International criminal law is replete with metaphorical references in one form or another to the decidedly non-legal but at once theological and, more to the point, literary devil. This is because the references to the devil are secular appropriations of an originally religious term. In examining this issue, this chapter owes a huge theoretic and methodological debt to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the paradigm, and his take on the theory of signatures, both of which retain a certain ‘capacity for elaboration’. Agamben somewhat counter- intuitively makes the point that ‘secularization acts within the conceptual system of modernity as a signature, which refers it back to theology’. Agamben’s work admittedly does delve deeply into theological concepts, but the focus is more on their decisive deployment in secular contexts rather than their systematic theological development over time.

In that spirit, this chapter advances the ‘Faustian pact’ as an exemplary paradigm with legal utility, historically borrowed from literature but originating in religion and, as a consequence, still bearing that originally religious signature that the law could never quite eradicate or completely repress, even as it presses that paradigm into service.