Monstrous Ontologies.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nirta, Caterina.

Contributor:

Pavoni, Andrea.

Series:

Series in Philosophy

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Monsters--Philosophy.

Monsters.

Monsters--Symbolic aspects.

Monsters--Social aspects.

Monsters--Mythology.

Monsters in art.

Monsters in popular culture.

Monsters in literature.

Ontologies (Information retrieval).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (255 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Monstrous Ontologies

Place of Publication:

Wilmington, DE : Vernon Press, 2021.

Summary:

While the presence of monsters in popular culture is ever-increasing, their use as an explicit or implicit category to frame, stigmatise, and demonise the other is seemingly on the rise. At the same time, academic interest for monsters is ever-growing. Usually, monstrosity is understood as a category that emerges to signal a transgression to a given order; this approach has led to the demystification of the insidious characterisations of the (racial, sexual, physical) other as monstrous. While this effort has been necessary, its collateral effects have reduced the monstrous to a mere (socio-cultural) construction of the other: a dialectical framing that de facto deprives monstrosity from any reality. 'Monstrous Ontologies: Politics, Ethics, Materiality' proffers the necessity of challenging these monstrous otherings and their perverse socio-political effects, whilst also asserting that the monstrous is not simply an epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological reality.There is a profound difference between monsters and monstrosity. While the former is an often sterile political and social simplification, the end-product of rhetorical and biopolitical apparatuses; the latter may be understood as a dimension that nurtures the un-definable, that is, that shows the limits of these apparatuses by embodying their material excess: not a 'cultural frame', but the limit to the very mechanism of 'framing'. The monstrous expresses the combining, hybridising, becoming, and creative potential of socio-natural life, albeit colouring this powerful vitalism with the dark hue of a fearful, disgusting, and ultimately indigestible reality that cannot simply be embraced with multicultural naivety. As such, it forces us towards radically changing not the categories, but the very mechanisms of categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies the profound ethical dimension that monstrosity forces us to acknowledge; here lies its profoundly political potential, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing monstrosity, and rather requires to engage with its uncomfortable, appalling, and revealing materiality.This book will appeal to postgraduate students, PostDocs, and academics alike in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, humanities, sociology and social theory, criminology, human geography, and critical legal theory.

Contents:

Monster-measures and monstrous values : a short reflection on the foundations of individual-environmental theory / Andrea Mubi Brighenti

Learning to live and die in the Cthulhucene / Paul Reid-Bowen

Relating (to) monstrosity and hybridity : translation and interconnectedness in the age of hyperobjects / Lucile Desblache

Uranium as monster in Swakopmund / Jack Boulton

Monster as a tool for thinking : learning from spatial practices in abnormal territories / Ramón Córdova González, Signe Pērkone

Revisiting Deleuze's bestiary : what difference do monsters make? / Carl Olsson

Do revolutions need monsters? : ethnographic fragments on toxic fish, monstrosity and social justice / Panos Kompatsiaris

Beyond scientific racism : monstrous ontologies and hostile environments / Sweta Rajan-Rankin

The slender man's ontology : playing with reality and belief online / Vivian Asimos

Collective voices and the materialisation of ideas : the monster as methods / The Monster Network

Fleeing from categories : monstrous artefacts and style in archaeology / Emanuele Prezioso

The unbearable monstrosity of being. On the narrative provincialization of ontologies / Riccardo Baldissone.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781648892196

1648892191

OCLC:

1243541805