ABSTRACT
Milton’s hell is a “zone of exception” beyond the regular, encoded jurisdictions of God and Nature, yet both still make their presence felt in it: after their defeat and fall, the outlawed devils find themselves confronted with a two-pronged attack of divine and natural condemnations. Milton’s God marks the fallen angels with signs that they have been irrevocably excluded from the divine legal order, which nevertheless still applies to them. (In that respect, they resemble Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer.) It has been noted that conventional depictions of the infernal punishments, as well as punishments by secular courts in Milton’s time, had a strong tendency to mirror the crime, to “restage” it in the interest of a revelatory and retributively balancing justice. Milton’s hell has a similar function; in his infernal theatre of punitive allegoresis, however, the punishment appears to be anticipatory and therefore strangely inappropriate. One of the most obvious examples for this inadequacy is the torture inflicted on Satan’s daughter, Sin personified, whose actions appear altogether sinless before she is thrown into hell; she only transgresses subsequently, as a reaction to this demonstration of divine displeasure. In these instances, allegoresis is combined with another technique for which Hannah Arendt has coined the ingenious term “lying the truth” (Wahrlügen): the conversion of juridical and political phantasms into truths by violent political and legislative means. A strange mixture of allegoresis and brutalization results from this method that is characteristic of hell. And Nature, from its ambiguous position, contributes decisively to this mixture.
