Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and Contemporary Thought by Lawtoo Nidesh;

Author:Lawtoo, Nidesh;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

PART THREE

The Affect of Ideology

7

La lettre, Lacan, Lacoue-Labarthe: Heart of Darkness redux1

STEPHEN ROSS

I follow Hillis Miller’s contention in his ‘Prologue’ to this volume as he states:

[T]he narrative of Heart of Darkness [i]s a way of indirectly speaking about, and bearing witness to, something that cannot be spoken of literally or directly but only in parable or allegory, and that can be borne witness to only in a sequence of voices, each speaking for the one before’ (26).

As his reading differs from Lacoue-Labarthe’s, though, so mine deviates from Miller’s in its determination to use Jacques Lacan’s theories to name the ‘something that cannot be spoken of’ as the real of desire. I suggest that the horror in Heart of Darkness is Kurtz’s discovery that he is ‘hollow at the core’; that his subjectivity is anchored by a void that threatens to absorb consciousness and yet sustains it as well. The parallel with the barbaric dark side of Western imperialism and with the brutality underwriting imperialist eloquence is neither accidental nor inconsequential. My reading demonstrates how Heart of Darkness functions as a critique of Western imperialism (as Lacoue-Labarthe has it) and as an account of a universal aspect of human subjectivity (as Miller has it). I contend that in addition Heart of Darkness illuminates the extent to which these two elements are interwoven through the fetishistic machinations of ideology.

There is an ethical dimension to this consideration of ideology in Heart of Darkness that is also at work, though quietly and secretly, in both Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Miller’s essays. Heart of Darkness’s concern with imperialism, race, capitalism, fidelity and duty makes ethics its most fundamental horizon of engagement; its concern with alterity in all these registers and its refusal to hypostatize alterity for hegemonic recontainment makes it a crucial pre-text to the late twentieth century ethical theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. This connection between Conrad and Derrida/Levinas is precisely what functions in Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Miller’s texts as their crypto-ethical engagement and, perhaps, their fundamental raison d’être.

Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay commences with words that could have come verbatim from the ‘Exordium’ of Derrida’s Specters of Marx: ‘Je voudrais, devant vous, ce soir, essayer de me justifier’ (111). Lacoue-Labarthe is specific: though he has begun with what he claims was a ‘rash phrase’, he seeks to justify not the phrase, but himself. Something larger is at stake here than a simple assessment of Conrad’s novel. The discourse thus invoked fades from such prominent display but reappears in Lacoue-Labarthe’s equation of the heart of darkness with the ‘interior intimo meo of Augustine’ (117) and in the distinction he makes between ‘knowledge’ and ‘know-how’, paralleling Levinas’s distinction between wisdom and knowledge in ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’. It returns most persistently, though, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s recurrence to the word ‘figure’. In English, an important nuance is lost: though figure means figure – shape, image, even eidos – in both English and French, in French it has an additional meaning: face. Time and again, Lacoue-Labarthe invokes la figure to describe Kurtz

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