How many of your ancestors were werewolves?

Why is it that we return repeatedly to certain monsters? What could lie behind our fascination with werewolves and the movies we keep making? Something buried in our cultural unconscious continues titillating us with this monster’s forgotten origin while unfolding politics act like the full-moon’s illumination of monstrous transformation.

We get the word ‘monster’ from Latin monere meaning ‘to warn, to admonish, advise’ and from which we get ‘monitor,’ ‘amnesia,’ even ‘mania.’ Monstrosity is a warning. It warns us not to forget (amnesia), admonishes us to pay attention and avoid falling into a mania, a loss of mind. Our monsters are here to advise us.

Monsters are not figures of the supernatural or religious. To think this is to inherit a mistake made in the late 19th and early 20th C by anthropologists then taken up by sociologists in the idea of “the ambivalence of the sacred.” As European explorers/colonists interacted with more and more cultures unlike their own, they adapted a notion of taboo into biblical religious study then famously entrenched in Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Thus it became a religious idea for psychologists to study since it now was all just in our heads. 

What was lost in this colonial deformation is the juridical-political history of a legal judgement (not a religious entity) originally known in Roman law as the homo sacer (the sacred man) and known in Germanic, French and English law of the Dark Ages as the wulfesheud, loup garou, and werwolf respectively. Sacred originally meant the target of a legal judgement that declared the person was now killable by anyone without committing homicide. So the ookie spookie sense of a religious supernatural spook hides a much more real and monstrous admonishment about the violence of Law and the political declarations making people sacred monsters who can be killed at whim by law once outside the law.

So who is the werewolf? The wargus, werewolf, wulfesheud is that political figure who has been judged outside the law, as a hybrid animal/human who is neither man nor beast yet is both man and beast sitting at the threshold of both. Who makes such a declaration? The Law, the power by which sovereignty has been empowered. The one who declares the wulfesheud - the person declared guilty who therefore must wear a wolf’s head and is now killable without committing a homicide - is the sovereign. Both the sovereign and the werewolf mirror one another as figures who exist both inside and outside of Law; the werewolf as subject of law by virtue of his exclusion from Law, and the sovereign as a figure of Law who also exists outside law as that which creates the Law.

The blunt takeaway is that sovereignty is fundamentally the power to kill without breaking the law (a violence that sits at the threshold of maintaining the law and originating outside of law) and so all law, every modern system of nation-state, declares its werewolves (a juridical judgement by law) as those who will function to reveal the borders of the law by being placed outside the law as expendable.

In today’s terms, these are anyone declared illegal, terrorist, unpatriotic, internal threat, and all the rest we hear from governments. Regimes of violence, always a part of modern nation-states, are now unleashed to become a killing violence of modern werewolves thus declared by a voracious sovereign. Monstrosity unleashed that blurs the borders of the monster and the monstrous, the admonished and the amnesiac, the killers and the killed. The warning, the admonishment of the monsters monitoring the thresholds of law, sovereignty, killing, and justice, are howling at the moon for a coming to our senses, to dispel our collective mania, in order to see clearly the risks of an unfettered violence threatening the monstrosity of all.

So how many of your ancestors were werewolves? How many were made killable? How many became victim to a killing violence of sovereignty, whether monarchical or by courts of a modern nation-state? And importantly, how many participated in the making of werewolves? How many caved-in to manipulations of power? How many bear responsibility for sovereign violences - genocides, enslavements, crusades upon infidels, heretics, and on and on - whose “lawful” participations still demand accountability? That is a demand made of the living by the dead now manifesting as the multi-crises of our times. Monstrosity now haunts both those with power and those being made into the modern werewolves. Pay attention to who does the dying. Pay attention to who does the killing. Who will you and I be after death to those who come after? Will there be werewolves?