Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought: Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-Lab by Nidesh Lawtoo (review)

Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought is a surprising, unusual, and thought-provoking volume of essays. Nidesh Lawtoo has collected a series of readings of Heart of Darkness by various literary critics, all responding to a reading of Conrad’s novella by the French philosopher and theorist, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, originally delivered as a talk in 1995, published in 1996, and translated into English by Nidesh Lawtoo and Hannes Opelz for this volume. Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay forms the centerpiece of the collection, and Lawtoo’s decision to position the essay in the middle of the collection emphasizes the way Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay both frames and is in turn framed by the critical essays that surround it and respond to its reading of Conrad’s tale.

What is framed is really a double concern: on the one hand, the abiding problem of reading Heart of Darkness, and on the other hand, the fate of a certain type of theory with which Lacoue-Labarthe is associated—“French theory” as Lawtoo describes it (2), or “deconstruction” as we might also call it, invoking Jacques Derrida and those other two philosophers, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, with whom Derrida humorously (and seriously) identifies himself as the “three musketeers” [in For Stransbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy (translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas; New York: Fordham University Press, 2014)]. Some might take issue with the suggestion that this type of theory encompasses all of “contemporary thought” (as the subtitle of Lawtoo’s volume suggests). For precisely that reason, though, Lawtoo’s framing of Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of Heart of Darkness stages a provocation to think through the contemporary relevance of Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of Heart of Darkness. The philosophical profile of Lacoue-Labarthe provokes, in turn, a double question about the relevance of “contemporary thought” for assessing the “horror” of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Can critical thinking measure the power of Conrad’s representation of the Belgian atrocities without repeating the distorting rhetorical effects of elision, hyperbole, and racism with which Heart of Darkness evokes the “horror” of that experience?

Conrad, then, in the company of Lacoue-Labarthe. This, I think, is the doubly-framed portrait Lawtoo’s book offers its readers: a portrait of Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophical profile juxtaposed with a portrait of Conrad’s Congo experience. As a double portrait, the book offers a rich and rewarding combination of essays that not only introduces new approaches to Heart of Darkness, but also introduces the work of Lacoue-Labarthe, perhaps the least well known of the “three musketeers” of deconstruction.

There is something necessarily problematic, though, about this double framing. Part of this has to do with what Lawtoo calls the “conceptual difficulties” posed by Lacoue-Labarthe’s work as a whole, which, like Derrida’s work, keeps returning to a set of key terms, most of which come from his engagement with Heidegger—above all, “myth,” “mimesis,” and “techne”—and all of which require extensive reflection on, annotation, and contextualization of the legacy of French philosophical discourse shared by Derrida, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe. Part of the problem with the book’s double-frame comes from the position adopted by almost all of the literary critics. Whether they agree or disagree with Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of Heart of Darkness, almost all of them adopt, in some manner or other, a literary critical engagement with Conrad that is assumed to be substantially different from the kind of reading Lacoue-Labarthe engages in. This rhetorical assumption is most explicitly articulated by Henry Staten at the beginning of his essay “Conrad’s Dionysian Elegy”: “There is an intrinsic interest in seeing the candid reaction to Conrad's tale of a notable intellectual figure like Lacoue-Labarthe. He does not engage the critical discourse that for the literary scholar stands guard around the story...