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Abstract
This essay argues that there is a productive resonance between Joseph Conrad’s political novel The Secret Agent and Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, that enables an intervention in key debate around the role and status of ambiguity in Benjamin’s theory. Alison Ross, in interpreting Benjamin, has disagreed with Werner Hamacher’s valorisation of ambiguity and in particular his notion of an ‘afformative’ bloodless violence embodied in language. I argue that Conrad draws upon literary techniques, particularly the ironic treatment of silence to explore violence, justice and ambiguity that anticipates elements of Benjamin’s essay. This treatment of Conrad and political theory revolves around a Benjaminian reading of the productive ambiguity of irony in particular and literature in general, to provide a sense of how literature helps us to think through the uncertainties and contradictions of politics and political settlements. Read in relation to Conrad’s novel, Benjamin’s concept of divine violence can be interpreted as a form of poetic violence, a trope frequently read as unfit for elitist modernist art. Yet Conrad situates literature in relation to popular culture to suggest that both are necessary to articulate and reflect critically upon truth. Divine violence as poetic justice emerges as a standard by which the justice of political settlements might itself be judged, whilst Conrad’s pervasive irony provides a productive ambiguity that works to maintain indeterminacy that is necessary to a Benjaminian conception of justice as divine violence.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Katherine Baxter for her feedback on a number of drafts of this essay. Also, my thanks to Graham Huggan for his continuing advice and mentorship, and to Julia Kuehn for her support throughout the development of this project. Finally, I’m grateful to Marco Wan for the conversation that prompted this research.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (London: Harcourt, 1970), 56.
2 Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994), 14–15.
3 Patrick Brantlinger, ““Heart of Darkness”: Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism?” Criticism 27, no. 4 (1985): 373. For a defence of Heart of Darkness and its use of irony, see Cedric Watts, “‘A Bloody Racist’: About Achebe’s View of Conrad,” The Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 204.
4 Paul B. Armstrong, Play and Their Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 173. Armstrong’s sense of irony’s ‘telos’ is contradicted by Hamacher’s sense of the ‘afformative’, thought if we read freedom more broadly in the place of emancipation, Armstrong’s formulation begins to fit better with Benjamin’s sense of means and ends (discussed later). Freedom seems closer to a means, whereas emancipation seems more like an end.
5 Werner Hamacher, “Afformative, strike,” Cardozo Law Review 13 (1991); Alison Ross, “The Distinction Between Mythic and Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” from the Perspective of Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” New German Critique 41, no. 1 (2014): 99; Alison Ross, “The Ambiguity of Ambiguity in Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’,” Towards the Critique of Violence: Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben’s, eds. Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
6 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (London: Dent, 1923), 30. Subsequent references will be given as parenthetical citations with page references only.
7 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 250.
8 Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 51.
9 Critique of Violence, 248.
10 Ibid., 286.
11 Ibid., 297.
12 Numbers, 26:10 (King James).
13 Hamacher, 1140.
14 Critique of Violence, 249.
15 Hamacher, 1140.
16 Ibid., 1139n
17 “Distinction between Mythic and Divine Violence,” 100 Note also that Derrida is deeply uncomfortable with Benjamin’s notion of bloodless violence, worrying that in the context of ‘the gas chambers and the cremation ovens, this allusion … must cause one to shudder’, Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (London: Routledge, 1992), 62.
18 “The Distinction Between Mythic and Divine Violence,” 99.
19 Ibid., 106.
20 Ibid., 120.
21 Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 301.
22 Elective Affinities, 302.
23 Critique of Violence, 243, 251.
24 Ibid., 249.
25 Ibid., 250.
26 Critique of Violence, 237. Note that the apparent pun on ‘state of nature’ in ‘the theory of state of natural law’ is not so apparent in the German ‘der Staatstheorie des Naturrechts’, although it does function as a cross-linguistic pun on ‘l’état de nature’.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 251.
29 Massimiliano Tomba, “Justice and Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Time of Anticipation,” Theory and Event 20, no. 3 (2017): 579–98.
30 It is worth noting that Conrad himself engages directly with Rousseau. In Under Western Eyes for example, the statue of Rousseau in Geneva looms large over the protagonist, Razumov. I address Conrad’s ambivalent engagement with Rousseau in another essay on Conrad and social contract.
31 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2011), 40 (original emphasis).
32 Eli Friedlander argues that Rousseau’s answer to this question involves a combination of fiction and autobiography, setting up a striking coincidence with Edward Said’s reading of Conrad. Also striking is the development of Friedlander’s own thought, which traces a path directly from Rousseau to Benjamin. Eli Friedlander, “Rousseau’s Writing on Inequality,” Political Theory 28, no. 2 (2000): 254–72, 256. Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).
33 From this follows the potential that divine violence might transform a person’s sense of their social identity without killing that person, which opens the utopian promise of education to which I allude in the concluding section of this essay. Modern formal education inevitably witnesses the complete transformation of children, and education at its best aspires to dismantle misconceptions and promote fundamental changes in an individual’s outlook. I am not claiming that education guarantees the just transformation of identity (far from it), but offer the hope that it might hold that potential, and without the death of the student or the teacher.
34 Angelika Zirker suggests that poetic justice is either viewed as ‘obsolete with modernity’ or transformed, in particular through an ‘asymmetry’ in which questions ‘as to what is good’ are set against ‘the demand for the punishment of evil’ (146). Yet Conrad’s modernist poetic justice falls into neither of these categories completely. It is based on symmetry even while it is connected to the ambiguity of the divine in Benjamin. Angelika Zirker, “Poetic Justice: A Few Reflections on the Interplay of Poetry and Justice,” Connotations 25, no. 2 (2015/2016): 146.
35 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 4th ed. Paul Armstrong (London: Norton, 2006), 58.
36 Critique of Violence, 250–51. For an account of Benjamin’s prioritisation of a just life over mere life, see also, Tomba, “Justice and Divine Violence”.
37 “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 297.
38 Ibid.
39 In terms of the relationship of The Secret Agent to the sentimental novel more broadly, there is not space to engage this here, but I will address this provocation in another essay in preparation that examines the sexual contract and The Secret Agent.
40 Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 104.
41 Ellen Burton Harrington, “The Anarchist’s Wife: Joseph Conrad’s Debt to Sensation Fiction in “The Secret Agent,” Conradiana 36, no. 1–2 (2004): 51.
42 “The Anarchist’s Wife,” 61.
43 Ellen Burton Harrington, “Suicide, Feminism, and “The Miserable Dependence of Girls” in “The Idiots, “The Secret Agent,” and “Chance,” The Conradian 37, no. 2 (2012): 50–1.
44 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 63.
45 Reference to biopolitics and suicide also raises the spectre of Achille Mbembe’s ‘necropolitics’. Whilst Winnie’s suicide does offer resistance to the state’s claim to power over death, ‘mere life’ as I am defining it is different to the state of being ‘living dead’ that Mbembe describes. To be ‘living dead’ is explicitly a state ‘in which vast populations are subjected’ to the ‘status of living dead’. The ‘mere life’ I discuss here, is in contrast, focused on individual experience. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 40.
46 Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 234–5.
47 Steven Donovan, Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).
48 Marjorie Gerber, “Over the Influence,” in The Muses on Their Lunch Hour (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 56.
49 Critique of Violence, 251.
50 Debra Romanick Baldwin suggests the possibility that Winnie might herself adopt ‘the narrator’s voice, objectifying herself in retrospect and detaching herself’. This would be consistent with the range of strategies Winnie deploys in order not to know herself, including her characteristic silence and wordlessness, but whether she is subjected to narrative distancing strategies or self-dissociative psycho-pathologies, she is either way a creation rendered inaccessible to the reader of The Secret Agent. “Conrad and Gender,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 138.
51 Geoffrey Hartman, “Public Memory and Its Discontents,” Raritan 13, no. 4 (1994): 24–41.
52 As discussed in his much cited Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (London: William Heinemann, 1921), x.
53 Ralph Grunewald, “Poetics of Injustice: The Case of Two Mockingbirds,” Connotations 26 (2016/17), 55.
54 According to Zirker, Susanne Kaul and Wolfgang Zach link poetic justice to ‘a concept of divine order’ that falls out of favour in modernity (Susanne Kaul, Poetik der Gerechtigkeit: Shakespeare – Kleist [München: Fink, 2008]; Wolfgang Zach. Poetic Justice: Theorie und Geschichte einer literarischen Doktrin [Tübingen: Nimeyer, 1986], cited in “Poetic Justice,” 136). This might begin to account for the relationship that emerges between the two in Conrad’s novel.
55 Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 303.
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Jay Parker
Jay Parker’s research stages critical conversations between political theory and literature, examining how attention to literary form can engage, critique, and expand upon political thought. He studies the political novel from the long eighteenth century and maintains further interests in Joseph Conrad, law and literature, postcolonial ecocriticism, and liberal political theory.