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excess-human

Someone in the session said “excess-human” when we were trying to define monster, and I keep returning to it because I think it’s more precise than anything else we produced. Not inhuman — the monster is not simply outside humanity, not simply animal or alien or incomprehensible. Excess-human. Too much of something that is recognizably human. Too much desire, too much will, too much need, too much capacity for harm. The monster exceeds the category without leaving it. That’s what makes it monstrous rather than merely other.

This connects to something Jeffrey Cohen says that we didn’t quite reach: the monster is always a cultural body, made of the same material as the culture that produced it, arranged wrongly. Hitler and Stalin appeared on the board as examples — unlimited power, disregarding humanity, violence, ruthlessness. But notice what these examples do: they move the monster outward, toward the political, the historical, the safely extreme. They let us locate monstrousness at a distance. The artist-monster is harder because it is closer. Polanski is not Hitler. The excess is smaller, more intimate, more entangled with something we love. And the category “excess-human” is useful precisely because it doesn’t require a threshold. You don’t have to decide when exactly the excess becomes monstrous. You just have to notice it’s there.

The fandom versus tribalism question that came up is one I want to sit with longer than we had time for:

The compilation of “the most electrifying chants in football” we watched was producing a specific effect in the room that I want to name. People were moved (and also appalled). People who are not football fans, who have no relationship to these clubs, no stake in any of these results, were getting something from watching other people’s unconditional collective attachment. Which is already interesting: the fandom was legible and contagious even without the object that generated it.

The instinct to distinguish fandom from tribalism is understandable — fandom feels chosen, individual, aesthetic; tribalism feels inherited, collective, identity-determined. But the words we collected in relation to “fan” told another story. Cult. Irrational. Unconditional. And then: mob. Stalker. Hater. The dark side of the fan column arrived almost immediately, uninvited, as if the structure of extreme attachment necessarily produces its shadow. The person whose love tips into something the beloved would recognize as violence. The crowd that becomes a mob not because something went wrong but because the same mechanism that produces collective devotion also produces collective rage — the same unconditional attachment, directed differently.

What the football chants show is that the mechanism operates without any individual relationship to the object at all. Likely, no one in the Dortmund yellow wall has met a single player personally. The love is entirely mediated, entirely collective, entirely constructed — and entirely real. Which suggests that fandom is not primarily about the artist or the work or even the content of the attachment. It is a form of collective self-production. The ultras are not fans of a football club the way a music fan is a fan of an album. They are fans of their own fandom — of the identity the fandom makes possible, of the community it creates, of the rituals that mark belonging. The club is the occasion. The fandom is the substance.

This is the thing that makes “fans are monsters” more interesting than it sounds as a provocation. Not because fans commit violence — though ultras sometimes do, and that is a whole other conversation — but because the structure of unconditional collective attachment is the structure that makes both devotion and destruction possible. The same architecture. You cannot have one without the other being available. And when the artist is a monster, what the fan community has to reckon with is not just their individual love of the work. It is the collective structure they built around it — the community, the identity, the rituals of belonging — and what that structure made possible for the person at its center.

What surprised me most in the session was the question that appeared almost as an afterthought: does the artist exist without the fan? This is either a trivial observation — of course artists exist regardless of their audiences — or it is the most important question the session raised, and I think it is the second. What it is asking is not whether the artist’s body would continue to exist without reception. It is asking whether the artist as artist — as the person who made the thing that matters, who has the cultural significance that makes the monster problem a problem — exists without the collective investment of the fan community. And the answer to that question is no.

Picasso without the fandom (and yes, academic-intellectual appreciation is a kind of fandom) is a man who made paintings. Picasso with the fandom is a genius whose crimes we debate. The fandom is what produced the category of person whose behavior requires a response. Which means the fan community is not just the passive recipient of the monster’s output. It is a constitutive part of what the monster is. The capital is supportive and destructive simultaneously. The fans built the pedestal. The pedestal is what made the fall possible. And the fall is onto them.

This is another thing Dederer doesn’t quite say, I think. She treats the fan as the person who suffers the stain — the one who loved before knowing and now has to carry the knowledge. But the fan is also the person who produced the conditions. The unconditional love, the irrational attachment, the refusal to apply the same standards that would apply to anyone else — these are not just symptoms of fandom. They are the mechanism by which a person becomes a figure large enough to be called a genius, and therefore large enough for the word “genius” to function as a permission slip.

Which is where we’re going next. The word appeared on the board in the monster column — or rather, it was implied by the female/male distinction that sat there without quite being named. The monster-men on Dederer’s list committed assault, rape, abuse of power. The monster-women — Joni Mitchell, Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing — abandoned their children, or their families, or their obligations. And the word “genius” was available to excuse the first category in a way it was not available to the second. Not because women can’t be called geniuses. Because the genius concept was built to cover a specific kind of excess — the male artist’s excess — and it fits that shape and not others.

Someone decided who gets to hand out the permission slips. The question for next session is who, and when, and what they needed the category to do.


Before our next session: re-read Chapter 5, “The Genius.” As you read, do one thing: find a sentence where Dederer uses the word “genius” not as her own description but as something being used by someone else — where she catches the word doing its work rather than just meaning something. Write down the sentence and write one sentence about what the word is doing in it. What is it stopping? What is it protecting?

For further reading: if the transitional objects question stayed with you, the clearest short introduction to Winnicott’s concept is in his essay “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1953), in International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, widely available. It is short, strange, and more radical than summaries suggest.

On the monster as cultural body: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture: Seven Theses” — the introduction to Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996). Seven short theses, each one a different way the monster functions. Thesis IV — “The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference” — and Thesis VI — “Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire” — are the ones most directly relevant to Dederer’s argument. Read them asking: which thesis fits the artist-monster? Is it the same thesis that fits the political monster — Stalin, Hitler — that appeared on our board?

On parasocial relationships and the economics of fandom: a short and sharp piece is Stacey D’Erasmo, “The Art of the Fan,” published in Tin House — essayistic, not strictly academic, and it asks directly what the fan gets from the transaction that the artist cannot provide and does not know they are giving.

Victoria Mummelthei
Victoria Mummelthei

Nur der Text ist unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International nutzbar. Alle anderen Elemente (Abbildungen, importierte Anhänge) sind „Alle Rechte vorbehalten“, sofern nicht anders angegeben.


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (22. Mai 2026). excess-human. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 13. Juni 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/169di


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