Every culture knows the phenomenon of monsters terrifying creatures that represent complete
alterity and challenge every basic notion of self and identity within a cultural paradigm. In
Latin and Greek culture the monster was created as a marvel appearing as something which
like transgression itself did not belong to the assumed natural order of things. Therefore it
could only be created by a divinity responsible for its creation composition goals and
stability but it was triggered by some in- or non-human action performed by humans. The
identification of something as monstrous denotes its place outside and beyond social norms and
values. The monster-evoking transgression is most often indistinguishable from reactions to the
experience of otherness merging the limits of humanity with the limits of a given culture. The
topic entails a large intersection among the cultural domains of law literature philosophy
anthropology and technology. Monstrosity has indeed become a necessary condition of our
existence in the 21st century: it serves as a representation of change itself. In the process
of analysis there are three theoretical approaches: psychoanalytical representational
ontological. The volume therefore aims at examining the concept of monstrosity from three main
perspectives: technophobic xenophobic superdiversity. Today's globalized world is shaped in
the unprecedented phenomenon of international migration. The resistance to this phenomenon
causes the demonization of the Other seen as the antagonist and the monster. The monster
becomes therefore the ethnic Other the alien. To reach this new perspective on monstrosity we
must start by examining the many facets of monstrosity also diachronically: from the
philological origin of the term to the Roman and classical viewpoint from the Renaissance
medical perspective to the religious background from the new filmic exploitations in the 20th
and 21st centuries to the very recent ethnological and anthropological points of view to the
latest technological perspective dealing with artificial intelligence.
