Monsters are projections used to name and domesticate ambient unnamed fear

Evidence

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen opens his edited collection of articles on monsters with the statement, “We live in a time of monsters,” a contention I do not bicker with. He goes on to discuss the American milieu, a complex space that engenders the fear and anxiety in which monsters flourish. America is “a society that has created and commodified ‘ambient fear’—a kind of total fear that saturates day-to-day living, prodding and silently antagonizing but never speaking its own name. This anxiety manifests itself symptomatically as a cultural fascination with monsters—a fixation that is born of the twin desire to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 574

Categorization

• XREF: This is the theoretical heart confirming the reader’s projection thesis — the monster as container for what a society cannot name in itself, echoing Hofstätter-instances and the Frankfurt reading of fear-without-object. — connects to: Puppet horror stems from consciousness revealing cosmic uselessness, not malice — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 282
• DEEPTHINKING: Cohen’s formula — monsters born of the twin desire to name the unapprehendable and to domesticate the threatening — is the operative definition of the Muslim monster throughout this whole book; a one-line analytic lens the reader can carry anywhere.
• SHARE: Worth sending Cohen’s exact formulation to someone working on monster theory or affect studies.