No perm: Resistance becomes domesticated when forced into understanding --- classification of it through the state leads to cooption by biopolitical power
Thomas Mercier 2019, a postdoctoral researcher at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez who specialises in twentieth-century philosophy, political thought and international studies, with a particular interest in the multilayered problematics of democracy, violence and political resistance from the perspectives of deconstruction “Resisting the Present: Biopower in the Face of the Event (Some Notes on Monstrous Lives)”, CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2019, pp. 99–128. –https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.19.3.0099
Nevertheless, the problem is not all that simple. How can one think the “appearing” of an exception? And of the monster? There are at least two ways of thinking the monstrous exception: on the one hand, the monster, because it instantiates a tautological singularity, should be absolutely unreadable and undecipherable, radically other and otherworldly; which also means that, on the other hand, it should break all rules in order to deliver its own rules, the rules we may then use in order to read the monster, to understand it—be it in order to mock it, expel it, cure it, take care of it, or look at it with pity, maybe tenderness... But—here lies the problem—as soon as it is read and demonstrated, as soon as it is understood and classified, the monster is demonsterized: it becomes appropriated and domesticated. It is not a monster anymore, or it is just one monster among others, which one may class according to a taxonomy or typology of monstrous lives—that is, a teratology. In this process, the monster loses its monstrous potency, its subversive force, and is converted into an item among others in order to be managed according to biopolitical normativity and power-knowledge dispositives. By definition, teratology is an impossible science.12 This difficulty prompts Derrida to distinguish between normal monsters and monstrous monstrosities:
I shall distinguish between normal monstrosities and monstrous monstrosities which never present themselves as such. A monstrosity never presents itself; or else, if you prefer, it only presents itself, that is, lets itself be recognized, by allowing itself to be reduced to what is recognizable; that is, to a normality, a legitimacy which it is not, hence by not letting itself be recognized as what it is—a monstrosity. A monstrosity can only be “mis-known” [méconnue], that is, unrecognized and misunderstood. It can only be recognized afterwards, when it has become normal or the norm. . . .
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: “Here are our monsters,” without immediately turning the monsters into pets. (1990, 79–80)