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Demonic History: from Goethe to the Present

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Demonic History: from Goethe to the Present Demonic History Demonic History From Goethe to the Present Kirk Wetters northwestern university press evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2014 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2014. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wetters, Kirk, author. Demonic history : from Goethe to the present / Kirk Wetters. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8101-2976-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Demonology in literature. 2. German literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. German literature—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Devil in literature. I. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832. Urworte orphisch. II. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832. Urworte orphisch. English. III. Title. [DNLM: 1. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832— Criticism and interpretation.] PT134.D456W48 2014 830.937—dc23 2014012468 Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. In all cases attribution should include the following information: Wetters, Kirk. Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015. For permissions beyond the scope of this license, visit http://www.nupress .northwestern.edu/. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. To write the history of a thought is sometimes to write the history of a series of misinterpretations. —Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis The Future is wholly a Stygian Darkness, spectre-bearing. —Diogenes Teufelsdröckh in Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus Contents Preface and Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xv Introduction 3 Chapter One Urworte Goethisch: Demonic Primal Words 21 Chapter Two Demons of Morphology 39 Chapter Three Biographical Demons (Goethe’s Poetry and Truth) 59 Chapter Four The Unhappy Endings of Morphology: Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History 87 Chapter Five Demonic Ambivalences: Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 111 Chapter Six Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 135 Chapter Seven Demonic Inheritances: Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 161 Conclusion Transformations of the Demonic 193 Appendix: German Text and English Translation of Goethe’s “Urworte Orphisch” (with Commentary) 201 Notes 209 Bibliography 239 Index 249 Preface and Acknowledgments In the context of intellectual or conceptual history, “the demonic” may seem relatively peripheral—and perhaps it is. It undoubtedly covers, however, an extremely varied field spanning numerous intellectual traditions without at any point landing in a single discipline or arriving at a clear consensus or even at an extensive pre-sorting of the relevant semantics. This is not to say that the demonic is absent from lexica and scholarship, but use and usage of it in the main period of the present study—roughly 1800 to 1950—is anything but uniform. Rather than producing reliable conceptual or theo- retical differentiations, the demonic, starting with Goethe and following his example, is often reinvented by every author who employs it. The demonic as I understand it is thus not a concept with a single definition (or even a set of definitions) but primarily an operative term and a vehicle of various kinds of rationalization. The specificity of this construction is most easily demonstrated in the word itself: A “demon” can be understood as a substantialized or personified force, including the possibility that it may unify a collection of heterogeneous forces. If this substantialization is not taken literally as an actually existing or imaginary entity with a given appearance, specific attributes and motivations, then it can only be understood as a substantialization or rationalization or collectivization of another force (or forces). The essence of all demons is displacement and dislocation: whether as a daemon or a genius or an evil demon, demons are always proxies that make it possible to imagine the oper- ation of other unidentified forces. The specific form or figure of the demon is a placeholder for invisible and unknown activities and motives which, like computer programs, mostly run silently in the background of a given operat- ing system. Such systems can be made manifest, visible, and nameable; their specific conditions and codes can be brought to light; as specific functions, they may be made predictable and controllable. Normally they are aspects of an unquestioned functionality, but in moments of crisis, when the function becomes problematic, a plurality of unknown causes manifest themselves as a “demonic” singularity. From the point of view of the subject who experiences it, the unknown sources of a system-crisis are singularized and metaphorized as “demons.” The prevalence of the adjective “demonic” relative to the noun “demon” (which typically belongs to fantasy, myth, religion, and imagination) offers further illustration. One may not believe in actual demons, but many ix x Preface and Acknowledgments nouns—objects, persons, behaviors, situations, ideas—may act as if they were possessed by demons. Virtually anything is capable of acting as if it were under the control of an unknown force. Thus the word “demon,” which strives to substantialize unknown and insubstantial agencies, is adjectivally de-substantialized into an ambiguous intentionality that can be attributed to almost anything. This act of attribution itself corresponds to the verb “to demonize,” which suggests that the supposedly demonic object, person, or situation is not really possessed by such a force but has only been made to appear that way by a specific and unambiguous agency. It may be that the German language’s propensity for substantialization is partly to blame for the adjectival noun, “the demonic” (das Dämonische), which re-substantializes the adjectival de-substantialization of the noun’s originally unwarranted substantial positing. Emerging from the move- ments of this—inevitably ironic—play of de- and re-substantialization, the demonic, starting from Goethe, served as a vehicle of variable thoughts and intention. Rather than presenting a dialogically structured field of “argu- ment” and “counter-argument,” the conceptual history of the demonic after Goethe developed “mimetically” along parallel and semi-independent fault lines. The demonic delineated itself in the interplay of unknown forces and the rhetorically articulated desires associated with these forces. More con- cretely, however, the term was often linked to the uncertainties surrounding determining drives imagined as the source of individual biography and col- lective history. With maximum vagueness, the demonic is the master term for whatever needs to be explained—but cannot be explained—by known causal factors. The mimetic aspect thus lies in the demonic’s limitless availability for reconfiguring underlying factors according to the needs of the moment. A purely rational theory of causation has no need of the attribute “demonic.” The intensity of the desire to compensate for the unknown or inexplicable through an ironic rhetoric of super-rationality led many to miss the irony and misunderstand the demonic as referring to a real force or substance that is only waiting to be properly defined. The rhetorical side of the demonic and its consequent underlying lack of a solid conceptual or definitional founda- tion can be observed in the multiple sources of the demonic in Goethe. These sources are above all: (1) the five stanzas of the “Urworte Orphisch” (“Orphic Primal Words”), (2) Goethe’s autobiography, Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit), (3) his morphological writings and, to a lesser degree, (4) his conversations with Eckermann. Despite numerous similarities and analogies, the divergences among these four models lead me not to assume that these conceptions are mutually compatible. The morphological writings establish paradigms or “cells” that can be traced through Goethe’s work, while, at the same time, the demonic may be at stake “analogically” in texts where it is not referred to by name. The demonic, furthermore, as a result of the extensive architecture of analogy within and between Goethe’s works, cannot be lim- ited a priori to any particular corpus or canon. Preface and Acknowledgments xi The reduction of this structural indefiniteness to a single understanding produces an arbitrary and appropriative privileging. This kind of univocal approach has mostly defined the reception of Goethe’s term (and to a lesser degree his work in general). Following Goethe’s example, the history of the term even in its most appropriative and emulative moments tends toward variation and divergence more than toward reduction and simplification. The variety of the appropriations reflects the variant possibilities intrinsic to and dormant within Goethe’s conception. My approach is thus to describe and defend the complexity of the actions and interactions that have taken place in the field of the demonic. This complexity is, on the one hand, specific to the material presented by the demonic itself and, on the
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