Table Of ContentMonstrosity and Philosophy
Radical Otherness in Greek and
Latin Culture
Filippo Del Lucchese
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Contents
Acknowledgements v
Introduction 1
1. The Myth and the Logos 8
Order and Chaos 13
Mythical Battlefi elds: Monstrosity as a Weapon 19
Causality and Monstrosity: Challenging Zeus 35
2. The Pre-Platonic Philosophers 56
Anaxagoras: A Material Origin for Life and Monstrosity 56
Empedocles: Wonders to Behold 63
Democritus: Agonism within Matter 70
3. Plato 78
4. Aristotle 93
5. Epicurus and Lucretius 130
An Immanent Causality for an Infi nite Universe 130
Zoogony, Monstrosity and Nature’s Normativity 140
Concourses of Nature 153
Lucretius’s Impact on the Augustan Age 161
6. Stoicism 170
Nominalism 172
Good and Evil, Beauty and Ugliness 181
Providence, God and Teleology 205
7. Scepticism 223
The Tropes and the Critique of Essentialism 228
To What Purpose? 239
iv MONSTROSITY AND PHILOSOPHY
8. Middle and Neoplatonism 248
The Material World and the Rediscovery of Transcendence 249
Demons 278
The World Order 287
Bibliography 326
Index Locorum 394
Index Verborum 408
Index Rerum 415
Index Nominum 417
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Brunel University, London, which granted me two semesters
of research leave, an increasingly rare luxury and one that was sorely needed
to accomplish a task of this magnitude. I am particularly grateful to Mark
Neocleous, who has not only followed my research since its inception, but also
wrote one of the fi rst books I encountered on monstrosity, and to Justin Fisher,
who provided me with me the institutional fl exibility I needed to accomplish
this research. I am also grateful to my colleagues and students in the Master in
Teoria critica della società at the University of Milano Bicocca and the Collège
International de Philosophie, who hosted me as a Directeur de programme from
2012 to 2019, and where I presented my work as it progressed.
I began working on monstrosity as a recipient of a Marie Curie fellow-
ship that allowed me to spend two years at Occidental College, Los Angeles
and one at the Université de Picardie, Amiens. During that time, I benefi ted
immensely from my connection with Warren Montag and Laurent Bove, who
offered not only academic supervision, but friendship and human and political
solidarity beyond the boundaries of academic work.
At different stages and in different measures I have received support and
invaluable criticism from several colleagues: Andrea Bardin, Luca Basso,
Laura Cremonesi, Oliver Feltham, Marco Fioravanti, Alain Gigandet,
Augusto Illuminati, Susanna Mezzadri, Vittorio Morfi no, Gabriele Pedullà,
Fabio Raimondi, Tania Rispoli, Hasana Sharp, Martha Shulman, Bruce
Tindall, Oreste Trabucco, Dimitris Vardoulakis, Stefano Visentin, Elia Zaru.
With their questions and curiosity, Djalal and Rahma helped me think
about monstrosity in ways I could not have imagined before meeting them.
Without them, this book’s writing would have been . . . much faster, but also
much sadder! I am most grateful for their challenging presence in my life.
This book is dedicated to Kady, who supported me in times of wrestling
with worse monsters. She has been the shield without which I could have not
faced them, and I will never forget.
Un commencement de monstres est possible.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Introduction
Monsters abounded in the ancient world. They proliferated on and around
Phidias’s lost sculpture of Athena Parthenos, one of the most renowned cult
images of ancient Greece:1 amazons and giants were depicted on her shield,
which hid the snake Erichthonius, centaurs adorned her sandals; Medusa was
represented on her peplos, and the Gorgoneion decorated the aegis. Finally, a
Sphinx and two winged gryphons stood on her crest. Athena, endowed with
skilful wisdom and warrior virtue, subjugated the monsters who had tried to
subvert the Olympian order and who are shown here tamed, thus confi rming
her might. The Greeks praise the gods, celebrating their fi nal victory over
chaos and monstrosity.
Today’s prevailing cosmological theories on the birth and evolution of
the universe teach that chaos will indeed, ultimately, swallow it. Theoretical
physics explains that the universe has two possible destinies, monstrously
necessary in their remote and yet eternal presence: the fi nal catastrophic
collapse of the universe on the one hand or its slow exhaustion in an unstop-
pable increase of entropy on the other. I wonder whether the widespread
interest in monstrosity that characterises scholarship today is dictated by the
intriguing yet unconscious feeling that, in some way, the ancient monsters of
chaos have never been fully defeated and, contrary to the Greeks’ belief, will
ultimately win the fi ght.
The specifi c interest in monstrosity in this book, however, derives not so
much from its hypothetically eschatological sense, but rather from its con-
cretely ontologico-political meaning. I am interested in monstrosity as radical
otherness, as the provoking alterity that challenges – sometimes by its mere
1 Paus. I.24.5–7. With few exceptions, abbreviations of classical works follow those in
the Diccionario griego-español (DGE): <dge.cchs.csic.es> or the Oxford Latin Dictionary
(OLD) and, when the DGE or the OLD does not provide them, I have used the abbre-
viations conventionally adopted.
2 MONSTROSITY AND PHILOSOPHY
presence, sometimes with open defi ance – the norm’s power to signify.2 In
exploring the history of ancient thought, I have tried to show how monstros-
ity’s challenge often comes in the form of a scandalous ontological project,
immanent and material. This project is both ontological and political, since
every metaphysical framework is at the same time determined by, and has
implications for, the concept of the human and her role in the world. Equally,
every vision of social, economic and political relations, like every idea of the
self and the other, is grounded on and determines, explicitly or implicitly, a
certain notion of being. Every ontology is produced by and produces, in the
last instance, a politics; every politics conceives itself and is conceived, in the
last instance, through an ontology.
My aim in this book is to reconstruct the concept of monstrosity in clas-
sical thought from its earliest beginnings, through pre-Platonic and Attic
philosophy to the Hellenistic systems, arriving fi nally at Neoplatonism. I want
to follow the discourse about monstrosity – mostly but not entirely – as it
appeared in philosophy, and show how an apparently peripheral concept is in
fact central to understanding how each of the above systems explains nature,
its functioning and its anomalies.
Although monsters have attracted their fair share of attention in the past,
no attempt has been made to analyse the topic extensively throughout antiq-
uity. Articles and monographs on similar topics exist in recent scholarship,
such as Morgan’s unpublished PhD thesis (1984), the essays in Atherton
(1992) or the enquiry on Roman monsters by Cuny-Le Callet (2005), the
studies of Jones (1993) and Morfi no (2013) on Lucretius, of Johnson (1987)
on Lucan, of Louis (1975) and Yartz (1997) on Aristotle, and I have benefi ted
greatly from them. A more comprehensive reconstruction, however, seems to
me indispensable for a better understanding of ancient thought as a whole.
Furthermore, it is crucial for the study of more recent historical periods in
which the heritage of antiquity becomes a battlefi eld that mirrors modern and
– albeit more indirectly – contemporary philosophical debates on the ques-
tions of nature, the divine, the relation between normality and abnormality,
and, perhaps most importantly, the construction of identity and otherness.
In this sense, this book, devoted to the ancient world, is self-contained and
autonomous, yet it can also be read as a necessary introduction to the study of
monstrosity in the middle ages, the Renaissance and modernity.
It is easier to say what this book is not and what it does not aim to be than
to say what it is and what I hope it can do: it is not an exhaustive handbook on
a specifi c topic, such as the classic monograph on fate by Chase Green (1944),
2 See Foucault (1999).
INTRODUCTION 3
Cotter’s work on miracles (1999), the seminal study on Hermetism by Festugière
(1949–54), Jaeger’s seminal study on Paideia (1934–47), or the less well known
but exhaustive enquiries on destiny by Magris (1984) and the concept of nature
by Naddaf (1992), all of which I have learnt from. My book intends to show
the diverse aspects of refl ections on monstrosity and the problems related to its
interpretation, always conscious of the provisional and incomplete character
such a study must have. I make no claim to completeness: fortune and time do
not permit the book to extend beyond geographic, linguistic and chronological
boundaries that may appear artifi cial. I try, however, to consider the principal
sources that, in my view, speak meaningfully about, shape and are shaped by the
development of the concept of monstrosity.
My most serious diffi culty has come from an attempt to keep together
texts and ideas shaped throughout the centuries, and to follow their develop-
ment without imposing on them a sense of continuity that emanates from the
observer’s eye rather than the coherency of the object observed. The multi-
plicity of such ideas and interpretations, of the problems and their attempted
responses across the ancient period, would suggest the necessity to speak
about a plurality of monstrosities rather than one concept of monstrosity.
I have resisted this solution. Although plurality does offer an escape from the
challenges of considering a complex set of problems and questions, it fails
to acknowledge that this multiplicity challenged classical thought in similar
ways. Thus this book grapples with the concept of monstrosity and the ques-
tions that this monstrosity poses to philosophy and thought.
Monstrosity is not one concept in the sense that different authors in differ-
ent schools and different periods address it explicitly as a unifi ed theoretical
object. Neither philosophers nor poets speak of it as if it were an entity that
passes from one thinker to another, ready for analysis across time. Nonetheless,
I consider it one concept because whenever it is addressed, however differently,
it touches upon the same questions, suggests recurring forms of analysis, and
requires similar theoretical tools, though it is not called by the same name or
necessarily recognised as a single object. Despite the diversity of the monsters,
again and again monstrosity compels philosophers to answer the same ques-
tions, to respond to the same set of problems.
Whether it insinuates itself as an uninvited guest or is explicitly evoked
and placed at the centre of enquiry, monstrosity insists on raising questions
that philosophers can neither dismiss nor fully solve. It is this powerful force
that acts across time and systems of thought that I follow in this book. My
methodological approach is to look for traces and hints of monstrosity even
when it is not mentioned explicitly, and to consider it as one and the same
concept despite the apparent multiplicity of its treatment and expression.
