A Political Mind Special | Humans: A Monstrous History, Monsters and the Politic

A Political Mind Special | Humans: A Monstrous History, Monsters and the Politics of Projection
Online
https://lnkd.in/en8umNJV
Book Now
16 September 2025
8:15 PM – 9.45pm
Join us for our next installment in our policial mind series with speaker Dr Surekha Davies and chaired by David Morgan.
In Humans: A Monstrous History, Dr Surekha Davies explores how societies define the human by constructing the monstrous. From a political-psychoanalytic perspective, monsters function as projections figures onto which we displace what cannot be tolerated in ourselves: vulnerability, aggression, dependency, or difference. This process sustains social cohesion through splitting, idealisation, and scapegoating.
Davies traces how race, gender, and nation are built on such psychic defences—what Klein might call the paranoid-schizoid position—where the ‘Other’ is held responsible for internal conflict. As the book moves through empires, colonialism, and corporate capitalism, we see how monstrosity becomes a tool of control: a way of managing anxiety by externalising threat.
Yet Davies also gestures toward a reparative project. If monstrosity reveals the unconscious of power, then recognising our projections opens the possibility for integration, reparation, and political transformation. This is not just a history of monsters, but of the psychic mechanisms that underwrite dehumanisation—and how we might begin to undo them.

Surekha Davies turns the tables and looks at humankind through the burning eyes of the monsters it has created in its seemingly limitless effort to isolate otherness. A triumph of scholarship that is as erudite as it is entertaining."—Lindsey Fitzharris, New York Times–bestselling author of The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I
"To consider the monster is to consider what it means to be human, because it forces us to examine how we have prescribed those limits, whether in terms of race, sexuality, appearance, or capacities. So Davies's book could not be more timely or urgent. That it is constantly insightful, erudite, and entertaining makes it irresistible; I can imagine no more congenial way of arguing that, in the end, the monsters are us."—Philip Ball, author of The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens
"In a fascinating upending of the usual analysis of monsters, Davies focuses on the humans who perpetrate 'monstrification,' from scientists and sports doctors to pop stars and spiritual leaders. The monster here emerges less as a figure for identity than a metaphor for a cultural process, constantly under revision, that allows one group of humans to disavow the humanity of another. Thoughtful, wide-ranging, and fun."—Annalee Newitz, bestselling author of The Terraformers and Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age