Enrique, de nuevo, me mandó un vínculo hacia
este texto ("Monsters and the Moral Imagination", de Stephen T. Asma) que no había podido leer hasta hoy. Un acercamiento distinto al de Newitz en
Pretend We're Dead, que está marcado por una lectura económica y de sospecha; el de Stephen T. Asma parece tener a la filosofía clásica detrás (en especial, la ética y poética aristotélica) como puede verse en los siguientes párrafos:
In a significant sense, monsters are a part of our attempt to envision the good life or at least the secure life. Our ethical convictions do not spring fully grown from our heads but must be developed in the context of real and imagined challenges. In order to discover our values, we have to face trials and tribulation, and monsters help us imaginatively rehearse. Imagining how we will face an unstoppable, powerful, and inhuman threat is an illuminating exercise in hypothetical reasoning and hypothetical feeling.You can't know for sure how you will face a headless zombie, an alien face-hugger, an approaching sea monster, or a chainsaw-wielding psycho. Fortunately, you're unlikely to be put to the test. But you might face similarly terrifying trials. You might be assaulted, be put on the front lines of some war, or be robbed, raped, or otherwise harassed and assailed. We may be lucky enough to have had no real acquaintance with such horrors, but we have all nonetheless played them out in our mind's eye. And though we can't know for sure how we'll face an enemy soldier or a rapist, it doesn't stop us from imaginatively formulating responses. We use the imagination in order to establish our own agency in chaotic and uncontrollable situations.Quizá, como puede verse hacia el final del artículo al que me mandó Enrique, Asma es un poco rápido e ingenuo al despachar el tema de si podemos o no definir a un hombre como monstruoso. En fin, se tendría que leer su libro
On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears.
