Civil Monsters Versus Moral Monsters

There are perhaps only a few epithets that have as long and cruel a history as “monster.” Unlike other slurs, to call someone a “monster” doesn’t refer to any particular quality. To be monstrous is to fail to be human, to be right, to be intelligible. In this, it is arguably the quintessential slur, for it is an act of recognition that refuses recognition. Yet at the same time, the monstrous is also a category of moral righteousness. Diabolical violence and sublime cruelty are said to be “monstrous” because they are at once inhuman and inhumane. The moral monster is beyond the pale in deed and motive. To identify an act as monstrous is to exclude it from the realm of civil possibility.

This dialectical tension around the term takes on a new light when we recall its genealogical significance. In Giambattista Vico’s 1744 edition of his New Science, a complex and speculative history of the development of human institutions and reason, he argues that the first monsters were the children of prostitutes or the offspring of the plebeians who were refused the civil institution of marriage. Monsters were all those whom the law refused to recognize as fully human. 

But the monster also plays an important role in the development of human thought. What Vico calls “poetic monsters and metamorphoses” arise from early cultures’ inability to abstract properties from bodies. If one wished to think of the properties of a lion and a goat together, one had to imagine something like a chimera. For when early cities are “unable to abstract properties from bodies, should they need to unite two different kinds of properties belonging to bodies of different kinds, they will unite the two bodies in a single idea.” In their “poetic logic,” early civilizations “had to put subjects together in order to put their forms together, or to destroy a subject in order to separate its primary form from the contrary form which had been imposed upon it.” Vico saw these processes of synthetic and analytic thought as connected. In a curious passage, he describes the origin of the Greek god Pan as a result of an attempt to grapple with children whose paternity was doubted: 

If, for example, they need to unite the property of man in his human appearance with that of mating with his mother, since this is an act observed most frequently in the more lustful, and therefore bolder and more brazen, of domestic beasts, such as goats, which is why the Latins used to describe the act of a lustful goat sighting a female goat, quite properly, as an act of protervia [‘wantonness’], they will unite ‘man’ and ‘female goat’ and thus imagine Pan and the satyrs. And since the belief that they were savages has remained constant, Pan and the satyrs must have been the first of the minor gods. Here the principle of all poetic monsters is discovered.

In Vico’s mythic allegory, the satyr’s combined form is a result of the impossibility of thinking of incest, the highest crime against the genealogical order. Pan comes to stand for all of those “monsters” who are produced not because of incest but through the exclusion of their offspring through the refusal to extend the civil institution of marriage to the plebs. Vico cites a passage from Livy where “the fathers object to the plebeians that whoever should thereafter be born of both [of both the patrician class and the plebeian class] would be born secum ipse discors,” that is, at odds with their own nature. Pan is the emblem of class-mixing, a crime made horrific through its association with the bestial and incest. In this way Vico says that the ancient word “monster” originally meant “civil monsters,” rather than the rare prodigies of nature. However, over time the plebs fought for and won the right to marry the patricians. Vico sees in this transformation of the institution a development in the religion of the Gentiles: Pan is no longer an abomination but is made a god. He is even given his own genealogy as the son of Hermes and Penelope. 

Without taking Vico’s historical claims too literally, I believe we can find in his connection between the development of thought and institutions an insight into a modern political problem. The refusal to recognize certain persons’ rights comes with the inability—or refusal—to think of bodies and their properties separately. This is a pattern of thought endemic to modern political reaction. One illuminating example is the “gold bug,” someone who believes that money only has value if it is “embodied” in precious metals. As Paul Krugman put it, their “belief in gold is, it turns out, not pragmatic but mystical.” But however troubling some of the predictions, beliefs, and recommendations of gold bugs may be, when political reactionaries create “monsters” of human bodies this becomes truly dangerous. The reactionary wishes to affix a certain image of a body in the law as the Body of the Citizen. All deviations from this image whose properties are seen as “mixings” are outside of the law. Certainly the Nazi’s Marital Health Law of October 1935 is an infamous instance of setting bodies outside of the law. But we should not forget that the Nazis were inspired by the precedent of the legal segregation of the United States. 

Sketch of the author that accompanied Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

The basis of American law on racial segregation had its roots in the monstrous customs of slavery. In his harrowing narrative of his time as a slave, Frederick Douglass begins his account with a reflection upon the genealogies of slaves. He says that he could “not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday.” Slaves were often kept in ignorance as to their origins. This was particularly true of those, like Douglass, who could say, “my master was my father.” The rape of enslaved women by their masters was a systematic and common part of slavery. Douglass reminds us that 

such slaves invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with, than others. . . The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his slaves, out of deference to his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human fleshmongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so; for unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back…

Laws against interracial marriage persisted in the United States long after the abolition of slavery, only being overturned in 1967 in the landmark Loving v. Virginia case. Even after this decision made legal restrictions on such marriages illegal, both formal and informal discrimination against such couples persisted at the state level. The last law forbidding interracial marriage was removed by Alabama only in 2000. The reactionary political movement of “birtherism” is only the most high-profile instance of recent attempts to delegitimate the children of interracial couples. Its legacy hardly need be mentioned. 

Monsters are not real is a comforting thought, but the child’s fear of them is real. Its political analogue is a brand of political liberalism that fails to grapple with the Machiavellian verità effetuale of the monsters others fear. Precisely because humanity is unable to be universally defined except against its others—animals, minerals, monsters—the legal possibility of a monster cannot be eradicated through merely tolerant attitudes. The fears of reactionaries and those who play upon them will seek comfort in restricting the definition of those who are recognized as citizens to bodies that resemble their own.  

What then can be done against the force of a fearful political imaginary? It cannot be banished but it may be, like all images, recaptioned. It is the use of the law to make “monsters” of humans that is truly monstrous. It is the master who rapes to bear children and sells them into slavery for profit that is a monster. We ought to repurpose the force of the monstrous as something that must be excluded from civic possibility, not to exclude individuals but to declare as illegitimate the practices, rhetoric, and institutions of reaction that would exclude others from civic recognition. That is, we must refuse to tolerate the monstrosity of intolerance. Herbert Marcuse argued in “Repressive Tolerance,” published in the volume Critique of Pure Tolerance, that “tolerance is an end in itself only when it is truly universal.” In a society that has not achieved full protections for all under the law, the liberal defense of toleration can become a barrier to achieving it.  Repressive tolerance is that which is “extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery.” To tolerate a repressive state apparatus is to invite a monster into the camp of humanity. This monster is a Leviathan like that imagined by Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist and intellectual. Schmitt critiqued Hobbes’ “myth” of the Leviathan for allowing an inner conscience to manifest dissent against the state. The crack of conscience would inevitably lead to the dissolution of a Leviathan that was completely incorporated and unified. It is precisely such a lack of conscience that makes a moral monster, with a “gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” It is just such a monster whose birth cannot be tolerated. Let us remember that Pan, the satyr god who was once a monster, is also the god of All—indeed, this is what Pan means.

Monster by William Gropper, 1939