In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy (Volume 1)

by Eugene Thacker

(“demons are other people”).

But the non-human remains, by definition, a limit; it designates both that which we stand in relation to and that which remains forever inaccessible to us. This limit is the unknown, and the unknown, as genre horror reminds us, is often a source of fear or dread.

This comes through more clearly in one of the classic Biblical accounts of demonic possession, that of the so-called Gerasene demon. Slightly different accounts are given in Mark 5 and Luke 8,

After this rather dramatic episode, something interesting happens: the villagers, witnessing the entire spectacle, become fearful of Jesus and his healing powers. With some urgency they politely ask Jesus and his followers to leave the village.

For the meontological demon, affirmation is negation, and thinking about its being is the same as thinking about its non-being. This is brought forward with great subtlety in Dante’s Inferno, one of the classic depictions of the demonic. However, there is not simply one type of demon in the Inferno; indeed, the central drama of the Inferno is not good vs. evil, but in the tensions within the Inferno itself.

(the demonic storm is not a discrete thing, much less a discrete body; it is everywhere but nowhere). Arguably, this last scene puts forth the most difficult view of the demon – not a transcendent, governing cause, and not an emanating, radiating flow – but a concept of the demonic that is fully immanent, and yet never fully present. This kind of demon is at once pure force and flow, but, not being a discrete thing in itself, it is also pure nothingness.

Generally speaking, the Inferno is of interest not simply due to the panoply of monsters that inhabit its pages, but because of the way in which it carefully stratifies different types of demonic being and non-being. Within the paths, rivers, caverns, and fortresses of the Inferno all boundaries collapse: there are human bodies melting into dead trees, rivers flowing with blood, and entire cities populated with the living dead.

The motif of possession in the Inferno demonstrates this: demonic possession is not just the possession of living beings, but includes the possession of the non-living as well. Demons possess not only humans and animals, but also the very landscape, the very terrain of the underworld. Demonic possession in t...

In particular, the question of the demon tends to oscillate, from highly anthropomorphic Satyrs to the more abstract and obscure demons that contagiously pass in the breath from person to person.

These “Faustbooks,” as they are known, detail the basic elements of the story: Faust’s challenge to faith, his pact with a demon, and his eventual downfall and damnation. One Faustbook tells how Faust, after dismissing the miracles performed by Christ, began to demonstrate his ability to perform miracles just as easily. When confronted by the Church, Faust rebukes, noting that “I have gone further than you think and have pledged myself to the devil with my own blood, to be his in eternity. How, then, can I return? Or how could I be helped?”22

These two types of non-existence (a parte post or after my life, and a parte ante or before my life) are mirrors of each other. This is a sentiment repeatedly voiced by Schopenhauer: “For the infinity a parte post without me cannot be any more fearful than the infinite a parte ante without me, since the two are not distinguished by anything except the intervention of an ephemeral life-dream.”68

Blasphemous life is the life that is living but that should not be living.

The mere return of material particles does not constitute resurrection, for those particles must be ensouled, renewed, or in some way cast anew. And here the almost absurdist debates concerning “chain consumption” come into the foreground. If the corpse is devoured by worms and beasts, and those beasts are in turn devoured by man, how can the parts or particles of the body be re-assembled for resurrection? (One can imagine a solution to this problem offered by Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu…) One partial resolution, offered by Tertullian, was to shift emphasis from the matter to the form of the resurrected body, so that continuity could exist through change. Cannibalism thus does not negate continuity, and thus the living dead can also be the eaten dead.

Given a radically non-anthropomorphic concept of God, the question is this: how can something be experienced, when there is nothing to experience?