Conrad and the Asymmetrical Duel

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Notes

notes

1 Nietzsche writes of the “Napoleonic tempo” in Stendhal's works (Beyond Good and Evil 384). See also Porter, “Stendhal and the Lesson of Napoleon.” I would like to thank Robert Irvine, Kenneth Millard, Alex Thompson and Laura Marcus for their exceptional and kind hospitality when I read an earlier version of this as a paper in the English Department at the University of Edinburgh in October 2007. An earlier version of this article can be found in my book Derrida, Literature and War: Absence and the Chance of Meeting (London: Continuum, 2009) 117–39.

2 At one point Scott's hero Henry Morton says: “I join a cause supported by men engaged in open war, which it is proposed to carry on according to the rules of civilized nations; and do not in any respect subscribe to the act of violence which gave immediate rise to it” (Scott 175).

3 Since writing this article I have seen that Derrida uses hébétude as a translation for Benommenheit in his reading of Heidegger's 1929–1930 seminar on world, finitude, solitude. See Jacques Derrida, Séminaire: La Bête et le souverain – Volume II (2002–2003), eds. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallett and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Galilée, 2010) 104, 142, 146, 173, 281, 304–05.

4 Having had his eardrums ruptured, Razumov's last words are “Je suis sourd” (Conrad, Under Western Eyes 305).

5 Reported Thursday 3 October 2002. See <news.bbc.co.uk>. In February 2007, Taha Yassin Ramadan was sentenced to death by hanging. He was executed on 20 March 2007, the day after the fourth anniversary of the start of the American-led invasion of Iraq.