Divine Violence, Ironic Silence and Poetic Justice in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

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.