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Schlagwort: the body that responds

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monsters: genius — a task for before we next meet

We’ve been circling the word “genius” for a while now without quite landing on it. Last session we talked about the stain, about fans and admirers, about what fandom builds in you and what happens to that thing when the person who made it turns out to have caused harm. But there is a mechanism underneath all of that which we haven’t yet named directly. It is the word that ends arguments. The word that functions as a permission slip, issued before the crime, honoured after it. The word that makes the calculation impossible.

Dederer calls it a “glittering absolute set into a dreary system of relative worth.” The genius breaks the calculator. You cannot weigh genius against harm because genius is not a quantity that can be weighed — it is a declaration that places someone outside the system of ordinary judgment. And declarations, unlike arguments, cannot be refuted. You can disprove a claim. You cannot disprove “genius.”

Before we next meet, I want you to sit with a few things. Not tasks exactly — provocations. Things to disagree about before we’re in the room together.

The image of the genius.

When we close our eyes and try to picture a genius — not name one, picture one — what do we see? Something specific? A body? Usually male? Physical, somehow, even when the genius is a painter or a poet rather than an athlete? Excessive? Moving with a kind of freedom that ordinary people don’t move with?

Picasso crouching half-naked on a beach, drawing a centaur in light with a sparkler. Hemingway kicking a beer can down a road in Idaho. Dederer describes exactly this: she found these photographs in a photo book as a child, and something in those images told her — before she could articulate it — what genius was supposed to look like. “The men were physical, extra-alive, moved by some spirit outside of themselves.”

That image — the body that moves differently, the person who operates by different rules, the one who is simultaneously master and servant to a force beyond themselves — is not a description. It is a construction. It was built, in the Romantic period, out of very specific materials. Christine Battersby traced the history: before the 19th century, artists were craftsmen serving patrons within conventions. The Romantic genius was an invention — a figure defined by qualities that were simultaneously feminised and supermale. Sensitive, irrational, excessive, ungovernable — but not a woman. The same qualities that in an actual woman would read as hysteria or instability became, in this specifically male figure, the marks of greatness. The category excluded women structurally, at the level of what genius was supposed to be, not just at the level of who got called one.

Now: we have Kanye West in Rolling Stone saying “I am a rock star. Rock stars can pull their dick out in public then go rock 20,000 people. Rock stars can give their fucking opinion without having to deal with — what’s that thing I get dealt with every day of my life? Oh yeah. Backlash.” He starts by claiming the genius freedom. By the end of the quote he has demonstrated he doesn’t have it. The hall pass is not universally available. It was built for a specific body and it fits that body and not others.

And then there is this: Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2023 was Taylor Swift.

And the question of whether she is a genius — which has been asked repeatedly and answered differently by different people — reveals something about the category that explicit argument cannot. Because she is extraordinarily skilled. The formal control over her songwriting, the longevity, the scale of cultural influence are undeniable. And yet the word sits strangely on her for many people, and I want you to think about why. She is not excessive in the required way. She is extraordinarily controlled — known for meticulous planning, strategic thinking, careful management of her catalogue and her image. She does not perform being overtaken by a force beyond herself. She performs mastery. And mastery, it turns out, is not what the genius image is built for. The genius is supposed to be subject to something that overtakes him. Swift is not subject to anything she hasn’t approved.

Damon Albarn said in 2022 that she “doesn’t write her own songs.” When pushed — because she co-writes extensively and is widely credited for her lyrics — he retreated. He then praised Billie Eilish as “exceptional,” who also co-writes with her brother. The criterion shifted. It kept shifting until it could exclude Swift specifically while including others who do the same thing. At which point the criterion is not about songwriting. It is about something else. And that something else is worth naming.

Also look who’s the Person of the Year 2025:

The petition.

In 2009, Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on a decades-old warrant. He had pled guilty in 1977 to unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old girl, then fled the country before sentencing. In response to his arrest, 138 filmmakers signed a petition demanding his immediate release. The petition called him an “ingenious filmmaker.” It was co-organised by Harvey Weinstein.

Among the signatories: Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodóvar, Wim Wenders, Tilda Swinton, Darren Aronofsky, Asia Argento, Wong Kar-wai.

Natalie Portman signed it. Nine years later she said: “I very much regret it. Someone I respected gave it to me and said ‘I signed this, will you too?’ And I was like, sure.”

The petition is the explicit, public, documented version of a cultural mechanism. The word “ingenious” does something in a legal-political context that an argument could not do — it claims an exemption from jurisdiction. It says: the normal rules do not apply here. And it may have worked, partially: the Swiss government released him.

But Portman’s account is the more revealing document. She didn’t think about what she was authorising. She trusted the social context. This is how the mechanism operates — not through deliberate moral failure but through the social lubrication of the genius culture. You don’t argue with the declaration. You sign.

The attraction.

Here is what I find to be an uncomfortable thing Dederer says in this chapter, and she says it almost in passing: “Maybe we have created the idea of genius to serve our own attraction to badness. Maybe we ask these artists to live out our darkest fantasies — and if we give it the label genius, then we don’t have to feel guilt for enjoying the spectacle. We can get off on the performance of badness, we can consume the biography, and remain in good taste. Well, he’s a genius. You can’t blame him. Or me.”

That last word. Or me.

She is not exempting herself from the mechanism she is describing. She is saying: the audience produced this. The collective investment, the unconditional love, the decision in advance that this person operates by different rules — the fan community issued the hall pass before the crime even happened. The genius is not imposed on the culture by powerful men and complicit institutions alone. It is something the audience wanted. The genius lives out the fantasy on our behalf.

Three things to think about before next session.

One. Go back to Dederer’s chapter and find the moment where she describes what the word “genius” does in a sentence — not what it means but what it stops. Write it down. Then find a sentence from anywhere — a review, an interview, a caption — where you can catch the word doing exactly that work.

Two. The Taylor Swift question: is she a genius? Don’t answer immediately. Notice what happens in you when you try to answer it. What is the resistance (or compliance) — or the discomfort (or comfort?) with the question itself — telling you about what the category requires?

Three. Dederer says the desire for resolution — any resolution, cancel or forgive — is itself a symptom. The fan wants the problem solved so they can go back to loving cleanly. Sit with this. Is there something on your own shelf — your own playlist, your own watchlist — where you have reached for a resolution that feels a little too convenient? Not for discussion necessarily. Just to notice.

We will start next session with the Taylor Swift question, because it is the one that forces the category to show what it is built for. From there we are going to the female monster — specifically to what Dederer says about women whose monstrousness involves their children rather than their victims — or what changes when children are involved. The asymmetry between those two types of harm is the thing I want us to think through together.

One question to carry with you until then: if the genius hall pass was issued before the crime — built into the culture before any specific person claimed it — then is the problem the individual monster, or the architecture we built for them to move through?

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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.

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and yet

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.

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monsters: task for May 5 (preperation of May 12)

Before our next session on May 12, think of a piece of art you love — the one you wrote down in our first session, or a different one. Now write two short paragraphs, no more than 150 words each.

In the first paragraph: make the case for why the work matters. Not why you like it — why it matters. What it does that nothing else does. Write it as if you are defending it to someone who wants to take it away from you.

In the second paragraph: make the case against consuming it. Not against the person who made it — against yourself, as someone who continues to return to it. What does your continued consumption say about you? What are you refusing to look at when you look at the work?

Do not resolve the contradiction between the two paragraphs. Do not add a third paragraph that explains how you feel about the tension. Stop after the second.

Bring both paragraphs to the session. You will be asked to read one of them aloud — you choose which.

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row zero and the poems

There is a copy of In stillen Nächten on my shelf. I have had it for years, long before the summer of 2023, when the allegations surfaced and the name Till Lindemann acquired a particular weight in public discourse that made it suddenly uncomfortable to say out loud that you own his poetry and have read it more than once. I am saying it now, which already feels like something — a small declaration, a minor positioning of myself, though in relation to what I am not entirely sure. In relation to the allegations? In relation to what the poems are? In relation to whoever might be reading this and already forming a judgment about what kind of person admits to such things in an essay that is, after all, supposed to be about ethics?

That last thought is the one I want to stay with, because it is the thought Dederer is most interested in: the thought that arrives just before you say the thing you are not sure you should say, the moment of internal self-monitoring that reveals something about the shape of the cage you are already living in. I noticed it. I noticed myself almost reaching for a qualification — of course the allegations are serious, of course I believe women deserve to be heard — and then I noticed the reaching, and I felt something slightly nauseating about the need for it. As if the preemptive qualification were the price of admission. As if I couldn’t just say: I like the poems, this is complicated, I don’t know what to do with that.

The case of Lindemann is not clean in the way that Polanski is clean, or rather, not clean in the same way. The Berlin prosecutors dropped their investigation in August 2023. His legal team obtained injunctions preventing Spiegel from repeating the core allegations. He has since filed criminal complaints against the publication for allegedly falsifying documents. None of this makes him innocent. None of it makes the accounts the women gave false, or the structural conditions those accounts describe — the auditioning, the hierarchy, the power differential at the centre of the Row Zero parties — any less worth taking seriously. What it means is that we are in a territory that has no clean floor, no place where you can stand and feel certain that your feet are on solid ground. The investigation was dropped but the publisher wasn’t wrong to drop him. The injunction was granted but the reporting was not fabricated. He may have done nothing criminal. That does not mean nothing happened. This is the territory, and it is not comfortable, and the discomfort is not a problem to be solved — it is, if Dederer is right, exactly the place where thinking has to begin.

But I keep returning to the poems. This is what I find most difficult to explain and what I suspect is most revealing about whatever I think I believe. The poems are dark in the way Lindemann is dark — obsessive, formally controlled, often violent in their imagery, occasionally tender in the way that things that have been through violence are tender. They are not good in the way a literature professor would use the word good. They are good in the way a very specific kind of attention to language is good, the way someone who has taken words seriously as physical objects, as things with weight and temperature, produces lines that land differently from lines produced by someone for whom language is primarily a vehicle for meaning. There is a precision in them that is also a kind of ruthlessness. And I noticed, reading them again recently, that the precision and the ruthlessness are part of what I find compelling — which means I am not, as I might prefer to think, loving the poems despite the darkness but because of it, or at least in the company of it, in the same room as it.

This is the thing Dederer calls the stain. Not the biographical fact attaching itself to the work from outside, contaminating something that would otherwise be pure. The stain is more intimate than that. It is the discovery that what you love in the work and what disturbs you about the person might not be entirely separable — that the quality of attention that makes the poems worth reading might be the same quality of attention that, directed elsewhere, toward other people, becomes something else. I don’t know if that is true of Lindemann. I am not sure it can be known. What I notice is that the thought makes me uncomfortable in a way that feels different from the discomfort of moral judgment, less clean, less satisfying. Moral judgment at least tells you what to do. This doesn’t tell me what to do. It just sits there, neither condemning nor forgiving, asking me to look at it.

What the poem knows, and what I keep having to acknowledge it knows, is that I came to it freely, without compulsion, and that I came back. That the returning is the part I can’t argue my way out of. I can tell a story about separating the art from the artist. I can tell a story about the death of the author, about the text as autonomous object, about how the biographical Lindemann and the lyric speaker of In stillen Nächten are not the same person. I can tell all of these stories and they contain genuine arguments and I do not entirely disbelieve any of them. And then I think about what his publisher actually said when they dropped him — and I find I cannot make the arguments hold as firmly as I would like.

The publisher’s statement, issued in June 2023 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, is worth reading carefully because it does not quite say what you might expect a publisher to say. It does not say primarily that the Row Zero allegations are credible, or that Lindemann has been found guilty of anything. What it says is that during the reporting surge, they became aware of a pornographic video — made in 2020, three years before it came to their attention — in which Lindemann uses the physical copy of In stillen Nächten as a prop in scenes depicting sexual violence against women. They describe this as a gross breach of trust. And then they say something that has stayed with me since I first read it: that they had always defended the separation between the lyric “I” and the author, had defended it stubbornly, as a matter of principle — but that Lindemann himself, through his deliberate use of the book in this context, had mocked that separation. Had collapsed it from the inside. The argument the publisher had been making on his behalf — that the violent speaker in the poems is a fictional construction, not the man himself — was destroyed not by a critic, not by a court, but by the author.

I find this philosophically vertiginous in a way I am still trying to think through. Roland Barthes killed the author in the Sixties, declared the text autonomous, freed it from the tyranny of biographical intention. What the reader makes of the text is what the text is; what the author meant or did or was is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the work. This is not a frivolous position. It contains a genuine insight about how meaning moves and multiplies once a text enters the world, how it escapes its origins. But Lindemann’s gesture — if we can call it that, if we can call the deliberate staging of sexual violence around the physical object of a poetry book a gesture, which is already to aestheticize something that perhaps should not be aestheticized — does something peculiar to the Barthesian argument. It does not refute it from outside. It does not prove that the author’s biography contaminates the text. It does something else: it demonstrates that the author himself does not believe in the separation. That he was using the fiction of separation — the lyric I, the autonomous text, the freedom of art — as a kind of cover. And if the author does not believe his own poem is separable from himself, I am not sure on what grounds I am supposed to insist that it is.

This is not the same as saying the poems are now worthless, or that my reading of them has been revealed as a mistake. I am not sure it means anything so clean. What it means, I think, is that the argument I was relying on — the argument that let me keep the book on the shelf without too much difficulty — has been specifically and deliberately voided by the person whose work I was protecting with it. Which leaves me holding the poems with something less comfortable than a theory. Which leaves me holding them with just the fact of my own continued attachment, stripped of its justification, asking me what exactly it is I am attached to, and whether I would be attached to it if I looked at it clearly enough.

There is a version of this essay in which I conclude something. In which I come down, however tentatively, on a side. In which the honest examination leads somewhere, to a decision about the book on my shelf, to a position about the allegations, to a statement about what I will and won’t do with my attention and my loyalty going forward. I notice I want that version. I notice the wanting. I am choosing not to give it to you, because I think the wanting is exactly what Dederer is asking us to examine — the desire for the essay to resolve what life will not resolve, the hunger for the clean position, the relief of the conclusion. The book is still on my shelf. I still don’t know what that means about me. I am bringing that not-knowing into the classroom, and asking whether you have something similar, and whether we can sit with it together without immediately reaching for the stories that make it go away.