The Impossibility of (Not) Serving: Sovereignty and Subjectivity through Inferno IX

As a central element of Christian theology, demonology has been marginalized from mainstream Christianities since the European Enlightenment, becoming the purview of artists, antiquarians, and fringe religiosities. Yet, while it has faded from much mainstream religious usage, the demon remains one of the West’s most enduring representations of evil and has acquired an increasingly potent place in the cosmologies of contemporary Christian nationalist movements in the United States and across the globe (O’Donnell, Passing). At the same time, the poetico-literary “afterlife” of demons catalyzed by (mis)readings of Milton’s Paradise Lost slowly shifted visions of the Devil and his cohorts from mere architects of evil to archetypes of rebellion (Faxneld; Luijk). This latter discourse, epitomized in the image of Milton’s Satan, is often encapsulated by the Latin Non Serviam—“I will not serve.” Allegedly uttered by the Devil at the instant of his rebellion, the phrase spoke of aspiration to mastery over, rather than servitude to, regnant order. Alasdair MacIntyre called it “Satan’s motto,” claiming that it signaled a rejection of established hierarchy (97), while Georges Bataille argued that it signified a “desire to accede to authentic being, to the sovereignty without which an individual or an action have no value in themselves, but are merely useful” (120). As Christian theology informs us, however, this desire was ultimately a doomed venture. At a time in which demonization has become central to mapping the global religious and political landscape, this article takes up the task of rethinking this doomed venture, not (only) in the narrative frame of Christian theology but in its (post)secular inheritors. It does so through a deconstructive reading of canto IX, lines 91–99 of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, using these verses as a lens through which to explore broader questions of demonization, subjectivity, and sovereignty that continue to structure our present. Recent works have demonstrated the continued influence of Christian demonology on modern systems of violence, dehumanization, and power (Kotsko; O’Donnell, Passing), and although exploring these systems through the lens of a trecento poem might initially seem odd, the place of Dante in the gradual secularization of religious and political concepts is widely acknowledged (Franke, Transgression). As a theologico-