Politics over monstrosity and politics of monstrosity. The difference between negative and positive consideration about monsters

Abstract

In this article we will consider monstrosity as a political category from a biopolitical perspective. According to the most prominent thinkers on biopolitics, we can understand monstrosity as an objective of biopower that aims to control and eliminate it (Agamben, Esposito), or as a subjectivity that resists appropriation by biopower and create life in common (Hardt & Negri), and produce powerful ways of life (Haraway, Braidotti). We will analyze these two orientations about monstrosity and its relation with the power, through the expressions: 'Politics over monstrosity' -the subjectivities that are constituted as monsters by the biopower- and 'Politics of monstrosity' -the capacity of some subjectivities to confront the biopower and create forms of life that do not reproduce the capitalist system and the gender hierarchy'. We will emphasize the possibility of a 'commonality of monsters', a way of common life where singulars are in permanent transformation and open to others. This means that in the commonality, life cannot be either normalized or neutralized; instead, life is conceived as potentia.