Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

The Satanic Verses and the Demonic Text 285in a sense, fictions. The power of such fictions, however, is recognised: therevelations recorded in the Koran can have genuine effects on people’s lives,even if that “truth” would be ambiguously motivated by the Prophet’s needsand personality. This can be applied to Rushdie himself: “In writing The SatanicVerses, I wrote from the assumption that I was, and am, a free man.” 112In a legal sense, this is a valid assumption. Yet, there are several other sensesthat disqualify any claims for absolute freedom; The Satanic Verses itself isan eloquent exposition of several of them. The characters in this novel areconstantly tossed around by powers they do not understand, nor control.Even full self-knowledge is questioned by pointing out the heterogeneity inthe constitution of an individual self. As a melting pot of religious, politicaland fictional elements, The Satanic Verses questions all separate, unbrokenidentities; the frequent inquiries into the fictionality of one’s self (“Whatkind of idea am I?”) emphasise this theme. Indecision, misunderstanding,discordance: these are some of the demons haunting the construction of(postmodern) identity. The “misreading” of The Satanic Verses, and its author’s“original intentions” just verifies the validity of Rushdie’s own fiction.The Satanic Verses and Rushdie’s situation after its publication establisha complex lesson on the power of limits, even in our the postmodern andheterogeneous world. Michel Foucault has written: “Power as a pure limitset on freedom is, at least in our society, the general form of its acceptability.”113 Arthur Kroker adds to this in his work The Possessed Individual thattoday, in a postmodern society, “rules exist only as a seductive challenge totransgress them.” 114 The power structures and the different limitations theyimpose on our freedom are irresistible to a postmodern mind precisely becausethey offer some means to illustrate and realise freedom in a transgressiveact. They “save us from limitlessness,” Kroker writes; absolute dissolutionof all limits would amount to incapacity to make any distinctions, or toexperience any real significance. The postmodern self – paradoxically – needspower structures, borderlines and prohibiting attempts: such an Other savesthe postmodern subjectivity from the complete self-absorption and aestheticemptiness of “possessed individualism.”No longer “possessive individualism” under the Lockean sign of privateproperty and use value, but now possessed individualism under the sign ofabuse value. The aestheticization of experience to such a point of excessthat nature, subjectivity, and desire migrate into seduction: into a game ofchance and indifferent relations of pure positionality.“Possessed individualism” is subjectivity to a point of aesthetic excessthat the self no longer has any real existence, only a perspectival appearanceas a site where all the referents converge and implode. 115112 Rushdie 1992, 396.113Foucault 1978, 86.114 Kroker 1992, 10.115Ibid., 4-5.