Communities in Mourning: Making Capital Out of Loss in Carlyle's Past and Present and Heroes

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Thomas Carlyle is perhaps most famous for his consistent commitment to hero worship. Heroes, Carlyle hopes, will resolve the problems of democratic and industrial modernity exemplified by the Chartist rebellion and acute economic exploitation.1 Despite his strident insistence on the necessity of heroes, Carlyle represents leaders perpetually marked by social failure. Notoriously inarticulate and resistant to public exposure, Carlyle's heroes preserve their manly integrity by apparently forfeiting their social effectiveness. With so many expectations resting on a hero who refuses to make himself available to the public, Carlyle, it would seem, chooses to represent not leadership but a remarkably consistent failure of responsibility. This essay explores how the failure to become visible to the public actually constitutes a powerful form of charismatic seduction that relies on invisibility, absence, and mourning. Carlyle, in Past and Present (1843) and On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840), creates an erotics of death, which allows the hero to be both irretrievably absent from the social and eerily present. Carlyle's dead leaders eroticize relations among men, presumably replacing relations of monetary exchange with relations of love. This love of death becomes particularly clear in the second book of Past and Present in the narrative of the monk Samson, in which Carlyle elaborates the coordinates of a fantasy of dead heroes and male communities. This narrative of a medieval monk functions, for Carlyle, not as a hopelessly anachronistic narrative of a lost world but as a model for how the dead matter of capitalism can become vitalized by the dead matter of the hero's body.