UC Berkeley

Monstrosity. If monsters are the things and creatures that put at stake taxonomy, proper categorization and overall containment, then monstrosity is the principle of ungraspability itself. Because the will to knowledge is a will to grasp, writing on monstrosity, or about monstrosity, is an impossible act that cannot but be violent to monstrosity itself. At the same time, monstrosity always escapes that act; it always overflows the attempt of enclosure. This dissertation is an essaying gesture of being with monstrosity, or nearby monstrosity, to be in relation to some of the aspects of fugitivity it produces and provokes. It assembles a bestiary of monsters to consider, theorize and imagine (as) an anontology of monstrosity. It theorizes monstrosity as a fugitive principle of incompleteness that goes beyond a positivist notion of knowledge as accumulation and progression, perhaps beyond or against knowledge itself. Where the shape of a logically linear dissertation does not hold, this set of essays evolved as a form of bestiary in which each chapter corresponds to a monster, and each monster, in its un/containment, fleshes out and speaks to some of the aspects of monstrosity itself.Mercury, as a way of introduction, questions the possibility of speaking with monstrosity rather than about it. It develops an anexegetic practice that recognizes the difficult entanglement of evil, ugliness and truth, and theorizes a method of opaque reading-writing in which teratography emerges as the praxis of monstrous engraving. The Three-Legged Bird focuses on a longue durée of the relation between monstrosity and imagination to show how each points to the transformative materiality of the other. The creature imagines imagination as the monstrous possibility of re-relating, simultaneously finding and creating new possibilities and worlds. Adamastor, from his own place of literary and literal marginality, shows how epic literature and world-making are constantly in need of monstrosity as a necessary supplement that they must persistently erase. The monster claims that his own metamorphoses embody the contra-dictions inherent to monstrosity. Shitty Bichxs, as the final chapter of the dissertation, examines the traces of the essentialism that staunch our old new ways of (de)generation. It looks into the practice of de-monstration as a rationalizing movement that intends to erase monstrosity, to make monsters into pets — and that, ultimately, always fails at it.