his body by a metal scarab that he discovers hidden in a
colonial statue of an angel that had belonged to the Viceroyalty of New Spain.
His humanity is transformed and at the same time perpetuated under the effect of
the monstrous, which promises Jesús eternal youth in exchange for his
assimilation into the world of vampires through the addictive consumption of
blood, which Kantaris calls “the biomedical paradigm” (56) proper to the
representation of the vampire. The connotations that derive from the main
character’s name, his occupation as an antiquarian, his advanced age, all confer
on this character a stateliness that amplifies the degradation that the practice of
vampirism imposes on him. According to Braham,

In the age of the vampire Lestat as international rock star, Cronos

unexpectedly presents us with a vampire who is aging, a homely
husband and grandfather, a gentle and erudite antiquarian whose own
life is presented in the first instance—even prior to the scarab—as an
eternal and somehow sacred domestic cycle. In his dependence on the
scarab, vampiric impulses compete with Jesus Gris’s essential
humanity, but also coexist with it. The promise of immortality also
coexists with the increasingly drastic, and seemingly irreparable, wear
and tear of the already aged physical vessel. (From Amazons to
Zombies 174)

From the past but relocated in the modern era, the mechanical scarab in
Cronos is a materialization of the symbology of cannibalism and functions as a
metaphor of time and death, articulating the ideas of capital, blood, and
temporality, antiquity and the future, survival and perishing, vulnerability and
resistance. It is a mysterious object that hides its sinister power until the moment
when it is activated and it embeds its metallic legs into its victims’ flesh to suck
their blood like a vampire, converting its prey into a member of its species. The
combination of vampire and machine introduces the idea of the cyborg, thus
problematizing the concept of the body as well as the separation between the
human, the mechanical, and the monstrous. According to Ann Davies, faithful to
its name, the apparatus that is given the name “Cronos” makes time run
backward, causing Jesús Gris to become younger and to acquire more sexualized
attitudes. This heterochronic quality associated with the scarab demonstrates its
capacity to transgress the borders of the body and to penetrate it in multiple
ways, not only through sucking blood but also through the rejuvenating effects
of vampirism that affect both the body and the spirit, both space and time. Some
other characters in the film, who are from the United States, attempt to recover
the scarab and embody monstrous qualities that threaten the protagonist’s
humanity, as even in the process of his vampirization he retains positive
attributes toward life and love of family. Toward the end of the movie, the
destruction of the vampiric artifact provokes, as Davies notes, the dismantling of
the heterotopic body and facilitates the reestablishment of social equilibrium
represented in the restoration of the family relation.
As other critics have indicated, this film insists on the continuity between
humanity and monstrosity particular to the trope of vampirism, not in a
dichotomy between the concepts. Additionally, as Braham argues, “Cronos not
only refuses to observe the dichotomies that justify definitions such as
monstrosity and humanity, but insists on the legitimacy—even the sanctity—of
the vampire hero,” who ends up sacrificing himself and destroying the scarab
that had promised him eternal youth (From Amazons to Zombies 174-75). For
Kraniauskas, the religious elements Del Toro intentionally includes in the film
emphasize colonial transculturation, reinscribing it in the space of the everyday
and in the nature of a common individual, a demystified, “Grey” Jesus [Jesús
“Gris”]. In this sense, Cronos “operates a kind of double abstraction away from
both social context and generic convention, and in doing so, displaces the
cultural experiences of capitalism and ‘real’ and ‘symbolic’ cannibalism into the
reluctant everyday vampirism of Jesús” (Kraniauskas, “Cronos and the Political
Economy of Vampirism” 154-55; emphasis in original).
Focusing specifically on horror cinema in the line of inquiry opened up by
Robin Wood and Tania Modleski, Tierney has underscored the transnational
character of Del Toro’s work, which makes up part of the currents that bring
together film production in the United States, Spain, and Latin America, forming
a network of material and symbolic exchange. Tierney emphasizes Del Toro’s
use in Cronos of a series of tropes established by Hollywood vampire movies in
combination with “reterritorialized” Latin American myths, like that of the
pishtaco, which, while providing implicit references to pre-Hispanic cultures,
also connects vampirism to U.S. exploitation of Latin American resources as
part of the practice of imperialism. That said, Del Toro’s Mexican-Spanish
production is also transnationalized within Latin America, expanding its
references toward the Andean region, where the myth of the pishtaco originates
and has been most fully developed, as well as toward the Southern Cone, with
Federico Lupi’s performance and multiple references to tango as a cultural frame
for the melodramatic actions that take place in the film.
According to Jorge González del Pozo, “los fantasmas en los filmes góticos
contemporáneos reaparecen para acercar hechos alejados en el tiempo [y] llamar
la atención sobre realidades olvidadas” (65). The emphasis González del Pozo
places on the transnationalization of the film El espinazo del diablo (dir.
Guillermo del Toro, 2001), a coproduction that combines the Mexican director’s
talents with the production efforts of the Almodóvar brothers, makes it possible
to recall the relation (or at least the parallelism) between this commercial and
cultural link and the past colonial relation between Spain and New
Spain/Mexico. In this case, however, the social and political catastrophe linked
to the supernatural is not colonialism but rather the Franco dictatorship.
The mysterious environment portrayed in El espinazo del diablo is set in a
Spanish orphanage that has been attacked by Franco’s forces. Orphaned children,
living and dead, a bomb about to explode, the presence of a ghost, and in general
a landscape occupied by the latent threat of death, all create an atmosphere of
diffuse, virtually monstrous terror where spectrality reveals the dark side of the
human more than its antagonistic double. At the beginning of the film, the
question “What is a ghost?”—appealing to the core theme of repetition, which is
proper to the performance of the monster: a ghost is a tragedy condemned to
repeat itself—perhaps constitutes only a moment of panic that can never be
erased. In any case, as Freud asserts, it is a matter of something familiar that
suddenly becomes unfamiliar, something dead that seems alive, or vice versa. It
is an uncertainty that makes it impossible to decide what is what, an emotion that
suddenly remains frozen in time, immobile, held in suspense, as if it were a
photograph or an insect trapped in amber. The definition encapsulates not only
the nature of the spectral but also the very experience of terror that paralyzes
time in a quiet instant that eternalizes emotion.
For Ann Davies, El espinazo del diablo allegorically portrays gender
identities through the relation between masculinity, represented by right-wing
political forces in the Spanish Civil War and personified in the character of
Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), and the threat represented by the monstrous and the
abject, expressed through the ghost child, Santi, whose incessantly bleeding head
wound reinforces his association with femininity and leftist resistance. As
Davies suggests, in what at times seems to be an over-reading of filmic subtexts,
Del Toro symbolically presents the horror provoked by the threat of
masculinity’s denaturalization in the face of the abjection that observes it.
González del Pozo’s interpretation focuses instead on political and social issues:
the ghost encapsulates the spectrality of the victims—it is the residual meaning
of history.25 It is in this sense that the film has also been framed in terms of the
“discourse of memory” (in which the Spanish film El espíritu de la colmena [dir.
Víctor Erice, 1973] is an obligatory reference) as a reflection on the past of the
Spanish Civil War and its social cost.26 The monstrous (the cinematic
representation of Frankenstein’s monster in the case of El espíritu de la
colmena), is the element that organizes a reflection on life and death that is
inevitably a meditation on history and politics. In El espinazo del diablo, in a
world predominantly consisting of children, Santi’s ghost announces an end that,
in the very dynamic of the narratives that stage the supernatural, is also a
beginning. In both representations, “order” is destabilized, the implicit pacts that
govern precarious forms of socialization are dissolved, and the anomalous body
precipitates the transformation of the social body, behind the cataclysm of which
the ideological strata that compose it seek to re-accommodate themselves. The
unrepresentable therefore takes on sublimated forms: horror is the mode in
which the imperative of memory and the necessity of forgetting are vicariously
articulated.
As a transnationalized cinematic experience that is also linked to local
political references in both Spain and Latin America, Pan’s Labyrinth
(Guillermo del Toro, 2006) makes use of horror (mixed with elements of fantasy,
magic, and myth) as an apparatus for establishing connections between the real
(history and the discourses it registers, the narratives of memory) and its
symbolic forms of visual representation.27 The fantastic operates here like a
Freudian illustration, as the symbolic network that visualizes the repressed and
represents the unrepresentable. Dreams de-actualize a reality that has already
exceeded the limits of its verisimilitude and whose comprehension obliges the
exploration of other registers and languages. The censored, the repressed, the
illusory, the delirious, and the ideological (in the sense of false consciousness),
all encounter a space where symbolic codification provides a pact of reading that
permits the circulation of signifiers, or at least of the indexes through which their
decodifcation can be attempted. In this ambiguous, open, unfinished,
atmosphere, the damned express their persistent and tormented presence in a
story that refuses to include them.
The film KM 31 (dir. Rigoberto Castañeda) premiered in 2007 in Mexico,
and includes such elements as telepathy, ghosts, and characters from Mexican
mostrology, like La Llorona. The themes of trauma, death, and mourning are
interwoven in a story that combines well-known features of the genre with
elements of national folklore and in which the monstrous functions as an
articulating element of a series of sub-plots that, according to some critics, give
the film a derivative, anecdotally saturated character. The film constitutes
another contribution to the exploration of intermediate zones between life and
death to the emotional world that permeates these zones and the beings that
inhabit them.

Tropical Zombies: The Master, the Slave,

and the Zombie
With a fixed and empty gaze, an erratic and vacillating walk, a bloated and
decayed body resulting from stagnant presence of death (which has halted its
still incomplete process), characterized by a gravelly and inarticulate voice that
decomposes in guttural sounds that reveal a horrifying and instinctive
emotionality, the corroded figure of the zombie incarnates the radical
disequilibrium of a biopolitical order based on exploitation and collective
alienation. Braham recognizes the intrinsic relationship that exists between
Caribbean reality and the trope of the zombie when she writes: “Soulless bodies
lacking self-determination, zombies are a metaphor for the colonial and
postcolonial relationship—based on the abjection and exploitation of human
bodies and the extraction of resources—between Europe, The United States,
Africa and the Caribbean” (From Amazons to Zombies 153). As Braham notes,
in Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies sociologist Mimi
Sheller has interpreted the prolific repertoire of monsters associated with the
Caribbean as a symbolic representation of the cannibalistic effects of capital,
which annihilated millions of Arawaks and Africans through the slavery,
epidemics, mutilations, and punishments of the colonial enterprise. According to
Sheller, the Caribbean has been excluded from modernity’s grand narratives in
spite of the central role the region played within the designs of European
colonial expansion from the fifteenth century onward. For this reason, the
Caribbean exists both in popular culture and in academic discourse outside of
Western space/time, as if it were a parallel reality whose exceptionality is
irreducible to dominant norms, principles, and values.
As a materialization of bourgeois bad conscience, the zombie hordes roam
the landscapes of the present and survive in the postcolonial era as a reminder of
lingering humiliations and insults, persistent and intractable social injustice, and
the irrationality of a discriminatory and exclusive existence controlled by a
minority that to this day, in fully sanctioned modernizing processes, exercises a
“magic” and dehumanizing power. According to some critics, despite its origins
and tradition, the zombie represents better than other monstrous figures the spirit
of postmodernity due to the characteristics it embodies and the redefinitions it
has undergone in peripheral regions. Honores explains the difference between
zombies and vampires in the following way:

Una manera de entender el impacto del zombi en la cultura popular es

oponiéndole al monstruo más emblemático: el vampiro. El vampiro es
un ser noble, aristócrata, elitista, decadente, sibarítico, a la vez,
solitario. Es un monstruo exclusivo, antidemocrático, con una
perversidad consciente y que puede coexistir con los humanos; el
zombi borra cualquier tipo de cualidad o condición exclusiva. El
vampiro es un líder, el zombi encarna a la masa anónima, dispersa,
desconocida, cuyas pulsiones están latentes: cualquiera puede ser
zombificado, perder la autonomía, conciencia y voluntad, pero no todos
son vampiros o pueden llegar a serlo, ya que es una experiencia
exclusiva. Como figura, el zombi se adapta mejor a un mundo
globalizado, en una era post-tecnológica, ya que el vampiro es pre-
moderno, pre-tecnológico, por ello, el vampiro es el último gran
monstruo de la literatura clásica; el zombi, en cambio, es el monstruo
de un presente líquido e inestable. (“El zombi en la nueva narrativa”
244)

In the chapter titled, “Eating Others: Of Cannibals, Vampires, and Zombies,”

Sheller, referring to the myths of cannibalism in the colonial Caribbean context,
asks “Who eats whom?” because the appropriation of the other’s body, whether
through forced labor or sexual violation, establishes the conqueror over the
conquered, encompassing both the exploitation of labor power and the
systematic rape of indigenous and slave women. The practice of cannibalism
thus extends across a broad symbolic territory. Sheller’s question is valid both
insofar as it concerns both vampires and zombies, metaphors of the absorption of
the other by a transgressive and anomalous (id)entity. If cannibalism poses a
question about the limits of humanity and reveals the violence that is exercised
on the other’s body in being victimized and incorporated into the self’s body, the
ethical aspects of the consumption of labor power and sexual exploitation show
these practices to be real and symbolic violence. As Marx observed, the
vampirism of capital appropriates the worker’s vital energy for its infinite
reproduction, recycling life as a currency and commodity through the
consumption of labor. The tripartite theme of cannibalism-vampirism-capitalism
is thus part of the broader question of ethical consumption and the forms in
which the relations of consumption materialize via bodily dynamics that
metaphorize (reify) the social body and the monstrous forces that threaten it.28
In this sense, zombies and vampires constitute images of the appropriation of the
Caribbean social, economic, and political body and of the bodily and spiritual
usurpation of what has been its object since the colonial era: “If the figure of the
cannibal represents European anxieties around the boundaries of consumption,
then the Haitian ‘zombi’—a “living-dead” slave deprived of will and physically
controlled by a sorcerer—is the ultimate representation of the psychic state of
one whose body/spirit is consumed” (Sheller 145).
The history of the Haitian zombie (linked to Jean Zombi, who during the
Dessalines government led a bloody slave rebellion that began with the massacre
of a large number of whites involved in the plantation system) is the story of
colonization read against the grain, from the perspective of the dominated.29 A
tale of horror and rebellion, this story uses the myth of the zombie and voodoo
mysticism to sublimate a history that appears to exceed historiographical models
and the paradigms of cultural criticism, modernity, and Occidentalism.
According to Joan Dayan in Haiti, History, and the Gods, “the dispossession
accomplished by slavery became the model for possession in voudou: for
making a man not into a thing but into a spirit” (36).
These transferences of social experience to belief, as well as from history to
spirituality, reality and myth, ideology, and symbolic mediation, allow for an
understanding of monstrosity as the language of the incommensurable. These
connections also explain the deeply rooted theme of the zombie and its
multifaceted meaning in different ideological contexts. Thus, as Dayan writes,
“the phantasm of the zombi—a soulless husk deprived of freedom—is the
ultimate sign of loss and dispossession. In Haiti, memories of servitude are
transposed into a new idiom that both reproduces and dismantles a twentieth-
century history of forced labor and denigration that became particularly acute
during the American occupation of Haiti” (37).
Horror stories, the zombie myth, and voudou mysticism all form a symbolic
constellation that articulates history and belief, reality and imagination, fear and
desire, submission and resistance. In her study of the trans-Atlantic connections
of the zombie myth, Sarah Juliet Lauro has noted the long history in Western
culture of the ideas of the living dead, the afterlife, resurrection, and the
existence of ghosts, from classic texts like The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Epic of
Gilgamesh, and The Divine Comedy, to the danse macabres of the Middle Ages
and Renaissance and Baroque re-elaborations of similar themes. Nevertheless, it
is the transoceanic appropriations and reformulations that will give the zombie
myth a more precise historical and ideological meaning by connecting it to the
malevolent processes of slavery and colonial exploitation.30
The Caribbean constitutes a dense nucleus of multicultural signification that
serves as the stage for a drama that Paul Gilroy examined in his book The Black
Atlantic. According to Gilroy, Caribbean history overthrows the paradigms of
European and Anglo-Saxon modernity, reducing the grand narratives of progress
and order, universalism, and instrumental reason to fragments—to shreds.
Interculturality and transnationalism are the mark of cultural, linguistic, and
epistemic exchanges that complicate the ability to understand or even to narrate
Caribbean history. In order to grasp the meaning of this history, Gilroy analyzes
the “double consciousness” that allows to perceive and conceptualize
postcolonial reality in societies that were subject to imperial depredation.
Caribbean history is thus countercultural: a collage that includes the remains of
colonizers and slaves, indigenous cultures and migratory flows from all over,
syncretic beliefs, hybrid customs, and languages constantly subject to foreign
contact, which they enrich, denaturalize, and recycle like a living organism
which must adapt in order to survive.31
The “Uses” of the Zombie
As the mark of an elemental and degraded form of existence, like the
embeddedness of an instinctive condition, indestructible and frozen in time, the
monstrous figure of the zombie is presented as a counter-image of modernity in
which the ideas of linear progress and teleological regulation function as the
basis for a utopian project with universal aims. The zombie materializes the
perversion of this productivist program by revealing that human beings are
bound to be dispossessed of their souls and objectified for the consumption of
their primal, vital energy and later, of their kitsch image for mass entertainment.
Sexual tourism, which has formed part of the commercialization of the
Caribbean, has added another turn of the screw to the exploitation of the region’s
social body and collective soul. Although the zombie has been studied almost
exclusively in relation to Haiti, the phenomenon is also part of Cuban,
Dominican, and Anglophone Caribbean culture, also extending to Puerto Rico,
which produced some early approaches to the theme.32 One of these early Puerto
Rican examples is by the writer Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, who published a
pioneering novel about zombies that did not receive at the time of its publication
the literary and critical attention it enjoys today.
Examining different ways in which the theme of the transgression of the
individual/social body has developed, Braham interprets his books Póstumo, el
transmigrado (1872) and Póstumo el envirginado, o la historia de un hombre
que se coló en el cuerpo de una mujer (1882) as parodic narratives which take
up both the rights of the Arawaks and the rights of women, portrayed through
the metaphor of anomalous corporeality. The novels’ representation of the
separation between the body and the soul, typical of zombie narratives, as well
as their references to the illegitimate penetration of the other and the control
exercised over it, allude to the Spanish colonization of Puerto Rico and the
resulting disturbance of identity (From Amazons to Zombies 161-62).33
The zombie’s metaphorical character, which today has a transnational extent,
is closely related to the intricate cultural webs of Haitian society, one of the
poorest and most exploited in the colonial Americas, where a revolutionary
uprising of slaves was carried out between 1791 and 1804, making it the first
Latin American revolution. This culminated with the abolition of slavery in the
French colony of Saint-Domingue and the declaration of the independent
Republic of Haiti. The fundamental role played by the houngan (voudou priests
or sorcerers) in this uprising and its tremendous social, cultural, and ideological
ascendance is well known. It was under the influence of these houngan that the
leaders of the Revolution (Dutty Boukman, François Mackandal, François
Dominique Toussaint-L’Overture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines) carried out their
rebellion, mobilizing more than 100,000 slaves to rise up against the colonial
system, which was based on the cultivation of sugar cane. François Mackandal,
an escaped slave and voudou priest immortalized by Alejo Carpentier in El reino
de este mundo (1949), was one of the legendary leaders of the revolution. It was
claimed that he had used black magic and poisonous herbs to sow panic among
slave owners and to recruit individuals to fight against the French system.
Mackandal was captured, tortured, and burned in the public plaza in 1758.34
However, the image and the symbolic field of the Caribbean zombie is
influenced not only by historical perspectives but also anthropological, mythical,
and ideological positions which construct this dark and tortured figure at the
intersection of multiple disciplines and imaginaries. The African aspect is one of
the most powerful in the construction of the Caribbean zombie, although in this
context the meanings and forms of the zombie’s appearance often change and are
articulated to other regional elements. In the process of its de/re/territorialization,
the zombie has been reincarnated, absorbing the representation of a wide array
of social conflicts and operating as an apparatus of symbolic communication that
says more about the contexts in which it is articulated than about its own nature.
Ann Kordas has reviewed the trajectory of the zombie, from its Haitian origins
to its incorporation into U.S. culture in the 1930s, the moment when the zombie
acquired a folkloric character that separates it from the slave rebellion in Saint-
Domingue and the migration of Haitian plantation owners to Louisiana, refugees
of the Revolution who brought their slaves with them. Kordas finds earlier,
nineteenth-century references to “zombis” associated with slave uprisings in the
United States. Nonetheless, it would be William Seabrook’s novel The Magic
Island (1929) that introduced the voodoo zombie to U.S. culture, fundamentally
helping to shape the cinematic versions that have visualized, disseminated, and
commercialized the trope of the zombie up to the present day.
In order to understand the relation between the concept of zombification
itself and its circulation in peripheral areas, it is important to consider the
process of construction of the signifiers that surround this particular teratological
figure and which connects the latter not only to the history of colonialism in the
Americas but also to the place that these cultures occupied and continue to
occupy in Western imaginaries. As René Depestre has emphasized, Haitian
history and culture are inseparable from the figure of the zombie, as it has come
to constitute an identitarian trope that transmits and perpetuates the notions of
primitivism, irrationality, and excess, which is to say, a void within civilization
dominated by a particular, mysterious, and libidinal (il)logic that is irreducible to
the utilitarian and homogenizing principles of modernity.35
The studies undertaken by Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis, who
graduated with a degree in ethnobotany from Harvard University, are widely
recognized as important sources for investigations of the process of
zombification in the Caribbean. His doctoral dissertation was revised into a
travel book and then adapted as a film with the same title, The Serpent and the
Rainbow (1986). In his book, Davis delves into the intricacies of voudou
witchcraft, investigating the procedures followed by the bokor who controls the
process of zombification and the appropriation of the victim’s soul (the ti bon
ange where will, conscience, and memory reside). It is also the bokor who
administers the antidote that ends the “coma” that keeps the zombified
individual in a state of death-in-life.36 For Davis, zombification is part of a
process of social correction since only those who deviate from behavioral norms
are converted into zombies.37 However, Davis’s work, along with the fictional
representation of the Haitian zombie that has appeared in numerous literary
texts, has been criticized as an ideological (as in, based on false consciousness)
form and as a stereotypical and derogatory affirmation of a supposed Haitian
exceptionalism, a concept that demonizes, sensationalizes, and condescends to
the people of Haiti and their experiences. Davis has been taken to task (for
example by Robert Lawless and Michael Dash) for appearing to portray himself
in the film version of The Serpent and the Rainbow (dir. Wes Craven, 1986) as a
kind of Indiana Jones, a daring and adventurous white hero in the land of blacks,
an image through which the ethnographer helps to consolidate a colonialist
image that is saturated with racism and consistent with certain forms assumed by
traditional anthropology, like the discipline of othering and cultural
subalternization.38 As Dash asserts, one of the most problematic aspects of this
author’s work is the historical moment in which it was produced:
 What was particularly disturbing about the timing of Davis’ work was
its revival of the image of rural Haiti as haunted by irrationality and
superstition just when Haitians were making an enormous physical
sacrifice in their attempt to destroy the Duvalierist state. Despite the
desperate collective effort to create a modern political state in Haiti,
that country was being projected as the land of the undead, whose
citizens belong to the kingdom of illness, described by Susan Sontag as
“the night-side of life.” (142)

The notion of Haiti as a primitive world dominated by irrationality,

promiscuity, and suffering allows for numerous ideological and aesthetic
manipulations which cumulatively produce an image of the island as a repository
of geocultural, moral, and physiological negativity. Considered a contaminated
and decaying space, the social body of this Caribbean nation has been compared
to a sickly and contagious organism, a diabolical mediator of illnesses that, like
AIDS are also presumed to have originated in Africa, were spread throughout
the “civilized world” because of the island: “Once more Haiti found itself
intensely associated with the stigma of bodily malfunction” (Dash 141).
According to Dash, Davis was a supporter of the regime of François “Papa Doc”
Duvalier (1957-1971) (which ended only with the dictator’s death and left a tally
of thousands of disappeared, tortured, and exiled Haitians) and had sought to
promote his dislocated, primitive, and magical version of Haiti as the
constitutive outside that would confirm the superiority of the civilized global
North and its elusive, Western modernity.39 This problematic surrounds and
encloses the appeal to monstrosity, the unsettling social presence of which is a
sign of political conflict, collective suffering, and the expressive needs of
communities condemned to systemic marginalization and violence.40
In works like Davis’s, the theme of the zombie and of the monstering of
Haiti in general falls within what Paul Farmer has called “the uses of Haiti,”
referring to the representational strategies through which a mysterious and
irrational symbolic space has been constructed, a space that makes Haitian
society become inconceivable outside the parameters of voudou mysticism and
the social domination its people have suffered since the colonial period.41 In this
context, the theme of the zombie functions as an overarching metaphor for the
discursive and ideological subalternization of the periphery, subjected to the
representational and aesthetic manipulation of “core” knowledges given
credibility by the disciplinary status from which they emerged and endorsed by
the centers of economic, political, and cultural power that sustain them.
The images of death-in-life and of errancy—theorized by Édouard Glissant
as a form of inhabiting and covering an indeterminate, alien, and in appropriable
space—transmit the notions of social disintegration, alienation, and the
fragmentation of sociality, representing through the figure of the zombie an other
world that is not foreign to civilization but rather its dark underside, inherent and
irreducible.42 The underlying ideological problem is what to do with the
zombie’s biopolitical alterity, how to escape from its unsettling stumblings, its
absent gaze, which likewise constructs us at a distance.
The interpretation of the zombie as a cultural and ideological trope allows for
the articulation of local, historically and geoculturally isolated signifiers and
larger symbolic contexts related to historical developments and global spaces,
resulting in a ubiquity that makes the zombie an apparatus or connector—a
shifter—that develops according to the convergence of the discourses in which it
is located and according to the forms of interpellation it puts to work. In general
terms, the figure of the zombie undoubtedly constitutes one of the most eloquent
interrogations of modernity and its self-legitimizing system of political,
economic, and social domination. The zombie thus represents modernity’s guilty
conscience, which always returns to intervene in spaces rationalized by power,
destabilizing and demystifying them. The zombie is therefore characterized by
the flexibility of its signifiers, which unfold in varied contexts and which occupy
the collective consciousness and are connected to diverse aspects of knowledge.

Through almost seventy-five years of evolution on the big screen, the

zombie can be read as tracking a wide range of cultural, political, and
economic anxieties of American society. Born of Haitian folklore and
linked from its earliest periods to oppression, the zombie began as a
parable of the exploited worker in modern industrial economies and of
the exploited native in colonial nations. Through decades marked by
concerns over environmental deterioration, political conflict, the
growth of consumer-capitalism, and the commoditization of the body
implicit in contemporary biomedical science, the creature has served to
articulate these and other anxieties in ways that are sometimes light-
 hearted and witty, sometimes dark and cynical. (Dendle 45)

The zombie’s interstitial position between life and death is also connected to
two other important aspects of the construction of the monstrous as a symbolic
bridge between contingency and transcendence, between locality and
universalism. The first has to do with the fact that the dissolution of the borders
between life and death, staged in the figure of the zombie, cancels the possibility
of mourning and thereby perpetuates melancholia. Incomplete death impedes the
rituals that define the end of the cycle of life and incorporate it into the
experience of the individual and the community, and therefore it annuls any form
of purification that would permit the recuperation of the normality of life,
transforming this latter into an agonic, contaminated, and sinister form loaded
with negativity and bad omens. Secondly, on the political and philosophical
level, the figure of the zombie is related to the theme of the master and the slave
elaborated by Hegel in his project to comprehend universal history through the
dialectical method, providing an image that allegorizes the effects of domination
and its prolongation as coloniality in the modern era. The constellation of
political, historical, and ideological signifiers that articulate the figure of the
zombie function as a war machine that is both external and internal to the
system, that destabilizes it from within, that consumes it from its own territory in
the signifier’s sinister errancy throughout the extensive and alien space of
modernity.
In this way, the figure of the zombie, perhaps more than any other peripheral
monster, articulates the theme of domination, particularly the relation between
exploitation and subjectivity, body and soul, capital, labor, and sociality. A
biopolitical image of the control of the means of production and its devastating
effects on the social body, the atemporalized and transhuman dynamic of the
zombie consolidates itself as one of the prismatic faces of universal history: like
the face of capital that has existed for centuries without being conscious of itself,
dismantling the world, an inexhaustible and useless testimony to the alienation
of the individual and the ruin of civilization, a reminder of a slavery that was
never completely abolished and which changes form and takes on different
names throughout history.
According to Kette Thomas, the zombie causes us to reflect on the existence
of beings who possess an illusory, phantom-like subjectivity. The myth of the
zombie begins by undermining the notion that human subjectivity is
invulnerable, consistent, and unified. For Thomas, this beginning exceeds the
interpretation of the zombie as a denunciation of imperialism, because the
deconstruction of subjectivity surpasses the political and touches the very heart
of modernity, especially in peripheral regions. Reading the theme of the zombie
in relation to the story of Lazarus, Thomas suggests that what the zombie myth
focuses on is the notion of the subject itself and the meaning of rebirth.
Particularly in the case of Haiti, the figure of the zombie is constructed in
opposition to the biblical idea of resurrection as an act that demonstrates the
power of God, affirming instead an incomplete and degraded return to life as a
debased and dehumanizing experience. While Lazarus’s name confers
individuality and thus localizes representation, the anonymity of the zombie is
lost in an amorphous collectivity. In addition, the zombie’s lack of language
constitutes an undeniable fact in this process of degradation and radical
precarity.43
Many critics have emphasized the importance of the transnational flows of
symbolic capital that have connected centers and peripheries, in many cases
contributing to the production of versions and visions that are generally
subalternized by dominant knowledge. The theme of the zombie has made
possible the emergence of imaginaries that dispute this centrality and develop
new perspectives on the historical experiences of colonial and modern
domination: “fictions and myths like the zombie have contributed in a very real
manner to an alternative strategy of colonial and postcolonial resistance: the
counteroccupation of mythical space” (Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie 25).
According to Larsen, as a subaltern figure subjected to social and mental
death, the zombie is situated at an epistemic limit that resets the biopolitical
relations between life and death, transforming it into a form of domination that
goes beyond the limits of the human: “the zombie considered as a subaltern born
of colonial encounters is a figure that has arisen then out of a new relationship to
death: not the fear of zombie apocalypse, as in the movies, but the fear of
becoming one—the fear of losing control, of becoming a slave” (Larsen,
“Zombies of Immaterial Labor” 8).
In Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009), Susan Buck-Morss analyzes
the relation between the Eurocentric construction of this universal history and
the Haitian Revolution, specifically, the mode in which Hegel incorporates (or
displaces) historical knowledge in the construction of his immense theoretical
edifice on the nature of Being and the possibilities of knowledge.44
Buck-Morss’s analysis focuses specifically on the Jena period (1803-1806),
which encompasses Hegel’s thought prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807). She argues that “there is no doubt that Hegel and Haiti belong together”
(20), a paradoxical conjunction of immense political and philosophical
significance, particularly if we take into account the antithetical relation between
slavery as a system of domination and radical exploitation and the ideological
context of the Enlightenment, which constituted the ideological atmosphere of
the era and was articulated around the “discourse of liberty.” The main point
Buck-Morss emphasizes is the fact that, although the topics of liberty and,
ultimately, slavery theoretically concerned the first stage of the ideological
debates of the Enlightenment, reflection on actual slavery and colonial struggles
against these European structures of domination was re/suppressed in the
political and philosophical consciousness of the time.45

By the eighteenth century, slavery had become the root metaphor of

Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about
power relations.… Yet this political metaphor began to take root at
precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery—the
systematic, highly sophisticated capitalist enslavement of non-
Europeans as a labor force in the colonies—was increasing
quantitatively to the point that by the mid-eighteenth century it came to
underwrite the entire economic system of the West, paradoxically
facilitating the global spread of the very Enlightenment ideals that were
in such fundamental contradiction to it. (Buck-Morss 21)

Buck-Morss’s central question about the connection between the Master-

Slave relation at the core of Hegelian thought that paradigmatically illustrates
the case of Haiti and the new global economy leads to a necessary interrogation
of the processes of historical interpretation and the silences, the “forgotten,” or
that which is displaced from certain geocultural contexts within totalizing
historiographic visions of European design.46 Buck-Morss wonders what effect
it would have to consider Haiti—contrary to conventional historiographic
positions—no longer as the victim of Europe but rather as a fundamental agent of
the advance of European modernity.
For the purposes of reflecting on the construction of monstrosity and on the
role of the zombie as an allegory of the specter of slavery that is anomalously
situated in the discourse of liberty, it is especially important to retain the idea
that the dialectical conception of the Master and the Slave emerged as a
reflection on the meaning of the Haitian Revolution, within which the zombie
captures a specific form of popular expression. On one hand, it represents forms
of residual humanity that contaminate modernity and testifies to the devastating
effects of economic, political, and social domination. It thus expresses the
degradation of humanity and, at the same time, its persistent will to survive,
evident in the phantasmagoric and disturbing presence of the living-dead in
collective imaginaries. The figure of the zombie exposes and spectacularizes the
irreducible, referring to a radical difference that, rather than disappearing, returns
to its origins in an obsessive replay of the repressed, the marginalized, and the
unconscious. In a colonial world with no common language, only
comprehensible through its image and its actions, the zombie inscribes from its
inception a non-verbal form of communication characterized by automatism,
rituality, and mimeticism, elements that permit the circulation—the wandering—
of the signifier, which exists on the margins of dominant culture and subtracts
itself from any form of legality or ethno-political domination.47
The representation of the zombie explicates in visual and discursive terms
the ruin of culture and history, allowing for an emblematic (signifying,
performative, ritualized, and symbolic) apprehension of historical contents and
experiences that are otherwise unrepresentable. “Voudou was constructed out the
allegorical mode of seeing that experiences history as catastrophe” (Buck-Morss,
Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History 127).48
Both the historical experience of slavery and the historical and political
experience of revolution constitute incomprehensible processes that are
incomparable within the domain of universal history and the rationality on which
it is founded. These processes saturate the historical imagination of their time:
“Haiti’s political imaginary as liberated territory, a safe haven for all, was too
grand for statist politics. Its absolutely new extension of both freedom and
citizenship transracially and transnationally does not lend itself to political
appropriation as a definition of national identity” (Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti,
and Universal History 147).
Therefore, the relation between zombification and colonialist domination,
and, in a more modern sense, its association with the concept of coloniality,
makes it possible to focus on some of the representational and interpretative
conflicts of our own time, in which social consciousness seeks new forms of
collective expression and new modalities of political action.49 Closely related to
the notion of people without history, inscribed in the discourse of freedom, and
suppressed by modern imaginaries, what the Caribbeans call zombitude
delineates a symbolic space with a powerful political content that defies
Euro/Anglocentric readings of history and narratives of progress and modernity.
Due to its countercultural specificity, the symbolic space of zombitude requires
new strategies for reading civilizing projects, their objectives, and their social
costs in peripheral societies. In these contexts, the figure of the zombie
condenses political and ideological meanings at the same time that it
concentrates aesthetic elements that permit the circulation of the trope in
literature, film, visual arts, music, video games, comics, and so on, constituting a
massive diffusion that in many cases leads to the cooptation of its
countercultural significance. It is primarily literature that is the most fertile
terrain for the proliferation of the ideological and cultural contents of voudou
and for the expression of the zombie trope’s representational abilities. As we
have seen, this opens up a panoply of possibilities and connotations that go from
the image of the living-dead as an illustration of total alienation and the blockage
of all possibility of social consciousness to its countercultural unfolding as a
figure that represents resistance to dominant discourses, instrumental reason,
productivity, and the infinite reproduction of capital. Hence, for the purposes of
studying the multiple mutations that zombie monstrosity can take on, it is
important to introduce certain representative poetic forms of this polyphonic
image in historical and political contexts that are extremely dense and deeply
problematic. The qualities of Caribbean culture that Antonio Benítez Rojo
highlights, particularly “su fragmentación, su inestabilidad, su recíproco
aislamiento, su desarraigo, su complejidad cultural, su dispersa historio-grafía,
su contingencia y su provisionalidad,” as well as the expressivity of diasporic
religiosity in these insular cultures find in literature a territory of symbolic
experimentation where the representation of the body, approached through
grotesque and Gothic procedures and sometimes through lyricism or magical
thinking, is a metaphor of biopolitical control and the search for alternative ways
of defining identity and rearticulating local agendas. Zombification is the theater
where social tensions are staged and where unresolved historical conflicts and
forms of life are expressed through the spectacularization of excess and the
radical lack that stems from a deficient sociality embroiled in a permanent
struggle for recognition and emancipation.

Zombitude and Coloniality

In literature, the zombie figure is recognizably connected to the Gothic but also
thematically articulated to other topics, such as the victimization of women in
patriarchal society. In many literary texts the theme of violence against women
disappears behind representations of solid family structures or is covered over by
issues of race and class that some consider to be more relevant than gender as
social indicators and articulations of collective identities. The zombie theme
recovers these repressed aspects and symbolically reworks them through plots
that stage violence and the erotic and thanatic drives that inform it, offering a
symbolic version of the mechanisms of repression that frequently overcome
collective consciousness.
Wide Saragasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys, portrays the theme of the zombie
in association with madness, orphanhood, exile, and gender. In a world defined
by colonization, Antoinette Cosway, the daughter of a black slave and a white
woman, is rejected by both white British colonial society and black Jamaican
society because of her racial otherness. Thomas Loe has studied the subtext of
zombitude in Rhys’s work, emphasizing the open quality of the novel, which
oscillates between the construction of a fictitious “reality” and the incorporation
of elements of fantasy that affect the configuration of identities and narrative
situation. Loe detects a metonymic narrative on the surface that connects to
deeper levels suggested by ellipses, insinuations, and hesitations. One of these
subtexts centers on the figure of the zombie, which, according to Loe, is the
object of new forms of interpretation, beginning with the publication of the
above-mentioned works by Wade Davis and Zora Neale Hurston. These authors’
books remove the processes of zombification from the realm of superstition,
black magic, and hallucination, offering more scientific and academic
interpretations of voudou-related practices. Following Loe, knowledge of these
new theories about the processes of zombification makes it possible to
understand levels to which Rhys’s novel only alludes, such as the errancy of the
soul that has separated from its body, the idea of the two deaths (that of the real
body and that of the zombie-body), as well as the ambiguity with which the text
presents the theme of death-in-life. The device of interrupting and withholding,
of silent instances in which the reader intuits references to zombies through
extra-literary knowledge, first of all makes it possible to do away with any
explicit discourse about the practices of the zombie theme and its resistance to
dominant rationality. This device creates a space parallel to discourse, a domain
of intuition in which signifiers circulate clandestinely, subtextually,
subconsciously, peripherally, appealing to occult, repressed levels of subjectivity.
It is a matter of the use and exchange of signifiers that elude instrumental reason,
patriarchal domination, mechanisms of control and social discipline, which
Western reason defines as madness, hallucination, or superstition, dismissing
them as unproductive knowledges and activities that corrode the social order.
Considered by critics an aesthetic experiment that used modernist narrative
techniques as well as elements that point to a feminist perspective inspired by
Charlotte Brontë’s influential novel Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847)—
which provides the model of the alienated woman—Wide Sargasso Sea
emphasizes the marginal positions of gender, race, and class and inscribes them
in an exotic and mysterious context where identities are fragmented and
dissolved under the weight of patriarchal power and the political and economic
structures of domination that resulted from colonization. The novel is narrated
from different points of view, but primarily by Rochester, the husband of the
protagonist and the counterpart of the feminine character (Antoinette/Bertha),
proposing a kaleidoscopic image of postcolonial subjectivity. The novel explores
the collective unconscious through the use of zombification as a metaphor of the
alienation of women and the invisible forces that dominate the social structures
of peripheral imaginaries. The plot develops the motifs of travel and illness that
are characteristic of zombie stories in the Caribbean. At the same time, Rhys’s
novel deploys compositional innovations that give the story density and
originality. According to Braham, “By telling the story from Antoinette’s
perspective, Rhys inverts the white zombie formula and displaces the burden of
monstrosity from Antoinette to Rochester” (From Amazons to Zombies 158).
The world of zombitude includes elements of magic, supernatural tales, allusions
to zombies and ghosts, voudou legends and Obeah practices, elements that
underscore the idea of an invisible and mysterious world that induces in the
characters (and transmits to the reader) the typical reactions of attraction and
rejection that are always connected to the monstrous. However, the figure of the
zombie is ambiguous and extremely flexible, particularly from the point of view
of ideology, and lends itself to representations that can reinforce both aspects of
cultural resistance and states of alienation that paralyze social consciousness.
However, it is perhaps René Depestre’s novel Hadriana dans tous mes rêves
(1988) that best captures the contradictory and often paradoxical relation
between zombitude, gender, and nationalism. The work focuses on a feminine
character in a world in which reality and mysticism are brought together
throughout three centuries of Haitian history, centering on the city of Jacmel.
Through the practice of a “hybrid realism,” the novel combines Catholicism and
voudou in a syncretic setting that delimits key elements of Haitian identity: exile,
animism, sensuality, and the metamorphoses that blur the limits between life and
death, between races, species, languages, and beliefs. Hadriana Siloé, the
protagonist of Depestre’s novel, reappears after her death as a new woman, a
wandering zombie whose “petit bon ange” must be set free.50 The notions of
exile, permanent deterritorialization, nomadism, and wandering are essential to
the zombie’s nature in relation to Haitian history, specifically regarding the
objective and subjective effects of colonization, dispossession, invasions, the
plundering of territories, and the appropriation of labor power and natural
resources. Other features of Haitian history and culture, like hybridity,
transculturation, and the predominance of orality, are also incorporated into
voudou as a syncretic construction with a magico-religious character that some
consider to have satanic connotations and which others regard as a kind of
therapy that allows inhabitants of rural areas to articulate forms of social
comprehension and action in relation to a reality characterized by violent social
contrasts, systemic violence, and epistemic marginalization. However, as some
critics have pointed out, Depestre’s novel subordinates its historical themes to
erotic ones and uses the trope of the zombie with the intention neither of
emphasizing the struggle for freedom nor of evoking cultural and political
resistance in the metaphor of the individual zombified by slavery. According to
Paravisini-Gebert in “Women Possessed. Eroticism and Exoticism in the
Representation of Woman as Zombie,” the zombie procedure used in Hadriana
dans tous mes rêves as a depiction of the Calibanesque remainder does not
reinforce peripheral postcolonial identities but rather reduces Haitian identity to
a collective lack of social consciousness. This condemns the people of Haiti
through the symbolic apparatus of literature to the perpetuation of the bonds of
subjection and political, economic, and social degradation. In this sense, the
topic of race also illustrates the prolongation of a system of social domination
and stratification.

The peculiarities of this view of history, which strips the Haitian people
of any possibility of self-determination, are underscored by Hadriana’s
own escape from zombification, which implies that Hadriana, like
Madeleine in White Zombie, being white, beautiful, and rich, can
quickly recover her will, whereas the Haitian people, because they are
black, gullible, and poor, are trapped in zombiedom forever. This
depiction of the Haitian people as zombies negates any possibility of
their transcending a history of colonialism, slavery, postcolonial
poverty, and political regression because, as zombies, they are
incapable of rebellion. (Paravisini-Gebert 49)51

Other Caribbean authors have also explored the figure of the zombie in
relation to patriarchal society in stories inscribed within the paradigmatic themes
established by the works of Rhys and Depestre. Thus, for example, Ana Lydia
Vega portrays the zombie theme in El baúl de Miss Florence (1991), bringing
together the notions of slavery and the dependence and submission of women,
their civil “disappearance,” and the madness that always emerges as a line of
flight from inapprehensible and disturbing realities.
The Cuban author Mayra Montero also deals with voudou subject matter in
many of her works, from her first novel La trenza de la hermosa luna (1987) to
later texts like La última noche que pasé contigo (1991) and Del rojo de su
sombra (1992), which focus on the experience of Haitian immigration to the
Dominican Republic and the practice of Gagá by workers in the sugar cane
industry.52 Tú, la oscuridad (1995) portrays a hunt for wandering zombies who
have fled to the hills, recalling the escape of slaves from their masters. This hunt,
during which Thierry’s father is killed by a zombie (Romaine la Prophetesse),
indicates today the dramatic conflict between modernity and primitivism, a
formula that expresses the clash of cultures and the structures of capitalist
domination based on the control, and eventually the extermination, of life. The
disappearance of animal species, people, etc., is constant throughout the text, and
the zombies are a persistent sign of the death drive that traverses Caribbean
culture and society. Additionally, in the story “Corinne, muchacha amable,”
Montero portrays the zombification of the main character on the eve of her
wedding, a theme frequently linked to the idea of marriage as a structure of the
repression and social domination of women.53
Undoubtedly, the figure of the zombie is connected not only to the historico-
political settings of colonialism and slavery but also to modern imperialism and
globalism, in which the zombie portrays the errancy of an alienated but
widespread social consciousness and bodies display a potential for coherence
and resistance that threatens the spaces of power and their epistemic foundations.
A decayed corporeality on which death has left its mark but stopped halfway
through becomes a spectacle and a warning of the precariousness of life,
allegorizing in itself the futility of capital and the vulnerability of the social body
that has been submitted to processes of corrosion that alter its systemic and
organic qualities. As a biopolitical metaphor, the zombie cannot help but also
refer to the concepts of decolonization and the need to read history against the
grain, from the perspective of its victims, the excluded, the dispossessed, for
which lack and social inequality are elements that denounce the social cost of
capitalism and its unkept promises. Along these same lines, the figure of the
zombie represents the topic of communication (language as an absent attribute
that does not guide the transmission of feelings or knowledge but rather inhibits
it, leaving in its place a silence that implies resistance but also the repression and
suppression of subjectivity). The zombie is a survivor who, unable to recuperate
the totality of life and left with only its vestiges, is the ruins that testifies to lost
totality and a precarious, pathetic form of partial survival that prevents forgetting
and constantly reactivates historical guilt and the impossibility of mourning.
In the Caribbean, the symbolic domain of zombitude retains the primary
features of the monstrous: it stages and expresses historical catastrophe, it warns
of future inequalities, it gives form to an otherwise unrepresentable reality whose
definition exceeds the limits of normality. It proposes categories that dilute
biopolitical dualisms (life/death, consciousness/alienation,
hegemony/subalternity, homeland/exile, civilization/barbarism) and the cultural
borders between languages, races, classes, and territories. In the space of
zombitude, the experience of fear has more to do with the deleterious effects of a
life without the possibility of death. The zombie re-presents the prolongation of
exploitation, marginalization, dispossession—that is, the coloniality that infects
the utopias of modernization, order, and progress.

Systemic Monstrosity and Popular Imaginaries

Chupacabras and Jarjachas

Among Latin American monsters, the chupacabras stands out for having
appeared across a broad range of territories: in rural areas, forests, and desolate
places, in Caribbean nations, northern Mexico, the Andean region, Central
America, Paraguay, Uruguay, etc., with sightings even being reported in the
southern United States. It is characterized as combining reptilian features with
aspects of a wild dog, and its behavior is determined by its appetite, much like
the vampire. Described as around a meter-and-a-half tall, it is portrayed as
standing on its hind legs and covered with scales, with very large eyes and sharp
claws.
Because the syncretic and transculturated myth of the chupacabras (as well
as that of its predecessor, the vampire) has been associated with regions
inhabited by indigenous cultures, ritual practices of blood offerings to pagan
gods, as well as Christian mythico-religious thought that early on introduced
belief in the supernatural, miracles, and demons. These doctrinal aspects were
combined with pre-Hispanic beliefs, superstitions, and legends that varied
significantly from region to region. According to Robert Jordan, the
chupacabras is “a form of cultural resistance which many people of Puerto Rico,
Mexico, and the greater part of Latin America use to maintain social bonds and
gain control over growing fears surrounding the perceived destructive effects of
‘toxic’ US political and economic imperialism” (qtd. in Radford 37).
As with other monsters, particularly those of the periphery, the chupacabras
expresses a lack of confidence in the efficiency and objectives associated with
modernizing projects, along with the ideas of progress, democratic integration,
and state recognition of the needs of the people. Old grudges and colonial fears
based on a long history of exploitation and plunder reincarnate in the modern era
in atavistic structures of thought that explain the real through such figures as a
way of constructing meaning in social realities that are inaccessible and/or
unacceptable to the lower classes. These forms of popular monstrosity retain in
their different versions the universal attributes of the monstrous: apocalyptic
connotations, the incorporation of the anomalous into the everyday as a way of
defamiliarizing the status quo and the relations of exploitation that characterize
it. They are also associated with emotional responses to social evils, an
articulation of economic, political, sexual, and social meanings, and to
metaphorical or allegorical elaborations of specific crises that affect peripheral
communities, particularly peasant populations.
The chupacabras feeds on animals from which it sucks blood (and
occasionally organs) through orifices in its prey’s body. It is believed that the
chupacabras takes on different appearances in different cultural contexts, a
shifting condition that makes this monster difficult to identify. In Puerto Rico,
there have been reports since the 1990s of attacks on animals attributed to the
chupacabras. This creature’s name—“goatsucker”—refers to its earliest dietary
preferences, although it also is said to feed on birds, crabs, cats, and other
animals. This urban legend is supposedly related to various cases of dogs or
coyotes afflicted by mange, a disease that causes fur loss and a sulfuric odor that
is frequently attributed to the chupacabras’s demonic nature.
Nevertheless, the chupacabras is by no means a one-dimensional figure that
can be reduced to its grisly actions. Several critics have analyzed its significance
in different sociocultural contexts, both in Latin America and the United States,
particularly in areas with a large Latino population where stories about the
chupacabras flourish and take on specific meanings. Furthermore, the spread of
stories about the chupacabras has led to polemics about its nature and its
ideological connotations. According to William A. Calvo-Quirós,

The Chupacabras is more than just a naive livestock-blood-sucking

creature, but rather represents a sophisticated entity that carries within
it the violent struggles lived by communities of color, because of the
local impact of global neoliberal policies, as manifested by late
capitalism, during the last quarter of the twentieth century […] This
blood-sucking creature turns into flesh the monstrous atrocities and
unnatural violence inflicted on Latina/o communities in both sides of
the border, as they have been forced to accommodate a global project
of market expansion, including but not limited to forced migration,
 land expropriation, wage dependency, poverty, and gender/sexual
violence. (3)54

In the context of violent attacks against the lives and safety of documented
and undocumented immigrants, the chupacabras story concentrates both fears
and forms of symbolic resistance that, without shying away from irony,
constitute a critique of both the US’s cruel and exploitative system and the
discourse of otherness on which it is founded.
In Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and
Folklore (2011), Benjamin Radford, who investigated official reports on
sightings of the chupacabras and witness statements, considers the possibility
that the science fiction film series Species, directed by Roger Donaldson,
constitutes the source of inspiration for both popular ideas and descriptions of
the chupacabras.55 Radford also believes that both conspiracy theories and anti-
American sentiments nurtured the belief in this monster that supposedly wanders
the outskirts of cities and attacks animals in rural villages and communities,
damaging the economy and the morale of the people.56
For its part, the jarjacha (from the Quechua qarqacha, an onomatopoeic
name that refers to the cry or call of this creature) belongs to popular Andean
mythology, particularly in the region of Ayacucho. An anthropomorphic
monster, with a body that generally has one or more human heads, the jarjacha
specifically incarnates the punishment of incest and the social exclusion that
results from it. This latter sanction was in practice during the colonial period as a
punishment for monks who, having broken their vows of chastity, engaged in
sexual relations condemned by the Church. The jarjacha has all the
characteristics of the monstrous: hybridity, physical anomaly, mutation,
aggressiveness, cannibalism, warning of evils, and disseminating fear. It is said
to appear only at night, to change its primarily human constitution, and to harass
communities in search of victims whom it punishes by sucking out their brains
or the fat from their bodies. In the form of a “survival guide in case of a jarjacha
attack,” Daniel Contreras writes, summarizing the terms of the Ayacuchan
legend:

Si se encuentra caminando de noche por algún paraje inhóspito de la

serranía y oye a los perros aullar lastimeramente, sospeche. Si
 acompañando dichos aullidos escucha un terrible “¡jar, jar, jar, jar!,” no
lo dude: tiene cerca de usted a un jarjacha. Una forma de alejarlo será
decirle en voz alta lisuras fuertes y amenazarlo con sogas o un chicote.
Recuerde también que el arma del jarjacha es el escupitajo. No olvide
portar un crucifijo, así como hachas o picos. Tampoco olvide portar un
espejo, pues el jarjacha no soporta verse a sí mismo por la vergüenza
de ser un pecador incestuoso. Para atacarlo, hay que hacerlo en grupo e
intentar atraparlo con cuerdas hechas de lana. De lograrlo, no lo mire a
los ojos, pues tiene gran poder hipnótico; espere a que se haga de día y
que tome su forma original humana para conocer de quién se trata.
(n.p.)

As with other monsters, the visual aspect of the jarjacha concentrates

signifiers and “constructs” the feeling of horror that accompanies the experience
of the anomalous. Like the vampire, the jarjacha cannot be looked at because
eye contact with it paralyzes the observer, and the creature itself is said to be
unable to see its own reflection in the mirror, because its image, connected to sin
and the transgression of community norms, fills it with fear.57 José Carlos Cano
López compares the jarjacha not only to the figure of the vampire but also to the
werewolf, with which it has in common the attributes of hybridity and mutation.
According to Cano López,

La monstruosidad es vivida como desdoblamiento. Cuando el humano

acepta este pathos trágico de la metamorfosis, accede al mismo tiempo
a encarnar una monstruosidad huésped: una especie de antisujeto que
necesariamente convive dentro de él. La monstruosidad habita en
calidad de huésped en el cuerpo del humano, alojándose en éste y
provocando la transformación en una nueva criatura. (184)

In an article titled “Transylvania en los Andes,” Jacqueline Fowks refers in

particular to cinematic representations of the jarjacha, explaining that,

El investigador Emilio Bustamante ha contabilizado desde 2002 hasta

ahora más de 20 filmes sobre estos seres sobrenaturales. Curiosamente,
el fenómeno surgió en la región de Ayacucho, la más golpeada entre
1980 y 2000 por la violencia del grupo terrorista Sendero Luminoso y
la contrainsurgencia de las Fuerzas Armadas, y para muchos no es una
 casualidad. La violencia de los monstruos, el quiebre del orden y el
miedo a su posible retorno serían ecos del conflicto armado. El origen
de este subgénero andino de horror, según los investigadores, es el
filme de Mélinton Eusebio, Jarjacha. El demonio del incesto (2000) e
Incesto en los Andes: la maldición de los jarjachas, de 2002, del
cineasta Palito Ortega Matute, ambos ayacuchanos. (n.p.)

Fowks asserts that this “cinema of resistance” carries out the task of
decentralizing information about the armed conflict and the interpretation of the
facts that constituted the internal war in Peru, offering a regional alternative that
can be counterpoised to the official versions that generally monopolize
elaborations on such themes. In many of its representations, the jarjacha
symbolizes killer instinct, gratuitous death, the fear of societal dangers,
repression, civil insecurity, forces that eschew reason, the defenselessness of the
population, terrorism, and systematic violence.
Following the studies of Juan Ansión on Andean mythical thinking, Cano
López has pointed out that the figure of the jarjacha also refers to the theme of
fertility, because the notion of incest entails a “sexualidad trastocada,
distorsionada, degenerada” (195). Additionally, the representation of the
jarjacha as a hybrid with the deformed body of a llama demonstrates the
continued demonization of incest because the llama, which appears in monstrous
form as the jarjacha, is in the Andean region traditionally associated with
procreative fecundity.

Pishtacos and Sacaojos

In the above-mentioned essay “Globalization and the Crisis of the Popular,” Jean
Franco analyzes some of the main elements of the symbolic repertoire used to
express perceptions of the real developed by Andean populations which, from
the colonial period to today, metaphorically represent the effect of the relations
of dominance on both the national and transnational level. In these imaginaries
and in the languages they catalyze, the corporeal acquires a renewed and
countercultural symbolic value related to the avatars of the social body, the
exploitation of the working class, and the subaltern position of large segments of
society that are not productively articulated to the dominant system. In a similar
way, Gareth Williams focuses on the theme of pishtacos and sacaojos as part of
an analysis of the need to recuperate and revise the concept of the popular in the
context of neoliberalism, which relocates the issue of subalternity and hegemony
vis-à-vis the advances of globalization and its effects in the Latin American
periphery.
The figure of the pishtaco (also known in Bolivia by the Aymara names
kharisiri or likichiri, which means “fat thief,” and in Peru by the Quechua name
ñakaq) is situated at the center of popular conceptions of exploitation and
indigenous resistance.58 The images and categories that express feelings and
reactions to the history of the devastation of indigenous cultures and the
exploitation of land and resources articulate disparate elements related to the
fields of politics, anthropology, history, and literature, organizing them into
impure and interconnected assemblages that resist dominant interpretative and
representative models of the popular. In these contexts, the recourse to
monstrosity has predominantly ethnic connotations related to past and present
racialized violence. It refers to ways of extracting the sources of life (blood, fat,
and organs), particularly from indigenous peoples, as well as to the experiences
of social disintegration, depredation, and appropriation of natural resources.
For Gareth Williams, the intensification of the pishtaco myth and its
recycling as the sacaojos constitutes further proof of the nonviability of the
transculturating/modernizing project in the Andean region, a subject that has
been profusely analyzed in connection with the work of Arguedas, Vargas Llosa,
and other key authors of the region.59 The image, behaviors, and meanings
popularly attributed to the pishtaco dramatically reinstall ethno-cultural
particularisms in the universalizing and homogenizing project of modernity,
which explains the radical heterogeneity of Andean society and its non-
dialectical antagonisms. The figures of the pishtaco and the sacaojos destabilize
the order of the nation-state, allegorizing antagonisms that cannot be reduced to
a problematic relation between identity and otherness, even though this relation
is obviously essential to the social problematic. In Williams’s terms, “the eye-
snatcher [sacaojos] rumor thereby wreaks havoc on the possibility of
constructing a hegemonic articulation between distinct agents and differential
social and ethnic personalities. Perhaps it even fractures the possibility of
thinking hegemony as a sustainable category in contemporary Peru” (254).
Derived from the Quechua word pishtay, which means “to cut into shreds,”
the pre-Hispanic myth of the pishtaco was fully developed in the contemporary
era in Peru, particularly in the provinces of Junín, Huancavélica, Cusco,
Ayacucho, Apurimac, Pasco, and the Lima sierra. However, its pan-Andean
dimension is also demonstrated in Ecuador and in the Bolivian highlands. This
“Indian-killer” monster has also variously appeared in the Amazon region
(Bellier and Hocquenghem). It is said that the pishtaco began as a kind of
indigenous assassin whose definition slowly approached the teratological and
broadened its cultural and ideological meaning.
Like all monsters, the pishtaco is a wanderer: a deterritorialized, nomadic,
and unpredictable being; a war machine that erodes the notions of order, social
control, rationality, organicity, civilization, and progress. Above all, it functions
as an apparatus of defamiliarization and demonstration that gives shape to the
terror of exploitation and social insecurity, on both the individual and collective
levels. It has been studied by historians, anthropologists, and scholars of medical
ethnology because it exposes the relationship of indigenous society to the issues
of nutrition, the body, death, health, and labor.
In his book Gods and Vampires: Return to Chipaya (1994, originally
published in French in 1992), the anthropologist Nathan Wachtel describes the
effects of vampirism in the Andean region based on the testimonies of local
informants, specifically Uru Indians from the Bolivian Andes, who are said to
practice vampirism. In the chapter titled “Tales of Vampires,” Wachtel analyzes
references to pishtacos from the colonial era to the present, noting that the first
time such phenomena were recorded was during the profound crisis of
indigenous society wrought by resistance to Spanish domination. The
conquistadors’ destruction of huacas (Andean divinities) and the conquered
Indians’ abandonment of the practice of worshiping them gave rise to the
vampire phenomenon, a metaphorical expression of the rage of the forgotten
gods. This form of vampirism also appeared in Spain at the beginning of the
twentieth century in the myth of the sacamantecas, which refers to this
creature’s practice of extracting its victims’ fat, thus revealing its colonial origins
(Wachtel 80).
The topic of power, particularly asymmetrical forms of domination, are
essential to the construction of narratives that relate the activities of pishtacos.
According to Irene Bellier and Anne Marie Hocquenghem,
 El pishtaco y su víctima están en una relación de fuerza de tipo
dominante /dominado, cuyos términos evolucionan con el transcurso
de los siglos. Dualista en los Andes en donde la relación
agresor/agredido cubre una oposición blancos/indios, la relación se
vuelve tripartita en la Amazonía en la que la relación agresor/agredido
pone en juego a los blancos, los mestizos y los indios. Retrocediendo
en el transcurso de la historia, localizamos los grandes momentos de la
transformación de esta relación de fuerza que nos permite captar la
racionalidad subyacente de esta creencia. (42)

And according to the anthropologist Enrique Mayer:

In popular belief, pishtacos are quintessential outsiders. They possess

advanced technology with which to perpetrate these crimes whose
purpose it is to convert the bodies of Indians into monetary profits.
Pishtacos are coherent and historically mythologized versions of the
real threat of externally perpetrated violence against which collective
outage is one possible outlet. (188)

Once again, the body/death/profit relation organizes the space of belief,

where the practice of colonialism/resistance is incorporated into popular
imaginaries. The iconic figure of the pishtaco articulates, like all monstrosity, a
belligerent and inorganic form of difference and agency. Its proliferating and
unstable condition is evident in its bodily mutations, its erratic mobility, and its
desperate and sordid gluttony.
Andrew Canessa reviews the multiple directions in which the meaning of the
pishtaco has gone: as a representation of the Other, as an exemplification of the
fear brought on by capitalism while also expressing the desire to participate in it.
It embodies the anxiety caused by the invasive character of modernity and by
racial violence; it materializes the feeling of indigenous rejection of foreign
invaders after centuries of exploitation. In this sense, it constitutes a narrative
that elaborates forms of social consciousness about local and national relations
as well as the connections between regional economies and global capitalism
(706).
Manfredi Bortoluzzi argues that the indigenous myth of the pishtaco
constitutes a “hermeneutic tool” for resignifying economic, political, and social
crises, epidemics, terrorist, military, or paramilitary violence, illegal drug and
human trafficking—in other words, for any kind of social chaos in the Andean
region. For this reason, it lends itself to multiple uses and can channel different
ideological charges.
In Mario Vargas Llosa’s Lituma en los Andes (1993), the figure of the
pishtaco, who haunts the novel’s pages with a sordid and tenacious wandering, is
portrayed as follows:

Foráneo. Medio gringo. A simple vista, no se lo reconocía, pues era

igualito a cualquier cristiano de este mundo. Vivía en cuevas y
perpetraba sus fechorías al anochecer. Apostado en los caminos, detrás
de las rocas, encogido entre pajonales o debajo de los puentes,
aguardaba a los viajeros solitarios. Se les acercaba con mañas,
amigándose. Tenía preparados polvitos de hueso de muerto y, al primer
descuido, se los aventaba a la cara. Podía, entonces, chuparles la grasa.
Después, los dejaba irse, vacíos, pellejo y hueso, condenados a
consumirse en horas o días. Esos eran los benignos. Buscaban manteca
humana para que las campanas de las iglesias cantaran mejor, los
tractores rodaran suavecito, y, ahora último, hasta para que el gobierno
pagara con ella la deuda externa. Los malignos eran peores. Además de
degollar, deslonjaban a su víctima como a res, carnero o chancho, y se
la comían. La desangraban gota a gota, se emborrachaban con sangre.
(Lituma en los Andes 66-67)60

Traitorous, scheming, cunning, and bloodthirsty, this Andean monster moves

(in concordance with its nature) in recondite spaces that hide its presence and its
cannibalistic appetites. Its characteristics and instinctive tendencies, its
insatiability, and its mutations place it in the Derridean space of the undecidable.
It suspends all categories, inaugurating cycles of self-regeneration and
destruction that hyperbolize and spectacularize evil, thus giving its actions an
ethical and ideologically promiscuous, grotesque, and stereotypical character that
inhabits the undifferentiated zone of simulacra and metempsychosis. The
pishtaco’s existence is an obsessive and disturbing oscillation between life and
death, between the domestic and the foreign, between archaism and modernity,
between ethno-cultural configurations and economic strata that perform a danse
macabre around the undefeatable imperium of capital.
 In the undecidable background of the actions carried out by the Shining Path
and the violence of the Peruvian state, the disappearances that occur in the novel
evoke a ritualistic encounter of forces that surpass rationality and unleash a
symbolic whirlwind that storms against the unassuming border town of Naccos,
establishing in its already extremely liminal condition the inconceivable
elements of disappearance, criminality, and human sacrifice.
In Bortoluzzi’s interpretation,

El mito del degollador no representa sólo una creencia local, un toque

costumbrista para generar una atmósfera cargada de superstición e
irracionalidad, que impregna la violencia desatada en los Andes
peruanos. El pishtaco, por el contrario, actúa como un dato escondido,
una estructura invisible que otorga significado a las diferentes
expresiones de la violencia que envuelven las vidas de los personajes.
(97)61

Topics like organ theft and the extraction of blood are almost naturally
connected to the history of colonialist exploitation and modern imperialism,
establishing a symbolic chain that is condensed in certain iconic figures who
capture the socioeconomic conflict and the forms of agency that develop on the
level of the community as resistance to the practices of power. The relation
between body and commodity, life and wealth, exploitation and cannibalism is
connected to biopolitical elements that have deep roots in the period of conquest
and colonization and which articulate race, class, and gender around problems
related to social control, the authority of religious, political, and economic
institutions, and the forms these practices take in modernity.
Authors like Steve Stern, Juan Ansión, Efraín Morote Best, Peter Gose,
Mary Weismantel, and others trace the origins of pishtacos, or kharisiris, back to
the practices of Spanish soldiers who would use body fat from Indians to treat
their battle wounds during the period of conquest. This same material is also said
to have been used by Bethlehemite monks in their medical work throughout the
colonies. Rosario de Prybil, Ansión, Eudosio Sifuentes, and Juan Granda Oré
have researched reports of vampiric activity in colonial texts dating back to the
sixteenth century, referring in particular (like Wachtel) to Cristóbal Molina’s
work, Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los Incas, which was probably written
between 1575 and 1576.62
In the seventeenth century, the myth of the pishtaco appeared to be
associated with the Bethlehemite religious order, as Ricardo Palma (1833-1919)
reported in a text dedicated to “Los barbones” (1889) in the seventh installment
of his Tradiciones peruanas, where he writes:

A los indios del Cuzco les hizo creer algún bellaco que los belethmitas
degollaban a los enfermos para sacarles las enjundias y hacer manteca
para las boticas de Su Majestad. Así, cuando encontraban en la calle a
un belethmita, le gritaban ¡Naca! ¡Naca! (degolladores o verdugos), lo
colmaban de injurias, le tiraban piedras, y aun sucedió que por
equivocación mataran a un religioso de otra orden. (64-65)

Specifically, there are references to the fact that the founder of this order,
Pedro de San José de Betancur, had adopted the habit of licking the wounds of
the sick in an act of humility and mortification that was probably interpreted as a
form of “medical cannibalism” (De Prybil 131), or simply as vampirism.63 The
pishtacos’ behavior has been portrayed ever since then with a wide variety of
variations both with regard to its actions and its habits as well as its physical
characteristics.64
According to Gose,

The slaughterer is often portrayed as a bearded White man, wearing a

white poncho or tunic, riding a white mule and carrying a machete at
his side. In other accounts, he may be a mestizo who wears black
leather clothing made from the hide of his flayed human victims and
rides a black mule. Some accounts even pose a team of two, where one
is black and the other white, for the ñakaq is a creature of death and
polarity. (296)

It is interesting to note, as Bellier and Hocquenghem do, that “[e]l pishtaco

nunca es acusado de emplear el fusil, que es el símbolo más evidente de la fuerza
de los blancos. Este rasgo indica que los indios se sitúan en el terreno de las
representaciones del poder y no en el análisis del poder en sí” (55).
The stories collected from the 1950s in the central highlands of Peru that was
edited by Pedro Monge and published by José María Arguedas in his studies of
the folklore of the Mantaro Valley and in the book he produced with Francisco
Izquierdo, Mitos, leyendas y cuentos (1970) constitute a fundamental source on
pishtacos and their habits, attributes, and activities in the areas of Huancayo,
Jauja, Canta, La Oroya, and other sites. As Gonzalo Portocarrero writes, “En los
Andes Centrales el pensamiento no ha abjurado de su potencia mítica. El
proceso de secularización es lento y desigual” (“La ética andino-cristiana” 123).
The theme of the pishtaco articulates this syncretism in both its mythic structure
and its possible ideological meanings.
The versions reported by villagers who had been witnesses to the
“slaughterers” in this region make reference to their presence in caves and
isolated places, their appearance as pairs of well-dressed individuals who
kidnapped women and made them into their servants and lovers and whom they
frequently mutilated, as well as frequent episodes of decapitated victims who
were incapacitated by a narcotic bone dust blown in their faces. According to a
study by Wilfredo Kapsoli, pishtacos are often described as black, an attribute
that he interprets as coming from the role of Indian executioner that African
slaves carried out in the central highlands when, “durante la sublevación de Juan
Santos Atahualpa en 1742 fueron condenados a muerte junto con los misioneros
y los españoles” (68). In any case, these stories demonstrate that the racialization
of the pishtaco is more complex than some authors have assumed. According to
Kapsoli, “[e]stas evidencias desmienten de manera categórica la idea de que todo
pishtaco es blanco, gringo y de apariencia sobre humana.” Morote instead
describes the pishtaco, as Kapsoli recalls, as “un hombre de pequeña talla, de
miembros potentes, de rostro color de púrpura. Los cabellos y la barba largos y
ensortijados casi del mismo color del rostro” (68).
In Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes (2001),
Weismantel argues that, even though there are testimonies from Bolivian
villagers who refer to kharisiri as an indigenous individual, the creature is more
frequently represented as mestizo. In this sense, the pishtaco, because of the fear
its legend spreads and because it constitutes a bridge between indigenous and
white communities, has a unifying effect on them as they tend to come together
in the face of the threat of the creature’s return (7). The pishtaco’s undefined
ethnicity contributes to its phantasmagoric quality since its shifting appearance
makes it nearly impossible to recognize and causes increased suspicion on all
levels of the community. Its constant features include nomadism and exteriority,
as well as its appearance’s incongruence in relation to its environment.
Weismantel underscores its uncanny effect: the experiences of defamiliarity and
strangeness that its difference provokes, the web of emotions that accompany it
(mainly fear, mistrust, and aggressiveness), in which the ancestral and the
atavistic are reactivated by organizing forces of modernity, creating a thanatic,
non-dialectical relation around the pishtaco monster. As in the Freudian
definition of the uncanny, the pishtaco is both familiar and foreign: it is
something both known and feared that returns with its charge of irreducible and
threatening alterity. On the collective level, the pishtaco keeps alive the notion of
an aggressive and dangerous alterity: that of the colonizer, the exploiter, the
invader, the city dweller, the foreigner, the anthropologist, the imperialist, the
intellectual, the businessman, the capitalist, the usurper. In this way, the pishtaco
constitutes the element of social immunity that maintains the relation of the
community to the biopolitical power that subjugates it.
As Gose points out, the pishtaco represents the “Baroque moment” of
Andean culture (309), which is to say, the instance of overcodification that in the
colonial context allegorizes the radical syncretism that began with the collision
between imperial power and indigenous perspectives. It is a moment of symbolic
exaggeration in which what is closest and most well-known confronts the
denaturalizing forces of the Other and tests out radical approaches to
rearticulations of identity. This bundle or constellation of meanings is organized
(at least on one of its main levels) by the reading of the body and its signs, an
essential practice of colonization and the systems of exploitation and exclusion it
produced. As a deformed and perverse extension of the social (racial)
classifications inherent to Andean society, the pishtaco continues to re-pose the
unresolved questions of ethnicity and the place of indigenous cultures in the face
of modernity’s foreign and aggressive proposals, returning to the theme of race
as a trigger of social antagonisms.
To the monstrous transgression of borders related to corporeality the pishtaco
adds its constant nomadic movement between rural and urban, criollo and
indigenous, and foreign and local spaces. In addition, its habits connect it to the
interiority of its victim’s organism in an even more grotesque way than is
suggested by the vampire’s hygienic extraction of blood, which gradually
weakens the victim through discrete orifices and is masked behind an embrace,
partially hidden by the sudden rising of the cape, an elegant and sensual gesture
supported by the visual paraphernalia of the Gothic in an update of the prestige
of medieval occultism. The pishtaco kills through evacuation, through the
dismantling of the body, which goes to the essence of life, the organic substances
that oil the machinery of domination, subordinating life to technology, blood to
progress, in a ritualism that exudes a dark and overflowing emotional complex.
It is the living image of dispossession, an itinerant, thanatic and transhistorical
incarnation that sums up a genocidal history of exploitation and victimization.
In her studies on the pishtaco in the Andean region, Weismantel considers
the Bolivian and Ecuadorian variants of the phenomenon and the elements of
territoriality that characterize them in material and symbolic terms, because the
monster allegorically reactivates the relations between communal spaces within
national culture, challenging the multiculturalist policies of ethno-cultural
assimilation. As Weismantel asserts, “[t]he political geography of race creates
separations that are both unreal and fiercely defended” (13). The violent
transgression of the borders that stage the pishtaco’s presence and activity in the
Andean region destabilizes the concepts of order and social discipline,
unification, centralism, progress, and so on. His erratic movement connects with
atavistic principles that have become embedded in modernity and dramatizes the
processes of mutual contamination among diverse cultural, economic, and
ideological domains.
While some scholars lean toward the more universalist interpretations of the
pishtaco as a representation of the demonic quality of capitalism, others, like
Gose, consider it to be instead

An “amoral” expression of the fascination that powerless people feel

when contemplating the ability of superordinate beings—weather gods
or local white men—to devour the weak. Far from offering an
“economic analysis” or an “ideology of political resistance to
exploitation”, he [Gose] asserts, Indians actually use the story of the
ñakaq to “articulate an erotico-religious desire” for their own
destruction. The ñakaq, then, is an emblem of Thanatos. (Weismantel
7-8)65

In her interpretation of the pishtaco, Jean Franco relates this monster’s

activity to the extraction of surplus value (similar to what was mentioned above
with regard to the figure of the vampire):

Body-part rumors are thus not just metaphors or symbols; they also add
a modern inflection to the Peruvian pishtaco stories (still current in the
Andes), according to which ladinos kidnapped Indians and extracted
grease from their bodies, sometimes for medicinal purposes but also to
grease guns or sugar mills or machines. In this story, what is interesting
is not the abstraction of surplus value from labor but the use of the
body to keep conquest and industry going. As one researcher has
observed in modern versions of the story, the grease is always exported
and even is rumored to have been used in space rockets. Nor are such
stories confined to Latin America—although in the United States body
exploitation is most often attributed to visitors from outer space.
(“Globalization and the Popular” 217)

This passage articulates, in some cases, elements we have already discussed

as belonging to the semantic and ideological field of the monstrous, but in
peripheral areas these elements acquire a particular precision and sordid quality
insofar as they are saturated with the specific features of the colonialist
domination. In fact, the references to labor, the extraction of life, surplus value,
corporeality, race, foreign exploitation, elements of military control, and social
violence all form a constellation of meaning that does not sacrifice any
contingent aspect of local history to the broad symbolic domains of non-
peripheral monstrosity. The visual and discursive paraphernalia of the Gothic is
re-deployed in these contexts through a historical and ideological texture that
renounces universality to emphasize instead the particularism that sacrifices
medievalist performances to the codifications of the pre-Western, ethnically
hybrid, tense, and fragmented Andean world. As Franco notes:

In the pishtaco, the grease makes the colonial and the capitalist
machine function and requires the death of the donor. But the body-
parts rumors and the Andean stories demonstrate the local within the
global. The body is no longer for reproduction within the family
structure but rather a tradable commodity that can be exported to keep
the global elite going. (“Globalization and the Popular” 217)
 The sketch provided by McNally is even more detailed, bringing together the
radicalized political spectrum of the 1980s, foreign debt, and the financial
circuits of global capitalism that form the basis for the mise-en-scène of Andean
vampirism.

Consider two cases of folkloric reactions by indigenous peoples in the

Andean region of South America to debt-driven economic crises. In
1982-1983, panic swept parts of Bolivia, where it was said that
gringos, in cahoots with the country’s president, had been sent by the
World Bank on a mission to extract fat from peasants in order to repay
foreign debts. Later in the decade, rumors circulated in Ayacucho
neighborhoods in Peru that children were being abducted by machine-
gun wielding gringos equipped with instruments for tearing out
eyeballs to be sold abroad in order to pay off foreign debts. Here, we
encounter another potent folkloric representation of the threats posed to
bodily integrity by the financial circuits of global capitalism.… Rather
than pre-modern superstitions, therefore, fantastic depictions of global
capitalism as a vampire-system that extracts and sells body parts
capture something very real about the economic universe we inhabit.
(9)

The loss of control of the individual body and the social body is concentrated
in the figure of the pishtaco, as it constitutes a fertile space for the convergence
of elements from diverse origins. These latter stage the socioeconomic conflict
of the Andean region, particularly the way in which the popular is debated
before the exploitation of local elites and the transnationalized forces of capital.
The pishtaco discourse thus constitutes an anti-imperialist interrogation that
denounces class collaboration, the game of economic and political interests, and
the ethnic and racial prejudices that have been rife in the region since the
colonial era and which survive as coloniality in modernity. As Franco notes, it
demonstrates the downfall of Enlightenment discourse: the inability of
rationality and, even more, of instrumental reason to take notice of an excessive,
overflowing, demonized, and radically dysfunctional reality.
Themes such as sacrifice, tribute, retribution, and punishment, which are
articulated in the construction of localized forms of monstrosity, particularly in
rural contexts, as is the case of the pishtaco, illustrate aspects of social self-
recognition of different ethnic groups and indigenous communities. Additionally,
these constructs are symbolic apparatuses of social cohesion in segments of
society that have been historically victimized and demonized by power in its
regional, national, and international manifestations. In fact, the figure of the
pishtaco, strongly connected to the regional conception of the sacred (both in
popular perceptions of the issues of social injustice and inequality, exploitation,
foreign investment, etc.), thematizes an ecologically potent and multifaceted
continuity that forms the background against which the region’s politico-
economic problematic is outlined. The figure and activity of the pishtaco is
closely related to nature, the animal and human world, belief and social
organization, the body and technology, organic cycles and the machinic function
of the state and modernity as domains that are differentiated from but
inextricably linked to domination and the dismantling of indigenous society.
The becomings that take place among these diverse levels give the
indigenous world a fluidity and instability that turn out to be disturbing and even
incomprehensible to Western perspectives. However, they are also connected to
the cycle of life, the presence of the dead, and a relationship with the earth, all
notions which form part of indigenous cosmovisions. The movement between
one species and another, as well as mutations of form and meaning within the
same species, is related to the unstable and precarious constitution of the
monstrous, a category that is condemned to intermediacy for its incomplete,
transitional, and polysemic character. It equally suggests modes of circulation
that are radically different from but also convergent with capitalist modes which
recombine through sacrificial dynamics, as Gose notes, in an indissoluble fusion
between the region’s essential organic fertility and mineral wealth. Finally, it is
the regional dimension of global structures that stem from the concept of
sacrificial tribute (redefined in modern terms as foreign debt), effectuated by
local economies at the altar of capitalism.
The pishtaco’s existence and characteristics have been interpreted in some
cases as a derivative and monstered form of the sacrificial rites through which
pre-Hispanic communities carried out offerings to the apus or Andean deities
considered instrumental to bountiful harvests and the fertility of the lands. These
ritualistic practices, based in the idea of retribution, supported a cycle of
exchange that has been compared to capitalist commodity exchange with regard
to the circulation of value, the relation between offerings and gifts, and the
fetishization of elements considered to be central to symbolic transaction. This
latter relates the level of the human to the level of the divine, taking into
consideration the intermediate instance of the natural in which the first two are
articulated (Gose 297-98). As Gose has pointed out, although they are originally
the gods of the mountains, the apus can also be portrayed through animal images
(condor, hawk, puma, etc.). When they take human form, they are generally
blonde men with blue eyes dressed in elegant clothing and riding boots, like the
old hacendados. The phenotypical traits of power are attributed to the apu, a
polysemic figure in which the divine unites with social privilege, refers to
national and international types associated with wealth, in clear contrast to the
characterizations of the peasant masses who are subjected to and victimized by a
power that (con)fuses nature with divinity.
The subject of fat is portrayed in the symbolic context of the pishtaco with
the same centrality and importance that is concentrated in the element of blood
in vampirism: it constitutes the vital substance that articulates signifiers in which
bodily organicity has its counterpart in conformity with the social body, creating
a biopolitical parallelism that reaches its most significant points in the ideas of
exploitation, circulation, exchange, and accumulation. Canessa correctly
suggests that more than an element symbolizing life, fat should be seen as a
trope that articulates and mobilizes signifiers at different levels.
In Bellier and Hocquenghem’s analysis of the pishtaco, they offer the
following characterization:

El “victimario” es extranjero a la comunidad, puede ser un gringo,

efectúa diversos oficios especializados, actúa aisladamente, en la
noche, ataca al indio pobre y sin defensa, con la ayuda de un alambre o
de un cuchillo, como un sable curvo con el cual corta la cabeza y los
miembros de la víctima para echarlos al agua. Mata a los hombres y
viola a las mujeres. Suspendiendo el cuerpo de la víctima o
calentándolo a fuego lento, recoge la grasa india que se dice sirven
para lubricar los ejes y los rodajes de todo tipo de máquinas o que entra
en la composición de los cosméticos y de los medicamentos. Las
víctimas potenciales están como hipnotizadas pero, a veces, pueden
tratar de precaverse gracias a una magia de defensa: así el hecho de
mojar su poncho en el agua bajo la mirada del “victimario”, de invitar
 coca, de mostrar una cabeza de ajo atravesada por una aguja o comer
tierra sería de cierta eficacia. (50)66

For his part, Ansión argues in his study of the demonic elements of Andean
culture that

La grasa representa la fuerza vital de la persona, que es su bien más

preciado. Por eso, la extracción de grasa por un foráneo, enviado por
gente de la ciudad, por curas o por gente del propio gobierno, es una
manera de representar la extracción del plustrabajo y la explotación del
campesino. Esto es aún más claro en los casos en que el nak’aq es un
hacendado. La multiplicidad de versiones se explica entonces en
relación con las realidades locales diversas, pero todas tienden a
explicar la situación de explotación. (qtd. in Kapsoli 70-71)

This becomes even more evident, as Kapsoli explains, in cases in which the
pishtaco is represented as a hacendado whose physical characteristics and
behavior condense local problematics related to the exploitation of indigenous
populations. In other cases, the pishtaco is portrayed as an old woman in rags or
as a North American professional. Nevertheless, the idea that established powers
support and even require the pishtaco’s activity underlies most popular stories
about the phenomenon. Kapsoli refers to Arguedas’s anthropological studies,
mentioned above, in which he recorded the popular belief that the Peruvian
government was directly implicated in the use of human fat for the lubrication of
railroad equipment:

Una maestra me aseguró que efectivamente los degolladores tenían

contrato con el gobierno para enviar grasa humana que era empleada
en la lubricación de las locomotoras; la misma maestra afirmó que el
contrato de los pishtacos con el Gobierno era reciente y que antes sólo
empleaban la grasa humana en la fundición de las campanas. (qtd. in
Kapsoli 71)67

The constantly shifting representations of the pishtaco show it to be a

phantasmagoric figure that hides behind diverse masks, able to flourish in the
most unexpected moments and through the most unexpected individuals.
Catharine Stimpson refers to this aspect of the evolution of the figure of the
pishtaco, which in the colonial context assimilated attributes of the Spanish
conquistadors who used Indian fat to treat their wounds. From the eighteenth
century on, the pishtaco had been represented as a monk with a knife, and later
as a man on a horse or driving an automobile. In any case, the element of the
foreigner’s invasive power threatening indigenous communities is persistent, as
are the constant references to the asymmetrical social relations in which the
pishtaco’s activity takes place. The imprecise nature of its appearance makes it
omnipresent and elusive. More than a particular and concrete being, the pishtaco
constitutes a quality of the real: a possible form of the manifestation of evil
without a definitive location harasses communities and provokes a constant and
indefinite terror, a permanent mistrust in Otherness and its predatory and
malevolent intentions. As Stimpson explains, “despite these variations, the
central meaning of the pishtaco has remained stable: he is a colonizer or from
the metropolitan center, he is white, he is male, he will penetrate the body of the
Indian—female or male—and he will destroy and profit from the Indian” (xiii-
xiv).
However, this stability does not minimize the importance of the historical
and cultural variables of the pishtaco, which are related to important aesthetico-
ideological nuances in the development of these narratives of cultural resistance
and their articulation to diverse social contexts.
According to the investigations of Bellier and Hocquenghem, who trace the
evolution of the pishtaco from the colonial period onward,

La idea de que los españoles utilizan la grasa con fines opuestos al

interés de la sociedad india, remite a las prácticas de brujería a
distancia en la que la punción de grasa se asimila a una influencia
sobre el saber, induciendo a una pérdida de conocimiento. Esto se
combina con una necesidad real de grasa que manifiestan los
españoles, detentores de armas y de máquinas (molino, rodaje, eje...),
símbolos del poder frente al cual los indios deben inclinarse. (50)

In communities victimized by the pishtaco, the use ritual use of Andean

ingredients, like chile, salt, garlic, and potato starch has been reported, all of
which are used to ward off attacks. It is interesting to note that in popular
narratives, the pishtacos are in many cases defeated, with the fundamental
element being not only the ingenuity and resistance of the would-be victims but
also the actions of animals like dogs, bulls, and so on that come to the victims’
defense. Rosario de Prybil asserts that, around 1920, according to stories that
circulated in the areas where the myth was most well-known, a variant of the
pishtaco story emerged in which the monster was usually defeated. As we have
seen, both the animal world and food-related metaphors are common in the
teratological dimension, in which the vampire and the bat are often (con)fused in
one supernatural being, or in which an organism becomes or transforms itself
from animal to human form and vice versa, as with the werewolf. In the
phishtacos’ sphere of activity, Kapsoli notes the references to transformation in
popular stories about the ancient Amaru, “monstruo horrible con cabeza de
llama, dos pequeñas alas y cuerpo de batracio que terminaba en una gran cola de
serpiente,” that can also turn into a bull (73-74). Bellier and Hocquenghem also
emphasize that the image of the sorcerer is inseparable from that of the pishtaco,
whose significance can be traced back to the colonial confrontation between the
biopolitical control of Christianity over indigenous communities and their
practices and beliefs about the exercise of bodily rites for offerings, pagos,
sacrifices, or tributes to the apus.
The association of the pishtaco with technological elements (metal objects,
industrial machinery, railroads, tools, space rockets, etc.) opens up another
fundamental interpretative path for the comprehension of its meaning since it is
related to capital and to labor in the Marxist approach to both the topic of
vampirism and, in a similar way, the phenomena of exploitation and alienation
that are effects of the process of capitalist production. Gose highlights the
importance of metal in the pishtaco’s symbolic configurations, particularly in
relation to the symbolism of the sound made by the machete carried by this
character, a metallic scraping sound that indicates its approach to its victims.
According to Gose, the sound of the metal constitutes an important element in
the poetics of the pishtaco: “Enchanted metallic ringing becomes both the means
and the ends of these attacks, and if grease changes hands as a commodity
between the harsh clang of the machete and the sonorous tolling of the church
bell, then the jingle of money only smooths the transition” (307).
Thus, a signifying contrast is produced between sounds that refer to the
metalized world of technology in the context of a capitalism in which religious
elements and the power of money sit side by side, mediated by the anomalous
and sinister intervention of the pishtaco, whose repetitive and ritualistic actions
create a perverse bridge between atavism and modernity. Equally, in Gose’s
version, the extraction of fat is accomplished through a curved needle called a
yawri, which is used to sever the nerves in an animal’s vertebral column, an
implement that is occasionally substituted by “a special machine” from the
United States.68 The pishtaco’s predatory activity is therefore guided by the
presence of instruments and materials that denote both the raw materials usurped
by colonizers and their manufactured modality, which is transformed and
returned to the community from which it emerged to exercise its malevolent
power over its ancestral victims.
A transition/transaction between social spaces, temporalities, and
commodified elements, the pishtaco’s voracity is a metaphor of the commerce
between life and capital which establishes the phantasmagoria of the
incommensurable, much like the imagery of Marx’s texts. It deploys multiple
exogenous forces whose power cannot be reduced to the principles of rationality
or to the disciplinary regime of modernity. Under the mask of the pishtaco, the
evil of capital roams the world seeking to satisfy its appetite, which has nothing
to do with hunger but rather with the anxiety of infinite accumulation and
consumption. The pishtaco, like other monsters, is situated on the metaphysical
side of the economy: it is the spectral image of modernity’s failures and the
mutant incarnation of its historical signifiers.
But the actions of the pishtaco, whether they ultimately can be attributed to a
foreigner or to someone from Lima who has usurped the wealth of the
countryside and the mountains, are also rural in nature and connected to the
earth, farming, and livestock. De Prybil emphasizes that there are certain
connections, yet to be studied in a systematic way, that show sightings of the
pishtaco occur more frequently during harvest times and during the dry season in
Peru (primarily in August), when there is typically increased anxiety about crop
yield (125).69 As Weismantel points out, “What the ñakaq does with the fat of
Indians is to sell it: he is moved by a lust for profit, not for flesh” (208). The
theme of wealth is recycled and adapted to different contexts, evoking livestock,
agriculture, and mining as sources that inspire greed.
In this way, the pishtaco narrative serves at once as a denunciation of the
national and international exploitation of indigenous populations, as an
expression of the fears and confusions associated with modernity, as a rejection
of the hegemony of the capital city, Lima, which overwhelms local cultures and
economies with its exclusive centralism, and as a revelation of the asymmetries
that characterize the relationship between indigenous peasant communities and
external powers, whether national or international, that exploit them and
sacrifice them for their own interests.
According to Bellier and Hocquenghem, the pishtaco myth has a defensive
and unifying but always polyvalent function on the social level, the signifier of
which can be redefined in different cultural contexts.

En los Andes como en la Amazonía, el pishtaco permite restaurar la

cohesión de la comunidad y desechar las injerencias exteriores,
extranjeras, percibidas como amenazadoras. En un contexto de
desestructuración cultural, de alienación, el miedo inspirado por este
personaje puede ser utilizado por todos, incluso por los blancos para
esconder las culpabilidades reales designando un enemigo mítico
unificador. La configuración general en la cual se inscribe el mito del
“victimario de indio,” el pishtaco, es la de una representación del Otro
todopoderoso que la ambivalencia de sus poderes hace temer. (56)

In this way, economics and belief constitute the ideological axes of the
pishtaco construct. What stands out in the order of machinic thought associated
with this phenomenon is the idea that the spirits of the mountains possess
subterranean machines that transform, through some kind of alchemical
operation, the tributes of indigenous religious practice into gold and silver, riches
that would remain preserved beneath the surface of the earth, protected by locks
and gates (Gose 301; Quispe 34-37). The connections studied by these authors
reinforce the idea of a close relationship between nature, technology, violence,
and capital, obviously linked to the mineral extraction that has taken place in the
region since the colonial era. Furthermore, the association of the practices of
expropriation of the region’s resources with the exploitative use of labor power,
sometimes even to the point of death itself, is evident on both the individual as
well as the community level. As with other monsters, the violence that emerges
from an anomalous corporeality that has been transformed into an apparatus of
annihilation and a metaphor of organic consumption is related to politico-
economic situations that are difficult to assimilate from dominant epistemic
categories. In non-Western cultures subjected to marginalization and
(neo)colonialist depredation—in many cases speakers of non-dominant
languages imbued with syncretic thought and a frequently belligerent social
consciousness—belief in phenomena like the pishtaco provides an alternative
matrix for interpreting social reality and conflicts related to criollo domination.
With its own iconography, its own history, and its own symbolic texture, these
other narratives allow for the expression and symbolic representation of
common feelings, which these stories help to share on a collective level. They
not only lend support to an autonomous interpretation of social reality but also
permit the circulation of meaning, the socialization of experience, and the
strengthening of community bonds, as well as the development of strategies of
defense and cultural resistance.
The resurgence of pishtacos and their evolution into the myth of the sacaojos
occurred (as many authors have discussed) during the end of the 1980s, when the
internal war in Peru intensified and the level of violence increased in both cities
and the countryside, leading to a crisis of the state and a profound break within
social and political structures. Carlos Iván Degregori refers to the device of myth
as a mode of expressing the terror of a situation in which social recognition and
public safety have been substantially altered.70 According to Degregori, the
inhabitants of the zones most severely affected by military confrontations and
the terrorism of armed groups retain atavistic beliefs that channel popular
uncertainty and fear: “Acorralados, hechos añicos hasta sus más sutiles
mecanismos ‘racionales’ de defensa, las explicaciones míticas, por cierto
siempre presentes, saltan a primer plano” (111).
This interesting prolongation of the notions of power and depredation from
the politico-economic field to the sociocultural realm alerts us to the degree of
popular consciousness about the complicity between different “comfortable”
segments of society uniting against the dispossessed. The establishment of
structures of domination that dismantle indigenous society and annihilate the
individual bodies of groups subalternized by colonialism and modernity has its
counterpart in the imposition of epistemic and interpretative models that
denaturalize the popular. In Stipmson’s words, “during the economic crisis of the
1980s, when rural residents immigrated to urban centers, the pishtaco reappeared
as the sacaojos, white medical technicians in dark suits who steal and
dismember children. From time to time, male anthropologists have been
associated with the pishtaco” (xiii).
The reaction against the anthropologists implies a radical and to a large
extent conscious rejection of the forms of epistemic invasion and representation
of the dominated through disciplinary discourses elaborated “from outside and
from above,” which is to say, from positions that construct their object of study
according to preconceived paradigms and values. As a constellation of
meanings, the pishtaco represents, appropriately, these various levels of popular
exploitation and alienation.
In Sacaojos, crisis social y fantasmas coloniales (1991), Gonzalo
Portocarrero Maisch and Isidro Valentín Soraya Irigoyen recover the social and
political context that surrounds these reappearances, as well as the “mental
landscape” and the atmosphere of “collective psychosis” that accompanies this
supernatural threat, which seems to encompass all the collective fears of the
systemic crisis and processes of the internal war in Peru in the 1980s. At the
same time that they trace the sacaojos’s colonial genealogy, Portocarrero and
Soraya reveal testimonies from multiple informants who describe this figure’s
features and behavior along with its effects on the level of the community. As
these sociologists’ analysis shows, in a world where the dominant culture
imposes a desacralized, rational, and instrumentalist vision of reality, particularly
in times of crisis, alternative forms of knowledge open up new approaches to a
system of relations that threatens and alienates representatives of dominated
cultures and vulnerable and marginal segments of society. The sacaojos, like the
figure of the pishtaco, articulates magical thinking and medical discourse,
creating a biopolitical constellation in which power and the body are connected
in dynamics charged with emotionality. In the narrative of the sacaojos, political
discourse, moral principles, and juridical regulation intersect, creating tensions,
associations, and epistemic antagonisms with substantial ideological
significance. The continuity between pishtacos and the sacaojos lends
verisimilitude to the latter since “El sacaojos es el pishtaco transfigurado y
estilizado. Ambos son seres malignos, agresivos y perversos” (Portocarrero and
Soraya 17).
As these authors note, the phenomenon of the sacaojos functions on the basis
of “una actitud ambigua y conflictiva frente a la modernidad” (20) on the part of
the affected community members, which can be perceived, for example, in the
discrediting and demonization of the figure of the doctor, who is considered
capable of taking advantage of their patients’ bodies, particularly with regard to
children. This idea has racial and class-based connotations that can be traced
back to the era of conquest and colonization because “los médicos eran
identificados como blancos. La ciencia y la modernidad asociadas al hecho
colonial” (20-21). The presence of the sacaojos, “emisarios de la frustración y la
muerte” (Portocarrero and Soraya 21), especially intensified in Peru in 1988 in
the midst of a climate created by the conjunction of a national economic crisis,
the paralysis of the government, scarcity, labor strikes, and the suspension of
public service, in which the country ground to a halt.71 Another twist that
characterizes the sacaojos phenomenon is some versions’ inclusion of the
monster leaving a large sum of money to the family of the victim for the eyes it
has taken, thus attributing a reparative behavior to the sacaojos (Portocarrero
and Soraya 48) that also relates to the economic crisis and the conjunction of
sentiments about corruption, necessity, and guilt that this situation created on the
popular level. The figure of the sacaojos expresses the mistrust of the other
conceived in racial terms (Portocarrero and Soraya 44), directed toward
professionals from urban centers, generally from Lima (such as anthropologists
and doctors), and foreigners, who are thought to have the intention of penetrating
(individual and community) bodies and are perceived as invasive and predatory.
Ansión has referred to the transition of the pishtaco into the sacaojos in the
following terms:

Los pishtacos sacaban la grasa, símbolo de la energía vital en una

sociedad agraria donde las posibilidades de sobrevivencia radicaban
esencialmente en la capacidad de trabajo. Los sacaojos aparecidos en
Lima extraen ahora el símbolo del conocimiento, de la apropiación de
lo occidental y de la modernidad. El rumor es peligroso, pues fortalece
las actitudes de desesperanza y de ruptura irracional con las
posibilidades de construir un futuro con la ayuda de un saber nuevo.
Indica un momento de desconcierto frente al avance de las grandes
mezclas culturales y sociales que se vienen produciendo
particularmente en la capital. (Pishtacos 14)

According to Ansión, the monstrosity of these apparitions, which can in

some cases function as referents for the reconstruction of social order, at the
same time has a deteriorating effect on the community level insofar as they
exacerbate xenophobic sentiments, creating a fundamentalist withdrawal that
prohibits the integration of knowledges and practices that could open up
alternatives at the popular level. The blindness caused by the removal of the
eyes, especially in children, suggests (as Ansión indicates) the material and
symbolic blockage of education (the power of “having eyes” with which to
confront the world), and the possibility of contemplating the Other, which can
entail the alienation of the self and even a threat to individual and community
survival. It is thus a metaphor for the fear of intercultural contact and the effects
of the transculturating practices associated with developmentalist processes in
the Andean region, which have been devastating at the popular level. The dust
that the pishtaco and the sacaojos use to take out their victims’ eyes (like the
idea of Haitian zombie powder) is produced, according to some versions, with
desiccated organic material for medicinal or magical use, which creates a circuit
of the reproduction of violence that, as in capitalism, returns the raw material to
the community from which it was extracted in manufactured form in a demonic
exercise of expropriation, accumulation, and consumption.
In this way, the theme of the pishtaco articulates, in a constellation of
meanings, anti-imperialist sentiments, popular mistrust of the national state,
fears derived from modernization, and ethnic differences: “el regreso de los
pishtacos revela un repliegue, ya no solo sobre lo local sino sobre lo étnico y,
por tanto, un desgarramiento profundo de los débiles tejidos nacionales que se
habían ido formando en la zona” (Degregori 113).
The symbolism of the pishtaco and its intrinsic relation to ethnic conflict
undoubtedly constitutes one of the most prominent aspects of comprehending
this materialization of the monstrosity of power and violence in the Andean
region. Weismantel, for example, highlights the sexual elements associated with
this phenomenon, such as the clubs and other weapons used by the ñakaq, as if
they were phallic attributes. The automobile portrayed in many versions
ironically functions as a sign of white masculinity, as does the practice of
mutilating victims. This sinister practice, which is related to the castration
anxiety Freud mentions in his reflections on the uncanny, is essential to the
comprehension of the monstrous. In line with this Freudian concept, the image
of the white man as a castrating father refers to the function of colonizers and
criollos whose racial paternalism infantilized and subjugated indigenous
populations, physically and spiritually incapacitating them (Weismantel 222).
However, this narrative also suggests the obsessive recreation of a social order
structured on the basis of loss and sacrifice, a matrix that is prolonged as
coloniality in modernity. As Weismantel points out,

Sex and race exceed and exacerbate the alienation produced by class,
resulting in a still more extreme alterity, which ultimately alienates us
not only from others but from our own bodies as well. This state of
utter estrangement is embodied in the ñakaq, who looks at the bodies
of his fellow humans and perceives only a stock of raw materials to be
turned into a profit. (263)

The biopolitical force of pishtaco monstrosity can only be fully appreciated

within the historico-social context in which the narrative is produced and as a
counterpoint to official versions in which the bodily is metaphorized, avoided, or
negated to the benefit of more aseptic perspectives on the economic and social
operations of modernity. According to Weismantel, the grisly materiality of the
practice of the ñakaq is supported by vividly sensorial and ghastly
representations involving inner viscera and organic fluids, their colors, odors,
and tastes, their manipulation and spurious uses, thus contradicting the bourgeois
version of a sanitized and sterile modernity in which alienation assures a safe
distance from the body: “the figure of the ñakaq brings to light what the bright
clean surfaces of the fetishized commodity try to hide: the multiple unequal
exchanges that feed the white body and drain the Indian one” (265).
The fetishization and exchange of the commodity acquires a hyperbolic
dimension in the practice of the pishtaco in which the themes of exploitation,
accumulation, and consumption are specified ad nauseum. Obsessively
repetitive, ritualized, and ominous, the pishtaco’s return constitutes a litany-like
and bloody reminder of the monstrosity of the process of the devastation of
economies and indigenous cultures and the forms of victimization that are
encoded as an undeniable testimony of the civilizing barbarism at the very heart
of modernity.
Related to the theme of pishtacos and sacaojos, the figure of the condenado
also forms part of the repertoire of the macabre in the Andean region, denoting
in this case the theme of punishment for those who have lived outside the law.
The transgressor suffers a “bad death,” remaining trapped, like the zombie, in an
in-between place in which the faults and sins committed during one’s life
(specifically avarice and the abuse of others) are materially paid for. Portocarrero
has studied these narratives, estimating that the figure of the condenado is a
syncretic product that articulates elements of Christianity (the notion of guilt and
punishment) and pre-Hispanic ideas (earthly retribution and expiation for the
evil one has committed).72 The condenado pays for sin on earth, punished with
an insatiable hunger. If the theme of hunger relates to the indigence and
vulnerability of vast indigenous populations marginalized both in the colonial
period and in the criollo republic, the idea of the abuse of power or of
mistreatment of others also has broad connotations in Andean society throughout
history, profoundly stratified and rife with criteria for racial discrimination,
patriarchy, and so on. The condenado is represented, as Portocarrero notes, as a
living skeleton dressed in a sayal who attacks and eats humans, impelled by a
drive that finds neither satisfaction nor end because the condenados

no retienen lo que ingieren, el alimento se les chorrea entre las

mandíbulas y las costillas. Los condenados expresan la paradoja de
morirse de hambre cuando no se hace sino comer. Pero, por otro lado,
hablan y razonan; actúan para tratar de conseguir esa satisfacción
inalcanzable. Arden de deseo. Con frecuencia botan candela. Su
frustración los llena de ira. Son peligrosos. Están inscritos en la
repetición compulsiva. Hacen daño y sufren. Eventualmente pueden
cumplir con su condena y morir en forma definitiva. (“La ética andino-
cristiana” 128)

Both thanatic and interstitial like the zombie, the condenado is portrayed as
an individual figure, never in groups, which confers on it a sense of desolation.
Apart from obvious specific features, it shares physical characteristics, habits,
and effects with similar monsters: it is interstitial, it lives in a space of intensified
emotionality, and it transgresses the corporeality of others. However, in contrast
to zombies and vampires, it has only captured regional popular imaginaries. It
produces fear not only through attacks carried out against communities but also
through the danger that exists for anyone of the possibility of being subject to a
“bad death,” thus prolonging the expiation of guilt among the living through a
torturous, interminable desire that consumes it like fire. Like other monsters, the
condenado is situated in a spatial and temporal conjuncture, an in-between place
and an in-between time that keeps it a prisoner of its skeletal essence. It has lost
its flesh but maintains desire; it can make use of reason and language but only to
grasp its disgrace and manifest its rage. It is an image whose typical attire
inscribes it within a cultural and even regional locality, although its bones
connect it to the universal human condition—to its ruin. It desperately wants to
incorporate the Other but loses it with every mouthful, unavoidably wasting
corporeality. Affective intensification invades it and exceeds it, but the terror it
generates prohibits empathy, also causing its emotionality to get lost, leaving it
to its solitary and erratic trajectory.

Notes
1. The debate on the nature of the Indian and the legitimacy of the Conquest reached one of its pinnacles in
the papal bull Sublimis Deus (1573), issued by Paul III, which recognized the human condition of the
Indians and their right to convert to Christianity (which, it insists, should happen peacefully). At the
Valladolid debates of 1550-1551, several aspects of the right to and theological justification of the
Conquest and its methods of domination and conversion were presented. The main positions on the
topic were represented by Bartolomé de las Casas, in defense of the rights of the indigenous, and Juan
Ginés de Sepúlveda, advocating the right of the Spanish to imperial domination.
2. On the topic of monsters in Leibniz and Locke, see Look.
3. In this regard, see Beatriz Sarlo and Andrew Brown, Test Tube Envy. For his part, César Aira analyzes
expressionism and the figure of the monster in Arlt: “Arlt propone una conciencia estancada, en la que
no hay unidad alguna que pueda tomar la iniciativa de un movimiento, sino una multiplicidad que se
quiere amorfa, una acumulación de Monstruos.… Todas las aporías arltianas, la de la sinceridad, la
ingenuidad, la calidad de la prosa, se explican en este dispositivo de la conciencia que pretende asis- tir
a su propio espectáculo, el lenguaje que quiere hablarse a sí mismo, en una palabra, el Monstruo. Ese
dispositivo mismo es el Monstruo” (61). Aira reads monstrosity in Arlt as an expressionist search for a
world populated by poetic and abominable forms and characters where the corporeal and the social are
based in a synthesis of exceptional emotional intensity.
4. Cyberpunk is a form of symbolic representation derived from science fiction that articulates aspects
related to social decadence with elements of advanced technology. According to Lawrence Person,
“Cyberpunk characters frequently seek to topple or exploit corrupt social orders. Postcyberpunk
characters tend to seek ways to live in, or even strengthen, an existing social order, or help construct a
better one. In cyberpunk, technology facilitates alienation from society. In post-cyberpunk, technology
is society.… Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge
of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change,
an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body.”
Additionally, this subgenre has mutated into “post-cyberpunk”: “Cyberpunk tended to be cold,
detached and alienated. Postcyberpunk tends to be warm, involved, and connected.” Examples of
cyberpunk film include Blade Runner (1982) and The Matrix (1999).
5. J. Andrew Brown has studied a corpus of “technological identities” in which the representation of the
human body complemented with prostheses or artificial organs is a metaphor for the social body
devastated by dictatorships and the effects of neoliberalism. The representation of torture or its effects
introduces the image of the body dominated by instruments that, violently penetrating the individual,
traumatically transform the latter’s emotional system and modes of socialization. In such cases, Brown
argues, the Father who tortures, far from being “inessential, as Haraway writes in the previous citation,
 becomes a memory that the victims obsessively revisit.” The texts Brown analyzes include Piglia’s
Respiración artificial (1980) and Ciudad ausente (1992), Alicia Borinsky’s Cine continuado (1997),
Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la tierra (1997), Eugenio Prado’s Lóbulo (1998), Rafael Courtoisie’s
Tajos (2000), Edmundo Paz Soldán’s El delirio de Turing (2003), Carlos Gamerro’s Las islas (1998),
Alberto Fuget’s Por favor, rebobinar (1996), and Rodrigo Fresán’s Mantra (2001), among others. In
these texts, the theme of the posthuman is combined with questions relating to gender, memory,
politics, mass media, and urban violence, resulting in narratives that invite reflection on the topic of
subjectivity in times in which the paradigms of modernity have given way to globalized forms of
human relations and symbolic circulation.
6. My thanks to Sergio R. Franco, who provided me with material on Andean culture.
7. According to Honores, this information comes from Valentí Ferrán, “El origen etimológico del vampiro
moderno” 92-93.
8. Many of the texts collected in this anthology address the theme of the woman in relation to vampirism, a
subject that has been represented in Latin America, often by women writers, in a diverse array of
styles. The Peruvian anthology mentioned here includes stories by María Consuelo Villarán, Cynthia
Zegarra, and Leyla Bartet.
9. For example, Honores emphasizes the fact that La novia de Corinto (The Bride of Corinth) establishes a
connection to Goethe’s 1797 poem of the same name, in which he critiques Catholicism. The vampire
is the connecting element in both contexts, the Christian and the profane, as well as between the classic
version of the myth and its peripheral expressions.
10. With regard to La novia de Corinto, see the commentary on Calderón Fajardo in “Esta boca es mía.”
11. For more on this novel, see Calderón Fajardo’s “Doble de vampiro: delirio gótico y delicioso juego
filosófico.”
12. Braham mentions the influence of cinema on Quiroga, who considered this technology to be a process
capable of creating a “pure art” in which life could be faithfully reproduced. This fascination
influenced his own narrative techniques. See Braham, From Amazons to Zombies 139-41.
13. It is interesting to note the transnational dimension of these artists who converged around their shared
interest in the perspective of genre and teratological tendencies, which would be continued by, among
other artists, Guillermo del Toro in his cinematic work, which also operates on a trans-Atlantic level.
This director’s aesthetics in many ways recalls the tones and compositions of Varo and Carrington, as
well as the narrative perspectives from which the represented universe is illuminated. For more on this
subject in the case of Frida Kahlo, see Adriana López-Labourdette, “Mis cuerpos y mis monstruos.”
14. With regard to the way the novel addresses the body, Eugenia Brito has written: “Los cuerpos de El
Obsceno son cuerpos que sufren importantes mutaciones, por pérdida de órganos y facultades
(Humberto) o por adquisición de otras (Inés). Ortopedia que abre o cierra posibilidades del
conocimiento en un gesto no exento de poder. Pero este poder es un poder oprimido, un poder
generado ante la oposición y tiranía del dominante que impide todo movimiento, salida, o desarrollo,
generando un sistema de prisiones, muros a los que es preciso socavar o contrarrestar a cualquier
precio. Aunque sea la sangre” (76).
15. For more on Donoso’s work, see Isis Quinteros.
16. See Honores, “El zombi en la nueva narrativa latinoamericana” and “Zombis en Lima.”
17. Braham examines the influence of cinema on the work of Bioy Casares, for example, in La invención
de Morel (1940), where the relation between original and copy is explored along Benjaminian lines,
showing cinema’s problematic reproductive capacity to be one of its most salient features (From
Amazons to Zombies 142-43).
18. The main characters of these horror films make up part of the process of the “social production of fear”
that authors like Rossana Reguillo have studied from different communicational registers.
19. For more on this, see Maribel Cedeño Rojas and Miharu Miyasaca in their essay in Terra Zombi, edited
by Rosario Díaz-Zambrana.
20. For more on this, see Honores, “Monstruos de papel.” Countries like Argentina, Chile, and Colombia
have also produced examples of this kind of film in which apocalyptic or dystopian plots allegorize
national situations, political crises, themes of public safety, and more generally, social situations
 wracked with fear, hopelessness, or mourning.
21. My thanks go to Ignacio Sánchez-Prado for bringing this text to my attention.
22. Sontag says of camp: “It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed, the essence of
Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric—something of a
private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.…Camp is the consistently aesthetic
experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of
irony over tragedy” (“Notes on Camp” 275, 287).
23. This tradition of vampire films includes, for example, El fantasma del convento (directed by Fernando
de Fuentes, 1934), and El vampiro (1957) and El ataúd del vampiro (1959), both directed by Fernando
Méndez.
24. According to Fernández L’Hoeste, “La contradicción latente es la si- guiente: si lo ansiado es la
eternidad, y la eternidad contiene, en sí, la anulación del tiempo, y por ende, de una fe en el progreso,
en el desarrollo cronológico de las cosas, ¿cómo es posible conciliar la vida eterna con el
entendimiento de la modernidad? Para Del Toro, la solución al acertijo reside en invertir el paradigma:
frente a la eternidad, la modernidad no se convierte en una entelequia progresista, sino en un deterioro
acelerado” (41).
25. For more on this, see the essays collected in The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, edited
by Ann Davies, Deborah Shaw, and Dolores Tierney.
26. See Tierney and Antonio Lázaro-Reboll.
27. See in particular Paul Julian Smith’s review of the film.
28. Sheller cites bell hooks, who argues: “the commodification of difference promotes paradigms of
consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by a
consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of the Other’s
history through a process of decontextualization” (144).
29. For more on Jean Zombi, see Sheller 36 and passim.
30. While it comes from an entirely different cultural domain, the mummy is a predecessor of the figure of
the zombie. In spite of their similarities (both species are a type of living dead), their performances are
different. According to some, the zombie is “a mummy in street clothes,” although one fundamental
difference is the fact that the zombie generally acts in a group and in many cases practices cannibalism.
31. See Gilroy, Black Atlantic, particularly the first chapter, “Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of
Modernity.”
32. It is thought that in the case of Puerto Rico the belief in zombies is strengthened by the island’s
relationship to the United States, which is characterized by a history of exploitation and the “suction”
of resources (at first, humans but also coffee, sugar, tobacco, and livestock) by its powerful neighbor to
the north. Additionally, it has been noted that Puerto Rico was in the midst of a full-fledged AIDS
epidemic when a widespread fear of the chupacabras took hold of the island in the 1990s. Finally, the
influence of evangelical churches has introduced or intensified existing fears of the devil and other
maleficent beings. See Radford, 33-36.
33. See also Braham, “Problemas de género.”
34. Se Jáuregui 472.
35. The treatment of the theme of the zombie is inscribed within the broader field of voudou or vodou—a
system of belief primarily practiced in rural Haiti and Jamaica—notoriously stereotyped,
sensationalized, and racialized in what has been called “Voodoo,” which signals the reduction of the
concept to its most vulgarized and marketable modalities within the domain of popular culture and the
entertainment industry. The element of Hoodoo is prominent in the notion of Voodoo, referring to
magic of African origin that was sometimes combined with Native American elements, for example in
Louisiana, where transculturated forms of these practices continue to be developed and refined by
Haitian immigrants. Thus, it is a highly syncretic, alternative symbolic field to other, more Occidental
discourses, beliefs, and ideologies like Christianity. Defined by orality and the transmission of
transculturated legends, myths, and stories, voudou integrates collective imaginaries, affirming itself as
a biopolitical narrative whose spiritual components are closely related to bodily practices, social
behaviors, linguistic uses, values, and conceptions of family, community, sexuality, life/death, power,
 etc. Configuring a cosmovision with a wide reach throughout society, voudou has also been
characterized by its interpellative ability, functioning as an anti-colonial, anti-slavery, and anti-
imperialist political discourse and more generally as a war machine external to the state and the
regulated and dominant forms of socialization and community organization. For more on Voudou,
spiritualism, and other Caribbean religions, see Marguerite Fernández Olmos and Lizbeth Paravasini-
Gerbert. One of the classic books on the theme of the Caribbean zombie is Tell My Horse: Voodoo and
Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), by the African American anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale
Hurston (1891-1960), a hybrid text that analyzes the relations between race, class, and gender in
connection with the theme of the zombie and labor. For more on this, see Rita Keresztesi.
36. Davis’s work is fundamental to the field of study concerned with zombification and particularly with
the procedures and substances used in the induction of this prolonged somnambulist state associated
with zombies. According to Davis, tetrodotoxin is one of the key elements responsible for the
production of these effects and the primary substance in the composition of the zombie dust that
induces zombification, specifically the initial “death,” as the process of “resurrection” is attributed to
other procedures. This hypothesis has been widely debated and discredited by other anthropologists
who specialize in herbology and medical ethnography.
37. As David Inglis has remarked, “The victims are those individuals who have transgressed certain
community norms—such as getting rich at the expense of one’s family and neighbors—which the
secret societies monitor and police in the interests of social stability in rural Haiti” (43). As Inglis also
emphasizes that in Haiti fear of zombies does not exist; what exists is the fear of being turned into a
zombie.
38. According to Inglis, the polemics surrounding Davis have their basis in the fact that he dealt with the
theme of the zombie in an ontological way (as if the zombie effectively existed) and not only as a
representational problem that broke with certain academic and disciplinary protocols.
39. Dash also criticizes Davis’s lack of self-consciousness about his anthropological othering, his reductive
attitudes, and the ahistoricity of his constructions.
40. As Braham notes, the Tontons macoutes, Duvalier’s secret police, were commonly thought of as a
repressive zombie (that is, monstrous) force devoid of all sensitivity and empathy.
41. Farmer, a legendary doctor who worked for many years on the AIDS epidemic in the Haitian
countryside, published his work under the title of The Uses of Haiti, with an introduction by Noam
Chomsky.
42. On the subject of errancy in Glissant, see Dash, “Exile and Errancy” 152-62 and Glissant.
43. Along with the themes of Lazarus and resurrection, Thomas elaborates on the concepts of illness and
purity, which add an air of importance to the interpretation of subjectivity in the zombie’s construction.
44. Buck-Morss’s ideas on Hegel first appeared in an issue of Critical Inquiry in 2000 in an essay
considered to be an intellectual event, constituting a sign at the end of the millennium of a fundamental
revision of historiographical protocols in general and of Hegelian criticism in particular. However,
Buck-Morss’s proposed critique yielded a series of reactions and criticisms that specifically attacked
her positions on the topics of universal history and dialectics, as well as her adherence to the concept of
a Western modernity that foretold the possibility of alternative or peripheral modernities that diverged
from dominant modernizing models with a Eurocentric orientation and origin. She was also criticized
for a certain romanticizing tendency in her analysis and her questioning of disciplinary problems in
history and philosophy that prohibit understanding of the contradictions and paradoxes that affect the
process of historical interpretation. For more, see Nick Nesbitt, Philip Cunliffe, and Alyssa Goldstein
Spinwall.
45. See, for example, Buck-Morss’s considerations of Rousseau and Diderot’s thoughts on slavery and of
the racism that explains their silence about the concrete effects of colonialism.
46. See Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, specifically the first chapter, “Slavery and Slave Rebellion: The
(Pre) History of the Zombi/e,” 27-63.
47. According to Buck-Morss, “voudou practice was pushed to the margins, an embarrassment for
‘modern’ Haitian elites, yet it has remained a way of manipulating the poor peasantry, hence a source
of power for political oppositions of every persuasion” (Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History 138).
 Buck-Morss studies the convergence of voudou and freemasonry both in regard to the operation of
each practice (their religious and symbolic aspects) and their character as secret societies. See Hegel,
Haiti, and Universal History 119-33.
48. As Buck-Morss argues, this notion is based in the ideas of Walter Benjamin, for whom “allegory was
the mode of perception peculiar to a time of social disruption and protracted war, when human
suffering and material ruin were the stuff and substance of historial experience” (Hegel, Haiti, and
Universal History 127).
49. Achille Mbembe argues in “Necropolitics” that “Slave life, in many ways, is a form of death-in-life. As
Susan Buck-Morss has suggested, the slave condition produces a contradiction between freedom of
property and freedom of person. An unequal relationship is established along with the inequality of the
power over life. This power over the life of another takes the form of commerce: a person’s humanity
is dissolved to the point where it becomes possible to say that the slave’s life is possessed by the
master. Because the slave’s life is like a ‘thing,’ possessed by another person, the slave existence
appears as a perfect figure of a shadow” (Mbembe 21-22).
50. The “petit bon ange” refers to the shadow of a person’s body that must be set free so that this
individual, once dead, will not remain trapped in the world of the living. According to Fernández-
Omos and Paravisini-Gerbert, “Zombification continues to be perceived as a magical process by which
the sorcerer seizes the victim’s ti bon ange—the component of the soul where personality, character,
and volition reside—leaving behind an empty vessel subject to the commands of the bokor” (129). In
the petit bon ange reside the elements that make up one’s personality and thoughts. Without a
relationship with the loa (a saint or lesser divinity in voudou religion), the petit bon ange loses its roots
and is left to wander, running the risk of being appropriated by a sorcerer and transformed into a
zombie. The gros bon ange, on the other hand, is the vital energy that all humans share, which enters
the body at birth and abandons it at death, when it reunites with the other vital energies in the grand
universal source of life. For more, see Joan Dayan.
51. As a counterpoint to Depestre’s novel, Paravisini-Gebert highlights Pierre Clitandre’s work, In la
Catédrale du Mois D’Août (1982), which attempts, through a grotesque representation of the social
body, to portray the struggle to recuperate history and the regenerative aspects of voudou (53-56).
52. Originating in Haiti under the name of rará, these festivities take place during Holy Week and began in
voudou temples from which they spread throughout the population as celebrations of syncretic beliefs
accompanied by sensual and satirical dances and songs. These rituals have been assimilated in the
Dominican Republic, where they are known as Gagá (a word indicating mental illness), providing an
example of peripheral transculturation in which body and spirit are submitted to the effects of
emotional breakdown. For more on rará and Gagá, see Antonio Benítez Rojo, José Francisco Alegría-
Pons. On Montero’s work, see Fernández-Olmos, “Trans-Caribbean Identity.”
53. This story is included in Cuentos para ahuyentar al turismo, edited by Vitalina Alfonso and Emilio
Jorge Rodríguez. On “Corinne, muchacha amable,” see Paravisini-Gebert, “Women Possessed” 51-52.
54. According to Calvo-Quirós, the chupacabras can be considered the result of the economic policies that
“suction off life” on a global level, exemplified in the case of Mexico with the NAFTA treaty and in
the case of the US with attacks on the “welfare state” and anti-immigrant policies (212-13). In the
context of the situation of immigrants in some states, like California, the emergence of the
chupacabras uses this telluric symbol to express the movement of populations to hostile urban
environments.
55. With a female protagonist named Sil, the movie combines elements of traditional monstrosity with
sexual themes, questions about identity, and aspects related to genetic manipulation. Commenting on
the series in the context of other science fiction movies of the same era, Susan George argues, for
example, that the character of Sil can be considered a kind of feminine Frankenstein’s monster because
of her intensely sexualized orientation toward procreation.
56. Radford’s book has been criticized for disqualifying popular belief in the chupacabras. His analysis
begins from a perspective that is ideologically distanced from the phenomenon in question and
informed by a condescending attitude toward the popular classes who believe in it. This tendency
manifests, for example, when he cites the arguments of folklorist Thomas Bullard, an expert in UFOs
 who compares Aztec human sacrifice to the belief in vampires, chupacabras, and other similar
monsters without sufficiently contextualizing (as Calvo-Quirós argues) the cultural differences,
religious meanings, and historical specificities of each phenomenon. In fact, Radford does not hide his
skepticism about the testimonies he examines and about the actual existence of the chupacabras, which
he treats as a popular superstition that demonstrates an “epistemic deficiency” in the communities
where it takes hold. According to Calvo-Quirós, “In Radford’s case, the Chupacabras are utilized as a
mirror, and as a synonym for immaturity and irrationality, and ultimately as a tool to perpetuate racial
oppression through the manipulation of discourses around reason, progress, modernity, and to
maximize productivity and to justify racial-based land dispossession” (224). Although Radford’s
condescending attitude is evident, some of his observations (which Calvo-Quirós also criticizes—for
example, the anti-American sentiment that is embedded in the belief in chupacabras as well as in the
belief in pishtacos) are undeniable in the cases he analyzes, in which anti-imperialism (the reaction to
what is seen as cultural invasion and the exploitation of resources by transnational companies) forms
part of Latin American history and social consciousness on different levels. I believe that it is evident
that this well-founded perception of reality is one of the elements that the pishtacos and chupacabras
narratives elaborate and metaphorically represent, not due to a lack of understanding of reality on the
part of oppressed segments of society but rather precisely because of these communities’ profound
grasp of the forces that are active in every situation.
57. José Carlos Cano López gives other explanations for the jarjacha’s inability to see itself reflected in
mirrors: “La incapacidad de poder verse reflejado en un espejo responde a dos ideas claves: el
desdoblamiento y la ausencia de alma en el caso de un condenado a muerte. La idea del
desdoblamiento nos indica que la persona ya no es la misma, más bien ahora en su cuerpo se albergan
dos nuevas personalidades. El espejo que típicamente refleja a quien se mira en él, en este caso no
refleja a nadie en particular. En el caso de la condena a muerte la interpretación es que un quarqacha es
un muerto en vida, ha perdido su alma, impidiéndole verse reflejado en un espejo. Este hecho molesta
al quarqacha porque le recuerda su condición de muerto viviente” (185). Cano López also connects the
figure of the jarjacha to the image of the Shining Path, especially with regard to the guerilla’s inability
to establish a productive link with society, and consequently to the exercise of violence as the erratic
search for public action as a “means that justifies the ends,” since the mission of the jarjacha is
supposedly to punish those who have committed incestuous crimes. See Ansión, Desde el rincón de los
muertos, and Cano López 189-90.
58. Other authors refer to the pishtaco as “slaughterer” or “Indian-killer.” Radford also mentions the
Andean belief in the “white ogre,” which is related to or interchangeable with the myth of the pishtaco.
59. See Moraña, Arguedas/Vargas Llosa for an analysis of a series of critical positions related to the ideas
of hegemony and modernization in the Andean region.
60. In this novel, Vargas Llosa incorporates cannibalism and figures like pishtacos, mukis, and apus, thus
combining magico-religious elements into the political background and promoting (according to some
critics) an irrationalist vision of Quechua culture, a perspective that reveals the writer’s outsider status
in relation to Andean highland society and his predilection for an archaism of which he was otherwise
critical, particularly with regard to Arguedas’s work. In Vargas Llosa, the monstrous, the ghostly, and
the atavistic are associated with barbarism, that is, the telluric forces that oppose modernity. See
Moraña, Arguedas/Vargas Llosa, particularly the chapter “Archaism as Floating Signifier.”
61. On the representation of the pishtaco in Vargas Llosa’s work, see, in addition to Bortoluzzi, Jeremías
Gamboa Cárdenas.
62. Juan Granda Oré points to this same text by Cristóbal de Molina as the first account of the activities of
the ñakaq in the Parinacochas province, known today as Ayacucho (Ansión 116). Ansión and
Sifuentes’s article is more exhaustive, examining “La imagen popular de la violencia a través de los
relatos de degolladores,” going back to Inca Garcilaso and other literate colonial figures who reported
on ritual sacrifice and extraction of fat, blood, and human flesh in the Inca Empire.
63. The Bethlehemites were members of the first religious order formed in the Americas, the Order of the
Brothers of Our Lady of Bethlehem, founded in Guatemala in 1656 by the Spanish missionary Pedro
de San José de Betancur. The Bethlehemites’ mission was to administer medical aid to the indigenous
 population and to alleviate poverty. It was suppressed in 1821, by which point the Order had founded
numerous hospitals and medical aid centers in different regions of the colonial world. On the medical
aspects of the pishtaco myth, see Rosario De Prybil, who connects it to pre-Hispanic methods of
treatment, the theme of sacrifice, and European traditions.
64. Ansión, Carlos Iván Degregori, Efraíni Morote Best, and Mary Weismantel (among others) all refer to
contemporary sightings and testimonies about pishtacos.
65. This passage from Gose is slightly different from the gloss Weismantel provides: “The ñakaq is no
more a representation of the evils of capitalism than are the apus, but like them makes the amoral
assertion that production, power and riches demand organic tribute, the transcendental assimilation of
the ruled. I would suggest that the ñakaq articulates an erotico-religious desire for transcendence in the
face of power more than an economic analysis of it, or an ideology or political resistance to it. Why
else would the fact that capital has so little interest in directly exploiting the Andean peasantry only
heighten its imaginary need for their grease?” (309). Gose’s conclusion here regarding the search for
transcendence in relation to the theme of sacrifice is less convincing, in my opinion, than his analysis
of the pishtaco phenomenon itself.
66. On the therapeutic and pharmacological uses of fat, see De Prybil 131-32.
67. The Amazonian variations of the pishtaco myth add elements that are useful for the reconstruction of
the historical references the figure channels. According to Bellier and Hocquenghem, “La máquina que
extrae la grasa gota a gota en la Amazonía recuerda el procedimiento de extracción del caucho por los
seringueiros, y por la vía del símbolo evoca una de las explotaciones más mortíferas de los indios por
los blancos, en esta región de la Amazonía (Hardenburg). Los Mai huna cuentan que en esa época
(1890-1920) los ‘patrones’ se divertían suspendiendo los cuerpos por las manos para balancearlos en el
vacío con la punta del machete... Estas imágenes como tantas otras, aún vivas en las memorias indias
muestran claramente de qué manera los indios se representan las conductas de los blancos” (55).
68. As Gose notes, the same detail about machines from the US was also reported by Jan Szeminski and
Ansión in their study “Dioses y hombres de Huamanga.”
69. De Prybil also claims that some places associate the pishtaco with popular festivals and with the
Christian calendar, particularly the feast of Saint Bartholomew, 24 August, also known in some areas
as “día del pishtaco” (126).
70. There exist numerous references to the fact that in the context of the violence of both the Shining Path
and the state, the former often disguised themselves in Peruvian military uniforms, thus making their
position in the conflict unrecognizable. This put indigenous and peasant populations into a state of
confusion that changed their decisions with respect to what kind of attitude they would take toward the
conflicting groups. The pishtaco’s mutation and mimeticism, which allows it to take the shape of a man
or a woman, change ethnic characteristics, etc. is comparable to the indefiniteness of social and
political identities during the period in question and allegorizes the lack of certainty and elements of
judgment from which social experience can be addressed. See Gonzalo Portocarrero, Degregori,
Gastón Zapata, and Ansión.
71. According to Portorcarrero and Soraya, “los sacaojos son la transfiguración de un rumor que parece
haber circulado por toda América Latina. En México en 1986, en Brasil en 1988, [lo cual] apunta a una
matriz histórica compartida, a una sensibilidad común: la de sentirse víctima de las metrópolis” (35).
They associate this sentiment with the theses of dependency theory which affirm a causal relation
between wealth and poverty as well as between developed nations and dependent nations. See also
Portocarrero, “Los fantasmas de la clase media.”
72. On the figure of the condenado, see Luis Millones.
 Chapter 8

Coda
Interpreted through the Benjaminian idea of the constellation, the figure of the
monster presents itself as a bundle of meanings that radiate in multiple
disciplinary directions, traversing very different fields of knowledge and social
experience. Maintaining its individuality while being strengthened by the totality
in which it is inscribed, the monster catalyzes reactions and transgresses borders,
displacing itself throughout the social space that its mere nomadic existence
symbolically disarms and rearticulates. Because of its eminently fragmentary
character, the monster challenges the stability of the semantic, semiotic, and
ideological systems in which it is inscribed. An aesthetic and ideological
apparatus, the monster deconstructs paradigms of gender, race, and class,
challenges traditional notions of heroism, progress, community and,
paradoxically, confirms them by driving their resignification and purpose in
different contexts.
As a result, two concepts become essential for any approach to the monster’s
polysemy: vulnerability and negotiation. The first refers not simply to the
monster’s Other, to its prey, to its victim, or to its observer, to whomever sees in
its arrival the object of an excessive and out-of-place desire, to whomever sees it
as a threat to the space of identity and the realm of existence. Vulnerability also
has to do with the monster’s nature itself, with its displaced and anomalous
being that provokes terror, shame, curiosity, harmful anxieties, and unsayable
desires. The monster inspires the positivity of an alternative, which, by revealing
itself to be in opposition to the status quo, allows us to see its calumnies and
contradictions and to strengthen the ideas of resistance and social change. This is
why the monster is vulnerable: because it constitutes an experimental, unfinished
construct, a precarious and ephemeral theatricalization of the forces in conflict
on the unstable ground of the social and the political. According to this
multiplicity of directions and ideological connotations, the monster (and its
Other) should be neither idealized nor essentialized, neither celebrated nor
condemned, since its meaning depends on the place that we ourselves occupy
and the form that the monster assumes in determinate historical moments,
geocultural spaces, and specific instances in the development of social
consciousness. This does not mean that the monster lives in the world of pure
relativism but rather that its meanings are not fixed and that its representational
strategies are ungraspable and unpredictable. The monster is vulnerable because
it elaborates its difference as a conspicuous, shameful, and compensatory pathos
that sublimates unresolved conflicts through erratic and automated behaviors.
Thus, in its own way, as a marginal being, condemned to itself, the monster is an
invalid, deficient, and defenseless being that exists in the uncertain space of
ambiguity and paradox.
Secondly, the semantic sphere of monstrosity negotiates multiple signifiers
with disparate origins. Every monster is a bundle of meanings; it occupies a
border space for the transmission of messages and the organization of emotional,
intellectual, and political reactions. Frustration, rage, anger, and humiliation all
become symbolic capital through being transformed into fear, an emotion that
factors the human element into the equations of capitalism. Although the
immediate effects of fear are paralyzing and erode the affective system, the limit
experience of monstrosity activates the will to survive and contributes to the
tightening of community bonds, driving reflection and perhaps organizing new
forms of social knowledge. This is why it has been claimed that monstrosity is a
shifter, a device for opening and closing the doors of meaning. The monstrous
negotiates negativity by staging it, by converting social struggle into
performance, exhibiting the intense emotionality of ideology and the complex
subjectivity of the political. However, the negotiation implied by monstrosity
does not stop there but instead extends to all its constitutive aspects, to its
semiotic structure, to its languages, and to its political and ideological revision.
From a cultural point of view, the monster is a product of both high and
popular culture and is always saturated with connotations that connect it to both
the sacred and the profane, to superstition, art, and folklore. However, since the
middle of the twentieth century, its relationship to the market has turned it into a
multifaceted apparatus, a kind of artifact that incessantly produces and
disseminates fear within its Other, the other who resides either outside or within
the Same. In this sense, the horror industry continues to explore new thresholds
of tolerance and new syntheses in which the monstrous is promiscuously allied
with sexuality, consumption, chaos, and technology, expressing a mistrust of any
kind of political or social totalization. The figure of the monster is also
recuperated in utopian discourses in which it comes to represent a possible
horizon of popular convergence, a rejection of the status quo, and an
investigation of alternative scenarios that from within the system can only be
conceived of as uncertain and anomalous.
An essentially syncretic phenomenon, although one with a long local and
global history that is both contingent and transcendent, the monster is inscribed
in postmodern imaginaries as a presence that combines the primitive and the
modern, transnational and intercultural elements, contradicting the notion of
linear time, progress, evolution, and teleology. In spite of the fact that the
modern and postmodern monster participates in the universal logic of the
grotesque and maintains clear links with the most conspicuous representatives in
the canon of Western monstrosity, its particularism is expressed through regional
variants that concretely articulate the background and conflicts of its
surroundings.
In a text entitled “Deconstructing Monsters,” Stephen Asma considers the
topic of monsters within the frame of postmodernity, which harbors (among
other theoretical tendencies) the critical mode known as social constructionism,
which he defines as “a loose confederation of ideas about the artificial nature of
human knowledge and, by extension, the constructed nature of reality itself”
(252). According to Asma, this orientation of thought questions categories like
race, species, and gender on the basis that these latter are founded on forms of
epistemological privilege that exclude a number of aspects of the real which,
consequently, end up being conceived as the darker realms of our culture. In this
way, imbued with a radical form of relativism, and in its enthusiasm for
questioning the Enlightenment concept of reason and dismantling “grand
narratives,” postmodernity has disrupted any objective notion of reality.1 This
critique of the Enlightenment, modernity, and so on tends to de-authorize the
normative frontiers of the post-Enlightenment social order, in which the models
of nation, modernity, and progress reign, knocking down the notion of fixed
identity in favor of fluid and unstable processes of social (self-)recognition. In
such conditions of the production and analysis of knowledge, “it is a good time
to be a monster” (252), since, according to Asma, this construct is an additional
subspecies of the Other. The monsterology of our time would need to be based
on a relativism in which monsters are no longer recognizable, thereby making
any classification of something as monstrous a form of derogatory cultural
oppression.
Explicitly aligning himself with the critics he identifies as “neo-
Enlightenment liberals” (253), Asma does not hide his discomfort with
postmodern skepticism and the criticism of dominant Western epistemic models.
Nevertheless, he recognizes the monster’s deconstructive capacity to escape the
ideological crystallization of this critical tendency:

I think it is entirely possible to accept the idea that monsters resist

classification and inhabit the terra incognita without succumbing to the
radical metaphysics of postmodern skepticism. The anomalies and
exceptions that comprise the monstrous are not unraveling the center,
as postmodernists predicted. The monsters remain, even by definition,
outsiders. They do not actually or symbolically overthrow the rational.
(329-30)

Asma criticizes what he considers the melodramatic tendency of postmodern

relativism, which he says ends up denying access to any form of reality. On the
margins of this debatable opinion, the element of melodrama connects with the
theme of the monster in more than one sense, not so much because of the
presumption that the monster’s downfall is its lack of ontological verifiability
but because the monster’s nature, and particularly the secret of its instantaneous
and lasting effects on communities and in collective imaginaries is founded on
an affective field that tends to be considered (like melodrama) in antagonistic
and contrasting terms.
In effect, the work of the monster is undertaken as an intervention in the
cognitive, emotional, and ideological field of a culture, putting its certainties and
discourses about order, identity, and power in question. This is done by
mobilizing primal emotions (fear, rejection, sensuality, desire) and by
transgressing representational models based on the discursive coherence, spatio-
temporal unity, and internal harmony of a narrative. In violating these
conventions, monster stories are connected to other aesthetic forms that welcome
their extreme syncretism, their inclination for anti-models (anti-heroism, the
grotesque, naïve and violent chiaroscuros, sensationalism, sentimentalism,
melodrama, etc.). For Asma, this is the aspect that postmodernism best captures
in its analysis of literary or visual narratives.2 Thus, it is the monster’s
externality, its foreignness, that assures its permanence since there is always a
place on the outskirts of the system from where this latter can be observed and
questioned. However, the qualities of the object are carried within the observer,
which makes the gaze a complex, frequently paradoxical, and always relative
mediation. As we have seen, in the dynamic of monstrosity, voyeurism is a two-
way street in which the monster and its Other mutually observe one another,
baring their fears, exposing their weaknesses, and exhibiting their convergences
and antagonisms. It is in this process that the monster and the observer
(re)cognize themselves as the Other and the Same. The monster’s subversive
potential can therefore only inhabit the intermediate space, the fissure or
interstice between knowing and being known, between power and
empowerment.
But if the figures of the monster allegorize the horror of catastrophic and
bellicose confrontations whose impact set fire to the design of modernity,
postmodernity in turn constitutes a representational challenge insofar as it
confronts social experience with new biopolitical technologies that have
generalized the state of war to a planetary level and have been disseminated
throughout all levels of social life. The very idea of war is diluted in a permanent
and ubiquitous threat that abandons its site of origin in armies and battlefields to
occupy outer space or the house next door, camouflaged in the intricacies of
daily life. Its instruments are apparatuses of mass destruction, bacteriological
devastation, terrorism, which cause the very object that produces fear to become
unlocatable, thus reproducing and increasing its ability to invade global
imaginaries.
Hardt and Negri write that “War is becoming a general phenomenon, global
and interminable” (Multitude 3). At times concentrated in areas of radical
intensification and at other moments dispersed and naturalized as part of the
status quo, the monster of war inhabits social spaces and haunts different levels
of social experience, colonizing daily life. “A golem is hunting us. It is trying to
tell us something.” In its modern version, the legend of the golem does not
transmit the arc of creation but rather the fable of destruction (Multitude 10). If,
as these critics argue, postmodern society is characterized by the dissolution of
traditional social bodies, the relation between subjectivity and the individual
body is also altered, as are the links between the construction of identity and the
body politic. The flesh of the body becomes elemental, primal, primordial,
common: it is more potential than act, more life force or vital energy than
particularized configuration.
The monstrous is no longer incarnated so much in specific figures but rather
constitutes a quality of the real that has been enshrined in the “normality” that
we consume as part of the enjoyment and torment of the status quo. As
Halberstam notes, this is the condition of postmodern fear, which has renounced
iconic embodiment in favor of a disseminated identity that occupies and
reproduces itself from within the entire social domain:

The postmodern monster is no longer the hideous other storming the

gates of the human citadel, he has already disrupted the careful
geography of human self and demon other and he makes the peripheral
and the marginal part of the center. Monsters within postmodernism are
already inside —the house, the body, the head, the skin, the nation—
and they work their way out. Accordingly, it is the human, the façade
of the normal that tends to become the place of terror within
postmodern gothic […] Monstrosity no longer coagulates into a
specific body, a single face, a unique feature, it is replaced with a
banality that fractures resistance because the enemy becomes harder to
locate and looks more like the hero. What were monsters are now
facets of identity, the sexual other and the racial other can no longer be
safely separated from self. (Skin Shows 162-63)

This dispersion, far from entailing the disappearance or attenuation of the

monstrous, signals instead its symbolic intensification. The multiplication of
monsters thus constitutes one of the most prominent facts of our time, since, as
Hardt and Negri emphasize, “Today, when the social horizon is defined in
biopolitical terms, we should not forget those early modern stories of monsters.
The monster effect has only multiplied.… Frankenstein is now a member of the
family” (Multitude 195).
In his study of the philosophy of horror, Carroll refers to the cycles of horror
as an expression of anxiety that at distinct historical moments crystalizes in
monstrosity as a metaphor of fears, uncertainties, and desires that affect the
collective imaginary. He emphasizes, for example, that if with German
expressionism horror films emerged in the turbulent context of the Weimar
Republic (1919-1933), the same thing occurred in the United States under the
impact of the Great Depression and during the post-war period. This historical
context also provided favorable conditions for the emergence of classics of the
genre and for a renewed interest in what monstrosity can express about the
visible and invisible forces that besiege the individual even in times of peace. In
some cases, the fear of social exclusion, unemployment, financial instability,
external threats, foreigners, military or scientific technology, communism,
diseases and plagues, pollution, etc. functioned as triggers for the advent of the
monster, resulting in the iconography of horror as a symbolic space of emotional
and intellectual sublimation. Carroll finds a connection between the positions
identified with postmodernism and the collapse of Pax Americana (a concept
that expresses the balance of forces associated with the international dominance
of the United States in different stages of modern history). As a consequence of
the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, the oil crisis, the growth of East Asian economies,
and internal problems liked to civil rights, immigration, and financial instability,
the system’s legitimacy suffered a tremendous blow, thus causing an increase in
uncertainty, pessimism, and social anxiety that eroded individualism and made
the vulnerability of society clear—a situation which obviously sharpened with
the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. In Carroll’s words, the exponential
presence of horror in the postmodern context is closely related to the
consciousness of the collapse of the world order established after the Second
World War, a devastating conflict which upset the very foundations of Western
culture.3 This assertion is further verified by the resurgence of narratives of the
monstrous in peripheral areas and by the consumption of the aesthetics of
monstrosity in the United States as an expression of the process of the
redefinition of the enemy that has been taking place since the end of the Cold
War.
Steven Bruhm summarizes the core thematic of the contemporary Gothic:
family dynamics, the limits of reason and passion, the relation between the state
and its citizens, the cultural effects of technology (259). In addition, the powerful
theoretical elaborations produced by psychoanalysis are no longer simply
considered part of an external meta-discursive corpus superimposed on the
symbolic space of monstrosity but rather have become the very subject matter of
these narratives, which seem to have emerged in order to illustrate them. As
Bruhm points out, the problem of the lost object Freud discussed as the moment
of separation from the mother, as the beginning of prohibition and the sacrifice
of desire (castration), finds in the domain of the Gothic a privileged place of
symbolic development in which the dynamics of the repression, transgression,
and sublimation of individual and collective anxieties are elaborated. Paranoia
and different kinds of phobias connected to science, aliens, foreigners,
biopolitics, etc. are expressed as the generalized fear of the loss of physical
integrity, mutilation, torture, biochemical threats, ecological catastrophe, and the
gradual degeneration of the species. In this same sense, Lauro has analyzed the
relation between the zombie and the ecological theme of the “eco-zombie,”
indicating that this particular variant of the zombie signals “un regreso a lo
preternatural.” This regression seems to show that the human has lost control
over nature, falling into destructive and negligent practices with regard to the
natural environment. The eco-zombie announces ecological decay, the loss of
natural resources, the poor distribution of these resources, and their unreasonable
exploitation (62).4
The monster appears as the most iconic and capable figure for embodying
these anxieties and assuring certain sublimated forms of symbolic circulation,
without forgetting that in postmodernity this anomalous figure represents—
closing the circle of its polyphony—the emancipatory possibility of everything
that no longer fits in the established categories or forms of behavior and
socialization set up by capitalist modernity. In this emancipatory incarnation, the
monster is, as indicated previously, a multitudinous, rhizomatic, spontaneous
force that is irreducible to the state—in a word, it is a war machine, an
alternative apparatus, an assemblage.
Another interesting observation is made by McNally, who argues that the
celebration of monstrosity expressed by postmodern ideology has ended up
transforming the monster into a champion of social non-conformity and a
representative of the oppressed masses. According to McNally, the conception of
the monster as an outsider hero flattens the complex and unequal field of the
political and betrays monstrosity’s ambiguous and polyvalent nature by turning it
into a unidimensional trope. Even though in these theoretical contexts the quality
of the monstrous appears to be used metaphorically to express a latent desire for
transformation interpreted as monstrous due to its evental character—which
surpasses the conventions of traditional politics, influencing and guiding the
oppressed multitudes of contemporary capitalism—the idea of the “advent” of
the liberating monster constitutes, in McNally’s estimation, a romanticized and
utopian vision of the political. Agreeing with Kearney, McNally argues that,
“rather than seeing the arena of monstrosity as a site of contestation, instead of
recognizing that monster-images are multi-accentual, the postmodern celebration
of the monstrous flattens out a field in which different social accents and values
contest one another” (10).
The relations of the market and “politically correct” thought also dissolve
and relativize all social conflict beneath the argument of pluralism in order to
encompass diversity and submit it to globalizing homogenization. In “Zombie
Trouble” for example, Stratton reflects on the progressive mutation and
domestication of the monster through which its disturbing image and
countercultural meanings are attenuated and subsumed by the discourse of
difference:

the sex and bestial savagery of vampires has now been tamed into a
disturbing and disruptive cultural difference, fear transformed into a
romantic frisson, within a cultural pluralist multiculturalism. The fear
of zombies is now not so much about death as of those excluded from
western societies who seem to be threatening civilization as we know it
in the West. (269)

Thus, if on the one hand, the spectacle industry ends up bestowing neutral
connotations on the monster as another form of mass entertainment, postmodern
social theory re-signifies it as a symbol of popular resistance. In this latter case,
there is the risk of what Hegel called “monochromatic formalism,” a procedure
built on binaries (identity/otherness, us/them) that fossilize contexts and
trivialize ethically and politically complex situations (McNally 11). On the other
hand, as many critics have observed, the reduction of all monstrous qualities to
their revolutionary and redemptive potential is useful from certain perspectives
connected to particular agendas, but at the same time, this cancels any possible
conceptualization of the negative aspects of monstrosity.5 Put differently,
although in determinate emancipatory discursive contexts, the monster acquires
a positive charge as the representation of countercultural rebellion and resistance
to and subversion of the status quo, monstrosity’s connotations as an expression
of perversity, devastation, abuse, and anti-humanism should be retained so that
the meaning of the monster does not fall into a utopian essentialism that would
trivialize evil by considering it to be enlightening and liberating. It would seem
that the monster’s nature presupposes conflict: embodying ambiguity, fluctuating
and polyvalent, leaving to the Other the task of disentangling the significance of
its mutations and attending to the particularities of each context.
It is impossible not to see in the monster’s irreducible anomaly the other side
of modern subjectivity, which ultimately exhibits its cracks and contradictions
through its deformed and absurd allegorical figure. Isolated by a difference that
cannot be productively assimilated to the dominant projects of colonialism and
the bourgeois republic, Western civilization exposes its epistemic nature: the
ideological, fragmented, out-of-joint body of a still incomplete utopian project
that is the object of social and political inquiries. If, as various contemporary
critics have proposed, the monstrous constitutes the dark side of the subject, the
negative of the presence of being, its spectrality and lines of flight, the monster’s
countercultural and counterhegemonic aspects also serve as an expression and
spectacularization of the subversive capacity of the margin that occasionally
threatens and destabilizes the centers of power and their principles of order.
The activity of the market has impacted the rhetorical and ideological figure
of monstrosity and, due to its unstoppable reproduction of commodities, has in
large measure exhausted the value of the occult as an anti-model of the dominant
paradigms guided by instrumental reason and a faith in progress and its
democratizing effects, reducing and in many cases trivializing and cheapening
the genre’s critical implications. Already in 1927, referring to the ground-
breaking The Castle of Otranto, H.P. Lovecraft, proponent of the Gothic’s more
transcendent dimensions, criticized Walpole’s novel for its stereotypical use of
what were by then seen as commonplaces of the genre. In his critique, Lovecraft
focuses on the fossilized quality of its main devices:

The novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of the Gothic

castle, with its awesome antiquity, vast distances and ramblings,
deserted or ruined wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden
catacombs, and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends, as a nucleus of
suspense and daemonic fright. In addition, it included the tyrannical
and malevolent nobleman as villain; the saintly, long persecuted, and
generally insipid heroine who undergoes the major terrors and serves
as a point of view and focus for the readers’ sympathies; the valorous
 and immaculate hero, always of high birth but often in humble
disguise; the convention of high-sounding foreign names, mostly
Italian, for the characters; and the infinite array of stage properties
which includes strange lights, damp trap-doors, extinguished lamps,
moldy hidden manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras, and the like.
All this paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness yet sometimes
with tremendous effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel; and
is by no means extinct even today, though subtler technique now forces
it to assume a less naive and obvious form. (The Complete Fiction 5)

Heroism and resistance, verisimilitude and fantasy, perversion and anomaly

become ideas with negotiable meanings that do not necessarily follow the
vicissitudes of the monster or of those who fight it; rather, they become floating
signifiers that are idiosyncratically resignified according to the particular time
and conditions of the production and reception of its symbolic message. Every
era, every individual, every segment of society reads the monstrous according to
specific forms of social consciousness and bad conscience. More than
monstrosity itself, these forms are what should always be interrogated in order to
disentangle the whys and wherefores of the hermeneutic operations that are
applied to the monster.
Viewed diachronically, it is impossible not to notice the exhaustion of this
model, which various critics have perceived and discussed—and not without a
certain nostalgia for the weakened paradigms that had solidified during the
development of humanism. With respect to the figure of the cyborg, for example,
Nina Auerbach writes:

In a culture turning from Humanism to computers and cyborgs, in

which authentic transcendence is associated not with nature or bodies
but with “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a
creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”, even
uninfected vampires are debilitated because trapped in outmoded
organicism. Originally unnatural, vampires as a species are now
abandoned in a nature withering before fabricated cybernetic brains.
(177)

Among the aspects related to the processes of negotiation that take place in
the semantic field of monstrosity, it is worth mentioning once again the
mediations between the lettered [letrado] domain and orality. This latter asserts
the authority of primary materials like legends, myths, beliefs, and superstitions,
and in particular it is connected to cultural spaces for the proliferation of
alternative epistemologies which understand the real through cognitive and
interpretative premises that are not part of the dominant models. Thus, to orality
belongs the oral transmission of experiences of monstrosity: testimonies, stories,
descriptions, and exegeses that are later integrated into visual discourses or into
written narratives, achieving permanence and broad circulation. Orality is also
related to many of monstrosity’s representational devices—for example,
ritualization and the repetition of behaviors that allow the story to become fixed
in order to survive in collective imaginaries. In contrast, lettered discourse is the
source of multiple transmissions that overlook orality, infinitely reproducing
horror stories in which the literary monster continues to grow and change, as if
by word of mouth, like an urban legend. This traffic of signifiers marks both
representational registers—the oral and the written—and causes them to
contaminate one another, creating symbolic products with a broad aesthetic and
ideological richness.
The monster is also a conspicuous, persistent, and paradoxical mediator
between the local and the global. Studies such as those by Jean and John
Comaroff have shown, for example in the peripheral context of South Africa,
that the monstrous is both a sign of the local and a globalized symbology that
appeals to universality. The same could be said of the Latin American context. If
it is true that Satanism operates as a globalized discourse that covers different
registers of the social and is expanded by geocultural locations with very
disparate characteristics, it is also undeniable that every society and every social
level—indeed, every individual—has its own hell that is expressed through
countercultural images, concepts, and situations that give form to excess, horror,
and desire. The monster thus circulates between the particularity of the local and
the contingency of the broad and foreign space of transnationality. Notions such
as belonging, territoriality, and identity tend to become diluted and transform
into symbolic commodities that are exchanged in transactions that progressively
domesticate the occult, thereby stimulating the development of new strategies
and stratagems of survival, seduction, and collective action.
Certain social, economic, and political conditions nonetheless seem to be a
breeding ground for the proliferation of monstrosity, which is expressed both in
concrete fears such as the desperation of being trapped, or the disconcerting
awareness of horizons that open up a landscape of disorienting freedom that
manifests as a foreign, ghostly place. According to the Comaroffs, we are now in
“the Age of Futilitarianism”—that is, an era in which all hope is thought to be
vain and all effort is considered futile:

Reports of escalating witchcraft and ritual murder, of zombies and

Satanism, must be situated on this restless terrain. The specter of
mystical violence run wild is a caricature of postapartheid “liberty”: the
liberty to transgress and consume in an unfettered world of desire, cut
loose from former political, spatial, moral, sexual, and material
constraints. (Comaroff and Comaroff, “Occult Economies” 293)

Finally, we must not forget to mention that, as an aesthetico-ideological

apparatus, the monster constantly negotiates its simulacral condition, its
artificiality, its intricate texture that combines the threads of fiction and reality,
imagination and history, philosophical, political, and social thought, collective
memory, and visual creativity. As a border being, the monster inhabits an impure
zone of exchanges and contaminations, a space of the illegal traffic of signifiers
and symbolic connotations. It speaks many languages, although in many cases it
lacks the gift of speech. It inhabits multiple existential territories, and it feeds on
us almost as much as we feed on it.

Notes
1. Asma’s critical example of this tendency of postmodern thought is Haraway’s influential work Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women, in which monsters have the positive function of destabilizing patriarchal
paradigms (Asma 329).
2. See Asma 330.
3. See Carroll, “Horror Today,” in The Philosophy of Horror 206-14.
4. For more on this, see Patricia Ferrer-Medina.
5. As I have previously noted, José Manuel Valenzuela made similar observations in his critique of Negri’s
use of the concept of political monstrosity.
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