Int J Semiot Law (2013) 26:55–72

DOI 10.1007/s11196-012-9275-8

Foucault and the Enigma of the Monster

Luciano Nuzzo

Published online: 12 July 2012

 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract In this paper Foucault’s thought on monstrosity is explored. Monsters

appear whenever and wherever knowledge/power assemblages emerge. That which
eludes the latter, and which threatens to subvert them, is the monstrous. Foucault
distinguished the production, throughout history, of juridical-natural monsters,
moral monsters, and political monsters. In this paper it is argued that Foucault must
have sensed that monstrosity eludes all notions of identity and difference, and
therefore also the notion that places it ‘outside’. It is the space of emergence itself,
i.e. the location where sheer potentiality becomes the possible of and in the event.
All monstrosity is therefore deeply, and inevitably, political. It is the promise of
unsettling subversion.

Keywords Foucault
Limits of Thought/Thought of Limit
Monster, Monstrous,

Monstrosity
Normalization device
Political emergence

1 Introduction

This essay proposes a reading of Foucault’s thought through the prism, or lens, if
you wish, of the monstrous. Foucault mentions the monstrous on a few occasions,
mainly in Les mot et les choses (1966) and in the course at the Collège de France of
1974–1975 dedicated to Les anormaux. Although Foucault’s pages dedicated to the
monstrous are few, the monster, as I will try to show in this article, actually has a
strategic function in Foucauldian discourse. The main theme of this article is not a
reconstruction of what Foucault says about the monster and the monstrous. What I
want to bring out is the centrality of the monster and monstrosity as the horizon

L. Nuzzo (&)
Philosophy of Law, Legal Studies Department, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]

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against whose background of meaning Foucauldian research on knowledge and

power is articulated.
Even before being a product of a device of knowledge/power, the monster is the
materialization of a space of experience in which thought tests its own limits. To
think of the monster and to think through the monster means to think of an
experience of the limit and to think departures from such an experience. This
experience of the limit constitutes a core element in Foucault’s thought.
I hold that the perspective of the monster is particularly productive for
understanding the Foucauldian thought on knowledge and power. It also permits the
opening of the thought of the limit—as well as on the limit—to the political and
ethical dimension. The monster is a heterogeneous materiality. Despite its
discursive construction as monstrous, it could never be included anywhere,
nowhere. It remains elusive. It undermines the knowledge-power device that
constructs it. The monstrous could not be represented, that is, it is not a difference
that can be included in representation. In the remainder of this essay I shall expand
on this as follows.
In the first section, the issue that I will seek to explore is that of the monster as
experience of the limit. The monster has represented a threat and a challenge for
thought. And in this seqasolavi9a (teratomachia), in this fight against the monster, it
is possible to trace the partage, those gestures of exclusion with which a culture, as
Foucault says in the preface to the Histoire de la folie, places outside of it that which
is threatening to it [26].
In the second section, the monster as experience of the limit will be analyzed in
relation to the way that Foucault defines both function and genealogy of the monster
in Les mots et les choses and in Les anormaux. Here I underline how the monster is
not only a central element in his thought but also how the very reflection and, I
would say, the method of Foucault’s research is crossed diagonally by the line of the
monster.
In the final section I will make an attempt to show how the devices of power,
analyzed by Foucault, are constantly crossed by lines of escape. That means, in my
opinion, that at stake in the analysis of power proposed by Foucault is the
identification of the breaking points, of the lines of escape from the pervasive links
of the devices that govern our lives. To read Foucault through the monster, here, is
productive. The political monster of whom Foucault speaks, even if briefly, in the
Course on Les anormaux, is the promise of unsettling subversion. It is the space of
the emergence of the ungovernable, i.e. the space in which the laws of the possible
and of the impossible are altered, the laws which govern these partitions are
deactivated, and new combinations become possible.

2 The Thought of the Monster

The first issue I would like to explore here is the enigmatic relation between the
monster and thought. Through the monster, in fact, it is possible to observe the
relation of thought with its limit. In the ancient tradition the limit which thought
experiences before the unexpected that the monster renders visible is presented in

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the form of the enigma. Aristotle, in his Poetics, tells us that the enigma is a saying
which one can only say by putting together impossible things.1
The Greek term se9qa1 (téras) indicates something that is an extraordinary sign
and therefore monstrous, horrible, and marvelous at the same time. It signals the
infraction of an order, the opening of a hiatus in the order of knowledge.2 Sa se9qasa
(ta térata) are ‘‘excessive’’ signs that refer to a hidden and therefore obscure
meaning. Therefore in the first place the monster is a threat for thought, an unveiling
of its limit, of its inadequacy. But at the same time it is enigmatic, and therefore it
represents a challenge, i.e. a limit that must be overcome by adequate knowledge,
truthful knowledge, indeed knowledge that is capable of matching itself to the
challenge presented by the monster. It is not by chance that the ha~tla (thaũma) of
which Aristotle speaks in the Metaphysics shares with the se9qa1 (téras) a semantic
field that makes reference to marvel and horror. Ha~tla and se9qa1 are ambivalent.
They are marvel and horror at the same time. That experience of ambivalence
produces that crisis in which thought—or philosophy as such—has its origin. Crisis3
derives from the Greek verb jqi9meim (krı́nein), that indicates the decision, the break
between the two ways, that of the logos and that in which the logos is lost.
Classical metaphysical thought will seek to neutralize the threat of the monster
by placing it into outside space,4 i.e. by denying it and by excluding it. But despite
its exclusion and marginalization, the monster continues to interrogate thought. The
monster is essentially hybridization, and this means that it is placed on the limit. It
lives in the unbridgeable gap between knowledge and world. It is found where
thought is incapable of corresponding to the world, of deciphering the face of the
world. The monster is the sign of this separation. For that very reason the liminal
space it occupies, and of which it is the sign, is, first of all, an epistemological space,
in which the categories and the distinctions used by thought are put into crisis.5
The monster is always a linguistic and cultural construction, in other words it is
always captured within a scientific, philosophic, or juridical discourse, but at the
same time it is as if the body of the monster were always exceeding the discursive
forms of its conceptualization. The hybrid that the monster incarnates consigns it to
a liminal space.
It is not by chance that the human monster signals a crisis, which is essentially a
crisis of knowing in the presence of the unexpected. And it is not by chance that this
crisis is resolved through the very body of the monster that becomes an object of

1
Aristotle. Poetics, 145 8, 26.
2
C. Bologna, Mostro ad vocem [5].
3
For a review of the meanings of crisis see Reinhart Koselleck, Krise [45].
4
Since antiquity the monster has occupied a liminal position. It indicates a spatial limit, which signals
with its presence the distinction between the inside and the outside, see Pliny, Historia naturalis [VII]
which, taking up the Greek tradition, places the monstrous races in the East; and a temporal limit, which
signals the distinction between the before and the after, see Hesiodos, Theogonia, where the world, before
it received its form and order, was populated by monsters.
5
About monstrosity and philosophical categories, see Filippo Del Lucchese, Monstrosity and the Limits
of the Intellect [20].

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sacrifice, of persecution practices.6 And when these practices will become costly
and not socially acceptable, new techniques, as Michel Foucault reminds us, more
subtle and minute, sustained by new scientific knowledge, will normalize the
monstrous traits that are sensed in little perversions or in criminal behaviours.
The monster incarnates, paradoxically, a lack of differentiation, or better, it is
that non-includable difference that threatens the capacity of knowledge and power
to establish and reproduce differences within a given order.7 In this sense the
monster is at the same time the effect and the bodily manifestation, and therefore the
visible aspect of the crisis. In other words the monster reveals a character that is
contingent and therefore arbitrary of social, political, and cultural distinctions
through which identities are constituted. It puts them in doubt and interrogates them
on their presumed naturalness.
The crisis, an ancient term of western culture which in medical language, going
back to Hippocrates, indicated the culminating moment of an illness in which life
and death reach a level of non-distinction, brings us back to the issue of limits. The
first issue of which the monster speaks to us is that of the cognitive limit of the
categories that try to place it within a given order of things. For all the teratology,
from Fisica and from De generatione animalium of Aristotle8 to the Histoire
générale et particulière dez anomalies of Isidore Geoffroy Saint Hilaire,9 the
monster represents a threat to be neutralized. In an essay, entitled La monstruosité et
le monstrueux, Georges Canguilhem affirms that the monster puts at issue the power
of life to teach us order. This creates a radical fear because monstrosity could have
been produced in us. We are from this point of view ‘failed’ monsters, because it
could have derived from us.10 But at the same time the fear raised by the monster
and the monstrous produces will to knowledge, and that is to classify and to bend
violently into an order that which exceeds it and disturbs it. Rosi Braidotti speaks on

6
On this point see Réne Girard [41]. In the text the author shows how the physical infirmities and
deformities constitute criteria for the selection of the victims. When the choice of victims falls within a
certain social, ethnic, or religious category, the attribution of infirmity or deformity to the members of
these categories functions as a strengthening of the victimizing polarization [p. 38]. At the same time the
disorder threatened by the thus ‘monsterized’ victim can be neutralized only through the persecution
episode which becomes the religious and cultural point of departure—on this point see also Mary
Douglas, Purity and Danger [22].
7
On this point see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Culture [13, pp. 6–7].
8
Aristotle spoke of the monster in the Fisica [II (B), 8, 199b, 5] where he affirmed that monsters are
errors of the given final cause, and therefore imply an incapacity to reach a given end due to the
corruption of some principle as in the case of the seed of the monsters. In his exts on animals and in
particular in the De generatione animalium [IV, 3, 767 a 13] Aristotle analyzed the different
consequences that can derive from a resistance of matter to being placed in form.
9
Isidore Geoffroy Saint Hilaire son of Etienne, founder of modern teratology, wrote the Histoire
générale et particulière des anomalies de l’organisation chez l’homme et les animaux [39] in which,
taking up and systematizing the teachings of his father, he enumerated monstrosity among the anomalies
and above all as Canguilhem [11, pp. 179–180] observes he established a relationship between the
concepts of anomalies and varieties, a relationship which is of great importance for the theories of
evolution at the end of the 19th century.
10
‘La monstruosité’, says Canguilhem, ‘c’est la menace accidentelle et conditionnelle d’inachèvement
ou de distorsion dans la formation de la forme, c’est la limitation par l’intérieur, la négation du vivant par
le non-viable’ [11, pp. 172–173].

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that point of the epistemofilia of teratological discourse [6, 7]. Here we arrive at the
second issue of which the monster speaks to us, the violence of the classification, the
will to knowledge that is the practice and exercise of power.11
On the body of the monster is played a conflict of opposed forces. On one hand
the excessiveness of the monstrous body opposes a strong resistance to its
translation into a clear, certain, true discourse that rests on the binary logic of
identity and difference. On the other hand, through definitions, classifications,
distinctions, the discourse of the monster produces its object, constructs continually
its specific monster in order to then deliver it to the practices of exclusion or
normalization. And the practices define and specify that knowledge that justifies
them and gives them foundation. The monster is not only the production space of
philosophical, juridical, medical, etc. discourses, but the space in which the
discourses produce and manifest themselves through practices of power. And on this
point the lesson of Foucault can help us a lot. The will to knowledge is the will to
truth. Discourse is an action that produces effects of power, and that intervenes on
the plane of the objects that it constructs, to classify them, control them, contain
them, and render them productive.12
The third issue can be indicated as the issue of the Outside. In fact, next to the
‘‘cognitive’’ function that the monster performs, we see another one, strictly
connected to the first but which radicalizes the discourse on the limit of thought. The
monster is not only an object that escapes any type of taxonomic order, rather it is
itself the effect of a certain ‘‘order of the discourse’’ that thinks it, and thinking it
produces it as difference from itself. The monster as difference or as that which is
produced outside of the discourse is captured in a discourse that declares its
monstrosity and in so doing inscribes the issue of the outside to its own inside. In
other words the monster opens the thought to the Outside of the representation. The
monstrosity is, then, a conceptual place that never remains completely accessible to
the transparency of thought, but which at the same time forces thought to open itself
toward its own not-thought. On this third level is played the problem of the
possibility of critique and of the counter-conduct as political practice.
These are, in my view, the three issues that the monster poses to thought which
tries to think it. The issue of the limit of the categories, the limit of thought itself
that meets the cage of language which it must use to describe an experience that
exceeds it and puts it into discussion; the problem of the effects of power of
discourse. These three issues will constitute the trajectories along which, in the

11
Foucault in L’ordre du discours [31] identifies the centrality of the relation between discourse and
power that is explicated in the will to knowledge which is the desire for truth. The discourse of the truth
becomes pervasive for every type of discourse that must find its authorization in truth. From that it
follows that ‘‘le discours n’est pas simplement ce qui traduit les luttes ou les systèmes de domination,
mais ce pour quoi, ce par quoi on lutte, le pouvoir dont on cherche à s’emparer’’ [31, p. 12].
12
In his installation lesson at the Collège de France [31], Foucault traces the genealogy of the will to
knowledge and above all identifies in the genealogical work that he would have undertaken in the
following years the instrument to gather the affirmative power of discourse, that is the capacity of
discourse to constitute environments of objects with respect to which it would then be possible to affirm
or deny true or false propositions [31, pp. 71–72]. They are those positivities of which he had spoken in
L’archéologie du savoir [30].

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pages that follow, I will seek to analyze the thought of Michel Foucault on the
monstrous.

3 The Monster of Foucault

The discourse on the monster has an ancient and complex history. This history
produced a tangle of issues that have to do with the conceptual vocabulary of
western thought. The proposition is therefore that of rereading Foucault’s thought
from the perspective of the monster. To do this it is necessary to weave the issues
that we have brought out with the issue of the monster in Foucault’s thought. This
way we should have the possibility of testing the thought of the monster, the issues
of which we have spoken in the preceding paragraph, on and through the monster of
Foucault.
The thesis which crosses these pages diagonally is that the monster takes up a
central role in Foucault’s thought, and is not just one theme among the many that
the French thinker has confronted in his reflections. The reasons for this affirmation
are based on an interpretive hypothesis that could be summarized with the syntagm:
the Monster of Foucault. If we inquire into the structure of the syntagm, an
ambivalence of its meaning will emerge. That ambivalence depends on the sense of
the genitive, which can be objective or subjective. The meaning of the objective
genitive could be summarized thus: the monster and the monstrosity of which
Foucault speaks. The subjective meaning instead would be formulated as follows:
Foucault as monster or, better, the ‘‘monstrosity’’ of Foucault’s thought. I would like
to start by analyzing the complex relationship which I believe is recognizable
between Foucault’s thought and the issue of monstrosity. The monstrosity of
Foucault is surely a somewhat bizarre suggestion. But at the same time, it seems to
me to be key to read together the reflections of the French thinker through his
reading of the monster and of the monstrous and vice versa, his reading of the
monstrous within his own research project.
To try, I don’t say to explain, but, somewhat less, to delineate the hypothesis of
the monstrosity of Foucault’s thought, I would draw attention to what Foucault says
in the Préface to Les mots et les choses [29]. Reading a text of Jorge Luis Borges in
a ‘‘Chinese encyclopedia’’ Foucault says that he laughed and at the same time felt a
certain uneasiness. From that laugh and uneasiness was born his text. The fantastic
taxonomy of Borges is monstrous, says Foucault because ‘‘espaces commun des
rencontres’’ between the things that are enumerated is subtracted. The language that
names and explains the elements that constitute the taxonomy paradoxically deny it
as taxonomy because it renders it unthinkable as a space in which the enumerated
things can be allocated. That which then emerges from that impossibility is the limit
of our thought. The limit is not objective but results from a given epistemological
configuration i.e. that configuration which constitutes the historical a priori from
which it is possible to speak, exchange, and classify. This is the background that
renders possible le visible et l’ énonciable (the visible and the articulable). If the
monster, in tradition, is always thought as having put into discussion distinctions,
equilibriums, and limits on which order is based, the monstrosity of Foucault

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consists in demonstrating the naked experience of order, demonstrating its

groundlessness. To paraphrase his words about Borges: ‘‘inquiétant pour longtemps
notre pratique millénaire du Même et de l’Autre’’ [29, p. 7]. Speaking of Borges it is
as if Foucault spoke of his research program. In other words the monstrous element
that Foucault sees in the Encyclopedia of which Borges speaks, and in a way
translated into the literature of Borges, becomes guide, program of the modalities of
his research. It is not by chance that already some years before he had shown
interest in literature, and in particular a type of literature capable of putting into
discussion language itself and the supremacy of the signified over the signifying,
capable that is of pushing language to its limit.13 But perhaps it is in the text
Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire [32] that is expressed with extreme clarity what
signifies a thought able to decentralize the perspective of things, to produce a
continual déplacement.14 A thought, to say it with Friedrich Nietzsche, capable of
turning the enchanted castle of Olympus upside down and looking in its cellars. As
is noted, in the text about Nietzsche, Foucault puts to the fire his method of
genealogical research. Genealogy is opposed to research of origins, is opposed in
other words to every form of metaphysics that intends to trace the performance in
time of an essence or a principle [2]. That implies discovering that ‘‘qu’à la racine
de ce que nous connaissons et de ce que nous sommes il n’y a point la vérité et
l’être, mais l’extériorité de l’accident’’ [32, p. 141]. If it is true that the monster
produces crises and is produced in crisis, mixing up the scheme of identity and
difference, as well as the unity of signified and signifying, then maybe one could
read genealogical thought as thought capable of demonstrating the fragmentedness
of that which was thought unified, the heterogeneity of that which was imagined to
conform to oneself [32, p. 142]. Monstrosity, then, consists, as in the Chinese
encyclopedia of Borges, in having put in place machinery that allows the
introduction, into the root itself of thought, of chance, the discontinuous, and
materiality.

3.1 The Monster and the Order of Things

The genitive of the syntagm Monster of Foucault is also objective. This means in
the first place that there exist textual places in which the French thinker has
explicitly confronted the theme of the monster. Secondly, from that awareness
derives the necessity of putting into evidence the points of intersection between the
thought of the monster and Foucault’s reflection on the monster. It seems to me that
where Foucault makes reference to and speaks of the monster he recognizes a
decisive role for it. The monster signals passages, shows fractures within a certain

13
Particularly meaningful, for purposes of our discussion, are Préface à la transgression [27] in which,
reflecting on the text of Georges Bataille, he places at the center of his analysis the relationship between
transgression and limit and the essay on Maurice Blanchot, La pensée du dehors [28]. The literary essays
perform a non-marginal role in the work of Foucault—see on point the essay by Bruno Moroncini,
Foucault e il pensiero del fuori [48]. But, above all, these essays are helpful to comprehend the
Foucauldian laboratory—see on point Judith Revel, Foucault. Le parole, i poteri [50].
14
For an interpretation of the Foucauldian archeology and genealogy as philosophy of the limit see Peter
Hallward, Out of This World [43, p. 160].

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type of order, and constitutes a principle of intelligibility. This is particularly

evident, I believe, both in Les mots et les choses and in the course on Les anormaux,
the two texts in which he confronts the issue of the monster.15
In Les mots et les choses, the issue of the monster is utilized to explain the
relationship between variation and continuity in the representation of living beings.
Therefore the reference to the monster is attached explicitly to the background of
the passage from the classical age to the modern age, from natural history to the life
sciences. But, as suggested by the Portuguese philosopher José Gil, the monster
appears also at another point in the same text. It is an indirect appearance, through
the reference to Diego Velásquez’ painting Las Meninas. Foucault analyzes in detail
the painting but is silent on the role within the representation of the dwarf, who
appears on the right, almost in the foreground.16 Despite his silence, however, or
perhaps because of his silence, it is possible to recognize in the dwarf a specific
function in the economy of the Foucauldian interpretation of representation. The
dwarf Pertusato, with his misshaped body, violates the laws that regulate the
relations between the parts and the whole, and therefore breaks the order of
representation. If for Foucault Las Meninas is the representation of Representation,
that is, of the epistemological model of the classical age, the dwarf-monster de-
centers representation. The dwarf denies the laws of perspective and so doing
appears as that which, in its turn, it is necessary to deny in order that the kingdom of
representation may be established.17
This first reference to the monstrosity as denial of the laws of representation
permits us to understand better the other reference to the monster in the text. The
paragraph has a significant title: Monstres et fossiles [29, pp. 163–170]. The outline
of the text is the debate at the end of the 18th century in the context of natural
history on the place of living beings in the order of nature and on their
representability. The model of reference for that representation of the living was the
chain of being of the Leibnizian mold. It permitted classification according to a
criterion of linear continuity of all the species from the simplest to the most complex
on the basis of morphological affinities. At the end of the 18th century the
representation of the order of being becomes complicated. That happens also
through a greater awareness of the multiformity of life, which was discovered
through new scientific instruments such as the microscope, through naturalist and
ethnological explorations, as well as on transoceanic voyages. The insertion of time
into the taxonomy of living beings renders mobile the Scala Naturae. And it renders
possible, as well, the introduction of chance and variation. In the classical model

15
The literature on the theme of the monster in Foucault is concentrated principally on the course Les
anormaux, and does not take into consideration the treatment of the monster in Les mots et les choses, see
e.g. Andrew N. Sharpe, Foucault’s Monster and the Challenge of Law [52].
16
For a reconstruction of the centrality of the dwarf in the painting of Velásquez and more generally in
pictorial representation see Leslie Fiedler, Freaks [24, pp. 64–89].
17
José Gil [40, p. 47] states that the dwarf Pertusato placed in the foreground overturns the laws of
pictorial representation in many ways. First, concerning perspective: the dwarf has the same height as the
infant in the middle ground and is smaller than the servants and the painter that are further away;
secondly, concerning the anatomical details: the dwarf who is the smallest presents the face that is richest
in details, lights and shadows, expressions of the lips and of the gaze.

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morphological disorder, like that of the dwarf of Velásquez, could not re-enter the
order of representation. It had to be denied because its excessiveness could not find
space in the taxonomic classification of beings.
In the modern age, time makes appear all the species that together will form a
continuous network [29, p. 165]. Nature is thought of as the collection of the
variations of the living beings that follow one another in time. From that is derived
the new statute of the monster. The monster no longer is that which is against-
nature, or nature different from that of the species, but is, rather, a failed attempt
which testifies, like the fossils, to the very continuity of nature. Monsters no longer
overturn the order of things, but they contribute to it. Affirms Foucault: ‘‘sur le fond
du continu, le monstre raconte, comme en caricature, la genèse des différences’’ [29,
p. 170]. In the moment of the passage from the classical age to the modern age,
therefore, the monster is distanced ever more from its dimension of against-nature,
of teras (se9qa1). It no longer signals the point of rupture in the unity between nature/
reason/law. It is no longer external to order, nature, knowledge, power. It is
malformation or degeneration that serves to explain the passage from one species to
another [11].
At the end of the 18th century we see two important transformations in the way
of understanding the monster. It becomes an object of science and at the same time
an instrument of it [11, p. 179]. But only the 19th century sees the complete
naturalization of monstrosity. Teratology, with Etienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-
Hilaire, and then with the experimentations of Camille Dareste,18 seems to have
discovered the secret of its causes and laws. Monstrosity naturalized in the 19th
century becomes anomaly, and anomaly becomes the key to explain the normal. The
pathological being the impeded normal.19 The monster is normalized and that is
included and rendered productive and therefore neutralized.

3.2 The Monster and the Abnormal

In Les mots et les choses, the monster is analyzed, principally, with reference to the
image of a living being organized by natural history. The monster is that which
exceeds a natural order centered in the distinction of species, genera, and kingdoms.
At least until the end of the 18th century it was a principle of confusion, a
spontaneous and unknown variant that breaks the taxis of the natural order. In Les
anormaux20 the monster is investigated, instead, with reference to the mechanisms
18
Camille Dareste is the founder of experimental teratology. According to Dareste, it is in the ascetic
space of the laboratory that teratology produces its own object. See Dareste Recherches sur la production
artificielle des monstruosités [14]; on this point see also Canguilhem [11, p. 180].
19
On this point see Canguilhem, who recalls explicitly Michel Foucault on Histoire de la folie à l’âge
classique [25]. In fact, as the insane serves to show what is reason, so the monster is found in the jar of the
embryologist to show what is normal [11, p. 178]. From the same author see also Le normal et le
pathologique [12].
20
Les anormaux [37] is part of a particularly important series in Foucault’s production. Beginning with
the earliest courses held at the Collège de France, in fact, in Théories et institutions pénales (1971–1972),
in La société punitive (1972–1973), and then with Le Pouvoir psychiatrique (1973–1974) [36] the
analysis is oriented toward the modalities that political technologies work on the entire social body. In
Volonté de savoir [33, pp. 121–129] Foucault will speak of his research method as an analytics of power,

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of power that produce it. The frame of reference within which the monster is placed
is that which Foucault defines the politico-judiciary power frame.
Also in Abnormal the monster takes centre stage. It constitutes the opaque
background upon which, slowly, the different figures which will go on to populate
the great undefined and confused family of the abnormals take shape. In the
economy of Foucauldian research during the 1970s, the monster becomes a point of
articulation and transit of genealogical research that traces not the Ursprung,
the origin, the essence, but the point of onset or formation, Entstehung, or the
provenance, Herkunft, of the figure of the abnormal. Through the figure of the
monster, for Foucault, it is possible to analyze the device of power/knowledge that
produces and constructs the subject as deviant. This is a device that combines in a
singular, almost grotesque, way, medical knowledge and juridical power, and which
Foucault calls power of normalization [37]. The genealogy of the monster and the
monstrous permits the decentralization, once again, of the observation of man,
reformulating the old question ‘‘what is man’’. Once again there are no
anthropological constants to invoke. Everything in man is socially produced, his
instincts, his desires, and his body, captured within knowledge-power constellations
that produce him and model him.21 The question that must then be asked is: what
makes man a monster? What are the mechanisms, knowledge, and powers that allow
the construction of the oxymoron the man-monster? And again: what is possible
when faced with the monster? How is it possible to protect oneself from
monstrosity?
The first figure that Foucault analyzes is that which with a deliberate oxymoron
he defines as the human monster. The field that defines its contours is of the
juridical-natural type. The monster is a transgression of law, natural and social. It is
out-law, in the sense that, bypassing the limit, it puts itself outside the space of law.
And outside the confines of law, as is known, live the monsters.22 But what
determines the monstrosity of the monster? The juridical-natural monster, Foucault

Footnote 20 continued
i.e. an analytics that has as object the relations of power and the instruments that permit its analysis. For
an analysis of the function of law in Foucault’s analytics of power see the text by Hunt and Wickham,
Foucault and Law [44] and the recent text by Golder and Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s Law [42]. For a
reconstruction of the Foucauldian itinerary see Giuseppe Campesi, Soggetto, disciplina, governo [9].
21
Foucault takes up the teaching of Canguilhem, who had discussed—in Le normal e le pathologique
[12]—the very existence of physiological invariants. In the last essay written shortly before his death,
Foucault affirms that the originality of Canguilhem is that of having brought the history of the sciences to
become interested in fields in which knowledge has remained tied to suggestions of the imagination—see
Foucault, La vie: l’expérience et la science [35, pp. 768–769]. For a reconstruction of the concept of
normalization in Canguilhem and Foucault see Giuseppe Campesi, Norma, normatività, normalizzazione
[10, pp. 5–30]. On the concept of norm in Canguilhem and Foucault see Pierre Macherey, Da Canguilhem
à Foucault, la force des normes [47].
22
According to an ancient literary tradition monsters are found outside the confines of the known world.
The East and in particular India becomes, in ancient literature, a place populated by monstrous races. This
is a very ancient tradition of which traces are found in Herodotos [III, 97–107/IV, 44], and later in
Strabone, [XV, 1, 25 (696)]. The Greek tradition was taken up in the Latin world by Plinius, Naturalis
Historia [VII]. For a reconstruction of the geographic dimension of monstrosity see Rudolf Wittkower,
The Wonders of the East [53]. The term monster, in this treatise, keeps its ambivalence of that which is
both terrifying and wonderful. On the etymology of the term monster see Émile Benveniste, Le
vocabulaire des institutions indo-eurpéennes [4].

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Foucault and the Enigma of the Monster 65

says, is ‘‘transgression des limites naturelles, transgression des classifications,

transgression du tableau, transgression de la loi comme tableau’’ [37, pp. 58–59]. In
order to be monstrous, therefore, it is not enough to be simply infirm or defective. It
is necessary instead that the transgression of nature be such as to refer to the
transgression of an interdiction present in law: ‘‘Pour qu’il y ait monstruosité, il faut
que cette transgression de la limite naturelle, cette transgression de la loi tableau soit
telle qu’elle se réfère à, ou en tout cas mette en cause une certaine interdiction de la
loi civile, religieuse ou divine’’ [37, p. 59]. Monstrosity is a mark that refers back to
responsibility. It consists of the violation of a juridical-natural norm, a norm whose
necessity is based on being. The monster is the physical manifestation of that
transgression.
In the modern age, at the end of the 18th century, the juridical-natural monster is
slowly substituted by the moral monster. Monstrosity is no longer the mixing of
opposites, of that which nature has prescribed to be maintained distinct. Monstrosity
is an irregularity, a deviation which however constitutes the occasion of monstrous
behaviours because they do not conform to juridical or moral prescriptions.23
Monstrosity is defined by conduct. Conduct is monstrous because it breaks social
order. And breaking social order and its laws implies a denial of interest in peace
and security. The moral monster, then, is characterized by the irrationality of
interests which motivate its conduct. But the irrationality of criminal conduct refers
back to something pathological and perverse. It is not by chance that the moral
monster is identified with the political monster i.e. he who, from the height or depth,
breaks the covenant with which is constituted the unity of the ‘‘social body’’.24 And
when in the 19th century the state becomes identified with the nation, and political
unity became ethno-political unity, the monster was able considered as he who is
not recognizable as belonging to the national community.25
With the movement from the figure of the natural monster to the moral monster,
from monstrous nature to monstrous behaviour, the concept of criminality
associated with the two figures changes. Criminality during the 17th century was
associated with the against-nature of the monster. The monster was ontologically
criminal. From the second half of the 18th century, however, criminality is no
longer determined by nature but by behaviour.
According to the criterion of legal-natural monstrosity the monstrous individual
was always associated with criminality. According to the criterion of moral
monstrosity, ‘‘le rapport s’inverse, et il y aura ce qu’on pourrait appeler le soupçon
23
With the figure of the hermaphrodite begins a change in the perception of the monster and a shift from
the legal-natural conception of monstrosity to a legal-moral type of conception instead. In the
examination of certain cases, Foucault shows us how this change came about. If until the 1600s the
double nature of the hermaphrodite, the being man and woman at the same time, was automatically
considered as an indication of legal monstrosity, from the 1700s onwards natural monstrosity does not
imply directly legal or moral monstrosity. The malformations of nature do not constitute a per se
manifestation of violation of juridical-social norms. Nature against nature suggests but does not determine
rule-breaking behaviour [37, pp. 64–70].
24
On the theme of political monstrosity, of the bestiality of the sovereign or of the people, see Jacques
Derrida, La Bête et le Souverain [21].
25
For a reading in the biopolitical as key to the relation between state and nation see Giorgio Agamben,
Homo sacer [1].

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66 L. Nuzzo

systématique de monstruosité au fond de toute criminalité’’ [37, p. 75]. The question

that Foucault poses is how it is that, from a certain point in time, the power to punish
has had to refer to the nature of the crime. In other words, in what way and why the
distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ became specified as that between ‘normal’
and ‘abnormal’.
The genealogy of the monster, the passage from the natural monster to the moral
monster occupies the center of a complex transformation of the technologies of
power. Between the 18th and 19th centuries we see the transition from the sovereign
and territorial power of the Ancien Régime to modern biopower, i.e. a power that
assumes the form of government of men and of things, of an ‘‘economy’’. The
transition from sovereign power—the power to make die or let live—to biopower—
the power to make live and to push out into death—also brings a new economy of
penalities and therefore a new conception of crime. Crime is no longer considered
simply an attempt on the person of the sovereign, which therefore legitimated
vengeance exercised through the spectacle of corporal or capital punishment, or
through banishment. Crime in the new economy of power is behaviour that violates
the social contract. Crime is animated by a specific interest, i.e. an irrational interest
that contradicts itself in the moment it is satisfied because it engenders punishment.
It is necessary, however, in order to be able to apply punishment and in order to
avoid repetition of the crime, to inquire into the nature of the crime, that is, to try
and understand the interest that caused the criminal to commit the offence. But if it
is true that the interest at the base of crime constitutes the principle of its
intelligibility at the same time, it is an interest that has to be irrational, because in
denying the interest of one’s fellows and following one’s own personal egoisms, the
criminal must indeed be ‘irrational’. In the ‘irrational’ criminal the wild and natural
instinct prevails over civility and order. In the form of the criminal we see the
‘nature against nature’ that characterized the monster reappear again. From the
genealogy of Foucault emerge, therefore, two fundamental issues. The first pertains
to the relationship between monster and law. The second to the techniques of
knowledge/power with which is produced a new against-nature of the monster.
As to the first: the monster is the infraction of the law. It is disorder of nature or
behaviour that questions the law on its foundation and legitimacy, and its
rationality. The monster’s attack on the logic of the law is frontal. No mediations are
allowed. The law, then, is not capable of entering into a relationship with monstrous
nature or monstrous conduct. The monster is an exception that suspends the law.
Before an exception, the law can only be suspended. The response to the monster, as
a consequence, could only be either outside-law, or violence, the force of law
without law, or medical cures, or mercy. Before monstrous criminality, the recurring
question is whether one should rid oneself of the monster/criminal without passing
to the arsenal of law. And the same issue is posed before those marginal subjects
which the social body does not recognize as being part of itself.
As to second issue: the monster as a spontaneous expression of the against-nature
represents the matrix, albeit on a grander scale, of all possible anomalies. The
against-nature of the monster is no longer identified with morphological disorder. It
must be found behind the visible space of the body. The relation between visible and
articulable is inverted. No longer is the visible the condition of the articulable, but

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Foucault and the Enigma of the Monster 67

the articulable is the condition for rendering visible that which is not immediately
visible. When the field of the anomaly will be completely constituted, the new
knowledge-power of normalization will seek the elements of monstrosity that hide
behind irregularities and little anomalies. In this sense the monster is a principle of
intelligibility. It serves as a model of all deviance. But it is a tautological principle,
because it is a principle of explanation that refers to itself.
As Dreyfus and Rabinow have observed, specialist knowledge ‘‘objectified man,
contributing to producing the nosological categories that the disciplinary technol-
ogies were made to manage […]. The criminal became an almost natural species,
that could be identified, isolated, and studied by the new emerging human sciences
such as psychiatry and criminology’’ [23, p. 221]. The criminal is characterized at
the level of his own nature by his criminality. Knowledge of crime and criminal in
this new framework is characterized and must be a naturalistic knowledge of
criminality [37, p. 83]. The criminal therefore as criminal is brought into the sphere
of the pathological. The issue of the illegal and of the pathological are welded
together. At the core of every criminal lurks a monster, where the monstrosity is
given by the pathological character of the criminal [37, p. 84].

4 The Politics of the Monster

The reading of Foucault that we have attempted here via the perspective of the
monstrous has allowed us to put into evidence the issue of the limit. The monster is
that which, excessively, signals a limit. But, in signaling the existence of the limit,
the monster is not limited only to transgress it. The transgression, in fact, would not
be other than a confirmation of the limit, since the limit is such only in relation to
the gesture that transgresses it.26 If the monster were none other than the
transgression of a limit of nature, of reason, or of law, monstrosity would be
captured within a dialectic in which it would be configured as the negative that
constitutes the premise and therefore the condition to be able to think and act the
limit. The subversive potential of monstrosity would thereby be reduced and
neutralized within a teleological scheme i.e. a scheme which permits the monster to
acquire value, albeit negative, in the finality to which it is preordained. But the
monster is not limited to transgressing a limit. That which is constituted as monster,
and that one would want to consign, through its inclusion in the discourse, to outside
space, constitutes nevertheless excess, a residue not reducible to the logic of identity
and difference.
That means that that which is constructed as monster is not crude, passive
material, but always and already resistant because, as Gilles Deleuze would say,
consistent.27 The monster, negative limit, dark matter, and primitive, emerges from
the unrecoverable background in which it had been confined to deactivate and
26
On the issue of the relation between transgression and limit, see Foucault, Préface à la transgression
[27].
27
In rereading Spinoza, Deleuze underlines the relation between ontological consistence and political
resistance—see Che cos’è la filosofia [18]. For reading the monster as resistant flesh because consistent,
and the monster as figure of existence, see Antonio Negri, Il mostro politico. Nuda vita e potenza [49].

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68 L. Nuzzo

disturb every metaphysic. The limit of which the monster speaks to us has therefore
a double dimension. It is in the first place the limit that order places to be able to
think as order, to be able to be the condition for producing identity and difference. It
is in relation to this dimension of limit that the monster is analyzed both in Les mots
et les choses and in the text on Les anormaux. The monster is always the
construction of a discourse that captures it, if only to exclude it, as ontological
difference from the order of being and from the hierarchies that are constructed
upon that order. And even when a position within that order is recognized as
monstrous, it is to be reduced to a ‘‘fossil’’, a witness of the negative, to an anomaly,
to a failure that was necessary in order to reach the norm. The teleological scheme
once again captures the monster. To think monstrosity as genesis of differences
means once again to neutralize the monster within a new metaphysic, that of
scientific positivism.
But there is not only the limit to which order confines the monster in order to be
able to strengthen its own boundaries.28 When the monster has entered to become
part of the order of discourse, it has been included, albeit through marginalization in
outside space, and that implies that the dialectic between transgression and limit
becomes more complicated. We think of the fantastic taxonomy of Borges of which
Foucault speaks. The monstrosity consists not only of transgressing the taxonomy
but of rendering it inoperative as a discursive place that organizes identity and
difference. The taxonomy continues to exist but it is complete deactivated as an
ordering principle. In Les anormaux this very deactivation of the taxonomy can be
observed on the level of law. The human monster and the moral monster, with their
nature and behaviour, are not limited to transgressing precepts, but they disable the
normalizing dispositif.29 Of course transgression exists and it remains a decisive
element of the monstrous. There must be a breach of the law, in its unity of law and
nature, for there to be a human monster. There must be transgression of moral
prohibition and therefore of the law in its unity of law and reason, for there to be a
moral monster. But transgression is not enough. There is the effect that the human
monster or moral monster produces. In other words, the monster as such, because it
is excessive, cannot be completely bent to the transgression/limit dialectic, and
therefore for that reason introduces into the law or into nature or into thought an
element of confusion that does not negate law, nature, or thought, but destabilizes
their functioning, deactivates their categories, deconstructs their representations. It
brings the limit to its own Limit, where it appears as difference without mediation,
as difference that escapes from the mesh of the dispositif that captured it.
Foucault’s archeo-genealogical research puts into evidence not only the
pervasive functioning of the devices of normalization, but, at the same time, their
mobile and porous character, the lines of flight that continually cross them. In other
words, that which emerges contextually in the ubiquity of power is the irreducible
singularities and differences of every categorization, intolerant of every dialectic of

28
In the preface of the first French edition of Histoire de la folie [26] Foucault says: ‘‘on pourrait faire
une histoire des limites –de ces gestes obscurs, nécessairement oubliés dès qu’accomplis, par lesquels une
culture rejette quelque chose qui sera pour elle l’Extérieur’’ in Foucault, Dits et écrits t. I [26, p. 161].
29
On this point see Andrew N. Sharpe, Foucault’s Monsters [52, pp. 34–38].

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Foucault and the Enigma of the Monster 69

recognition. That which is affirmed here is the multiplicity, chance, dispersion, and
difference where metaphysical discourse saw unity, purpose, coherence, and
identity.
Here we enter into the heart of the political issue of the monster and the
monstrous. Here the monster becomes the ground of political conflict. The
discursive reference to the monster always signals a game of forces, resistances, and
struggles. It signals, in other words, an emergence, and precisely a political
emergence. The discourse of the monster presents itself on the scene with all its
evocative force of the moment in which a model order enters into crisis. And in fact,
an ancient and illustrious tradition of western political thought saw, evoked, or
warded off the political power of the monster.30 Foucault too identifies in the
political monster an important passage for understanding the transformations of the
forms of power.
In the course on Les anormaux, precisely in the lesson of 29 January 1975, Foucault
makes reference to the political monster to explain the passage, in the modern age,
from the juridical-natural monster to the juridical-moral monster. The moral monster
whose monstrosity is determined by behaviour and its effects appears for the first
time, Foucault tells us, in the guise of the political monster. Foucault writes: ‘‘Or,
curieusement, et d’une façon qui me paraı̂t très caractéristique, le premier monstre
moral qui apparaı̂t est le monstre politique’’, and, continuing, ‘‘que le premier monstre
moral qui apparaisse à la fin du XVIII siècle, en tout cas le plus important, le plus
éclatant, est le criminel politique’’ [37, p. 84]. In Foucault’s argument, therefore, the
appearance of the moral monster depends on a new form of power that came to be
affirmed at the end of the 18th century. But what relation is there between the moral
monster and the political monster? Is the political monster identified completely with
the moral monster, and does it therefore appear with modernity? Or is the political
monster an autonomous figure, distinct from the biological monster and the moral
monster? And if it is an autonomous figure, how is it differentiated from the other two
figures that Foucault describes in a rather analytic way?
It seems to me we must exclude the thesis of the complete identification between
moral monster and political monster, because if the two were completely identical,
it would mean also that the historical period in which Foucault locates them must
coincide. And consequently one should hold that the figure of the political monster
is a figure that appears with modernity. Such an interpretation would be
problematic. In fact there is a rich and ancient tradition that uses the metaphor of
the monster to define one who puts into discussion, from above or from below, the
political order.31 Foucault’s reference to the political dimension of the moral

30
For a reconstruction of the relation that runs between the figures of political tradition and monstrous
bestiality see Jacques Derrida, La Bête et le Souverain [21].
31
In antiquity the degeneration of the political forms was manifested through the metaphoric
transformation of man into beast, or of the beast that becomes man. The image of the wolf-man as a
metaphor for political degeneration constitutes a true and proper tropos of political discourse. On this
point, see Plato, Repubblica, [VIII, 566a]. See also Ovidius, Metamorfosi, [I, 209–252], in which is taken
up the myth of Lycaon of which Plato speaks in Repubblica. In the same way is underlined the being
outside the law of the political monster. The being outside the law means not being human. Apolis is a
God or a Beast, in any event it is not a man; on this point see Aristotele, Politica [I, (A), 2, 1253 a, 25].

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monster has instead a double meaning. One explicit meaning, evident enough from
the reading of the text, and one implicit meaning, but which, in some way, one can
infer a contrario from the exclusion of other interpretive hypotheses.
The first meaning that emerges from the reference to the political monster
permits us to discard the thesis of the identity of the moral monster with the political
monster. Foucault, it seems to me, wants to tell us that the moral monster has a
political dimension because its appearance is situated at a decisive political
conjunction, which sees the affirmation of a new form of organization of power. The
moral monster appears against the background of a radical transformation of the
political structures. And it is natural, therefore, that in a decisive political
conjunction, he who is identified as the artifice of the subversion of the old order,
the multitude, or as the representative of the tyrannical system, the sovereign, can
easily be constituted as monster. And in effect in the context of the political conflict
between the supporters of the Ancien Régime and the revolutionaries, the enemy is
necessarily constituted as monstrous so as to underline the bestiality of their
behaviour. And through the bestiality of their behaviour is demonstrated their
bestial, and therefore non-human nature. It is no coincidence that Foucault reminds
us that Jacobin literature and reactionary literature constitute respectively the tyrant
as incestuous and the people as cannibalistic, i.e. as transgressors of the two
fundamental prohibitions which define the humanity of man. To construct someone,
for specific biological, moral, racial reasons as a monster, means to act always
within a political dimension. The discourse about the monster has a performative
value, produces effects of power, and emerges within a conflictual dynamic.32 The
definition of monster is never neutral; it is a saying which, in the moment in which it
speaks, is already a doing. But if on one hand the discursive reference to the monster
is the instrument used to stigmatize and exclude, on the other the same discourse or
power that stigmatizes, denies its own weakness and impotence.
From these reflections one can infer a second meaning of ‘political monster’. The
political dimension identifies not just the moral monster, and at the same time, it
does not determine a tertium genere, precisely the political monster, that would
exist beside the biological monster and the moral monster. The attribute ‘‘political’’
instead defines the monster. In a double sense: firstly because the discourse that uses
the monster reference to construct and stigmatize the difference has an explicitly
political dimension. Secondly, because the monster makes visible the lines of flight
of the power/knowledge dispositif itself. In its points of emergence, in its ‘conduct-
against’, in its moments of resistance, the monster always and already is political. In
this sense the monster is living potential, a body without organs,33 flesh not
functioning in hierarchies, eluding the mesh of power/knowledge that would want to
exclude it, manage it, or control it. The monster as point of flight, as exercise in the

32
On the political as war see Michel Foucault, Il faut defendre la société [38].
33
The expression body without organs was used by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux
[17], to indicate the indetermination of the flesh as an accumulation of potential. On this point see also
Gilles Deleuze Felix Guattari, Come farsi un corpo senza organi [19]. For an interpretation of the body
without organs as the revolutionary monster of post-modernity see Antonio Negri, Il mostro politico [49].
About the relation between monster and post-Fordism economy see Marco Bascetta, Verso un’economia
politica del vivenete [3].

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Foucault and the Enigma of the Monster 71

critical practice of de-centering, is not thematized directly by Foucault. Neverthe-

less, it is as if his analysis of the monster went in this direction or legitimized a fold
in the thought that leads Foucault, I would say inevitably, from the archeo-
genealogy to the ontology of the present.34 The thought of the monster or the
monstrosity of thought, in this perspective, become the diagnosis of the present,
understood as ‘‘the now of our becoming’’35 and imply the capacity to grasp that
which is possible in the event, and, therefore, to no longer exist, to no longer do, and
to no longer think that which we are, do, and think.

Acknowledgments I wish to express a deeply thank to Prof. Ronnie Lippens for supporting my research
and for his helpful suggestions and comments. Thanks to IJSL’s reviewers for comments on earlier
version of this paper.

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