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To think “with” demons requires reframing a political theology with or as a political demonology. Before doing so, however, it is important to clarify how academic scholarship uses the term “political demonology” (or sometimes simply “demonology”). At least since political scientist Michael Paul Rogin used the term in 1987, “political demonology” has referred simply to systems of dehumanization. For Rogin, the term refers to the exacerbation of existing racial and class divides tied to a broader reactionary tradition in American cultural and political life, one that engaged in the creation of monsters by inflating, stigmatizing, and dehumanizing political foes. This is the primary sense in which political demonology appears today across academic disciplines, from the political theory of Bonnie Honig to the film criticism of Adam Lowenstein. In these works, political demonology names a process of narrating both culture and history that privileges intense binarization: how one’s politics and life become warped by enmity and projection and the simplification that neat, clear-cut binaries bring. Demonology here names the process of dividing the world into self—imagined as pure, whole, and wholesome—and other—understood as threatening, corruptive, violating, and to be shunned.
One hallmark of this understanding of political demonology particularly relevant to political theologians, however, is its estrangement from both lived religion and the theological history of demonology. It is almost wholly secularized, collapsing varieties of demonology (past and present) and concepts embedded in them to privilege creating self/other binaries as demonology’s solitary function. I am not suggesting such binaries are unimportant—quite the contrary. Rather, situating demonology more fully in its religious and theological contexts furnishes resources that not only nuance understandings of movements for whom demonization is central, but also recontextualize discussions of core political theological concepts, including sovereignty, power, economy, subjectivity, and freedom. By doing so, we might open the way for thinking “with” demons, as theoretical tools to comprehend social and political processes of demonization, and through which we might challenge those very processes.
The figure of the demon emerging from Christian theology is not simply a figure of evil, but one constructed and actualized by asymmetrical relations of sovereign power. The Devil is illustrative of this construction, as literary critic Neil Forsyth explores. The Devil, previously an angel in heaven, receives his identity as the Devil through his fall. This is his origin as a subject: he is subjected to divine sovereign power—being defeated and cast down by God—a subjection from which subjectivity and identity emerges. This subjectivity exists both inside and outside of divine order: a system that excludes him defines the Devil’s sense of self, while his actions and their results still exist within and feed into that system. Historian Philip Almond refers to this duality as the “demonic paradox.” The Devil, and demons broadly, are simultaneously the implacably opposed to divine order and (often unwilling) agents of it. Demons oppose yet cannot escape divine order. At the same time, their antagonism allows them to be positioned as an other, a figure embodying everything divine order rejects while being scapegoated for that order’s systemic failures.
The Devil’s inside/outside position is a theme political theologian Adam Kotsko explicitly takes up. Kotsko traces the Devil’s journey from early Christian theology through the early modern period to show how the Devil’s story—his fall and irrevocable damnation—serves as the template for notions of sin and blameworthiness in Western society. Interrogating the problem of evil from a new angle, Kotsko explores how the Devil’s fall happens arbitrarily at the instant of creation. The Devil is held morally culpable by God for this fall without specifying whether he could ever have chosen otherwise. Moreover, with small theological exceptions, his damnation is irrevocable. In this way, the Devil’s fall creates a permanent reservoir of “evil” whose energies can always be turned toward achieving the divine plan. In Kotsko’s analysis, the Devil and those aligned with him become included exclusions—that is, individuals and groups who are excluded from the benefits and protections of a given social order but whose exclusion is necessary for that order to sustain itself. Divine order manufactures the conditions for the Devil’s exclusion while rendering him blameworthy for it, ultimately recuperating their energies for its own sustenance and survival. Examining the legacy of the Devil in secularized systems of antisemitism, antiblackness, and neoliberal economic and social order, Kotsko shows how demonization creates the framework in which free will becomes a paradigm for apportioning sin and punishment. It creates systems of power through which individuals are cast as blameworthy for choices they cannot not choose, justifying regimes of violence that fall disproportionately on disempowered sides of racial, class, gender, and sexual lines. The targets of such regimes of violence become demonized, not simply in the more general sense—drawing on Rogin—that they are dehumanized and othered, but in the sense that they adopt the demon’s structural liminality as the included exclusions of social, political, and theological orders. Like demons, the demonized are situated inside and outside systems of power, ineluctably enmeshed in even while persistently struggling against these systems.
By situating demons not simply in relation to constructions of evil or otherness, but also to liminality and asymmetry, we can foster a critical framework that approaches demonized subjectivities as embedded in broader systems of sovereign power and sovereign violence. Understanding demonization as the construction and imposition of relations of subjection and subjectivity opens space through which to articulate a form of political theology “from below”—one that speaks “with” demons, with the demonized, acting in alignment with those forced to embody infernal substrates of sovereign power—its foundations, its fear, its fuel.
Conclusion
The field of political demonology has concerned itself with broadly secularized models of intense othering, models divorced from both historical demonology and the lived demonologies of the contemporary world. The ascendancy of demonology in modern reactionary movements as a resource through which these movements frame models of legitimacy, power, self sovereignty, and state sovereignty—as witnessed in contemporary America—highlight the need for political theology to articulate a new, more nuanced, paradigm of political demonology. Cooper and Kotsko’s works represent crucial steps in this direction, bridging theology, early modern demonological analyses, and modern critical theory to lay the foundations for a holistic understanding of Christian demonology’s conceptual landscape and more or less secularized legacy. Their work not only encourages political theologians and critical theorists alike to look beyond demonology as merely a tool for the violent division of the world into self and other, but also to interrogate the relations of sovereign power, subjectivity, and subjection that this division fosters—and also to begin plumbing its abyssal depths for the forbidden resources by which we might learn to unmake the world and its structures.
Jonathon O’Donnell – https://politicaltheology.com/demonology/