Postmodern culture suppresses the angelic and numinous more than the demonic

Evidence

What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental. (Wim Wenders’ excruciatingly cloying and portentous Wings of Desire is perhaps the most spectacular failed contemporary attempt to render the angelic.) Yet, as Rudolf Otto establishes in The Idea of the Holy, encounters with angels are as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons. After all, what could be more shattering, unassimilable and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy? — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 358

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with ch10’s claim that ‘evil can be read as proof rather than disproof of God’s existence’ — both reverse the usual dark-side privileging. — connects to: Postmodern citation replaces the uncanny with a knowingness that kills it. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 310; The numinous can be decoupled from religion and experienced as alien tranquillity — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 359
• DEEPTHINKING: The final rhetorical question — why calm joy is the most shattering thing in our overstimulated lives — reframes the whole book’s depression/hauntology axis: the uncanny is not horror but peace.