Criminals, monsters, human rights : are human rights for monsters too?

Abstract

The idea of the monster as an evil person with no human feelings and deprived of any rights is a recent creation of the collective imagination. The confusion of the notion of criminality with the teratological notion of the monster is a typical fable of the troubled times we are living in. The monster begins his adventure in the traditional Western culture as a prodigious creature. He is endowed with benevolent understanding in the famous pages of Montaigne, presents the occasion for sanctity to the canon Giuseppe Cottolengo, suffers peculiar amorous throbs in tales from Mary Shelley to Mel Brooks, and is called "delicate" by Baudelaire. He is even enrolled among indirect educators by Bruno Bettelheim, because he could be useful in children's fables to prepare them for the horrible experiences they will have to face on becoming adults. Sadly the monsters of the past are no more, as the Granguignol-like analyses of the private slaughterhouses of the cruelest murderers show in detail. The children of darkness and the children of light battle on in the twilight of the old certainties; while the survival and the meaning of democratic systems are called into question by new "demoniac religions". Unfortunately, we still need monsters to calm us. The monster is the alien in our midst; and his radical otherness can help us to define ourselves. It could help support an uncertain, ambiguous, and shaky identity. In conclusion, the monster is often a kind of cheap therapy to assuage the persistent mental disorders of the average citizen of our times.