Table Of ContentThe Devil Notebooks
The Devil Notebooks
L A U R E N C E A . R I C K E L S
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
MINNEAPOLIS • LONDON
Frontispiece:Devil Father Mine,2005.Photograph by Nancy Barton.
Copyright 2008 by the Regents ofthe University ofMinnesota
All rights reserved.No part ofthis publication may be reproduced,stored in a
retrieval system,or transmitted,in any form or by any means,electronic,mechanical,
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Published by the University ofMinnesota Press
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Minneapolis,MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rickels,Laurence A.
The devil notebooks / Laurence A.Rickels.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8166-5051-4 (hc :alk.paper) — ISBN978-0-8166-5052-1 (pb :
alk.paper)
1. Devil. 2. Devil—Psychology. 3. Psychoanalysis. I. Title.
BF1548.R53 2008
133.4'22—dc22 2008006868
Printed in the United States ofAmerica on acid-free paper
The University ofMinnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF • ix
DEVIL FATHER
NOTEBOOK ONE • 3
Intro/Limbo or Satan’s School for Girls—Race with the Devil—
Murder in Isla Vista, Santana, and Santee—Dare Devil Aleister
Crowley—The Devil Rides Out
NOTEBOOK TWO • 19
The Devil in Freud or the Father’s Same Body—The Other Sideand
Communications from the Memoirs ofSatan
NOTEBOOK THREE • 34
More ofthe Same Body—Wolfman and Fraternities ofSatan
NOTEBOOK FOUR • 45
Metropolis,California—The Satanic Cult ofthe Built Body
NOTEBOOK FIVE • 60
Prints of Darkness in Freud, Goethe, Flusser, and Reisner—First
Circle ofthe Seven Deadly Sins
NOTEBOOK SIX • 70
Second Circle ofSevenand the Deadly Sins—The Evil Within
NOTEBOOK SEVEN • 86
Freud’s Dying Days and The Wild Ass’s Skin—Sweet Nothing or
Needful Things
NOTEBOOK EIGHT • 99
Angel Heartin the Right Place—DemonsProjections—Falling Angel
Takes Heart—Demonic Phallus—Walpurgis Night
NOTEBOOK NINE • 112
Sounds ofSatan—The Wagner before the Horse—Banality or Evil
NOTEBOOK TEN • 131
Satan and Golem,Inc.—Childhood’s EndandBeyond the Pleasure
Principleon Purpose—What’s the Sexual Difference between Techno
Survival and Mass Suicide?
NOTEBOOK ELEVEN • 154
Demonic Bodies ofWork between Satan:His Psychotherapy and Cure
andEvent Horizon
NOTEBOOK TWELVE • 163
Revelations of Evolution in Memnoch the Devil—Inferno—Keep
Away from Apeling—Dancing in the Light
NOTEBOOK THIRTEEN • 176
Possession by Demons or the Dead in The Amityville Horror,Witch-
board,andThe Exorcist
NOTEBOOK FOURTEEN • 194
The Exorcism ofAnneliese MichelandThe Possession ofJoel Delaney
NOTEBOOK FIFTEEN • 201
“The Call ofCthuluh”or The Craft ofDisgust
NOTEBOOK SIXTEEN • 211
My Bad or The Damned—Spiritualism—To the Devil a Daughter
andThe Sentinel—My Evil
MINE
NOTEBOOK SEVENTEEN • 233
Paradise Lost—Hearst Castle—The Black Cat—The Coming Race—
Peter Schlemiel
NOTEBOOK EIGHTEEN • 250
“The Mines ofFalun”
NOTEBOOK NINETEEN • 258
Swedish Tourism and German Romanticism
NOTEBOOK TWENTY • 276
The Devil’s ElixirsandThe Monk
DEVIL FATHER MINE
NOTEBOOK TWENTY-ONE • 293
Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself, Part II—From Ferenczi to
Derrida,or Faith without Redemption
NOTEBOOK TWENTY-TWO • 310
The Witch Metapsychology in Freud,My Mother: Demonology,and
Anton LaVey
NOTEBOOK TWENTY-THREE • 331
Freud and the Devil,or Appetite Comes with Eating
NOTEBOOK TWENTY-FOUR • 343
The Devil and His Grandmother,or Rear View Mirrors
NOTEBOOK TWENTY-FIVE • 353
Michelle Remembers,or Rhyme Word Death
NOTEBOOK TWENTY-SIX • 360
Hitting Bottom in The Club Dumas,The Omen,and “Reading the
Lack ofthe Body”
REFERENCES • 369
FILMOGRAPHY • 377
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PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF
I once led a field trip through the Falun mines with students of the
Konsthögskolan at Umeå Universitet following our compact seminar on
a famous incident that transmitted a certain mining complex oftechno
unmourning to and through German Romanticism first,then psycho-
analysis.Here’s 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 exca-
vations.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 familiar
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 ex-
changes in which teen volatility, confusion, idealism must be metabo-
lized, doubled, and contained. He chose not to be a ghost visiting the
scene of his time past,but to visit upon the survivors of those he mur-
dered scenes ofcrime and haunting.
Several years later I started wrapping my work ofcompilation (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 ofCalifor-
nia,Santa Barbara,and Universität zu Köln and the graduate students at
ix
Description:Milton’s Paradise Lost. Goethe’s Faust. Aaron Spelling’s Satan’s School for Girls? Laurence A. Rickels scours the canon and pop culture in this all-encompassing study on the Devil. Continuing the work he began in his influential book The Vampire Lectures, Rickels returns with his trademark w
