Godzilla, ISIS, and Heidegger’s conception of das Seiende, Being, have something in common: they look backwards for their moment of genesis, for their rebirth, their “true” birth as something, their natural individuation/speciation. The monsters we have studied so far and will continue to study are always attempting to bring about their own genesis, to create a birthing after their birth, on their own terms, by their making, becoming substance from accident. They situate their genesis after their moment of becoming monstrous, after the composite existence. Whether their attempts end in failure or success, they try to create a new form of being.

Let us look at Godzilla, beloved Kaiju of three generations, emerging from its submarine lair. At its first moment of emergence, it is an accident, a by-product of physics gone nuclear, weaponized atoms, transforming a species into a monster. There is a horror to it, an uncertainty, a trauma even. Out of the pacific, the monster now heads west, Gojira molting into Godzilla, Godzilla into a franchise. Not that monsters are sacred, above marketing. What matters is the origins. Now Godzilla is no longer an accident, but the ancient god of a forgotten civilization, object of prophesies long faded into oblivion. It was long before we saw it emerge from the waters, the new narrative goes. The monster preceding itself, displacing its origin, looking backwards, to Genesis itself.

The two recent Hollywood blockbusters Godzilla and Godzilla: King of Monsters, depict a different origin story for the monsters of the Godzilla franchise. They are not monsters at all but ancient earth god, guardians of Gaia, in a way. Godzilla has an underwater altar/home where radiation is aplenty, naturally provided by something or other. The architecture connotes an ancient civilization that worshiped the Kaiju, prophesied its coming in times of need, a savior. From an accident to substance ever-lasting, ever-existing. Legitimization through a backwards inscription of origins. I am Leviathan, whose coming has been foretold. I am nothing new, merely forgotten. Oblivion becomes the seedbed of individuation, for anything could exist, have existed, and have been merely forgotten. A Platonic theory of monstrous genesis, nothing new, just recalled.

ISIS is the same, claiming an atavistic genesis in the True Islam practiced in its early days. Nothing new, only the revival, the remembering, of forgotten values and practices. A new idea is a monster, in a sense, and it has to legitimize its existence, it has to become a valid form of being, of existing. Some ideas, some monsters short-circuit this process by displacing their origin, by dissembling their originality, inscribing themselves before themselves, in a before-time that brooks no questions, that is already legitimate, already individuated.

Heidegger’s idea of Being as forgotten among beings, as fallen yet already Given, and so indeed the whole of phenomenology and its idea of the Given, the myth of the Given, as Sellars calls it, are all forms of monstrous regression, of reverse inscription, of seeking the benevolence of the God of Genesis, to be at the start of things before time and at the end of things after time. The Godzilla world, the ISIS-being.

Lovecraft’s machine in “From Beyond” can also fit here to some extent, although it also falls outside this category of monstrous genesis. In the story, a mad scientist builds a device that is able to stimulate the pineal gland, the organ of a sixth sense that gives access to a hitherto unperceived world of higher dimensions and the things that dwell therein. These things from beyond are at the other spectrum from the machine that birthed them (or according to the narrative, enabled us to sense), they are a totality pure and unblemished, a gelatinous whole, veritable Bodies without Organs, smooth and full, floating jelly-like volumes that are nothing if not ONE. They are of a higher order of being, apparently and fill ours to the brim, making it a plenum. In a way the machine is tracing its own origin into an eternity beyond time, a genesis as old as the world but it does not do so in an inscription, in the investment of a prophecy with oblivion or misunderstanding. It creates itself backwards but not on a mnemonic basis. Godzilla traces its origins to a forgotten civilization, ISIS to a forgotten tradition (the true tradition) of Islam, Heidegger’s Seiende to a forgetting of Death and facticity among the everyday beings.

Monsters do not always gaze forwards, as we saw in this installment, and to accomplish a genesis in reverse is always the easier option. There are other, more interesting, more creative monsters that attempt a true auto-genesis, dream themselves new bodies and inscribe them into reality, placing their birth after their birth, their rebirth an absolute NEW, an event. There are cases where individuation forms a strange and twisted relation to speciation, like the vampire that only ever produces and reproduces itself. There are also always more failed cases to consider, closed passages where, to quote Deleuze, nothing passes.