We didn’t define “monster.” Someone pointed this out right at the end, almost as an afterthought, and I’ve been thinking about it since. We spent ninety minutes inside the problem — arguing about whether consumption is complicity, whether the work survives the biography, whether moral judgment and aesthetic experience can even run on the same tracks — and we never stopped to ask what kind of thing we were actually calling a monster. Michael Jackson came up repeatedly, especially because of the new “biographical” movie that recently started in the cinemas, see a review (in German) here:
Polanski was in the room, and so were Hitchcock, and Weinstein. And yet the word “monster” just hovered there, doing enormous work implicitely, completely unexamined.
That’s not a criticism of the session. I think it’s actually the most interesting thing that happened.
Because “monster” is doing something specific in Dederer’s argument that we’ll need to get at directly. The word has a history. It originally meant something that exceeds the normal, that signals something — from the Latin monstrare, to show, to demonstrate. A monster was an omen, a portent, something that pointed beyond itself toward meaning. Medieval bestiaries are full of them: creatures at the edges of maps that indicated where the known world ended. The monster marked the boundary of what was thinkable.
What Dederer inherits from this, I think, is not the creature but the function. The monstrous artist marks a boundary — between the work we love and the person we can’t forgive, between our aesthetic life and our moral life, between who we thought someone was and what we now know. The monster is the figure that makes a clean position impossible. That’s why Cosby is easier than Michael Jackson in some ways: Cosby’s monstrousness colonized the work so completely that most people find The Cosby Show genuinely unwatchable now. The boundary collapsed. Whereas with Jackson (or also Rowling) — and this is what the session kept circling — something refuses to collapse. Thriller still does something. The voice still arrives. The monster didn’t fully win.
Why?
That’s the question we only touched. Someone said: because we loved it before we knew. That’s Dederer’s stain — the contamination of retrospective knowledge on a memory made in innocence. But someone else pushed back, and I thought this was the sharper move: what if the love isn’t really about who made it? What if loving Thriller is loving something about rhythm and arrangement and the specific texture of that production that has nothing to do with Jackson the person — that would exist identically if it had been made by someone entirely different, someone blameless? Barthes’ death of the author, applied not as a theory but as a felt experience: the work already feels autonomous, already feels like it belongs to you more than to him.
The problem is that this position — clean, logical, defensible — is exactly what Dederer calls bad faith. Not because it’s wrong about the work. But because it’s too convenient. It arrives at exactly the right moment to let us keep consuming without any discomfort. And the fact that it arrives so readily, that we reach for it so quickly, should make us suspicious of it. Arguments that solve the problem too neatly are usually doing something other than describing the situation honestly.
What “love” means here, we barely scratched. But I want to leave a thought about it before next session, because I think it’s the pivot on which everything else turns. Dederer is not really writing about aesthetic appreciation. She’s writing about a specific and somewhat irrational attachment — the kind where the work has become constitutive of something in you, where removing it would require removing part of how you understand yourself. That’s a different thing from finding a film beautiful. It’s the fan’s relationship: the work has done something to you, you have organized something around it, you have used it to become who you are. And this is why the monstrousness lands differently than it would for a work you merely admire. Because it’s not just “can I still watch this film” — it’s “can I still be the person who loves this film.”
That’s the question for next session. And it connects to the one thing we didn’t ask, which I’ll save.
We still haven’t defined “monster.”
Before our next session: read (again) Chapter 3 (“The Fan”) and Chapter 5 (“The Genius”). As you read: find the moment where Dederer distinguishes between admiring a work and being a fan of it. Write down her distinction in your own words. Then ask yourself: for the work you wrote about in the first session — are you an admirer or a fan? If you’re not sure, that uncertainty is the thing to bring.

