The essay examines the articulation of the figure of the beast (thērion) in Plato’s thought on the city and soul, in the Republic and other dialogues. The constitutive correspondence or homology of the city and soul comprises Platonic psycho-politics, a space defined by the thērion: monster and animal at once. The thērion operates within the tripartite division of the soul (the desiring, the spirited and the rational parts) and the tripartite division of the city (producers, guardians, kings). Its various figurations, from wolf to hydra, seem to constrict this figure to the margins of metaphor; the trope of this liquid metaphor however guides the Platonic psycho-political project. It is a project of a metamorphosis, an open transformation, undertaken in order not merely to define, but to effectuate justice in the city and soul.

Along the path opened by Galileo’s mechanics, early modern mechanical philosophy provided the metaphysical framework in which ‘matter in motion’ underwent a process of reduction to mathematical description and to physical explanation. The struggle against the monstrous contingency of matter in motion generated epistemological monsters in the domains of both the natural and civil science. In natural philosophy Descartes’s institution of Reason as a disembodied subject dominated the whole process. In political theory it was Hobbes who opposed the artificial unity of the body politic to the monstrous multiplicity of the multitude. Through a parallel analysis of the basic structure of Descartes’s and Hobbes’s enterprises, this article explains in which sense Hobbes’s peculiar form of materialism is in fact to be considered a surreptitious reduction of materialism to its ideological counterpart, Cartesian dualism, and to its implicit political-pedagogical project.

The question of political judgement is usually addressed within a normative or epistemological framework. In contrast in this paper the approach is that of a pragmatics of judgement. The leading questions are what does political judgement do and how does it operate? This enquiry, carried out through an examination of political judgement in Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, is shown to ineluctably lead to an ontology of action. These philosophers’ contrasting ontologies give rise to two different frameworks for political judgement whose avatars are still with us today: Hobbesian functionalism and Spinozist affirmationism. Finally these competing frameworks of judgement are put to the test of resolving—or at least treating—the very problem that gave rise to them in the first place in Hobbes and Spinoza’s philosophies, the problem of political conflict. The singularity of Spinoza’s affirmationist framework for judgement is identified as its capacity to pose the reflexive question of who the subject of judgement is for the object of judgement in the actual action of judgement. The hypothesis is that this question opens a way for both subject and object of judgement to increase their power to act and think.

Hobbes obviously thought politics with metaphors relating politics to bestiality and monstrosity: in De Cive, a man is a wolf to a man, and two of his major political books are entitled with the name of a biblical monster, Leviathan and Behemoth. Did Hobbes mean that political problems emerge from a natural violence of men and that the political solution to these problems must be found in sovereign violence? This contribution tries to demonstrate that these references do not outline any natural human ugliness but a double bind of culture and society (which is organized and developed for natural reason but thanks to artificial means). For human reasons, the historical development of human life separates this life from humanity in two ways—politics and history turn humanity into monstrosity and divinity (a man is also a god to a man and Leviathan is also a mortal god), and Behemoth means that historical violence is a cultural product.

In this paper I explore this question of the ways we might form enabling assemblages with non-human others, by returning to Spinoza’s theory of the composite individual. The challenge, as I see it, is less that of a need to move beyond a romanticized view of Nature as a harmonious whole, Nature as a perpetual threat, or Nature as motivated by a final cause (whether good or evil). The problem that confronts us, rather, is a problem of composition—which Nature do we ally with, what components? How do we understand or define, much less defend, localized ecosystems which are supported (and threatened) by a dizzying and infinite array of intensive and extensive properties? This is a problem of the monstrous infinite.

In Leopardi’s writings the idea of the monster/monstrous means a deviation from nature or a consequence of something that is considered monstrous because it belongs to, or reflects a taste or a set of criteria of evaluation belonging to another time or place. There is therefore both an absolute and a relative meaning of monster/monstrous, according to whether it refers to the real history of mankind, which progressively diverged from nature, or to the imaginary foundation of taste and judgement. Nonetheless, these two moments are intertwined and refer one to the other reciprocally. In fact, the real difference between humanity and nature is the source of every imagination about monstrosity. One might even say that the notion of the monster/monstrous is the chain that links the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ because it is the result of a miscalculation that makes a mere partial viewpoint absolute.

The monstrous power of the blind in Diderot’s 1949 Letter is not due to its ability to make people laugh or afraid, as its most common etymology would indicate: monstrum, monstrare, to point to an abnormal fact. The monstrous power of Diderot’s monster is that of one who shows: monere, monitor, in the manner of a guide or pathfinder. It shows us that everything that lives, and especially the human being, is a hybrid. It takes the idea of a possible mixture of animals and humans into account, thus the boldness of an ‘anti-speciesism’ as presented in the fantastical bestiary of Alembert’s Dream. It brings the humanism of essence to an end and invites us to redefine a new social bond.

In this paper, I analyse the problem of monstrosity as a key point of Lucretius’s theory through the opposite interpretations of Bergson and Canguilhem. According to Canguilhem, Lucretius’s philosophy can be described as follows: before the constitution of the ‘pacts of the nature,’ forms proliferate in the kingdom of Chaos. Following the pacts, the Kingdom of the form and of the Cosmos is established. Following Bergson, on the contrary, Lucretius’s pacts of nature represent the ‘kingdom of necessity’ and the ‘eternal law of nature.’ Not in the sense that the persistence of forms is ensured, but rather in the sense of the necessity of the combinations of atoms. Hence, the form’s constitution is not secured by the pacts of nature, and a monster is not an exception to them. Both interpretations paradigmatically illustrate what is at stake in the concept of monstrosity, namely the meaning of Lucretian determinism and its relation with chance.

This article problematizes the political category of the monster in Hobbes’s thought from a biopolitical perspective. Even though political thought has been traditionally focused on Leviathan’s figure as a political monster, here we pay particular attention to the maxim homo homini lupus, which can be identified with the werewolf. This figure allows us on the one hand, to show how the wolf becomes man with the creation of the State, and on the other hand, to show how there is a constant threat of man becoming wolf, of the lupification of man. Hobbes’s discourse of sovereignty aims to neutralize the werewolf. This neutralization can be seen as immunization. In this sense, the werewolf operates both as poison and as antidote—pharmakon—within the State. The werewolf produces an inoculation with a therapeutical function: it is a dose of the same poison from which the State seeks to protect itself.

Foucault characterizes the defining feature of modern politics in terms of a new form of power concerned with maximizing life, biopolitics, as opposed to the sovereign right to kill. This characterization becomes problematic, especially when the overwhelming frequency of death and massacres in the twentieth century is considered. The question of how so much death is produced in an economy of power concerned with the maximization of life has stirred considerable debate. This paper argues that there is a death-function internal to biopolitics that should be considered in terms of biopolitical social defense. In making the life of a population its object, biopolitics makes death into an immanent condition of the population. The history of the emergence of this death-function internal to biopolitics is traced out in terms of different figurations of the monstrous: the shift from a juridical conception of monstrosity to a criminal and then medico-normative monstrosity shows that the steeping of death in the life of the population is done by normalizing judgment, through which death becomes an immanent condition of society. Thus, I show that the defense of society against its own monstrosity is done on both the disciplinary and the biopolitical levels.

This paper argues that today the true source of terror in the economico-biopolitically advanced countries of global capitalism lies in biopower’s own constitution as a normative field (the protection of life) that presupposes its exception (the superfluity of life) as its own precondition. At the two extreme poles of this exception we find “terrorism,” and particularly suicide bombing, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones), as the pair revealing the core of biopower. However, of the two only “terrorism” is discursively constructed in the “West” as a monstrous act that should incite horror. Linking horror to the psychoanalytic concepts of repression and foreclosure, I argue that the biopolitical function of horror lies in rendering unreadable the message of such “monstrous” acts. Furthermore, insofar as horror’s experience is an affective state of being that can, nevertheless, be incited discursively, affect shifts to the center of the political domain. The affect of horror in particular becomes instrumental to politics as it can provide the criterion for determining the bio-racial break between, in Foucault’s words, “what must live and what must die.”

The paper is organized around two ideas that come out in Steve Crowell’s Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger and that I discuss critically in turn. The first concerns the reach of Crowell’s claim according to which the connection between intentionality, meaning and normativity is necessary in all forms of intentional experience. I make my point by considering the case of imagining experiences, which are—I argue—meaningful, intentional, but not necessarily normative in any relevant sense. The second question is about Crowell’s criticism of the role of bodily self-awareness in Husserl’s phenomenology of perception. While Crowell is right to maintain that the norm of proper functioning relevant to bodily skills can’t be understood as arising from a system of kinaesthetic sensations alone, I argue that bodily self-awareness still has a normative role to play in perception inasmuch as it allows me to cast my own experience in evaluative terms.

Steven Crowell’s new book is a wake-up call for phenomenology in general and for Heidegger studies in particular. This article focuses on Crowell’s robust reinstatement of the phenomenological reduction and the transcendental reduction in Heidegger’s work.

This paper responds to comments by Maxime Doyon and Thomas Sheehan on aspects of my book, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Among the topics discussed are the relations between phenomenology and analytic philosophy, the difference between a Brentanian and an Husserlian approach to intentional content, the normative structure of the intentional content of noetic states such as thinking and imagining, the implications of taking a phenomenological approach to Heidegger’s concept of “being,” Heidegger’s “correlationism,” and the normative character of Heidegger’s analysis of Angst, death, and conscience.