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The Devil's Blind Spot: Tales from the New Century

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"What do you mean by the Devil?" asks the Secret Service agent in one of Alexander Kluge's short stories from The Devil's Blind Spot. "A man in Wittenberg," replies the university professor, a specialist in medieval metaphysics, who has been brought from Germany to the Pentagon's Terrorist Screening Center. "Specifically, the direct descendent of a scholar who fourteen generations back is said to have taught Hamlet and assisted Dr. Faustus."

Told in the style of Nietzsche's aphorisms and based on the found material of current events and historical anecdote, this book is bound to confuse readers looking for Evil incarnate. For, as Kluge shows, the Devil is no one person. Rather, the diabolical pervades the world we inhabit. Chernobyl, the Kursk, 9/11, asymmetrical warfare - the disasters of modernity are viewed by Kluge as missives to all of us, who live, as he writes, in the Devil's blind spot.

It has often been remarked that the Frankfurt School of philosophy - Kluge refers to Horkheimer, Adorno and Benjamin as his "teachers" - offers no solutions, only scenarios of doom. Recall the opening lines of Dialectic of Enlightenment, according to which "the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant." Indeed, the infernal elements of modernity figure prominently in these stories. However, Kluge's stories offer "antidotes" to the perceived pessimism of critical theory.

The black humor of these stories is clearly in a Swiftian tradition. For instance, in a story subtitled "Episode from the First Epoch of Globalization," Kluge traces our "sense of beauty" to heightened powers of imagination developed by our ancestors during the Ice Age: "Those were terrible years," Kluge writes, "without hope, and only in the hearts of man and beast did a kind of glow of former times, promising warmth, remain. In the end only stories." A far cry from today, yet the analogy sticks. The stories in The Devil's Blind Spot chip away at the forms of existence frozen in our collective memory - and provide reason to hope.