ABSTRACT
This chapter will consider the significance Foucault’s conceptual framework for understanding monsters has for conjoined twins in the present. For Foucault, conjoined twins represent the ‘privileged monster of the Renaissance’ (Foucault, 2003, p 66). However, while Foucault emphasises this historical period, he does not conclude that conjoined twins thereafter lost monster status. In contrast to Canguilhem (1964, p 38), he does not insist that medical science heralded the death of monsters. Conjoined twins not only exist in the present as an empirical fact.1 They might also be properly characterised as monsters within Foucault’s theoretical terms, that is to say, in terms of a double breach, of law and nature. Indeed, it may be that conjoined twins are the sole figure to have retained monster status over time. In this respect, contemporary legal treatment of conjoined twins might be viewed as demonstrating continuity in the importance of irregular morphology and the element of natality to the monster category. In contending that conjoined twins can be viewed as monsters within Foucault’s terms, it is important to emphasise that there is no simple or necessary relationship between advances made in medical science and the disappearance of monsters. Monsters do not disappear simply because science gains mastery over them. For monster status is not an effect of mystery or lack of scientific knowledge. It is not lost because particular forms of difference are rendered transparent. Rather, monster status is lost when a breach of nature no
longer poses a challenge to or upsets law. It is precisely for this reason that conjoined twins can be distinguished from hermaphrodites and human/animal hybrids of old. Moreover, it is precisely for this reason, as we will see in the following chapter, that the human/animal admixed embryo can be considered a monster.
