The Devil Notebooks Laurence A. Rickels Table of Contents		$24.95 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5052-1 $75.00 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5051-4
This sequel to The Vampire Lectures takes on the Devil. Milton’s Paradise Lost. Goethe’s Faust. Aaron Spelling’s Satan’s School for Girls? Laurence A. Rickels scours the canon and pop culture in this all-encompassing study on the Devil. Continuing the work he began in his influential book The Vampire Lectures, Rickels returns with his trademark wit and encyclopedic knowledge to go mano a mano with the Prince of Darkness himself. Revealing our astonishing obsession with Satan in his many forms, Rickels guides us on an entertaining and enlightening journey down the darkest corridors that film, music, folklore, theater, and literature have ever offered. “The Devil represents the father,” Rickels writes in the opening pages, setting the stage to challenge foundational interpretations of Freudian psychology. The Devil presents not the usual fantasy of immortality, he explains, but instead provides victims with a paternal origin. Until their preordained deadline is reached, the Devil’s pitch goes, people will enjoy the pleasure of uninterrupted “quality time” without the threat of random death. Rickels terms it “Dad certainty”: you know where you came from and you know where you are going. Despite the grim outlook, Rickels keeps the proceedings amusing, with extravagant wordplay and buoyant prose. A stunning cultural and psychological analysis, The Devil Notebooks shows how the prince of occult has been used—throughout history and across cultures—to represent people’s primal fear of authority and humanity’s universal suffering. Sharing this cultural moment with the idea of evil being bandied about in our political discourse, the supposed satanic influence of pop music on our children, and a wildly popular book series on the end of the world, The Devil Notebooks is a sweeping and timely work that sheds light on the source of human fear and dread in the world. Laurence A. Rickels is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include The Vampire Lectures and The Case of California, both from Minnesota. 392 pages | 1 b&w photo | 6 x 9 | 2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself Devil Father Notebook One Intro/Limbo or Satan’s School for Girls—Race with the Devil—Murder in Isla Vista, Santana, and Santee—Dare Devil Aleister Crowley—The Devil Rides Out Notebook Two The Devil in Freud or the Father’s Same Body—The Other Side and Communications from the Memoirs of Satan Notebook Three More of the Same Body—Wolfman and Fraternities of Satan Notebook Four Metropolis, California—The Satanic Cut of the Built Body Notebook Five Prints of Darkness in Freud, Goethe, Flusser, and Reisner—First Circle of the Seven Deadly Sins Notebook Six Second Circle of Seven and the Deadly Sins—The Evil Within Notebook Seven Freud’s Dying Days and The Wild Ass’s Skin—Sweet Nothing or Needful Things Notebook Eight Angel Heart in the Right Place—Demons Projections—Falling Angel Takes Heart—Demonic Phallus—Walpurgis Night Notebook Nine Sounds of Satan—The Wagner before the Horse—Banality or Evil Notebook Ten Satan and Golem, Inc.—Childhood’s End and Beyond the Pleasure Principle on Purpose—What’s the Sexual Difference between Techno Survival and Mass Suicide? Notebook Eleven Demonic Bodies of Work between Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure and Event Horizon Notebook Twelve Revelations of Evolution in Memnoch the Devil—Inferno—Keep Away from Apeling—Dancing in the Light Notebook Thirteen Possession by Demons or the Dead in Amityville, Witchboard, and The Exorcist Notebook Fourteen The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel and The Possession of Joel Delaney Notebook Fifteen “The Call of Cthuluh” or The Craft of Disgust Notebook Sixteen My Bad or The Damned—Spiritualism—To the Devil a Daughter and The Sentinel—My Evil   Mine Notebook Seventeen Paradise Lost—Hearst Castle—The Black Cat—The Coming Race—Peter Schlemiel Notebook Eighteen “The Mines of Falun” Notebook Nineteen Swedish Tourism and German Romanticism Notebook Twenty The Devil’s Elixirs and The Monk   Devil Father Mine Notebook Twenty-One Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself, Part II—From Ferenczi to Derrida, or Faith without Redemption Notebook Twenty-Two The Witch Metapsychology in Freud, My Mother: Demonology, and Anton LaVey Notebook Twenty-Three Freud and the Devil, or Appetite Comes with Eating Notebook Twenty-Four The Devil and His Grandmother, or Rear View Mirrors Notebook Twenty-Five Michelle Remembers, or Rhyme Word Death Notebook Twenty-Six Hitting Bottom in The Club Dumas, The Omen, and “Reading the Lack of the Body” References Filmography