The Archaeology of the Dark Soul: The Evil Within Us

Peter-André Alt argues that the Enlightenment never banished evil; it merely relocated the Devil from church walls into the human psyche. From Friedrich Schlegel's demand for "careful analysis" of darkness to Schiller's Franz Moor weaponizing medical knowledge against his own father, Alt traces how literature transformed evil from external demon into internal impulse. Baudelaire's ennui, Kierkegaard's boredom-driven seducer Johannes, Kleist's judge-criminal in *The Broken Jug*: each reveals evil as aesthetic object, survival reflex, psychological void.

You'll learn:

- Why Schiller's tiger metaphor licensed art to admire what it condemns

- How Adrian Leverkühn's coldness bargain explains modern art's emotional distance

- What Kleist's identical-faced saviour and rapist reveal about moral legibility