Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

Epilogue on Gnostic Relapses

Lukács’s “Gnostic” turn in The Theory of the Novel anticipates postwar 

debates on the demonic, which crystallized around the figures of Carl Schmitt 

and Hans Blumenberg.

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 In the terms of this later debate, the demonic, and 

especially the “monster motto” (der ungeheurere Spruch, Nemo contra deum 

nisi deus ipse, “only a god can go against a god”) either formats (according 

to Schmitt) a Gnostic-dualistic conflict that is inherent to monotheism, or else 

(according to Blumenberg) it is the formula of a mythic-polytheistic balance 

of powers in which individual self-assertion is both possible and ethically 

allowable but simultaneously subjected to an extensive system of limitations 

and checks. What Lukács shows in this context is how difficult it may be to 

separate these two options—given that the decision between them is never 

simply a question of how to read Goethe. The case of Lukács poignantly 

shows that even (and especially) the highest levels of reading are never free 

from political-theological and metaphysical assumptions.

Goethe’s work, and especially his idea of the demonic, perhaps unsur-

prisingly, provides the ideal stage for playing out metaphysical intuitions. If 

Lukács shows anything, it is that the demonic can easily become the medium 

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Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 

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for the kind of self-seeking and self-finding that defines the “quests” of mod-

ern heroes. But what any given individual actually finds under the heading 

of the demonic is ultimately governed by the vagaries of the demonic itself. 

Certainly, it is easy to stand against anti-modern Gnostic “recidivists”—espe-

cially when they are characterized that way. But, then again, perhaps it is not 

so easy, when things get serious. The young Lukács was nothing if not seri-

ous, and in this sense his attempt to use the idea of the demonic to depict the 

modern world as a world system predicated on unmitigated atheism may still 

contain some arguments against Blumenberg’s idea that the modern world, 

at least in its ideal state, should be conceived as a stable polytheistic “bal-

ance of powers.” If Lukács were right, then Gnostic relapses, including his 

own, would be more than understandable. But to the extent that the “reality” 

of the demonic apparently lies mostly in individuals’ presuppositions about 

it, this might be a minimal reason—assuming one is needed—to side with 

Blumenberg.

The demonic in Lukács’s conception, like Spengler’s, tends to anticipate 

crises, toward which it can only relate as an overreactive overcompensation 

in the direction of a form of transcendence that is not only utopian but hos-

tile to the world as such. In contrast with such scenarios, Blumenberg (and 

Goethe) would assume that the “demonic” state of the world is not uniquely 

modern, but is only a residual condition, the perennial endurance of a rela-

tive lack of absoluteness. This lack, however, is one that modernity and the 

modern novel have often tasked themselves with overcoming, not always 

with foreseeable consequences.

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