Epigraph

If you think of a torso as a box, you can see

how someone might want to open it with his fingers.

—Beth Bachmann

Modernity has eliminated the comfort of monsters because we have seen, in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, that evil works often as a system, it works through institutions as a banal (meaning “common to all”) mechanism. In other words evil stretches across cultural and political productions as complicity and collaboration. Modernity makes monstrosity a function of consent and a result of habit.

—Jack Halberstam