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Monstrosity and the Monstrous

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2024

Georges Canguilhem
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Extract

The existence of monsters throws doubt on life's ability to teach us order. This doubt is immediate, no matter for how long a time we have had confidence, no matter how accustomed we have been to see honeysuckle grow on honeysuckle vines, tadpoles become frogs, mares suckle colts, and in general to see like engender like. It is sufficient that this confidence be shaken once by a morphological variation, by a single equivocal appearance, for a radical fear to possess us. Perhaps, fear, you will say; but why radical? Because we are living beings, real effects of the laws of life, and in our turn future causes of life. A failure on the part of life concerns us doubly: a failure could affect us, and we could cause a failure. It is only because we men are living beings that a morphological failure is, in our eyes, a monster. Suppose we were pure reason, a pure intellectual machine for observing, calculating, and accounting—inert, and indifferent to the objects that give rise to thought: in that case the monster would simply be that which was different from the ordinary, of an order other than the most probable order.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 10 , Issue 40 , December 1962 , pp. 27 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © 1962 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Section 26.

2 L'Opposition universelle, Paris, 1897, p. 25.

3 Corps de Philosophie: La Physique ou Science des choses naturelles, bk. VII, ch. 22: "Des monstres," Geneva, 1636. 1st ed. Paris, 1607.

4 Histoire des monstres depuis l'Antiquité jusqu'à nos jours, Paris, 1880, p. 69.

5 Recherche de la vérité, Book II, Part 1, Chapter 7.

6 "Recherches sur la force de l'imagination des femmes enceintes sur le fœtus, à l'occasion d'un chien monstrueux" (Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences et belles-lettres, 1756. Berlin, 1758, p. 12).

7 Paris, Colin, 1955.

8 Paris, Colin, 1960.

9 "Au sujet d'Adonis," in Variété, Paris, Gallimard, 33rd ed. 1927, p. 81.

10 Folie et diraison, Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, Paris, Plon, 1961.

11 P. 198.

12 Op. cit., bk. I, p. 37.

13 Recherches sur la production artificielle des monstruosités, Paris, 1877, p. 44.

14 Quoted by Dareste, Recherches etc., p. 35.

15 Collège philosophique, Paris, 24 January 1962.

16 La Science des monstres, Paris, Gallimard, 1948, p. 17.

* This article is based on a lecture delivered in Brussels on February 9th, 1962, at the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Belgique.