Ethics in the Face of Terror: Shelley and Biometrics

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I would like to acknowledge the valuable input I received from attendees of Beyond Ground Zero: 9/11 and the Futures of Critical Thought and from my colleagues at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. The composition and completion of this essay was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.

Notes

Even as a particular date, September 11, 2001, names an event that is known only imprecisely and may never be fully comprehended. The meaning of the attack on the World Trade Center is proliferating so quickly and in so many different registers that the association of a fixed date, and the acts of observance and presumed knowledge that come with memorializations of the day, does a strange violence to the event itself, in the sense that it assigns a temporal fixity to a point of reference that is defined by the temporal instability of its meaning.

The events of Manchester were not the only significant confrontation between the state and those agitating for reform in this period, though they were the most bloody. Similar post-war demonstrations were held in Pentridge in June of 1817 and in London in December 1816, the latter known as the Spa Field Riots.

We must discern here between at least two contradictory impulses that characterize Shelley's reformist literature. In a poem such as “Prometheus Unbound,” his expressions of reform are evidently aimed towards the elite of the labor movements, yet his songs and other “popular” works demonstrate, in effect, a desire to further radicalize the men and women of the mob. Shelley wrote for both audiences and as Cian Duffy suggests such a practice underscores a politics that was split between a gradualist revolution and violent unrest. Shelley was, in other words, “ultimately unable or unwilling to choose between ‘reform’ and ‘civil war' ” (Duffy 2005, 186).

Barbara Judson also attends to the social agitation that underwrites the composition of “On the Medusa” but does so to argue the text is preeminently self-referential and furnishes Shelley with a “self-critical representation of his own liberalism” (Judson 2001, 135). I strive in this essay to refuse this gesture that risks erasing the differences that obtain between Shelley and the Medusa in order to argue the poem stages a reflection not of the self but of alterity, of a radically conceived other who interrupts Shelley's mastery over his powers to respond to the Manchester Massacre.

Treating Shelley's poem as a reflection on terror, I am considering a very different scene of terror than the one we encounter at this moment. But if Shelley has something to teach us now, and I certainly believe he does, it is because Terror and terrorism is rooted in the complex forms of state terror of the Romantic period. Modern nonstate terrorism shares with this legacy an assertion that their terrorism comes in response to prior state terrorism (Derrida 2003, 152). We cannot escape this history. It is reinscribed even in modern terrorism that is not based in the monopolized violence of the state. Shelley reminds us that responses to state terrorism are also part of a history of how we now respond to terror.

Redfield is not referring to Peterloo here but rather to a generalized condition of Terror in which life becomes subject to extermination. His metaphors of a “germ” or “parasite” are powerfully undesirable but also very canny in how they avoid the complexity of more conventional rhetoric of animality and the noncriminal putting to death of the animal other. For Shelley the question of ethical obligation in “On the Medusa” will be unthinkable without reference to animals, but also irreducibly complicated by it.

Shelley writes of Castlereagh, who was already notorious for advocating the postponement of the abolition of the slave trade in 1815, in the opening lines of the “Mask of Anarchy”:

I met murder on the way—

He had a mask like Castlereagh—

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

seven bloodhounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might

Be in admirable Plight,

For one by one, and two by two,

He tossed them human hearts to chew

Which from his wide cloak he drew (5–13).

Mary's acquaintance with physiognomy began early in life. Godwin had his daughter's face read while she was still an infant.

My remarks recall Marc Redfield's physiognomically inflected analysis of Benedict Anderson's idea of imagined communities. The nation “requires its constituents to partake of a collective identity irreducible to a face-to-face encounter. But the nation is radically imagined: it cannot be experienced immediately as a perception” (Redfield 2003, 49). While the nation is faceless, physiognomy stages an imagined knowledge of the other that is one of the forms with which to imagine the nation as a community. Under this logic, citizens are not just connected by a shared interest in reading and consuming print media, but are themselves examples of that media, texts by which the collectivity of the nation can be apprehended—as if it were a legible individual.

For this reason I find Grant F. Scott's assertion that “the poem works to eradicate any actual or rhetorical frames” bears little relation to his subsequent, and I think quite right, statement that “Medusa is described as if she were actually present to the observer” of Shelley's poem (Scott 1996, 19). The issue of mediation between the speaker and the work of art/literalized Medusa does not eliminate frames but multiplies them unceasingly as the ekphrastic poem ponders how acts of observation—which is also to say acts of reading—are structured and enabled.

Derrida's analysis of Perseus and the Medusa comes as part of Memoirs of the Blind and is as remarkable as it is slight. Like Shelley's poem, Derrida's reading is prefaced by an encounter with the Medusa, in this case Giancinto Calandrucci's Head of the Medusa.

While Grant Scott reads these surrogate observers as prophylactics that “absorb the virulence of Medusa's gaze and assume the grave responsibility of a direct view” (Scott 1996, 29), I see these surrogates as forms of Shelley. These others assume roles that mark, in part, the impossibility of any direct view of the Medusa or of the self.

In her superb close-reading of “On the Medusa,” Carol Jacobs notes the Medusa is “allied with poetic figuration” in the sense that she has the power, much like language, to transform materiality (Jacobs 1985, 171).

To pursue this question further would also require a thorough consideration of Levinas' conception of the animal and how it mediates forms of obligation. As David L. Clark has shown in a wonderfully rich reading of Levinas' “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” this is an irreducibly complex undertaking that involves reading Levinas dialectically against analyses of animality by Heidegger, Kant, and even Derrida in order to try to understand how and why he broaches the question of the animal alongside the brutalization of Jews in the Holocaust. As Clark notes of Levinas' account of Bobby, a dog whose dutiful recognition of the humanity of Levinas and other prisoners in Camp 1492 earns him the name of the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, “the fact that the question of our obligations to animals is raised in such a maximally important context [in a slave labour camp], indeed, as the opening move in the evocation of that context, puts to us that the thought of the human, no matter how profound … can never be wholly divorced from the thought of the animal” (Clark 2004, 171).

Levinas speaks of art in terms that resonate with Shelley's interruption of alterity. He characterizes art as a sphere in which “being is able to traverse, but in which its shadow is immobilized.” Art is a space between or an “interval”: “it is the meanwhile, never finished, still enduring—something inhuman and monstrous” (Levinas 1987, 11). As such art is not removed from an originary ethics, but is the trace in language of an alterity that appears at odds with communicative speech. Levinas' own language here figures the interruption of something to the side of a fantasy of purely referential speech and language. His words approach the monstrously figurative here as he writes of the immobilized “shadow of being.” This interruption of a poetic language—a monstrosity always at the core of language—is another form of being awakened from within to what is outside of oneself or a form of radical defamiliarization.