Temptations of Faust: The Logic of Fascism and Postmodern Archaeologies of Modernity

Mima Vulovic is a sessional lecturer at York University who also works
at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

Evelyn Cobley is a professor of English at the University of Victoria.
Temptations of Faust is a remarkably original study of the correlation
between the lofty conceptual paradigms of modernity and, inversely, one
of its most incomprehensible historical aberrations—the emergence of
totalitarian fascism. Even more unique is the fodder for this
exploration, which could be surmised as, essentially, the esthetic of
music. The texts Cobley uses in support of her thesis are Thomas
Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus (about the fictional avant-garde composer
Adrian Leverkьhn), and Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music
(a critique of Arnold Schцnberg, on whom Leverkьhn was based).

The crux of Cobley’s argument is that German fascism remains,
paradoxically, both continuous and discontinuous with modernity.
Therefore, the resurgence of savageness amid the culture renowned for
its intellectual accomplishments cannot be simply dismissed as an
(in)explicable anomaly from modernity and the humanist assumption that
an intellectually sophisticated nation automatically ensures a highly
civilized rule of the state. Nor does it suffice to see fascism as a
failure of modernity. Instead, Cobley suggests a far more demanding
dialectical approach, a consideration of the possibility that the logic
that allowed the rise of and massive support for Hitler may be implicit
in the very blueprint of modernity. Moreover—and herein lies the true
currency of this work, for it goes beyond the scope of fascism—this
possibility that the modernist processes of fragmentation are complicit
with the totalizing tendencies they seek to disrupt continues to be
tacitly present in contemporary postmodern discourses, which take
themselves as virtuous and emancipatory.

This work by no means anticipates another Holocaust, but it does shed
strong light on that which we so often suspend from the picture of
self—namely, that most of human endeavor is conducted within an
archetypal impasse in which “good” and “evil” continue to
mutually reinforce each other. Cobley reminds us of Faustian temptations
with a supreme intellectual rigor, and in so doing, contributes an
extraordinary piece to both literary scholarship and the study of the
Holocaust.