ABSTRACT
The Monster is a new Adam who challenges his maker with the question, “Who is the Monster?” His question taps into the root of ignorance in our ways of knowing. This root reaches deeply into the Socratic maxim to know thyself and branches out toward the twentieth century emergence of psychoanalysis, which demonstrates that the difficulty at the heart of this effort toward self-knowledge is the barrier between conscious knowledge and the dynamic processes that build walls on the margins of the conscious mind. Posing his question to Frankenstein, who is an emblem of an ethics of denial, Question Seven discusses Adolf Eichmann as a prophetic emblem of the monstrous consequences of a utilitarian ethics that denies responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. The lethal nature of denial shows Shelley’s story to be a cautionary omen for our time. The Monster’s question reverberates like an aftershock in the voices of protests erupting today from those in exile whose stories have been silenced and unheard. They re-tell Shelley’s story as a prophecy of a radical new ethics. The work of Paul Ricoeur is discussed in terms of the profound philosophical implications of this ethics made on the margins of mind.
