The Devil’s party: the discourse of demonisation in a fracturing world Nathaniel Berman* Linn Normand, Demonization in International Politics: A Barrier to Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) Demonisation, counter-demonisation, and self-demonisation have become cen- tral to contemporary political debate. This essay proceeds from engagement with Linn Normand’s work on Israeli-Palestinian polemics to the broader onto- logical, epistemological, and political stakes in demonisation. It explores de- monisation in thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Carl Schmitt, and Julia Kristeva. It relates this phenomenon to the problematisation of the religion/secularity divide by thinkers like Karl Marx and Talal Asad. ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (ca. 1790–93) ‘Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal ... . [T]he Manichaeanism of the colonist produces a Manichaeanism of the colonized. The theory of “the colonist: absolute evil” responds to the theory of “the native: absolute evil”.’ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) ‘De-demonizing the enemy is a step in the direction of peace making because it forces the adversaries to take each other seriously and to humanize the other... . De-demonizing would be the beginning of the end of demonization deadlock.’ Linn Normand, Demonization in International Politics: A Barrier to Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2016) ‘The discourse of demonisation is the untranscendable horizon of our time.’ With apologies to Jean Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (1960) * Rahel Varnhagen Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture, Brown University. Email: nathaniel_berman@brown.edu. London Review of International Law, Volume 6, Issue 1, 2018, 127–159 doi:10.1093/lril/lry013 ß The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/lril/article-abstract/6/1/127/5078926 by Columbia University user on 24 August 2018