The Great Criminal, the Exception, and Bare Life in James Joyce’s <em>Ulysses</em>

Abstract

In twentieth and twenty-first centuries, theories of state increasingly grappled with ethical questions raised by specters of colonial violence that give rise to equally violent nationalist revolutions. In few places has this violence been so sustained and long-drawn-out as in Ireland, and James Joyce directly confronts rhetorical and physical violence of this conflict in Ulysses (1921-22).1 This article uses theories of origins of state offered by two of Joyce's German contemporaries-jurist Carl Schmitt and literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin-to think through interdependent ethics of violence, narratives of national origins and sovereignty, and role of would-be citizen in Joyce's novel. I propose that, in character of Leopold Bloom, Ulysses develops strategies for negotiating violence and conceptualizing a form of citizenship that is more inclusive than those offered by prevailing colonial and nationalist models. Bloom's actions attempt to imagine an Irish future beyond terms offered by these models. These actions can be situated relative not only to critique formulated by novel's engagements with Irish nationalism but also to broader concerns of those interested in questions of how state power rhetorically legitimizes itself.Violence and Sovereign: Benjamin, Schmitt, AgambenBenjamin's Critique of Violence (1921) and Schmitt's Political Theology: Four Essays on Concept of Sovereignty (1922) each provide an origin story for sovereign state.' Schmitt's work famously opens Sovereign is he who decides on and work as a whole focuses on structure and maintenance of sovereignty.3 According to Schmitt, sovereign's power rests on his ability not to enforce but rather abrogate law and declare a state of emergency; this power includes ability to define terms of both emergency and its resolution. As a result, the legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm becausethe sovereign produces and guarantees situation in its totality. . . . The essence of state's monopoly . . . must be juristically defined correctly, not as monopoly to coerce or rule, but as monopoly to decide. . . . The decision parts here from legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to law it need not be based on law.4Schmitt's sovereign has power not simply to establish law but also to determine when that law should be suspended, to decide what constitutes emergency and exception, and thus to produce rather than simply react to juridical situation.When this definition of sovereignty is read in tandem with Benjamin's account of state origins, it becomes evident that Schmitt's account elides or underestimates violence of sovereign decision over both law and norm. If legal order rests on an original decision on exception that defines boundaries, both temporal and geopolitical, of state, then that decision arises out of a violence that is inherent to act of distinguishing inside from outside, exception from norm. This dynamic forms context for Benjamin's Critique of Violence, in which he treats theories of law that take as justification for violent means as ethically inadequate; his essay concludes that the violence of an action can be assessed no more from its than from its ends, but only from law of its suggesting with distinction between effects and ends that neither intended nor unintended results of an act can serve as a basis on which to judge its ethical status.1Faced with a lack of criteria for judging violence, Benjamin writes anatomy of (foundational) violence, one that closely resembles Schmitt's sovereign decision:The function of violence in lawmaking is twofold, in sense that lawmaking pursues as its end, with violence as means, what is to be established as law, but at moment of instatement does not dismiss violence; rather, at this very moment of lawmaking, it specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence, but one necessarily and intimately bound to it, under title of power. …