Identity, Community, Monstrosity
Following last week’s feature of my guest contribution to Gesher on linking presence and hope, I thought I would follow up with another contribution I made to Humanum Review, which is an essay length treatment of the 2004 anime series Monster. There is a contrast between last week’s post linking presence and hope, and this week’s essay which links the lack of presence and monstrosity. I include the first segment of my essay below and you can move onto the full essay by clicking the link at the bottom.
It is commonly recognized that persons find themselves only in community, insofar as our identities, whilst our own, are always conditioned by the communities we belong to. However, what happens to our identity when community is torn away from us? I would argue that if being part of a community makes us human, then being sundered from community results in our becoming “monsters” in two senses: the monster that is a portent of terror, and the monstrosity that arises from being unmoored from history, community, and identity.
Typically, when we think of monstrosity, we think of physical deformity, beings that are so hideous in appearance that they cause us to turn away in fear. But there is a subtler type of hideousness, not related to physical form, but to time. To understand this temporal dimension of monstrosity, we need to attend to the etymological dimension of the word “monster.”
In Latin, the root word for the noun “monstrum” is the verb “monere,” which means “to warn.” In this definition, the locus of monstrosity is not in the physical present, but in a temporal future, such that what magnifies the terror of the monster is the person’s being left alone with no sense of the dangers that lie lurking before them beyond those concocted by their unguarded imagination. Indeed, it is precisely the lack of any tangible connection to the present and to others that is the source of the monstrosity. The monster is that anonymous and threatening future that hurtles itself towards the lonely, isolated individual who has no one to rely upon for support or to verify that the threat even exists.
What a temporal appreciation for the word “monster” helps us to understand is that there exists a crucial nexus between time, identity, community, and monstrosity: that the sense of who we are in the temporal present is vulnerable to the shapelessness of an unknown future and to a loneliness before what might be coming towards us. Yet, such vulnerability arises only when left alone and completely marooned. Under such conditions, the specter of our imagined monsters will have an even more corrosive effect on our identity. Put more positively, the stability of our identities is found in their being anchored in a community, whose intercession in the present dispels the specter of the uture monsters projected by our imaginations.
Naoki Urasawa's 74-episode anime series Monster (directed by Masayuki Kojima) provides a slow, graphic, confronting, blow-by-blow account of a person’s relationship with past, future, and others. In keeping with the title, the series provides a visceral portrayal of both the personification of monsters, and of how close a person—even one we consider “good”—can be to becoming a monster themselves.
The series begins with a cascade of texts, an introduction familiar to many anime fans. But what a viewer might not expect is that this introduction is comprised of excerpts from the Book of Revelation, passages that evoke the most explicit of biblical monsters: the beasts of the Apocalypse. The series of texts ends with “and they also worshipped the beast and asked ‘Who is like the beast? Who can fight against it?’” (Rev 13:4).
At a surface level, what makes the monster monstrous in this passage is…
