Ştefan Bolea - Internal Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Literature - Reading The Jungian Shadow-Lexington Books (2020)

Internal Conflict in
Nineteenth-Century
Literature
Internal Conflict in
Nineteenth-Century
Literature
Reading the Jungian Shadow
Ştefan Bolea
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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To my parents
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1 The Shadow in Analytical Psychology 7
2 The Double and the Demonic 27
3 The Second I: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs (1816) 41
4 The North Pole of Being: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) 53
5 The Supershadow: E. A. Poe’s William Wilson (1839) 65
6 I against I: Dostoyevsky’s Double (1846) 73
7 The Shadow of Degeneration: Stevenson’s Strange Case (1886) 89
8 The Empty Mirror: Maupassant’s “The Horla” (1887) 101
9 Genesis of the Shadow: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891) 109
10 The Shadow in Philosophy: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (1883–1885) 123
Coda 143
Appendix 1: Year Zero: The Avant-garde of the Avant-garde 149
Appendix 2: The 19th Century from Romanticism to
Post-Romanticism (Chronology) 159
vii
viii Contents
Appendix 3: The Individuation from the Persona to the Self 165

Appendix 4: The Moments of the Shadow 169
Appendix 5: A Note on Archetypology 173
Appendix 6: The Shadow in Music 179
Bibliography 183
Index 201
About the Author 211
Acknowledgments
A previous version of this book was published in Romanian in 2019 under the
title Jung and the Philosophy of Shadow. The book is a significantly extended
and revised version of my second PhD thesis in Comparative Literature
defended in September 2017 at the Babeș-Bolyai University from Cluj-
Napoca. Corin Braga, Marta Petreu, Mădălina Diaconu, Ion Vartic, and Ilinca
Ilian have improved my manuscript with their suggestions. A notable part of
the documentation work for this book was conducted during my research stay
at the University of Vienna as a visiting PhD student thanks to an Ernst Mach
grant awarded by the OeAD, whose support is gratefully acknowledged. In
am indebted to Liana Don, who suggested the theme of my research, and
to Paul Chetreanu-Don, with whom I’ve discussed incessantly the topics
developed in this book. My friends, Sorin-Mihai Grad, Petrișor Militaru,
and Oliviu Crâznic, deserve my gratitude for their help, advice, and support.
I would also like to thank Octavian More for helping me translate fragments
of this book from Romanian to English. Thanks are due to an anonymous
reviewer, whose valuable hints contributed to improving the manuscript.
I would like to thank my editor from Lexington Books, Holly Buchanan, for
her advice and patience. Without the support of my family, I wouldn’t have
been able to finish this seven-year nékyia in the realm of the Shadow. I would
especially like to thank my nephew, Cristian Andrei Verdeș, who inspired me
and convinced me that children are naturally born philosophers.
The theory of antihumanism presented in this book was initiated in
articles such as “The Nihilist as a Not-Man. An Analysis of Psychological
Inhumanity” (Philobiblon. Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary
Research in Humanities, XX, 1, 2015) and “Alien Covenant” (Philosophy
Now, 124, 2018). Parts of this book have seen published previously. Fragments
from chapter 1 have been published in Philobiblon. Transylvanian Journal
ix
x Acknowledgments
of Multidisciplinary Research in Humanities (XXI, 1, 2016) under the

title “The Persona and the Shadow in Analytic Psychology and Existential
Philosophy.” Chapter 4 extends the previous article “Of Hatred and
Solitude in the Works of Mary Shelley and E. M. Cioran” from Philobiblon.
Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Humanities (XXII,
2, 2017). Chapter 6 is an extension and revision of the article “The Paranoid
Feeling of Being. A Jungian Reading of Dostoevsky’s Double” from Meta:
Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy
(VIII, 1, 2016). Chapter 8 and 9 exploit and revise materials published in
Hermeneia: Journals of Hermenutics, Theory and Critcism (XVIII, 2017) and
Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Philosophia (LXI, 2, 2016). Permission to
reprint is gratefully acknowledged.
All the texts from Romanian, German, French, Italian, and Latin for which
no English versions were available were translated by the author.
Abbreviations
JUNG
Quotations are cited with reference to the following abbreviations.
CW Collected Works, eds. Sir Herbert Read, Michael

Fordham, Gerhard Adler and William McGuire. Trans.
R. F. C. Hull, 20 volumes, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1953–1983. Cited in the text with volume
and paragraph number.
FJL The Freud-Jung Letters. The Correspondence between
Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, ed. William McGuire.
Trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1974.
JWL The Jung-White Letters, eds. Ann Conrad Lammers,
Andrian Cunningham, and Murray Stein. London, New
York: Routledge, 2008.
LJ 1-2 Letters of C. G. Jung. Vol. I. 1906–1950, Vol. II. 1951–
1961, eds. Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffé. Trans. R. F.
C. Hull. London: Routledge, 2015.
MDR Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniella Jaffé. Trans.
Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage, 1989.
QPT The Question of Psychological Types. The
Correspondence of C. G. Jung and Hans Schmid-
Guisan, eds. John Beebe and Ernst Falzeder. Trans.
Ernst Falzeder and Tony Woolfson. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2013.
xi
xii Abbreviations
RB The Red Book. Liber Novus, eds. Sonu Shamdasani

and Ulrich Hoerni. Trans. Mark Kyburz, John Peck and
Sonu Shamdasani. New York, London: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2009.
SNZ Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Notes of the Seminar Given
in 1934–1939, ed. James Jarett, two volumes. London:
Routledge, 1989.
NIETZSCHE
AC The Anti-Christ (1888/2006). In The Anti-Christ, Ecce

Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. Trans.
Judith Norman, eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman,
1-67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
BGE Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of
the Future (1888/2002). Trans. Judith Norman, eds.
Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
BT The Birth of Tragedy And Other Writings (1872/2007),
eds. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Trans. Ronald
Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
EH Ecce Homo. How to Become What You Are (1888/2006).
Trans. Duncan Large. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
GM On the Genealogy of Morals (1887/1989). In On the
Genealogy of Morals. Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books.
GS The Gay Science. With a Prelude in German Rhymes
and an Appendix of Songs (1882/2001). Trans.
Josefine Nauckhoff, ed. Bernard Williams. Cambridge:
HAH Human, All Too Human (1878/1995). Trans. R. J.
Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
KSA Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15
Bänden (1999). Band 4. Also sprach Zarathustra. Band
9. Nachgelassene Fragmente 1880–1882. Band 11.
Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884–1885, hs. Giorgio Colli
und Mazzino Montinari. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Abbreviations xiii
P The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche (1986), ed. and trans.

Philip Grundlehner. New York: Oxford University Press.
TSZ Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885/1982). In The
Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann,
103–439. New York: Viking.
TI Twilight of Idols (1888/2006). In The Anti-Christ, Ecce
Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. Trans.
Judith Norman, eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman,
153–230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
WP The Will to Power (1967). Trans. Walter Kaufmann and
R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York:
Vintage Books. This edition follows the 1911 German edition.
MAIN LITERARY WORKS
D Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Double (1846/2014). Trans.

Ronald Wilks. London: Penguin.
DE E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Devil’s Elixirs (1816/2017).
Trans. Ronald Taylor. Richmond: Alma Classics.
DG Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891/2000),
ed. Robert Mighall. London: Penguin Books.
F Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
(1818/1994). London: Penguin Books.
H Guy de Maupassant, “The Horla” (1887/1998). In A
Day in the Country and Other Stories. Trans. David
Coward, 275–302. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
JH Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde (1886/2002). In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales of Terror, ed. Robert
Mighall, 2–70. London: Penguin Books.
WW Edgar Allan Poe, “William Wilson” (1839/1978). In
The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas
Ollive Mabbott, 422–50. Cambridge, MA, London: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Introduction
We are not whole beings, at peace with ourselves. There is an internal war
raging inside us, and this book seeks to explore this war by referring to
several key works of the 19th century. The seven works I intend to analyze
are The Devil’s Elixirs (1816) by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Frankenstein (1818)
by Mary Shelley, “William Wilson” (1839) by E. A. Poe, The Double (1846)
by F. M. Dostoyevsky, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by
R. L. Stevenson, “The Horla” (1887) by Guy de Maupassant, and The Picture
of Dorian Gray (1891) by Oscar Wilde.
First, I would like to demonstrate how the attack against the principle of
identity, which is present, for constitutive reasons, in all the literary works
studied, anticipates the way in which we conceive post-identity in our age
(i.e., as a succession of functional masks we don as a means of conforming
to present society). Stevenson explicitly shows that multiplication of person-
ality can be a consequence of duality. Duality is accompanied by more than
the classical conflict of dissociation (I versus not-I), signaling the breaking
of ego in more “copies of the copy,” an infinite series of mirrors: “(not-)I1,”
“(not-)I2,” “(not-)I3,” and so on. Just as Baudrillard claimed that we have to
renounce the myth of the unconscious, around the 1880s we learned that we
must abandon ego (critically understood by Ernst Mach as a bundle of sensa-
tions, or by William James as a stream of consciousness).
Second, I would like to argue that there is an unmediated connection
between analytical psychology and romanticism and post-romanticism. In
my view, 19th-century literature anticipates the theoretical findings of the
analytical psychology of the 1920s and 1930s. These texts from the 19th cen-
tury prefigure Freudian and Jungian innovations (just like William Blake’s
intuitions prefigure Kierkegaardian hypotheses, or just as Marcel Proust is a
forerunner of the Husserlian phenomenology). For instance, Dostoyevsky’s
1
2 Introduction
novella The Double (1846) precedes the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber,
published in 1903 and used by Freud for his research regarding paranoia.
Third, I intend to argue, by way of reference to the luminaries of the phi-
losophy of literature, that both disciplines intersect with and influence one
another, just as springs from the same stream. For instance, a novel like Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, which starts from the presupposition of romantic
isolation, a thesis common to both Goethe and Byron, exhibits also the deca-
dent doctrine from Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, anticipating both the
pathological journal from Nietzsche’s Ecce homo (1888) and Cioran’s ode to
solitude from On the Heights of Despair (1934), which “starts with the end.”
Moreover, Nietzsche’s and Cioran’s auctorial masks signify the ordeal of
certain existential subjects, who seem to have abandoned the Heideggerian
being-in-the-world; they write instead as if they exist alone in a postapoca-
lyptic world.
Fourth, we contemplate the 19th century to understand more about the pres-
ent moment. A process was initiated, around the 1880s, of tracing the origin
of our mutable and already outdated postmodern self. For instance, Rimbaud
and Nietzsche discovered our hidden alterity, just as recent post-structuralists
discovered recently that we are lived and thought by the social and linguistic
structures. In much the same way as Lautréamont prefigures Cioranian anti-
humanism and as Nietzsche anticipates Foucault’s version,1 or in the same
way as death of transcendence leads to the death of man and the dissolution
of the previous conception of the ego, we also live today “the zero hour” of
nihilism (using Beckett’s expression in a different context): we count the time
using the clock without hands from Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957).
Using another cinematographic analogy, Lars von Treir’s Planet Melancholia
has been gradually encroaching since the 1880s: Can it be stopped, or are
we merely trying to delay the inevitable? The 19th century is our collective
shadow, and we will either integrate it or permanently experience it, in our
projective network, as a “continuous end.”
Although I am reading 19th-century literature, I am only interested in our
extreme contemporary perception of romanticism and post-romanticism.
This is why I will attempt to reconstruct the 19th century through contempo-
rary philosophy and pop culture. A TV series such as John Logan’s Penny
Dreadful (2014–2016), which includes several “shadowy” classical protago-
nists featured in my book (Victor Frankenstein, Henry Jekyll, Dorian Gray,
Dracula, etc.), reconstructs the 19th century from a postmodern perspective.
One of its main characters, Caliban, parodies William Wordsworth’s poem
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1807), expressing the conflict between
early romanticism and the modernism of an industrial society on the brink of
expansion: “I am not a creation of the antique pastoral world. I am modernity
personified. . . . We are men of iron and mechanization now. We are steam
Introduction 3
engines and turbines. Were you really so naive to imagine that we’d see
eternity in a daffodil?” Therefore, my book cannot be seen as an “ode” to an
obsolete century. It tries, instead, to analyze the problems of our society by
way of a detour to the century that discovered industrialization, nationalism,
modernity, and the unconscious.
For instance, we shall see how Maupassant’s “The Horla” can be read, not
only in a Nietzschean vein but also through the hermeneutic lens of Cioran’s
antihumanism. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs can be read as a reaction to
Fichte’s oscillation between I and not-I, or as a romantic criticism of the
enlightenment notion of the autonomy of the subject. Furthermore, referring
to the philosophy of literature, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is com-
parable to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843) and The Concept of Anxiety (1844)
for two reasons: first, because it introduces an analogy between aestheticism
and demonism, and second, because Dorian Gray can be read as a medita-
tion of the Fall. In the same vein, Wilde’s Mephistophelian Henry Wotton
can be compared not only to Walter Pater but also to Nietzsche and Cioran. I
will detail, in the appendix, a research hypothesis addressing the relationship
between the Jungian shadow and the fin de siècle literature: How was our
modernity born in the 1880s from the attack on subjectivity, the discovery of
the unconscious, the rise of Darwinism and degenerationism, the rediscovery
of sexuality, the religious crisis, and the “avant-garde of the avant-garde”?
Verlaine’s stanza from “Languor” (1883) says it all: “I am the Empire in the
last of its decline” [Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la decadence].
I will focus on the 19th-century literary shadow, because Jungian analy-
sis fits perfectly with the postulates of romanticism and post-romanticism.
There are many “shadowy” literary works in the 20th century as well, such
as Golem (1914) by Gustav Meyrink, Steppenwolf (1927) by Hermann Hesse,
Despair (1934) by Vladimir Nabokov, Mephisto (1936) by Klaus Mann, The
Dwarf (1944) by Pär Lagerkvist, or Doctor Faustus (1947) by Thomas Mann,
which can be analyzed in another book. Postmodern writings (and the mov-
ies based on them) concerning the duality of the shadow such as Fight Club
(1996) by Chuck Palahniuk and The Double (2002) by José Saramago should
be analyzed through the anarchetypical perspective popularized in Romania
by Corin Braga: the anarchetype results from the destruction of the meaning
of the work and has a decentered and anarchic manifestation. An anarchetype
of this kind would be the shadow of the shadow, which, like the “copy of
copy” (a term used by Palahniuk and by the industrial rock band Nine Inch
Nails), develops on the ruins of the Jungian shadow.
According to analytical psychology, the shadow is an archetype and the
personification of evil. Moreover, it symbolizes the inferior personality:
the other in ourselves. From a literary perspective, the two versions of the
shadow are the double and the demonic. From a philosophical point of view,
4 Introduction
the double introduces the themes of alienation and estrangement, making us

aware of the danger of dissociation and the destruction of the unitary, self-
centered identity. Moreover, the relationship between the demonic and the
identity modeled on divine personality reminds us of the conflict between
transgression and transcendence: transgression can be understood as a nega-
tive transcendence—the downward plummet to dissociation and un-identifi-
cation (summarized in the formula “I am not who I am”).
The term “shadow” is first used, in its philosophical meaning, by Friedrich
Nietzsche in his work The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880). Carl Gustav
Jung employs the Nietzschean sense of the word in his study Psychology of the
Unconscious (1911–1912), the first version of Symbols of Transformation—
his attempt to desexualize the Freudian libido and to transcend the boundar-
ies of psychoanalysis. In the early Jungian sense, the shadow is a version of
the Freudian id: “Much of it belongs to the conscious sphere, but at least as
much goes on in the half-shadow, or entirely in the unconscious” (CW 5,
§39). In the article “New Paths in Psychology” (1912), the first version of
his Psychology of the Unconscious, Jung invests the Nietzschean term with
a similar meaning: the “shadow-side of the psyche [is] withdrawn from
conscious scrutiny” (CW 7, §438). Considering that Jung operates with the
metaphor of the shadow in his earlier papers (1900–1910), its absence from
the definitions from Psychological Types (1921) is peculiar. We have to wait
for the second chapter of Aion (CW 9/II, §§13–19), published in 1951, for a
systematical approach to the shadow.
One notices from this brief prehistory of the Jungian shadow that it is
a notion which belongs to several different fields. According to its psy-
chological meaning, the shadow is a more precise term than the “double”
[Doppelgänger] from literary theory, a word that Jean Paul first uses it in
his novel, Siebenkäs (1796). The double can be understood as a not-I, anti-I,
or alternative I, according to Slavoj Žižek’s definition from The Pervert’s
Guide to Cinema (2006): “[T]he double embodies myself, but without the
castrated dimension of myself.” In analytical psychology, the shadow is
both an archetype and a complex, which, according to evolutionary biology,
was created to warn of the evil stranger: the fear of the stranger is a survival
mechanism, in much the same way that confidence in our mothers (faith in
the maternal archetype) operates to keep us safe during childhood. Despite
its contested meaning as an archetype, the metaphor of the shadow symbol-
izes, in psychiatry, an inferior sub-personality which takes over the “fortress
of identity” (Stevenson) in neurosis and—even more so—in psychosis. Jung
challenges Freud’s conviction that we are all potential neurotics, illustrating,
by his confrontation with psychological discomfort during his experience
in the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, that we all are potentially psychotics.
From this perspective, the shadow is an autonomous personality, usually
Introduction 5
repressed through projection, the archetypal essence of which is manifested

in mental illness.
Regarding the psychological shadow, I will refer, mostly, to the simi-
larities and contrasts between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. For
instance, the Jungian notion of the shadow is both a version of the Freudian
id and an adaptation of the Schopenhauerian will. Moreover, the Jungian
theory of projection derives from Freud and—according to some interpret-
ers—should be replaced with the enhanced concept of synchronicity. In his
studies concerning narcissism, Freud anticipates later reflections on duality
and dissociation. Furthermore, the Freudian investigation of paranoia will
assist our attempt to philosophically redefine this malady (see chapter 6).
The philosophical shadow arises during the interactions between Jung
and his direct forerunners in the discovery of the unconscious: Arthur
Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. We will also discuss Schopenhauerian
disciples such as Eduard von Hartmann, who influenced Maupassant (chapter
8) and Philipp Mainländer. The similarity between the psychology of the
unconscious, anticipating the Freudian revolution, and the extreme pessi-
mism, even nihilism of post-Schopenhauerian philosophy, is intriguing. A
possible explanation would be the new perspective, shared by thinkers who
discovered the character of the ego to be submissive rather than modeled on
divine identity (I = I).
I was always interested, moreover, in the parallels between Jungian psy-
chology and existentialist philosophy. Existentialism might be conceived
as the remaking of nihilism, transforming the meaninglessness of nihilism
(“death removes all the meaning from our lives”) into a doctrine of freedom
and authenticity “on the edge of the abyss” (“the impending death gives life a
sense of urgency and possibilities of fulfilment”). This is why the philosophi-
cal positions of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, or
E. M. Cioran can be seen as a counterpart to Jungian psychology, keeping
also in mind that existentialism and analytical psychology became influential
during roughly the same age (1930–1960).
This book contains ten chapters followed by six appendices. In chapter 1, I
will discuss the ego-self axis and look closely on the persona and the shadow.
Chapter 2 makes a few theoretical considerations regarding the subthemes of
the shadow, that is, the double and the demonic. The double will be consid-
ered in its relationship with the ego; the demonic will be contrasted with the
daimonic.
The main body of the work (from chapter 3 to chapter 9) is dedicated to
the reading of romantic and post-romantic literature. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s
Elixirs opens the problem of the duality between the ego and the shadow. M.
Shelley’s Frankenstein concerns not only romantic isolation but also existen-
tialist “inhuman” dissociation. For my reading of “William Wilson” I have
6 Introduction
created the term “shadow of the shadow” or “super-shadow.” Dostoyevsky’s

novella The Double can be read not only as a dissociative conflict between I
and not-I but also as an interesting case of existential paranoia. Stevenson’s
Strange Case brings another step in the history of the destruction of egology.
Maupassant’s “The Horla” will be read as a cautionary tale of Nietzsche’s
para-Darwinism and as a prefiguration of Cioran’s description of the “not-
man.” The Eden complex or the allegory of Fall can offer a Kierkegaardian
interpretation of Wilde’s Dorian Gray.
In chapter 10, I will investigate the constellation of the philosophical
shadow in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and will closely look on Zarathustra’s
shadow: the jester, the dwarf, the ape, the soothsayer, the last pope, the ugliest
man, and, finally, the “shadow” itself. In my last part I will make some notes
regarding the “avant-garde of the avant-garde” (appendix 1), the chronology
of the shadow from the 19th century (appendix 2), the individuation from
the persona to the self (appendix 3), the moments of the shadow (appendix
4), the problems of archetypology (appendix 5), and the shadow in music
(appendix 6).
NOTE
1. See Bolea (2018, 53): I use the concept of antihumanism in a different sense than
Michel Foucault’s. “The French philosopher spoke of the death of a certain concept
of humanity following the demise of God: ‘Man would be erased like a face drawn
in sand at the edge of the sea.’ However, poets such as Baudelaire and Lautréamont
and philosophers such as Stirner, Nietzsche and Cioran add misanthropy—dislike of
mankind—to their antihumanistic project. While Foucault alluded to the downfall of
man understood in a certain type of way, and to the arrival of a non-humanistic system
of reference, some post-romantic poets and philosophers see themselves as agents
of destruction—of what Nietzsche called ‘active nihilism’—and would like to finish
with the saga of humanism altogether through a Schopenhauerian process of universal
death.”
Chapter 1
The Shadow in Analytical Psychology
THE EGO-SELF AXIS
“Becoming a Being” is always done on the ego [Ich]—self [Selbst] axis. We

are born into a state of inflation, and the ego develops as the unconscious
ocean of the self withdraws (CW 11, §935). In the first half of our life,1
according to Jung, we need to develop a strong, socially responsible ego.
When the “Great Noon” arrives, at the “crossroads of life,”2 the self takes the
reins of development, turning the ego in a direction that it sometimes refuses
anxiously. We could say that every step toward the self is a step beyond the
ego and somehow against him.
Countless times, Jung equates the “ego” with “consciousness,” the two
terms being interchangeable in the Swiss psychologist’s view (CW 6, §711;
CW 8, §611; CW 9/II, §1). Several Jungian psychologists believe this equiva-
lence (between “ego” and “consciousness”) is somewhat erroneous because
the ego also contains unconscious functions, such as “repression, denial, pro-
jection, rationalization, or reaction formation,” which are described by Anna
Freud in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (Stevens 2001, 62). In the
same way as the Jungian shadow [Schatten] can be brought, with some obser-
vational effort, to the proximity of consciousness, so the ego may also have
an unconscious component that Jung seems to ignore or minimize. The ego,
as the center of consciousness, is a psychic component subordinated to the
self, which is simultaneously the center of consciousness and unconscious-
ness. “I have suggested calling the total personality which, though present,
cannot be fully known, the self. The ego is, by definition, subordinate to the
self and is related to it like a part to the whole” (CW 9/II, §9).
The relationship between the ego and the self is similar to that of the part
and the whole or of the patiens (the present active participle of the verb
7
8 Chapter 1
patior = “to suffer,” “to endure”) and agens (the present active participle of
the verb agere = “to lead,” “to do,” “to act”) (CW 11, §391). The relationship
will be, therefore, like that of passive and active or similar to the one between
the Earth and the Sun. Their conceptual spheres may not overlap exactly, but
this relationship recalls the Freudian rapport between ego and id: “The rider
[is] obliged to guide the horse along the path by which it itself wants to go”
(Freud 1990, 96). In other words, “the ego is in the habit of transforming the
id’s will into action as if it were its own” (Freud 1989, 19).
The relationship between the ego and the self can be internalized, such as
that which presumably existed between Goethe and Faust, between Nietzsche
and Zarathustra, or, in Jung’s case, between Personality No. 1 and Personality
No. 23 (the spiritual duality that brought him the diagnosis of infantile schizo-
phrenia from Donald Winnicott (1964, 450) in a famous review). “I . . . dis-
tinguish between the ego and the self . . . , since the ego is only the subject
of my consciousness, while the self is the subject of my total psyche, which
also includes the unconscious. . . . [T]he self often appears as supraordinate
or ideal personality, having somewhat the relationship of Faust to Goethe or
Zarathustra to Nietzsche” (CW 6, §706).
The self can be approximated by the term “God within” and closely associ-
ated with the Kantian concept of “noumenon” or Meister Eckhart’s notion of
divine “spark.” Jung states that the purpose of individuation, the becoming
for the self, is not a “deification of man,” so as to avoid the accusation of “the-
osis” (divinization), which has been repeatedly brought against him by the
church.4 “Sensing the self as something irrational, as an indefinable existent,
to which the ego is neither opposed nor subjected, but merely attached, and
about which it revolves very much as the earth revolves round the sun—thus
we come to the goal of individuation” (CW 7, §405).
To accept the direction and the teleology of individuation is equivalent
to being elevated to the intimacy of our own inner divinity (“God within”)
or the mysterious understanding of the fact that “the kingdom of God is
within you” (Lk. 17, 21) (Stevens 2001, 61–62). According to David Tacey
(2015, 47), the self “has no equivalent in the Freudian system, and its
closest counterpart is the Atman or ‘God within,’ of Hindu philosophy.”
According to Edward Edinger (1992, 210), the numinous force of the
archetype of the self can be grasped through its description from Bhagavad
Gita: “This (Self) is never born, nor does It die, nor after once having
been, does It go into non-being. This (Self) is unborn, eternal, changeless,
ancient.”
Based on the excerpt from the Indian scripture, the self has on its side
that unformed quality of the archetypal ideas, which characterized also
the divinity from the poem “A Dacian’s Prayer” (1879)5 written by Mihai
Eminescu (1964, 120): “Ere yet the Gods existed already He was God.” Just
The Shadow in Analytical Psychology 9
as Nietzsche considered himself a follower of the sage Zarathustra, militating

for “a creation beyond the self,” the ego must break itself to make room for
the “superordinate size”: “the experience of the self is always a defeat for the
ego” (CW 14, §778). In other words, “It is not I who create myself, rather
I happen to myself” (CW 11, §391). We also remember Nietzsche’s lines
dedicated to “The Unknown God” (1864): “I want to know you, Unknown
One,/ you who have reached deep into my soul,/ into my life like the gust of
a storm” (P 26). We must go beyond the lesser “divinity” of the ego to track
inside us the hidden numinous force of the self.
We can ask ourselves if the self does not contain a certain cosmogonic
trait, acting as an individual Big Bang, keeping in mind that our personalities
are born as the ocean of the self withdraws (CW 11, §935) or as “the original
inflation dissolves” (Edinger 1992, 12). The self is an inner God, a sort of
hidden divine center. In fact, that is his strength and weakness. In a universe
modeled on the death of God, the self can also be seen as a kind of Big
Crunch: both the goal of individuation and another mask of extinction. If God
has died, does not the inner God die as well? Is the self God or the God of the
death of God? Perhaps when we peel the onion of our self, we are no longer
able to find the core.6 Not unlike Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, we could declare: “I am
a sheet of paper on which nothing is written” (Ibsen 2006, 81). Therefore,
one can argue that both God and Nothing (Sein and Nichtsein) are aspects of
the personality nucleus. Perhaps the contact between being and nothingness
sparks our sense of selfhood.
THE PERSONA
In Jung’s view, the persona is “the mask of the actor” (CW 9/I, §43). Persona
refers to “both the actor’s mask and the actor,” meaning “the role someone
plays because of his features, looks and abilities” (Müller and Anette Müller
2003, 315). According to Jolande Jacobi (1971, 44–45), the persona derives
from Persu, the Etruscan masked god of the inferno. In the ontological con-
stitution of the persona we observe a contrast between objective and subjec-
tive, between general and particular, between the archetypal mask and the
distinct voice. As many Jungian definitions show, the persona is “individual”
+ “the world” or “individual” + “the other.” “The persona . . . is a compro-
mise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be”
(CW 7, §246) or “the individual’s system of adaptation to, or the manner he
assumes in dealing with, the world” (CW 9/I, §221). Moreover, “the persona
is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think
one is.” According to Jung, “the persona is . . . a functional complex that
comes into existence for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience. . . .
10 Chapter 1
The persona is exclusively concerned with the relation to objects” (CW 6,

§835).
The persona mediates between the inner world and the outside world,
between the impressions of the unconscious and the stimuli of the external
world (Singer 1994, 159–164). The imprint of “the world” (Heidegger would
have used the existentialist being-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-Sein] to indicate
an original connection between the individual and the world) and the mark
of the “being-with” [Mitsein], of the fellow human being—who develops
co-participatory or competitive relationships with me—in other words, the
external imprint is significantly more pronounced than the internal one,
which originates in my selfhood. This is proof that we do not need the per-
sona when we are alone (Jacobi 1971, 41) or that we lose our persona if we
are isolated from the world (Hannah 2000, 75). The difference between ego
and persona7 can be perceived intuitively when talking on the phone with
someone from outside the family circle, with a friend, or an acquaintance:
when we hang up, the mask dissipates instantly. Family and intimate friends
know us not only by the ego but also by the shadow. A close person who
notices how we relate to a “stranger” through the persona may have the
impression of us being false. A world without the persona8 would be relevant
and destructive at the same time, for its brutality and lack of politeness. We
would learn a lot about ourselves, we would lose many of our illusions, but
we would also acquire a poisoned knowledge that would curtail some essen-
tial potentialities.
The persona has been called a social archetype precisely to explain the
prevalence of the world (and the “other”) in its construction. With ourselves
we are—at least on the conscious level—most of the time honest, but we
do not hesitate to lie to others: “There is always some element of pretence
about the persona, for it is a kind of shop window in which we like to
display our best wares” (Stevens 2001, 63). Moreover, it is a “barricade”
(CW 7, §269), “designed on the one hand to make a definite impression
upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual”
(CW 7, §305).
The persona has a dual teleology: (a) positive—our mask must move the
others, or awaken admiration or envy in them; without the persona, we would
be completely inadequate (Stevens 2001, 74); (b) negative—the mask can
hide a hollow ego or an aggressive shadow.
An effective persona must take into account three factors:
“a) the physical and the psychic constitution;

b) the ego-ideal: what / how I want to be;
c) the ideal of the environment, how people would want me to be” (Jacobi
1971, 54).
If we only have factors (a) and (b), “the individual is a dreamer, a rebel, or
an eccentric.” If we have factors (a) and (c), the individual will be boring, flat,
and mediocre (he will be predictable and somewhat cowardly). If we only
have factors (b) and (c), we have a contrast between “ideal and real,” between
what I am and what I cannot be because of facticity: “the fat wants to be slim,
the little one wants to be big, the weak wants to be strong.” If we only have
factor (b), the individual will be a total nonconformist; if we only have factor
(c) man dissolves in the collective without any personal touch. “Only when
all three factors are interdependent, the persona is effective” (Ibid., 54–5).
Long before Jung and Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer had intuited that the
persona “is always paid in cash” (CW 9/1, §221) or, in other words, that
we often pretend in order to protect our interests. Paraphrasing Nietzsche,
we can say that life is a will to power or a pure desire to win, disguised9
under the masks of nobility, friendship, philanthropy, or altruism. “After all,
our entire civilized world is only a great masquerade. Here one encounters
knights, preachers, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and who
knows what else! But they are not what they represent; they are mere masks
under which, as a rule, money speculators (money-makers) are hiding”
(Schopenhauer 2017, 192).
Furthermore, the Jungian view of the persona is anticipated10 by
Schopenhauer’s most significant disciple, Friedrich Nietzsche. First, in GS
(356), the German thinker warns of the danger of identifying with the pro-
fessional persona (a recurring theme in Sartre and Jung), which is mostly
arbitrary and contingent, and not the result of a genuine existential option:
“Almost all Europeans, at an advanced age, confuse themselves with their
role; they become victims of their ‘good performance’. . . . Upon deeper
consideration, the role has actually become character.” The excerpt remains
pertinent: we become the victims of our own game because assuming the role
is rewarded, just as, in a complementary fashion, leaving the role (or display-
ing the shadow) is quickly penalized.
It is interesting that Nietzsche does not insist (like Sartre) on the socio-
anthropological ramifications of the falsity of the persona, but rather deals
with the psychological dimension of the one who is false to himself. “Are you
for real? Or only an actor? A representative? Or the represented?—In the end,
you are really only an imitation of an actor” (TI, “Arrows and Epigrams,” 38).
Nietzsche seems to draw attention to the fact that the one who puts the mask
reaches a disjunction to himself. In other words, once the persona is imprinted
on the face, the ego will suffer. We’re talking about an authentic “labyrinth
of masks behind masks” (Dixon 1999, 211), which obstructs the person
behind them. Thus, in his posthumous fragments, Nietzsche refers to those
who vehemently lie to themselves, becoming actors to themselves: “But your
faith must be so blind, so immense and fantastic, to overcome the suffering
12 Chapter 1
of the guilty conscience . . . Oh, actors to yourself!” (KSA 9, 182). Moreover,

in the fragment The Actor of the autumn of 1884, the pre-existential philoso-
pher shows that there is a similarity between acting and alienation, between
the “good” role and the fragmentation of the “identity’s citadel”: “There is a
kind of art of the actor, to temporarily assume a foreign soul. . . . At the same
time a sign that denotes weakness and a lack of unity” (KSA 11, 254). This
is how Jung synthesizes these Nietzschean insights in his perspective upon
the identification with persona: “Identification with one’s office or one’s title
is very attractive indeed, which is precisely why so many men are nothing
more than the decorum accorded to them by society. In vain would one look
for a personality behind the husk. Underneath all the padding one would
find a very pitiable little creature” (CW 7, §230). The mask of the soul “can
grow into our flesh” (Hannah 2000, 77) and in this circumstance it is almost
impossible to discern between persona and ego: “Only, the danger is that they
become identical with their personas—the professor with his text-book, the
tenor with his voice. Then the damage is done. . . . The garment of Deianeira
has grown fast to his skin” (CW 9/I, §221).
We should not confuse the face with the mask, or the “skin with the cloth-
ing” (Whitmont 1978, 158): even if I lie to the other, I have to be honest with
myself. Moreover, even if I lie to myself (at the level of the ego), there is—at
the bottom—a profound personal truth, wherein I coincide with myself and
where there is no lie (between the level of shadow and that of the self). The
voice of the daimon (in the Heideggerian sense Ruf des Gewissens, the voice
of conscience) comes from the depth and reverberates beyond the mask, jam-
ming the verbiage of the persona. Identification with the persona resembles
the psychosis of the actor who is “totally” identified with his role: “A time
will soon come when the tragic actors will think that their masks and boots
and costumes are themselves” (Epictetus 1956, 197). When we identify with
the persona, it reprograms the ego according to the collective requirements
of the “world” and “the other.” We take refuge in the bad faith of the per-
sona when we want to disobey the ego, just like Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi
officer who created the Holocaust and who defended himself by claiming he
had merely followed orders. As Edward C. Whitmont shows, the ego’s dis-
solution by identifying with the persona (which the Jungian analyst calls the
creation of a pseudo-ego) may be the alibi of a monstrous activity that totally
transgresses the ethical register:
Society expects . . . every individual to play the part assigned to him as perfectly
as possible, so that a man who is a parson must not only carry out his official
functions objectively, but must at all times and in all circumstances play the role
of parson in a flawless manner. Society demands this as a kind of surety; each
must stand at his post, here a cobbler, there a poet. No man is expected to be
both. Nor is it advisable to be both, for that would be “odd.” Such a man would
be “different” from other people, not quite reliable. . . . Society is persuaded that
only the cobbler who is not a poet can supply workmanlike shoes. (CW 7, §305)
On the intersubjective level, the persona expresses a fear of the other, more
precisely, a repugnance to the ego and the shadow of the other. Under the skin
there is hell, a Vesuvius that can erupt at any time, an amoral chaos, anoma-
lous and devoid of space-time determinations, similar to the Freudian id. The
persona’s dictatorship is a re-signification of the self through functionality:
the individual with a deficient persona will be considered a sub-human, a
“stranger,” an outcast, and will be the target of general projections (Hannah
2000, 76). Sartre sketches in Being and Nothingness an argument similar to
the Jungian one:
There is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they
endeavour to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auc-
tioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such
a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his
function as a grocer, just as the soldier at attention makes himself into a soldier-
thing with a direct regard which does not see at all, which is no longer meant to
see. . . . There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as
if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break
away and suddenly elude his condition. (Sartre 1978, 59)
Society commands us to abandon our specific personality and to identify

in a vigilant manner with the function we embody; consequently, falsity
becomes an efficient and universal currency. We feel offended if the grocer
takes off his mask and confesses to us; a soldier who does not radiate determi-
nation and discipline appears to us as degraded; a cobbler who recites poetry
will be looked at with mistrust, and so on. Beyond the persona there is a world
that our society prefers to bracket.
According to Vasile Dem. Zamfirescu (2009, 445), the Jungian persona can
be assimilated to the they [das Man], translated “creatively” by Constantin
Noica as “anonymous being.” Three of the features of this Heideggerian con-
cept also fit the persona: mediocrity or averageness [Durchschnittlichkeit],
leveling down [Einebnung] and disburdening of being [Seinsentlastung].
Here is how Heidegger describes the “mediocrity” of Dasein suffering from
the despotism of the “anonymous being”: “Thus, the they maintains itself
factically in the averageness of what belongs to it, what it does and does not
consider valid, and what it grants or denies success. This averageness, which
prescribes what can and may be ventured, watches over every exception
which thrusts itself to the fore” (Heidegger 1996, 119).
14 Chapter 1
Like the persona, das Man is a compromise between the individual and
the world (here, “compromise” is rather a euphemism for the connection
between a submissive subject and a society with authoritarian claims).
Recalling the three criteria for an efficient persona, criteria evoked by
Jolande Jacobi, we could say that the individual acting under the auspices
of averageness is subjugated by the ideal of the environment, having no
eye for the ideal of the ego, which can bring it out of anonymity. The
Heideggerian leveling down [Einebnung] recalls the Nietzschean syntagma
of Ausgleichung, which in its turn has been translated by “leveling,” but
which also means “equivalence” and “equalization”: “Every priority is
noiselessly squashed. Overnight, everything that is original is flattened
down as something long since known. Everything won through struggle
becomes something manageable. Every mystery loses its power. The care
of averageness reveals, in turn, an essential tendency of Dasein, which we
call the leveling down of all possibilities of being [die Einebnung aller
Seinsmöglichkeiten]” (Heidegger 1996, 119).
Averageness, the characteristic feature of the they, seems to be concerned
with obliterating exception, with the annihilation of the tendencies that could
transgress the Procrustean bed of the norm. It is eloquent that the Nietzschean
term for “leveling” is related to “mediocritization” [Vermittelmässigung]
(BGE 242) and “diminution” [Verkleinerung] (GM I, 12). The persona is a
diminutive11 variant of that which exists: through it we all participate in the
reduction of the world. The third Heideggerian feature refers to disburden-
ing: “It can most easily be responsible for everything because no one has to
vouch for anything. The they always ‘did it,’ and yet it can be said that ‘no
one’ did it . . . In this way, the they disburdens Dasein in its everydayness. . . .
Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the
answer to the who of everyday Dasein, is the nobody [das Man . . . ist das
Niemand]” (Heidegger 1996, 119–120).
The disburdening of one’s being goes hand in hand with a sort of deper-
sonalization: from a Jungian perspective, this abdication of personality
(understood as the renunciation of the self) can be signaled in the identifica-
tion with the professional persona society imposes upon us. In Heidegger’s
view, we ourselves are das Man (in Jungian terms, our persona takes over
the attributes of the ego-self axis in our professional life), and, as functional
and anonymous robots, we are nobody. This identification of the persona with
non-personality may be exaggerated from the Jungian point of view, but it
corresponds to a “mask of the soul” which is excessively tributary to the fac-
tor (c) mentioned by Jacobi, namely, the ideal of the environment.
Schopenhauer’s reflections in Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life (1851)
could be included in the prehistory of the concept of persona. He speaks about
three layers of human existence:
“(1) What one is: that is, personality in the widest sense.
(2) What one has: that is, property and possessions in every sense.
(3) What one represents: By this expression we usually mean what someone
is in the eyes of others, thus how he is represented by them. Hence it con-
sists in their opinion of him and is divided into honour, rank, and fame.”
(Schopenhauer 2016, 275; Jacobi 1971, 61)
Schopenhauer (2016, 309) argues that “our existence in the opinion of oth-
ers, is consistently much overrated as a result of a particular weakness of our
nature, although the slightest reflection could teach us that in itself, for our hap-
piness, it is not essential. Accordingly, it is hard to explain how inwardly glad
all human beings are as soon as they detect signs of others’ favorable opinion
and their vanity is somehow flattered.” The German philosopher shows that we
often invest more energy in building the persona than in orchestrating our own
inner evolution. We want to impress others, but we should, first of all, grow up
in our eyes. However, the persona is “an essential component” of our person-
ality (Jacobi 1971, 61) and, in contrast to Schopenhauer, the individual must
be open to the stimuli of the environment; otherwise, if he dedicates himself
exclusively to the first point (as the German philosopher seems to suggest), he
becomes a solipsist who separates himself from the pattern of “likeness,” a mis-
anthrope who refutes his humanity, from which he breaks only in appearance,
because on the unconscious level he is constitutively connected with others.
We have spoken depreciatively about the persona, following the direction
initiated by Schopenhauer and Jung. There are, however, Jungian analysts
who have defended the persona, such as Thayer Greene, who argued that
the so-called mask is a perfectly legitimate organ of the soul through which
the ego projects its inner reality (the self) in the world (Sanford 1987, 134).
Analyzing the role of the mask in Greek theatre, the psychologist notices that
it “was specifically designed to amplify the actor’s character. . . . The mask
was a practical invention, in part at least; its purpose was to reveal, not to
conceal” (Greene 1975, 26). If in front of the persona we find the outer real-
ity (the world)—and this is its preeminent component—behind it stands not
only the ego but also the self. However, the persona mediates predominantly
between the ego and the world, and the shadow is the “veil” between the ego
and the self.12
We have seen that the external world puts an indelible impression on the
persona; on the contrary, the shadow wants to hide from the world, to dwell
undisturbed in the underground, becoming denser and more threatening.
The ego lies between the persona and the shadow, between the world and
hell, between the social archetype and the demonic archetype. “Persona and
shadow are usually more or less exact opposites of one another, and yet they
are as close as twins” (Stein 1998, 109).
16 Chapter 1
As we have seen, the persona is “the mask of an actor” (CW 9/I, §43). Just
as acting is an art, the management and control of the persona is also an art.
Some are amateurs and their shadow leaks through the mask (the silhouettes
of fear and disgust painting their fake smiles); some are skillful masters in
handling the persona and are able to control themselves, despite the tre-
mendous energy the ego spends to take cover. The price is high: shadows
are hunted and sometimes executed, masks are rewarded and consecrated.
However, this binary opposition (shadow/persona, truth/lie, authenticity/das
Man) is too simplistic. The persona can be self-expressive, as Greene argues,
and the authenticity of the shadow might be a despicable truth “born in Hell.”
Moreover, half-truths further distort the general picture. The “clash” between
persona and shadow makes aware of the fact that becoming is higher than
being. Being is lazy and self-complacent; becoming, industrious and risk
taking. The shadow indicates our inner repressed conflicts. The persona is
a Machiavellian prince that firmly keeps his eyes on the prize. Both can be
understood either as hindrances and squanderers of energy or as weapons of
self-overcoming.
THE SHADOW
According to the Jungian scholar Mario Trevi, the first indirect references to
the term “shadow” are found in the study published between 1911 and 1912
under the title Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (the first edition of CW5)
in Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen,
III–IV. An express reference appears in the study “New Paths in Psychology”
(CW 7, §§407–441), published in 1912 in Raschers Jahrbuch für Schweizer
Art und Kunst, an article that represents the first version of the work “The
Psychology of the Unconscious Processes.” Paradoxically, the concept of
shadow does not appear among the famous definitions in Psychological Types
(CW 6), a work published in 1921, which suggests that Jung was, at a rather
early stage, already in possession of the notion of shadow, but he refined in
the 1920s–1930s (Trevi 2009, 4; Agnel et al. 2008, 120).
According to John Beebe and Ernst Falzeder,13 the Swiss author had
used the term “shadow metaphor” before its distinct occurrences in CW 5
and CW 7. Already in his dissertation On the Psychology and Pathology of
the So-called Occult Phenomena (1902) and in his article “On Simulated
Insanity” (1903) he writes about the “psychic shadow side” (CW 1, §74,
§340). In the nine lectures published as “An Attempt at Presenting a
Psychoanalytic Theory” (1912–1913), the psychologist speaks of the “shad-
owy . . . existence” (CW 4, §305) of the complexes. Moreover, in the lecture
“On the Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology” (1914), when
referring to the philosophical genealogy of the notion of unconscious, Jung

mentions the Kantian “shadowy representations” (CW 3, §440). From this
metaphor we arrive at the concept of a “shadow-side of the psyche” (CW 7,
§438) in the already mentioned article “New Paths in Psychology” (1912).
Or, from this view to the mature notion of shadow presented in the influ-
ential work On the Psychology of the Unconscious (published in 1917 and
revised in 1926 and 1943), there is only a small step: “The personal uncon-
scious contains lost memories, painful ideas that are repressed . . . , sublimi-
nal perceptions, by which are meant sense-perceptions that were not strong
enough to reach consciousness, and finally, contents that are not yet ripe for
consciousness. It corresponds to the figure of the shadow so frequently met
with in dreams” (CW 7, §103; QPT 83–4 n.).
On numerous occasions throughout his vast oeuvre (CW 7, §78; CW 9/I,
§513; CW 9/II, §15; CW 10, §714 (28); CW 16, §134, etc.), Jung defines
the shadow as the inferior personality. The shadow should be understood
as personal inferiority in contrast with the projected superiority of the per-
sona. We display the persona and hide the shadow. Jung uses the Freudian
notions of repression [Verdrängung] and resistance [Widerstand] in order to
signal the evasive mechanism of the shadow—the substance of the shadow
is unacceptable for the ego: “Seen from the one-sided point of view of the
conscious attitude, the shadow is an inferior component of the personality and
is consequently repressed through intensive resistance” (CW 9/I, §513). I do
not recognize myself in the shadow; I am not myself in it—the shadow is my
hidden and repressed brother, the shadow represents for the individual “the
thing he has no wish to be” (CW 16, §470).
The shadow, understood as a “heart of darkness within the ego” (Stein
1998, 107), is the inner devil we have committed in the basement of our
being, afraid of his aggressiveness and force. We are afraid of our own inte-
riority; this is why we flee from ourselves in persona, the “they” or bad faith.
But the persona is a sort of fake mirroring, while “the shadow . . . is a sort
of counter-persona” (Stein 1998, 110). The shadow, “the dark, unlived, and
repressed side of the ego complex” (von Franz 1995, 3) is the “part of the per-
sonality which has been repressed for the sake of the ego ideal” (Whitmont
1978, 160). Moreover, the shadow can be defined as the dark side consisting
“not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dyna-
mism” (CW 7, §35).
If the persona is the interface between the ego and the world, the shadow
will be—in the Jungian sense—the interface between the ego and the self.
Beyond the persona lies the outer world, between us and the shadow—our
own sincerity. Who are we in truth? We could reply through the lyrics of Lux
Occulta, the Symphonic Black Metal band, who have intuitively registered
this oscillation between the ego and the shadow: “We are not who we think
18 Chapter 1
we are/ We are who we’re afraid to be” (Lux Occulta 1999). “It is a rare and
shattering experience for us to gaze into the face of absolute evil” (CW 9/
II, §19), so let us say Tat Twam Asi (“thou art that” in Sanskrit) to the evil
character hiding in the unconscious. In each of us there is an antihero: that is
why it is common sense to try to integrate it.
The shadow can be defined metaphorically as a stain on the soul that we
try hard to conceal. In the glossary from MDR (398–9), Jung states that the
shadow is the “sum of all personal and collective psychic elements which,
because of their incompatibility with the chosen conscious attitude, are
denied expression in life and therefore coalesce into a relatively autono-
mous ‘splinter personality’ with contrary tendencies in the unconscious.”
Furthermore, in the same line of argumentation, the shadow “is the sum of
those personal characteristics that the individual wishes to hide from the oth-
ers and from himself. But the more the individual tries to hide it from him-
self, the more the shadow may become active and evil-doing” (Ellenberger
1970, 707). On the one hand, we hide our inferiority through the so-called
superiority of the persona; on the other, we hide from ourselves the primitive
impulsive and undifferentiated material, projecting it onto our fellow human
beings.
Jung repeatedly warns us (CW 5, §267; CW 9/I, §474) that the shadow
corresponds to the Freudian personal unconscious.14 We may say, using a
more technical term (from the second Freudian theory of the psyche), that
the shadow is similar to the Freudian id. The id is conceived as “the dark,
inaccessible part of our personality. . . . We approach the id with analogies:
we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations,” observes Freud
(1965, 73), in a manner reminiscent of the Schopenhauerian definition of the
will.15 “The will . . . is just as wild and impetuous an urge as the force that
appears in a downward plunging waterfall—in fact, as we know, these are at
the most basic level identical” (Schopenhauer 2018, 224). The shadow can
be compared to “a cauldron full of seething excitations,” a metaphor for the
immense reservoir of energy that lies in the unconscious.
However, the Freudian id contains much more than the shadow—it is
the repository of instinctive desires and forces, such as the death instinct
(Thanatos), and the life force (Eros), and the desire to propagate the species.
Freud claims that the “aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main rep-
resentative of the death instinct,” referring to the “natural aggressive instinct”
and to “the hostility of each against all and all against each” (Freud 1961b,
122). He quotes from Goethe’s Faust, reminding us of Mephistopheles’s dec-
laration, that combines the destructivity of the death instinct with the dense
shadow of the demonic: “Destruction,—aught with Evil blent,—/ That is my
proper element” (Ibid., 121). To capture the portrait of the “destroyer,” Freud
could easily refer to Seneca’s Medea: “I can be quiet only if I see everything
overwhelmed along with my ruin. As you go down it is a satisfaction to drag

others with you” (Seneca 1956, 23).
Freud conceives the death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
as the tendency to return to an inorganic state in order to diminish the inner
tensions: “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that every-
thing living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then
we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking
backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’” (Freud 1961a,
32). Just like how the founder of psychoanalysis is deeply influenced by
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in his conception of the id16 and the repression,17
one may say that he borrows a lot from Philipp Mainländer’s worldview: his
will to death [Wille zum Tode] from The Philosophy of Redemption (1876)
is the first version of the death instinct (in a similar manner, Schopenhauer’s
will is the precursor of the Freudian unconscious).
For Mainländer, the Schopenhauerian will to life is only the disguise of
the will to death: “We die incessantly, our life is a slow struggle with death,
everyday death defeats us” (Mainländer 1989, 140). In fact, the will uses
life as bait for death. According to Mainländer, the will to death is not only
individual; it is a form of expression of divinity and of the cosmic forces
which “conspire” for the victory of nonbeing (Ibid., 59). If we pay attention,
we can hear a calling from the divine spheres: “Redemption! Redemption!
The death of our life!” [Erlösung! Erlösung! Tod unserem Leben!]. We also
can perceive a consoling answer: “You will find annihilation and you will
be saved” [Ihr werdet alle die Vernichtung finden und erlöst werden] (Ibid.,
68). For Mainländer, not only us, the human beings, but also the plants and
the animals ardently aspire to death; the entire cosmos yearns for oblitera-
tion. Furthermore, God killed himself in order to give life to the universe
(a passage from overbeing [Übersein] to nonbeing [Nichtsein]): “God has
died—writes the German philosopher, anticipating Nietzsche’s famous
declaration from GS—and his death was the life of the world” (Ibid., 38).
Mainländer’s extreme nihilism is only a consequence of the Schopenhauerian
negation of the will from the end of the first volume of The World as Will and
Representation: “[F]or everyone who is still filled with the will, what remains
after it is completely abolished is certainly nothing. But conversely, for those
in whom the will has turned and negated itself, this world of ours which is
so very real with all its suns and galaxies is—nothing” (Schopenhauer 2014,
439).
Behind the personal shadow looms the transpersonal or archetypal
shadow. If the former “can to some extent be assimilated into the conscious
personality” (CW 9/II, §16) and “can be seen through and recognized fairly
easy” (CW 9/II, §19), the latter is an initiation into the demonic principle of
existence, into an archetypal darkness which discloses the infernal nature of
20 Chapter 1
our world. “It is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize
the relative evil of his nature” [personal shadow], but “it is a rare and shat-
tering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil” [archetypal
shadow] (Ibid.). If the personal shadow can be seen as the first obstacle we
encounter on the road to individuation,18 the transpersonal shadow has a
more deconstructive or degenerative feature, leading to madness, psychosis,
death, or suicide. Its archetypal feature can be compared to a nuclear bomb:
“Nobody has ever seen an archetype, and nobody has ever seen an atom
either. But the former is known to produce numinous effects and the latter
explosions” (LJ 2, 53).
The battle between the ego and the archetypal shadow is unequal:
“Whenever an archetypal event takes place, there is some danger that the
human ego will be overcome by the numinosity of the image and experience
an inflation” (Frey-Rohn 1989, 82) The individual who, in the manner of
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, confronts with the archetypal self and the archetypal
shadow (in other words, with God and the dark side of God) risks his life
and his mind: “A hazardous situation developed, in which the dark, instinc-
tual side, until now largely of theoretical import alone, was activated and
threatened to rip the soul apart by opposing the ‘divine’ with the ‘satanic’”
(Ibid., 110).
One of the crucial aspects of the shadow is the identification with it,
which Jung thinks he diagnosed it in Nietzsche’s personality19: it is “a
phenomenon that occurs with great regularity in such moments of confron-
tation with the unconscious” and transforms the affected individual “into
a hero or into a godlike being, and superhuman entities” (CW 7, §41f.).
If the virtual integration of the shadow is related to the awareness of the
unconscious (a snatch of primitive and infantile contents from unconscious
abodes, the building of a Lichtung20 in the heart of shadows), identification
with the shadow will be, conversely, the making unconscious of conscious-
ness. Thus, it involves the resignation of consciousness, the death of the
inner “sun,”21 the absolute darkness,22 reminding us of the nihilist feeling of
Byron’s masterpiece, “Darkness” (1816): “The bright sun was extinguish’d,
and the stars/ Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/ Rayless, and
pathless” (Byron 2008, 272).
In pop culture too (for instance, in the suggestively titled song “Fade to
Black” (1984) by Metallica), there appears the theme of the darkening of con-
sciousness, of inflation, consequent upon the identification with the shadow.
We remember the line: “I was me but now, he’s gone.” The passage from the
first to the third person reveals estrangement, alienation, the disjunction in
the structure of identity (ego ≠ ego), which reminds us of the description of
depersonalization from the romantic poem “Melancholy” (1876)23 by Mihai
Eminescu (1964, 76): “When I look back on living, the past seems to unfold
/ As though it were a story by foreign lips retold. / As though I had not lived
it, nor made of life a part.” We will translate the crisis if identity expressed
in the lines of the Metallica song thus: “I was ego, but now I’m shadow.” We
may redefine the identification with the shadow as the death of the ego, which
is clouded and annihilated by the dark content of the unconscious.
We should keep in mind that “the ‘other’ in ourselves” (Hauke 2000, 133),
“das Andere in uns” (Wolff 1959, 152), “the dark brother of mankind” [der
dunkle Bruder der Menschheit] (Neumann 1993, 92), is an oneiric aggres-
sor, which reminds us of the repression of inferiority. The shadow, consist-
ing of all the personal aspects we avoid recognizing, will often be projected
on our closest ones. “As we know, it is not the conscious subject but the
unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections,
one does not make them. The effect of projection is to isolate the subject
from his environment” (CW 9/II, §17). Projection severs the subject from
the world, propelling outward what is found in the unconscious. Projection
leads to autism, turning the world into a dream, in which the inner fantasies
are externalized.
Not accidentally, the projection mechanism is borrowed by Jung from the
Freudian research on paranoia.24 “The mechanism of symptom-formation in
paranoia requires that internal perceptions—feelings—shall be replaced by
external perceptions. Consequently, the proposition ‘I hate him’ becomes
transformed by projection into another one: ‘He hates (persecutes) me, which
will justify me in hating him’” (Freud 1958, 63). Thus, we find outside what
is often hidden inside, replacing the inner perception with an external one: the
feelings of hostility we find in the environment could be a projection of our
own hostility. If our sight is dark, we will find only darkness. “We are still
so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is. We
are convinced that certain people have all the bad qualities we do not know
in ourselves or that they practise all those vices which could, of course, never
be our own” (CW 11, §140).
The evil we find in the others (“l’enfer c’est les autres”) is a reflection of
our inner negativity (“l’enfer c’est moi”). “First and foremost, one sees the
mote in one’s brother’s eye. No doubt the mote is there, but the beam sits in
one’s own eye” (CW 6, §9), remarks the founder of analytical psychology,
paraphrasing the Gospel (Mt. 7, 3–5). However, the projection is so seductive
because it keeps the feeling of the “monarchy of the ego,” keeping us in a
comfortable and irresponsible bad faith: “Projection causes the least amount
of distress to the ego, which can observe its twin but at a safe enough distance
to allow for an illusory sense of separation” (Moores 2010, 26).
Despite these aspects, we have an effective means of combating the ten-
dency of the unconscious to project, to find in the other that which belongs to
us by right. When we feel an irrational antipathy toward a certain person, we
22 Chapter 1
can assume that it actually disturbs an intimate defect that we find embodied
in the detested individual. Moreover, “if you feel an overwhelming rage com-
ing up in you when a friend reproaches you about a fault, you can be fairly
sure that at this point you will find a part of your shadow, of which you are
unconscious” (von Franz 1964, 68). Also, if we want to know what one’s
shadow looks like, we only have to ask him what he hates with intensity and
passion: “Ask someone to give a description of the personality type which he
finds most despicable, most unbearable and hateful, and most impossible to
get along with, and he will produce a description of his own repressed char-
acteristics” (Whitmont 1978, 162).
Therefore, we have to practice “the path of attention” (Bly 1988, 47), by
which we withdraw part of our projections and intuit an aspect of our shadow.
We find Hyde in our colleague, instead of guessing it in the mirror. We
despise ourselves by proxy25: the projection is a detour by which we hide our
dissatisfaction with ourselves. Therefore, “every situation in life which car-
ries for an individual a charge of strong affect, which makes him excessively
angry or anxious or even delighted, must be considered in terms of possibility
that the extra investment of energy may be coming from the unconscious in
the form of a shadow projection” (Singer 1994, 174f.).
“The path of attention” (Robert Bly) implies the necessity of “disci-
pline”26 (Edward C. Whitmont), an operation defined as the opposite of
repression. The Jungian analyst draws attention to the “deliberate igno-
rance” inherent to repression, which simply “looks elsewhere.” “Even
though we are not responsible for the way we are and feel, we have to take
responsibility for the way we act. Therefore, we have to learn to discipline
ourselves” (Whitmont 1978, 167). Repression (and incognizance) of the
shadow would not be so unproductive for the individual if the shadow
were pure inferiority or there weren’t a bright side to the shadow and an
energy reservoir that would help us in our personal development. “The
unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally
reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities,
such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative
impulses” (CW 9/II, §423). The discovery and integration of the shadow
is a process simultaneous to individual self-creation. The shadow “even
contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and
embellish human existence” (CW 11, §134). The Chthonian shadow may
possess a huge potential of creative libido. Thus, we will conceive of the
shadow as a false inferiority, which contains a certain teleological fea-
ture. Consequently, if we reverse an alchemical aphorism quoted by Jung
(CW 14, §118), we reach at a genuine observation: “Son, extract from the
shadow its ray!”
NOTES
1. See CW 8, §§772–773. See David Tacey’s objections: “Jung’s theory is

slightly dated and reflects a time in which society was more stable than it is today.
The ego nowadays is not given the luxury of developing itself for thirty-five years,
unimpeded by disruptions. . . . The theory of the stages of life needs some postmodern
modifications, in my view. . . . We often find that even very young people have to go
in search of meaning and purpose, since these elements are no longer evident in or
provided by society, and have to be sought by individual effort” (Tacey 2015, 49).
2. The Jungian theory is also amendable from another perspective. How does a
schizophrenic who prepares for symbolic suicide, like Hölderlin, see the “half of life,”
or a bipolar like Sylvia Plath, who, this time, will not fail to commit suicide? See,
for example, Hölderlin’s poem, entitled “At the Middle of Life” (1804), a true hymn
to alienation and the impossibility of experiencing youth. “But when winter comes/
where will I find/ the flowers, the sunshine . . . ? /” (Hölderlin 2004, 26). See also
Plath (2005, 185): “Wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris
or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own
sour air.”
3. In his autobiography, Jung compares the relationship between Personality No.
1 and Personality No. 2 with the relationship between ego and the shadow: “Now
I know that No. 1 was the bearer of the light, and that No. 2 followed him like a
shadow” (MDR 88).
4. “Forming a relationship with the divine through the psyche is not to be con-
fused with becoming divine, which for Jung is equivalent to psychosis” (Tacey 2013,
86–87).
5. Trans. Corneliu M. Popescu.
6. I thank Paul Chetreanu-Don for suggesting this line of argument to me.
7. Thomas Mann describes, before Jung, how much energy the persona takes
away from the ego. Note that the German novelist literally uses the term “mask”: “But
the little boy saw more than he should have seen; the shy, gold-brown, blue-shadowy
eyes observed too well. He saw not only the unerring charm which his father exer-
cised upon everybody: he saw as well, with strange and anguished penetration, how
cruelly hard it was upon him. He saw how his father, paler and more silent after each
visit, would lean back in his corner of the carriage with closed eyes and reddened
eyelids; he realized with a sort of horror that on the threshold of the next house a mask
would glide over his face, a galvanized activity take hold of the weary frame” (Mann
1994, 505).
8. Such a world without a persona is imagined by Yorgos Lanthimos in his films,
for example, in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017).
9. See also Blaise Pascal (1995, 326): “Man is therefore nothing but disguise
[déguisement], falsehood and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard to others.”
10. In fact, Nietzsche is also a precursor of the existentialist concept of authenticity.
11. “[People] have become smaller, and they are becoming smaller and smaller”
(TSZ, III, “On Virtue that Makes Small,” 2).
24 Chapter 1
12. The shadow is the mask of the self, just as the demonic is the negative
(“shadowy”) aspect of the divine.
13. The editors of QPT: the correspondence between Carl Gustav Jung and Hans
Schmid-Guisan.
14. The essential difference between the Jungian concept of the shadow and the
Freudian concept of the unconscious (whose main mechanism is repression) is that
the first contains the “germs of further development,” being oriented mainly teleologi-
cally, not only regressively (Frey-Rohn 1969, 93).
15. The correspondence between shadow, id, and will is hinted at in the TV series
The OA (Batmanglij and Marling 2019): “He’s your shadow. Who has no shadow has
no will to live.”
16. Schopenhauer argues that the will is unconscious and that it is the master,
while the intellect is the servant. The relationship between the intellect and the will
anticipates Freud’s dynamics between the ego and the id. See especially the chapter
“On the Primacy of the Will in Self-Consciousness” (Schopenhauer 2018, 212–257).
See also Nietzsche’s anticipations of the id from GS: “For the longest time, conscious
thought was considered thought itself; only now does the truth dawn on us that by
far the greatest part of our mind’s activity proceeds unconscious and unfelt” (GS
333); “[M]an, like every living creature, is constantly thinking but does not know
it; the thinking which becomes conscious is only the smallest part of it, let’s say the
shallowest, worst part” (GS 354).
17. Schopenhauer’s theory of madness (2018, 417–418) prefigures repression:
“[I]f the will’s resistance and refusal to assimilate some cognition reaches the point
where the operation simply cannot be carried out; if, therefore, certain events or
circumstances are fully repressed [unterschlagen] from the intellect because the will
cannot bear the sight of them . . . then there is madness.” Nietzsche’s conception of
“forgetting” and of the “positive faculty of repression” comes very close to Freud’s
definition of “repression” [Verdrängung]: “Forgetting [Vergeßlichkeit] is no mere
vis inertiae as the superficial image; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense
positive faculty of repression [Hemmungsvermögen], that is responsible for the fact
that what we experience and absorb enters our consciousness as little while we are
digesting it. . . . To close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to
remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility organs
working with and against another; a little quietness, a little tabula rasa of the con-
sciousness, to make room for new things . . . that is the purpose of active forgetful-
ness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette”
(GM, II, 1).
18. See appendix 3.
19. See also Wolff 1959, 63: “When the collective unconscious is activated, the
ego without sufficient self-knowledge identifies itself with archetypal figures, as
happened, for example, with Nietzsche when he identified himself with the figure of
Zarathustra.”
20. “I knew . . . that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. . . .
Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is
still a light, my only light” (MDR 88).
21. See Thomas Campbell’s “The Last Man” (1823): “We are twins in death,
proud Sun!/ Thy face is cold, thy race is run” (Campbell 2015, 522).
22. See John Clare’s Superstition’s Dream (1822): “Leaves crumbled ashes to the
air’s hot breath,/ And all awaited universal death” (Clare 2015, 519).
24. See CW 6, §784: “Projection . . . does not lead to ingestion and assimilation but
to differentiation and separation of subject from object. Hence it plays a prominent
role in paranoia, which usually ends in the total isolation of the subject.”
25. “When we hate someone, what we hate is something in him, or in our image
of him, that is part of ourselves. Nothing that isn’t in us ever bothers us” (Hesse
2013, 91).
26. Another Jungian analyst argues that humility is an existential possibility
needed to handle the projective capacity of the shadow: “Humility is simply the abil-
ity to acknowledge the truth about ourselves. . . . Humility can disarm the fiercest
of deceptive demons lodged in the dark shadow realm, because it is Truth itself. . . .
Humility gives us the calmness and patience to find out what [the] soft side is, and to
catch hold of it” (Pascal 1992, 128).
Chapter 2
The Double and the Demonic
THE DOUBLE
The double is the first subtheme of the shadow. The German word
Doppelgänger1 was coined by Jean Paul (1994, 67 n.) in 1796 in a note of his
novel Siebenkäs: “This is the name for people that see themselves” [So heis-
sen Leute, die sich selbst sehen]. According to Rogers (1970, 4), the German
word is much more dynamic than the simple translation double: it translates
as double-goer. The definition lacks precision: “The word double is embar-
rassingly vague, as used in literary criticism” (Guerard 1967, 3). According
to Hallam (1981, 5), the double implies not only duality but also multiplicity.
The double is “a figure of visual compulsion.” The trait of double vision,
present in Jean Paul’s definition, refers to an autoscopic subject who “beholds
its other self as another, as a visual object, or alternatively is beheld as object
by its other self” (Webber 1996, 3). In Hoffman’s The Devil’s Elixirs, both
double vision and double-talk, another trait of the Doppelgänger, are present.
I was no longer going to flee from them; I would advance upon them, proclaim-
ing in tones of thunder God’s vengeance on all transgressors. But—O horrid
sight!—before me stood the bloody figure of Victor. It was he, not I, who had
spoken. My hair stood on end with terror. (DE 71)
The door had opened and a dark figure entered whom I recognized to my own
horror as my own self in Capuchin robes, with beard and tonsure. The figure
came nearer and nearer my bed; I lay motionless, and every sound I tried to utter
was stifled in the trance that gripped me. (DE 97)
In Hoffmann’s novel, Medardus fulfills his sexual and criminal desires

through his stepbrother Victor. While Medardus plays an exterminating angel
27
28 Chapter 2
in the first fragment, Victor makes his entrance as a specter of murder. In

the second fragment, anticipating Poe, the shadow provokes the paralysis of
the ego: when the shadow speaks, the ego must keep silent. Poe’s “William
Wilson” provides us another autoscopic version: “I looked;—and a numb-
ness, an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved,
my knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with an objectless yet
intolerable horror. Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still nearer prox-
imity to the face. Were these,—these the lineaments of William Wilson?”
(WW 437). In this case, the visual experience is terrifying because the struc-
tures of subjectivity are under attack from the inside: “Is this me? If that is so,
then who I really am?” The recognition of the other implies my unrecognition
as ego. The law of ontological identity is sacred: “We go from individuum
to individuum.” The possibility of the double leads to “doubts concerning
the indestructibility, unity and unicity of my own identity” (Reber 1964, 57).
The crisis of identity makes room for the discovery of the inner alterity
as an enemy, just like in the famous scene of the mirror from Maupassant’s
“The Horla.” “It was as bright as day, but I could not see myself in my mirror!
. . . It was empty, very bright, bursting with light! But my reflection was not
there . . . and I was standing directly in front of it! I could see the tall, clear
glass from top to bottom” (H 299). The shadow blocks the ego’s capacity
of reflection, the access to the main formula of self-consciousness: I=I. The
double acts as a detour from structural identity, as deconstruction which leads
to derealization. If I am not able to see my reflection, then there is nobody in
the mirror. In Heideggerian terms, the Dasein is revealed as Niemand.
The visual component of the double is also present in Dorian Gray: “On
his return he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and
himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is half
the fascination of sin, and smiling, with secret pleasure, at the misshapen
shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own” (DG 135).
If William Wilson and “The Horla”’s diarist felt the horror of the physical
confrontation with the double, Dorian Gray is full of self-hatred, which might
be a displacement of narcissism. His first reaction is the regret of wasted inno-
cence, nostalgia for the paradise he had lost when he became an individual.
But with a modern gesture, the “rotting ideal” also fills Dorian with pride and
fascination. Wilde’s character experiences the pleasure of being an individual
who abolishes conventional morality, for whom, like Nietzsche’s writing per-
sona, there is neither guilt nor sin. Besides, he also has a reaction of infantile
satisfaction regarding the “shadow,” which takes over all the burden of dense
darkness, allowing himself to shine like a black sun.
The conflict between the double and the ego makes us rethink the prob-
lem of identity, because “[s]elfhood as a metaphysical given is abandoned
here to a process of enactments of identity always mediated by the other
The Double and the Demonic 29
self” (Webber 1996, 3). One of the main themes of Hoffmann’s The Devil’s
Elixirs is the acknowledgment of an inner “destructive conflict” (DE 120).
The inner split is sometimes linked to estrangement (DE 120), and sometimes
to the possibility of the multiplication of personality (DE 195), prefiguring
the Dostoyevskyan dissociation from The Double: “I am what I seem to be,
yet do not seem to be what I am; even to myself I am an insoluble riddle,
for my personality has been torn apart” (DE 54). Dostoyevsky’s character,
Golyadkin, begins to doubt his own existence (D 54), a symptom of psycho-
sis. Mentally ill persons who, for instance, fail to recognize themselves in
the mirror, can experience a feeling of “ontological insecurity” (Laing 1990,
39–43). The discovery of the unconscious at the end of the 19th century is
anticipated by this fall of the “fortress of identity” (JH 57): the enemy is no
longer outside the walls, he secretly slipped in. As Jekyll noted in a dissocia-
tive fashion: “He, I say—I cannot say, I” (JH 67).
A peculiar trait of the double in 19th-century fiction is its gendering as
male (Webber 1996, 4). In spite of the description of the complexity and
the uneasiness of the woman’s soul from Madame Bovary (1856) or Anna
Karenina (1877), we find no clear instances of feminine dissociation. In other
words, the female subject is unjustly excluded from the conversation regard-
ing inner duality, probably because she was considered unable to access her
identity structures, and unable to possess the feeling of the wholeness of per-
sonality. Without identity, there is no crisis of identity; one cannot experience
dissociation without the perception of a strong and stable ego. One cannot say
“I am not who I am” without first declaring “I am.”
The ones who never possess the feeling of identity and still experience
duality or multiplicity have no reference point of their preliminary organic
unity. They struggle in a pre-linguistical and prerational obscurity, in the
night of id which never imagined the morning of self-awareness. Yet another
important trait of the double is noticeable: if masculinity is deeply connected
with the double and the feminine ego is conceived as unable to become a dou-
ble, it means that the double is dependent on a powerful subject, on the “I=I”2
formula from Fichte’s and Schelling’s works. That is to say that only the one
who first says “I” can later pronounce “non-I” or “double.” It is possible that
a sort of hypertrophied romantic subject, similar to Byron’s Manfred or Cain,
casts a shadow over its double, creates it from overabundance, like Plotinus’s
demiurge. Double cannot exist without the previous expansion of the ego.
If we consider the relationship between the ego and the non-ego, we can
state a law of the genesis of the double: “Where there is I, there will always
be double”; with the corollary: “Where there is no I, there is nothing.” The
ones who have the feeling of their own subjectivity will probably encounter
scission or personal multiplicity, like Whitman3 or Hesse,4 but also have the
chance of experiencing the wholeness of personality. The ones who linger
30 Chapter 2
in the innocence prior to the discovery of self-awareness are unable of dual-

ity, because they haven’t discovered identity yet. Their ignorance (what
Buddhism calls avidyā) maintains them in a territory where there is neither
conflict nor life. Like in Max Stirner’s philosophy,5 the first discovery of
each existential subject is his or her ego. Without this preliminary egoism, we
cannot advance toward the more subtle acquisition of the concept of alterity.
In the constitution of the double, the oscillation between subject and object
provides interest. According to Freud (1990, 73), the “ego can take itself as
an object, can observe itself, criticize itself. . . . In this, one part of the ego is
setting itself over against the rest. So the ego can be split; it splits itself during
a number of its functions—temporarily at least.” The objectivity of subjectiv-
ity reminds of Narcissus’s dilemma and his inability to distinguish between
lover and beloved (Ovid 1958, 78; Rogers 1970, 19). How does the non-ego
emerge, disrupting the intimate connection between me and myself? There is
a territory in the depth of our being, which defies the diurnal tyranny of the
ego. This territory is unexplored and removed from consciousness but makes
its presence felt in flashes which intuitively discloses us (intuition belongs
to an unmediated knowledge that makes us feel the truth, although it cannot
be reasonably explained) the essence of our existence. From this perspec-
tive, the relationship between the ego and non-ego (or the shadow) becomes
relevant. The double is related to the mystery of “simultaneous distinction
and identity” (Keppler 1972, 1) or, more straightforward, to the destruction
of the principle of identity (Camet 1995, 8). What is the relationship between
identity and alterity from the perspective of the double? A self-centered sub-
ject is able, like Medusa’s head, to convert any type of alterity into the mirror
of his or her subjectivity. To put it differently, always experiencing alterity
as identity, a narcissistic subject, who loves with an ardent passion only his
reflection, has every chance to recreate the world after his own likeness,
residing in a prison of his own projections.
A certain egology is a closed system, which deals with the outside only if
it is able to reprogram the external stimuli according to its inner structural
coherence. For Narcissus, the nymph Echo is the symbol of perdition, a threat
to decoding alterity as identity. “The toxic self-love of narcissism prevents
one from experiencing self-transcendence through intimacy with another
human being” (Moores 2010, 112). The authentic discovery of alterity saves
ego from its solipsistic circularity, but, at the same time, it represents an
attack against its identitary sovereignty. In his prison-like palace, Narcissus
is a king. The chains connecting him to himself are on his royal badge.
However, although he is the one who loves, he is not also the beloved. The
love the subject projects onto the object comes back as a simulacrum, as the
opposite of love. Not unlike Dorian Gray, Narcissus bows in front himself,
loathing himself at the same time. He hates his humiliating dependence on the
ego and his exceptional incarceration. If Narcissus loved himself, he would

solemnly kneel before the altar of self-transcendence.
It is worth mentioning that the near absence of the anima from almost
all the literary works we shall read shows the downward trajectory of the
shadow: one may say that the shadow is here “an affair of the ego.” Similar
to the nihilists, for whom the opening toward alterity is nonexistent (Diaconu
1996, 222), the shadowy characters vacillate between suicide and madness:
an illusory “either/or,” because madness is a form of suicide. Medardus from
The Devil’s Elixirs and Golyadkin from The Double are committed to men-
tal hospitals. The creature from Frankenstein seeks the North Pole to die in
absolute isolation. William Wilson, Henry Jekyll, and Dorian Gray kill them-
selves, attempting to assassinate their doubles. The diarist from “The Horla”
hesitates between suicide and mental collapse. For all the seven characters,
the shadow is not a tool for individuation, but a deathly struggle with the ego.
In Jungian psychology, the personal shadow is considered both the last
station of personal unconscious and the path for the experience of the anima,
which belongs to the presupposed collective unconscious. This vision is
incomplete, according to the authors from the 19th century. The shadow sig-
nifies both the dissolution of the ego, its incapacity to recuperate itself, and
the invasion of the id in the hostile ground of self-awareness. The emergence
of the shadow suggests that the principle of identity is breaking down. Hence
the question: Who am I when I am not myself anymore?
As we shall see in the analyzed works, the shadowy characters cannot
linger in this territory of psychotic un-identification: if the climax of the
meeting with the double is mental illness, its denouement can only be sui-
cide. Psychosis is a reverse initiation into the “satanic principle of suffering”
(Cioran 1996, 109). It is not only the dark revelation of world as hell, but also
the vision of an inferno without the possibility of paradise. The immanent
inferno of “the sickness unto death” (psychosis which leads to suicide) refers
to the pure aspect of damnation. If in Origen’s apocatastasis even the devil
can be eventually saved, from the perspective of the shadowy character who
has to choose between madness and death (I use here “choice” ironically),
everybody, even God, is condemned to the permanence of hell.
THE DEMONIC
The demonic is the second subtheme of the shadow, strongly linked with
the double. If the ego was modeled after the pattern of “image and likeness”
(Gen. 1, 27), the non-ego or the double parodies this ontological program-
ming, revealing the pattern of the “enemy” in the constitution of the person-
ality. The devil is both God’s double (Rogers 1970, 6) and the double of the
32 Chapter 2
human being, when one conceives him or her as a divine creature, destined
to aspire to the perfection of the formula “I am what I am” (Exod. 3, 14).
According to Jung, the demonic is one of the essential traits of the shadow:
“And indeed it is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow-side to
him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively
demonic dynamism” (CW 7, §35). In all the literary works we will discuss,
the demonic plays an important part.
In The Devil’s Elixirs, the dual antagonists of the main character are
thought to possess a demonic influence, verifying the Jungian hypothesis
which claims that the shadow is sort of an inner devil. “You yourself are
Satan!” (DE 90), Medardus tells the painter. “You are not me, you are the
Devil!” (DE 97), he answers to Victor. According to Sarah Kofman (1991,
120), the double is the devil.6 In Frankenstein, the unnamed “monster”
refers to Lucifer, recommending himself as an enemy of both divinity and
mankind. “But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.
Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his
desolation; I am alone” (F 213). The self-characterization is arrogant, Mary
Shelley’s character claiming an angelic origin for an ordeal that transcends
the boundaries of mankind. The romantic theme of isolation, of the one
excluded from the human community because of his radical exceptional-
ism, concerns a superiority complex distinguishable in Byron’s and Wilde’s
works.
In “William Wilson,” the most important intervention of the double (or the
shadow), who exposes the main character as cheating at cards, is accompa-
nied by a “dying of light,” signifying the darkening of consciousness. “The
wide, heavy folding doors of the apartment were all at once thrown open, to
their full extent, with a vigorous and rushing impetuosity that extinguished,
as if by magic, every candle in the room. Their light, in dying, enabled us
just to perceive that a stranger had entered.” (WW 442–3). The somber
atmosphere suggests we are dealing with an uncanny [unheimlich] appari-
tion, reminding of the mysterium horrendum identified by Rudolf Otto in
the constitution of the demonic (Otto 1958, 106–107 n.). Poe’s story is more
complicated because the double of the main character prevents Wilson from
doing evil, personifying the superego or the moral consciousness [Gewissen].
Nevertheless, from a Freudian perspective, a repressive superego, who spoils
id’s agreeable party, or from a Nietzschean perspective, a dry and ascetic,
maybe even spiteful, advocate of moral purity, will be perceived as a demonic
intrusion, despite the justness of his cause. It all depends on the perspective:
because of the reciprocal projections of the two characters, we can no longer
distinguish who the “angel” (the superego is an “angel” who generates neu-
rosis, repression and shame) and who the “demon” is. Both are rather demons
for each other: shadow and shadow of the shadow.
From the first meeting with his Doppelgänger, Dostoyevsky’s Golyadkin

has a sense of his demonic and adversarial nature. After psychiatry replaced
theology, the modern name of demonic possession became neurosis.
According to Freud, “demons are bad and reprehensible wishes, derivatives
of instinctual impulses that have been repudiated and repressed” (Freud 1964,
72). From a Freudian perspective, Dostoyevsky’s novella can be understood
either as a rebellion against paternalism (the father is the “individual proto-
type of both God and the Devil” (Freud 1964, 86)), or as a Schreberian case,
in which the projective factor from paranoia reconfigures the Weltanschauung
of the individual. From a Jungian perspective, Golyadkin’s meeting with his
demon is a version of the confrontation with the shadow.
In Stevenson’s Strange Case. . . , Hyde’s inhumanity (“[T]he man seems
hardly human!” (JH 16)) is directly related to the demonic (“I read Satan’s
signature upon [his] face (JH 16)). Not unlike Frankenstein’s “creature,”
Hyde is both an enemy of divinity and the human being, traditionally con-
ceived as God’s analogon. Hyde’s proclivity to absolute evil transforms him,
according to a Jungian psychologist, into a personification of archetypal
shadow, transcending the mere personal shadow (Hannah 2000, 83): “I knew
myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more
wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment,
braced and delighted me like wine” (JH 57). From a Jungian perspective, The
Strange Case . . . reveals two essential stages of the confrontation with the
shadow: the split and the identification.
Several descriptions from Maupassant’s “The Horla” remind us of Henry
Fuseli’s famous painting Nightmare (1781), in which an incubus crouches on
the chest of a sleeping woman, seemingly influencing her oneiric activity: “I
get into bed and wait for sleep as some await their executioner. . . . I fall into
sleep as a man falls into a pit of stagnant water to drown. . . . I’m also aware
of the approach of someone who looks at me, touches me, gets onto the bed,
kneels on my chest, takes my neck in both hands, and squeezes and squeezes
with all his strength” (H 277). If the diurnal ego was mostly able to censor
the unconscious interferences, during sleep we deal with the dark aspect of
existence. Fuseli’s demon is a personification of our anxieties and a symbol
of all the things we repress or refuse to confront.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the demonic emerges most strikingly in
the episode when Dorian shows the painter Basil Hallward the horrible pic-
ture destroyed by the immoral behavior of the main character: “The rotting
of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.” Dorian’s picture has “the
face of a satyr” and “the eyes of a devil” (DG 150). Similar to Nietzsche and
Baudelaire, Wilde observes the degeneration of the Platonic ideal, which
meets putrefaction and horror: translated into a philosophical language, this
is the death of God (in theological terms, the Harrowing of Hell). While
34 Chapter 2
the picture of Dorian’s soul indicates his descension toward the final circle,
Dorian keeps his unspotted beauty, which does not spare him for anxiety,
guilt, melancholy, and nostalgia. Dorian’s decline is in agreement with the
shipwreck of aestheticism, which, at a certain point, crushes with the reef of
the ethical. It is probable that a pure demonism, without reference to divinity,
is inconsistent.
It is important to distinguish between personal shadow, as a station on a
road to individuation (the confrontation with our repressed fears sometimes
indicates the direction of inner development7), and transpersonal or arche-
typal shadow,8 personified by Satan or the dark side of God. The vision of
the demonic of the 19th-century writers is much closer to the latter aspect of
the shadow. Their Dionysian characters, who oscillate between suicide and
psychosis, are ripped apart by satanic complexes, which have little to do with
the “little weaknesses and foibles” (CW 7, §35) which can be accepted and
integrated. The demonic in romantic and post-romantic literature refers to the
dark numinosity of the archetypal shadow (Rudolf Otto’s mysterium horren-
dum), which can detonate the tiny kingdom of the ego, and to the destructive,
dissociative and even “diabolic” violence of the Freudian instinct, which
dislocates (dia-bállein = “to tear apart”9) and undoes connections (even the
liaison between the ego and his or her self).
One of the first modern interpreters of the demonic is Stefan Zweig, who
analyzes in his book The Struggle with the Daemon (1925) this theme in the
works of Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Zweig’s definition of the concept is important for my research:
I term “daemonic” the unrest that is in us all [eingeborene Unruhe], driving each
of us out of himself into the elemental. It seems as if nature had implanted into
every mind an inalienable part of the primordial chaos, and as if this part were
interminably striving—with tense passion [mit Spannung und Leidenschaft]—to
rejoin the superhuman, suprasensual medium whence it derives. The daemon is
the incorporation of that tormenting leaven which impels our being (otherwise
quiet and almost inert) towards danger, immoderation [Übermaß], ecstasy,
renunciation and even self-destruction [Selbstvernichtung]. (Zweig 2017, 243)
If, from Freud’s or Rank’s perspective, the artist has an intrinsic proclivity
to infantilism and neurosis, one can say that he or she possesses, through his
or her nature, an inclination toward demonism. “There is no art worthy of
the name without daimonism [Dämonie]” (Ibid., 246). Analyzing the biog-
raphy of the aforementioned writers, Zweig discovers a propensity toward
immoderation, which brings them on the brink of madness, self-sacrifice, and
even self-destruction. These authors are inherently predisposed toward trans-
gression, imitating the Nietzschean shadow: “With you I strove to penetrate
everything that is forbidden, worst, remotest; and if there is anything in me

that is virtue, it is that I had no fear of any forbiddance” (TSZ, IV, “The
Shadow”). The demon which endows its host with brilliant inspiration leads
him to collapse, to a sort of “carbonisation in his own flames” (Zweig 2017,
523): “For the daemon cannot make his way back to the infinite which is his
home except by ruthlessly destroying the finite and the earthly which restrains
him, by destroying the body wherein, for a season, he is housed” (Ibid., 244).
According to Lucian Blaga (1980, 296), who comments on Goethe’s concep-
tion of the term, “the ones touched upon by the demonic behave as being pos-
sessed by an overwhelming power.” Furthermore, the demonic “partly labors
in darkness, in the unconscious, fiercely removing all obstacles.”
The proclivity toward demonism, identified by Zweig, is fit for some of
the characters of the works I shall analyze. For instance, both Frankenstein’s
scientific ambitions (“I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers,
and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation” (F 42)) and Jekyll’s
assault on the “very fortress of identity” (JH 57) come to my mind. Likewise,
Dorian Gray advances toward demonism, following the percepts of pure aes-
theticism. Following Rimbaud’s imperative, he transforms from an artist into
a work of art: “Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your
days are your sonnets” (DG 207).
There is an intimate connection between duality and demonism. The nature
of the double is to be demonic: for instance, the number 2 signifies disso-
ciation,10 as the number 1 suggests the perfect identity of God.11 Indeed, the
postmodern conception of the multiplicity of the ego (one ego for job, another
ego for games, another for my partner, another for me, etc. (Forderer 1999,
14–15)) begins with the destruction of the principle of identity from the 19th
century: “Others will follow . . . and I hazard the guess that man will be ulti-
mately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent
denizens” (JH 55–6), notes Jekyll. The duality (afterward plurality) of the
ego is suggested by the snake from Genesis, who declines the noun “God” at
plural: “Ye shall be as gods” [eritis sicut dii] (Gen. 3, 5; Barrett 1962, 99). If
classical identity is modeled on the divine subjectivity, the death of God is in
agreement with the disappearance of a unitary, self-centered subject.
From a nihilistic perspective, following Nietzsche and Rimbaud, one can
say that when we renounced to believe in God, we stopped believing in our-
selves. When “I is an other,” the Augustinian God is no longer traceable on
the map of being. From a sociological perspective, we accept that the ego is
a kind of Proteus, which we adjust and adapt according to our momentary
requirements. If in fact there is no ego, only egos, it is worth noting that we
pay the absence of identity with our souls. I can lie to the others with my
persona, but when I lie to myself or when I am unable to know how I am, a
split occurs. And if the connection between lost identity and dispossession
36 Chapter 2
of God can be resolved in a Jungian fashion through the progression on the

ego-self axis, the relationship between ego and non-ego is analogous with the
oscillation between ego and shadow.
I am not who my ego and my persona think I am, but I can be, like Hyde
or Dorian, the shadow. If we get stuck at the moment of the identification
with the shadow, which can be seductive through the exuberance of the
overflowing of unconscious material in the tiny vase of the consciousness,
we cannot hope to become authentic and to possess an ego strengthened
through the “self-realization of the unconscious” (MDR 3) or the partial
integration of the shadow. The shadow is the secret of the ego, just like the
self is the secret of the shadow: the underground of the underground is an
attic. If, from an esoteric perspective, the subconscious is, in fact, supercon-
scious (with no connections to the Freudian superego), the way to the depths
is an ascension disguised in descension: from a theological perspective, a
revolt against ego and identity prepares an insurrection against the self or
the inner God.
The more generous concept of the daimonic, which attempts to bind
the dichotomy of demonic and divine, is helpful here. “In contrast to the
demonic, the daimonic includes the diabolic as well as divine human endow-
ments, without making them mutually exclusive” (Diamond 2003, 79). The
daimonic is a synthesis of the “diabolic” (dia-bállein = “to tear apart”) and
symbolic (sym- bállein = “to unite”) traits (May 2007, 138; Schwarcz 1999,
6), a “marriage of heaven and hell,” or of Elysium with Hades.
The existential psychologist Rollo May, defines the daimonic in his book,
Love and Will (1969), in opposition with the Freudian death drive (which
has the demonic tendency to dissolve connections): “For the polar opposite
to the daimonic is not rational security and calm happiness, but the ‘return
to the inanimate’ . . . the death instinct. The antidaimon is apathy” (May
2007, 122). Just like depression is sometimes seen as the “death of the soul,”
daimonism can be an exploitation of the vital energies of the spirit, both
creative and manic, a “flame” we should not extinguish. May quotes a frag-
ment from one of Rilke’s letters, in which the poet motivates his retreat from
a psychoanalytic cure, when he found out its purpose: “If we throw out our
devils . . . we had better be prepared to bid goodbye to our angels as well”
(quoted in May 2007, 122). For a poet nothing is more unbearable than the
absence of inspiration; this is why he or she prefers to struggle with the
demon, he or she chooses Zweig’s “tension” and “passion” (or Plato’s theía
manía [divine madness] from Phaedrus 265 b) over the anodyne apathy of
normality. In a film inspired by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), we find
out that the avoidance of the demonic feature of existence is pure cowardice:
“Remember! There is no more . . . detestable creature in nature than the man
who runs away from his demon” (Roeg 1993).
According to May, the genealogy of the daimonic becomes manifest

especially in the activity of the poets, because these arrive more easily at
the confrontation with the Dionysian aspect of existence. “Every poet is of
the Devil’s party,” notes William Blake, referring to Milton’s Luciferianism
(quoted in May 2007, 127). Furthermore, William Butler Yeats observed:
“And in my heart the daemons and the gods/ Wage an eternal battle” (Ibid.).
Therefore, poetry can be described as a battleground between the divine and
the demonic. We have to “go to heaven for form and to hell for energy” and
“marry . . . our inner heaven and our inner hell” (Johnson 1993, 38). The
daimonic describes the “crucifixion”12 between divine and demonic.
Hermann Hesse,13 in his novel Demian (1919), defines the daimonic as
the union of “the divine with the satanic.” The gnostic deity Abraxas is con-
sidered able to reunite God with his shadow, presenting a whole conception
of divinity, which includes his dark side as well. “[T]he god we worshipped
represented only an arbitrary second-off half of the world. . . . But we should
worship the whole world, so either we needed a god who was also the devil,
or we needed to establish devil’s services along with the church services
that honored God. And so here was the god who was devil and god in one:
Abraxas” (Hesse 2013, 75).
Hesse’s vision of Abraxas is consistent with many Jungian ideas. Quoting
the gnostic theologian Valentinus, Jung thought that Jesus was born “not
without a kind of shadow” (CW 9/II, §171) and that “although the attri-
butes of Christ . . . undoubtedly mark him out as an embodiment of the self,
looked at from the psychological angle he corresponds to only one half of
the archetype. The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as
much a manifestation of the self, except that he consists of its dark aspect”
(CW 9/II, §79). Moreover, “in early Jewish-Christian circles Satan . . . was
regarded as Christ’s elder brother” (CW 9/II, §113). But Hesse’s conception
is also deeply influenced by the Jungian short writing Septem Sermones ad
Mortuos, published anonymously in 1916: “This is a god whom ye knew
not, for mankind forgot it. We name it by its name ABRAXAS. It is more
indefinite still than god and devil. That god may be distinguished from it, we
name god HELIOS or Sun . . . Abraxas standeth above the sun and above the
devil” (MDR 383).
The daimonic Abraxas is a synthesis between “light” and “darkness,”
between the “divine” and the “demonic.” One can argue that the Jungian
shadow is both demonic and daimonic. As long as it is modeled on the arche-
type of the stranger and of the enemy, it is appropriate to call it demonic.
However, when we think of the “bright side of the shadow,” of the creative
resources hidden in the darkness of the shadow, or of the repressed potenti-
alities, and if we consider Nietzsche’s influence on the Jungian conception
of the shadow,14 the synthesis of “diabolic” and “symbolic” seems to aptly
38 Chapter 2
describe the complexity of the Jungian shadow. The post-Nietzschean vision

from The Last Temptation of Christ (1955),15 which presents the daimonic
conjunction between Sol niger and Stella matutina, deserves mention in
this context: “Someone came last night in my sleep. . . . Surely it was God,
God . . . or was it the devil? Who can tell them apart? They exchange faces;
God sometimes becomes all darkness, and the devil all light” (Kazantzakis
1998, 15).
NOTES
1. Jean Paul’s original version was Doppeltgänger.

2. Schelling (1980, 75) sets the tone for the romantic egology in his Of the I
as Principle of Philosophy (1795): “I am! [Ich bin!] My I contains a being which
precedes all thinking and imagining. It is by being thought, and it is being thought
because it is; and all for only one reason—that is is being thought only inasmuch as
its thinking is its own.” He is deeply influenced by Fichte, (1982, 97), who argued
that the “self’s own positing of itself is . . . its own pure activity. The self posits itself,
and by virtue of this mere self-assertion it exists; and conversely, the self exists and
posits its own existence by virtue of merely existing.”
3. “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself,/ I am large, I
contain multitudes” (Whitman 2004, 123).
4. “In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest
degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages,
of inheritances and potentialities” (Hesse 1969, 67).
5. “The divine is God's concern; the human, ‘man’s.’ My concern is neither the
divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and
it is not a general one, but is—unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than
myself!” (Stirner 1995, 7). “Not ‘man’ is the measure of all things, I am this measure”
(Reschika 2001, 85).
6. The double and the demonic are also intertwined in Thomas Bernhard’s vision
from Frost (2008, 83): “Then he briefly described how he had once met himself as
someone else. ‘Have you had an experience like that, ever?’ he asked. ‘When I went
up to myself, I naturally wanted to shake my hand, but then I suddenly pulled it back.
And I knew why.’”
7. “There is no development unless the shadow is accepted” (CW 9/I, §600).
8. The personal shadow refers to a conflict on the individual level (me against
myself). The archetypal shadow concerns a “war” on a transpersonal level (my divine
“substance” against its demonic counterpart, my inner Christ versus my inner Satan).
Matters are complicated when the ego is “overcome by the numinosity” of an “arche-
typal event” and tends to be “absorbed by the unconscious” (Frey-Rohn 1989, 82).
The inflated ego metaphorically tends to become his or her inner devil/God. See also
Baudelaire (1975a, 682–683): “There are in all men, at all times, two simultaneous
postulations, one towards God, the other towards Satan. The invocation to God, or
spirituality, is a desire to raise oneself higher; that towards Satan, or animality, is the
joy of descent.” Identification with God or the devil is a common symptom of psy-
chosis, when the barriers of the ego are dissolved. See also Lucka (1916, 132): “Just
like the individual double is the personified cleavage of a human being, the devil is the
double of the inwardly torn mankind, the double of Christ, as the perfect representa-
tive of mankind. This inner conflict comprises of the splitting of an individual man
into two egos and the splitting of mankind into two egos—in Christ and the devil.//
The devil is the perceptible hatred against the Good, against God—and the anxiety
of this hatred.// ‘Man, should you see the vermin inside you,/ It would horrify you as
the devil/,’ Angelus Silesius said. And just like the ape was perceived as the double
of mankind, the devil was named the ape of God.”
9. The diabolic (in etymological sense) power of the death drive is obvious in
Freud’s description: the aim of the death instinct is “to undo connections and so to
destroy things” (Freud 1981, 148). Cioran characterizes in his first book the “satanic”
tendency as “a principle of dislocation and duality” (Cioran 1996, 109).
10. “The number 2 is polyvalent, although at first instance it bears a negative sig-
nification, because it splits and cleaves the Unity and the Whole” (Betz 1989, 37).
11. “One, as the first numeral, is unity. But it is also ‘the unity,’ the One, All-
Oneness, individuality and non-duality—not a numeral but a philosophical concept,
an archetype and attribute of God, the monad” (MDR 310).
12. “To accept the shadow . . . is to be crucified between one’s virtues and one’s
vices, never sure which has to be lived, for only after one has suffered the utmost con-
flict between the two can a ‘third’ be born which is neither the one nor the other, but
something which comes closer to the totality of human nature” (Hannah 2000, 87).
13. The Swiss author was analyzed by the Jungian psychotherapist J. B. Lang.
14. “The Shadow: And I hate the same thing you hate: night. I love mankind
because they are disciples of light” (HAH II, “The Wanderer and His Shadow”).
15. See also Scorsese’s movie based on the novel.
Chapter 3
The Second I
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
The Devil’s Elixirs (1816)
ASCETIC LIBIDO
The Devil’s Elixirs is a combination of Bildungsroman and Schauerroman

in the gothic tradition, where terror precedes the formative element (Webber
1996, 184). Prefiguring Dostoyevsky’s Double, Hoffmann’s work is a hymn
to duality: Medardus, the main character, can be seen both as Christ’s double,
as a Capuchin monk (Troubetzkoy 1996, 60) and an “erotic nihilist,” like
Satan (Hoffmeister quoted in Bär 2005, 263), who may be characterized by
the “joy of descent” Baudelaire (1975a, 682–683).
The Devil’s Elixirs is a collage of many texts: “Editor’s Preface,” “The
Posthumous Papers of Brother Medardus,” “Editor’s Note,” “The Parchment
of the Old Painter,” “Appendix by Father Spiridon.” This plurality of aucto-
rial voices leads to a kind of narrative anarchy, because the variations are
somewhat incoherent and inexact (Webber 1996, 190; Troubetzkoy 1996,
62). One might think that the dissociation of the main character reflects in
the narrative structure of the novel, which can be compared to the infinite
multiplication of the reflections of two broken mirrors.1
Positioned from the very beginning under the hereditary sign of sin2 and
marked, in a way that anticipates the cinematography of vampirism and pos-
session, by a symbolic unhappy contact with the cross,3 the young Franz (the
future Brother Medardus) wants to dedicate himself to his monastic voca-
tion. According to Troubetzkoy (1996, 80), Hoffman’s novel is a circular
crossing of hell from and to paradise. The prelapsarian incubator is, for the
main character, the Capuchin monastery close to the unmentioned town of
Bamberg, which inspired Hoffmann: “It would certainly not be easy to find
a more attractive district than that in which the Capuchin monastery lies, just
outside the town. The lovely garden, with its views up into the mountains,
41
42 Chapter 3
seemed to shine in fresh splendor each time I walked down the long avenues”
(DE 14). Franz’s propensity toward vita contemplativa, the “growing inclina-
tion to take the cowl” (DE 16) is deepened, but also short-circuited by the
repression of sexuality: “I felt an unpleasant embarrassment in the company
of other people, particularly when women were present” (DE 17). The repres-
sion of the “seething” energies (Freud 1965, 73) from the shadow harasses
young Franz’s consciousness. His first contact with the manic essence of
Eros takes place at a musical soiree when he is observed kissing the glove of
a girl he admires. Feeling humiliated and “unmasked” as a disciple of Venus
insinuated in the temple of God, the future monk meets with dissociation in
way that anticipates the Zarathustra’s difficult relationship4 with the alterity:
One of the ladies . . . whispered something in her ear. Then they looked at me
and giggled. I was utterly crushed. An icy tremor pierced my heart . . . I rushed
over to the monastery and into my cell. I threw myself on the ground in a fit
of frantic despair, and burning tears poured from my eyes. I uttered curses on
myself and on the girl, now praying to heaven, now laughing like a madman.
Derisive voices sounded all around me. (DE 18–9)
Franz simultaneously understands two distinct things: the repressed force

of the libido—a secret only to himself—and the danger of the gaze of the
other, which breaks through a deficient persona. The flame of the Eros
freezes, moving from equatorial to polar temperatures, to paraphrase Shestov
(1982, 280), when the authentic passion is pierced by the needle of derision:
the examination of the other is, like Medusa’s look, the bringer of death.
There are two conflicts here: one between the passion of the young man and
the contempt of the alterity and another deeper clash between Eros and the
contemplative ideal. The explosive presence of the affect from this scene
shows us that we are dealing with a manifestation of the shadow, one that the
ego refuses to acknowledge it. Franz’s natural sexual appetite (the shadow)
contrasts with the rigorous asceticism required by monastic life (persona) and
with the proclivity of the character for a life dedicated to the contemplation
of divinity (both ego and self).
Hoffmann shows that the shadow is a mystery only for us, because we
cannot evaluate it from a safe distance. Theoretically, the girls that mock
Franz, who burns in the temple of Eros with juvenile passion, give him the
chance to recognize an aspect of his shadow that should be brought in the
proximity of the light of consciousness. Perhaps Franz should not sacrifice
nature on the altar of divinity. We keep in mind that the irony of the girls
was doubled by the derision of the superego (“Derisive voices sounded all
around me” (DE 19)): “Your libido does not make you fit for the monastery!”
could whisper him a draconic and dictatorial superego. Instead of accepting
The Second I 43
his shadowy material, Franz enhances its density, further repressing sexual-
ity: “I was firmly resolved never to see her again and to renounce the world
altogether” (DE 19). One could say that for the future monk, just like for the
Freud according to the Jungian interpretation,5 sexuality is a numinosum, the
secret of his personality, the nucleus of his personality.
Franz takes the monastic name of Saint Medardus, a bishop of Vermandois,
renowned for his devotion and erudition and who is considered, among oth-
ers, the patron of prisoners and mentally ill persons. After some time spent in
the monastery, Brother Medardus is put in charge with the supervision of the
chamber of relics, including a so-called devil’s elixir, used by the “enemy”
to tempt Saint Anthony. Despite Medardus’s rationalist skepticism, who
perceives the relics as vulgar ways to gain profit and popularity for various
clerical institutions, he is impressed by the mystique of the devil’s elixir.
Soon enough, Medardus becomes a successful preacher and his ever-grow-
ing fame feeds his grandiose delusion: “The idea then began to grow in me
that I was one of the Lord’s elect . . . I was not of this world or of mankind,
but walked the earth in order to bring men comfort and salvation. . . . [T]hey
should recognize in me the saint exalted above them” (DE 26). Medardus’s
megalomania, who even begins to identify with Saint Anthony (DE 28), is
seen as demonic inspiration by the prior Leonardus6 and by his benefactress,
the Abbess.7 This situation of a character, who practices the dark work while
considering himself guided by divinity, prefigures an episode from Gogol’s
story, “The Portrait” (1835), in which a painter, despite wanting to create
sacred art, involuntarily imprints demonic traits to his icons.
Medardus’s grandiose delusion and his double-play can be explained, in a
Jungian fashion,8 through two ideas. First, in the case of the Capuchin monk,
we record the elevation of the ego at the level of the self, which, according to
Liliane Frey-Rohn, is also a characteristic for Nietzsche in his last writings.
The identification with Saint Anthony can be the consequence of an arche-
typal event, which leads to inflation. In the struggle between the human being
and the archetype, between man and the image of God, man is destined to be
crushed. “Instead of establishing a relationship with the [archetype] and thus
objectifying it, [Nietzsche] actually counted himself and his ego as constitu-
ent parts of the archetype” (Frey-Rohn 1989, 138–139). How can we find a
practical solution to the Medardus’s error of elevating the ego at the height
of the self? Acknowledging that the “inner God” is not me9 (this determined
biological being, a psychophysical configuration modeled on contingency
and finitude), but something else from me (an unalienable spiritual nucleus),
called self by mystics and analytic psychologists.
A second Jungian idea can be applied here in Medardus’s case. The grandi-
osity of the one who does the work of the devil while thinking he has access
to divinity (indeed, a case of theosis) occurs when we identify ourselves with
44 Chapter 3
the shadow: when we take over the shadowy parts in our own identity and
“the destructive actions are no longer considered foreign for the ego” (Vogel
2015, 43). We see once more the inherent contradiction of Medardus’s being:
if before he was split between unrecognized sexuality and monastic vocation,
now there is a gap between vita contemplativa and the will to power (the
desire of being worshipped or even canonized). One can say that when we
try to elevate the ego at the level of the self, we become the shadow: the dark
content of the id possesses us, and we cannot longer identify it as separate
from ego. To summarize, when we wish to become divine, there are great
chances that we become devils. Nietzsche’s insight may be helpful here: “In
every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he
needs to diabolize the other part” (HAH 137).
Medardus’s attempt of theosis brings him closer to dissociation: the Brother
self-medicates tasting the forbidden elixir. The declaration of independence
of the monk from the religious constraints and interdictions is described by
Hoffmann in a way that prefigures Stevenson’s birth of Hyde10: “My veins
glowed and I was filled with a feeling of indescribable satisfaction. I drank
again, and there arose in me the desire for a new and glorious life” (DE 32).
Medardus’s second meeting with dissociation derives from the wish of being
worshipped and acknowledged as saint (and as inaccessible sublimated erotic
object). However, it is still reminiscent of the previous conflict between
asceticism and repressed sexuality: this is proven by the violent desire for
the stranger (who will be later identified as Aurelia) who confesses her love
to him.
Furthermore, religion and sexuality seem to form a relationship (and this
is a distinctive modern trait of the work) and consume each other. Like in
Cioran’s controversial Tears and Saints (1937), Medardus does not hesitate
to identify Aurelia with Saint Rosalia (the “profane” prototype of the saint in
the painting from the monastery was Venus herself). The identification with
the shadow and the elevation of the ego at the dimension of the self, the two
analytical psychological ideas, are combined in this projection of sexuality
(traditionally deemed as demonic) to a sacred background: this is at the origin
of the libidinal investment of the monk in the painting which depicts the mar-
tyrdom of Saint Rosalia. However, this is a profanation that greatly exceeds
the limits of the juvenile flirtation. Therefore, with the agreement of the Prior
Leonardus, Medardus decides to leave the convent.
I AND NOT-I
Medardus’s substitution with his “shadow brother” Victor, whom he

believed he accidentally murdered (and the adventures that come out from
The Second I 45
this substitution), makes up the plot of the novel. The conflict between
sexuality and devotion, which has intensely divided Medardus, is solved
through the identification with his double: through Victor, Medardus truly
experiences his sexuality.11 “Victor . . . represents everything [Medardus]
represses . . . For Medardus . . . Victor is the desirable ego: this is who he
wants to be!” (Hildenbrock 1986, 141; Bär 2005, 263). The monk is eroti-
cally initiated by Euphemia and tries to seduce Aurelia, his desirable object.
According to the intricate chronology from “The Parchment of the Old
Painter,” Medardus, Victor, Euphemia, and Aurelia (and also Hermogenes)
are step-siblings. All of them are marked by the “original” sin of the painter
Francesco, “the boldest sailor on the sea of vice” (DE 215), who saw, like
his great-grandson, Medardus, sexuality imprinted on the face of Saint
Rosalia.
Euphemia touches upon an essential problem of the novel, that is, identity
in the context of the will to power:
You must admit that I have always had an exceptional intellectual control over
my environment. This, I believe, is easier for a woman than a man, for it is
brought about by the union of that irresistible physical charm which nature can
confer on a woman and a higher spiritual principle which rules with complete
freedom. One of its aspects is the power to step outside oneself and view oneself
from without, and this then assumes the role of a servant of the superior will in
the task of achieving the highest goals in life. Is there anything greater than to
control life from within life itself, to dispose over all its manifestations, all its
rich delights with the recklessness permitted to a ruler? (DE 59)
This fragment contains at least three ideas. First, Euphemia adapts her
persona (a multitude of masks) at the required situation to fulfill her purposes
in a Machiavellian manner. Second, Hoffmann anticipates here the break-
ing of the psychic unity from Freudian psychoanalysis between ego, id, and
superego (or the Jungian version between persona, ego, shadow, etc.). Similar
to his contemporaries, Fichte and Schelling, the German novelist prefigures
the destruction of the ego and its conflict with the non-ego. What Euphemia
calls “the power to . . . view oneself from without” or the adaptation of the
ego to persona is a falsification of a deeper ego with the purpose of gaining
strategic advantages. Third, Euphemia and Medardus present contrasting
typologies, according to the fundamental opposition will to power—libido
(CW 7, §78). Euphemia would agree with Nietzsche, who argued that power
is more important than pleasure,12 or with Jung, who believed that the will to
power is “as mighty a daemon as Eros” (CW 7, §42). Euphemia is capable of
any sacrifice to exercise her authority: for her, the power is numinosum, the
“deeper element reverberating” (MDR 152) in her.
46 Chapter 3
It is more interesting that Euphemia, as a follower of absolute cynicism,

who initiates Medardus in the “charms of domination and psychological
domination” (Troubetzkoy 1996, 68), developing “power phantasms regard-
ing . . . the free domain of the sovereign spirit . . . is, ironically, a plain sexual
object for Medardus” (Forderer 1999, 63), whom she mistakes with Victor.
Therefore, according to Forderer, the caricature of the ideal of the absolute
sovereign leads to a skepticism regarding power, an aporia of domination:
the master might be the involuntary servant of one he takes for his servant,
“a marionette’s marionette.”
The duplicity between Medardus and Victor increases the ontological con-
fusion of the former. The conflict between the shadow and the ego is based
on the antithesis between eroticism and devotion:
I had become the sport of a cruel, mischievous fate and was now drifting help-
lessly in the sea of events which were breaking over me like raging waves, so
that I no longer knew where I was. It was evident that Victor had fallen into the
gorge by an accident brought about by my had, but not through my intention; I
have taken his place, I meditated, but Reinhold knows Father Medardus . . . , so
to him I really am what I am. But the affair that Victor is carrying on with the
Baroness is also my charge, for I am Victor as well. I am what I seem to be, yet
do not seem to be what I am; even to myself I am an insoluble riddle, for my
personality has been torn apart. (DE 54)
In the beginning of the fragment, the sea is understood as a psychological

analogy of the human being, or as a “mirror” of the soul, which hides the
“richness of [its] depths” (Baudelaire 2008, 33–35). The end of the quote
prefigures Golyadkin’s ambivalence between I and not-I: while Medardus
becomes megalomaniac, Dostoyevsky’s character can be diagnoses with a
kind of existential paranoia, which makes him doubt his own existence.13
That “I no longer knew where I was” indicates a state of confusion and
disorientation felt by Medardus because of his substitution with Victor. It
is not random that the barber Belcampo, one of the secondary characters of
the novel, later warns Medardus: “What is direction, reverend Capuchin?
. . . Direction presupposes a goal from which we take our bearings. Are you
certain of your goal, dear Brother?” (DE 204) As we shall see, the ending of
the novel suggests that only a desexualized libido (or a unio mystica of sub-
limated sexuality) constitutes an authentic “goal.”
The mysterious painter is also Medardus’s double. If Victor personifies
the shadow, the painter symbolizes the self; in Freudian terms, Victor is
the id liberated from the constraints of the moral consciousness, while the
painter, who makes his presence felt in the decisive moments of Medardus’s
life (when he is near to hubris or inflation), signifies the superego or the
The Second I 47
“voice of consciousness” (Hildenbrock 1986, 151). The arrival of the painter

when Medardus archetypically identifies with Saint Anthony has a touch of
that “sacred horror” encountered in the proximity of mysterium tremendum:
“His face was deathly pale, but as his great black eyes stared at me, a dagger
seemed to pierce my heart. . . . The whole figure had a horrible, frightening
air about it” (DE 28). The gaze of the painter pierces through the phenom-
enal cover of persona and that is the reason why he does not have to utter
a word, his mere presence indicating a great mistake or the unacknowledg-
ment of an inconvenient truth. “The painter rose, fixing with his half-dead,
half-living eyes. . . . He said nothing; he stood there still and lifeless, but his
ghostly stare made me shudder” (DE 90). The painter acts as “transgression
detector,” who feels that the overabundance of the demonic hides in itself
the possibility of salvation, because the dark flower of the sin grows near the
rose of liberation.
Coming back to Medardus’s relation to his projected shadow Victor,
the “destructive conflict” [Zwiespalt] (DE 120) of the first is understood
as an alienating death of the soul. Medardus feels “like a departed spirit
walking an earth in which all the affection he had once enjoyed had long
since perished” (DE 84): the gap between ego and self gives him a ghostly
impression, perceiving life like a version of death. Not unlike Dorian
Gray, Medardus could reflect: “It was the living death of his own soul that
troubled him” (DG 210). Because of his existential confusion and of his
dissociative state, the former monk cannot admit his facts and becomes
responsible. The melancholy of estrangement is not foreign to him: “But
that preacher was the monk Medardus, who now lies buried in a moun-
tain-gorge, so he cannot be I, for I am alive. . . . Such were my thoughts
whenever my dreams brought back to me the events in the palace, as
though they had befallen some other person; and this other person was the
Capuchin again, not I” (DE 84). Medardus’s encounter with the shadow
is reminiscent of Otto’s concept of mysterium horrendum, the horror of
facing the demonic:
The door opened and a dark figure entered whom I recognized to my horror
as my own self in Capuchin robes, with beard and tonsure. The figure came
nearer and nearer my bed; I lay motionless, and every sound I tried to utter was
stifled in the trance that gripped me. The figure sat down on my bed and leered
mockingly at me.
“You must come with me,” it said. “Let us climb on to the roof beneath the
weathercock. . . . Up there we will fight each other, and the one who pushes the
other over will become king and be able to drink blood.”
I felt the figure take hold of me and lift me up. With the strength of despera-
tion I screamed. “You are not me, you are the Devil!” (DE 97)
48 Chapter 3
First, we might note the physical and clothing similarity between Medardus
and Victor. The shadow really is the “other self”: a self we prefer to repress or
project, instead of accepting it. Second, we observe that Medardus is at first
unable to utter a single word: the paralysis of anxiety meets with the muteness
of the drives from Freudian psychoanalysis (Fiennes 2006). Victor captures
both Medardus’s image and sound. Third, Victor tells his “shadow brother”
that the one who wins the struggle of egos “will become king and will be able
to drink blood.” Like Stevenson’s Hyde, Victor wants to become an absolute
sovereign: to break free from the shackles of consciousness and rule in the
pure night of the id. Medardus replies: “You are not me, you are the Devil!”
(or “you are who you are,” similar to the demonic Iago). According to Emil
Lucka, the devil14 is mankind’s double: “Just like the moral consciousness
of the individual has created the terrible ghost of the double, the moral con-
sciousness of mankind has created the devil” (Lucka quoted in Hildenbrock
1986, 162). If ontology depends on the concept of a being identical with itself
(“I am what I am” (Exod. 3, 14)), meontology should investigate the “anti-
structure” and the “anti-being,” not only the minus of being.
The destruction of identity from Hoffmann’s novel might be understood as
criticism of the optimistic Enlightenment project regarding the autonomous
subject (Forderer 1999, 60). Moreover, one might argue that it prefigures the
disintegration of subjectivity from the end of the 19th century captured in
the works of authors such as Nietzsche, Wilde, or Rimbaud. It can also be
said that it anticipates the multiplicity of postmodern subjectivity. Preparing
the way for both Ernst Mach (1918, 19–20), for whom the subject is only “a
bundle of sensations,” and Stevenson, for whom the ego is a “mere polity
of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (JH 56), Hoffmann
remarks: “A gentle warmth spread through my body and I felt a strange tin-
gling in my veins. Feeling turned to thought, but my character seemed split
into a thousand parts; each part was independent and had its own conscious-
ness ” (DE 195).
An important character, a personification of the ironic spirit, who mediates
on the subjective destruction and on the liquid borders between reason and
madness, is the barber Schönfeld/ Belcampo. Not unlike the narrator from
Bonaventura’s Nightwatches (1804), Belcampo mocks Fichte’s solipsistic
philosophy of the absolute ego: “[T]he atmosphere here in the madhouse,
harmful to sane people, has had a beneficial effect on me. . . . If I only exist
by virtue of my own consciousness, then it is simply a matter of letting the
consciousness remove the harlequin’s dress from what is conscious, and I
shall be able to present myself as a respectable gentleman” (DE 201).
Folly becomes wisdom, like in Bonaventura’s work, the metaphor of the
impossible adaptation to a society for which normality means mediocrity,
The Second I 49
deceitfulness, and inner void. “Folly . . . appears on earth as the true Queen
of the Spirits” (DE 199), shows Belcampo, mining the boundaries between
normalcy and phantasy, between the useful lie and the hidden truth.15 Or,
according to Bonaventura: “And who finally decides whether we fools here
in the asylum are erring more masterfully, or faculty members in their lec-
ture halls? Whether perhaps error might even be truth, folly wisdom, death
life—exactly the opposite of how one at present takes it!” (Bonaventura
2014, 74)
THE POEM OF THE FIRE
The motif of the fire permeates Hoffmann’s novel so intensely that one could
say that his work is a long, repetitive, ambiguous, obsessive, and esoteric
poem of the fire. First, the fire is a metaphor for the repressed libido of the
main character.
the brand that the unknown woman had cast into my heart aroused sinful
desires (DE 36).
the flame of perdition consumed me more and more (DE 36).
a firebrand fell into my heart, kindling all the secret emotions (DE 56).
the burning power of my words should pierce Aurelia’s heart like shafts of
lightning (DE 64).
the ardour of reverence (DE 65).
a warm breeze was wafted towards me . . . fanning the flame of love and set-
ting my mind in a whirl (DE 70).
you embraced her with burning desire, and thought to rise above the pettiness
of earth in the flame of your fervent longing (DE 143).
my burning passion raged as never before. (DE 263)
For Medardus, similar to Schopenhauer or Coleridge, Eros is “the essence

of existence.” “All thoughts, all passions, all delights,/ . . . All are but min-
isters of Love,/ And feed his sacred flame,” writes Coleridge (1997, 375) in
his poem “Love” (1799). Moreover, fire contains a dual symbolism: biologic
and metaphysical. At Hoffmann, the former is included in the latter. For him,
the fire of libido receives an ontological meaning, reminiscent of Heraclitus’s
cosmological definition: “That which always was, and is, and will be everliv-
ing fire, the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replen-
ishes in measure as it burns away” (Heraclitus 2003, 37). For Medardus, this
world is the “everliving fire” of libido. Second, the satanic fire is another
strong metaphor of sexuality:
50 Chapter 3
My veins glowed (DE 32).

Often there was a strange glow in her eyes from which sudden flashes of light
darted out when she thought she was unobserved—a destructive fire slowly
growing until it forced its way out (DE 49–50).
Then Satan appeared to me in a cloud, promising that if I would turn from
heaven and serve only him, he would release me. Sobbing, I felt on my
knees and cried: “I serve no God. You alone are my master, and from your
burning coals of fire shine the joys of life!” (DE 105).
As the choir sang the words “confutatis maledictis flammis acribus addictis”
[the damned and accused are convicted to the flames of hell] in the solemn
requiem, I felt myself tremble (DE 269).
My weakness has fled, but there was a burning pain against my breast, coarse
bristles plucked at my eyes, and Satan screeched with delight: “Now you
are mine alone!” (DE 209)
the flames of hell had already begun to consume his soul (DE 220).
The association between fire and the demonic is well documented in

the biblical tradition: the “unquenchable fire” (Mk. 9, 43); “the furnace of
fire” (Mt. 13, 50); “I am in agony in this flame” (Lk. 16, 24); and so on.
We are also reminded here of Blake’s description: “Once I saw a Devil
in a flame of fire . . . I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these
ten commandments” (Blake 2002, 175). Hoffmann, anticipating Flaubert,
Huysmans, and Hesse, links sexuality to its traditional protector, the devil.16
Moreover, the German author seems to prefigure the dark atmosphere of
certain gothic metal or black metal songs, such as Forever Burning Flame or
The Serpent’s Chalice: “Souls are flames that are forever burning” (Tiamat
1992); “Black flames from the deeps aspire,/ As in the chambers of my
hearts desire,/ I limn thy brilliant potency in fire” (Watain 2007). The pre-
sentation of the demonic as fire indicates an aspect about its uncontrollable
and unquenchable essence: just like the id, the black fire can be repressed
to the background of the consciousness but cannot be put out. Its extinction
leads to an exorcism that would deplete all the vital resources and a medio-
cre demonism—a demonism that avoids excess—is self-contradictory. “It
is better to burn out than to fade away,” Kurt Cobain wrote in his suicide
note (quoted in Edelstein 2013, 119), referencing Neil Young. Or: “I would
rather die of fire than of void” (Cioran 1996, 89). From the devilish aspect
of fire, we move on to its sacred hypostasis, which shows that fire is truly a
daimonic notion:
In prayer the fire of devotion burns with greater intensity (DE 64).
Again and again I read Aurelia’s letter. The spirit of heaven seemed to shine
forth from it, lighting up the sinful darkness in my soul (DE 190).
The Second I 51
She had kindled the eternal love that now glowed in me (DE 269).
“It is not the fire that has conquered, for there is no conflict between light and
fire. Fire is the Word, which transfigures the sinful.” These words seemed
to come from the rose itself (DE 245).
“The fire of devotion” contrasts with the dark flame of the sin. The libido is
desexualized in a mystic manner. The last quote, containing Rosicrucian reso-
nances, refers to a no longer punishing, but liberating fire. The rose reminds
us of Saint Rosalia and Aurelia’s martyrdom, which break “the mysterious
bonds” of sin (DE 265). Keeping in mind Baudelaire’s diagnosis of the dual
human condition, one can say that we are shaped by the struggle between the
black and rosy flame.17 One cannot say which will prevail: either the flame
of the heart will extinguish the libidinal investments or the circularity of our
desires will imprison us in chambers of our own echoes. Nevertheless, our
world is, however we look at it, an “everliving fire.”
The ending of the Elixirs is peculiar with its decisive “no” said to
instinct and immanence: the lovers and step-siblings Medardus and Aurelia
choose devotion over Eros. Aurelia wanted to take the vows before being
murdered, Medardus returns to the monastery. From Hoffmann’s perspec-
tive, love cannot be fulfilled in the world: the will to death is stronger
even than Eros. Medardus and Aurelia are “united in that love which rules
above the stars and has nothing in common with earthly love” (DE 266).
The desexualized libido is analogous with mortification, and Hoffmann is
aware, like Schopenhauer and Wagner, that the absolute of love can only
be equaled by the absolute of death18: on this side of love—platitude and
bourgeois debilitation; on the other side of love—death’s wing. Death
is “the hollowed feast of love” (DE 143), notes Hoffmann, anticipating
Isolde’s Liebestod.
NOTES
1. See Jean Paul’s letter to Jacobi from 22.12.1799: “Take a mirror of infinite
proportions and another—but given infinite separability two finite ones will do—each
repeats the gallery of the other, this one repeats itself and the repeating mechanism of
the rep., this one of the r. of the r. of the r.—in short an infinity of infinities” (quoted
in Webber 1996, 31–32).
2. “My father had been led by Satan to commit a heinous crime” (DE 7).
3. “The diamond crucifix she wore on her breast had so hurt my neck when she
clasped me to her, that the place was red and bruised” (DE 10).
4. “But they think that I am cold and I jeer and make dreadful jests. And now
they look at me and laugh: and as they laugh they even hate me. There is ice in their
laughter” (TSZ, prologue, 5). Franz is seen as an imposter (a disciple of the real under
52 Chapter 3
the guise of the ideal), Zarathustra—as a jester. For the crowd the Nietzschean hero
addresses, the Übermensch is nothing but a “chimera” (Cioran 1976, 85).
5. “There was no mistaking the fact that Freud was emotionally involved in
his sexual theory to an extraordinary degree. When he spoke of it, his tone became
urgent, almost anxious, and all signs of his normally critical and skeptical manner
vanished. A strange, deeply moved expression came over his face, the cause of which
I was at a loss to understand. I had a strong intuition that for him sexuality was a sort
of numinosum” (MDR 150).
6. “There is a sinister spirit behind your sermons” (DE 26–7).
7. “The demon of deceit has entered you” (DE 34).
8. The grandiose delusion may be explained in also a Freudian manner:
“According to our analytic view the megalomania is the direct result of a magnifica-
tion of the ego due to the drawing in of the libidinal object-cathexes—a secondary
narcissism which is a return of the original early infantile one” (Freud 1963, 424).
9. See Nicoll (1950, 22): “A man will then be tempted to say: ‘I am God,’ and not
‘God is I.’ If he says: ‘I am God,’ he identifies himself with God from a lower level.
This annihilates him. If he says: ‘God is I,’ he surrenders his self—will and makes the
will of God ‘I’ in him and so is under, and must obey, God—that is, a higher level.”
10. See JH 57: “There was something strange in my sensations, something inde-
scribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter,
happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disor-
dered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of
obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.”
11. Through Victor, Medardus experiences his own criminality, as well.
12. “Not for pleasure does man strive: but for power” (quoted in Kaufmann
1964, 262).
13. See chapter 6.
14. See Kofman (1991, 119). See also Lucka (1916, 131): “The double essentially
is the devil. Judas is the traitor of the divine, the devilish in man, that rebels against
Christ.”
15. See Euphemia’s characterization of Hermogenes: “It is a peculiar thing about
madmen that, as if in closer contact with a mysterious force, they often pierce our hid-
den thoughts and express them in strange ways, so that the dreadful voice of a second
self sends an unearthly shudder through us” (DE 61).
16. “Mephistopheles: If I had not reserved myself the fire,/ I should have nothing
on my own” (Goethe 1962, 163).
17. “And the fire and the rose are one” (Eliot 1963, 209).
18. Novalis writes in one of his Last Fragments (1799–1800): “Death is the
Romanticizing principle of our life. Death is minus, life is plus. Life is strengthened
through death” (Novalis 1997, 154).
Chapter 4
The North Pole of Being

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
ROMANTIC DISCONNECTEDNESS
The theme of solitude, of “isolism” (Sade), of the exceptional romantic sub-

ject (separated from the Heideggerian existential In-der-Welt-Sein) is cardi-
nal in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Among others, Coleridge, Byron, and
Poe develop this topic in their poems. The following quote from Coleridge’s
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) is one of Mary Shelley’s favorite
fragments and she had it copied in her journal. “Alone, alone, all, all alone,/
Alone on the wide wide Sea!/” (Coleridge 1970, 32).
These stanzas give the feeling of a fundamental ontic isolation, a subject
familiar to the author of The Last Man. The sea is seen as a vast prison or an
existential desert where the subject is separated from the inherent structures of
intersubjectivity, becoming a split personality. “It was the will of Providence
that I should pursue my pilgrimage alone,” Coleridge wrote. This issue is
further mirrored in Mary Shelley’s journal: “Loneliness1 has been the curse
of my life” (quoted in Lau 2009, 81). Byron gives an interesting account of
isolism in Manfred (1817): “From my youth upwards/ My spirit walk’d not
with the souls of men,/ Nor look’d upon the earth with human eyes” (Byron
2008, 290). If Coleridge’s text is an expression of the romantic melancholy,2
akin to what is nowadays diagnosed as clinical depression (Radden 2000,
vii–xi), Byron’s tone is rather manic, suggesting the state of mind of a hero,
who is not only different from the human species but also superior to it.
If we agree with the Adlerian thesis which states that a certain feeling of
inferiority derives from a just evaluation of reality and our incapacity to control
it (Adler 2009, 43–44), Manfred’s inflation (not unlike Zarathustra’s) takes us
into a sort of psychopathological territory. The pattern of likeness (Gen. 1, 27)
does not work for Manfred, who considers himself to be radically different.
53
54 Chapter 4
“The thirst of their ambition was not mine,/ The aim of their existence was
not mine” (Byron 2008, 290). Manfred veers into the transcendent category
of the not-man,3 toward the North Pole of being, a zone also cherished by
Frankenstein’s monster: “I shall quit your vessel on the ice-raft which brought
me thither, and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe” (F 214).
Moreover, Manfred claims that “my joys—my griefs—my passions—my
powers,/ Made me a stranger” (Byron 2008, 290–291). The Byronian hero
understands himself as a romantic version of the Gnostic “stranger,” a term
that anticipates the existential nihilism of Camus’s character, Meursault.
Therefore, the concept of nihilism seems useful for the description of not
only Manfred and Cain but also Frankenstein’s monster. A nihilist will direct
abhorrence against human beings (which, from a psychological perspective,
leads to self-destruction) and against God (which sets nihilism “on fire”
and distinguishes it from the neutrality of atheism4). In Frankenstein, the
unnamed creature synthesizes these principles in an almost Lautréamontian
fashion: “[F]rom that moment I declared everlasting war against the species,
and, more than all, against him who had formed me, and sent me forth to this
insupportable misery” (F 131). From Manfred to Edgar Allan Poe’s lyrical
subject from the poem “Alone” (1829), there is only a slight step: “From
childhood’s hour . . . I could not bring/ My passions from a common spring/”
(Edgar Allan Poe 1984, 60). Furthermore, Lermontov’s character from A
Hero of Our Time (1840), Pechorin, possesses the same Byronic nihilistic
substance: “I have a restless fancy, an insatiable heart; whatever I get is not
enough; I become used as easily to sorrow as to delight, and my life becomes
more empty day by day” (Lermontov 1988, 41).
The romantic feeling of distinction presupposes a spiritual transgression
of mankind. Both Poe’s and Byron’s heroes (and also the ones imagined by
Ugo Foscolo and Théophile Gautier5) consider themselves to be human only
from a biological perspective. The metaphor of the “systemic anomaly” from
The Matrix Reloaded6 sets them apart in a category of their own from a socio-
logical vantage point. Nihilists such as Manfred or Poe’s daimonic hero will
either kill themselves or descend into madness (Diaconu 1996, 159), because
the world pushes them toward a spiritual North Pole. Romantic heroes refuse
both the “likeness” of mankind and the face of God. Their rebellion alternates
between demonism (“many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of
my condition” (F 125)) and nihilism, a deeper conception than demonism,7
because it rejects both the “prime mover” and the “adversary,” taking us
beyond God and devil, that is, a new territory of human subjectivity: “Lucifer:
He who bows not to him has bowed to me.// Cain: But I will bend to neither”
(Byron 2008, 893).
In Frankenstein, there is an analogy between Victor’s “deep, dark, death-
like solitude” (F 86), combining melancholy and mourning in an almost
The North Pole of Being 55
Freudian fashion and the monster’s feeling of radical isolation8: “I had never
yet seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse with me. . . .
I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me” (F 117, 139). This
touch of isolism makes it clear that, without alterity and the “world” (without
Mit-Sein and In-der-Welt-Sein in Heideggerian terms), there can be no sense
of selfhood. The subject will experience dissociation, because a human being
cannot survive without inner alterity (we are originally open toward the
other). But when this human being is rejected and sentenced to the desert of
the Orwellian “minority of one,” he will turn to psychopathology:
I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity: but am I not alone,
miserably alone? . . . When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I can-
not believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with
sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness.
But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that
enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.
(F 96, 213)
This sense of deep loneliness can be viewed as a metaphor of psychosis,

as Vardoulakis (2010, 16–18) argues, analyzing the works of Jean Paul and
Goethe. If the subject can no longer relate to his or her neighbor, a feeling of
ontic disconnectedness arises. “I see nothing before me, and nothing behind
me . . . nothing but the endless night of loneliness in which I find myself,”
writes a character from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795–1796). “I, totally
alone, nowhere a pulse-beat, no life; nothing around me and without me
nothing other than nothing,” (quoted in Vardoulakis 2010, 13–18) Jean Paul
observes. The analogy between insanity and loneliness can be inferred from
the double meaning of the word “alienation”: both estrangement and mental
illness.
The theme of solitude is protuberant in Cioran’s work, especially in his
early Romanian writings, On the Heights of Despair (1934) and The Twilight
of Thoughts (1940). There are at least three levels of E. M. Cioran’s discus-
sion of “solitude.” First, there is the sense of “isolism” already experienced
in our treatment of the theme in Coleridge and M. Shelley. “Solitude doesn’t
teach you that you are alone, it shows that you are the only one” (Cioran
1991a, 7). In other words, the ontic separateness of loneliness singularizes
the subjects and cuts him or her off from humankind. “I renounce my human-
ity even though I may find myself alone” (Cioran 1996, 43), notes the then
23-year-old philosopher. A sense of Byronian pride makes its presence felt
here. Like Manfred, Cioran’s auctorial subject has a distinct cyclothymic
feature. He also writes of “disjunction from the world” (Cioran 1996, 109)
and of individuation as a result of an “orgy of solitude” (Cioran 1991a, 109).
56 Chapter 4
Up to a point, solitude is necessary for our individual growth, but, taken to

the extreme, this singularization removes us from the world and becomes
symptomatic of neurosis and/or psychosis.
This leads to the second theme mentioned by Goethe and Jean Paul: soli-
tude understood as “the proper milieu of madness” (Cioran 1996, 36). The
solipsistic feeling of being “alone in the world,” of being “disjointed” from
the In-der-Welt-Sein, transforms one into a sort of monster, a being without
contemporaries, removed from society. If such a being indeed exists, the
expression “Myself am Hell” (Milton 2005, 107) would be a fitting portrayal.
Although separation from the world is problematic (painful, but achiev-
able, as many ascetics have proven), more dilemmatic is separation from
one’s self, from one’s inner alterity and one’s inner structures of subjectivity.
This kind of disconnectedness is also experienced by Maupassant’s diarist
from the short horror story “The Horla,” who fails to see himself in the mir-
ror, suggesting that self-reflection disappears when self-consciousness breaks
down9 (H 299). However, Cioran’s solitude, reaching the boiling point of
insane “disjunction,” only finds comfort in the solitude of a God in whom he
does not believe. “Separated from neighbors through the insular faith of the
heart, you cling to God, hoping that the seas of madness wouldn’t flow over
your solitude” (Cioran 1991a, 188). Third, Cioran associates loneliness with
a sort of “living death,” which is the logical result of the abandonment of the
world and mankind. This feeling of not being alive is certainly discouraging
for a post-Nietzschean anti-Platonist who no longer believes in the possibility
of a second life. Cioran’s libido is removed from the world, suggesting that
he lived through a Schreberian “personal apocalypse,”10 where life “as we
know it” has ended. If life is death, and death is nothingness, the prospects
of existential nihilism are grim: “We are so lonely in life that we must ask
ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence”
(Cioran 1996, 6).
“THE LOOKING-GLASS OF THE SHREW”

AND THE SORROWS OF HATE
There are three versions of the theme of hatred in Shelley and Cioran.
Hating the Other

Frankenstein’s creature’s hatred of alterity derives from his inability to
adjust to human society because of his hideous shape. Here, we can make
two observations. First, as we know, hate is the result of a repressed love:
love and hate are twin concepts.11 “I was benevolent; my soul glowed with
love and humanity” (F 96), writes Frankenstein’s creature. Moreover, the

other “greets” my hate with his hate: hate is more contagious than kindness,
because the latter can be faked, while the shadow of hate is unequivocal.
The meeting between hate and hate can be satisfying for a species which
cannot communicate otherwise. “A raving hyena, I anticipated making
myself hateful to every creature, forcing them to league together against
me, crushing them or being crushed by them” (Cioran 2013, 124), writes the
Romanian philosopher. Cioran echoes here Lautréamont’s fearless dictum
from Maldoror (1869) “I alone against mankind” (Lautréamont 1978, 148).
Moreover, it is certain that nihilists can also experience a sort of rebellious
jouissance in declaring war against the whole world. However, hating the
other can also have a strategic value. Just like a predator, “the enemy” lures
the victim into a trap, hoping to destroy him completely. Like Lady Macbeth,
she develops a deceptive persona, disguising herself while she prepares the
critical strike. Hatred feeds from hatred (a phenomenon described by Jungian
therapists as the reciprocal projection of shadows) at all levels (either inter- or
transpersonal).
Hating Myself
Insight makes us accept the fact that hating the other is a form of self-hatred.
Instead of dehumanizing the other and projecting our shadow onto him, we
should admit to our own inferiority. Moving on from the psychoanalytical
interpretation of hatred, we must understand that there is a pure and infer-
nal version of self-hatred, consubstantial with nihilism: “You hate me; but
your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself” (F 214), the
monster from Frankenstein claims in a pre-Cioranian fashion. From a logical
perspective, if hatred is the prelude to murder, self-hatred can only “create”
suicide or madness (Diaconu 1996, 159). Moreover, if hatred of others is a
transformation of self-hatred, then any murder is in fact a suicide—through
which the murderer excludes himself from humanity. In its essence, hate is
dissociative, even more than solitude: the incapacity to acknowledge the oth-
ers joins with the incapacity to take responsibility for myself. The passion of
hate can only be ambivalent, a term identified by E. Bleuler in the constitution
of schizophrenia.
Baudelaire (2008, 157) speaks of an inner split, of the un-identifica-
tion with one’s self (“I am . . . the prisoner, the torturer”) in his poem
“L’Héautontimorouménos” (1857). Referring to a “false accord” in the “holy
symphony,” the French poet writes about the ones who exclude themselves
from humanity, who are unable to countersign the declaration of human
rights. Such a declaration should be conceived for nihilist not-men. The
problem of posthumanity is very timely, but it is mostly ill-conceived in
58 Chapter 4
technological and biological terms (we will all be cyborgs with certain digital
improvements), or ideological and political ones (we no longer accept the
humanist tradition which must be amended after Auschwitz and Dachau12).
However, I would like to touch on the psychological nuance of misan-
thropic antihumanism. What do we become when, just like Baudelaire’s lyri-
cal subject, we see ourselves as “false accord,” “a looking-glass of the shrew”
or “cheek and slap”? How does one categorize a schizophrenic beyond
schizophrenia, a symbolic dissociative subject who refuses the harmony and
security of humanity? Mostly the un-identification with the “looking-glass of
the shrew” signals the self-awareness of the demonic, reminiscent of Iago’s
parody of Genesis’s demiurge: “I am not what I am” (Shakespeare 1992, 5). It
speaks of a shattered glass, a portal to (inner) hell and a metaphor of the split-
ting of the identity. Baudelaire’s subject can no longer identify with himself:
for him, not only the world but also an essential aspect of himself is dead.
If we move the problem of antihumanism from psychology to philosophy,
we reach the shores of nihilism, an indefensible philosophical movement,
avoided by most authors because of its hopelessness and morbid agenda (with
the notable exceptions of Stirner, Nietzsche, Cioran, and Baudrillard). What
Cioran says of Nietzsche (“His diagnosis of nihilism is irrefutable: because
he himself is a nihilist” (Cioran 1999, 37)) can certainly be applied to him,
as well. The nihilistic not-man, the type of post-Nietzschean-Cioranian sub-
ject, makes his presence felt in pop culture. Detective Rust Cohle (brilliantly
portrayed by Matthew McConaughey) from Nic Pizzolatto’s television series
True Detective is certainly a not-man.
I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became

too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are
creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under
the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling,
programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact
everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny
our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last
midnight—brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal. (Pizzolatto 2014)
From “consciousness as destiny” [Bewusstsein als Verhängnis], Cioran’s

thesis derived from Alfred Seidel, which shows the toxic and potentially
hazardous trait of self-awareness, to the Freudian distinction between
nature and culture, from the Buddhist idea of the inexistence of the self
to the Heideggerian treatment of das Man als Niemand, we are led to
the Schopenhauerian tableau of the voluntary self-destruction of species.
Swinburne, in “The Garden of Proserpine” (1866), Byron, in “Darkness”
(1816), and other poets, such as Lautréamont and Eminescu, have explored
this collective explosion of the death instinct.13 The description of the per-
sonal apocalypse, the illustration of the feeling that the world extinguishes
itself in the lyrical subject, is provided by Leopardi in his poem “The Setting
of the Moon” (1837). The last stanzas of the poem are said to be composed
on his death bed14: “She remains a widow all the way./ And the Gods deter-
mined that the night/ which hides our other times ends in the grave.” In his
“Song of the Great Wild Rooster” (1824) from Operette Morali, the Italian
poet imagines “the death of all things” as well.
The time will come when this universe and nature herself will be no more.
And just as of very great human kingdoms and empires and of their marvelous
exploits, which were so very famous in other ages, there remains no sign of
fame whatsoever; so too of the entire world, and of the infinite vicissitudes and
calamities of all created things, no single trace will remain; but a naked silence
and a most profound quiet will fill the immensity of space. Thus, this stupen-
dous and frightening mystery of universal existence, before it can be declared
or understood, will vanish and be lost. (Leopardi 1982, 379)
Combing back to purely nihilistic self-hatred, this contradictory and acute

feeling can be found in the declarations of M. Shelley’s self-destructive mon-
ster and also in many Cioranian fragments:
I am inebriated by hate and by myself (Cioran 1991a, 207).

I love my own self-hatred . . . (Cioran 1991b, 108).
I hate myself: I am absolutely a man (Cioran 2013, 192).
Hating God
In a similar manner to the Frankensteinian monster, who is a descendant of
Milton’s Lucifer, Cioran proves himself to be an heir of Manfred, Cain, and
Maldoror,15 a group of characters who all constellate a father complex.
How do we move from self-hatred to hatred against the divine? First, we
can blame divinity for a “traumatic birth,” to use Otto Rank’s expression
in a different context. Because we have not created ourselves, we cannot
be held responsible for our projection into existence. Nihilists have always
appreciated the wisdom of Silenus,16 for whom nonexistence is preferable
to existence (BT 23). Therefore, the shock of moving from nothingness
to being (in more straightforward terms, from non-being to the suffer-
ance of existence) cannot be left unpunished. If the well-known Sartrian
formulations emphasize either the responsible freedom or the preeminence
of choice, those who have been transported into this world, to experience
illness, pain, lack, estrangement, and final extinction, did not choose to be
60 Chapter 4
born, therefore transferring the responsibility for their “adventure” onto

their maker(s).
It’s that the world is basically a forced labor camp from which the workers—
perfectly innocent—are led forth by lottery, a few each day, to be executed. I
don’t think that this is just the way I see it. I think it’s the way it is. Are there
alternate views? Of course. Will any of them withstand scrutiny? No. (Jones
2011)
Nothing attracts our lively attention so irresistibly as someone in mortal dan-
ger: nothing is more terrible than an execution. The boundless attachment to life
that appears here cannot have come from cognition and deliberation: to these,
it rather seems foolish; since the objective value of life is very certain, and it
remains doubtful whether life is to be preferred to non-being; in fact if experi-
ence and deliberation had their say, non-being would certainly be the victor. If
we were to knock on gravestones and ask the dead whether they would like to
rise again they would shake their heads. (Schopenhauer 2018, 482)
From a logical point of view, the passing from nonexistence to being is

akin to the move from “zero” to “minus.” If the world were a forced labor
camp, then, according to Nietzsche, Cioran, or Camus, it would be our duty
to rebel against our guardian. This familiar theory of spiritual disobedience
derives from the father complex, transforming nihilism into a preliminary
step of anarchism.17 However, the new aspect of this struggle between nihil-
ist and God is that the traditional transcendent divinity “greets” the nihilist
with his own hate, “communicating” with the human subject. This totally
interpersonal war is described by Cioran: “Solitude of hatred . . . sensation of
a god turned toward destruction, treading the spheres Underfoot, slobbering
on the blue of heaven and its constellations . . . of a frenzied, filthy, unhealthy
god; the demiurge ejecting, through space, paradise, and latrines; cosmogony
of delirium tremens; convulsive apotheosis in which gall consummates the
elements” (Cioran 2012, 128–129).
The nihilist not-man is a version of the human being who could benefit
from the transcendent capital of the Nietzschean Übermensch. However, the
not-man is a sort of a shadow of the Übermensch. When one contemplates
through the lenses of Nietzscheanism, he could almost be perceived as a sub-
man. The not-man is no child of the demiurge from Genesis and he fails to
recognize himself in the pattern of likeness. Consequently, the not-man may
identify himself with the statement of the knight d’Albert from Théophile
Gautier’s novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835): “[T]he world in which
I live is not my own, and I understand nothing of the society around me.
Christ did not come for me. . . . I have never been to gather the passion-
flowers on Golgotha” (Gautier 1981, 186). If the declaration of freedom for
the Übermensch is “God is dead,” the not-man arduously declares: “Man is

dead.” If the not-man is somewhat akin to the Übermensch and to Camus’s
“rebel” [l’homme revolté], this is only a recoil of two millennia of Christianity:
the shadow of God (GS 109) cannot fade away quietly. Moreover, the Big
Crunch of the death of God is only a recent event.
A Dasein with Cioran’s soul and Nietzsche’s mind, with Baudelaire’s
expressivity and Lautréamont’s “innocent perversion,” at the same time an
aristocrat and an “underground” man, a poet in epileptic tremor, a gnostic priest
like Philip K. Dick, an active member of Project Mayhem, a cannibal aesthete
like Hannibal, a schizo teenager like Donnie Darko, a decadent poet who can no
longer see “eternity in a daffodil” like Caliban from Penny Dreadful, a hacker
of the psyche like Mr. Robot—these are some versions of the nihilist not-man.
NOTES
1. See Cioran (1991b, 108): “Being categorically alone.” See also Fitzgerald
(1995, 262): “Being alone in body and spirit begets loneliness, and loneliness begets
more loneliness.”
2. The distinction between melancholy and depression can be compared to the
one between and anxiety and fear: melancholy looms behind depression (just as anxi-
ety is a super-fear, a fear of fear). Furthermore, depression is caused by a concrete
loss, melancholy refers to an ontological loss: I have lost myself; I have lost the feel-
ing of my being. See Kristeva (1992, 5): “My depression points to my not knowing
how to lose—I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for the loss? It
follows that any loss entails the loss of my being—and of Being itself. The depressed
person is a radical, sullen atheist.” Julia Kristeva (1992, 4) also describes depression
as the death of the soul:
“A life that is unlivable, heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair,
scorching at times, then wan and empty. In short, a devitalized existence that, although
occasionally fired by the effort I make to prolong it, is ready at any moment for a plunge
into death. An avenging death or a liberating death, it is henceforth the inner threshold of
my despondency, the impossible meaning of a life whose burden constantly seems unbear-
able, save for those moments when I pull myself together and face up the disaster. I live
a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverized, my rhythm slowed down or
interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow.”
Cioran argues that depression isolates and differentiates us from the “flux of being”:
“Only in the depressive states is the man able to consciously differentiate himself from the
world, because in those states the growing distance between the man and world . . . leads
to the acuteness of the phenomenon of awareness” (Cioran 1991c, 124–125).
3. For the first contemporary discussion of this term, see Bolea (2015b, 33–44).
For the origin of this notion, see Cioran (1996, 68–69).
62 Chapter 4
4. For the essential difference between nihilism and atheism, see Diaconu (1996,
40): “[Nihilism] can be defined through the category of despair, and [atheism]
through that of doubt. . . . The atheist is not necessarily a nihilist, because for him,
although there is no God, the world doesn’t lose its value, while nihilism is an atheism
which extends from the stage of the intellect into the entire subjectivity.”
5. See Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1802): “I haven’t been able to
know myself or to recognize myself as others see me. I don’t think anyone will ever
be able to recognize himself as I see him” (Foscolo 1970, 90). See also Gautier’s
Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835): “I have never been able to persuade myself that
men were really my fellow creatures. When someone calls me sir, or they talk about
me and say ‘that man,’ it seems very singular to me” (1981, 100).
6. “The otherwise contradictory systemic anomaly, that if left unchecked might
threaten the system itself” (Wachowski et. Wachowski 2003).
7. The connections between demonism and nihilism have not been yet thor-
oughly researched. From a philosophical point of view, both doctrines have a com-
mon feature: their inherent misotheism, a tradition emphasized in modern times by
Goethe’s “Prometheus” (1774), Byron’s Cain (1821) or Mihai Eminescu’s “Memento
mori” (1872). From a theological perspective, nihilism has a strong demonic feature
deriving from its substantial attack of the notion of God. From a logical point view,
nihilism is demonism + “x,” where “x” rejects the devil as well, not only God. The
affirmation of nihilism is post-Nietzschean: “God is dead, I am God,” a perspective
shared by many nihilists such as Lautréamont, Mihai Eminescu, and the young Emil
Cioran.
8. Frankenstein’s isolation can be seen as a consequence of his monstrosity. See
also Caliban’s reflections from Penny Dreadful (Logan 2014): “For the monster is
not in my face, but in my soul. I once thought that if I was like other men I would be
happy, and loved. The malignance has grown you see, from the outside in, and this
shattered visage merely reflects the abomination that is my heart. Oh, my creator, why
did you not make me of steel and stone? Why did you allow me to feel? I would rather
be the corpse I was than the man I am.”
9. See chapter 8.
10. See Freud (1958, 70): “The patient has withdrawn from the people in his envi-
ronment and from the external world generally the libidinal cathexis which he has
hitherto directed on to them. Thus everything has become indifferent and irrelevant
to him. . . . The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe; his
subjective world has come to an end since his withdrawal of his love from it.”
11. See Baudelaire (1975b, 16): “Indeed, hatred is a precious liquor, a poison
dearer than that of the Borgias,—for it is made with our blood, our health, our sleep
and two thirds of our love!” See also Gautier (1981, 176): “Every great hatred serves
as a counterweight to a great love; and whom could I hate, since I love nothing?”
12. A certain type of human subject has been destroyed at Auschwitz and Dachau.
Humanism must be redefined after the murderous exclusion of its alterity. There can
be no “we” after the dissociation between “I” and “other” and the destruction of the
“other.” See Drucker (2009, 34), 61: “If the totalitarian ‘we’ is intact in the wake of
Auschwitz, the ‘we’ of community and solidarity is forever ruptured. . . . ‘[A]fter
Auschwitz,’ there is no basis to assert that humanity is one or that ‘the human condi-
tion’ is a truly universal experience. . . . Auschwitz calls this faith in Man into ques-
tion. To be sure, Levi uses reason as a tool of resistance against Nazism’s attempt to
reduce him to an unthinking ‘non-man.’” See also Adorno 1973, 362–363: “Perennial
suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it
may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.
But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can
go on living.”
13. See appendix 1.
14. Leopardi’s last stanzas may be compared to Lenau’s last but one poem written
before his mental breakdown. See his “It’s All in Vain!” [Eitel nichts!] (1844): “It’s
all in vain, wherever my eyes turn!/ Life is an unspeakable wandering,/ An empty
chase from here to nothing,/ And in the end our powers won’t return//” (Lenau 1970,
510–511). The same morbid feeling is identifiable in one of Eminescu’s poems,
“Linden Flower” (1882), written one year before his mental collapse: “Flowers
of tomb/ In secret evenings/ Wuthering wings/ I give to my doom” (Eminescu
2015, 417).
15. Cain and Malodror are the proponents of an “absolute misotheism”: “Their
expression of God-hatred can be dark and tormented. . . . [A]bsolute misotheists are
not to be confused with atheists, since they still maintain a degree of religiosity and
channel feelings of a religious nature into their attacks of God. . . . Absolute misothe-
ists only want to trample God and eliminate him altogether from the world. The best
way to achieve this is by bringing him down to the human level and then by destroy-
ing God with the arsenals of literature” (Schweizer 2011, 18–19). For other examples
of misotheism, see Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night (1874): “The vilest thing
must be less vile than Thou/ From whom it had its being, God and Lord!” See also
Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon (1865): “The supreme evil, God./ Yea, with thine
hate, O God, thou hast covered us.” Also Swinburne’s often quoted line from the
“Hymn to Proserpine”: “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown
grey from thy breath” (quoted in Schweizer 2011, 85–90).
16. See TI, “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” 36: “We cannot help having been
born: but we can make up for this mistake (because sometimes it is mistake). When
you do away with yourself you are doing the most admirable thing there is: it almost
makes you deserve to live.” See also the negation of life from Villiers de L’Isle-
Adam’s drama Axël (1890): “Living? No.—Our existence is full,—and the cup over-
flows.—What kind of hourglass will count the hours of this night? The future? . . .
Already exhausted . . . Living? Our servants will do that for us” (Villiers de L’Isle
Adam 1959, 671).
17. For the distinction between nihilism and anarchism, see Bolea (2015a, 66):
“[T]he principle of anarchism asserted the call to arms against a superior opponent (or
the creation of a war machine that must harass the hegemonic power). . . . We could
probably say that through anarchism nihilism becomes pre-anti-nihilism, nihilism
becoming a propaedeutics for its own destruction.”
Chapter 5
The Supershadow
E. A. Poe’s William Wilson (1839)
I AM (NOT) WILLIAM WILSON
In Poe’s “William Wilson” the struggle takes place between the id and the
superego (in Freudian terms) or between the shadow and the ego (in Jungian
terms). As many commentators have observed (Coskren 1975, 155; Hubbs
1983, 75; Moores 2006, 36), this short story stages a conflict between wills,
symbolized through the clash between William Wilson 1 and William
Wilson 2. Starting from William Chamberlayne’s epigraph from the poem
“Pharonnida” (1659), Poe opens a path for the draconic attack of the super-
ego, which is, along with the shadow, the real hero of the story: “What say of
it? what say of conscience grim,/ That spectre in my path?” (WW 426). From
childhood, the voice of Poe’s character “was a household law” (WW 427).
William managed to manipulate his parents, making his own rules, which
means one of two things: either Wilson becomes an anarchic id, transgress-
ing parental authority (or, from a Jungian perspective, his shadow “becomes
part of consciousness, as he [William] is given license to express traits that
for most people are kept locked in the dark recesses of the psyche” (Moores
2006, 36)) or, more plausibly, the hero introjects his superego, creating his
own “repressive system.”
Commenting on his early “school-life” spent in “a large, rambling,
Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England” (WW 427–8),
the narrator notes that “the house . . . was old and irregular” and that “there
was really no end to its windings—to its incomprehensible subdivisions.”
Moreover, “our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not
very far different from those with which we pondered upon infinity” (WW
428–30). According to many authors, the house is a symbol of the human
psyche,1 while its labyrinthine nature can be understood as an analogy2 for
65
66 Chapter 5
William Wilson’s ambiguous and conflicted personality. Another analogon

of the hero is the school principal, the Reverend Bransby, whose heteroclite
nature anticipates the conflict between William Wilson and his double. It
seems that the narrator cannot “comprehend how two contrary personalities
can function harmoniously within one human being” (Hubbs 1983, 73).
William Wilson 1 encounters a schoolmate with the exact same name, who
is exactly his age and dresses exactly like him: in short, he has the same phys-
ical and psychological traits. This William Wilson 2 is not at all impressed
by the “ardor, the enthusiasm, and the imperiousness” of William Wilson
1’s disposition (WW 431), or by his “ascendancy” over most of the school-
boys. William Wilson 1 fears that the potential equality between him and his
double can be read as the hidden superiority of William Wilson 2. The second
William Wilson resists and defies the narrator, imitating him perfectly: the
only thing that differentiates him is “a weakness in the faucial or guttural
organs, which precluded him from raising his voice at any time above a very
low whisper”3 (WW 433).
The episode where William Wilson 1 enters the room of the sleeping
William Wilson 2 can be considered the first climax of the story:
I looked;—and a numbness, an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame.

My breast heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with
an objectless yet intolerable horror. Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in
still nearer proximity to the face. Were these,—these the lineaments of William
Wilson? . . . The same name! the same contour of person! the same day of
arrival at the academy! And then his dogged and meaningless imitation of my
gait, my voice, my habits, and my manner! Was it, in truth, within the bounds
of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result, merely, of the habitual
practice of this sarcastic imitation? Awe-stricken, and with a creeping shudder,
I extinguished the lamp, passed silently from the chamber, and left, at once, the
halls of that old academy, never to enter them again. (WW 437)
William Wilson sees himself through the other. The meeting between them
fails because the main character is unable to recognize the other, unable to
accept him. Just like Rimbaud, William Wilson 1 repeats a mantra: “I am not
William Wilson 2,” “I am the radical alterity which cannot be reconstructed
through the language of identity.” Individuation programs us to distinguish
ourselves from the other, even when the other embodies an aspect that belongs
to us. The feelings of numbness and iciness which prefigure the horror of
recognition (“if this is me, then who am I?”), along with the violation of the
principles of identity and noncontradiction, anticipate the behavioral strange-
ness of Dostoyevsky’s character, Golyadkin.4 William Wilson 1 refuses to be
William Wilson 2: the cleavage is ontological before being psychological.
The Supershadow 67
Imagine that you see your double in your place, one of the “favorite” hal-
lucinations of “The Horla”’s author,5 as well as its narrator. One suspects
that one of your first feelings may be one of inferiority: doubting your own
existence can make you feel ontologically insecure (Laing 1990, 39–43). “Is
this really my double or am I the double, the copy of my copy, the shadow
of my shadow?” In Borges’s words: “Not to be a man, to be the projection
of another man's dream, what a feeling of humiliation, of vertigo!” (quoted
in Bate 1998, 30). William Wilson 1 experiences derealization6 (in both the
literal and the figurative meanings of this word: loss of reason and loss of
the sense of phenomenal reality) and feels that his conception of identity is
fragile and shaky, that he may be swallowed by the ground like Cowper’s
Abiram from his poem “Lines Written During A Period of Insanity” (1773).
Poe’s narrator’s reaction is one of denial and flight, abandoning the infinite
boarding school, which now can be seen as a threatening place both for his
identity and for his being.
However, just like a demon, William Wilson 2 remains attached to William
Wilson 1, because in our desperation we change our surroundings instead of
acting upon our attitudes (Seneca 2000, 48). There are two other significant
episodes where the repressive Wilson 2 intervenes in ways similar to those in
the Heideggerian Ruf des Gewissens:
In this low and small room there hung no lamp; and now no light at all was
admitted, save that of the exceedingly feeble dawn. . . . As I put my foot over
the threshold, I became aware of the figure of a youth about my own height. . . .
Upon my entering, he strode hurriedly up to me, and, seizing me by the arm
with a gesture of petulant impatience, whispered the words “William Wilson!”
in my ear. (WW 439)
The wide, heavy folding doors of the apartment were all at once thrown open,
to their full extent, with a vigorous and rushing impetuosity that extinguished,
as if by magic, every candle in the room. Their light, in dying, enabled us just
to perceive that a stranger had entered. . . . “Gentlemen,” he said, in a low,
distinct, and never-to-be-forgotten whisper which thrilled to the very marrow of
my bones. (WW 442–3)
It is highly relevant that in the first three confrontations with the double,
while the superego harasses the id (or the ego collides with the shadow),
struggling to shed some rationalistic light upon the hero, light progressively
diminishes, anticipating the eventual darkness resulting from merging with
an exceptionally dense shadow. From the “bright rays” which fell “vividly
upon the sleeper” (WW 437) and the light “of the exceedingly feeble dawn”
(WW 439), we move on to “a vigorous and rushing impetuosity that extin-
guished . . . every candle in the room” (WW 442), so that we can barely
68 Chapter 5
perceive William Wilson 2’s figure (Gargano 1963, 179). This dying of the
light signifies one of two things: (1) the supergo is, like the Hegelian ratio-
nalization of the reality, a black light, a fake source of enlightenment, and
consequently the attempts at control and supervision of the superego rather
“darken” the existential subject, blocking their capacity for transformation,
or (2) the superego collapses into the dark night of the id, and the light of
consciousness is swallowed by the obscurity of the unconscious. One com-
mentator claims that the latter version is more plausible. Wilson 1 becomes
more irrational, witnessing the disintegration of his personality, while the
analytical tone of the narrative gives way to emotional climaxes (Stauffer
1965, 328–329).
The end of the short story, when William Wilson 1 eventually kills his
antagonist at the masquerade ball at the palace of the Duke Di Broglio,
signals the hero’s last crisis of consciousness or rather the final triumph of
irrationalism. The murder/suicide “destroys any hope” of Wilson 1’s abil-
ity “to attain psychic harmony” (Hubbs 1983, 78): he is devastated “by
a neurosis in which he will never again experience the joy of syzygies,
the pleasurable tension of opposites and polarities that fuels the psyche”
(Moores 2006, 38). William Wilson is cut off from his existential nucleus,
living the existence of a dead soul (Girgus 1976, 303–304). The death of
William Wilson 2 is the mirrored suicide of William Wilson 1: we have the
double destruction of the phenomenal and noumenal being (“dead to the
world,” and dead “to Heaven” (WW 448)). First, Wilson dies as a sentient
being, losing the charm of this world. In other circumstances, he could
be saved as a spiritual being, through askesis and meditation. However,
second, he is also dead to heaven: he is denied both the inebriation of
the senses and the rectitude of the spirit. Furthermore, he is also dead
“to Hope.” One remembers here Wilde’s stanzas from The Ballad of
Reading Gaol (1897): “Something was dead in each of us,/ And what
was dead was Hope” (Wilde 1994, 146). Some might argue, rather opti-
mistically, that “losing all hope was freedom” (Palahniuk 2006, 22).
However, an existence without hope cannot be mistaken for the kind of
lucid despair needed in order to accept “the tragic sense of life.” In this
context, the death of hope signifies a “war with myself,” a sort of per-
sonal inferno where the subject cannot longer accept his inner alterity.
Wholeness, the Jungian version of existential authenticity, is no longer
possible for Poe’s hero. The Jungian definition of neurosis is a fitting
emblem for Wilson’s condition: “Neurosis is an inner cleavage—the state
of being at war with oneself. . . . What drives people to war with them-
selves is the suspicion or the knowledge that they consist of two persons
in opposition to one another. . . . A neurosis is a splitting of personality”
(CW 11, §522).
The Supershadow 69
THE SHADOW OF THE SHADOW
According to Ruth Sullivan, the moralistic William Wilson 2 is the narra-

tor of the story (not the hedonistic William Wilson 1), a fact which can be
proved by the harsh tone of the narrative, through the pious incrimination,
which can be the symptom of a reverse narcissism (Moore 1994, 71–72).
“By the device of misleading the reader into believing that the sinful”
William Wilson 1 “is the narrator, Poe . . . permits a tyrannical superego
to run rampant” (Sullivan 1976, 255–256). Using the same line of reason-
ing and recalling the meaning of Poe’s title “A Dream Within a Dream”7
(1849), Nancy Berkowitz Bate suggests a fascinating hypothesis, allowing
us to imagine that “the universe itself is a dream or a fiction.” The researcher
argues that William Wilson 1, the main character of the story, is only a hal-
lucination, a nightmare imagined by William Wilson 2. The phantasmatic
behavior of William Wilson 1 violates the Cartesian cogito ergo sum:
William Wilson 1 thinks but is not. Moreover, “disturbed by the actions
of his dream persona,” William Wilson 2 “attempts to censor or shape”
William Wilson 1’s “behavior—to have only good dreams, not nightmares”
(Bate 1998, 27–31).
According to Moores, both William Wilson 1 and William Wilson 2 are
mere shadows (rather than only Wilson 2, the “whisperer,” as earlier com-
mentators argued). William Wilson 2 “has not been killed off but exists in
a repressed, subterranean psychic world. . . . Yet, a close reading reveals
that” William Wilson 1, “despite his first-person status in the narrative, may
also be the repressed other of a sleeping” William Wilson 2 (Moores 2006,
32–34).
Starting from the hints of these three researchers (Sullivan, Bate, and
Moores), who propose a paranoid interpretation of the story (meaning that
the main character, the so-called William Wilson 1, is moved into the back-
ground, as an id dominated by the superego or as a hallucination in William
Wilson 2’s dream), and also following D. J. Moores’s analysis (which argues
that both Wilson 1 and Wilson 2 are reciprocal shadows), I advance another
hermeneutical hypothesis. In my opinion, Wilson 2 is the Jungian shadow of
the main character, his enigmatic double, who makes Wilson 1 feel anxious
and submissive. The progressively diminishing light from the aforementioned
first meetings with the double (from the “bright rays,” and the “feeble dawn,”
to the darkened room where all the candles where extinguished), marks the
collapse of the consciousness into the dark ocean of the id. It also indicates
both the death of the inner sun and the Nervalian resurrection of the black sun
of nihilism from his posthumous novella Aurélia (1855), which may be seen
as a cataclysmic counterpart to Novalis’s “nocturnal sun” from the Hymns to
the Night (1800):
70 Chapter 5
I thought I saw a black sun in the deserted sky and a globe of red blood above the
Tuileries. I said to myself: “The eternal night is beginning, and it is going to be ter-
rible. What will happen when men realize there is no more sun?” (Nerval 1996, 49)
Praise the world queen, the higher messenger of a holy word, a nurse of blessed
love—she sends you—tender, beloved—Night’s lovely sun [liebliche Sonne der
Nacht],—now, I wake—for I’m yours and mine—you called the Night to life
for me. (Novalis 1988, 13)
There is also a Sol niger, a black sun, which coincides with the nigredo and
putrefactio, the state of death. (CW 14, §113)
Because William Wilson 1 refuses to accept his shadow, and fails to

acknowledge his inner devil, “the little light”8 of consciousness (MDR 88)
risks being annihilated by the darkness of the id. Thus far, my interpretation
coincides with the standard Jungian reading. However, from my perspective,
William Wilson 1 can be designated as a supershadow or the shadow of the
shadow.9 My reading goes further than that of Moores, who explained the
story through the reciprocity of shadows, but follows the same paranoid line
of reasoning: William Wilson 1, the main character, is the copy of the original
shadow, a derivative shadow of the repressed whisperer. According to Jung,
the shadow is closely related to the body (CW 16, §134; CW 16, §145; etc.).
Therefore, the body of the shadow of the shadow is the original shadow,
that is, William Wilson 2. The inversion of William Wilson 2—the shadow/
William Wilson 1—or the shadow of the shadow is supported by the presence
of the mirror from the final scene, which disrupts the relation between the
copy and the original (see also Bate 1998, 31).
What is the novelty of my hermeneutical hypothesis, compared to
Moores’s similar reading? The Jungian shadow also has a luminous aspect:
“But the shadow is . . . not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive
qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence” (CW
11, §134). The postmodern shadow of the shadow presupposes a duplication
and hijacking of demonism. A reflection can shed some light on this ques-
tion: the servant of the devil (the shadow of the shadow) is sometimes more
satanic than his master (the shadow). If only Hitler (the shadow) (CW 10,
§455) is guilty, might his “banal” assistants, such as Eichmann (the shadow
of the shadow), be excused?
The liaison between the shadow and the shadow of the shadow can be
observed in Dostoyevsky’s novels. Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov are
Luciferic characters (shadows), hiding many inner suns. Pyotr Stepanovich
Verkhovensky, Stavrogin’s admirer, and Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov,
Ivan’s “ape,” are shadows of the shadows, deprived of the romantic stature of
the first two. The shadow might support salvation; the shadow of the shadow
The Supershadow 71
has no place for itself, not even in hell. Lucifer, the devil (diábolos comes
from diabállein = to divide) (Fabre 1992, 241–242), the prototype of absolute
evil, the classical archetype of the shadow represses his brilliant and angelic
nature: he is split and schizoid, like Wilson 1. Not evil but duality is the fun-
damental trait of the devil. Just as God has a negative aspect (his left hand),
Lucifer has a propensity toward freedom, autonomy, and refusal to accept
dictatorial authority (his right hand).
If the shadow possesses this Luciferic depth and height, the shadow of the
shadow is completely deprived of nobility, and rectitude, having a somewhat
animalic quality, reminding us of Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde10 or of the not-man
described by Osamu Dazai.11 This secondary shadow also encompasses a
diabolic trait; one that is combined with contingency, infamy, and abjection.
The shadow of the shadow is the slime left after the filtering out of brilliant
Luciferianism. If Othello is the shadow, the shadow of the shadow is Iago;
Macbeth is the shadow and Lady Macbeth the shadow of the shadow. K.’s
murderers at the end of Kafka’s The Trial correspond to the combination of
demonism and abomination which symbolizes the presence of the shadow
of the shadow. The painful endings of works such as 1984 or Animal Farm
contain the same satanic horizontality. In Orwell’s dystopias (and also in
Dostoyevsky’s The Double), the individual is completely crushed by the sys-
tem. Resistance seems a form of blindness, an illusion created by the system to
further humiliate the potential rebel. Kafka and Orwell warn us of the existence
of a hell-in-itself, which can no longer refer to the idea of heaven; an inferno
where the death of hope presupposes the permanent acceptance of terror.
Far from being only a pun, the shadow of the shadow is a fitting concept for
the romantic and post-romantic literature, especially for the situation where
an evil character (who is also grand, and could, under different circumstances,
be a positive character) is served and doubled by a mean negative character,
who feeds from the demonic rectitude of the original shadow, hijacking his
greatness toward an obscure horizontality. William Wilson 1 has repressed
the “golden” aspect of the shadowy nature of William Wilson 2, combining
demonism with platitude. If the shadow finds a proper hell for itself, one must
invent a tenth circle for the shadow of the shadow.
NOTES
1. See Chevalier, Gheerbrant (1990, 604), Halliburton (1973, 300), Cooper

(1974, 131).
2. See Braga (1999, 148–149): “The labyrinthine structure of the school is a
reflection of William Wilson’s malady: he has lost his way through the alleys of his
unconscious.”
72 Chapter 5
3. Wilson 2’s vocal defect might suggest that the superego is some kind of dark
ventriloquist who takes pleasure in shaming the id.
4. See chapter 6.
5. See chapter 8.
6. “When we discern the unreality of everything, we ourselves become unreal”
(Cioran 1976, 95).
7. See Poe’s conclusion of “A Dream Within a Dream”: “Is all that we see or
seem/ But a dream within a dream?” (Poe 1984, 97). See also Poe’s dedication of
Eureka (1848): “To the few who love me and whom I love—to those who feel rather
than to those who think—to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the
only realities” (Ibid., 1259).
8. See also JWL 219: “To keep the light alive in the darkness, that’s the point,
and only there your candle makes sense.”
9. From a logical point of view, through its double negation the shadow of the
shadow would cancel itself, becoming a lack of shadow, the minimal shadow of
the saints and the enlightened ones. But just as the logical principles of identity and
noncontradiction are suspended when one discovers a psychological contradiction
inside the human being (“I am not myself,” “I am not what I am,” “I am and am not
me”), one cannot make the case for the logical positivity of the double negation. On
the contrary, the darkness grows denser: if the shadow contains a lucent potentiality,
the shadow of the shadow is an anarchetype of negativity in itself, deprived of any
connection with positivity.
10. See chapter 7.
11. “That effigy suggests nothing so much as a human body to which a horse’s
head has been attached” (Dazai 1973, 16–17).
Chapter 6
I against I
Dostoyevsky’s Double (1846)
EXISTENTIAL PARANOIA
Paranoia can be described as an altered form of solipsism. There are at least

two versions of paranoia: either one discovers that he or she is the only real
Dasein in a world where everybody else is a simulation or one becomes aware
of the fact that he or she is a simulation in a real world. The first version was
explored by Philip K. Dick in his brilliant novel Time Out of Joint (1959).
Movies like James Mangold’s Identity (2003) and M. Night Shyamalan’s
Sixth Sense (1999) present the second situation. We choose to reflect on the
first version because both views share a perverse symmetry in depriving the
Dasein of his world.
Paranoia, etymologically defined as “alternate awareness” [para-nous],
is capable of transforming the Weltanschauung through the remodeling of
perception. If the experience of taking drugs can be seen as oriented through
the unconditional “pursuit of pleasure” to revealing the world as heaven,
paranoia can only be understood as an absolute intensification of pure pain,
revealing the world as hell. If anxiety cuts one off from das Man’s perimeter,
paranoia, seen as a lesson in “underground reality,” is a Harrowing of Hell.
Through its extreme isolation, paranoia separates the Dasein from its In-der-
Welt-Sein, removing the self from world. Not only that he is being excluded
from this world; moreover, the Dasein becomes, in R. D. Laing’s terms, a
“divided Self,” one suffering from an internal split. Losing the In-der-Welt-
Sein and the Mit-Sein, not unlike the monks from the desert, who are still
linked to their abandoned world through the wires of resentment and nostal-
gia, Dasein loses himself.
“The world doesn’t exist anymore; it is only the I that still exists. The
world revolves around this divine I. Neither this I doesn’t exist anymore.”
73
74 Chapter 6
This inner division between ego and the self was well documented by Mihai
Eminescu (1964, 76) in his aforementioned poem “Melancholy” (1876)1:
“When I look back on living, the past seems to unfold/ As though it were a
story by foreign lips retold.” Paranoia brings along the separation between
individual and world (“I am the anti-representation of the world”) and the
inner dissociation (“I am not myself; I am the Other to myself”). The terri-
tory discovered in the heart of the world, in the womb of Sein, is the mental
experimentation of hell. The etymology clearly shows that paranoia is a
form of being aware of reality. I believe that it is a form of comprehending
the dark essence of existence, the subliminal revelation of the immanence
of hell. If the anxiety of death helps us overcome the everyday inauthentic-
ity, paranoia allows us to exit the world and ourselves. After breaking his
internal unity, paranoia transforms the Dasein into a shadowy figure who
has lost both his world and his sense of self. It can be argued that the two
principles constituting paranoia are Iago’s declaration “I am not what I am”
(Shakespeare 1992, 5) and Lucifer’s statement “Myself am Hell” (Milton
2005, 106).
Technically speaking, paranoia is based on the perception of the falseness
of the world: the paranoid subject feels that everything is fake, “directed” or
“arranged,” and that there is not a single trace of authenticity or of spontane-
ity in his psychotic universe. A movie like Peter Weir’s The Truman Show
(1998), where a bogus world is built around the main character played by
Jim Carrey, shows the ultimate ambiguity of falseness: “Is my perception
false or is the world itself a fake?” That is the (paranoid) question.2 And
how can I know the difference? The feeling that the world isn’t real, that
everything else is a simulation, the sickening bitter taste of falseness can only
be disproved—and treated—with the notion of contingency, which reveals
the unnecessary character of our existence. The ratio between paranoia and
contingency is equivalent to that between meaning (“everything has meaning
and it’s all about me”) and meaninglessness (“accidental coincidences can
only emphasize the worldly feeling of alienation and indifference”). More
exactly, the neutrality of contingency relativizes the notions of meaning and
non-meaning, while inversely, paranoia’s method renders the category of
meaning absolute.
If “Myself am Hell” (Milton 2005, 106), then my selfhood is hell, which
means that its properties are the conflict between essence and appearance and
the contrast between “me” and “myself.” Therefore, “I am not myself” means
that I cannot find myself in me, I run away from myself, I don’t know who I
am. Furthermore, I am afraid of myself and I probably hate myself. My non-
ego is my shadow, which grows as I diminish. Let us take a closer a look at
the opening scene from The Double, which is a reply to Gogol’s “The Nose”
(1836)3:
I against I 75
It was a little before eight o’ clock in the morning when Titular Counsellor
Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin awoke after a long sleep, yawned, stretched and
finally opened his eyes wide. However, for about two minutes he lay motion-
less on his bed like a man not yet entirely certain if he has woken up or is still
asleep. . . . Once out of bed he immediately ran over to a small round mirror that
stood on the chest of drawers. Although the sleepy, weak-sighted countenance
and somewhat balding head reflected there were so insignificant as to command
no attention at first glance, its owner was obviously perfectly satisfied with all
he saw in the mirror. “A fine thing it would be,” said Mr Golyadkin under his
breath, “a fine thing it would be if there were something not quite right with me
today—if, for example, some kind of unwanted pimple had popped out up, or
something else just as unpleasant.” (D 3–4)
For an educated public, Iakov Petrovich’s gesture of looking in the mirror

to find new pimples is a reference to the psychoanalytical loss of the nose,
or, more exactly, to the anxiety of a possible loss. What is the significance
of this opening mirror scene? A touch of anxiety, the premonition of duality,
or an expression of ambivalence? In my opinion, all these three themes are
related to the (super)theme of identity. The mirror signifies self-awareness in
an unmediated and unmetaphysical form. To paraphrase Alexandru Dragomir
(2005, 15–17), the mirror assures me that “I am eye to eye with myself.” This
is why, in psychotic states, when “I am no longer me,” when I am dissociated
or split, the mirror4 becomes magic, a portal to past reality, when I was me:
In Turin, at the beginning of his madness, Nietzsche would rush to his mirror,5
look at himself, turn away, look again. In the train that was taking him to Basel,
the one thing he always asked for was a mirror. He no longer knew who he was,
kept looking for himself, and this man, so eager to protect his identity, so thirsty
for himself, had no instrument at hand but the clumsiest, the most lamentable of
expedients. (Cioran 1976, 210)
FROM “IT’S NOT ME” TO THE

DESTRUCTION OF THE PERSONA
One of the first sequences of the Dostoyevskyan novella The Double (1846)
treats the crucial theme of identity. Meeting the head of the office during a
carriage ride, Golyadkin hesitates to assume his identity and salute his supe-
rior (his failure to identify himself will later prove to be an ontological failure
to recognize himself):
“Should I bow or not? Should I respond or not? Should I acknowledge it’s me or
not? . . . Or should I pretend it’s not me, but someone else remarkably like me,
76 Chapter 6
and look as if nothing were the matter? Really, it’s not me, it’s not me at all—
and that’s the end of it!” exclaimed Mr Golyadkin, doffing his hat to Andrey
Filippovich and without taking his eyes of him. “I’m . . . I’m all right,” he barely
managed to whisper, “I’m all right, quite all right, it’s not me at all, not me at
all, Andrey Filippovich—oh no! And that’s all there is to it.” (D 8)
“It’s not me” reminds us of Iago’s aforementioned self-characterization

of his imposed split between appearance and essence or between persona
and shadow. The demonic Iago parodies the supreme creator who revealed
Himself in Exodus (3, 14): “I am that I am.” The ones that are what they
are solve the problem of the contrast between essence and appearance, inte-
grating their essence into the appearance, simultaneously being their own
manifestation and their own revealed obscurity. This is the ideal case of the
divinity, the case of an I who won’t ever be not-I. But “if I am not what I
am,” I cannot keep at bay “the inferno of the existence,” which will always
manifest itself through ambivalence and duplicity. I cannot claim that “hell is
other people” (Sartre 1989, 45) (if that were the case my own selfhood would
be a soteriological reservoir), my founding myth will be “Myself am Hell.”
My selfhood is the inferno: the split between “me” and “me.” Therefore “it’s
not me” means that I don’t find myself inside myself, that I run from myself,
that, simply put, I don’t know who I am. Moreover, I am afraid of myself
and I probably hate myself. My not-I will be the shadow who grows as I’m
diminishing.
Moving on, Dostoyevsky’s novel contains an intriguing description of
the future Jungian concept of the persona6. After Jung, “the persona . . . is a
compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear
to be” (CW 7, §246) or “the individual’s system of adaptation to, or the man-
ner he assumes in dealing with, the world” (CW 9/I, §221). Yakov Petrovich
Goliadkin, the main character, attacks the category of the persona (defined
as the “mask of the soul” (Jacobi 1971, 1–10)), claiming that his sincerity is
absolute: “I don’t like double-talk, I abhor slander and gossip, I’ve no time
for wretched duplicity. Only when I go to masquerades do I wear a mask,
but I don’t parade one in front of people every day” (D 14). Goliadkin’s self-
confessed persona is a total lack of persona. His incapacity to distinguish
between ego and persona shows us his unconscious indifferentiation, a symp-
tom of the future psychosis. According to Nietzsche, a sense of allegiance to
the mask is necessary: “Everyone profound loves masks” [Alles, was tief ist,
liebt die Maske] (BGE 40). Without mask there is no guardian at the gates
of our empire. Without mask the shadow transgresses both ego and persona,
gaining more control. If we are the owners of a treasure—and we all are, even
if we do not know it—, we should guard it and keep it safe. Moreover, the
energy from the depths must be filtered and processed; otherwise, in its pure
I against I 77
state, it is infernal and can harm us. From a later conversation with Anton
Antonovich Setochkin, we find out more about Goliadkin’s attack against the
principle of the mask:
All I meant, Anton Antonovich, was that I keep to the straight and narrow, that I
despise deviousness, that I’m not for intrigues. . . . I’m talking of myself, Anton
Antonovich, I’m talking of myself, for example: when I say that I wear a mask,
it’s only when I need to; that is, only for carnivals or festive gatherings, speak-
ing literally. But I don’t wear one every day in front of people, speaking in a
different and more cryptic sense. That’s all I wanted to say. (D 74–5)
Golyadkin expresses himself in a disguised manner, building an authentic

philosophy of the mask, a true personology. The fact that the Dostoyevskian
hero puts on his mask only for “masked balls” is not a virtue, as he wished,
it is a symptom of this aforementioned indifferentiation between conscious-
ness and unconsciousness. He wants to project honesty while he displays
division: I am not who I am (I am not ego or persona, I will be the shadow).
One could infer that life is either a “carnival” (where persona, the interface
between individual and society, is the sole ruler: my persona touches the per-
sona of the other, to simplify the intersubjective dialogue), or an “inferno”
(where the shadow, the not-I and the inner split are the only masters). From
the beginning, Goliadkin’s existence stays under the sign of the shadow.
Dostoyevsky’s hero conceives himself sincere in an insincere world, suffer-
ing from the romantic Hyperion complex,7 which manifests itself through
separation, differentiation, and isolation. In the overestimation of his sincerity
(the absence of a mask), Golyadkin paves the way of his future psychosis.
Unfortunately, “people with a deficient persona . . . have no shield against
the projections of others and are in constant danger of falling back into the
original state of participation mystique with their environment” (Hannah
2000, 76).
THE CONSTITUTION OF THE DOUBLE
After being kicked out from Klara Olsufyevna’s birthday party, the
Dostoyevskian hero continues his descensus ad inferos:
Every clock tower in St. Petersburg that showed and told the hour was striking
exactly midnight when Mr Golyadkin, beside himself, ran on to the Fontanka
Embankment . . . seeking refuge from his enemies, from persecution, from the
insults that had rained down on him, from the shrieks of frightened old ladies,
from the sobbing and sighing of women—and from Andrey Filippovich’s
78 Chapter 6
murderous glances. Mr Golyadkin was crushed, absolutely crushed, in the full

sense of the word (e.m.) . . . . Mr Golyadkin now looked like a man wanting to
hide, wanting to run away from himself (e.m.). . . . Let us say more: now Mr
Golyadkin not only wanted to escape from himself, but even hide from himself,
to be utterly annihilated, to exist no more and to turn to dust. . . . He was so
perplexed that several times, despite all that was surrounding him, he would
suddenly stop short and stand stock-still in the middle of the pavement. . . . At
those moments he would die, he would vanish (e.m.). . . . Mr Golyadkin plumbed
such depths of despair, was so tormented, harassed, exhausted, so bereft of any
spark of fortitude, so disheartened, that he had forgotten everything. . . . But
what did it matter? Really he couldn't have cared less. (D 41–3)
Golyadkin was “crushed” like a Kafkian bug, for which society has noth-
ing but contempt and loathing. He experiences a sort of spiritual death that
can be understood in two ways. First, the character experiences with exis-
tential a confusing crisis of identity: the hero wants to hide and run from
himself. Nevertheless, we can temporarily hide but we can never perma-
nently escape from ourselves. “You sought the heaviest burden:/ there you
found yourself ” [Du suchtest die schwerste Last:/ da fandest du dich], wrote
Nietzsche (P 204) in his “dithyramb” “Between Birds of Prey” (1888). These
stanzas remind us of Goethe’s poem “Daemon” from Primal Words. Orphic
(1817–1818): “You must be/ None but yourself, from self you cannot flee8”
[So mußt du sein, dir kannst du nicht entfliehen] (Goethe 1994, 230–231).
The selfhood is, I have argued, either heaven or hell, but it also possesses an
unalienable quality: it cannot be transgressed. The ego can hide from its own
self—through denial, repression, resistance, projection, through “alteriza-
tion”—but it cannot detach/break from itself.
Second, without death, understood as an alias for “transformation,” there
would be no mobility and dynamism. The myth of the Phoenix9 shows us
that life starts after the “first death.” This esoteric metaphor has valid psycho-
logical connotations, despite being biologically counterintuitive. The death of
Golyadkin 1 is a requirement for his resurrection as Golyadkin 2: the persona
and the ego must give way to the shadow. From death we move on to indif-
ference [adiaphoría] (“he couldn't have cared less”), a concept constitutive
for the Nietzschean definition of nihilism. The suffering, disappointment,
and despair have consumed him so hard that Dostoyevsky’s hero is emptied,
annihilated, brought closely to its nothingness. Nihilism, not unlike depres-
sion, can be defined as death of the soul, as metaphorical death in life or as
death before death. Nihilism can be understood as mortification and agony,
as Kierkegaard (1980b, 18) does, when he defines the “sickness unto death”
as “this tormenting contradiction, this sickness of the self, perpetually to be
dying, to die and yet not die, to die death. For to die signifies that it is all
I against I 79
over, but to die death means to experience dying, and if this is experienced
for one single moment, one thereby experiences it forever.” Physical death
abolishes pain, moving us from one distance to another, being transcendent to
existence. However, the death of the soul, the nihilistic affective emptying, is
the “death of death” and corresponds to the Kierkegaardian experience of the
“dying of death.” It brings us close to an inferno of immanence, of damnation
“here and now.” One could argue that Golyadkin lives a similar crisis situa-
tion, a Japserian limit-situation, in which a certain personality is annihilated
to make room for another, in which the ego becomes non-ego.
Mr Golyadkin . . . saw a passer-by walking towards him, most likely someone

delayed for some reason himself. It was all of little consequence, it would seem,
a chance encounter. But for some mysterious reason Mr Golyadkin became
alarmed, afraid even, and he felt somewhat at a loss. . . . Now Mr Golyadkin
could clearly make out his new, belated companion—made him out completely
and he shrieked with horror and bewilderment; his legs gave way. . . . And in
fact he had very good reason to feel so distressed. The fact was, this stranger
now seemed somehow familiar. That in itself wouldn’t have mattered. But he
recognized him—he almost completely recognized that man now. (D 44–6)
In his crisis of affective emptying and self-annihilation, Iakov Petrovich

notices a passer-by coming from the opposite direction. His reaction should
not be dramatic, because every meeting is somewhat arbitrary: nevertheless,
he becomes anxious. Existential anxiety is an indication of nothingness (or
more exactly, a signal of the presence of non-being inside being—this is
precisely why anxiety is a meontological affect); moreover, anxiety is mostly
anticipative, concerning the future. Golyadkin is anxious because he intuits
the essence of his situation: he meets during bad weather (the blizzard is an
expression of his sentimental storm that has consumed him until there was
almost nothing left) on the Fontanka Embankment with his double. Not only
that, he meets him twice. The anxiety intensifies and his intuition transforms
into (re)cognition. His casual look hides his inner terror resulting from the
troubling and paralyzing experience of autoscopy.
Dostoyevsky’s hero is “on the brink of the abyss,” a philosophical situation
analyzed by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre among others. “His situation
at that moment was that like that of a man on the brink of a terrifying preci-
pice, when the ground is giving way beneath him. . . . The abyss is drawing
him on and finally he himself leaps into it, thus hastening his own demise” (D
47). The abyss is the metaphor of the negative infinity, the metaphor of non-
being, which is always close to us, but we avoid acknowledging it, because
a life permanently aware of the impending death would be a nightmare. The
abyss is always at hand, and when we really see it we are tempted to join it.
80 Chapter 6
According to Nietzsche, “and when you stare for a long time into an abyss,
the abyss stares back into you” (BGE 146). The German philosopher refers
to a personality transfer between the existential subject and nonexistence:
the human being and the abyss “communicate” because nothingness exists
in both being and non-being. “He whose eye happens to look down into the
yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as
much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down”
(Kierkegaard 1980a, 61). Furthermore, according to Sartre (1978, 29), the
“vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the preci-
pice, but of throwing myself over.” I am not afraid of falling, I am afraid that
something inside me shall decide my annihilation. The difference between
the fall and the jump is colossal: if I threw myself over, I would no longer be
innocent. The precipice is alluring for the eye, because the abyss and the spirit
have a similar (meontic) nature.
When Golyadkin meets his double, one could say that there is confronta-
tion between identity and alterity, a collision between the I and the not-I. This
mysterious meeting violates Pauli’s exclusion principle which states that two
identical objects cannot simultaneously occupy the same spatial position.
In this case fiction overpowers the laws of physics; moreover, the novella
moves toward a paranoid metaphysics, where the positional simultaneity of
the I and the Double radically expresses the breaking down of the identity
principle. Golyadkin is and is not himself at the same time, destroying the
logical laws of noncontradiction and identity. The following formula applies
to his case: a = [a(a = a) ^ (a = Øa)]. In a Sartrian manner one can define this
type of subject as alternating between facticity and transcendence or between
freedom and contingency. One can redefine this situation in a Jungian way:
the center of my ego coincides with the center of my self, but my ego hesi-
tates between shadow and persona.
After meeting with his Doppelgänger, Golyadkin even begins to doubt
his own existence (D 54). The primacy of the enmity and falseness in the
confrontation with his not-I brings us to the paranoid feeling of being and
to our definition of paranoia conceived as a radical alteration of solipsism. If
the classical solipsism can be understood as the impossibility of proving the
existence of others, the paranoid solipsism seems to even doubt the existence
of the thinking subject. In other words: Am I a hallucination in a god’s mind?
(“If you are the dreamer, then I am the dream” [Wenn du der Träumer bist,
bin ich dein Traum], wrote Rilke (2001, 23) in The First Book of the Monkish
Life (1899)) or a software programmed by an almighty conscience. “Does
the world exist? Or is it only in my vision?” asks himself Mihai Eminescu
(2002, 17) in his poem “Dream” (1876). One can argue that the paranoid
often sees himself as a ghost, who will be sent back to nothingness once
the dreamer wakes up and pushes the start button of self-awareness. It is a
I against I 81
troubling feeling to ponder one’s own inexistence and something far apart of
everyday normalcy [das Man], when one possesses a common sense of the
reality, which spontaneously discriminates between “real” and “imaginary.”
This feeling could be the start of an alternate consciousness, of a systemic
anomaly [para-nous]. One can notice that describing Goliadkin’s night-
mare, the Russian novelist anticipates a scene from The Matrix Reloaded,
when, attempting to finish off Neo (Keanu Reeves), the agent Smith (Hugo
Weaving) clones himself and multiplies ad infinitum.
But with every stride, with every thud of his foot on the granite pavement, there
would spring up, as if from under ground, a completely identical Mr Golyadkin,
utterly similar in depravity. And the moment they appeared, all these perfect
replicas would start running one after the other and, stretching out in a long
chain like a gaggle of geese, would hobble behind Mr Golyadkin so that there
was no escaping these replicas, so that the eminently pitiable Mr Golyadkin
couldn’t catch his breath for horror, so that in the end such a terrifying multitude
of exact replicas was spawned that the whole city was finally jammed with these
perfect replicas and a police officer, observing such a breach of the peace, was
obliged to grab all these perfect replicas by the scruff of the neck and fling them
into a lock-up that happened to be close at hand. (D 107)
From the perspective of the shadow (or of the copy) we have an anarchistic
and criminal multiplication. The confusion and chaos created by the multiply-
ing of the clones build the premises of a crime; therefore, the (dream) police
will sanction this revolutionary act. The terror increases once we analyze the
scene from the perspective of the ego (or of the model): Sankt Petersburg is
invaded by the copies of Golyadkin 1, the original ego. If only the clones
(only Golyadkin 2, the Doppelgänger) multiplied, the identity structures
of subjectivity (“ego sum qui sum”) would face immediate obliteration.
Golyadkin 1 sees in his dream a crowd of his copies, growing as cancer cells,
which are entirely different from him, from their source. An absolute split
replaces the hegemonic structure of the identity. Furthermore, the multitude
of replicas (which mimic the original, the only authority who knows the dif-
ference between model and clone) will act at the limit of legality, incriminat-
ing thus Golyadkin 1.
One can read this nightmare in a political fashion, as Dmitri Chizhevsky
does. If from a psychoanalytical and phenomenological perspective, the
“attack of clones” brings with it the destruction of identity, from a sociopo-
litical point of view, this situation shows that Dostoyevsky’s main character
is pushed at the limit of the condition of citizenship, becoming, like Camus’s
character, Meursault, an absolute “stranger.” The “ontological problems of
the fixity, reality, and security of the individual existence” (Chizhevsky 1962,
82 Chapter 6
116) are presented by the Russian writer, when he refers to a citizen—not

only humiliated and discriminated but also—excluded from the polis by his
clones. Dostoyevsky anticipates in this strange dream Kafka, drawing on the
problem of political meaninglessness. When one removes the right of a socio-
political existence, one prepares the way for an ontological annihilation: not
unlike Josef K., Golyadkin will be banished beyond the walls of the citadel at
the end of the novella. Making use of tragic irony, in the manner of Samuel
Beckett or Harold Pinter, the director and co-screenwriter of a film based
on Dostoyevsky’s Double, Richard Ayoade shows that Simon/Golyadkin’s
removal from the system anticipates his physical annihilation:
Workers’ Services Executive: You don’t exist anymore.

Simon: Excuse me?
W S E: You’re no longer in the system.
S: Well, just put me back in the system.
W S E: I can’t put you back in the system.
S: Why?
W S E: Because you don’t exist. I can’t put somebody who doesn’t exist in the
system.
S: So how do I get back in the system?
W S E: You need a card.
S: Right. So can I please get a new card?
W S E: No.
S: Why?
W S E: Because you’re not in the system.
S: So . . . what . . . so that’s it?
W S E: That’s it. I’ll leave you to make your own arrangements. (Ayoade 2013)
It is interesting to see how the ego perceives the shadow, how Golyadkin
looks upon his double: “There suddenly appeared Mr Golyadkin Junior,
cheerful as ever, smiling and frivolous as ever: in short, mischievous, caper-
ing, toadying, guffawing, nimble of tongue and food as ever” (D 117). The
shadow is presented as lecherous (“‘She’s a scrumptious dish,’ said Mr
Golyadkin Junior, roguishly winking at Mr Golyadkin Senior” (D 127)) and
greedy (“putting his empty cup that he had drained with unseemly greed
down on the table” (D 128)). Starting from these descriptions, we can clas-
sify Golyadkin 2 as the extraverted sensation type according to the Jungian
typology10 presented in CW 6 (§§606–608): “Wulfen’s The Sybarite . . . is
the unvarnished confession type of this sort. . . . To feel the object, to have
sensations and if possible enjoy them—that is his constant aim. . . . The more
sensation predominates, however, so that the subject disappears behind the
I against I 83
sensation, the less agreeable does this type become. He develops into a crude
pleasure-seeker.”
While Golyadkin 1 is captivated by his inner world, Golyadkin 2 is a
“worldly,” sociable personality, strongly attached to everyday “reality.”
From his perspective, the problem of solipsism is irrelevant. To give another
the cinematographic example, a famous extraverted sensation type from
The Matrix is the villain Cypher (played by Joe Pantoliano), who considers
that (sensitive) pleasure is more important than (intellectual) truth. “I know
this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix
is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know
what I realize? . . . Ignorance is blissˮ (Wachowski et. Wachowski 1999),
declares Cypher, in a premeditated parody of the discouraging reflections of
the Ecclesiast: “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow” (Eccles. 1, 18). If Golyadkin 2 corresponds
to the extraverted sensation type, Golyadkin 1 coincides with the introverted
intuition type. According to one Jungian therapist, “when people of this type
break down they tend to become paranoid” (Stevens 2001, 92).
If until now we have mentioned only the philosophical definition of para-
noia, understood as an alteration of solipsism, we should also mention its psy-
chiatric definition. A paranoid delusion is a “false belief based on incorrect
inference about external reality that is firmly held despite what almost every-
one else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious
proof or evidence to the contrary” (American Psychiatric Association 2013,
819). Paranoia is based on a false perception (a “wrong” vision of reality),
which sees the whole world as falsified or phony. The impression of falsity
is so strong that the paranoid can no longer discern between the inner and the
outer world (his unconsciousness is projected in front his eyes). When the
paranoid feels threatened, trembling with fear of the outside world, he feels
the projection of his own aggressiveness (Stevens 2001, 66). When he says
“they want to kill me,” he is projecting his own homicidal intention. One of
the best literary descriptions of the paranoid nightmare belongs to Philip K.
Dick11:
A paranoiac psychosis. Imagining that I'm the center of a vast effort by mil-
lions of men and women, involving billions of dollars and infinite work . . .
a universe revolving around me. Every molecule acting with me in mind. An
outward radiation of importance . . . to the stars. Ragle Gumm the object of the
whole cosmic process, from the inception to final entropy. All matter and spirit,
in order to wheel about me. (Dick 1987, 119)
The paranoid will say “I am God,” but not in a cheerful mood. The god
from the unconsciousness is a demon in disguise [le mauvais demiurge] who
84 Chapter 6
will force his will upon the afflicted subject. Therefore, Golyadkin will obey
the will of his dissociated shadow: we anticipated that the inner division in
the structures of his identity will lead to psychosis. This demonism of para-
noia, found in the Philip K. Dick’s novels or in Roman Polanski’s movies12
make a strong case for considering paranoia as an initiation into the Cioranian
“satanic principle of suffering”: “The divine principle distinguishes itself by
an effort toward cosmic synthesis and participation in the essence of every-
thing. The satanic principle, on the other hand, is a principle of dislocation
and duality which characterizes all suffering” (Cioran 1996, 109).
The dislocating pains of insanity cut Golyadkin off his In-der-Welt-Sein.
The separation is absolute, the isolation impeccable. His ultimate temporal
disorientation13 could be another reference to Gogol: “‘But is it today?’
flashed through his mind. ‘Was there a mistake about the date? Well, it’s
possible, anything is possible. . . . It’s possible it was yesterday that the let-
ter was written but it didn’t reach me—it didn’t reach me because Petrushka
got involved in it—the scoundrel! Or perhaps “tomorrow” was written there,
that is . . . I . . . that everything had to be done tomorrow’” (D 150). We
are reminded here of the hallucinatory insertions from Gogol’s “Diary of a
Madman”: “The Year 2000, 43rd of April,” “The 86th of Martober. Between
day and night,” “The of 34 February th, yrea 349” and even the more bizarre
“Don’t remember the date. There was no month, either” or “Date none. The
day had no date” (Gogol 1999, 294–299).
The last image Golyadkin will see in his trip to the mental hospital (a
descensus ad inferos, which was only a one-way trip in Dostoyevsky’s time)
belongs to his Doppelgänger, a true devilish twin, who has lead and pushed
him into the abyss: “With hands in the trouser pockets of his green uniform
he ran along with a contented look, leaping up first on one side on the carriage
and then the other; at times he grabbed the window frame and hung from it,
poking his head in and blowing farewell kisses at Mr Golyadkin” (D 163).
NOTES

2. See also Bolea (2020, 46) for the “‘liquid’ divide between perception and real-
ity”: “Most of us possess a sense of reality, but what if our senses deceive us? Would
I still know what was real if, for instance, I had a microscopic brain tumor that made
me hallucinate that the people around me were devils, or that a beautiful sunny day
was a dark nightmare? What if I then felt the urge to start shooting people?”
3. See Gogol (1999, 304–305): “The collegiate assessor Kovalev woke up quite
early and went ‘brr . . .’ with his lips—something he always did on waking up, though
he himself was unable to explain the reason for it. Kovalev stretched and asked for the
little mirror that stood on the table. He wished to look at a pimple that had popped out
I against I 85
on his nose the previous evening; but, to his greatest amazement, he saw that instead
of a nose he had a perfectly smooth place! Frightened, Kovalev asked for water and
wiped his eyes with a towel: right, no nose! He began feeling with his hand to find
out if he might be asleep, but it seemed he was not. The collegiate assessor Kovalev
jumped out of bed, shook himself: no nose! . . . He ordered his man to dress him and
flew straight to the chief of police.”
4. See Troubetzkoy 1996, 46: “To not see me as myself, to see me how the others
see me, to see me as an other, introduces . . . inside my ego a distance, a scission, a
cleavage, an irremediable alterity. This is the great error of narcissism, the error of the
mirror, the wandering in front of the mirror. There is nothing more dangerous than the
mirror.”
5. See also Zarathustra’s alarming dream from TSZ, II, “The Child with the
Mirror”: “‘Why was I so startled in my dream that I awoke? Did not a child step up
to me, carrying a mirror? ‘O Zarathustra,’ the child said to me, ‘look at yourself in the
mirror.’ But when I looked into the mirror I cried out, and my heart was shaken: for
it was not myself I saw, but a devil’s grimace and scornful laughter.” See SNZ II, p.
868: “The dream of the devil’s face when Zarathustra showed his other side becomes
more understandable—he is the devil himself.” See also Frey-Rohn (1989, 110–111):
“What was this ghastly self-reflection? To all appearances, the dark opponent of
the hitherto unchallenged concept of a God embracing both light and darkness—the
devil—had come to life and was stepping forward. A hazardous situation developed,
in which the dark, instinctual side, until now largely of theoretical import alone,
was activated and threatened to rip the soul apart by opposing the ‘divine’ with the
‘satanic.’ In repressing the emotional situation, his ego ran the risk of being overrun
by the powerful, super-personal satanic complex, which revealed itself immediately
afterwards as an exaggerated feeling of mission.”
6. See chapter 1.
7. Eminescu’s Hyperion reflects at the end of the poem Lucifer (1882, 178): “Still
earth shall only earth remain,/ . . . And I in my own kingdom reign/ Immutable and
cold.//” (Eminescu 1964, 178—Trans. Corneliu M. Popescu).
8. See TSZ, III, “The Wanderer”: “I am a wanderer and a mountain climber. . . .
And whatever may yet come to me as destiny and experience will include some wan-
dering and mountain climbing: in the end, one experiences only oneself [man erlebt
endlich nur noch sich selber].” See also TSZ, I, “On the Way of the Creator”: “But
the worst enemy you can encounter will always be you, yourself; you lie in wait for
yourself in caves and woods.”
9. “You must wish to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you wish
to become new unless you had first become ashes!” (TSZ, I, ‘On the Way of the
Creator’)
10. According to Jungian typology, there are two attitudes (introversion, oriented
toward inside, and extraversion, oriented toward outside) and four cognitive func-
tions: thinking (for the exercise of the intellect), intuition (for the perception of the
essence of a situation, often through irrational means), sensation (the function which
tests reality), and feeling (the function of the expression of the affects). If my superior
function is thinking, my auxiliary function can be intuition, the third (partly conscious,
86 Chapter 6
partly unconscious) will be sensation and my inferior function (completely situated in

the unconscious, surprising me when it takes over) will be feeling. The excessive use
of the thinking function can give the impression of a robot, of an intellectual computer
and the repression of the feeling function is similar to an autistic “death of the soul,”
a certain objectifying coolness. The therapy of a thinking type should make him or
her aware of the high temperature of the feelings of the fact that human beings are
very sensitive about their feelings, which are considered more important than some
logical-rational operations. The excessive use of the intuitive function is similar to an
“eagle eye’s view,” of a general perspective from the above, which does not care for
the concrete, for the particular and the huge distances between the various elements.
“From the heights of Notre-Dame, I cannot, when I like, feel myself to be on equal
footing with those who, enclosed within those walls, there minutely pursue incom-
prehensible tasks. High places attract those who wish to look over the world with
an eagle-eye view” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 77–78). The repression of the sensitive
function is a symptom of devitalization; the feeling of an “unlived life” persists. The
therapy of the intuitive function should make him or her train to effectively perceive
things, to feel their texture and particularity. The superior function determines the
individual type. For instance, Immanuel Kant appears to have been a pure thinking
type. Schopenhauer may be considered a thinking type with intuition as auxiliary
function. Nietzsche is an intuitive type, with thinking as auxiliary function. We might
guess that Cioran was a feeling type with intuition as auxiliary function. Heidegger
and Freud may have been sensation types, with thinking as auxiliary function.
11. See also Gray (2015, 53–54): “Dick’s propensity to paranoia was exacerbated
by his style of life—not least his excessive use of amphetamines. But his was para-
noia of a peculiar kind, one that articulated an entire world-view—a highly distinctive
version of Gnosticism. With its vision of the world as being ruled by an evil demiurge
Gnosticism is, in effect, the metaphysical version of paranoia. Paranoid delusion is
often a reaction against insignificance—the sense, often well founded, of counting
for nothing in the world. Dick’s paranoia was of this kind. By seeking a sense of sig-
nificance, he became familiar with the dark side of a world where nothing is without
meaning.”
12. See for instance The Tenant (1976), which can be read in a Freudian manner,
associating paranoia with feminization. Polanski’s movie is based on Roland Topor’s
novel, Le locataire chimérique (1964): the main character, the architect Trelkovski,
played by Polanski, rents an apartment from a suicidal Egyptologist, Simone Choule.
Slowly, Trelkovski comes to believe that the neighbors have forced Simone to com-
mit suicide and that he is the next to be sacrificed. Here is a glimpse of his paranoid
“argument”:
“Trelkovski: They’re trying to kill me. They’ll drive me to suicide.
Stella: What are you talking about? Who’s trying to kill you?
Trelkovski: Stella, I’ve been lying to you. I’m living in her apartment.
Stella: Whose apartment?
Trelkovski: Simone’s. I've rented Simone Choule's apartment.
Stella: How did you rent it?
Trelkovski: She’s dead because of the neighbours. It was a plot.
I against I 87
Stella: Plot against Simone? You’re insane.

Trelkovski: I’m not insane. Listen. They forced her to commit suicide. I can
prove it. And they’re trying to do the same thing to me. Everything’s ready. They
worked it all out, every detail. Do you know what they’ve been doing to me? It’s so
appalling, so incredible that I can hardly tell you. It’s true, I swear it.
Stella: Tell me. Tell me, I’m listening.
Trelkovski: They’ve been trying to turn me into Simone Choule” (Polanski
1976).
13. See Heissenbüttel (1980, 70) for a sample of postmodern confusion of tempo-
ral planes: “It was yesterday. Was it yesterday? Or will it really be just tomorrow?
The day after tomorrow? Or today?” [Es war gestern. War es gestern? Oder wird es
doch erst morgen sein? Übermorgen? Oder heute?]
Chapter 7
The Shadow of Degeneration

Stevenson’s Strange Case (1886)
THE CITY OF THE NIGHT
The first meeting with Hyde—which can be found in the first part of the
novella, “Story of the Door”—is announced by the sepulchral description of
London. “Street after street, and all the folks asleep—street after street, all
lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as a church” (JH 7). The
hypnotic depiction of the great city, which seems to deepen in the darkness
of the id, prepares the screening of a nightmarish scene:
All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was stumping along east-
ward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was run-
ning as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one
another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the
thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming
on the ground. (JH 7)
Who is this mysterious man, intrinsically linked to the honorable Doctor

Jekyll, who tramples over a child, as he would squash a bug?
Hyde is a special combination of
(a) not-man: “It wasn’t like a man” (JH 7); “[T]he man seems hardly
human!” (JH 16);
(b) devil: “sneering . . . like Satan” (JH 8); “I read Satan’s signature upon
[his] face” (JH 16);
(c) degenerate: “Something troglodytic” (JH 16); “ape-like fury” (JH 22).
89
90 Chapter 7
But let us not anticipate. A year after he mistreats the little girl, a ser-
vant observes how the shadowy character beats to death the patriarchal
Sir Danvers Carew—an episode that also contains a trait of oedipal revolt
(Luckhurst 2006, xvi–xvii). “Mr Hyde . . . clubbed him to the earth. And next
moment . . . he was trampling his victim under foot, and hailing down a storm
of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered” (JH 21–2). Hyde’s
distinctive feature seems to be the beastly: he regresses into pre-humanity,
liberating the violence, the naturalness, and the absolute freedom of the ape.
Many interpreters of the novella (Heath 1986, 103; Halberstam 1995,
78–80; Arata 1996, 33–34; Reid 2006, 95) observe that Hyde is described
according to Lombroso’s theory of anthropological criminology, popularized
in Great Britain by Havelock Ellis. The Italian physician Cesare Lombroso
discovered the atavistic criminal contemplating the skull of the famous bandit
Vilella: “This was not merely an idea . . . , but a revelation. At the sight of that
skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flam-
ing sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who
reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the
inferior animals” (quoted in Arata 1996, 34). The late Victorian emphasis on
degeneration—not only in the Strange Case, but also in the Great God Pan
(1890) or Dracula (1897)—hides the “post-Darwinian fear that evolution
may be reversible” (Halberstam 1995, 78). If man was “more ape than any
ape” (TSZ, prologue, 3), as the para-Darwinian Nietzsche stated, it would
only be suitable that Hyde (exceptionally portrayed by Frederic March) in
Rouben Mamoulian’s cinematic version of Stevenson’s novella from 1931 is
depicted as a chimpanzee-like individual.
Just like the shadow stands for the psychological inferiority of the human
being, the ape symbolizes its biological inferiority. The ape alludes both to
the slumber of human spirit and to the dawn of a certain biological imme-
diacy or the absolute triumph of the instinct (repressed and defamed by our
civilization). In the night of id, the animal soul is free (the original, unlawful
freedom which does not coincide with responsibility) to experience in all its
plenitude the principle of lust. Hyde is a personification of the extraverted
sensation function, born from the Faustian “dryness of a life of study”
(JH 59), repressed by an introverted intuitive type. Not unlike in “William
Wilson,” where we have, from a Freudian perspective, a conflict between ego
and superego, in Jekyll and Hyde we find an antithesis between ego and id.
The two names—Jekyll and Hyde—are mirrored: “e y/ ye: Jekyll, the I, the je,
that kills, represses Hyde, the hidden, the inner he . . . that destroys the unity
and the identity of the I, of me; Freud’s Es” (Heath 1986, 96–97).
Before further commenting on Hyde, we should note that London is one
of the main characters of Stevenson’s book. Jack the Ripper,1 Dorian Gray,2
Dracula,3 or Villiers4 from the Great God Pan all share the hunting ground
The Shadow of Degeneration 91
or the inferno of the fin de siècle capital of the world. The “mighty” city is at
the same time axis mundi and the road to hell. Jung paraphrases Nietzsche,5
claiming that “[w]hen a tree grows up to heaven its roots reach down to hell”
(CW 11, §791). London is not only the essential metropolis of modernity but
also “a place of fear and darkness, a labyrinthine hell” (Dryden 2003, 86), “a
great flower that opens but at night” (Gallienne 1982, 127) “a city of night-
mares” (Machen 2006, 50), “[a] city of perpetual suffering” (Logan 2015)
or “a hallucinatory place, never clearly navigable” (Luckhurst 2006, xxviii).
London’s Plutonic feature can be captured from the description of
Utterson’s trip to Soho, searching for the location of Hyde’s house:
It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the season. A
great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continu-
ally charging and routing these embattled vapours; so that as the cab crawled
from street to street, Mr Utterson beheld a marvellous number of degrees and
hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the back-end of evening; and
there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange con-
flagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a hag-
gard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal
quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and
slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had
been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in
the lawyer’s eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. (JH 23)
We encounter the trance-like “street to street” again, reminding of Enfield’s

hypnotic description from the beginning of the novella. The light cannot
wash away the nuances of darkness; on the contrary, the feeble sun rays are
devoured by the dark morning, suggesting a day more frightening than the
night. Night’s immanence in day, like death’s immanence in life (Cioran
1996, 23), is more threatening than the astronomical presence of night, which
will eventually give way to a liberating day. But when the night takes over the
reign of the day (similar to the nothing that sprouts in the heart of the being),
the light is stained beyond reclaim, the sun is irrevocably dark and the morn-
ing will personify the alchemic state of nigredo. The image of the ghostly
city reminds us of James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874): “The
City is of Night; perchance of Death/ But certainly of Night; for never there/
Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath” (Thomson 2005, 4).
“The city of the night” symbolizes the geographical realization of the
personal night, the spatial fulfillment of the individual inferno. London is the
capital of death’s immanence to life, the spectral necropolis where we are
all demons in each other’s nightmares. The light is black6 in the metropolis,
because “the sun has never visited that city” (Thomson 2005, 4). Moreover,
92 Chapter 7
London’s light is not “darkness of night, in which objects are seen dimly,”
it is a light “turned to blackness,” a “negation of light” (Machen 2006, 62).
Under these circumstances, mornings7 duplicate a terrifying night and light
becomes stranger than darkness. London is uncanny [unheimlich], the mani-
festation of an appalling secret.
ONTOLOGICAL DUALITY
I will go on to explain the genesis of the “inferior personality,” following

Jekyll’s report about his experiences in “transcendental medicine” (JH 53).
The doctor has discovered in his youth his fundamental duality, the conflict
of identity between his “grave” and his exigent side or “[his] imperious desire
to carry [his] head high” and his “impatient gaiety of disposition,” which lead
him to commit certain—euphemistically speaking—“irregularities” (JH 55).
The Victorian self-censorship does not shed light on those “irregularities”:
however, one can infer that Jekyll alludes to an excessive libido, repressed
by the “dry” respectability of the grave physician. In my opinion, there is
nothing deviant about Jekyll’s “irregularities”; but we might think of a certain
heterosexual priapism, pushed off by the professional persona in instinctual
indifferentiation.
Jekyll’s self-conceited superego heads him toward verticality, while his
shadow or id practices a subterranean cult of life, longing to feed with sensa-
tion. The doctor can be, therefore, accused of an inability to accept his own
nature. Moreover, one can say that “the result of Jekyll’s falseness was the
accumulation of evil on the inside, in the manner pointed out by the Lord
when he spoke of the Pharisees being like whitewashed tombs that look fine
on the outside but inside are full of dead men’s bones” (Sanford 1987, 67;
Mt. 23, 27). John A. Sanford argues that Jekyll’s inauthenticity creates Hyde.
Not the shadow is responsible for its own darkness: we can find the source of
corruption in the body which projects it (CW 7, §35; CW 9/II, §422f.).
In Stevenson’s view, ontological duality8 is a constant of human existence:
It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations . . . severed in me

those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual
nature (JH 55).
[M]an is not truly one, but truly two (JH 55).
It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize
the thorough and primitive duality of man. (JH 56)
This duality corresponds to the analytical psychological distinction

between the persona and the shadow or, according to Jungian typology, to
the conflict between the superior and inferior function—the fourth function
being completely hidden in the individual shadow. While Jekyll uses his
intellect and intuition in his professional activity as physician and scientist (“I
laboured . . . at the furtherance of knowledge” (JH 55), he represses feeling
and sensation in the indifferentiation of his unconscious. Identifying with his
Victorian persona, the “transcendental” doctor would like to be absolutely
good, following his “upward path” (JH 56) toward virtue. Consequently, he
provokes an inflation of the superego, which prepares an autonomization of
the shadow. When, in a Luciferian manner, he destroys “the very fortress of
identity” (JH 57), he creates a potion that turns him into his evil subpersonal-
ity, Edward Hyde.
“Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil” (JH 58).
The oscillation between good and evil characterizes the human being: a cer-
tain ethical “averageness,” which spontaneously stays away from extremes,
is mankind’s general trait. Hyde is an antihero, who belongs to the almost
impossible sphere of pure negativity, similar to a demon (“pure evil”) and
a not-man (“alone in the ranks of mankind”). Similar to Dorian Gray, Hyde
enjoys the spectacle of his corruption: “I knew myself, at the first breath of
this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my
original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like
wine” (JH 57). Moreover, he totally accepts his inferiority, in the manner of
the Indian saying Tat Twam Asi: “And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol
in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome.
This, too, was myself” (JH 58).
Hyde, an “inherently malign and villainous” being, was “drinking pleasure
with bestial avidity,” seeking “undignified” (another Victorian euphemism)
gratifications (JH 60). Jekyll’s bad faith paralyzes him: while being “aghast”
before Hyde’s actions, he considers the other in himself responsible for them.
“It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty” (JH 60). Which
means that, because of the proclivity for evil (Jekyll is average, Hyde is evil),
Hyde begins to take control. The “balance of my nature might be permanently
overthrown” (JH 62). An autonomous, livelier subpersonality attacks the ego:
“I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly
incorporated with my second and worse” (JH 62). Facing the danger of com-
pletely regressing toward Hyde’s demonism, Jekyll stops taking the potion
that turns him into his subpersonality, choosing Jekyll’s inauthentic but more
reliable self: “I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor” (JH 63).
However, in a modernist fashion, reason is surpassed by passion: “[I]n my
case, to be tempted . . . was to fall” (JH 64), notes Jekyll, prefigurating Oscar
Wilde: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it” (DG 21).
The shadow surges impatiently, compensating for the repressive persona:
“My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was conscious, even
94 Chapter 7
when I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity to

ill” (JH 64). Hyde, a being created after the face and likeness of the demon,
radicalizes his proclivities toward inhumanity, becoming a murderer: “With
a transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every
blow” (JH 64).
Because of the irrevocable propensity toward negativity, resulting from
the unequal struggle between absolute evil and an average character, Jekyll
begins to spontaneously turn into Hyde, unaided by the potion. In a fragment,
where we see the passage from the first person to the third person, where I
turns into the “other” (Rimbaud), the mechanism of estrangement and the
impossible identification with the shadow become visible:
At my appearance . . . the driver could not conceal his mirth. I gnashed my

teeth upon him with a gust of devilish fury; and the smile withered from his
face—happily for him—yet more happily for myself, for in another instant I had
certainly dragged him from his perch. At the inn, as I entered, I looked about me
with so black a countenance as made the attendants tremble. . . . Thenceforward,
he sat all day over the fire in the private room, gnawing his nails; there he
dined, sitting alone with his fears, the waiter visibly quailing before his eye; and
thence, when the night was fully come, he set forth in the corner of a closed cab,
and was driven to and fro about the streets of the city. (JH 67)
Jekyll goes on, synthetizing the divorce between ego and shadow: “He, I
say—I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in
him but fear and hatred” (JH 67). This brief diagnosis brings us the afore-
mentioned conjunction between not-man, devil, and degenerate. One might
also note that Jekyll does not acknowledge himself as Hyde. “This, too,
was myself” (JH 58), observed the doctor when his evil subpersonality was
brought to light. Now, the shadow is negated (“He, I say—I cannot say, I”),
and I ≠ I. There is a major caesura between the identification with the shadow
(that Tat Twam Asi whispered to the devil in the mirror) and the rejection of
the shadow as irreducible to ego, belonging to an autonomous and dissoci-
ated sphere. We cannot recognize ourselves when we “gaze into the face of
absolute evil” (CW 9/II, §19). If Frederic March’s Hyde was degenerate,
Spencer Tracy would be a demonic Hyde, in Victor Flemming’s film version
from 1941.
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF IDENTITY
Starting from this “He, I say—I cannot say, I,”9 I will go on to investigate
the constitution of the subjectivity at the end of the 19th century in European
philosophy and literature. Hyde’s novella can be seen as an example of the

contestation of the “fortress of identity” (JH 57) in the fashion of Eduard von
Hartmann and Friedrich Nietzsche (Heath 1986, 97). According to Hartmann,10
the author of a best-selling Philosophy of Unconscious (1869), there are at
least four divisions of the unconscious: (a) the absolute unconscious, which
organizes the substance of the universe; (b) the physiological unconscious,
which assists the evolution of living beings; (c) the psychological uncon-
scious which predetermines the conscious mental life; (d) the metaphysical
unconscious, “the essence of all operations in the universe (Darnoi 1967,
61–74; Ellenberger 1970, 209–210). These traits are divided by Hartmann
in many other categories. For instance, a part of the psychic unconscious,
that which is not definitely conscious has five other subcategories, such as
the inferiorly conscious, the obscurely and indistinctly conscious, the unob-
served in the content of consciousness, and so on (Hartmann 1900, 273–290;
Darnoi 1967, 65–67). Hartmann combines the Schopenhauerian voluntarism
with the Hegelian idealism, claiming that “a highly intelligent although blind
dynamism” underlies the visible universe (Ellenberger 1970, 210). The phe-
nomenology of the unconscious presented by the Schopenhauerian disciple,
with its enormous compartmentalization, brings us closer to Stevenson’s
insight: the subject is double, if not multiple. Another assault on the “fortress
of identity” is found in Nietzsche’s posthumous fragments:
The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is

just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and
struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? A kind of
aristocracy of “cells” in which dominion resides? To be sure, an aristocracy of
equals, used to ruling jointly and understanding how to command?
My hypothes[is]: The subject as multiplicity (WP 490).
This “aristocracy of equals” breaks down both logical principles of iden-

tity and noncontradiction and the Cartesian cogito, the founding postulates
of classical individualism. The philosopher and physician Ernst Mach also
attacks in his work Beiträgen zur Analyse der Empfindungen (1886) the prin-
ciple of the unitary subject, claiming that the ego is just a “bundle of sensa-
tions” (Mach 1918, 19–20). To establish his anti-metaphysical stance, Mach
quotes one of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms: “It thinks, we should say, just as one
says, it lightnings. To say cogito is already too much if we translate it as I
think. To assume the I, to postulate it, is a practical necessity” (Lichtenberg
2012, 152).
According to Mark Currie (1996, 119), a multiple subject (Jekyll 1 +
Jekyll 2 + Hyde) is in fact the main character from the Strange Case. The
British author identifies a “double schizophrenia,” a true “quadrophrenia” in
96 Chapter 7
Stevenson’s book. Speaking of Jekyll’s inner division, Currie refers to “the

less obvious doubleness of the narrator and the narrated, representing the
kind of schizophrenia which will occur when narrated time catches up with
the time of narration and temporal distance collapses into the present.” The
double duality consists of two separate points: not only Jekyll refers to him-
self in the third person, but also there is a greater fissure between Jekyll as a
narrative subject and Jekyll as a narrative object. Stevenson writes:
Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the
situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of
conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was
no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would
even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus
his conscience slumbered. (JH 60)
We can approach Currie’s ingenious idea referring to temporality: Jekyll

2 is different from Jekyll 1 just like Hyde is different from Jekyll. Jekyll 1
evolves toward Jekyll 2. The complexity of this situation can be augmented
with the observation that there also are two Hydes. Using Stephen Arata’s
idea, who concerns himself with Hyde’s evolution, one might say that the
degenerated Hyde 1 begins to turn into a civilized gentleman, so that Hyde
2 is “no longer Jekyll’s opposite but his mirror image” (Arata 1996, 39–40).
Therefore, in this case, we have a triple duality, a “sexophrenia” (Jekyll vs.
Hyde, Jekyll 1 vs. Jekyll 2, Hyde 1 vs. Hyde 2).
The Nietzschean idea of subjective multiplicity is also explored by Oscar
Wilde:
Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which

we can multiply our personalities.
Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray’s opinion. He used to wonder at the
shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple,
permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad
lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself
strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with
the monstrous maladies of the dead. (DG 137)
The author of Dorian Gray undermines not only the “fortress of identity”
but also the notion of authenticity understood as personal truth; in fact, one of
his interpreters reads Wilde as a proponent of “authentic insincerity” (Arata
1996, 59). The praise of the disjunction modeled on the principle “I am not
what I am,” the apology of a lie creating personal complexity reminds us
of Frederic W. H. Myers’s idea from an essay published in the same year
as Stevenson’s work (1886): “The multiplex and mutable character of that

which we know as the Personality of man” (Myers 1886, 648).
One might say that Jekyll and Hyde are “polar twins” (JH 56) or coheirs
“to death” (JH 69), who hate and despise each other. Jekyll sees Hyde as a
demonic double or as a devilish figment of the id, commissioned to fulfill the
doctor’s damnation. Hyde hates Jekyll because he resents “the dislike with
which he was himself regarded” (JH 69), writing blasphemies on the pages
of the Bible and destroying the portrait of Jekyll’s father. Taking into account
that “the primal father was the original image of God” (Freud 1961b, 42),
that attack of the paternal authority can be seen as a satanic aggression of the
divine principle. It is also a call to arms against the superego, which “retains
the character of the father” (Freud 1989, 30). Just like Jekyll’s persona, the
superego with “my imperious desire to carry my head high” (JH 55) failed
disastrously: their untruthfulness repressed a deeper and more undifferenti-
ated shadow.
But Hyde’s “love of life” is “wonderful”: “When I recall the abjection
and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to
cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him” (JH 69). Despite his
evil character, Hyde possesses a Dionysian lust for life: he “is a beast with
a beast’s soul, an organism that gives unquestioning obedience to instinct”
(CW 7, §35). Hyde has fulfilled his animalic nature, saying “yes” to both life
and instinct. Despite his inferiority, he is more alive and, from an extramoral
perspective, more authentic than Jekyll. “It would appear that, evil though
Hyde was, God preferred him to Jekyll,” writes the Episcopalian pastor John
A. Sanford. “Why would this be so? Because Hyde, however evil, was genu-
ine, whereas Jekyll was a sham. God . . . used Hyde to destroy Jekyll because
Jekyll’s false life was an affront to his Creator” (Sanford 1987, 48). There is
a stark contrast between the Jekyll’s monstrous falsity and Hyde’s energetic
authenticity. Hyde’s vitality is also appreciated by Andrew Lang, one of the
first critics of the novella: “Not for nothing did Nature leave us all savages
under our white skins” (quoted in Luckhurst 2006, xxxi).
According to Frank McLynn, Jekyll and Hyde deals with “the kind of
darkness in the heart of human beings that would produce the death camps
of the twentieth century” (quoted in Dryden 2003, 74). How can we under-
stand this affirmation? Hyde’s case invites us to acknowledge in ourselves
the inclination toward absolute demonism: the anthropological potentiality to
hide inside a shadow as dense as Adolf Hitler’s. We are co-responsible for
Auschwitz and Dachau, co-responsible for the murder of our fellow creatures
in gas chambers, because of the continuity of identity between us and the
worst from us: “In Hitler, every German should have seen his own shadow,
his own worst danger” (CW 10, §455). We would like to compare ourselves
to saints or heroes, but we are much closer to the people who have crucified
98 Chapter 7
Jesus or have lynched Hypatia. Hyde’s adventure discloses the truth that
there are inside us territories as dark as the ninth circle of hell. Both Judas
and the Lord of Lies appreciate and feed from our inferiority. Like Milton’s
Lucifer, we can say: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell” (Milton 2005,
107). The acknowledgment of the inner demonism alludes to the withdrawal
of projections or to the Jungian concept of the integration of the shadow,11
a term which “refers to the psychological act of ownership: that is myself!”
(Stein 1995, 19)
NOTES
1. An article from Pall Mall Gazette (September 8, 1888) compares Jack the
Ripper’s brutal murders with Hyde’s ferocity: “There certainly seems to be a toler-
ably realistic impersonification of Mr. Hyde at large in Whitechapel. The Savage of
Civilization whom we are raising by the hundred thousand in our slums is quite as
capable of bathing his hands in blood as any Sioux who ever scalped a foe” (quoted
in Curtis 2001, 126).
2. “Where he went to he hardly knew. He remembered wandering through dimly-
lit streets, past gaunt black-shadowed archways and evil-looking houses” (DG 86).
3. “I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the
midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all
that makes it what it is” (Stoker 1995, 31).
4. “It’s a curious thing, Austin, to be alone in London at night, the gas-lamps
stretching away in perspective, and the dead silence, and then perhaps the rush and
clatter of a hansom on the stones, and the fire starting up under the horse's hoofs”
(Machen 2006, 51).
5. “But it is with man as it is with the tree. The more he aspires to the height and
light, the more strongly do his roots strive earthward, downward, into the dark, the
deep—into evil” (TSZ, I, “On the Tree on the Mountainside”).
6. “Before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the
shadow of death;/ A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death,
without any order, and where the light is as darkness” (Jb. 10, 21–2).
7. See Novalis, Hymns to the Night: “Now I know when the final morning will
be—when Light will no longer frighten away the Night and love—when sleeping will
be forever just one unsuspendable dream” (Novalis 1988, 19).
8. Ontological duality is prefigured by Nerval: “Every man has a double. . . .
In everyone is a spectator and an actor, one who speaks and one who answers”
[L’homme est double . . . Il y a en tout homme un spectateur et un acteur, celui qui
parle et celui qui répond] (Nerval 1996, 30). See also Dr. Jekyll’s statement from
Penny Dreadful: “We are all two things in a way, are we not? Deep in the marrow.
Angel and Devil. Light and dark. The pull between the two is the active verb which
energizes our lives” (Logan 2016). See also Blake (2002, 163): “Without Contraries
is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are
necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call
Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from
Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.”
9. The inability to refer to oneself in the first person is a symptom of schizophre-
nia (Currie 1998, 119).
10. Hartmann’s book was translated into French in 1877 and his Schopenhauerian
vision of the unconscious influenced Maupassant in his description of the “The Horla”
(Kessler 1995, xlii–xliii).
11. See appendix 4.
Chapter 8
The Empty Mirror

Maupassant’s “The Horla” (1887)
PHENOMENOLOGY OF ANXIETY
Anxiety is present in one of the earliest entries of Guy de Maupassant’s “The

Horla”’s diarist. On May 16, he writes: “I am constantly aware of a feeling
of imminent danger, and I sense some impending disaster or the approach of
death, and it all amounts to a presentiment which is quite likely the first sign
of some illness which has yet to declare itself, but is already germinating in
my blood and in my flesh” (H 277). That sense of impending disaster [un
malheur qui vient] reminds us of one of Kierkegaard’s statements,1 which
marks the birth of the phenomenology of anxiety (“a more precise and correct
linguistic use links anxiety with the future” (Kierkegaard 1980a, 197)) or of
the paradoxical Cioranian insight (“anxiety . . . a sort of remembrance of the
future?” (Cioran 1997, 72)). Moreover, the anticipatory characteristic of the
affect described by Maupassant can be analyzed in the context of Heidegger’s
treatment of the concept in Being and Time: “As something threatening, what
is harmful . . . is coming near” [Das Abträgliche . . . als Drohendes . . . naht]
(Heidegger 1996, 132).
One can claim that the distance which must be covered by the Drohendes
(the displacement of the future trauma) in its way to the Dasein (the fact that
“I” am here and the “enemy” is not (yet) here) only feeds anxiety, which in
turn becomes denser and darker. This coming close [es naht] (the feeling
that you are followed, surrounded or under siege) is more terrifying than the
unavoidable meeting with disaster [es ist schon da]. One could clarify this
idea through the well-known Cioranian2 association between anxiety and
death: “The only fear is, in fact, the fear of death” (Cioran 1996, 26). The
Romanian philosopher seems to suggest that the source of every anxiety is
the fear of death: had death never existed, we would be immune to fear. Only
101
102 Chapter 8
when we meet death, when Epicurus’s death is really “here,” we are done
with anxiety, because the Abträgliche has already harassed us and the Birnam
Wood “marches on the castle of Dunsinane” (Levinas 1987, 72), besieging
Macbeth. But when death vibrates from the distance, when the Birnam Wood3
only begins to murmur, when the threat begins its gloomy ritual, the black sun
of anxiety hypnotically rises at the horizon.
The anxiety of the narrator takes shape (on May 25) with the “dying of
the light,” when the Apollonian lights of awareness are conquered by the
Plutonic Unheimlichkeit of the id: “As evening approaches, an incompre-
hensible feeling of anxiety comes over me, as though the night ahead held
some terrible threat” (H 277). The character seems to understand that night
brings along with it a Harrowing of Hell or even a soteriological attack: Will
I emerge safe after the dominion of darkness, after the infernal trap that seeks
to shatter my soul? We are reminded here of the terrible description of the
“infinite” night from the story “The Little Roque Girl”: “But night, opaque
night denser than walls, night, empty and infinite and so black and fathom-
less that terrifying things reach out and touch us, night when we feel horror
stirring, mysteriously prowling—night seemed to him to hide some unknown,
imminent, threatening danger” (Maupassant 1998, 229).
Beyond the abstract intimations of anxiety, which we all experience as
existential subjects, the immersion into sleep as in “a pit of stagnant water”
[un gouffre d’eau stagnante] (another symbol of the id, after the terrifying
night), brings us, not unlike in the painting Nightmare by Henri Fuseli, the
concrete feeling of anxiety: “I get into bed and wait for sleep as some await
their executioner. . . . I fall into sleep as a man falls into a pit of stagnant
water to drown. . . . I’m also aware of the approach of someone who looks
at me, touches me, gets onto the bed, kneels on my chest, takes my neck in
both hands, and squeezes and squeezes with all his strength” (May 25, H
277). Comparable to Fuseli’s incubus, the “presence” described by the nar-
rator on July 4 steps over his chest, “sucking the life out of me through my
mouth, yes, drawing my life out of me like a leech” (H 281). This expression
shows that between the main character and the demonic apparition, between
ego and shadow (or servant and master, in Hegelian terms), a life-and-death
battle is about to take place. There can be no armistice between two par-
ties that share as battleground a unique body. In a fragment reminiscent
of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll (“Man is not truly one, but truly two” (H 55)),
Maupassant’s narrator infers the fundamental duality of the human being
[il y a deux êtres en nous], who is at the same time A and non-A, violating
the principle of noncontradiction: “If so, I have been walking in my sleep
and, without knowing it, living a mysterious double life which makes a man
suspect that two separate beings exist inside us, or that there are times, when
our soul is lulled and torpid, when an unknown, invisible alien takes over
The Empty Mirror 103
our captive body which it obeys as it obeys us, only even more readily”
(H 282).
The nightmare of possession, made famous by the horror movie tradition,
fuels this fear of the shadow, understood as radical alterity. Maupassant
personifies the shadowy figure, which literally “sucks the life” out of us.
However, bracketing the phenomenology of anxiety from “The Horla,” isn’t
it obvious that in the night of Dasein, in the depths of our id, resides someone
else? Perhaps we all hide a shadowy subpersonality, an inner alter ego, a
deeper das Andere, whom we anticipate in all our fierceness, in our repressed
fanaticism. . . . And maybe like Rimbaud or Nietzsche, we have all been
concealing an inner Dr. Jekyll, a subliminal Tyler Durden, an autonomous
Doppelgänger, whom we are destined to meet only at the end of our psycho-
ses. When the pale light of awareness fades away, we tend to switch to our
inner alterity.
The narrator even provides us more concrete actuality on August 6, using
the Jungian function of sensation, one that offers immediate access to real-
ity: “This time, I know I’m not mad. I’ve seen him! I saw him with my own
eyes!4 There’s no doubt in my mind now: I saw him! My blood still runs
cold. I can still feel the fear in my bones. I saw him!” (H 290). From the
nightmarish intuition of Fuseli’s succubus, who crushes the narrator’s chest
and feeds with his prāṇa, we are led to the permanent sensation of posses-
sion, of sharing the same body: “I feel him near me, spying on me, watching,
probing, dominating me” (August 8, H 292). Where ego once ruled, there is
only shadow, the proverbial light of the consciousness dimming in the pres-
ence of darkness. It seems that we are listening to a sonata of possession and
dominance in four movements:
1. allegro furioso: “I have lost the ability to will anything: but someone else
is doing my willing for me; and I do what he says” (August 13, H 292).
2. largo: “I am nothing inside, merely a spectator enslaved and terrified by
everything I do” (August 14, H 293).
3. scherzo: “What sort of creature is it who has taken control of me? He
is invisible, unknowable: is he a roving member of some supernatural
race?” (August 15, H 293).
4. presto agitato: “It is as if men, from the moment they began to think,
have always sensed the presence of a new kind of being whom they have
feared, stronger than they are, who will one day be their successor in this
world” (August 17, H 294).
From (1) and (2) one might derive the “blackening” of the ego, the death
of the inner sun, which becomes the puppet of an evil director. Will the
frightening master (“a roving member of some supernatural race,” “an occult
104 Chapter 8
being,” “a hazy phantom . . . born of fear,” August 15–17, H 93–4) be man’s

successor? (A question left for the end of this chapter.)
A key scene from Horla takes place on August 19 (a date repeated in the
diary: proof of the narrator’s confusion descending into madness), when the
main character stalks the monster, desiring to “to gaze into the face of abso-
lute evil” (CW 9/II, §19) or to “stare . . . into an abyss” (BGE 69).
So I was sitting there, pretending to write to allay his suspicions, for he too was
watching me. Then all at once I sensed that he was there, reading over my shoul-
der, almost touching my ear. I leaped up with my arms out and turned round so
quickly that I almost fell over. And then . . .? It was as bright as day, but I could
not see myself in my mirror! . . . It was empty, very bright, bursting with light!
But my reflection was not there . . . and I was standing directly in front of it! I
could see the tall, clear glass from top to bottom. (H 299)
In empirical terms, the Horla blocks the narrator’s reflection; the shadow
stands between the mirror and the ego. In symbolical terms, analogous to
Tolkien’s Sauron or to the demon from the horror production The Blair Witch
Project (1999), the absolute evil is invisible (and vice versa). We can observe
two details. First, when someone fails to see himself in a mirror, we might say
that this is a classic symptom of derealization, of the breaking down of con-
sciousness. His identity (that famous A=A of Schelling and Fichte) is shattered:
he is no longer himself. Second, losing his “spatial root,” he flies beyond the
territory of beings, beyond the Dasein GPS, being transported in a Neverland
of the id where “la vida es un mal sueño.” Transgressing reality, he enters the
realm of dreams. A quote from Maupassant’s letters, proved to be apocryphal,
but very useful in this context, emphasizes the deep connection between the
losing of one’s reflection and the dissolution of identity: “Do you know that
when I stare for a while at my own image reflected in a mirror, I have some-
times felt myself losing the notion of the ego?” (quoted in Kessler 1995, xlv).
Discussing the narrator’s alleged psychosis, many critics observed that
insanity is not present in the text from a syntactical point of view. First, “the
narrator’s logical coherence shows no sign of deteriorating and there is no
trace of pathological semantic or syntactic distortion” (Traill 1996, 132).
Second, in contrast with, for instance, Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” (1835),
Maupassant doesn’t record “the slow disintegration of the logical thought.
Madness is contained in the text, but it is not visible in the form of the
text” (Camet 1995, 160). From this refusal of the portrayal of the psychotic
disorganization, the French writer adds to the ambiguity of the story: if the
character is not mad, the threat is even more real. However, the clinging to
reason of the diarist could be the final defense of a superego harassed by id’s
“dying of the light.”
THE MIRROR OF THE NOT-MAN
The Cioranian concept of the not-man (Bolea 2015b, 33–34) may be used to
define an anthropological mutation which might supervene in the destiny of
the Dasein. The monster called the Horla could be well characterized—not
only logically but also psychologically—as inhuman. Let us take a look
at the Cioranian texts before judging if the Horla can be redefined as a
not-man.
There are among men some who are not far above plants or animals, and there-
fore aspire to humanity. But those who know what it means to be Man long to
be anything but . . . If the difference between Man and animal lies in the fact
that the animal can only be an animal whereas man can also be not-man—that
is, something other than himself—then I am not-man. (Cioran 1996, 68–69)
Cynics are no longer supermen or submen, they are post-men. One begins to
understand and even love them, when a confession addressed to one or maybe
to no one escapes from the pains of our absence: I was man and I no longer am
now. (Cioran 1991a, 127)
The not-man is man’s radical alterity. Moreover, just like the Nietzschean
Übermensch, the not-man can be a symbol for a future development of the
human being, for a genetic project of self-transcendence. The man becomes
not-man, Cioran shows, only when he is different from himself. Furthermore,
there comes a moment when humanity becomes our past, when we can no
longer be human. This touch of inhumanity is visible in Jean Lorrain’s short
story “The Possessed” (1895). If Maupassant’s not-man is a devilish invisible
being, who terrorizes its host and drives him to suicide, Lorrain’s not-man
adds to this extraterrestrial component (shared with Horla and even Cthulhu)
a disgusting animal feature. Because of his propensity to a shattering anxiety,
J. Lorrain’s narrator cannot distinguish between reality and hallucination,
dehumanizing his peers and transforming the concept of not-man through a
reverse Nietzscheanism into a subman:
I’d taken the tram from the Louvre to Sèvres, and the distressing effect of the
suburban landscape . . . brought me to such a pitch of anguish while I watched
all those ugly faces, that I had to get off near the Pont-du-Jour. I couldn’t bear it
any longer; I was possessed, so sharply that I could have cried out for merciful
relief, by the conviction that all the people facing and sitting to either side of me
were beings of some alien race, half-beast and half-man: the disgusting products
of I don’t know what monstrous copulations, anthropoid creatures far closer to
the animal than to the human, with every foul instinct and all the viciousness
of wolves, snakes and rats incarnate in their filthy flesh . . . [R]ight in front of
106 Chapter 8
me, there was a cigarette-smoking hag with a long, mottled neck like a stork’s,
and hard, widely-spaced little teeth set in a mouth that gaped like the mouth of
a fish. . . . That foolish woman seemed to me to be the archetype of an entire
species, and as I looked at her, an unreasoning dread took hold of me that if she
should open her mouth to speak, no human language would emerge, but only
the clucking and cackling of a hen. (Lorrain 2001, 128–129)
The not-man can also be observed in Barry Pain’s lesser known story
“Diary of a God” (1901). Pain is clearly influenced by Maupassant and
Gogol, describing the descent into madness of his diarist. The combina-
tion between psychosis (i.e., paranoid God complex), antihumanism (in
Lautréamont’s fashion), and ontological solitude (based on extreme isola-
tion) is present in Pain’s text. Furthermore, there is a certain ambiguity
between life and (existential) death which results from the antihumanism of
the narrator: the diarist feels that he is the last man in the world, and that his
contemporaries do not exist for him. However, he sometimes feels that he
is dead and that there is a clear separation between his solipsistic world and
the “real” external world, between his inner inferno/paradise and the hell of
“other people”:
When I am out there [in the moors] in a place where I cannot see any trees, or
houses, or living things, I am the last person left alive in the world. I am a kind
of god. . . . I never knew what real independence was before. . . . It seems to
me now such a common and despicable thing to live among people, and to have
one’s character and one’s ways altered by what they are going to think. . . . The
people are all right, but they are people, and therefore insufferable. I can no
longer live or breathe in a place where I see people, or trees which people have
planted, or houses which people have built. It is an ugly world—people. . . . I
think I must be dead, because there seems to be a line ruled straight through my
life, and the things which happened on the further side of the line are not real.
(Pain 1901, 15–20)
Echoing Maupassant, Lorrain, and Pain, we could say that the Dasein
veers toward psychosis when he encounters the not-man, in his self or the
outer world. The transgression of humanity brings us closer to the feeling
of the numinous. After all, this world can be compared to an ontologi-
cal prison, where humanity was jailed for thousands of years. Therefore,
inhumanity is, in Maupassant’s writing as well, an evolutionary experience.
From a theological point of view, the Horla can be seen as a not-man. The
devilish aspect of the monster has already been exposed, being obvious that
it departs from the pattern of “likeness” (Gen. 1, 27). From a psychologi-
cal perspective, Horla is the bringer of madness and of the dissolution of
identity, splitting and destroying the ego. Both Maupassant and Cioran show
that the not-man is an extreme alterity, who can succeed once the human
race is enslaved: “After man, the Horla” (the final entry from September 10,
H 302).
Now I know, I understand: man’s reign on earth is over.

The thing is here, the One so feared by early peoples in their primitive terrors!
The One whom anxious priests fought with exorcisms! The One whom sorcer-
ers summoned at dead of night but never did see. . . . From the beginning, the
vulture has eaten the dove; the wolf has eaten the lamb; the lion has devoured
the sharp-horned buffalo; man has slain the lion with arrow, sword and gun. But
the Horla will use man as we have used the horse and the ox: he will make us
his chattel, his slave, and his food by using nothing more than the power of his
will. Woe betide us!
Yet sometimes an animal will turn and kill its master!” (August 19, H
296-7)
Echoing Nietzsche’s para-Darwinism, Maupassant sketches an evolution-

ary narrative, which does not end with the crowning of man, as medieval
theologians would have conceived it. The breaking down of the anthropologi-
cal structures of humanity (along with the death of God) brings us closer to
an almost Lautréamontian dominion of the not-man. The mentioning of the
human being as a mere predator is ironic and disdainful. We have mastered
the animals with “arrow, sword and gun”: nothing is said of reason, intellect,
or soul. The Horla will be the successor of the man also because humanity
distinguished itself through the disregard of other species, which were either
imprisoned or exterminated. The only comfort of the human race is to leave
the masters’ side [Herren] and join the Nietzschean herd [Herden] and hope-
fully start a “revolt of the slaves.” Following the principle of anarchism (“I
shall be the enemy of every higher power” (Stirner 1995, 165)), man should
aspire to the revenge of the “insulted and humiliated,” as Dostoyevsky would
have put it. “After all, dogs sometimes bite their masters; don’t they go for
the throat?” (August 17, H, 295).
NOTES
1. See also Freud (1961a, 6): “‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of expecting
danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one.”
2. Cioran is strongly influenced by Schopenhauer (2018, 412): “The greatest of
evils, the worst thing that could ever be threatened, is death, the greatest anxiety the
anxiety of death.”
108 Chapter 8
3. See Cioran (1976, 111): “I have always lived with the vision of a host of
moments marching against me. Time will have been my Birnam Wood.”
4. Barry Pain (1901, 21) echoes Maupassant: “I can without doubt believe
the evidence of my own senses. I have seen, and I have heard. I know now that I am
a god.”
Chapter 9
Genesis of the Shadow

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture
of Dorian Gray (1891)
“YOUR EYES SHALL BE OPENED”
There are three Jungian shadows in The Picture of Dorian Gray: Lord Henry
Wotton, Dorian Gray 2, Lord Henry’s Luciferian creation and—of course—
the physical portrait, the mirror of Dorian’s decadence. The “unspotted”
Dorian (DG 19), the hero before his Fall, can be called Dorian Gray 1, in con-
trast with his demonic and nihilist version, Dorian Gray 2. In my reading, the
second chapter of Wilde’s novel is the philosophical key of the whole novel:
the original shadow (Lord Henry) recreates here Dorian from the innocent
prototype of a charming but unaware young man. This section is as important
as the third chapter from Genesis, where the snake seduces Adam and Eve,
staining their primary innocence.
One cannot say too many things about Dorian Gray 1: “There was some-
thing in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth
was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity” (DG 19). Before being
“awaken” by Lord Wotton from the abyss of “self-unawareness” (an awaken-
ing just as brutal as Neo’s from The Matrix when he chooses the red pill1),
Dorian Gray was not yet a character. His fabulous beauty makes him a desir-
able erotic object. The ones around him project in his being their passion or
friendship, charging and symbolizing Dorian affectively. “Before meeting
Henry, and his own likeness, Dorian is indeed a brainless beautiful creature.
He is somewhat spoiled but spoiled in a childlike way; he is good-natured,
spontaneous, and generous, an absolute innocent” (Oates 1980, 423). Dorian
Gray 1 is truly a non-person, a “pre-individual,” a child who is still sleeping
in the night of unconsciousness.
Fortunately, Dorian is an ambiguous non-person: if he were pure void or
absolute nothingness, he would never be able to change. The first Dorian has
109
110 Chapter 9
a huge well of potentiality: a quality which fascinates us in children in the

same measure as the “dead end” actuality scares us in elderly people. This
potentiality contains an almost perverse feature resulting from the contradic-
tion between purity and the thirst for infinity: innocence sings its swan song
before awakening. One can almost say that a seducer like Henry Wotton
smells the perfume of anxiety (the Kierkegaardian dream of the soul about the
spirit) just as the snake from Genesis has a nose for the incompleteness and
the desire for transgression of the original couple. In a self-referential quote,
Lord Wotton, the one who will eventually turn Dorian into his own shadow,
speaks of the nature of influence: “Because to influence a person is to give
him one’s own soul. . . . He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an
actor of a part that has not been written for him” (DG 20).
To influence someone is to provoke a personality transfer, impressing one-
self in the texture of someone else’s being, reduplicating the other in one’s
own image. From this perspective, the snake from Genesis wanted to impress
his own face on Adam and Eve, desiring to become their spiritual creator.
If God physically created them, the snake would spiritually decreate2 them.
The snake brings our ancestors at the brink of the abyss with a most tempting
offer: “But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God
hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the
serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that
in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as
gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3, 3–5).
“Ye shall be as gods” [eritis sicut Deus], “your eyes shall be opened”
[aperientur oculi vestri]: the snake promised Adam and Eve everything, self-
awareness and the access to the absolute Being, where essence and existence
do coincide. “To be man means to reach toward being God. Or if you prefer,
man fundamentally is the desire to be God” (Sartre 1978, 566). The origin of
this incommensurate desire derives from the promise of the “enemy.” Seen
from the causal perspective of lost innocence, the Fall is a tragedy; seen from
the teleological perspective of the birth of self-consciousness, the decre-
ation from Eden is a Hegelian revolution. We should not cry for the wasted
paradise, we should be grateful for the gifts of awareness and autonomy.
For Hegel, the Garden of Eden was “a prison appropriate for animals who
are bound by natural necessity. . . . By partaking of the tree of knowledge,
humanity transcends its animal nature and becomes like God” (Stewart 2003,
412–413).
Just like the tempter, Lord Wotton offers “the Adam-like Dorian” (Oates
1980, 423) what the young man so lacks, that is, being: “The aim of life is
self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us
is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten
the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self” (DG 20). The
Genesis of the Shadow 111
aim of life consists in self-transformation and self-consciousness; the funda-

mental duty of the Dasein is toward himself: we register here Henry Wotton’s
unique temptation for the main character of the novel. The “pre-individual”
Dorian is fascinated by the virtuality of this personal America, that is, his own
personality. When the Lord promises selfhood to the young man, the painter
Basil Hallward (liaison between tempter and tempted) becomes “conscious
only that a look had come into the lad’s face that he had never seen there
before” (DG 21).
Dorian is attracted with the ideal of intense and full existence, which
strongly contrasts with the unlived life of Dorian 1, spent in the incubator
of unawareness: “I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and
completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought,
reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh
impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediævalism, and
return to the Hellenic ideal” (DG 21). “We” must overcome repression and
denial, “the mutilation of the savage” (DG 21), the ascetic mortifying and the
draconic superego of the Christian morals. “Every impulse that we strive to
strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us” (DG 21), notes Wotton echoing
an aphorism from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793): “He who desires,
but acts not, breeds pestilence” (Blake 2002, 165). The paradigmatic conflict
of the Victorian age, the one between duty and passion is abolished by the
unconditional and almost nihilist cult of temptation. “The only way to get rid
of a temptation is to yield to it” (DG 21).
As we have seen, Wotton has a nose for the perfume of anxiety, understood
as a Kierkegaardian dream of the soul about the spirit, for the innocent’s
desire of transformation and “sin” (“if there are such things as sins”) (DG
20): “You, Mr Gray, . . . you have had passions that have made you afraid,
thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams
whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame” (DG 21). The
impact of the Lord’s speech on Dorian is devastating: the words “had touched
some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was
now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses.// Music had stirred him like
that” (DG 21–22). The repressive reign of ignorance (to echo Hegel) comes
to an end: “There was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when
they are suddenly awakened” (DG 23). The “Adam-like” Dorian awakens in
the garden while the Luciferian Lord Henry explains the ontological principle
of hedonism: “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can
cure the senses but the soul” (DG 23). (Only sensation can heal the imbalance
provoked by intellectual pursuits.)
The episode from the garden reminds us the atmosphere of The Doors’
track Newborn Awakening and Louis’s state of mind from Interview with the
Vampire before his transformation: “That morning I was not yet a vampire,
112 Chapter 9
and I saw my last sunrise . . . I watched its whole magnificence for the last
time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sun light, and set out
to become what I became” (Neil Jordan 1994). Jekyll’s rebirth as Hyde
derives from the same spiritual territory “I crossed the yard, wherein the
constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder,
the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed
to them” (JH 58). Dorian’s second birth (his conversion from Dorian Gray
1 to Dorian Gray 2) is the essential one: Dorian turns from an object, a
beautiful, “unspotted” thing into a fascinating and powerful subject, into an
exceptional individual, who will both live and act “beyond good and evil.”
We easily forget that recreation is endorsed by decreation, which means
that before his rebirth, Dorian suffered in the garden a spiritual death, an
ontic break-up with his primary and anxious innocence. Dorian Gray 2 will
become, as Lord Wotton, a shadowy personality, attracted to the dark realm
of existence.
“NEW HEDONISM”
Lord Henry adds to the hedonistic ideal of a total existence the promise of a
consistent being (“Ye shall be as gods”) and the praise of beauty3 and youth,
two qualities that are for the first time perceived by Dorian in their fundamen-
tal ephemerality. “You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr Gray . . . And
Beauty is a form of Genius—is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no
explanation” (DG 24), argues the descendant of the snake in a shocking way,
speaking for the absolute superiority of the beauty, seemingly transgressing
not only the moral register but also the realm of the creative excellence. This
extreme eulogy seems to open the way for the surrealist vision, which presup-
poses a beauty both visceral and numinous, a “convulsive” one (Breton 1994,
160). Beauty is an astral and cosmological event, being one “of the great facts
of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of
that silver shell we call the moon” (DG 24). The cult of the visible (“The true
mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible” (DG 24)) is influenced
by Théophile Gautier’s defiant statement: “I am a man for whom the visible
world exists” [Je suis un homme pour qui le monde visible existe]” (quoted
in Satzinger 1994, 119).
Wotton reveals Dorian to himself, inspiring in him the faithfulness to the
present moment, when “the world belongs” to him “for one season” (DG
25), faithfulness which coincides with an enormous horror of the destructive
character of time.4 Seemingly, Dorian has met beauty and youth only for one
second as poisoned gifts that would mean nothing “tomorrow,” when Wilde’s
character will be banished in the mediocre abyss of old age:
You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When
your youth goes, your beauty will go with it. . . . Every month as it wanes brings
you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against
your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and
dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly. . . . Ah! realize your youth while you have
it. . . . Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon
you. Be always searching for new sensations.5 Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new
Hedonism—that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.
(DG 24–5)
From the perspective of the “new Hedonism,” the difference between youth
and seniority coincides with the distinction between life and death. The old
man becomes “unclean because of his vicinity with death” and is considered
“a subhuman, a creature who has lost the right to belong to the human race or
an imbecile who has forgotten to claim the right to euthanasia” (Vălcan 2011,
44–45). The fear of old age is a subspecies of the fear of death. It would be
fairer to say that the fear of old age is a mask of the fear of death because it
stains the seemingly limitless potentiality of youth, jamming it with the real-
ity of its ephemerality, whispering to this youth that in the essence it is truly
moribund and “sick unto death.” Every instant hides its own memento mori:
For there is such a little time that your youth will last—such a little time. . . .
But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty,
becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous
puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much
afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.
Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth! (DG 25)
Dorian Gray 1 was young, beautiful, and unaware—Dorian Gray 2 became

aware of his two main qualities (“The sense of his own beauty came on him
like a revelation” (DG 27)) and would do anything to preserve them. Because
of his fear of old age6—a version of the fear of death as I have shown above—
the hero of the novel breaks away completely from the first version of his
personality (what I have called decreation), becoming Dorian Gray 2 and
recreating himself through the Faustian ontic transfer7 between him and the
picture: “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to
grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing
in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” (DG 28).
The episode from the novel is a reference to the myth of Narcissus from
Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Enchanted by the charms which were his own./
Himself the worshipped and the worshipper,/ He sought himself and was
pursued” (Ovid 1958, 77).
114 Chapter 9
THE ECHOES OF NARCISSISM
The revealing narcissism (“The sense of his own beauty came on him like a
revelation” (DG 27)) is the incentive of Dorian’s conversion. The condemna-
tion of narcissism originates in Ovid’s text, when he mentions Narcissus’s
“odd love” (Ovid 1958, 75). According to Vera B. Profit (2014, 111), “each
and every narcissistic person suffers from a fractured relationship between
himself and his surrounding. He/she consistently fails to see reality for what it
is: an entity unto itself, with its inherent attributes and exigencies. Due to their
overweening self-absorption, these individuals consistently regard reality as
an extension of themselves.” Furthermore, according to the Jungian therapist
Thomas Moore (1994, 58, 71), “obsessive, but not genuine, self-love leaves
no room for intimacy with another. . . . The echoing aspect of narcissism—the
feeling that everything in the world is only a reflection of oneself—doesn’t
want to give away power. . . . The narcissist is clearly sadistic in his rejection
of others and in his feelings of superiority.”
According to Vera B. Profit, the solipsism of the narcissist leads him or
her to a certain inflation: I = world. A typical case of inflation is found in
Nietzsche’s TSZ in the ego’s transgression of the self: “If there were gods,
how could I endure not to be a god! . . . Away with such a god! Rather no god,
rather make destiny on one’s own, rather be a fool, rather be a god oneself!”
(TSZ, II, “Upon the Blessed Isles,” TSZ, IV, “Retired”). Indeed, there is a
resemblance between the ego’s inflation which thinks it can overpower the
self and the solipsistic narcissist who stamps his or her face onto the world,
transforming the creation into an echo. To declare that “I am the world,” like
Narcissus, is another way of saying, like Zarathustra, that “I am God.” “Other
than himself, Dorian sees no one. That means that he doesn’t see himself
for who he is either” (Profit 2014, 125). One can declare that “I am God”
only if one ignores two obviously related aspects: alterity and contingency.
The rejection of alterity is already present in Schelling’s and Fichte’s “I=I.”8
Much later, the individualism of existential phenomenology was criticized
by Levinas, who dismisses the Heideggerian conception of death because of
its indifference of the death of the other (Levinas 2000, 17). The author of
Totality and Infinity argues that alterity is a revelation on its own. Moreover,
the contingency indubitably proves that we are far from being God or neces-
sary beings. Therefore, only the experience of the contingency can “cure” us
from the paranoia of the ego which dethrones the territory of the self.
However, a modest version of the “I am God” of the narcissist may be
defended: the feeling that “I am (arguably) the most important person from
my life” is constitutive for self-confidence and pride. If one expects every-
thing from exteriority (from alterity or destiny), one is deceived in one’s
expectations. Of course, not everything is up to you (the manic illusion of
control), but you should not think it is impossible to minimally influence real-
ity (the depressive powerlessness of the victim). Each success is a conjunc-
tion between ego and fate (not a separate victory of either ego, or chance), and
each failure is a quadrature of the two terms involved (it often is a manifesta-
tion of the contingent of fate). If we renounce solipsism and paranoia, let us
keep individualism, with all its liberating might.
Furthermore, up to a point, narcissism is sustainable as a gift of self-
awareness and of the realization of identity. When one praises innocence, one
must ask, like Hegel, if Eden was not a prison of “natural necessity” (Stewart
2003, 412–413). Self-love presupposes an obvious perverse impossibility,
on account of the coincidence of the subject and object: “Am I the lover/ Or
beloved?” (Ovid 1958, 78) But, at the same time, it is becoming, transfor-
mation, fruit of the individuation. If Dorian remained “unspotted,” if Adam
lingered in the ontic incubator, we would be deprived of two fundamental
narratives, knowing less about ourselves. To choose innocence over narcis-
sism is, according to Michel Onfray (2007, 38), a “ban on intelligence”: “You
can do any-thing in this magnificent Garden, except become intelligent—the
Tree of Knowledge—or immortal—the Tree of Life. What a fate God has in
store for men: stupidity and mortality! . . . Let us then praise Eve who opted
for intelligence at risk of death.”
Narcissism can be also defended in another way. In both Ovid’s poem and
Wilde’s novel, self-love is compared with an inner burning, an excruciating
pain: “I’ve loved within the shadow/ Of what I am, and I that love I burn,/ I
light the flames and feel their fires within/” (Ovid 1958, 78). The unparalleled
sufferance, which proceeds from unattainable love, anticipates the transition
from the demonism of the character (who burns in his own hell) to his final
transfiguration, when he puts an end to evil with his suicide. We may say that,
in this case, suicide signifies—not damnation, but—an end to damnation.
Because Dorian, like Narcissus, is visiting hell—understood as “a state of
final separateness from God” (Vann 1954, 54). The inferno of pure aestheti-
cism, which minimizes and despises conventional morality, treats alterity and
the world as mere echoes of the ego. The ones who consider narcissism a
form of sadism choose to ignore the pain of differentiation and the isolation9
of superiority. Narcissus has created from beauty a religion with a single
disciple and a unique object of worship.
“ETHICS BECOME AESTHETICS”
Dorian Gray 2, the dark, shadowy, Luciferian personality, who would even
break the sixth commandment, is the impeccable creation of Lord Henry,
this follower of the “Dark Force,” who “had begun by vivisecting himself, as
116 Chapter 9
he had ended by vivisecting others” (DG 56). For Dorian’s master,10 as for
Protagoras, “man is measure of all things.” “Human life—that appeared to
him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else
of any value” (DG 56). Wotton uses the method of natural science to fortify
his psychology: he deconstructs his own psyche and one of their acquain-
tances to increase his self-knowledge. Another 19th-century “biologist,”
Turgenev’s nihilistic hero from Fathers and Sons (1862), Bazarov, arrives at
a sort of brutal materialism, applying the principles of natural science: “Each
one of us has a brain, a spleen and lungs made in the same way and the so-
called moral qualities are the same in all of us. The minor variations don’t
mean anything” (Turgenev 1998, 84). For Bazarov, man is no more than a
“thing.” The Kierkegaardian distinction between individual and species that
becomes essential for the difference between man and beast is irrelevant for
Turgenev’s character: “One human example is sufficient to judge all the rest”
(Ibid.). The Russian nihilist is, therefore, an anti-psychologist. Au contraire,
Lord Henry is a connoisseur of the human soul and a disciple of individual-
ism: he increases his insight practicing spiritual deconstruction. Moreover,
like Baudelaire, Gautier, and Huysmans, Wotton (and his partisan Dorian
with him) flirts with the negative, plucking “flowers of evil”11: “There were
poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them.12
There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one
sought to understand their nature” (DG 56).
Lord Henry is a pure aesthete and as we have seen in Nietzsche’s case,
aestheticism brings along the destruction of ethics13 or, in other words, is
morally indifferent. “No artist has ethical sympathies” (DG 3), we read in
Wilde’s bold Preface. Dorian’s transformation, his deviation toward his sec-
ond personality, is a conscious creation of Wotton, which has nothing to do
with the realm of the contingent. The Shadow-Wotton projects himself in the
innocent young man to de/restructure him as Dorian Gray 2: “Talking to him
was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and
thrill of the bow” (DG 37). The exercise of influence is compared once again
with the identity transfer, with the “cloning” of the other, who becomes one’s
“replica”: “There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influ-
ence. No other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious
form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views
echoed back” (DG 37).
I must make three observations at this point: first, when I influence the
other, when I impress my personality in his spiritual code, the other does
not become an alter ego, “another me.” He would evolve in his own terms,
“becoming who he is” (not who I am), using what I gave him to find his
unique and personal direction. He honors me becoming himself.14 Second, the
one I transform would not be able to rise above himself, would not be able
to receive my influence if he hadn’t possessed in himself a certain capital to

welcome this influence (an imbalance, an undeniable disproportion, an inner
unrest). Even before receiving my influence, the other is—in a way—already
like me: from a certain point of view, the other is “spotted,” turned toward
ontic mischief before knowing me. Thus, we should not overestimate the
influence of the master: a version of the shadow is encrypted in the spiritual
code before the archetypal shadow (Sauron’s eye) exerts its influence. In
fact, this pre-shadow prayed from the depths for the archetypal descending of
the shadow. We see here that the disciple influenced the master to influence
him. Third, when I change the other, I am—in a certain measure—chang-
ing myself. The relation between Wotton and Dorian (or the one between
Mephistopheles and Faust) is always dynamic. Any transformation presup-
poses an inner metamorphosis.
The picture is the third shadow from Dorian Gray. Wilde doesn’t give too
many details concerning the strange correspondence between Dorian’s spirit
and the fabric of the painting, which assumes the moral decomposition of the
perpetual young man: “Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical
atoms, that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas, and the
soul that was within him? Could it be that what that soul thought, they real-
ized?” (DG 93) The “new Hedonism” and the ideal of a total existence are
experienced by Dorian through the identification with the Jungian function of
sensation15 and through the endless pursuit of pleasure. “Eternal youth, infi-
nite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins—he was
to have all these things” (DG 102). “The more he knew, the more he desired
to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them” (DG
124). Through the picture, “the most magical of mirrors” (DG 103), Dorian
will keep track of his decadence sometimes with horror, other times with a
sick, perverted pleasure: “On his return he would sit in front of the picture,
sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride
of individualism that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling, with secret
pleasure, at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should
have been his own” (DG 135).
According to Wolfgang Maier (1984, 308), the relationship between
Dorian and the picture can be compared to that of Jekyll and Hyde from
Stevenson’s novella. Just as Jekyll projects his shadow in Hyde to satisfy his
bloody impulses, Dorian protects his pristine persona, transferring corruption
and negativity into the picture. It is a classic example of dissociation,16 of
separation between good and evil, also mentioning that the good which pre-
tends not to acknowledge the evil it produces, which pretends to be innocent
despite obvious transgression, comes close to absolute evil. “Even as good
shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly
on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the
118 Chapter 9
lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay”
(JH 58), notes Jekyll. Stevenson’s fragment is mirrored in Basil Hallward’s
reflections from Dorian Gray: “But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, inno-
cent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth—I can’t believe anything
against you” (DG 143). Just like it is a sign of intelligence to recognize our
“silly” mistakes, an acknowledged inferiority is—not necessarily cured but—
curable. Conversely, the unrecognized shadow becomes denser and more
Plutonic. Dorian and Jekyll are classical examples of dissociation: on one
hand, they enjoy the havoc unleashed by the maenads of the id, who break the
barriers of reason and invade the territory of a weaker ego, on the other they
see themselves as the heralds of beauty and good, despite their inherent faults.
In fact, the portrait is the true Dorian Gray 2 while our character seeks dis-
guise under the mask of Dorian Gray 1. From another perspective, the picture
is Dorian’s living corpse,17 a zombie which feeds with negativity, with “sins”:
“What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image
on the canvas” (DG 113). While Dorian grows as a sensation type, satisfying
his thirst for life, the shadow of the picture grows, becoming “blacker and
denser.” “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the indi-
vidual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is” (CW 11, §131).
The portrait symbolizes a certain anthropological truth: to become he or
she is, any person must become his or her own demon before becoming a
god. The shadow reveals our inner devil. The painter Basil, observing the
horrifying degradation of the portrait, the collapse of the absolute ideal in
the inferno of moral decay, exclaims: “You were to me such an ideal as I
shall never meet again. This is the face of a satyr” (DG 150). He reminds us
of the famous verses from Baudelaire’s Carrion which also commemorate
the hellish decomposition of a sacred ideal: “Yes, you will come to this,
my queen,/. . . when you rot underground among/ the bones already there”
(Baudelaire 2006b, 36). Maybe this is the fate which modernity has reserved
for the intelligible: to be dumped at the junkyard, like a “carrion.” Perhaps
all ideals are entwined with their putrefaction in a world constructed on the
Nietzschean affirmation “God is dead.”
Toward the end of the novel, Lord Henry praises Dorian’s aesthetic-exis-
tential fulfillment, who abstained from creating poetic, sculptural, or musi-
cal oeuvres, transferring his creating libido into his own life, turning himself
into a genuine work of art. “Life has been your art. You have set yourself to
music. Your days are your sonnets” (DG 207), observes Wotton, emphasiz-
ing his previous reflections: “But now and then a complex personality took
the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work
of art, Life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculp-
ture, or painting” (DG 57). The argument of the Irish writer reminds us both
of Nietzsche18 and Rimbaud.19 Dorian achieves the absolute fulfillment of
the aesthetical, becoming one of “Life’s masterpieces.” Despite this realisa-

tio, his melancholy (the discrepancy between Dorian Gray 2 and the ghostly
Dorian Gray 1, the nostalgia for the lost paradise) leads him to suicide.
“He loathed his own beauty” (DG 210), writes Oscar Wilde, almost in
Rimbaud’s fashion: “One night, I sat Beauty on my knee.—And I found her
bitter.—And I hurt her” (Rimbaud 2003, 195). “It was his beauty—reflects
Dorian—that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed
for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain” (DG
210).
In the manner of Søren Kierkegaard, who discovers the ethical at the end
of the aesthetical stage, Wilde contradicts his whole aesthetical nihilism, also
depreciating his “beyond good and evil” eulogy of Beauty. Dorian becomes
ethical at the end, a splinter of Dorian Gray 1 “finding bitter” the beauty that
“destroyed” his life. The identity between Dorian Gray 2 and the picture,
on one hand, and the split between the uncreated Dorian Gray 1 and the de/
recreated Dorian Gray 2, on the other, lead the main character to demise. The
young man senses the identity with the horrible portrait, living in the exis-
tential dimension of the “dead soul”: “It was the living death of his own soul
that troubled him” (DG 210).
If Dorian Gray had been equivalent with Dorian Gray 2 and the portrait,
things would have been much easier: the character would have advanced
to a sort of absolute demonism, transgressing any anthropological reg-
ister. But in the end Wilde revolts against the necessity of the Genesis,
against self-affirmation through original sin, against self-awareness and
theosis, contra Hegel, Bakunin or Onfray, rediscovering like Cioran and
Kierkegaard, the fetal nostalgia of paradise. Dorian Gray 1, the one sacri-
ficed by the Lord Wotton’s decreation, returns from the unconscious, pos-
sessing the autonomy of a shadow’s shadow and kills himself, destroying
the picture.
Why does not Wilde end his novel in a Nietzschean fashion, like
Maupassant’s Bel Ami (1885) or like Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s “The Lovely
Ardiane’s Secret” (1883)? Why does he punish his character who has fulfilled
an aesthetic ideal and has achieved excellency, despite his immoralism? “But
the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself” (DG 21). The Irish poet suc-
cumbed to his fear: his demonism hardly foretells an anti-theology, his phi-
losophy of the “Dark Side” is only a symptom of the repressed Christianity.
Like Baudelaire, whose Litanies of Satan (1857) mark a progression to
Catholicism, Wilde destroys his ship in the ethical reef. The nihilism of his
characters is only a mask of an Eden complex: their sophisticated freedom
hides an infantile nostalgia for nonage. Their duality reproduces the quarter-
ing of their author, torn between the cult of beauty and the worship of “Adam-
like” purity.
120 Chapter 9
NOTES
1. “You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe
whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I
show you how deep the rabbit hole goes” (Wachowski et. Wachowski 1999).
2. I use decreation in a different way than Simone Weil (2002, 32), who defined
it as making “something created pass into the uncreated” as opposed to destruction
as making “something created pass into nothingness.” My definition is closer to
the theories of Bakunin and Nietzsche: decreation must be understood as a sort of
creative destruction. See also Cioran (1976, 6): “Unmaking, decreating, is the only
task man may take upon himself, if he aspires, as everything suggests, to distinguish
himself from the Creator.”
3. See Gautier (1981, 137): beauty is “visible Divinity, palpable happiness
descended on earth.” See also Lionel Johnson’s poem, “The Dark Angel” (1894):
“And all the things of beauty burn/ With flames of evil ecstasy” (Johnson 1982, 119).
See also Refn 2016: “Beauty isn’t everything. Beauty is the only thing.”
4. See Eliade (1963, 51): “Whatever endures wastes away, degenerates, and
finally perishes.” See also Fitzgerald (2009, 69): “Life is a process of breaking down.”
5. Jules Destrée’s observation regarding Huysmans’s À rebours (1884) may also
be applied to Oscar Wilde’s novel: “This excessive book is nothing but . . . the exces-
sive poem of sensation” (quoted in Urmann 2016, 288).
6. “Yes, there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his
eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed. . . . The life
that was to make his soul would mar his body. He would become dreadful, hideous,
and uncouth” (DG 27).
7. He gives away his soul to gain his spirit.
8. “[I]t is the I alone that bestows unity and stability on everything that is. . . . [I]t
is the absolute I that furnishes the basis for all form of identity (A=A)” (Schelling
1980, 83). “The proposition A is A (or A = A, since that is the meaning of the logical
copula) . . . is admitted to be perfectly certain and established” (Fichte 1982, 94).
9. See Lingua (1995, 129): “Wilde’s narcissists . . . are condemned to the solitude
of a tormented consciousness, which reduces to nothing all possibilities of evasion
beyond itself.” See also Moores (2010, 112): “The toxic self-love of narcissism pre-
vents one from experiencing self-transcendence.”
10. Lord Wotton’s model is Walter Pater, who wrote in his controversial
“Conclusion” of The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873): “To burn always
with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. . . . While all
melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution
to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any
stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of
the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some
passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic
dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before
evening” (Pater 1980, 189).
11. “There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which
he could realize his conception of the beautiful” (DG 140).
12. See Rimbaud’s similar idea from the letter to Paul Demeny (15.05.1871):
“A Poet . . . exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences”
(Rimbaud 2008, 116).
13. “Bedelia: You no longer have ethical concerns, Hannibal. You have aestheti-
cal ones.
Hannibal: Ethics become aesthetics” (Fuller 2015).
14. See Nietzsche, GS 255: “A: ‘What? You want imitators?’ B: ‘I don’t want
people to imitate me; I want everyone to set his own example, which is what I do.’”
15. See also the awakening of the sensitive function in Gide’s The Immoralist
(1902):
“Up till that day, so it seemed to me, I had felt so little and thought so much that now I was
astonished to find my sensations had become as strong as my thoughts.// I say, ‘it seemed
to me,’ for from the depths of my past childhood, there now awoke in me the glimmerings
of a thousand lost sensations. The fact that I was once more aware of my senses enabled
me to give them a half fearful recognition. Yes; my reawakened senses now remembered
a whole ancient history of their own—recomposed for themselves a vanished past. They
were alive! Alive! They had never ceased to live; they discovered that even during those
early studious years they had been living their own latent, cunning life” (Gide 1958, 32).
16. See appendix 4.

17. See Dorian’s identification with the picture from Penny Dreadful: “Do you
not yet comprehend the wicked secret of the immortal? All age and die, save you.
All rot and fall to dust, save you. Any child you bear becomes a crone and perishes
before your eyes. Any lover withers and shrinks into incontinence and bent, toothless
senility. While you, only you, never age. Never tire. Never fade. Alone . . . You have
become a perfect, unchanging portrait of yourself” (Logan 2016).
18. “Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art” (BT 18).
19. “I became a fabulous opera” (Rimbaud 2003, 349).
Chapter 10
The Shadow in Philosophy

Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (1883–1885)
JUNG AND NIETZSCHE ABOUT ZARATHUSTRA
The seminar concerning Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was held in English by

Jung between 1934 and 1939 at the Psychology Club in Zurich. It was not the
first such seminar, having been anticipated by the Dream Analysis Seminar
(1928–1930) and the Visions Seminar (1930–1934), dedicated to archetypal
visions painted by Christiana Morgan. During the six years, around eighty
people participated in the seminar dedicated to the Nietzsche’s masterpiece.
Until 1989, the manuscript of the seminar notes had not been known to the
general public, acquiring a legendary and mysterious status, as it had been
thought that they would reveal a new facet of analytical psychology. The
various persons associated with analytical psychology, who had access to
the text of the seminar, were forbidden to copy or quote it without Jung’s
permission (Jarett 1989, ix). An example of Jungian analysis applied to
Nietzsche, influenced by Jung’s perspective from the seminar, is the book
Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond the Values of His Time (1984), belonging
to Jungian analyst Liliane Frey-Rohn, one of the participants. After the
almost 1,600 pages of the seminar saw publication in 1989, several com-
parative approaches between the two explorers of the unconscious began to
be published.1
Since his student years, Jung had been fascinated by Nietzsche’s ambig-
uous figure: on the one hand, a brilliant professor of classical philology at
the University of Basel at only twenty-four and author of an autobiography
at the age of fifteen, and on the other, eccentric, isolated, misunderstood,
nonconformist, unintegrated, despised, and ignored to and beyond the
border of psychopathology. Here’s how Jung receives Nietzsche in his
undergraduate years:
123
124 Chapter 10
Nietzsche had been on my program for some time, but I hesitated to begin read-
ing him because I felt I was insufficiently prepared. At that time he was much
discussed, mostly in adverse terms, by the allegedly competent philosophy
students, from which I was able to deduce the hostility he aroused in the higher
echelons . . . I was held back by a secret fear that I might perhaps be like him,
at least in regard to the “secret” which had isolated him from his environment
. . . Thus Spake Zarathustra . . . like Goethe's Faust, was a tremendous experi-
ence for me. Zarathustra was Nietzsche's Faust, his No. 2, and my No. 2 now
corresponded to Zarathustra. (MDR 101–2)
The Jungian “secret” is his inner duality, discovered in childhood, between

the personality no. 1 (what we could call his ego engaged in the daily real-
ity of existence) and personality no. 2 (the other of his own personality, the
transtemporal self “who knew God as a hidden, personal, and at the same
time suprapersonal secret” (MDR 45)). In Jung’s view, Zarathustra was
Nietzsche’s secondary personality, the inner man, the unconscious numinous
center, which showed him, secretly, the path to his shadow and his inferior
function.
Nietzsche conceived the first part2 of Zarathustra in Rapallo around
February 1, 1883, trying to recover from the amorous disappointment caused
by the break-up with Lou Salomé in the winter of 1882: “My health was not
of the best; the winter cold and exceptionally rainy; a little albergo, right by
the sea, with the high sea at night making it impossible to sleep, offered in
more or less all respects the opposite of what was desirable. Nevertheless
. . . it was in this winter and these unfavourable circumstances that my
Zarathustra was produced” (EH, “TSZ,” 1).
The second part was conceived at Sils Maria in July 1883, and the third
part was written at the beginning of January 1884 in Nice. Nietzsche cycli-
cally fluctuates between depression and euphoria, between marasmus and
daimonic inspiration, accessing archetypal content during this gestation
period: “A rapture whose immense tension is released from time to time in
a flood of tears, when you cannot help your step running on one moment
and slowing down the next; a perfect being-outside-yourself with the most
distinct consciousness of myriad subtle shudders and shivers . . . a depth of
happiness where the most painful and sinister things act not as opposites”
(EH, “TSZ,” 3).
Each of the first three parts was written in less than ten days. The fourth
book was written later and much more slowly, in Zurich, Mentone, and Nice
in the winter of 1884–1885, and has an ambiguous and demystifying status
in relation to the entire first three parts, as is the case with the second part of
Goethe’s Faust. Despite this, the Zoroastrian ensemble finally receives the
quadripartite structure of a post-romantic symphony, comparable to Brahms’s
The Shadow in Philosophy 125
Symphony No. 1 in C Minor (1877) (Burnham and Jesinghausen 2010, 114).

The opening of Zarathustra fits with the tragic, sublime, and grandiose [über-
menschlich] atmosphere of Un poco sostenuto, and the Brahmsian movement
could be a counterpart to the Sonnenaufgang from Richard Strauss’s sym-
phonic poem dedicated to Nietzsche’s work (1896).
There are three most important themes of the book. First, the main
Nietzschean character is acclaimed as a prophet of the superman (the death
of God3 accompanies this theme). Second, the philosophy of will to power (a
recurring theme in the posthumous fragments, not intended for publication)
shows the development and the potential overcoming of the Schopenhauerian
voluntarism. The third important concept concerns the eternal recurrence of
the same, a doctrine introduced by the German philosopher at the beginning
of the third part. All these themes are imbued with the issue of nihilism4 and
Nietzsche himself oscillates between a Schopenhauerian foundation of passive
nihilism, a disposition for destruction specific to active nihilism, and a nar-
rower anti-nihilist register, consistent with the assertion of the eternal return.
The Jungian seminar dedicated to Nietzsche’s work has some hermeneutic
peculiarities, which I will refer to below. First, it is based on the method of
amplification, which involves the use of mythical parallels in order to eluci-
date the symbolic material presented by Nietzsche. Moreover, the Swiss psy-
chologist considers that the subliminal dynamics of the book is enantiodromy
(a “law” that comes from Heraclitus,5 whereby each thing is considered to be
its antipode) and that Zarathustra, by its very structure, can be likened to a
great enantiodromic moment6 (Bishop 2003, 216).
In addition, Jung’s interpreters have highlighted some shortcomings of
the seminar. One of them notes that Jungian analysis is purely psychologi-
cal (Clarke 1992, 71). Another problem is the ignorance of the connection
between Nietzsche and the history of philosophy (Parkes 1999, 214), the
German philosopher being emplaced in a mythological, occult, or esoteric
context, a tradition he knew little about (Bishop 2003, 216). The common
thread of the Jungian criticism of the seminar consists in the observation
that Nietzsche would not have been able to differentiate between ego and
self (Parkes 1999, 217)—a questionable observation. Moreover, for Jung,
Nietzsche, Zarathustra, and superman are equal. According to Gadamer
(1986, 5), this is a major hermeneutic error. Syllogistic reasoning is used
abusively, Zarathustra being identified with characters that represent oppo-
site tendencies (the ego, the shadow, the soul, and the self) (Parkes 1999,
218; Liebscher 2000, 191–199). Consequently, we can see that, by applying
the postulates of analytical psychology mechanically, the text appears to
say more about Jung than about Nietzsche (Bishop 2003, 216), and that the
similarities between Jung and Nietzsche are concealed by the Swiss author
because he does not want to recognize in Nietzsche his own malady.
126 Chapter 10
In my opinion, the most troubling shortcoming of the seminar is the exclu-

sion of Nietzsche from the general philosophical context (his relationship
with Schopenhauer, with Platonism, with German idealism, with ontology7).
Moreover, conceptual analysis is avoided (the superman or the eternal return
are treated non-philosophically, through mythological references). Often, the
impression is that the discussion is being pushed toward a non-essential area.
Furthermore, one can argue that the understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy
as refractory to the construction of an enduring symbol8 (Frey-Rohn 1971,
319; Bishop 1995, 290) is inadequate9 (Huskinson 2004, 96). As one com-
mentator notes, in a somewhat trivial but edifying language, Nietzsche was
a madman, and Jung was not (Lindner 2010, 112). The notion that there is
an implicit connection between the Nietzschean work and psychosis is not
necessarily viable (Huskinson 2004, 131). In the works published in 1888
the Verfallen toward mental illness is evident, while in Zarathustra it is less
so. Can we talk about a sane person’s disdain of the one who proves his
“inferiority”?
Things are more complex, and proof of this also comes from Jung’s pro-
pensity for the split between Personality No. 1 and Personality No. 2, for
childhood schizophrenia, in harsher terms (Winnicott 1964, 450). If we also
consider the depressive, even psychotic episode that followed his separation
from Freud, his disdain may be only a shadow of self-contempt. Together
with Strindberg, Jung is one of the few cases of authors who recovered
from their mental illness (Lachman 2005, 239). Moreover, the Swiss psy-
chologist built his work on the basis of his psychosis from 1913 to 1919.
Anyway, Zarathustra is not the work of a mere sickly character. Even if
it were, its hyperbolic scale (Nehamas 1999, 22), like that of Rimbaud and
Baudelaire, represents the foundation of modernity. After Nietzsche, we all
went insane—in other words, normality was redefined. The monstrosity of
the thinker from Sils Maria redefined the category of the anthropological, just
as its transgressive character10 redefined psychology, practically creating psy-
choanalysis (Nietzsche is among the first to speak of repression, resistance,
unconscious, shadow, anima, self).
Like Baudelaire’s character in “L’Héautontimorouménos” (1857), Nietzsche
is a schizophrenic beyond schizophrenia: he confronts Schopenhauer and
his passive nihilism, and he confronts himself and his own active nihilism.
Although the affirmative phase of his doctrine is less obvious,11 Nietzsche
aims at anti-nihilism. His doctrine of the superman was associated with the
search for the self, with Jungian individuation. Dionysos is not only Wotan
or a god of death like Hades (Frey-Rohn 1971, 308–309), and his superman
cannot be identified with the “devil.”12 Although it starts from the death of
God, nihilism should not be understood as demonism. Nihilism always refers
to God, but not only through an anti- but also through a jenseits, a trans-. Its
negative theology is especially post-Christian. What is beyond the concepts

of transcendence and transgression, beyond the Creator and the “adversary”?
This is the new question of the “zero hour” represented by Nietzsche, which
establishes the foundation of modernity. Moreover, it makes no sense to
excuse Nietzsche or to assign to him improper coherence. His deviance
through mental illness, even when assumed to be a consequence of his work,
makes him so much more interesting, so much more alive—a true fellow
being. Nietzscheanism has always been a cliff’s edge to jump from or a lad-
der to climb.
ZARATHUSTRA’S SHADOWS
The Jester, the Dwarf, and the Ape

The jester is the first shadowy personality to appear in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. The jester [der Possenreisser] is prominent in Zarathustra’s
prologue, after the Nietzschean prophet makes his first speech about the
superman and the last man. Zarathustra’s exposition on the superman is
ridiculed by the crowd, who consider it an attempt to promote the tightrope
walker. As the tightrope walker advances on the rope stretched between
the two towers above the market square, halfway through, behind him
appears the gloomy figure of the jester, who intones with an “awe-inspiring”
[fürchterlich] voice these mysterious imprecations: “‘Forward, lamefoot!
. . . Forward, lazybones, smuggler, or I shall tickle you with my heel! What
are you doing here between towers? The tower is where you belong. You
ought to be locked up; you block the way for one better than yourself’”
(TSZ, prologue, 6).
If we understand the activity of the tightrope walker in an analogy with
Zarathustra’s mission (SNZ I, 49) (both have “made danger their voca-
tion”—the tightrope walker through his risky profession, the prophet through
his revolutionary action to destabilize “Platonism for the ‘people’” (BGE,
preface) by all means), we can also understand the meaning of the jester’s
violent reprimands. “The tower is where you belong” can be understood as a
warning for Zarathustra: “The cave is where you belong! Nobody cares about
your teaching.” Next, the jester jumps over the tightrope walker (this is the
meaning of “tickling with the heel”), making him suffer a fatal accident. The
jester is a perennial reminder of the peril of Zarathustra’s burden, who wants
to transform the world through his tripartite doctrine of the superman, will
power and eternal return. In other words, the jester symbolizes the “intrinsic
vulnerability” of those who attempt the dangerous transition to superman
(Burnham and Jesinghausen 2010, 25).
128 Chapter 10
The later mention of the jester from TSZ III emphasizes precisely this
opposition to the doctrine of the superman, manifested especially by paro-
dying the Nietzschean concept of self-overcoming [Selbst-Überwindung],
which always accompanies transcendence to superhumanity: “Man is
something that must be overcome [Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwun-
den werden muss]. . . . But only a jester thinks: ‘Man can also be skipped
over.’ [Der Mensch kann auch übersprungen werden]” (TSZ, III, “On Old
and New Tablets,” 4). The jester is symptomatic for the anxiety and the
compensatory contempt for the superman. Refusing the difficult askesis
of self-transcendence, the shadowy character prefers the shortcut of the
“jump” and the contemptuous “tickling with the heel.” It is interesting that
the jester considers himself superior to the tightrope walker (and implicitly,
to Zarathustra), in the way that inferior people protect themselves by will-
ful ignorance (what Sartre called “bad faith”) from the revelation of their
own self.
We move on to the warning of the jester from prologue addressed in
a whispered tone to Zarathustra, which sheds new light on the relations
between the emissary of the superman and his shadow:
Go away from this town, Zarathustra . . . there are too many here who hate
you. You are hated by the good and the just, and they call you their enemy and
despiser; you are hated by the believers in the true faith, and they call you the
danger of the multitude. It was your fortune that you were laughed at; and verily,
you talked like a jester. It was your good fortune that you stooped to the dead
dog; when you lowered yourself so far, you saved your own life for today. But
go away from this town! or tomorrow I shall leap over you, one living over one
dead. (TSZ, prologue, 8)
Several ideas emerge from this fragment. First of all, the hatred and con-
tempt of the crowd addressed to Zarathustra and his new unconventional
doctrine are obvious, feelings that the prophet had discovered intuitively
when he observed the reaction of the crowd in the market square (“And
now they look at me and laugh: and as they laugh they even hate me. There
is ice in their laughter” (TSZ, prologue, 5)). Second, who are those who
consider the Nietzschean main character a public danger? “The good,” “the
just,” “the believers in the true faith”: representatives of traditional moral-
ity, named in GM, Herdenmoral—the morality of slaves. Those who hate
Zarathustra to death are hard-pressed to create new values, to set up new
slates, based on the authority of the dragon [der Drache], who endorses the
almighty power of duty, tradition, and resentful morality (“Who is the great
dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and god? ‘Thou shalt’ be
the name of the great dragon” (TSZ, I, “On the Three Metamorphoses”)).
Moreover, they are the ones who will later intone hypocritically: “I serve,
you serve, we serve” (TSZ, III, “On Virtue that Makes Small”).
Thirdly, the jester postulates a similarity between his technique and that
of Zarathustra (“verily, you talked like a jester”). This means that the jester
can only understand Zarathustra’s speech as a parody of his own parody. By
exposing Zarathustra to the “secret motives” of the people gathered in the
market square, the jester can be compared to the cynical “buffoon” from BGE
26, that “provides the ‘shortcut’ in the philosopher’s indispensable study of
the average man” (Lampert 1986, 27). Moreover, the jester symbolizes the
reactionary rage of the crowd (Burnham and Jesinghausen 2010, 25), who
refrained from stoning the prophet, because the latter had unintentionally
humiliated himself when he decided to bury the corpse of tightrope walker
(Rosen 1995, 67).
A figure related to the jester is the dwarf, who makes his most prominent
appearance in the section “On the Vision and the Riddle,” where Nietzsche
presents in an allegorical form the doctrine of eternal return, which in his
philosophy represents the transition from an active nihilism (the corrosive
themes of the superman and the death of God) to anti-nihilism. Here is how
the dwarf [der Zwerg] addresses the Nietzschean character:
O Zarathustra . . . you philosopher’s stone! You threw yourself up high, but

every stone that is thrown must fall. O Zarathustra, you philosopher’s stone,
you slingstone, you star-crusher! You threw yourself up so high; but every stone
that is thrown must fall. Sentenced to yourself and to your own stoning—O
Zarathustra, far indeed have you thrown the stone, but it will fall back on your-
self. (TSZ, III, “On the Vision and the Riddle,” 1)
We notice from the very beginning the same technique of parody that we
have become accustomed to in the jester’s case: in fact, parody has often been
considered diabolical13 and the dwarf has been called earlier “the devil” [der
Teufel]. The stone is regarded as a symbol of divinity14 (Grün 2013, 75–76)
and has a significant role in alchemy, in Gerard Dorn’s view: “Transform
yourselves from dead stones into living philosophical stones!”15 The dwarf
is the embodiment of the spirit of gravity [der Geist der Schwere] and warns
Zarathustra that any transcendence to superhumanity is subject to the uni-
versal gravitational law and will fall toward the last man, the diminished
man,16 toward the Schopenhauerian background of passive nihilism, which
Nietzsche constantly tries to leave behind: “And the eternal recurrence even
of the smallest—that was my disgust with all existence” (TSZ, III, “The
Convalescent,” 2, Loeb 2012, 166).
In other words, the dwarf operates a pre-Cioranian critique17 of Nietzschean
nihilism: “To believe it his responsibility to transcend his condition and tend
130 Chapter 10
toward the superman is to forget that he has trouble enough sustaining him-
self as man” (Cioran 1970, 183). The Nietzschean “stone” (the Nietzschean
ideal of transcendence to superhumanity)18 will fall and crush the parent with
a tremendous weight. We could read here, in Jung’s style, one of the many
warnings about madness, a sign from the unconscious, announcing the bio-
logical impossibility of the transition to the superman without a considerable
risk of inflation. The dwarf is, in Jungian interpretation, the saturnine “man
of lead,” which “destroys the mind” (SNZ II, 1260): the dwarf “sat on me
. . . making lame, dripping lead into my ear, leaden thoughts into my brain”
(TSZ, III, “On the Vision and the Riddle,” 1). The dwarf is a personification
of gravity, but also of the fall [Verfallen], another allusion to the diabolical
provenance of the shadowy figures: “Through him all things fall” [durch ihn
fallen alle Dinge] (TSZ, I, “On Reading and Writing”).
Another shadowy personality of Zarathustra is the madman nicknamed by
the townspeople “Zarathustra’s Ape,”19 because he borrows from the prophet
the ideas and the vehemence of discourse. Zarathustra’s ape criticizes the Big
City from the perspective of one who participates in social life (Burnham
and Jesinghausen 2010, 142), without being an outsider, a “stranger,” like
the superman’s follower. Moreover, his contempt is a compensation for his
hurt pride: his tirade is bitter with the regret that “nobody flattered [him] suf-
ficiently” (TSZ, III, “On Passing By”). The relationship between Zarathustra
and his “ape” can be likened to the biological relationship between superman
and ape/human: “Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape
than any ape. . . . What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful
embarrassment” (TSZ, prologue, 3).
The Soothsayer
The Plutonian figure of the soothsayer conceals Schopenhauer, “the never
overcome master” (Colli 1999, 415). If, according to Lucy Huskinson,
Nietzsche is Jung’s shadow,20 Schopenhauer can be understood as Nietzsche’s
shadowy personality. Although the Nietzschean shadow is only the predeces-
sor of the Jungian one, the German philosopher describes his inherent duality,
understood as a duel of shadows: “But as he was sitting there, a stick in his
hand, tracing his shadow on the ground, thinking—and verily, not about him-
self and his shadow—he was suddenly frightened, and he started: for beside
his own shadow he saw another shadow. And as he looked down around
quickly and got up, the soothsayer stood beside him . . . the proclaimer of the
great weariness” (TSZ, IV, “The Cry of Distress”).
We could infer that Schopenhauer is the shadow of the shadow that is
Nietzsche: or, in simpler terms, that Schopenhauer is the Nietzschean double,
against whom he sometimes rebels and with which he sometimes identifies,
allying himself against his ego. Or, Schopenhauer is—together with com-
poser Richard Wagner21—Nietzsche’s great complex: the master worshipped
in his youth, then abandoned and blamed for his alleged belonging to the
Christian-Platonic heritage. Schopenhauer is a Nietzschean sub-personality,
who, along TSZ, has a significant degree of autonomy: we could divide
Nietzsche into Nietzsche 1/Schopenhauer and Nietzsche 2/Zarathustra—
Dionysus (a split similar to that between William Wilson 1 and 2 or between
Jekyll and Hyde).
Schopenhauerianism is especially prominent in the episode The Soothsayer.
And I saw a great sadness upon mankind. . . . A doctrine appeared, accompanied

by a faith: “All is empty, all is the same, all has been!” . . . In vain was all our
work; our wine has turned to poison; an evil eye has seared our field and hearts.
We have all become dry; and if fire should descend on us, we should turn to
ashes; indeed, we have wearied the fire itself. All our wells have dried up; even
the sea has withdrawn. All the soil would crack, but the depth refuses to devour.
“Alas, where is there a still a sea in which one might drown?” . . . Verily, we
have become too weary even to die. We are still waking and living on—in
tombs. (TSZ, II, “The Soothsayer”)
Summing up, Schopenhauerianism is interpreted as a nihilistic manifesta-

tion of the will to die. Nihilism destroys the notion of meaning, starting from
the consideration that as long as death is the great negator, the great annihila-
tor, and as long as there is death, life is questioned, life is seen as meaning-
less (“all is empty”). Logically, nihilism is justified, because each of our
efforts, noble intentions, and aspirations is faced with the grinder of death,
which abolishes Dasein, turning it into nothing. But, from the standpoint of
Nietzsche 2, which is also pre-existential, the “truth” of nihilism, no matter
how logically consistent it is, must be overcome from the perspective of doc-
trines such as the superman or the eternal return of the same. For example,
the superman, who can be considered a symbol for the cult of excellence
(Solomon 2003, 131), tries to lead an exemplary life, trampling over death
with a hero’s pride, even if death cannot be annihilated by his attitude.
A personality like Beethoven must still die like a “human mold” (TSZ,
III, “The Convalescent,” 2), but his essentially daimonic genius ridicules the
triviality of death: there is no immortality; however, excellence is the closest
version of it from the perspective of human existence. Moreover, the eternal
return transgresses the collective “cry of distress,” which was such a strong
obsession for the Buddha22 or Cioran. If you want the pleasure to return,
you also have to accept the “waves of great distress and melancholy” (TSZ,
IV, “The Cry of Distress”) brought by life. From a Nietzschean perspective,
immanence has an almost sacred character, which cannot be denied by the
132 Chapter 10
absurd and compensatory doctrine of eternal life, or by death, the driving

force of nihilism.23
Unfortunately, Nietzsche 2 is not strong enough to overcome [überwin-
den] the sickly structure of Nietzsche 1. The Soothsayer (Nietzsche 1), just
like Schopenhauer’s disciples (e.g., Philipp Mainländer, Richard Wagner in
Tristan und Isolde (1865), the Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu or even the
young Emil Cioran), finds no other solution to the nihilistic deadlock than
the defense of the will to death: “Alas, where is there still a sea in which one
might drown?” (TSZ, II, “The Soothsayer”). In TSZ, Nietzsche has frequent
relapses in Schopenhauerianism, to the extent that his own presentation
of his philosophy as anti-nihilism is sometimes misleading. For instance,
in a fragment that resonates with Schopenhauer, Leopardi and Eminescu,
Zarathustra’s melancholy becomes obvious: “Something unknown is around
me and looks thoughtful. What? Are you still alive, Zarathustra? Why? What
for? By what? Whither? Where? How? Is it not folly still to be alive?” (TSZ,
II, “The Dancing Song”). Another fragment can be read both in an existential-
ist and a Schopenhauerian key:
A long twilight limped before me, a sadness, weary to death, drunken with
death, speaking with a yawning mouth. “Eternally recurs the man of whom you
are weary, the small man.” . . . Naked I had once seen both, the greatest man and
the smallest man. . . . All-too-small, the greatest!—That was my disgust with
man. And the eternal recurrence even of the smallest. Alas! Nausea! Nausea!
Nausea! (TSZ, III, “The Convalescent,” 2)
When Nietzsche 1 takes precedence over the anti-nihilistic background

of Nietzsche 2, even the affirmative doctrines regarding the superman and,
especially, the eternal return are replaced by their shadows: the diminished
man and the last man, respectively the eternal return of the insignificant and
the contingent, which transforms the positive doctrine into an analogon of
damnation.
The battle between Nietzsche 1 and Nietzsche 2, or that between the
characters of the soothsayer and Zarathustra, takes place around the cardinal
Christian virtue of pity, considered by Nietzsche a “sin.” Pity (or compassion)
is Zarathustra’s last temptation, his last attempt on his way to emancipation
from the long shadows of Christianity, Platonism, and metaphysics. A virtue
with a controversial status in the history of philosophy, disavowed by Kant
and Kierkegaard, praised by Rousseau and transformed by Schopenhauer into
the cardinal stone of his ethical system, pity lurks around Zarathustra, like
nihilism, “the uncanniest of all guests” (WP 1). Pity can be understood as a
kind of disgusted contempt, as a reaction of the strong to the humble,24 as a
“powerful insult” (Solomon 1976, 340–341), and this is the way it was often
viewed by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. But for the Zarathustra in the context
of the Cry of Distress (TSZ IV), which is a collective cry of the superior
people, pity symbolizes the opposite of the nihilistic notion of adiaphoría or
the stoic concept of apathy: pity is páthos, co-participation to “human suffer-
ing.” Compassion resonates with the love of humanity, which is repressed in
a nihilistic fashion by the saint from the prologue: “Love of man would kill
me” (TSZ, prologue, 2). The discovery of compassion through the soothsayer
from the Cry of Distress represents the enantiodromy of thought toward
its inferior sentimentality. If Christ’s last temptation is to flee the cross,
Zarathustra’s last temptation on his long and hesitant road to Dionysian revolt
is precisely the crucifixion on the tree of Schopenhauerism: “Is not pity the
cross on which he is nailed who loves man?” (TSZ, prologue, 2).
The Last Pope and the Ugliest Man

The last pope represents theological nihilism: with the death of God the foun-
dation of faith disappears. The last pope is “retired” [ausser Dienst] (TSZ,
IV, “Retired”), being unable to run a dead church, a true funeral monument
erected in the memory of the deceased god.25 The absolute priest, relegated
to the profession of guardian of graves, symbolizes atheism in the bosom of
the church. Although masterless, the pope is not free—for two reasons: first,
after the revolutionary nihilistic moment (the assassination of the first prin-
ciple: “First we’ve got to clear the ground,” wrote Turgenev (1998, 50)), the
church servant cannot adopt the affirmative doctrine of the eternal return or
the alternate transcendent foundation of the superman. For those who cannot
create new values, nihilism is a stone hung around the neck.
Second, Christianity dies, but its shadow remains26: the church disappears
but the church structures remain. It is the mechanism by which God [Gott]
is demoted to idol [Götze]: religion becomes inauthentic and mechani-
cal, devoid of soul. It is a long process that is observed by Kierkegaard,27
Feuerbach,28 and Stirner29 before Nietzsche. Because the entire Platonic level
of transcendence disappears, the idea of immortality vanishes: that is why the
church has become a tumulus. If the priest no longer believes, being an atheist
like the Great Inquisitor, the simple man does not believe: he only believes he
believes. The shadow of God that arises after the death of the deity represents
precisely this disjunction between form and substance: it remained the empty
form (faith in faith), while the background (living faith, faith in a living God
and in immortality) became rotten.
The last pope deconstructs the idea that God means love: “Did this god not
want to be a judge too? . . . [H]e built himself a hell to amuse his favorites”
(TSZ, IV, “Retired”). It is rather the love of a cruel father, who does not
hesitate to sacrifice his son. This is not the most disturbing aspect, but the
134 Chapter 10
degradation, the senilization of sacredness, its transformation into Götze, in

the ghost, in a living corpse, which survives (in pure dead form): “Eventually
. . . he became old and soft and mellow and pitying, more like a grandfather
than a father, but most like a shaky old grandmother” (Ibid.). And the over-
dose of compassion was ultimately fatal to him: “One day he choked on his
all-too-great pity” (Ibid.).
To this decadent confession, in which Christianity is combined with
Platonism and Schopenhauerianism (a version of passive nihilism),
Zarathustra opposes the doctrine of active nihilism: “Away with such a god!
Rather no god, rather make destiny on one’s own, rather be a fool, rather be
a god oneself!” (Ibid.). The first part of the phrase is claimed from atheism
(“no god”), the second involves an anarchic, libertarian component (“make
destiny on one’s own”), the third accepts the risk of infatuation (“be a fool!”),
the fourth goes beyond infatuation and reaches a declaration compatible with
Jungianism (self = God). However, the Zoroastrian path could be summarized
as follows:
1. atheism + preliminary nihilism;

2. anarchism + active nihilism;
3. psychopathology (megalomania, transgression of the category of
normality);
4. the realization of individuation (access to God after the death of God).
The last pope, who possesses a perfect insight, like the great therapists,
detects precisely the “piety” [Frömmigkeit] of Zarathustra, for which athe-
ism or even nihilistic antitheism are only preliminary forms of a Dionysian
doctrine that does not exclude religious experience: “Some god in you must
have converted you to your godlessness [Gottlosigkeit]” (Ibid.). Gottlosigkeit
would be precisely the faith of nihilism, which transcends both Christianity
and demonism, the investing of nothingness [–losigkeit] with religious attri-
butes. Moreover, keeping the analogy with the atheist’s piety, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra is such an influential book (a revolutionary book30 or an initiatory
book) because the separation from religion is done by sublimating a religious
background. From a stylistic point of view, TSZ is closer to the Bible, com-
pared to the founding works of atheism, such as Feuerbach’s The Essence of
Christianity (1841), Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1844), and Bakunin’s
God and the State (1882). It is the book of an atheist who does not believe in
his own unbelief.
The ugliest man31 is encountered by Zarathustra in a realm of death, in
the valley of Snakes’ Death. From the beginning, the abominable form of
the murderer of God is revealed: “But when he opened his eyes he saw
something by the way, shaped like a human being, yet scarcely like a human
being—something inexpressible” [wie ein Mensch und kaum wie ein Mensch,
etwas Unasusprechliches] (TSZ, IV, “The Ugliest Man”). The most despi-
cable man transcends the human category and can be named an “abhuman”
subject, as researcher Kelly Hurley explains: “The abhuman subject is a
not-quite-human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continu-
ally in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other” (Hurley 1996, 3–4).
The “morphic variability” of the character from Zarathustra reminds of the
dissolution of the character Helen from the gothic novel The Great God Pan
(1894) by Arthur Machen: “The skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and
the bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to
be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve”
(Machen 2006, 62).
Like the last pope, who oscillates between the nihilism of the death
of God and the shadow of the dead deity, the most despicable man wan-
ders to the edge of humanity, symbolizing a dark and destructive form of
existence that has killed “what is highest in its own nature” (Rosen 1995,
220). The killer of transcendence despises mercy, being honored instead by
the Zarathustra’s shame (Lampert 1986, 297). Moreover, the Nietzschean
character is “the personification of all that is ugly, wretched, debased and
pitiable” in humanity, “the living refutation that God’s creation is perfect
and that God is good” (Burnham and Jesinghausen 2010, 177). Here is the
motive for the crime:
But he had to die: he saw with eyes that saw everything; he saw man’s depths
and ultimate grounds, all his concealed disgrace and ugliness. His pity knew
no shame: he crawled into my dirtiest nooks. This most curious, overobtrusive,
overpitying one had to die. He always saw me: on such a witness I wanted to
have revenge or not live myself. The god who saw everything, even man—this
god had to die! Man cannot bear it that such a witness should live. (TSZ, IV,
“The Ugliest Man”)
Piercing the “eye” of transcendence is reminiscent of God’s “empty

bottomless socket” from Jean Paul’s “Speech of the Dead Christ from the
Universe that There is No God” (1796) and could constitute, together with
Hegelian philosophy, the source of the theory of gaze in Sartre’s fundamental
work, Being and Nothingness: “The Other looks at me and as such he holds
the secret of my being, he knows what I am. Thus the profound meaning
of my being is outside of me, imprisoned in an absence. The Other has the
advantage over me” (Sartre 1978, 363). In his posthumous work on ethics, the
French phenomenologist returns with an even more spectacular description,
which brings him closer to Foucault’s panoptic theory: “The king is never an
object. He is the justifying gaze. And this gaze is freedom. In a monarchy, the
136 Chapter 10
king is everywhere. He has divine ubiquity, since each subject into an object
by his gaze. . . . The entire kingdom lies under his gaze” (Sartre 1992, 145).
Like Sartre’s king, being his divine analogon and the traditional source of
his power, God (the sun) controls through sight the whole human kingdom:
he continually transforms us into objects, he dissolves our identity structures
of subjectivity. The most despicable man kills God out of prudery. He exag-
gerates his own importance to the level of paranoia: even if we were con-
stantly monitored, what would be so spectacular to watch? In other words,
the motive of assassinating transcendence is not heroic or sublime, like the
confrontation between titans and gods in Greek mythology or like the trans-
gressive intent of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, but a banal one, of a subject that
cannot learn the existentialist lesson of arbitrariness and contingency. In this
line of argument, the fourth part of Zarathustra, the one in which most of the
shadowy figures of the superior people make their appearance, has, like Faust
II, a demystifying, almost postmodern, status. Both the passive nihilism and
the oscillating character of the last pope, as well as the prudery of the one
who can no longer be minimized through surveillance, are rather related to
the “human-all-to-human” character of the diminished man,32 which always
mocks the grandeur of the superman.
We can add that the most despicable man (as a personification of the col-
lective shadow33) can be compared to the shadowy personality of the pale
criminal in the first part of the work, a figure that awakens Jung’s amazement
and disgust: “Here Nietzsche really becomes an intellectual criminal. . . . [A]
natural feeling function . . . will be hurt by the special psychology here. . . .
Your feeling refuses to touch upon that thing because it is altogether too
pathological” (SNZ I, 459). From my perspective, just as God was demoted
in the last pope’s confession to the status of “grandfather,” the most despi-
cable man belongs to a diluted and diminutive humanity, despite the terrible
consequences of his act.
The Shadow
Zarathustra’s shadow accompanied him in the adventure of nihilism (Frey-
Rohn 1989, 157; Lampert 1986, 298). Just like the figure of the prophet, it
contains in a concealed form the Schopenhauerian background of Nietzsche
I. In the chapter “On the Vision and the Riddle,” we find an argument for the
nihilist philosopher, who is in search of his own personal America, precisely
to experience negation to the peak of reactivity and to pave the way for the
anti-nihilism of the eternal return. In the section dedicated to the shadow,
the German philosopher reveals some of the pitfalls of nihilism. Initially, the
shadow is a “bold searcher” who embarked on “terrible seas” (TSZ, III, “On
the Vision and the Riddle,” 1):
With you I haunted the remotest, coldest worlds like a ghost that runs volun-
tarily over wintery roofs and snow. With you I strive to penetrate everything
that is forbidden, worst, remotest; and if there is anything in me that is virtue,
it is that I had no fear of any forbiddance. With you I broke whatever my heart
revered; I overthrew all boundary stones and images; I pursued the most danger-
ous wishes: verily, over every crime I have passed once. . . . “Nothing is true, all
is permitted”: thus I spoke to myself. (TSZ, IV, “The Shadow”)
In the first sentence, the shadow deplores the glacial coldness of the think-
ing function, the almost schizoid objectification of the thinker that breaks
away from affect (“whatever my heart revered”), the conflict between Geist
and Seele. In this sense, the shadow represses the function of feeling, the
unlived pathetic life: the volcano of affections that lurks hidden while the
main function continues its intellectual action. In the second one, the shadow
assists the ego in its revolutionary activity, revealing absolute permissive-
ness (liberation from traditional programming) as well as disregard for pro-
hibition. In the third sentence, the destructive component of active nihilism
is revealed—that which dynamizes idols and transgresses borders, living
“dangerously.” Like Zarathustra, the shadow is a follower of the Order of
Assassins and finds out that there is no longer a stable and immutable concept
of truth, as everything is allowed: “Nichts ist wahr, Alles ist erlaubt.”
However, nihilism did not lead the shadow to an obvious goal (“Do I have
a goal any more? A haven toward which my sail is set?” (Ibid.) and the initial
enthusiasm turned into that Leopardian morbidezza of passive nihilism (“a
heart, weary and impudent,” “flutter-wings,” “a broken backbone” (Ibid.).
Moreover, the shadow is everlasting and does not have a “home” [Heim],
wandering between “everywhere” [Überall], “nowhere” [Nirgendwo], and
“in vain” [Umsonst]. First, we have here a reference to the demoralizing, nar-
cotic action of passive nihilism, similar to that predicted by the prophet: “All
is empty, all is the same, all has been!” [Alles ist leer, Alles ist gleich, Alles
war!”] (TSZ, II, “The Soothsayer”). Second, the consciousness of futility
alludes to the infernal aspect of the eternal return, described in the posthu-
mous fragments as an extreme form of nihilism: “Duration ‘in vain,’ without
end or aim, is the most paralyzing idea [Die Dauer, mit einem «Umsonst»,
ohne Ziel und Zweck, ist der lähmendste Gedanke]” (WP 55). To put it sim-
ply, we could say that the Nietzschean shadow has distinct Schopenhauerian
features. Or, trying to summarize, the path of nihilism is dangerous precisely
because it operates with the destruction of the idea of divinity. The shadow
of transcendence represses itself into the unconscious, which is why one has
to fight two enemies: God and oneself.
The nihilistic dimension of the shadow is also accentuated by the fact
that, later, the shadow plays on the harp a remarkable piece containing a
138 Chapter 10
significant meontological thesis: Wilderness grows: woe unto him that har-
bors wildernesses!” (TSZ, IV, “Among Daughters of the Wilderness,” 2). The
pendant of this verse is an aphorism from BGE 146: “Whoever fights with
monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when
you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” The
two Nietzschean sentences imply the identity between the nihilistic and the
non-nihilistic subject, by combining the psychological component with the
cosmological element. The abyss, respectively, the desert, is the source of
the nihilist’s negating power, the matrix of his transgressive courage [Mut],
the root of his destructive activity, the warrantor of the No, through which
the lion confronts the dragon in the chapter “On the Three Metamorphoses.”
Like a deity, the abyss is simultaneously on the outside and inside of con-
sciousness. The work of negation begins under the influence of the abyssal
Paraclete, which reprograms the subject, deconstructing it according to the
nihilistic requirements (“you stare for a long time into an abyss”). Negation,
however, must be conceived as a propaedeutic for affirmation. Eventually,
the nihilist must “jump over his shadow—and . . . into his sun” (TSZ, II, “On
Those Who Are Sublime”), otherwise the abyssal asceticism will lead him
to self-nihilism, to a holocaust, in which he will be sacrificed on the altar
of the abyss (“the abyss stares back into you,” “woe unto him that harbors
wildernesses”).
The confession of the Zoroastrian shadow is anticipated by the dialogue
in The Wanderer and His Shadow din Human, All Too Human (1878–1880),
work that opens the middle (post-Schopenhauerian) period of Nietzsche’s
philosophy:
The Wanderer: Only now do I notice how impolite I am towards you, my

beloved shadow: I have not yet said a word of how very much I rejoice to hear
you and not merely see you. You know that I love shadow as much as I love
light.
The Shadow: And I hate the same thing you hate: night. I love mankind
because they are disciples of light. . . . That shadow all things cast whenever the
sunlight of knowledge falls upon them—that shadow too am I. (HAH II, “The
Wanderer and His Shadow”)
First, from this extended fragment, we note that Jung’s observation that
Nietzsche would not have accepted the shadow is nonsensical (Liebscher
2000, 206). The relationship between ego and the shadow is one of comrade-
ship, based on elective affinities. The delicacy of the tone also reminds us of
a prominent Jungian analyst’s remark, that “the unconscious takes the same
attitude toward the ego as the ego takes toward the unconscious. If, for exam-
ple, the ego has a kind and considerate attitude toward the shadow, the latter
will be helpful to the ego” (Edinger 1992, 137). Both the harmonious rela-
tionship between the shadow and the ego, and the noble constitution of the
shadow, seem to anticipate the Jungian precept according to which “behind
the shadow looms up the self” (SNZ I, 123), which is the reformulation of a
Nietzschean idea.34 Moreover, the ego “loves the shadow” (like an archetypal
gothic character) but also the light. The shadow hates the night, which means
that understanding the shadow only through the category of demonism is
absurd. The observation that the “luminous part of the shadow” (the Jungian
conception that shadow energies are essential for creativity (Dixon 1999,
215)) appears, again, to be of Nietzschean origin: “I am . . . that shadow all
things cast whenever the sunlight . . . falls upon them.”
NOTES
1. See for instance Bishop 1995, Dixon 1999, Golomb, Santaniello, and Lehrer
1999, Huskinson 2004, Lesmeister and Metzner 2010, Bishop 2016.
2. For the genesis and significance of TSZ, see EH, “TSZ” and Duhamel
1991, 9–11.
3. The doctrine of the superman and the idea of the death of God already are
introduced in the prologue. The first description of the death of God is published in
GS (125), conceived at the same time with TSZ. One may say that the Übermensch
and God occupy the same ontological region. See for instance TSZ, I, “Of the Gift-
Giving Value”: “Dead are all the gods: now we want the overman [Übermensch] to
live.” See also Cioran’s criticism of Nietzsche: “He demolished so many idols only
to replace them with others: a false iconoclast, with adolescent aspects and a certain
virginity, a certain innocence inherent in his solitary’s career. He observed men only
from a distance” (Cioran 1976, 85).
4. See also Granier (1982, 29–30).
5. “The cosmos works by harmony of tensions, like the lyre and bow” (Heraclitus
2003, 37).
6. “Zarathustra as a whole is a sort of enantiodromic movement, it is the river of
the unconscious and the chapters are like pictures of the waves of that underground
current” (SNZ I, 275).
7. See, for example, Heidegger 1961a, 1961b.
8. “In habentibus symbolum facilior est transitus . . . For those who have a
symbol, the passing from one side to the other, the transmutation, is easier” (SNZ II,
1248).
9. The conjunction between the eagle and the serpent is a powerful symbol. See
Thatcher (1977, 253–255):
“The eagle is solar and masculine . . . , the serpent lunar and feminine. . . . In many respects
the eagle shares the attributes of Apollo, the serpent of Dionysus. From a psychoanalytical
point of view the eagle represents the rational, conscious mind (ego) and the serpent the
forces of unconscious (id or libido). Eagle and serpent stand in the same relation as spirit
140 Chapter 10
and body, alpha and omega, and embody a dualism which lay at the heart of Zoroastrian
religion, a dualism which Nietzsche, ‘der erste Immoralist,’ seeks to transcend. . . . Just
as Zarathustra sees in himself a counter-image of his Persian forerunner, so the eagle
and the serpent, as agathodaemon, are set as counter-images, i.e., no longer enemies, but
friends, beyond good and evil, and beyond death and time. . . . [T]he friendship between
two traditionally hostile creatures points to a synthesis of symbolical meaning above and
beyond the symbols.”
10. “With you I strove to penetrate everything that is forbidden, worst, remotest;
and if there is anything in me that is virtue, it is that I had no fear of any forbiddance
” (TSZ, IV, “The Shadow”).
11. Even the eternal return has a gloomy aspect too: “duration ‘in vain’ . . . is the
most paralyzing idea” (WP 55).
12. “You highest men whom my eyes have seen, this is my doubt concerning you
and my secret laughter: I guess that you would call my overman [Übermensch]—
devil” (TSZ, II, “On Human Prudence”). See also the idea of a prominent Jungian
analyst, according to whom in Zarathustra we can find a “satanic complex” (Frey-
Rohn 1989, 111).
13. CW 11, §252. Also see SNZ II, 1392: “One calls an imitative person a monkey,
for instance, as the devil was called God’s ape, meaning one who is always doing the
same thing apparently but in a very inferior way, a sort of bad imitation. But that is
exactly what the shadow does.”
14. “As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by
God and precious to him—you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual
house” (1 Pet. 2, 4–5).
15. Transmutemini de lapidibus mortuis in vivos lapides philosophicos! (quoted in
CW 12, §378).
16. “The dwarf is the image of mediocrity that lurks within Zarathustra-Nietzsche,
and that mediocrity was the most frightening and distasteful thing that Nietzsche was
willing to see in himself” (Barrett 1962, 193).
17. Cioran is anticipated by Freud (1961a, 36), who claims that the aspiration
toward Übermenschlichkeit (what Nietzsche would call self-overcoming) is nothing
else than a neurosis, and warns of the biological feature of mankind:
“It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct
towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high
level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to
watch over their development into supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of
any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved.
The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different expla-
nation from that of animals. . . . The processes involved in the formation of a neurotic
phobia, which is nothing else than an attempt at flight from the satisfaction of an instinct,
present us with a model of the manner of origin of this supposititious ‘instinct towards
perfection’ an instinct which cannot possibly be attributed to every human being.”
18. Cioran considers the Übermensch a “preposterous, laughable, even grotesque

chimera” (Cioran 1976, 85).
19. “[A]s Nietzsche moves off toward the very great figure of Zarathustra, his
shadow moves backwards to the monkey man and eventually becomes a monkey,
compensating thus the too great advance through the identification with Zarathustra”
(SNZ II, 1393).
20. “Jung sets out to present Nietzsche as the definitive neurotic, and to hide any
evidence that his diagnosis of Nietzsche is really a self-diagnosis. . . . The shadow
projection on to Nietzsche would explain why Jung is reluctant fully to acknowledge
Nietzsche’s influence when it is deserved” (Huskinson 2004, 133, 170).
21. Wagner is disguised in the figure of the magician, who satirizes and ridicules
the Nietzschean solitude.
22. Buddha is also ridiculed by Nietzsche: “The encounter a sick man or an old
man or a corpse, and immediately they say, ‘Life is refuted.’ But only they themselves
are refuted” (TSZ, I, “On the Preachers of Death”).
23. “And the earth is full of those to whom one must preach death. Or ‘eternal
life’—that is the same to me ” (TSZ, I, “On the Preachers of Death”).
24. “I am ‘superior’ to the beggar to whom I give money because I have money
and he does not” (Solomon 1999, 138).
25. “What then are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”
(GS 125).
26. “God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be
caves in which they show his shadow.—And we—we must still defeat his shadow”
(GS 108).
27. “Christianity’s idea was: to want to change everything. . . . The result . . . is:
that everything . . . has remained as it was, only that everything has taken the name
of ‘Christian’” (Kierkegaard 2009, 185).
28. “Religion has disappeared, and for it has been substituted . . . the appearance
of religion” (Feuerbach 1989, xix).
29. “[M]an has killed God in order to become now—‘sole God on high’” (Stirner
1995, 139).
30. Rosen (1995, xiv).
31. See also Bishop (2016, 10–11) for the contrast between the ugliness of the
killer of transcendence and the “beauty” of the superman.
32. “I walk among this people and I keep my eyes open: they have become
smaller, and they are becoming smaller and smaller” [Sie sind kleiner geworden und
werden immer kleiner] (TSZ, III, “On Virtue that Makes Small,” 2).
33. Frey-Rohn (1989, 151).
34. “The beauty of the overman [Übermensch] came to me as a shadow” (TSZ, II,
“Upon the Blessed Isles”).
Coda
I would like to review some of the results of my research. First, the liter-
ary works I have analyzed (all conceived in the 19th century) anticipate the
Freudian personal unconscious and the Jungian shadow (theories from the
beginning of the 20th century). The 19th-century authors were among the first
who claimed that we have to give up the classical conception of identity mod-
eled on the divine personality. The Freudian id, personified by a character like
Hyde, overturns the old relationship between master and slave, showing that
we are not at all the masters of the unconscious, being “servants in our own
house.” Moreover, I have noticed that duality is a prelude of the postmodern
multiplicity of the ego. From Stevenson’s “assault” on the unity of the ego to
the disintegration of the ego in tiny instrumental masks, from the transforma-
tion of the ego into multiple subpersonalities through the corrosive action of
duality, starting from the 19th century the notion of the unitary ego must be
abandoned.
As I have mentioned, the destruction of subjectivity can be a consequence
of the death of God, who can no longer be conceived as a voucher of fun-
damental values. Because the subject can no longer borrow the majesty of
divinity, because, according to Nietzsche, “man is more ape than ape,” ego
can no longer be ego: from a biological perspective, the “crowning of the
creation” is nothing else than an animal, albeit a cunning and malicious one.
From a psychological perspective, ego is no longer ego (“I am not what I
am”), because, simply put, the ego does not exist anymore: the feeling of ego
is illusory, and the metaphysics of the ego is yet another pious lie. Thinkers
such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Mach, or William James have documented
the demise of the ego at the end of the 19th century.
Furthermore, I have observed a similarity between Jungianism and exis-
tentialism. For instance, if the double raises the question of alienation, the
143
144 Coda
shadow refers to authenticity. From a sociological perspective, accepting the

dictate of the multiplicity of the egos in nowadays society, it is hard to tell
if we can resist alienation. On the other hand, there could be a hedonism of
alienation, a Sisyphic happiness (to adjust Camus’s expression), which con-
sists in accepting fragmentation and splitting without spite. The yes uttered to
the perishable and the tiny, the elation in playing an unsuitable part, the con-
sent to un-identification: all these assume the awareness of the fact that we are
broken mirrors and that we are proud with our undiagnosable disease. “Quit
being perfect, let’s evolve” is one of Tyler Durden’s imperatives from Fight
Club. I am not longer myself because maybe I do not want to be myself any-
more. Alles was tief ist, liebt die Maske [“Everyone profound loves masks”],
according to Nietzsche. Je suis le sinistre miroir/ Où la mégère se regarde!
[“I am the looking-glass of pain/ Where she regards herself, the shrew!”],
according to Baudelaire. “The looking-glass of the shrew,” “the mask without
a face”: accepting the alienating feature of existence is a source of energy,
which transforms negativity into action.
Referring to authenticity, the term “persona” can be seen as an analogy to
the existentialist inauthenticity, having much in common to the Heideggerian
das Man or the Sartrian mauvaise foi. If persona was a lie, the shadow
would often be an inconvenient truth. The problems occur not when we lie
to the others, but when we deceive ourselves. Furthermore, we can imagine
a succession of masks which represent various degrees of inauthenticity.
While persona is a synonym for untruth and inauthenticity, we cannot say
that the shadow and authenticity are the same thing: the identification with
the shadow is only a deeper lie. Indeed, authenticity is a controversial and
unstable virtue: when we believe we are authentic, we are often immersed
in falseness. Despite this fact, it can be argued that the progression toward
authenticity consists in the withdrawal of projections and the evolution
toward the acknowledgment and the acceptance of the shadow: “The path of
attention” (Robert Bly) becomes necessary, along “discipline” (Edward C.
Whitmont) and “humility” (Eugene Pascal).
Another personal conclusion refers to the reconstruction of the idea that
the 19th century prefigures the 21st century. In the 1880s, many important
modern themes have occurred in the Western culture. To name just a few:
the “assault” against identity (see for instance Rimbaud’s and Nietzsche’s
works), the problem of sexuality (moving on from the Victorian bashful-
ness to the Schopenhauerian-Freudian pansexualisms), the concept of the
Übermensch (anticipating antihumanism), the connection between the dis-
covery of the unconscious and Schopenhaeur’s irrationalism, the problems
of evolutionism and degeneration, the feeling of lassitude, of permanent
possibility of the apocalypse, and others. One may almost say that the 21st
century begins in the 1880s.
Coda 145
I have also noticed that the connections between several authors, such as
Oscar Wilde and Søren Kierkegaard, Mary Shelley and Emil Cioran, Guy de
Maupassant and Friedrich Nietzsche, shows us that between philosophy and
literature there are only distinctions of method, and not of substance. If for
a philosopher the history of philosophy is indispensable, and for a historian
of philosophy history is just as necessary, one might say that for a philologist,
philosophy can be as important as literary theory. Conversely, a historian of
philosophy should study the history of literature, because literature intuitively
reveals the abstractions of philosophy. For instance, when we become aware
that Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and Byron’s
Manfred are conceived around the same historical moment (1817–1818), we
may see with new eyes both the Schopenhauerian pessimism and the Byronic
megalomania.
Another conclusive reflection shows that the double and the demonic are
interdependent. I first wanted to study the literary works under the herme-
neutical lenses of either the double or the demonic. However, the double is
inherently demonic, parodying the existential subject, just like the devil paro-
dies God (the link between simia dei and simia hominis). If it was obvious
that all the seven works I have studied relate to the double, I would also like
to review their liaison with the demonic. Medardus from The Devil’s Elixirs
sees his devil in Victor (his shadow). Frankenstein’s creature is a Miltonian
Luciferian. “William Wilson” can be read either as an attack on the super-
ego (Marie Bonaparte), or a dualism between the shadow and the shadow
of the shadow. If the superego goes way, there is only the night of the id:
the triumph of the instinct. When consciousness dies, the shadow becomes
denser. In Dostoyevsky’s Double, Golyadkin Junior, is a devilish alter ego.
Stevenson’s Hyde is absolute evil or the archetypal shadow. In Maupassant’s
“The Horla,” the shadow is a predator which announces the end of mankind’s
domination. In Wilde’s Dorian Gray, the picture is a “magic mirror” of the
true shadow.
I should also to mention some of the limits of my research. First of all,
there are some quantitative limitations. I have focused my research on 19th-
century romantic and post-romantic works. The 20th century would deserve
a book of its own. Several 20th-century books are related to the Jungian
shadow: Golem (1914) by Gustav Meyrink, The Steppenwolf (1927) by
Hermann Hesse, Despair (1934) by Vladimir Nabokov, Mephisto (1936) de
Klaus Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947) by Thomas Mann. I have mentioned
that a study on the Jungian shadow in postmodern literature (on Palahniuk’s
Fight Club (1996), José Saramago’s The Double (2002), etc.) should also
consider the anarchetypal feature of the shadow. Moreover, there are other
19th-century literary works which prefigure the theory of the Jungian shadow
but have not been analyzed here because of the limited space: Melmoth the
146 Coda
Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin, Mitteilungen aus den Memoiren des

Satans (1826) by Wilhelm Hauff, The Great God Pan (1894) by Arthur
Machen, and so on.
Second, there are some qualitative limits of my book, for instance, there
could be supplemental immersive research. It would be interesting to study in
the future the connection between the constitution of the double at Jean Paul
and Schelling’s egology. Kierkegaard’s and Wilde’s aestheticism deserve an
extended comparison. Another research which transgresses the limits of my
book would take into consideration the history of the daimonic from Plato to
Heidegger. The duality of Robert Schumann’s compositions provides interest
for a book regarding the shadow in music.
Furthermore, there are potential contemporary research leads to the
Jungian shadow. Keeping in mind Victor I. Stoichita’s essay on art history,
Short History of the Shadow (1997), a similar history of the musical shadow
(from Bach to Ligeti) can be written. A study dedicated to the shadow in film
should analyze foremost expressionist movies. For instance, I think of the
iconic frame from Murnau’s Faust (1926), in which the personification of
the archetypal shadow, Mephisto, dominates Faust’s village with his colos-
sal size and unleashes the plague. The Shadow in Film should also refer to
existentialist movies: for instance, Ingmar Bergman’s work. Contemporary
filmmakers such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Lars von Trier, Joachim Trier,
Nicholas Winding Refn, Robert Eggers, Ari Aster deserve a chapter in this
virtual book. TV series such as Hannibal, True Detective, Penny Dreadful,
The OA, and others also should be taken into consideration.
Another promising lead refers to 20th-century Gnosticism from Jung
and Hesse to Cioran and Philip K. Dick: the idea of moving on from God’s
shadow to the God of Shadow (Abraxas). Gnosticism replaces the simple
belief in God with the more advanced “knowledge” of God and could provide
a solution to the crisis of contemporary spirituality. The connections between
Jung and existentialism deserve a separate book: authenticity and persona,
anxiety and fear of development, the death of God and the God within,
anima and the second sex, and so on. Another study regarding the relation-
ship between the discovery of the unconscious and nihilism. Schopenhauer,
Hartmann, Nietzsche, Bahnsen, and Mainländer reveal the irrational trait of
existence and arrive at antinatalist conclusions: if life was only suffering, then
death is release and salvation. Another paper can be written on inspiration
understood as “shadow work” (acknowledgment and possible “enlightening”
of the shadow), a way to become conscious of the unconscious.
Paraphrasing the observation of the analytic psychologists Lutz and Anette
Müller, that the third great revolution (after Copernicus and Darwin) was
started by Freud and Jung, when they have discovered and tried to map the
huge and strange territory of the unconscious. Beyond its archetypal value,
Coda 147
the shadow is a metaphor of the id, a part of our personality which we usu-
ally are not aware of. As long as dissociation, duality, and the obscure alterity
the demonic (what Otto called mysterium horrendum) exist, the shadow will
continue to grow. Put another way, the shadow is an answer (but an answer-
question) to the existential question of our identity crisis: “Who am I?”
It may be concluded that one has to be careful about “knowing” too much
about the shadow. The most basic and logical definition of the unconscious
is that it simply cannot be known. We have seen “through a glass, darkly”
(1 Cor. 13, 12) scenes from a foreign land, glimpses of an ontological
nightmare, where the archetypal shadow reaches the density of a black
hole. Perhaps conceptual language falsifies the Dionysian experience of the
shadow; therefore, we should approach with metaphors. We have seen that
the shadow cannot be construed as external to the human being. But do we
live in a world of shadows, or are we shadows ourselves? “What, as Shadows,
can we touch with our shadowy/ Hands? Our touch is absence and vacancy.//”
(Pessoa 2006, 363).
Appendix 1
Year Zero: The Avant-garde
of the Avant-garde
The year 1888 is a turning point in the cultural history of the world: on the
last page from Nietzsche’s AC, modernity is (re)created in the mind of a
distressed author. “And time is counted from the dies nefastus when this
catastrophe began,—from the first day of Christianity!—Why not count
from its last day instead?—From today?—Revaluation of all values! . . . //
. . . Given on the Day of Salvation, on the first day of the year one . . . War
to death against vice: the vice is Christianity” (AC 62). The day Nietzsche
refers to, the day when these words are written, is September 30, 1888. This
“day” marks a moment when the universal culture reached a dead end, a sort
of “continuous end,” a feeling described by Verlaine (2011, 95) in the sonnet
“Languor” (1883), for instance in his famous stanza “I am the Empire at the
end of its decline.”
1888 is a sort of “ground zero,” the moment when the triumphing nihilism
overtakes and displaces the Christian and Platonic heritage of the Western
culture. Considering the year 1888 a landmark in the confrontation between
old and new, between the feeling of exhaustion and the presentiment of avant-
garde, I will refer to a series of ideas from works published by poets, philoso-
phers, and scientists who can be considered participants in the Nietzschean
revolution: “The Garden of Proserpine” (1866) by Charles Swinburne, Les
Chants de Maldoror (1869) by Lautréamont, “Memento mori” (1872) by
Mihai Eminescu, The Strange Case. . . (1886) by R. L. Stevenson, Beiträgen
zur Analyse der Empfindungen (1886) by Ernst Mach, Confessions of a
Young Man (1888) by George Moore, and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
by Oscar Wilde, and others.
149
150 Appendix 1
THE END OF THE I
The physicist Ernst Mach claimed in his work Beiträgen zur Analyse der
Empfindungen (1886) that the ego is just a “bundle of sensations” (Mach
1918, 19–20). Mach goes on to quote Lichtenberg to defend his main thesis:
“It thinks, we should say, just as one says, it lightnings. To say cogito is
already too much if we translate it as I think. To assume the I, to postulate it,
is a practical necessity” (Lichtenberg 2012, 152). He also adds that the “I” is
“beyond redemption” [unrettbar] (Mach 1918, 20). Lichtenberg’s aphorism
is closely related to Rimbaud’s famous reflection from a letter to Georges
Izambard (1871): “It’s wrong to say: I think. Better to say: I am thought . . .
I is an other” (Rimbaud 2008, 113). The death of the unitary I prepares the
way for the Doppelgänger: when I disappear as myself, I can survive as an
other to myself. The other me is able to do things I cannot allow myself to
be aware of. My unlived and repressed life finds its force of expression in
my double. Lichtenberg’s and Rimbaud’s deconstructions of the Cartesian
cogito (“it thinks = it lightnings,” “I think = I am thought”) go against the
traditionally rationalistic orientation of the Western culture. For Rimbaud
and Lichtenberg, thinking and existence can never be one: thinking is only an
accident, a flash of lightning that sometimes enriches us, but mostly makes us
blind to the silent workings of the id. The two of them prefigure the Freudian
discovery of the unconscious claiming that the I as cogito is derivative. The
I is erased “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 2005,
422) and the lightning of the cogito will be swallowed in the dark night of
the id.
The duality of the subject (am I me or the other one?) prefigures the
further disintegration of the I. Freud spoke of ego, superego, and id in his
second theory of the structure of the psyche, and, as we have seen, Jung fur-
ther divided the psyche into persona, ego, shadow, anima/animus, and self.
Therefore, the double, the shadow, or the other me may be only the first of his
kind and open the gates for a “legion” of secondary selves: “[Ma]n is not truly
one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does
not pass beyond that point. Others will follow . . . and I hazard the guess that
man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous
and independent denizens” (JH 55–6). “The assumption of one single subject
is . . . unnecessary,” Nietzsche wrote, in the same line of argument, “per-
haps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects” (WP 490).
Furthermore, to Dorian Gray, “man was a being with myriad lives and myriad
sensations, a complex multiform creature.” Wilde’s hero also despised those
“who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of
one essence” (DG 136–7). As I have stated in the introduction, duality as the
end of the monarchy of the I prefigures postmodern multiplicity: the strong
Year Zero 151
and unitary I was replaced by a series of functional and convenient second-

ary selves. Rephrasing the discoveries of these authors, we can say: I was
once myself. But once I met my double, I became receptive to all my virtual
secondary selves hidden inside me. Furthermore, the human being is not one,
but truly multiple. The is an army of others, aspects of our many-faced self,
which never stops growing, adjusting, and evolving.
THE END OF GOD
Although Hegel, Stirner, Feuerbach, and Mainländer anticipated the theme of

the death of God, Nietzsche provided in GS (1882) its classical description:
Where is God? . . . We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers.
But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us
the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we
unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? . . . Are we not
continually falling? . . . Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers
who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition?
. . . God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! (GS 125)
The death of God and nihilism1 are intrinsically connected. Nihilism is an

alarm signal, a sort of “zero hour” of mankind, when our most precious val-
ues are put to the test, when we acknowledge the fact that “Being no longer
needs to be thought of as endowed with stable structures and ultimately with
a foundation” (Vattimo 1993, 164). In the Nietzschean fragment, a certain
disorientation is discernable, which does not concern only divinity, but also
the relationship of the existential subject with the transcendent. If God died,
a certain conception regarding the human being would die too. If the pat-
tern of “image and likeness” disappeared, we would find in the mirror the
distinguishing features of the ape or, even worse, the face of nothingness,
the “black skull” (Ligotti 2010, 42). As Foucault and Deleuze have argued
(Deleuze 1988, 130), when God has died, the human being began to die as
well. Moreover, in this fragment, Nietzsche reveals the essential difference
between anti-theism (as nihilism) and atheism. If the atheist refers with neu-
trality at the inexistence of God, some nihilists almost bemoan his death in an
emotional discourse. The nihilist is, therefore, ambiguous, if not dissociated,
when he mentions God. If the atheist reflects with a certain satisfied coldness
the impossibility of a “prime mover,” nihilists such as Nietzsche and Cioran
may be suspected of a repressed worship (disguised in hatred) of God. For
instance, Cioran defined himself, in Stavrogin’s fashion, as a “believer who
couldn’t believe” (Zarifopol-Johnston 2009, 185). This nihilistic ambiguity
152 Appendix 1
is also visible in George Moore’s fragment from the Confessions of a Young

Man (1888):
Hither the world has been drifting since the coming of the pale socialist of
Galilee; and this is why I hate Him, and deny His divinity. His divinity is fall-
ing, it is evanescent in sight of the goal He dreamed; again He is denied by
his disciples. Poor fallen God! I, who hold naught else pitiful, pity Thee, Thy
bleeding face and hands and feet, Thy hanging body . . . Thy day is closing in,
but the heavens are now wider aflame with Thy light than ever before—Thy
light, which I, a pagan, standing on the last verge of the old world, declare to be
darkness, the coming night of pity and justice which is imminent, which is the
twentieth century. The bearers have relinquished Thy cross, they leave Thee in
the hour of Thy universal triumph, Thy crown of thorns is falling, Thy face is
buffeted with blows, and not even a reed is placed in Thy hand for sceptre; only
I and mine are by Thee, we who shall perish with Thee, in the ruin Thou hast
created. (Moore 2004, 110–112)
The impression of profanation, present in George Moore’s text, refers

mostly to a profanation of the human being, who has lost his inner sun, which
is being replaced by the black sun of nihilism. Thinking of the theologies
of the death of God, one might say that the death of God is still a Christian
event, a religious Ereignis, while the mere acknowledgment of his inexis-
tence is based on the detachment of the Enlightenment proposed by those
who promote the “new atheism.” One can almost say that the difference
between nihilism and atheism is similar to the one between Gnosticism and
agnosticism. Nihilism can be seen as a modern gnosis (Couliano 1992, 250),
based on a passionate and unconventional knowledge of God. Even when it
is violent or aggressive, nihilism directly targets divinity.
THE END OF GOD II
The most radical version of anti-theism from the 19th century is found in
Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1869). His hatred and disgust of
God is a consequence of his pre-Cioranian antihumanism: “Stupid, idiotic
race! You will regret having acted thus! It is I who tell you. You will regret
it! My poetry will consist exclusively of attacks on man, that wild beast, and
the Creator, who ought never to have bred such vermin” (Lautréamont 1978,
73–74). God is seen as an absolute predator, the instantiation of a brutal
ideal, aiming to destroy humanity. In one of Lautréamont’s fragments, God
is reminiscent of Goya’s Saturn. In others, he is a disgusting alcoholic who
rests, while the rest of the creation is condemned to incessant toil. We find
Year Zero 153
ourselves at the antipode of Platonism and Christianity. The only relationship

between the creator and the creature is an intense reciprocal hatred.
I slowly raised my splenetic eyes, ringed with bluish circles, towards the
concavity of the firmament and I, who was so young, dared to penetrate the
mysteries of heaven! Not finding what I was seeking, I lifted my eyes higher,
and higher still, until I saw a throne made of human excrement and gold, on
which was sitting—with idiotic pride, his body draped in a shroud of unwashed
hospital linen—he who calls himself the Creator! He was holding in his hand
the rotten body of a dead man, carrying it in turn from his eyes to his nose and
from his nose to his mouth; and once it reached his mouth, one can guess what
he did with it. . . . First he ate his head, then his legs and arms, and, last of all,
the trunk, until there was nothing left; for he crunched the bones as well. . . . And
he would continue his savage meal, moving his lower jaw, which in turn moved
his brain-bespattered beard. Oh reader, does not this last-mentioned detail make
your mouth water? (Ibid., 85)
To establish the sharp contrast between early romanticism and post-roman-

ticism in the perception of the image of God, Jean Paul’s “Speech of the Dead
Christ from the Universe that There Is No God” (1796) is more than eloquent:
I traversed the worlds, I ascended into the suns, and soared with the Milky
Ways through the wastes of heaven; but there is no God. I descended to the last
reaches of the shadows of Being, and I looked into the chasm and cried: “Father,
where art thou?” But I heard only the eternal storm ruled by none, and the shim-
mering rainbow of essence stood without sun to create it, trickling above the
abyss. And when I raised my eyes to the boundless world for the divine eye, it
stared at me from an empty bottomless socket; and Eternity lay on Chaos and
gnawed it and ruminated itself.—Shriek on, discords, rend the shadows; for He
is not! (Jean Paul 1992, 182)
For the romantic subject, God’s inexistence was an anguishing revelation,

a condemnation to cosmological solitude. It even can be seen as an individual
symbolic death sentence, as some Nietzschean commentators argue. If the
human being lost God, he or she would accept nothingness as a primordial
principle: a chaotic freedom he or she was not prepared to embrace. Everything
changes in Lautréamont’s universe: God sits on a throne of excrement and gold
with “idiotic pride.” The lost God was a real God: he died, but no one contested
his legitimacy. Lautréamont’s divinity is almost subhuman. Reduced to excre-
ment and gold (a devalued alchemic work), the cannibalistic God can no longer
be perceived as a founding principle. In reality, the new God is a sort of hei-
nous negative model. One cannot follow or worship him, one may at the most
154 Appendix 1
tolerate him as an original flaw of creation. Lautréamont’s description is much

more radical than Nietzsche’s “God is dead.” Echoing the German philosopher,
one may speak in this context of the super-death of God.
In another fragment, the French poet imagines an even more degraded
picture of God. God (or his absence) no longer produces romantic anguish
(which can also be found in Nietzsche’s famous aphorism from GS), only dis-
gust and contempt. God becomes a grotesque, ludicrous, and senile character:
He was lying stretched out on the road, with his clothes all torn. His lower lip
was hanging down like a heavy chain; his teeth had not been cleaned, and the
blond waves of his hair were full of dust. . . . Floods of wine filled the ruts
which had been hollowed out by the nervous jerkings of his shoulders. . . . Blood
flowed from his nostrils: as he fell he had knocked his face against a post. . . . He
was drunk! Horribly drunk! Drunk as a bug which in one night has gorged three
barrels of blood; his incoherent words resounded all around; I shall refrain from
repeating them here, for even if the supreme drunkard has no self-respect, I must
respect men. . . . Man, who was passing by, stopped before the unrecognizable
Creator; and for three full days, to the applause of the crab-louse and the viper,
he shat on his august face! (134–5)
Maldoror’s God no longer exists as an authoritarian instance, inspiring

only contempt. He is lower than the animals, which toil for their food, while
he indulges in debauchery. Disgraced by the human being, he is too drunk to
take notice. His total decline suggests that he occupies a position he should
have vacated a long time ago.
THE END OF ALL THINGS I
The post-Schopenhauerian project of universal crime initiated by philoso-

phers such as Philipp Mainländer, Eduard von Hartmann, or Julius Bahnsen
brings death in the proximity of the romantic subject. The dead man is no
longer outside the city walls, conquering the reflecting subject. Through
Poe, Rollinat, Nietzsche, or Eminescu, one may observe this nihilistic turn.
In “The Madman” (1883), Rollinat brings death in his comfort zone: “I’d
like to bury myself in an old castle . . ./ To have two or three graveyards
instead of gardens/ Where I could roam all night alone” (Rollinat 1917, 298).
The funeral discourse becomes a serious option, because the human being
becomes more aware of his/her perishable nature; moreover, it is in the nature
of nihilism to exalt itself in a self-destructive and masochistic fashion before
individual/universal extinction. The triumph of nothingness is also a cathartic
way to suppress anguish.
Year Zero 155
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra carries the dead body of the tightrope walker and
sees himself as “the mean between a fool and a corpse”: “Dark is the night,
dark are Zarathustra’s ways. Come, cold, stiff companion! I shall carry you
where I may bury you with my own hands” (TSZ, prologue, 7). Eminescu
in his poem “Mortua est!” (1871),2 influenced by Novalis and Poe, no lon-
ger sees death as a ceremony of separation: the physical death of the anima
prepares us for personal death and the triumph of nihilism in a meaningless
universe: “For when suns are extinguished and meteors fail/ The whole uni-
verse seems to mean nothing at all” (Eminescu 1964, 43). In E. A. Poe’s “The
Sleeper” (1831–1845), the gentleness of the eternal slumber of the beloved
contrasts concrete reality of the corpse: “My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her
sleep,/ As it is lasting, so be deep!/ Soft may the worms about her creep!”
(Poe 1984, 65).
The separation between the living and the dead is now removed and
their confluence is seen as a source of nihilistic power. Lautréamont’s hero,
Maldoror, is hosted by a gravedigger and feels fine in this ambiance. One
may say that in Lautréamont’s memento mori, we move from the concept
of universal death to the one of universal crime. It is a shift operated with
nihilistic force, through a transgressive leap. A textual reference for the first
concept can be found here:
[The Gravedigger:] I have seen many drawn up under the flag of death—the
once-handsome man; the man who remained handsome even after death; men,
women, beggars, kings’ sons; the illusions of youth, the skeletons of old men;
genius; madness; idleness and its opposite; the false and the true-hearted; the
mask of the proud, the modesty of the humble; vice crowned with flowers and
innocence betrayed.
[Maldoror:] I thank you for your kindness Gravedigger, it is grand to contemplate
the ruins of cities; but it is grander still to contemplate the ruins of human
beings!’ (Lautréamont 1978, 60–61)
We are beginning to see death as a grand, general, forceful equivalation.

Universal death is a medieval theme, but it would not have become so viral
in romanticism, had it not been based on individual death (the anguish of
my death—as a personal apocalypse—becomes the “seed” and prototype of
universal death). Byron’s “Darkness” (1816) prefigures Lautréamont’s move
from universal death to universal crime. However, the French poet oscillates
between romanticism and surrealism when he parodically constitutes his
apocalypse: “If the face of the earth were covered with lice as the sea-shore
is covered with grains of sand, the human race would be destroyed, a prey
to dreadful pain. What a sight! With me, motionless on my angel wings in
the air to contemplate it!” (Ibid., 92) To appreciate the surrealist component
156 Appendix 1
of the text, the previous apology of the louse must be recalled: “You may be
sure that if their jaws conformed to the measure of their infinite desires, your
brain, the retina of your eyes, your spinal column and all your body would be
consumed. Like a drop of water. Take a microscope and examine a louse at
work on a beggar’s head; you will be surprised. Unfortunately these plunder-
ers of long hair are tiny” (Ibid., 88).
Lautréamont immanent apocalypse contains a near evolutionist trait. It is
just, according to the French poet, that a species of predators (either the louse
or the shark) should replace a stagnating species. The spectacle of torment
is presented cynically and sarcastically. Furthermore, the ego becomes an
agent of the apocalypse: “What a sight! With me, motionless on my angel
wings in the air to contemplate it!” (Ibid., 92). Taking into account that God
has failed in creating a meaningful and valuable world, the poetic subjects
takes over its functions and “unmakes” in his imagination the evil produced
by divinity. Maldoror dethrones God, saving the failed creation, repairing
God’s mistake in a sinister fashion. The joy of the void, the spectacular nihi-
lization, the contemplative delirium of chaos is a direct connection between
Lautréamont and Cioran, who wrote in A Short History of Decay (1949):
“The spectacle of man—what an emetic! Love—a duel of salivas . . . All the
feelings milk their absolute from the misery of the glands. Nobility is only
in the negation of existence, in a smile that surveys annihilated landscapes”
(Cioran 2012, 7).
THE END OF ALL THINGS II
The destruction of the ego and the eclipse of divinity lead to the idea of a
universal ending. The theme approached among others by Jean Paul, Byron,
or Leopardi knows a post-romantic resurgence in the works of Swinburne and
Eminescu. “Then star nor sun shall waken/ . . . Only the sleep eternal/ In an
eternal night,” writes Swinburne (2000, 139) in “The Garden of Proserpine”
(1866). Furthermore, Mihai Eminescu’s “Memento mori” (1872) is a power-
ful initiation into nihilism: “Deathlike time spreads its arms and becomes
eternity./ When nothing will persist on the barren landscape/ I will ask: What
of your power, Man? – Nothing!!” (Eminescu 1993, 125–126). One can
say that Swinburne’s and Eminescu’s thanatophilia from their apocalyptic
texts (what Freud called destrudo or the death instinct) is a symptom of
Schopenhauereanism, also visible in Cioran’s early writings. If Swinburne’s
poem gives the impression of exhaustion and of fading of the will to live
reminiscent to passive nihilism, Eminescu observes that the being is filled
with nothing, and, as an active nihilist, allies himself with this nothing to
complete the work of absolute destruction.
Year Zero 157
We can argue that Schopenhauereanism survives and even thrives today

in the Antinatalist philosophies of David Benatar, Thomas Ligotti, Eugene
Thacker, Jim Crawford, or Nic Pizzolatto. Antinatalism, the doctrine which
claims that nonexistence is preferable to existence, because life is pure suf-
fering, is based not only on Schopenhauer’s views but also on Cioran’s and
Thomas Bernhard’s works. “Maybe the honorable thing for our species
to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into
extinction, one last midnight—brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal,”
reflects the nihilistic Rust Cohle from True Detective (Pizzolatto 2014). “I
wish I were never born. I wish my children had never been born. I wish the
sun would explode and crisp us all as we sleep, leaving the Earth a charred,
barren, lifeless ball of nothing,” writes Jim Crawford (2010, 48). Why has
the will to die replaced the will to live? Because death removes not only
meaning from life but also pleasure and security. Life is a disguised death,
but death is something else: if life was pure suffering, death would be the
end of suffering, the radical purity, the only absolute in a tedious existence
of compromise, half-truths and mediocrity. But while we breath, life in the
universal abattoir is sheer terror: “We resemble lambs playing in the meadow
while the butcher already makes his selection of one or the other of them with
his eyes” (Schopenhauer 2017, 263).
NOTES
1. “God is dead. It is the historical hour of nihilism” (Safranski 1997, 260). See
also Prideaux (2018, 379): “Nietzsche’s statement ‘God is dead’ had said the unsay-
able to an age unwilling to go so far as to acknowledge the obvious: that without
belief in the divine there was no longer any moral authority for the laws that had
persisted throughout the civilisation built over the last two thousand years.//What
happens when man cancels the moral code on which he has built the edifice of his
civilisation? What does it mean to be human unchained from a central metaphysical
purpose? Does a vacuum of meaning occur? If so, what is to fill that vacuum? If the
life to come is abolished, ultimate meaning rests in the here and now. Given the power
to live without religion, man must take responsibility for his own actions.”
Appendix 2
The 19th Century from Romanticism
to Post-Romanticism (Chronology)
1774 Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

1782 William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek.
1785 William Cowper publishes The Task.
1789 The beginning of the French Revolution.
1793 William Blake finishes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
1794 Francisco Goya completes Yard with Lunatics.
1795 Schelling publishes as a twenty-year-old Of the I as the Principle of
Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge.
1796 Jean Paul coins the term “Doppelgänger” in the first volume of Siebenkäs.
1797 The first book of Hölderlin’s Hyperion.
1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth publish Lyrical Ballads, marking the

beginning of English Romanticism.
1799 Jacobi’s open letter to Fichte, in which he coins the term “nihilism.”
1800 Novalis, Hymns to the Night.
1801 Beethoven composes the Sonata No. 14 in C Flat Minor, Op. 27
(Moonlight Sonata).
1802 Ugo Foscolo, The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis.
1803 The beginning of the Napoleonic Wars.
1804 World population reaches 1 billion.
Bonaventura, Nightwatches.
The first version of Senancour’s Obermann.
1805 The Battle of Trafalgar. The beginning of Britain’s naval supremacy.
The premiere of Beethoven’s Third Symphony (Eroica).
1806 Kleist completes The Broken Jug.
1807 Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Spirit.
1808 The first edition of Goethe’s Faust.
Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation.
159
160 Appendix 2
1809 Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom.

1810 The University of Berlin is established.
Kleist, On the Marionette Theater.
1811 Shelley publishes The Necessity of Atheism.
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility.
1812 Napoleon invades Russia.
Grimms’s first collection of fairy tales.
1814 Napoleon abdicates and is exiled to Elba.
Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl.
1815 Congress of Vienna.
Napoleon’s Hundred Days.
The eruption of Mount Tambora.
1816 “The year without a summer.” An unusually cold summer caused by
the eruption of Mount Tambora.
Hoffmann’s Devil’s Elixirs.
P. B. Shelley, “Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude.”
1817 Byron’s Manfred.
1818 Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein anonymously in London.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.
John Keats, “Endymion.”
P. B. Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”
The first edition of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and
Representation.
1819 Byron’s Don Juan.
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa.
John William Polidori, Byron’s physician, publishes “The Vampyre,”
one of the first modern vampire stories.
1820 Antarctica is discovered.
P. B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.
John Clare publishes Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery.
Robert Southey’s “The Cataract of Lodore.”
1821 Napoleon’s death in exile.
The beginning of the Greek War of Independence.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey.
Sardanapalus and Cain by Byron.
1822 Hazlitt, Liber Amoris.
1824 T he premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Schubert, Death and the Maiden.
1825 The Decemberist uprising from Saint Petersburg.
1826 Mary Shelley, The Last Man.
1827 Leopardi, Small Moral Works.
The 19th Century 161
1828 Nerval translates Goethe’s Faust.

1830 The July Revolution.
The premiere of Berlioz’s Symphony fantastique.
Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.
1831 Pushkin’s Boris Godunov.
The Invasion of Algiers.
1834 The Spanish Inquisition is officially abolished.
1835 Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin.
1836 Lenau’s Faust.
Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century.
1837 The start of the Victorian era (the beginning of Queen Victoria’s
reign).
Chopin composes The Funeral March from his second sonata.
1838 Lamartine, The Fall of an Angel.
1839 Poe’s “William Wilson.”
Lermontov finishes The Demon.
1841 Emerson, Essays. First Series.
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity.
Kierkegaard defends his doctoral thesis On the Concept of Irony with
Continual Reference to Socrates.
1842 Gogol’s Dead Souls.
1844 Stirner, The Ego and Its Own.
The first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore.
1845 The beginning of the Great Famine in Ireland.
1846 The first use of anesthesia.
Chopin’s last Polonaise.
Dostoyevsky’s Double.
Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust.
1847 E. A. Poe’s “Ulalume.”
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights.
1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto.
The Year of Revolution.
Schumann’s Manfred.
1849 The inventions of the safety pin and the gas mask.
Franz Liszt completes the Danse macabre S. 126.
1850 The beginning of the Taiping Civil War which will take about
20 million lives.
The end of the Little Ice Age.
Wagner’s Lohengrin.
Schumann’s Third Symphony (Rhenish).
John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents.
162 Appendix 2
1851 Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena.

Melville’s Moby Dick.
1853 The beginning of Crimean War between France, British Empire, the
Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire.
The premiere of Verdi’s Traviata.
1854 The beginning of the siege of Sevastopol.
1855 Friedrich Gaedcke isolates cocaine.
Nerval’s Aurélia is published posthumously.
The first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
1856 In the Bessemer process iron is converted to steel.
The first oil refinery in the world is built in Ploiești.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.
1857 Leon Scott invents the phonautograph, the first device able to record
sound.
Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal.
1859 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species.
The construction of the Suez Canal begins.
The premiere of Charles Gounod’s Faust.
1860 Baudelaire publishes Artificial Paradises.
1861 The start of the American Civil War.
The Russian empire abolishes serfdom.
Maxwell’s four equations.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.
1862 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables.
Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons popularizes the term “nihilism.”
1863 The world’s first underground railway in London.
The controversial The Luncheon on Grass by Édouard Manet.
1864 Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground.
1865 The premiere of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
1866 Gustave Courbet, The Origin of the World.
Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
Swinburne, Poems and Ballads.
1867 Alfred Nobel invents dynamite.
Ibsen publishes Peer Gynt.
1868 Brahms completes the German Requiem Op. 45.
1869 Lautréamont, Les Chants du Maldoror.
The first edition of Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious.
Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
1870 The start of the Franco-Prussian War.
1871 The beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution.
The Paris Commune.
Darwin’s The Descent of Man.
The 19th Century 163
1872 N
ietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy.
Eminescu works on “Memento mori.”
Dostoyevsky’s Demons.
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla.
Böcklin’s Self-portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle.
Bruckner’s Third Symphony.
Bizet, L'Arlésienne.
1873 Rimbaud, A Season in Hell.
1874 James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night.
1875 The premiere of Bizet’s Carmen.
Grieg’s Peer Gynt.
1876 The premiere of Brahms’s First Symphony.
Gustave Moreau, The Apparition.
Lombroso, The Criminal Man.
1877 Edison invents the phonograph.
1879 Edison tests the light bulb.
Félicien Rops’s Pornocratès.
1880 T he first version of Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead.
The first philosophical occurrence of the term “shadow” in Nietzsche’s
The Wanderer and His Shadow.
The third and final version of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet.
1881 The assassination of Tsar Alexander II.
1882 The statement “God is dead” in Nietzsche’s Gay Science.
The premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal.
Bakunin’s God and the State is published posthumously.
D’Annunzio’s New Song.
1883 N ietzsche writes the first book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Auguste Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Cruel Tales.
The first version of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony.
Paul Bourget, Essays of Contemporary Psychology.
1884 Huysmans, Against Nature.
1885 L ouis Pasteur invents the rabies vaccine.
Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean.
Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony op. 58.
Maupassant’s Bel Ami.
1886 Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing’s first edition of Psychopathia

sexualis.
1887 Maupassant’s “The Horla.”
1888 Jack the Ripper’s murders from Whitechapel.
Gymnopédies by Erik Satie.
Nietzsche writes The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner,
The Twilight of Idols, The Anti-Christ and Ecce homo.
164 Appendix 2
1889 Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Odilon Redon’s Death: My Irony Surpasses All Others!
1891 Wilde’s Dorian Gray is published in a book form.
Huysman’s Down There.
1892 Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte.
Stefan George and Hugo von Hoffmannstahl create the literary journal
Blätter für die Kunst.
1893 Lionel Johnson’s “The Dark Angel.”
1894 The first gramophone recording.
Machen’s horror novella The Great God Pan.
1895 Oscar Wilde’s trial.
Alexandru Macedonski’s Excelsior.
The discovery of the X-rays.
Jean Lorrain’s “The Possessed.”
1896 Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra Op. 30.
1897 Wilde writes De profundis in prison.
Strindberg, Inferno.
Bram Stoker, Dracula.
James Ensor, Death and the Masks.
1898 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds.
1899 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
Ravel, Pavane for a Deceased Infanta.
1900 Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.
1903 J ung’s doctoral thesis On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called
Occult Phenomena (CW 1).
Appendix 3
The Individuation from the
Persona to the Self
Jung Exegesis
(1) Persona The persona is “the mask of the An effective persona must take into
actor” (CW, 9/I §43). account three factors:
“The persona . . . is a “(a) the physical and the psychic
compromise between constitution;
individual and society as to (b) the ego-ideal: what / how I want to
what a man should appear to be . . . ;
be” (CW 7, §246). (c) the ideal of the environment, how
“One could say, with a little people would want me to be”
exaggeration, that the persona (Jacobi 1971, 54).
is that which in reality one is “It is evident that a persona is an
not, but which oneself as well indispensable part of the personality.
as others think one is” (CW 9/I, People with a deficient persona
§221). are really at a great disadvantage
in outer life. They have no shield
against the projections of others
and are in constant danger of
falling back into the original state
of participation mystique with their
environment” (Hannah 2000, 76).
(2) Ego “By ego I understand a complex “The ego is itself the centre of
of ideas which constitutes consciousness and it is what we
the centre of my field of refer to when we use the terms ‘I’
consciousness and appears or ‘me’. It is responsible for our
to possess a high degree of continuing sense of identity so that
continuity and identity” (CW we still feel ourselves at 80 to be
6, §706). exactly the same person we were at
8” (Stevens 2001, 62).
(Continued)
165
166 Appendix 3
Jung Exegesis
“Yet without the ego, “It even seems as if the ego has not
consciousness is unthinkable” been produced by nature to follow
(CW 8, §611). its own arbitrary impulses to an
“We understand the ego as the unlimited extent, but to help to
complex factor to which all make real the totality—the whole
conscious contents are related. psyche. It is the ego that serves to
It forms, as it were, the centre light up the entire system, allowing it
of the field of consciousness; to become conscious and thus to be
and, in so far as this comprises realized” (von Franz 1964, 162).
the empirical personality,
the ego is the subject of all
personal acts of consciousness”
(CW 9/II, §1).
“My I, you are a barbarian. I
want to live with you, therefore
I will carry you through an
utterly medieval Hell, until you
are capable of making living
with you bearable. You should
be the vessel and womb of life,
therefore I shall purify you”
(RB 330).
(3) Shadow The “inferior personality” The shadow is “the dark, unlived, and
(CW 7, §78, CW 9/I, §513, CW repressed side of the ego complex”
9/II, §15). (von Franz 1995, 3).
“The shadow personifies The shadow is the “part of the
everything that the subject personality which has been
refuses to acknowledge about repressed for the sake of the ego
himself and yet is always ideal” (Whitmont 1978, 160).
thrusting itself upon him The shadow is “the ‘other’ in
directly or indirectly” ourselves” (Hauke 2000, 133), das
(CW 9/I, §513). Andere in uns (Wolff 1959, 152),
The shadow represents “the thing der dunkle Bruder der Menschheit
[the individual] has no wish to (Neumann 1993, 92).
be” (CW 16, §470). “When an individual makes an attempt
“And indeed it is a frightening to see his shadow, he becomes
thought that man also has a aware of (and often ashamed of)
shadow-side to him, consisting those qualities and impulses he
not just of little weaknesses denies in himself but can plainly
and foibles, but of a positively see in other people—such things
demonic dynamism” (CW 7, as egotism, mental, laziness,
§35). and sloppiness, unreal, fantasies,
“There is no development unless schemes, and plots. . . . If you feel
the shadow is accepted” (CW an overwhelming rage coming up in
9/I, §600). you when a friend reproaches you
“The personal unconscious . . . about a fault, you can be fairly sure
corresponds to the figure of the that at this point you will find a part
shadow so frequently met with of your shadow, of which you are
in dreams” (CW 7, §103). unconscious” (von Franz 1964, 168).
From the Persona to the Self 167
Jung Exegesis
(4) Animus, “The animus corresponds to “The anima is a personification of all
anima the paternal Logos just as feminine psychological tendencies
the anima corresponds in a man’s psyche, such as vague
to the maternal Eros” feelings and moods, prophetic
(CW 9/II, §29). hunches, receptiveness to the
“As the anima produces irrational, capacity for personal
moods, so the animus love, feeling for nature, and—last
produces opinions” (CW 7, but not least—his relation to the
§331). unconscious. It is no mere chance
“The projection can only be that in olden times priestesses
dissolved when the son (like the Greek Sibyl) were used to
sees that in the realm of his fathom the divine will and to make
psyche there is an imago connection with the gods” (von
not only of the mother but Franz 1964, 186).
of the daughter, the sister, “But the animus does not so often
the beloved, the heavenly appear in the form of an erotic
goddess, and the chthonic fantasy or mood; it is more apt to
Baubo. Every mother and take the form of a hidden ‘sacred’
every beloved is forced conviction. When such a conviction
to become the carrier is preached with a loud, insistent,
and embodiment of this masculine voice or imposed on
omnipresent and ageless others by means of brutal emotional
image, which corresponds scenes, the underlying masculinity
to the deepest reality in in a woman is easily recognized.
a man” However, even in a woman who is
(CW 9/II, §24). outwardly very feminine the animus
“Woman is compensated by can be an equally hard, inexorable
a masculine element and power. One may suddenly find
therefore her unconscious oneself up against something in a
has, so to speak, a masculine woman that is obstinate, cold, and
imprint. This results in a completely inaccessible” (von Franz
considerable psychological 1964, 189).
difference between men
and women, and accordingly
I have called the projection-
making factor in women the
animus, which means mind or
spirit” (CW 9/II, §29).
(5) Self “I have suggested calling the “The self is the sum of all polarities
total personality which, though and paradoxes, a synthesis
present, cannot be fully between past, present and the
known, the self. The ego is, future possibilities of development,
by definition, subordinate to between light and dark, ‘divine’
the self and is related to it like and ‘demonic’, ‘feminine’
a part to the whole” (CW 9/ and ‘masculine’, normal and
II, §9). pathological, becoming and
death” (Müller and Anette Müller
2003, 377).
(Continued)
168 Appendix 3
Jung Exegesis
“The ego stands to the self as “According to the testimony of many
the moved to the mover, or myths, the Cosmic Man is not only
as object to subject, because the beginning but also the final
the determining factors which goal of all life—of the whole of
radiate out from the self creation. “All cereal nature means
surround the ego on all sides wheat, all treasure nature means
and are therefore supraordinate gold, all generation means man,”
to it” (CW 11, §391). says the medieval sage Meister
“Sensing the self as something Eckhart. And if one looks at this
irrational, as an indefinable from a psychological standpoint,
existent, to which the ego is it is certainly so. The whole inner
neither opposed nor subjected, psychic reality of each individual
but merely attached, and about is ultimately oriented toward this
which it revolves very much as archetypal symbol of the Self” (von
the earth revolves round Franz 1964, 202).
the sun—thus we come to
the goal of individuation”
(CW 7, §405).
Appendix 4
The Moments of the Shadow
Moments Jung Exegesis

(1) Projection “Projections change the world “Projection causes the least amount
into the replica of one’s own of distress to the ego, which can
unknown face. In the last observe its twin but at a safe
analysis, therefore, they lead enough distance to allow for
to an autoerotic or autistic an illusory sense of separation”
condition in which one dreams (Moores 2010, 26).
a world whose reality remains “The deep and unjustified
forever unattainable. . . . The antipathy, the most irrational
more projections are thrust in idiosyncrasy . . . are the results
between the subject and the of the projection of the shadow”
environment, the harder it is (Trevi 2009, 18–19).
for the ego to see through its
illusions” (CW 9/II, §17).
“If you imagine someone who is “It is a very difficult task to
brave enough to withdraw all disentangle such a projected
these projections, then you get factor from the carrier of the
an individual who is conscious projection. Perhaps one of the
of a pretty thick shadow” (CW most dependable indicators
11, §140). of a projection is the presence
“Experience shows that there are of emotion. If other people’s
certain features which offer weaknesses or bad qualities
the most obstinate resistance make us unduly angry, we may
to moral control and prove be pretty sure there is some
almost impossible to influence. projection involved, because
These resistances are usually at bottom we do not resent the
bound up with projections, weaknesses of others, they may
which are not recognized as even give us a pleasant feeling of
such, and their recognition is a superiority. The weakness or bad
moral achievement beyond the qualities that we resent are always
ordinary” (CW 9/II, §16). our own” (Hannah 2000, 78–9).
(Continued)
169
170 Appendix 4

(2) Recognition “The shadow is a moral problem “Because a great part of the
that challenges the whole shadow is unconscious (and
ego-personality, for no one identifiable with the personal
can become conscious of the unconscious), the analysis
shadow without considerable of the projections and the
moral effort. To become dream material will gradually
conscious of it involves lead to the enlightenment
recognizing the dark aspects of of the inferior aspects of the
the personality as present and personality and of the non-
real” (CW 9/II, §14). differentiated . . . functions”
“The future of mankind very (Trevi 2009, 21–2).
much depends upon the
recognition of the shadow. Evil
is—psychologically speaking—
terribly real” (JWL 143).
“Recognition of the shadow . . .
leads to the modesty
we need in order to
acknowledge imperfection”
(CW 10, §579).
(3) Dissociation “The essence of hysteria is a “With respect to Stevenson’s
systematic dissociation, a Strange Case, dr. Jekyll is
loosening of the opposites unable to acknowledge or
which normally are held firmly to integrate the inferior part
together. It may even go to of the personality . . . and is
the length of a splitting of the compelled to live a double
personality, a condition in life, duplicating his horrible
which quite literally one hand shadow, which became
no longer knows what the autonomous and escaped
other is doing. As a rule there from the control the ego”
is amazing ignorance of the (Trevi 2009, 23–4).
shadow; the hysteric is only
aware of his good motives,
and when the bad ones can no
longer be denied he becomes
the unscrupulous Superman
and Herrenmensch who
fancies he is ennobled by the
magnitude of his aim” (CW 10,
§424).
“Neurosis is intimately bound
up with the problem of our
time and really represents an
unsuccessful attempt on the
part of the individual to solve
the general problem in his
own person. Neurosis is self-
division” (CW 7, §18).
The Moments of the Shadow 171

“Hence, it is quite natural
that with the triumph of the
Goddess of Reason a general
neuroticizing of modern man
should set in, a dissociation of
personality analogous to the
splitting of the world today
by the Iron Curtain. This
boundary line bristling with
barbed wire runs through the
psyche of modern man, no
matter on which side he lives.
And just as the typical neurotic
is unconscious of his shadow
side, so the normal individual,
like the neurotic, sees his
shadow in his neighbour or
in the man beyond the great
divide” (CW 10, §544).
(4) Identification “That is the moment of “The identification with the
Dionysian frenzy. . . . The shadow is . . . the reverse
seizure transforms him into a of the dissociation of the
hero or into a godlike being, shadow” (Trevi 2009, 24).
a superhuman entity. . . . The “The identification with the
psychological observer knows shadow may be seen as
this state as ‘identification a defensive intrapsychic
with the shadow,’ a mechanism . . . The concept
phenomenon which occurs refers to the taking over
with great regularity at such of our own shadowy parts
moments of collision with the or at least of some of their
unconscious” (CW 7, §§40–1). relevant components in
“A man who is possessed by his our own identity. The
shadow is always standing destructive actions are no
in his own light and falling longer considered foreign
into his own traps. Whenever for the ego, as exceptional
possible, he prefers to make reactions or regrettable facts,
an unfavourable impression on being accepted as ‘normal’
others. In the long run luck is and naturally belonging to
always against him, because our own personality” (Vogel
he is living below his own 2015, 43).
level and at best only attains
what does not suit him. And if
there is no doorstep for him to
stumble over, he manufactures
one for himself and then fondly
believes he has done something
useful” (CW 9/I, §222).
(Continued)
172 Appendix 4

(5) Integration “Psychologically we can say “The integration of the shadow
that the situation has thrown is the taking upon ourselves
off the conventional husk of the obscure and negative
and developed into a stark part of the personality with
encounter with reality, with the purpose of gaining a new
no false veils or adornments psychological dynamic and
of any kind. Man stands forth a new use of the psychic
as he really is and shows what energy repressed by the
was hidden under the mask of shadow or, in other words,
conventional adaptation: the the use of the negative as a
shadow. This is now raised to pole of the new energetic
consciousness and integrated field” (Trevi 2009, 25–6).
with the ego, which means “The integration of the shadow
a move in the direction of . . . is foreign to human
wholeness. Wholeness is nature; a great achievement
not so much perfection as would be to perceive it and
completeness” (CW 16, §452). accept it” (Kast 2016, 19).
“Medical treatment of the “The integration [of the
transference gives the patient shadow] is the beginning
a priceless opportunity to of the objective attitude
withdraw his projections, to regarding our own
make good his losses, and to personality” (Wolff 1959,
integrate his personality. The 153).
impulses underlying it certainly
show their dark side to begin
with, however much one may
try to whitewash them; for an
integral part of the work is the
umbra solis or sol niger of the
alchemists, the black shadow
which everybody carries
with him, the inferior and
therefore hidden aspect of the
personality, the weakness that
goes with every strength, the
night that follows every day,
the evil in the good” (CW 16,
§420)
Appendix 5
A Note on Archetypology
According to Paul Schmitt (1945, 98), arché contains in itself the double
significance of “cause” and “hegemon,” which makes us simultaneously
think about “preeminence” (or “originality”) and a dominant, power-position.
Further on, týpos reminds us of “coin minting.” According to Corin Braga
(1999, 5), the concept of “archetype” draws attention to the invariant, which
precedes logically and chronologically the later, secondary sequence of the
phenomena, just as the intelligible prototype takes precedence over the sensi-
tive copy.
The term “archetype” appears in the works of authors such as Cicero and
Pliny the Younger. In its philosophical sense, it is first encountered in the
Hebrew philosopher of Greek expression Philo of Alexandria. In his book On
the Creation [De opificio mundi], the archetype refers to the connection between
man and the “image of God.” The Jewish philosopher draws attention to the
fact that this image does not refer to the physical resemblance between man
and God, but to the mental similitude—“the sovereign element of the soul”—
between Creator and Created (JWL 130–1; CW 9I, §5). A second author who
deals with archetypology is Bishop Irenaeus, who noted in Adversus haereses:
“The creator of the world did not fashion these things directly from himself but
copied them from archetypes outside himself” (CW 9I, §5).
Its next philosophical occurrence can be found in a fragment from Corpus
Hermeticum, a collection of initiatory writings from the 2nd and 3rd centuries
attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (CW 11, §89 (65)). In this volume we also
find the characterization of God understood as “archetypal light” [archéty-
pon phós] (JWL 130–1; CW 8, §275 n.). The work of Pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite, On the Divine Names (conceived in the 5th century), contains
another reference to the notion of archetype: “Perhaps, however, someone
will say: ‘The seal is not entire and the same in all the printed copies.’
173
174 Appendix 5
I answer that this is not due to the seal itself (for it gives itself wholly and
identically to each), but the difference of the substances which share it makes
the impressions of the one, entire, identical archetype [primitivae formae] to
be different” (Dinoysius the Areopagite 2018, 78).
Moreover, the configuration of the concept of archetype comprises the
Augustinian term “main ideas,” used by the Christian theologian in his treaty
Eighty-Three Different Questions (question 46, paragraph 2):
[F]or in fact the ideas are certain original and principal forms of things, i.e.,
reasons fixed and unchangeable, which are not themselves formed and, being
thus eternal and existing always in the same state, are contained in the Divine
Intelligence. And though they themselves neither come into being nor pass
away, nevertheless, everything which can come into being and pass away and
everything which does come into being and pass away is said to be formed in
accord with these ideas. (Augustine 1982, 79–80)
According to Jolande Jacobi (1959, 49), the foundation of ideas as the

main forms, distinguished by their essential “non-formation” and their
belonging to the divine intelligence, is similar to the Jungian definition of
the term “archetype.” On the one hand, the concept of “archetype” is in a
strong, original position and, on the other (like Augustine’s “main ideas”—
though it is “unformed” in itself), it has the capacity to impose its shape, to
configure, to “stamp” the structure of the soul. According to Jung, the source
of the archetypes must be sought in the mythologemes and the fundamental
symbols that appear in dreams and proclaim the appearance of a deeper
layer of the unconscious, which Jung calls “the collective unconscious” so
as to distinguish it from the narrower Freudian concept of the “personal
unconscious.”
[I]n dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched
mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time,
often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excita-
tions working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These
“primordial images,” or “archetypes,” as I have called them, belong to the basic
stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisi-
tions. (CW 8, §229)
I have often been asked where the archetypes or primordial images come
from. It seems to me that their origin can only be explained by assuming them
to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity. . . . Not only
are the archetypes, apparently, impressions of ever-repeated typical experiences,
but, at the same time, they behave empirically like agents that tend towards the
repetition of these same experiences. (CW 7, §109)
A Note on Archetypology 175
In the study based on his 1919 Belford College paper, “Instinct and the
Unconscious” (CW 8 §§263–282), Jung uses the term “archetype” for the
first time, claiming that “[j]ust as his instincts compel man to a specifically
human mode of existence, so the archetypes force his ways of perception and
apprehension into specifically human patterns” (CW 8, §270). Before being
redefined as archetypes, the mythologemes and symbols of psychic life had
been called “primordial images” [Urbilder] or “archaic images” [urtümliche
Bilder]—a term belonging to Nietzsche’s professor, Jakob Burckhardt—or
“dominants of the collective unconscious” [Dominanten des kollektiven
Unbewußten].
One can clearly see that Jungian archetypes have
(1) a philosophical significance: to archétypon eidos, the archetypal form

of Corpus Hermeticum, the primitivae formae of Pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite or the Augustinian ideae principale, which are essentially
unformed [quae ipsae formatae non sunt] and belong to the divine
intellect;
(2) a mythological significance: mythologemes and symbols that appear
in dreams and mental illnesses and which, as Jung claims, cannot be
explained by the Freudian concept of the “personal unconscious”;
(3) thirdly, a biological significance.
Probably one of the defining aspects of the archetype is its ability to pre-
form, to “stamp,” to create form and configuration: archetypes’ “natural
images engraved on the human mind, helping it to form its judgments,”
argues the founder of analytical psychology (CW 8, §275), this idea being
encountered in the history of philosophy in Nicolas Malebranche, Francis
Bacon, or the scholastic metaphysics. Of course, the Platonic ideas,1 the
Kantian categories, and ideas2) and the Schopenhauerian prototypes and
ideas3 anticipate the Jungian concept. We could say, together with James
Hillman, the creator of archetypal psychology, that the archetype is “the most
ontologically fundamental of Jung’s concepts” (Hillman 1975, 142).
Taking into account the fact that there are at least three meanings of the
term “archetype” (metaphysical, psychological, and cultural), archetipology
must focus on the cultural dimension of the term.4 Moreover, we have nar-
rowed our research theme to the romantic and post-romantic prose of the
19th century, which prefigures the psychological treatment of the Jungian
archetype of the shadow. In the 20th century, there are also literary works that
become eloquent when applying the hermeneutics of Jungian archetypology
(Meyrink’s Golem, Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann,
etc.), but they could be the subject of secondary research. But it is especially
romanticism and post-romanticism that fit with the issue of the dual and
176 Appendix 5
demonic shadow: ego versus. non-ego, the discovery of inner darkness, of the
“shadow brother,” and so on.
If we were to extend our research onto postmodern prose in the future,
we would find more useful a concept similar to the anarchetype, defined by
Corin Braga as “a broken archetype, an archetype with which the center of
meaning, the logos of the work, has been pulverized” (Braga 2006, 250) or
as “a concept that is anarchic to the idea of model or center” (Ibid., 277). The
archetype is a concept that suits the modern subject, who, although dissoci-
ated (in Baudelaire’s, Rimbaud’s or Nietzsche’s versions), hasn’t renounced
to the idea of seeking unity and totality, while the anarchetype mirrors the
postmodern subjectivity, broken up into multiple identities and multi-focused
(Braga 2007, 16). Whether we are schizoid from a Rimbaudian point of view
or we celebrate with Deleuze “the pulverizing” of the identity “that exploded
in a galactic cloud of meanings” (Braga 2006, 250–251), we are all obliged
to minimize the corrosive effects of dissociation.
NOTES
1. “In Plato, however, an extraordinarily high value is set on the archetypes as

metaphysical ideas, as ‘paradigms’ or models, while real things are held to be only
the copies of these model ideas” (CW 8, §275).
2. “Kant defines [the idea] as the “archetype [Urbild] of all practical employ-
ment of reason,” a transcendental concept which as such exceeds the bounds of
the experienceable” (CW 6, §733). Lucy Huskinson argues that the archetype is
not “logically isomorphic” with Kant’s Idea (Bär 1976, 114) and that “that a more
appropriate influence on Jung’s archetype is Schopenhauer” (Huskinson 2004,
76–78).
3. “[T]he primordial image acts as a mediator, once again proving its redeeming
power, a power it has always possessed in the various religions. What Schopenhauer
says of the idea, therefore, I would apply rather to the primordial image” (CW 8,
§751).
4. However, the validity of psychological archetypes in Jungian psychotherapy is
a strong argument against their purported lack of relevance. The difference between
the Freudian treatment method based on a certain pansexualism that had to be admin-
istered to the repressed Victorian society and Jung’s “dangerous” method, inspired
by mythology and first presented in its radical form in CW 5, is also revealed in the
closing scene of the film A Dangerous Method: “What he’ll [Freud] never accept is
that what we understand has got us nowhere. We have to go into uncharted territory.
We have to go back, to the sources of everything we believe. I don’t just want to open
a door and show the patient his illness, squatting there like a toad. I want to find a
way to help the patient reinvent himself, to send him off on a journey, at the end of
which is waiting the person he was always intended to be” (Cronenberg 2011). For
the source of this argument, see FJL 294:
A Note on Archetypology 177
“I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for ΨA than alliance with an ethi-
cal fraternity. I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centres, to
revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform
Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb
those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and
the sacred myth what they once were—a drunken feast of joy where man regained the
ethos and holiness of an animal. That was the beauty and purpose of classical religion,
which from God knows what temporary biological needs has turned into a Misery Insti-
tute. Yet what infinite rapture and wantonness lie dormant in our religion, waiting to be
led back to their true destination!”
Appendix 6
The Shadow in Music
Taking into account that music has an obvious imaginative dimension (Nagari
2016, 29–33) and that death1 (Trevi and Innamorati 2008, 162; Vogel 2015,
55) and madness are two of the concepts belonging to the shadow, I will focus
my research on the shadow in music2 on the two aforementioned themes.
1. The theme of death as an aspect of the shadow in music has two different
subthemes:
(a) The subtheme of agony, understood as oscillation between life and
death, both as “death of death” (Feuerbach) or as continuous death, as
“deathless death” (Kierkegaard and Cioran). From this perspective,
death is seen, against Epicurus’s famous argument, as immanent to
life. The allegretto from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A major
Op. 92 renders the unrest of the one who hesitates between life and
death. The ostinato from the beginning of the second movement of
Beethoven’s symphony (the theme is first played by cellos and violas,
then the violins take over the first melody, while the cellos and the
violas play the second melody) seem to configure the ambiguous and
heterogenous trait of agony, oscillating between despair and resigna-
tion, between the will to life and destrudo. The dialogue between
the violins, cellos, and violas leads us into a territory transcending
both being and non-being, into a metaphysical no man’s land, where
life is desirable, death seems acceptable, but the space within them
is infernal. The moment of extreme anxiety when the goddess Maat
prepares her feather to weigh the unworthy soul is revealed to us. The
first melody comes back in a fugato at the end of the movement after
Beethoven develops a more serene theme with the woodwinds (with
the clarinet in the foreground). The repetition of the agonic theme
179
180 Appendix 6
seems to indicate a resurgence of the nightmarish trait of existence

and a sort of suspension of decision (between death qua life and death
qua death there is no choice). If Mozart, with his inherent delicacy,
arrives at a sort of regressive micromania, a sort of reconciliation
with the defeated status, like a terminally ill who assumes a fetal pos-
ture (see the molto allegro from his Symphony No. 40), Beethoven
makes the universe burn along the depressive subject. Through con-
tagion, the world is set on fire on account of an extreme inflammation
of the romantic ego, as if the suicide of certain individuals can cause
apocalypse. The sadness of Beethoven’s hero is similar to the “black
despair” of a colossus who could blow up the cosmos in a fit of anger.
(b) The subtheme of mourning famously linked by Freud to melancholy.
Now agony is transcended and the ocean of non-being has swallowed
the island of the existential subject. A perfect sample of the “experi-
ence” of death qua death can be found in Chopin’s Piano Sonata No.
2 in B-flat minor Op. 35 (1839). The famous theme of the funeral
march is cut off by a lento only to later come back in full force. This
dreamy lento seems to emphasize through contrast the vigor and the
rhythmic violence of the march, the supremacy and intransigency of
death. The lento might be seen as an elegy of the soul who does not
want to renounce her world (or as a lamentation of the one dispos-
sessed by living). However, the theme of march comes back with
self-assurance, with an almost meta-human harshness. One might say
that it is impossible to believe in post-existence after this apology of
the coffin, which transforms us from individual into thing. The lento
speaks of our perishable and vulnerable nature and of the unrealiz-
able wish to stay alive of the individual touched by death. Neverthe-
less, the final repetition of the march, with its mechanical atrocity,
transgressing the anthropic domain, reminding us that man can be
squashed like a bug, can be understood—in a Sartrian mood—as
contempt of the living over the dead. Chopin syncs with the shadow
of death, which consumes souls from the beginning of time, symboli-
cally allying himself with the supreme executioner to desensitize his
melancholic spirit, to die easier.
2. Madness has many distinctive moments:
(a) The bipolar phase can be described through the depression-mania
alternance introduced by Kraepelin in the psychiatric nosography
(Radden 2000, 259–260) and, obviously, through a marked cyclo-
thymic aspect (the trait of Golyadkin, Dostoyevsky’s character3).
The depressive4 dimension is found in the adagio sostenuto from
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C flat minor Op. 27 No. 2
(1801). This adagio, probably the most famous Beethoven’s piece,
The Shadow in Music 181
along with the bagatelle Für Elise and the opening theme of the Fifth
symphony, is usually seen as unrequited love poem. In the first part of
the sonata, the anger and the violence are repressed, and Beethoven
creates the portrait of the feeling type. However, the presto agitato,
the third movement, destroys the credibility of the notions of “love,”
“soul,” “delicacy.” Beethoven’s daimonic character is revealed in the
presto: we witness the extraversion of a sentimental human being,
who could say, like Nietzsche, Flamme bin ich sicherlich [“Flame
I am assuredly”] (P 250). The depression is transformed into mania
with a fury which would burn down the planet if Beethoven’s soul
were anima mundi, if the cosmic order resonated with the individual
tragedy. Coming back to the adagio, I must note that before being
a love poem, it is also a hymn of isolation. From my perspective, it
reveals the ontic incapacity of the union of souls, the preeminence
of separation. The excruciating desire mirrors the distancing from
the order of mankind. The unrequited love justifies the tragic fury
from the presto; moreover, while the libido diminishes, the shadow
of death descends upon the sonata. The adagio presents the ordeal
of subjects who wakes up alone in a slumbering dead world, a deaf
world without fellow creatures.
(b) The schizoid or dissociative phase reminds of the shadow and the
double. The original version of Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana
op. 16 (1838) was conceived in only four days. The first movement,
Äußerst bewegt in D minor, feels like a continuation of Beethoven’s
presto from the Sonata No. 14. Schumann imagines a subject who
lives in an unimaginable tension in the poles of human life, men-
tioned by Shestov (1982, 280). Not also in the equator, because
there is something icy in this unrest: we are listening to the music of
inner disintegration and the leap to madness. Reminding of Chopin,
a slower movement cuts off this Äußerst bewegt, but the dreaming
here has a delusive, almost hysteric, effect, and cannot break free
from the dissociative chains. It seems that Schumann’s fantasy starts
where Marlowe’s Faust ends, at the open gates of hell. Furthermore,
Kreisleriana suggests the image of a suicidal who jumps into the
abyss, not with resignation, but with frenzy. The seventh movement
of the composition, Sehr rasch, transports us into a schizoid bolgia.
If Chopin’s funeral march had an inhuman touch, suggesting the
transformation of the individual into a thing and the sinister merger
with the coffin, Schumann’s work seems to exemplify the experience
of death in a concentration camp through the machinal and repeti-
tive efficiency of the execution. Seven of the eight phantasies for
piano are very short, five are fast, three slow, presenting a conflicting
182 Appendix 6
picture. In fact, the whole composition has a dual character (two bro-
ken mirrors are facing each other), and we almost feel “the wind of
the wing of madness” (Baudelaire 2006a, 106).
(c) The autistic phase, of total isolation. If the arrietta from Beethoven’s
Sonata No. 32 can be seen as a sort of end of music (just like the
finale from Chopin’s Sonata No. 2), it still can be interpreted as the
labor of an individual who is programmed to exercise his natural
dispositions, albeit despite himself. The Große Fuge op. 133 (1825)
is the end of the end and the beginning of musical deprogramming.
No more alterity, no more intersubjectivity, total autism: it is almost
as if we were watching the depth of hell from a submarine or if we
visited the basement of mental hospital where incurable patients are
isolated. In this sense, Beethoven’s fugue contradicts the Freudian
thesis from Westworld: “The human intellect was like peacock feath-
ers. It's an extravagant display intended to attract a mate. All of art,
literature, a bit of Mozart, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and
the Empire State building . . . just an elaborate mating ritual” (Joy
and Nolan 2016). According to Wittgenstein (1986, 225) “if a lion
could talk, we could not understand him.” This sort of meta-human
language is presented to us in the Große Fuge: how does a deaf man
feel, after he has become estranged from the humanism of the Ninth
Symphony, from the barbaric religiosity of the Missa solemnis and
from the explosive exuberance of the last sonatas? It is a sort of deaf-
ness that does not refer to hearing but to the sense of mankind. As if
Beethoven set foot on a foreign planet and watched the explosion of
Earth from great distance. Große Fuge symbolizes absolute incom-
municability, a trait that the absurd theater only manages to parody
it. If music assured unmediated access to the sentimental earthquake
of the composer, Große Fuge can be considered a foray into the mind
of a member of another species.
NOTES
1. Analytic psychology and existential psychotherapy meet in this point.

2. Double metaphor: the shadow is a metaphor in itself and the musical shadow is
a meta-metaphor.
3. See chapter 6.
4. The adagio from Sonata No. 14 is closer to melancholy than depression. It con-
tains a propensity toward Thanatos, like Novalis’s Hymns (1800), but also a certain
delicacy deprived of clinical traits.
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Index
Abraxas, 37, 146 72n9, 145, 176; archetypal, 5, 8–9,

Adler, Alfred, 53 19–20, 24n19, 33–34, 38n8, 43, 117,
Adorno, Theodor W., 63n12 123–24, 139, 145–47, 158, 173,
aesthetics, 115, 121n13 175; archetypal psychology, 175;
alienation, 4, 12, 20, 23n2, 55, 74, maternal, 4, 167. See also anima;
143–44 social. See persona
analytical psychology, 1, 3–5, 7, 21, 44, atheism, 54, 61n4, 63n4, 133–34, 151,
92, 123, 125, 175 152, 160
anarchism, 60, 63n17, 107, 134. See Augustine, 35, 174–75
also nihilism Aurelia, 44–45, 49–51
Angelus Silesius, 39n8 avant-garde of the avant-garde, 3, 6,
anima, 31, 126, 146, 150, 155, 167, 181 149; continuous end, 2, 149; year
antihumanism, 2–3, 6n1, 58, 106, 144, zero, 149; zero hour, 2, 15, 127
152. See also not-man
antinatalism, 146, 157 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 146
anxiety, 34, 39n8, 48, 61n2, 73–75, 79, Bacon, Francis, 175
101–3, 105, 107nn1–2, 110–11, 128, Bahnsen, Julius, 146, 154
146, 179; abyss, 5, 79–80, 84, 104, Bakunin, Mikhail, 119, 120n2, 134, 163.
109–10, 112, 138, 153, 181; anguish, See also anarchism
23n7, 80, 105, 153–55; fear, 4, 13, Baudelaire, Charles, 6n1, 33, 38n8, 41,
16, 34–35, 61n2, 83, 90–91, 94, 97, 46, 51, 57, 58, 61, 62n11, 116, 118–
101, 103–4, 107, 111, 113, 119, 124, 19, 126, 144, 162, 176, 182
137, 140, 146; terror, 27, 41, 71, 79, Baudrillard, Jean, 1, 58
81, 107, 111, 157; vertigo, 67, 80 Bazarov, Yevgeny, 116
apocatastasis, 31. See also Origen beauty, 34, 55, 109, 112–14, 118–19,
Apollonian, 102 120n3, 141n31, 141n34, 177n4
archetype, 3–4, 8, 10, 15, 20, 37, Beckett, Samuel, 2, 82
39n11, 43, 71, 106, 173–76, Beethoven, Ludwig van, 131, 159–60,
176nn1–2, 176n4; anarchetype, 3, 179–82
201
202 Index
Being [Sein], 9, 74 39n9, 56, 72n6, 75, 84; on religion

being-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-Sein], and sexuality, 44; on solitude, 55–56,
10, 53, 55–56, 73, 84 60; on superman, 52n4, 130, 139n3,
Being-with [Mit-sein], 55, 73 140n17
Belcampo, 46, 48–49 Clare, John, 25n22
Benatar, David, 157 Cobain, Kurt, 50
Bergman, Ingmar, 2, 146 Cohle, Rust, 58, 157
Bernhard, Thomas, 38n6, 157 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 49, 53, 55,
black sun, 28, 69–70, 102, 152 159
Blaga, Lucian, 35 contingency, 43, 71, 74, 80, 114, 136
Blake, William, 1, 37, 50, 98n8, 111, Couliano, Ioan P., 152
159 Cowper, William, 67, 159
Bleuler, Paul Eugen, 57 Crawford, Jim, 157
Bonaventura, 48–49, 159 Cypher, 83
Borges, Jorge Luis, 67
Braga, Corin, 3, 71n2, 173, 176 Darko, Donnie, 61
breath [prāṇa], 103 Darwin, Charles, 146, 162
Buddha, 131, 141n22 Darwinism, 3; animalic, 71, 97; ape, 6,
Burckhardt, Jakob, 175 39n8, 70, 89, 90, 127, 130, 140, 143,
Byron, George Gordon, 2, 20, 29, 32, 151. See also Nietzsche; beast, 90,
53–55, 58, 62n7, 145, 155–56, 160 97, 105, 116, 152; para-Darwinism,
6, 107. See also Nietzsche;
Cain, 29, 54, 59, 63n15 degenerationism, 3; pre-humanity, 90
Caliban, 2, 61, 62n8 Dasein, 13–14, 28, 61, 73–74, 101,
call of conscience [Ruf des Gewissens], 103–6, 111, 131
12, 67 Dazai, Osamu, 71, 72n11
Campbell, Thomas, 25n21 death, 5, 20–21, 31, 42, 49, 51, 52n18,
Camus, Albert, 54, 60–61, 81, 144 54, 59, 68–71, 74, 78–79, 90, 91, 97,
Chopin, Frédéric, 161, 180, 182 98n3, 98n6, 101–3, 106, 107n2, 112,
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 173 113–15, 119, 126, 128, 131, 132,
Cioran, Emil: and antihumanism, 134, 139n3, 140n9, 141nn22–23,
2–3, 6, 6n1, 61, 61n3, 105, 107, 149–50, 153–57, 160, 163–64, 167,
130, 152; on anxiety, 101, 107n2, 179–81; agony, 50, 78, 179–80;
108n3; compared to Nietzsche, 52, of God, 2, 9, 19, 33, 35, 61, 107,
58, 75, 129, 139n3, 151; compared 125–26, 129, 133–35, 139n3, 143,
to Schopenhauer, 107n2, 131–32, 146, 151–52. See also Nietzsche;
156–57; on death, 91, 101, 107n2, immanence of, 91; living, 47, 56,
179; on decreation, 120n2; on 61n2, 78–79, 86, 119; of man 2, 6n1;
depression, 61n2; on excess, 50; murder, 28, 44, 51, 57, 62n12, 68,
as existentialist, 5; as feeling type, 71, 78, 94, 97, 98n1, 134, 151, 163;
86n10; on Gnosticism, 146; on God, suicide, 20, 23n2, 31, 34, 50, 57, 68,
59–60; on hatred, 56–59; as nihilist, 86–87, 97, 105, 115, 119, 180. See
58, 62n7, 151, 156; on nostalgia of also madness; super-death of God,
paradise, 119; on philosophy and 154; universal, 6, 25n22, 155. See
literature, 145; on psychosis, 31, also anxiety
Index 203
death instinct, 18–19, 36, 39n9, 156; Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich,

destrudo 156, 179; Thanatos, 18, 1, 6, 29, 33, 41, 46, 66, 70–71, 73,
182. See also Eros; will to death 75–79, 81–82, 84, 107, 145, 161–63,
[Wille zum Tode] 19, 51, 131–32. See 180
also Mainländer. See also Freud Dracula, Count, 2, 90
decreation, 110, 112–13, 119, 120n2 Dragomir, Alexandru, 75
Deleuze, Gilles, 151, 176 double, 1–6, 27–32, 35, 38n6, 39n8,
demonic 3–5, 15, 17–19, 24n12, 27, 31– 41–42, 45–46, 48, 52n14, 55,
37, 38n6, 38n8, 43–44, 47–48, 50, 66–69, 71, 72n9, 73–77, 79–80, 82,
58, 62n7, 71, 76, 94, 97, 102, 109, 95–97, 98n8, 102, 130, 143, 145–46,
145, 147, 166–67, 176; antidaimon, 150–51, 160, 170, 173, 181, 182n2;
36; daimon, 12; daimonic, 5, alterity, 2, 28, 30–31, 42, 55–56,
36–38, 50, 54, 124, 131, 146, 181; 62n12, 66, 68, 80, 85, 103, 105, 107,
daimonism, 34. See also devil 114–15, 147, 182; Doppelgänger,
derealization, 28, 67, 104 4, 27, 33, 80–81, 84, 103, 150, 159;
despair, 42, 61n4, 68, 78, 179–80 duality, 1, 3, 5, 8, 27, 29–30, 35,
destruction, 3–4, 6, 6n1, 18, 30, 35, 45, 39n9, 39n11, 41, 71, 75, 84, 92, 96,
48, 60, 62n12, 63n17, 68, 75, 81, 98n8, 102, 119, 124, 130, 143, 146–
94, 116, 120, 125, 137, 143, 156; 47, 150; multiplicity, 27, 29, 35, 48,
creative, 120n2. See also decreation; 95–96, 143–44, 150; other, 3, 9–10,
self-destruction, 34, 54, 58. See also 12–15, 18–19, 21, 23n9, 27, 28, 32,
identity; nihilism 35, 37, 38n8, 39n12, 42, 44, 47–48,
devil, 1, 3, 5, 17, 27, 29, 31–33, 36, 51, 51n1, 55–58, 62n5, 62n8, 62n12,
38n8, 39n8, 41, 43–44, 47–48, 50, 66, 69, 74, 76–77, 80–81, 85nn4–5,
52n14, 54–55, 62n7, 70–71, 84n2, 91, 93–94, 97, 105–7, 110, 114, 116–
85n5, 89, 93, 94, 97, 98n8, 105–6, 18, 124, 135, 139n3, 139n8, 144,
118, 126, 129, 140n12, 145, 160; 150–51, 165–67, 169–71; plurality,
Antichrist, 37; enemy, 31–33, 43, 35, 41
55, 57, 110; inner, 17, 32, 38, 38n8, Durden, Tyler, 103, 144
70, 118; Lord of Lies, 98; Lucifer, dwarf, 6, 127, 129–30, 140n16
32, 37, 54, 59, 70–71, 74, 85n7, 93,
98, 109, 111, 115, 145; Satan, 20, ego, 1, 2, 5, 7–17, 20, 23n1, 23n3,
32–34, 37, 38n8, 39n9, 41, 49–50, 23n7, 24n16, 24n19, 28–36, 38n4,
51n2, 54, 70–71, 84, 85n5, 89, 97, 38n8, 39n8, 42–48, 52n8, 65, 67,
119, 140n12, 146; satanic principle 74, 76–82, 85nn4–5, 90, 93, 95–96,
of suffering, 31, 84. See also Cioran; 102–4, 107, 114, 118, 124, 125, 131,
simia dei [God’s ape] 39n8, 145; 134, 137–39, 139n9, 143–44, 150,
snake, 35, 109–10, 112 156, 161, 165–72, 176, 180; alter,
Diaconu, Mădălina, 31, 54, 57, 61n4 116, 145; anti-I, 4; ego-ideal, 10, 17,
Dick, Philip K., 61, 73, 83–84, 86n11, 165–66. See also persona; egoism,
146 30; egology, 6, 30, 38n2, 146; I=I,
Dionysian, 34, 37, 97, 133–34, 147, 171 28–29, 114; ego-self axis, 5, 7–9,
Dionysos, 126 14, 36; individuation, viii, 6, 8-9, 20,
divinization [theosis] 8, 43–44, 119 31, 34, 55, 66, 115, 126, 134, 165,
Dorn, Gerard, 129 168; monarchy of, 21, 150; non-ego,
204 Index
29–31, 74, 79, 176; not-I, 1, 3–4, 6, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 3, 29, 38n2, 45,
44, 46, 76–77, 80; pre-individual, 48, 104, 114, 120n8, 159. See also
109, 111; pseudo-ego, 12. See also identity; Schelling
persona; self, 2, 5–9, 12–15, 17, 20, fin de siècle, 3, 91
24n12, 27, 29, 34, 36–37, 38n12, fire, 49–51, 52n16, 54, 61n2, 94, 98n4,
42–44, 46–48, 52n9, 52n15, 56–58, 115, 131, 180
73–74, 78, 80, 93, 106, 110, 114, Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 61n1, 120n4
124–26, 128, 134, 139, 150–51, Flaubert, Gustave, 50, 162
165, 167–68; subject, 2–3, 8, 14, Foscolo, Ugo, 54, 62n5, 159
21, 25n24, 27–30, 35, 48, 53–55, Foucault, Michel, 2, 6n1, 135, 150–51
58–60, 62n12, 68, 74, 80, 82, 84, Frankenstein, Victor, 2, 5, 31–32, 53–
95–96, 102, 112, 115, 135–36, 138, 54, 57, 160
143, 145, 150–51, 153–54, 156, 166, freedom, 5, 45, 52n10, 59–60, 68, 71,
168–69, 176, 180–81; superego, 32, 80, 90, 119, 135, 153, 160
34, 36, 42, 45–46, 65, 67–69, 72n3, Freud, Anna, 7
90, 92–93, 97, 104, 111, 145, 150 Freud, Sigmund: on anxiety, 107n1;
Eichmann, Adolf, 12, 70 compared to Cioran, 140n17;
Eliade, Mircea, 120n4 compared to Jung, 5, 126, 146,
Ellis, Havelock, 90 176n4; on death instinct, 18–19,
Eminescu, Mihai, 8, 20, 58, 62n7, 39n9, 156; on id, 5, 18, 42, 150; on
63n14, 74, 80, 85n7, 132, 149, megalomania, 52n8; on melancholy,
154–56, 163 180; on narcissism, 30; on neurosis,
Epictetus, 12 33; on paranoia, 2, 21, 73, 86n12; as
Epicurus, 120, 179 sensation type, 86n10; on sexuality
Eros, 18, 41, 45, 49, 51, 167; libido, 4, 16, as numinosum, 43, 52n5; on
22, 41–42, 45, 46, 49, 51, 56, 92, 118, superego, 97, 150
139n9, 181; sexuality, 3, 42–46, Frey-Rohn, Liliane, 20, 24n14, 38n8,
49–50, 52n5, 144; Venus, 42, 44 43, 85n5, 123, 126, 136, 140n12,
estrangement, 4, 20, 29, 47, 55, 59, 94. 141n33
See also alienation Fuseli, Henry, 33, 102–3
Euphemia, 45–46, 52n15
event [Ereignis], 152 Gautier, Théophile, 54, 60, 62n5, 112,
evil, 3–14, 18, 20–21, 32–33, 63n15, 71, 116, 120n3, 161
86n11, 92–94, 96–97, 98n2, 98n5, gaze, 17, 20, 42, 47, 94, 104, 135–36
99n8, 104, 107n2, 110, 112, 115–19, Gide, André, 121n15
120n3, 121n11, 131, 140n9, 145, God, 6n1, 9, 20, 31–33, 35–38, 38n5,
156, 170, 172 38n8, 39n8, 39n11, 42–44, 49–50,
existentialism, 5, 143, 146 52n9, 54–56, 59–61, 62n4, 62n7,
63n15, 71, 80, 83, 85n5, 90, 97,
Fall, 3, 6, 109–10, 161; Eden complex, 106–7, 108n4, 110, 112, 114, 118,
6, 119; innocence, 28, 30, 109–10, 124–26, 128–29, 133–37, 139n3,
115, 139n3, 155 140nn13–14, 141nn25–26, 141n29,
Faustian, 90, 113 143, 145–46, 151–54, 156, 157n1,
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 133–34, 141n28, 163–64, 167, 173, 177n4; complex
151, 161, 179 (“I am God”), 52n9, 83, 106, 114;
Index 205
creator, 62n8, 76, 85n8, 97, 110, Hesse, Hermann, 3, 25n25, 29, 37,
120n2, 127, 152–54, 173; dark side 38n4, 50, 145–46, 175
of, 20, 34. See also Abraxas; devil; Hillman, James, 175
image of, 43, 97, 173; inner, 9, 36, Hitler, Adolf, 70
38n8, 39n8, 43; Jesus Christ, 37–38, Hoffmann, E. T. A., 1, 41–42, 44–45,
39n8, 41, 52n14, 60, 98, 133, 135, 48–51
153, 161, 177n4; of Shadow 146. Hölderlin, Friedrich, 23n2, 34, 159
See also Abraxas; within, 8, 146. Huskinson, Lucy, 126, 130, 139n1,
See also death; devil; misotheism; 141n20, 176n2
nihilism Husserl, Edmund, 1
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 2, 8, 18, 35, Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 50, 116, 120n5,
52n16, 55–56, 62n7, 78, 124, 159, 163
161 Hypatia, 98
Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich, 43, 74, 84, Hyperion complex, 77
84n3, 104, 106, 161
Golyadkin, Yakov Petrovich, 29, 31, 33, Iago, 48, 58, 71, 74, 76
66, 75–84, 145, 180 Ibsen, Henrik, 9, 162
Goya, Francisco de, 152, 159 id, 4–5, 8, 13, 18, 24nn15–16, 29, 31,
Gray, Dorian, 1–3, 6, 28, 30–31, 33, 44–46, 48, 50, 65, 67–70, 72n3, 89–
35, 47, 86, 90, 93, 96, 109, 111–13, 90, 92, 97, 102–4, 143, 145–46, 150
115–19, 145, 149–50, 164 identity, 4, 12, 20, 28–31, 35–36,
44–45, 58, 66–67, 72n9, 73, 75,
Hannibal, 61, 121n13, 146 80–81, 84, 90, 92–93, 95, 97, 104,
Hartmann, Eduard von, 5, 95, 99n10, 107, 115–16, 119, 120n8, 136, 138,
146, 154, 162 165, 171, 176; crisis of, 21, 28–29,
hatred, 28, 39n8, 56–57, 59–60, 62n11, 78, 147; destruction of the principle
63n15, 94, 128, 151–53 of, 1, 48, 81, 90, 94–96, 144; divine,
Hauff, Wilhelm, 146 4–5, 35, 143; post-identity, 1;
hedonism, 111–13, 117, 144 un-identification, 4, 31, 57, 58, 144
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 68, 95, ignorance [avidyā], 30
102, 110–11, 115, 119, 135, 151, 159 indifference [adiaphoría], 78, 133
Heidegger, Marin, 2, 5, 10, 12–14, 28, inferiority, 17–18, 21–22, 53, 57, 67,
53, 55, 58, 67, 86n10, 101, 114, 90, 93, 97–98, 118, 126
139n7, 144, 146 inflation, 7, 9, 20, 43, 46, 53, 93, 114,
Heissenbüttel, Helmut, 87n13 130
Helios, 37. See also Abraxas insanity, 16, 55, 67, 84, 104. See also
hell, 13, 15, 16, 31, 33, 73–74, 76, 78, madness; psychosis
91, 94, 98, 99n8, 102, 106, 111, 115, Irenaeus, 173
118, 133, 159, 163, 166, 181–82; isolation, 2, 5, 25n24, 31–32, 53, 55,
damnation, 31, 79, 97, 115, 132, 161; 62n8, 73, 77, 84, 106, 115, 181–82
harrowing of, 33, 73, 102; inferno, 9,
31, 68, 71, 76–77, 79, 91, 106, 115, Jack the Ripper, 90, 98n1, 163
118, 164 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 51n1, 159
Heraclitus, 49, 125, 139n5 Jacobi, Jolande, 9–10, 14–15, 76, 165,
Hermes Trismegistus, 173 174
206 Index
James, William, 1, 143 Ligeti, György, 146

Jean Paul, 4–5, 27, 38n1, 51n1, 55–56, Lombroso, Cesare, 90, 163
135, 146, 153, 156, 159 London, 89–92, 98nn3–4, 160, 162
Jekyll, Henry, 1–2, 29, 31, 35, 89–90, Lorrain, Jean, 106–6, 164
92–97, 102–3, 117–18, 131, 163, 170 Lucka, Emil, 39n8, 48, 52n14
jester, 6, 52n4, 127–29
Johnson, Lionel, 120n3, 164 Maat, 179
Jung, Carl Gustav: about his mental Mach, Ernst, 1, 48, 95, 143, 149–50
illness, 126, 141n20; on archetypes, Machen, Arthur, 91–92, 98n4, 135, 146,
174–75; compared to Freud, 4, 164
17–18, 21, 146, 176; compared to madness, 20, 24n17, 31, 34, 36, 48, 54,
Hesse, 37; compared to Nietzsche, 56–57, 75, 104, 106, 130, 155, 179–
4–5, 12, 20, 45, 91, 123–26, 141n20; 82. See also insanity; psychosis
compared to Sartre, 11; compared magician, 141n21
to Schopenhauer, 5, 11, 15; on ego- Mainländer, Philipp, 5, 19, 132, 146,
self axis, 7; and existentialism, 5, 151, 154
146; and Gnosticism, 37, 146; on Maldoror, 57, 59, 149, 152, 154–56, 162
individuation, 8; on persona, 9–12, Malebranche, Nicolas, 175
23n7, 76; on shadow, 4, 16–18, 22, Manfred, 29, 53–55, 59, 145, 160–61,
23n3, 32, 37, 70; on structure of the 163
psyche, 4, 7, 18, 150; on theory of Mann, Klaus, 3, 145
stages of life, 23nn1–2; on theosis, Mann, Thomas, 3, 23n7, 145, 175
23n4 Marlowe, Christopher, 136, 181
master, 16, 24n16, 50, 70, 77, 102–3,
K., Josef, 71, 82 107, 116–17, 130, 131, 143; master
Kafka, Franz, 71, 82 morality [Herrenmoral], 107;
Karamazov, Ivan Fyodorovich, 70 servant, 24n16, 45, 63n16, 70, 90,
Kierkegaard, Søren, 1, 3, 5–6, 78–80, 102, 133, 143; servant of the servant,
101, 110–11, 116, 119, 132–33, 46; slave morality [Herdenmoral],
141n27, 145–46, 161, 179 107, 128
Kleist, Heinrich von, 34, 159–60 Maturin, Charles, 146
Maupassant, Guy de, 1, 3, 5–6, 28, 33,
Lady Macbeth, 57, 71 56, 99n10, 101–7, 108n4, 119, 145,
Lagerkvist, Pär, 3 163
Laing, Ronald David, 29, 67, 73 Medardus, 27, 31–32, 41, 43–49, 51,
last pope, 6, 133–36 52n11, 145
Lautréamont, Comte de, 2, 6n1, 54, 57, Medusa, 30, 42
58, 61, 62n7, 106–7, 149, 152–56, megalomania, 43, 46, 52n8, 134, 145
162 Meister Eckhart, 8, 168
Lenau, Nikolaus, 63n14, 161 melancholy, 20, 34, 47, 53, 54, 61n2,
Leopardi, Giacomo, 59, 63n14, 132, 74, 119, 131–32, 180, 182n4;
137, 156, 160 depression, 36, 53, 61n2, 78, 124,
Lermontov, Mikhail, 54, 161 180–81, 182n4; mania, 180–81
Levinas, Emmanuel, 102, 114 Mephisto, 3, 18, 52n16, 117, 146. See
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 95, 150 also devil
Index 207
Meursault, 54, 81 selfhood, 78, 121n14; on shadow, 4;

Meyrink, Gustav, 3, 145, 175 on will to power, 11, 45; Zarathustra
Milton, John, 37, 56, 59, 74, 98, 145 as his no. 2 personality, 8–9, 24n19
minority of one, 55. See also George nigredo, 70, 91
Orwell nihilism, 2, 5, 19, 54, 56–58, 60, 61n4,
mirror, 1, 22, 28–30, 41, 46, 51n1, 56, 62n4, 62n7, 63n17, 69, 78, 119,
70, 75, 84n3, 85nn4–5, 94, 96, 101, 126, 131–34, 136–38, 146, 149,
104, 109, 117, 144–45, 151, 182 151–52, 154–56, 157n1, 159, 162;
misotheism, 62n7, 63n15 active, 6n1, 125–26, 129, 134, 137;
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 180, 182 anti-nihilism, 126, 129, 132, 136;
Mr. Robot, 61 meontology, 48; nobody [Niemand],
mysterium horrendum, 32, 34, 147. See 14, 28, 58; nonbeing, 19, 79;
also Rudolf Otto nothingness, 9, 13, 56, 58, 78–80,
mysterium tremendum, 47. See also 109, 120n2, 134–35, 151, 153–54;
Rudolf Otto passive, 125–26, 129, 134, 136–37,
156; pre-anti-nihilism, 63n17;
Nabokov, Vladimir, 3, 145 theological, 133. See also atheism;
narcissism, 5, 28, 30, 52n8, 69, 85n4, Cioran; death; God; Nietzsche;
114–15, 120n9 Schopenhauer
Neo, 81, 109 nostalgia, 28, 34, 73, 119
Nerval, Gérard de., 69–70, 98n8, not-man, 54, 57–58, 60–61, 71, 89, 93–
161–62 94, 105–7; abhuman, 135; inhuman,
neurosis, 4, 32–34, 56, 68, 140n17, 170 5, 105, 181; last man, 25, 53, 106,
Nietzsche, Friedrich: about his mental 127, 129, 132, 160; subman, 60,
illness, 43, 75, 125–27, 141n20; 105; superman, 125–33, 136, 139n3,
about philosophy of literature, 141n31, 170. See also antihumanism;
145; compared to Baudelaire, 33; Cioran; death; Nietzsche; nihilism
compared to Cioran, 3, 6n1, 58, noumenon, 8; numinosum, 43, 45, 52n5
60, 139n3, 140n17; compared to Novalis, 52n18, 69–70, 98n7, 155, 159,
Foucault, 2; compared to Freud, 19, 182n4
24nn16–17; compared to Hartmann,
95; compared to Jung, 91, 123–27, Onfray, Michel, 115, 119
130, 136, 138, 141n20; compared to ontological insecurity 29, 80. See also
Rimbaud, 2, 35, 48, 103; on death Ronald David Laing
of God, 133–36, 151; on death of Origen, 31
subject, 95, 150; on decreation, Orwell, George, 55, 71
120n2; on daimonic, 34, 181; on Otto, Rudolf, 32, 34, 47, 147
eternal return, 125–27, 129, 131–33, Ovid, 30, 113–15
136–37; as existentialist, 23n10, 79;
as intuitive type, 86n10; as nihilist, Pain, Barry, 106, 108n4
6n1, 58, 60, 80, 125, 130–33, 136, Palahniuk, Chuck, 3, 68, 145
141n22, 146, 149, 151, 154; as para- paranoia, 2, 5, 21, 25n24, 33, 83, 84,
Darwinian, 90, 143; on persona, 11, 86nn11–12, 114–15, 136; existential,
76, 144; as Schopenhauerian, 5, 11, 6, 46, 73–74, 80, 83, 84, 114–15
19, 24nn16–17, 130–33, 136, 146; on Pascal, Blaise, 23n9
208 Index
Pater, Walter, 3, 120n10, 163 psychosis, 4, 12, 20, 23n4, 29, 31,
paternalism, 33, 97 34, 39n8, 55–56, 76–77, 83–84,
Pauli, Wolfgang, 80 104, 106, 126. See also insanity;
Pechorin, Grigory Alexandrovich, 54 madness; mania; neurosis; paranoia;
persona, 5–6, 9–18, 23n7, 28, 35–36, schizophrenia
42, 45, 47, 57, 69, 75–78, 80,
92–93, 97, 117, 144, 146, 150; Rank, Otto, 34, 59
bad faith [mauvaise foi] 12, 17, repression, 7, 17, 19, 21–22, 24n14,
21, 93, 128, 144. See also the they 24n17, 32, 42, 78, 86, 111, 126
[das Man]; depersonalization, 14, resistance, 17, 24n17, 78, 126, 169
20; identification with, 12, 14; Rilke, Rainer Maria, 36, 80
inauthenticity, 74, 92, 144; mask, Rimbaud, Arthur, 2, 35, 48, 66, 94, 103,
9–16, 23n7, 24n12, 76–77, 165, 172; 119, 121n12, 121n19, 126, 144, 150,
personology, 77; professional, 11, 163, 176
14, 92 Rollinat, Maurice, 154
pessimism, 5, 145. See also nihilism romanticism, 1–3, 153, 155, 159, 175;
Pessoa, Fernando, 147 post-romanticism, 1–3, 153, 175
Philo of Alexandria, 173 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 132
philosophy of literature, 2–3
Phoenix, 78 Sade, Marquis de, 53
Pinter, Harold, 82 Saint Anthony, 43, 47
pity, 97, 132–35, 152 Saint Medardus, 43
Pizzolatto, Nic, 58, 157 Saint Rosalia, 44–45, 51
Plath, Sylvia, 23n2 Saramago, José, 3, 145
Plato, 36, 146, 176n1; anti-Platonism, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 5, 11, 76, 79–80, 110,
56; Platonism, 33, 126–27, 131–34, 128, 135–36
149, 153, 175 Saturn, 130, 152
Pliny the Younger, 173 Sauron, 104, 117
Plotinus, 29 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 1, 28, 32, 53–54, 29, 38n2, 45, 104, 114, 120n8, 146,
65, 67–69, 72n7, 154–55, 159–60. See also identity
161 schizoid, 71, 137, 176, 181
portrait, 18, 43, 97, 109, 118–19, schizophrenia, 8, 57–58, 96, 99n9, 126.
121n17, 163, 181 See also madness; psychosis
projection, 5, 7, 21, 25n24, 30, 32, 44, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 5, 6n1, 11, 14–
57, 59, 67, 77–78, 83, 141n20, 144, 15, 18–19, 24nn16–17, 49, 51, 58,
168, 169, 170. See also paranoia; end 60, 86n10, 95, 99n10, 107n2, 125–
of the world, 62n10; target of, 13, 26, 129–34, 136–38, 144–46, 154,
165. See also persona; withdrawal of, 156–57, 160, 162, 175, 176nn2–3
22, 98, 172. See also shadow Schreber, Daniel Paul, 2, 33, 56
Protagoras, 116 Schumann, Robert, 146, 161, 181
Proust, Marcel, 1 Seidel, Alfred, 58
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, 173, self-overcoming [Selbst-Überwindung],
175 16, 128, 140n17
psychoanalysis, 4–5, 19, 45, 48, 126 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 18–19, 67
Index 209
shadow, 3–7, 10–13, 15–22, 23n3, Tamburlaine, 136

24n12, 24nn14–15, 25n26, 27–38, Tat Twam Asi, 18, 93–94
38nn7–8, 39n12, 39n14, 42, 44–48, Thacker, Eugene, 157
57, 60–61, 65, 67, 69–71, 72n9, 74, the they [das Man], 13–14, 16, 58, 73,
76–78, 80–82, 84, 89–90, 92–94, 81, 144; averageness, 13–14, 93;
97, 98n6, 102–4, 109–10, 115–19, diminution, 14; disburdening of
123–26, 128, 130, 133, 135–39, being, 13–14; leveling down, 13–14
140n10, 140n13, 141nn19–20, Thomson, James, 63n15, 91, 163
141n26, 141n34, 143–47, 150, 163, Tolkien, J. R. R., 104
166, 169–72, 175–76, 179–81, transgression, 4, 34, 47, 54, 106, 110,
182n2; acceptance of, 39n12, 144; 114, 117, 127, 134
archetypal (transpersonal) 19–20, Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich, 116, 133
33–34, 38n8; bright side of, 22, 37, twin, 15, 21, 25n21, 57, 84, 97, 169
138–39; collective, 2; half-shadow, typology, 82, 85n10, 92; feeling type,
4; identification with, 20–21, 36, 44, 86n10, 181; intuition type, 83,
94, 171; integration of, 20, 22, 36, 86n10; sensation type, 82–83, 86n10,
98, 172; personal, 19–20, 33–34, 118; thinking type, 86n10
38n8; shadow of the (supershadow),
3, 6, 32, 70–71, 72n9, 130, 145 ugliest man, 6, 133–35
Shelley, Mary, 1, 55–56, 145, 160 uncanny [unheimlich], 32, 92
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 160
Shestov, Lev, 42, 181 Valentinus, 37
Silenus, 59 Verkhovensky, Pyotr Stepanovich, 70
Sils Maria, 124, 126 Verlaine, Paul, 3, 149
Smerdyakov, Pavel Fyodorovich, 70 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Jean-Marie-
solipsism, 73, 80, 83, 114–15. See also Mathias-Philippe-Auguste de, 63n16,
paranoia 119, 163
soothsayer, 6, 130–33, 137
Stavrogin, Nikolai Vsevolodovich, 70, Wagner, Richard, 51, 131–32, 141n21,
151 161–63
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1, 4, 6, 33, 44, Weil, Simone, 120n2
48, 71, 89–90, 92, 95, 96–97, 102, Whitman, Walt, 29, 38n3, 162
117–18, 143, 145, 149, 163, 170 Wilde, Oscar, 1–3, 6, 28, 32–33, 48,
Stirner, Max, 6, 30, 38n5, 58, 107, 68, 93, 96, 109, 112, 115–17, 119,
133–34, 141n29, 151, 161 120n5, 120n9, 145–46, 149–50, 164
Stoichita, Victor I., 146 will to life, 24n15, 156–57, 179. See
Stoker, Bram, 98n3, 164 also death instinct
stranger, 4, 10, 13, 32, 37, 44, 54, 67, will to power, 11, 44–45, 125
79, 81, 92, 130 Wilson, William, 1, 5, 28, 31–32, 65–
Strindberg, August, 126, 164 71, 90, 131, 145, 161
surrealism, 112, 155 Winnicott, Donald, 8, 126
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 58, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 182
63n15, 149, 156, 162 Wordsworth, William, 2, 159
systemic anomaly, 54, 62n6, 81 worldview [Weltanschaaung], 33, 73
syzygy, 68 Wotan, 126
210 Index
Wotton, Henry, 3, 109–12, 116–19, Zarathustra, 6, 8–9, 20, 24n19, 42,

120n10 52n4, 53, 85n5, 114, 123–37, 139n2,
139n6, 140n9, 140n12, 140n16,
Yeats, William Butler, 37 141n16, 155, 163–64
youth, 23n2, 53, 67, 92, 109, 112–13, Žižek, Slavoj, 4
117–19, 131, 155 Zweig, Stefan, 34–36
About the Author
Ştefan Bolea is currently working as an associate lecturer within the Faculty

of History and Philosophy of the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca
and as an editor of the literary magazine Apostrof. He is also the cofounder
and editor-in-chief of the cultural e-zine EgoPHobia. He has received his
second doctorate summa cum laude in Comparative Literature in September
2017 (after a first one in Philosophy in 2012) with an interdisciplinary
investigation on the archetype of the shadow in the literature. He has won
research fellowships in Oslo, Munich, Paris, and Vienna. He also has two
BA’s in Philosophy and European Studies and one MA in American Studies.
He is the recipient of twenty national and international prizes of literature
and selections from his texts were translated into English, German, French,
Portuguese and Ukrainian. He published twelve books in Romanian. His
activity encompasses a remarkable number of articles in both Romanian
and English published with journals such as Philosophy Now, Philobiblon,
Studia Philosophia, Caietele Echinox, or Meta. He maintains active profiles
on ResearchGate and Academia.edu and he is currently working on a book
on existentialism.
Personal site: http://stefanbolea.ro/category/english
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Internal Conflict in

6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2020 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN 978-1-7936-0712-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

Appendix 3: The Individuation from the Persona to the Self 165

of Multidisciplinary Research in Humanities (XXI, 1, 2016) under the

Quotations are cited with reference to the following abbreviations.

CW Collected Works, eds. Sir Herbert Read, Michael

RB The Red Book. Liber Novus, eds. Sonu Shamdasani

Quotations are cited with reference to the following abbreviations.

AC The Anti-Christ (1888/2006). In The Anti-Christ, Ecce

P The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche (1986), ed. and trans.

MAIN LITERARY WORKS

Quotations are cited with reference to the following abbreviations.

D Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Double (1846/2014). Trans.

the double introduces the themes of alienation and estrangement, making us

repressed through projection, the archetypal essence of which is manifested

created the term “shadow of the shadow” or “super-shadow.” Dostoyevsky’s

The Shadow in Analytical Psychology

THE EGO-SELF AXIS

“Becoming a Being” is always done on the ego [Ich]—self [Selbst] axis. We

as Nietzsche considered himself a follower of the sage Zarathustra, militating

The persona is exclusively concerned with the relation to objects” (CW 6,

“a) the physical and the psychic constitution;

of the guilty conscience . . . Oh, actors to yourself!” (KSA 9, 182). Moreover,

Society commands us to abandon our specific personality and to identify

referring to the philosophical genealogy of the notion of unconscious, Jung

overwhelmed along with my ruin. As you go down it is a satisfaction to drag

1. See CW 8, §§772–773. See David Tacey’s objections: “Jung’s theory is

The Double and the Demonic

In Hoffmann’s novel, Medardus fulfills his sexual and criminal desires

in the first fragment, Victor makes his entrance as a specter of murder. In

in the innocence prior to the discovery of self-awareness are unable of dual-

ego and his exceptional incarceration. If Narcissus loved himself, he would

From the first meeting with his Doppelgänger, Dostoyevsky’s Golyadkin

everything that is forbidden, worst, remotest; and if there is anything in me

of God can be resolved in a Jungian fashion through the progression on the

According to May, the genealogy of the daimonic becomes manifest

describe the complexity of the Jungian shadow. The post-Nietzschean vision

1. Jean Paul’s original version was Doppeltgänger.

The Devil’s Elixirs is a combination of Bildungsroman and Schauerroman

Franz simultaneously understands two distinct things: the repressed force

Medardus’s substitution with his “shadow brother” Victor, whom he

It is more interesting that Euphemia, as a follower of absolute cynicism,

In the beginning of the fragment, the sea is understood as a psychological

“voice of consciousness” (Hildenbrock 1986, 151). The arrival of the painter

THE POEM OF THE FIRE

For Medardus, similar to Schopenhauer or Coleridge, Eros is “the essence

My veins glowed (DE 32).

The association between fire and the demonic is well documented in

The North Pole of Being

The theme of solitude, of “isolism” (Sade), of the exceptional romantic sub-

This sense of deep loneliness can be viewed as a metaphor of psychosis,

Up to a point, solitude is necessary for our individual growth, but, taken to

“THE LOOKING-GLASS OF THE SHREW”

Hating the Other

love and humanity” (F 96), writes Frankenstein’s creature. Moreover, the

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became

From “consciousness as destiny” [Bewusstsein als Verhängnis], Cioran’s

Combing back to purely nihilistic self-hatred, this contradictory and acute

I am inebriated by hate and by myself (Cioran 1991a, 207).