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Edward J. lngebretsen. 2003. At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $40.00 hc. $28.00 sc. xiv + 341 pp.
In an interview segment in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, Brian Warner, a.k.a. Marilyn Manson, makes the same point Edward Ingebretsen makes in At Stake: fear, especially when it hovers on the verge of panic and hysteria, is a politically and socially useful affect. Starting with the assumption that individual and collective, as well as civic and national, identity are products of a continuous negotiation of normalizing discipline, Ingebretsen examines the role that monsters-like Marilyn Manson-play in this process. Given the etymology of the word "monster," which points simultaneously at acts of "showing" and "warning," it is hardly surprising that monsters appear primarily as protagonists of cautionary tales, objects of anxiety to be contained or destroyed, only to return and trigger another round of exorcism. Subjected to demonization and ostracization, monsters demonstrate what happens when social rules are...