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The demonic is mysterious because it appears to be without cause. It is an apparently unmotivated malignancy, which delights in destruction for its own sake. Or, as the saying goes, just for the hell of it. It is hard to know quite why Iago feels so resentful of Othello. The witches of Macbeth reap no obvious profit from driving the protagonist to his doom. This kind of wickedness seems to be autotelic, having its grounds, ends and causes in itself. It thus joins a privileged, somewhat underpopulated class of objects, which includes God and art. It is enigmatic because it is brutely itself, not because it has the inscrutability of something too deep to fathom. As St. Augustine remarks in the Confessions of his youthful debauchery, I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it’.
For many commentators, the Holocaust would be the prime example of this phenomenon. Part of its horror lies in its apparent pointlessness. Even if you had wanted to rid the world of Jews, you could have found some less unspeakable way of doing it. As Stangl, the ex-commandant of Treblinka, was asked later: ‘Considering that you were going to kill them all... what was the point of the humiliations, the cruelties?’ Or as Primo Levi inquires:
‘Why go to the trouble of dragging them on to their trains, take them to die far away, after a senseless journey, die in Poland on the threshold of the gas chambers? In my convoy there were two dying ninety-year-old women, taken out of the Fossoli infirmary; one of them died en route, nursed in vain by her daughters. Would it not have been simpler, more “economical”, to let them die, or perhaps kill them in their beds, instead of adding their agony to the collective agony of the transport? One is truly led to think that, in the Third Reich, the best choice, the choice imposed from above, was the one that entailed the greatest amount of affliction, the greatest amount of waste, of physical and moral suffering. The "enemy" must not only die, but must die in torment.
1 St Augustine, Confessions (London, 1963), p.62Google Scholar [(translation amended)].
2 Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved (London, 1988), p. 96Google Scholar.
3 Wallerstein, Immanuel, ‘The Uses of Racism’, London Review of Books vol. 22, no. 10 (May, 2000)Google Scholar.
4 Žižek, Slavoj, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London, 2001), pp. 634Google Scholar.
5 Levi, p. 101.
6 ibid., p. 83.
7 ibid., p. 100.
8 Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Horrors Beyond Tragedy’, Times Literary Supplement (June 9, 2000).
9 Jaspers, p. 101.
10 Aquinas, Thomas: Selected Writings (London, 1998), p. 567Google Scholar.
11 Kierkegaard, Søren, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, New Jersey, 1980), p. 133Google Scholar.
12 ibid., p. 132.
13 For a valuable philosophical account, see Airaksinen, Timo, The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade (London, 1991)Google Scholar.
14 Moretti, Franco, Signs Taken For Wonders (London, 1983), p. 81Google Scholar.
15 Freud, Sigmund, Civilisation and Its Discontents (London, 1930), p. 77Google Scholarn.
16 Plato, , The Lust Days of Socrates (London, 1993), pp. 110 & 112Google Scholar.
17 For an impressively wode‐ranging study of this theme, see Dollimore, Jonathan, Death, Desire and Loss in Western culture (London, 1998)Google Scholar.
18 Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London, 1979), p. 33Google Scholar.
19 See the translation of the play by Martin Greenberg in Heinrich von Kleist: Five Plays (New Haven and London, 1988).
20 Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, 1977), p. 19Google Scholar.
21 Mann, , The Magic Mountain (Harmondsworth, 1962)Google Scholar. All references to this text are given in parenthese after quotations.
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