Margrit Shildrick - Embodyng The Monster - Encounters With The Vulnerable Self

Embodying the Monster
Theory, Culture & Society

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Embodying the Monster

Encounters with the
Vulnerable Self
MARGRIT SHILDRICK
SAGE Publications
London Thousand Oaks New Delhi
2002 Margrit Shildrick

First published 2002
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
vi
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction
1. Monsters, Marvels and Meanings
2. Monstering the (M)Other
28
3. The Selfs Clean and Proper Body
48
4. Contagious Encounters and the Ethics of Risk
68
5. Levinas and Vulnerable Becoming
87
6. The Relational Economy of Touch
103
7. Welcoming the Monstrous Arrivant
120
Notes
134
Bibliography
142
Index
149
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1.1
1.2
1.3
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
4.1
Human twins conjoined at the head, born at Worms in 1495

(Sbastien Brandt) from Aesculape, 1993, Vol. 1
14
Some members of the Monstrous Races in Cosmographiae

universalis, lib. VI (Munster 1554)
15
The Monster of Ravenna in De monstrorum caussis, natura,

et differentis (Licetus 1634)
18
The Monster of Cracow in De monstrorum caussis, natura,

et differentis (Licetus 1634)
52
Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins, photographed in 1860

(Source unknown)
57
Lazarus and John Baptista Coloredo from

The Gentlemens Magazine (1777)
64
The Bengali Boy (Basire) from The Philosophical Transactions

of the Royal Society 80 (1790)
65
Conjoined twins from Still Life (Karl Grimes 1997)
70
Figure 1.1, copyright ISHM, is reproduced courtesy of the International Society for
the History of Medicine (ISHM) and supplied by the Wellcome Library, London;
Figures 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 are reproduced courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London;
Figure 1.2 with the permission of the governors and guardians of Marshs Library,
Dublin; Figures 1.3 and 3.1 courtesy of Liverpool Medical Institution; Figure 4.1
courtesy of the artist and the Gallery of Photography, Dublin.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The genesis and successful completion of Embodying the Monster relies, as does
every publication, on a wide number of colleagues and friends though some
may remain unaware of its existence as well as on various forms of institutional
support. On the formal level, I am very grateful to Staffordshire University for
giving me a three-year research fellowship that has allowed me to concentrate
full-time on this and related projects, and for providing sufficient funding for me
to attend several important conferences where initial papers were tested out. I
should also like to thank the organisers of a number of seminar series and conferences held under the auspices of the Institute of Womens Studies at Lancaster
University where I have had the opportunity of many stimulating discussions
about both my own work and that of others. Thanks too to the feminist academics
in Australia who welcomed my participation at their own conferences and seminars
and provided some invaluable responses to my ideas. It would be too restrictive to
name any individuals here, but I hope that all those involved feel acknowledged.
On a more practical level, Id like to register my gratitude for continuing support
from the Department of Primary Care at University of Liverpool where I have
come and gone over many years, initially as a student of bioethics, then as a parttime lecturer, and finally as an honorary research fellow.
Turning to more personal matters, it is perhaps even harder to supply any list
that does full justice to the many people who provided critical and supportive
input. Some have been directly involved with aspects of the text, while others
have given equally valuable emotional backup. I particularly want to thank Janet
Price, who has been heroic both in her willingness to read a complete draft on top
of previous exposure to several of the discrete papers that became chapters, and
in her unwavering friendship. Lis Davidson too has probably heard almost every
word, though in a less organised way, and my thanks to her extend far beyond the
academic. Im not sure its possible to make a firm distinction between intellectual and personal engagement, so Ill mention indiscriminately several others
whove given their backing one way or another. Thanks variously to Maggie
ONeill and Ruth Holliday, and other current colleagues, who eased my way in a
new job; to Joanna Hodge, who unknowingly set the whole project in motion, to
enduring friends Liz MacGarvey and Grindl Dockery who always bring fresh
perspectives; to Ailbhe Smyth for those all-important invitations; to Sara Ahmed
for several years of difficult but productive questions; and to Mike Featherstone
who published some early papers and asked for the book.
As Ive indicated, some of the text has already appeared as discrete papers or
chapters in books edited by others. Most, however, have been heavily reworked
and often split between two or more chapters in the present book, making it
difficult to give exact acknowledgments. Incorporated work has previously
appeared in the journals Body & Society, Journal of Medical Humanities,
viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and Rethinking History; and in the edited
collections Transformations (Routledge 2000), Body Modification (Sage 2000),
Thinking Through the Skin (Routledge 2001), Beliefs, Bodies and Being
(Rowman Littlefield 2001), and Contagion: Cultural and Historical Studies
(Routledge 2001).
INTRODUCTION
What are the figures of difference that haunt the western imaginary, and what
would it mean to reflect on, rework and valorise them? My project here is the
limited one of reconfiguring two such devalued domains that are interwoven one
with the other in both predictable and surprising ways. On the one hand, I turn
to the monster in order to uncover and rethink a relation with the standards of
normality that proves to be uncontainable and ultimately unknowable. Although
the image of the monster is long familiar in popular culture, from the earliest
recorded narrative and plastic representations through to the cyborg figures of
the present day and future anticipation, it is in its operation as a concept the
monstrous that it shows itself to be a deeply disruptive force. My second concept, by contrast, is that of vulnerability, an existential state that may belong to
any one of us, but which is characterised nonetheless as a negative attribute, a
failure of self-protection, that opens the self to the potential of harm. As such it
is, like the notion of the monstrous, largely projected on to the other and held at
bay lest it undermine the security of closure and self-sufficiency. The link that I
want to make is that we are always and everywhere vulnerable precisely because
the monstrous is not only an exteriority. In both cases what is at issue is the
permeability of the boundaries that guarantee the normatively embodied self. As I
shall argue, neither vulnerability nor the monstrous is fully containable within the
binary structure of the western logos, but signal a transformation of the relation
between self and other such that the encounter with the strange is not a discrete
event but the constant condition of becoming. Both are in play, then, on a plane
where conceptual logics cannot be distinguished from the corporeality of becoming in the world. Moreover, in contradistinction to the dominant convention, the
body expressly the differential body is not incidental to the ontological and
ethical processes of the self, but intrinsic to their operation.
Within the context of a more general elevation of the body as a focus for contemporary scholarship, many theorists, and particularly those who are feminists,
have identified the erasure of the corporeal from the founding moment of western
modernity I refer to the take-up of the Cartesian split between mind and body
as a paradigmatic element in the oppression not only of women, but of a range of
other others. Moreover, as the sustained deconstruction of the seminal texts of
philosophy has shown, from the classical era to the present century, the masculinist retreat from the body and from embodiment has denied to those others
access to subjectivity itself. It is somewhat paradoxical, then, that deconstruction
and its companion discourse, postmodernism on which my project relies
extensively reputedly have no place for the corporeal. The confusion arises, I
believe, from the mistake of thinking that postmodernism must take only one
form. From the common ground of problematising the modernist project, the
EMBODYING THE MONSTER
trajectory of postmodernisms is multiple, and for feminism in particular, the body

remains a politically necessary site of contestation. Given that masculinist dominance has characteristically entailed the disembodiment of the exclusionary masculine subject, and a corresponding corporeal inscription of femininity/otherness,
the task is to reject biologism with its appeal to prediscursive natural givens
at the same time as recuperating the possibility of embodiment.
In recent years, then, many feminist theorists have looked again at the indifference to the corporeal and have developed new insights which mobilise a reinstatement of the feminine. In this work, I shall extend that reassessment to take
account of differently excluded others with a focus on those who are categorised
as monstrous, not just as the feminine, or the racial other, but also those who are
physically disabled or whose bodies radically disrupt morphological expectations. Although feminist theory has long since moved on from an exclusive concentration on gender issues, I sense with relatively few exceptions that for all
the emphasis given in recent and current thought to embodied difference as the
grounds for a specific reappraisal of the conventional paradigms of ontology,
epistemology, and ethics, the body that is recovered in its difference, remains
highly normative.1 It is as though in the desire to establish an adequate alternative to masculinist standards of disembodied subjectivity, the body in question
must be read primarily through its capacity to instantiate new norms of sexuality,
production or reproduction. Whether the feminist approach has appealed to a
more or less nuanced form of essentialism, to notions of the body as a social
construct, or to a phenomenology of the body that emphasises corporeal beingin-the-world, all seem to me to have failed to engage with the issues arising
from morphological diversity that are not reducible to questions of sameness
and difference.
In contrast, what I want to do in this book is to address the consequences
ontological, epistemological and above all ethical of viewing all bodies as
unable to comply with the norms through which they enter the space of discourse,
and thus of what counts as reality.2 It is not that some bodies are reducible to the
same while others figure as the absolute other, but rather that all resist full or final
expression. The security of categories whether of self or non-self is undone
by a radical undecidability. The issue is not one of revaluing differently embodied others, but of rethinking the nature of embodiment itself. By engaging with a
characteristically, though by no means exclusively, feminist take-up of the
insights of poststructuralism and postmodernism, I shall suggest that the reincorporation into our terms of reference of what might be called monstrous bodies
by which I mean those bodies that in their gross failure to approximate to corporeal
norms are radically excluded demands a fundamental re-evaluation of the selfsame, and of the relationship between self and other. Where normative embodiment has hitherto seemed to guarantee individual autonomous selfhood, what is
monstrous in all its forms hybrid creatures, conjoined twins, human clones,
cyborg embodiment and others disrupts the notions of separation and distinction that underlie such claims. So long as the monstrous remains the absolute
other in its corporeal difference it poses few problems; in other words it is so
distanced in its difference that it can clearly be put into an oppositional category
INTRODUCTION
of not-me. Once, however, it begins to resemble those of us who lay claim to the
primary term of identity, or to reflect back aspects of ourselves that are repressed,
then its indeterminate status neither wholly self nor wholly other becomes
deeply disturbing. In short, what is at stake is not simply the status of those
bodies which might be termed monstrous, but the being in the body of us all. To
valorise the monster, then, is to challenge the parameters of the subject as defined
within logocentric discourse.
The use of the term monster or monstrous to describe such liminal beings
has extensive historical precedents, but my point in this work, far from being to
reiterate the negative charge of that ascription, is to contest the binary that
opposes the monstrous to the normal. There is plentiful archival evidence of
the destruction or persecution of those considered monstrous, and certainly the
monster has often functioned as a scapegoat, carrying the taint of all that must be
excluded in order to secure the ideal of an untroubled social order. Clearly, the
category has taken on very specific cultural and historical forms with regard not
simply to anomalies of embodiment, but to the operation of racist or sexist paradigms that have deployed the notion of the subhuman for highly political
purposes.3 Nonetheless, the pertinence of the monstrous, I would argue, is determined not only by the contested terrain of a particular historical moment, but by
the always already problematic ontology of human being. The hermeneutics of the
monstrous focus, then, on quasi-human beings, for they alone can confirm the
normalcy and closure of the centred self, though, as I shall go on to discuss, simultaneously unsettling it by being all too human. Such monsters are both necessary
and feared, and yet effectively have been denied a place in the domain of ethics,
except as the passive object of moral regard. The implicit danger of my transhistorical approach which must be acknowledged lest it play out the very ethical erasure that I am contesting is that the specificity of any singular instance
should be betrayed by reference to a generalised category of the monstrous. But
insofar as my task is to deconstruct the strategies of a morphological imaginary
that covers over the differences within and across terms, whilst universalising the
differences between terms, then it is a risk that can, and must, be negotiated.
Moreover, the greater violence would be to assume that the particularity of the
other is within our grasp, that the place of the other is fully accountable from
the outside.
What I propose is a new form of ethics that answers more fully to the multiplicity of embodied difference, and as such, it is precisely my intention to undo
the singular category of the monster. In place of a morality of principles and rules
that speaks to a clear-cut set of binaries setting out the good and the evil, the self
and the other, normal and abnormal, the permissible and the prohibited, I turn
away from such normative ethics to embrace instead the ambiguity and unpredictability of an openness towards the monstrous other. It is a move that acknowledges both vulnerability to the other, and the vulnerability of the self. The
question of value here is not so much made irrelevant, as disrupted, suspended in
the face of an encounter that cannot be known in advance. Moreover, despite a
persistent desire, stretching from the natural science of Aristotle through to present
day medical discourse, which seeks to categorise and explain monstrosity through
the pathology of abnormal corporeality, there is another more disruptive intuition

that the monstrous cannot be confined in the place of the other. It is not simply
that monsters strangers in general disrupt the usual rules of interaction in that
their cultural distance may be offset by physical proximity, but that they may not
be outside at all. Although they are always there in our conscious appraisal of the
external world, they are also the other within. In seeking confirmation of our own
secure subjecthood in what we are not, what we see mirrored in the monster are
the leaks and flows, the vulnerabilities in our own embodied being. Monsters,
then, are deeply disturbing; neither good nor evil, inside nor outside, not self or
other. On the contrary, they are always liminal, refusing to stay in place, transgressive and transformative. They disrupt both internal and external order, and
overturn the distinctions that set out the limits of the human subject.
The question of the reality or otherwise of such monstrous creatures is not
one that will concern me as such, and I have no hesitation in bringing together the
undoubtedly mythological, the speculative, and those whose differential embodiment is lived out in our own experience. What matters is the way in which each
breaks with any given form, and functions beyond predetermined limits as a fluid
signifier. My approach is unashamedly postmodernist in that I understand all
bodies to be discursively constructed rather than given. It is not simply that corporeality is a dynamic process that belies the static universalisation of the body
image, but that all bodies are in some sense phantasmatic. Nonetheless, my intention to mark my primary concern as being with the meaning of the corporeal, and
to concur with Liz Grosz that (bodies) are materialities that are uncontainable in
physicalist terms alone (1994: xi), should not be taken to exclude the substantial
and tangible. Indeed, two things are at work in my approach. Although from
one perspective, I take on the often somewhat abstract theorisations of postmodernism to contest the dominant body image of modernity, that does not stand
alone. At the same time, my focus on certain aspects of materialisation engages
with not only the monstrous bodies of the past, but the radically new possibilities
of embodiment that are emerging in the era of postmodernity, through such techniques as cloning, transsexual surgery, genetic engineering and xenotransplantation. Combining those points of view strongly suggests that the standard body is
not only being superseded in practice, but has been unstable all along.
When I first started thinking about the notion of the monstrous body, initially
through archival texts, it was to ask just what it is that the monster signifies
monstrare itself means to show forth that gives rise to a transhistorical and
ubiquitous intermingling of fascination and fear. In other words, why is it that
like the feminine or racial others for example, monsters are both the unspoken of
western discourse, and at the same time always haunting its margins, simultaneously seductive and threatening? What is clear is that the strength of the western
logos as a symbolic system depends in large part on defining those who are other,
those who escape normative identity, if they successfully resist total exclusion, as
marginal and dangerous. That same process is at work with regard to the body
itself. In those discourses where corporeality is scarcely considered a proper component of identity, then the potential of corporeal irruption into consciousness an
irruption that is a feature of all bodies constitutes an understandable threat to
INTRODUCTION
self-containment. Moreover, when in addition that threat is associated with

women, or other others, who are already embodied differently to existing norms,
then it is considerably heightened. And yet, as my analysis will uncover, the monstrous is never simply negative because it is never fully outside, but always a
figure of ambiguous identity. Although the very word monster is a common
term of abuse, implying a denial of any likeness between self and other such that
a barrier is put in place between the two, the very force of rejection of such
otherness cannot but suggest a level of disturbing familiarity, even similarity. The
monster is not just abhorrent, it is also enticing, a figure that calls to us, that
invites recognition. Simultaneously threat and promise, the monster, as with the
feminine, comes to embody those things which an ordered and limited life must
try, and finally fail, to abject.
In the face of the potential vulnerabilities exposed by the embodied other, the
ideal of the humanist subject of modernity, supposedly fully present to himself,
self-sufficient and rational, can be maintained only on the basis of a series of
putative exclusions. That which is different must be located outside the boundaries of the proper, in black people, in foreigners, in animals, in the congenitally
disabled, and in women; in short in all those who might be seen as monstrous. At
the least contentious level, monsters whether those already cited, or those of
disordered maternal impressions, of science-fiction literature, or of the becomingcyborg evoke opposition to the paradigms of a humanity that is marked by selfpossession. Moreover, what is at stake in a politics of identity and difference is
the security of borders that mark out the places which are safe and which are
unsafe, and who is due moral consideration and who is not. But despite the foundational claims, those boundaries are never finally secured, not because the
claims of the excluded may become too insistent to resist, but because exclusion
itself is incomplete. As Derrida has shown, the uncontested belief in full selfpresence at the heart of the logos cannot be maintained even by the violent hierarchy of the binary. At the very moment of definition, the subject is marked by
its excluded other, the absent presence which primary identification must deny,
and on which it relies. The monster is irreducible to the selfsame but it is also
within. And it is that trace, the supplement, the undecidable signifier at the heart
of diffrance, the spectre of the other who haunts the selfsame, which ensures that
change is not only possible but perhaps inevitable. If identity is founded on what
Butler calls a radical concealment (1991: 15), then the encounter with the
monstrous other opens up both the putative risk of indifferentiation, and the hope
that oppressive identities might be interrupted.
My concern, then, is to uncover the extent to which the western notion of the
sovereign self, and of the bounded body, is, in general, both guaranteed and contested by those who do not, indeed cannot, unproblematically occupy the embodied subject position. As such, any being who traverses the liminal spaces that evade
classification takes on the potential to confound normative identity, and monsters
paradigmatically fulfil that role. For all their conceptual fluidity, however, the force
of normalisation that is directed towards them should never be underestimated, and
I am far from suggesting that successful resistance to the standards of sameness and
difference is assured. On the contrary, the persecution of those who are classed as
monstrous may operate within historically changing parameters, but it is as

persistent as it is intolerable, at least to the ethics that I propose. Nonetheless, it is
in the very negativity that the monstrous provokes that we may begin to discern different ways forward. It is not that the fears are offset by fascination for that too
may be intercut with a certain shame but rather that we cannot finally locate the
monster as wholly other. Though it remains excessive of any category, it always
claims us, always touches us and implicates us in its own becoming. And it is here
that the theme of vulnerability begins to take shape as the somewhat unanticipated
yet irreducible companion of the monstrous. Alongside the capacity to evoke anxiety and loathing, the vulnerability that may seem to belong to it is also our own.
And, moreover, as we reflect on the meaning of the monstrous, and on its confusion of boundaries, the notion of vulnerability emerges precisely as the problematic. The responses of disavowal of and identification with the monstrous arise
equally because we are already without boundaries, already vulnerable. It is not my
claim that every form of the monstrous effects the same counter-logic, but that in
demanding a deconstruction of the strategies by which the self is secured, all may
be effective in mobilising new ways of thinking not simply the binary encounter
between self and other, but the very impossibility of such a determined location.
In turning, as I do in the chapters that follow, variously to historical archives
and to contemporary cultural and biomedical sources, and to the discourses of
philosophy, psychoanalysis and feminist theory, I want to wrench those texts
away from their conventional readings. Rather than accepting any at face value,
I intend to go beyond the specific disciplinary receptions as history, as anthropology, and so on that are taken to mark the limits of their intelligibility. By
asking what metaphors and rhetorical devices such texts carry, and what forms of
imaginary are put into play, my aim is to effect a double reading that opens up
the problematic to unanticipated insights. The outcome that I hope for in interweaving such differential source material, and in exploiting multiple layers and
registers is, as Derrida puts it, that the articulation of the heterogeneous voices
among themselves both causes one to think and causes the language to think
(1995b: 375). In particular, I want to be quite clear from the start that in bringing
together empirical material of various sorts with what is at times a highly theoretical discourse about the nature of embodied subjectivity, my intention is to disrupt the binary between practice and theory. At the same time, the juxtaposition
of models of thought that are more usually kept apart can serve to throw new light
on each in what is, I hope, a mutually productive manner. It is often the case that
the insights that I draw on are scattered throughout poststructuralist and postmodernist works, and that the most provocative and ultimately most illuminating
inspirations are commonly denied currency outside their own disciplinary boundaries. Yet, in researching this project, what has struck me time and again is the
richness and relevance of various postulates drawn from theorists who have nothing to say directly with regard to the monstrous, disability or vulnerability, or
indeed to each other. In many instances I have unashamedly forced the issue, not
so much in refashioning ideas to fit my own ends, but in opening up new channels of exploration, where ideas flow and overflow into unexpected configurations, and circulate between hitherto disconnected sites of enquiry.
INTRODUCTION
The book begins, then, with a critical historical survey of monsters and the
monstrous taken always to include the modern category of disabled bodies
and introduces the always ambivalent nature of our response to the problematic.
I go on to raise the question of what is at stake in our reading of texts as history,
and to question our investments in textual truths. Chapter 2 continues with those
issues firmly in mind as it focuses on the close connections between the monstrous and the female body, both in the past and in contemporary popular culture.
By tracing out the trajectory of maternal imagination, I introduce the notion of a
cultural imaginary that differentially constructs monsters in response to both
socio-political and psychic anxieties. The following chapter brings together the
phenomenological stress on corporeality with modernist conceptions of the self,
and mounts a challenge to the separation of mind and body through a reflection
on the conjoined and concorporate body. With specific reference to some recent
cases of conjoined twinning, I demonstrate the fragility of the clean and proper
body. The boundaries of the modernist subject are further contested in Chapter 4
where the notion of vulnerability is firmly linked to the encounter with the monstrous other whose very presence signals the threat of contamination. By reflecting on both a recent photographic exhibition of radically deformed foetal and
infant bodies, and on responses to other forms of disability, I reconsider the psychic dimensions of corporeal rejection. The theme of vulnerability as a quality of
the self in the encounter with the other is extended in the next chapter, which
gives an account of the partial satisfaction of Levinasian ethics. In response to
those limits, Chapter 6 goes on to reincorporate the lived body in its consideration of the tangible relation with the monstrous. In focusing on the phenomenology of touch with particular reference to the work of Luce Irigaray and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty I reintroduce the question of conjoined twinning and suggest it
figures a relational economy that is better able to accommodate embodied difference than conventional models that privilege specular detachment. The final
chapter both encompasses the materiality of Donna Haraways promising
monsters, whether they be the cyborgs of the future or the tricks of an always
unpredictable nature, and the more abstract insights of Derrida, who haunts the
whole book like the spectres he evokes. For Derrida, undecidability and hence
vulnerability are the irreducible components of any ethical becoming, and his
hope for the future is precisely that it should be monstrous. I conclude with a
reminder that ethics is not about finding solutions, but about creating openings in
and through the uncertainty of strange encounters.
If my project is successful, then the final issue that I want to mention here is less
contentious than it might otherwise be. I am acutely aware that in choosing to
include a limited number of illustrations throughout my text, I run the risk of
encouraging a kind of voyeurism with respect to monstrous bodies. Just as the use
of certain terms, such as monster itself, is freighted with sexist, racist and ableist
connotations which must be constantly challenged and undone, the deployment
of visual imagery also requires delicate negotiation. By explicating the discursive
context of the illustrations I hope, at the very least, to counter the negativity associated with those who are differently embodied, but that is too modest an aim. Over
the period of research for this book, I have perused countless images both historical
and current, overtly fantastic and ostensibly accurate representations of reality.

Inevitably the repulsion and fascination that I analyse is as much my own as that of
either the abstract modernist subject, or the projected reader, and I want to be clear
that none of us is innocent. Nonetheless, while we may all teeter on the brink of a
voyeurism that in its lack of (self-)recognition would reduce the object of our gaze
to merely one of excitement for the forbidden, a more reflexive engagement will
provoke just those questions that I want to ask of the ambivalent nature of the
encounter with the monstrous. What exactly is it that we are looking for? And even
as I question my own motives in looking, as I explore the theorisations that will
move my thinking out of the boundaries that seem to structure what is possible,
I am struck especially in the face of video and photographic material not by any
academic insight into vulnerability but by the overspilling of my own slow tears.
For an academic this is a scandalous admission, and one, I hope, that will be shared.
Although my methodological approach may at times seem dis-ordered, and
certainly outside the strict bounds of logical analysis, I can only claim that as a
virtue, and remind the reader that our discursive conventions need not determine,
or be allowed to limit, the paths that deconstructive thought can travel. For feminist thinkers, such an apparent lack of logical rigour has often been the only way
out of the stranglehold of masculinist models of intellectual and academic propriety, and although this work is only tangentially a contribution to feminist theory
as such, I am acutely aware that the structures that I contest are those that have
been authorised by phallologocentric discourse. Indeed it is difficult to imagine
any contestation of modernist normativities that did not entail not simply an
awareness, but a politics, of sexual difference. The deconstruction of hitherto
unproblematised conventions does not, however, imply that they can or should be
rejected in their entirety. Some paradigms remain useful as a basis for critical
thought and others will always reassert themselves. The trick is to let neither
settle. I would concur strongly with John Caputo who comments on his own challenge to mainstream philosophy: To question philosophy and its ethicsis not to
jettison them altogether, but to let them be rocked by a shock or trauma of something other, to expose them to a view from somewhere else, where thingsmay
even seem a little mad (1999: 84). The prospect is certainly risky, but also
provocative of the positive realignments that my own strategy intends to mobilise.
It is not, of course, only to methodological concerns that Caputos remarks
could be applied, but to the nature of the terrain of the monstrous as a whole.4 The
radical challenge that such an unsettled and unsettling terrain offers to the scene
of the embodied self is indeed traumatic, but out of that rending of the ontologically and ethically known and certain, space is created for movement and transformation. Though the very incoherence of the monstrous exposes the
vulnerability at the heart of all becoming, the task does not end there, but opens
up the question of how to develop provisionally other more adequate structures that can accommodate corporeal undecidability without compromising the
conditions for an ethics. I make no promise of answers, but offer the belief that it
is only by reconfiguring thought that we can move on to potentially more creative
modes both of becoming in ourselves and of encountering others, whatever form
those others might take.
1
MONSTERS, MARVELS AND
MEANINGS
The concept of the monstrous and the figure of the monster have haunted western
history from its earliest records. Whether in the popular cultural legacy of ancient
Greek myth, in travellers tales of early imperialist and colonialist encounters, in
the so-called freak shows, and the enduring tradition of horror stories and films,
or in the more rarefied context of the medical theory of the classical ages, the
European Enlightenment, or contemporary high-tech biomedical science, the category of the monster is of enduring fascination. Although my purpose is not to
present a socio-history of monstrosity as though it were already there waiting to
be catalogued, described and expounded by the supposedly impartial voice of the
historian, I want to look both at some persistent themes in the western imagination, and at some specific instances of monstrosity, to open up the meanings
which both order and disorder the historical discourse. In this chapter, what is at
issue primarily is the epistemological significance of that discourse, but as will
quickly become clear in later chapters, the epistemological is intimately entwined
with ontological and ultimately ethical dimensions. The status of the subject and
of human personhood may often remain unspoken in the projection of the
monstrous as a wholly external phenomenon, but even in the most objectified of
accounts, the discomforting question of boundaries may be discerned. Indeed, the
very insistence on a series of binaries that define the otherness of the monster
should alert us to the instability of the categories that ground the normative
human subject. The varying and sometimes contradictory explanatory accounts to
which I refer take in both the notion of monstrous races and individual monsters,
and serve to justify, among other things, a range of sexist, racist and colonialist
attitudes. Nonetheless, in beginning with a relatively unproblematised delineation, I want to point the way to the fractures and insecurities which render the
discourse of the monstrous both so engaging and disturbing.
Monsters of course show themselves in many different and culturally specific
ways, but what is monstrous about them is most often the form of their embodiment. They are, in an important sense, what Donna Haraway (1992a) calls inappropriate/d others in that they challenge and resist normative human being, in the
first instance by their aberrant corporeality. I want to stress from the outset that
the reality of the various forms is not at issue, and though a descriptive reading
of historical texts may yield successive reformulations of inappropriate/d others,
what concerns me is that monsters operate primarily in the imaginary. My explicit
intention in using archival and other sources is to challenge the conventional
disciplinary limits set on their use and meaning in order to discover what underlying
10
forms of imaginary are mobilised by their expressive strategies. The differential

interpretations of monstrosity may speak clearly to the mapping of specific
socio-historical anxieties and interests, but what is at stake more importantly are
the contested relations between self and other, the simultaneous rejection and
recognition, horror and fascination, that grounds ontological unease. What links
the monstrous others, whether those of human birth whose bodies fail to match
the normative standard encephalitic infants, conjoined twins, even Pars
monster of Ravenna1 or man-made creations like Sil in the film Species (to
which I shall refer later) or the replicants in Blade Runner, is their unnatural and
often hybrid corporeality.
Although that differential and strange embodiment might explain the enduring
fascination of the monstrous as an object of knowledge, it does not so easily
account for the normative anxiety that they invoke. What disturbs is that for all
that it is extra-ordinary and widely characterised as unnatural, the monster is not
outside nature. It is, rather, an instance of natures startling capacity to produce
alien forms within, a capacity that equally constitutes identical twins and even
pregnant women, for example, as productive of ontological uncertainty. In other
words, against an ideal bodyliness that is the being of the self in the body that
relies on the singular and the unified, where everything is in its expected place,
monstrosity in its various forms offers a gross insult. At very least, it destabilises
the grand narratives of biology and evolutionary science and signifies other ways
of being in the world. It is perhaps odd explicable only in terms of the binary
either/or of constructivist culture versus essentialist nature that the dynamism
of the biological, of the natural, should have ever been overlaid with the imagery
of the static and determinate. And although I am interested primarily in wholly
organic monsters, the issues raised are often equally relevant to techno-organic
monstrosity such as the cyborg envisioned by Haraway (1990). Moreover, rather
than reiterate a nature/culture split, as though some monsters are natural where
others are not, it would be more appropriate perhaps to recognise from the outset
that techne plays a part in the construction of all monsters, indeed all bodies. As
Haraway reminds us: Biology is discourse, not the living world itself (1992b:
298). The biological is no guarantee of a predictable given structure of reality; on
the contrary, the monsters that most effectively complicate our preconceptions
are precisely those that are blatantly organic.
What I am disputing, then, is the givenness of any body, the sense of a foundational and certain form which may be compared to an ideal template. Despite the
convention of taking the body for granted, it is clear that embodiment is always a
dynamic process of development, growth and adaption, but there is more to it than
that. The point in the sense intended by Judith Butler (1993) is that bodies,
rather than being material and graspable from the start, are materialised through a
set of discursive practices. It is over a period of time that the process comes to
instantiate the effects of the solidity, surfaces and boundaries that mark out the
material. And moreover, as Butler claims: there is no reference to a pure body
which is not at the same time a further formation of that body (1993: 10). The
body, then, is not a prediscursive reality, but rather a locus of production, the site
of contested meaning, and as such fluid and unstable, never given and fixed.
MONSTERS, MARVELS AND MEANINGS
11
Regardless, then, of whether past narratives speak to realisably embodied and gross
peculiarities, to simple category mistakes, or to the effects of a powerful personal
or social imaginary, the question of the concrete existence of specific monsters is
not one that need concern us. In any case, although for my own part, I am clearly
persuaded that the materiality of bodies is inaccessible and is known only as mediated (t)here are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, is how Spivak puts it
(1989: 149) it makes little difference whether or not we redefine all bodies as
social and psychic constructs. What is at issue is the transformatory power of the
body, and whatever credit is given to the pre-existent reality of nature, biological
process itself does as a matter of course continually frustrate the desire for certainty.
Nonetheless, organic bodies are as it were naturalised post hoc, where the
epithet unnatural implies a location that is literally out of place, the scene of
cultural degradation or the abnormal, although that might sometimes signify the
marvellous. The reverse terminology is even less straightforward, for although
nature may be accorded positive value as the site of the pure and uncontaminated,
it also threatens to overspill the boundaries of the proper. When set against culture
as that which is managed and regulated, nature is at best base and unruly that
which must be controlled and at worst that which is deeply disruptive and uncontrollable. And that negativity is clearest in the conventional association of the
female with the natural, such that womens bodies are especially untrustworthy. An
appeal to nature is, then, always ambivalent, and the desire for clear distinctions
either between nature and culture, or between the appropriate (where everything is
in its place) and chaotic aspects of the natural are constantly disrupted. 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 (1992b: 300). The point is that monsters can signify both the binary
opposition between the natural and the non-natural, where the primary term confers
value, and also the disruption within that destabilises 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. The issue is not so much that monsters
threaten to overrun the boundaries of the proper, as that they promise to dissolve
them. Before following through that thought in later chapters, however, I want first
to trace some historical representations and explanations of the monstrous, although
as will become clear, no account can be disinterested or merely descriptive.
The relationship between monstrosity and what might be deemed the natural was
one which greatly exercised the classical mind, and later the Church fathers, for
whom the problem was how to account for the unnatural within a God-given universe. Unlike many of his contemporaries who posited wholly supernatural explanation, Aristotle used the term monstrosity to describe forms of corporeal excess,
deficiency or displacement, not just in those bodies which were malformed by disease, accident, or birth, but more widely to depict all beings that are a deviation from
the common course of nature. As he put it: Monstrosities belong to the class of
things contrary to nature, not any and every kind of nature, but Nature in her usual
operations; the crucial marker for him being that such deformities transgressed the
law of generative resemblance (Generatione Animalium 1953: 767b, 510). And
12
insofar as Aristotle marked excess and deficiency more generally as conditions of

moral failing, the traditional characterisation of monstrosity in terms of excess,
deficiency or displacement suggests not only bodily imperfection, but an
improper being. Given, however, that Aristotle regarded any deviation from the
morphology of the normal male body as a type of monstrosity he famously
characterised the birth of girls as the most common form of deformity (GA, 728a
18; 737a 27) then what is at issue is not so much the unexpected disruption of
corporeal limits, as the putative failure signalled by both monstrous and female
birth of the male seed to replicate itself, to reproduce paternal likeness. The
search for the causes of monstrosity is, for Aristotle, not so much a philosophical
enquiry into significance, as an enquiry into a puzzling aspect of everyday biology. Such natural science aside, however, it appears from the surviving texts that
the important questions for the classical world, the Middle Ages, and the early
modern period were often the more abstract ones focused on the meaning of the
monstrous. The Aristotelian insistence that such beings are curiosities of nature,
rather than opposed to it, was widely reflected in subsequent texts, but it does not
preclude a parallel history in which monstrosities are understood as prodigies, as
marvellous signifiers of Gods will, the ominous markers of good or ill to come.
The Latin roots of the word monster are rich in associations, suggesting both
monstrare to show, and monere to warn, and for the most part it was these connotations that were the focus of scholarly interest. Although the commentary
offered by Aristotle remained influential, it was Ciceros list of synonyms
monstra, ostenta, portenta, prodigia (De Divinatione 1920: 1, 42) which anchors
meaning in later ages, and privileges a teleological rather than aetiological
approach. What Cicero firmly marks out is the trajectory of the monstrous as a
supranatural signifier of coming social and political calamities, or as a commentary on contemporary mores. Such interpretations were seized upon in medieval
and Renaissance Christian Europe as a means of offering social, political and religious comment, and both lay and scholarly texts concur in their understanding of
the meaning of monstrosity. Accordingly, gross deviations from the norm were not
simply horrifying, but also marvellous, signs both of natures fecundity and Gods
power. Thus, in the thirteenth and fourteenth century works of the pseudoAlbertus Magnus, monsters are created for the adornment of the universe (1992:
113), while Ambroise Par, writing in 1573, begins his list of the causes of monstrosity: The first whereof is the glory of God, that his immense power may be
manifested to those which are ignorant of it.Another cause is, that God may
punish mens whickednesse, or show signs of punishment at hand (1982: 4).
Somewhat later, but in a similar vein, John Bulwer, whose encyclopaedic
Anthropometamorphosis (1653) deals in the main with the monstrous appearance
and contaminatory potential of other races, also acknowledges the traditional explanations of Gods influence and mans own sin, albeit with a more naturalistic tone:
these apparitions that be contrarie to Nature, happen not without the providence of
Almighty God, but for the punishing and admonishing of Men, these things by just judgment are often permitted, not but Man hath a great hand in these monstrosities; for
inordinate Lust is drawn in as a Cause of these Events, whereby the seed of Man is made
weak and unperfect. (Quoted in Glenister 1964: 17)
13
What is more interesting, however, is Bulwers further claim that man frequently
has a part in deliberately creating such abnormal features as deformed heads,
elongated ears, and the marks of scarification, not just for purposes of fraud
which many writers allude to but for reasons of differential cultural norms. In
his view, quasi-mythological races such as the Blemmyae, who reputedly had no
heads, but instead faces on their chests, are real people who have fashioned their
own monstrosity over generations. Bulwers detailed explanations, although
highly intolerant of what he takes to be insults to the Regular Beauty and
Honesty of Nature (1653: title page), may represent an early recognition that
monstrous difference is a matter of cultural production.
Any supposedly monstrous birth could be called upon to support both political
and moral exhortations, and for a time after the commercialisation of printing in
the sixteenth century, heavily illustrated popular texts circulated with more or
less fantastic versions of monster stories, much as the tabloid newspapers might
publish such stories today. Even when books appeared initially in Latin a strategy conferring authority and respectability translations into the vernacular commonly followed, often into several different and usually idiosyncratically updated
editions. Fortunius Licetus original work of 1616, De monstrum, caussis natura
et differentis, which is one of the most comprehensive surveys of that period of
human malformations, taking in both classical references and topical accounts, is
still being supplemented almost a century later when Jean Palfryns French translation of 1708 appeals to topical interest by marking on its title page a monstrous
birth that had occurred in Flanders just a few years previously. Despite, however,
regular appeals to the authenticity of eyewitness accounts, the testimony of
respected professionals, and the textual authority of classical authors such as
Hippocrates, Aristotle or Galen, there is little internal attempt in pre-modern
works to cite singular evidence in ways that would be understood today. Stephen
Bateman, for example, sincerely recommends his own monster book, (t)o whose
painefull studie I have putte nothingsaving that whyche I myselfe have seen in
my own time, or have received of my special friends, men of good credite (1581:
Preface), but in fact the subsequent text is almost entirely taken from a work by
Conrad Lycosthenes (1557). But it mattered little; observation as such was not
the motive force of such texts which sought rather to position monstrosity within
a familiar network of epistemic associations mythological, classical, biblical,
medical and symbolic. Edward Fentons introduction to his free translation of the
French author Boaistuau (1560) is similarly typical of the period:
there is nothing to seeme, which more stireth the spirite of man, which raiiseth more his
senses, which doth more amaze him, or ingendereth a greater terror or admiration in all
creatures, than the monsters, wonders and adhominations, wherein we see the workes of
Nature, not only turned arsiversie, misseshapen and deformed, but (which is more) they
do for the most part discover unto us the secret judgement and scourge of the ire of God.
(Fenton 1569: Preface)
What matters in these highly coincident texts is that they speak both to pedagogic
intent and to a human curiosity about what lies outside the bounds of the known.
The various images of monsters human, animal or hybrid are clearly
intended not as exact, but as iconic, representations, for not only do the same
14
Figure 1.1 Human twins conjoined at the head, born at Worms in 1495
(Sbastien Brandt) from Aesculape, 1933, Vol. 1
narrative descriptions reappear across a range of works spanning many decades,

but the selfsame image may be used within a single book to illustrate accounts of
several different creatures. Batemans The Doome Warning all Men to the
Iudgemente (1581), for example, characteristically reiterates both text and pictures
already popularised in earlier works, as well as showing no regard for congruence
between the apparent age of the figures in the drawings, and those in the text
whose stories are illustrated. Monstrous births hermaphrodites, hydrocephalic
infants, hairy men, one-eyed giants, dog-headed humans, human-headed pigs and
conjoined twins and other freak events such as meteorological peculiarities are
related with gusto. But where causative explanation is offered, it is invariably
overlaid with portentous meaning. Bateman was evidently aware of the doctrine
of maternal imagination,2 as his account of twins joined at the head makes clear:
The cause of this Monster was this, two Women spake together, one of whiche was with
Child, and the thirde coming upon them sodayne knocked both their Heades together as
they were talking, wherewith the Woman with Child being afrayd made a token of the
Knock in her Child. (1581: 287)3
But the event flows seamlessly into his reference to a battle between Christians
and Turks in the same year as the birth. The connection is purely emblematic
(Figure 1.1).
15
Figure 1.2 Some members of the Monstrous Races in Cosmographiae

universalis, lib. VI (Munster 1554)
Like many other writers of the great period of monster texts, or wonder books
as they are often known, Bateman makes little distinction between one category
of monster and another, so that deformed human beings, newly discovered and
strange animals of land and sea, and fabulous creatures of mythology are all
lumped together. In this there is some continuity with the medieval tradition of
bestiaries catalogues of animal lore which occasionally, though not invariably, included both individual hybrid human forms and the so-called monstrous
races as part of their treatment of the animal world. A more important link is in
the pedagogic purpose of the bestiary whereby each creature was assigned an
allegorical significance in terms of its putative good or evil features. The longestablished belief in the existence of monstrous races at the outer margins of the
known and habitable world was itself an important element in the composition of
wonder books. In his hugely influential Natural History (1961), first circulated in
AD77, the Roman writer and traveller Pliny the Elder lists over fifty such races,
which range from the recognisably human, such as the short-statured Pygmies of
interior Africa or the one-legged Sciopods of India, to the morphological confusion of two other notable Indian races, the Cynocephali, who have dogs heads
and communicate by barking, and the Panotii whose enormous ears serve not
only as blankets, but provide the means of flight (Figure 1.2).4 For Pliny himself,
the description of such races conveys a sense of wonderment at the diversity
created by natures power and majesty, and he does not characterise corporeal
difference as indicative of moral failings. In contrast, both bestiaries and wonder
16
books explicitly use difference to draw out moral lessons, with the latter in
particular loading the non-normative with negativity.
As travel expanded throughout the medieval period for reasons of trade,
conquest, crusade and pilgrimage increasing encounters with the racial other
provided a complex vehicle for the expression of inner desires and anxieties.
Narrative accounts such as that given in the fourteenth-century manuscripts
called Mandevilles Travels (1967)5 indicate that far from actual contact with
unfamiliar ethnic groups resulting in a reduction of illusory expectations, perception was framed in highly fanciful terms. Nearly three centuries later, Bulwer is
still writing of the monstrous races as a present reality: For although this Nation
of Men hath been accounted by many among the Types and Fabulous Narrations of
the Ancients, yet in these latter Times we have received credible Intelligence of
such kind of Nations newly found (1653: 18). He then goes on to describe
several instances in which races of Cynocephali have been discovered. Although
Bulwer himself believes that such monstrosities could be the result of longstanding
human manipulation of nature, his text nonetheless feeds into a well-established
popular tradition of quasi-anthropological writing. Friedmans remarks on the
earlier travel narratives are no less apposite: there appears to have been a psychological need for Plinian peoples. Their appeal to medieval men was based on such
factors as fantasy, escapism, delight in the exercise of the imagination, and very
important fear of the unknown (1981: 24). Nor are such responses limited to
distant history. The monstrous images alternately terrifying and fascinating of
the primitives supposedly inhabiting lands unconquered, or at least unaccessed,
by the colonialist powers have been a mainstay of the European imaginary.
Present day racism thrives on such long-established connotations.
Although the margins of the known world were held to be the pre-eminent
location of monsters, then, it was, as Cohen reminds us, a purely conceptual
locus rather than a geographical one (1996: 6).6 Above all, the representation of
geographically and imaginatively distant peoples is beset by questions as to their
human or animal status. Despite Aristotles deep scepticism about the probability of hybridity he argued that differential periods of gestation made interspecies generation impossible monstrosity was frequently manifest in the
popular imagination in just such a guise. Travellers tales provided a rich source
of images, in which individual as well as racial examples were equally common.
The human/animal hybrid signalled not just absolute otherness, but the corruption
of human form and being. Accordingly, other races were situated not simply as
monstrously different, but as ontologically and existentially dependent on the
unquestioned humanity of the civilised races. What is less obvious, but nonetheless crucial, is that the existential status of that humanity does not stand alone, but
by corollary is dependent on its monstrous other.
What seems to emerge from the accounts referred to above, is that the categories of natural, supranatural and supernatural are far from distinct.7 The
monster occupies an essentially fluid site where despite its putative otherness, it
cannot be separated entirely from the nature of man himself. Even when
expressed within the prevalent and historically persistent discourse of the supernatural, the monster is taken to reflect back at least some contingent truths of the
17
human condition. The monstrous is not thereby the absolute other, but rather a
mirror of humanity: on an individual level, the external manifestation of the
sinner within. Given that all human beings were seen as more or less corrupted
from a state of pre-lapsarian perfection, then the visible disorder of the monstrous
body, and the moral failings that it signalled, were a sign of the vulnerability of
all men and women to a loss of humanity. What was thrown into question was the
stability and predictability of human existence. Although, then, at first sight, the
monstrous represents an indisputable case of otherness, which might engender
fear and horror of the unknown, it has a far more paradoxical status. Given that
the western logos is structured according to an infinite series of binaries that
ground all knowledge in the play of sameness and difference, it is only by making such distinctions, by having a clear sense of self and other, that it is possible
to mark out the parameters of self-identity. If we know what we are by what we
are not, then the other, in its apparent separation and distinction, serves a positive
function of securing the boundaries of the self. And yet time and again the
monstrous cannot be confined to the place of the other; it is not simply alien, but
arouses always the contradictory responses of denial and recognition, disgust and
empathy, exclusion and identification.
I want now to look in some detail at one of the most ubiquitous hybrid
monsters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which speaks eloquently to
the way in which such figures operated simultaneously on several different
levels. The point is not whether such figures were taken as really existing, for
though countless medical historians have indulged our own ages disciplinary
desire for categorisation with explanations based on modern knowledge of congenital deformity, many monsters seem to us, and may have been, wholly fantastic. It would be misplaced to see our predecessors as simply credulous, for as the
early seventeenth-century author of the apocryphal Aristotles Works admits,
without doubt some of the stories of monsters are fabulous (n.d.: 40), but that
does not diminish their pedagogical value. Indeed in many early manuscripts and
printed books, there is a characteristic indifference to the putative modernist
boundary between reality and fantasy. What interests me, then, is not the truth
value, but what significance can be attached to the accounts. Although Aristotle
had defined monstrosity in terms of bodily excess and deficiency, the legacy of
Pliny in particular threw up the question of hybridity where the division between
human and animal was indeterminate. But even in those historical moments
where the issue of monstrous corporeality may seem to be primarily about form,
about the difficulty of reconciling in a single body those things which should not
go together, what can be read there too are all sorts of ontological anxieties about
what exactly the human subject consists in. The dislocations of hybridity are,
then, the surface manifestations of a much deeper uncertainty and vulnerability
of the self.
The rather charming Monster of Ravenna is one of the most widely reproduced
figures in monster texts of the early modern period, and multiple illustrations of
its appearance are still in existence (Figure 1.3). The images that we have all show
an infant of reputedly human birth, whose body nonetheless displays a variety of
transgressive elements, and whose human status is surely complicated by its
18
Figure 1.3 The Monster of Ravenna in De monstrorum natura, caussis et

differentis (Licetus 1634)
resemblance to both an angel and a devil. The figure is evidently intersexed,

having both penis and pudenda as well as breasts, though the convention refers only
to an it. The head bears a single horn, the arms are replaced by feathered or in
some cases reptilian wings, the legs are fused to form a scaled, sometimes feathered, mermaid-like tail which terminates in a giant avian or reptilian claw. In addition a third eye peers out at knee level, and in some illustrations, cross-like letters
or marks confusingly symbolising Christian virtue appear on the torso. In short,
the monstrous body ostentatiously crosses the boundaries between male and
female, between human and animal (itself hybridised as simultaneously mammal,
reptile, fish and bird), and, on the interpretive level, between virtue and vice.
Writing in the mid-sixteenth century, Par (1982) offers a relatively unmediated
account of its existence, counting it among the examples of those monsters caused
by the wrath of God. In contrast, Bateman more specifically explains each of the
corporeal peculiarities in terms of pride, unsteadfastness, buggery, and other such
vices, but he also makes the link to the political situation of popery at Ravenna, the
monsters birthplace. The working out of Gods scourge as signified on the body of
the child indicates to Bateman the wider lesson, that for these vices Italy shold be
beaten down with the sword (1581: 295). Nonetheless, the corporeally inscribed
letters carry their own contrary message of salvation should Italy turn to virtue.
Despite a startling number of modern attempts to reclaim the creature as the
real outcome of several distinct congenital deformities,8 the Monster of
19
Ravenna is a highly symbolic figure constructed at the confluence of several

discourses in this instance political, religious and superstitious. Its monstrous
form is marked by the classical attributes of excess, deficiency and displacement,
sutured together in a hyperrealisation of ambiguity. Moreover, the very hybridity
of the infant speaks to a series of transgressions with regard to sexuality, species,
and personhood. If the monster is more than appearance, if it does have an inner
life, is it that of the brute animal or is it that of a sense of self? More pertinent for
the historical context was the question of whether such a creature should be baptised. If the soul were an attribute of human beings alone, and baptism the necessary gateway to salvation, then the Church faced a very real dilemma about the
appropriate response to those monstrous births which confounded the putative
boundaries of the human. In the early Christian period, Augustine laid down a
remarkably tolerant formula that remained influential for many centuries:
But no faithful Christian should doubt that anyone who is born anywhere as a man that
is as a rational and mortal being derives from that one first-created human being. And
this is true, however extraordinary such a creature may appear to our senses in bodily
shape, in colour, or motion, or utterance, or in any natural endowment, or part, or
quality. (City of God 16. 8; 1972: 662)9
By the early seventeenth century, however, the canonist, Alphonzo a Carranza,

offered a more ambiguous version, that those having human form can and ought
to be washed by holy baptism and those truly monstrous, which lack rational
souls, not (quoted in Friedman 1981: 1823). Perhaps because the qualifier for
baptism was, strictly speaking, a matter of the rational soul rather than of appearance, the subsequent Enlightenment interest in more naturalistic explications of
human monstrosity did not settle the issue of what was appropriate. The problem
of radical hybridity, and what it signified of inner being, remained. The real or
imagined fate of the Monster of Ravenna is not recorded.
When Bateman turns to another multiple hybrid, the equally infamous Monster
of Cracow,10 reputedly born in 1543, the prodigious nature of the event is not only
apparent in the peculiarity of the birth, but is voiced directly by the monster itself:
he is said to have lived foure houres after he was borne, and at length (after he
had uttered these Wordes, Vigilate, dominus deus vester adventat, that is, Watche,
youre Lorde is a comming) to have dyed (1581: 337). What is notable again is
that the Latin-spouting infant, a favourite with Renaissance and early modern
chroniclers, is as much constructed by the discursive strategies of the political and
religious climate as by any account of an actual birth. As Foucault among others
has shown, the body is the inscribed surface of events, a text to be deciphered
and read (1977: 148), an utterance in its own right. It is as though the monstrosity is materialised precisely in order that it might speak. The monsters that engage
us most, then, that command intricate explanation, are those which are closest to
us, those which display some aspect of our own form, and speak, both literally
and metaphorically, a human language. And monsters do always signify. In his
sermon on the birth of conjoined twins in his parish, for example, the seventeenthcentury cleric Thomas Bedford characteristically stresses that all monstrous and
misshapen births, though dead, yet speak for the instruction of the living
(Bedford 1635). Although the purely animal monster might also be an object
20
of curiosity or fear, and has a similar history of heralding events to come, of

providing a material marker of divine affect, or later of signifying evolutionary
diversity, it does not thereby unsettle the security of human being. The animal is
the other in the comforting guise of absolute difference, but in its lack of humanity it cannot appeal directly to the heart of our own being. Those monsters that
are at least in an ambivalent relationship to humanity, however, are always too
close for comfort. They invoke vulnerability.
Although I am wary of a too simplistic periodisation of the past that lines up
the epistemological significance of the monstrous with specific external events,
many commentators have claimed that a preoccupation with monstrosity seems
to be a regular feature of periods of social and political uncertainty.11 Whether
such an externalisation of motivation is justified or not, what is certain is that the
grasping after an order of explanation in the face of extraordinary corporeal disruption is an enduring feature of historical record. We should remember, moreover, that for many centuries, including the early modern period, the human body
in all its forms represented variously, in the popular and sometimes in the
scholastic imagination, an index and analogy of the political state, of cosmology,
and of the wider natural world.12 In short, the body was freighted with symbolic
meaning. For those births attributed to divine or supernatural intervention, their
supposed purpose could cover a number of options: to foretell macro-calamities;
to express Gods wrath or vengeance on a morally negligent population; or indeed
to punish individual immorality such as sodomy, transspecies coupling, consorting with the devil, or intercourse on the Sabbath. Whether narrated in popular
monster books or in the somewhat later proliferation of street ballads and broadsheets, which operate as much within the realm of entertainment as moral admonition, monstrous affronts to nature always demanded interpretation. And even
when the longstanding belief in the supposedly portentous nature of monstrosity
lost favour among the learned in the face of the more biologistic explanations of
Enlightenment science, the requirement of exegesis remained. Each instance is
related to an external cause, but that does not settle meaning. Moreover, the very
telling seems also to speak to an ontological vulnerability in which the ambiguously unnatural otherness of monsters may serve as the focus of abjected fear,
anxiety and guilt.
It is with regard to this inherent ambiguity that we should understand attempts
made to fix the epistemology and ontology of monstrosity, to impose order on the
disordered. To summarise briefly the empirical parameters of the debate, the
history of monstrosity took, during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
a decidedly normative and positivist turn. In line with Foucaults concept of an
emergent norm for the human body itself, monstrous difference became more
regularly defined as deviant abnormal rather than as wholly distinctive. With
a reinvigorated interest in practical science, Enlightenment scholars largely abandoned abstract speculations on monstrosity in order to impose instead a medical
discourse increasingly focused on embryology and comparative anatomy
which served to normalise and domesticate the marvellous and prodigious. The
pioneering methods of Francis Bacon were particularly influential, and his
Novum Organum of 1620 explicitly sets out to categorise deviant instances, that
21
is errors of nature, freaks and monsters, where nature deflects and declines from
its usual course (Bacon 2000: 148, Aphorism 8). The point was to thereby
better understand common forms, and ultimately to control nature. As Bacon
notes: we must make a collection or particular natural history of all the monsters
and prodigious products of nature, and every novelty, rarity or abnormality in
nature. But this must be done with the greatest discretion, to maintain credibility
(2000: 149, Aphorism 8). The gathering of collections of monstrosities as part of
the fad for a gentlemans personal cabinet of curiosities was a familiar feature
in an age of expanding travel and commerce, but the value of the monstrous as
the other caught in the gaze of the beholder was more than that of entertainment
or moral instruction. For Bacon and his successors, it promised insight into the
nature of life itself. As the body in general became an object of intense scrutiny,
the monstrous was studied as the prototype for a new kind of scientific fact
(Daston 1991: 95), an aberration that would throw light on the normal. By the
nineteenth century, the newly coined science of teratology seemed to promise the
certainty of explanation.
It was particularly in the field of reproduction that the scientific approach to
monsters played an influential role in grounding and contesting a range of speculative theories. The relative importance of the sperm and egg, the role of the uterine environment, and dominance of either preformation or epigenesis13 as models
of generation were all debated in a context which explicitly sought to account for
monstrous births. The question of whether such births were predetermined or the
result of accident was itself relevant both to the possibility of repair of the abnormal body, and to the prospect of creating monsters experimentally. In the view of
many commentators, such as Dudley Wilson in his detailed book, Signs and
Portents (1993), there is a clear epistemological break between the preEnlightenment focus on the supranatural status and symbolic significance of the
monstrous, and the post-Enlightenment will to impose rational meaning and
determinate form. Wilson takes as paradigmatic the work of nineteenth-century
scientists such as Etienne and Isidore Geoffroy St-Hilaire who were especially
concerned with investigating the monstrous as a stage in the development of the
foetus. Their greater aim was to throw light on the origin and development of differential species themselves, where the monstrous marked a kind of transition
stage. The sense of mystery and awe that had characterised the response in
earlier periods was reduced by the scientific gaze in such work to the desire to
unravel a set of natural laws that were as yet imperfectly understood, but essentially transparent. Monstrosity was simply the normal which had been hindered
or had deviated into a parallel yet equally explicable course. As Isidore Geoffroy
St-Hilaire wrote in 1832:
Monstrousness is no longer random disorder, but another order, equally regular and
equally subject to laws: it is the mixture of an old and a new order, the simultaneous
presence of two states that ordinarily succeed one another. (Quoted in Jacob 1989: 124)
The operation of power/knowledge here, and the illusion of potential if not actual
mastery, attempts to strip away the disturbing and indeterminate status of the
monstrous body. If, as Geoffroy St-Hilaire asserts, there are no exceptions to the
22
laws of nature, only to the laws of the naturalists, then science has laid claim to
its own invulnerability.
Although in one sense the domain of science at least appears to treat the anomalous body with a new degree of moral neutrality, the very fact that any
epistemological category such as that which constitutes the proper form of
humanity works on the basis of exclusion, should alert us to its questionable
ethical underpinnings. In discursively constructing the objects of its concern,
rather than simply reporting on a pre-existing state of affairs, the operation of
both historical and contemporary biomedical discourse is never exempt from
deconstructive scrutiny. In introducing a new system of classification to the natural
sciences, for example, Linnaeus was enabled to demythologise human-born
monsters and include them in a common genus with other human beings, whilst
at the same time emphasising a hierarchical ordering of species that privileged
white Europeans over darker skinned peoples, who were in turn superior to the
merely monstrous in form (Linnaeus 1759). Almost 250 years later, the resulting
formalisation and authorisation of a racial hierarchy based in the apparent
neutrality of science has been deeply shaken, but not entirely dislodged. The task,
then, is to displace such texts from familiar and preferred readings, decoupling
them, that is, from the predetermined disciplinary frameworks medical, moral,
legal, or the like that function to delimit their significance and meaning. It is
perhaps in what remains overtly unspoken, though often apparent in the rhetorical and metaphorical devices that mark all discourse scientific or otherwise
that we may discern the workings of an imaginary that responds with anxiety to
the monstrous. The desire for mastery over the excessive other, so explicit in
Baconian taxonomies, for example, illustrates not so much the strength of the
scientific endeavour as the need to stabilise the uncertainty that the monstrous
creates at the heart of human being. The same desire is, moreover, no less a motivating force in the present day response to corporeal difference, with regard not
only to skin colour, but, as I shall go on to discuss, to congenital disabilities.14
The narrative of a set of explicit cultural transformations that constitute the
emergence of western modernity, and which produce a corresponding change in
the response to the monstrous, is taken up in Rosemarie Garland Thomsons
analysis of the genealogy of what she calls freak discourse. According to
Thomson, the progressive shift from the mode of the marvellous to the mode of
the deviant can be discerned in a series of sequential moves: from prodigious
monsters to the pathological terata of medical discourse; from revelation to entertainment; from awe to horror; from portent to site of progress; from wonder to
error (1996: 3). In an epoch of increasing faith in rational and secular explanation, the monstrous was incorporated into the quintessentially modernist paradigm of the normal/abnormal, where its threat was and is relational rather than
autonomous. In the face of the valorisation of uniformity and unity, it must be
both compared and contrasted to corporeal norms in a way that reduces difference
to a matter of pathology. Taking up the Foucauldian theme, Thomson asserts that
modernity affected a standardization of everyday life that saturated the entire
social fabric, producing and reinforcing the concept of an unmarked, normative,
levelled body as the dominant subject of democracy (1996: 12). In consequence,
23
the monstrous body represented at once boundless liberty and appalling

disorder (ibid.) which must be recontained by strategies of normalisation institutionalisation, reconstructive surgery, prosthetic aids and so on. Thomson
herself is particularly concerned with issues of corporeal disability, which she
sees as providing the present day coordinates of monstrosity or freakery, limited
now to the abnormal.
And yet the standardising impulses of modernity and the positivism of science,
taken at face value by Wilson, Daston, and to a large extent by Thomson, to signal an epistemological break in the response to the monstrous, tells us little of the
enduring and disruptive power of the morphological imaginary. Rather than the
sequential model that I have outlined above, I propose instead an interweaving of
elements where the deviant and the marvellous are always imbricated one with
the other. Alongside, and indeed within, the work of the learned societies,15 a
sense of wonder remained undisturbed, an indication that the monstrous signified
rather more than simple corporeal difference. A late seventeenth-century report to
the Royal Society, for example, on the strange birth of conjoined twins testifies
to the persistent fascination of the monstrous. The twins, reports Mr A.P., are
likely to Live, if the Multitudes that come to see them (sometimes 500 in a day)
do not occasion the shortening of their Lives (A.P. 1705: 303). And yet, despite
the enormous public and scientific interest in monsters in the early modern
period, it is difficult to find evidence of any self-awareness on the part of the
observers. For bodies like the Royal Society, which very self-consciously promoted scholarly impartiality, this is perhaps not surprising, but the emphasis put
on measurement, on dissection where possible, and on the importance of corroborating accounts creates a distance that serves to obscure less acceptable concerns. By focusing on the monster as an object of knowledge, observers could
endeavour to ignore the disquieting questions that monsters raised about the
human condition in general, and individual identity in particular. If the hundreds
and they were as likely to be sophisticated and educated urbanites as unschooled
peasants who flocked to each new monster attraction on display in the large
cities were made conscious of their own vulnerability, then there is little textual
evidence of it (Todd 1995: 154). Certainly the crowds came to gasp with horror
and to admire, to be frightened and amused, but the very extent of the desire to
witness monstrosity first hand, to report in detail every instance, and to circulate
a prodigious literature indicates, I suggest, an inner anxiety about the relation
between the creatures on display and normative form and identity. It is an anxiety, moreover, that persists in our own time.
Although the last two centuries have seen a massive acceleration in biomedical
knowledge, it has also been a period during which the organised freak show the
display of human monstrosities for profit and entertainment has flourished. The
word freak seems to have been used to indicate corporeal anomaly only since
the mid-eighteenth century, and freak shows as such were a particular feature of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but there is a much longer standing
tradition of showing monsters for gain. For individual children and adults who
survived a monstrous birth, there is plentiful evidence from all periods that selfdisplay was a common strategy of subsistence. Paul Semonin (1996) traces the
24
tradition of such public shows back to Bartholomews Fair which was held annually in London from the early 1100s until it was finally suppressed in 1855,16
although private appearances before the wealthy and titled were also popular as
late as the reign of Queen Victoria, who personally received many well-known
show figures such as the diminutive General Tom Thumb. As the evidence of
advertisements, ballads and handbills from an earlier period demonstrates, freaks
have traditionally been, and continued to be, shown in such a way as to offset
their non-normative natures and bodies with an appeal to their recognisable
everyday or cultured attributes that drew in the spectators at the same time as
astounding them. Relatively few of those displayed were passive objects; they
were performers engaged not only in showing off their anomalies, but in singing,
sewing, dancing, feeding children, conversing in foreign languages, and in every
way bypassing the putative handicaps of their extraordinary bodies. As Todd puts
it, a dynamic of attraction and avoidance structures the internal economy of
monster exhibits (1995: 156) such that sameness and difference are simultaneously evoked.
Such shows have attracted much scholarly analysis of late both for their
demonstration of the function of the gaze, and for the ways in which they construct and authorise such binary systems as racist discourse. What the spectators
actually believe of what they see and hear seems scarcely to matter. As the most
successful of the nineteenth-century showmen, P.T. Barnum himself allows in
his autobiography, the spectacle was often based on a fraud in that there might be
little or nothing out of the ordinary with the body, or mental capacities, of the
performer. Although many other shows did of course stage real anomalies, the
crucial factor, as Robert Bogdan makes clear, is that the label of freak relates not
to a particular physiology, but to a way of thinking about and presenting people
(1988: 3). When, however, he goes on to remark that everyone exhibited was misrepresented, he means merely that showmen and performers exaggerated physical features, mimicked strange behavioural traits and made up suitably exotic
backgrounds. Rather than accepting Bogdans assumption of an underlying true
state of being, I prefer to think in terms of the discursive construction of all
bodies and selves in which the gaze, whether of science or entertainment, plays a
prominent role. The question of authenticity is redundant, for as Susan Stewart
notes: it is the imaginary relation, not the real one, that we seek in the spectacle
(1993: 111). Like the biomedical gaze which manages monstrosity either by
examining the bodies of the dead or by reducing the living to categories of
knowledge, the freak show, for all its play with the flexibility of the boundaries
between them and us, is finally no more than a safely contained and distanced display that seeks to sanitise the contaminatory potential of the anomalous other.
The point is that freak shows were productions which staged not real life as
such, but more or less meticulously contrived spectacles, which encouraged
viewers to think and see in terms of various binary distinctions between them
and us. Those divisions, moreover, took on cultural, racial, national or historical significances which emphasised difference as inferiority. In creating such a
distance, the display of abnormality served to normalise the viewing public at the
same time as marking the performer as a deviant type. Again like science which,
25
for example, during the early part of the nineteenth century was displaying and
later dissecting the body of Sarah Bartmann, the so-called Hottentot Venus, the
freak show made explicit links between cultural otherness and monstrous form.17
Racial stereotyping was extremely common, both in the overdetermined use of
non-white performers, and in the practice of blacking up to produce a more
exotic image. For Susan Stewart:
(t)he body of the cultural other isboth naturalized and domesticated in a process that
we might consider to be characteristic of colonization in general.On display, the freak
represents the naming of the frontier and the assurance that the wilderness, the outside,
is now territory. (1993: 10910)
But in that precisely lies the problem; for, contrary to Stewarts view of the freak
display as a horrifying closure, the shifting of boundaries, and the ability of
monstrous difference to enter into the space of identity, gestures towards an opening up of signification. The safety of entertainment and putative education about
the anomalous or racial other is undermined by the persistence of a troubling
familiarity. In Barnums highly popular What is It? show, for example, the
spectacle of the supposed man-monkey did not just evoke feelings of cultural and
racial superiority in the viewing public, but raised too the question of the supposedly missing link in human evolution.18 In making such a connection, the
distance created by the gaze is frustrated by its own object.
Although freak shows themselves had largely disappeared by the 1950s, the
widespread investment in the monstrous as a matter of ambivalent repulsion and
attraction remains powerful. Not only has horror become a popular genre in both
literature and film, but the apparently widespread belief in the worlds most
scientifically sophisticated nation, the United States in the putative invasion of
alien beings, and their interference in the human body, speaks eloquently to the
instability of both material and ideological frontiers.19 Far from fitting neatly into
the new epistemological categories constructed by the taxonomies of postEnlightenment science, the otherness of the monster remains containable neither
in its gross materiality, nor as the radically other which sets the limits of the
human, and of the self. And though it resists classification, it does not thereby
represent simply what Butler calls a domain of unlivability and unintelligibility
that bounds the domain of intelligible effects (1993: 23). Insofar as neither the
attempt to pin down nor the repudiation of the monstrous is ever complete, its disruptive signification persists. Though frequently cast as the absolute outsider, it
is always both strange and external, and familiar, even intimate. It is the marker,
then, not of the successful closure of embodied identity of the selfsame, but of the
impossibility of securing such boundaries.
It is with all this in mind that the question of the monstrous resists reduction to
the conventional historical pattern of credulous superstition supplanted by rational scientific explanation. It is not simply that the narrative of progressively more
adequate understanding of corporeal anomaly is cross-cut continually by conflicting beliefs and observations, but that reality and fantasy are always in
tension. The significance of the monstrous lies not in explanatory and causative
accounts of materialised phenomena, but in the discursive production of those
26
accounts, not just in terms of ideological interests, but as a matter of psychic

investments. What is called for is a performative analysis of the language of the
monstrous. The shifting meanings alone, and the repressions, fears and desires
that underlie those meanings, should forestall a merely descriptive reading of the
historical sources, and in an acute pun Derrida urges us to interrogate the hierarchives.20 In opening up my enquiry in this way, I want to sketch out my own
unwillingness to limit the significance of historical texts to their constative content, a limitation that operates even when it is acknowledged that the past remains
irretrievable to presence. Nor are archival sources to be unproblematically privileged, for as Dominick LaCapra warns:
The archive as fetish is a literal substitute for the reality of the past which is always
already lost for the historian. When it is fetishized, the archive is more than the repository of traces of the past which may be used in inferential reconstruction. It is a stand-in
for the past that brings the mystified experience of the thing itself an experience that is
always open to question when one deals with writing and other inscriptions. (1985: 92)
There would be little disagreement that the contemporary context of any operation of recording demands consideration, but that is only a starting point. And yet
it is not simply a matter of going on to acknowledge the processes of selection,
suppression, and narrative manipulation that constitute any archive, although
those are concerns with which historians, and particularly feminist historians,
have been rightly engaged. The issue, rather, is one of taking the further step of
querying the adequacy of analyses which focus solely on conscious or intentional
motivations. If we accept that the archival impulse is as much a matter of authorative command Believe this! as it is of the objective to record, then what is
raised, in addition to ideological incitement, is the question of subconscious
desires and fears. It seems to me, then, that any expectation of pinning down
meaning by investigating source material on a basis limited to either, or indeed
both, authorial intent and historical context cannot succeed. Moreover, as
Suzanne Gearhart puts it:
A text whose sense would only be that determined by the explicit context of its own
era (as in a historicist reading) would be a text without a history, a text produced, read
and interpreted in a single instant without duration. (1984: 16)
In other words, the complexities of meaning are not limited even to a recovery of
the implicit as well as explicit content, but are fully imbricated with our own
present reading context. To the extent that history is a discursive product, rather
than a reproduction faithful to some assumed original, it is constituted both in the
texts of the past and in the subsequent reiteration of those texts.
The status of a historical account is never straightforward, but according to the
tenets of traditional models, neither the present day writer nor reader of history
should reflect, still less acknowledge, that they too are agents of the making. In
contrast, what is at stake for a postconventional approach is not, of course, a
matter of truth or falsehood, but rather the production of meaning through a
process of reiteration that reinforces the supposed veracity of the event whilst
simultaneously destabilising it. As Derrida (1988) makes clear, reiteration is
never simple repetition, but a continuing operation in which the interval itself
27
constitutes an alteration that belies the fixity of any event or text. As such, I see
history as process, in which my own concerns as a feminist, located in a
post-Freudian interpretive landscape, inevitably become part of that production.
Although, then, my preliminary analysis of the concept of the monstrous refers
extensively to the texts of the periods in which it was most debated, I want to
resist closure of meaning and urge a reading that is deliberately open-ended and
undecidable. The fissures, breaks, contradictions, and indeed unexpected continuities in the received meaning of the monstrous are not then problems to be
resolved, but opportunities to reconfigure first impressions. With that in mind it
is easier to see how what seems to be a simple narrative of progressively more
rational approaches to the issue of monstrous form obscures a far more complex
process of contestation in which a whole range of modernist parameters of
knowledge truth and fiction, self and other, body and mind, inner and outer,
normal and abnormal are at stake.
2
MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER
Given the postEnlightenment organisation of knowledge into a series of binaries
that structure both the relationships 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 both of meaning and of boundaries. The figure of the monster is particularly rich in binary associations, and, as we have already seen, is characterised
variously as unnatural, inhuman, abnormal, impure, racially other and so on. In
every case, it is marked against the primary term, the normative standard, as
degraded or lacking, an oppositional category that is never of equal value. Thus,
for example, although the question of the humanity of human-born monsters and
indeed of non-western races was widely debated from the medieval through the
early modern period,1 they were cast as others whose anomalous bodies served to
fix the normalcy of the standard (European) model. In the case of those born
closer to home as part of western society where the failure to provide a copy
of the original was the proximate indicator for the ascription of monstrosity, again
such creatures functioned ideally as the other of the same, as boundary markers
that secured rather than threatened the integrity of the normatively embodied
subject. All this is highly familiar in deconstructionist thought as the first step of
an analytic that goes on to show not simply the mutual necessity but inequality
of the binary pair, but also the way in which simple difference yields up to
diffrance.2 As will become clear, 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 diffrance.
That link between the monstrous and the feminine runs as a thread throughout
the varied historical accounts and explanations, in more or less explicit terms, and
forms a nuanced but consistent motif in my theorisation of what is at stake in our
understanding of monstrosity. The point, of course, is not to equate the operation
of sexual difference with monstrous difference, but to mark those places where
the two signifiers are doing similar work, in both supporting and contesting the
structure of the western logos. What precisely occupies the site of the other at any
given time is always discursively mobile, but just as the marked term may be
feminised, so too it may be monstered. So long as we resist the temptation to
stabilise otherness, and recognise that we cannot reduce the monster to a singular
29
meaning, then the overlaps between the feminine and the monstrous can be highly
productive. It is not, then, a matter of actual women or monsters standing in some
simplistically oppositional relationship to men or to normatively embodied
human beings, but rather that one way of stripping a putative threat of its danger
is by pointing up not only its non-identity to the dominant standard, and assigning it to binary difference, but by fixing it within a network of degraded qualities.
Though my emphasis in this chapter is on the female body as a transgressive signifier, it is by no means the exclusive focus of normative anxiety. There is no doubt,
for example, that the disabled body on the one hand and the black body on the
other are positioned in a similar relationship of threat to the putative norm. It is,
then, not simply the possibility of the morphologically aberrant body that disrupts
the boundaries of the normative subject, but the being of any/body that signals
difference. The relationship between the monstrous body as other and the feminine as other, both implicitly in relation to the masculine subject, is a highly complex one, but what it does seem to speak to is a deep and abiding unease with
female embodiment, and indeed with the corporeal in general. As Braidotti puts
it, the womans body is capable of defeating the notion of fixed bodily form, of
visible, recognizable, clear and distinct shapes as that which marks the contour of
the body. She is morphologically dubious (1994: 80). Moreover, whatever the
specifically ascribed meaning, transhistorical horror and fascination with the
monstrous seems to centre both on the disruption of the corporeal limits that
supposedly mark out the human, and on the uncertain aetiology of monsters a
response that speaks to a more general anxiety about origins, and the relationship
between maternal and foetal bodies.
At the very simplest level, the monster is something beyond the normative, that
stands against the values associated with what we choose to call normality and
that is a focus of normative anxiety. The transhistorical interest in teratology,
which has taken philosophical, medical, anthropological, astrological and popular forms, has characteristically defined the monstrous as being intrinsically
opposed to the familiar course of nature, an affront to the expected that throws
doubt, as Canguilhem puts it, on lifes ability to teach us order (1964: 27). In
his paper Monstrosity and the Monstrous Canguilhem suggests that what gives
value to the individual life may be both the maintenance of a protective bodily
integrity, and the capacity to reproduce it over time. Against such goods, the dissolution of the body and final negation of life by death might seem the greatest
threat, but it is one, nonetheless, that Canguilhem dismisses. As he observes:
It is monstrosity, not death, that is the counter-value to life (1964: 29). What
monstrosity demonstrates is the interior operation of the accidental that thwarts
and limits sameness and repetition, that is the negation of the living by the
non-viable (1964: 29). And yet that precariousness of value is simultaneously
the very thing which bestows value on the normative life in that it has resisted
deformation and fulfilled the principle of generative resemblance. Although what
counts as normative, and indeed as monstrous, is always caught up in historically
and culturally specific determinants, what matters here is that those two concepts
remain locked in a mutually constitutive relationship. The monstrous, then, is a
necessary signifier, a signifier that is of normality, of a self that is constructed
30
discursively against what it is not, and yet, as I have indicated, that is nonetheless
unstable. The apparent security of the binary self/non-self that guarantees the
identity of the selfsame is irrevocably displaced by the necessity that the subject
be defined by its excluded other.
In the light of the longstanding association of the feminine with disorder, in
terms both of the irrational mind and the leaky body (Shildrick 1997), the conflation of women with monsters should come as no surprise. For all our cultural
and technological sophistication, we have inherited, in western countries, an ideological burden that explicitly associates women with danger, particularly in the
spheres of sexuality and maternity. Although the main body of historical material that I go on to analyze in this chapter is concerned primarily with issues of
pregnancy and childbirth, the supposedly excessively sexuate nature of women is
an implicit assumption throughout. And even where maternity is seen as the salvation of potentially wayward women as it was for much of the Victorian period
and the early twentieth century there is no guarantee that womens social and
familial recuperation is secure. Like other women, mothers, as a highly discursive category, have often represented both the best hopes and the worst fears of
societies faced with an intuitive sense of their own instabilities and vulnerabilities. Given that an overall theme of my argument is that security is in any case an
illusion, it would be spurious to point to any one era above others as especially
exemplary in this respect, but it might be instructive nevertheless to look briefly
at the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a period in western history
when notions of the monstrous, the feminine, and the racial other were highly
intertwined to their mutual and enduring detriment. As Bram Dijkstra puts it in
his study of the theme of the woman as vampire, racial, sexual, and political prejudices converged during this period to make the sexual woman into one of the
most terrifying human monsters of all time (1996: 253).3
The social context to which Dijkstra (1986, 1996) refers was of course intellectually mediated by the doctrines of Social Darwinism which pitted the successful evolution of humanity or more properly of the Aryan races against the
constant threat of degeneration to the lower forms of life figured in our animal
past. Both women and non-white peoples were seen as regressive agents capable
of dragging down white civilisation by feeding off the precious resources, both
economic and bodily, accrued by right-living men. Given their necessary reproductive access to male bodies, women represented a deadly threat in the struggle
between the forces of progress and of primitivism. Although a woman properly
controlled and contained in a reproductive relationship in which she was otherwise passive was welcomed as the mother of race purity, it was only the most
superior and continent of men who could hope to achieve such a union. For the
rest, the disordered sexual desires that lay beneath the civilised veneer of every
woman threatened both the future of the dominant race, and the personal health
and integrity of each individual man. In popular culture women were widely
represented as vampires or as predatory animals, whose monstrous appetites
could drain the life from their victims. As Dijkstra points out, in many contemporary and highly respected biological texts, sex was equated with a form of
cannibalism in which the male was devoured post-coitally. Accordingly,
31
snake-bedecked women, women with (or better yet, turning into) wolves, black
panthers, gorillas, bats, cobras, andother gaping-mouthed predatorswere
thus to become the most lasting cultural heritage of turn-of-the-century biological science (1996: 146). The monstrosity of such creatures and here they are
unlike their racial counterparts such as the Jew who was represented as both
animal-like and scheming was that they were driven, not by malice, but by an
uncontrollable and excessive desire for sexual expression and maternity.
In less febrile terms, the theme of the essential excessiveness of women can be
traced like a leitmotif throughout western history. In a tradition dating at least
from the Pythagorean Table, the masculine has been associated with the limit, the
feminine with the limitless, where the latter implies a failure of the proper, an
unaccountability beyond the grasp of instrumental consciousness. Womens
bodies, paradigmatically, and by elision, women themselves, exemplify an indifference to limits evidenced by such everyday occurrences as menstruation, pregnancy, lactation and such supposedly characteristic disorders as hysteria, and
more commonly today, anorexia and bulimia. In particular, the pregnant body is
not one vulnerable to external threat, but actively and visibly deformed from
within. Women are out of control, uncontained, unpredictable, leaky: they are, in
short, monstrous.4 Set against the more familiar and unthreatening parameters of
feminine passivity, the anxiety provoked by the female body with its putative
power to disrupt must alert us to the inadequacy of any attempt to confine corporeal difference to the place of the other. The explicit Renaissance interest in
human monsters is no mere historical curiosity, but simply one specific way of
attempting to represent the unrepresentable otherness that adheres to the same.
Certainly the standard of perfection was the normal male body but by that
token the less-than-perfect was scarcely unnatural. Moreover, perfection was
never secured, so that despite an enduring belief during the Renaissance and early
modern period in the generative privilege of the male seed, human progeny was
always subject to the threat of the maternal.
Whatever the manifest outcome at birth, the pregnant female body itself is
always a trope of immense power in that it speaks to an inherent capacity to problematise the boundaries of self and other. As the paradigmatic example of the
other within the same, pregnancy marks a monstrous insult to the order of the
proper. And for many centuries, a more specific problem was that with women at
the centre of the reproductive process, there could be no guarantee of the repetition of masculinist ideals of selfsameness, nor of the paternal principle. As I have
already indicated, the influence of Aristotle pervades western discourse, not least
in his assertion that anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way
a monstrosity, since in these cases Nature hasstrayed from the generic type
(GA 4.3.767b; 1953: 401), and he famously identified the birth of female babies
as the most common form of deformity (GA 728a 18; 737a 27). What was at stake
was a failure, in other words, of the law of resemblances, such that the proper
order of paternal power was compromised. In a remarkable reversal of the
accepted relationship of influence in reproduction, in which the fathers part was
held to be the dominant factor, the propensity of the mother herself an innately
deviant model of humanity to produce the monstrous marks the potency and
32
danger of unbridled female imagination. And insofar as Aristotle marked excess

and deficiency more generally as conditions of moral failing, the traditional characterisation of monstrosity in terms of excess, deficiency or displacement suggests
not only bodily imperfection, but an improper being. The disordered body is not
merely an affront to form, but casts doubt on the moral constitution of the
subject. All these elements corporeal disorganisation, lack of resemblance, ontological impropriety, and the link with the feminine form a shifting epistemological pattern that is as likely to emerge in our contemporary societys response to
disabled people as it is in periods when the concept of the monstrous was uncritically applied to a range of bodily differences. Later chapters will deal more extensively with present day issues, but for now I want to turn specifically to the
historical belief in monstrous imagination which draws together many of the
themes that I have been outlining.
In 1735, one Timothy Sheldrake submitted a report to the Royal Society of
London.5 In it he recounted how a pregnant woman named Elizabeth Spencer,
having been sentenced at Norwich Assizes to transportation to Australia for
shoplifting, successfully utilised the not uncommon ploy of pleading her belly
and was given respite until her baby should be delivered. Sadly the resultant
infant was born congenitally deformed, reputedly having two noses, unjointed
arms, no lower limbs, and only the rudiments of feet joined directly to the lower
part of the body. As a result of this strange production, the mother was accused
by some of having been guilty of some Practices both unnatural and unlawful
(Sheldrake 1747: 314), which according to the popular and roughly contemporaneous midwifery manuals of John Maubray (1724) or Nicholas Culpeper (1762)
might mean anything from commixture of humane with brutal seed to copulation during menstruation.6 The woman herself would have none of it, and offered
an alternative explanation that would have found equal favour with both Maubray
and Culpeper, and indeed with much informed medical and lay opinion of the
eighteenth century. As Sheldrake notes, Spencer:
said that she knew nothing that could give any Change to the natural Form of this creature, but the strange apprehensions that her Sentence had put her under [and heres the
clincher] from the uncommon Creatures the Country to which she was sentenced might
bring to her Sight. These odd Ideas that she had formed to herself, were all and the only
Thing, that had occasioned so great a Change from the natural Form the Child might
otherwise have had. (1747: 314)
In other words, in citing her prospective fear of Australian animals, the mother
appealed although Sheldrake does not use the term to the much debated and
controversial notion of maternal imagination.
Whether the supposedly eyewitness account of the newborns appearance is
accurate, and whether the convicted woman herself really believed her own
claim, or was simply acting expediently, we have no way of knowing. What is
certain is that Sheldrakes audience of learned men would be fully familiar with
the historical precedents and contemporary arguments that apparently allowed to
pregnant women a remarkable influence over the plasticity of their infants. The
concept of maternal imagination, or maternal impressions as it was more often
known, held that the disordered thoughts and sensations experienced by a
33
prospective mother during pregnancy were somehow transmitted to her foetus

such that at birth the childs body, and sometimes its mind, was marked by corresponding signs. These might be anything from the relatively common and insignificant incidence of scarlet birthmarks to the grossly disordered morphology of what
were known as monstrous births. And where the former might, for example,
denote a simple craving for strawberries on the part of the pregnant woman, the
latter were taken as evidence of far more dangerous and disruptive passions.
Although other explanations were available, almost any sort of neonatal nonconformity, corporeal or mental, could be attributed to the power of female imagination which seemed to offer a plausible explanation for anomalous births without
recourse to divine or supernatural causes. At its height, enthusiasm for the notion
of maternal imagination corresponded with a period in western Europe roughly
between the late sixteenth and first half of the eighteenth century, when there was
great speculative interest but very little firm understanding of the processes of
reproduction, or generation as it was more properly known. However extraordinary it may appear now, it was, in context, a belief fully consonant with other prevailing forms of knowledge. The point of my enquiry, however, is not to fix a
moment of progressive medical developmental history I shall resist the simplistic assertion that the concept of maternal imagination was either bad science
or misguided folk belief but in part to investigate an epistemic model very different to our own. More importantly, however, what interests me is that network
of truth, power and desire which, as Foucault asserts, constitutes all scientific
knowledge, both historical and contemporary. And where Foucault displays a
certain indifference to gender concerns, I shall draw out in particular the implications for sexual difference.
I have already outlined in Chapter 1 my wish to read history against its constative content, and to open it up to a fully discursive contextuality not limited
to a moment of original production. The brief story of Elizabeth Spencers travails serves well as an example. The process of dismantling the Chinese-boxlike structure of the account may clarify the process of history making, but it
cannot uncover an ultimate referent. As a historical event, the content of the
monstrous birth, and even more the form of its putative cause, relies at every
stage on differential discursive and narrative strategies. The mother had good
reason to muster sympathy; a country lay-person may have embellished to
impress the members of a metropolitan learned society; the archivist of the
Royal Society possibly edited the story; and I have certainly chosen to recall
those parts which best illustrate my purpose not to mention my selection
of that account above many others to hand, simply because Timothy Sheldrake
is a close namesake of my own.7 No less importantly, the way in which the
elements of the tale might be retold subsequently by readers of my own present
reiteration signals an equally open-ended future process. The issue of truth
must remain undecidable, and a close reading of relevant material of earlier
centuries, though necessary, cannot alone settle the question of significance.
Moreover, in terms of the specific set of beliefs under consideration, what is at
stake, the psychic attribute of imagination itself, resists authentication from the
very start.
34
With these provisos in mind, any understanding of the widespread popularity

of maternal imagination as an explanatory model for birth defects in the early
modern period must relate in part to a broader intellectual history. The development of biological knowledge, as a subdivision of what was called natural philosophy, had been, for the Christian world at least, text-based, largely divorced
from contemporary empirical enquiry and reliant on the Church fathers or ancient
Greek and Roman writers for its ultimate authority. Through the ubiquitous influence of Aristotle in particular, an assertion of the primacy of the male seed, and
especially the rule of generative resemblance the expectation that like would
produce like were widely accepted as the basis for knowledge of the reproductive process, such that in the sixteenth century Ambroise Par, for example, could
confidently insist, Nature always tries to create its own likeness (1982: 62).
Nonetheless, up until the seventeenth century, replication was not seen as a
necessity of nature, but as the result of a mysterious mechanism that was subject
to the intervention of divine power. As Jacob puts it: generationwas to some
degree, a unique isolated event, independent of any other creation, rather like the
production of a work of art (1989: 19). Although the reasons cited for the occurrence of monstrosity varied over subsequent ages, existent texts indicate that the
naturalism favoured by Aristotle was, in time, largely overridden by the belief in
divine and supernatural intervention.8 It is not until the mid-sixteenth century that
alternative explanations begin to gain ground, and the hitherto shadowy idea of
maternal impressions re-emerges in authoritative texts.
From a late modernist perspective rooted in the episteme of scientific rationality, the turn to maternal imagination may seem no better founded than the
appeal to Gods will, but, nevertheless for its adherents it was taken to mark,
often very self-consciously, a move towards more naturalistic, even scientific,
accounts of generation and foetal development. One influential writer on the
subject, who attempted to bridge the gap between a simple listing of the unusual
and fabulous and a more organised enquiry, was the practising surgeon,
Ambroise Par. In his 1573 text, On Monsters and Marvels, the first chapter On
the Causes of Monsters lists thirteen such possibilities, making no distinction
between types. On the one hand it proposes some accidental abnormality of the
male seed too much or too little is equally problematic or, at a similar
scientific level of hypothesis, the effect of assaults on the mothers body or her
own physical inadequacy too narrow a womb or an inappropriate posture
during pregnancy which might reasonably account for deformity. On the other
hand, the text asserts equally that either God or demons may have intervened in
the natural process. The explanation of the effect of imagination is also explicitly cited, and, as with all the possible causes, Par goes on to devote a short
chapter to examples. The most famous example, which Par claims to have
taken from Hippocrates, and which is widely recirculated throughout the next
two centuries, concerns a child black as a Moor born to a white-skinned royal
couple. The princess not surprisingly is accused of adultery, but Hippocrates
saves her by pointing out the imaginative effect of a portrait of a Moor that was
hung over her bed. In another example from his own century, Par recounts a
fathers explanation for the birth of a frog-faced child:
35
he thought that it occurred when his wife, who was ill of a fever, one of her neighbours
advised as a cure that she should take a live frog in her hand; her and her husband
embraced and she conceived; thus this monsterwas born by virtue of her imaginings.
(1982: 37)
The constant retelling of such stories, the appeal to classical authorities such as
Hippocrates, Aristotle, or the Bible, or the insistence that the author or other
respectable figures had seen the case with their own eyes were constant features
of both serious texts and the many popular, so-called wonder books in circulation
which dealt with miraculous and monstrous births. Pars text was by no means
the first to emphasise the power of imagination, and nor did he attempt to explain
how such a corporeal process might actually work in the body, but what is somewhat different to the existing tradition is that he places maternal imagination
among the mechanical rather than supernatural causes of monstrosity. That such
explanations were not simply retrospective, but gave rise to proscriptive behaviour, is evident in Fentons contemporaneous account of a two-headed woman
who, he says, made a living by showing herself from door to door, but was eventually chased through the Duchie of Bavarie, to the ende she might marre the
fruite of women with childe, for the apprehension which remaineth in the imagination of the figure of this monstrous Woman (1569: 135). For a more closely
argued exposition of the cause and effect phenomenon, I shall turn to the French
philosopher Nicolas Malebranche.
In Malebranches major work, The Search after Truth (1980 [1674]), the question of imagination in general and its dangerous implications is given full consideration. Writing a hundred years later than Par, during which time exemplary
accounts of maternal impressions had burgeoned, Malebranche expands on and
analyses the concept in a way that clearly marks it as a product of an emergent
Enlightenment scientism. As a follower of Descartes, Malebranche is concerned
not only to describe, but to explain the mechanical workings of the human body.
As before there is the same anxious desire to find reasons for human abnormalities, but with the emphasis now on rational explanation, albeit within the ultimate
context of divine will. And paradoxically, what counts as a rational explanation
relies on the ascription of a certain irrationality to women. It should not be supposed that imagination was inherently negative in its effects; rather that its
supposed function of mediating between the materiality of the natural world and
abstract thought could shift dangerously out of control. The mind/body split
authorised by Descartes and taken up by Malebranche at once positioned imagination in its naive form on the side of the corporeal senses, while at the same
time attributing to it the capacity to transmute sense impressions into the
ideational content of the incorporeal mind. The crucial factor that regulated imagination within the appropriate confines was judgement, the ability to order thought
rationally. Nonetheless, imagination was regarded with suspicion as a faculty that
might frustrate the proper distinction between mind and body.
Where earlier writers had presented the dangerous power of imagination as
being as it were accidentally stimulated in pregnant women, for Malebranche and
many of his contemporaries, the imagination is an especial characteristic of all
women that confounds the rationality of clear and distinct ideas. As he puts it:
36
(the) delicacy of the brain fibers is usually found in women, and this is what gives them
great understanding of everything that strikes the sensesbut they are normally incapable of penetrating to truths that are slightly difficult to discoverthe style and not the
reality of things suffices to occupy their minds to capacity. (1980: 130)
In the light of this intellectual shortcoming in women, the belief in maternal

impressions that mothers are capable of imprinting in their unborn children all
the same sensations by which they themselves are affected, and all the same passions by which they are agitated (1980: 113) both mirrors and produces a complex of ideas about sexual difference. In theorising just how anomalous birth
markings might occur, Malebranche again surmises a physicalist explanation.
Given that delicate people are more susceptible to compassionate imagination
than robust ones, then for the child still in the womb, the delicacy of the fibers
of their flesh being infinitely greater than that of women and children, the flow
of spirits is bound to produceconsiderable changes in them (1980: 115).
In illustration of his thesis Malebranche offers his famous example of a
Parisian woman who having witnessed, during her pregnancy, the horrific sight
of a criminal executed on the wheel, subsequently gave birth to a child who was
born mad, and whose body was broken in the same places in which those of
criminals are broken (1980: 115). What has passed between mother and child
then is both a mental affect, whereby the mothers compassionate imagination
has been so disturbed that it has produced madness in the womb, and the representation of an actual sight, whereby the womans animal spirits have passed in
physical imitation of the broken body of the executed man into that of the foetus.
Nonetheless, as with Pars examples, the violent passions of a woman, whether
of terror or desire, need not be excited by a real occurrence for maternal impressions to leave their mark. A mere image Malebranche mentions a child born
resembling St Pius after his mother had gazed too closely on a portrait of the
saint is sufficient to produce the trace of a trace. For all the strangeness of such
material, the intellectual underpinnings of Malebranches accounts are the familiar gendered motifs of the early modern period. Women are essentially irrational,
rooted in a determinate bodyliness, unable to maintain a proper distance between
subject and object, and not fully agents of their own will. The contrast with the
rational, reflective, detached figure of the male philosopher, the ideal of masculinity, could not be clearer.
Nonetheless, there is more to Malebranches exposition than the operation of
masculinist power/knowledge. Whilst the capacity of women to transmit impressions, both mental and physical, to their unborn children, provides a plausible
answer to the puzzle of monstrous birth, it also plays right into a deep-seated
human anxiety about proper paternal origins, and into a masculine fear of
womens procreative power. In other words, the rationalism of the explanation
cannot fully recoup the irruption of the undecidable within the principle of life
itself. In admitting that an absent object represented only by an image in the
mothers mind can be inscribed as a trace on the body of the foetus, reference
to the primacy of the male principle is overwritten. The monstrous signifier
effaces the father as that which should be rightfully signified. Now it might be
supposed that the very idea that paternal influence could be so easily interrupted
37
by a quality of the mother would position the concept of maternal imagination as

a rare acknowledgment of female power, or even more radically that, as MarieHlne Huet puts it in her book Monstrous Imagination, (t)he monster is thus a
maternal language (1993: 53). But even at the height of philosophical, popular
lay and medical support for the notion of such an effect, it is not the case that
women are looked on with new respect. As Huet goes on to show, in the intellectual circles of the early modern period at least, male superiority could be
partially retrenched.
The threat of monstrous births was a real and disturbing danger, but what they
testified to was not the power of women, but their inherent weakness. As
Malebranche himself makes clear, truth could be manifest only in abstract ideas
which are, he says, incomprehensible to women (Malebranche 1980: 130).
Indeed what maternal impressions signal is precisely that feminine propensity
which fails to distinguish between mere appearance and the deeper abstract ideas
that an image represents. Without the mediation of critical judgment of the type
that a man might exercise, appearances as such are a dangerous source of error.
But while Malebranche reassures his readers in general that since women are not
involved in seeking truththeir errors do not sustain much prejudice, for one
hardly takes their proposals seriously (1980: 131), the significance of maternal
impressions is less easily dismissed. Having admitted that as a result of womens
weakness, there must be very few children whose minds are not distorted in
some way, and who are not dominated by some passion (1980: 119), Malebranche
retreats from the disturbing implications by an equal insistence both that most
afflicted foetuses die in the womb (1980: 116), and that in any case at birth, all
but the strongest maternal passions will be overridden by the childs own direct
impressions (1980: 120). It is as though the full import of his own thesis is too
anxiety-provoking, for what is surely at stake in the excessive imagination of
women is, as Huet suggests, the corruption of not just the monstrous body, but to
a lesser degree, any being (the mother) engenders (Huet 1993: 55). While the
rational masculine mind, and ultimately for Malebranche at least, the mind of
God is the source of abstract truth, feminine imagination gives material expression to the hidden desires and passions of women that threaten always to corrupt.
And the resultant monstrous creation testifies to the failure of the pure mind
to master the body. At very least the superiority of the masculinist mind is in
tension with its vulnerability.
Despite the attempts by Malebranche to neutralise the implications of maternal
imagination, we may sense perhaps an unease that relates not simply to womens
role in generation, but to their very sexuality. In more popular texts at least, the
potential of foetal markings equally to reveal and to conceal the exercise of a
mothers unregulated sexual desire is a matter of both serious and ribald discussion. Although a woman might be caught out in her hidden infidelities by the
unexpected or abnormal appearance of her child, an appeal to the imaginative
power of an image alone could be used to provide an innocent rationalisation.
In, for example, the incident of a girl born furry as a bear, traditional explanatory models would have pointed to a case of actual bestiality, but for Par and the
others who remarked on it, the reason was the mothers predilection for a painting
38
of John the Baptist in his animal skins. Not surprisingly, the possibility that
accusations of adultery and the like might be circumvented was quickly noted
by writers such as Nicolas Venette who, in his much reprinted tracts of the late
seventeenth century, was concerned among other things to address the juridical
issue of filiation. The real danger was that the gap between truth and appearance
could be critically undermined, for, as Venette astutely recognised, an errant
woman might use the supposed power of maternal imagination, not simply to
explain away the failure of an infant to resemble its rightful father, but equally to
forestall altogether the tell-tale occurrence of such a lack of resemblance. As
Venette notes, any woman might easily have hidden adultery:
for, by thinking always on her Husband, when in the Arms of her Lover, she prints the
Features of the Body, and all the Characteristics of the Soul, of him she fixed her
Thoughts on, upon the tender Body of the Infant she was then conceiving. (Venette
1712: 303)9
In short, the operation of maternal imagination opened up a chasm in which, as

Marie-Hlne Huet notes, in matters of sexuality, no woman was above suspicion.
Given that the question of female desire has been, in the western world, an endless, transhistorical source of masculinist anxiety, the implications of maternal
imagination were thus doubly disturbing. It is not of course that one is able to pinpoint direct and unequivocal evidence of such fears of sexual otherness, but rather
that what is not said like the absent objects of maternal admiration leaves its
own trace in the texts. Although populist texts frequently had a robust approach
to the discussion of sexual mechanics, there is, as Roy Porter somewhat disingenuously remarks of Venette, no inkling of modern preoccupationswith
unconscious desire, with sublimation and repressionno hint of the Freudian
notion of sex as the secret spring of everything (Porter 1984: 238). Nonetheless,
our contemporary reading has much to gain from the gaps and silences, the
in-betweens that fundamentally undermine the binary divisions that supposedly
characterise the debate between pro- and anti-imaginationists. As Derrida puts it
in a slightly different context:
How does one prove in general an absence of archive, if not relying on classical norms
(presence/absence of literal and explicit reference to this or to that, to a this or a that
which one supposes to be identical to themselves, and simply absent, actually absent, if
they are not simply present, actually present; how can one not, and why not, take into
account unconscious, and more generally virtual archives)? (Derrida 1995a: 64)
Should we not be alerted, then, to the fact that with respect to desire more scholarly speculation managed the issue by avoidance, by concentrating instead on the
conundrum of the potential clash between a putative female capacity and the existence of a divinely ordered generative process? And if God is representative of
the male principle par excellence, might we not say that the strategy is precisely
one of repression and sublimation?
In the decades following the publication of Malebranches book, which went
through five editions in the mid-eighteenth century alone,10 the debate around
maternal imagination became ever more intense. It was not of course an isolated
concern, but was usually tied in with changing knowledge of other aspects of
generation. Embryology remained a highly speculative science with limited
39
technological resources, but even after the invention of such instruments as the
microscope, the input of more experimental data was read within existing meanings, such that profound discontinuities operate between such data and theoretical beliefs. Prominent among these during the period in question was the doctrine
of preformation which held that the embryo which grew in the womb was already
present in all its parts as a minute animalcule either in the sperm, or less commonly in the ovum. All that happened in intercourse was that an existent fully
formed being was transferred to a growth environment. The advantage of microscopic examination was that it seemed to confirm expectation, as Hartsoekers
famous drawn-from-life illustration of an animalcule within a spermatozoon
shows (Hartsoeker 1694). But how could maternal imagination so radically alter
foetal development, if the form of the foetal body was already given and fixed in
advance? For some theorists, the apparent incompatibility of the two theses was
sufficient to support rejection of maternal imagination, but for many others
including Malebranche, who was a committed preformationist there was no
conflict. What concerns us more, however, is that for those on both sides of the
argument, the gendered nature of the disruption that imaginationism seemed to
suggest was a major point of contention.
I want to look at some of the issues in circulation through a brief consideration
of the TurnerBlondel debate which raged for several years during the 172030s,11
and was subsequently continued by others. Both men were members of the
College of Surgeons in London, and both could claim vocal support from other
eminent scientists and philosophers, many of whom were engaged in an energetic
battle of claim and counterclaim conducted largely through the print media of
books, pamphlets and letters.12 Although merely repeating received opinion in
many respects, Daniel Turners medical treatise on diseases of the skin first
published in 1714 and reprinted in the 1720s was the proximate cause of the
debate. In it Turner devoted a chapter to the spots and marks of the skin which
arose, as he saw it, from the operations of maternal imagination:
which have had not only Power sufficient to pervert and disturb what the Ancients
called the Plastick or formative Facultybut to stamp its Characters, to dismember and
dislocate, and to make large and bloody Wounds upon the Body of the Foetus, conceived long since and formed completely. (Turner 1726: 169)
Despite the somewhat misleading expression here, it is clear from his book and
subsequent pamphlets that Turner rejected preformationism and is referring to a
foetus formed completely during an earlier stage of pregnancy. The subsequent
changes in the womb are produced, he believes, by mechanical processes which
in effect transmit impressions between the maternal mind and the foetal body.
Even so, Turner is reluctant to relinquish entirely the older paradigm of divine
intervention, and marks those mechanical processes as subservient to the exercise
of an immaterial force set in motion by an unknowable Creator. Although no adequate explanation of causation is offered, Turner refers to the effect of the imagination as an undeniable fact, and supports his claim with a wide variety of
examples. In contrast, his rival, James Blondel, both strongly espouses preformation, and insists on the characteristically post-Cartesian separation of mind and
body. The tension between epistemic models operates then both between opposing
40
scholars and within each man, with the reproductive capacities of women serving
as the objectified ground of debate.
At first sight there seems much to commend Blondels arguments to modern
eyes in that he not only sets out to disprove the vulgar error of maternal
imagination, as contrary to EXPERIENCE, REASON, and ANATOMY
(Blondel 1729: 5), but also concedes that some physical changes in the mothers
disposition even if caused mentally could affect the foetus. What he categorically denies is that imagination alone has any such power. As he puts it: if [the
mother] cannot make a determinate alteration in her own body, by a determinate
imagination, why should we believe that she is able to do it in the Child? (1729:
97). Alongside this appeal to reason, Blondel points out both that most foetuses
are subject to imagination without being marked or deformed although he
ignores Malebranches explanation, castigating the latters approach as mere
enthusiasm and bigotry (1729: 27) and that the mothers of deformed children
may deny any unusual passion during pregnancy. Moreover, he puts forward
fifteen propositions which include several unequivocal assertions:
XI The Rudiments of all Plants, and Animals, are from the beginning of the World.
XII Conception is independent on the Mothers Will.
XIV The Foetus has a Sensation and a Circulation of the Blood independent on the
Mother. (1729: Preface, n.p.)13
It is not only that Blondel is a preformationist, but he supports the theory

of emboitment which sees all living beings as having existed, encased either in
successive male seed or in the female ovary, from the creation of Adam and Eve.
Accordingly, his stated belief that theres not a single foetus at this time, but has
been successively in the ovary of 250 persons at least (1729: 141), allows
Blondel to explain some foetal deformity as a kind of wear and tear.14 He nevertheless wants to stress the relative unimportance of the mother in the whole
process, asking: By what means can the mothers imagination on a sudden, without her knowledge, or consent, and contrary to her inclination, obliterate the lineaments of the foetus, which were pre-existent to conception, and subsisting, even
since the creation of the world? (1729: 111).
These are clearly appealing arguments to a rationalist yet God-fearing audience, for without them there arose the unacceptable prospect of a female capacity
so powerful that it could undermine the purpose of the divine Creator himself.
Despite his incredulity at such a thought, however, Blondel was perfectly at ease
with other less threatening explanations of counter-action on the animalcule:
accidents arising from the usual laws of motion; force or violence on the foetal
body, perpetuated either by cheating parents or inept midwifery attendants; disease in the uterus; or simply interrupted development. Given the undeniable reality of monstrous births, some explanatory model was indeed required, but for all
his rationality, Blondels insistence that a belief in preformation uniquely ruled
out maternal imagination whilst allowing multiple other insults to the godgiven form of the foetus betrays unacknowledged concerns. Interestingly,
other preformationists used the imaginationist theory precisely to account for
congenital anomalies. One learned paper by the French physician and experimentalist, Daniel de Superville, could almost be a direct response to Blondel, for
41
it systematically refutes his arguments against maternal impressions while agreeing

both on the origin of the foetus, and on the accidents that might change or destroy
it. In answer to the assertion of foetal independence, Superville comments:
this is ridiculous; for one cannot deny, that the Secundines are closely related to the
Matrix, and receive from the Mother a Humour, or a Liquid, which by the Navel-string
it remits to the Foetus.Accordingly one may say, that the Foetus owes part of its
Being to the Mother. (1740: 310)
As for how the passions of the mother are passed to the child, Superville admits
ignorance, but adds airily: (I)t does not follow from thence, that we ought to
reject as false all that our Reason cannot penetrate into. Moreover, the hypothesis of an active maternalfoetal link allows Superville to preserve the notion
of an original perfection in all creation, and shift the responsibility for imperfection
to a more credible source: Daily observations demonstrate to us, that the disordered and disturbed Imagination of Women often hurts the Infants (1740: 311).
Whatever the putative focus of the imaginationist debate, it is being played out with
respect to the agency and corporeality of women, and certainly to their detriment.
That the deformatory power of maternal impressions was a serious matter is
evident in relation to the age-old question of the human soul. As the concept of
maternal imagination developed in the scientific discourse of the early modern
period, much of its capacity to do damage prospectively on a not yet existent
embryo was dropped. The point now, about maternal imagination both to supporters and detractors and indeed about some other suspected naturalistic
causes of monstrosity, such as an ill-formed womb (Maubray 1724) or accidental insults during pregnancy (Daniel de Superville 1740), was that the precipitating factor occurred post-conception. It would seem to follow then that the
progeny at conception must be unquestionably human and thus the possessor of
an indestructible soul, and all that this implied in terms of baptism. Strangely,
however, there was still uncertainty, for though an infant at birth might be human
in appearance and/or provenance, there was no guarantee of a rational soul. In a
discussion in 1668 of a human-born hairy monster, whose mother had seen an ape
during the fifth month of pregnancy, members of the Royal Society debated the
power of maternal imagination. The issue, however, was not simply whether this
creature was endowed with a human soul; [but] if not, what became of the soul
of the embryo, that was 5 months old? (Baldam 1738: Vol. 1, 86). Not only then
could mothers impart monstrous form to their offspring, but they could deny
them salvation. And, as always, the monster itself defies explanatory closure.
That the status of women was central to the historical debate around maternal
imagination is well supported by the archival texts, but what is actually at stake
remains perhaps unspoken. Although at the surface level on both sides, many of
the disputants and they are almost invariably men present their material as
supportive of the feminine, the underlying themes seem to be a desire either
to point out the dreadful consequences of a putative female power, or to deny
that such a power is possible. James Blondel, for example, while appealing to
common sense, shows a lurking anxiety about what he sees as natural to women:
What can be more scandalous, and provoking, than to suppose, that those Whom God
Almighty has endowdwith an extraordinary Love and Tenderness for the Children,
42
instead of answering the End they are made for, do bread [sic] Monsters by the
Wantonness of their Imagination? (1727: Preface, n.p.)
However, his later opinion that some monsters, at least, are frauds perpetrated by
cruel mothers hoping to excite Charity and Benevolence(1727: 22), somewhat
vitiates his apparent defence of womens god-given virtue.15 In the face of
Turners representation of his own argument as one for rightful recognition of the
Objects of our Admiration that demonstrate the power of the mothers imagination (Turner 1730: 22), Blondel claims to remove from women both the unnecessary worry that accompanied pregnancy and the unjustified burden of guilt for
deformities that were in reality owing to remote Causes, which have taken effect,
even a long Time before she came into the World (1729: 142). There is little
doubt that such a burden did in fact exist, for if maternal impressions were
acknowledged as real, the effect was characterised in general as a malign power
which, as far as possible, should be circumvented. But it was not only the mental
and physical weakness of the female constitution that invoked the disordering of
the foetal body, but an intrinsic lack of self-restraint that marked women as
actively dangerous others, whose very nature could disrupt generative regularity.
Both medical texts and those intended for lay consumption were, then, full of
advice to doctors, husbands and to intending mothers on how best to avoid the
dreadful possibility of monstrous or deformed births. It was not just a scientific
understanding of the female body or of the mysterious process of generation that
was at stake, but the extent to which women were in need of policing and control.
Given that maternal impressions could be activated by anything from the pious contemplation of a saintly portrait to the terrifying sight of a murder or mutilation, from
a longing for a particular food during pregnancy shellfish was especially liable to
produce horrendous facial features to a hidden and lascivious desire for unnatural
sex, there was virtually no aspect of pregnant womens lives which could be
considered safe. As Barbara Stafford notes, maternal imagination worked like a
pre-Freudian fetal psychology in which offspring visibilized concealed or surrogate passions on their surfacesmottled by an alien pattern of interiority (1991:
313). Above all it was the excessive appetites of women that were to be feared, for
even where a potentially damaging external event had occurred, it was the womans
over-indulgence of fear or pleasure that was at the root of subsequent problems.
Both Turner and Blondel offered fairly circumspect practical advice on the care of
mothers-to-be, with each counselling calm. Turner urged women to resist particular cravings and to avoid becoming frightened (1730: 137), while Blondel advised
that expectant mothers should avoid fear and apprehension when faced with those
sights that were thought to produce marks and deformities, precisely because they
were in fact harmless (1727: 58). More direct disciplinary power is evident in the
exhortations of John Maubrays popular text, The Female Physician, in which he
places on pregnant women the responsibility to suppress all Anger, Passion, and
other Perturbations of Mind, and avoid entertaining too serious or melancholick
Thoughts; since all such tend to impress a Depravity of Nature upon the Infants
Mind, and Deformity on its Body (Maubray 1724: 3756).
As convincing new theories of reproduction began to emerge towards the
end of the eighteenth century, the issue of maternal imagination faded in medical
43
and philosophical texts, although it was never convincingly resolved in either

direction.16 Moreover, as a popular belief, it remained strong,17 and long continued to rationalise an implicit fear of female interiority, and to ground demands for
the close surveillance and regulation of womens pregnancies. Although some
writers recommended that womens irrational desires should be acceded to in
order to lessen the possible ill-effects on their foetuses, the more usual response
was to impose some form of control. And as late as 1792, the Swiss theologian
Lavater speculates on the potential eugenic implications of programming maternal imagination. It is not only that an exact register of the incidents of pregnancy
might enable women to forsee the physiological, philosophical, intellectual,
moral, and physiognomical revolutions through which each child has to pass, but
that they might, perhaps, be enabled to fix beforehand the principal epochs of the
life of their children (1810: 186, my emphasis). However the links between
maternal and foetal bodies are theorised, and whether the place of the mother is
seemingly empowered or degraded, the dangerously affective nature of women is
deemed responsible for any corruption of the form of their offspring. What the
Enlightenment debate around maternal imagination fixes is, as Bouc claims, the
insidious assimilation of the pregnant woman with an abnormal creature
the great culprit, the evil scapegoat (1987: 98).
Although the supposed operation of maternal imagination exemplifies a tangible point of crisis, its power is not alone in defying the supposed immanence of
the female body. All those processes of procreation which speak to change rather
than to replication are similarly suspect. What is evident throughout the debates
is the operation of power/knowledge over, and a desire for mastery of, the procedures of reproduction insofar as they are the domain of an unstable other. Indeed
it is notable that during the period in question, and certainly in many contexts
since, male authors have widely used procreative metaphors to figure their own
creativity.18 It was not that the link between imagination and reproduction was
wholly unacceptable, then, but that in the context of the feminine it ran the risk
of spilling over into an uncontrollable and dangerous enthusiasm. In reflecting on
the putative threat of imagination in the context of the early modern understanding of reproduction, where like should produce like, postmodernist historians
may be alert to the parallels with the unease which greets the overt exercise of a
historical imagination, in which a reading of the past is acknowledged as a matter
of production rather than replication. In both instances, a conservative desire for
ideal reproduction is fundamentally challenged by the notion that undecidable
forces are at work. Whilst the power of imagination is widely, if reluctantly,
accepted, it is nevertheless seen as corruptive of the proper end of male generative sexuality/traditional historical research a monstrous aberration that must be
explained but not embraced.19
As a moment of historical enquiry, the debate around maternal imagination
remains fascinating both for its monstrous subject matter and for the richness of
illustrative material, but far from being a simple matter of descriptive interest, it
is, in common with all discourse of either past or present, never entirely neutral
or innocent. The nexus of truth, power and desire that mobilises all authoritative
accounts of which biomedical science is a prime example raises complex
44
ethico-political and ontological questions. Although the representations of female

form and function are culturally specific, what is at stake more fundamentally
may be less variant. Behind the facts of the issue, our predecessors were deeply
concerned not just with the moral and indeed legal status of women, but with
questions of the aetiology of monsters, the dangerous nature of the feminine, and
the vulnerable boundaries of the human. In contrast to the unproblematised historical accounts of maternal imagination offered by Philip K. Wilson (1992) and
Dudley Wilson (1993) for example, several feminist writers Barbara Maria
Stafford (1991), Marie-Hlne Huet (1993), Julia Epstein (1995), Rosi Braidotti
(1996) have speculated over and against received meanings. Would it be too
incautious to suggest that the motivating anxieties that fuelled the controversy are
with us still? In her Reith Lectures20 of the mid-1990s, Marina Warner was able
to declare: Ungoverned energy in the female always raises the issue of motherhood and the extent of maternal authority [and] fear that the natural bond
excludes men and eludes their control (1994: 4). In turning away from the
natural, the concepts of foetal independence, of disputed paternity, and of the
perfect child are hinged today on advance reproductive technologies, on genetic
engineering, and on cloning all of them grounded on womens bodies. The aspiration to fix the uncertainties and to override the unruliness and excessiveness of
women and their reproductive powers remains undiminished.
With this in mind, I want finally in this chapter to look more closely at the
inherent monstrosity of the maternal body, which far exceeds a postnatal retrospective marking of error on the part of the mother. It is not just that the mother
is always capable of producing monstrosity, but that she is monstrous in herself.
It is above all the very fecundity of the female, the capacity to confound definition all on their own that elicits normative anxiety. At the turn of the millennium,
the disciplinary nature of the clinical encounter, the attempt to regulate and normalise the body, has taken on new forms with the advent of high-tech medicine.
But the resulting increase in clinical intervention has both enhanced control in
general and undermined it in specific instances. In particular, the new reproductive
technologies with their complication of the lines of paternity (and maternity) have
opened up anew the horror of indeterminacy. Just at the moment when technological advances have enabled the extension of surveillance to the womb itself,
and when sperm and ovum may be processed prior to fertilisation, the fear of
what goes on unseen in the recesses of the body may be relocated to uncertainty
about origins and foundational narratives. What, we may ask, becomes of the
Law of the Father, the symbolic order itself, once the Oedipal scenario of daddy,
mommy, me is displaced by techniques such as cloning or simple lesbian parenthood? As Mary Ann Doane suggests: (t)he story is no longer one of transgression and conflict with the father but of struggle with and against what seems to
be an overwhelming extension of the category of the maternal, now assuming
monstrous proportions (1990: 169).
Just as the narrative of maternal imagination occupied an earlier age, popular
culture today plays out many of the anxieties associated with the female body and
its monstrous (re)productivity. I want then to bring my theme right back to the
present by looking at a recent monster film that enjoyed high popularity, though
45
rather less critical success. Species (1995) is the story of a clinical experiment that
goes wrong; of how alien genes mixed with those of a human being produce a
voracious, female-identified monster whose sole aim is to mate and reproduce.
The band of humans, standing in her way and intent on exterminating her threat,
comprise four men representing a variety of masculine stereotypes, and a token
woman, all of whom have strictly normative appetites. After much predictable
carnage, and some impressive bodily transformations, the monster, Sil, is eventually hunted down and destroyed, giving the satisfied survivors a rare moment
of reflection and the opportunity to pronounce the epithet: She was half us; half
something else. And it is precisely that ambiguity that lies at the heart of what
makes the monstrous body transhistorically both so fascinating and so disturbing.
It is not that the monster represents the threat of difference, but that it threatens to
interrupt difference at least in its binary form such that the comfortable otherness that secures the selfsame is lost. Moreover, as we have seen, the female body
just is monstrous in the western imagination, the necessary locus of worship and
disgust, whose corporeality threatens to overflow boundaries and engulf those
things which should remain separate. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen puts it most pertinently: Feminine and cultural others are monstrous enough by themselves in
patriarchal society, but when they threaten to mingle, the entire economy of
desire comes under attack (1996: 15). Just as the feminine haunts the margins of
western discourse, always out of place in the paradigms of sameness and difference, so too monsters are liminal creatures which cannot be transcribed within the
binary, and whose abjection leaves always the trace within. What lies beyond
the unproblematic horror of the absolute other is the far more risky perception that
the monstrous may not be recognised as such, for it is not so different after all.
In Doanes reading of the film Alien (1979) the monstrous feminine merges
with the environment such that the space of the narrative is the space of the maternal body itself (Doane 1990). The same point is also taken up by Barbara Creed,
who outlines how in turn the inner space of the mother ship in which the alien
lurks, the vast uterine chambers of the mother aliens lair, and the finale in which
the escape capsule is ejected from the malevolent mother ship with explosive
force, all reproduce the maternal as monstrous (Creed 1993: 1820). A similar
move characterises the denouement of Species where Sil retreats to the sewers to
give birth to, literally to pro-ject, her monstrous offspring, leaving the human pursuers to force their way through what amounts to the slime of amniotic/semiotic
fluid. Species is an altogether less knowing and sophisticated film than Alien, but
for that reason its motivating anxieties are writ large. As I indicated before, what
is directly at issue is the perception that Sil at very least resembles one of us. Her
surface appearance is that of an attractive and nubile young woman, though
resemblance should, of course, never be trusted. Beneath her skin, Sil displays a
phallic worm-like writhing structure that complicates the boundaries not just of
her putative humanity, but of her femininity. Far from the heterosexually desirable woman she appears to be, Sil is rather the feminine principle in its archaic
and repressed role of the phallic mother. Nonetheless, her devastating drive to
procreate serves to remind us that the reproductive identity of all women is similarly out of control. For the human males, the AIDS era link between sex and
46
death is fairly explicit What about protection? gasps one just before he is
overwhelmed by the monstrous embrace but it is not sex itself that obliterates
the boundaries of selfhood, but the limitless fecundity of the maternal presence.21
Moreover, as Kristeva makes clear, the bond between the mother and child in the
semiotic is monstrous in its refusal of the separations demanded by the paternal
order (1982: 72). The monstrous feminine frustrates distinction, and in threatening to merge strikes at the patriarchal economy of desire.
In the final sewer scene, the fear of the loss of differentiation between self and
other, male and female, inside and outside, mother and child, reaches its climax
when Dan whose previous face to face encounter with Sil is protected by the
speech act of separation: Its you risks immersion in the metaphorical amniotic
fluid. It is a moment of recognition of what is repressed, of the Kristevan abject, of
the maternal body that disturbs identity, system and order, that fails to respect
borders, positions, rules (Kristeva 1982: 4). For Kristeva, the abject is centred on
the maternal body as simultaneously the origin of life and the site of insertion into
mortality, the location then of an inherent ambiguity. Significantly, the apparent
happy ending of the film where Dans bodily autonomy is restored relies on a
rebirthing scene in which the remaining patriarchal couple haul Dan out of the by
now flaming slime to take his place as part of the Oedipal triad. The Law of the
Father is recuperated, and the monstrous mother, blasted by the gun-toting male,
disintegrates before the power of the phallus. But that, as the conventions of the
genre and of a more nuanced understanding of monstrosity make clear, is far too
simple to effect closure. Despite her sometime human form, the threat of Sil eludes
corporeal boundaries, and in opening up to an alarming and engulfing viscosity
beneath the skin, she exceeds instantiation as the absolute other. The final gunshot
cannot resolve the complicity of the identity and separation that typifies the maternal space. With Sils extinction, the external threat of the absolute other is vitiated,
only for the other within to re-emerge. Her splattered remains produce a tasty snack
for a sewer rat which instantly begins its own process of monstrous metamorphosis.
The complicity of the normal and abnormal, the pure and the impure, and
above all the self and the other, is a theme that must haunt any postconventional
understanding of the monstrous. The assignation of the term to all those who are
devalued in western society speaks to a determination to hold in place a precarious system of binary difference that is always undermined by diffrance. It is not
only pregnant women who confuse the boundaries of the selfsame; the impossibility of holding apart distinct categories of self and other is the omnipresent condition of being. Where the monstrous other, and more particularly the monstrous
mother, has figured an anxiety about the disorganisation of the embodied self, the
move has been to effect strategies of exclusion and vilification that deny full
humanity to those who are ostensibly different. What is at stake is that the normative claim to self-present autonomy and bodily distinction should be sustained
against the putative threat of any being that represents the self as intrinsically
insecure or unstable, vulnerable, that is, both in its potential dependency and in
its loss of morphological boundaries. The extent to which we feel it is necessary
to defend our investment in the sovereign self is a measure surely of an unacknowledged apprehension that it is always too late: the other is already half us.
47
It is not my purpose to suggest that the reading of the monstrous which I

propose here is the only one or without risk. Moreover, the anxieties generated by
corporeal difference have most often resulted not simply in assimilation but in a
violent policing of boundaries, both practically and metaphorically, and may continue to do so. The task, then, is to take up the explicit challenge to normative categories of being and to reconceive the monstrous, as would Butler I think, not
only as an imaginary contestationbut as an enabling disruption, the occasion
for a radical rearticulation of the symbolic horizon in which bodies come to
matter (1993: 23). If the monstrous is indeed half us, half something else, then
the encounter with the monster need not mark the place of external hazard, but
rather the interruption of the dead-end of full presence, and the emergence of the
imaginative and embodied complications within. As a move that speaks
inevitably to the imperative to reformulate the relations of self and other, it is
irreducibly an ethical project.
3
THE SELFS CLEAN AND
PROPER BODY
In order to shed more light on the predicament of the monstrous in western
thought, my purpose in this chapter is to investigate further the precarious place of
the body, and to bring it into relation with dominant conceptions of the self.
During the last few years, both feminist scholarship and postmodernist philosophy
have opened up afresh an interest in monstrous corporeality that moves far beyond
a well-established clinical concern where therapeutic modification is the major
issue to an altogether more discursive reading. Like the well-established
configuration of matter and mother, to which it is also supplemental in the
Derridean sense, the monstrous is somehow both excessive to and yet, as I shall
show, embedded in the structuration of the western logos. What is at stake is not
only the categorical integrity of bodies that matter, but also the hitherto taken for
granted stability and autonomy of the singular human subject as the centre of the
logos, of a self that is foundational without being embodied, and a body whose
integrity is so unquestioned that it may be forgotten, transcended. Against this, the
confused and essentially fluid corporeality of monsters makes them an ideal location for an enquiry into the closure of both subjects and bodies that characterises
modernist philosophical discourse. As I have suggested elsewhere, the issue is
one of leaky boundaries, wherein the leakiness of the logosis mirrored by the
collapse of the human itself as a bounded being (Shildrick 1996: 1).
It is not, of course, that modernist philosophy has shown any great interest in
the organic substantial body as such, but rather in the human as the abstract universal marker of the site of foundational voice, vision and vitality. In one major
tradition, the body itself is simply the mechanical housing of the subject, and as
such may be bracketed out, unrepresented, transcended. As Descartes puts it in
the Meditations: although the whole mind seems to be united to the whole body,
yet, if a foot, or an arm, or any other part, is separated from my body, it is certain
that, on that account, nothing has been taken away from my mind (1968: 164).
The mind, in short, is an indivisible thinking substance, exempt from the laws of
natural science that determine the nature of the body. The human has been of
interest then not as a biologically defined category, but only to the extent that the
term is elided with that of person the possessor, conventionally, in a Lockean
formulation (Locke 1975), of a sense of self as a continuing subject of its own
experiences. I will not rehearse here the by now well-known arguments identifying the subject of the western logos with the human male,1 but will simply mark
that insofar as their difference is specified, women are the non-subject other, the
excluded, the embodied, the monstrous. As the masculinist subject surveys his
THE SELFS CLEAN AND PROPER BODY
49
world he sees only that which reflects his own self-presence, the confirmation of
his own wholeness and completion.
As one alternative among the multiple histories of thinking ontology, the underlying question of what it is to be a subject, and experience oneself and the world
as such, is addressed increasingly through a phenomenological approach, which is
perhaps more in keeping with our commonsense understanding of our embodied
selves. Unlike the mindbody split effected by the Cartesian tradition, in phenomenology abstract selfhood is seen as inseparable from material being-in-theworld. The two are intertwined such that it is in the spatial and temporal extension
of our bodies that we become our selves. It is a model that calls for a radical
rethinking of the concept of embodiment. Moreover, as Merleau-Ponty (1962)
understands it, perception is no longer the inner representation of an outer world
in the mind of a distinct perceiver, but is constituted in the organic relationship
between the self and the world. In consequence, the order of perception is from the
first an interdependent relation between the perceiver and the perceived, in which
the seeing I is decentred. More importantly, Merleau-Ponty stresses the
reversibility of every body as a visible-seer or tangible-toucher; in other words, the
status of the self as a sensible-sentient being collapses the rigid distinctions both
between mind and body, and between subject and object. Above all it is in the
application of corporeal schema habitual ways of seeing, touching and listening
that the body is constituted as meaningful, and integral to our sense of self.
Although in our active relation to the world we remain open in principle to
transformation, there is nonetheless a certain solidification of perception such
that we can reflexively experience our embodied selves in more or less consistent
ways. What matters is the practical competence in relation to our material context
that enables us to act appropriately prior to conscious reflection or intent. As I
read to the end of a page, for example, I turn it without thought. Yet, even when
our own bodies are taken as that of which we can be most certain, the finite material site of the bounded individual, and the point of interface with a social world,
there remains a breach between self and body to the extent that the latter can
betray us as that which is beyond logic and reason. Even in the phenomenological tradition of Merleau-Ponty which stresses in particular the unity of matter and
mind expressed through the dynamic being-in-the-world of bodies, the healthy
body as I have analyzed in more detail elsewhere (Shildrick 1997) far from
being consistently present to us, is scarcely experienced at all. It is what Drew
Leder (1990) refers to as the absent body. Once, however, it is broken that is
diseased, damaged or otherwise unwhole the body forces itself into our consciousness and that comfortable absence is lost. The body is now perceived, but
is experienced as other. As Leder puts it: The body is no longer alien-asforgotten, but precisely as re-membered, a sharp searing presence threatening the
self (1990: 91). In consequence, there is a sense in which embodiment, in being
symbolically associated with the disruption of the subject, runs the same risk of
being ontologically devalued, being seen as potentially monstrous, in phenomenology as it does in more conventional philosophies.
There is too a related problem in that despite the nature of embodiment being
a fundamental component of phenomenology, the method nonetheless assumes as
50
standard a normal model of corporeal development, and finds it difficult to

theorise from the grossly disordered body. I dont mean to suggest that the phenomenological perspective has not already figured prominently in staging the ontological and epistemological consequences of corporeal anomalies be they the
result of illness, trauma or congenital disorders but rather that the integrated and
fully functioning body remains an implicit standard. In other words, marked differences in embodiment are seen a priori as deviations from a singular model
rather than as equally valid alternatives. Clearly there are many corporeal forms
which signal an acute loss of previous bodily integrity and corresponding function, but in the case of congenital conditions in particular, negative comparison
to a putative model of normality seems more a matter of disciplinary regulation
and control than of pragmatic value. But what if the focus were on the abnormal, on the explicitly monstrous? At this point, it is not my intention to offer a
phenomenological account, but just as feminist phenomenologists such as Iris
Marion Young (1990b) and Ros Diprose (1994) have moved to disrupt the
assumption of a gender-neutral, ageless and universalised body as the centre
of lived experience, so too we may gain further insights by theorising nonnormative morphology, not as a failure of form (inviting therapeutic modification), but as an-other way of being. The existence of monstrosity may serve to
define by comparison and opposition the delimited corporeality and secure subjectivity of the majority, but what is important is the realisation that the standard
is not normal but normative.
The question that haunts the western imagination Who am I? and its
implicit companion Where did I come from? has been answered conventionally by reference to a sense of self having a transcendent detachment from the
material business of the world, or at least effective autonomy within it. To be a
self is above all to be distinguished from the other, to be ordered and discrete,
secure within the well-defined boundaries of the body rather than actually being
the body. Although from time to time we may experience ourselves out-of-body,
what rarely happens and then it is defined as a special type of madness is that
we should either inhabit the body of another, or find our own bodies shared
invaded we would say by another.2 And while the narcissistic pleasure to be
derived from perceiving our image from the outside, most commonly in the
mirror, may also evoke the sensation of strangeness and misrecognition, it is
the unfamiliarity of the material body and the space it occupies that strikes us, not
the perception that another subject might occupy that body. In short, though the
integration of mind and body may be contested by a western discourse of transcendent subjectivity, there are few doubts as to which minds and bodies go
together. Self-identity may always and necessarily be a case of misrecognition as
Lacan would say, but it is precisely the mapping of the boundaries between singular selves and bodies and those of others that authorises our being-in-the-world
as subjects. Moreover, the inherent exclusivity of such a closure is marked, as I
have noted already, by the realisation that the sovereign I, who defines himself
against the other, the non-self, describes an intrinsically masculine subject.
Given that the western logos is at best ambivalent about the ontological status
of the body, the putative split between mind and body that it puts into play has
51
not resulted in disinterest in or disengagement from questions of corporeal being.

Contra Descartes, we are obsessed with bodies, such that the desire to know oneself, to establish identity, involves always both the interface between singular
bodies and the difficult, even intractable, relations between self and body
(Epstein 1995: 4). To the extent that the western notion of subjectivity in general
is both guaranteed and contested by those who do not, indeed cannot, unproblematically occupy the subject position, the self-present subject who defines himself against all that is non-self need scarcely acknowledge his own corporeality.
The assumption is that if sovereign minds are housed in appropriate bodies, then
those who are inappropriate/d others cannot occupy unproblematically the subject position. It is not, then, normative morphology that engages the greatest
attention, but those bodily forms the monstrous, the physically vulnerable, the
disabled, the congenitally different like conjoined twins or hermaphrodites3
which most clearly challenge the distinctions both between mind and body and
between body and body.
In terms of modernist ontology, epistemology and ethics, the ideal parameters
of thought and action in the social world point to an inviolable self/body that is
secure, distinct, closed, and autonomous. In setting up a model of such invulnerability, it is inevitable that for all of us there is a struggle to maintain the necessary boundaries, while for a substantial minority who experience some form of
corporeal breakdown or congenital anomaly, the ideal is beyond reach. Despite
such a plethora of antithetical lived forms, however, morphological difference
continues to figure the monstrous. What happens, in effect, is that normative discourse, which is propelled by the notion of discrete and autonomous sites of being
and agency, sets itself against such a blurring of distinctions and attempts to
maintain physical and moral detachment from those for whom the boundaries of
embodied selfhood are uncertain or plainly breached. Now those lines of separation are not merely symbolic, but are realised quite literally in the material of the
body. Accordingly, as the most visible boundary of all, the skin is both the limit
of the embodied self and the site of potentially transgressive psychic investments.
In consequence, any compromise of the organic unity and self-completion of the
skin may signal monstrosity. Many fairly common congenital conditions are
counted as deformities precisely because they breach the external margins of the
body. Spina bifida, cleft palate, and exomphalos, for example, are all the result of
a lack of material closure, the more serious arising initially from the failure of the
infolding primitive streak to establish ever new but securely consolidated boundaries in the increasingly complex organisation of the early embryo. What is more
notable, however, is that the non-normative development of the surface phenomenon can be taken to denote, both in the present day and historically, a far more
significant disturbance to the structure of being.
One need only look at the many representations of the Monster of Cracow
(Figure 3.1) a sixteenth-century favourite displaying both excess and displacement to appreciate how violently monstrosity might breach the borders of
humanity. The human-born infant is beset not only with manifold excrescences
which burst through the surface membrane, but by an inhuman mix of fur, horn,
skin and scale. It is, in other words, indiscriminately transspecies in appearance.
52
Figure 3.1 The Monster of Cracow in De monstrorum natura, caussis et

differentis (Licetus 1634)
Moreover, the deformities constitute a multiplicity of additional orifices, the creature being described as having apes faces instead of breasts, dogs heads at both
elbows and knees, toads feet, and cats eyes under the navel (Bateman 1581: 337).
The emphasis on the points of exchange between inner and outer marks the creatures monstrosity as a matter of being as much as of appearance. Although it
plays no part in the Cracow monsters form, it is perhaps worthy of note that
racial difference too has often been reduced to a focus on the sites of the body
where there is an open intersection between inside and outside. The attention
given to the forms of the mouths, noses, breasts and genitalia4 may well speak, in
its concentration on erogenous zones, to an eroticisation of the racial other, but I
would suggest that even more is at stake. As breaches in the bodys surfaces
points of vulnerability for us all such sites, in their evident or supposed difference, mark an uncertainty about the putatively self-contained human being.
Moreover, as with the Monster of Cracow, their contaminatory potential is clear.
53
That unusual bodily form has a long history of provoking fear, repugnance and
frequently condemnation is widely evidenced in a variety of western texts. I am
not suggesting that those are the only responses, but rather that whatever other
explanations and interests are predominant at any particular time and cultural
location, there does seem to be a continuous thread of anxiety. The elision of ethical and physical affronts to the norms of human being has its roots in classical
antiquity. If Aristotelian virtue is that which strikes the harmonious balance
between the vices of excess and deficiency, the very same characteristics by
which Aristotle defines monstrosity, then it is a simple step to corporeal disorder
inviting moral condemnation, and indeed the institutional, as well as individual,
response of erasure. In his history of the monstrous races, for example, Friedman
cites customary Roman Law which states: A father shall immediately put to
death a son recently born, who is a monster, or who has a form different from that
of members of the human race (Friedman 1981: 179); while wonder books and
broadside ballads give endless accounts of infants being destroyed at birth, sometimes along with their mothers. As we have seen, for medieval Christianity with
its belief in human descent from the bodily perfection of the single progenitor,
Adam, morphological difference represented the corruption of the species either
by miscegenation, or as a result of divine punishment for collective or individual
sin. In Batemans account of the Monster of Cracow he makes clear that the creature is born to honest and gentle parents, thus allaying the suspicion of parental
transgression. Nonetheless, as I indicated in Chapter 1, the monstrous birth has
portentous value in that it warns of the general dangers of sin, and reminds the
sixteenth-century viewers of the coming judgment of the Lord. And despite the
partial turn in subsequent centuries towards more scientific forms of knowledge,
those exist alongside a persistent belief that non-normative bodies of all kinds are
marked by moral deficiency.
Given the highly negative historical value accorded the monstrous, the term
may be suppressed today as an explicit description whilst still functioning implicitly in relation to those whose bodies transgress normative standards. The inference that people with disease or disabilities are morally at fault is clearly evident
in the blame and stigma attached, for example, to cancer and subsequently to
HIV/AIDS in the twentieth century (Sontag 1990). In the case of AIDS in particular, the initial widespread public reception of the condition as figuring a gay
plague, from which blameless heterosexuals were exempt, speaks to the notion
that those affected were paying for sins in their past. The disruption of corporeal
integrity and the open display of bodily vulnerability is always a moment for anxiety and very often for hostility. Where disabled people in contemporary developed societies are, more generally, accorded all sorts of legal and social rights
which overtly challenge discrimination against them, there is nevertheless a persistent unease occasioned by corporeal difference. That such differences are more
likely to be addressed by measures that are designed to minimise or cover over
their effects, rather than by full acknowledgment of them, does little to allay
dis-ease. It is as though the characteristic split between mind and body that marks
modernist discourse enables us to bracket out the lived materiality of the flesh,
especially when it threatens our sense of what Kristeva calls the self s clean and
54
proper body (1982: 71). Yet the divisions which operate between body and body
and between mind and body are under pressure from the very liminality of the
monster in whatever form it might take and by its refusal to stay in the place
of the other. For all that the monster may be cast as a figure vulnerable in its own
right by reason of its own lack of fixed form and definition and its putative status
as an outsider, what causes anxiety is that it threatens to expose the vulnerability
at the heart of the ideal model of body/self.
Although we might think of the Monster of Cracow, for example, as a semimythological construct that stands in contradistinction to the natural possibilities of the human body, it should be recalled that techne is never absent from the
construction of monsters, and indeed from bodies more generally. As a model of
the proper in which everything is in its place and the chaotic aspects of the
natural are banished, the so-called normal and natural body and particularly its
smooth and closed up surface always remains to be realised. The task, as
Bakhtin describes it, is one of normalisation: That which protrudes, bulges,
sprouts or branches offis eliminated, hidden, or moderated. All orifices of the
body are closed. The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass,
the impenetrable facade (1984: 320). In short, the normal body is materialised
through a set of reiterative practices that speak to the instability and leakiness of
the singular standard. The monster, then, rather than being simply an instance of
otherness, reminds us always of what must be abjected from the selfs clean and
proper body. Even the Monster of Cracows gross violation of external order, its
suturing together of surfaces that should remain apart, its excrescences and orifices that lead [] beyond the bodys limited space or into the bodys depths
(Bakhtin 1984: 318) cannot disguise its claim on the human. It remains a figure
of both horror and fascination. And as Kristeva (1982) makes clear, the abject is
never completely externalised: alongside their external manifestation, monsters
leave a trace embedded within. In collapsing the distinctions between self
and other, monsters constitute an undecidable absent presence at the heart of
human being.
The monstrous may of course be the openly crafted result of techno-organic
creation like Haraways cyborg (1990), or of intentionally transgressive conjunctions and displacements of body parts, as in the novel Geek Love (Dunn 1989),
but for the remainder of this chapter I want to look at the epistemological and
ontological status of wholly organic, unquestionably human, beings whose difference is always already evident. The monstrosity they evidence is not, then, the
result of accident, degeneration or disease, nor yet of self-willed modification,
but rather the very condition of life. Nonetheless, such congenital monstrosity
especially as it pertains to my later focus on conjoined twins facilitates an
understanding of the processes of normalisation that underpin the so-called
natural body. As I understand it, the concept of corporeal modification implies
reference to a biological given that might be denaturalised, or at very least to the
notion of a standard morphology which might then be altered or transgressed. But
once such a standard of bodyliness is understood as an impossible ideal in itself
as something to be achieved rather than as a given then it makes good sense to
take the monstrous as the starting point rather than the end point of any enquiry
55
into the lived body. I shall be looking, then, at the issue of body modification as
an intervention into the always already unstable corpus, whereby what is intended
is not the practice of transgression, but is on the contrary a matter of managing
often clinically what is inherently unruly. It is a process of normalisation, albeit
one fraught with anxieties.
The clinical encounter, then, though putatively directed towards the relief of
supposedly fragile bodies those affected by viral illnesses, disabilities, or the
breakdown of auto-immunity, for example is at least as much concerned with
the restoration of normative forgetfulness. Indeed, it is hardly the broken body
that is fragile and vulnerable, though clearly that may be perceived as monstrous
as the metaphors of cancer and AIDS in particular make clear but the normal
body itself. Although the monstrosity of chronic disease or disability overtly
undermines any notion of a securely embodied subject, that ordinary body is not
given, but is always an achievement. It is a body that requires constant maintenance and/or modification to hold off the ever-present threat of disruption: extra
digits are excised at birth, tongues are shortened in Downs Syndrome children,
noses are reshaped, warts removed, prosthetic limbs fitted, healthy diets recommended, HRT prescribed. And in such cases, it is the unmodified body which is
seen as unnatural, in need of corrective interventions. In short, the normal body
is materialised through a set of reiterative practices that speak to the instability of
the singular standard. That the standard may be achieved, or at least approximated, by material intervention is of course highly dependent on levels of technological expertise developed during the last hundred years, but there is already
evident in historical texts an understanding that regular morphology could not be
simply taken for granted. Writing in the seventeenth century, Thomas Bedford
argued that what is demonstrated by monstrous and misfeatured births is that
it is a singular mercy of God when the births of the womb are not misformed,
when they receive their fair and perfect feature (1635: n.p.). In the modern day
we are less likely to attribute flawless morphology to God, but we may well
expect the gynaecologist or surgeon to eliminate or tidy up any defects which
offend against the narrow canons of normality.
The construction and maintenance of the selfs clean and proper body is not,
however, a matter of material practice alone, but is fully imbricated with the discursive mechanisms that constitute psychic unity. As I have indicated already, the
security of human being is unsettled constantly by what Kristeva calls the abject,
which she defines as: what disturbs identity, system and order. What does not
respect boundaries, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite (1982: 4). Human monsters, then, both fulfil the necessary function of the
binary opposite that confirms the normality and centrality of the accultured self,
and at the same time threaten to disrupt that binary by being all too human.
Although the monstrous may provoke both the fascination and horror accorded
the absolute other, that response is never unproblematic, but spills over into the
anxiety and repulsion which is occasioned by the violation of internal order. And
as Kristeva makes clear, that which is abjected is never completely externalised.
It is, then, in their failure to wholly and only occupy the place of the other that
such monsters betray the fragility of the distinctions by which the human subject
56
is fixed and maintained as fully present to itself and autonomous. In collapsing

the boundaries between self and other, monsters constitute an undecidable absent
presence at the heart of human being. Alongside their external manifestation, they
also leave a trace embedded within, that, in Derridean terms, operates as the signifier not of difference but of diffrance. What is at stake throughout is the risk of
indifferentiation. In illustration of the operation and force of such theoretical considerations, I want to look specifically at a set of embodied forms which radically
challenge normative standards of human selfhood.
The phenomenon of conjoined twins has been recorded throughout history, and
it is estimated that, even prior to the development of present day surgical techniques of separation, several hundred have lived to adulthood.5 As a thread that
runs through the socio-history of monstrosity and teratology, the material manifestation of the body that is not one whether as functioning adults or dying
neonates demands specific epistemological and ontological reflection in which
the issue of the boundaries of subjecthood, and in earlier periods of a soul, is
particularly acute. I will leave aside the very many recorded instances of the supposed conjunction of human and animal bodies, to concentrate on what remains
to this day an area of deep-seated fascination. Unlike the hybrid variety which
leaves room for a wholly exclusionary approach, the incidence of corporeal
doubling in which both bodies are visibly human is highly disruptive to western
notions of individual agency and personal identity. Rather than such twins being
absolutely other to ourselves and that response as I have indicated is in any case
finally untenable they are in effect the manifestation of the mirroring process
that underlies and founds identity in the doubling of the selfsame (Lacan 1977a).
Textual evidence suggests that conjoined twins have always counted among the
monstrous, though their portentous value was sometimes positive rather than negative.6 Although most undoubtedly died at birth or soon after, they are often portrayed in archival texts as fully formed children or adults, thus throwing up not
simply the urgent question of which twin has the soul, but also whether one or
both should be considered autonomous persons. Medieval and early modern theologians adopted a kind of fail-safe with regard to baptism, which required the
priest to baptise one, and then turn to the other head or body with the words: If
you are baptised, I do not baptise you, but if you are not yet baptised, I baptise you
(quoted in Friedman 1981: 180). It remains unclear how great a degree of separation was required for the formula to be invoked, but the doubling of limbs alone
was not sufficient. Excess is merely monstrous, whereas the conjunction of that
which could and should be separate invites and requires discursive normalisation.
The significance of morphology, and the relationship between the body and the
subject is put centre stage by the wide range of forms that conjoined twins may
take. The simplest from the point of view of understanding them as separate individuals are those whose bodies appear relatively self-complete externally, albeit
joined by fleshy material and shared circulation, though they might also lack two
complete sets of internal organs. The anomaly of conjunction is overridden in
such cases by the commonsense judgement that in all other respects such twins
are two autonomous beings. The famous nineteenth-century Siamese twins,
Chang and Eng, for example, were indeed sufficiently independent of each other
57
Figure 3.2 Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins, photographed in 1860
(Source unknown)
to contract marriage to two sisters and for each to father several children. The
conjunction of Chang and Eng was relatively simple, consisting of a five-inch
band of cartilaginous material between their chests, with the liver as the only
shared internal organ although even that was not apparent until post-mortem
examination (Figure 3.2). Although surgical intervention was considered and
rejected as too dangerous, it is not surprising that they were each accorded full
social and legal identity. Nonetheless, despite such strategies of normalisation,
the unmodified corporeal excessiveness of the twins condition labelled them as
freaks, who existed only as a unit, and they were frequently exhibited as such.
The fascination for the viewing public, and for the wider media who followed
Chang and Eng throughout their long life, was the simultaneous possibility of
objectifying them as the monstrous other and identifying with them in their role
58
as upright American citizens as the same. The twins themselves on the one hand
endured conjunction and are known to have insisted on the semblance of autonomy, by maintaining two marital households for example, yet on the other they
were so identified with one another that the idea of separation is said to have
filled them with dread.
The perception that separation is in the best interests of conjoined twins rests
on the prior assumption that two distinct persons with distinct identities have, as
it were, become trapped in a single morphology. Whatever the visual form, there
is an overriding need to find distinctive selves. As Hillel Schwartz writes: That
it or he or she or they might be neither exactly one nor exactly two [is] too logically distressing or emotionally unsatisfying to be true (1996: 52). In the nonclinical sphere, even a writer as non-judgmental as Fiedler seems to concur with
the common cultural anxiety of losing individuality. Of Chang and Eng he
remarks, nothing but death could deliver them from this lifelong bondage
(1981: 217); and of Daisy and Violet Hilton, the conjoined vaudeville and film
stars of the early twentieth century, they remained slaves to each other to the end
of their lives (1981: 209). Modern medicine wholly reflects such attitudes, and
the issue of surgical intervention and modification is taken as settled in principle,
and subject only to technical feasibility, as though there is nothing at stake except
an inappropriate body. But what is not taken into account is the complex interrelationship of body and self, the phenomenological sense of being-in-the-world,
in which corporeal extension is indivisible from subjecthood and identity. In
short, there is no clear distinction to be made between corporeal exteriority and
psychical interiority. Nonetheless, in western discourse, the evident privileging of
singularity and autonomy implicitly premised on the bodily separation, and the
value accorded bodily self-determination combine to erase any consideration that
there might be other ways of being. I am not suggesting that conjoined twins, and
others whose morphology defies normative categories of embodiment, should
be denied personhood; rather it is the defining parameters of the self, still more
of the subject, that are inadequate to embodied difference. Moreover, the question of identity, which is commonly taken to indicate what is the unique core of
each person, may equally well express that which is the same.
In any case, if, as Merleau-Ponty (1964) asserts, identity is realised only as the
lived body is immersed in the lived bodies of others, then concorporation is
scarcely hostile to that model. In contrast, the dominant discourse of the singular
and bounded subject, together with the privileging of corporeal self-completion,
where exclusive property rights in ones own body stage the meeting with the
other, enact a closure that suspends more open and ambiguous modes of existence. Though in the majority of cases the drive is to see conjoined twins as two
persons, it might be more appropriate to say instead that the symbolic distinction
between self and other that is taken to found identity in difference is deferred by
the persistence of identification. For conjoined twins, the other-self is indivisible,
not just as a facet of early infanthood, but as the very texture of experiential
being. And where in general the Lacanian mirror stage marks the assumption of
the armour of an alienating identity (1977a: 4) and inaugurates an illusory corporeal integrity and singularity,7 for conjoined twins the undecidable other-self is
59
figured in a very different kind of reflection. The (mis)recognition of the mirror

stage is in a sense the permanent condition of such twins, with the evident difference that in that moment they may refuse identity in its symbolic sense and
choose identification. What conjoined twins have in common with other monozygotic twins is not that they are visually identical, for many are not, but that they
cannot be told apart. For external observers, the incommon materiality of such
twins disconcerts the discriminating gaze, but what is equally confusing is that
they may, in both types, experience a kind of internal merging.8
Given that twin studies have often been notorious for their question-begging
assertions of mental and behavioural coincidence which seem to point to some
peculiar quasi-telepathic power, they should be approached with some caution.
Dorothy Burlinghams psychoanalytically based study (1952), for example,
which followed the lives of three sets of identical twins in a wartime boarding
nursery over a period of many months, is rigorous in its observation of behaviour,
without ever adequately addressing the issue of whether family-based pairs might
produce different results. In being separated from their mothers, it seems highly
likely that close siblings would forge substitute relationships with each other in
which both intense love and hate formed a large part. Burlingham does record,
nevertheless, an exceptional number of instances where an individual twin seems
genuinely uncertain as to his or her own unique identity. Mirror images are especially confusing to them. Most telling of all is that despite episodes of intense
anger and (self ) rejection, all the twins are unable to cope with separation.
Burlingham herself is in no doubt that the twin relationship is every bit as important as the motherchild bond. Even though some of it may be scientifically dubious, there is here and elsewhere plenty of evidence that monozygotic twins in
general habitually blur the boundaries between one and the other simultaneously thinking the same thoughts, making the same choices, speaking together as
one and it should not be surprising that conjoined twins, who share experiential
being, do not make the separations that are commonly taken for granted.9 If
being-in-the-world, and still less identity, is not a given, then might not a different morphology ground other ontological and ethical relationships between self
and other?
In non-autobiographical accounts of conjoined twins, both modern historical
and contemporary, the one consistent factor that overrides differences in morphology is the reiteration of their essential separateness.10 Clinical understanding is
far from decisive, however, and as the Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it: (s)uch
double malformations probably arise following the less than complete separation
of the halves of the early embryo, or from partial separation at later stages (New
Encyclopaedia Britannica 1992: 367). What this suggests to me is a difference
between putative twins who remain anomalously joined at birth, and a putative
singleton whose body has unfortunately begun to divide prenatally. What is at
stake with the latter case is perhaps even more ontologically disruptive than the
former, and I have yet to see the implications of such specificity addressed.
Instead, the question with regard to all conjoined twins is rarely if they should be
separated, but rather how and how soon. As Schwartz puts it: The pressure to
cleave them is not narrowly medical; it is broadly cultural (1996: 61). The
60
expected birth of conjoined twins in Manchester in 1996 was, for example, the
occasion for a spate of articles reviewing similar cases and looking at the
prospects of the present pair. Most telling of all were the attempts of the prospective parents to normalise the birth. The father is quoted as saying: We have made
up our minds to look on the bright side and focus on having two lovely girls who
will eventually lead normal separate lives (Guardian 11 October 1996: 5, my
emphasis). Quite clearly, and understandably, he and the medical advisers could
conceive of the twins lives only as being on hold until they were separated,
stripped as it were of their power to disrupt. So deeply is the ideal of corporeal
and mental autonomy written into the western understanding of what it is to be a
person, that any suggestion that the infants could function as a merged unit was
swiftly rejected. Even a sympathetic observer such as the attending paediatric
surgeon was constrained to find signs of independent personhood: They are
exploring each other, each touching the other, sparring away with their tiny
hands, while a clearly unsympathetic reporter interprets the same behaviour as
involving struggle, discomfort and distress for each half of this bizarre whole
(Observer 17 October 1996: 12).
A similar emphasis is evident in a recent television documentary entitled
Separate Lives (BBC TV 1999). The programme focuses on a pair of Pakistani
twins, Hira and Nida, who, we are told and shown, are joined at the scalp in such
a way that they are unable to stand upright. Right from the beginning the commentary sets the tone with the assurance that they had come halfway across the
worldfor the chance of a normal life. The stress on such factors cannot but
carry, I feel, certain racist overtones both in terms of the superior civilisation of
the west, and in the implicit allusion to the racialised chain of being that moves
from apes through stooping black bodies to the upstanding white figure, which in
turn evokes the Christian notion of the human being as upright, erect. In contradistinction to the acceptance shown by the girls mother who expresses her joy
at seeing them laugh and play together, and their father when he says I see them
as one life that God has given to two children, the Canadian neurosurgeon who
examines the twins treats them primarily as a clinical problem, albeit one with an
interwoven but unacknowledged value judgement: Theres a possibility of cutting this into two normal children (my emphasis). Ironically his desire to construct normal functioning is spoken over shots of the twins playing happily with
building bricks, just as other children of their age might do. In the view of the
medical specialists, however, the strain on the kidneys and the heart in Hiras
body which are doing the work for both twins is sufficient in itself to justify surgical intervention. In the absence of any real discussion of the ethical issues of
separation surgery itself, the major question that they must consider is the bioethical and legal one of whether Hira, as a child, can donate a living organ (a kidney)
to her sister. This is indeed a pertinent consideration, which raises the issue of
whether the twins can be regarded as one or two, but it is couched in the characteristically western terms of the ownership of body parts. As an audience we are
implicitly invited to empathise with the professionals dilemma in their treatment
of a perplexing vulnerability in the body of the other, but not to reflect on the
phenomenological difference of such a body. When Nida fails to survive
61
separation (her brain was not enoughto keep her alive as an individual), the
commentary reassures viewers, without any sense of doubt, that Hira is thriving.
The clear implication is that where no properly constituted subject could exist in
the unmodified twin body, at least there is now one.11
I want now to look in greater detail at the story of the Irish conjoined twins,
Katie and Eilish, whose early childhood and subsequent separation features in
two television documentaries shown initially in 1993 and 1995. The twins body
is merged from the upper thoracic area, giving them just two legs and two functioning arms with two other residual upper limb stumps having been already
excised in the expectation of future separation surgery. There are separate hearts
and lungs, but all other organs are single. What is at stake throughout for both the
parents and the medical team is how best to balance the risk of separation and
it is made clear that the twins degree of conjunction exceeds any in which surgical intervention has been previously attempted with the normative desire that
each should have a functionally autonomous existence. The issue of corporeal
normalisation, is, however, clearly distinct from a more complex and contradictory understanding of what constitutes normality in the specific case of the twins.
For the parents, Katie and Eilish already operate as two normal children, having individual personalities which they do much to encourage; while for his part,
the consultant surgeon is constrained to stress that he cannot promise the twins a
normal life if they are separated. The characteristic western split between mind
and body is mirrored in the assumption of an existential normality that is merely
obstructed by the abnormal morphology of the children. As they are not one, then
they must become two. The voice-over suggestion that although we value individuality, they might not value it. They might prefer togetherness (Yorkshire
Television 1993: Katie and Eilish: Siamese Twins) is, then, both a disturbing
glimpse of other ways of being, and a reminder of what the normative regime of
individuality must repudiate.
Although at that moment the commentary may reveal an unresolved tension in
our response to the normative operation of self and other, its reflection of a nostalgia for togetherness does not challenge what we take to be a developmentally
necessary split. It is not, I think, that there is any recognition that the concorporation of the twins might speak to new and more fluid forms of embodied subjectivity, but rather that the ideal of the autonomous subject is contested by the
twins concurrent and co-operative intentionality. Their successful negotiation of
their environment largely depends on their acting as one, even in such small matters as unscrewing a bottle. Nonetheless, the sense that being-in-the-world might
imbricate with body and environment is not explored; to those who must decide
their future, the discrete subjectivities of the twins are already given and simply
awaiting release. The twins embodiment is, then, a monstrous insult to the norms
of human corporeality, an other mode of being that defies the binary of sameness
and difference into which medical intervention is designed to recuperate them.
Although both parents and doctors are sensitive to the implicitly ethical question
of potentially disrupting the twins current contentment, the phenomenological
and epistemological questions remain unexplored in the face of an overriding
concern with the material risks of surgery. Following a visit to some successfully
62
separated conjoined twins, matters of procedure become paramount. The operation

is undertaken with some real confidence, but although Eilish recovers, Katie
unexpectedly dies.
The point of turning to this often very moving narrative is not so much to critique the current medical practice for in this case the participants, whether
detached professionals or closest family, are all properly caring and reflective12
but to illustrate the power of ontological anxiety. Against the corporeal excessiveness of Katie and Eilish, the attempt to radically reconstruct their bodies
speaks eloquently to the notions of closure and containment assumed to be at the
heart of being. What is finally unacceptable about the twins is not the degree of
their disability and indeed it is uncertain that a successful outcome would have
increased function but the ambiguity of their concorporation. For all the discursive efforts to normalise their life in terms of assigning dual individuality, it
remains undecidable whether they are one or two. In contrast, the conventional
understanding of the only proper form of subjectivity requires a clarity of boundaries between self and other, an affective and effective autonomy that is fully
realised only by singular embodiment. Despite the death of Katie, then, the father
of the twins is constrained to justify the operation by remarking on the surviving
twins enhanced quality of life after separation: Shes free of being joined to
another human-being (Yorkshire Television 1995: Eilish: Life without Katie). In
fashioning Eilishs body so that she may comply with normative ideals, she is
realised as an intelligible subject, and a body that matters. The impossibility of
the ideal is made clear, however, in the acknowledgment that for Eilish, body
modification must be continued throughout life: her prosthetic leg and body
harness must be periodically replaced to ensure scopic normalisation. It is ironic
that although no-one seems able to articulate the real extent of Eilishs corporeal
disruption, the doctor worries that in losing her first prosthesis, she will think
some part of her is being taken away. For her own part Eilish renames her new
leg Katie, in recognition of the absent presence of her self/other.
The phenomenological specificity of concorporate being-in-the-world is
addressed by no adult in the films, except perhaps in the psychologists halfrecognition that Katie is still incorporated into the life of her surviving twin. At
bedtime, Eilish gets what she calls her Katie kisses, but even that observation is
normalised in the remark that the ritual happens in a healthy way, not in any way
that is holding Eilish back (YTV 1995). That implicit rewriting of the twin relationship as obstructive is reiterated in an interchange between Eilish and her
sisters. When asked what she remembers of her sister, Eilish replies: She used to
bring me round everywhere, only to be interrupted by an older sibling who
declares: Eilish couldnt go wherever she wanted. What matters to the family is
that Eilish should be well adjusted, and indeed, despite the four months spent in
hospital post-operatively in which she is described as traumatised, she does
appear happy and talkative in the second documentary shot over the next two
years. For her parents, her social and physical recovery is a matter of relief, but
it is evident too that for Eilish herself, the splitting of her (subject) body has
produced an effect somewhat akin to the phenomenon of the phantom limb.
As Merleau-Ponty explains it, to experience such a phantom is to remain open
63
to the presence of what is lost (1962: 806). The wound she experiences,
unacknowledged, is as much psychical as material, a severe disruption to the unified, albeit imaginary, body map that founds the ego.13 When Teresa, the elder
sister, says of Katie, She had freckles, the response from Eilish is both confused
and defiant: So did I, so do I, [pushes Teresa], I still do. Katie both is and is not
there, a shifting body memory and continued inscription on the flesh of her twin.
What these stories emphasise is a dominant postEnlightenment discourse in
which our psychic investment in the corporeal is covered over by the illusion that
the body is merely instrumental, a source only of impediment or advantage to the
subject. Biomedicine in particular proceeds on the basis that any intervention into
the materiality of the body can be divorced from the patients own sense of self
and from her phenomenological engagement with the world. The clarity of corporeal boundaries is what grounds existential and moral personhood, while the
meeting with the other is premised on bodily self-determination and property
rights in ones own body. The conjunction of two consciousnesses is characterised only in terms of a meeting of self and other, properly mediated by contract
or the calculation of individual best interests. What separation surgery attempts
then aside from cases where it is medically indicated to preserve life is a
reconstitution of autonomous subjecthood as the only proper way of being in the
world. In a move that strongly calls to mind Foucaults theorisation of assujettissement, it is the very subjection of the body to the forces of normalisation
which enables the emergence of the subject herself.14 But for conjoined twins, the
other is also the self a transgressive and indeterminate state in which corporeal,
ontological and ultimately ethical boundaries are distorted and dissolved. As Clark
and Myser put it, the assumption is that conjoined life, precisely because of its
imagined phenomenological unintelligibility must be intolerable (1996: 351).
And one might add, intolerable to society rather than to the twins themselves.
There is no sense here that corporeality might constitute the subject, only that a
somehow foundational subject or rather two is thwarted by a monstrous body.
I want finally to look briefly at other forms of concorporate twins whose
monstrous bodies do not afford the contemplation, theoretical or material, of separation into self and other, although less radical modification may be possible.
The horror of losing ones singular identity to a parasitic other is a powerful motif
in monster narratives of all kinds, and is, Judith Halberstam claims in her book
Skin Shows, paramount within the genre of Gothic monster fiction. What the
trope of parasitism expresses is an ever present threat within, an internal not an
external danger that Gothic identifies and attempts to dispel (Halberstam 1995:
15). It is a moment of semiotic confusion in which inner and outer are indistinguishable, bodies are both doubled and diminished, and meanings flow into one
another. In non-literary sources, the same concerns are in operation with regard
to concorporation, particularly in extreme instances. Of the cases of monstrous
excess considered here, one is specifically called parasitic twinning where the
very naming speaks to a putative insult to an ideal of bodily self-determination;
the other concerns the mirroring of heads on a singular body.15 In both instances
the infants involved survived birth and lived for several years in a state of monstrosity. The appearances of the seventeenth-century Coloredo brothers the
64
Figure 3.3 Lazarus and John Baptista Coloredo from The Gentlemens
Magazine (1777)
wholly formed Lazarus, and his parasitic twin John Baptista are extremely well
documented in popular histories, contemporary ballads and official documents
(Figure 3.3). Although for the most part they were viewed benignly as marvels,
the existence of so extraordinary a body raised worrying questions. The following is an account from a pamphlet of 1640 referring to Lazarus, who:
from one of his sides hath a twin brother growing, which was borne with him, and living still; though having sence and feeling, yet destitute of reason and understanding:
whence methinks a disputable question might arise, whether[,] as they have distinct
lives, so they are possessed of two souls; or have but one imparted betwixt them both.
(1640 A Certain Relation of the Hog-faced Gentlewoman quoted in Rollins 1927: 8)
The second case was even more extraordinary, the more so in that the child
involved survived until he was four years old, when he was killed, reputedly, by
65
Figure 3.4 The Bengali Boy (Basire) from The Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society 80 (1790)
a cobra bite. The so-called Bengali boy was born with two heads not unusual
within the context of conjoined twins, except that the second head grew not from
his neck but was attached upside down and back-to-front on the top of the childs
scalp (Figure 3.4). The bone casing of the craniopagus skull, as it was known,
was fused where crown met crown and, as a contemporary post-mortem report to
the Royal Society put it, the two brains wereseparate and distinct, having a
complete partition between them (Home 1790). Moreover, the bodiless head
during life was not in itself unusual in appearance, having well-formed facial features, ears, and a crop of hair, and separate affect. Nonetheless, the anxiety that
such an occurrence might be expected to generate was effaced by regarding
the skull, not as the site of contested subjecthood, but merely as an object of
biomedical enquiry. The significance of the craniopagus skull to the British
scientific community of the day was not, as it might have been in the past, an
occasion for reflection on the notion of maternal imagination though the initial
report from the East India Company was clearly obliged to assert that the mother
had suffered no fright or accident during her pregnancy but rather as ammunition in a wholly medicalised controversy regarding the process of evolutionary
development. As Evelleen Richards notes in her detailed analysis of that debate:
66
historical monstersmay be understood at one and the same time both as

anatomical objects and as the embodiments of different strategies of power
(1994: 405). In her understanding of what she calls political anatomy Richards
is reluctant to pursue a Foucauldian deconstruction of what she sees as concrete
historical events, but nonetheless her account does point up the discursive construction of the meanings inscribed on the monstrous body. The widespread
scientific interest excited by the craniopagus skull, which became and remains a
prize exhibit in the Hunterian Museum, indicates too that by the rationalist mideighteenth century, monsters were as before a primary ground for competing
discourses, but stripped now of questions of personal agency. For my own part,
however, I want to return to those very questions.
If the issue of subjectivity or identity is at very least problematised in the indistinct corporeality of those conjoined twins with two relatively well-formed
bodies, both internal and external, or more remarkably where two heads append
the same body, then it is radically challenged by such incomplete instances of
doubling. In her essay entitled Freaks, Liz Grosz remarks: it is no longer clear
that there are two identities, even if the bodily functions of the parasitic twin
occur independently of the will or awareness of the other. In such cases, is there
one subject or two? (1991: 34). The question haunts the historical accounts of
the cases I have mentioned. Contemporary descriptions of the Coloredo brothers
often touch on such a point, and, like the distinctive affect of the two heads of the
Bengali boy which Everard Home recorded, make frequent reference to the independent physical sensitivity of the parasitic body. The inherent confusion of
embodied identity is apparent in William Turners depiction which describes first
the little brother:
his left foot alone hung downwards; he had two Arms, only three Fingers upon each
Hand: Some appearance there was of the Secret Parts; he moved his Hands, Ears, and
Lips, and had a little beating in the Breast. This little Brother voided no Excrements but
by the Mouth, Nose, and Ears, and is nourished by that which the greater takes: He has
distinct Animal and Vital parts from the greater; since he sleeps, sweats, and moves,
when the other wakes, rests, and sweats not.Lazarus is of a just Stature, a decent
Body, courteous Deportment, and gallantly Attired; he covers the Body of his Brother
with his Cloak: Nor could you think a Monster lay within at your first Discourse with
him. (Turner 1697: Chap. 8, 8)
What marks a difference between the two cases, however, is that whereas the
Coloredos are always referred to and named as two distinct people, and indeed
each was baptised according to report, the Bengali boy is already singular.
Although surgical intervention was not a possibility in either case, a discursive
normalisation of the excessive subject has taken place. That the singularity of all
subject bodies is similarly constructed and reiterated by regimes of normalisation
that defer the slippage of excessive embodiment is obscured by the insistence
that monstrosity is radically other, the exceptional case that secures the normative standard.
So what type of subjectivity or identity could fit such a range of differences, and
how does the monstrous corporeality of my examples imbricate with the sense of
self? Where Liz Grosz, in her paper Freaks (1991), posits a continuum of
67
identity ranging from the autonomous, self-complete and individuated subject,

which western discourse assumes as the standard for all, to a non-differentiated,
quasi-collective subject in which the symbolic moment of distinction between
self and other is endlessly deferred I am inclined to caution. The desire for full
self-presence is, I think, never realised, and results only in a phantasmatic structure of subjectivity. As I understand it, monsters both define the limits of the
singular embodied subject, and reflect our own ultimately insecure and unstable
identities. As Rosi Braidotti puts it: the monstrous other is both liminal and
structurally central to our perception of normal human subjectivity (1996: 141).
And it is the move to forcibly impose the norm of one body/one mind, the move
to erase difference either by exclusion or by processes of normalisation, that
underlines the instability of the ideal. Where monsters blatantly blur the parameters of being, they invoke in us all and this seems particularly true of the
doubling of twinned bodies both a nostalgia for identification and the horror of
incorporation. They demonstrate that the relation between self and other, as with
body and body, is chiasmatic, precisely insofar as corporeality and subjectivity
body and mind are themselves folded back into each other, overflowing,
enmeshed and mutually constitutive.
Though bodily modification may hope to avert the overtly transgressive, its
very practice alerts us to the crisis at the boundaries of the body which is never
one. As the in-between, as diffrance, the monstrous shows us that neither the one
nor the two is proof against deconstruction. Promise and risk lie equally in the
move beyond/before it is undecidable the one that determines ontological and
corporeal unity, or the two that mark difference as opposition and relationship as
the quasi-contractual exchange between autonomous beings. It is the necessarily
incomplete abjection of monstrosity that guards against the successful
closure of what Derrida has called an illegitimately delimited subject (1991b:
108). If, then, such closure is merely a myth of modernity, the attempted limitation of the monstrous body by both surgical and discursive means is doubly
doomed to failure. Rather than attempting to recuperate the monstrous, might we
not refigure it as an alternative, but equally valuable, mode of being, an alterity
that throws doubt on the singularity of the human and signals other less restrictive possibilities? As such the monster might be the promising location of a
reconceived ontology, and an ethics centred on a relational economy that has a
place for radical difference.
4
CONTAGIOUS ENCOUNTERS
AND THE ETHICS OF RISK
In the last chapter, I outlined the extent to which the western ideal of the selfs
clean and proper body with its attributes of integrity, closure and autonomy is in
a sense as imaginary as the monsters that threaten it. Nonetheless, the strength of
the normative standard is so powerful that our society is constrained to go to
extraordinary lengths to perpetuate a clear distinction between what is considered
normal and acceptable, and what is abnormal and intolerable. It is not the case
that what constitutes the standard remains static over a period of time, but that,
despite a certain fluidity of definition, there remains always an oppositional relationship between the relevant categories of self and other, human and animal,
normal and abnormal, us and them. Moreover, for all that the ideal is reiterated both discursively and materially, it fails continually to exclude the tensions
and slippages that point to a very different model of embodied being. Within
modernist paradigms, however, stubbornly founded as they are on a binary structure that shapes epistemology, ontology and ethics alike, the force of denial
directed both at the radically other that cannot be subsumed by the binary, and at
the excessive elements that threaten to burst out of the model of the same, creates
an illusion of stability. Above all, vulnerability must be managed, covered over
in the self, and repositioned as a quality of the other. And yet for all its putative
lack of integrity and closure, that same other monstrously embodied poses the
greatest risk to the selfs clean and proper body. In view of the lack of definition,
and the potential leakiness across borders, the monstrous body is not just deviant
in itself, but is characteristically metaphorised as dangerously contagious, capable of spreading its own confusion of identity. The function of the gaze, then, is
in part to arrest such a process by fixing the other at a safe distance, but even so,
the monstrous is no respecter of boundaries. In this chapter, I want to build on an
autobiographical moment that illustrates the implausibility of constructing a self
untouched by, and invulnerable to, the monstrous other.
Some time ago in Dublin, while I was researching representational forms of
historical monsters, I visited the highly regarded Gallery of Photography to see a
new exhibition by Karl Grimes. Still Life records the chance visit by Grimes to
the specimen room of an Italian hospital at which he was working on a different
project. The exhibition comprised a couple of dozen large photographic portraits
of late foetal and neonatal infant bodies with gross congenital deformities, of
whom most were preserved in vast glass containers, in some cases after partial
dissection. There were several concorporate twins, and many bodies with hydrocephalic disorders, exposed spines, or other gaping orifices, their corporeal
CONTAGIOUS ENCOUNTERS AND THE ETHICS OF RISK
69
borders dis-integrated. In clinical terms they would be classed as monsters, in lay

terms as freaks. The collection was deeply disturbing; it touched me and many
others who saw it. As might be expected, some of the press reviews constructed
the staging of Still Life as exploitative, voyeuristic, as something that should not
be put on public show. It was as though the aw(e)ful vulnerability of those
bodies put us, the viewers, at risk, as though they were contagious. But that was
and is to miss the point. The encounter with the others who define our own
boundaries of normality must inevitably disturb for they are both irreducibly
strange and disconcertingly familiar, both opaque and reflective. They enable us
to recognise ourselves; they are our own abject. As Grimes (1998) himself notes,
Images of what we have denied turn towards us. And once the initial shock of
confronting what is usually excluded had passed, I found myself not repulsed, but
moved to tears by the unaccountable beauty of the bodies. Beyond the marks of
a violent and violating science that were evident in their confinement, both materially to specimen jars, and discursively to the category of abnormality, it was
possible to acknowledge a siblingship which claims us all (Figure 4.1).1
Is it possible, then, to theorise these autobiographical moments in the interlocking context of vulnerability and contagion without betraying the shock of
recognition? Among the several meanings of the word contagion all of which
are deeply negative in their import is the notion of a disease process spread by
touch, or even by proximity. We understand that a contaminated object is one to
be avoided or kept at a safe distance, lest we too become affected, our bodies
opened up to the forces of disintegration. Our well-being, our very lives, are
dependent then on the maintenance of a self-protective detachment, an interval
not only between ourselves and evidently dangerous others be they microbes,
parasites, or infected human bodies but also between ourselves and the mere
potential of risk. Contagion is a familiar term in medical discourse, and at the
macro level, public health, for example, relies, in large part, on the success of epidemiological measures designed not simply to control, but also to avoid the threat
of an other that would expose our underlying vulnerability to bodily degeneration. Similarly immunology explains at the cellular level the internal processes by
which the body counters intrusion by potentially damaging non-self organisms.
Thus the prophylactic strategies of, for example, the vaccination of children, antimalarial drug regimes for travellers, or the practice of safe sex all make good
sense. The probability that any one threat might materialise may be extremely
low, but nonetheless our well-being is seen to be enhanced by the erection of protective barriers. There is nothing particularly contentious in any of this, except
perhaps in the calculation of risk, but I want to move away from the notion of
contagion as a material effect alone in order to consider its wider discursive
import. The significance of contamination is not limited to the physical effects in
and on the body, but enmeshes with our understanding of what it is to be a self.
The discourse around HIV-AIDs is a particularly good example, as it concerns
not just the clinical breakdown of the immune system in the face of a proliferating virus, nor the epidemiological defence of attempting to isolate the vectors by
behavioural regulation, but the perceived disintegration of the bounded and singular self exposed to an alien and engulfing other.2 I shall go on to explore more
70
Figure 4.1 Conjoined twins from Still Life (Karl Grimes 1997)
closely the implications of attempting to cover over the vulnerability of human

bodies, and indeed of human being, and to suggest that far from being a simple
matter of prudent protection, what is at stake in our vulnerability to non-self
factors is an ethics of relationship.
My argument is that in western discourse, the notion of the diseased, the
unclean or the contaminated is never just an empirical or supposedly neutral
descriptor, but carries the weight of all that stands against and of course paradoxically secures the normative categories of ontology and epistemology.
71
In short, as the realisation of a contaminatory threat, contagion can figure any

transgression of the categories of sameness and difference, any breach in the
unity of the embodied self. As postmodernist theory makes clear, the normative
construct of the selfs clean and proper body is under constant threat, on the one
hand from the potential of internal leakage and loss of form, and on the other,
from the circulation of all those dangerous bodies of women, of racial others,
of the sick, of the monstrous who both occupy the place of the other and serve
to define by difference the selfs own parameters. At particular times and locations, when two or more forms of threat come together, what may be menaced is
not just the singular self, but a normative category as a whole. The fear of species
degeneration and contamination which has played so large a part in recent
history, from the eugenic movement of the early twentieth century to contemporary notions of ethnic purity, is a powerful example of the latter. The conflation
of the diseased and the racial and sexual other, in a paradigm of contagious
monstrosity, may have reached its peak perhaps in the genocide of World War II,
but the exclusionary impetus which, taken to extremes, motivated that murderous
fervour both preceded and survives the historical moment. The desire to protect
the unity of the ideal social/racial body is instrumentalised always through a programme of measures that speak not to strength but to uncertainty, to an implicit
recognition that vulnerability is not on the side of the other, but is embedded in
the heart of normativity.
In this chapter, I shall be looking more closely at the microcosmic effects of a
notion of contagion, and specifically at the condition of physical disability3 as the
site of modernist discourses that figure the human body, or at least the white male
body, as ideally closed and invulnerable. That is not to say of course that disabled
people have not been the collective object of macrocosmic initiatives which have
been both eugenic and genocidal, and indeed they were explicitly targeted during
the period of National Socialism, but what I want to point up here is the way in
which we are all implicated on an everyday level in a process of discursive
othering that serves to establish and perpetuate standards of normativity. From
historical archival material through to current research into the prenatal genetic
manipulation of potential congenital abnormalities, the stress throughout has
been on controlling or eliminating the conditions of vulnerability as though
science could settle ontology. But what, precisely, is at stake in the western imaginary with its dream of containment, and what marks the disabled body as a threat,
as though it could contaminate? My concern is to suggest new ways of conceptualising disability that demand a deconstruction of existing ethical parameters in
the light of an always already vulnerability as the disavowed condition not only
of all bodies, but of all embodied selves.
I want first to set out the ground on which, in western modernity at least, vulnerability is figured as a shortcoming, an impending failure both of form and
function; a predicate that marks its subject as potentially beyond normative standards of being. It is not exactly that vulnerability is denied in and by the normative subject, but that the proper unfolding of human life, and the exercise of
selfhood, is taken to overcome such dangers. Those who too readily admit or who
succumb to vulnerability are either weak or unfortunate, beset by moral and/or
72
material failure. Although the heroic narrative of individual transcendence over

corporeal adversity the triumph of mind over matter is highly familiar, and
constitutes the greater part of auto/biographical accounts of illness and disability
(for example Couser 1997), its claim to our admiration exists alongside contrary
tendencies. More usually vulnerability is feared as a condition of both mind and
body, an ontological as well as physical state, an embodied being in which those
familiar mind/body distinctions enacted by postEnlightenment thought are suspended. As with the traditional view that women are ruled by their biological
processes, the anomalous body contaminates the will. Instead of triumphant transcendence, the compromised body may invite the assumption of intellectual
insufficiency those with physical disabilities are all too commonly denied
access to standard education as children and find themselves spoken for as adults
or alternatively the outward appearance of an ailing body may be taken as the
sign of an inner deficiency of will, or prior moral dereliction. And while the first
of those more negative responses might be evidence of the unsettling dis-ease
occasioned by the non-normative body such that engagement is avoided, the
latter speaks to a sense of moral superiority in the face of the others vulnerability.
It is not my suggestion that our response to disabling conditions is always as
crude, or sets up so blatant a division between the categories of the normal and
the deviant, between the supposedly whole-bodied and those whose bodily
boundaries have in some way been breached or distorted. And nor are healthy
bodies seen as uniformly invulnerable: for infants and children whose bodily
well-being is largely dependent on others, for older people facing the finitude of
death and bodily decay, and for women whose intrinsic leakiness marks a body
that is always already breached, the ideal of a closed, powerful and self-defined
corporeal schema is never less than compromised. Nonetheless, at the beginning
of a new millennium in which ever more detailed biomedical accounts of the
body are passing into lay usage, and in which we are invited to marvel at the
capacities of biomedical technologies to remake the body, reminders of uncontrolled corporeal vulnerability are highly unwelcome. The cultural theorist
Rosemarie Garland Thomson recounts her own shock at being given a copy of
Robert Bogdans scholarly study Freak Show Freak disturbingly summarized the accusation I had most dreaded my entire life and she goes on to
describe how owning her personal and very visible physical disability was akin
to coming out:
Indeed, pressures to deny, ignore, normalize, and remain silent about ones own disability are both compelling and seductive in a social order intolerant of deviations from
the bodily standards enforced by a quotidian matrix of economic, social and political
forces. (1997: xvii)
What I would want to add to Thomsons matrix is the power of psychic and ontological anxiety that must itself be denied.
Where the fully self-present sovereignty of the modernist subject is taken for
granted, there is an expectation, and indeed biomedical discourse encourages us
to believe, that our bodies are similarly under control, predictable, determinate,
and above all independent in form and function. The mapping of the human
genome, which promises both a measure of individual uniqueness and a template
73
for enhanced control and manipulation, signals that the perfect body, marked by
its consistency, predictability and self-transparency, is available to all. Such a
standard serves to deny corporeal vulnerability, and, as many commentators have
already pointed out, further strengthens the othering of those whose bodies fall
short. The more we believe that we can control our bodies, the greater the anxiety that is generated by the evidence of vulnerability, whether as the result of the
accident of disabling conditions, both chronic and acute, or in the form of those
routine biological processes of change in which the feminine is overdetermined.
The challenge to what have been seen as masculinist values with regard to
embodiment has been a particular concern of feminism as part of its general project to revalue women. It is, then, somewhat ironic, as Susan Wendell (1996)
points out, that in contesting the traditional identification between women and
their supposedly unruly bodies, feminist theory has itself often displayed a
certain somataphobia. The noticeable paucity of academic interest, both there and
elsewhere, in disability studies4 may look like indifference, but I suggest it plays
into the wider issue of our perception of non-normative corporeality. The disabled body, the body that resists the conscious control of the will, that is effectively out of control, may carry no infectious agents, and yet regardless of
gender investments it is treated as though it were contaminatory.
Although such a potentially dangerous entity must be kept at a distance, beyond
the capacity to touch, it is nonetheless a privileged object of the gaze. What is
evoked at worst is a kind of revulsion and dehumanisation, characterised historically by the public display of human monsters both dead and alive as, for
example, in the freak shows of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or
today, as Andrea Dennett (1996) suggests, by the enfreakment of corporeal
extremes especially of the fattest or heaviest variety on many American
television daytime talk shows. What is striking about such spectacles, however, is
that they may elicit the contradictory responses both of horrified disengagement,
and of fascination and recognition. The present day staging of disability may seek
to avoid the offensive excesses of the past by flying the banner of education or
social concern, but the invitation like the freak show barkers pitch appeals,
more or less explicitly, to the model of the abnormal viewed from a safe distance.
In his fascinating analysis of US charity telethons in aid of various illnesses and
disabilities, for example, Paul K. Longmore (1997) demonstrates both the distancing effect of the gaze, and the way in which the apparently altruistic structure
of the events authorises the contemporary equivalent of finger pointing. In such
orgies of public compassion, Longmore sees as the prime motivation the conspicuous display, not of links of sameness, but of difference. As he puts it: People
with disabilities are ritually defined as dependent on the moral fitness of nondisabled people (1997: 136). Although agreeing with the outlines of his analysis,
I believe the relationships are more complicated than Longmore allows. Where he
would see vulnerability which he characterises in terms of dependency as fixed
by the gaze as the property of the differentiated other, the underlying anxiety of
the encounter with the corporeal anomaly needs further explanation.
It is of course precisely the failure of the monstrous body to observe a material and metaphorical cordon sanitaire, its failure to wholly occupy the place of
74
the other, that grounds anxiety. Thinking, for example, of the negative responses
to the pictures in the Still Life exhibition, it is evident that the triple confinement
of the unruly foetuses, in death, in glass containers, and in the photographic
image, was nonetheless insufficient to allay the uncomfortable feeling that there
was risk of contagion in the encounter itself. Clearly the artist was well aware of
the power of his images, which were intended to breach the immunity of the gaze,
yet the gallery was constrained to give a written warning to visitors that they might
be disturbed. So powerful is the impulse to avoid actual contact with anomalous
bodies that certain city ordinances, effective in the United States during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, actually banned those with visible disabilities
from appearing in specified public places. In Chicago, for example, a 1966
provision of the Municipal Code states:
No person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an
unsightly or disgusting object or improper person to be allowed in or on the public ways
or other public places in this city, (or) shall therein or thereon expose himself to public
view, under a penalty of not less than one dollar nor more than fifty dollars for each
offense. (1966 Chicago, Ill., Municipal Code, 3634 [repealed 1974])
Similar restrictive rules were imposed around the same period on travellers, with
the Air Traffic Conference decreeing that member companies should not carry
persons with gross disfigurement, or other unpleasant characteristics so unusual
as to offend fellow passengers (1962 Air Traffic Conference of America). What
these examples seems to speak of is not just the individual fear of contagion, but
a public desire to defend the wholeness, regularity and cohesion of the body
politic. It is as though the metaphorical organic unity of the socius, with its
system of well-controlled functions, rules of inclusion and exclusion, and protective boundaries, has come to express an actual bodyliness that is at risk from
corporeal dissidence.
The psychological category of mysophobia the excessive anxiety occasioned
by the real or imagined risk of contamination works, then, at a number of levels,
though it is clearest in relation to the individual. In its operation, the putative fear
of contamination mirrors the psychic structure of phobia in general in that what
is feared marks the site of projection for an intrinsic condition, in this case vulnerability. Although the ascribed content of that vulnerability may vary from one
psychoanalytic interpretation to another,5 what is consistent is that the selfs own
vulnerability cannot be spoken. Although, as a result, the corporeally deviant may
be secretly despised, a more usual and seemingly positive response is that of compassion. Nonetheless, as Susan Wendell reminds us, the desire to eliminate differences that are feared, poorly understood, and widely considered to be marks of
inferiority, easily masquerades as the compassionate desire to prevent or stop
suffering (1996: 156). And even when at best there may be an attempt at empathy,
that empathy is about trying to smooth out differences, to find the grounds of
sameness, but it is not about opening oneself becoming vulnerable to an
encounter with irreducible strangeness. Indeed, insofar as the gaze remains operative, we might say that no real encounter takes place, for the emphasis is not on
exchange in which mutual transformation might occur, but precisely on forestalling such a move. Monstrously embodied selves are, then, fundamentally
75
disturbing in that they cannot be accounted for within the binary parameters of
sameness and difference, in which the latter is measured in terms of the former.
Instead, they transgress boundaries in being simultaneously too close, too recognisable (threatening merging and indifference), and in being excessive, in being
irreducibly other to the binary itself.
Before going on to theorise that in more clearly postmodernist terms, I want to
retrace briefly the aporias within modernism itself. What is really unsettling
about non-normative embodiment is not simply the reminder of the empirical
instability of all bodies, but the intuition that despite the privileging of mind in
western discourse, our embodied selfhood is a matter of complex interweaving.
Whenever the body is at risk, it is the stability of the self that is threatened. In
short, corporeal and ontological anxiety are inseparable. Nonetheless, despite an
intuitively phenomenological experience of being-in-the-world, we do still see
our bodies almost as though they are suits of armour protecting a core self. We
are unsurprised and unembarrassed by references to the real me inside. Any
breach in the ideal impregnability of the surface flesh signals potential contamination, an openness to the assault of the other. Moreover, the postEnlightenment
ideal of autonomous subjectivity and agency relies on a spacing, an interval
between self and other that covers over the putative threat of engulfment by the
other. And as becomes repeatedly evident, that threat is rarely gender-neutral. In the
western imagination, the female body just is monstrous, the necessary locus of worship and disgust whose corporeality threatens to overflow boundaries and engulf
those things which should remain separate. As Liz Grosz notes, it is inscribed as a
mode of seepage characterised as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid: as
formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply
the phallus but self-containmenta formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder
that threatens all order (1994: 203). The transhistorical hostility towards the feminine expresses, then, a fear of, and revulsion from, bodies that appear unable to
maintain the distinction and definition required by the sovereign self.
As might be anticipated, the dominant systems of western ethics, and this is as
true of bioethics as elsewhere, reflect that ideal of distinction and separation and
characterise individual bodies primarily as the property of autonomous selves.
The rights I hold in my own body are both protective and must be protected
against the incursions of others. In such a system the interaction between subjects
is mediated by implicit contract, which assumes the independence of each. In
principle, biomedical law and ethics, even though constituted in part to secure the
rights of persons at points of self-evident vulnerability in illness or disability
devolve on the assumption of autonomy, as is evident in a seminal judgment of
the sixties: Anglo-American law starts with the premise of thoroughgoing selfdetermination. It follows that each man is considered to be master of his own
body (Natanson v. Kline 1960). As a corollary of such formulations, vulnerability is positioned not as an existential state, but as a contingent physical dependency. In practice, nonetheless, that dependency is often taken to justify
paternalism6 towards those in ill health; and moreover there appears to be a whole
class of others the very young and old, those who are mentally ill, people with
disabilities, pregnant women, and so on who are in any case deemed incapable
76
of fully autonomous agency, and in whom vulnerability is intrinsic. Given the

extent of the exclusions from the ideal of self-determination, what is thrown up,
as Thomson puts it, is the troubling question of whether any person is independent of physical limitations, immune to external forces, and without need of assistance and care from others. Taking up her own particular focus, she goes on: The
disabled body exposes the illusion of autonomy, self-government, and selfdetermination that underpins the fantasy of absolute able-bodiedness (1997: 456).
It is just such resonances, however, that remain largely unacknowledged, and
the source of a persistent anxiety in the face of the corporeal other. What causes
unease is not that those named as disabled are helpless indeed the majority are
far from it but that the inviolability of their bodies, the inviolability that confers
an aura of self-mastery, appears to have been breached. They are in other words
visibly vulnerable. Given, however, the failure to successfully separate off lack
of integrity and completion as a wholly oppositional category, the western logos
finds its very structure under contest. Alongside a mainstream bio/ethical discourse saturated with the notion of vulnerability as the property of the other,
where vulnerability signals dependency (and in ethical terms a claim on the duties
of beneficence and non-maleficence), it is paradoxical that both biomedical and
lay discourse see the normatively embodied self as vulnerable to contamination
by proximity to those same others. Insofar as what we characterise as disability
as opposed to disease is not in itself literally contagious, then could it be that the
desire to deter the approach of those who are thus labelled, through limiting
access, through isolation and silencing, speaks not to the reality of an external
threat so much as to a simultaneous apprehension and denial of our own inherent
vulnerability.7 It is not a vulnerability to some(thing) other, but rather the incommon vulnerability of self-becoming.
Few such ontological reflections or psychic complications trouble the persistence of binary models of understanding, and vulnerability remains positioned as
some kind of falling short which is attributed to others in one strand among
others by virtue of their devalued embodiment. In their failure to reflect normativity, such figures may be seen as the objects of the benevolence of securely
embodied subjects, where the moral traffic is taken to be one way. Accordingly
the dominant ethical response is to suppose that those who are in any degree
unable to fulfil normative standards of self-care may, for that reason, have special claims to care from others. Indeed, benevolent concern for the vulnerable is
one of the hallmarks of the highly influential ethics-of-care strand of feminist
ethics. Yet curiously, such claims arising from a perceived vulnerability may
serve not to alleviate but rather to mark the position more clearly relative to the
other. In her analysis of the use of disabled female figures in sentimental novels
of the nineteenth century, for example, Thomson remarks that such women
often poor and black are deployed as icons of vulnerability (1997: 82), whose
relative powerlessness creates a bridge of sympathy, acceptance and identification to their more privileged that is middle-class and white sisters.
Nonetheless, it is an affiliation which empowers not the disabled women themselves, but their benefactors, who are confirmed in their own capacity to act as
the agents of liberal society.8 The relations of power at work are similar in effect
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to those of the present day telethons to which I referred earlier. Regardless of

ethical intent, those on the receiving end of (limited) beneficence are never able
to claim equal agency while their vulnerability remains. Vulnerability is positioned, then, as that which impairs agency in the damaged other while inspiring
moral action on the part of the secure self to make good the perceived lack.
In line with an analysis of vulnerability that grounds what is intended as a
normative ethics, the philosopher Robert Goodin has developed a model of moral
responsibility that derives from the wholly negative notion that to be vulnerable
is to be open to harm. As he puts it: You are always vulnerable to, and dependent upon, some individual or group who have it within their power to help or
harm you in some respect(s) (1998: 79). Although Goodin goes on to acknowledge some degree of vulnerability in us all, it is strictly speaking, in his view, an
empirical and contingent, rather than ontological, condition of human being. In
consequence, what he has in mind is an intrinsically asymmetrical model in
which some are called upon to respond to and protect, ideally, the vulnerability
of others. This is made particularly clear in his claim that there may be analogous responsibilitiesfor protecting animals and natural environments (1998: 73).
Although he is explicit, and at least partially successful, in his contention that the
principle of protecting the vulnerable involves a move beyond special moral
obligations which are individual, case specific and usually a matter of personal
involvement, Goodins inclusion of certain classes of strangers does not contest
the attribution of vulnerability as a misfortune of individual or collective others
that may be countered by appropriate response. Indeed he goes on to argue that
the degree of responsibility that arises out of obligation is proportionate to the
level of dependent vulnerability suffered by the other. Even though the exercise
of responsibility is intended to mitigate the asymmetry of the power dynamic,
there is little sense in which those who are positioned as the objects of concern,
as recipients of attention, are acknowledged as participants in a mutual ethical
encounter. It may well be that the particular condition of an individual disabled
woman, for example, prevents or constrains her full engagement, but my concern
is that the model is one in which the unlikelihood of mutual exchange is not
merely anticipated, but scripted in advance. It is precisely this kind of binary
thinking, which supports existing power relations, that I want to unsettle.
There are, of course, already within the terms of conventional discourse, strategies implicitly resistant to such reductionist thinking, one such being the claim
that we are all just temporarily able-bodied (TAB) in the sense that disabling illness, accident and old age are the possible or certain fate of all. Useful though
such accounts are in challenging the stigma of disability, however, they remain
locked into a positivist account of embodiment which may itself be disturbed by
reading the body and vulnerability through a postconventional perspective. In
such a spirit, Megan Bolers critical consideration of the supposedly radical call
for empathy with the other a kind of caring for the other by the effort of putting
oneself in her place more adequately breaks with the convention (Boler 1997).
Unlike many other feminist ethicists who work within a liberal humanist framework and see such ethical responses very positively, Boler concludes that empathetic identification remains trapped within a self/other binary that ultimately
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consumes and annihilates the other. It is, in effect, a refusal to hear the others
voice as uniquely her own, a refusal to acknowledge irreconcilable difference.
Moreover, if we accept that the form of embodiment cannot be split from selfhood, such that issues of sex, age, race, physical ability, and many more the
very historicity of the body are irreducible, then we cannot simply enter into the
experiential being of an other. But is the alternative of an attentiveness of listening without assimilation necessarily as free of its own ethical difficulties as Boler
seems to imply? As Foucault (1979) has pointed out, the one who elicits all from
the other, as in a confessional, is in a dominant position of power. The act of
speaking itself can heighten vulnerability in the asymmetry set up or perpetuated
by the power/knowledge relation. Instead, like Boler herself, I prefer a testimonial response that requires the encounter with vulnerability to rest on an openness
to the unpredictably strange and excessive, an openness that renders the self
vulnerable. It is not to reduce the response to a fear for ones own vulnerabilities,
so much as to take the risk of working through the incommensurable layers of
power and emotion that mediate the relational economy. This seems to me an
altogether more fruitful approach that recognises both that the self and the other
are mutually engaged, and yet are irreducible the one to the other.
What meaning, then, would vulnerability have if we stepped back from the
relentless binaries of western epistemology that set health against illness, conformity against disparity, the perfect against the imperfect, the self against the other?
What would it mean in other words to address the issue of vulnerability not without recourse to normative standards, but with a critique that exposed not simply
the limits set by the cultural specificity of normativity as opposed to the claim
of a general if not universal validity but more radically yet that the dichotomous
structure is itself unstable? One immediate effect would be to place less emphasis on vulnerability as the dependency of others, and more on the notion of vulnerability as the risk of ontological uncertainty for all of us. And what if the
question of contagion, of contamination were found to reside not only in the supposed materialities of bodies, but in the structure of discourse itself? I propose to
reread the body as a discursive construction, by now a widely familiar move to
poststructuralists, but one that still often seems to stymie those who work in the
health care disciplines. The problem is that aside from a thoroughgoing deconstruction of the discourses of sexuality, such as Judith Butlers work on queer
bodies (1993), and a relatively small number of specific studies like Catherine
Waldbys book on AIDS (1996) or some of my own previous work with Janet
Price on disability (1996, 1998), it is hard to find many postmodernist texts that
address the body of biomedicine not just as a concept but, the body as it is lived,
in pain as well as pleasure. Although I am highly sympathetic to the notion of
corporeal inscription, that approach tends to flatten out the problematic such that
certain issues concerning the fully three-dimensional, mobile, breathing, excreting body that encompass the interplay of internal and external space cannot be
adequately addressed.
What is called for is a rethinking that challenges the conventional opposition
of the material to the discursive, and marks them as fundamentally intertwined.
It is a matter of mutually constitutive modes of becoming, where (t)he flesh
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and blood givenness of the physical body is not a passive surface, but the site of
sensation and libidinal desirein continuous interaction with textual practices
(Shildrick 1997: 178). Moreover, in the area of biomedicine in particular, the
problematisation of the distinction between what claims to be a transparent
science and its social implications results not just in the blurring of that distinction, but in a more thorough reconceptualisation around the concept of a biomedical imaginary. The supposed objectivity of scientific knowledge is itself
inevitably contaminated by its specific cultural construction such that what is
both spoken and acted on refers not to some given truth, but to a slippery chain
of re-presentations. The imaginary anatomy of the body a term used by Lacan,
but reflecting too the philosophical anatomy of earlier centuries operates not
simply at the level of lay speculation, but is intrinsic to the discipline of biomedicine.9 Any understanding of the form and functioning of the body is always shot
through with metaphor, with psychic significances, with idealisations and ideologies that continually shape and reshape that which is presented, nevertheless,
as a stable entity. However strongly bioscience might resist the deconstruction of
its own belief system, the importance of making such a move, for me, is not just
whether we can successfully retheorise the taken-for-grantedness of bodies, for
clearly feminist theory in particular has generated many such reconfigurations,
but whether those can be carried forward to make a difference in practice. The
project is, I think, ultimately an ethical one of being enabled to act differently
because we can also think differently.
But how does this all relate to bodies, and more particularly to disabled
bodies? Where the convention insists that some bodies are or become vulnerable
by default, the postmodernist understanding of discursive instability speaks to the
intrinsic vulnerability of all bodies and indeed all embodied selves. Moreover, the
corpus to which I have been referring as though it were a given materiality is
more properly a body schema, a psychic construction of wholeness, that in most
cases belies its own precariousness and vulnerability. I want to look briefly,
then, at some psychoanalytic models before turning to consider the implications
of a linguistic approach. In Lacans account of the mirror stage in infant development, it is clear that the emergent sense of embodied and bounded selfhood is
phantasmatic to the extent that the infants actual experience of motor incapacity
and nursling dependency is covered over. But it is more than merely physical
inadequacy that is disowned. From the time of birth, as Lacan postulates, the
infant is psychically exposed to images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body, in short
imagos of the fragmented body (1977c: 11) that it is necessary to disavow. This
is how Lacan characterises the process:
The mirror stage is a dramawhich manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure
of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented
body-image to a form of its totalityand lastly to the assumption of the armour of an
alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subjects entire mental
development. (1977a: 4)10
The stability and distinction of normative embodiment relies then, from the first,
on a re/suppression of the dis-integration which belongs to the subject as embodied,
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and, indeed, precedes the subject as such. The originary lack must be made good
by a lifelong desire to recognise oneself, and to be recognised as a unified and
stable self.
What Lacans insight suggests to me is that any body which manifests signs of
insecurity may become the repository of both corporeal and ontological anxiety.
In the encounter with the disabled or damaged body, the shock is not that of the
unknown or unfamiliar, but rather of the psychic evocation of a primal lack of
unity as the condition of all. The specular moment that juxtaposes the whole and
the fragmented body is not about an absolute difference, but on the contrary
about an unnerving doubling of the one in the other. The unified embodied self is
faced not with an unknown other, but rather with its own being stripped of the
armour of an alienating identity. In investing, for political and social ends, in a
specific identity for disabled people that is as powerfully protected and policed as
its able-bodied counterpart, very few theorists of disability have been prepared to
engage with the psychic roots of our sense of embodiment, or have taken up the
implications of Lacans analysis. One exception, with whose analysis I largely
concur, is Lennard Davis, who is concerned with how disability occupies a field
of vision and translates into psychodynamic representations (Davis 1997: 52).
As he astutely recognises, the issue is less about the qualities and nature of
the observed object than about the investments of the observing subject. On the
question of physical difference, Davis writes:
The disabled body, far from being the body of some small group of victims, is an entity
from the earliest of childhood instincts, a body that is common to all humans.The
normal body is actually the one that we develop later. It is in effect a Gestalt and
therefore in the realm of what Lacan calls the imaginary. The realm of the real
in Lacanian terms is where the fragmented body is found because it is the body that
precedes the ruse of identity and wholeness. (1997: 61)
Yet, as Lacan makes clear, repression is the price of self-identity, and the sensations of early infancy must remain unacknowledged and unacknowledgable,
albeit in a state of instability.11 Moreover, given that the unified sense of self is
constructed, at least initially, in the visual image and detachment of the mirror,
then it is not simply the psychic dimensions of the body that are repressed, but
the indeterminate physicality of touch and being touched. In consequence, what
constitutes the inherent vulnerability of the self embodied as normative is projected on to the other, who must then be avoided, and above all not touched, for
fear of contamination.
While it is not difficult to recognise the mechanisms at work in the response to
disabled bodies, I want to stress that similar moves operate in relation to all forms
of monstrosity. It is, above all, the corporeal ambiguity and fluidity, the troublesome lack of fixed definition, that marks the monstrous as a site of disruption. If,
as I have been arguing throughout, the predictable, knowable body with which we
think ourselves familiar is a construction secured only by the processes of normalisation that must seek to abject, name and exclude the monstrous other, then
any risk to those processes is fraught with danger for the embodied subject. What
is at stake is the impossible desire for transcendence, and the denial of the impure
and uncontrollable materiality in which all of us find our existence, and that
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renders the subject always already vulnerable. What makes the other monstrous
is not so much its morphological difference and unfamiliarity, as the disturbing
threat of its return. It is in its failure to fully occupy the category of the other, in
its incomplete abjection, that the monster marks the impossibility of the modernist self. Monsters haunt us, not because they represent an external threat and
indeed some are benign but because they stir recognition within, a sense of our
openness and vulnerability that western discourse insists on covering over.
Monsters, then, are what Freud would call the uncanny which he defines as that
class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar (1919: 220). Like the feminine, the monstrous may remain the other, unreflected as itself, but it is nonetheless evident as das Unheimliche, as the
anxiety-provoking double that haunts the margins of self-presence, and, Freud
says, arouses dread and creeping horror in our selves.12
At a similar level of analysis of the psychic constitution of the subject, the
Kristevan notion of the abject puts into play an even clearer explanatory model
of the contaminatory potential of non-self materiality. For Kristeva, the abject is
the term for all those things which a subject must disavow in the attempt to secure
the selfs clean and proper body (1982: 71). They are most notably those sticky,
viscous, or amorphous things which are associated primarily with the female, and
more particularly with the maternal, body. It is through the dynamic of abjection
that the subject must distinguish both between inside and outside the body, and
between one body and another. In other words, the abject exists prior to selfother
differentiation. Any substance, then, that crosses corporeal boundaries pus,
blood, saliva, breast milk, faecal matter is a significant focus of cultural anxiety and regulation. The womb is especially dangerous for not only does it produce the outflow of menstrual blood, but it nurtures new life which must itself
eventually cross the boundary from interior to exterior existence, carrying with it
the contaminatory potential of meconium, cervical mucus, amniotic fluid,
placental material and so on. The disgust and anxiety invoked by the abject is that
felt by the clean and proper subject faced with the memory trace of her own
origins, which both repel and attract, and throw into doubt the project of selfcompletion. The abject, then, figures a highly ambiguous response to the maternal
body, for, as Kristeva puts it, we do not cease lookingfor the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal
body (1982: 54). Moreover, the abject is never fully expelled; it is properly neither subject nor object in the binary sense, but occupies a liminal space in
between where it partakes of both. It is, then, the other others the feminine, the
monstrous, the unclean who resist both arrest as the other of the same, and
successful exclusion as the absolute other, who inevitably contest the closure of
self-identity. It is as though subjectivity is always already contaminated by its
own archaic memories. In other words, the abject never really leaves the subjectbody, but remains as both reminder of, and threat to, the precarious status of
the closed and unified self. As Kristeva puts it: It is something rejected from
which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an
object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us (1982: 4).
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It is precisely the threat of engulfment with its breaching of boundaries and

loss of self-containment that makes clear the psychic function of abjection. In
order to enter into the symbolic as a proper self, the subject must break the power
of the motherchild bond by disavowing all those things which belong to the state
of primary indifferentiation. As Barbara Creed puts it in her discussion of the
monstrous feminine in film: by constructing the maternal figure as an abject
being, the symbolic order forces a separation of mother and infant that is necessary to guarantee its power and legitimacy (1993: 69). In consequence, what signals the monstrous is any sign of the failure of the paternal order to enforce and
maintain the break. Within overtly literary sources, of course, the mechanism of
the return of the abject is made acceptable, even pleasurable, by its sublimation
in fantasy, but it remains, nevertheless, a powerful phantasm in the dynamics of
everyday life. The powerful images of Still Life again come to mind in Iris
Marion Youngs description of the dangers of return:
The expelled self turns into a loathsome menace because it threatens to re-enter, to obliterate the border between it and the separated self.The abject must not touch me, for
fear it will ooze through, obliterating the border.The abject provokes fear and
loathing because it exposes the border between self and other as constituted and fragile.
(1990a: 1434)
In her long discussion of the notion of abomination in biblical texts, Kristeva

argues that while it is not lack of health itself that causes abjection, but rather
the confusion of identity, system, and order, nonetheless the disabled body is, by
virtue of its corporeal nonconformity, among those things which may represent
abjection. If the process of giving birth is in all cases a matter of abjection, then
how much more so when the product itself is a morphological aberration. In
marking its debt to nature the supposedly violent tearing away from the maternal insides on its own flesh, such a body cannot be proper, that is it cannot be
wholly ones own. And if, as Kristeva indicates, it is the disavowed trace of the
maternal body that grounds the concept of the abject, then it becomes clear why
the marked disabled body should threaten contamination.
In her more recent book Strangers to Ourselves (1990), Kristeva develops her
early concept of the abject to give a psychical account of the often negative and
fearful human relationship to the irreconcilable other. The emotional intensity of
the loathing directed at those who display unacceptable differences is never a
matter of external factors alone. Rather, the potentially catastrophic encounter
with that which appears foreign to us the stuff of violent aversions of every
kind is the expression of the disavowal of the improper facet of our own unconscious. As such the subject is in an unstable and highly vulnerable relation to its
supposedly exterior others, but it is a vulnerability that can be overcome not by
repression but by acceptance. Just as Derrida sees diffrance as the trace within,
so Kristeva understands the phenomenon of strangeness to be the interior presence of what she calls the other scene, that, as she puts it: integrates within the
assumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolic
and becomes an integral part of the same (1990: 181). What is at issue is that our
ambivalent response to the external manifestation of the strange, of the monster,
is an effect of the gap between our understanding of ourselves as whole and
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separate, and the psychical experience of the always already incorporation of

otherness. Moreover, that otherness within remains unheimlich, simultaneously
both integrated with and irreducible to the self. For Kristeva, it is this double
status that opens up the possibility of a radically ethical response, which she calls
an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable (1990: 182). In owning ourselves as
dis-integrated, we can give up both the urge to reduce others to the selfsame, or
to persecute them as absolutely different. The analytic of the uncanny, in
Kristevas view, sets the difference within us in its most bewildering shape and
presents it as the ultimate condition of our being with others (1990: 192).
Compelling though I find such psychoanalytic accounts, which seem to resonate with a wide variety of cultural practices and beliefs whilst giving due regard
to their specificity, I want to push the argument into territory which breaks
entirely with biologistic explanation. I am thinking in terms of the linguistic register, and particularly of the analytic offered by Jacques Derrida and the way in
which it has been taken up in Judith Butlers more recent work. As critics of both
are all too ready to claim, the level of theorisation involved often makes it difficult to see where or how their abstract insights could be applied to lives as they
are lived. If, however, we take seriously, as postmodernists surely must, the claim
that bodies and subjects are discursively constructed materialised rather than
material, as Butler (1993) has it then the problematic of language cannot be
ignored. At a relatively simple level, it is clear to see that if, as I have outlined,
biomedicine itself is structured by a culturally and historically unstable series of
metaphors imbricating with a wide range of other discourses, then it can make no
claim to purity. It is from the start inherently contaminated by its discursive
others, and always vulnerable, therefore, to alternative readings that contest
received truth. And at a more complex stage, what seems to me to warrant further
thought in particular is the structure of iterability. Iterability is the process of
resaying, a process which functions not simply as the repetition that seeks to
authorise and sediment meaning by repeated reference to a prior context, but as
the moment of slippage inherent in repetition, that destabilises meaning even as
it establishes it. It is, in other words, the rearticulation that introduces the interval
of transformation. My question is, what difference does a consideration of iterability make to our understanding of contamination and vulnerability? But first
I want to recall briefly what the primary moves of the deconstructive approach
already entail.
In contradistinction to the binary system that seeks to divide self from other so
completely that each may have mutually exclusive properties, one major insight
of poststructuralism is that each term is fundamentally reliant on the other for its
definition, in the sense both of meaning and outline. Presence defines itself
against absence, good against evil, unified against fragmented, able-bodied
against disabled, and so on. In place of the closed and complete boundaries that
ostensibly mark difference and separation as absolute, the move of deconstruction has been to demonstrate that both primary and marked term are mutually
dependent, and measured against a single standard in terms respectively of
wholeness and lack. Each term is, as Spivak puts it, an accomplice of the other
(Derrida 1976: lxviii), or to put it more materially, they are opened up to one
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another. But what that description misses perhaps is that because the constitutive
interdependency that is, the trace of the one in the other is overlain in western
discourse by a binary structure of sameness and difference, a more appropriate
expression of the relationship might be that each term is contaminated by the
other. And the implication of that mutual contamination, or what Derrida calls
diffrance, the operation of the trace that defers and detours meaning, is that all
claims to purity are radically destabilised. Can we not say then, as I have suggested elsewhere (Shildrick 1997), that the inherent leakiness of meaning in the
logos is paralleled by a necessary uncertainty about bodies, as themselves discursive constructions? In other words, vulnerability comes not from the outside,
but just is implicit in ontological and epistemological structure. Moreover, among
the many synonyms of diffrance, those paradoxical expressions that interweave
opposites without settling on either, Derrida proposes the term pharmakon, which
can denote both poison and cure. It is then a small step to see that very same
undecidability in the figure of the pharmakos the scapegoat that both cleanses
and is cast out by the community as the nominated carrier of contamination. Not
surprisingly Kristeva (1982) marks the scapegoat as a figure of abjection.
In understanding how the deconstructive move operates, then, we are already
alerted to a certain anxiety at the borders of both concepts and bodies. The scapegoat after all may only speak for the ideal of a secure, untroubled, bounded order
after it has been excluded. But as Judith Butler reminds us in a much-quoted
phrase, it is the very process of exclusion that produces a constitutive outside to
the subject, an abjected outside, which is after all, inside the subject as its own
founding repudiation (1993: 3). And moreover, to the extent that the constitution
of the subject and the materialisation of the body are performative and discursive,
the process is never complete, but must be repeated constantly: it must be reiterated. There is in consequence no way of securing the purity of the subject, not
least because in the mode of becoming, in the iterative structure itself, there is
always slippage such that the standard effects its own internal othering. In other
words, iteration is not simply the repetition that fixes what is performed, but the
scene of its difference from itself. As Derrida insists: Iterability alters, contaminating parasitically what it identifies and enables to repeat itself (1988: 62).
Now although Derrida here and Butler in her later work Excitable Speech (1997)
are concerned primarily with the analytic of the speech act, it seems to me that
the very same trajectory is at work in bodies. However much we speak our being
in the body as closed and secure, the ideal invulnerability that we intend to perform is breached in the very repetition. Derrida again: [iterability] limits what it
makes possible, while rendering its rigour and purity impossible. What is at work
here is something like a law of undecidable contamination (1988: 59). The implication, which Derrida later spells out, is that iterability troubles the binary and
hierarchical oppositions that authorize the very principle of distinction (1988:
127), and he is explicit that this is as true of common parlance as of philosophical discourse.
The iterative process, it must be stressed, is to be understood more as constitutive than as the operation of an already established subject. Nevertheless, more is
needed to explain the coming-into-being of that subject, and Butler for one turns
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back to the Althusserian concept of interpellation. In her somewhat transformed

version, the subject to be is inaugurated in the address of the Other such that the
address constitutes a being within the possible circuit of recognition and, accordingly, outside of it, in abjection (1997: 5) Whilst it is not entirely clear what relation this abjection bears to the constitutive outside that Butler refers to in her
earlier book, Bodies That Matter, her formula emphasises again the inherent vulnerability and instability of our existence regardless of whether we are assumed to
be within or beyond discursive normativity. As Butler puts it: There is no way
to protect against that primary vulnerability and susceptibility to the call of recognition that solicits existence, to that primary dependency on a language we never
made in order to acquire a tentative ontological status (1997: 26). In consequence, although interpellation must precede subjectivity, it is not a once and for
all process that fixes our status as embodied subjects, and neither can it deliver
the radical autonomy that modernist models take for granted. In view of our
mutual immersion in a discursive realm that continues to make and unmake us,
our morphology can never be certain. Yet again, what is at stake is the instability
of the boundaries that divide whole bodies from broken ones. In emphasising
once more the discursive nature of embodiment, the deconstructive turn serves
not to occlude lived experience, but to further attest to the necessary vulnerability, the undecidability, at the heart of becoming.
As should now be established, what is at issue, for me, is a radical undoing of
the very notion of embodied being as something secure and distinct from its
others. Although the postEnlightenment standard of a wholly autonomous body
and mind can be critiqued for its failure both to accommodate at very least the
patina of a functional or emotional vulnerability due to us all, and to recognise
the interrelatedness of social life, the western imaginary is remarkably resilient.
Even within that tradition, Martha Nussbaums observation that (t)he peculiar
beauty of human excellence just is its vulnerability (1986: 86) a remark, note,
that preserves the subject is a rare insight indeed. In contrast, my purpose is to
reconfigure vulnerability, not as an intrinsic quality of an existing subject, but as
an inalienable condition of becoming. The deconstructive enterprise does not of
course aim to change things in and of itself, but to provide a critique which gives
some account of the violence with which the process of othering different forms
of bodyliness is conducted. That violence, it is worth noting, operates on both a
discursive and a metaphorical level as the violent hierarchies of the binary
system that Derrida refers to; and as material violence to which the eugenic
programmes of sterilisation or even extermination of the feeble-minded and
feeble-bodied bear witness. And clearly, similar fears of the contamination of a
notional purity are operative in the response to racial others. All this poststructuralism understands, and in a telling phrase, Gayatri Spivak refers to deconstruction as a radical acceptance of vulnerability (1990: 18). Her insight does
not supplant that of Nussbaum, but gives it rather more depth and urgency.
Always more than mere abstract considerations, those perceptions together add
further explanatory depth to my own face to face responses to the images of the
Still Life presentation in Dublin. The shock, the putative threat to my own wellBeing that the figures seem to offer, and the parallel feeling of recognition, both
86
spring from the unavoidable realisation that as an embodied subject, I too am

fragile. Not only is my own unity of being uncertain, but what has seemed intolerable, even unthinkable, is precisely constitutive of my self. The notion of an irreducible vulnerability as the necessary condition of a fully corporeal becoming of
my self and always with others shatters the ideal of the selfs clean and proper
body; and it calls finally for the willingness to engage in an ethics of risk.
5
LEVINAS AND VULNERABLE
BECOMING
The question of vulnerability, as I have developed it in the last chapter, is one that
has played a strictly limited part in normative ethics, and still less has it been
explored in any depth in ontological philosophy. There is, however, in the work
of Emmanuel Levinas a thoroughgoing attempt to position vulnerability as the
mobilising feature of an ethics that precedes and thus constitutes the ontological
moment. Rather than seeing ethics and ontology as mutually constitutive and
inextricable as I have so far done Levinas suggests that we should reverse
entirely the order of the western convention in which an already self-identified
subject engages as an agent in the moral landscape. According to Levinas, it is
only through our pre-ontological face to face encounter with the other,1 a situation of the utmost vulnerability, that we may become subjects enjoying selfconsciousness and freedom. Like Derrida, Levinas wishes to stress the ethical
necessity of response and responsibility, but with the difference that it is not so
much the occasion of a deconstruction of the subject as of a construction. As with
much postconventional theory, the work of Levinas is highly abstract and difficult to apply outside a conceptual frame. Nonetheless his insistence on vulnerability and responsibility as the modalities of the existent, together with the
concentration on terms such as encounter, proximity, and above all the face, may
provide, I believe, a further understanding of the issues that concern me. So radical is his approach that, despite some misgivings, I want to look at it at some
length as a model in which the concept of vulnerability is opened up in just the
way that advances my own project. At no point does Levinas speak of the
monstrous, at least in the sense that I have been using it, but he is engaged with
the stranger, the one whose appearance may seem to threaten me, and yet whose
own vulnerability calls out to me. In a similar way, what concerns me is the other,
not so much in a difference which may be reduced to the same, but as an alterity
whose strange(r)ness is absolute. As such, it may be possible to think further such
empirical circumstances as those of the Still Life encounter.
In terms of conventional philosophy which has pre-eminently concerned itself
with the question of Being, the privilege that Levinas gives to ethics signals an
extraordinary realignment of the central problematic. Throughout the western
tradition, ethics has been considered as a subset only, an area of specialist enquiry
that does not emerge until the issue of ontology has been settled. It has been a
theme only in an already thematised context, in which ethics is understood
largely as the study of morality as a system of principles, or of moral behaviour
in a substantive framework. Throughout this work, I have tried to unsettle the
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plausibility of the apparent detachment between ontology and ethics, focusing

instead not on a state of being, but on a process of becoming that is always relational, always intrinsically ethical. In his own turn to ethics, Levinas sees the relation with and response to the other as that which founds the self as a subject, that
instantiates its very being. Ethics, then, assumes an inescapable priority that overturns the proper order of things, and what Derrida calls the metaphysics of
presence. It should not be supposed, however, that Levinas intends a chronological
sequence that culminates in a fully formed subject, but rather a constant interruption in which ethical response the Saying disturbs the thematisation, the
regulatory moral apparatus, of the Said.2 It is as though the ethical moment, in its
originary form, recurs as a trace that challenges the sedimentation of stable
subjectivity and determinable moral agency.
How, then, does Levinas characterise the originary relation? In his two major
words, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, first published respectively in 1961 and 1974, he develops a quasi-phenomenology of self and other
that grounds ethics and thus ontology in the inescapable encounter between the
putative need or demand of the other and the hitherto undisturbed pleasurable
solitude of the self. The one who finds herself not alone in the world must forfeit
her sensuous enjoyment, in which, as Levinas puts it: Life is love of life, a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than my being: thinking,
eating, sleeping, reading, working, warming oneself in the sun (1969: 112). Yet
to relinquish that state of sensibility and immediacy, of the ego at home with
itself, of interiority in the face of the other, is not a loss as such but the threshold
of freedom and self-conscious subjectivity. It is a moment not of being, but
otherwise than being, what Levinas calls the very possibility of the beyond
(1989b: 179). From a situation of egoistic self-sufficiency, the one is called upon
to respond to the vulnerability, destitution and nakedness of the other, to act not
for-oneself, but as the one-for-the-other. What is implicitly commanded is that in
the response the one should take responsibility for the other, whom Levinas
habitually refers to as the stranger, the widow, the orphan. It is, in other words, a
call for an ethical response to an other who cannot be recognised within any
shared cultural or political context. It is expressly the alterity of the other, then, and
the absolute dissymmetry between us, that mobilises ethics: The strangeness of
the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and possessions, is precisely
accomplished as the calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics (1969: 43).
It is from the start an asymmetrical relationship, rather than one between putative
equals, for equality is a modality of the Law which is yet to come.
Aside from its positioning as a pre-ontological moment, there is at first sight
little to distinguish this relation from many other such formulations that pose
vulnerability as a condition that might be expected to evoke an ethical response, such
as that which duty, virtue or utility might command. Although we may fall short
of or wilfully ignore the moral good, we are unlikely to be unaware of the ethical
principles that are designed to mediate response. For Levinas, however, such
considerations are beside the point for all they do is return the self to itself, preserving,
in other words, the purity of the sovereign subject. His point is that in conventional discourse, where ethics is subordinate to ontology as first philosophy,
LEVINAS AND VULNERABLE BECOMING
89
moral response speaks to a model of power and domination. In a gesture of

symbolic violence, everything is reduced to self-consciousness, and to the selfpresence of a pre-determined knowing subject: Knowledge is re-presentation, a
return to presence, and nothing may remain other to it (1989a: 77). In the
encounter with the strange, we do no more than grasp the other, strip away her
difference, and assimilate her to our selves: It is not a relation with the other as
such but the reduction of the other to the same (1969: 46). The normative subject exercises moral agency by taking itself as the model to which others must be
made analogous. Removed, then, from its alterity, difference is put to the service
of the same and becomes lost in the totalisation of being. To locate ethics as prior
to ontology, therefore, enables a very different reading of the encounter in which
the distinction, the absolute difference, between the one and the other can be
recuperated. Moreover, it establishes that identity begins in, and relies on, the
engagement with radical otherness.
The encounter, for Levinas, is not so much a phenomenological experience,
reliant on vision or contact, but rather the figurative moment of the face to face
with the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself (1969: 39). It is
a breach in the self-sufficiency of the one, an opening to, and acceptance of, exteriority. We will be reminded, in another register, of the uncanniness of the monster
to which I have already referred. In his use of the term face, Levinas wants to
suggest that which is resistant to the grasp of appropriation. As he explains:
The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we
here name face.To approach the Otheris therefore to receive from the Other beyond
the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. (1969: 501)
This is a very different mode to that in which an object is given to sight, given up
to my knowledge and power. The face is always incommensurable with my own,
excessive to representation, and always beyond any mutual recognition. On the
contrary, to regard the face, as Cathryn Vasseleu points out, is not so much to
look at it as to have a regard for it, to display a generosity towards it (1998: 88).
Moreover, in his suspicion of vision, Levinas privileges language albeit a nonverbal language of sensibility as the medium that necessarily presupposes
plurality and difference: The other is maintained and confirmed in his heterogeneity as soon as one calls upon him (1969: 69). As interpellation or expression,
language breaks up unity and continuity and establishes a relation of separation
and transcendence:
The fact that the face maintains a relation with me by discourse does not range him in
the same; he remains absolute within the relationthe ethical relationship which subtends discourse is not a species of consciousness whose ray emanates from the I; it puts
the I in question. (1969: 195):
The irreducibly different and incommensurable, unknown other demands a

response which is not that of knowledge, recognition, of representation to oneself, or even of communication. As Waldenfels points out, a communicative
ethic, such as might be implied by the turn to language, is no part of Levinas project for it fulfils the demand of the other by stripping it of alterity and making it
commensurable with my self-fulfilment (1995: 43). In contrast, in Levinasian
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ethics, I cannot gather the other into myself. The very singularity of the face
precludes any form of identification, and calls instead for a response to its unique
need. To respond to the call, to answer Here I am, as one must, is to be inaugurated into responsibility. Indeed, far from exercising moral agency on ones own
behalf with all the connotations of autonomy and rationality which that intends
the response to the other is, for Levinas, no choice at all. As he puts it: The recurrence of the self in responsibility for others, a persecuting obsession, goes against
intentionality, such that responsibility for others could never mean altruistic will,
instinct of natural benevolence, or love (1998: 11112). Rather, the response
is compelled, not even in recognition of a spoken or sensed demand, but as
Levinas insists before any demand by the other, or commitment of the self, has
been made. In the sensibility of my exposedness to the other, I have already been
offered without any holding back, in a non-present, and without commencement
or initiative (1998: 75). The one is infinitely obligated before the transcendent
other, not in respect of a predetermined moral duty, but simply by virtue of the
face to face relation.
To be responsible for an other without limit, to be a self-for-the-other, is, as
Levinas pointedly names it, to become the hostage of an other. It is not, nonetheless, a state of unfreedom, a capturing of the will, for in his ethics the will does
not yet exist. The finite parameters of conventional moral agency freedom,
rationality, and self-identity have no part in Levinasian ethics. Rather, in the
face of the unavoidable call to responsibility, the question of being, and thus of
agency, is yet to come. Insofar as Levinas speaks of or implies being before the
ethical moment, it is as an artefact of a necessarily ontological language, and
should always be read sous rature. In place of the calculability of moral duty
which theoretically at least treats everyone alike, an ethics of responsibility posits
the other as a unique and irreplaceable individual. And moreover, it is precisely
as the one called, the one who must respond to the vulnerability, the suffering,
and the need of the other who meets me face to face, that I am instituted as a subject in my own right. My interiority, my unselfconscious enjoyment of the world,
is opened up to exteriority and to the infinite. Moreover, insofar as the call is
directed to me alone, not as a demand for the satisfaction of pre-existing rights
but as a personal reaching out, even though the call may come only from a silent
face, it establishes me as singular and unique. No-one, Levinas insists, may take
my place; it is from me alone that the other requires response. In being subjected
to the needs of the other in a passivity more passive still than the passivity of
matter (1998: 11314), I become a subject. It is my very election as a hostage
that establishes my freedom.
There is a very significant difference, then, between Levinasian ethics as they
open onto infinity, and the more usual conception of morality with its totalising
schema organised around the ontologically given. But where the latter schemata
are clearly normative, we could ask whether Levinas offers prescription or simply
description. In transforming the semantic meaning of ethics, he refuses the
ascription of value as such, but makes clear that to be ethical is otherwise and
better than being (Levinas 1989b: 179). Moreover, it would be misleading to
conclude that the response to the encounter is empty of more or less preferable
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alternatives. Certainly his language implies that in the face to face encounter
things could not be otherwise, that the call or demand is inescapable, that the one
has no choice but to respond. Nonetheless, it is not the case that one will necessarily take responsibility: the opportunity to enter into ethics may be passed over.
Although the criticism that Levinas is being merely utopian carries some weight,
he is well aware of the shortcomings of humanity. To hear the call, to meet the
other face to face, and to ignore her, is not after all to fail to respond. Indeed as
Levinas makes clear, the initial response to the unknown stranger may be no less
than murderous; we would kill what seems to threaten us. Such a reaction chimes
with the encounter with what we call monstrous, but the point Levinas wants to
make is that the threat is apparent only, the violence is all mine. Though the other
infinitely exceeds my power, it arises not through the exercise of force, but by the
overflowing of every idea I can have of him (1969: 87). To kill the other, then, to
annihilate, is literally without meaning. In the pre-ontological moment, it is the
defenceless transcendence of the other that stays my hand. Murder is a real
possibility, but an ethical impossibility: There is here a relation not with a very
great resistance, but with something absolutely other: the resistance of what has
no resistance the ethical resistance (1969: 199). The point is not that I cannot
respond with violence, but that it will fail in its aim; in absolute alterity, the other,
that which is non-self, is always beyond my grasp.
In her critique of Levinasian ethics, the philosopher of religion, Grace Jantzen
(1998), asks why violence rather than welcome should suggest itself as the first
proclivity, and although she provides a partial answer with reference to Levinas
own understanding of the western logos, her question, I believe, misses the mark.
As Jantzen rightly points out, Levinas sees the ontological impulse as founded in
mastery, an overcoming of otherness that secures the same in a gesture of violence. In contradistinction, the face to face constitutes an ethical moment which
forbids murder. As Levinas insists, the originary encounter prior to an ontology
that opposes self to other is pre-eminently peaceful; alterity displaces violence,
because the absolute other is inviolate. At first, this seems to make good sense,
but there is, nevertheless, a problem both for Levinas rethinking of the ethical,
and for Jantzens critique: it is difficult to understand why, in the pre-ontological,
there should be ascriptions such as violent or peaceful at all. To whom or what
do they pertain? The question is especially acute given that Levinas makes clear
that the face, rather than displaying finite characteristics, opens onto infinity. As
several commentators have pointed out, Totality and Infinity, in which the discussion of violence develops, is beset by the complications of writing the
pre-ontological in the language of self and other, and perhaps it is up to the reader
in the encounter with the text to disabuse herself of assumptions of meaning.
Despite a remaining hesitation, a more generous approach cannot fail to appreciate the novelty of a project that demonstrates how ethics might be constituted
otherwise. It should be remembered, besides, that the face to face relation is both
an-archic and recurrent. In encountering the stranger-neighbour, I may be called
back to the ethical from my immersion in the ontological; I may be interrupted
in my being. Whatever the status of my initial response, then, violent or welcoming, it is the move to responsibility that matters. The other who calls to me in
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unprotected openness, does not limit but promotes my freedom, by arousing my

goodness (Levinas 1969: 200).
As Levinas develops his model, it becomes clear that his notion of vulnerability is one which will answer to my own use of the term to mark a state which is
as much that of the one as of the other. Although initially it is the other who is
vulnerable, who is figured as homeless, poor, widowed, orphaned, and whose
suffering humanity invokes response, that response itself or rather the
irrestistibility of the call pitches me also into vulnerability. I am exposed before
the nakedness of the face, the certainty of my own existence thrown into doubt.
It is my moral subjection to the other, my vulnerability in exposure to her vulnerability, that instantiates me as a subject. At the level of my corporeity, of my
incarnation before being tied to my body (1998: 76), the relation with the other
before any conscious determination is characterised by Levinas as maternal.
This is not intended to denote that I give birth to the other, nor yet that she is
dependent on my prior existence for her own. Certainly I am for-her, rather than
for-myself, but it is in that that I become. In responding to the need of the
stranger-other with a hospitality without limit, by giving shelter and nourishment,
I enact a donation without return which positions me not as a beneficent subject,
but as a pre-ontological maternal hostage. It is hardly surprising that for feminist
critics the lack of concern with maternity as birth-giving, and the focus on what
seems to amount to a form of self-annulment raises serious misgivings. As Cynthia
Willett remarks: however much ethical sacrifice brings honor to the mother, this
sacrifice is also suffered as an effacement of the female self (1995: 84).
Although Levinas might respond that there is as yet no real self as such to efface,
one might wonder, nonetheless, whether the subject who emerges from the ethical encounter could ever be a feminine self. What is clear is that my suffering as
one-for-the-other effectively ties together the concepts of maternity,
vulnerability and proximity.
The proximity of the encounter is, for Levinas, quite distinct from every
other relationship (1998: 46), and is very different to the closeness of two
beings in communication, be it verbal or tactile. As Vasseleu puts it: Prior to
any sensation and irreducible to it, proximity is a sensibility which is distinguished from the conjunction which occurs in experience and knowledge
(1998: 98). In other words, no-thing is grasped in the here and now. Proximity
is an an-archic concept, reducible neither to the simultaneity of objects in time,
nor as Levinas says, to any modality of distance or geometrical contiguity, nor
to the simple representation of a neighbour; it is already an assignationan
obligation, anachronously prior to commitment (1998: 1001). It is rather a
non-phenomenal state of vulnerability, an abyss as Levinas remarks. Strictly
speaking, proximity signals neither presence nor yet absence to/of the other, but
an openness or exposure that traverses the space of difference. Although it is primarily an auratic and not a tactile relation, there is no exchange of words, nor
even mutual awareness. The one and the other are not known to each other, and
yet the relation if it can be called that is intensely personal. In proximity, I am
claimed by an an-archical and persecuting obsession that remains always nonreciprocal. I am alone and singular in my exposure to the call to responsibility.
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Moreover, I am called to suffer not only as the hostage of the other, but in the
place of her responsibility.
In Otherwise than Being, Levinas unfolds the concept of substitution as the
crux of his understanding of the ethical relation between the one and the other. It
is not simply that I must respond to the other, I must substitute myself for her and
take on both her suffering and her responsibility, even to the extent that she
causes me to suffer. Yet substitution is not an act, an intentionality towards the
other, but an absolute passivity, beyond the usual binary of active and passive.
I do not put myself in the place of the other, so much as I am occupied by it. It is,
then, neither a form of respect in the Kantian sense for an equal and autonomous
other, nor an empathy that would collapse difference into the selfsame. The question of agency, as it is usually understood, does not arise; there is as yet no willing I. Indeed, (t)hese are not events that happento an ego already posited and
fully identified, as a trial that would lead it to be more conscious of itself
(1998: 11516), but that happen to the being in-oneself-for-the-other, what
Levinas calls otherwise than being. In substituting myself, I exist through the
other and for the other, but without this being alienation.The psyche can
signify this alterity in the same without alienation in the form of incarnation, as
being-in-ones skin, having-the-other-in-ones-skin (1998: 11415). Although,
then, I am summonsed to expiation before any fault of my own, and prior to any
act of will, the substitution is not a submission to an-other ego, but rather the
mark of the irreplaceability and uniqueness of my self. In short, the self is
ethically liberated.
It is only in the mode of substitution that suffering, which otherwise is for nothing, can take on a meaning: the suffering for the useless suffering of the other
person, the just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the Other, opens
upon suffering the ethical perspective of the inter-human (Levinas 1988: 159). As
Levinas understands it, the problematic of the pre-ontological being-in-itself
disrupts the philosophical question of why others concern us. Unlike the selfconscious being-for-himself who washes his hands of the faults and misfortunes
that do not begin in his own freedom or in his present (1998: 116), the one-forthe-other the hostage, the substitute who responds without prior commitment
opens on to human solidarity. I am ethical because I am only in response to all
the others. And yet the originary relationship remains deeply asymmetrical in that
although I substitute for the other, neither she nor any other may substitute for
me. There can be no reciprocity, no expectation of the return of my gift of responsibility,3 for that would be to enter into an economy of exchange which Levinas
considers to be post-ethical. At the level of the ethical, there are no grounds on
which I can judge the transcendent other; my task is responsibility alone. If I am
persecuted by the other, then, in my limitless responsibility for her and in her
place, I am guilty. In consequence of my openness to the other, in a proximity
unmediated by any principle, I open myself to the utmost vulnerability.
It is precisely the relationship of non-reciprocity on which Levinas insists that
theorists such as Cynthia Willett (1995) who is equally concerned to reconfigure
the dialectic of self and other have found deeply problematic. In specifically
feminist ethics, even with a postmodernist slant, the appeal to reciprocal exchange
94
is paradigmatic. Except perhaps for Luce Irigaray who fully embraces a

Derridean notion of the gift (Irigaray 1992: 73), such a reading entails an understanding that renders the gift without return as untenable. Willett, moreover, is
suspicious of the unmeasured generosity of Levinasian ethics and perceptively
remarks: the gift given without regard to the particular context of the other, the
gift given ex nihilo, may be regarded as an insult or violation, a wilful form of
misrecognition or misattunement (1995: 82). Certainly Levinas implication that
the gift occurs before any specific demand has been made would seem to support
such a concern, but for him the gift nevertheless always takes the form of a
response. There is little reason to suppose that it is, or could be, imposed. On the
contrary, it is a matter of risk, a reaching out to the unknown other that is not conditional on an appropriate return. Although the notion of a pleasurable, interpersonal exchange that Willett develops with regard to the paradigm relation
between caregiver and infant is appealing, and like the Levinasian model does
not presuppose the meeting of full subjects, it cannot easily be extended to the
ethical encounter between strangers. Were response indeed dependent on the
expectation if not the calculation, then at least the erotics of mutual exchange,
then there would be little incentive in enter into any unfamiliar encounter. The
extent to which Levinas is willing to forgo the safety of mutual response, and
embrace the vulnerability of unknowingness, is precisely the measure of the
potential inclusiveness of his ethical imagination.
Nonetheless, this is an extremely harsh understanding of ethics, and though it
forecloses the ontological split between the one and the other, and refigures
vulnerability away from negativity, it is difficult to see how to progress to the
socio-political world in which we must live together. Levinas could scarcely be
described as a social or political philosopher, and yet he is not detached from the
prevailing climate of postwar, post-Holocaust Europe; rather he is responding to
the horrors that had already been perpetrated. Indeed, Otherwise than Being is
dedicated to the memory of those affected by National Socialism, and to other
victims of the same hatred of the other man. We must concede that his text is
intended to have substantive import. Though, for Levinas, ethics cannot be
grounded in either a pre-given ontology or in universal reason, the priority, immediacy and particularity of obligation itself gives rise to the community of subjective meaning, and to general laws. But how are we to move from a severe personal
ethic of infinite responsibility, in which judgement and reciprocity play no part, to
one that engages with justice in the socio-political sphere? It is just such a question that Simon Critchley (1992) addresses when he claims that Levinasian ethics
do lead back to politics insofar as I find myself to be an other like all the others.
Although it is hard to agree with Critchley that the ethical relation never takes
place in an a-political space outside the public realm for surely it is just such
interruptions to the polity that Levinas intends it is clear that the relation to the
face is always already a relation to humanity as a whole (Critchley 1992: 226).
Rather than being already political, as Critchley contends, ethics, as I see it,
subtends the political. What mobilises the crucial move relies on two things.
First is the point that in the face to face relation with the other, I am also in the
presence of the third party, the whole of humanity, in the eyes that look at me
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(Levinas 1969: 213). The entry of the third party is not an empirical event so
much as a realisation that the other, my neighbour, is also in a relation to other
others. It is not just that the third stands against the danger of closure and
complicity in the interpersonal relation; it is the presence that mitigates the
originary asymmetry and links me to a community of equal others. In opening up
to a multiplicity of others, the third party allows for the thematization of the same
on the basis of the relationship with the other (1998: 158). And second, the obligation placed on me in proximity to the other even though I cannot be replaced
is addressed too to everyone else in their uniqueness. In other words, I am not alone
in my singularity and vulnerability, but one among a multiplicity of others. It is
these other others, then, who mark, as Levinas puts it, the limit of responsibility and
the birth of the question of justice, where justice is an incessant correction of the
asymmetry of proximity (1998: 158). It is not that the non-reciprocity of the relationship with alterity should be reversed, but that in the plurality of such relations,
justice arises. But are we not then returned to the sphere of totalisation, the realm
of the Said, of universal laws and principles that erase difference? Could I not, to
return to my earlier theme, regard the images of the Still Life exhibition as those of
undifferentiated beings deserving of respect for their vulnerability, but making no
personal call to me above that to moral decency?
There is room, I believe, in the concluding sections of Otherwise than Being,
for an alternative approach within the concept of justice. Far from turning away
from the specific, Levinas insists that justice must not be taken for an anonymous law of the human force governing an impersonal totality (1998: 161).
Even as I am able to move to another dimension beyond the exacting nature of
the asymmetrical relation, I am aware that because it arises from that original
proximity, justice itself can preserve the non-indifference to difference that proximity demands:
All the others that obsess me in the other do not affect me as examples of the same genus
united with my neighbor by resemblance or common nature.The one for the other of
proximity is not a deforming abstraction. In it justice is shown from the first, it is thus
born from the signifyingness of signification, the one-for-the-other, signification. This
means concretely and empirically that justice is not a legality regulating human
masses.Justice is impossible without the one that renders it finding himself in
proximity. (1998: 159)
What justice enables is a society where there is no distinction between those

close and those far off, but that resists totalisation. Moreover, ethical discourse
in the Levinasian mode is neither determinate nor definitive, precisely because
the Said, the formalisation, must be thought back to the Saying of the ethical
moment of proximity, vulnerability and responsibility. The recurrence of the face
to face disturbs the complacency that fixed principles and rules of behaviour
might effect, and ensures the ongoing development and adequacy of universal,
but not totalising, laws. It is because of the evolution of ethical discourse in the
face to face, that it remains open to the trace of the originary relation and to
absolute difference.
It appears, then, that Levinas is fully committed to an account that resists the
assimilatory power of the same and relies on the continuing alterity of the radically
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other. His rejection of the ontological moves that return the other to the self
signals the need for an acceptance of the irreducibility of otherness, although it is
less clear that his model serves to mark the otherness within the self. Nonetheless
insofar as the self becomes a subject only through proximity to and by substitution for the other, it is evident that the two are not strictly bounded or divided one
from the other. Even before the Law, the realm of justice, the trace of that proximity remains as the guarantee that the community of equals is one sensitive to
difference. As Levinas puts it, justice is necessary for compassion, co-existence
and co-presence, but as a regulatory power it is always non-indifferent in its operation. And yet despite the concentration on an irreducible alterity, critics of
Levinas make two major claims against him: first that his ethical position is
deeply egoistic, and second that he betrays the claims of sexual difference as perhaps the most radical difference of all. The latter point is of interest here, not
because it constitutes an explicit theme in my approach, but because, as I outlined
in Chapter 2, the feminine and the monstrous are habitually conflated the one
with the other. Although Levinas may seek to save the stranger which is surely
another form of the monster how far do, or could, his ethics encompass all
forms of radical alterity? I shall move on to consider briefly some critical
responses to his work.
The accusation that there remains a fundamental egoism at the heart of
Levinasian ethics is serious indeed for it would seem to challenge the very
priority of ethics over ontology that is the crux of his approach. The charge, as I
understand it, is supported in at least two different forms. The first arises precisely
from the move that would seem to negate the selfsame in the acceptance of infinite responsibility for the other. But does this not suggest a self who is unable to
acknowledge the limitations of finite being, who imagines that she is entitled to
answer the call of the infinite? Moreover, in the putative opening on to infinity in
the place of the other, do I not simultaneously efface any intuition of my own need,
and erase the sense that the demands and needs of the other may be local and
specific? In the focus on infinity, I take my self to encompass both nothing and
everything. As always with Levinas, it is difficult to avoid confusing the abstract
and the empirical register, but there is some validity in David Woods comment:
our exposure to the other is not some huge, excessive obligation, but rather a complex
openness to requests, demands, pleas, which call not just for acknowledgment of my
obligations, but for scrutiny, for negotiation, for interpretation, and ultimately for
recognizing both opportunities and limitations. (1997: 110)
As Wood sees it, the restricted and calculative nature of rule-bound morality
should not be put in an either/or opposition to an excessive responsibility.
Certainly, the Levinasian self can at times sound almost messianic in its putative
capacity to substitute, to suffer for the other, but it should be remembered too that
Levinas does not in fact set up the binary which Wood discerns. Rather, he
wishes the empirically active moral agent to be called back to infinite responsibility as an interruptive and corrective trace that continuously repositions ethics
as prior to ontology.
The second charge of egoism is best exemplified by Luce Irigaray (1991a),
who, whilst admitting that Levinas work is temporarily useful and partially
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worthy of respect, is also highly critical. She accuses him of depriving the other
of identity in the notion of substitution. But this surely is to beg the question, for
if my own identity is not yet formed, then is not the same true of the other? In the
register of the face to face, the ego, for Levinas, is not yet an identity as such, or
is in any case set aside, as it were, in the recurrence of proximity. It is precisely
that ethical moment which interrupts the ego. It should be noted, however, that
his concept of proximity does not imply contact as such, still less an intertwining
as it would do with Irigaray.4 Rather, it is an approach. But what then is it that
keeps itself apart, even as it is given up to the other? Even in his account, in
Totality and Infinity, of the caress which is somewhat different from the indeterminable face to face Levinas seems to Irigaray to maintain distance and be concerned only with the elaboration of a future for himself (Irigaray 1991a: 179).
She goes on:
This autistic, egological, solitary love does not correspond to the shared outpouring, to
the loss of boundaries which takes place for both lovers when they cross the boundary
of the skin into the mucous membranes of the body, leaving the circle which encloses
my solitude to meet in a shared space. (1991a: 180)
The complaint is that as an approach, the caress fails to open on to a future for
both the one and the other (Irigaray 1993a: 188). Instead, the one seeks transcendence at the expense of the other. The lover (whom Irigaray identifies as male)
does not truly encounter the other in her own specificity, but reads only his own
desire through her.
The question of egoism cannot of course be separated from the more sustained
charge that Levinas himself is not merely indifferent to sexual difference, but
positively repressive of the feminine. What he intends in his account is that the
ethics should be organised around an alterity before the mark of sexual difference, which is thus subordinated to a supposedly more fundamental division
between self and other. In his earlier work in particular, however, that priority is
under strain as gendered terminology threatens to swamp any claim to neutrality.
Irigaray is highly critical of Levinas here, but in a characteristic move that recuperates the emphasis given to alterity, she turns the Levinasian model around so
that a radical sexual difference is the very threshold of ethics (Irigaray 1993a).
Where other feminists also, such as Gayatri Spivak, have no hesitation in referring to the work of Levinas as prurient, male-identified ethics (Spivak 1992: 77),
critics like Derrida, who has himself been accused of anti-feminism (though mistakenly in my view), make similar points. As Derrida remarks, Totality and
Infinity could not have been written other than by a man (1978: 321), and
although clearly attracted to Levinasian ethics, he expresses the view that in
attempting to write without a thematised philosophical language and context,
Levinas fails to escape the grip of an ontological discourse that, as he himself
avers, collapses the other into the same. By the time of Otherwise than Being,
Levinas has more successfully pre-empted ontology, but his new work too is subject to a Derridean critique. In At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am
(1991a) Derrida mimics the voice of Levinas, and plays on his initials, E.L., to
replace them finally by the fully fledged elle the dissident feminine voice that
has hitherto been missing.
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What is really disturbing to most feminist readers of Levinas is that although

he may intend to posit an originary humanity before sexual division, the supposed
neutrality of that project is undermined by the evident masculinity of the one, and
by his use of the feminine metaphor, often to characterise otherness as such.
Certainly his deployment of terms associated with a traditional view of the feminine as less than in which guise it has been associated with the strange, the
unknown, the monstrous in general works to give the impression of a masculinist philosophy in which radical alterity is constantly subverted. As John Caputo
notes, for Levinas, the instantiation of the Same and the Other par excellence is
the Macho Man and the Modest Maid (1997: 151). In particular, the vulnerability and frailty of the other is clearly marked as feminine, a destitution that can
be relieved only by the one. But in contrast to the traditional model of dominance
which it might seem to evoke, the Levinasian response to the suffering other is
not one of power, but of infinite ethical responsibility. It is not a relationship of
mastery. Moreover, as we have seen, the oneself is called into question, exposed
before the other, subjected to an unanswerable demand; revealed, in short, in its
own utmost vulnerability. Yet this presents a further moment of hesitation for the
feminist reader, as Levinas clearly identifies the infinite responsibility and
vulnerability of the one with the concept of maternity. The pre-ontological maternal body is one that suffers without limit for the other, that always already bears
the full weight of the hostage, the substitute:
In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for
others and suffering both from the effect of persecution and from the persecuting itself
in which the persecutor sinks. Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even
responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor. (1998: 75)
Unlike the subject of ontology who would incorporate and consume difference,
maternity is devoted to feeding the other, to offering the gift of oneself-for-theother without return. When Willett (1995) complains that the mother, as subject,
is yet again effaced, she may overlook the priority of Levinasian ethics over
ontology, but expresses a legitimate anxiety that the feminine is as ever the
marked term.
Despite his frequent use of the term woman in Totality and Infinity, Levinas
has in other work pointedly denied any substantive connection between the feminine, as he uses it, and any romantic notions of the mysterious, unknown, or misunderstood woman (1989c: 49). And yet there remains an unease that his
terminology is marked by binary sexual difference. One commentator, Grace
Jantzen, has suggested forcefully that the problem lies in Levinas failure to problematise the face of the one who responds, which, she claims, is indeed his face,
the face of an adult male with sufficient ability and privilege to be able to choose
its response (1998: 241). What, she asks, if the face of the oneself were that of a
woman? But surely this cannot express the problem, for on the one hand, the question of choice has been deferred, and on the other, Levinas has already identified
the one who responds with the maternal figure. If this is sex specific, then he has
effectively disrupted the negativity associated with woman. If not, then the
purpose must be that in being called first to ethics, the virility, mastery, and
violence of the western symbolic in which the unknown other is perceived as a
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threat is suspended in favour of those qualities associated with the feminine.

The ontological anxiety that underlies the assumption of dominance over, and
violence towards, the other is displaced. If the Levinasian project of radically
rethinking the other, and of breaking the hegemony of sameness over difference,
is successful, then I am inclined to agree with Tina Chanter when she says: we
cannot understand Levinass account of the otherness which accomplishes itself
in the feminine as a restatement of the traditional domination of the Other by the
same (1988: 36). Because the I in its singularity is instituted in the summons by
the other, we can accept that (t)he otherness with which the feminine has always
been associated is rethought by Levinas (ibid.).
I will leave aside further consideration of whether Levinas has given an adequate account of sexual difference in its radical Irigarayan sense, to ask instead
the question more pertinent to my own immediate project of whether the other
has really been recuperated in a specific and absolute alterity. Although I am willing to accept that the gesture of subsuming the other under the ontological category of the same has been avoided, might there be some other violence involved?
Given that Levinasian ethics, even when opened out to encompass the arena of
justice in a universal sense, is rooted in the immediacy of the face to face
encounter, does that not pose a risk of forgetting the other others, all those who
never do, or could, appear to me? As Levinas characterises it, the departure from
myself is explicitly the approach, the proximity, to a neighbour, or at least a
stranger in my neighbourhood, but what, then, of those who do not, cannot, present themselves, who remain truly alien, or even monstrous? At the beginning of
Totality and Infinity, where Levinas identifies ethics with metaphysics, he
describes the latter in its general form as a movement going forth from a world
that is familiar to usfrom an at home (chez soi) which we inhabit, toward
an alien outside-of-oneself (hors-de-soi), toward a yonder (1969: 33), but it
is precisely this sense of the not-yet approachable that seems to disappear from
the ethics.
What I am suggesting is that Levinas, in his concentration on the encounter as
the wellspring of all ethics, may unwittingly assimilate the unencountered others
to what the face to face already gives up to the thematisation required by
universal law. It is not a matter of knowledge as such, for to know the other is
already to be unethical. It is more a case of failing to think the radical alterity
between all the others. The assumption is that justice and the law will refer back
to be interrupted by my own originary position in proximity to the other,
though that, we should remember, is necessarily limited. The voice of the ethical
hostage is strongly personal in Levinas work and suggests the struggle of the
writer to produce a delineation of ethics that is adequate to his own experience.
There is nothing wrong with that as a starting point indeed in the absence of
pre-determined values, it must be the starting point but how can it go on, without supplement, to account for the complexity of other relations? As Spivak
remarks: An ethical position must entail universalization of the singular.But if
there is one universal, it cannot be inclusive of difference (1992: 75). In illustration of the difficulty, let me recall briefly the dedication of Otherwise than Being to
which I referred earlier. More fully, it remembers the millions on millions of all
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confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same
anti-semitism. Whilst the general appeal against the murderous violence of intolerance is irreproachable, it is not clear to me that all hatreds take the same form.
Would, for example, a homosexual man or woman, or a mentally disabled
person even to stay within the circuit of those persecuted under National
Socialism recognise themselves as experiencing the same hatred of their otherness as that directed towards Jews? Would the Still Life neonates, as objects of
fascinated repulsion rather than hatred, have demanded the same ethical response
as any of the foregoing?
With the problem of the possible erasure of specificity in mind, Sara Ahmed
has raised the question of whether we need to examine how the other is figured
as such in the very process of being designated the other. She suggests that once
otherness is ascribed as a quality of the neighbour-stranger, then, that is surely
to fill the other in, to know the other as being in a certain way, and thus to ontologise the other as a being, albeit an alien one (2000: 142). As such, Levinas ethical project defeats its own terms, and, moreover, otherness is fetishised to the
extent that it conceals the particular other in her difference. Nonetheless, Ahmed
argues that it is misplaced to assume that in the name of ethics we could or should
seek to gain access to an other at the level of individual specificity. Instead she
suggests that we turn our attention to the particularity of modes of encounter, in
a move that would account for a multiplicity of others. As she puts it: introducing particularity at the level of encounters (the sociality of the with) helps us to
move beyond the dialectic of selfother and towards a recognition of the differentiation between others (2000: 144). The effect of such a shift of focus would
be to open up the encounter to the question of elsewhere and otherwise. Rather
than holding the other in place, Ahmed claims, I would need to ask about the conditions of possibility for the encounter itself, about its historicity and its future,
and about what it is of the other, and the other others, that exceeds the presence
of this face to face. In short it is an opening on to broader social processes. The
problem in relating this to Levinasian ethics is that the emphasis on finite and
particular of modes of encounter may fall short of the demand for infinite responsibility. Again Ahmed suggests an answer. By drawing some distinction between
responsibility for and response to the other as indeed I have already done with
regard to the question of violence we might reasonably satisfy both the infinite
call to responsibility, and the here and now need for a finite response within the
particular encounter. As Ahmed comments: Ones infinite responsibility begins
with the particular demands that an other might make, but the particularity of my
response cannot fulfil my responsibility (2000: 147). Indeed to exceed the
singular moment is precisely to open oneself to ethics.
The difficulty with the Levinasian model is that while it convincingly
expresses the originary moment of ethics, and provides an answer to the classic
puzzle of why be ethical, it is more problematic when dealing with material situations in which power and other differentials are already established and have a
history. The encounter that Levinas describes both is and is not a phenomenal
event, but unless it can bear some substantiality, it remains too abstract to deal
adequately with the issue of difference in its multiple forms. One area that is of
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particular concern to me is whether or not the ethical, for Levinas, is embodied.

Despite a plethora of corporeal terms such as face, skin, body, pain, nakedness,
birth and so on, it appears that they do not figure any material entity. Although
critics such as Critchley refer to an ethics grounded in a flesh and blood sensibility (1992: 179), it seems to me that the body eludes expression or slips away
even as it expresses. This is especially clear in relation to Levinas conception
of the face, which he wants to remain separate from that which can be seen
apprehended by a perceiving consciousness which would return it to the same
and thus defeat its absolute alterity. Instead, as Levinas puts it: The face of the
Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the
idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum the adequate
idea (1969: 501). But can the abstraction of the transcendent face without features ground an ethics that is able to differentiate between a multiplicity of specific others? Levinas maps out no explicit route to move from one to the other, but
it may be possible to extend his approach precisely by fleshing out the face, by
noting the particularity of its expressive features, as well, as Ahmed suggests, as
the mode of the encounter. My response in proximity to the faces of the Still Life
series is explained best not by the austerity of strictly Levinasian ethics, but by a
double movement that encompasses the abstract form, focuses in on the real
face of a whole body in a particular context, and opens out again to being otherwise. The encounter touched me deeply both in its finite specificity and in its infinite implications. What is at stake here speaks to a central conundrum with regard
to the encounter: unless it is described to an extent at least in the language of bodily
materiality the relation is no more than an ideal abstraction, but if it is taken to be
only phenomenal, then it risks being grasped to the selfsame.
In the next chapter I shall address some other ways of thinking the contact
between bodies which both rely on their fleshy corporeality and withstand the
possessive impulse that would overwhelm difference and specificity. To enter
into an embodied and sensuous engagement will entail a return to the analytic of
the real bodies from which Levinas seems distanced. Nonetheless, despite this
and other serious reservations about what is inherent in his work, there is much
in Levinasian ethics that is of value and relevance to my own project. At its simplest level, the resistance to totalisation, and to the impetus of assimilation that
characterises the western logos, opens up to a reconceived concept of difference.
In eschewing a calculative morality tied to pre-determined principles, to expectations of balanced exchange, and to standards of equality, ethics, for Levinas, as
for Derrida, is always a matter of risk. In addition, the notion that the encounter
with the other precedes self-presence and self-determination marks not just the
points about becoming-in-the-world-with-others that I develop in the next
chapter, but the more radical realisation that exposure, a vulnerable openness in
the face of alterity, is the very condition of becoming. In the place of the reactions of violence, intolerance and fear in the face of the strange encounter all of
which seek and necessarily fail to preserve an impossible separation we might
see that greeting and welcome are more appropriate. I am not suggesting that
there are no instances in which the protective function of distinctive boundaries
is necessary, for clearly some approaches are hostile in intent. Rather it is a matter
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of forswearing judgment in advance, of refusing to place pre-determined limits

on my ethical response, or to limit the other to the categories of the known even
as she is unfamiliar. To hold open the idea of the other, in whatever form she
takes, is to enter into the risk of mutual becoming. In short, it is vulnerability
itself, of the one and of the other, and the responsibility that it engenders in the
one and for the other, that is the provocation of ethical subjectivity.
6
THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY OF
TOUCH
The issue of what is at stake in the relational economies of self and other in
effect the question of difference has been taken up in feminist thought as
possibly the most urgent and critical focus of postconventional theory in general.
Is it possible that the encounter with the other can be mediated such that the interval of distance the spacing that separates self-complete subjects and that makes
possible the objectifying and disciplinary operation of the gaze will lose its
determining power? In this chapter I shall reflect on monstrous corporeality, both
as a category and in some specific examples again turning to the instance of the
Irish conjoined twins not just to problematise further the relation between the
non-normative and the normative subject as they are embodied, but to reconsider
the issue of subject relations in general. While the notion of contamination figures
an other whose anomalous body is leaky and noxious, the perceived risk of contact is not limited to the realm of the ab-normal, but encompasses too the coming
together of those normatively embodied subjects who are supposedly marked out
by closed boundaries of the skin. In focusing on those organic beings whose
difference is always already apparent at the surface, I want to open up the question
of touch, the very thing that signals potential danger in a specular economy that
privileges separation. In analysing the gendered exercise of the gaze, it has
seemed to many feminist theorists that the emphasis on the detachment of the
specular at the expense of the immediacy of touch is a characteristic of a masculinist logos. Although it may express the operative nature of those relations
between autonomous subjects most valued in the dominant discourse, it is
scarcely an adequate image of relational economies that are lived in phenomenological complexity. The value put on the clarity and distinction implied by clear
sight, the lack of affective engagement, and the minimisation of interconnection
are all aspects that could flourish only where the materiality and voluminosity of
the flesh is reduced to a surface phenomenon that ideally reflects back the unity
and completion of the viewing subject. In contrast I shall look instead at the issue
of monstrosity as a manifestation of the always already unstable corpus, whose
fluidity resists the closure of the skin, and as a difference that defies distinction
and separation.
As paradigms of clear-sightedness, images and metaphors of the mirror, in
both its speculative and its self-reflective capacity, constitute a familiar trope in
western metaphysics.1 To look into the mirror of nature or of the soul, to reflect
on matters of judgement, is to exercise a distinctly human capacity in which the
enquiring mind constitutes distance and objectivity as the mark of truth.
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Moreover, in the period of modernity in particular, the parameters of knowledge,

once the absolute domain of God, are fixed in the (self)reflective mind of the
human being, or more specifically the human male. By gazing on the natural
world, man, it is claimed, has been enabled to gain mastery over all things external to him, while at the same time looking into himself for knowledge of his own
being. The self-certainty of the Cogito in the abstract mode of self-reflection
carries with it, however, the risk of splitting off as other those things, such as
ever-changing bodily substance, which seem to carry no ontological consistency.
For the subject of the masculinist logos, the whole and unified self is affirmed by
reference to an ideal of unvarying sameness that demands the disavowal of the
dynamics of becoming. Contact, and still less interchange, finds no place in the
stasis of abstract being. As it constitutes its other, nonetheless, the speculative
gaze is sustained only insofar as it is reflected in its own exteriority. The self cannot come into being without the other, which is positioned either in terms of identity as the selfsame, or in terms of difference as the other of the same. In both
cases, self and other are inextricably co-dependent. As Alphonso Lingis puts it:
A thing is by engendering images of itself, reflections, shadows, halos. These cannot be
separated from the core appearance which would make them possible, for they make
what one takes to be the core appearance visiblethe reality that engenders the phantasm is engendered by it. (1994: 41)
Nonetheless, in the specular economy, such intertwined relations cannot be

acknowledged, and the ethics of modernity are predicated on the separation and
independence of subjects.
In the work of Luce Irigaray, the image of reflection is central to her understanding of how the history of philosophy, and the logos it supports, is structured
by a series of exclusions, and although her focus is on the place of the gendered
woman, I believe her insights can be extended to the linked term of the anomalous and monstrous body. As I indicated earlier, the monster, as a figure of the
imaginary, may be read most fruitfully alongside, and as supplemental to, the
already familiar composite of matter and mother through which feminism in
particular has staged a critique of the dominant forms of western discourse.
Within the masculinist forms, those conditions of matter and maternity are both
irrecuperable in themselves, and yet at the same time as feminism has come to
recognise they are quasi-foundational, albeit unacknowledged, in the structuration of the logos. In this context, Irigarays work has been highly influential in
uncovering the paradoxical relation that underpins the ambivalent reception of
the mother/matter/monster configuration, as it incites both nostalgia and fear in
the interplay of sameness and difference. Rather than working within a model that
positions all epistemological phenomena either in terms of identity or as the other
of the same, Irigarays project demands recognition of the radical other, of what
is other than the same. Against a subject who sees only that which reflects his
own self-presence, or which confirms his own wholeness and completion,
Irigaray proposes a third term uncontained and unreflected by the binary of self
and other. Moreover, as she shows in Hystera (Irigaray 1985a), despite the lack
of acknowledgment for its radical difference, the excluded other is the necessary
support of the whole system. And it is the very move of excavating that structural
THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY OF TOUCH
105
function that disrupts and throws into doubt the modernist phantasy for no such
figure exists of a bodily closure and self-completion.
Throughout her deconstructive critique Irigaray asserts that the quality of reduplication that sustains the logos is predicated on and perpetuates a move in which
the feminine, as the marked term of the masculine/feminine binary, is merely the
reflective surface, the other of the same whose only function is the reproduction
in all its senses of masculine subjectivity: Mother-matter-nature must go on
forever nourishing speculation. But this re-source is also rejected as the waste
product of reflection, cast outside as what resists it (1985b: 77). It is an image
that at best speaks to the passivity of women, and by extension of all who share
their exclusion, at worst to their erasure. What interests Irigaray, and concerns me
here, is how the unreflected excess, that which is other than the same, nonetheless
destabilises the system and points up its inadequacy as a model of existential relations. In short, the apparent clarity of the mirroring process, the regular doubling
of the selfsame, cannot be taken for granted. As Baudrillard warns, and as
Irigaray is very well aware in her own strategy of mimicry, (t)here is always
sorcery at work in the mirror.Reproduction is diabolical in its essence; it makes
something fundamental vacillate (1988: 182). Though the two-dimensional plane
of the mirror may seem to faithfully reiterate the original,2 it has in its unrepresented excess always the potential for subversion.
It is the image of the mirror as a hard reflective surface that is taken up too by
Lacan, who sees it as that which metaphorically and literally inaugurates the
accession to being-in-the-world as a subject, a singular self in a singular body.
Just as Irigarays analysis recalls the exclusionary operation of (self)reflection
and the denial of maternal origin, Lacan too uses the metaphor of the mirror to
figure the infants turning away and repression of its early experience of nursling
dependency (1977a: 2) in favour of a sense of bodily unity and selfhood. Instead
of the circuit of bodily exchanges that characterise the early maternal/infant bond,
and which rely on the physicality of unmediated touch, the move is one to a
scopic drive that heralds differentiation. Where the early infant is unable to recognise the distinctions between self and other, or between inside and outside, and
experiences only fragmentary and uncoordinated motor impulses, the mirror
stage founds the ego as both a map of the bodys surface and a reflection of the
image of the others body (Grosz 1994: 38). In Lacans account, it sets the scene
for the infants jubilant assumption of his specular image (1977a: 2), and the
succession to the armour of an alienating identity (1977a: 4). It is, in other
words, the point at which a subject becomes distinguished from its objects, and
yet both the corporeal unities that it posits, and identity itself are fictional. The
closure and distinction of normative embodiment pivots on a (mis)recognition,
which, whilst apparently inaugurating wholeness, in fact relies on a splitting at
the heart of subjectivity. Although Lacan explicitly saw his account of the formation of the subject as counterposed to the disembodied Cogito, the bodyimages that are (mis)recognised in his model enact their own exclusions, again
most particularly of the feminine. But it is not simply that the feminine is represented only as a lack the nothing to be seen with nothing of itself to reflect it
is also the site of an unruly excess that must be repressed. The conventional
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model of subjectivity be it Cartesian or Lacanian has no room for corporeal

being that is either uncontrollable or less than perfect. It is a model that disavows
existential vulnerability. The supposedly intrinsic leakiness of female and
monstrous bodies is, then, a threat to well-Being, a breach in the boundaries of
selfhood that blurs the distinctions between self and other, and between one
corpus and another.
The implication is that as self-identity and self-image are fundamentally unstable, they must be protected from any/body that is either insecurely bounded in
itself, or that threatens to fracture or expose the corporeal and ontological vulnerability of the singular subject. As Lacan remarks: There is something originally,
inaugurally, profoundly wounded in the human relation to the world (1988: 169).
As such, the shock, even horror, invoked by the monstrous and more particularly
the conjoined body is not so much that of an extraordinary morphology, as of a
psychic reawakening of an originary confusion of form and lack of singularity as
the condition of all. The specular interval that holds apart the autonomously
embodied subject from the body without clear boundaries is less a staging of difference than a moment which risks the reflection of the disunity inherent to the
self. As I have already remarked, theorists of disability with which bodily
conjunction is classed have been reluctant to take up such themes. On the contrary, their emphasis is more usually on establishing that extraordinary forms of
embodiment are no obstacle to the full participation of the subjects involved in an
ethics of autonomy that privileges clear distinctions between self and other. The
phenomenological and especially psychic dimensions of embodiment are
scarcely considered. Yet if, as Lacan implies, the unity of the self relies on the
reflective unity of the specular other, then that dependency is radically shaken by
any mark of disunity in the external image. As Samuels notes, consciousness is
always consciousness of the otherwithout the reflected image of the other, the
ego is nothing (1993: 734). The (mis)recognised template of the body that maps
the ego can only be secured by a set of exclusions of the excessive other most
notably the feminine and the anomalous body.
Regardless of a fundamental divergence in approach to the question of sexual
difference, there is much in Irigarays themes that resonates with the descriptive
element of Lacans work. For Irigaray, the masculinist subject can flourish only
by disavowing its own origins, its own initial place of embodiment, in the inconstant, mutable and excessive materiality of the maternal body. In her potent
analysis of the denial in the masculine imaginary of matter and of the mother, she
asserts that the horror of fluidity is characteristic of the male: All threaten to
deform, propagate, evaporate, consume him, to flow out of him and into another
who cannot be easily be held on to (1985a, Volume-Fluidity: 237). What are
lost are the hard, smooth reflective surfaces that reduplicate but never vary the
subject. And just as uncontainable feminine excess must be erased from the clean
and proper masculinist subject, so too must the disturbingly fluid corporeality of
the monstrous. So powerful is the need to protect itself against the threat of dissolution inherent in the gross materiality of the maternal body, that the subject
must claim autogenesis, (r)eproducing itself instantly and in(de)finitely, in selflikeness, in a process that closes up/off past time (Irigaray 1985a: 289). In its
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quasi-transcendent form, nothing must remain for the subject as a reminder of the
indeterminate form of its origin, and yet such a project must necessarily fail. I
have already outlined how Kristevas concept of the abject refers to those things
such as the originary envelopment of the maternal bond that must be kept at bay
lest they threaten the subjects extinction, but which thereby serve to emphasise
the contingency and vulnerability of the symbolic, what she calls the frailty of
the law (Kristeva 1982: 4). A similar point is made by Lyotard when he comments that entry into the symbolic is never complete:
It is not I who am born, who is given birth to. I will be born afterwards, with
language, precisely upon leaving infancy[but] when the law comes to me, with the
ego and language, it is too late. Things have already taken a turn. And the turn of the
law will not manage to efface the first turn, this first touch: the one that touched me
when I was not there. (1993: 179)
What Lyotard introduces here, which I want to develop, is that notion of an

ineradicable touch. It is, in short, the corporeal ambiguity of touch that disrupts
the distinction between self and other, that institutes and perpetuates an indifference that is deeply alien to the notion of a disembodied subject. That ambiguity figures an uncanny such that it is not simply that monsters are always there
in our conscious appraisal of the external world; they are the other within.
Given that persistent sense of ambivalence which seems to ground a deepseated anxiety not simply about the monstrous other, but about the corporeal as
such, it is easier to understand modernist attempts to fix the epistemology and
ontology of the monstrous. If the price of a unified self-image, illusory though it
may be, is repression, then the subject must be in a relationship of mastery over
all that is alien to the clean and proper self. Far from entering into engagement
with the strange(r), the modernist subject would figure the other as an object that
might be possessed. Despite the best endeavours of the disciplinary and regulatory impulses, evident in the gaze of both popular culture and science, that which
is monstrous evades the limits of classificatory and representational systems, and
remains on the side of the unthought. It is neither reflective of the proper subject nor reflected in itself, and yet it is not entirely absent nor present. Describing
the unthought of western culture, Foucault refers to the Other as not only a
brother, but a twin, born, not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the same
time, in an identical newness, in an unavoidable duality (1970: 326).3 This is the
selfsame in its constituent parts, who would see in the mirror not the authorised
reflection that constructs and defines the parameters of self-presence, but an
unnerving double that is yet irreducible to the bounded subject. It is not simply
that the self is split, but that duality is the condition of becoming. As such, the
image that looks back at us could mirror our own disturbing and half-recognised
selves. And in looking for a reflection of our own autonomy, security and separation in the others from whom we are ideally distinct, it is as though we were to
see instead the leaks and flows at the boundaries of, and the vulnerabilities
within, our own embodied being. But while the mirror remains resistant to such
possibilities, it is through touch that we may come face to face with our other
selves. As such, the monstrous is always with us, as our own necessary ontological excess. Can we then reconfigure the (ethical) relation between self and other,
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not in terms of a reflective interval, but as a moment of contiguity where the

boundaries are necessarily blurred?
I want now briefly to renew my focus on the phenomenon of conjoined twins,
for whom the cotangibility of the other is of particular significance. Unlike the
Monster of Cracow, or other similar figures of the early modern period, the disturbance at the level of the skin does not, for conjoined twins, necessarily signal
an inner transgression of normative humanity, at least insofar as it is assumed that
there are two separate persons, each with their own identity embodied in a shared
morphology. In non-autobiographical observations, the much repeated claim that
beneath the skin such twins are essentially separate and autonomous as though
concorporation were merely a surface effect acts almost as a necessary strategy
of ontological reassurance. It is as though the body were merely instrumental and
the shared organ of the skin which is the minimum condition of conjunction
bore no relation to the real persons beneath. What is primarily at stake in such
an account is the conceptual separation between subject and object in which property in ones own body is the ground of selfhood. As Luce Irigaray puts it:
Property, ownership, and self-definition are the attributes of the fathers production.To be. To own. To be ones own (1985a: 300). Yet though that model
would seem to position the unmodified corporeal excessiveness of concorporation as only skin deep, such twins do have a clear history of being regarded as
freaks, who exist only as a unit. Their doubled and shared bodies point up an
extraordinary disturbance that problematises, as I have put it elsewhere, not only
the protection of ones own body from encroachments, but a denial of the leakiness between ones self and others (1997: 178). What is missing, then, from the
commonsense version, and its appeal to the modernist privileging of the selfidentical, singular subject, is not only the affective complexity of perception, as
it is mediated in this case by mutual touch, but also the psychic investments that
accrue to body image and the significance of a phenomenological sense of beingin-the-world-with-others. In the attempted recuperation of the anomaly of conjoined twins as nonetheless potentially conforming to the western standard of
singularity and self-determination, there can be no acknowledgment that a radically different form of embodiment might ground other relational economies and
demand a rethinking of our limited parameters of ethical being.
As I understand it, the phenomenon of conjoined twins provides a kind of limit
case in our perception of the self/other relationship, in which the uncertainty that
lurks always at the edges of being is exemplified in a particularly acute form.
Despite their highly unusual morphology, such twins are, then, by no means
redundant to a consideration of ontology and ethics, but rather serve to crystallise
what is at stake in a normative economy of self and other. They encourage us to
pose the unthought question of what would emerge if instead of the interval of
separation and distinction, we were to experience the other, as Foucault suggests,
always as a twin, an unavoidable duality. I am not suggesting, of course, that
Foucault intended his remark to be taken literally, but given his own interest in
the theoretical import of the anomalous body such as that of Herculine Barbin
(Foucault 1980a) I have no hesitation in moving between material and abstract
registers. Indeed, an understanding of the discursive nature of both could scarcely
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demand otherwise. I want, then, to sketch out a quite different way of grasping
the significance of concorporate bodies, and more specifically the coextensivity
of the skin. For conjoined twins, the cotangibility of the other is an ever present
reality, but alongside that literal materiality, the condition may suggest a theoretical pathway in its staging of an economy of touch. Before returning to some relevant narrative material, however, I will review the existing development of the
notion of tactility in some psychoanalytic and philosophical texts.
In comparison with the visible, with its clarity and distance, the tactile a
sensation that both frustrates detachment and compromises objectivity by reason
of its reversible nature is thoroughly devalued. And yet, touch is recognised as
the originary sense through which we begin to interact with the world. As Didier
Anzieu puts it:
From before birth, cutaneous sensations introduce the young of the human species into
a world of great richness and complexity, a world as yet diffuse, but which awakens the
perception-consciousness system, forms the basis for a general and episodical sense of
existence and opens up the possibility of an originary psychic space. (1989: 1213)4
Postnatally, the skin is an extraordinarily sensitive surface which both registers

sense impressions of the external world, and transmits, through and on its surface,
information as to the babys own state of being. Alongside the apprehension of
the skin both as a containing sac for physical and psychical apparatus, a unifying
envelope for the self as it were, and as a protective barrier between that self and
a potentially threatening outside, it is apparent that the skin is also the primary
organ of communication. Touch, then, is an essential component of the infants
well-being, and the skin itself is of both an organic and an imaginary order, both
a system for protecting our individuality and a first instrument and a site of interaction with others (1989: 3).
In the first months of life, as Anzieu makes clear in his psychoanalytic reading
of what he calls the skin ego, there is, for the early infant, no distinction
between internal and external corporeality marked by the epidermal membrane,
but rather a coextensivity with the mother in which they seemingly share a common skin. In Anzieus words, (t)his common skin ensures direct communication
between the two partners, reciprocal empathy and an adhesive identification: it is
a unique screen which comes to resonate with the sensations, mental images and
vital rhythms of the two (1989: 623). But, as he explains it, the babys initial
inability to distinguish between inside and outside, and between itself and the
maternal body, is progressively displaced as the intermediary and communicative
nature of mutual touch gives way to self/other differentiation in which the skin
functions more as a barrier than as a permeable interface. The task for the developing infant is to move beyond corporeal and psychical indifferentiation to a state
where what is experienced at the surface of the skin serves to constitute a distinct
and increasingly self-aware ego. It is as though a hierarchy develops in which the
enveloping function of the skin is privileged, rather than the reciprocity of cotangibility having continuing value alongside the protective function. In short, as the
conceptual interval between self and other is established, the intermediary role of
the skin loses ground, or perhaps more accurately is repressed in the drive to
enact normative and symbolic self-identity. But in the light of the sensory
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richness and psychic significance of the surface flesh, could there be a quite
different imaginary order in which a sense of self did not depend on the distancing of separation, or on the mode of reflection in/of the other?
Both Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray seem to me to offer a means of understanding
the significance of cotangible bodies that makes redundant the interval of the
Lacanian mirror.5 Despite their very different theoretical agendas, each signals a
way forward in the exploration of touch, which Irigaray claims both as characteristic of the feminine and as the substratum of all the senses. Most importantly, touch
constitutes, in Cathryn Vasseleus words, a scene which defies reduction to the discriminations of vision (1998: 17). Despite her strong critique of Merleau-Pontys
text, The Visible and the Invisible (1968), for its apparent privileging of sight
which in her view consigns the other to passivity Irigaray concurs with him in
marking the tactile as that which not simply precedes, but more accurately defers,
the separation of the subject from its objects (Irigaray 1991b: 108; Merleau-Ponty
1962). Taken as a whole, Merleau-Pontys project focuses on the phenomenology
of the lived body in which the interface with others both objects and living
beings constructs a dynamic sense of self in which abstract singularity plays no
part. In a forthright rejection of the Cartesian split between psychological and
physiological modes, he makes clear that the two always and necessarily overlap
at every moment of existence (Merleau-Ponty 1962). It is through the habitus and
comportment of the body, as well as in the imaginary and in desire, that we experience self-becoming. Moreover, the body and the world are inseparable, and:
every perception is a communication or a communion, the taking up or completion by
us of some extraneous intention or, on the other hand, the complete expression outside
ourselves of our perceptual powers and a coition, so to speak, of our body with things.
(1962: 320)
This intertwining is by no means limited to the tactile, but it is especially through

touch, the originary sense, that we are made aware of the limitations of reading
the world through sight alone. Above all, as the subject of touch, I cannot simply
objectify external things: Tactile experienceadheres to the surface of our body;
we cannot unfold it before us and it never quite becomes an object (1962: 316).
Nor can I forget the order of precedence in which tactile experience occurs
ahead of me, and is not centred in me (ibid.).
In the focus on co-presence and in what is effectively a decentring of the subject, there are clearly some resonances between Merleau-Ponty and Levinas,
particularly with regard to the latters concept of proximity. For both, our nearness
and contact with the other is inescapable, and for Levinas grounds an explicitly
ethical relation that contrasts with the impersonal distance required by the realm
of conventional morality and the law. As I outlined in the preceding chapter,
proximity figures an attentiveness and responsibility to the other who meets me
face to face, an encounter that precedes being as such. Nonetheless, it is important to note that Levinas has a very different understanding to Merleau-Ponty on
the question of touch. He writes: To be in contact is neither to invest the other
and annul his alterity, nor to suppress myself in the other. In contact itself the
touching and the touched separate, as though the touch moved off, was always
already other, did not have anything in common with me (Levinas 1998: 86).
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Indeed, for Levinas it is contact that, in frustrating the knowing grasp, instantiates
the individual uniqueness of self and other, that inaugurates the move to an ontology of being. As I have already noted, however, there is little sense of bodily
materiality in proximity, even in the mode of the caress. As he puts it, an erotics
of touch does not grasp, but consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what
ceaselessly escapes its form toward a future never future enough in soliciting
what slips away as though it were not yet (1969: 2578). Moreover, as with all
forms of proximity, there is for Levinas no sense of an interchange. On the contrary, proximity is the asymmetry of the relationship that marks it as the site of
the responsibility of the self for the other, but never vice versa. I am not suggesting that in contrast Merleau-Ponty gives equal weight to both sides of the touch
and in fact Irigaray rebukes him for it, almost as forcefully as she criticises Levinas
for his egoism but that it is above all the reversibility that he posits that opens us
onto a world of others. Although in his early work, Merleau-Pontys focus on
touch is relatively underdeveloped, the significance of that reversibility becomes
far more central as he elaborates his concept of flesh ontology.
The term flesh is used in The Visible and the Invisible to designate not matter,
nor mind, nor substance, but an elemental medium like air or fire in which
self and the world are constituted in mutual relation (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 13940).
It expresses a way of undoing the binaries that structure our knowledge of ourselves in the world, not to the extent that subject and object are redundant, but
such that we experience distance through proximity. By folding over on itself, by
reversals in its own voluminosity, flesh creates openings and the possibility of
difference, within a unified medium.6 As Sue Cataldi explains in her commentary
on that aspect of Merleau-Pontys work, the notion of flesh enables us first to
think through embodiment beneath sub-ject dualism by developing a radically
unified ontology, and second to accommodate difference (between perceptible
phenomena in themselves and between that which is perceiving and that which is
perceived) and distance (as the form or possibility of perceiving) in an ontology
of perception (1993: 58). As an undifferentiated medium in itself, flesh is the
dimension in which things simultaneously envelop or copresently implicate each
other (1993: 28). The task for Merleau-Ponty is to set out the fundamental unity
of existence while at the same time not reducing it to a matter of the knowing subject. The move he makes is to claim that touch is always reversible in that the
hand that touches is also touched, a double sensation that is especially evident in
the contact between two animate surfaces. His insistence that we are all part of
the same flesh functions, then, to establish other landscapes besides my own
(Merleau-Ponty 1968: 141) yet woven together with mine by the reversibility of
perceiver/perceived and subject/object. It is important to note that the reversibility
is never such that the two participants merge; there is always an excess. The chiasm,
the cross-over, is the point of both convergence and divergence; it is not a loss of
distinction, but a coming together in difference. The subject accordingly is in a
mutually constitutive relationship with its objects, intertwined one with the other
through touch. In other words my own expressive body is in a chiasmatic and
pre-reflective relationship with other bodies. What Merleau-Ponty enables here is
a new opening on the question of responsibility.
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It is in contradistinction to the disjunction intrinsic to the specular image that

the significance of the chiasmatic nature of touch becomes apparent. The point
for Merleau-Ponty is that I am able to see and touch only because I am seen and
touched, not in the negative Sartrean mode of vulnerability to the other, but as a
co-functioning. This is far indeed from the narcissistic gaze or the possessive
touch that characterises dominant discourse. As Merleau-Ponty says of the tactile
hand: through the crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own
movements incorporate themselves into the universe they interrogate, are
recorded on the same map as it (1968: 133). Nonetheless, a form of hierarchy
remains in the external relationship in that the reversibility is never in the form of
indeterminacy: I am always on the side of my body (1968: 148). But what of
the body that is not one? By taking the human corporeality as a structure which
exemplifies the flesh in itself, as well as being of it in the wider sense, MerleauPonty shows how the sensations of the individual body are themselves chiasmatic. If I reach out my own hand to the other, I can experience a reversibility
between touching and being touched such that the world of each opens upon that
of the other (1968: 141). In other words, I am coincidentally both subject and
object to myself. But although he analyses at some length the tactility between
ones own two hands or lips, he does not, I think, offer an account that satisfies
questions about the extraordinary bodies with which I am concerned. The irreducible flip that he proposes between the active and passive is premised on the
image of one hand reaching out to touch the other, not on two surfaces that are
always already touching.
Part of the difficulty lies, I think, in a point made by Drew Leder who claims
that the sensible/sentient surface, on which Merleau-Ponty focuses, speaks to an
ontology of perception alone. It cannot stand in for the living body as a whole, in
which our corporeal depths are perceptually elusive (Leder 1999: 203). In short,
the flesh ontology is limited by its failure to address the visceral dimensions of
the body: Beneath the surface flesh, visible and tangible, lies a hidden vitality
that courses within me. Blood is the metaphor for this viscerality (1999: 204).
As Leder goes on to insist, my relation to the other is a relation of flesh and blood,
and he explicitly cites the maternal/foetal bond as an example of chiasmatic
identity-in-difference: the two bodies are enfolded together, sharing one pulsing
bloodstream (1999: 206). Although acknowledging that gestation and natality
are lost to us, he recognises nevertheless that this bodily intertwining is never
fully effaced from adult life (ibid.). It is not my claim, of course, that conjoined
twins or other concorporate bodies are similar to intrauterine forms, but as
Leders point makes clear there are certain metaphorical and material correspondences. Moreover, in her own take-up of the themes of the flesh ontology which
mesh with an understanding of the feminine as always (self)touching, containable
as neither one nor as part of the subject/object pair Irigaray sees the originary
relationship as precisely that which must be suppressed in a specular economy.
For Irigaray, feminine morphology is never singular and self-complete: the birth
that is never accomplished, the body never created once and for all, the form
never definitively completed (1985b: 217). In her view, the significance of tactility is not simply that it is the first sense, but that it remains primary for those who
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are excessive to the binary division of self and other. It is only those who are
locked into the dominant models of masculinist subjectivity who can overlook the
fact that the world of which they are a part is (de)structured by continuous change,
the flux and flow of material form, a viscerality that is not limited to the body.
The thematics of touch have a place of great importance in Irigarays work,
from which it is possible to derive an account more adequate to the issue of concorporation. For Irigaray, it is the notion of a specifically feminine desire that is
addressed through the image of bodily contact, not necessarily as an anatomical
event, but in the imaginary. Nonetheless, her evocation of the womans body as,
in a sense, always already concorporate the birth that is never accomplished
is highly pertinent to the problematic of (self)identity, and to the particular context of conjoined twins. For the body Irigaray proposes, the interval of the
mirror, or more literally of the cut,7 is displaced, just as it might be for conjoined
twins in an alternative cultural discourse. Instead of the flat, reflective surface
that Irigaray sees as a weapon that wards off touching and holds back fluidity
(1993b: 65), what is mobilised is the plasticity and intimacy of cotangibility. In
stark contrast to the normative insistence on the independent and proper body
sealed into singularity by its own skin, Irigarayan corporeality is positive precisely insofar as it is mediated by touch, by mucus, and by the mingling of blood.
It is as though the regulative negativity of the abject, the mechanism that forces
separation between self and other, has been overcome by the inherent power of
attraction of those very same elements. In place of the detachment and control
associated with the disembodied gaze, Irigaray calls for a sensuous engagement
both with the other and with the world. The masculinist economy of subject and
object finds no place here: Everything is exchanged, yet there are no transactions.
Between us, there are no proprietors, no purchasers, no determinable objects, no
prices. Our bodies are nourished by our mutual pleasure (Irigaray 1985b: 213).
It is an image that indeed suggests an other mode, not of being, but of the dynamic
of becoming.
In her detailed reading of The Intertwining The Chiasm, Irigaray specifically displaces Merleau-Pontys active hand that takes hold of another. She
prefers the image of two hands touching as though in prayer, which she calls a
touching more intimate.A phenomenology of the passage between interior and
exterior (Irigaray 1993a: 161). Like Leder, she understands Merleau-Pontys
doubled touch as an intentional and exteriorised moment that neglects the chiasm
of bodily surface and depth. Instead of an active subject reaching out, the imaginary that Irigaray postulates is the site of a fluidity, a blood relation between the
two, that blurs the dichotomy of active and passive, inside and out: The joined
hands perhaps represent (the) memory of the intimacy of the mucus (1993a: 170).
In contradistinction to the two-dimensional reflective surfaces that institute the
Lacanian subject, or to Merleau-Pontys tactile switch between the toucher and
the touched, the three-dimensional and fluid contact privileged by Irigaray abolishes the split between subject and object, where the one however briefly is
in a relation of mastery over the other. She commends instead: Nearness so
pronounced that it makes all discrimination of identity, and thus all forms of property, impossible.This puts into question all prevailing economies (1985b: 31).
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What Irigaray envisages, then, is a necessary reconfiguration of ontology in

which she comes closer, I think, to developing the ethical implications that
Merleau-Ponty leaves inadequately addressed. In turning now to the issue of literal concorporation, I want to ask whether, by virtue of its non-normative positioning, it might help us rethink the interval of difference and make sense of an
economy of touch. Can we make sense of Irigarays imaginary in the context of
actual bodies as they are lived?
The case of the Irish conjoined twins, Katie and Eilish, that I referred to in
Chapter 3, suggests that we can. Given the nature of their particular morphology
it is perhaps more accurate to describe them not as conjoined, but rather as concorporate a term that more strongly signals the complexity of their embodied
being. Nonetheless, it is routinely asserted that under the skin they are certainly
two, with discrete subjectivities already given and simply awaiting release from
the fleshy bondage of their shared skin suit. Despite their lack of distress and the
very evident pleasure that Katie and Eilish take in their mutual and reversible
touch they are shown stroking and kissing each others faces the trope of
liberation from the body, which is a common motif in narratives of conjoined
twins, is repeatedly, if not entirely uncritically, voiced. Once the decision to go
ahead with surgery is taken, the initial procedure is to implant expanders under
the skin which will artificially extend its surface area. Rather than itself suffering
the cut, the skin is seen not as an organ of perception, but as no more than the
manipulable covering-over for the wound to come. And yet, if the hand that held
the knife were that of the concorporate body itself, where, we might ask, would
it cut to establish self and other?8 My critique is not directed primarily at the practice of heroic medicine represented by the surgeons knife, but at the underlying
assumption that the autonomy that is deemed preferable can be fully realised only
by singular embodiment sealed by the flesh, which is itself of no more than utilitarian value and significance. It is a moment of Cartesian disarticulation that
belies any sense of both the phenomenology of the lived body and of becomingwith-others. Following the death of Katie, then, the measure of success for Eilish
depends on the resealing of her body and the recontainment of her self.
It is not simply ontological anxiety in the face of corporeal excessiveness that
is being allayed by the material and discursive strategies evident in the television
documentaries, but the putative threat of monstrous engulfment. In a condition of
unmodified corporeality, the bodily exchanges between the twins, the flows
where we would expect unbreachable boundaries, blur the distinctions by which
we usually make sense of living beings. The loss of the interval between self and
other, the ambiguity at the heart of concorporation, frustrates the mapping both
of the singular subject and of the pair. The recurrent refrain that Katie and Eilish
are nevertheless two individuals is, then, a refusal of undecidability, an attempt
both metaphorical and ultimately literal to see them as both existentially and
corporeally distinct.9 But even as we institute a specular model of being, is it not
contested by Freuds remark that the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego
(1923: 26), that is, the psychic location of introjected sensation touching and
being touched at the surface of the skin? For Katie and Eilish, who at the time
of the operation are three years old, the contact between them as conjoined twins
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has surely constituted their primary experience of touch, existing alongside or

perhaps overriding their bond with the maternal body. But where that latter bond
is temporary and variable, their mutual concorporation sets the parameters for
their phenomenological sense of self. To each other they are as one, and even
after the crisis of separation, Katie remains incorporated as an absent presence in
the life of her surviving twin through the psychic endurance of mutual touch. The
positivity of the indivisible tactility of their co-existence as self/other survives to
contest the continuing stress on concorporation as an existential impediment. So
much at variance with the accepted standards of selfhood is the bond between
concorporate twins that even those closest to them find it beyond comprehension.
Recall for a moment the telling interchange in which an older sister declares:
Eilish couldnt go wherever she wanted. For Eilish the memory of Katie is quite
different, as her own poignant words attest: She used to bring me round everywhere. The normative voice is clearly disrupted here, and directly echoes
Irigarays take-up of the fluid and undecidable relationship between, and of,
women when the feminine is freed from the binary of same/difference: I carry
you with me everywhere.You are there, like my skin (1985b: 216). In this very
positive recollection, and in other instances, it is as though for Eilish the corporeal memory of her twin stands against guards against, perhaps one should say
the closure of the self.
As I outlined in the introductory chapter, one of my aims is to juxtapose theoretical and material discourse in such a way that each will be informed by the
other in new and mutually productive ways. It is not that I believe that the highly
complex practical concerns of narratives such as that of concorporate twins
should be set aside, or overridden, by a more discursive approach, but that alternative modes of action might be suggested by a consideration of the ontological,
epistemological and ethical questions that are so often repressed in the accounts
of both popular culture and biomedicine. Although the emotive force of the narratives is usually acknowledged in the former at least and indeed may mobilise
an unsavoury voyeurism the underlying reasons for our fears, anxieties and
fascination as viewers, or motives as participants, are rarely analyzed. In deconstructing those very reactions, to which I am certainly not immune, my intention
is not to criticise but to open up the issues to a more fluid approach. It is not a
question of rejecting any course of action as either right or wrong, a move that
would merely perpetuate another often unhelpful binary, but of seeking out new
pathways. Given the heavy social constraints and resistant philosophical heritage
of the society in which we live, I am by no means certain that the current treatment of those with conjoined bodies is misplaced. The point is rather that until
there is a more in-depth analysis and understanding of all the implications and
issues involved, such as in the hierarchical distinction made between separation
and contiguity, we cannot begin to seek more adequate responses.
Just such a moment of opening up alternatives does in fact occur in Eilish: Life
without Katie when the Irish family go to the US to visit a pair of unseparated
twins and their parents. Brittany and Abigail also have a single body from the
neck down, but nevertheless enjoy a high degree of mobility and are filmed
participating in a number of activities common to children of their age. As talkative
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and alert eleven-year-olds, the twins are considered mature enough to be consulted
about their own wishes for the future, and both they and their parents appear to
have little difficulty in accepting their concorporation. The mother in particular
expresses the familys reluctance to sanction separation for the sake of what
society thinks is normal. She is adamant, moreover, that to separate the twins
would introduce a set of handicaps where currently there is none. For the Irish
parents, who in the fathers words have anticipated being rocked a bit, the visit
is clearly highly emotional as they are faced, for perhaps the first time, with an
image of concorporation that belies the negativity usually associated with it.
Eilish herself, not surprisingly, remains more or less silent throughout, and it is
not clear how far her parents engage, off camera, with her own anxieties and perhaps shock that such a life is possible. The merged nature and mutuality of the
American twins experiential body is presented, very unusually, as simply
another way of being-in-the-world, and the interval between self and other is
shown to be a convention, not a necessity. In their concorporate state, Brittany
and Abigail literally, as well as metaphorically, leak and flow into one another,
blurring the boundaries that are taken to secure the subject body.
The precise nature of physical contact is of course quite exceptional in the case
of concorporation, yet it does, I think, indicate very strongly what is at stake in
normative efforts to treat the body as little more than instrumental. The emphasis
on the closure of separation, and on individuality, comes at the cost of masking
our psychic investments in the flesh itself. But as Susan Cataldi notes, the tangible reality of contact, which we have all experienced, tells another story: the
experienced ambiguities, the doublings and reversibilities of touch confuse the
sharp distinctions philosophers try to draw between what is internal and what
is external. Through our flesh and thanks to tactility, we are always already
out-side of our selves (1993: 126). Moreover, in the contact of flesh, we
experience our other/self not only as surface feeling, but as an emotion: we are
touched.10 The physiological and psychological processes come together such
that the skin is less a boundary than an organ of communication, a passage or
crossing point, both for the self and towards the other. Where the flesh is literally
co-extensive, as in concorporation which I use again as a metaphor for what is
lost to us all the other is at the same time the self, in a condition of undecidability in which corporeal, ontological, epistemological and ethical boundaries
are all implicated. In its indeterminacy it speaks eloquently to the need to recover
not intercorporeity as such, but a recognition of the embodied mutuality of
becoming. To be oneself only and always with and in the other, both radically
contests the determinate separation of self and other as the only proper form of
ontology, and undermines the ethics of the interval. Not surprisingly, given the
strength of our discursive stake in constituting and maintaining clear boundaries,
the image of corporeal indistinction arouses great anxiety, and actual instances of
bodily conjunction are assumed to be intolerable. It is important, then, to note that
it is not that I believe conjoined twins should be understood as fully merged or
indistinguishable, for they can exhibit differential behaviour and affect, but that
like that most everyday state of pregnancy, the double embodiment cannot be
unravelled without loss to what constitutes the phenomenological self.
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The puzzle and fear of merging arises more strongly yet in cases of corporeal
conjunction where it is not simply that the organ of the skin fails to differentiate
one body from another, but that the embodiment seems to speak to incorporation
rather than concorporation. As before, the ideal of a clean and proper body is visibly disordered by what appears to be an eruption from within bursting through the
skin, that, as with other conjoined twins, with their shared blood, bowels and faecal matter, mobilises the uncanniness of the abject. And where for all such double bodies, the inevitability of union with a corpse that most sickening of
wastes, Kristeva calls it (1982: 3) is the ultimate and ever-present threat of
abjection, for the specifically incorporative types, the parasitic material, though
living, will never participate in life. Such an anomaly is certainly rare but by no
means unique, and as neonatal death is not inevitable, it too raises questions as to
the closure and integrity of the self. In parasitic twins, such as the seventeenthcentury Coloredo brothers,11 one body may be fully endowed with mental and
motor capacity, while the second may show physical affect but no evidence of
rational thought. The resulting irresolvable confusion as to where the boundaries
of the self lie, or even if an other exists as such, may trouble our expectations, but
the insistence that such monstrosity is wholly other is indicative of the strength
of our discursive investment in clear and distinct boundaries. For the normative
mind-set, the monstrous must always remain the exception. Yet both Irigarays
play on the originary mother-matter, which continues to ground female-to-female
relationships but is repudiated in the male, and the inherent instability of corporeality in its always incomplete process of abjection, testify to a different scenario. Regimes of normalisation must be constantly reiterated to defer the
slippage of an excessive embodiment that threatens always to overwhelm. As Liz
Grosz puts it:
the stability of the unified body imagemust be continually renewed, not through
the subjects conscious efforts but through its ability to conceive of itself as a subject
and to separate itself from its objects and others to be able to undertake wilful action.
(1994: 434)
It is perhaps precisely in that urgent need for renewal of the normatively embodied self that we can see the gap that allows for another way of being and relating
to others. Not only does reiteration always signal a shift, but it opens up the
potential of more radical transformations in which a sense of self need not depend
on separation. In place of seeing material contact as a risk to be averted, we might
instead begin to understand it as the promise that our embodied vulnerability and
lack of closure signals not insecurity but rather an openness to new forms of
becoming and to new relational economies.
It is in the embodied gesture of touch that we may sustain a reciprocal sense of
solicitude and intimacy that is grounded in the mutual instabilities and unpredictability of our corporeal becoming. To touch and be touched speaks to our
exposure to, and immersion in, the world of others, and to the capacity to be
moved beyond reason, in the space of shared vulnerabilities. It is in the openings
of touch that our bodies overstep their bounds; our flesh is in flux (Cataldi 1993:
126). The space of tactile interaction is never a static given, but what Cataldi calls
the embodied space of copresent implication (ibid.). Nonetheless, for all the
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potential positivity of touch, we must be aware too of the dangers of foreclosing

difference and opening up the other to violence. Not all tactile contact is benign,
and the crossing of boundaries may be not so much the occasion of acknowledging shared vulnerability as a kind of corporeal colonisation that exploits the
specific vulnerability of the less dominant partner. A responsible ethic must be
sensitive to the need to be with others in a variety of different ways that do not
erase the specificity on either side. Rather than the somewhat universalised
anonymous body without the markings of gender, race, physical ability or age,
for example that Merleau-Ponty posits, and which encourages a sense of familiarity, it is the strange(r)ness of embodiment, and the differential ways in which
each of us lives our body that must be preserved. There is, then, no suggestion
that the contact between bodies signals indifferentiation, for in that lies only the
violence of colonisation, or a stultifying nostalgia for the lost pre-subjectal plenitude of undifferentiated infant/maternal corporeality. Rather the task for all of us,
however we are embodied, is to develop a mode of intercorporeality without a
complete dissolution of personal identity. In place of the model of the selfsame,
or the masculinist economy that reduces difference to a property relationship, our
selves could form in the dynamic contact with others, not according to a fixed
ideal but in a transformatory encounter in which neither self nor other is a predictable, calculable entity with inviolable boundaries.
Despite her own emphasis on the significance and importance of recovering
the maternal bond, Irigaray too is far from recommending indifferentiation,
which, as she recognises, may result in paralysis. The crucial issue for her is that
it should be not only the masculinist subject who is able to say I, and that there
should be a non-hierarchical relation in which radical difference is recognised
and no self could appropriate the other. Her project is to uncover new horizons of
growth, to mobilise new configurations of the subject that do not rely on the static
mirroring that marks the masculinist symbolic. What is called for rather is a move
to difference otherwise, where the subjectobject relation might be rewritten as
the contiguity, as a certain undecidability even, between-subjects:
I caress you, you caress me, without unity neither yours, nor mine, nor ours. The
envelope, which separates and divides us, fades away. Instead of a solid enclosure, it
becomes fluid: which is far from nothing. This does not mean that we are merged.
(1992: 5960)
The point, as I see it, is that in place of the inflexible and distancing reflection of
modernist discourse, which locks both subject and object into the binary of the
selfsame, the mediating presence of cotangibility holds open difference at the
living, moving border of the body. The doubling of the mirror could be
reclaimed, then, not as an interval, but as a term of tangible coming together,
where two subjects reflect each other. As Irigaray puts it: if being means
permanent advent between us, our bodies become living mirrors. Sense mirrors
where the outline of the other is profiled through touch. No longer the site of a
frozen, fixed appropriation and expropriation (1992: 77). Her dream is of recognition and responsibility between subjects where neither is able to assimilate the
other to its own self-image. Far from privileging a dissolution of the self or a
fusion that erases difference, Irigaray is insistent that what matters is that we
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should acknowledge radical difference as that which is irreducible and yet not
absolutely other. Those forms that are and always remain excessive to our selves
are not thereby out of touch but participate in the mutuality of contact that
changes and reshapes both elements of the encounter.
One significant achievement of postmodernism and its feminist uptake has
been to deconstruct the rigidity of both the mind/body split, and the
postEnlightenment model of an autonomous, fully self-present, and invulnerable
subject, in favour of undecidable and fluid forms of embodiment that frustrate the
mirroring of the selfsame. There is no certain reduplication. What the monstrous
in all its forms reflects is that the singular disembodied subject is in any case a
construct of modernity that cannot be fully achieved, and that instead our necessarily embodied identities are never secured, and our bodies never one. Once the
surface of our bodies is understood not as a protective envelope that defines and
unifies our limits but as an organ of physical and psychical interchange, then the
(monstrous) other is always there, like my skin. In that sense I read monstrous
corporeality as potentially figuring the site not just of a reconceived ontology, but
of a new form of ethics. In the move away from the phantasy of the wholly unified and self-complete embodied subject, we may lose the illusion of autonomy,
but gain access to a more sustaining mode of becoming with others. It is to relinquish the determinacy of the bounded body and open up the possibility of reconfiguring relational economies that privilege neither the one nor the two. Instead
of an anaesthetic ethic that works by separation and division, there is licence for
Irigarays vision: The internal and external horizon of my skin interpenetrating
with yours wears away their edges, their limits, their solidity. Creating another
space outside my framework. An opening of openness (1992: 59). It is a space
where the double relation between the normal and the monstrous does not hold;
a space that no one of us can fully occupy. As such, it mobilises an ethical economy in which our specificities, rather than haunted by, are in communion with the
differences between, and internal to, us all. To embrace a chiasmatic relation to
the other does not imply a merging in which all sense of self is forfeit, but rather
a space of holding together in which radical difference replaces pale reflection.
The threshold of ethics is, as I see it, inseparable from an acceptance of bodyliness in all its forms.
7
WELCOMING THE MONSTROUS
ARRIVANT
Throughout my project to reclaim the notion of vulnerability and its relation to
the embodiment of difference, I have, by and large, concurred with the assaults
made on humanism by recent continental philosophy, and by postmodernist cultural studies. The radical critique of humanist certainties is never without its risks,
however, and the anxious and nostalgic question of what is to replace, what can
replace, the securely embodied and autonomous subject has become increasingly
insistent. Is there, after all, some way that anti-humanism, and the vertigo of the
deconstructive abyss, might be averted not only by reconstituting value, but by
reinstating the centrality of the human? To the extent that my own project is an
ethical one, the question of value always remains open, but in the context of the
theoretical limitations of the determinate human, and of a humanism centred on
the subject, I welcome not the putative negativity of anti-humanism, but the positive openings and aspirations of posthumanism. If there is never an essential, still
less perfectly natural, body outside of cultural configurations, it remains to ask
whether our own postmodern age might not speed up transformation to the extent
that the unitary, bounded and autonomous nature of the human being is not simply
contested, but is at the point of collapse. As I see it, two things are happening.
On the one hand, poststructuralism has provided the analytic tools to theorise
instability and vulnerability, while on the other, contemporary and projective
techno-science has opened up new possibilities not merely for change, but for
transformation. Moreover, given the theoretical insights of deconstruction, it is
no longer possible to separate out the abstract and the material: both are discursively produced and they are equally unstable. As I have made clear throughout,
it is not a matter of denying that the medium of the body has reality, but of affirming that there is no essential corpus upon which meaning is inscribed. My claim
is that as the body is discursively materialised in both language and practice, that
materialisation is never value-neutral. There is, then, a very legitimate interest for
the postmodernist not just in how new bodies are constructed in discourse, but in
the material constitution and effects of those bodies. The task as Foucault puts it
is to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and
materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. (1980b: 97).
I emphasise this point particularly to counteract the perception of postmodernism as being deeply antithetical to any concept of embodiment. Certainly the
body as such, and indeed any unified category as such, is no longer the issue, but
that does not preclude attending to the here-and-now moments of embodiment
WELCOMING THE MONSTROUS ARRIVANT
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that may, among other things, provide just those I-slots that Spivak insists on
(1988: 243). The dissolution of the subject is not an achievable telos, so much as
a constant process in tension with the very need to reiterate the boundaries of the
subject. What postmodernism makes clear is that the specific humanist understanding of a stable, universal, prediscursive subject will not hold, but that does
not necessarily entail no subjects at all, still less the demise of the body as the site
of subject positions. To uncover the inherent vulnerabilities at the heart of being
or becoming, rather is not to dissolve the ontological anxiety that has driven the
modernist project, but to begin to understand it. The task is not to destroy the
foundations of the logos so much as to open them up to take account of all that
has hitherto been excluded or disavowed. Spivak, ever pragmatic, characterises
deconstruction as a critique of something that is extremely useful, something
without which we cannot do anything (1989: 129). Deconstruction, then, is not
anti-humanist as such and indeed such an approach would simply reiterate the
binary structure of modernity so much as posthumanist, a way of rethinking
bodies and subjects. Nonetheless, as existent and potential bodies are increasingly
complicated, the question becomes what is at stake not just for personal identity,
but for the category of humanity itself. In any case despite the foundational
claims, identity is a matter of process, and spatiality and presence are the characteristic achievements of the western subject. The interface between what is
human and what is monstrous is an age-old concern; it is the realisation that no
boundaries are ultimately secure that marks out postmodernity. And although the
critique of modernism and the trajectory into postmodernism may still draw cries
of alarum from those, like many feminists, nostalgic for the humanism so long
denied them, I wish to celebrate along with Donna Haraway (1992b) the
promise(s) of monsters.
Before moving on to look more closely at Haraways highly productive feminist deployment of the monster in contemporary times, I want to stress again that
the disruptive, irruptive manifestation of the monstrous is not just an inventive
trope of postmodernism, but a transhistorical site of challenge to the rational,
autonomous, masculine subject, and to the category of the human itself. The
taken-for-granted stability of human bodies, the body that can be safely forgotten
by the transcendent subject, has flourished only in conditions of denial and exclusion. The erasure of maternal/corporeal origin, for example, that necessary move
which has enabled the erection of a completed autogenic disembodied subject
convincingly charted by Luce Irigaray (1985a, Any Theory of the Subject,
and passim) relies on the notion of corporeal stasis, of a body that is fixed and
transparent to the knowing gaze. But once, however, it is admitted that both social
and biological bodies are not given, but exist only in the constant processes of
historical transformation, then there are only hybrid bodies, vulnerable bodies,
becoming-bodies, cyborg bodies; bodies, in other words, that always resist definition, both discursive and material. And it is when we understand definition in
terms both of meaning and of distinct boundaries that we can grasp the full transgressive implications of postmodernism. Crary and Kwinter, writing in an edition
of Zone entitled Incorporations, express it this way: Neither human subjects nor
the conceptual or material objects among which they live are any longer thinkable
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in their distinctness or separation from the dynamic, correlated, multiple systems

within which they arise (1992: 15). In short, humanism and the human are
irrevocably decentred.
For the editors of Zone, I suspect, postmodernism as a set of critical theories is
inseparable from postmodernity as a historical epoch, but they too implicitly
acknowledge a wider canvas. What matters is that the classical mechanisation of
life Descartes conception of the body as a machine for example should merge
with the vitalisation of the machine (Crary and Kwinter 1992: 14). Clearly,
neither process is new, but perhaps it is only in the last few decades that the move
has come to seem irresistible. For those who see postmodernity as a threat, the
response a dual one: on the one hand as I have made clear already the fear of
endless fragmentation; and on the other of an appropriative assimilation across
boundaries that erases the specificity of the hitherto liminal, just as surely as does
the binary. Feminism in particular has been wary of such a move, seeing in incorporations not the provisional hybridity of temporary alliances, but the final loss
of alterity, and especially of sexual difference. I, too, have no wish to forfeit difference nor abandon entirely the concept of the feminine, and I consciously use
the term incorporations, not verbally as a cannibalistic process, but as a plural
noun to denote becoming-bodies. What should be stressed is that with the collapse of the binary, the feminine I refer to is not that of conventional gender,
but rather a thing to be achieved. What the term feminine does insist on is the
specificity of corporeal difference which may take the form of material but never
determinate bodies, with regard neither to sex nor other categories of
difference. My argument is that boundaries are fluid, and permeable, not that they
cease to exist altogether; indeed permeability implies difference. Donna Haraway
makes the point succinctly when she writes that the cyborg her paradigmatic
figure for postmodern hybridity speaks to an intimate experience of boundaries (1990: 223). It is an experience fashioned not by rigidly prescribed limits,
but on the contrary by recurrent flux and transformation. Whether the cyborg has
a sex is perhaps rather more complicated.
I want to make the point again that the feminist take-up of postmodernism does
not claim to be the only path, and even within feminism we should not expect uniformity. My own concern for bodies and for the becoming of the not-yet reflects
one provisional set of possibilities. In consequence, though I find poststructuralist analysis an indispensable starting point, I remain wary of certain deployments
that paradoxically result in closing down on some conceptions of otherness. I am
thinking specifically here of Derridas apparent desire to ditch sexual difference
along with the tiresome humanist male subject who is caught up in the metaphysics of presence. Whilst I have no argument with the undercutting of gender
as a foundational category, or with its repositioning as a discursive construct
always open to resignification, I wonder why the feminine should disappear
rather than re-emerge as the radically other. Though he doesnt name them,
Derridas project, as I understand it, has a place for the uncanniness of monsters,
and certainly in his turn to the ethical he is concerned to mark the irreducibility
of the other to the same. Moreover, although it is scarcely developed, a concern
with the question of the animal is apparent in Eating Well, or the Calculation
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of the Subject (1991b) which seems explicitly to broach the way in which
incorporation as I have already warned can mark as it were the ingestion of
the other. As Derrida puts it, the structure of the humanist subject implies carnivorous virility for which he coins the term carno-phallogocentrism (1991b: 113).
Yet when it comes to sexual difference we find Derrida advocating in Choreographies not simply the polysexual signatures of the dance, but this indeterminable number of blended voices (1985: 184). Now that term blended implies
to me not an ethical recognition of the incalculable other in this instance the
feminine but a dream of absolute sexual indistinction. It is at least odd that the
delineation, in Eating Well, of ethical responsibility as the obligation to protect
the others otherness (1991b: 111) does not apparently extend to sexual specificity.1 The valorisation of the monstrous, as the unknowable and the incalculable, applies to Woman metaphorically, but seems to stop short at flesh and
blood women.
I turn now to Donna Haraway whose ironic adventures2 into cyborg reality
may throw new light on the relation between the feminine and the monstrous,
where both are other to the masculine subject of modernity. What Haraway proposes in her iconoclastic Manifesto for Cyborgs paradoxically speaks unambiguously for feminism and yet seems to have no place for sexual difference. In
providing a highly evocative vision of feminist politics in a technological age,
Haraway deploys the monstrous figure of the cyborg as that which is neither
woman nor even human, but a fabricated hybrid of machine and organism
(1990: 191). In later manifestations in her work, the equally strange FemaleMan
and Oncomouse serve similar purposes, though as she is at pains to point out,
none is in opposition to reality: their constructedness is the condition of their
reality (1997: 120).3 Where the reference in Derridean texts to the relationship
between the human and the animal remains fairly oblique, it has long been taken
up by Haraway as a central binary whose undoing puts in motion a multiplicity
of differences that profoundly contest western humanism. Indeed for all their
differences of approach, Haraway must acknowledge a siblingship with Derrida
on those central questions of humanism concerning origin, authenticity and
universality. The project for both is to dissolve categorical distinctions, which
Haraway pursues most particularly by challenging the concept of the natural as it
seems to authorise discrete location and spatiality. As she puts it: what counts as
human and as non-human is not given by definition, but only by relation, by
engagement in situated, worldly encounters, where boundaries take shape and
categories sediment (1994: 64). If western ontology and epistemology are founded
on the fixed and the proper, then her aim is to celebrate the inappropriate/d others;
in other words, those liminal figures people of colour, simians, cyborgs and
women who evade both sameness and difference. All are boundary creatures,
and it is the cyborg in particular that serves to destabilise evolutionary, technological and biological narratives.
In representing a complex intermerging of animal, human and machine,
cyborgs populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted (1990: 191), a world
which, as Haraway maintains, we all already inhabit. It has little connection with
the familiar and mythical secure world of humanism where nature is a given,
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originary location, the site of mans purpose which alone has constitutive power,
and in which monsters as the excluded other speak for the ideal of an untroubled,
natural order. Haraways monsters are, then, not so much the uncanny but essentially organic others which haunt the margins of what is known and can be controlled, but more the construct of an impure and undecidable nature that itself
encompasses techno-science as a practice of materializing refigurations of what
counts as nature (1994: 60). The conventional concept of the human as the actor,
the autonomous agent of production, collapses in Haraways re-vision in which
the technical, textual, organic, mythical and political are inseparable (1992b:
300), and in which all spheres are actively involved together in construction. It is
not that Haraway is either for or against such a nature in its reconceived form a
potential threat respectively to the rational transcendent subject and to nostalgic
essentialists but rather that she sees her primary aim as queering what counts
as nature (ibid.). Her question throughout is what exactly gets to count, and
whom does it profit. For her, nature is always elsewhere and simultaneously
nowhere, an absent, but perhaps possible, other present (1992b: 295). Against
the depiction of a natural order in which science and culture play out their normative impulses, the alternative conception offered by Haraway cannot be fully
grasped or even thought in its refusal of classificatory systems.
In the brave new world envisaged by Haraway, nature itself is characterised as
artefactual, a trickster, a shape-shifter encompassing both imagination and material reality, and the agency of both human and non-human actors. Although she
is in no doubt about the radicality of such a vision, Haraway celebrates what she
calls the material-semiotic as protean embodiments of a world as witty agent and
actor (1991b: 201). What happens at the boundaries, where the leaks and flows
across categories signal not so much the breakdown of security as the always
already impossibility of fixed definition, becomes of crucial importance. They are
sites not only of the enhanced policing that accompanies anxiety, but of powerful hopes. Any being occupying the liminal spaces or moving across putative
classifications takes on the potential to confound and fracture normative identity.
Like Haraway, Gloria Anzalda too locates the point of contestation for a deconstruction of the natural order in what she calls the borderland:
a vague and undetermined place created byan unnatural boundary.Los atravesados
live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the
mulatto, the half-dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, to go through the
confines of the normal. (1987: 3)
The possibility of such transgressions has long occupied the cultural and individual psychic imaginary, playing on half-hidden fears of vulnerability. But where
once distinctions appeared self-evident and defensible, the questions, now, of
what is to count as natural or as normal can no longer be separated: both are
equally constructs of the human propensity to set up boundaries of domination.
To be out of place, whether in a wholly organic form or as a techno-organic
hybrid, is to show up the faultlines in the closure of normativity, and to gesture
towards other modes of existence. But it is not the alterity of the absolute other
that beckons, but the far more disturbing figure of the in-between that is already
both self and other. Are we, then, at the point where the only option is to embrace
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monstrous transformations and enter into those other possible worlds, not as
bounded, unitary human(ist) subjects, but as cyborg actants?
Though such a thought may be seductive, it is far from unproblematic. For all
the apparent celebration of cyborg reality is there not, after all, the suspicion
that it may prove as damaging to the embodied other as has the masculinist subject of patriarchal humanism? Certainly many feminists critical of Haraways
project have suggested as much,4 and there remains also the issue that I raised
earlier of what becomes of sexual difference. Haraway herself for whom, it
must be stressed, a certain irony is always intentional is fully aware of the
contradictory and perverse nature of the cyborg, and of the implications of its
boundary-changing practices. With regard to the first point, the anxiety is that the
techno-science animal/human/machine composite might be simply a dangerous
reification of the humanist dream of autogenic, autonomous man. In noting the
risk, Haraway allows that the cyborg could be the awful apocalyptic telos of the
Wests escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at
last from all dependency, a man in space (1990: 192).5 The same tension is evident throughout her later work, particularly where she addresses not so much the
not-yet realised cyborg, as the present-day constructions of high technology operating on a global scale. The reconfigurations of knowledge and practice required
by contemporary bioscience especially, the questioning of the meaning of life
itself, look set to escalate in the twenty-first century, and for Haraway the task
is not to make the futile attempt to oppose such reworkings of the known, but to
intervene in them responsibly. As she puts it, her project depends on nurturing
and acknowledging alliances with a lively array of others, who are like and
unlike, human or not, inside and outside what have been the defended boundaries
of hegemonic selves and powerful places (1997: 269). It is when that ethical
dimension is missing that we have reason for apprehension.
Moreover, as Marie-Hlne Huet makes clear in Monstrous Imagination, there
are of course good historical precedents for such a fear. The disruptively organic,
female-inspired and (un)natural monsters of the early modern period were to a
large extent superseded particularly during the Romantic age by man-made
hybrids which signified not a devalued place beyond rational control, but the
power and authority of the male imagination, be it artistic or scientific. We might
well read the chaotic outcome of Victor Frankensteins creation as Mary
Shelleys own comment on the refusal to take responsibility for the monstrous
other. And yet that fictional depiction of the unanticipated breakdown of the
attempt to normalise and discipline monsters by the male gaze is only the antithesis of Geoffroy St-Hilaires near-contemporary controlled experiments to induce
foetal monstrosities.6 Both seem woefully without ethical engagement on the part
of the master scientist. And in the twenty-first century, one wonders what is to
stop a reconceived Cartesian subject from annexing cyberspace. The image of the
isolated, ultimately disembodied, computer nerd surfing the Net, or of the robotic
heroes of recent science-fiction film is hardly feminist-friendly. The much celebrated Deleuzian body-without-organs has too often been taken to figure a being
free of the restraints of physicality, invulnerable to the processes of disease,
deterioration and decay, having nothing to do with the body as it is lived day by
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day. It is perhaps the epitome of corporeal mastery: the final overcoming of the
uncertain body in its conclusive disappearance. As many commentators have
noted, in cybertexts it is the body itself, any body, that is given the derisive term
meat and seen as ultimately dispensable, just as Cartesians might have wished.
Such an outcome could not be further from Haraways own view of life as a
window of vulnerability which we should not try to close.
In consequence, the popular image of the communication technologies of postmodernity, at very least, as offering an escape from the body sits uneasily with
the perception that they are the location of wholly positive transgressions of and
transformations to the humanist subject. Rather than rereading the inherent instabilities of the embodied self as the take-off point for a re-evaluation of the concepts of vulnerability and difference, such mediums risk reinforcing existing
binary splits by denying the felt body altogether, or in the case of virtual reality
overriding existing affect to manufacture new sensations and desires. It is as
though the categories of mind and body, natural and technological, real and virtual
were always and everywhere opposed, rather than, as I have argued, always and
everywhere inseparably interwoven. Moreover, the differences that are generated
in cyberspace even where participants deliberately choose deviant performances are ultimately non-threatening, not because of an enhanced awareness
and acceptance of an in-common vulnerability, but because the detached mind is
taken to be in transcendent control. Yet the question of identity is played out at
one remove, ignoring the very pertinent issue of the embodied nature of the one
who operates the keyboard, follows the characters on a screen, or who dons the
apparatus of virtual reality. The slippage and insecurity of the embodied self may
indeed be left behind, but it is not resolved. It is not that I want to deny the transformatory aspects of the new technologies, but rather to warn against the danger
of replacing one set of boundaries with another. The real task for the postmodernist
theorist is surely to take up Anzaldas concept of the borderland, that vague and
undetermined place, as not simply the location of the abnormal, but as the place
where all binary distinctions are undone. Indeed, it is precisely against such a
scenario that Haraway explores the promises of monsters, seeing in them the
opportunities for new connections and alliances that cut across the monolithic
certainties of the western logos. In the mode of the cyborg, the humanist subject
can neither annex nor reinvent himself if what is irretrievably lost to him is the
assurance of distinction and separation.
The world that Haraway proposes is the locus of continual regeneration, a cats
cradle of undecidable but determinate possibilities, a place where the unexpected
may always come together and be mutually transformative. In a question that will
recall the concerns of Irigaray, Haraway asks, Why should our bodies end at the
skin? (1990: 220), though for the latter it is as much a case of signalling the need
to encompass prosthetic devices as of the meeting of two or more organic entities.
What matters is that where boundaries are in a constant state of flux, then the
potential for centres of domination is dissolved, and it is Haraways ironic hope
that out of what she calls these dangerously unpromising times (1992b: 319) we
may build new collectivities, and moreover ones in which hitherto liminal creatures
are equal actors. Contrary to critics such as Vicki Kirby (1997) who argues that
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the vision of hybridity and impurity celebrated in The Cyborg Manifesto implies
a time of unity before difference, it seems clear to me that Haraway is not guilty
of such an oversimplified periodisation. Although she is undoubtedly a materialist, deeply concerned with the implications of the changing practices that science
studies traces, she employs the metaphorics of postmodernity to point up the
fragility and vulnerability of all identity claims. As Kirby puts it: The complex
identity of originariness already incorporates the monstrous impossibility of the
cyborg (1997: 148), and Haraway would scarcely disagree. Her deployment of
the cyborg suggests not a break with a past integration, but the crafting of a
device that demonstrates precisely what the western logos has been concerned to
conceal: the irreducible difference at the heart of being. As she explains: An
origin story in the Western humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity,
fullness, bliss and terror (1990: 192, my emphasis). Kirby and Haraway concur,
then, in the insight that we are monstrous from the start.
There is no doubt at all about the fate of binary sexual difference in Haraways
utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender (1990: 223)
As she makes clear in Manifesto, gender is not a given, but along with race or
class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible experience of
the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and capitalism (1990: 197). But to reject a totalising theory of categorical difference is by
no means the same as a rejection of differences as such. Haraway herself explicitly intervenes in current worlds as a woman, as a feminist, and her monstrous
world without gender is precisely the location of the not-yet feminine. At very
least, as she puts it in The Promises of Monsters: (t)he functional privileged
signifier in this [new] system will not be so easily mistaken for any primate
males urinary and copulative organ (1992b: 301), and she goes on to postulate
a quite different grammar of gender. I dont want to push Haraways deliberately ambiguous texts too hard in the direction of specific answers, but simply
note that in an interview with Andrew Ross she asserts (the cyborg) is a polychromatic girl.She is a girl whos trying not to become a Woman, but remain
responsible to women of many colors and positions (1991a: 20). As a clear rejection of the masculine propensity to metaphorise Woman as the sliding signifier a
move that can be attributed to Derrida Haraways remark underlines her commitment to the specificity and the multiple differences of women, and by derivation, of other others. If the cultural meanings attached now to bodies are set to
disappear, then that is the hope that all those inappropriate(d) others, including
the monstrous, may yet emerge as valorised figures.
Despite some very necessary reservations of her own in the face of the disciplinary and regulatory potentials of the new technologies and information
sciences,7 not to mention their profit-driven motivation, Haraway is well aware
that not just conservative but liberal appeals to what is natural are often racially
inflected. As she puts it: I cannot help but hear in the biotechnology debates
the unintended tones of fear of the alien and suspicion of the mixed.I hear a
mystification of kind and purity akin to the doctrines of white racial hegemony
(1997: 61). Although she is specifically discussing transgenic organisms at this
point, her suspicion that supposedly ethical objections to the relevant practices
128
may be founded in a distinctly counter-ethical nostalgia for purity could equally

be extended to some feminist analyses hostile to technological interventions into
the body, particularly in the area of reproduction. I am not suggesting that such
approaches display a bad will, but neither are they innocent. Indeed it would be
to ignore a whole history of western racism and imperialism, and a cultural imaginary that privileges the split between sameness and difference, to suppose that
such innocence were possible. The celebration of difference as an absolute is
hardly positive if what it covers over is a fear and rejection of contact with the
other, an anxiety lest the boundaries of separation be breached. Moreover, as
Haraway reminds us, human biological history is in any case cobbled-together,
mixed up with a long tradition of genetic exchange (1997: 61). Where the
prospect or reality of the cyborg, of transgenic organisms, of xenotransplantation,
or even of transplant surgery between human beings, are all open to fears of miscegenation, and of monstrous loss of the selfsame, much less sophisticated practices like surrogacy, or even egg donation, are no less vulnerable to the sense of
contamination. Whatever the vector of transformation, it exposes the fallacy, the
impossibility, of purity.
For Haraway, then, the advent of a world made possible by new technologies
in which the monstrous can no longer be hidden from view is one that may
figure a changed understanding of our own vulnerabilities. It is not that a cyborg
world is without risks: monsters and their kin are always dangerous, but they may
also be our best hope. In place of the security of a rigid categorisation that has
bred intolerance, persecution and the putative mastery of strange and unfamiliar
others, there is the opportunity of positive transformation in our ontological and
epistemological models. It will be apparent that, for all her playfulness,
Haraways project is a deeply ethical one. It is about finding both pleasure and
responsibility in the constant merging and reformation of bodies and boundaries,
and in the flexibility and unpredictability of nature, not as biologism, but as trickster. To resist calculability, however, is not necessarily to resist accountability or
responsibility, as many critics of postmodernism suppose. I have given some time
to Haraway precisely because she recognises the ultimate futility of boundary
violation for its own sake, where the impetus is little more than a libertarian
masculinist fantasy. As Haraway puts it: Queering specific normalised categories is not for the easy frisson of transgression, but for the hope of livable
worlds (1994: 60). The point about her 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. It is in some senses a utopian vision of a possible future, and one
where the move beyond the paradigms of modernism leaves open the question of
how posthumanity will figure outside the narratives of humanism (1992a: 88).
The move is difficult, but not impossible, and it begins to answer the well-placed
impatience voiced by Kirby among others that we rarely question the humanness
of the subject whom we critique. As she sees it, the self-present identity of
humanness to itself is the closed container within whose limits the breaching of
limits (difference) can be risked (Kirby 1997: 153). To embrace the monstrous
in its multiple forms, however, to open oneself to that which most clearly throws
129
the spatial and temporal solidity and calculability of the human into doubt, is, as
I understand it, precisely to breach the limit of the limits.
The take-up of the problematic of the monstrous as a pathway to a posthumanist ethics is exactly the move intended in this book. Although what I propose
is in the fullest sense a bioethics that is an ethics for and of the body my strategic wish to emphasise embodiment is not intended to conceal any nostalgic longing for either ontological or corporeal security. On the contrary I am on the side
of the monsters as signifiers of the radical destabilisation of the binary processes
of identity and difference that devalue otherness. Monsters clearly cannot exist
apart from normal bodies, but at the same time they are excessive to the binary,
uncontained by any fixed category of exclusion. Like women, they 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,8 so too the catachrestic term monster both
escapes 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 realised. The modernist focus on a humanist politics of norms and identity gives way to a politics of
hybrids and transformation. And the point here is that although final meaning,
full presence, and fixed substance are all deferred, the promise is not one of
unproductive, limitless fragmentation, but of dynamic new incorporations.
Certainly, those reconfigurations would claim no more than temporary spatial
location, purpose, or political efficacy, but they are not thereby indeterminate.
The monstrous bodies that I propose mirror Derridas remark, in the Afterword
to Limited Inc, about the feminine: I want to recall that undecidability is always
a determinate oscillation between possibilities (1988: 148).
As so often in this text I find myself coming back to Derrida, whose acute
appreciation of the necessary aporias of ethics belies the suggestion that the
deconstructive move results in destruction and negativity. On the contrary, it is
Derrida who spells out the power of the double affirmation, the yes, yes, that
allows us to embrace both the unending task of deconstructionist critique and the
risky welcome for who or what is yet to come, the unknown and unknowable
other. He encourages us not so much to cross the threshold into the domain of the
absolute other, as to linger within the shadow of its open portals where the distinction between inside and outside is lost. Just as Haraway and Anzalda in their
own more materialist ways turn to the disruptive nature of the borderlands to
express the intrinsic strangeness of what seems to be securely known, so Derrida
offers the concept of parergonality to figure a practice of uncovering liminal
phenomena as those which expose make vulnerable the main corpus (ergon)
to its other(s). What has hitherto been silenced but never finally excluded
is shown to occupy a paradoxical space that is both beyond and necessary
supplemental to the primary term. Can we then name what is monstrous as just
such a parergon? As I have argued throughout, the monster is not simply a signifier of otherness, but an altogether more complex figure that calls to mind not so
much the other per se, as the trace of the other in the self. And as Derrida reminds
us in relation to the similarly uncanny figure of the spectre: they are always
130
thereeven if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not
yet (1994: 176). Nevertheless, although the interruption of the oppressive closure of identity that characterises the postmodernist (and feminist) project must
surely profit from Derridas suggestion that we should learn, how to let it [the
monster] speakor how to give it back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the
other, in the other in oneself (ibid.), that should not imply any comfortable
assimilation. On the contrary, it is in the very power to disturb and unsettle, to
resist final intelligibility, that the monstrous beckons to a more open future.
The sense of what is yet to come the -venir that Derrida insists on is a
powerful incentive to rethink the adequacy of a humanist ethics. Bearing in mind
Derridas naming of the calculable and the determinate as fundamentally unable
to deliver ethical content,9 the very undecidability of the monstrous may signal a
way forward:
A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would be already a predictable, calculable and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is
prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant. (Derrida 1995b: 307)
And it is not just that the arrivant is undecidable in itself; although the encounter,
the event is always in one sense awaited, it is also unexpected, a necessary surprise, in Derridas terms, if the welcome is to have ethical valency. Moreover, as
he puts it in Aporias, the unexpected arrivant effects the very experience of the
threshold (1993: 33). Rather than there being a simple crossing from one defined
and identifiable location to another, the boundary itself is displaced. The arrivant
surprises the host enough to call into question, to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with
the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage (1993: 34).
As with Levinas, it is the at-homeness with oneself that cannot be taken for
granted. The arrivant who will come, who cannot be kept apart has the quality of the unheimlich. One must welcome the unknown other, then, both in the
absence of any foreknowledge that would establish either identity of, or identity
with, and in the context of radical doubt as to ones own identity.
Yet it is on this reading which marks again the fundamental vulnerability, the
impossibility of completion, of being, that the strange or monstrous can be understood also as enabling, an unclassifiable miscegenation that signals the coming of
the other as the possibility of ethical decision. Rather than the encounter being the
moment of a recuperation of alterity, the violent occasion both in actual practice
and symbolically of inclusion in the identity of the selfsame, it is a confrontation with what is both a constitutive outside and an impossible, irreducible
excess. To mark the monstrous, then, as only the abject is to miss that further
dimension of what is always already beyond. At the same time, the implied
refusal of linear temporality is no mere play on words, but a marker that what is
yet to come is paradoxically already here. If the other is both excessive and constitutive to the self, then it cannot be assigned to either a fixed time or place. The
call to responsibility cannot be determined, but nor can it be deferred; it encompasses both my own becoming and the coming of the other who has been there
from the first. Derrida goes so far as to suggest that the decision (in his sense) can
only be made by the other in myself. Just as the other and indeed the self escapes
131
conceptual definition, so the ethics that he speaks of can never be systemised, but
remains, as he stresses, the experience of the impossible.
Two things are required by the otherness of the other: first, the need to decentre my own identity and accede to the realisation that I am not the focal nor
stable point of reference, and second, the acceptance of a decentring of the human
as such. The other in its strangeness may elude any such familiar designation and
remain beyond the limits of intelligibility or representation. The call to ethics is
not a question of more or less adequate knowledge, but of the encounter with the
irreducibly different, in which I also encounter myself. Responsibility lies, then,
not in re-cognition as an appropriative move, as though the one and the other
could be brought into the same category, nor yet in an insistence on absolute difference, for that would be to annul entirely the possibility of an ethical relation.
Instead, I must find a way to inhabit that impossible point poised between assimilation and rejection where both signal the ethical bankruptcy of indifference.
Responsibility lies rather in an openness to the radically, but not absolutely,
unknowable other, which understands that neither the one nor the other can exist
apart. As such I read the monstrous, along with Haraway and Derrida, as hopeful, the potential site of both a reconceived ontology, and a new form of ethics.
To let go of determinacy and of the impulse to master the undecidable is to
embrace the possibility of reconfiguring relational economies. It is an opening
onto becoming-in-the-world-with-others which sustains alterity as diffrance.
In the light of the potential of late twentieth-century biotechnology to radically
vary the body, the need to reconfigure relational economies may be of special
urgency. I am not claiming that morphological difference has become more acceptable; on the contrary, the processes of normalisation that are correlative to the
stable bounded subject are potentially even more powerful, and thus call for greater
resistance. Rather than promoting transformation, it could well be the future role of
techno-science to impose conformity. As the ability to read and understand organic
structures becomes ever more sophisticated I am thinking particularly of enterprises such as the mapping of the human genome or the Human Genome Diversity
Project it may be that however unidentifiable monsters initially are, their very
alterity and strangeness is there to be recuperated within the known. As Derrida
warns, from the moment they enter into culture, the movement of acculturation,
precisely of domestication, of normalisation has already begun (1995b: 386). As I
have already outlined, the unease and fear generated by morphological difference
has found expression historically not only in an assimilative grasp, but in a policing of boundaries that effects both real and symbolic violence, the continuing
potential of which cannot be ignored. Whatever its form, the other is always the
signifier of a difference that speaks to the non-self-sufficiency of the singular subject, an unwelcome reminder of inherent vulnerability. Although some commentators have argued that our own age is particularly characterised by a pervasive
unease about the instability of all bodies,10 those claims even if well supported
should not be taken to mean that anxiety has not always been ready to break out in
the face of anything which threatens disintegration or confuses categorical limits.
And yet, as I have suggested, there are alternative ways forward. Where the
modernist project has sought to disentangle the inherent ambiguity and uncertainty
132
of organic beings and to impose the constraints of taxonomic definition, more

recent theorisations have celebrated that same ground as the basis on which to
open up to the productive possibilities of uncontained and multiple differences.
The deployment of postmodernist insights, particularly by those feminists who
have turned their focus to embodiment, has not only resulted in the deconstruction of the deeply entrenched modernist tendency to split corporeality from
subjectivity thus greatly enhancing the myth of an invulnerable autonomy but
has also made possible the placing of bodily difference at the centre of enquiry.
As long as we resist the impulse to recapture, as it were, those undecidable and
fluid forms of embodiment that mark out the monstrous, then the encounter with
the strange(r) will be the grounds for a radical rethinking of the concept of the
selfsame. In place of the interval, not just between self and other, but between one
category of being and another, it will be apparent that identities are never singular and always embodied. Though the constructs of modernity might seem to
promise a limited security, they do so only at the cost of a violent and exclusionary ethic that can encompass neither other modes of being, nor yet internal
change and indistinction. To resist closure, to be open to the trace of the other
within, the other that is both self and irreducibly alien in its excess, to resist the
normalisation of the strange, is to accept vulnerability. It is the very possibility of
our becoming, for ourselves and with others, and it commands us to give up the
comfort of familiarity and willingly embrace the risky ethics of uncertainty.
In tracing the eruption of the monstrous into a western discourse posited largely
on the increasingly fragile certainties of liberal humanism, my purpose throughout
has been to reclaim the pervasive significance of embodied difference to all and
every encounter. That encounter is no longer one between individuated, selfpresent subjects who meet one another as though on an abstract plane mediated by
pre-determined rights and duties, or by the operation of a calculative rationality,
but one in which both psychic interaction and phenomenological connection play
an equal part. The force of both the personal and cultural imaginary with its strategies of identification and inclusion, disavowal and abjection, not only constitutes
the boundaries of selfhood, and the limits of what and who are to count, but at the
same time undermines the narrative of rational engagement. Our relationship with
the other, moreover, cannot be fully expressed in conceptual terms alone, but
demands an attention to corporeality and the felt contact between living bodies in
the process of mutual becoming. The ways in which embodied beings touch on
one another draws together the abstract, affective and physicalist dimensions of
being-in-the-world. In place of any ideal or final point of achievement for embodied selves, however, there is only a location and time otherwise where multifarious
differences frustrate both the pretension to categorical knowledge and mastery,
and the strident claims to the closure of self-identity. It cannot be the objective,
nonetheless, to enter into that domain as such, for to do so would be to extend the
grasp of the known and the certain. On the contrary the point must be to safeguard
its very otherness, not as a determined site, but as a perpetual horizon of possibility that reminds us always of our own inherent vulnerability.
If what is at stake for an ethics of embodiment is both the transformation of the
masculinist metaphysics of presence that is, the assurance of a self-complete,
133
self-authorising subject set against the other and the transformation of the
normativities of the body, then the analytic of the horror and fascination of the
monstrous must indeed be promising. Moreover, to acknowledge that vulnerability is not a debased condition of the other, but the very condition of becoming, is
a step of profound significance, not least because it leads us to question the certainty and centrality of human being itself. As I have traced out in my analysis
of archival and historical texts, and of present day cultural practices, in philosophical interventions that dispute the convention, and in the speculative thought
of contemporary theorists it is the discourse of the monstrous that mounts a challenge to humanism and the interlinked category of the human, and grounds the
deconstruction of both. By taking up the invitation of postmodernism, particularly
as it has been deployed in feminist thought, we may approach the problematic not
with destructive intent, but with the hope of finding innovative and creative openings on to the world. For a postmodernist ethics that acknowledges the inevitability of aporia and refuses the false security of closure, monsters are a pertinent
trope: they are always on the move, always in flux, slipping away even as they are
encountered. It is only those who have no wish to cede the authority and power
that they hold under the sign of modernism who need fear the monsters.
NOTES
Introduction
1. The work of Butler (1993) and Grosz (1994) clearly qualify as exceptional in this
respect, yet there is little sense that either speaks directly to the body as it is lived in its flesh and
blood materiality.
2. Discourse, as I use it, is not simply a matter of language, but a set of what Haraway calls materialsemiotic practices through which objects of attention and knowing subjects are both constituted
(1997: 218).
3. The question of the specific social and political contexts in which the term monstrous is and
has been deployed is far from insignificant, but is beyond the scope of my necessarily limited enquiry.
In choosing to focus on ontological and ethical issues, I have done little more than consistently flag the
analytics of race, sexual difference, disability, and other discourses of difference. Each is highly
specific and deserves extensive attention in its own right, and in the present work I hope to extend and
complicate the framework in which that might take place.
4. Derrida makes the apt and approving suggestion that the hybridisation of heterogeneous textual
bodies may be called a monster (1995b: 385).
1 Monsters, Marvels and Meanings

1. The Renaissance Monster of Ravenna is best known today through the work of the
French surgeon and writer Ambroise Par (c. 151090). I look more closely at the figure later in
this chapter.
2. As I discuss in the next chapter, the doctrine of maternal imagination was widely accepted in
the latter half of the sixteenth century, and was subsequently the subject of rigorous debate for at least
another 150 years. Believers held that the pregnant woman might transmit to her foetus a mark both
of her own somatic experiences, and of her thoughts and desires. See Marie Hlne Huet (1993) for
a detailed exposition of the connection between maternal imagination and monstrosity.
3. In this one tale, Batemans plagiarising of Lycosthenes (1557) is closely mirrored in Fentons
1569 translation of Boaistuau (1560) who in turn had referenced Sebastian Munster who claimed to
have witnessed the monster in 1501.
4. For a comprehensive summary and analysis of Plinys account, see Friedman The Monstrous
Races in Medieval Art and Thought (1981).
5. It is unlikely that the putative traveller, Sir John Mandeville, ever existed, and the English language version of the work is a translation of a French author who himself draws on several prior
sources such as pilgrim guides to the Holy Land. The tale was, nonetheless, extremely popular and by
1500 had been translated into many European languages.
6. In Freaks, Leslie Fiedler, citing twentieth-century tales of the Asian yeti and North American
sasquatch, carries the argument up to date: Even in our own time, we have not given up trying to
persuade ourselves that monstrous races inhabit the remote places of this earth, rather than of our own
deep psyches (1981: 239). And Cohen himself makes clear the links with contemporary preoccupations: Ultima Thule, Ethiopia, and the Antipodes were the medieval equivalents of outer space and
virtual reality, imaginary (wholly verbal) geographies accessible from anywhere, never meant to be
discovered, but always waiting to be explored (1996: 18).
7. See Park and Daston (1981) for an opposing view.
8. See Pallisters Appendix to her translation of On Monsters and Marvels (Par 1982), and similar moves in Longo (1995), and Walton et al. (1993).
NOTES
135
9. The point was that the material condition of monstrosity did not in itself preclude redemption.
In furtherance of his case, Augustine believed that at the Resurrection, God would restore monsters
in perfect human form (City of God, 1972).
10. See Chapter 6 for further commentary on this figure.
11. For historically varying yet situated explanations see, for example, Park and Daston (1981),
Daston (1991), Pingree (1996), and Thomson (1996, 1997). Also Tudor (1995) who links specific
developments in the cinematic monstrous with transformations in late modern society.
12. See Jonathan Sawday, who notes: Imitation...orders the body, the world and the heavens
into a pattern of replication, in which each component of the system finds its precise analogical
equivalent in every other component (1995: 23). Yet neither the system of affinities, nor the
Cartesian model of the mechanistic body which partially replaced it, was sufficient to ensure
certain corporeal knowledge. As Sawday remarks, (the) triumphant overthrow of body-fear never
took place (1995: 37).
13. The doctrine of preformation held that the infant body was already present in all its parts in
miniature in either every sperm or every egg; while epigenesis held that the embryo developed structurally in utero from the progressive differentiation of cells, and that the process required the input of
both sperm and egg.
14. In using the term congenital disability, I am aware that many contemporary theorists and
activists would prefer the word impairment. See for example Carol Thomas discussion in Female
Forms (1999). Nonetheless, for reasons that would be too lengthy to explain here, my own postmodernist
approach, combined with the desire not to obscure the phenomenology of the lived body as a social
and psychical/material experience, leads me to prefer the more familiar terminology. For a more
detailed exposition, see Shildrick and Price (1996) and Price and Shildrick (1998).
15. The prestigious Royal Society, chartered in 1660 and operative in Great Britain, was preceded
and paralleled by the French institutions of Bureau dAdresse (163342) and the subsequent
Acadmie Royale des Sciences, set up in 1666. Other influential groupings of the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries include the College of Physicians (later the Royal College), the Athenian Society,
publishers of the Athenian Gazette, and the group around Le Journal des Savants in France. Each of
these groupings was concerned to investigate the monstrous from an initially Baconian perspective.
See Park and Daston (1981) for further details on the setting up of the Royal Society in explicit part
response to Bacons tripartite schema for a natural history which gave the investigation of the
monstrous co-equal ranking.
16. See also The Shows of London (Altick 1978) for a broader historical and cultural view of the
monster as spectacle, and The Mystery and Lore of Monsters (Thompson 1930), reprinted in 1996 as
The History and Lore of Freaks.
17. After being brought to Europe from southern Africa, the unfortunate Sarah Bartmann was displayed both as a freak for entertainment, and as an object of scientific study. Her body was extensively investigated both in life and after her death, in an attempt to pin down and categorise her
otherness. But as Anne Fausto-Sterling (1995) makes clear, her bodily differences were constructed
in line with existing paradigms of knowledge, and what was at stake in the scientific gaze was an insecurity about race and gender. See also Bernth Lindfors (1996), whose review of ethnographical show
business details Bartmanns British appearances, together with those of a similar group of San people
known as the Bosjemans. In each case, differences in appearance and in speech from European
norms were taken as evidence of racial degeneracy.
18. The missing evolutionary link between apes and human beings was a preoccupation of the later
part of the century, when various individual candidates appeared both in freak shows and in scientific
forums. See, for example, Nigel Rothfels, Aztecs, Aborigines, and Ape-People (1996) for an account
of the phenomenon in Germany.
For a fuller account of the flexibility of categorisation evidenced by What is It? and of its relation to the volatile racial politics of mid-nineteenth-century America, see James W. Cook (1996). It
is known that the figure of What is It? was played by at least two different actors, one black and the
other white.
19. For an account and critical analysis of such beliefs see Aliens in America (Dean 1998).
20. I am grateful to Janet Price for bringing Derridas speech The State of the Lie; The Lie of the
State (1997) at Delhi University to my attention.
136
2 Monstering the (M)Other

1. See Friedman (1981) for a detailed discussion.
2. I use the word diffrance in its Derridean sense to signal the deferral of meaning and identity,
and the extent to which each allegedly simple term is marked by the trace of another term, the
presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority ( Derrida 1981b: 33).
3. For a somewhat different view of the horror of vampires, see Nina Auerbach (1995), who sees
the image of the female vampiric predator as relatively respectable in turn of the century culture.
4. A similar move, again, is made in relation to black bodies whose very presence is contaminatory. The centring of the AIDS epidemic as a phenomenon that has leaked out of Africa (originally
Haiti) is just the latest expression of the imagery of infection and pollution that spreads from the other
to disrupt the same.
5. The account subsequently appeared in the Societys abridged publication of its own proceedings. See Timothy Sheldrake (1747: 31314) Concerning a Monstrous Child Born of a Woman under
Sentence of Transportation.
6. Although Culpeper (161654) and Maubray were not contemporaries, the formers manual, first
published in 1651, went through several editions in the eighteenth century, indicating its continuing
popularity.
7. I mention this in illustration of the point that the coherence of archival narrative is threatened,
as Kaplan notes, by showing on what thin strands of coincidence, accident, or on what unfair forms
of friendship, ownership, geographical proximity, the discoveries (are) based. See Alice Yaeger
Kaplan (1990: 104) Working in the Archives.
8. See for example: Augustine City of God (1972); Conrades Lycosthenes Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon quae praeter naturae ordinem (1557); Stephen Bateman The Doome Warning
all Men to the Iudgemente: Wherein Are Contayned for the Most Parte All the Straunge Prodigies
hapned in the Worlde (1581). A good summary of shifting accounts is offered by Lorraine Daston 1991.
9. Roy Porter claims that Venettes manual of sexual practice and mores was the most popular of
its kind in the French-speaking world of the eighteenth century, and was in addition translated into
four other languages. See Porter 1984. Venette himself was actually an anti-imaginationist, and was
merely outlining the views of others.
10. See Barbara Staffords account of Malebranches influence, in Body Criticism (1991: 31314).
It should be remembered, nonetheless, that the discussion of maternal impressions occupies a relatively small part of a wider discussion of the imagination in Malebranches work.
11. For a detailed account of the debate see Philip K. Wilson (1992) Out of Sight, Out of Mind?
pp. 6385.
12. Alongside such learned disputes, lay interest in the very same issues persisted in the media of
popular midwifery books and natural histories, and in broadsheets and ballads sold on the street or at
fairs. See, for example, the apocryphal Aristotles Works: Containing the Masterpiece, Directions for
Midwives, and Counsel and Advice to Child-bearing Women, with Various Useful Remedies (n.d.);
and Buffons Natural History of 1767, in its English version (1828). Both learned and lay works were
often translated into several languages.
13. The same list also appears in Blondels first response to Turner, The Strength of Imagination
in Pregnant Women Examined (Blondel 1727).
14. It is somewhat unclear whether Blondels belief in emboitment was spermist or ovist. In his
1727 text, he seems to accept the former: By what right has the mothers fancy any influence upon
the body of the foetus when it comes from the Semen virile....If the Father could not causeany
change in the animalcule which was originally in his Body, I desire to know why the Mother should
plead that privilege (1727: 47); whereas by 1729, as the quotation I use in my text makes clear, the
latter is strongly implied. Nonetheless, it appears that although Blondel toyed with ovism as suggested
by Regnier de Graafs work on the ovarian follicule, he favoured Antoni van Loewenhoeks spermatic
explanation. The problem for believers was that emboitment in the spermatozoa implied an enormous
wastage of potentially viable foetuses.
15. The incidence of such frauds is well documented. The notorious case of Mary Toft who, in
1726, claimed to have given birth to seventeen rabbits by reason of maternal passions before
NOTES
137
confessing to fraud was widely satirised and is said by Blondel to have inspired his original pamphlet.
For a full account and convincing analysis of the implications and significance of the case, see Dennis
Todd 1995.
16. Remnants of the belief persist, however, even in the nineteenth century, as evidenced by random letters to respected medical journals. See for example, the credulous letter headed Maternal
Impressions in the Lancet, 4 July 1863: 27.
17. It would be difficult to say that the power of maternal imagination was ever entirely discounted
in lay discourse. Certainly one popular explanation for the appearance of the so-called elephant man,
John Merrick, towards the end of the nineteenth century was that his mother had been startled by a
circus elephant. See the account in the popular and somewhat salacious Victorian text, Anomalies and
Curiosities of Medicine (Gould and Pyke 1897: 81). In a similar vein, and in common with many other
freak show performers, Lionel the lion-faced man a famous exhibit of P.T. Barnum assured audiences that his mother had witnessed a terrible sight, specifically his father being torn apart by lions.
See Fiedler 1981: 167.
18. See Todd 1995 and Huet 1993.
19. Many further parallels might be explored, not least the function of the trace. (My thanks to
Alun Munslow for suggesting the initial link.)
20. The Reith Lectures, which are broadcast every year by the BBC, are a series of six lectures
usually addressing contemporary issues and aimed at lay-people.
21. The theme of bodily contamination is in any case neatly turned on its head when the scientists
decide that Sil has rejected one would-be mate on the grounds that he has a congenital defect. The
monster too appears to have fragile boundaries.
3 The Selfs Clean and Proper Body

1. The argument is established in feminist critique as diverse as Genevieve Lloyds The Man of
Reason (1984) and Luce Irigarays Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a).
2. This is no small matter, for invasion, either corporeal or psychic, is one of our greatest fears.
Indeed the whole genre of horror stories, to which the monstrous is clearly related, might be said to be
fundamentally about invasion. As Creed puts it: The possessed or invaded being is a figure of abjection in that the boundary between self and other has been transgressed (1993: 32). It will strike us,
nonetheless, that there is something odd about a fear that effectively denies the maternalfoetal connection. We all once were concorporate with another, and some of us, as mothers, have experienced
the sharing of bodies in pregnancy. Yet it is precisely that archaic link that constitutes the abject.
3. Julia Epstein (1995) offers an extensive discussion of the significance of hermaphrodism and
related genital disorders in the early modern period.
4. See Londa Schiebinger (1993) on the social and medical fascination with such differences in the
context of racial categorisation.
5. Estimates of the incidence of conjoined twins vary from 1 in 50,000 to 1 in 100,000. The first
successful operation in which both twins survived was not carried out until 1953 in the US.
6. Aristotle implies in De generatione animalium that all twins are monstrous. In justification of
this apparently extreme position, Thijssen reminds us: By monsters, Aristotle does not just mean
creatures which, due to some pathological process, are misshapen, but, much more generally, all creatures which are out of the ordinary in the sense that they are not the result of the common course of
Nature (1987: 240). Surprisingly, then, the Biddenden Maids reputedly born in Kent in 1100 may
be the exception to the rule that conjoined twins are certainly monstrous. Tradition has it that they led
an exemplary Christian life, and on their death at the age of thirty-four endowed a charity for the
needy of the parish. It should be remembered too, that the monstrous does not always imply negativity. Fentons reference to a child with doubled limbs is, for example, entitled, A Wonderful Historie
of a monstrous childe, which was borne the same day that the Genervois and Venicians were reconciled (1569: 135). In a similar vein, Thomas Bedfords sermon on the birth of conjoined twins eulogises their metaphorical relation to the Christian body: Surely these are not more nearly conjoined in
breast and belly than christians ought to be in heart and affection (1635: n.p.).
138
7. Merleau-Ponty (1964) takes a less deterministic view of the mirror stage, in which the
inauguration of difference is always offset by a continuing mutuality of being-in-the-world with others.
8. Interestingly, what Schwartz labels the myth of the vanished twin...the notion that each of us
may once have had a living copy (1996: 24) appears to have some clinical justification. Schwartz
indicates research which suggests that as many as a quarter of singleton births may originally have
been twin conceptions (1996: 20), with the possibility that the weaker foetus is absorbed into its twin
in the early stages of pregnancy. Indeed, the idea of bodies that leak and flow into one another is a
familiar part of the modern language of embryology, and is only gradually displaced by reference to
the apparent certainty of organic boundaries.
9. Although on one level the oneness of such twins may appal, on another they may be an
attractive, albeit uneasy, reminder of the lost pre-subjectal plenitude of undifferentiated infant/
maternal corporeality.
10. In analysing a number of recent accounts of conjunction and concorporation, I am aware that
my approach traverses ground that will have highly personal meanings to surviving twins and their
families. None of the material I use is outside the public domain, and some has been very deliberately
given wide circulation, but in addition to safeguards already incorporated into the original texts, I
have taken the step of withholding potentially identifying surnames. Nonetheless, I remain conscious
that the significances I wish to elicit may be in tension with authorised interpretations, and want to
stress that my primary concern is not with the specific material circumstances of the twins as such.
Emphatically, the issue is not to offer judgement on any of those involved in the varying accounts,
but to investigate the nature of the ontological and ethical responses.
11. Since I finished this chapter, the highly publicised case of the Maltese conjoined twins, born in
the UK in 2000, has brought some of the issues I discuss to a wider audience. Known as Jodie and Mary,
the pair have been consistently treated as separate beings, despite an extensive degree of concorporation.
The need for separation surgery in this case, nonetheless, has been widely debated both in lay and
legal contexts not for reasons of doubt about the ontological status of the infant body, but because it
was clear that Mary was parasitic on Jodie and would inevitably die if she were unable to share her
twins vital functions. At the same time, it was calculated that failure to operate would result in the
deaths of both after a few months. (The operation did in fact go ahead in November 2000.) The situation was then, extremely complex and I do not presume to judge it. The point I would make, however,
is that the debate was conducted in almost exclusively modernist terms, hinging on the right to life, and/or
to self-defence, and the disputed rights of the parents, while professional bioethicists added in cost/benefit
considerations. The question of what constitutes a self and its relation to the body was not addressed.
12. For a rather different documentary narrative of medical intervention, in which the concerns of the
clinic were overriding, and for which the filming itself realised a certain technologized medical gaze,
see Clark and Mysers account (1996) of the separation of the Thai conjoined twins, Dao and Duan.
13. In psychoanalytic terms, the mirroring process (both literal and metaphorical), by which the
infant comes to see itself as separate and distinct, allows accession to a self-image of corporeal unity
that covers over the reality of the fragmentary and uncoordinated motor experiences of the child
(Lacan 1977a). As an ego ideal, however, the resultant body map is precarious, having a psychical
interior, which requires continual stabilization, and a corporeal exterior which remains labile, open to
many meanings (Grosz 1994: 38).
14. See Foucault 1977.
15. Neither of these cases is in any way unique. Parasitic twinning, and to a lesser extent supernumerary heads, feature in many early monster books, and are described by Lycosthenes (1557),
Boaistuau (1560), Par (1573), Licetus (1634), Aldrovandus (1642) and Bartholinus (1654), among
others. C.J.S. Thompson (1930) details many other occurrences, traced through handbills, eyewitness
accounts, and personal appearances, as for example in Barnums freak shows.
4 Contagious Encounters and the Ethics of Risk

1. It is interesting that Fiedler refers to the freak show tradition of displaying human foetuses in
glass jars. While the staging was called officially The Show of Life, it was known by carnival people
NOTES
139
themselves as pickled punks. Fiedler sees it as a form of pornography, an ultimate invasion of

privacy, revealing what travesties of the human form even the most normal among us are at two, three,
or four months after conception (1981: 18). What he does not adequately explain is why he would
wish such forms to remain hidden.
2. Catherine Waldby (1996) has written succinctly on the connection between immunology, public
health and individual ontology in the context of HIV-AIDs.
3. I am deliberately using the term broadly, because although there are multiple ways in which disability is experienced, I want to take up the sense in which those specific categories are collapsed into
a generalised icon of improper embodiment in conventional discourse.
4. It is not that disability studies are non-existent, but that they are largely seen as the responsibility of academics who themselves have disabilities. As with feminist studies, their limited impact may
in part reflect a certain self-policing of boundaries, of who is and who is not entitled to speak, teach
or research, but that only serves to confirm the binary thinking at an institutional level.
5. The phobic projection of vulnerability onto the (feminine) other signals for Freud an unresolved
castration crisis (Freud 1933); for Klein, the rage and confusion occasioned by the loss of the mothers
breast (Klein 1986); and for Lacan, a denial of the actual powerlessness of the phallus (Lacan 1977b).
6. By paternalism I mean making decisions on behalf of others, or acting in their supposed interests, without their fully informed consent.
7. Such ontological anxiety is part undercut by the turn, often advocated by activists, to a social
model of disability which insists that disabling effects are produced by society rather than being the
property of individuals. See Oliver 1996, and Shakespeare and Watson 1997, for examples. The
implication is that a real self is frustrated by the attribution of an improper status.
8. The complication introduced by Thomson is that in the historical context of nineteenth-century
patriarchal United States, the middle-class women themselves are highly constrained by the cult of
domesticity and far from being the autonomous and invulnerable agents they wish to be. See Thomson
1997: Chapter 4, Benevolent Maternalism and the Disabled Women in Stowe, Davis, and Phelps.
9. Liz Grosz summarises imaginary anatomy as an internalized image or map of the meaning that
the body has for the subject, for others in its social world, and for the symbolic order conceived in its
generality (that is, for a culture as a whole). It is an individual and collective fantasy of the bodys
forms and modes of action (1994: 3940). The earlier term, philosophical anatomy refers to the
supposedly transcendent significance of the human body in reflecting the order and harmony of
the created universe. Although the idealised perfection of Vitruvian Man rapidly lost influence after
the Renaissance, the idea that the body holds the key to the laws of nature is still fully evident in the
early nineteenth-century studies of teratology conducted by Geoffroy St-Hilaire. The point is that the
biomedical representation of corporeality is always sutured with complementary discourses which are
evident in the metaphorical structure of science and self-consciously imaginative texts alike. See, for
example, Jonathan Sawday (1995) for a highly evocative analysis of Renaissance and early modern
anatomy in the light of contemporary philosophy, literature, art, religion and natural science.
10. Lacans reading of the mirror stage and its emphasis on the narcissistic construction of selfhood is challenged by (among others) Cynthia Willett who claims: The mirror holds the attention of
the infant not because it provides a static image of wholeness but because it recalls the interactive
qualities of subjectivity (1995: 68). Nonetheless, Lacans analysis better explains the dominant
conception of western selfhood.
11. As Lacan remarks:
This disarray, this fragmentedness, this fundamental discordance, this essential lack of adaptation,
this anarchy, which opens up every possibility of displacement, that is of error, is characteristic of
the instinctual life of man. . . .That is in fact what so many different experiences show one, and calling them psychopathological conveys nothing since they lie on a continuum with many experiences
which themselves are regarded as normal. (1988: 169)
12. It will strike us that the uncanny carries much of the force of Derridean diffrance, as a term
that undoes binary difference. As Freud is at pains to stress, the words heimlich/unheimlich are by no
means simple opposites, and might be better expressed as (un)heimlich. The meaning of heimlich is
both that which is homely, familiar, intimate, and that which is concealed and hidden from sight
(Freud 1919).
140
5 Levinas and Vulnerable Becoming

1. Throughout this chapter, I have referred to the other in my own text without capitalization.
Although Levinas makes a distinction, especially in Totality and Infinity between autrui and autre
as personal Other and general other respectively, his translator, Alphonso Lingis, admits that he has
had to sacrifice the possibility of reproducing the authors use of capital or small letters with both
these terms in the French text (Levinas 1969: 25n.). In Otherwise than Being, the issue has been
shelved, and lower case is the general form. I follow all quotations as they are given in translation.
2. The Saying and the Said are aspects respectively of pre-ontological and post-ontological
language. While the latter refers to themes, propositions and meanings that are a conscious communication between subjects, either individually or as a socius, the former is the event of the risky exposure of the one to the other in the ethical encounter. Saying holds open its openness, without excuses,
evasion or alibis, delivering itself without saying anything Said (Levinas 1998: 143). It is a statement
of the here I am which is identified with nothing but the very voice that states and delivers itself,
the voice that signifies (ibid.).
3. I am using the term gift in the postmodernist sense of that which is given with no goal, and
that is not the prelude to exchange. It presupposes neither the donor nor receiver as separate identities. As Derrida puts it: For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I will give him or her,
then there will not be a gift (1992: 12).
4. I take up this theme more fully in Chapter 6.
6 The Relational Economy of Touch

1. See Richard Rorty (1980) and Rodolphe Gasch (1986) for detailed analyses.
2. As Derrida has made clear, reiteration is not in any case a faithful copy. See, for example,
Limited Inc (Derrida 1988) and Judith Butler Bodies That Matter (1993) for a detailed exposition.
3. Deleuze insists that Foucaults work is haunted by the theme of the double, which he links with
the notion of the fold that produces an interiorisation of the outside. Accordingly, the double is never
a projection of the interior. . . .I do not encounter myself on the outside, I find the other in me. . . .It
resembles exactly the invagination of a tissue in embryology (Deleuze 1988: 98). Moreover, that
other cannot be fully assimilated; there is always a snag, a difference, in the operation of the fold.
4. Anzieus view is no mere rhetorical gesture, but is widely accepted in both physiological and
psychological literature. Ashley Montagu, for example, offers the following: When the embryo is
less than an inch long from crown to rump, and less than eight weeks old, light stroking of the upper
lip or wings of the nose will cause bending of the neck and trunk away from the source of stimulation. At this stage in its development, the embryo has neither eyes nor ears. Yet its skin is already
highly developed (1971: 1).
5. Levinas too insists that the face to face encounter is not a play of mirrors (1969: 183). But
where for Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray the encounter is mediated by touch, and the potential opening
onto sociality, Levinas is concerned to emphasise not mutuality, but a responsibility beyond ourselves: The surpassing of phenomenal or inward existence does not consist in receiving the recognition of the Other, but in offering him ones being (1969: 183).
6. One is reminded of Foucaults expression of the folds that constitute the doubling of the self.
See note 3.
7. The first cut is of course that of the umbilical cord interconnecting mother and infant.
8. I am grateful to Janet Price for posing this question to me. Interestingly, Merleau-Ponty makes
a similar point with regard to his flesh ontology: Where are we to put the limit between the body and
the world, since the world is flesh? (1968: 138). He further discusses the matter of the cut, what he
calls the cleavage in relation to the meother exchange (1968: 215). I am reminded that cleave is
one of those words, to which Derrida has alerted us, that means two apparently contradictory things,
as in (a) split apart and (b) cling to. As Derrida remarks: Words of this type situate better than others
the places where discourses can no longer dominate, judge, decide: between the positive and the
NOTES
141
negative, the good and the bad, the true and the false (1995b: 86). How, then, should we think twin
bodies in the mode of cleavage?
9. In another well-documented case of conjoined twins in the UK, the post-operative strategy of
positioning a mirror next to the bed of each recovering twin both served to reflect back a whole and
separate self, and was seen to minimise distress at the loss of the other-self (ITN report, 21 July 1998).
These ostensibly contradictory aims at least show an awareness of the paradox of concorporation that
is entirely missing in the case of Hira and Nida, the twins discussed in Chapter 3. To aid the formers
recovery after separation, the therapist has no doubt of what is required: Right away we got a mirror
and showed her she was just her (BBC TV, 1999).
10. Where flesh is used in the sense intended by Merleau-Ponty, the emotion may be independent of actual contact. I am touched by the images of the Still Life exhibition (see Chapter 4), and by
documentaries about concorporate twins, precisely because we share the same elemental, intercorporeal, mutually enfolding space.
11. See Chapter 3 for an initial discussion of the Coloredo twins.
7 Welcoming the Monstrous Arrivant

1. For a fuller analysis of Derridas position, see Shildrick 1997: 1607.
2. As Haraway explains:
Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is
about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method. (1990: 190)
3. FemaleMan is Haraways own term, originally derived from Joanna Russ novel The Female
Man (1975), for a transgenic hominid creation of techno-science and informatics. OncomouseTM is the
commercial name of a special laboratory-manipulated strain of mice which bears oncogenes, and was
marketed by the Du Pont medical products division in the 1990s as a cancer research tool. For
Haraway, each is both potentially promising and apocalyptic.
4. See, for example, Lee Quinbys reservations in Anti-Apocalypse, 1994: 91.
5. On the less abstract level too there is reason for caution, for the bodily reconstructions that are
at the heart of global biotechnology are driven, as Haraway recognises, by the search for power and
profit (1997: 61).
6. Mary Shelleys Frankenstein was published in 1818; an account of Etienne Geoffroy
St-Hilaires experiments, Considrations gnrales sur les monstres, in 1826 (cited in Wilson 1993).
7. See Shildrick 1997, Chapter 6, for a fuller analysis of such concerns with regard to the advanced
reproductive technologies available in the western world.
8. This is particularly true of Derridean discourse, where the clearest use of the feminine as the
privileged figure of undecidability can be found in Dissemination (1981a).
9. There are frequent allusions throughout Derridas work to the ethical emptiness of a rule-bound,
calculative morality that takes no account of undecidability. Perhaps the clearest exposition is found
in the question and answer session published as Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility where
Derrida remarks:
there would be no decision, in the strong sense of the word, in ethics, in politics, no decision and
thus no responsibility, without the experience of some undecidability. If you dont experience some
undecidability, then the decision would simply be the application of a programme, the consequence
of a premiss or a matrix. So a decision has to go through some impossibility in order for it to be a
decision. (1999: 66)
10. Andrew Tudors analysis of what he terms paranoid horror, which arises where boundaries
cannot be recuperated, is one such example. Specifically he uses film to exemplify contemporary
experiences of disorder and incoherence in social life (1995: 39).
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INDEX
Entries in Bold indicates illustrations
A
abject, the/abjection 5, 20, 45, 54, 55, 64, 67,
69, 812, 84, 85, 107, 113, 117, 130, 132
abnormality 4, 201, 23, 24, 50, 69, 73
absent presence 5, 38, 54, 56, 62, 115
Ahmed, Sara 100, 101
Albertus Magnus, Pseudo 12
Aldrovandus, Ulyssis 138n
Altick, Richard F. 135n
anxiety 29, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 44, 47,
52, 535, 734, 75, 76, 84, 107,
116, 124, 131
ontological anxiety 10, 17, 62, 72, 79,
99, 114, 120, 139n
Anzalda, Gloria 124, 126
Anzieu, Didier 109, 140n
archives 9, 26, 136n
Aristotle 3, 1112, 16, 312, 34, 53, 137n
Aristotles Works 17, 136n
Auerbach Nina 136n
Augustine 19, 135n
B
Bacon, Francis 2021, 135n
Bakhtin, Mikhail 54
Barnum, P. T. 24, 25, 137n
Bartholinus, Thomas 138n
Bartholomews Fair 24
Bartmann Sarah 25, 135n
Bateman, Stephen 13, 1415, 18, 19, 52, 53
Baudrillard, Jean 105
becoming 6, 7, 8, 76, 789, 84, 85, 86, 87,
10102, 104, 107, 113, 114, 116,
117, 119, 130, 132
becoming-in-the-world 101, 131
Bedford, Thomas 19, 55, 137n
Bengali Boy, the 646, 65
bestiaries 15
binary oppositions 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 24, 289,
30, 38, 45, 46, 55, 61, 68, 75, 77, 78,
834, 85, 105, 126
structure of knowledge 17, 28, 68,
76, 111
biology 1011, 31, 34, 72, 73, 82, 128
biologism 2, 20, 83
biomedicine 22, 23, 24, 63, 65, 75, 76,

789, 83, 115, 139n
bio(medical) science 9, 2022, 43,
72, 125
Blondel, James Augustus 136n, 137n
see also TurnerBlondell debate
Boaistuau, Pierre 13, 138n
body, the 4867, 106119 passim
body image 4, 63, 105, 106, 117
body modification 545, 62, 67
as constructed 4, 1011, 24, 54,
78, 84, 120
as fluid 10, 54, 106, 107, 114
as leaky 4, 30, 71, 72, 103, 106,
107, 108, 116, 138n as property
58, 63, 75, 108
clean and proper 53, 55, 68, 71,
81, 86, 107, 117
womens bodies 2847 passim, 72, 73,
81, 106, 113; see also pregnancy
Bogdan, Robert 24, 72
Boler, Megan 778
Bouc, Paul-Gabriel 43
boundaries 5, 9, 18, 24, 25, 28, 456, 47, 48,
51, 68, 81, 97, 106, 114, 116, 117,
1224, 130
Braidotti, Rosi 29, 44, 67
Bulwer, John 1213
Burlingham, Dorothy 59
Butler, Judith 5, 10, 25, 47, 78, 83, 84,
85, 135n
reiteration 140n
C
Canguilhem, Georges 29
Caputo, John 8, 98
Cataldi, Sue L. 111, 116, 117
Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins 568, 57
Chanter, Tina 99
chiasm 67, 11112, 113
Cicero, Marcus Tullius 12
Clark, David L. 138n
cloning 44
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 16, 45, 134n
Coloredo, Lazarus and John Baptista 634,
64, 66, 117
concorporation 58, 6366, 68, 108, 109,
112, 114, 115, 116, 137n, 141n
150
conjoined twins, see twins

contagion 24, 52, 6871, passim
contamination 701, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78,
80, 81, 82, 85, 103, 128
linguistic contamination 834
see also contagion
Cook, James W. 135n
corporeality 1, 4, 10, 45, 51, 73, 103,
113, 138n
Couser, G. Thomas 72
Crary, Jonathan 1212
Creed, Barbara 45, 82, 137n
Critchley, Simon 94, 101
Culpeper, Nicholas 32, 136n
cyborgs 10, 54, 121, 122, 123, 1258
D
Daston, Lorraine 21, 134n, 135n
Davis, Lennard J. 80
Dean, Jodi 135n
Deleuze, Gilles 140n
body-without-organs 125
Dennett, Andrea Stulman 73
Derrida, Jacques 5, 6, 67, 82, 84, 88, 93,
97, 1223, 129131, 135n, 140n
archives 26, 38
ethics 1223, 12931, 141n
the monstrous arrivant 130
(re)iteration 26, 84, 140n
Descartes, Ren 35, 48, 51, 122
diffrance 5, 28, 46, 56, 67, 82, 84, 131,
136n, 139n
difference 2, 5, 24, 28, 45, 51, 52, 53, 71,
73, 80, 82, 83, 89, 95, 100, 101, 103,
104, 111, 11819, 122, 1278, 132
sexual difference 8, 28, 33, 36, 96,
978, 106, 1223, 125, 127
Dijkstra, Bram 301
Diprose, Rosalyn 50
disability 2, 7, 22, 23, 29, 51, 53,
717 passim, 79, 80, 106, 135n
social model of 139n
distance 4, 23, 36, 92, 97, 103, 109, 111
distancing, process of 245, 68, 69,
73, 118
Doane, Mary Ann 44
double, the 81, 140n
E
elephant man 137n
ego 63, 88, 93, 97, 105, 106, 109, 114, 138n
skin ego 109
embodiment 2, 10, 20, 29, 4951, 75, 78,
7980, 85, 101, 105, 108, 111, 11617,
12021
emboitment 40, 136n

embryology 20, 389
empathy 74, 77, 93
encounters 5, 6, 8, 47, 74, 77, 78, 82, 87,
91, 94, 97, 100, 110, 119, 130, 132
Epstein, Julia 44, 51, 137n
ethics 3, 7, 8, 47, 51, 60, 61, 67, 75,
768, 79,
83, 86, 104, 106, 108, 116, 118, 119,
125, 128
Levinasian ethics 87102, 110
posthumanist ethics 12933
eugenics 43, 71, 85
exclusion 5, 22, 46, 84, 104, 105, 106, 129, 132
F
Fausto-Sterling, Anne 135n
feminine, the 2, 44, 73, 979, 105, 110,
11213, 115, 122, 127, 141n
as monstrous 2831, 446, 48, 75
see also women
feminism 2, 8, 27, 73, 92, 93, 98, 103,
104, 119, 121, 122, 123, 125, 127
Fenton, Edward 13, 35, 137n
Fiedler, Leslie 58, 134n, 1389n
Foucault, Michel 19, 20, 33, 63, 78, 107,
108, 120
double, the 107, 140n
freaks, freak show 22, 2325, 57, 66, 69,
72, 73, 108, 135n, 137n, 138n
Freud, Sigmund 27, 38, 114, 139n
(un)heimlich 81, 139n
Friedman, John Block 16, 53, 134n, 136n
G
Gash, Rodolphe 140n
gaze, the 24, 73, 74, 103, 107, 113, 125
Gearhart, Suzanne 26
genome, human 723, 131
Geoffroy St-Hilaire, Etienne and Isidore
201, 125
gift 93, 94, 140n
Goodin, Robert E. 77
Grimes, Karl 689
Grosz, Elizabeth 4, 667, 75, 105, 117,
135n, 138n
H
Halberstam, Judith 63
Haraway, Donna 9, 10, 11, 54, 122, 123128,
129, 131, 135n
as ironic 123, 126, 141n
INDEX
Hartsoeker, Nicolaus 39
HIV-AIDS 53, 55, 136n, 139n
Hira and Nida 601, 141n
history
as discursive 267, 43
Huet, Marie Hlne 37, 38, 44, 125, 134n
human 3, 19, 20, 22, 25, 29, 41, 44, 48,
523, 54, 108, 12025, 131
humanism 12022, 123, 125, 1267,
1289
hybridity 16, 1719, 121, 122, 125, 129
I
identity 5, 11, 23, 25, 28, 46, 51, 56, 579,
63, 667, 68, 79, 80, 89, 97, 104, 105,
108, 112, 113, 118, 119, 121, 124, 126,
127, 130, 131, 136n
self identity 17, 50, 80, 81, 87, 90,
106, 108, 109, 113
identification with 6, 579, 67, 73,
778, 79, 90, 109, 132
imaginary, the 3, 6, 7, 910, 11, 16, 22,
23, 24, 71, 79, 85, 104, 110, 113,
114, 124, 128, 132
imaginary anatomy 79, 109, 139n
imagination 33, 35, 43, 125
see also maternal imagination
indifferentiation 5, 56, 82, 109, 118-19
interpellation 84
Irigaray, Luce 94, 967, 1045, 106, 108,
110, 111, 11214, 115, 117, 11819,
121, 137n
iterability 834
J
Jacob, Franois 34
Jantzen, Grace 91, 98
justice 95, 96, 99
K
Kaplan, Alice Yaeger 136n
Katie and Eilish 613, 114116
Katie and Eilish: Siamese Twins 61
Eilish: Life Without Katie 62, 115
Kirby, Vicki 1267, 128
Klein, Melanie 139n
Kristeva, Julia 46, 534, 55, 813, 84, 107, 117
Kwinter, Sanford 1212
L
Lacan Jacques 50, 79, 10506, 110, 113
mirror stage 56, 589, 7981, 105,
138n, 139n
151
LaCapra, Dominick 26
Lavater, John Caspar 43
Leder, Drew 49, 112
Levinas, Emmanuel 87102, 11011,
130, 140n
assymmetry of self-other 88, 95, 111
the face 87, 8990, 91, 94, 98, 101
the hostage 90, 93, 98, 99
the maternal 92, 98
proximity 87, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97,
99, 11011
Saying, the, and the Said 88, 95, 140n
substitution 93, 97, 98
third party 945
see also ethics; self; other
Licetus, Fortunius 13, 138n
Lindfors, Bernth 135n
Lingis, Alphonso 104, 140n
Linnaeus, Carolus 22
Lloyd, Genevieve 137n
Locke, John 48
Longmore, Paul K. 73
Longo, Lawrence 134n
Lycosthenes, Conrades 13, 138n
Lyotard Jean-Francois 107
M
Malebranche, Nicolas 3537, 38, 39, 40
Mandevilles Travels 16, 134n
maternal imagination/impressions 14, 3243,
65, 134n, 137n
as fraud 41, 1367n
Maubray, John 32, 42, 136n
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 49, 58, 623,
11012, 11314, 118
flesh 111, 112, 140n,141n
reversibility thesis 49, 11112
mind-body split 35, 39, 489, 501, 534,
61, 72, 119
mirror (images) 50, 56, 59, 1034, 105,
107, 113, 118, 138n, 139n, 140n 141n
see also Lacan, mirror stage
monsters
Monster of Cracow 19, 512, 52, 53,
54, 108
Monster of Ravenna 10, 1719, 18
as excessive 11, 32, 46, 51, 56, 74,
107, 129
as fluid 5, 48, 68, 75, 80, 103, 132
as marvels, prodigies or wonders 12,
1323 passim, 64
as other 23, 17, 20, 25, 28,
55, 129
as sign of moral failure 12, 1516, 17,
32, 53
152
monsters cont.
ambiguity of 3, 5, 19, 20, 45, 46, 54,
80, 82, 107
eye-witness accounts of 13, 32, 35
historical accounts of 9, 1124
performativity of 26
monstrous births 12, 13, 14, 21, 338,
40, 42, 53
monstrous races 9, 12, 15, 1516,
53, 134n
Montagu, Ashley 140n
Munster, Sebastian 134n
Myser, Catherine 138n
N
Natanson v. Kline 75
nature 10, 11, 12, 17, 20, 1234, 128
normality 29, 50, 55, 60, 61
normalisation 20, 223, 545, 56,
60, 63, 667, 117, 131
normativity 2, 4, 29, 50, 612, 71, 78,
103, 116, 124
Nussbaum, Martha 85
O
Oliver, Michael 139n
ontology 9, 20, 434, 49, 50, 51, 59, 67, 68,
70, 71, 72, 76, 84, 85, 87, 91, 96, 99,
111, 114, 116, 119, 131
other, the 2, 11, 289, 43, 45, 51, 69, 71,
104, 10611 passim,113, 11519
passim, 124
as irreducible 5, 69, 75, 78, 83, 88, 89,
96, 119, 122, 131
in Levinas 85, 88102
within (the self) 4, 5, 28, 31, 46, 823,
107, 116, 12931
P
Par, Ambroise 12, 18, 345, 378, 138n
Park, Katharine 134n, 135n
phantom limb 623
phenomenology 49, 58, 60, 62, 106, 108,
110, 114
phobia 74, 139n
mysophobia 74
Pliny, the Elder 15, 17
Porter, Roy 38, 136n
preformation 3940, 135n
pregnancy 10, 306 passim, 3943 passim,
46, 65, 756, 116, 137n
Price, Janet 78, 135n
psychic dimensions
of the body 11, 51, 7980, 106, 108,
116, 135n, 138n
psychic dimensions cont.

of the monster 26
of the other 823
of the self 55, 81, 114
Q
Quinby, Lee 141n
R
race 30, 71, 135n, 137n
racism 3, 9, 16, 22, 24, 25, 28, 301,
52, 60, 85, 1278
response 87, 92, 94, 100
responsibility 87, 90, 91, 923, 95, 98,
100, 110, 111, 123, 128, 130,
131, 141n
of mothers 4143
Richards, Evelleen 656
Rorty, Richard 140n
Rothfels, Nigel 135n
Royal Society 23, 32, 33, 41, 65, 135n
S
Samuels, R. 106
Sawday, Jonathan 135n, 139n
Schiebinger, Londa 137n
Schwartz, Hillel 58, 59, 138n
self, the 17, 25, 2930, 46, 489, 50, 58,
68, 6971, 75, 80, 86, 104, 107110,
113, 115119 passim, 130, 141n
in Levinas 8897 passim
selfsame 5, 25, 30, 31, 45, 46, 56, 83,
93, 96, 101, 104, 105, 107, 118, 119,
128, 130, 132
Semonin, Paul 234
Separate Lives 60
sexuality 301, 378, 42, 456
Shakespeare, Tom 139n
Sheldrake, Timothy 323
Shelley, Mary Wollenstonecraft 125
Shildrick, Margrit 48, 49, 78, 79, 84,
135n, 141n
skin 51, 93, 103, 108, 10910, 114, 115,
117, 119, 126
Sontag, Susan 53
soul 19, 41, 56, 64
Species 456
Spivak, Gayatri 11, 83, 85, 97, 99, 121
Stafford, Barbara Maria 42, 44, 136n
Stewart, Susan 24, 25
Still Life 689, 74, 82, 856, 87, 95, 100,
101, 141n
INDEX
subject, the 3, 4, 5, 30, 48, 501, 56, 61,
63, 667, 81, 85, 88, 92, 98, 103,
10507, 111, 112, 117, 119, 12021, 132
Superville, Daniel de 401
T
Thijssen, J. M. 137n
Thomas, Carol 135n
Thompson, C. J. S. 135n, 138n
Thomson, Rosemarie Garland 223, 72, 76
Todd, Dennis 24, 137n
touch 73, 80, 103, 105, 107, 108, 10914,
115, 116119, 132
Tudor, Andrew 135n, 141n
Turner, Daniel
TurnerBlondell debate 3942
Turner, William 66
twins 59, 137n
conjoined twins 14, 19, 23, 51, 5663,
1089, 112, 113, 114116, 137n, 138n;
separation of 58, 603, 114; see also:
Chang and Eng; Hira and Nida; Katie
and Eilish
parasitic twinning 63, 66, 117, 138n;
see also: Bengali Boy; Coloredo,
Lazarus and John Baptista;
concorporation
U
uncanny, the 81, 83, 107, 117, 122, 139n
undecidability 2, 8, 27, 62, 84, 85, 114,
116, 118, 129, 131, 141n
unheimlich 130
see also Freud; uncanny, the
153
V
vampires 30, 136n
Vasseleu, Cathryn 89, 92, 110
Venette, Nicolas 38, 136n
viscerality 11213
vision 89, 110
visible 109
voyeurism 78, 69, 115
vulnerability 3, 6, 16, 17, 20, 30, 37, 52,
534, 60, 68, 69, 70, 713, 74, 758,
79, 8295 passim, 98, 10102, 106,
107, 111, 11718, 120, 121, 124,
126, 12833 passim
W
Waldby, Catherine 78, 139n
Waldenfels, Bernhard 89
Walton, M.T. 134n
Warner, Marina 44
Watson, Nicholas 139n
Wendell, Susan 73, 74
Willett, Cynthia 92, 934, 98, 139n
Wilson, Dudley 20
Wilson, Philip K. 136n
women 5, 11, 29, 3045, passim, 71, 72,
98, 104, 123, 127
irrationality of 356, 43
as objects of disciplinary power 423, 44
see also feminine, the
Wood, David 96
Y
Young, Iris Marion 50, 82

Margrit Shildrick - Embodyng The Monster - Encounters With The Vulnerable Self

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Embodying the Monster

Theory, Culture & Society

Embodying the Monster

London Thousand Oaks New Delhi

2002 Margrit Shildrick

Typeset by SIVA Math Setters, Chennai, India

1. Monsters, Marvels and Meanings

2. Monstering the (M)Other

3. The Selfs Clean and Proper Body

4. Contagious Encounters and the Ethics of Risk

5. Levinas and Vulnerable Becoming

6. The Relational Economy of Touch

7. Welcoming the Monstrous Arrivant

Human twins conjoined at the head, born at Worms in 1495

Some members of the Monstrous Races in Cosmographiae

The Monster of Ravenna in De monstrorum caussis, natura,

The Monster of Cracow in De monstrorum caussis, natura,

Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins, photographed in 1860

Lazarus and John Baptista Coloredo from

The Bengali Boy (Basire) from The Philosophical Transactions

Conjoined twins from Still Life (Karl Grimes 1997)

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

trajectory of postmodernisms is multiple, and for feminism in particular, the body

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

the pathology of abnormal corporeality, there is another more disruptive intuition

self-containment. Moreover, when in addition that threat is associated with

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

monstrous may operate within historically changing parameters, but it is as

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

and current, overtly fantastic and ostensibly accurate representations of reality.

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

forms of imaginary are mobilised by their expressive strategies. The differential

MONSTERS, MARVELS AND MEANINGS

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

insofar as Aristotle marked excess and deficiency more generally as conditions of

MONSTERS, MARVELS AND MEANINGS

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

narrative descriptions reappear across a range of works spanning many decades,

MONSTERS, MARVELS AND MEANINGS

Figure 1.2 Some members of the Monstrous Races in Cosmographiae

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

MONSTERS, MARVELS AND MEANINGS

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

Figure 1.3 The Monster of Ravenna in De monstrorum natura, caussis et

resemblance to both an angel and a devil. The figure is evidently intersexed,

MONSTERS, MARVELS AND MEANINGS

Ravenna is a highly symbolic figure constructed at the confluence of several

By the early seventeenth century, however, the canonist, Alphonzo a Carranza,

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

of curiosity or fear, and has a similar history of heralding events to come, of

MONSTERS, MARVELS AND MEANINGS

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

MONSTERS, MARVELS AND MEANINGS

the monstrous body represented at once boundless liberty and appalling

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

MONSTERS, MARVELS AND MEANINGS

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

accounts, not just in terms of ideological interests, but as a matter of psychic

MONSTERS, MARVELS AND MEANINGS

MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER

EMBODYING THE MONSTER

MONSTERING THE (M)OTHER

EMBODYING THE MONSTER