Embodying the Chimera: Biotechnology and Subjectivity

''Chacun d'eux portait sur son dos une e ´norme Chimère'' [Each one of them carried on his back an enormous Chimera] —Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris, bk. VI Until the end of the seventeenth century, the monstrous body had a mythological function: A sign from irate gods, the monster (Kapler 1980) is not malformed like Oedipus's twisted foot/fate, it is a prodigious creature whose corporeal formation endows it with superior power. However, one must differentiate between fabulous monsters, whose corpo-real hybridization remains paradoxical, and biological monsters studied as early as Hippo-crates in Of Generation, X-I, and Aristotle in Of the Generation of Animals, Book IV. Greek mythology includes fabulous monsters, human bodies that have been recomposed with animal attributes such as wings, serpents, and boar tusks for Steno and Euryale (transformed by Athena owing to Medusa's jealousy), and Medusa, lover of Poseidon and expecting his child also transformed by Athena). Losing or disfiguring its human body defines the fabulous monster as a fall. On the other hand, the chimera is born with a triple animal body, a sort of multiform and polycephalous beast uniting multiple forms in one body (Plato, The Republic, bk. IX): lion-headed and dragon-tailed on the body of a goat. Yet specific unity is not maintained, as in the embodiment of Cerberus, the dog with three heads and a tail of snakes (figure 3.1). Cerberus remains a dog when a chimera represents three juxtaposed species. The chimera is a malefic creature whose next of kin are Echidna (half snake, half nymph), Geryon, the three-bodied giant, Medusa (serpent-haired and stony-eyed), Scylla (six claws, mouths and heads, and the roar of a lion) as well as the Sphynx endowed with a maiden's head and breasts, lion claws, and a dragon tail on a dog's body. Bellerophon, queen Stheneboea's would-be lover, was exposed to her husband as he spurned her. The king then ordered him to rid the country of Chimera, a fabulous creature