ABSTRACT
What the preceding chapter has both intimated, and pulled away from, is a haptics of the living body. That is, for a body to shudder, and by this bodily performance to thereby mark the monster, is to enact at once an intimacy, whereby one has felt the monster’s touch in the viscera of one’s own body, and a distancing, that is, a drawing away from that which threatens a sense of Self. The body of the monster is by default unique and non-substitutable, and its touch is thereby unheralded, unprecedented and irreproducible; yet, its presence is a momentous event that can be rendered legible by reference to all manner of geopolitical concerns. The body of the monstrous, by contrast, speaks to the notion of a spectrum and deviations from the same; this is a concept that requires a multitude of otherwise equivalent corporealities. A monstrous touch may be unexpected, even irruptive, but is nevertheless subject to anticipation. This is because the monstrous by its very nature is apprehended in the midst of a citizenry; hence, it needs must be understood in terms of the prevailing regulation of affects and the disciplining of bodies. And, as Adams et al. (2009: 248) note, such anticipation enables, “the production of possible futures that are lived and felt as inevitable in the present, rendering hope and fear as important political vectors.” Monstrousness, one might say, after Derrida, is a domestication of, or a living with, the monster.
