"They're monsters." said Brittanee Drexel's mother. Along with Madeleine McCann, they were taken at the seashore. The image is from John exiled to Patmos, Revelation 13:1, or the cartographer's sea serpent, some of which are seen sporting crowns as they gaze at the land. Or, Olaus Magnus, Histor. Septentrion, fills in the spaces of the impossible trident on the early maps.
When the priest Pacheco passed the church key, it was the symbology of the sea monster. McKenna fathoms the experience:
'We cannot deny past and present complicity with (sacrificial) institutions, nor can we resign ourselves fatalistically on that account to paralysis, to what in every sense amounts to statism. To claim or disclaim responsibility appears to result in one and the same determinism, the same logical impasse, whose rationality is undecidable. We need no longer remain in awesome, stymied contemplation of this impasses, however, now that we have an anthropological theory for it. For what Derrida's double bind propels us toward is a theory rooted in the contradictions of desire, which he has concisely described as "la coherence dans la contradiction."
His argument here unfolds precisely according to the movement of the sacrificial scenario, where a double bind affecting the victim issues in the generation of a divinity, an (ignotum x [italics]), whose baffled contemplation protects and absolves the community from examining or confronting the contradictions of its violent foundation. This scenario is just where Derrida leads when he summons what this difference generates, what awaits the work generated by this "difference irreductible": "Here is a kind of question, let us call it historical, whose (conception, formation, gestation and labor [it.]) we are only catching a glimpse of today.
I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the operations of childbearing -- but also with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as-yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity." (WD 293) These are the very last words of his essay.'
(McKenna, Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction. Conclusion, Representation and Decidability)
