Teufel. Über Verführung

The devil has the priceless privilege of being at home wherever he is (he is a squirrel). Faust’s study, 1930s Moscow, a village in Northern England in 1759, Nazi Germany, above and below, today and tomorrow – the devil is acquainted with all of it and rejects everything. This makes him an indispensable figure, a system crasher. No order can prevail against him, because the power of order is its ability to integrate, and the devil resists all integration. He counters the tools of order – reward and punishment, education, isolation, fear and violence – with the most complimentary of weapons: seduction. Those who are seduced see themselves as the chosen ones, as the privileged for whom rather different rules apply than for the dull masses. They have been abducted, carried away from the boundaries of the existing order. As Lessing wrote, “Whatsoever goes by the name of violence is nothing. Seduction is the true violence.” Or, put differently: the seduced are abducted from themselves.