Daemonism
“Ethos anthropoi daemon,” Heraclitus once said and that is usually translated as the classical platitude “a man’s character is his fate” (as if it were a Tolstoy epigraph) but which we will translate as “human essence is daemonic.” Daemonism then, as it is practiced today, is the responsibility for the stranger in you (das andere psychische); a stranger neither God nor Man but radically human; what the Greeks called the daemon, others the unconscious, and still others name the feminine; an angel, or demon—or both (every angel is terrible); it is that excess in you that eludes all categories and obeys no law; the fairy in your mortal coil; the genius in your lamp; what appears to you in dreams and which will even appear to you, uncannily, out there, most other and unknown; an alien or an ocean, but that is in fact your own-true-self; an incredible self without limits, it is true, and yet one that is routinely repressed, suppressed and even killed, and that, we must admit—let’s face it—is the psychotic person you avoid on the subway, or the displaced native, or the tens of thousands of young black men in solitary confinement, or the dead and dying children of Gaza for that matter—but we don’t want to think about that do we? The study of what-you-do-not-want-to-think-about but that, nevertheless, has already been thinking you (because it is you), is the better part of daemonism—or demonism if you’re feeling wicked—which, to be fair, is really a kind of Daoism (the daemon is a dragon); an attempt to acknowledge that which you already are, but cannot accept.
