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O'donnell, S. Jonathon (2015) Owning the Future : Demonology and the Architecture of Sovereignty in a Time of Terror

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O'donnell, S. Jonathon (2015) Owning the Future : Demonology and the Architecture of Sovereignty in a Time of Terror O'Donnell, S. Jonathon (2015) Owning the future : demonology and the architecture of sovereignty in a time of terror. PhD Thesis. SOAS, University of London http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/23689 Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non‐commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this thesis, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", name of the School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination. Owning the Future DEMONOLOGY AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF SOVEREIGNTY IN A TIME OF TERROR S. JONATHON O’DONNELL Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD 2015 Department of Religions and Philosophies SOAS, University of London 1 Declaration I have read and understood regulation 17.9 of the Regulations for students of SOAS, University of London concerning plagiarism. I undertake that all the material presented for examination is my own work and has not been written for me, in whole or in part, by any other person. I also undertake that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of another person has been duly acknowledged in the work that I present for examination. Signed: Date: 1 December 2015_______ 2 ABSTRACT This thesis analyses the relation between demonology and sovereignty in apocalyptic and spiritual warfare discourses in contemporary American evangelical conservatism. Employing a poststructuralist hermeneutical framework drawn from Jacques Derrida and Michel de Certeau, it assesses selected texts published between 2008 and 2013 which construct specific threats to what the authors view as the legitimate telic orders of being, or ‘orthotaxies’. I analyse how these orthotaxies operate as sovereignty claims, positing ownership of the future as temporal, ideological and geopolitical territory within various theopolitics of identity that juxtapose a singular ‘authentic’ self against a multiplicity of others coded as demonic. Orthotaxic sovereignty claims are thus predicated on strategies of (de)legitimation reliant upon demonic others which contest and continually haunt those claims through (an) orthotaxy’s structural dependency on them as self-consolidating others. My thesis focuses on three such demonological others as constructed in thematically-related texts: ‘Islam’, ‘Jezebel’, and ‘Transhumanism’. Each of the case studies traces a distinct relationship between theopolitical sovereignty and its demonic other. Those of ‘Islam’ figure a discourse of competing unity, constructing an uncanny other so (un)like the self which embodies in abject form the order the writers crave. Those of ‘Jezebel’ belie a terror of process, flow and (in)stability that exposes the absence of a stable, singular sovereign. Those of ‘Transhumanism’ reveal a structure of secularised metamorphosis that threatens to rewrite the (in)evitable telos of God’s sovereign role in history. By situating these others in the context of a genealogy of the political implementation of demonology and of a reification of American ‘authenticity’ both during and after the Cold War, my thesis explores the structural relationship between theopolitical conceptions of sovereignty and a demonic other which both guarantees and subverts that sovereignty through the mechanisms of its exclusion. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ....................................................................................................... 4 CONVENTIONS AND ORTHOGRAPHY ................................................................................. 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... 8 INTRODUCTION: DEMONOLOGY IN A TIME OF TERROR ............................... 9 A POLITICAL DEMONOLOGY .......................................................................................... 13 A Case for Demonology ............................................................................................ 14 Contingencies (A Question of Good) ........................................................................ 19 (SPIRITUAL) WARFARE IN A TIME OF TERROR ................................................................ 22 And There Was (Cold) War in Heaven ..................................................................... 23 Three Faces of Orthotaxy .......................................................................................... 26 STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS ............................................................................................ 31 PART I: A DESCENTION ............................................................................................. 34 CHAPTER 1. DELINEATING DEVIATION, ARTICULATING ABSENCE: DEMONOLOGY IN HISTORY AND LITERATURE—A GENEALOGICAL REVIEW .......................................................................................................................... 35 STATECRAFT AND WITCHCRAFT: PERVERTING THE PROPER, 1320–1634 ....................... 37 Darkness and Silence: Recent Scholarship on Demonologies of Witchcraft ............ 39 Statecraft and Witchcraft, Centres and Peripheries ................................................. 43 The Devastating Syllogism ........................................................................................ 46 A PROTEAN POST-ENLIGHTENMENT .............................................................................. 48 Architect of Evil to Archetype of Rebellion: Satanisms, Romantic and Symbolic .... 49 (In)Visible Ubiquity: Conspiracy Theory—Night Science, Hermetic History .......... 52 INTO ‘THE “SENSELESS” MAZE’ ..................................................................................... 56 CHAPTER 2. I WILL (NOT) SERVE: THE DEMONIC AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF SOVEREIGNTY ..................................................................... 58 THE (IN)DIVISIBILITY OF SOVEREIGNTY ........................................................................ 62 A Sovereignty Is Born ................................................................................................ 62 Sovereign Limits I: The Self(-Otherness) .................................................................. 64 Sovereign Limits II: Origins and Borders ................................................................. 68 The Prescriptive Phantasm ....................................................................................... 71 THE STATE OF NATURE AND THE SOVEREIGN’S ENVIOUS DUTY ................................... 75 Antepolitics and Antipolitics ..................................................................................... 76 The Imitation God ..................................................................................................... 79 The Counterfeit Kingdom .......................................................................................... 81 THE BEAST, THE SOVEREIGN ......................................................................................... 84 In Want of a Foe ........................................................................................................ 85 Making Truth at the Limits of the Lie ........................................................................ 89 The (Im)Possibility of Reigning in Hell .................................................................... 93 CHAPTER 3. CITIZENS OF PARADISE: NEOCONSERVATISM, EVANGELICALISM, AND THE THEOPOLITICS OF IDENTITY ....................... 96 PARADISE HAS WALLS: SOVEREIGNTY AND CIVIL RELIGION ....................................... 100 4 (Re)Making Histories .............................................................................................. 100 Apocalyptic Substrates ............................................................................................ 102 NEOCONSERVATISM AND THE GEOPOLITICS OF EVIL .................................................... 105 Nativity Scene .......................................................................................................... 105 Shifting Strategies of Self-Consolidation ................................................................ 108 CAPITALIST, CHRISTIAN, AMERICAN ............................................................................ 110 Constructing (A Need for) Normality ...................................................................... 111 Dispensation(s) ....................................................................................................... 115 Fission and Fusion .................................................................................................. 118 OWNING THE FUTURE—A THEOLOGICO-GEOPOLITICS OF IDENTITY ........................... 122 Future Territories .................................................................................................... 122 Zone of Peace (House of War) ................................................................................ 124 One America ...........................................................................................................
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