Prosopopia

Heather Smith
12/07/04

Dr. Rai
Eng 4934-03

Smith 1
Heather Smith
Dr. Rai
Eng 4934-03
7 December 2004

Prosopopia
Literature has struggled to contain the monstrous within narrative. The parameters
and limits of time and actuality do not apply to the Other. The monstrous as defined in
Parisis work is a state of the virtual, partial subject, which opens the possibilities of the
referent beyond our present understanding. This monstrous vision of the subject
exponentially expands the correlation between signification and production. The potential
for narrative in this vision creates an ostranenie in the relations of biological-sexual
norms, the subject, as defined by the body, and the boundaries of the monstrous.
Narrativeness is based on the teleology of the subject. The limitless potential of
the sexual/as-sexual evolutionary monster disrupts the objective, narrative. Morrison
discusses this: Pure chance, however, provides weak material for narrative, precisely
because it comes from nowhere and therefore seems to preclude the requirement that
narratives offer meaningful connections. This disruptive potential or evolution of
assimilation is the exact contradiction that Parisi presents:
In particular, my critique of theories of evolution based on
the centrality of sexual reproduction to ensure the
complexification of life not only questions the assimilation
for nature and women but more fundamentally challenges
the teleological metaphysics of nature on which this
assimilation depends. (25)

Smith 2
The Darwinian theory of nature as having a teleological purpose is archaic in its
conceptualization as nature as a purposeful mover, it does not account for random change
and movement. Bergson explains that Darwinisms flaw lies in its inability to define
unique creation such as the emergence of new species because it fails to explain
movement in itself. In the same way contingency in narrative is opposed to chance and
directs narrative.
The evolutionary theory of Endosymbiosis presents evolution as deconstructive.
According to Parisi: Endosymbiosis challenges the Darwinian and Freudian economy of
evolution centered on the difference between simple and complex, homogeneous and
heterogeneous, death and life, inorganic and organic. Evolution was not a neat process
of complexification but a random occurrence, a simple accumulation of raw, untapped
data through mutations. This problematizes the theory of teleological evolution, removing
from narrative the process.
In a nonpurposive nature, the state of becoming redefines the limits of the body
through a removal of gender. It poses sexuality and reproduction as potentials not
formula for narration. Parisi elaborates:
The virtual only maps a field of potentials out of which
acutals emerge . . . .All dynamics entail a virtual-actual
circuit of individuation, which is an open process occurring
in the middle: on the fissure or crack disclosing between
adjacent surfaces. (26)
Darwin defined evolution as a purposeful process with monstrosities disrupting
the conception of nature and destroying logic, but new studies in biology and physics

Smith 3
shatter much of this theory. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discuss this perspective of
randomness:
Physics and biology present us with reverse causalities that
are without finality but testify nonetheless to an action of
the future on the present, or of the present on the past, for
example, the convergent wave and the anticipated potential,
which imply an inversion of time. More than breaks or
zigzags, it is these reverse causalities that shatter evolution.
(25)
Based on this concept of machinic nature, narrative and science are indeterminate
having no recognizable past and thus limitless futures.
Cloning also disrupts the directionality of Freud and Darwin proposing the
continuance of life beyond death and limiting the potential of the all powerful libido.
Ultimately, they built their theories around the supremacy of body cells in reproduction.
If a somatic cell has the potential to create life the power of sexual reproduction is
limited. Parisi reflects: Cloning, on the contrary, suggests that somatic substances
themselves have specific abilities and potentials of individuation unknown to nucleic
DNA. Thus the putative organizing function of life attributed to DNA- the germlineresults in a mere induction, whose nature is a matter of indifference.
Sigmund Freud suggested that the progress of society and life depended on the
opposition between successive generations. The liberation of an individual as he grows
up, from the authority of his parents, he argued, is one of the most necessary though
one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. (55-56)

Smith 4
Discourse as symbolized by evolution, as a monstrous creation, is at war within itself, not
with an external force. This is a distinctly Darwinian view on evolution and discourse
proposing that the evolution of an organism is guided by its fight for survival through sex
beyond death. The objections presented by Parisi propose that the evolution of discourse
lies in its delocalization and disjunction from a nonpurposive, random beginning.
As Freud and Darwin debate the need for revolt from the descent of lineage for
the bodys survival through sexuality, science claims there is a strive for unification in an
already disjointed system. Parisi says:
It is above all about nonlinear relations, open-ended
connections of partially actualized bodies encompassing
distinct levels of organization . . .it lays out the engineering
of parts that never add up to a whole but enter new partial
relations without being able to trace back the line of
descent . . . .bodies are never completely actualized but
occupy regions in between the virtual and the actual
worlds. (28-29)
The body in the politics of evolution and discourse is that of individualizations, a
disjointed and fragmented structure. Parisi borrows from Deleuze and Guarttari to argue
that:
The body coincides with its virtual or indeterminate
potentials emerging from its actualizations . . . .the virtual
precedes and exceeds actuals, which are never completely

Smith 5
exhausted but always plunged in dynamic processes. In
short, they are always under construction. (38)
The body, unlike the ideal definition of a collected subject is in this theory a
disjointed and incomplete assemblage of parts. There is no neat cure for the monstrosity
of becoming as Parisi claims: the process of individuation has to be related to
endosymbiotic dynamics of parasitism and contagion, which are ecologies of information
trading, suggesting that the body, far from being completed, is suspended in a field of
virtual partialities.
The narrative of evolution, if one exists, is that of the unlimited potential of the
disjointed. This leads to an open, ever increasing possibility in narrative as well as life.
Parisi claims: Evolution does not entail the passage from actuals to actuals- from the
possible to the possible- but it can only be conceived as a movement of individuation of
the virtual tending toward the actual; heterogeneous potentials tending toward
heterogeneous formations.(32)
The monsterous is the incarnation of that knowledge which enters the world
without introduction and without precedent. New and unfamiliar knowledge can only be
troubling to those who are unacquainted with its origins. All knowledge has a monstrous
quality and the only way to introduce knowledge is to demonstrate it, that is to display it
and in doing so, to demystify it.

Smith 6

Bibliography
Berthold Schoene-Harwood, ed. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein. Columbia University Press,
(New York, NY.) 2000.
David Macey, ed. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. Penguin Putnam Inc.,
(New York, NY.) 2000.
Milburn, Colin Nazhone, Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida. John Hopkins
University Press, (Baltimore, Maryland) 2003.
Morson, Gary Saul, Narrativeness. Northwestern University Press, (Evanston, IL.) 2001.
Parisi, Luciana. Information Trading and Symbiotic Micropolitics Social Text 80, Vol.
22, No.3, Fall 2004. Duke University Press, (Durham, NC.) 2004.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol.8
(London: Hogarth, 1920-22), 55-56.