Faust and Alienation

Abstract

Although the story of Faust was largely relegated to the popular sphere between Marlowe and Goethe, its contention that performative representation leads to the death of the soul remained a prominent concern in European high culture. John Milton’s Paradise Lost restates the Biblical story of the Fall as a version of the Faust myth. The forbidden fruit is a performative sign that effects a pact with Satan, and the poem analyzes the psychological consequences of this pact. These include idolatry, which is the mistaking of the sign for the referent, and carnality, which is the reduction of human beings to objects, and the ultimate form of which Milton presents as death. The Faust myth is profoundly influential on Milton’s depiction of Satan who, like his prototype Comus, is given many of the characteristics conventionally ascribed to magicians and witches. Preeminent among these is a denial of mediation, a refusal to recognize that the world of appearances refers to any ulterior logos, which Milton figures as Satan’s irrational envy of the Son. The consequences of the Fall also include alienation. The curse laid upon both Adam and Eve is that they will experience their essential subjective activity—their labor—as alien, hostile, and unpleasant. A world made up of performative signs is by definition meaningless, and Milton shows how this absence of significance renders human life obnoxious to itself.