The Line of Lilith: Remy de Gourmont’s Demons of Erotic Idealism

Abstract

According to medieval tradition, the (male) incubus and (female) succubus were demons who preyed upon their victims by engaging in sexual activity with them. Representations of these spirits can be found in various works by the fin-de-sièclewriter, critic, and poet Remy de Gourmont (1851-1915). In this article, I offer a close textual comparison of the play Lilith (1892) and the short story ‘Péhor’, as well as considering a pseudonymous treatise entitled Les Incubes et les succubes (1897) of which Gourmont is likely the author. In the fin de siècle, as in the middle ages, the incubus or succubus could be found at the centre of western culture’s discourse over abnormal, dangerous, or obscure sexual phenomena. Aware of the prominent place this symbol held in the collective imagination, Gourmont sought to imbue the trope of the demon lover with his own set of phenomenological questions pertaining to the erotic life. Gourmont’s work is perennially concerned with the condition of Eros in a world which, according to idealist principles, is ultimately unknowable except as a projection of the individual mind and the fallible senses. In the texts I shall address, Gourmont extrapolates Arthur Schopenhauer’s neo-Kantian notion of ‘the world as representation’ to the realm of demonology, adopting the incubus and succubus as potent subjective phenomena which contribute to an idealist view of erotic dynamics and interactions.