Life in Crisis: The Biopolitical Ambivalence of Joseph Conrad’s <i>The Secret Agent</i>

Abstract

Of late, Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent: A Simple Tale has capitalized on a certain timeliness. A number of critics have remarked on way that this tale of terror not only resonates with present historical period - so-called War on Terror - but also reveals its truth. In this line, Tom Reiss, writing in September 11, 2005, edition of New Yor Times, asks which work by Joseph Conrad, Secret or Under Western Eyes, is true classic of terrorist literature. According to Reiss, value of these novels is in their ability to explain why real people throw away promising careers and families to become terrorists. Although Reiss mentions history of the troubled zone that divides West from East, pressing task remains entering into terrorist's psychic in order to map the terrorist mind.1 In weighing these two novels against each other, Reiss relies on a psychologizing paradigm of interpretation that reduces subject of political terror to a matter of individual psyche. Joseph Conrad's novels transform into a vast diagnostic tool, classifying individuals according to their normality or abnormality, in process becoming void of political and historical content.The diagnostic approach is not, however, limited to a narrow psychological focus. There is a long tradition of criticism staging Secret as a drama pitting forces of social order against forces of social anomie. More specifically, several critics interpret text as an attempt to resolve crises confronting liberalism and capitalism during fin de siecle. Eloise Knapp Hay argues that Secret polemicizes against revolutionary desires of novel's anarchists. In Hay's reading, represents a tradition of social conservatism in which organic foundations of society are threatened by anarchist malcontents, or hommes de ressentiment. Avrom Fleishman, on other hand, portrays as an organically minded social conservative but suggests that instead of depicting a struggle between extrinsic forces (society and anarchism), novel stages a contradiction internal to liberal society. social forms that organize liberal society - especially individualism, national citizenship, and private property - also threaten to tear it apart by fragmenting society into a chaotic tangle of atoms.2Indeed, one of most persistent perspectives from which to view Secret is what Alex Houen has aptly termed entropolitics, that is, political implications of social/physical chaos.3 Houen remarks on pervasive sense of entropie social decay in novel, a sense that world of late Victorian London risks dissipating into a flow of unorganized energy. This disorganization translates to social disorder within novel, making politics into so many attempts to plug up holes in society proper. Yet for Houen, entropolitics is not merely a matter of conservation but is also invention of a new political field. political becomes a corporeal fabric of organization and disorganization comprehending architectural mass of London, bureaucratic networks and social institutions of nation-state, revolutionary underground, and news media.4 However, Houen's concern for blurring of line between order and disorder, for indiscernibility of state power and anarchism, risks neutralizing antagonistic political gesture that constitutes one of most interesting aspects of novel. Carey James Mickalites's The Abject Textuality of Secret Agent acts as a notable corrective to such a tendency in criticism. Mickalites argues that Conrad employs figures of abject to reveal that anxiety-ridden, 'perverse' desire defines public unconscious of Victorian social order, and that this return of repressed constitutes novel's modernist effort to push literary signification beyond bourgeois limits of Victorian symbolic order. …