Something Happened by Us: A Demonology
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Highlights
- A friend once wrote to me about a mutual acquaintance, “He’s deeply driven, but it’s not entirely clear to me that he is in charge of the forces that drive him — at times they seem a bit, in the proper sense, demonic, not demons exactly but extra-personal agential forces that grip him and compel him to act in ways he later not so much regrets as doesn’t recognize as ‘his actions.’”
- In a 1976 lecture, Michel Foucault said that it is a mistake to study power by looking at what we think of as the center — a national capital, say — or at those who stand at the top of the pyramid. Rather, “we should make an ascending analysis of power, or in other words begin with its infinitesimal mechanisms” — the tiny ways that power manifests itself in everyday relations — “which have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then look at how these mechanisms of power, which have their solidity and, in a sense, their own technology, have been and are invested, colonized, used, inflected, transformed, displaced, extended, and so on by increasingly general mechanisms and forms of overall domination.” Power replicates at something like a cellular level rather than being exercised by leaders.
- Christians who talk about demonic activity tend to make a distinction between possession and oppression. Those possessed by demons — or, to use the language I here prefer, those who have been absorbed into the demonic realm — lack volition. They feature in a behaviorist puppet show. The more fortunate, though perhaps also the more miserable, are the merely oppressed: The demonic acts on them from without, they feel its force but are capable of resisting it; or perhaps only of desiring to resist it. “For what I am doing, I do not understand,” writes Paul to the church at Rome; “for what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.” Faced with an intractable dividedness, a spiritual gridlock, he can only cry out — this is one of the screams that a scream can elicit — “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
Something Happened by Us: A Demonology
Metadata
Highlights
- A friend once wrote to me about a mutual acquaintance, “He’s deeply driven, but it’s not entirely clear to me that he is in charge of the forces that drive him — at times they seem a bit, in the proper sense, demonic, not demons exactly but extra-personal agential forces that grip him and compel him to act in ways he later not so much regrets as doesn’t recognize as ‘his actions.’”
- In a 1976 lecture, Michel Foucault said that it is a mistake to study power by looking at what we think of as the center — a national capital, say — or at those who stand at the top of the pyramid. Rather, “we should make an ascending analysis of power, or in other words begin with its infinitesimal mechanisms” — the tiny ways that power manifests itself in everyday relations — “which have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then look at how these mechanisms of power, which have their solidity and, in a sense, their own technology, have been and are invested, colonized, used, inflected, transformed, displaced, extended, and so on by increasingly general mechanisms and forms of overall domination.” Power replicates at something like a cellular level rather than being exercised by leaders.
- Christians who talk about demonic activity tend to make a distinction between possession and oppression. Those possessed by demons — or, to use the language I here prefer, those who have been absorbed into the demonic realm — lack volition. They feature in a behaviorist puppet show. The more fortunate, though perhaps also the more miserable, are the merely oppressed: The demonic acts on them from without, they feel its force but are capable of resisting it; or perhaps only of desiring to resist it. “For what I am doing, I do not understand,” writes Paul to the church at Rome; “for what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.” Faced with an intractable dividedness, a spiritual gridlock, he can only cry out — this is one of the screams that a scream can elicit — “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”