ABSTRACT
I want to move on now to consider the relationship between the demonic and desire. This is the territory of possession. Possession relates to the demonic negativity we’ve explored in that active possession negates that which it possesses, whereas being possessed negates the possessed victim. Much art and culture confesses that though we lock possession up in the black box of the demonic, it is in fact a major, often indissociable element of our intimate lives. To recover the key to this black box is to unlock dark themes in the form of suppressed continuities between demonic possession, the sexual and the religious. For desire and sex typically involve some interplay between possessing and being possessed. And we shall see that these dark materials gleam with their own strange light: a positive and even potentially saintly aspect of possession. God is often portrayed as a possessing agent, and Christ figures a more ethically exemplary kind of passive possession. He who says ‘not what I will, but what thou wilt’ (Mark 14.36) radically abandons himself to the will of God, to the point that God shines perfectly through the rags of his shredded mortality. And Christ’s abandonment to God isn’t in any way fastidious or exclusive. On the contrary! For it somehow entails equally abandoning himself to all – all! – that is what so moved Dostoevsky.
