ABSTRACT
Drawing upon Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of utopian messianism as posited by the emergence of justice in the suspension of law, this chapter argues that Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim plays on a variation of the same theme—the failure of law to achieve order in the context of imperialist modernism. Jim can only bridge the gap by exercising autocratic rule, in anticipation of the totalitarian regimes of force emerging in the wake of the Empire. Patusan relies for its existence on the authority and law of one man and on the fiction of his almost supernatural power. Harkening back to Agamben’s Arcanum imperii (the fiction of power at the heart of sovereign rule), this chapter reads Brown’s successful attack as the exposure of the empty core of Jim’s power and his established state, staging the collapse of the order and peace built on the ideals of imperial commerce. Law and order form the ideological basis for material interests and the development of the relations of production—ultimately of imperialist and capitalist expansionism. Conrad’s modernism is cast as a late stage in the bourgeois cultural revolution. The fragmented economy of capitalism (reflexive of the fragmented modernist state) opens itself into the new wave of modernism, in which the hired object of labor is no longer the pseudo-feudal/romantic hero of the ruling class, but the specialized, routinized, systematized Weberian proletariat laborer who undergirds the weight of the metropolis.
