ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we considered the ‘problem’ of concorporation in the specific and contemporary context of conjoined twins. In this context, emphasis was placed on the continued relevance of the older meaning of the concept of monstrosity as morphological irregularity. Indeed, and as noted in chapter 6, it may be that conjoined twins represent the sole figure to have been considered a legal monster over time as an unbroken chain. Certainly, in relation to Foucault’s monster archetypes, this claim could only be made in relation to conjoined twins. In this chapter, we return to another of Foucault’s monster archetypes, namely the bestial human or human/animal hybrid. For a focus on admixed embryos brings to the fore, in a particular contemporary context, an age-old concern over human/animal hybridity and the conceptual problem or category crisis that it represents. Moreover, human/animal admixed embryos, like conjoined twins, redraw our attention to the contemporary relevance of the older meaning of the concept of monstrosity as morphological irregularity. This is an important point to emphasise because it would be mistaken to see the abnormal individual, and therefore a modern understanding of the concept of monstrosity as psyche or interiority, as exhausting the relevance and applicability of the monster concept in the present. In other words, while there has been an historical shift from the body to the soul as the target of legal regulation (Foucault, 2003, p 110), and while it is now possible to think of the abnormal individual as a contemporary monster, law’s disavowal of the monster should not be conceded in relation to the materiality of the body.1
Moreover, while Foucault positions the bestial human in terms of a genealogy of the abnormal individual, it would seem that this latter figure is not the end of a history that traces concern over human/animal hybridity into the present. For medical science, having formerly vanquished the idea of the human/animal hybrid, appears to have breathed new life into this legal figure.
