I once led a field trip through the Falun mines with students of the Konsthgskolan at Ume Universitet following

our compact seminar on a famous incidnt that transmitted a certain mining complex of techno unmourning to and through German Romanticism first, then psychoaalysis. Heres looking back with you, kids. It was right after our Last Supper in Falun, in some provincial restaurant, after it became evident that our immediate environs doubled on weekends, after dinner, as disco for teenagers, that we visited the ultimate level of our Falun mine excavations. What was mine was now yours: the recent past, which is always the most primal, repressed, and catastrophic past, had flashed back before your eyes. This was the disco setting of your own adolescent grouping, groping, responding. And you cruised the dance floor with some sense of what it means to have survived yourself, to be a ghost at a failiar scene. It was time to remember the mass killer of Falun, the adolescent army boy, who had no doubt been a regular visitor to those disco exchanges in which teen volatility, confusion, idealism must be metabolized, doubled, and contained. He chose not to be a ghost viiting the scene of his time past, but to visit upon the survivors of hose he murdered scenes of crime and haunting. Several years later I started wrapping my work of compilation (and resistance) dedicated to the Devil around the kernel of this excavation project (which enjoyed a shelf life prior to this Devil frame). Now that my infernal framework is a wrap, I remember with gratitude my Devil course clients, both the undergraduate students at University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Universitt zu Kln and the graduate students at Art Center College of Design and European Graduate School. Thanks for another work of teaching, a sequel of sorts to The Vampire Lectures. I first proposed my new class on Satan for the 2000 summer session at UC Santa Barbara. I knew it would give me the opportunity of catching up with a piece of my own resistance. Thus I initiated research into the Prince of all occult figuresand the only occult figure I had to that date avoided interpreting with Freud. Of course I knew the Devil in the corner of the Faust tradition, but my focus there was always fixed on the superhuman dimension of all that strivingas on the instalment plan of Fausts suicide. I also knew that there were precedents for distinguishing or choosing between the rule of the Devil, and undead realms not subsumable by that rule. In The Satanic Bible Anton LaVey calls vampire another name for the passive aggressive in our midstthe one, you know the one, who, just like a parasite, sucks up all our energy. Anne Rices vampire Lestat, as we will see, takes affirmative action against the Devil in the Nietzschean mode. Nietzsche, however, cast vampirism in the pejorative mode (although he certainly affirmed writing with bloodwhich is not the same thing as signing in blood). But Nietzsches

Zarathustra also dismisses the Devil, borrowing his nimbus and name (in Of Great Events) to identify among the various diseases of the earths skin: more modern fire-dogs or subversive and revolutionary devils: they are bitter, deceitful, superficial. Perhaps it is Miltons Lucifer, the Devil as freedom fighter, who is the cursed precursor of this targeted tradition of acting out in groups. Zarathustra teaches that we must unlearn belief in great events (such as the resounding acts of liberation of salvation); the world revolves instead inaudibly on the discursive feat of introduction of new values. Zarathustra anticipates with dread that his superman will be identified as the Devil, probably. When Freud recast Nietzsches superman as belonging in the primal past rather than coming toward us out of the future, he wasnt being contrary but in fact, like another X-man, was proffering a way out of certain appropriations of the future. Nietzsche withdrew the superman identification from Men of Resentment by projecting his thought experiment into the uncontrollable, unforeseeable future. In the meantime, however, these very resentful types could lay claim, in Freuds day, to Nietzsches future, now present going on past, as their time of the supermans realization (heil). Freud therefore shoots the superman back into the primal past underneath multiple layerings of commemoration and mourning. The primal father, or rather the primal father in early development, or, in other words, the pre-Oedipal father, is the model for this studys understanding of the Devil in psychoanalysis and its fantasy syndications. The study also submits for consideration the importance in psychic life at large of the pre-Oedipal fathers brief stint before times up with the arrival of the Oedipal father-child. Following the First World War, Freud recalculated the lump sum of what the supremes (realized superman or racist demigods, the Prince of Darkness, the primal father) could inflict. He consequently placed themall of them, all of them demonic possesersin the personalized past of our recovery on the couch of his science. In my course of amassing materials upon materials to make out the case of the Devil, I found the rule (according to the Standard Edition of psychoanalytic figures dedicated to the fathers death) in my place of exception. The Devil turned out not to belong to the network of haunted occult media-tic relations I had explored before over various undead bodies. In my series of occult media studies I took exception to the rule that the fathers death is the content or discontent of every haunting. Main-line occult figures, like vampires, for example, get a rise out of unmournable losses that, in these cases (for the creature or for the victim), have not been contained by the fathers [unnecessary] death. Behind every vampire, mummy, werewolf, and [Psycho] so on, we can findmissingthe unmournable loss

of mother, child, or sibling. But the Devil represents the exception to this rule (one that proves its own rule). The Devil represents the father, an early image of or fantasy about the father, which we will be designating throughout as Dad certainty. In all the other occult scenarios, the father and the fathers death provide a [con[sealed]soling] diversion leading away from the crypt of unmournable loss. But if the father takes center stage in Devil fictions, its not as Oedipal father! The substitution that the Oedipal father introduces as third person is also always commemorative: to substitute for a loss, withdrawal, or lack is to keep in touch with it as loss, as lost. (Desire sparks in these dark shadows, a guilty survivor inside the Oedipus complex.) Down the pages of this study, we will assemble the composite picture of the Devil father. For now lets just say again that the infernal Prince represents the pre-Oedipal father, the primal father in our earlier lives. (The funky desire we may encounter here is one-way and at this fathers disposal.) To obtain the Devils psychoanalytic portrait we will proceed, then, by process of elimination (but elimination in every possible sense). Lets keep turning up the contrast between the undeadthe un-Dadand the Devil father. The Devil does not grant the fulfilment of the get-well or bedead wishes of immortality neurotics. The Devil doesnt give immortality while every other occult figure extends life to the point of unsettling boundaries between life and death. The Devil gives a certain amount of time and the dead line. Artists, thinkers, even professors (like Dr. Faust or Dorian Grey) are given to appreciate the Devils grants of quality time, of a span of time uninterrupted by the randomness of death or by any other suddenly pressing inhibition. In Thomas Manns Doctor Faustus the Devils offer assumes the guise of the immortalizing side effect of deadly diagnosis: the Devil gives composer Adrian Leverkhn more-of-the-same time, but time controlled and intensified by the certain dead-line contained in his syphilitic infection. The Devil only gives time at once immersed in finitude and immortalized by an appointed end. Leverkhn in turn will die only of this certain deathand no other fatality, no accident, will intervene to cut short the time that is given. The Devil gives a diagnosis and that gives time, time to work, time to break through to a lament that rings true through the history of music and man, which, as we will see, is the double history of the Devil. This book began as lecture notes. But the notes scribbled for lecture were in turn largely based on the notes I took down as dictation from a host of gadget lovers and other experts. Is there a single key Devil fiction or study considered here that wasnt recommended to me by students, friends, and colleagues?

The handful of premature publications of portions of this Devil notebook could perhaps be excavated but can no longer be recognized in the new mix. Beware of raising the ghosts of improper burialrecycling, plagiarism, the unread worksin the precincts of the infernal Prince!