Ewan Fernie Argues That the Demonic Tradition in Literature Offers a Key to Our Most Agonised and Intimate Experiences

The Demonic

Are we either good or bad, and do we really know the difference? Why do we want what we cannot have, and even to be what we’re not? Can we desire others without wanting to possess them? Can we open to others and not risk possession ourselves? And where, in these cases, do we draw the line? Ewan Fernie argues that the demonic tradition in literature offers a key to our most agonised and intimate experiences. The Demonic ranges across the breadth of Western culture, engaging with writers as central and various as Luther, Shakespeare, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Melville and Mann. A powerful foreword by Jonathan Dollimore brings out its implications as an intellectual and stylistic breakthrough into new ways of writing criticism. Fernie unfolds an intense and personal vision, not just of Western modernity, but of identity, morality and sex. As much as it’s concerned with the great works, this is a book about life.

Ewan Fernie is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK, author of Shame in Shakespeare, and joint General Editor of the Shakespeare Now! series. Redcrosse, his latest, collaborative project, is a new poetic liturgy for St George’s Day, which has been performed in major cathedrals and by the RSC, and a book published in 2012. ‘Provocative and profound – a thrilling and radical account of the allure of the demon in us all.’ Salley Vickers, author of Miss Garnet’s Angel

‘Ewan Fernie’s study of the demonic in canonical literature is an original and exciting work of scholarship. Beautifully written, and continuously engaging, this book surprises the reader at almost every turn with insights into literature that remain in the mind and change how we think of poems and narratives we thought we knew well.’ Kevin Hart, Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia, USA

‘That the word “evil” contains within itself the word “live” is merely a lexical accident, but that the demonic might yet reveal what it means to truly or fi nally live is the profound mystery at the heart of Ewan Fernie’s book, which, in brilliantly ranging right across the Western literary canon, succeeds in alerting us to the sheer vitality in our cultural inheritance of demonic experience, or what Fernie calls the “life that is opposed to life”. And in this life-against-life Fernie fi nds or senses a way of being-in-the-world that we might not only dare to call truly human but even, perhaps and paradoxically, good or divine.’ John Schad, Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Lancaster, UK

‘With dazzling range and depth, Ewan Fernie has tackled a subject that we ignore at our peril: the demonic. He not only mines cultural resources – from Luther to Kierkegaard, from Marlowe to Dostoevsky, from Nietzsche to Schreber – to examine the experience of the demonic, but more: with his compelling prose, Fernie manages to create the experience of the demonic for us. This is not a book for the faint of heart. It reveals the relationship of the demonic to contemporary thought on negativity, to the darkness of possession, and to the transcendence of the sacred, showing that “sainthood is perilously close to damnation”. This book immeasurably enhances our understanding of the problem of evil.’ Regina M. Schwartz, Professor of English and Law, Northwestern University, USA

‘The Demonic: Literature and Experience is a bold, trailblazing book of formidable intellectual scope and ethical intensity. Through radical reappraisals of masterpieces by Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Dostoevsky and Mann, and through dialogues with thinkers as diverse as Luther, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Freud, it reveals the demonic as a vital force in our daily lives that we disavow to our cost. A passionate, seductive defence of the dark side by a critic committed to making literature matter.’ Kiernan Ryan, Professor of English Language and Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK The Demonic Literature and experience

Ewan Fernie

Foreword by Jonathan Dollimore First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Ewan Fernie The right of Ewan Fernie to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Fernie, Ewan, 1971– The demonic : literature and experience / Ewan Fernie ; foreword by Jonathan Dollimore. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Demonology in literature. 2. Devil in literature. 3. Demoniac possession in literature. 4. Sex in literature. 5. Desire in literature. 6. Literature–History and criticism. I. Title. PN56.D465F47 2013 809'.9337–dc23 2012018130 ISBN: 978-0-415-69024-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-69025-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-08230-0 (ebk) Typeset in Baskerville by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby Contents

List of illustrations vii Acknowledgements ix Note on references xi Foreword by Jonathan Dollimore xiii

PART ONE Demonic negativity 1 1 Dark night of the soul 3 2 Luther: man between God and the Devil 34 3 Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus 45 4 Demonic Macbeth 50 5 Satan (and demonic sex) 69 6 A justifi ed sinner 81 7 Dostoevsky’s demons 87 8 Thomas Mann as Dr Faustus (via Love’s Labour’s Lost) 115 9 She Devil 142 10 Loving the alien 148

PART TWO Turnabout and dialectic 151 11 Kierkegaard trembling 153 12 Nietzsche: a demon that laughs 160 13 The marriage of heaven and hell 165 14 Demonic dialectic: Boehme, Schelling, Hegel 169 vi Contents PART THREE Possession 181 15 Introduction 183

A. The agony in possessing 189 16 Angelo 191 17 Claggart 201 18 Possessing a child 208 19 Possessing god 209 20 Christ the possessor 213

B. The possessed 217 21 Introduction 219 22 Donne 220 23 Poor Tom 223 24 A Freudian interruption 237 25 The devils of Loudon 240 26 Jane Lead 245 27 The Master of Petersburg 253 28 Schreber 264

Notes 285 Index 304 List of illustrations

0.1 Gustav Doré, illustration from Paradise Lost, Edmund Ollier, The Doré Gallery (London: Cassell, Peter and Galpin, 1870), engraving 112, Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham. xiii 1.1 Louis Raemaekers, ‘The Adoration of the Magi’, Plate One, in The Great War: A Neutral’s Indictment, One Hundred Cartoons, with appreciation by H. Perry Robinson and descriptive notes by E. Garrett (London: The Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street, 1916), Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham. 15 3.1 Ian McKellen as Dr Faustus in Dr Faustus (Royal Shakespeare Company touring production, 1974). Joe Cocks Studio Collection © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. 45 4.1 Jonathan Slinger as Macbeth and Aislin McGuckin as Lady Macbeth in Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2011). Image courtesy of Photo Stage (www.photostage.co.uk). 50 5.1 John Martin, illustration from Paradise Lost, in John Milton, The Poetical Works of John Milton, with a life of the author by William Hayley in 3 volumes, vol. 1 (London: John and Josiah Boydell and George Nicol, 1794–7), illustrating Book II, line 1 (facing p. 37), Selbourne Collection, care of Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham. 73 7.1 John Martin’s illustration from Paradise Lost, in Milton, The Poetical Works, illustrating Book IV, line 505 (facing p. 124). 109 9.1 Julie T. Wallace in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986) © BBC Photo Library. 142 viii List of illustrations 15.1 Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon and Tamara (1890–1). Used by permission of The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. 183 23.1 B. Reading (engraver), ‘Edgar’, T & H Rodd, 17 Little Newport Street, May 1820, in William Shakespeare, The plays of William Shakespeare illustrated (London: Boydell, 1815 [i.e. 182–]), unpublished extra-illustrated edition, vol. xiii, facing p.107, Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham. 223 28.1 Image of Daniel Paul Schreber from A Dictionary of Hallucinations, edited Jan Dirk Blom (Berlin: Springer, 2010), p. 461. Used by permission of the publisher. 264 Acknowledgements

Insofar as it breaks with specialism and other academic decorums, this book has needed friends and supporters. I have benefi ted as always from fellow Shakespeareans but others have helped with German and Russian materials, theology and philosophy, literature I am less than expert in. All have given and engaged beyond expertise, which by nature is a limited thing. They include: Harry Acton, Zorica Bečanović–Nikolić, Jaq Bessell, Maurizio Calbi, Christie Carson, Farah Karim Cooper, Michael Dobson, Tobias Döring, Hugh Grady, Paul Edmondson, Rana Haddad, Robert Hampson, Andreas Höfele, Andrew Brower Latz, Kate McLuskie, David Ruiter, John Schad, Liam Semler, Andrew Shanks, Boika Sokolova, Andrew Taylor, Stanley Wells and Sarah Young. My employers have afforded opportunities to explore demonic literature with students, among whom I have to single out David Paxton and Adam Seddon for stimulating suggestions. Paul Hamilton and Mohamed Salim Said were spared my demonic pedagogy but have also taken a generous and helpful interest. Close friends David Fuller and Eric Mallin have given crucial inspiration, insight and support. Kiernan Ryan, my intellectual example and collaborator at Royal Holloway, has remained centrally involved since. I have many serious things to thank Simon Palfrey for, including being my Mephistopheles, as well as letting me on occasion be his. John Gillies and Richard Wilson lent of their vast learning and sympathies, and I was helped by anonymous readers at Routledge. Jeremy Newton renewed the past – again! – by reading the whole thing with lively intelligence. Sarah Apetrei gave me Boehme and Jane Lead, as well as her own uniquely spiritual take on my thinking. My enthusiasm for heavy-duty European writers I derive from my father, Rab Fernie. Karin Brown and Martin Killeen found all the Birmingham-based images. An earlier version of the chapter on Angelo was published in Shakespeare and I, ed. William McKenzie and Theodora Papadopoulou (Bloomsbury). The Shakespeare Institute, and all my colleagues there, provided a congenial environment in which to fi nish the book. Polly Dodson, Emma Joyes, Niall Slater and Ruth Moody at Routledge were of terrifi c help throughout the editorial process. As was Rob Brown at Saxon Graphics. x Acknowledgements The person who helped above all with this book is Jonathan Dollimore. He’s the great forerunner. His belief in the project kept me going. All along the way he’s been counsellor, father-confessor and friend. My children, Theo and Kirsty, have remained happily oblivious to the project. My wife, Deanna, has been too busy to weigh every word, and therefore bears no responsibility for lapses of taste and judgement. What I owe her is beyond my capacity to state here. Note on references

Full references are given in the notes. All biblical references are to the Authorised Version.

Foreword Jonathan Dollimore

Figure 0.1 Gustav Doré, illustration from Paradise Lost. xiv Foreword What the English lack, says Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, is ‘real power of spirituality, real depth of spiritual insight, in short, philosophy’. Such spirituality is not to be confused with Christianity; on the contrary says Nietzsche, it’s precisely because the English lack philosophy in this sense that they ‘cling fi rmly to Christianity’.1 Whether this is an accurate characterisation of the English, or the traditions of philosophy in English, or even the English philosophical tradition, is doubtful (and quite which of these Nietzsche is referring to is unclear, since he moments later seems to assume David Hume is English). However, it does strike me as acutely true of dominant aspects of those traditions. And it became strangely prescient of certain university based practices of literary criticism in English in the twentieth century, which did indeed lack both spiritual insight and depth, and, in some cases (and as a direct consequence) embraced facile versions of Christianity in compensation. These practices, bolstered by lots of English good taste and decency, had limited horizons, and deep tendencies towards political and intellectual complacency. It helped produce the passively educated, in relation to whom one can’t help but recall a character in Margaret Drabble’s fi rst novel; recently graduated from Oxford with a literary degree, she refl ects ruefully: ‘Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations’.2 It’s not surprising that those practices have long been challenged, most recently by ‘Theory’ in all its diverse manifestations, but it is surprising that they lasted as long as they did. Perhaps they are even now making a return, but with that good sense and decency now exposed for what it was by a new (but equally institutionalised, and now highly professionalised) sense of political correctness. Ewan Fernie has written a truly exceptional book which explores the spiritual in Nietzsche’s sense of what the English – and especially Eng Lit – lack. And precisely because he doesn’t need or want the prop of a facile Christianity, Fernie can engage insightfully with some of the more challenging and even disturbing Christian writers. Bearing witness to the Light when ‘the darkness comprehended it not’ ( John 1.7) led ultimately to the death of the witness and the crucifi xion of the Light. So a nihilistic atheism found it easier to bear witness to the darkness instead. The demonic is an idea which is both before and beyond nihilism; in fact it’s not just an idea, but the existential realisation of how darkness and light merge, not just at their limits (dusk and dawn) but absolutely. One of the challenges of theory was to distinguish between the inevitable diffi culty of the strange, and an obscurantism parasitic upon it. Those who opted for a kind of pure theory, for example the Lacanians and the Deconstructionists, probably failed in this task most embarrassingly: certainly their own writing was frequently obscurantist. Conversely, those who stuck to some kind of historicism – one thinks most obviously of the New Historicists in the USA – fared much better in the intelligibility stakes. Foreword xv So much so that historicism in one newish form or another has become a new orthodoxy. In the academic arts subjects orthodoxies are limiting in many ways; in a sense that is their raison d’être, especially now, when those subjects are professionalised as never before. In the present conjuncture, the main limitation of these orthodoxies is that those academics who are most successful at practising them, tend to be the least interesting intellectually. Historicism, in its diverse but related manifestations, has become an orthodoxy which needs to be challenged. Fernie does so implicitly throughout his book, and directly if briefl y in his introduction; I need to do so a little more fully in order to make clear the importance of Fernie’s alternative take on literature, history and philosophy. Jason Scott-Warren’s Early Modern English Literature is a book whose ‘more historicist than thou’ objective is to discredit all those misguided and unhistorical critics who have fashioned the early modern in the image of the modern, making fi gures as different as Samuel Pepys and Shakespeare’s Hamlet supposed ‘harbingers of modernity’.3 Scott-Warren diligently applies his historical knowledge to rescuing early modernists from the grasp of their modernist appropriators, and restoring them to their rightful historical context. He claims anthropological and ethnographic infl uences, but actually what he offers is fairly conventional ‘factual’ history. The book’s fi nal sentence declares: ‘We have yet to learn how to read this complex text [Pepys’s Diary] without imposing our own egos upon the early modern self’ (245–6). ‘Yet to learn’? Although you wouldn’t know it from this book, Scott-Warren’s kind of historicism has been advocated by many a conventional scholar across the best part of the last century. And many other more engaged scholars, especially those outside of Oxbridge, have found it unsatisfactory, be it in its newer or older forms. One reason they have done so is because this kind of historicism tends to be deliberately constricting – so much so that one occasionally suspects that it’s deployed by those who lack critical acumen, and perhaps as a cover for this lack; indeed, the way they sometimes delight in deploying historical ‘fact’ to discredit critical insight may even be a kind of revenge upon the latter. As such it’s a depressingly defended kind of historicism – as can be seen from Scott-Warren’s treatment of Hamlet. First off he rejects the Romantic tradition which sees the play as essentially about its protagonist’s deep interiority, and as such an avatar of the modern individual, or what another critic called ‘“expressive individualism” – the post romantic conviction that the self discovers its fullest authenticity in intensely personal, intensely original expression’ (229). On the contrary says Scott-Warren, the ‘subjectivity or individuality that the play unfolds is conditioned chiefl y by the revival of ancient philosophy and the dictates of a theatrical mode … Hamlet’s alienation is utterly of its time, and of its place’ (237). That’s all right then. This is the intellectual equivalent of being more concerned with correctly shelving a book than actually reading it, let alone allowing it to affect one. xvi Foreword For sure there is something narcissistically complacent in appropriating the past for ourselves – in simply imposing our own egos on the past.4 And yet the deeper complacency might be in Scott-Warren’s conviction that, where literature is concerned, a good dose of common-sense empiricism, deployed mainly to prove others wrong, can and should cure us of that desire. Beyond trying to remove Hamlet from the grasp of those who want to egotistically appropriate it, Scott-Warren doesn’t seem to know what to do with the play other than to walk around it making sure no crude appropriators come near. Ultimately such historicism tends towards a policing of the play against interpretation. It doesn’t just avoid questions of value, but represses them; in other words it’s a contextualising which is also, and more fundamentally, a containment. Its rhetoric is sometimes about perceiving the play’s difference, but in practice this is an historicism which removes the play to a safe distance, to a place where that difference can’t really challenge us. One of the very fi rst essays I read onHamlet included a statement which went something like this: ‘Everyone thinks Hamlet was written for them, but I know it was written for me’. At the time I found this rather disconcerting, because I’d never remotely thought Hamlet was written for me; on the contrary I knew it was written for someone else. But on balance I think I actually prefer this kind of naked appropriation to Scott- Warren’s historicist policing. The problem with historicism applies to scholarship more generally. Scholarship may be a necessary condition for good criticism but not only is it not a suffi cient condition, it can also preclude insightful criticism, substituting for it a competent knowledge which only thinly disguises its own intellectual poverty. If scholarship is truly the essence of the academy, indispensable for most if not all intellectual work, it’s precisely this fact which enables the plethora of well-educated but ultimately second-rate minds in the universities to use it to simultaneously police the limits of thought while advancing careers. Of course slick and fashionable appropriations don’t last. The best critical insight is about being alive to the past through the present, and it will usually though not invariably be mediated by scholarship; but even when it is, it must always also be at some level vitally appropriative. After all, it’s sometimes the case that in order to fully perceive its challenge, the different has to be incorporated, re-located to the place (within) where it can make a difference. Appropriation in this sense can be a kind of creative vulnerability rather than intellectual mastery. Or it can emerge from a confl ict between the two, even from a clash of sensibilities. And this is exactly what I fi nd in Fernie’s book. It seems to me that he takes both appropriation and historicising to another place where neither is cancelled yet both contribute to a new understanding. (This process is reminiscent of Hegel, and of course it’s no coincidence that Fernie gives such a cogent reading of Hegel’s relevance to his project). This is especially true of what he says about Schreber, where the demonic becomes a way of being true to Foreword xvii the ‘alien’ spirituality of the past while also speaking to our own intensely confl icted interiority. Like all important works of criticism this book unobtrusively involves us in larger metaphysical considerations – about human individuality, social being, and especially our relationship to others and other cultures. To take one example of many: ‘Just start to imagine a form of human personality, a race, a society, built not so much on agency as susceptibility’ (278). This remark, which is part radical insight, part speculative suggestion, isn’t conjured from nowhere, but ‘earned’ through a very careful reading of the Schreber text. It’s the insightful care of the reading which has led to it, which makes the observation resonantly compelling. The same can be said of the following:

The demonic is perhaps the vanishing mediator between God and sex. (282)

It raises the question as to whether our purest and most sacred feelings can ever be free of demonic elements. (194)

And one more:

the spirituality of subjection … is visible in sex but inassimilable into life. (278)

In relation to that last remark, I would say that not only does Fernie write more insightfully about sex than some academic so-called queer theorists, but he does so in relation to heterosexual scenarios, and in ways which understand the complexities of desire so insightfully as to show, just occasionally but crucially, the irrelevance of categories like ‘straight’ and ‘gay’ to such an understanding. And this too contrasts with those theorists who would willingly deconstruct such categories, yet simultaneously keep them in place as a guarantee of the superiority of their own (queer) analysis. The fi nal section of the Angelo chapter ‘I am not a rapist’ dares a new kind of criticism – I can see what is already a heavily defended profession reaching for yet more rearmament in order to resist the challenge it poses. And yet to draw some professional fi re may be to further Fernie’s project, such is its scope. Unlike many academics, Fernie writes very well. By that I don’t mean his writing draws attention to its own elegance – almost the opposite: it’s completely accessible, even colloquial in places, while all the while challenging us to think harder and further. His insightfulness is integral to his style; he can get into a couple of sentences what other critics would need an article for, and this brings to mind a distinction which is more important xviii Foreword now than ever – that between insight and sophistication. University Arts departments are awash with critical sophistication. The display of this sophistication is usually high on the agenda for writing in the fi rst place. It’s been more prevalent in the US than the UK, and hit a high point with the fi rst deconstructionists, who sometimes either inadvertently obscured their argument through an obtuseness of style, or half-deliberately opted for such obtuseness to obscure a shaky or non-existent argument. Sophistication was – and still is – deployed as professional defence. It’s mostly not interesting once the point of sophistication has been proved. And for all its apparent complexity there remains something facile at its heart. I recall attending a conference in the USA where a noted deconstructionist gave a paper which was so sophisticated as to be unintelligible, at least to me. A member of the (academic) audience declared afterwards with huge enthusiasm and respect, ‘God that was a smart paper!’ Smart was then a word much favoured by US academics in describing each other. Having not myself understood the paper, I asked this person to elucidate it for me. He didn’t disguise the fact that he had no idea himself either, but the really interesting point here is that for him, our shared incomprehension, far from diminishing his respect for the speaker, only increased it. Fernie by contrast uses all of his critical acumen to articulate as clearly as he can something of great importance, and this imposes on him as a writer the obligation of clarity as well as depth – clarity in depth, which is hard to achieve. But he does achieve it, and the result is real insight into spiritual intensities of being. Put another way, it is a kind of writing which is vital, fully alive. I’m not quite sure how we became ‘post-theory’ – probably from a confl icted mix of a restless desire for the new coupled to a nostalgic desire for the past, for what preceded theory. But just as some arts academics were trying to settle back into the narrow scholarly specialisation which theory eschewed, so events are wrecking their complacency: economic collapse, another crisis of university funding, the marginalising of the humanities, and international confl icts pressing ever closer. Some will try to retreat even further into the academy, but, with the exception of our most privileged institutions, the days are gone when they will fi nd cover there. And when they eventually fi nd themselves unable to retreat any further and with their backs fi rmly against the wall, it won’t be a wall in the ivory tower, but a market place pretty much indifferent to what they do. But bad times make for good books, and sometimes for an engaged criticism as well. I believe this book of Fernie’s to be one of the most important instances of engaged criticism that I’ve encountered in a long while. He is alive to the difference theory has made in this regard, especially in its valorising of negativity and repudiations of illusory ideas of human identity, but he is also rightly sceptical of theory’s idealising of these things. That’s one reason why he has found it necessary to go further afi eld, to ways of thinking – and feeling – which may be best characterised as growing from both the differences and Foreword xix the connections between philosophy and theology (the latter, like the spiritual, also being understood in a fuller sense than is customary). At the same time, this engagement with ways of thinking which Eng Lit traditionally ignored is completely true to the spirit of theory and its openness to very different, usually continental, philosophical and literary traditions. Turning to theology, Protestantism’s concern with the demonic is especially interesting. Some seminal Protestant texts have always struck me as marked by a strange mix of abjection and arrogance – abjection paradoxically energised by arrogance. Fernie goes back to Luther and others in this tradition, deconstructing the doxa in order to connect with a deeper, disturbing, more authentic spirituality. Hesitating to use that ‘deconstructing’ in the previous sentence, I nevertheless did so in order to make this further incidental point: had university based deconstructionists engaged honestly with the demonic it might not have ended up so academically introverted and professionally defended. Some of the seminal Protestant writers remind us that alienation, dislocation, and displacement can be conducive to insight and an ethics much deeper than that afforded by successful incorporation; they realised that authenticity is more often than not outside the doxa. The historicist scholar, wedded to criticism as tidy elucidation, might prefer it if Fernie had given a thesis-like, introductory defi nition of the demonic which he then elaborated chapter by chapter, in historical sequence, paying his scholarly dues on the way. I much prefer it the way he’s actually done it, developing a sense of the conceptual complexity by engaging with certain intense cruxes of literature and philosophy. A pervasive assumption of many in the West is that our history has seen a progressive deepening of understanding, in all the main branches of knowledge. It is an assumption inseparable from – almost the same as – our belief in progress. And if I refrain from making some facile repudiation of that belief, it’s because such cultural self-deprecation often conceals not only a damaging ignorance, but also a politically correct arrogance at least as damaging as the one it contests. Nevertheless, the fact remains that to read creative, philosophical and religious writers from the past, especially those concerned with selfhood, is to be constantly enlightened by their understanding of confl icted states of being, their breadth of ethical apprehension, acuteness of cultural sight, and sheer depth of suffering self- awareness. Look no further than the soliloquies of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or this from St Paul:

For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my fl esh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that xx Foreword which is good I fi nd not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I fi nd then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? (Romans 7.14–25)

For all the complexity of modernity, it often feels as if we have lost depth, and that progress has involved a shallowing not a deepening. Recently Germaine Greer, one of our putative public intellectuals, asked on a BBC radio programme if she regretted anything, replied proudly: ‘I don’t do regret’. She’s not alone in thinking or claiming this. To regret nothing about one’s life is supposed to be a sign of having lived it well, even to the full. In truth it is one of the pervasive and shallow rationalisations of our age, and of a piece with the delusion that ‘I did it My Way’: ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention’ … And I can’t help seeing The Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious’ version of that song as demonic in its way, not least because his puny adolescent body so poignantly belied his posturing toughness, as did his self-destructiveness (which, though, should not be confused with weakness). Not to do regret is not to do life either. One can only hope that such claims are more often a disavowal of gnawing deep regrets. Regret and remorse are inevitable for anyone who is alive to any degree both passionately and empathetically. Post- modernism endorses a certain kind of shallowing, regarding the ‘depth-model’ as a damaging error in cultural thinking. Whether this is a permanent or signifi cant break with the past, rather than a dialectical stage of reconnection with it, remains to be seen. Fernie’s book suggests the latter. At a time when institutionalised Christianity can be either crudely fundamentalist on the one hand or endlessly accommodating to, and compromised by, secularism on the other – what might be still be called, after Aldous Huxley, ‘dilute Christianity’ – the kind of re-engagement with the radical complexity of Western spirituality which Fernie offers in this book is truly important. And it’s signifi cant that it comes from one who, in the material here, professes no overt religious affi liations as such. Or if that is to presume too much, let me put it this way: this book elucidates intensities of being which may be the more far-reaching for not having the supportive reference of an institutional religious framework. Indeed it may be one dimension of our modern condition that its most searching accounts of spirituality necessarily come from outside or beyond such frameworks, those who join the church or convert from one faction to the other, seeming deluded by their own sense of self importance, or compromised by their wish to belong. If Tennyson’s right in In Memoriam that there’s more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds, it’s also sometimes true that the Foreword xxi sacrilegious show the most vivid and intense appreciation of the sacred. Sometimes it seems to me that we can now only really understand what it means to be fallen when we cease to believe in God. These are my views rather than Fernie’s, whose other recent work has involved an extraordinary and creative collaboration with the Church.5 Nevertheless this present book certainly suggests that whatever your religious leanings or otherwise, you’ve got to work it out on your own. The concept of bad-faith developed in existentialist thought was a powerful one, and spoke to precisely this kind of realisation and the deep temptation to disavow it. I don’t want to argue terminology, but it seems that existentialism, avowedly atheistic, was nevertheless a modern kind of spirituality. Again Nietzsche was a seminal precursor, and in a way this has become an elusive modernist aspiration if ever there was one: spirituality without metaphysical guarantees, spirituality without religion. But let’s not forget that it was this aspiration which took at least some of Nietzsche’s followers beyond good and evil with terrible consequences he could never have envisaged, whilst at another extreme entirely, it has led to the feel-good banalities of new ageism. Again, this underscores the importance of Fernie’s challenging re-engagement with Christianity, rather than its repudiation. Showing the demonic as an aspect of the Christian spiritual legacy is arguably a more effective challenge to dilute Christianity than a blanket rejection of the tradition ever could be. But if all this is the territory of the Big Stuff, how might that legacy connect with the everyday of the present? Tentatively, I’d suggest the following: spiritual lack doesn’t have to be experienced as the agonising void, or the dark night of the soul preceding revelation, despair or apostasy; on the contrary it can be precisely mundane : in every walk of life people know that there are better ways of living than the ones we have chosen, or been constrained by. Be it the endless corruption of ‘democratic’ politicians; or the relentless barbarism of dictatorial ones; or the multi-national corporate crimes in pursuit of profi t; or (closer to home) the ludicrous dictates of modern bureaucratic management, now inane, now contradictory; or the abdication of responsibility involved in the practice of defensive medicine (something increasingly apparent in most other professions too); or the timidity and dishonesty encouraged by the culture of accountability and targets; or (yet closer still) the endless shabby personal compromises forced upon us by the need to survive here and now – typically in the career, one of the most compromised, complicit and corrupt kinds of success available today. (It’s ideologically revealing that the career as a way of life remains so uncritically regarded by so many of those who are in a position – that’s to say with the relative security of possessing a career – to know better.) In relation to these realities and so many others, we experience a self-evident yet still astonishing truth: almost everything that is done, including what we ourselves do, be it at the macro or the micro level, could and should be done more authentically, more honestly, more meaningfully, xxii Foreword more truthfully. Just to know this, and to dimly yearn for that other way of doing things, to feel that discrepancy as a daily, repeated frustration of the spirit, is something more than the political, more even than the ethical, though it’s also still both of these. Again I don’t want to argue terminology, but it seems to me that, crucial as the ethical and the political are, neither fully addresses the truth of this frustration, which, in the constant intimacy with which it is felt, we might even call the negative spirituality of the everyday. It’s a comforting deception of dilute Christianity that somehow ‘true’ spirituality puts you in a state of grace where it is impossible to do harm. Self-evidently, this was never true of a spirituality contained by institutionalised religion; as we know, time and again it has been the institutions of the Church which have condoned barbarism and even provided a rationalisation for it. And it’s even less true of a spirituality beyond or after those institutions. The intensity of being which spirituality embraces can never be necessarily or only benign, either in relation to oneself or to others. This too is an aspect of the demonic, an apprehension of which pressures us into challenging thoughts – for example, the thought that the consoling belief in an absolute distinction between good and evil is a human fi ction; and then a question about this thought: is it just obvious, or blasphemous, or both? A related question: what is the humaneness of the humanities? Some would have us believe it to be an aura of benign profundity emanating from all the major subjects, but most especially from the arts, good for the soul of all those who imbibe it, and therefore also for society as a whole. In individuals it manifests itself as educated good taste, while its cumulative effect in the culture at large is nothing less than a guarantor of civilisation. As a justifi cation for the arts – in education for example, or as a rationale for funding – this is deeply complacent if not cynical: it makes of the aesthetic an anesthetic. Here’s a different view of the relationship of art to society: all civilised life, even or especially the most evolved, has repressions at its centre – repressions which, far from being extraneous, are constitutive: they both enable it to be what it is, yet also threaten what it is. Thus the humane involves a repression of what it is to be fully human, and a certain kind of spirituality is a sublimation of this repression. Perhaps spirituality is the only sublimation that really works; that’s to say, it can limit what it is to be human, but in a way that intensifi es life rather than stultifi es it. Even so, the repressions remain, and the humane is haunted by its own vital exclusions which sooner or later it will confront – in nightmare, in fantasy, in crisis, in transgression, in the angst of an exceptional vulnerability, or occasionally just the cold light of an exceptional honesty. Or it might derive from that infamous determination to follow the truth wherever it might lead. Given that such determination, and such truth, are often on the side of reason against religion, they might be regarded as inimical to spirituality. But that remark of Nietzsche’s with which I began, and in which he equates spirituality with philosophy, suggests on the contrary that this search for truth may be spiritual in essence, even or especially Foreword xxiii when challenging established religion. It also suggests that this quest for the truth of being compromises the commitments of faith and belief. There has always been a need for what might be called a cognitive spirituality, but perhaps now it’s greater than ever. Confronted by its repressions, the humane is exposed to that which makes it possible in the fi rst place; exposed then, to an absent, disavowed, repressed part of itself, exposed in other words, to a dangerous knowledge. Only now spirituality is on the side of desublimation, breaking through limitations rather than submitting to them. This confrontation, and the potential risk it entails, is one meaning of the demonic, and as Fernie shows, the arts are a place where it is articulated most profoundly. That everyday frustration of the spirit mentioned just now is also potentially demonic in its essential dissatisfaction with life as it is. If in the past the demonic can only be fully apprehended when spirituality violates whatever religious authority it belongs to, even if only temporarily, the disappearance of that authority leaves us open to even more searching violations, and we might be reminded of the sub-title of Nietzsche’s text: Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. In this regard we can understand why, theologically, despair was thought to be such a grave sin. Whereas, say, depression entails a state of enervation and fatigue, despair – which is a state beyond depression but sometimes growing from it – is by contrast energised, even exhilarated, by the same sense of hopelessness that lends depression its lassitude. Courage perversely animated by despair: to feel most alive when most sinful. To those who despair, Luther’s injunction ‘sin bravely’ makes perfect sense, and Dostoevsky’s ‘sudden demon of irony’ (40, 108) offers an entirely new kind of aliveness, as does the satanic impulse towards decreation. Pascal’s observation that there is a kind of evil which often passes for good because ‘it takes as much extraordinary greatness of soul to attain such evil, as to attain good’,6 anticipates Nietzsche of course, but others too, including Oscar Wilde: ‘Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to’.7 A spirituality which precludes the prospect of despair, like an aesthetic without the possibility of dangerous knowledge, is not much, since (simplistically) that which by defi nition can’t harm can’t do much good either. That’s not a logical truth but, in a fallen world, it could be a spiritual one. For Deanna Part one Demonic negativity

1 Dark night of the soul

Modern Western civilisation is intimately related to the demonic, and some of our most valuable artistic, religious and philosophical works – from Shakespeare to Thomas Mann, from Luther to Liszt, and from Hegel to Dostoevsky – repeatedly confess this. Contemporary culture blocks its ears, and who can blame it? But demonic fi gures such as Faust, Macbeth and Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin continue to stare at us from the canonical centre of Western literature, with baleful accusation in their burnt-out eyes. Though vampires abound, we don’t much identify with the demonic. And yet, as I hope to show in this book, our current lives in fact resonate with it more than ever. From St Augustine onwards the demonic is classically understood in terms of difference, opposition and negation. And now we defi ne individuality in just such terms. This is very much the case, as we will see below, in the most fashionable contemporary philosophy, but it is also true of much ordinary experience. Take, for instance, a teenager’s passionate revulsion from mum and dad and her familiar domestic self. Or the very prevalent (and increasingly long and moveable!) phenomenon of the ‘mid-life crisis’, where an ageing husband, say, recoils from the very self and life he himself has substantially made. It’s easy of course to laugh at adolescents and the middle aged, but theirs are our defi ning epochs, when our identities are fi rst crystallising and have become most established, and there is something very resonant and instructive about their urgent sense that what we really are may be quite opposite to what we appear to be and even have become. Shakespeare (who else?) crystallises it: ‘I am not what I am’ (Othello, 1.1.66).1 This makes personality the power to be somebody else: J’est un autre, as the French poet Rimbaud has it.2 And, deep down, many and perhaps all of us cherish a sense of ourselves as different not just from the world and from others but even from our own selves and lives. Consider the shock and embarrassment you might feel at being suddenly confronted with your own obituary. Not me! Not that! You’d drop your spoon and grab hold of the breakfast table, all the puny, recordable facts of your life impelling a panicked effort to recognise, to rescue yourself as something – anything! – other …

* 4 Demonic negativity This book is called The Demonic: Literature and Experience and the last word of the subtitle has raised a few eyebrows at academic staff meetings; but for the artists and thinkers who have engaged with the demonic most impressively, it is experience above all – experience of a soul-shaking kind – which reasonable objectivity is liable to miss altogether. Here is Stevenson in a letter to J. A. Symonds on reading Crime and Punishment by perhaps the greatest novelist of the demonic, Dostoevsky:

Raskolnikoff is easily the greatest book I have read in ten years; I am glad you took to it. Many fi nd it dull: Henry James could not fi nish it: all I can say is, it nearly fi nished me. It was like having an illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and on further refl ection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of to-day, which prevents them from living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purifi ed.3

This sort of profoundly vital experience is clearly foreign to objectivity. Indeed, so magnetised is he by the main character, Stevenson gets Dostoevsky’s title wrong! What the academy typically asks for and rewards is precisely objectivity in the sense of a correct or impartial appreciation. Yet an informed or balanced response may, of all things, betray passionate and vital reading experience, may betray art as what deals with and in such experience. Information is so often an evasion, an attempt to master as fact an agency – the work – which is analogous to personhood, even if the virtual personality of the work of art must be distinguished from the actual personality of the author. There are other criteria for judging criticism than balance or expertise. How interesting is any given reading? How far does it do justice to the work’s varying charisma and possibilities of meaning? Some things in even a great work are just less good than others. How fertile is it? What is its generative potential, in terms of art or life? – I’m thinking now partly of Rilke looking at the Apollo Belvedere and writing, ‘You must change your life!’4 But of course literature may not always change our lives for the better. Can it be owned by a living human being, at his or her most intimate and exposed, in the sudden depths of a surprising conversation, in that prone moment of consciousness before falling asleep, when engaged in the rawest and most agonising self-refl ection?5 Of course scholars know all this, and it conditions our response to the critical work and art we most like and respond to, but, I feel, too secretly and too much in the background, to the effect that scholarship is now a professional business largely sealed off from enthusiastic reading. It is hard for contemporary academic readers to do justice to the sheer life-potential of a book. Professional identity and standing in an epoch of unprecedented Dark night of the soul 5 professionalisation stand in the way. And if a critical orientation towards history typically proffers facts in place of the subjectivity of aesthetic encounter, theory involves abstraction from experience. A good question of any theory or philosophy is: what kind of model or image of life – realised, say, in novel form – would it express? If we cannot imagine this as anything other than hopelessly thin or facile, then it’s simply not suitable to the dense complexities of art. And political criticism also steps away from experience, being ethics at a higher level of abstraction. One reason for its righteous tendency is that politics enables a comfortable distance from the ambivalence of one’s own moral life. That of course is properly the domain of ethics. But ethical criticism has, in recent times, tended to be too pious, too liable to neglect not just the temptation to privilege oneself over ‘the Other’, but the real reasons for and desirability of doing so. It therefore degrades into ethical kitsch. Perhaps the demonic can help bring something of the complication, asperity, even agony of ethics back in. It is interesting that Stevenson is writing about a Russian masterpiece, as expressly opposed to an Anglo-American tradition. Intensity is a well-known predicate of Russian and German literature. And it may be that for English or American readers such dislocated traditions communicate all the more instantly and powerfully with raw experience, because they are from elsewhere, beyond educated familiarity, beyond mastery. Scottish authors are a bit of a special case and the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde seems closer than his typical English counterparts to these alternative traditions. I believe that authors such as Shakespeare should be read much more often in such contexts – and that to read Shakespeare in such a way will be to discover or rediscover a more powerful and existentially compelling Shakespeare. In these pages at least, he – and other English writers such as Marlowe and Milton – will be found in the company of Hegel, Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann. I also believe, strange though it is to say, that another way of renewing an intensely serious intellectual and emotional engagement with art in the English critical tradition is via a new engagement with theology. Jonathan Dollimore once said to me that theology at least connects with ‘the Big Stuff’ – life, death, tragedy (the Fall being the fi rst and perhaps the greatest of tragedies), meaning, value. And Martin Luther wrote in the same vein, in a letter of 17 March 1509, to his friend, the Eisenach priest Johannes Braun, ‘From the outset I would rather have exchanged philosophy for theology. I mean for a theology that gets at the meat of the nut, at the kernel of the corn, or the marrow of the bones’.6 But if theology can help repair criticism’s connection with life, we need the right kind, the sort of theology that really does connect up with the Big Stuff. Luther, remember, had to lay his life (and much else) on the line in his effort to keep it honest. And he knew that one thing which keeps theology honest is the demonic – because the Devil is a tempter, because he is a possessor of souls, because he gets right into the bone marrow, making it plain that moral objectivity 6 Demonic negativity and pride are unsustainable, that life is a struggle in which we are always messily and ambivalently involved. Here’s Kierkegaard on the subject:

Commonly, one hears little about the demoniacal, notwithstanding that this fi eld, particularly in our time, has a valid claim to be explored, and notwithstanding that the observer, in case he knows how to get a little rapport with the demon, can, at least occasionally, make use of almost every man for this purpose. As such an explorer Shakespeare is and constantly remains a hero. That horrible demon the most demoniacal fi gure Shakespeare has depicted and depicted incomparably, the Duke of Gloucester (afterwards to become Richard III) – what made him a demon? Evidently the fact that he could not bear the pity he had been subjected to since childhood. His monologue in the fi rst act of Richard III is worth more than all the moral systems which have no inkling of the terrors of existence or of the explanation of them.7

I shall argue in due course that Macbeth is more demonic than Richard III, but it’s instructive that both Kierkegaard’s and Stevenson’s testimonies to literature’s vitality are inspired by great demonic works: the Macbeth-like story of an unnecessary murder that is Crime and Punishment, and Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard III which Kierkegaard expressly nominates as ‘demoniacal’. Kierkegaard asserts the pertinence of the demoniacal for nearly all of us, provided we can bear to recognise it in ourselves. But he also asserts the particular pertinence of the demoniacal in our times. This might be because of secularisation, because the demonic is now the back door into spirituality and religion where the front door appears to be shut, because the demonic is the prevalent form of modern religious experience. But, given his richly inward understanding of the demonic, Kierkegaard is also on to the strange lure and temptation of a negative life, which, as I indicated at the very beginning of this book, has grown even stronger since. In all this, Shakespeare foretells demonic modernity. But Kierkegaard’s emphasis here falls on the true-to-life challenge of such demoniacal art to theoretical abstraction: ‘moral systems which have no inkling of the terrors of existence or the explanation of them’. Unwilling to settle for his lot in life, the Crookback breaks out. He violates nature and custom, wooing women over their husbands’ corpses. If being has made him this, then he will punish and defy it. Life seems brutally, baldly and insistently to say, ‘You’re a hunchback, loser’. So he makes himself sexy, glamorous and powerful.

I am not what I am!

The lesson for us is that literature is more responsive to experience than philosophy is. But as a result criticism must not turn literature into philosophy, Dark night of the soul 7 stepping away from what literature has to tell us, and there are implications for critical voice and form. This book will move between more familiar types of scholarly refl ection and an attempt to admit, own and bring into view the demonic as a form of life, suffering and excitement. This necessarily will be subjective. But not just an indulgence. According to Stevenson and Kierkegaard, it’s the only way to do justice to the demonic at all.

‘I am that I am’ is what God says in the Bible (Exodus 3.14); ‘I am not what I am’ is what the Devil snaps back. And especially nowadays we too typically defi ne ourselves by our difference – not just from each other and the wider world, but even from our own established personalities. Here identity becomes strangely one with self-destruction. In fact, rejection of the world slides inevitably into a related rejection of the self, as we see, for instance, in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. ‘I banish you,’ says the eponymous hero, to a Rome which has banished him, and thereby confounds the very basis of his accustomed identity, leaving Shakespeare to unfold the tragic consequences (3.3.127). But if undoing one’s own being without actually physically disposing of it is tragic, it is also of course thrilling: for what remains is pure selfhood, disencumbered of all the natural and social predicates that previously made it up. This is that quick element which Coriolanus imagines standing as if ‘man were author of himself and knew no other kin’ (5.3.36–7); it is Macbeth the self-made king, the liberated thing that is Lady Macbeth unsexed, and Richard without the hump. Coriolanus is ultimately cut down as a mummy’s ‘boy of tears’ (5.6.103); Richard is squashed; Macbeth’s beheaded and his wife crumples, but Milton’s Satan supplies a beacon for a more successful break-out when he impatiently pushes his chair back and steps away from the banquet of creation into all the nullity and possibility of the uncreated. It’s an amazing moment, one which blazes a trail not just for Romantic poets like Byron, Shelley and Blake, but also for all the social and sexual outlaws who are their counter-cultural inheritors. I say counter-cultural but, in this respect, the counter-culture has become mainstream. And if the social order nevertheless remains standing, it is haunted, even partially wrecked from within, by a counter-cultural spirit. Some people enjoy a more advantageous position in the world than others – and some just enjoy worldly position more – but I suspect, as I’ve intimated already, that few if any participants in mainstream Western culture defi ne themselves in terms of their established identities ultimately. I may speak for myself, at least. I’m sure I cherish my given and achieved identity as vainly as anyone, and yet in my most serious and needy moments I recognise myself and want to be loved not as a middle-class man from Maidenhead who has become a Professor of English but as a self ineffably distinct from this. Emily Dickinson speaks to the feeling: 8 Demonic negativity I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – Too? Then there’s a pair of us? Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!8

This is deliciously direct about the secrecy and seduction of a negative form of life; at the same time, it is satirically knowing. But popular celebrations in movies, books and music of sexual and social dissidence speak to the same thing – even when they often have the edge rubbed off them so as not to be too threatening or confounding. By contrast, paragons of familial or civic duty are in desperately short supply. As I’ve said, the social order remains standing. It would seem we occupy ourselves anxiously repairing, refurbishing and recovering our familiar selves and world while at the same time hankering after something else. And perhaps, on refl ection, this isn’t such a bad or embarrassing thing; perhaps it’s just the creative and unavoidable friction of human experience and culture in its diffi cult potential for all sorts of change. It’s also a truth that goes deeper than the social. Kierkegaard implicitly realises Richard’s case is our own. We are all of us constrained by limitation, shut in dying bodies. We are all rebels against death, somewhere, perhaps deep in the cave of consciousness, screaming in concert.

I am not what I am!

And then again if we are rebels against death, we are also, as Freud saw, death-loving rebels. For only death can defeat the contingency and entropy of being. The outcry against death perhaps is consummated in the rebel yell of death itself.

I am not what I am!

I have, to this point, kept academic theory largely at bay. This is because, whereas such theory is often seen as impossibly, even absurdly abstracted from experience, I want to establish a real resonance between what is classically construed as demonic negativity and contemporary life. And yet, current philosophy and current life are pretty much at one in positively valuing the negative. ‘Deconstruction’ (the word says it all) has been the most infl uential philosophy of our time and it is very much about the kind Dark night of the soul 9 of negativity I’ve been invoking here. For it is motivated by a subversive hostility to all being, including our own selves. Thus when Jacques Derrida cries in his classic exposition of deconstruction, ‘Différance’, ‘Not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom’, he has in his sights not just political sovereignty but also ‘the sovereign subject’ – that is, the real and substantial established self which you and I think we are.9 Existentialism isn’t often credited in deconstruction, but that’s because it’s deconstruction’s precursor and, as such, typically disavowed. In fact, Jean-Paul Sartre crisply conceptualised human identity in negative terms before Derrida did:

I am not my body to the extent that I am not what I am.

According to Sartre, this I am not what I am is most crucial to my life and identity, because it expresses not so much my merely creaturely being as my power to be what I will. Sartre elaborates as follows, ‘Freedom is precisely the nothingness which is made-to-be at the heart of man and which forces human-reality to make itself instead of to be’.10 Here is the positive potential of deconstruction avant la lettre. In fact, there is remarkable consensus among contemporary thinkers that human life is paradoxically and ultimately negative. The most high-profi le opponent of deconstruction, Slavoj Žižek, very much agrees with Derrida on this point. Žižek proposes that ‘“nothing” ultimately stands for the subject’.11 He insists that ‘modern subjectivity emerges when the subject sees himself as “out of joint”, as excluded from the “order of things”, from the positive order of entities’ (157). ‘Out of joint’ (Hamlet, 1.5.189): we may wish to observe here that both thinkers see Hamlet’s dislocation as emblematic of what it means to be a person now.12 But Žižek elaborates, describing the travails of deconstruction as a kind of positive spiritual exercise: ‘without the … sacrifi ce of all “inner” substantial spiritual content, the subject remains embedded in his substance, and cannot emerge as pure self-relating negativity’. Warming into a kind of zeal, he calls for a ‘radical abandonment of all the “inner” substantial content of my spiritual life’, arguing that ‘it is only through such an abandonment that I emerge as the pure subject of the enunciation, no longer attached to any positive order, rooted in any particular life-world’. In short, he is proposing – he himself dares, as he says, to ‘risk this formulation’ – ‘precisely a soulless subject, a subject deprived of his depth of “soul”’.13 For the soul, too, must be made away with in order to clear a space for a new selfhood: the subject of a new political world. This is compelling and extreme, and it brings us up against the idealisation of the negative in contemporary thought. But I still insist on the resonance between such abstraction and contemporary life: for if this spectre of self- evacuating spirit expresses the essence of deconstruction, it also resonates with adolescent rebellion, with mid-life crisis, and with that recoil from one’s own obituary which I imagined above. 10 Demonic negativity Sartre linked antagonism to what is familiar and given and the demonic, writing as follows:

The experience of Evil is a princely cogito which reveals the singularity of consciousness before Being. I want to be a monster, a hurricane, all that is human is alien to me. I transgress all the laws established by man, I trample every value under foot, nothing of what is can defi ne or limit me; yet I exist, I shall be the icy breath which will annihilate all life.14

Here, very explicitly, is a form of existence founded in destruction, and this expresses the essence of demonic heroes such as Macbeth or Stavrogin. The relation between ‘evil’ and ‘the demonic’ may give us pause. The demonic names the personal possibilities of evil; it is evil as a form of life. And while we’re on the subject of terminology, some thinkers prefer to use ‘daemonic’, presumably so the phenomenon is not always contained and subordinated by God and Judaeo-Christian theology, but I will use ‘demonic’ in this book partly because, in the Western world, we cannot but live in at least a post- Christian culture, but mostly because I am especially interested in the demonic as what cannot but be negative and yet often is or becomes mysteriously powerful and positive in spite of that, and in ways that set off and strike echoes with contemporary thought and life.15 For now the point is the valorisation of the negative in contemporary philosophy as opposed to its old association with evil. Dostoevsky calls the Devil ‘the spirit of self-destruction and non-being’.16 The prominent contemporary theologian (and founder of the Radical Orthodoxy movement) John Milbank writes, ‘Traditionally, in Greek, Christian and Jewish thought evil has been denied any positive foothold in being’.17 In the Institutes, Calvin writes, ‘But as the devil was created by God, we must remember that this malice which we attribute to his nature is not from creation’.18 But whereas Milbank and traditional Christian theology see evil and the demonic ‘as the privation of being itself’, contemporary thinkers, though they do not name it as evil or the demonic, typically see it in more positive terms, as the womb of possibility.19 This edges us into a major paradox. The demonic is evil, for sure, in its violent hostility to being. And yet, it involves a potential for creativity over against what merely is, which is something other than evil – and indeed, if we are to pay heed to contemporary philosophy and culture, may be a central component of the Good.20 That’s why Macbeth is strangely lovable; it’s why Stavrogin’s eyes glint and dazzle even while they repel. The orthodox Christian ‘privation theory’ of evil also entails the paradox which Jean-Luc Marion wittily observes: that the non-existence of the Devil is the existence of the Devil!21 And this is more than just a scholastic quibble, for we have seen that just such ghastly and exciting negativity is basic to contemporary self-experience and conceptualisation. If characters such as Shakespeare’s Richard represent its more sympathetically human face, the Dark night of the soul 11 Devil is the purest and most absolute incarnation of modern negative subjectivity as we know it. Look into your most intimate mirror and see the Devil wink back.22

Georges Bernanos writes that Satan is ‘the rebel angel who said no only once, but once and for all, in an irrevocable act in which he engaged his entire substance’.23 But the demonic in religious thought develops in theology after the Bible, where there is no Hell, and no fall of the angels; and where Satan does not seduce Adam and Eve, and is not the prince of an evil empire. All these are later additions of the church fathers.24 In the Bible, the demonic is especially and suggestively unfi xed. Satan in Job, for instance, is not readily dissassociated from God, whose functionary he appears to be. One of Job’s sententious sayings resonates with this, ‘shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?’ ( Job 2.10). Such incorporation of the demonic into the Godhead stresses the sovereignty and freedom of the deity beyond restricted categories of human morality. Yet elsewhere of course the Bible lays evil and the guilt thereof squarely at our door, notably in Ecclesiastes and the Apocrypha. Christ says in Mark, ‘There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defi le him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defi le the man’ (Mark 7.15). Nevertheless, there are far more references to Satan (and Beelzebub, the Devil, demons and evil or unclean spirits) in the Gospels, Revelation and the Pauline Epistles than there are in the Old Testament, such that at times they seem to add up to an almost Manichean dualism, between God and the Devil, the demonic and the divine. This is especially the case in the Gospel of John; and, for example, when Christ says in Luke, ‘I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven’ (10.18), or when Paul says to the Romans, ‘And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly’ (16.20). But even such opposition hardly remains clean and clear in scripture as a whole. It is striking that the demons which Christ casts out herald and recognise him, enduing them with a certain paradoxical odour of sanctity. And in this famous passage from Corinthians, Paul makes it clear that Satanic powers are operating in a godly fashion to the good of his soul, ‘And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the fl esh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me’ (2.24–5). The clash between God and the demonic is most central and terrible in Revelation, but here especially the two tend to blur into one. The threat of Satan pales in comparison with the violence of God when the Son of Man ‘thrusts in his sickle on the earth’ and the second angel ‘pours out his vial on the sea: and it became as the blood of a dead man; and every living soul died in the sea’ (14.14–20, 16.3). Then there is the wonder that is the Whore of Babylon: 12 Demonic negativity So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness; and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and fi lthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, ‘MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.’

This tremendous fi gure evokes an attitude that is at once wholly opposed to and indistinguishable from religious awe: ‘And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus; and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration’ (17.3–6). In the following passage from the same biblical book, there is a hint of the complex negative reality of the demonic as it will develop into privation theory:

The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition; and they that dwell on earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is. (17.8)

This passage caught Dostoevsky’s attention and for good reason.25 The being of the beast is simultaneously given and taken away here: it ‘was, and is not’. And the same goes for those who wonder at it; for though they seem to be living and seeing things, their ‘names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world’. Or at least they weren’t from the moment that they beheld the beast ‘that was, and is not’. There is, in all this, a revocation of being which seems ultimate and yet cannot be since it is revoked in time. And this sense of a complex fading in and out of reality is compounded by the fact that ‘the beast that was, and is not’ this time ‘yet is’. Perhaps Shakespeare got something of his riddling Macbeth idiom from this? ‘If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly’ (1.7.1–2); ‘nothing is / But what is not’ (1.3.142–3).26 Whatever the case, here, mysteriously and unpredictably, in the midst of life we are in death indeed. And vice versa. It is a foretaste of the demonic as it will develop in later culture. And it is very notable that, in imagining God’s apocalyptical extinction of the demonic, Revelation can only make it more strangely substantial and fascinating. Indeed, how do you extinguish what weirdly thrives precisely when it is not? A privation theory of evil and the demonic is present in Zoroastrianism, the fi rst recorded monotheistic religion, which conceptualised evil as the Dark night of the soul 13 ‘non-good’ brought into God’s perfect creation via imperfect human choice. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, it features, for example, in the work of Jewish philosopher-theologians like Maimonides in the Middle Ages, but it is associated above all with St Augustine. Having left behind the Manichean belief in an independent power of evil, Augustine struggled as a Christian theologian to understand how evil related to the comprehensive and perfect being of God. In his City of God (12.22), he concluded that there can be no natural evil, since all natures were created by God, and God only creates what is good. Yet this led to some improbable consequences, as he recognised himself:

One in which evil is present is a defective or faulty good; nor can there be any evil where there is no good. From this a strange result emerges. Since every being, insofar as it is a being, is good, when we call a defective being an evil being, we seem to be saying that what is good is evil, and that only what is good can be evil.27

One thing this entails is that, because the Devil is a creature, he is also good! Moreover, because God works good out of evil, evil is only evil apparently and temporarily. What privation theory seems to want is a sort of bleaching out of evil, which, it suggests, is hardly evil at all, to the effect that the demonic also vanishes. Except that Augustine is perturbed by a recalcitrant and disturbing sense of evil’s obstinate reality. When, in City of God, he says that evil takes its origin from the fact that man is made out of nothing, he is very close to recognising not just the primordial negativity of human selfhood as contemporary philosophy conceives it but also its demonic opposition to God as the perfect being.28 And when he recounts the following experience of stealing pears as one of a gang of boys in Babylon, he is confessing that he knows, on his own pulses, the thrill of the demonic:

Such were the companions with whom I made my way through the streets of Babylon. With them I rolled in its dung as if rolling in spices and precious ointments (S. of S. 5.4.14). To tie me down the more tenaciously to Babylon’s belly, the invisible enemy trampled on me (Ps. 55.3) and seduced me because I was in the mood to be seduced … I wanted to carry out an act of theft and I did so, driven by no kind of need … Wickedness fi lled me. I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality. My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong. There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit, though attractive in neither colour nor taste … We carried off a huge load of pears … Even if we ate a few, nevertheless our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed … Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart … Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I 14 Demonic negativity became wicked for no reason. I had no motive for wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for what I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your fi rmament to ruin … My feasting was only on the wickedness which I took pleasure in enjoying. If any of those pears entered my mouth, my criminality was the piquant sauce.29

Here the stupidest boyish jape turns into a brilliantly vivid encapsulation of a sublimely demonic subjectivity, of the supreme and attractively palpable – you can taste it! – transgression of hurling oneself from the grounds of one’s being into freely chosen negativity. That tree in Babylon is a tree of knowledge indeed. Another great Christian theologian who struggled with this positive lure of the demonic was Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius nails demonic negativity in the following observation about demons:

They are called evil because of the deprivation, the abandonment, the rejection of the virtues which are appropriate to them. And they are evil to the extent that they are not, and insofar as they wish for evil, they wish for what is really not there.

This is text-book privation theory, but Dionysius also wrote as follows, perceiving a danger in seeing evil as non-being, for doesn’t this glamorise it, and even potentially associate it with God’s transcendence of mundane reality?

Evil is not a being; for if it were, it would not be totally evil. Nor is it a non- being; for nothing is completely a non-being, unless it is said to be in the Good in the sense of beyond-being. For the Good is established far and beyond simple being and non-being. Evil, by contrast, is not among the things that have being, nor is it among what is not in being. It has a greater nonexistence and otherness from the Good than nonbeing has.30

But it is diffi cult to sustain a tidy demarcation between the non-existence (of the demonic) and non-being (of God). And it doesn’t help to characterise God’s kind of non-being as ‘beyond-being’, for non-existence and non-being alike would seem to be beyond being. It has to be said that, in the end, the logic chopping of Pseudo-Dionysius pales compared with the convulsive thrill of Augustine’s luxurious consumption of stolen pears which is invested in and speaks so powerfully of the strange metaphysical reality of evil as non-being. In its attempt to deny evil and hygienically separate the demonic from God, privation theory actually does the reverse. It leads us into the weird, fascinatingly and alluringly positive negativity which is the essence of the demonic. This goes beyond some of the most infl uential modern conceptions of evil. Kant’s concept of ‘radical evil’, for instance, isn’t radical enough to accommodate the demonic. For radical evil in Kant is ultimate Dark night of the soul 15 dedication to self-interest, but that won’t tell you why the stolen pears taste so good to St Augustine. He doesn’t need them; he isn’t hungry. He doesn’t want them; they don’t even, in themselves, taste good. But the evil does. Though it doesn’t exist, it tastes real. And if Kant can’t understand the boyhood of St Augustine, he certainly can’t account for the fi gure of the suicide bomber, who has so much torn into our contemporary world. As Joseph P. Lawrence writes, ‘He has sacrifi ced his very life in a way that Kant has denied is even possible’.31 The demonic is more excessive than Kant’s philosophical rationalism.

Figure 1.1. Louis Raemaekers, ‘The Adoration of the Magi’, from The Great War: A Neutral’s Indictment, presents demonic evil as sacrilegious decreation operating as a real historical force.

In ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’, her famous essay on Adolf Eichmann’s trial for his part in the holocaust, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’, proposing that:

Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been further from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’. Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing … He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.32 16 Demonic negativity But even if what Arendt says of Eichmann is correct, it doesn’t render evil as such ‘banal’ and essentially accidental; the naming of Richard III, Iago and Macbeth admits that it may be freely chosen for itself. Arendt’s essay diminishes evil by suggesting that, in more ordinary existences, it isn’t at all intended. But is this really so? There can scarcely be anything more mundane – ‘banal’, if you like – than a bunch of boys stealing pears, but Augustine’s testimony shows that real metaphysical evil inheres in this. Milbank writes:

To imagine that Hitler was a deliberate Satanist, or even that [Charles] Manson can attain a fully Satanic perspective is to lend credence to that saddest of all the errors of evil (and of Satan) whereby it always imagines that it is more evil than it really is. For evil to be at all, it must still deploy and invoke some good, yet it would like to forget this: evil as positive is evil’s own fondest illusion.33

But his authority of tone is belied by the fact that Augustine tasted the weird positivity of evil on his tongue. As we shall see later, Kierkegaard also insists on evil’s positivity, perceiving that the demoniac’s ‘state of sin … holds him together, wickedly strengthening him in consistency’.34 And though he saw the demonic as a universal modern temptation, he certainly didn’t see it as banal. No, for him the demonic is a tragically noble thing. It is praiseworthy in its abstraction from merely conventional morality, but it falls dreadfully short in that it does not make the fi nal step – or leap – into religion proper. Arendt is writing at an historical juncture when the need to oppose any charisma or dignity of evil could not have been greater, and yet she herself implicitly concedes that we look into the face of demonic evil in encountering great heroes of literature such as Macbeth, Stavrogin and Leverkühn. If privation theory exists, on the one hand, to diminish and even deny the demonic, it also seeks to establish the monolithic reality and purity of the divine. And yet, what the theology of the demonic seems fi nally to demonstrate is what was already visible in the biblical sources: their terrifying and confounding intermixture. This becomes clear when evil discloses that it is as metaphysical and transcendent as the Good is. It is worth noting here a further rhetorical sleight in Milbank’s remarks quoted above: for surely the fact that evil keeps encroaching into good is as much of a problem for good as it is for evil? While, as I’ve said, it attempts to bleach evil into an encompassing good, privation theory actually compounds the mingling of good and evil, for this can equally be seen as tainting and corrupting the Good. Relevant here is a witty dramatic fantasy of Kenneth Burke’s:

The Lord … Though made in my image, the Earth People will necessarily [to Satan]: incline towards that part of me which you would be, were our realm to be, like theirs, divisible. Dark night of the soul 17 Satan: … But with these temporal verbalizers, is there to be a deviant kind of ‘freedom’? The Lord: You would ask that, my lad! I see why I love you so greatly. If my negative ever broke lose from me, I’d know where to look for it. Satan: Milord, I blush! (pause.)35

We shall see in due course that Hegel offers the fullest and most serious outworking of what Burke intuits here: the fundamental indivisibility of God and Satan. What Burke so deliciously renders as a scandalous fl irtation between them reveals the intense, libidinised territory where we ourselves deviate between good and evil. For if God and Satan are ultimately one, it is nonetheless, as Burke also suggests, the inexorable destiny of we ‘temporal verbalizers’ to live as divisible what in fact cannot be separated. And indeed from where we stand, in our fallenness, it is diffi cult to see how unity with Satan could fail to entail God’s corruption. The upshot for spiritual life is that the stakes couldn’t be higher or the voyage more treacherous. We shall see often enough in what follows that demonic negativity can constitute and operate as the sort of destruction that it is impossible to see – and which surely we should not see – as anything other than evil. But we shall also see that, in its antagonism to the limitations and corruptions of being, the demonic can equally function as a revolutionary good of just the sort that so much contemporary life seems to yearn for. Indeed, in the third and fi nal part of The Demonic, we’ll see that when such negativity is carried into the self, it effects an ecstatic openness to others where eros and ethics merge; and where, though it risks possession, the demonic even acquires a touch of sainthood.

All told, the demonic takes us into the dense and paradoxical thickness of moral experience, into which a tidily rational approach cannot go. Among current thinkers, Terry Eagleton deserves great credit for reintroducing a consideration of evil and the demonic into a moral discourse that is in the habit of excluding it as superannuated and ‘reactionary’. In his 2010 book On Evil, Eagleton writes:

On the whole, postmodern cultures … have had little to say of evil. Perhaps this is because postmodern man or woman – cool, provisional, laid-back and decentred – lacks the depth that true destructiveness requires. For postmodernism, there is nothing really to be redeemed. (15)

The satiric implication here being of course that it’s absolutely our loss. Eagleton is always instructive and amusing but this is nevertheless something 18 Demonic negativity of a simplifi cation if I’m right to say that contemporary theory – even while it avoids speaking of the demonic – in fact resonates powerfully with it, in its emphasis on existential negativity and the ethics of otherness. A reconsideration of contemporary values in light of the demonic might reveal and perhaps even restore depth, complexity and spirituality to current experience. Still, Eagleton’s book is full of insight. He is very much on the case, for instance, of the strange resemblance between evil and good. ‘Evil’, we read, ‘is an example of pure disinterestedness’ (93) – and indeed it is, if it’s devotion to nothing. In a particularly compelling passage, he writes:

Evil … is a form of transcendence, even if from the point-of-view of good it is a transcendence gone awry. Perhaps it is the only form of transcendence left in a postreligious world. We know nothing any more of choirs of heavenly hosts, but we know about Auschwitz. Maybe all that survives of God is this negative trace of him known as wickedness, rather as all that may survive of some great symphony is the silence which it imprints on the air like an inaudible sound as it shimmers to a close. Perhaps evil is all that now keeps warm the space where God used to be. (65)

This has a wistful wisdom. And if evil is the negative, then Eagleton acknowledges that to our fallen condition the love of God itself, as William Golding’s Pincher Martin shows, cannot but appear to us as ‘sheer negation. Without form or void … A sort of black lightning destroying everything we call life’ (25). This convergence of evil and good is perhaps why, as Eagleton recognises, ‘being on speaking terms with evil is where the saints have the edge over what one might call the moral middle classes’ (56). At such points he seems to capture something of the agonising complexity of our moral experience at its most intimate and honest. And yet, for all his insight into the dark ambivalence of the demonic, Eagleton’s insistent refrain in On Evil is much more reductive, to the point, I would suggest, of real evasion. ‘Even so,’ he writes, ‘evil can never quite get even with the Almighty, which is one reason why Satan is in such a permanent sulk. For it depends on there being material things in the fi rst place in order to put its foot through them’ (62). There’s something in this and it’s pungently expressed but, as we’ve seen above, Eagleton has, via Golding, already recognised that the divine is perhaps typically experienced as the negation of life as we know it. Moreover, the primacy of the positive is not universally accepted in intellectual history. As we shall see below, Jacob Boehme, as well as Hegel, argues otherwise; and one way of describing the intellectual climate in our own epoch of deconstruction would be in terms of the overcoming of the positive by the negative. Still, Eagleton says it again: ‘evil is a kind of cosmic sulking’ (117). And elsewhere he writes: Dark night of the soul 19 Evil is boring because it is lifeless. Its seductive allure is purely superfi cial. There may be a hectic fl ush on its visage, but, as with the characters of Mann’s The Magic Mountain, it is the deceptive glow of the diseased. It is fever rather than vitality. (123)

I think Eagleton protests too much here, and it all depends on what life is. The Magic Mountain is very much the wrong text to invoke, because there life is most lively – most itself – precisely when it’s diseased. That’s the whole point of the novel, and the source of its pathos. In The Magic Mountain, it is robust health that is boring, and the signature quality of mere being, whereas everything that is most valuable, including love, is a form of creative degeneracy. Mann sees deep into the ambivalence of what tends to be enshrined as a pure positive in contemporary theory: that human life paradoxically exceeds itself, that it is dis-ease and the rejection of ordinary being. But he celebrates it anyway. If this is to be linked to the demonic, then it lends the demonic an heroic cast. On another page of On Evil, Eagleton sneers, ‘The damned refuse to be saved, since this would deprive them of their adolescent rebellion against the whole of reality’ (116). As will be clear from my opening remarks in this book, I am disposed to see adolescence as more signifi cant and sympathetic for the rest of us. I suppose a ‘rebellion against the whole of reality’ might fairly be described as ‘adolescent’ but it might also be painted as tragic and even sublime, which is of course just the way that many great artists from Milton onwards have painted it. And to refuse to give up the rebellion to save oneself in the reality one hates and rejects surely counts as a kind of integrity? Eagleton really turns on the rhetoric in the following:

Evil is philistine, kitsch-ridden, and banal. It has the ludicrous pomposity of a clown seeking to pass itself off as an emperor. It defends itself against the complexities of human experience with a reach-me-down dogma or a cheap slogan. Like Pinkie in Brighton Rock, it is dangerous precisely because of its lethal innocence. It has no grasp of the human world and is as bemused by a genuine outbreak of emotion as the British royal family. It has no savoir faire, and is as much at a loss as a toddler when confronted with grief or euphoria or sexual passion. If it believes in absolutely nothing, it is because it does not have enough interior life to be capable of doing so. Hell is not a scene of unspeakable obscenities. If it were, it might well be worth applying to join. Hell is being talked at for all eternity by a man in an anorak who has mastered every detail of the sewage system of South Dakota. (124)

Now this is not just powerful, it is also funny. And there is more than a smack of truth to it. Pitched as it is beyond being, evil can be understood as 20 Demonic negativity lacking in savoir faire or worldly knowledge. And it can fairly be described as lethally innocent – although something of its power, even purity creeps into that latter description and chafes against Eagleton’s belittling mockery. Evil’s lethal innocence, its bracing negativity, makes it harder to reconcile with ‘the philistine, kitsch-ridden and banal’; it is, at fi rst sight, too unworldly for that, as it also is to be embodied as ‘being talked at for all eternity by a man in an anorak who has mastered every detail of the sewage system of South Dakota’. Still, Eagleton is never stupid or simply wrong. Evil can be tediously and tendentiously self-obsessed; this is reconcilable with privation theory inasmuch as evil as selfi shness expresses demonic negativity in the form of the self that is abstracted and alienated from the world. But, all told, Eagleton’s mockery acts as a rhetorical defence against some of his own insights. Now that evil has been comfortably diminished, we can forget all about it as pure disinterestedness, as a form of transcendence, as a sheer negation uncomfortably resembling God’s own relation to our fallen world. Eagleton further diminishes evil when he writes at the end of his book:

Plain wickedness, like destroying whole communities for fi nancial gain or being prepared to use nuclear weapons, is a great deal more common than pure evil. Evil is not something we should lose too much sleep over. (130)

This is a recrudescence of Arendt’s argument. Here evil isn’t banal, but wickedness is. Yet the distinction between ‘wickedness’ and ‘evil’ is not so easy to sustain. Eagleton wants to see wickedness as selfi shly pragmatic, and evil as weirdly disinterested. But earlier he lumped the bore from South Dakota together with the lethal innocent. And indeed they are related inasmuch as the selfi shness which steps away from the world (bore from South Dakota) is related to that more complete abstraction which steps so far away as to detach itself even from self (lethal innocent). Out-and-out evil is not something we should lose too much sleep over, according to Eagleton or Arendt, because it is so extraordinary as to scarcely exist. But, again, we should recollect Augustine and the boys with their stolen pears. And we might also want to linger on what C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape says in a letter to the lesser and more inexperienced devil, Wormwood, about the very cumulatively effective and fi nally damnable lesser ills which Eagleton wants to separate from evil and the demonic:

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from Dark night of the soul 21 the Light and into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without, milestones, without signposts.36

If edging into ‘the Nothing’ is the essence of demonic evil, as it is here, then something like teenaged rebellion against your own family and – if only you could! – all the world will count as such. And let’s not be sentimental. Teenaged rebellion does indeed violate some very tender tissue – of parental love, of one’s own childhood; teenage kicks clearly involve the pleasures of annihilation. But we will want to say that such rebellion is nevertheless a kind of good, in terms of self-determination, self-authorisation, freedom. As we shall see, Hegel tends to confi rm all this. Meanwhile it is true that there are obvious and understandable moral reasons for belittling and making light of demonic evil as Eagleton does, but insofar as this obscures the complex realities of our morality and spiritual life it is also highly questionable. The very fact that Eagleton writes of evil, rather than the demonic, keeps it at arm’s length: for, remember, the demonic is the subjective possibility of evil, evil not in the abstract but as a form of life. Again and again in this book we will encounter the sheer vitality of the demonic which a more offi cial moral discourse has to disclaim. Jeffrey Burton Russell’s impressive survey, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, ultimately acts as that sort of disclaimer. It covers a vast amount of material, including much that is the focus here, and yet there is a real sense in which it has decided against its subject in advance. It is ultimately dedicated to:

W. A. Mozart and Flannery O’Connor whose joy is the antidote for evil.

And the epigraph from O’Connor admits ‘[m]ore than in the Devil, I am interested in the indications of Grace’. But some of the most powerful art actually suggests that the demonic is inextricably involved in life. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s Devil says, for instance, ‘Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto’: ‘I am Satan and nothing human is alien to me’.37 Coleridge blesses not only the water snakes in the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ but also, in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, the ‘last rook’ which ‘beat its straight path along the dusky air’, clearly echoing Macbeth and hallowing its demonic energy. In a kind of mystical vision, he permits its ‘black wing’ to enter ‘the mighty Orb’s dilated glory’, for ‘no sound is dissonant which tells of Life’ – note the capital letter.38 Goethe writes:

Although the demonic can manifest itself in the most remarkable way even in some animals, it primarily is connected with man. It represents 22 Demonic negativity a power which is, if not opposed to the moral order of the world yet is at cross-purposes with it; such that one could compare the one to the warp, the other to the woof. There exist innumerable names for the phenomena which it produces; all philosophies and religions have tried, in prose or poetry, to solve the enigma and then have done with it, – which also in future may be their prerogative. In the most awesome form the demonic appears when it manifests itself in some human being. In the course of my life I have had the opportunity of observing several cases either from near or from afar. They are not always men superior in mind or talents, seldom do they recommend themselves by the goodness of their heart. Yet, a tremendous power goes out from them; they possess an incredible force over all other creatures and even over the elements; nobody can say how far their infl uence will reach. All united powers do not prevail against them. In vain the lighter part of mankind suspect them of being either deceived or deceivers; the masses are always attracted to them. Seldom or never have they contemporaries of equal kind. And they cannot be overcome except by the Universe itself which they have challenged to combat. From such considerations this strange and terrifi c word may have orginated:nemo contra nisi Deus ipse.39

The ‘strange and terrifi c word’ translates as, ‘Nobody can oppose God except God himself’, and Goethe testifi es personally here to encountering vastly more powerful and attractive avatars of the demonic than Eagleton’s bore from South Dakota. Nor is his experience any simple departure from morality. To the contrary, it’s where life becomes most urgently, treacherously and mysteriously moral. It makes for the spiritual density and strength of the human world, being not just opposed to its moral order but at cross-purposes with it ‘such that one could compare the one to the warp, the other to the woof’. The demonic here is the bearing of real, lived experience on ultimate meaning. According to van Gogh, life leads ‘the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something’ into such territory. And yet, in going so far he ‘breaks, “violates” – they say’. Vincent concludes witheringly, ‘Let them talk, those cold theologians’.40

The demonic is the paradox of life that is opposed to life. It’s what Coleridge blesses when he blesses the ‘black wing’ in the sun. And that black wing can symbolise any creative work. For, as van Gogh intuits, the demonic encompasses all active originality which, in bringing something new into being, transgresses the limits of what is. Coleridge’s natural images imply life has a demonic energy all its own. And if this is exciting on the one hand, of course it is disgusting on the other. Here is no less an authority than Darwin on the subject: Dark night of the soul 23 What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature.41

If the demonic, then, is life that is opposed to life, it nevertheless inheres in life. Nature already offers the demonic. And if Eagleton evades this, one contemporary critic who meets it head on is Jonathan Dollimore. In Dollimore’s work, the demonic is intimately connected with the aesthetic and never less than a disturbing provocation. He writes,

Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov and Nietzsche’s fantasy of the creator as supreme amoral artist, chillingly confi rm Pascal’s observation that there is a kind of evil which often passes for good because ‘it takes as much extraordinary greatness of soul to attain such evil, as to attain good’.42

We don’t smilingly transcend the abasement of evil in Dollimore; instead he insists, ‘To take art seriously must be to recognize that its dangerous insights and painful beauty often derive from tendencies both disreputable and deeply anti-social’ (xi). In fact, they are worse than anti-social. Dollimore quotes Lawrence from The Plumed Serpent, ‘what do I care if he kills people. His fl ame is young and clean’ (354). But even this isn’t enough. For it’s not that the demonic produces destruction and death as unfortunate side effects, destruction and death are indissociable from demonic creativity in its purest, most negative forms. Dollimore recognises this with unfl inching objectivity in his focussed exploration of desire and sex, where he reaches for ‘the daemonic’ as a category encompassing pre and post Christian cultures:

To think of desire as daemonic is to think of it as being to some defi ning extent not just incapable of socialization, but deeply antagonistic to the social – perhaps even to civilisation. The daemonic in this sense is powerfully expressed in some of the great mythic oppositions of western culture including the Greek one between Apollo and Dionysus, the Renaissance ones between reason and passion, culture and nature, and most recently, Freud’s account of human history as the unending antagonism between civilisation and instinct. (73)

Recognising implicitly that, though this may be perfectly tolerable in theory, it’s harder to take in practice, Dollimore gives it terrible concreteness by drawing attention to ‘barebacking’, the practice of deliberately unprotected gay male sex, and an associated website ‘xtremesex’, where people write of the incomparable thrill of being infected with AIDS. This confi rms at the very least, as Dollimore suggests, ‘what we always knew: an experience of 24 Demonic negativity desire as daemonic continues to circulate in fantasy’ (20–1). Dollimore also quotes from Bataille’s The Trials of Gilles de Rais:

Ostensibly he would sit on the belly of his victim, and in this fashion, masturbating, come on the dying body; what mattered to him was less the sexual enjoyment than to see death at work. He liked to watch. He had the body cut open, the throat cut, the members carved to pieces: he relished seeing the blood. (67)

Now of course this is extremely distasteful, but it’s extremely distasteful because it’s important. It’s important because it shows where the metaphysical transgression of being involved in the demonic leads in the sphere of sexual relations. It’s perhaps particularly troubling because it expresses in extreme form that feature of ‘ordinary’ desire which is its possibly motivating and certainly intensifying connection to mortality and death, whether or not procreation is involved. Dollimore argues that whenever our ‘vision of desire … becomes disorganized by its own repressions, the daemonic becomes half-visible again and constitutes an obscure challenge’. ‘In art’, he says, ‘it has never not been visible. Artists have always been fascinated by the daemonic, especially in terms of erotic risk, and the erotic encounter with death’ (78).43 I have said that Dollimore draws somewhat on Bataille. In Literature and Evil, Bataille provides a philosophical account of the demonic, for which he sees literature as the privileged vehicle. Like Dollimore, Bataille suggests literature speaks to philosophy and, more widely, civilisation itself the inadmissible truth of the supremacy of evil. But whereas Dollimore sees this supremacy in terms of evil’s morally devastating and lamentable intensity, Bataille argues that evil ultimately attains a kind of moral sovereignty over the Good. He writes:

Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil – an acute form of Evil – which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a ‘hypermorality’. (ix)

This sovereignty of evil revealed in literature is why ‘literature is not innocent’; Bataille suggests ‘it is guilty and should admit itself so’ (x). According to Bataille, its guilt consists in its implacable and recurrent demonic hostility to being, which he proposes is the source of its power and concretely and consistently expressed by its greatest authors and protagonists, such as Baudelaire, de Sade, Genet and Heathcliff. For Bataille, the demonic represents a revolutionary challenge to traditional ethical ontology. ‘The principle of classical morality’, he writes, ‘is connected Dark night of the soul 25 with the survival of being’. By contrast, he associates ‘sovereignty’ or ‘sanctity’ with ‘the being whose beauty is composed of indifference to survival, of attraction, we might almost say, to death’ (183). Bataille presents good and evil as mutually intensifying and inextricable. ‘The exasperated desire of Evil,’ he writes, ‘appears by revealing the profound signifi cance of holiness which is never greater than when it is reversed’. He suggests the demonic needs to kick against being, or else ‘a potentially unlimited desire for nothingness is reduced to vain agitation’ (187). But, in spite of its intermixing with good, what evil potentially achieves is nothing other than mystical union which greatly exceeds good’s more conservative consummation. Evil in Bataille’s conception fi nally and obscurely shades into good; indeed, it is more good than good is. Where good simply wants to protect and sustain being, evil achieves a dissolution of being as the striated and segregated reality we know and live in. According to Bataille, Genet’s testimonies as artist, thief, homosexual and anti-Christ take us close to ‘those ecstatic moments when our very being seems to fall apart and, though it survives, escapes from the essence which limits it’ (202–3). But, Bataille suggests, Genet fails the full potential of evil by seeking to engross this apotheosis as his own achievement. Evil rises beyond individuated being, and this perhaps must also leave the demonic behind. But as life lived against life the demonic is what initiates and enables such transfi guration in the first place. To return to Bataille after Dollimore is therefore to invest the demonic and demonic risk with a real aura of the sacred. It seems clear, then, that Dollimore and Bataille open up something Eagleton prefers to close – although, to be fair to Eagleton, given what’s behind the door you might very well want to keep it shut in. We may turn to Karl Jaspers for a better idea of what sort of experience this might constitute, what from within it might feel like. Jaspers uses the terminology of the ‘daemonic’ to indicate that he is talking about ‘pre-theological’ experience, but he uses it in a morally intense fashion symbollically allied to darkness which clearly shades into the demonic. He suggests we may live life to the fullest in the fully realised world that is, but that even so ‘what we hear at the end of this bright world – given true lucidity – is the call of daemons we have spurned’.44 He also suggests, intriguingly, that ‘the very achievement of the good seems to involve a guilt toward another world’ (94); there is no evading guilt, for loving and conserving what exists is the murder of possibility. Jaspers goes on to say, ‘The daemon’s magic sweeps me to a love akin to night’ (98), the word ‘love’ contributing an element of subjective heat, of desire, to this experience. In this love that is akin to night ‘[t]he daemon lets the phenomenon of Existenz dissolve in its transcendence’ (98–9). The demonic is an ecstasy in which the world burns. Jaspers goes on:

As a diurnal creature, I trust in my God, but I do so in fear of strange powers beyond my understanding. In thrall to night, I give myself up to 26 Demonic negativity depths in which the night destroys me, but as it does, it turns into a truth that is both consuming and fulfi lling. (99)

This ‘nocturnal passion’, he admits, ‘is obscure, yet wholly certain’. ‘It puts me in fear,’ he says, ‘but in an infi nite fear of the fateful need to break faith and be unclearly driven to my death by the absolute mystery’ (92). In concrete biographical terms, this is the kind of fear involved, presumably, in mid-life crises; but Jaspers would honour the mid-life crisis, as testimony to our instrinsic, perhaps tragic alienation from everything we are. His usage of the word ‘unclearly’ is important, for it enables the recognition that the demonic is the very passion for unclarity – since clarity is a property and pride of identity, which the demonic undoes or transcends in favour of the infi nite. But Jaspers’ description also attains to a sort of overdetermined spiritual and experiential density suggestive of real experience:

It is in embracing the nocturnal passion, sure of its being in the void, blessed and damned at once, that in existence I atone by dying for the betrayals I committed, and for the havoc I wrought. (92)

‘Sure of its being in the void’ is a useful description of the paradoxical positivity of demonic existence; and ‘blessed and damned at once’ describes this as at once a release from mere individuality and a self-offending sin. But what really makes this sentence is its upwelling feeling that the demonic does mortifying justice upon itself for destruction wrought during more positive daylight hours, since good, conservative behaviour also involves treachery to what else might be. And thus perversion and punishment, salvation, damnation and nothingness, all mix together in Jaspers’ demonic cocktail. And the cocktail is dangerously tempting. So much so that it shades into the sense that an actual tempter is present.

My daemon shows a depth that fi lls me with fear. He seeks to lead me into a worldless being. He may counsel destruction. He brings me not only to an understanding of failure but to its direct accomplishment. He regards as potentially positive what used to be negative at other times. He may thus be the ruin of loyalty, legality, and lucidity. My genius may be the one God, who can still be revealed to me in this form while his essence is so far removed that as himself he cannot become familiar. My daemon is like a power both divine and antidivine, a power whose obscurity bars defi nition. He is not the same as evil; he is the invisible possibility on the course steered by my genius. While the genius gives me certainty, the daemon is unfathomably ambiguous. The genius seems to speak in a fi rm, distinct voice; the daemon, in his Dark night of the soul 27 secret coercive indistinctiveness, makes me feel at the same time as if he were not there. (80–1)

Jaspers recovers from experience here something like the morality play structure where the soul is caught between the good and bad angels, but it is not at all certain anymore that the bad angel simply is bad. The phenomenology of demonic experience is, as Jaspers says, ‘obscure, yet wholly certain’. But a concrete example is probably in order and everything he says resonates very much with Tristan’s experience in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde ; for Tristan betrays King Mark and the whole daylight world of moral responsibility and clarity in favour of his overwhelming, mysterious and revelatory passion for his lover and the night, and in the end it is diffi cult to feel he’s not right to do so. Whereas Eagleton ironises the demonic from a point of serious detachment, Jaspers dives right in. I said his description shades into a sense that an actual tempter is present, but the tempter is no ordinary sort. Instead he is the profoundly ambiguous presence of what actually isn’t present but which somehow speaks all the more seductively and insistently for that – as though he were speaking for what life really is behind the cumbersome and frozen mask of being. This is certainly the call to which Tristan and Isolde hearken. The demonic in Jaspers is, on the one hand, the failure of everything I am and will and would be. But, on the other hand, it is all that I might be otherwise. It is vacant and infi nite. It isbecause it is vacant that it is infi nite. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari seem positively to endorse this when they say, ‘But we are not interested in characteristics; what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling. I am legion’.45 Jaspers also writes of the demonic:

It plunges us into the timeless abyss of nothingness, dragging everything into its whirl. All of the building we do in time, as a historic phenomenon, looks to this passion like a superfi cial mirage … No tasks, no goals speak for it; it is the urge to ruin myself in the world to gain perfection in the depths of worldlessness. (90–1)

‘Worldless being’, ‘Worldlessness’: these are good terms for the shifting thing we are trying to get a fi x on here, for Jaspers doesn’t quite consign the demonic to non-being but sees it rather in terms of ‘the depth of being that puts man outside existence and brings him to naught’ (91; my emphasis). And, incidentally and to return to our example, this is just what the music – rather than the words – express in Wagner’s Tristan. ‘Destructiveness’, Jaspers writes, ‘comes to possess the whole of man; whatever constructive will remains is pressed into its service, seeming to effect the opposite of the apparent 28 Demonic negativity volition’ (91–2). And if this is true of Tristan and Isolde, it may, again, suggest Macbeth and his lady. It is as if destruction were the soul of life, negativity its quick and core. Jaspers confesses for all of us foolish enough to write on the demonic, ‘Concrete descriptions of the phenomenon of nocturnal passion fail because every defi nite statement moves into the light of day, belongs to the day, and is subject to its law’ (92), but the libidinised intensities of his prose nevertheless convey the fl avour of these intimately recognisable experiences, just as Augustine does. Dollimore and Bataille show what the demonic may entail in terms of actual behaviour. Great art such as Macbeth and Tristan shows how, though it may work through identity and action, the demonic resonates beyond it. From Jaspers, it emerges as an inner world of desire which does not fi nally require or even conceive of any particular partner because it consumes and goes beyond all being as such.

Scorn for and superior judgements on the banality of evil therefore seem to be missing something important about if not fundamental to experience. We have seen that contemporary thought offers ample testimony to something not unrelated, but its idealisation of the negative weakens its experiential credibility. As we have observed, current thinkers such as Levinas, Derrida or Žižek are far more likely to sacralise negativity than they are to demonise it.46 Bataille does better because he does both. Much current work on difference and ‘the Other’ is suggestive but also evasive of the real destruction and ambivalence negativity entails. Of course sophisticated contemporary thinkers do not altogether neglect the destruc- tive side of their ethics of difference. Derrida returns, via Kierkegaard, to the story of Abraham and Isaac in a conscientious working out of what effect an ultimate responsibility to God as ‘the wholly other’ will have on more humdrum responsibilities to one’s present life and world: one might be asked by God to sacrifi ce one’s own son!47 Žižek rejects the ethics of difference, but only insofar as he wants to make the difference real, which, as he acknowledges, will involve destruction of the present world and order. Certeau even associates the ethics of difference with the demonic in his The Possession at Loudon.48 But the ultimate idealisation of negativity in these thinkers nevertheless entails a serious screening of its destructiveness. A new demonic characterisation of the negative has the potential to bring this destruction clearly into view. And, given that the bravest and most satisfying explorations of the demonic have always shown how it is, in disturbing and destabilising ways, related to the divine and good, this can only thicken and make more real the ethics of contemporary thought. One place to go for a richer ethics alive to the demonic is theology. The Christian story very centrally fi nds darkness in the deity. Thus Christ’s agony in Gethsamene; thus Calvin’s agonised refl ection that ‘in truth, if Christ was not crucifi ed by the will of God, where is our redemption?’49 Dark night of the soul 29 But it is not the case that all theology will help us escape the wishful evasions of contemporary theory. Here is Paul Tillich:

According to Paul, the demonic-idolatrous powers which rule the world and distort religion have been conquered in the cross of Christ. In his cross Jesus sacrifi ced that medium of revelation which impressed itself on his followers as messianic in power and signifi cance. For us this means that in following him we are liberated from the authority of everything fi nite in him, from his special traditions, from his individual piety, from his rather conditioned world view, from any legalistic understanding of his ethics. Only as the crucifi ed is he ‘grace and truth’ and not law. Only as he who has sacrifi ced his fl esh, that is, his historical existence, is he Spirit or New Creature. These are the paradoxa in which the criterion of a fi nal revelation becomes manifest. Even the Christ is Christ only because he did not insist on his equality with God but renounced it as a personal possession (Philippians, ch. 2). Christian theology can affi rm the fi nality of revelation in Jesus as the Christ only on this basis. The claim of anything fi nite to be fi nal in its own right is demonic. Jesus rejected this possibility as a satanic temptation, and in the words of the Fourth Gospel he emphasized that he had received everything from his father. He remained transparent to the divine mystery until his death, which was the fi nal revelation of his transparency. This condemns a Jesus-centred religion and theology. Jesus is the religious and theological object as the Christ and only as the Christ. And he is the Christ as the one who sacrifi ces what is merely ‘Jesus’ in him. The decisive trait in his picture is the continuous self-surrender of Jesus who is Jesus to Jesus who is the Christ.50

This is compelling, and Tillich’s defi nition of ‘the demonic’ as ‘the elevation of something conditional to unconditional signifi cance’ works well for, say, Faustus’s egotism, or even for a wayward husband’s dedication to his secretary.51 As a form of demonic negativity, it involves a specifi cally idolatrous negation of what is ultimately real. But Tillich’s theology also involves a subtle reversal of orthodox privation theory and is, in the end, scarcely distinguishable from the philosophical ethics of otherness which evades or soft-pedals its own demonic aspect. The ‘continuous self-surrender of Jesus who is Jesus to Jesus who is the Christ’ expresses divinity precisely in terms of the annhilation of what, to us, is real, and appears to undo something of the incarnation in the process. Does it not crucify Jesus again? Tillich and Derrida alike actually seem to embrace the demonic without acknowledging its darkness. By comparison, Karl Barth’s theology seems more promisingly true to the ambivalence of the demonic, and of experience. Barth insists on the inextricability of the demonic in no uncertain terms: 30 Demonic negativity Religion is not at all to be ‘in tune with the infi nite’ or to be ‘at peace with oneself’. It has no place for refi ned sensibility of mature humanity. Let simple-minded Occidentals retain such opinions as long as they are able. But religion is an abyss: it is a terror. There demons appear. There the old enemy of man is strangely near. There sin deceives. There the power of the commandment is deadly. The serpent beguiled me (Gen. 3.13).52

It would clearly be unfair to describe Tillich as ‘a simple-minded Occidental’, but his sense of a religious attunement with the infi nite which lifts us utterly beyond the demonic is at odds with Barth’s view that they are intimately entangled. In his commentary on The Epistle to the Romans, Barth describes evil as ‘The Great Negative Possibility’. He links it with revolutionary passion. And he invests it with a pseudo-divine charisma. As he explains:

We are … most anxious about the man who embarks upon revolution … Why is it that we have to watch so carefully the forces of revolution? Why are we not so equally anxious about the forces of conservatism? The question must be answered. In the dialectical scales revolution and reaction are not equally balanced … We are anxious about the forces of revolution and not about the forces of conservatism, because it is most improbable that any one will be won over to the cause of reaction as a result of reading the Epistle to the Romans! On the other hand, it is not unlikely that its reading may foster a contempt for the present order and an attitude of negation towards it. The disquiet, the questioning, the negation, the emphatic insistence on the parable of death, to which Christianity is defi nitely committed (12.16), may be so misunderstood as to be transformed into a positive method of human behaviour, into a means of justifi cation, indeed, into the Titanism of revolt and upheaval and renovation. The revolutionary Titan is far more godless, far more dangerous, than his reactionary counterpart – because he is so much nearer to the truth. To us, at least, the reactionary presents little danger; with his Red brother it is far otherwise. With this danger we are vitally concerned. For the honour of God we have to bring the revolutionary within the orbit of sacrifi ce; and his sacrifi ce is of quite peculiar dignity! (478)

‘The disquiet, the questioning, the negation, the emphatic insistence on the parable of death, to which Christianity is defi nitely committed’: such theology comes much closer to recognising its demonic aspect than does Tillich’s. It is clear in Barth that only a cigarette paper separates ‘The Great Negative Possibility’ from true religion. Both possess a world-transforming power. The demonic seems to offend only in engrossing God’s revolutionary prerogative for ourselves. What Barth seems to hope is that God will take up the burden of demonic negativity for us. He knows and trembles at demonic Dark night of the soul 31 negativity but also recognises its allure and ‘quite peculiar dignity’ while repudiating it. His is a piously obedient view, but only one step away from allowing and even endorsing the demonic while wringing one’s hands over the cost. In short, he isn’t all that different from Dollimore. Reading Barth, good and evil start to look like opposite sides of what in fact is a Möbius strip, even though nothing can be more important than distinguishing them. Here is an agony of soul to bring us in contact with the terrors of existence that, according to Kierkegaard, moral systems usually don’t reach. In the wake of the First World War, Oswald Spengler characterised contemporary culture as demonic. He admired the lively appreciation of the demonic negativity that had lurked in the heart of life in an earlier, devout religious culture:

[T]his world of purity, light, and utter beauty of soul would have been unimaginable without the counter-idea, inseparable from it, an idea that constitutes one of the maxima of Gothic, one of its unfathomable creations – one that the present day forgets, and deliberately forgets. While she sits there enthroned, smiling in her beauty and tenderness, there lies in the background another world that throughout nature and throughout mankind weaves and breeds ill, pierces, destroys, seduces – namely, the realm of the Devil. It penetrates the whole of Creation; it lies ambushed everywhere. All around is an army of goblins, night- sprites, witches, werewolves, all in human shape. No man knows whether or not his neighbour has signed himself away to the Evil One. No one can say of an unfolding child that it is not already a Devil’s temptress. An appalling fear … weighs upon man. Every moment he may stumble into the abyss.53

This fully personalised and embodied conception of the demonic Spengler sees as being dissolved into a modern world-view, which he describes in terms which startlingly anticipate contemporary theory. For Spengler, cultural history can be split into three phases: the Apollonian phase of Greco-Roman civilisation, which focused on being, the body and the present moment; what he called the ‘Magian’ phase, when the great Religions of the Book – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – emerged, and which was preoccupied with essence; and our own modern culture, which Spengler called ‘Faustian’, and which is characterised by a longing for difference, distance, infi nity. Spengler writes evocatively of what he calls ‘the new Faustian world-feeling, the new personal experience of the Ego in the Infi nite’ (291). And his insight into modernity is premised on an understanding of Faust and his desires as ultimately negative, unsatisfi able by anything in particular – similar to a view I will be developing below. Spengler interestingly sees Faust as comparable in this to ‘Siegfried, Parzefal, Tristan, Hamlet’.54 At the same time, he recognises what he calls ‘the dynamic fertility of the Faustian with its ceaseless creation of new types and domains of form’ 32 Demonic negativity (204–5). It makes for a richly balanced view of demonic modernity, which at once spells the ruin of present reality and is the womb and engine of the possible. Spengler makes some toothsome observations, such as, ‘The nude statue is Apollinian, the art of the fugue Faustian’ (183) – which, as we shall see, Thomas Mann’s fi ctional biography of the diabolical composer who breaks through into modern art, Adrian Leverkühn, makes good on. Spengler’s complex understanding of modern culture connects the great theological and artistic traditions of the demonic with contemporary life and thought in a way which anticipates this book.55 A more contemporary person who has seen into the demonic character of modern culture is Philip Blond, whose Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It has made him famous or notorious, depending on your political persuasion – the book has been adopted as a key-text for David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ agenda. Still, in an interesting, early piece on Emmanuel Levinas, written when he was still a lecturer in theology, Blond characterises the ethics of otherness in demonic fashion as a ‘blasphemous need to negate and sacrifi ce the existence and existents of this world’. If we understand evil in the traditional terms of privation outlined above, then Blond is quite right to say that ‘Levinas ontologises evil and makes it the principle of all reality and Being’. He is also right that contemporary philosophy and culture’s idealised Other ‘threatens to eviscerate us and reduce all our interiority and specifi city to a horrifi c void where all living beings have vacated that which is essential to themselves’. He concludes, ‘the project of transcendence centred around the Other has culminated then not in ethics but in the wholesale endorsement of an erasure of existents from existence’.56 Say what you like about the ‘Red Tory’, his insight in this early piece is really quite brilliant and original. This is indeed the other side of the ethics of someone like Žižek as we have explored it above. Nor is it all just a storm in an academic tea-cup. We have seen that deconstruction resonates with contemporary existential negativity, the I am not what I am of a teenaged rebel, or a husband in crisis, or anyone in revolt against our mortality. Should further proof of its connection with wider culture be needed, consider the way it interlocks with the pervasive political, cultural and commercial ‘diversity’ agenda. What Blond realises is that, pushed to its limits, the ethics of otherness exhibits an unsuspected diabolical tendency, where we seek to undo and depart from what we are and have in favour of what is different and ultimately uncreated, with real and deleterious consequences in terms of our responsibilities to our established selves, our intimates and the world at hand. And yet, and yet. I’m not, in this book, arguing that we should put contemporary culture into reverse and back up – quick! – into one of Spengler’s earlier epochs of being or of essence. Far from it. For a start, I don’t think we could, and the consideration of the Bible and Augustine above will suggest that it’s really not possible to root negativity out of being, Dark night of the soul 33 ethics and religion. It’s also true that I don’t think we’d want to. For surely human being is never merely being? Doesn’t it always and essentially exceed itself? Otherwise, art is unthinkable; and so is love, whether sexual or religious – to say nothing of any other kind of reformation or revolution and therefore hope for the future. So it’s not that modern humanity should make its wounded and skulking retreat into the cave of being. But it may be that a reconsideration of the demonic can help us see not just evil’s ambivalence, but also the darkness and opacity it brings into the Good, from which it cannot fi nally or reliably be separated. Moreover, recovering the demonic can help us recognise the cost of our passions – the moral and spiritual price that you will fi nally and unavoidably pay should you turn your back on your given world and self in the hope of fi nding and becoming something else. The partisans of the ethics of difference often write in such a way that it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t want to live ‘otherwise than being’.57 This shades into what I’ve called ethical kitsch. But of course it’s very hard to give up reality even extending to your own self. And painful: it will almost certainly bring tears, for you and for those you will inevitably betray when you seek to become somebody else. That perhaps is what Christ is referring to when he says, ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14.26). Pious lip- service is easy where ethics becomes disjoined from actual living. My argument in this book is that a reconsideration of the demonic may bring thought back into more honest relation with the sometimes confounding, sometimes thrilling, always urgent complexity of any truly experienced life. Which is also the domain of art.