The Secret Agent: Necropolitics, Democracy, and the Community without Qualification

Abstract

In its juxtaposition of liberal government and terrorist violence, metropole and colony, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent explores the imbrication of modes of biopolitical and necropolitical sovereignty. Taking as its starting point Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, which has not yet been widely discussed in relation to Conrad’s work, this essay argues that Conrad analyses a shift from biopolitical liberal democracy to necropolitical terror. Necropolitics, however, also forms the basis on which radically democratic communities of the biopolitically outcast can form communities of resistance to sovereign power.