popular and learned interest in monsters
(in the 16th century & 17th century Baconian scientific program: ) treatments of nature and natural history must have included (with rigorous selection) monsters (~ aberrations in the natural order: new, rare, and unusual nature, both exotic & domestic)
[*]nature: an ingenious craftsman ——> [*]monster: nature’s most artful work (——> they bridged the natural & the artificial)
—— corresponded to the activities of nature =/= types of subject matter, methods of investigation
—— interest in irregularities (=/= end of 17th century interest in nature’s uniformity and order)

(Daston –> a case study of) the changing relationship between popular & learned culture

…monsters began to lose their religious resonance
(from) fear ——to——> delight
(from) prodigy ——to——> wonder
(from) sermon ——to——> table-talk
(from) horrible, terrible, effrayable, espouventable ——to——> strange, wonderful, merveilleux (marvellous جالب)
(from) final cause ——to——> proximate cause (physical explanations and the natural order)
==> nature began to assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~> natural wonder

The Scripture sayth, before the ende
Of all thinges shall appeare,
God will wounders straunge thinges send,
As some is sene this yeare.
The selye infantes, voyde of shape,
The calues and pygges so straunge,
With other mo of suche mishape,
Declareth this worldes chaunge.

(monsters ——> shift from) signs of God’s wrat ——to——> signs of nature’s fertility
(by the end of 17th century) ——to——> comparative anatomy and embryology (teratology)
(from) اعجوبه prodigy ——to——> examples of medical pathology

earlier tradition of interest in monster:

(corrupt or) *bad animal* <== damaged relations / nature suddenly gone unfamiliar
[monster: bodies tumbled into bodies Tsing]
<== existential cultural atrophy + social entropy (destabilizing effects of non-meaning)

cybernetic teratology

corrupt animal ~= wonders of bad symbioses, trans-species precarious entanglements across bodies (that are not always even constructive, and can be ugly) [=/= Cinderella: who doesn’t experience atrophy after insult upon insult]

(an ecological) monstrous consciousness

..penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.

(how to extricate ourselves properly from the) notions of Nature, Matter, Object, and Subject

there was a time (12th century——my favorite) when Avicenna was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in east and west corresponded to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was inseparable from its spiritual context. ——> think of the alchemists for whom the operation undertaken in the laboratory only attained its end if it was accompanied by an interior transmutation of the man——that is to say only if it effected the interior birth (of spiritual man)

(for Corbin) Modern / Western venture = application of the intelligence to the scientific investigation of a nature that has been desacralized, which must be violated in order to find out its laws (and to subject its forces to the human will)

Alcemist’s chemistry
Nicolas Oresme’s geometry
[out of history]
Descartes’ geometry is also out of history, discontinious