Mostri, Inc.

(Monsters, Inc. - Italian translation from the Spanish by Jean-Claude Lévêque)

Abstract

This essay aims at settling the drift of modern images of evil according to the stereotypes that art and education have determined in the bourgeois collective imagination. It also aim at showing the unfolding of a progressive de-substantialization of such figures, which tends toward comedy and the grotesque, together with the fact that, precisely for this reason, there develops an increase in the sense of horror and anxiety in front of an oscillation that the “normal” citizen does not know how to handle. In this line of a logic of the excess, the essay analyzes the return, in so-called post-modernity, of the nineteenth-century figures of the violently monstrous, which are nowadays productively and artificially ready-made for consumption.