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It portrays the country’s leader as a human being instead of a grand demiurge, responsible for its future.

How can we know that we are not being systematically deceived by some demonic demiurge?

An hour with Sugar Plum Gary addresses both kinds of existentialism in a phantasmagoric dive — with Q&A! — through his richly frightening cosmos where Santa is something like a malevolent demiurge.

Edward Steichen’s dramatically moody photographs of Rodin’s masterpiece, his strangely leaning monument to the novelist Honoré de Balzac, emphasize the sculptor’s influential vision of Balzac as a self-creating demiurge.

But it lacks neither that nor the dramatic irony of Liston’s collapse: in effect, prostration to a demiurge of history on the turn.