Freud’s’ secret Agent’ and the Fin du Corps

Abstract

The lights are always turned low in the waiting rooms of the fin de sièle, be they imagined as Yeats’s autumn(s) of the body; Nietzsche’s twilight of metaphysics; the poor illumination of Adolph Verloc’s pornographic-cum-political bookshop in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, or the rooms at IX Bergasse 19, where Freud lived and worked from 1891 to 1938 surrounded by oriental carpets and traces of Egyptology. These too are space of physical and intellectual disembodiment, of a semiotic ‘transparency’ that gives birth to a discipline. Among its kindred spirits, this detachment of signs from their arenas of local habitation, might count Yeats’s man of Phase 28, so refined by the imaginary Emperor’s flames that he can never exist in the flesh; Pater’s membraneous ’Diaphanéité’; Oscar Wilde’s imaginary volume of verse whose seamlessness would be obtained at the price of maximising the margins; or Sigmund Freud’s dream of an invisible, unimpeding contraceptive device.¹ Only a radical purging of the barriers which subsidise self-consciousness might enable the individual to escape the burden of history, often hypostasised in the fin de Steèle as some endlessly rewritten autobiography or memoir (those of George Moore and Alfred Douglas come quickly to mind), or its formal corollary, that unique combination of reincarnation and metempsychosis that keeps all of Yeats’s personae bound to the great wheels of one or another historical cycle.

The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two and six in heavy black figures; a few books with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titles like the Torch, the Gong — rousing titles. And the two gas-jets inside the panes were always turned low, either for economy’s sake or for the sake of the customer.

(Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, ch. 1)

It is a self-deception on the part of the philosophers and moralists to imagine that by making war on decadence, they therewith elude decadence themselves … what they select as an expedient, as a deliverance, is itself only another expression of decadence.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols)

In order to be a critic I must first do violence to myself

(Freud, Letter to Fliess, 1 March 1896)