devil notebook (1)

7/28/2019 Devil Notebook (1)

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Zarathustra also dismisses the Devil, borrowing his nimbus and name (in OfGreat Events) to identify among the various diseases of the earths skin:more modern fire-dogs or subversive and revolutionary devils: they arebitter, deceitful, superficial. Perhaps it is Miltons Lucifer, the Devil asfreedom fighter, who is the cursed precursor of this targeted tradition of

acting out in groups. Zarathustra teaches that we must unlearn belief ingreat events (such as the resounding acts of liberation of salvation); theworld revolves instead inaudibly on the discursive feat of introduction of newvalues.

Zarathustra anticipates with dread that his superman will be identified as theDevil, probably. When Freud recast Nietzsches superman as belonging in theprimal past rather than coming toward us out of the future, he wasnt beingcontrary but in fact, like another X-man, was proffering a way out of certainappropriations of the future. Nietzsche withdrew the superman identificationfrom Men of Resentment by projecting his thought experiment into theuncontrollable, unforeseeable future. In the meantime, however, these veryresentful types could lay claim, in Freuds day, to Nietzsches future, nowpresent going on past, as their time of the supermans realization (heil).Freud therefore shoots the superman back into the primal past underneathmultiple layerings of commemoration and mourning.

The primal father, or rather the primal father in early development, or, inother words, the pre-Oedipal father, is the model for this studysunderstanding of the Devil in psychoanalysis and its fantasy syndications.The study also submits for consideration the importance in psychic life at

large of the pre-Oedipal fathers brief stint before times up with the arrival ofthe Oedipal father-child. Following the First World War, Freud recalculated thelump sum of what the supremes (realized superman or racist demigods, thePrince of Darkness, the primal father) could inflict. He consequently placedthemall of them, all of them demonic possesersin the personalized pastof our recovery on the couch of his science.

In my course of amassing materials upon materials to make out the case ofthe Devil, I found the rule (according to the Standard Edition ofpsychoanalytic figures dedicated to the fathers death) in my place ofexception. The Devil turned out not to belong to the network of hauntedoccult media-tic relations I had explored before over various undead bodies.In my series of occult media studies I took exception to the rule that thefathers death is the content or discontent of every haunting. Main-line occultfigures, like vampires, for example, get a rise out of unmournable losses that,in these cases (for the creature or for the victim), have not been containedby the fathers [unnecessary] death. Behind every vampire, mummy,werewolf, and [Psycho] so on, we can findmissingthe unmournable loss


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of mother, child, or sibling. But the Devil represents the exception to this rule(one that proves its own rule). The Devil represents the father, an earlyimage of or fantasy about the father, which we will be designatingthroughout as Dad certainty.

In all the other occult scenarios, the father and the fathers death provide a[con[sealed]soling] diversion leading away from the crypt of unmournableloss. But if the father takes center stage in Devil fictions, its not as Oedipalfather! The substitution that the Oedipal father introduces as third person isalso always commemorative: to substitute for a loss, withdrawal, or lack is tokeep in touch with it as loss, as lost. (Desire sparks in these dark shadows, aguilty survivor inside the Oedipus complex.) Down the pages of this study,we will assemble the composite picture of the Devil father. For now lets justsay again that the infernal Prince represents the pre-Oedipal father, theprimal father in our earlier lives. (The funky desire we may encounter here isone-way and at this fathers disposal.) To obtain the Devils psychoanalyticportrait we will proceed, then, by process of elimination (but elimination inevery possible sense).

Lets keep turning up the contrast between the undeadthe un-Dadandthe Devil father. The Devil does not grant the fulfilment of the get-well or be-dead wishes of immortality neurotics. The Devil doesnt give immortalitywhile every other occult figure extends life to the point of unsettlingboundaries between life and death. The Devil gives a certain amount of timeand the dead line. Artists, thinkers, even professors (like Dr. Faust or DorianGrey) are given to appreciate the Devils grants of quality time, of a span of

time uninterrupted by the randomness of death or by any other suddenlypressing inhibition. In Thomas Manns Doctor Faustus the Devils offerassumes the guise of the immortalizing side effect of deadly diagnosis: theDevil gives composer Adrian Leverkhn more-of-the-same time, but timecontrolled and intensified by the certain dead-line contained in his syphiliticinfection. The Devil only gives time at once immersed in finitude andimmortalized by an appointed end. Leverkhn in turn will die only of thiscertain deathand no other fatality, no accident, will intervene to cut shortthe time that is given. The Devil gives a diagnosis and that gives time, timeto work, time to break through to a lament that rings true through the history

of music and man, which, as we will see, is the double history of the Devil.This book began as lecture notes. But the notes scribbled for lecture were inturn largely based on the notes I took down as dictation from a host ofgadget lovers and other experts. Is there a single key Devil fiction or studyconsidered here that wasnt recommended to me by students, friends, andcolleagues?


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The handful of premature publications of portions of this Devil notebookcould perhaps be excavated but can no longer be recognized in the new mix.Beware of raising the ghosts of improper burialrecycling, plagiarism, theunread worksin the precincts of the infernal Prince!

devil notebook (1)

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