Posts tagged monsters

“La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.”

–

Antonio Gramsci (1930)

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

(Misattributed/alternatively,…)

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” A loose translation, commonly attributed to Gramsci by Slavoj Žižek. Presumably formulation by Žižek. Presumably a translation from a loose French translation by Gustave Massiah, strict English with cognate terms and glosses:

"Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”

“The old world is dying, the new world tardy (slow) to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters.”

“Epochs throw up the monsters they need. History can be written of monsters, and in them. We experience the conjunctions of certain werewolves and crisis-gnawed feudalism, of Cthulhu and rupturing modernity, of Frankenstein’s and Moreau’s made things and a variably troubled Enlightenment, of vampires and tediously everything, of zombies and mummies and aliens and golems/robots/clockwork constructs and their own anxieties. We pass also through the endless shifts of such monstrous germs and antigens into new wounds. All our moments are monstrous moments.”

–China Miéville. Theses on Monsters