日本英文学会第 80 回大会

2008 年 5 月 24 日第一室（教育学部 K 棟 K203 教室）

Leviathan, Ziz, Behemoth: Allegories of Sovereignty, War and Empire
三重大学外国人教師 Taras A. SakI.

Introduction: Why these authors—Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac
McCarthy—and why now?
A) They are “untimely” and speak to our present—possibly our future, as wellB) The need to rethink the field of “American Studies”
1) Alan Wolfe reviewing Pease (ed.) Futures of American Studies = “AntiAmerican” (pre-Iraq Invasion)2) Amy Kaplan addressing the American Studies Association (post-IraqInvasion): How does American Studies respond to Guantánamo (hereafterGTMO)?
C) My own attempt to “respond” to GTMO, the never-ending “War on Terror,” andcurrent political realities

II.

Overview of My Presentation & ProjectA) Three Beasts that Herald the Messianic Age: Leviathan, Ziz, Behemoth1) Used to structure my readings of Moby-Dick (1851), Gravity’s Rainbow(1973) and Blood Meridian (1985)
2) Allegory (from allo “other” and agoria “speaking”) read mainly through Walter
Benjamin (as marking disruption, disjunction and suspension)3) The “other discourse” at play in these allegories = Sovereignty
B) Relation to War, Crisis
1) Moby-Dick: Mexican-American War 1846-1848
2) Gravity’s Rainbow and Blood Meridian: Vietnam 1965-1975
3) Melville akin to Baudelaire, an allegorist of the crisis of “modernity”
4) Pynchon & McCarthy: post-WWII, post-Vietnam, postmodern allegorists
C) Reading Moby-Dick Allegorically1) Dimock, Empire for Liberty & Jeffersonian Individualism/Expansionism2) Spanos, Errant Art of Moby-Dick & Critique of American “Exceptionalism”
3) Following Spanos: linking these novels to Iraq, “War on Terror,” GTMO
4) This approach helps us better read them as “political” texts, as having asecond (allegorical) level of meaning that must be historicized: Sovereignty
D) On Sovereignty & the State of Exception
1) Carl Schmitt: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”
2) Giorgio Agamben: indeterminancy; the “inclusive exclusion;” bare life3) Reading the three novels through Agamben (Sovereign Violence/Bare Life)1

日本英文学会第 80 回大会

2008 年 5 月 24 日第一室（教育学部 K 棟 K203 教室）a) Moby-Dick: Ahab—Pip/”Pagan” Harpooners/Ishmaelb) Gravity’s Rainbow: Blicero/Weissmann—Gottfried/Enzian/Slothropc) Blood Meridian: Judge Holden—his “fool”/the Delawares/”the kid”
4) Contrast Pynchon & McCarthy on the State of Exceptiona) Pynchon’s “Zone”—more Utopian, nostalgic, “Subjunctive Hopes”b) McCarthy’s “Bloodlands”—more Dystopian, nihilistic

III.

In Place of a Conclusion
A) This study might help to reconstruct the genealogy of American militarism andthe “Metaphysics of Indian Hating”B) A way to read American Literature in the age of GTMO—and bring “Empire”
back into “American Studies” in a moment of profound crisisC) Possibility of resistance, through Melville’s “isolatoes” and “castaways,”
Pynchon’s “Preterite” and even McCarthy’s “itinerant degenerates”?
Works CitedAgamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford UP, 1998.
_____. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford UP, 2005.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osbourne. Verso, 2003.
_____. Selected Writings, 4 Vols. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Harvard UP, 2005-2006.
Dimock, Wai Chee. Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism. Princeton UP, 1991.
Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. Univ. of Oklahoma Press,1997.
James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.
Dartmouth UP, 2001.
Kaplan, Amy. “’Left Alone With America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture” in Cultures ofUnited States Imperialism. Eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease. Duke UP, 1993: 3-21.
_____. “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today” (Presidential Address to the American Studies
Association, Hartford, Connecticut, October 17, 2003). American Quarterly 56: 1. March 2004: 1-18.
Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton UP, 1997.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West. Vintage, 1992.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick or, The Whale. Penguin, 2002.
Pease, Donald. (Ed.) The Futures of American Studies. Duke UP, 2002.
_____. Introduction to C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. Dartmouth UP, 2001.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. Penguin, 2000.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Univ. ofChicago Press, 2006.
Spanos, William V. The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Cannon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies.
Duke UP, 1995_____. America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire. Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Univ. ofOklahoma Press, 2000.
Wolfe, Alan. "Anti-American Studies: The Difference between Criticism and Hate." New Republic 10 Feb. 2003: 25–32.

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