ABSTRACT

The Devil’s work, so they say, is never done. That work is always soul-destroying. Goethe’s Faust is published as “a tragedy in two parts”; it is an epic; it is also a dramatic exposé of modernity and its discontents. At the core of modernity and its discontents, Faust has it, is a wager with the Devil. This is the wager in the epic that Faust makes with Mephistopheles. But, quite strikingly, this wager is a symbol of modernity—and post-modernity no less. On one side, Faust may be read, without “reading in” to it too much, as a critique of modernity; and, on the other side, as about the possibility and impossibility of enchantment. The tragedy is that the possibility becomes increasingly impossible for Faust—and for modernity. History bears out Goethe’s Faust myth. The book is more relevant and true now than when Goethe wrote it. We shall not understand modernity and its discontents if we do not understand Faust. The importance of closely reading this work (and I do not necessarily mean reading it with specialist expertise) can scarcely be over-emphasized. Faust is a foundational text of all humanistic culture—particularly Goethe’s own brand of futuristic humanism, as I called it in the last chapter.