drove a wedge … between Inside and Outside, between Spirit and Body, between the ideal and the real … by calling attention to the double surplus that ‘sticks out’. On the one hand, there is the spiritual element of corporeality: the presence, in matter itself, of a non-material but physical element, of a subtle corpse, relatively independent of time and space, which provides the material base of our free will (animal magnetism, etc.); on the other hand, there is the corporeal element of spirituality: the materializations of the spirit in a kind of pseudo-stuff, in substanceless apparitions (ghosts, living dead).
a fundamental mechanism of identity formation produces the second, hybrid grotesque … by the very struggle to exclude the first grotesque. … The point is that the exclusion necessary to the formation of social identity … is simultaneously a production … of a complex hybrid fantasy emerging out of the very attempt to demarcate boundaries, to unite and purify the social collectivity.
» Rouse the Executioner #sealed by #command
This superstition once proved nearly fatal to a harmless botanist, who, while collecting plants on a hillside many years ago, was observed by some peasants, and, in consequence of his crouching attitude, mistaken for a wolf. Before they had time to reach him, however, he had risen to his feet and disclosed himself in the form of a man; but this in the mind of the Roumanians, who now regarded him as an aggravated case of wolf, was but additional motive for attacking him. They were quite sure that he must be a prikolitsch [werewolf], for only such could change his shape in this unaccountable manner, and in another minute they were all in full cry after the wretched victim of science, who might have fared badly indeed had he not succeeded in gaining a carriage on the highroad before his pursuers came up.
The increasing utilization of scientific concepts and language in
nineteenth-century texts about lycanthropy provides clear evidence
of the process by which science was installed as a hegemonic mode of
explanation during this period. Particularly from the middle of the
century, considerable energy was devoted to the production of ‘scientific’
explanations of lycanthropy, most of which stressed its origins
in primitive, superstitious societies which were temporally, spatially
or culturally removed from the modern period. Such explanations
worked to separate strategically the social group involved in producing,
circulating and reading these texts from the realm associated with
the ‘lower’ (superstitious, plebeian, corporeal, bestial, instinctive or
‘natural’) conditions of existence, where lycanthropy was generally
situated. When contests developed over which members of this social
group should be accorded the highest authority, science once again
emerged as the mode that would give one author the discursive edge
over another.
Wolf head, 1-100 CE, bronze, Roman, Cleveland Museum of Art
