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Kirk Wetters. Demonic History: From Goethe 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 book, Demonic History: From Goethe 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 Dämonische 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...