The last chapter showed Adam’s rather gentle and framed iteration of exile as a Tragic narrative that ultimately creates an obedient, citizen-like human being. This is one narrative of exile in Paradise Lost. But Adam is not the only exilic figure in Milton’s epic. The other being in exile found Paradise Lost is the far more complicated Satan. Satan represents exile as something far different than Adam. His actions and the events of his life are different. His treatment by Power is different. His space is different. So much about Satan differs that it is not surprise that he is known as the “Enemy”. But if the narrative of Adam does not present the exile as he or she actually is, it may be necessary to look for difference to describe what is falsely framed in Power’s discourse. This chapter explores the representation of Satan in exile as way of
problematizing the representation of exile that Adam presents. It considers Satan as if he were a model for human subjectivity which originates in the moment of the “ban”. The Satanic exile resembles in his treatment by Power, figures of madness, criminality and unfortunate refugees.
A Satanic “narrative” does not easily appear in Paradise Lost. One cannot point to any easily understandable and meaningful literary form that accurately describes the events as Milton has arranged them. One is not “supposed” to read a narrative into Satan’s actions and indeed his “life”. He is merely the “Enemy” of Adam, Eve and God. One is obliged to frame a narrative for the Enemy. Satan’s story is fragmentary, disruptive and absurd and his presence is peripheral, antagonistic and resistant.
In the traditional reading, the closest form of narrative for Satan that one could posit is the Epic. But as a great deal of criticism of Paradise Lost has pointed out, if one thinks of Satan as the hero of the classic Epic, the form does not resolve and it suffers from a poor combination of Greek and Christian myth and philosophy. Satan fails to be an Epic hero and the Enemy fares poorly adhering to this frame because it insists that we compare him to idealities which are better represented in the beings of God, Jesus and Adam.
It is because of this elusive difference that the closest form one can point for a narrative of Satan is an Ironic or Mock Epic. This form appears from Milton’s framing of Satan’s struggle in which he focuses the reader’s eye through the lens of God and Power and ascertains the delusion, the criminality and the blasphemy of Satan’s being and body. When Satan is in view, the sense of parody and perversion in being is the primary means of representation. In this way Satan’s “story” is one which discloses its own absurdity and futility in its attempt to make his existence appear when his existence is denied validity from the start. In the traditional reading of
Paradise Lost, Satan disappears as the lens through which we view his being grows indifferent to
his fate. 1
Satan’s narrative, like his being, appears as form transgressing form, a form which is in itself exilic. It is for this very reason of form and meaning that Adam is in many ways the preferable protagonist of Paradise Lost. His story, his tragedy is perhaps one humanity might wish for itself, in exile. But this is not the fiction nor the reality that authentically represents exile as we know it, see it, and experience it when its presence disrupts Western life. When it
1 Clearly as Mock Epic, the story of Satan is incomplete, his presence dissipates as Paradise Lost focuses more and
more on Adam and his end is a series of ellipses by Book XII. Thus, despite the strength of his early
characterization, Satan is always pushed into the periphery of the larger Poem, Milton and God’s gaze always returns to Adam. Satan is always outside, always exiled. The Mock Epic that might have been written about Satan is, without investigation, too indistinct to appear.
comes to showing exile with all its complications and problems, Satan’s story is much more authentic.
Because of this elusive exilic being, the goal of this chapter will be different than the first chapter concerning Adam’s narrative. Adam represents a being that has presence through Power in the West. He is simultaneously the good-citizen and the form exiles should correspond to. The previous work shows Adam’s presence in Western thinking and the accepted discourse of exile. The remainder of this dissertation sets out to read against this dominant fiction, to try to see an equally human, exilic being in Satan. Satan, who is not always fully rendered, who appears on the periphery, who is decidedly not the fiction of human being that Power would allow and is the in fact the being Power desires to ban, chase, strike and destroy.
Satan is a being of two essential aspects. He is the Enemy-exile as framed by Power. But he is also the essential, unseen being of humanity and this is most visible in real-world exiles of the body. This chapter demonstrates how Satan’s relationship by Power and its citizens coincides and informs the relationship of real-world exilic beings and bodies. It will explore the origins for his “essence”, the nature of his “classification” and “treatment”, which build his subjectivity and create the “problems” of his resistant actions and being. Finally, this chapter will show how this Satanic being pervades beneath the surface of the contemporary discourse concerning the exile and how and why it is necessary to bring this reality to the surface. This work is intended to create a more transparent frame of the being that Satan is, the being refugee becomes through the effect of discourse, and the being that existentially we all are. In the first section, I present a genealogy of the theoretical underpinnings of my term for this being, Enemy Life. In the second section, I trace Satan’s treatment under the view of God and the violence of the ban. In the third section, I further explore the linkage between the Satanic criminal and madman via Foucault.
Then in the final section I demonstrate how in the traditional rendering of the exile, assimilative efforts are precluded via the frame of blasphemy.
What is “Enemy Life”?
“Enemy Life” is the human being-in-exile from social Power. It is a subject position that occurs when Power views a being to be “resistant” or “oppositional” or even simply “apart from”. Materially, Enemy Life is the form of exile that Satan presents in Paradise Lost. The term outlines a discourse of the Enemy-exile. It traces its roots through biopolitical theory, Milton’s Satan, and is rehabilitated by Shelley and Byron. Contemporarily, it informs our moment’s discourse. Because of this genealogy, there are two stances concerning Enemy Life. The first stance is one that views Enemy Life as Power does and thereby attempts to understand the difficult position the exilic Enemy has been placed in. (This represents the work ahead when viewing Satan in Paradise Lost). The second stance is one that recognizes the exilic Enemy subject position as human reality and attempts to rehabilitate that position from its long-suffering relationship with Power. (This is the work that will mostly be done by Shelley and Byron
through their efforts in the Satanic School.) What the following work with Milton, Byron and Shelley should perform is to make visible the reality of the first stance and show how the second stance of rehabilitation can be used to address this problematic position.
I have already somewhat investigated what “Enemy Life” signifies in exilic discourse. The influence of the Puritan origins of American culture and a long standing literary tradition has created a consciousness of the American citizen as the “American Adam” who comes to the New World, is restored and situates himself. The “Enemy” of this Adam is the Other, the displaced person, the refugee, the tempting transgressor of the American Edenspace, the Satanic exile.
This “Enemy” does not appear naturally hostile to the citizen without the framing of Power, whose justice and legitimacy is inherently questioned by the existence of such life. According to the narrative, the Enemy is the person who does not fulfill or accept the reality that America is a new Eden and that its Power restores situation to being. Given this cultural reality, inherent to the American imagination of the transgressive figure or border-crossing enemy is an identification of that figure as Satan, the devil, a Rebel Angel. In other words, the de-situated being is a form of life which is Enemy to (human) being, an existential threat, not included in social human life. De-situated being is Life which appears Satanic, exiled, oppositional and apart from.
My account of “Enemy Life” builds Giorgio Agamben’s work in bio-politics, most particularly his works Homo Sacer, State of Exception and The Use of Bodies. Arendt, Foucault and Heidegger are all necessary components of my conception of Enemy Life and I will
introduce and refer to them in the pages that follow. But the narrative and existential framework of “Enemy Life” is most adjacent to Agamben’s conceptions of sovereignty, the citizen, the denizen and exceptionalism and especially the use of the ban. It is for that reason that I will (re)introduce his work now.
In his 1995 text Homo Sacer, Agamben investigates the origin of sovereign power. Beginning with Aristotle, he defines power through its recognition of life. This process begins with the determination of whether life is biological, bare life “zoe” or political, framed, formed and (especially because of this political aspect) human life, “bios”. He places the origin of Power in the ability of the sovereign to banish an individual, to deprive them of this “human” life without it being considered violence. This is the deciding of what Agamben calls the “state of exception” and the individual who exists as bare, biological, non-political life. He calls this being who is banished from the polis “homo sacer” the sacred man:
“The protagonist of this book is bare life, that is, the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed…An obscure figure of archaic Roman law, in which human life is included in the juridical order [ordinamento] solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed), has thus offered the key by which not only the sacred tests of sovereignty but also the very codes of political power will unveil their mysteries.” (Homo Sacer 8)
This bare, banned life is fundamental to Agamben’s conception of sovereign power for it places every being within the sovereign’s sphere of influence. On the other end of the spectrum of political life, the included, the citizen, is clearly inside the sovereign power and protection. But perhaps more surprisingly, the vulnerable human being who is at the very periphery of society is included as well by this act of banishing because they are still under the force of the sovereign’s ban. Of particular interest in Agamben’s conception of homo sacer, is a reality which Agamben invokes, but does not perhaps bring into prominence for its discursive or
narrative effect, the inherent “sacredness” of the sacred man and the ritual of purification that the ban represents. This originary being and ban that Agamben supposes has a religious root
structure and the irony that homo sacer is considered sacred, when such a being is clearly blasphemous to Power and the polis cannot be overlooked.
It is because of this original reality of homo sacer, alongside the enforced pervasive, vague, and indeed fictionalized danger of “terror” in the post-9/11 era that Agamben shows the polis that exists today is a perpetual state of exception. The “state of exception” is a term which he employs and defines in his work State of Exception first published in 2003. Agamben links the state of exception with the tactics and practices of totalitarian governments in the past and reveals this same emergency in the operations of democracies today. This “state of exception” indicates the excepting of sovereign power and homo sacer from “normal” administrations of justice and legality. This is because the time, according Power, has entered a moment of crisis which dictates the suspension of the usual customs of legality. A society of exception is one in
which Power, outside the juridical structures, can apprehend any individual and banish them. Because of this, our time is when “exception” is the norm and the actual functioning of our society has become one where homo sacer is every human being. Every human being is potentially at risk of being-banned.
In The Use of Bodies, published in 2014, Agamben further explores the nature of the body as a tool and of the relationship between biological conceptions of life and socio-political identifications of life. In the second part of his book, he traces a genealogy of the concept “life” and demonstrates the essential regulation of “forms of life” which are isolated and abjected by Power from a “form-of-life.” In this “form-of-life” which is a way of living through acts which do not define or mark being, Agamben looks to restore the potentialities of human being, re- establishing as Heidegger might put it the be-ing of being.
With the term of form-of-life, by contrast, we understand a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate and keep distinct something like bare life…It defines a life-a human life- in which singular modes, acts and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all potential (The Use of Bodies 207). What Agamben means to do by this theorization is deny Power the possibility of exploiting the state of exception that exists in the modern polis and expose the bare life within the various vulnerable human beings that live within/out the boundaries of the Western nation- states. This idea of living life is the ellipses of Agamben’s work in biopolitics- that is to say re- thinking human life through the movement of its potentialities- and it is at this junction that I would begin fleshing out what Milton and the Satanic School can add to this exploration.
“Enemy Life” as employed by this dissertation, is a term designed to connect biopolitical philosophy with the narrativity of everyday political discourse so as to elaborate a Satanic
frames the realities of biopolitical Power relations. It operates to show an actual, structuralized system of some of the essential concepts of biopolitics. To put it another way, Enemy Life exists to tell a “story” of “Satanic” exiles to understand their subject-position.
The desire to connect the narrative of the Satanic exile with the biopolitical subject is why both words “Enemy” and “Life” are important to the term. The Satanic narrative of exile shows the same realities as biopolitical theories of the Other. Thus “Enemy” is inseparable from “Life” in the way that Power and Western thinking have made “bare”, “mere” or (perhaps we can say) “just” life visible. “Enemy Life” these words, together, show the joining of all human life into a persistent, adversarial, and blasphemous relation with Power. Strange, outside, and disruptive, Life is the Enemy to Power. Thus, life is the site of conquest and colonization by Power. One could equally indicate this reality by calling the term “Enemy: Life” to indicate the targeting of Life as Enemy by Power (which is outside the frame).
This sense that body and being are Enemy sites of conquest and potential Power is at the heart of bio- and thanato-politics. It is also at the heart of the Satanic School’s reading that makes the Enemy the being of human being. It is in this sense that the compound term “Enemy Life” is designed to reframe the Satanic School of poetry into work which addresses bio-political theory and attempt to rehabilitate the Satanic exile. As I will read them, Shelley and Byron are poets of Enemy being and body, poets who are principally concerned with defining and representing Enemy Life as essentially human life. They are members of the Satanic School of poetry, but this school was formed to represent life.
The word “Enemy” in “Enemy Life” is crafted from and with memory of the name “Satan” in ancient Hebrew. Satan can be translated as “Enemy” or “Adversary”. In this meaning of “adversary” it can imply “one who resists”. This sense of resistance is amplified when one
recalls the Latin phrase most often attributed to Satanic being “non-serviam” (I will not serve) which seems proleptic of later iterations of resistance, especially the infamous phase of Bartleby: “I prefer not”. The word “Satan” also touches the Arabic word “shaitan” which connotes
“distant” “astray” and “apart” (and perhaps I may suggest exile). This is particularly interesting if one considers Heidegger’s conceptions of Da-sein, or being-there as the human condition. This sense of the word “Enemy” therefore seems to already be quite near the way in which Agamben, Arendt and Foucault have crafted the subject-position of their respective Others.
To emphasize this conceptual overlap, the characterizations of Satan in the earlier Biblical usage show him, in the Book of Job, “roaming and patrolling the Earth”. This early Enemy therefore clearly exists in a transgressive, boundary crossing mode of being. This act of boundary crossing was noted in the earlier chapter, when Book IV saw Satan’s first entrance into Eden take the form of him leaping the natural wall. Satan is also ambivalence to physical form or body. He represents the essence of the Enemy body: transgressive, imperfect and imperfecting. This transgressive language and its connotations are a critical aspect of Enemy Life’s “ambiguity of being”. The very potentiality of being which modern biopolitics is attempting to theorize is the same being which Power is most bent on forming and failing in that, destroying.
Furthering this sense of indistinctness and corresponding danger is the ambiguous plurality/singularity inherent to this Biblical concept of “Enemy”. As it is used in the Old Testament, “Satan” can be a single being but also an entire population, the article “ha-” which sometimes attached to Satan (as in ha-Satan) indicates “The Enemy” as singular being but the