This text first appeared in French in Trou Noir, November 28th 2021.
1. WHAT THE MONSTER SIGNS
From the incessant conflict with the Civilization, the volte-face that is ours of the Monster. It is not born by chance, like a failure of the structure and that it would come to confirm in its generality. We say of the Monster that it announces rather than it is born, that it pierces a world rather than it comes to it. The Monster is a teaching, not of some sacred mystery unknown to beings, but of a new path to be cleared and followed¹. It is a sign of a two echoes metamorphosis: effective metamorphosis of the body and metamorphosis of the style of being to be carried out. This breakthrough in the order of things is that of an extreme otherness coming to disturb any rational “languaging” [mise en langage] — any possibility of a teratology — and to corrupt the categories of the identity. The monstrous reason, in opposition to the autonomous and universal reason which affirms a normativity of behaviours, asserts its rights to perversion: it produces its own illogic of behaviours so that there is a monstrous way of feeling and acting — Sade.
The Monster, in what it signs, is by no means a search of redemption: refusing innocence and its myths, the Monster does not promise any appeasement but on the contrary opposes to the innocent ontology a dishevelled ontology, as excessive as the passions which conspire in its members. No promise: where the political identities of the LGBT and the new queers address the State, obsecrations on their knees. To the insistent, almost too markedly vice-like, vow of the LGBT of integration, the Monster opposes the bellicose enterprise of an integral monstrosity. A throw towards the limit — linguistic, institutional, corporal — as long as it moves away from any center, from any identity: repulsion to constitute itself as the Other heterogeneous to the Self.
2. WHAT THE MONSTER ABOMINATES
The revival of the gesture of flight towards the radical, the limit never reached — the Monster experiments in the region of the penultimate — offers the only guarantee of a disidentification. For the Monster is repugnant to identity, just as he considers with disgust any property and any responsibility of the self. This enclosure of identity, imposed by the discursive network, by the Doctor, by the Jurist, by the Patriarch, appears to him only as the hold of a totally foreign and deceptive rationality on the passions, which are the true motor of the insurrection of the bodies.
Abandoning Progress, all this ideology of which the LGBTQ+ gorges themselves like piglets supplicating for udders — all identity politics are rubbish [une cochonnerie, cochon meaning pig], let us say it. Progress is inscribed in the regime of innocence of Civilization and in the promise of the blessed future of an appeased social order where everyone, queers primarily, will be integrated in the vast pigsty where we live and think.
The Monster disfigures progress: it reveals the violence of its process that is institutionalization. He promises this same logic of disfigurement to literally everything and, above all, to keep it [the promise]. The promise to disfigure is the only passionate constraint that is exerted on him, that he admits: he is the phantasm in his obsessive constraint [2]. To disfigure in order not to integrate because it is necessary to repeat it again: the queer does not “question” the norms but affirms the ways of a dissidence — movement of repulsion of the center — , of a monstrous way that will be entirely devoted to the lightning destruction of the norms and the general institutions. If the monster is an aberration, it is not only in relation to the existing norms: that would be to make of the monster something partial, that is to say an integrable. On the contrary, the monster is an aberration that aims at another mode of totality: it wants to establish the counter-generality, that is to say the integral monstrosity.
3. THE INTEGRAL MONSTROSITY
To be in turn Olibrius, the occiser of innocents. Heliogabalus with the imperial anus always hungry. Exuberant Schreber, wife of God. The monster is profoundly singular but his goal is to make of this singularity a counter-generality. At the antipodes of identity politics that want to integrate into the generality to make it a simple variation, an orientation, a taste. The LGBTQ political project claims the banal as a way out; it is the defeat of the desiring movement in its conflict with the instituted and civilized self. Then it is necessary to change of scene so that the conflict between the Civilizational and the Monster can still exist; and that the later can retain by the end of the collar the former in its destructive fury. The enterprise of integral monstrosity must prevent the normalization of the civilizational violence — while affirming to destroy it. To want to destroy civilization, it is to limit its destructive power.
The enterprise of the integral monstrosity is a temporary deception: its goal is not that there are no more monsters. The enterprise of monstrosity can only take place in the institutional space of Western civilization and in its categories: it is an activation of the tension with the Civilizational. It allows for politics because its aim always maintained, in its obsessive constraint, revives the fight between the Monster and the Civilizational. If this pursuit disappears, nothing more opposes the Civilizational and politics disappears — the rule banality.
The movement that emerges is what takes precedence: it makes possible the becoming-monster as a process of disidentification of modernity. The requirement to put an end to the responsible self, identical to itself and to property. One sees then appearing, in the volte-face, the monstrous in arms.
Félix Alibert
[1] Emile Benveniste, Indo-European language and society.
[2] Pierre Klossowski, Du signe unique. Feuillets inédits.
