About the monster, nature and origin: a retelling of Frankenstein Or the modern Prometheus

Abstract

The strange figure of the monster, a sort of unclassifiable or outside
and margin of every classification, may be found in the path between an
apparently disperse series of histories: history of psychiatry, of religious or
secular law, of criminology, of the western representations of the East, of
embryology, of the conservative political philosophies and even of a certain
literature. This essay intends to revisit the figuration of the monster in its
paradoxical relation with knowledge: at one time, the outside of knowledge,
the sign of its impossibility, and principle of intelligibility: founder key of the
psychiatric knowledge, of embryologic knowledge, of the representations of
the distant other. To exploit this relation, this paper intents to accomplish a
short rereading of the classic Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus.