Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present by Kirk Wetters

Abstract

Kirk Wetters. Demonic History: From to the Present. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 253 pp.Disciples of the demonic will know that Kirk Wetters's book is not the only recent study of this notoriously slippery topic: Angus Nicholls's monograph Goethe's Concept of the Demonic: After the Ancients (Camden House, 2006) investigated its ancient roots in Platonic philosophy and traced its development in the poetics of the Sturm und Drang and Romanticism. The title of Wetters's new Demonic History: From to the Present, could give the impression that he has written a study that commences where Nicholls leftoff. This could not be further from the truth, for as Wetters convincingly argues, das Damonische is not a concept, and it does not, strictly speaking, have a history that predates Goethe. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg's Arbeit am Mythos, Wetters describes it as a stand-in for variable unknowns and . . . for the unknown (8). The demonic is a meta-metaphor whose history can be aligned with modernity alone. While Wetters dispenses with the significance of Socratic daemons for Goethe's demonic, the virtue of his reading, ironically enough, is its Socratic stance: he refuses to claim a unified theory for a principle that amounts to something of a conceptual black hole, yet in the course of discussing that which by its own definition is unknowable, he generates a remarkably illuminating account of it. Wetters achieves this via painstaking readings in which he upholds his promise to allow the individual moments of the presentation to exist simultaneously, paratactically, each with its own implications, none definitively reducible to the others (5). This makes for difficult but rewarding reading.Wetters charts metamorphoses of the demonic in chapters on Spengler, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Doderer, and though he claims not to have written a Goethe book, he begins the volume with three dazzling chapters on that are invaluable for understanding the later history. These include a terrifically productive reading of Orphisch, which, as he goes on to show, constitutes a paradigmatic but not exclusive rubric for conceiving the demonic in Goethe's oeuvre (he includes a translation of Goethe's cycle and commentary in an appendix); a subsequent chapter on morphology, in which he uses his reading of Urworte to reveal fundamental linkages in Goethe's philosophies of science and religion; and, finally, a chapter on Dichtung und Wahrheit, in which he demonstrates the misprision (embodied by Gundolf's Goethe) of equating das Damonische with the Damon of Urworte and thereby exposes the fallacy of reading Goethe's autobiography as the fateful narrative of a great man coming inevitably into his own. No doubt these chapters will spur vigorous discussion among those for whom the demonic is an object of study, but they introduce such dynamic lines of inquiry into so many dimensions of Goethe, including the poetic, scientific, religious, and autobiographical, that they will undoubtedly prove fecund for scholars at large. …