Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror (review)

As this collection of essays arcs from Matthew Green’s reading of The Giaour, which cites Badiou, Žižek and Nancy, to its Baudrillardian conclusion in the shape of Piya Pal-Lapinski’s analysis of terror and exchange in Werner, its methodological tendencies are clear. In fact, it is reassuring that unashamedly ‘theoretical’ criticism does not cede themes such as freedom and terror to purely historicist analyses. Moreover, the preponderance of references to French theory (with a smattering of Frankfurt School for good measure) does not preclude a dialogue with some more conventionally contextualised approaches both within and between the essays.

Indeed, such a dialogue is present between the first pair of essays. Green opens with a complex but satisfying reading of Byron’s oriental romance, interlacing a basically Nancyean argument about transgression as the condition of possibility for freedom with a concern for the fragility and passivity of the gothic body. Writing that ‘the Giaour stands as a literary representation of the sort of revolutionary subject whose acts are endorsed by Žižek and Badiou’, Green broadly affirms the necessity of violence before going on to evoke the unsettling image of Leila’s dead body as a reminder of the material wound through which the transcendence of law may have to be purchased. Andrew Stauffer, known for his monograph Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (2005), then offers an intriguing essay that focuses on orientalist stagings of Byron’s Sardanapalus, with particular reference to performances in the United States. Despite some obvious differences in approach, both Stauffer and Green maintain a firm commitment to understanding Byron’s contemporary resonance, be it in relation to 9/11 or American imperialism. This note is struck throughout by the collection’s contributors, and is one to which I shall return at the end of this review.

Many of Byron’s most politically interesting texts are set abroad, and therefore it is no surprise that a number of essays take a geographical approach to interpreting the tense relationship between freedom and terror within these texts. Joshua David Gonsalves sees Venice as ‘a site for questioning the possibility of republican violence in the aftermath of the irreversible sociohistorical mutations generated by Romantic geopolitics’. Enlivened by a dash of Agambenesque biopolitics, his essay argues that Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari carry out an interrogation of the revolutionary state-form, exploring the tensions between the popular will and its representation, and the gap between republican rhetoric and the reality of geopolitics. Ian Dennis’s reading takes up parallel issues, once again turning to Venice and Marino Faliero in describing the secularisation of a political centre as ‘sociality without sacrality’. Evoking the aesthetics of tragedy and sacrifice, he claims that whereas the pre-modern centre was a site of sacrificial violence, the democraticised modern centre can be best understood as a nexus for contradictory, perhaps irresolvable, forces of ‘resentment’. Jane Stabler also roots her account in Byron’s Italy, suggesting that the poet’s understanding of terror was increasingly mediated by Italian art, politics and history. Stabler concludes that Byron’s immersion in Italian culture prompted a renewed awareness of an aesthetic of terror based on distance, suffering and spectacle. By way of contrast, Simon Bainbridge turns northwards, over the Alps, contextualising Byron’s response to Switzerland within a wider Romantic history of liberty. Finally, Stephen Minta’s piece on Byron’s political consistency foregrounds Greece, claiming that his late commitment to the Greek cause needs to be seen in the context of a long internal struggle that attempted to reconcile a politics of passion and immediacy (by definition, changeable and predicated on seizing the moment of crisis) with the possibility for consistent adherence to a political programme.

Alongside Byron’s strong engagement with continental and even global geographies and histories (see Jonathan Gross’s piece on Byron and Coetzee), the other major theme that connects these analyses would be that already...