The book has been more than 10 years in the making. Thinking that writing a novel was too big a task, I decided to write a series of occasional short stories. But I have a penchant for ordering and collecting and rearranging, and soon I wrote two and then three stories with the same narrator: a PhD student named Joseph who goes somewhere to study local beliefs in demons, only to get swept up in those demon beliefs himself. Those three stories begat a few more; Joseph met a woman named Lucy; then he kept meeting women named Lucy; then he got embroiled in an academic spat between professors from the University of Chicago’s Department of General Demonology and its breakaway Department of Applied Demonology. Then he started going a little crazy, trying to find this Lucy who, as his friends suspect, may never have been there in the first place.
I hope the book speaks to anyone who’s ever been a passionate student, or who’s ever been afraid of getting too mixed up in what they study, or who’s ever been afraid of anything at all. Or desired anything at all. Especially what you fear.
In this blog post I’ve reflected on what it means to write about demons in the modern world.
After studying philosophy and anthropology at Grinnell College in Iowa and at the University of Chicago, since 2013 I’ve been working at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. I’ve written a book about authenticity and the changing meaning of “the people” in post-Communist politics and folklore. I’ve co-edited a volume about the Czech Marxist philosopher Karel Kosík and another about the Czech Marxist art theorist Karel Teige. I’ve written essays about the contradictions of “civil society” politics and the exclusions of modern political theory. And I have scattered fragments of other writing waiting to be gathered into books of the future. All of this work is tied together by the ambition to understand how collective agency is constructed in multiple, competing forms.
On the margins of my academic work, I’ve also done my part in the imagining and constructing of collectivities—the kind of work that some people call “folklore.” I’ve collected folk tales in the South Pacific and labor songs in Chicago, and I’ve sung with a revolutionary choir in Prague.
The flipside of collecting is organizing, and in addition to organizing songs and stories, I’ve taken my turn at collecting grad students and philosophers and devotees of diasporic Jewishness.
But more than anything else, what I like organizing are words. When I gather a few together, they turn into poems. When the organized words turn into characters, sometimes they turn into stories. And sometimes the stories come together into that peculiar monster of modern sensibility known as the novel.
In addition to all that, there’s a lot I dream of writing, and sometimes I write about not writing it.
A Blog on Medium where I turn not-writing (or at least not finishing) into a genre of its own.
A Substack page where I collect thoughts on demons, gods, and politics.
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