“Pétalos”. Smell and obsession of monstrous character

Abstract

This reflection does not investigate the monstrous in terms of deformity, but traces what is and could be a monstrous being. In the same way, the relations between the body, its odors and the values assigned to them through normality are explored in a dialogical exchange of the human, the inhuman and the animal. In other words, of what is configured as monstrous. So, the story "Petals", written by the Mexican Guadalupe Nettel, is taken as a reference to weave these approaches, in which the monstrous linked to the body, takes precedence by the sense of smell and eschatological smells. The monstrous will be separated from its reduced notion; on the contrary, it will be approached as a link to the philosophical and archaeological thought of various authors such as Michel Foucault, David Le Breton, Jean Luc Nancy, and Friedrich Nietzsche; in order to identify and locate points of convergence that throw new perspectives and ways of approaching the complexity of the body and the smells that configure it around the monstrous.