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Everything is dislocated: reading (dis)connections in Joseph Conrad and theories of justice and violence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
Abstract
The relationship between law and justice has long been a concern of legal theory, but the gap of uncertainty, or aporia, between them has been a particular focus of recent jurisprudence. Some theorists, such as Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington, have focused on the cleavage between judgment and the aspiration to ethical justice to the Other, while others, such as Robert Cover, Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, have worked on the gulf between law and justice in the face of violence and pain, within, caused by and before the law. This paper suggests that such theories are primarily concerned with problematised dislocation, as a critical technique and an observed state, which is also to be found in modernist fiction, especially in Joseph Conrad's Weltanschauung and literary style. It is argued that examining the disconnections that characterise Conrad's fiction, through engagement with his stories and secondary commentaries thereon, and combining that analysis with the study of dislocation in legal theory, permit the development of a richer picture of these shared concerns. On this basis, the paper constructs a distinct concept of ‘dislocation’ and suggests how it can supplement jurisprudential discussion.
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- Copyright © Society of Legal Scholars 2008
References
1. Although the term ‘post-modern’ is occasionally used here in relation to work that explicitly identifies itself as such, the term ‘late modern’ is preferred in order to highlight continuities, based on the view that late modern critical writing is closely related to, and in many ways an extension of, modernist cultural critique, a view also expressed by, eg, Bell, M ‘The metaphysics of modernism’ in Levenson, M (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) p 9 Google Scholar and but note at p 410.
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38. Ibid, p 201.
39. Ibid, p 204.
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50. Ibid, p 110.
51. Ibid, pp 17–25.
52. Ibid, p 25.
53. White, above n 43.
54. Ibid, pp 1–2.
55. Ibid, pp 2–6.
56. Ibid, p 16.
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63. Gillon, ibid.
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65. Ibid, pp 118 and 167.
66. One of Conrad's last works, Victory, was published in 1915 and arguably represents the clearest distillation of his concerns with self-knowledge, the unreliability of engagement with the factual world and the tension between solitude and community: Kalnins, M (ed) Victory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar‘Introduction’ pp xiii–xxxviii, especially pp xv–xvii.
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69. Ibid, pp 63–64.
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71. In chapters 2, 3 and 4 of her book, above n 25, Erdinast-Vulcan discusses these ideas in terms of Conrad's responses to failures of myth, of metaphysics and of textuality, supporting her analysis with examples drawn from nine of Conrad's stories.
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77. Stape, above n 29, p xii.
78. Ibid, p xiii.
79. White, above n 43 – see nn 58 and 60 and related text.
80. See also Skinner, above n 5, at 485 on the excess beyond the text.