Chapter 9 “This Post-Mortemizing of the Whale”

The Vapors of Materialism, New and Old

Bonnie Honig

This upset of a vertical ontology

—Samantha Frost, Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human

As much wind as thing

—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

The potential of solidarity opens as a wound in the world that no humanism can repair. . . . There we find a collective incitement to take in the air and start to aspire; there we take each other’s breath away only to let each other breathe more fully and there—or here—consume the furtive potentials of one another’s life as a practice of utopian persistence.

—Judith Butler, “Solidarity/Susceptibility”

our undercommon, underground, submarine sociality.

—Fred Moten, The Universal Machine

As new materialism has gained a following in recent years, critics have begun to register the concern that new theorists of matter underrate the importance to their case of so-called old materialism. Recently, Paul Rekret has argued that if new materialists want “to eliminate the hierarchy between thought and natural substance,” they must attend to the role of capitalism, which is responsible structurally for “the contemporary separation of the mental and material.” Absent attention to the political economy of abstraction, new materialism can offer only a “voluntarism” that is politically wanting. Instead, Rekret says, we need “a counter-narrative” to foreground how “the division of the mental and material is itself situated upon the terrain of social struggle or antagonism.”1

Dividing the mental and the material—or to borrow from the title of Rekret’s essay, “the head [and] the hand”—is an old ruse of capitalism, in which “the unity of head and hand was broken, and labour was transformed from a mass of individual artisan workers doing various handicraft jobs into an organized collective worker.” Managers and owners were cast as the heads of business and workers as the hands. I will not in this essay consider the question as Rekret puts it; his offered choice between a proposed heterodox Marxism versus voluntarism is too stark. But I do want to note by way of response that the division of the head and the hand repeats that of the head and the body and has a political genealogy as well as the economic one Rekret foregrounds.

Rekret asks, What if the very separations that new materialism tries to heal or bridge (between thought and matter, head and hand) are the products of capitalist divisions of labor? I will argue that these separations also carry traces of past and present sovereignties in which the head is the sovereign and the body is the populace (as in Thomas Hobbes) or in which the distinction between the two is troubled for democratic reasons (as in Herman Melville). I see in Moby-Dick Melville’s effort to trouble the distinction between head and hand in their political context, aiming to explore futural political possibilities and the conditions under which they might emerge. In fact, the novel explores both the political and the economic strands of the head–hand division (on board ship, the captain is the head and the sailors are referred to by the synecdoche of the hand: “All hands on deck,” or in the novel, Chapter 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand”), while also showing that some enchanted resources, to which at least one new materialist is drawn, are not merely voluntarist at all.

From “A Squeeze of the Hand” to Chapter 96, “The Try-Works,” Melville portrays the industrial horrors of whale butchery in which the creatures’ flesh is submitted to the tryworks’ processes of modern production. (Hence C. L. R. James’s claim that “Melville is not only the representative writer of industrial civilization. He is the only one that there is.”)2 But “A Squeeze of the Hand” also shows a more artisanal scene of work in which men liquefy whale flesh by hand at the fleshpots, the tubs of spermaceti. Does Melville thus depict the conditions of so-called old materialism via the tryworks, and something like those of new materialism via the fleshpots? Old materialism’s division of labor is certainly the rule at the tryworks. At the fleshpots, by contrast, the men work as a collective, and a connection between new materialism and the fleshpots is suggested by a detail: squeezing globules of whale flesh, the men release the flesh’s vapors into the air. The aroma has its way with Ishmael, and perhaps with the other workers too. The men had worked with the whale flesh as if it was theirs to handle, only to find that it would have its way with them. Thus, Melville both nods to the tryworks’ division of labor, the structure to which Rekret gives causal priority, and at the same time offers a new materialist way out of its “determinations”: under the influence of a whale’s strange aroma, the crew might just become “motley.”3

Another critique of new materialism is tendered by Eric Santner, who, in a psychoanalytic reading of “flesh,” notes the materiality of “flesh”—how sometimes it is said that our skin crawls or that something has gotten under our skin—and argues that such experiences point to the metabolization of psychic experiences through human flesh. Santner focuses on the economic and political-theological registers of the psychic, and he privileges the human exception that new materialists seek to contest or (only in some cases) topple. Here again Moby-Dick offers helpful critical resources, pressing us beyond the exclusively human focus of psychoanalysis, to see what potential politics might be metabolized, or not, through the animal flesh that circulates through the novel and is even in the air.4 The focus on the animal decenters the human. This does not mean we leave the register of politics, though it does mean we are turned away from the “royal remains” that are Santner’s stuff of sovereignty dispersed into the vibrating flesh of biopoliticized late-modern subjects. True, in Moby-Dick, whale flesh is, among other things, divine portent and a commodity to be packaged and sold (in seeming accordance with Santner’s focus on the theological and the economic). But, beyond that, whale flesh enters into Melville’s men in ways different from those Santner imagines, and with different effects.

Rather than getting under the crew’s skin, the aroma of whale flesh enters their breath, and it surely also moistens their skin’s surface while touching their tongues and throats in condensation. These synesthetic qualities mean that the vaporized flesh violates John Locke’s requirement in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding that we allow the world in only through “the proper inlet,” the one proper sense. Like language itself, which Locke’s Essay is dedicated to controlling, vapor is fundamentally improper. In Moby-Dick, it is wild and in-spiring (perhaps it even con-spires with the men) as it gathers the men up in its wafts.5 Might this vaporous flesh open the men to a future different from what Santner’s “royal” offers as its “remains”? Different, too, from what Hobbes imagines with his whale of sovereignty, the animalized Leviathan that results from (or, equally, causes) his social contract?6 That this different future is not to be theirs need not mean that the men of the Pequod might as well not have glimpsed it. Such moments sometimes resurface unexpectedly, at other times and places.

When the flesh of the whale, worked by the men, becomes air, this gives new meaning to the catechismic “There she blows!” The call normally refers to a whale breaching the surface to become visible to those seeking to capture it. But it can now be heard to suggest precisely the opposite. Flesh that was caught in order to be sold escapes into vapors that cannot be captured: there she blows . . . away. Is this transformation (“all that is solid melts into air”) Marxist, messianic, or new materialist? We need not choose just one in order to note that when the flesh evaporates, it acquires a kind of immaterial materiality. Entering the men, and not worked by them, it may well work on them. Perhaps it even works them up. Importantly, as aroma, the whale becomes again what it once was, and what both the book and the whale still are: elusive, seemingly uncapturable, and uncontainable. This, I argue, is a possible source of inspiration for democratic theory.

Whereas some readers of Melville’s novel (C. L. R. James, Jason Frank) focus on the democratic promise of the crew hard at work in the fiery tryworks and/or erotically aroused around pots of whale flesh, the latter conjuring a kind of shipboard commons of homosocial or constituent power, I suggest we attend also to the shapelessness to which the evaporated whale flesh calls attention. The men who work at the fleshpots in Chapter 94 are gathered on board ship in the common purpose of whale hunting. At the fleshpots, they together absorb an aroma or are absorbed by one. They are susceptible to its intoxications, which means they are not fully docile. Neither is the whale flesh, which, as vapor, escapes the commodity’s grasp. It seems important that no one imagines bottling the “uncontaminated aroma.”

The aromatic is not on Rekret’s or Santner’s minds when they, respectively, draw the line between their approaches and new materialism. Santner distinguishes his interest in flesh as a matter of theopolitical economy from the new materialist focus on flesh as vibrant matter. Whereas Santner attends to flesh as a way in to understand new circuitries of subjectivity or the manner of human electrification, Jane Bennett’s new materialism seeks a way out. The vital materiality of the body, Bennett says, is “not fully or exclusively human.” Our flesh is host to “an array of bodies,” and if we attend to the fact “that we are made up of its” and not just “mes,” then perhaps a “newish self” might eventually emerge, “the self of a new self-interest.” Similarly, Samantha Frost sees the human as, like all organisms, “the living trace . . . of many histories of creaturely engagements with habitats.”7

In Bennett, flesh is host to vibrant worlds. The bacteria that live in the crooks and nooks of our bodies have the power to knock us off our human pedestal. For Santner, by contrast, flesh is host to a dispersed sovereignty whose powers put us on a pedestal and demand we stay there. The vibrancy he tracks is allied with the undeadnesses of a world catapulted into perpetual motion by the need to cover over the void left yawningly open by the removal of the king of political theology from the ontological and political scene. “It is the ‘business’ of the sovereign,” Santner says, “to cover the void in two fundamental senses: to veil it with his or her glorious body” and “[to] stand surety for it as a primordial debt” (The Weight of All Flesh, 80, 85). For Santner, we are marked psychoanalytically by that primordial lack and by the fetish for the missing king that once veiled it, since turned, he says, into the fetishism of things diagnosed by Marx as filling a metaphysical need. The biopolitical administrative governance in which we are now enmeshed is simply the next in this series of steps aimed at covering over the disenchanting loss of a once powerful and meaning-securing sovereignty. Instead of giving meaning to death, biopolitics now makes us live, and its deadening demands vibrate through us.

We may find what looks like evidence for Santner’s worldview in Moby-Dick. But if we tarry with Bennett’s vibrant matter, her critique of human exceptionalism, and her enlistment of Lucretius’s figure of the swerve, we find something else in the novel, something that may be contributing to those vibrations but is not reducible to them, something between king and things, or beyond them.8 We may hear what I take to be Melville’s call to attend to the tons of gelatinous, liquefied, melted, commodified, worshipped, revered, hated, slippery but still globular flesh that are the stuff of the whale, the stuff of sacrifice, hunt, food, lubrication, trade, illumination, and even inspiration. When the novel goes so far as to claim that whales are all and entirely made of flesh, we may wonder, Is that also true of us? For Santner, surely, this is the problem with new materialism: its reduction of all forces and energies into a kind of leveled traffic. For Bennett, Frost, and others, though, this is new materialism’s virtue, that it not only de-exceptionalizes the human but also levels the energies that move through it. Where humanists focus on our movements through the world, posthumanist materialisms ask us to see the world as moving through us, “through breathing, eating, and absorption,” Frost says (Biocultural Creatures, 17). Flesh in Moby-Dick does all three: it is inhaled, consumed, and absorbed by the crew.

That such organicization may be a source of promise is a possibility considered even by Santner’s own inspiration, Freud. As Judith Butler notes, Freud in a letter to Einstein floated the idea that humans’ organic nature, which puts us level with other organisms, might animate in humans a pacifist utopian refusal of war and its destructiveness.9 Flesh, that is to say, may make Quakers of us all. First, though, we have to work through the flesh.

There are three sites of the workings of the flesh in Moby-Dick. The first two are arguably corollaries of the two regimes or epistemes focused on by Santner: political theology and political economy, personified in Moby-Dick by Ahab and Starbuck, respectively.10 Melville pits the political theological (or what is left of it, in the form of the one-legged Captain Ahab) against the political economic (in the form of the mercantile and not-so-adventurous Starbuck). But Melville also offers a third option that contests the choices laid out by Santner and Rekret. By way of the flesh, which is everywhere on board ship, we encounter the shape(lessness) of the democratic, which presses people up against each other, sometimes uncomfortably, sometimes with joy in being together with others acting in concert, often jostled with and by the world of animality that has been leashed to our politics through the great figure of Leviathan since Job and Hobbes, as Melville knows. Referring to both, Ishmael says, “Leviathan is the text.”11 That textuality alerts us not only to the many connections among theology, political theory, and literature but also to the inescapability of reading, language, and interpretation in all three, a point Bennett does not take up but Melville, with his glossolalia, does.12 That wild play of language in Moby-Dick may be seen as Melville’s critique of Hobbes, who sought to underwrite his absolutist Leviathan by assigning to the sovereign the absolute power of definition, not only to contain conflict but also to shut out the void.

Disturbing confrontations with the void (contingency, meaninglessness, mortality, mystery) were once managed through sacrificial rituals of flesh burning, sensorial meaning-making rituals that would have been experienced as felt heat, seen light, and smelled aroma, all absorbed and absorbing. When Ahab chases the whale without measure, he resurrects this extinct (perhaps extinguished) sacrificial practice, hoping to find or make meaning rather than money out of the flesh of the whale.13 Ahab’s is a political-theological world, in which a man can pile “upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down” (Moby-Dick, 184). Moby Dick bit off Ahab’s leg, leaving him maimed and desperate not only for vengeance but also for the sort of world in which injury can be repaid and an injured man made whole. Ahab wants remediation for lack. He thinks he can find it in or beyond the whale, which, teeming with signification, is brutely enigmatic, its forehead wrinkled with hieroglyphics: “I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can” (347). Its legible illegibility means Ahab can imprint what he likes on it and fantasize his justice. But this also drives Ahab mad since, as Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly put it, “the whale is a mystery so full of meaning that it verges on meaninglessness, so replete with interpretations that in the end they all seem to cancel out.”14 There is no Hobbesian sovereign here to stop the spin of meaning or arrest the cyclical quest for vengeance, which Hobbes saw as the most destabilizing passion of all.

For Starbuck, Ahab’s opposite, considerations of political economy dominate (or at least there is no difficult conflict between theology and economy for this Quaker whose pacifism fits with his preference for profit over vengeance).15 Starbuck sees the whale as a commodity, mere flesh to be sold at market, and the sea voyage as nothing more than a commercial venture.16 Ahab’s quest for vengeance is madness not only because it endangers ship and crew. It is also madness in that it makes no sense. Worse yet, it is blasphemous: “Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.” Starbuck does not mind the chase (“I am game for his crooked jaw”) nor the risks (“and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab”), though only “if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market” (163–64). You cannot put a price on vengeance, Starbuck says. To Ahab that makes it priceless. To Starbuck that makes it worthless.

Ahab longs for a political theology lost to a deadening political economy. That political economy leaves workers vulnerable to—even hungry for—the frighteningly seductive incantations of the Ahabs of the world. But Starbuck is less vulnerable than the rest of the crew to Ahab’s speeches, and he is unmotivated by the gold doubloon that Ahab, just a few pages earlier, nailed to the mast to invigorate the ship’s crew members to strive to be the first to sight the elusive white whale. So Ahab will appeal to him differently: “Come closer Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower layer” (164). At that lower layer, Ahab instructs Starbuck that all is not what it seems: the whale is the occasion but not the goal. The goal is to pierce through the whale, not to kill it but to see what is on the other side, to confront the divinity or lack thereof that makes (non)sense of the world of man and nature.17 But Starbuck is not a metaphysical man, and so, sensing his reservations, Ahab moves to a still different register, invoking now the prudence and glory that Hobbes associates with Leviathan, the social contract in which the sovereign’s power works “to conforme the wills of them all.” Referring to himself in the third person (never a good sign with Ahab), he points out that the crew are “one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale,” warns that Starbuck cannot alone “stand up amid the general hurricane,” and appeals to Starbuck, as “the best lance out of all Nantucket,” to “not hang back” when the rest of the crew have signed on to the hunt and “every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone” (164). Starbuck does not so much consent as acquiesce. The Hobbesian social contract is not concerned to distinguish between consent and acquiescence: compliance is compliance. Starbuck may mutter reservations that will prove prescient, but he stops protesting. He is on board.18

Now we arrive at the third of the three sites of the workings of the flesh in Melville’s drama of the flesh. Here whale flesh operates as an enigmatic, enchanting source of passion, inspiration, and social adhesion, and it articulates or occasions a distinct form of sociality that is less vertical, more horizontal than the first two, and more anarchic.

The first site was political-theological: Ahab’s monomania of the flesh into which the crew enlists with enthusiasm, supplemented by the lure of the doubloon, to hunt down Moby Dick. When the crew swears their oath, they enter into an explicit social contract with their captain. (“Harpooners! Drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” [166]). It is a Hobbesian contract: the men swear to Ahab, but Ahab does not reciprocate. They will answer to him; he is not answerable to them. Nor is he interested in the intricacies of their motives. Fear or profit, true belief in him or feigned; it doesn’t matter.

The second was political-economic: Starbuck’s market perspective, albeit informed by religion when Starbuck accuses Ahab of blasphemy and supplemented by Melville’s warning that whale flesh costs not just money but also lives. Hunting whales for profit requires coordination and clear chains of command in which every man knows his place and some, as Pip finds out, surely to his chagrin, must know their worth. “A whale would sell for thirty times what you would, in Alabama,” Stubb tells Pip after he jumps into the water and their whaleboat stops to rescue him. “Bear that in mind, and don’t jump any more.” As the novel explains, the message was clear: “Though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence” (413). It is against the background of that warning that Pip soon dives again into the water, only to be made mad by the mortal experience. Is the message that we do well to stay in our places, secure and enchained by the politics and economics of worth and flesh, no matter how odious their traffic? Or is the message that any escape is worth it, no matter the cost; that freedom is to be found in marronage or madness?19

The third site of the flesh in Moby-Dick explores the media of escape, or the media that escape. Here a democratic-materialist view of the flesh highlights the interpellation of the men not by way of passion (Ahab’s existential or theological quest for meaning) or interest (Starbuck’s and also Stubb’s economic quest for profit) but, rather, through the senses (Ishmael’s sensitivity to the touch and smells of proximity), and it leads them not into the social (or economic) contract but out of it.20 The men’s experience of whale flesh is most forcefully recounted in the novel when the men sit around fleshpots and squeeze the spermaceti to break open its solidifying globules. This work of liquification and commodification is wearing, but Ishmael experiences it as a kind of joyous loving brotherhood:

With several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps. . . . As I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma . . . I forgot all about our horrible oath [to hunt down Moby Dick under Ahab’s absolute command]; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it. . . . Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. (415–16)21

The men’s proximity and homosocial enjoyment in this scene (“let us all squeeze ourselves into each other”) has been noted.22 But the flesh in this scene, liquid, globular, and aromatic, is as important as the men. In their resistance to being smoothed, the stubborn globules may even suggest we have here a parable of the politics of (non)compliance and escape hinted at in the famous frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan.

In a reading of the frontispiece, Mark Reinhardt notes the presence, in the dominating sovereign figure’s “crook of the [peopled sovereign’s] right arm,” of some “bad subjects,” whose “heads swivel well off course,” in spite of the giant’s “sword charged with ensuring docility and compliance.” Rather than gaze up at the sovereign in devotion or fear, a “youthful-seeming, shaggy-headed fellow looks—unmistakably—right at us.” He sounds rather like Ishmael. “One or two others appear to join him.”23 Similarly the globules of whale flesh in Moby-Dick resist being broken down. Are these globules like the “bad subjects” of Leviathan who “swivel well off course”? If so, then we may see the men who break the globules down not as a motley crew of dissidents taking their pleasures at work but rather as the guardians of the Hobbesian order, enforcers of the demanded conformity and compliance. And sometimes they are. But things may take them off course too. It turns out that the deviant globules the men are supposed to destroy have some powers of their own. Might the globules escape the grip of their would-be captors and lure them into new enchantments?

This last possibility comes into view when we note that the flesh, which is shapeless in its liquefied form and is given shape only by the pot that contains it, provides the men with cover for their wild, submarine hands and for adventurous digital explorations in its depths. Ishmael says, “I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.” But liquid is not the flesh’s final form. It also evaporates, and when it does, it is released: “Those soft, gentle globules . . . richly broke to my fingers,” says Ishmael, “and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma” (416). As vapor, the whale flesh embraces the formlessness its antiliquifying globules had earlier resisted, and that formlessness is here intensified as a kind of fugitivity. Going from globule to liquid to air, the whale flesh responds to manual manipulation by becoming a perverse stowaway. Hiding in the air breathed by the crew, it occupies them when they inhale it. “I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me,” says Ishmael. Is he celebrating the breakdown of all boundaries into the pure sentimentalities of fellow feeling (thus rhyming with the lawyer’s empty invocation of “humanity” at the end of Melville’s “Bartleby”)?24 Or is what is at issue more like an apersonal atmospheric wind?25

As we have seen, the whale flesh is the node of Ahab’s bitter ressentiment, Starbuck’s commodity for sale, and Ishmael’s conductive conduit of democratic camaraderie or constituency, a simple social lubricant that overcomes “social acerbities,” Ishmael says. But the enchanting democratic powers and invitations of whale flesh go further still. The flesh as aroma enters the men and has its way with them. It is not just a thing for use, sale, or democratic connection. If it is in the air, it can neither be stopped nor stopped up. Becoming air, the whale becomes part of the crew’s biocultural existence, what Samantha Frost terms a kind of “traffic into the body” (Biocultural Creatures, 119). It is notable that Ishmael does not just absorb the whale when he inhales its vapors; he is absorbed by the experience. Left to ponder his relationship with the men, he registers the shift away from the social contract that seems to be the terrifying rival of the fleshpots’ amorous scene. “I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it.” This forgetting is perhaps enabled by something observed two chapters later in the novel, in “The Try-Works,” where it is noted that, “once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body” (422). To forget the social contract figured by Hobbes as Leviathan, the sea creature, we only need to light the match (tryworks) or wash our hands and heart with whale sperm (fleshpots). Thus, Ishmael presents himself precisely as the biocultural creature of Frost’s new materialism while manifesting the reflectiveness and agency that many, wrongly according to Frost, deny to such creatures (Biocultural Creatures, 119–46).

Squeezing the sperm oil with his crewmates, Ishmael notes with pleasure that sometimes he squeezes another man’s hand in the fleshpot, mistaking it for a globule, and this gives rise in him to “an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling” (416). His joy in this surprise couples with the intoxications of whale aroma and goes straight to the heart of things. That intoxicated, intoxicating joy is the condition and the effect of his forgetting the oath that is the ship’s otherwise unforgettable Hobbesian contract—to hunt down Moby Dick under Ahab’s absolute authority. But is that contract truly forgotten? Or is it merely displaced?

Ishmael reports, “It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty. . . . After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.” Here we see how one sea monster—the social contract’s terrifying and indefeasible “Leviathan”—is replaced by another, the becoming-serpent of the men. The figure of Leviathan has been variously depicted, but one of the more famous depictions is William Blake’s Behemoth and Leviathan (1825) in which Leviathan has a distinctly eellike or serpentine shape.

How should we read the men’s becoming-serpent? We may see it as sign they are inhabited or instrumentalized by the sea creature of Hobbesian absolutism; that is to say, we may read this transformation as “royal remains.” Or, given the wildness of the scene and Ishmael’s surprise, we may see more of a “swerve,” Jane Bennett’s Lucretian term for vibrant matter’s powerful vulnerability to contingency. The aroma and its effects are certainly unexpected pleasures, and their impact may be anarchic. Or another possibility: becoming-serpent may signal not the dissolution but the democratization of Leviathan, the emergence of new potential forms of collectivity and alternative affects: love, not fear; brotherhood, not vengeance; forgetting, not memory are highlighted as sperm becomes placenta, the birthplace of something like (what Bennett calls) a “self of a new self-interest,” one that, as Hannah Arendt would point out, is “inter-est,” in between or among others (Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 113).26

When animal flesh in Moby-Dick seduces the men, it also de-exceptionalizes the human, and so becomes—or might become—the occasion of a new social relation that positions the human as a synesthetic, sensory creature in the world and of the world, not above it or apart from it. The vaporous aromatic flesh of the whale invites the men to see how, perhaps, when all that is still solid melts into air, it is not the pinnacle of commodification they witness but rather a subversive swerve in commodification’s operations. The crew are invited to become part of the vapor and perhaps in that way to gain the power to vaporize all the orderings that claim to make sense of the world and that underwrite its conventional hierarchies: commodity and divinity, sale and worship, solid and liquid, calculation and enthusiasm, head and hands, social contract and divine pact. All of these lose their shape while, at the melting pots, the men’s powers wax, wane, or mutate into new forms or formlessness.27

The ship will end in catastrophe, but the novel signals here what could be if only the men could break the spell—for they are equally spells—of the theological and commercial ventures in which they are enmeshed and by which they are instrumentalized. These, too, are aromas that we snuff up and by which we may be snuffed out. Perhaps this is why Ishmael calls the aroma of the whale’s flesh uncontaminated, implying there are other aromas, not uncontaminated, and that some of them contaminate us. We do know that the smell of whale flesh burning in the more industrial setting of the tryworks is described quite differently: “His smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funeral pyres” (422). The flesh’s unctuous perfume at the fleshpots is a casualty of industrial processing.28

Tuned in now to the olfactory sense, we may notice that, when Ishmael signs on for his ocean adventure, he is precisely led by his nose. He says in Chapter 1, “Loomings,” “Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head-winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern . . . so for the most part the commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it” (6–7). This is surely a “queer turn from the straight path,” to borrow Judith Butler’s phrase. If leaders lead from behind, this may mean the leaders are actually the led, led by those who are supposed to follow them! It also means the air the men breathe is fresh. Sometimes that fresh air will breed some fresh ideas. The nose knows.29

Leviathan may be “the text” (455), but it is an old text, and Moby-Dick invites us to approach it in new ways. When Melville casts whalers as “knights and squires,” he appropriates aristocratic glory for democratic striving, moving us past the absolutism of Hobbes’s Leviathan and past the parallel worlds of some democratic utopianism.30 He shows that Leviathan is mere flesh that can be hunted down, though at some risk. Through the whalers, he shows both that the fearsome sovereign is less indefeasible than we assume and that we have to do our part too, which means we must forget “all about our horrible oath” (416). Such forgetting is not easy. It can be terrifying. It has to be enabled or invited, especially given the daily reminders and reinterpellations to which most contractarians are subject. Ironically, however, in Moby-Dick such forgetting is made possible by the very sea creatureliness that is said to bind us. The frightening Leviathan is turned to mere whale flesh; it then evaporates to aroma, and the vaporized flesh casts a new spell. Does this mean that Leviathan will vaporously inhabit us even when we want to refuse its terms? Or might it mean the opposite, that Leviathan secretes a wildness (once reserved for the sovereign) that we have the power to release and claim for ourselves?31 That wildness is not only flesh but language itself, whose wild interpellations are arguably metaphorized by the flesh that, in Melville, knows no bounds. The ensuing excitements (ex-citements) are anticipated by Hobbes, who knew what he was about when he assigned to the sovereign the power of definition.

It surely matters to this reading that Melville has earlier noted that, in fact, the creaturely whale is actually all flesh and nothing but flesh.32 Melville takes care to demonstrate this in Chapter 78, “Cistern and Buckets,” as he describes what happens when Tashtego falls into a whale’s head that he has been mining for flesh, collecting spermaceti to be boiled for oil. He is rescued, but Ishmael muses, “Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti” (344). When we unpack the head of Leviathan we find, not the cool calculation Hobbes leads us to expect, but sperm.33 The flesh exposes the fragility of sovereignty and its fiction; the fleshy head of the whale uniquely upends traditional figurations of sovereignty like Hobbes’s: as a head that rules over the flesh–body of the people that it incorporates (into a body) from their natural state as an unruly multitude or even a motley crew.

Melville adds to the democratic stew when he has Ishmael make clear that the whale’s anatomy is known best not by scientists who study it, or even by ship surgeons who witness it, but by whale hunters who engage with it. Against experts like Carl Linnaeus, Ishmael invokes “Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage” and, later, “practical cetology,” which anyone can do and which Ishmael himself practices when he peruses two whale heads hanging off the sides of the Pequod (136). “Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay together our own” (329).

To study his subjects, all a practical cetologist has to do is cross the deck from one side to the other. And we learn something fundamentally important from this democratic source: the Leviathan, that “mortal god” that Hobbes relies upon to be all-seeing and powerfully surveillant, turns out to be less than omnipotent: its two eyes sit at such a distance from each other that it is not possible for the whale to see what is straight ahead of him or directly behind (476). “He can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern.” It is as if for a human our ears were our eyes and we could see only from the side, even if “your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day” (476). Such a creature is incapable both of vengeance (against his “bitterest foe”) and of self-defense (against a “dagger uplifted”). Consequently, Ishmael says, ordinary whaling men in small boats can surround a whale and force it into a “helpless perplexity of volition” (478).

That phrase matters. In Leviathan, Hobbes promotes volition or willing as the central act or force around which to theorize freedom and sovereignty.34 Thus, in a Hobbesian context, suggesting the regal beast of sovereignty is easily paralyzed into volitional perplexity by whaling men working together sounds almost like an invitation, an incitation, an incantation.35 Once high on the perfume of whale flesh, now acting in concert, informed by the experiential knowledge of one of their own, and made up of knight-like spearmen from the world over, these men in their small whaleboats can do anything, it seems, even turn that figure of sovereignty—a terrifying sea creature—from predator to prey.36 This radical democratic idea is the explosive thought Melville sets in the pots before us and releases into the air.

In Melville’s novel, the animal body provides the supplement of whale (flesh) that both secures and attenuates the sovereignty that Hobbes meant only to secure with the figure of Leviathan, a powerful and terrifying sea creature that later came to be identified with the whale. Seen as flesh, the whale is both less and more than we thought: vulnerable prey, a once powerful sovereignty now running on fumes, it is also a source of fumes that may inspirit a new and different sovereign future. The material whale, all flesh, subverts the fetish of the whale as the sign of absolutism, Hobbes’s authority-centered political order. This material whale calls our attention not to the slavish multitude organized into a people by their sovereign ruler but rather to the motley crew, democratic men of multiple races, creeds, and sexualities, who work together—not without friction, but still, together—to overpower and force into a “helpless perplexity of volition” the very creature whose will was supposed to overwhelm theirs. In the mismatch between symbolic and material flesh exposed by Melville, between that which is solid and that which is air, a democratic gap opens.37

Rather than the useless voluntarism attached by some to new materialism, we find in Melville agentic powers to act in concert against political structures that interpellate us but claim to have been freely consented to. True, the crew of the Pequod never actually rebels. They keep their faith with Ahab. But the novel invites other postures toward authority, and it will not decide among them for us: is Ishmael a lonely, ineffective voluntarist when he says he forgets all about the social contract? Or does he light the way? The men’s powers depend more on a swerve or swivel than on the amnesia momentarily enjoyed by Ishmael, in any case. Their agency is not necessarily clean or uncontaminated. It may well be stoked by Ahab’s quest for unquestioning support of his vengeance and by Starbuck’s interest-based quest for profit. But who is to say that Ahab and Starbuck are themselves immune to the vapors inhaled by the crew? They breathe the same air, as we know from Ishmael: what the crew breathes first, the captain breathes last. In any case, the democratic lesson to be found here, and it is here, is one of impurity: the men who can drive a whale into helplessness are themselves partly charged for the task by other men who lead, inspire, threaten, berate, reward, frighten, and organize them, as well as by the unexpected swerves and swivels of sensorial pleasures, quirky postures, and mind-altering inhalations.

The generative, if impure, democratic possibility, personified by Ishmael, offers a counter to Melville’s other and lately much-celebrated protagonist, Bartleby, the scrivener. In contrast to Bartleby, who dies after refusing to work, Ishmael works to die, not to expire, though, but rather to exist. As Ishmael says in “Loomings,” he seeks out the sort of work that makes him feel alive “whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in [his] soul” (3). This, by contrast with the onshore Bartlebys, “water-gazers,” that Ishmael leaves behind when he joins up with the Pequod: “Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries . . . all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks” (4).

For his many admirers, including Santner, Agamben, and Deleuze, Bartleby, who begins “clinched to his desk,” is a pure figure of refusal who empties language of meaning and ultimately and admirably unplugs from the relentless routine of the productive work economy. But Ishmael and the crew, hunters and enjoyers of the flesh, inhalers of its aromas, model an alternative. They, too, unplug, but they do so by plugging into something else. They leave the land where life is dull and deadening. Although Ishmael contemplates suicide (noting the temptation of “pistol and ball”), he does not yield to despair, and he does not, like Bartleby, waste away. Ishmael boards the ship in quest of a future unforetold, departing from the landed path of the soon-to-be starved Bartleby (3–4).

In the end, Ahab may hijack his crew’s (suicidal) democratic potential; or perhaps he fulfills it. But he does not obscure it. We spend too much time in the men’s company to miss the moments that suggest there are ways out of the ontology of landed sovereignty. Hobbes himself invites such thoughts when he ruminates on matter and substance in Leviathan (chapter 34) and explains, against the Schoolmen, that all is matter and that spirit is merely a metaphor, and a dangerous and misleading one at that:

Bodies are subject to change, that is to say, to variety of apparence to the sense of living creatures . . . that is to say, Subject, to various accidents; as sometimes to be Moved, sometimes to stand Still; and to seem to our senses sometimes Hot, sometimes Cold, sometimes of one Colour, Smel, Tast, or Sound, somtimes of another. And this diversity of Seeming, (produced by the diversity of the operation of bodies, on the organs of our sense) we attribute to alterations of the Bodies that operate, & call them Accidents of those Bodies. (Leviathan, 270)

Hobbes’s concern is to prevent us from attributing such alterations to spirit or divine powers. He warns, “Substance incorporeall are words, which when they are joined together, destroy one another, as if a man should say, an Incorporeall Body” (270).38 Flesh may melt, liquid may evaporate, but in all these shapes and “diversity of seeming,” Hobbes insists, we confront bodies and only bodies, matter and only matter. This leaves open the questions of whether matter, in its different “Accidents,” may act on us, and of how we may find power in such materialism, perhaps even seeking out such “Accidents” in an effort to detach ourselves from inherited or imposed shapes and open ourselves to new forms and futures.

As we saw earlier, Hobbes’s frontispiece represents the sovereign as a big-headed, peopled body, corporeally cascading into rolling hills. Behind him or beneath him is the water to which Melville calls us and without which, Ishmael says, no one is drawn to a work of art. Imagining an artist who wants to draw the viewer in, Ishmael asks,

What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees . . . and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. . . . But though the picture lies thus tranced . . . yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. (4–5)

Water draws us in. “There is magic in it.” Without it, “all were vain.” Why? Water is possessed, Ishmael says, of “mystical vibration.” In it we see “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” But unlike the painting of Ishmael’s imagining, the water in Leviathan’s frontispiece is so far from view that it is easily—and often!—missed, in spite of the fact that, as Magnus Kristiansson and Johan Tralau point out, the frontispiece arguably positions Hobbes’s sovereign in the sea’s water, rising up from it, a sea monster, they claim, scaly and possessed of a creaturely tail with spikes discernible beneath the creature’s elbow. It is from this fearsome, watery base that Leviathan’s sovereign joins the people together on land. From the water, ships approach; one fires onto shore, underlining the association of the marine with danger and death by contrast with the supposed safety of land. Thus are promised the security and predictability of a fearful positivism that rests on its own terrible (deployed and denied) magic.39

Melville breaks the spell of landed sovereignty by taking us all out to sea. He goes even further when he opens the sovereign figure’s head to our view. He has the Pequod’s crew show us the experiences of the flesh that might alter our possibilities. He has us breathe the air they breathe. True, Ahab’s crew is in the end nailed, like the doubloon, to the mast. But still, they have their moments, and those interested in democratic agency have every reason to resist ceding them to an archive of utopias too damaged to inspire anyone. Instead we should cultivate their capacity for susceptibility. “Susceptibility is the capacity to catch the wind that comes from elsewhere, to give way to the protest that arrives damaged and dismissed in advance as impossible,” Judith Butler says, in a startlingly marine moment of commentary on the work of José Muñoz. “What is deemed impossible within a given horizon turns out to be the potential to break apart the constraining force of that horizon, the constraint on intelligibility that it reiterates within straight time. It is a site of rage, but also of pleasure; it does not ask for recognition within the terms of the existing world; it arrives, unrecognizable, to force a reconfiguration of time and space” (14). The temporality conjured by Butler is anything but tragic. But that does not mean we will succeed. It may be mad. But that does not mean we will fail. “The link between water and madness is deeply rooted in the dream of the Western man,” Michel Foucault notes.40 That is what Hobbes counted on when he made the sovereign a sea creature and relegated his subjects to landed territory.

Hobbes says men fear violent death, and if they are pacified by this fear, they can be made more predictable—governable. Melville begs to differ. He shows men leaving the deadness of landed work, craving adventure, chancing intimacies, and risking themselves in action with others not just for profit but also for sheer thrills. It’s an exciting story, Hobbes might say, but it is also dangerous. The fearless enthusiasms of the Ahabs of this world start civil wars, engendering violence that spins quickly out of control. The counter, offered by Melville, is noted by Toni Morrison, who without mentioning Hobbes seems to rebut him when she finds in Melville an opposing wisdom, warning that zealots may be not our dangers but our saviors, if we are to combat oppressive structures like slavery and white supremacy. Such structures will not be negotiated away, nor will they simply surrender. They will enlist the supposedly security-securing state for their own purposes and do what they need to survive. They will only fall when combated—again and again—by fearless men like John Brown, whom Morrison sees in Melville’s Ahab, with his just and maniacal battle against whiteness, a whale of a foe he has vowed to battle to the death. Here the focus on flesh, to which Ahab’s white whale and all whales call attention, is also a reminder of the “flesh trade” that dares to commodify Pip and monetize his worth.41

Ahab and his sailors, never the mere bearers of self-interest, are marked by a wildness that finds expression in pleasures that are not instrumental and experiences that are not discretely bounded. The men in the crew are de-subjectified, taken up by the very flesh they think is theirs to handle. Transmogrified first into flesh, then liquid, and then air, the whale enters into the crew; its aroma moves them and its tactilities invade them, positioning them, with their newly eellike fingers, in transgression of the normative boundaries that center and separate the human in and from a world teeming with (non)signification. Thus, flesh in Moby-Dick is surely like Jane Bennett’s wild, which, as she and coauthor Alexander Livingston say, provides “a tonic against conformity, a challenge to our default ways of seeing, feeling, judging . . . a source of ‘perpetual suggestions and provocations.’”42

Butler cites a letter from Freud to Einstein in which even Freud seems to toy with the possibilities of something like vibrant materialism. She notes the surprise of Freud’s move in the letter, from the death drive to vitalism and from the psychic to the organic, in order to reject war: “‘Pacifists we are because our organic nature wills us thus to be,’” he says. That, Butler says, “is quite a claim by someone [whose theory of the death drive suggests he] knows full well that many are excited by war.” But she rejects the paranoid reading: if “we expose his contradiction,” she says, “we miss the way he inflects his descriptive claim with a utopian turn.” War’s “destruction of organic life . . . is unbearable for humans to accept in light of their own organic life” (emphasis added). Freud’s reparative suggestion, that “organic life makes us pacifists,” asserts that it is only as “as living organisms” that we can fully reject war and destruction. “Vacating the received human form, a new kind of ethical relationality becomes possible,” Butler says. Absent such transformation, we are doomed to eternal destruction: “Destroying destruction, however, only fortifies and augments destruction unless its second instance swerves from the first and refuses to replicate its logic—in another queer turn from the straight path.”43

The “swerve,” just one of Butler’s “queer turns,” is Bennett’s figure borrowed from Lucretius, who, Bennett says, “tells of bodies falling in a void, bodies that are not lifeless stuff but matter on the go, entering and leaving assemblages, swerving into each other.” The vapor or aroma of the whale illustrates this when it rises from the pots. Without the swerve, says Lucretius, whom Bennett quotes, “all things would fall downwards through the deep void like drops of rain, nor could collision come to be, nor a blow brought to pass for the primordia: so nature would never have brought anything into existence.” Bennett sees the same thought in Louis Althusser’s “materialism of the encounter,” in which “political events are born from chance meetings of atoms.” The swerve, she argues, preserves “an element of chanciness [that] resides at the heart of things, but it also affirms that so-called inanimate things have a life, that deep within is an inexplicable vitality or energy, a moment of independence from and resistance to us and other bodies: a kind of thing-power” (Vibrant Matter, 18).

One chancy future faced by the crew in Moby-Dick is their own destruction, and I have noted here two swerves away from it (or toward it!) staged by the novel. One swerve is the social contract by way of which the crew binds itself together in common purpose under the Leviathanic leadership of Ahab. The second swerve is represented by the aromatic invitations of the whale to the men to become-serpent and forget the social contract. These are two forms of collectivity, and the second’s amnesia of forgetting is a nonviolent and posthumanist assault on the first, a withdrawal of the very voluntarism and linear memory by way of which the social contract claims to be secured, staging instead the possibility of a leap into a new, possibly queer subjectivity pitched on a nonlinear temporality, in which the old form—the once unforgettable social contract—is forgotten and time forks.44

The senses and faculties through which this happens, or might happen, are not only the “seeing, feeling, judging” that Bennett and Livingston list. These are arguably democratic theory’s historically preferred points of entry into subject formation and collective action. But at the fleshpots, the sensoria of touch and smell are privileged. There, the haptic and the aromatic combine. Touching and breathing, in the dark and on the foremast, Melville’s men dare to breathe together, perchance to conspire. But democratic agency depends not just on working our way out of the problem of sovereignty but also on working our way back into it, perhaps holding and not just squeezing our serpentine hands as we sift through the lumps and globules of Leviathan’s melting and inhale the air of its vaporous flesh. (“Blubber is blubber,” Melville wrote in an 1850 letter.)45 Perhaps we can this time break out of the old determinations, avoid the repetitions of “destroying destruction,” and refuse “to replicate its logic.” This would be a real “post-mortemizing of the whale” (Moby-Dick, 419), an effect of cultivating what Butler calls “susceptibility.”

Notably, prophetically, the dangers of air are not lost on the book of Job, which notes that Leviathan’s power is due to the fact that its scales are “so neere to another, that no ayre can come betweene them. They are ioyned one to another, they sticke together, that they cannot be sundred” (quoted in Kristiansson and Tralau, “Hobbes’s Hidden Monster,” 3). Thus, we have known from the beginning that a whale that becomes air has the power to unlock the scales of Leviathan and to open up new lines of flight. There she blows (away).

Notes

1. Paul Rekret, “The Head, the Hand, and Matter: New Materialism and the Politics of Knowledge,” Theory, Culture and Society 35, nos. 7–8 (December 2018): 49–72: “To implicitly revoke concrete historical status from the act of separation of the mental and material in the origins of capitalism in favour of taking it as ethical or epistemic error, is to treat the scale and scope of the political as the result of a conceptually voluntarist act” (60).

2. C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2001), 105.

3. On the “motley crew,” see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2012), excerpted at https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2749-a-motley-crew-in-the-american-revolution.

4. I discuss Santner in detail in “Charged: Debt, Power, and the Politics of the Flesh in Shakespeare’s Merchant, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Eric Santner’s The Weight of All Flesh,” in Santner, The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy, ed. Kevis Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 131–82; further citations in the text. This essay grew out of that reply to Santner and develops work I did for two other occasions. “What Literature Can Teach Politics: Melville’s Moby-Dick as a Critique of Hobbes’ Leviathan” was my 2016–17 lecture for Brown University’s Presidential Faculty Award. I am grateful to Chris Paxson for that opportunity and for the audience’s passionate engagement on that occasion with Moby-Dick. I first thought about Melville and Hobbes together in “The King’s Three Bodies: Lion, Leviathan, and the Democratic Imagination Gone Wild” for the 2015 Law in Motion Annual Lecture at Northwestern University. I am grateful to Laura Beth Nielsen for that invitation and to those in attendance for their questions. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Meredith Farmer and Jonathan Schroeder for inviting me to contribute to this volume, for their comments on earlier drafts and helpful suggestions throughout, and for their patience as I found my way to this essay. I am very grateful to James Martel, George Shulman, and Kevis Goodman, who read multiple drafts and offered great suggestions for related reading. Thanks to Victoria Wohl for a timely and instructive conversation about language and catastrophe and to Jane Bennett, Sam Frost, and Mark Reinhardt for giving me the OK.

5. On conspiracy as a trope in political theory, see James Martel, Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry, and Political Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); my Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Ronald J. Schmidt Jr., Reading Politics with Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

6. See Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

7. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 112–13; Samantha Frost, Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 123. Further citations in the text.

8. Aware of a possible rapprochement between his view and the new materialists’, Santner cites Julia Lupton’s argument that the assembly of hospitality presupposes Bennett-type assemblages. See Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Hospitality,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 423–41.

9. Judith Butler, “Solidarity/Susceptibility,” in Social Text 36, no. 4 (December 2018): 1–18.

10. Santner refers to “the shift from the political theology of sovereignty to the political economy of the wealth of nations [which] is . . . a shift from one ‘epochal’ mode of shaping our life in the flesh to another.” The Weight of All Flesh, 51.

11. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 455. Citations hereafter are in-line and to this edition.

12. Victoria Wohl notes, in a reading of Euripides’s Troades and new materialism, that sometimes one sense alone will not do. “Scholars debate whether the force of ἐκγελᾷ [‘it laughs out’ from Tro. 1176: ‘slaughter laughs out’] is visual or auditory.” But, she says, “it is fully neither: more impression than expression, more affective than constative, it provokes sensation precisely through its opacity of sense. It sits right at the edge of human signification, where metaphor meets matter. Euripides thus encourages us to ask (in a way that Bennett declines to do) about the role of language in mediating the relation between the human and the nonhuman.” For Wohl, Bennett wants to get away from or beneath language somehow, perhaps because its “role is profoundly ambivalent, in part because of the ambiguous ontology of language itself, which is simultaneously material and immaterial.” Wohl, “Stone into Smoke: Metaphor and Materiality in Euripides’ Troades,” in The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, ed. Mario Telò and Melissa Mueller (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 17–34.

13. Cesare Casarino calls attention to the extinction of sacrifice in Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

14. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011), 149.

15. Thanks to Meredith Farmer on this point.

16. To be fair, Starbuck is less driven—or perhaps better, differently driven—than Ahab. Starbuck wants profit and he is willing to die for it. He finds useful sublimation in the commercial adventurism of whaling, which, after all, has a bit of the old (the aristocratic world: Melville calls the whaling men “knights” and “squires”) and a bit of the new (market and money life).

17. “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!” (164).

18. Many Hobbes scholars note that what is called consent in the Hobbesian social contract is indistinguishable from acquiescence. As for his focus on profit, Starbuck is not unusual; he is unique only on board this ship; on land he would have had more company: “Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge” (270; emphasis added). Of course, the people who stay on land are made of different stuff. Indeed, it was for a time the ones who set out to sea who emblematized the new nation as a global power: In the early nineteenth century, “whaling in the open ocean was rapidly becoming the young Republic’s strongest claim to global preeminence and indefatigable enterprise. . . . By the 1840s some 600 American whaling vessels were plying the Pacific, vanguards of U.S. geopolitical ambitions, and a major source of national wealth.” D. Graham Burnett, Trying Leviathan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 6.

19. But is he mad from facing mortality or from tasting twice what it is to be fugitively free? For the latter possibility, see Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Hortense Spillers distinguishes “between ‘body and flesh,’” noting that “before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.” Hence her reference also to the “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” torturous markings on African bodies concealed by near meaninglessness beneath the discourses that do not register the marks or the pain to which they bear witness: “The European hegemonies stole bodies [but] we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding. If we think of the ‘flesh’ as a primary narrative, then we mean its smeared, divided, ripped—parents, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’ overboard.” See Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 67. The fungibility of flesh and its would-be opacity underline the unspeakable crime of stolen lives. When whale flesh (captured to be sold for profit) escapes as vapors, is it a spiriting away? Is it a parable of fugitivity or marronage for all those criminally animalized into mere flesh as commodity?

20. To be clear, the crew is available to be pulled into the theological (Ahab), the economic (Starbuck), or this third, sensorial site of the flesh. All three have powers of interpellation. But only the third is illustrated only by the crew and by Ishmael, not by Ahab or by Starbuck.

21. Did Melville invent sperm squeezing or just report on it? See Caleb Crain, “Did Melville Invent Sperm-Squeezing?,” Steamboats Are Ruining Everything (blog), September 9, 2010, http://www.steamthing.com/2010/09/did-melville-invent-sperm-squeezing.html.

22. Jason Frank describes the scene as an “egalitarian jouissance of collective undertaking . . . which Melville portrays as a kind of democratic absorption that resists incorporation into the terrible logic of Ahab’s quest.” In the end, as Frank acknowledges, the energies of this concerted action will not provide a sure democratic counter to Ahab and may even be enlisted by him for his mad quest. Nonetheless, it is remarkable, as Frank says, to find in the “squeeze of the hand” scene a possibly “constituent moment.” See Frank, “Pathologies of Freedom in Melville’s America,” in Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory, ed. Romand Coles, Mark Reinhardt, and George Shulman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2014), 452. Frank recounts efforts by collective actors to repartition the sensible to appear as and to speak in the voice of “the people.” Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). See also Frank’s introduction “American Tragedy: The Political Thought of Herman Melville,” in A Political Companion to Melville, ed. Jason Frank (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 1–20.

23. Hobbes commentators differ on how to read the frontispiece: does it depict the sovereign as man or monster? Canvassing the literature, Magnus Kristiansson and Johan Tralau argue in favor of the monster reading, noting that it is odd that “all scholars seem to agree that there is nothing monstrous and nothing aquatic about this sovereign body—enigmatic, it would seem, for a political symbol named after the Biblical water creature Leviathan.” Kristiansson and Tralau, “Hobbes’s Hidden Monster: A New Interpretation of the Frontispiece of Leviathan,” European Journal of Political Theory 13, no 3 (May 2013): 299–32. The members of the body politic depicted in the frontispiece have also recently drawn new attention: are they indistinguishable from each other, or are some distinctive? Mark Reinhardt argues for the latter, noting in the crook of the arm (echoing Bennett on the same body part that plays host to alien bacteria) one or more faces that look not toward the sovereign in seeming compliant submission but out to the viewer, suggesting and perhaps even solicitating noncompliance. Reinhardt, “Vision’s Unseen: On Sovereignty, Race, and the Optical Unconscious,” Theory and Event 18, no. 4 (2015), Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/595837.

24. Thanks to James Martel, who first pressed me to attend further to the perfume of the whale and Ishmael’s high. Also, thanks to Meredith Farmer, who, citing Amy Parsons, “‘A Careful Disorderliness’: Transnational Labors in Melville’s Moby-Dick,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 58, no. 1 (January 2012): 71–101, rightly suggested it would be worthwhile to attend more to the nightmarish work of the tryworks, “a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night” (Moby-Dick, 416–17).

25. Thanks to Jane Bennett for this suggestion.

26. True, under the condition of “rise of the social,” this “inter-est” could relapse into what is merely a rather old self-interest: the traffic in flesh. Thus, the question for Arendt is always how to hold on to the “inter-est” that inaugurates something new, rather than succumb to (what she casts as) its deathless repetitions as mere self-interest. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, ed. Danielle Allen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 182.

27. The undecidability of whale flesh, or of whales more generally, were matters for trial earlier in the nineteenth century. The trial that was to decide the status of the whale as fish or mammal was almost certainly mocked in Moby–Dick’s Chapter 32, “Cetology.” On the trial, see Burnett, Trying Leviathan. On the incapacity of law to make such decisions, according to Melville, see Moby-Dick, Chapter 89, “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,” and Christopher Tomlins, “Animals Accurs’d: ‘Ferae Naturae’ and the Law of Property in Nineteenth-Century North America,” University of Toronto Law Journal 63, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 35–52.

28. In Chapter 92, “Ambergris,” Melville hilariously notes the perfumeries of whale flesh: the whale cannot “possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the open air. I say, that the motion of a sperm whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlour” (410). Thanks to Meredith Farmer on this point.

29. But it doesn’t tell, as Melville notes in Chapter 92: “Living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odour; nor can whalemen be recognized, as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose” (410).

30. For the sake of argument, I assume here the more conventional and still influential readings of Hobbes rather than the intelligent commentaries of those (like Michael Oakeshott and Richard Flathman) who see Hobbes as a defender of individuality, or of Samantha Frost, who makes the case for reading Hobbes as a materialist. Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” in Hobbes on Civil Association (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 1–79; Flathman, Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality and Chastened Politics (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993); Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

31. Thus, thinking about the politics of the flesh through the whale may ultimately do more than the vibrant or spectral materialisms of Bennett and Santner, respectively, to undo the image knot that democracy must undo if it is to alter the world of possibilities and not just add a possibility to the world of conventional politics as rule. That image knot is that of the Hobbesian head over body, Marx’s observed opposition of head and hand, the image of rule and self-rule.

32. We learn this, notably, in Chapter 70, “The Sphynx,” when we are told that a whale was “beheaded.” That term, normally reserved for regicide, invites revolutionary thoughts (310; also see 427).

33. On this point, I am grateful to George Shulman, who tracks the figure and the work of “Leviathan” through Job, Hobbes, and Carl Schmitt in his essay, “Chasing the Whale: Melville’s Moby Dick as Political Theory,” in Frank, A Political Companion to Herman Melville, 70–108.

34. In Leviathan, Hobbes establishes willing as the last appetite in deliberation (a point since left behind by deliberative democratic theory): “In Deliberation, the last Appetite, or Aversion, immediately adhaering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that wee call the WILL; the Act, (not the faculty,) of Willing. And Beasts that have Deliberation, must necessarily also have Will. The Definition of the Will, given commonly by the Schooles, that it is a Rationall Appetite, is not good. For if it were, then could there be no Voluntary Act against Reason. For a Voluntary Act is that, which proceedeth from the Will, and no other. But if in stead of a Rationall Appetite, we shall say an Appetite resulting from a precedent Deliberation, then the Definition is the same that I have given here. Will therefore is the last Appetite in Deliberating.” Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 44–45.

35. The idea that the whale is vulnerable to action in concert by ordinary men might have suggested to Ishmael that so, too, was Ahab (whom Leon Harold Craig takes to represent Hobbes’s sovereign). Writing from a different perspective than mine, Craig documents many of the apparent allusions to Hobbes’s Leviathan in Melville’s great novel: “Suffice it to say, there is no shortage of features woven into Moby-Dick that are suggestive of Hobbes’ Leviathan.” Craig, The Platonian Leviathan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 21; on Hobbes and Melville, see esp. “A Melvillian Coda: Moby-Dick as Fourfold Allegory,” 499–524.

36. Following Jessica Whyte on Agamben, we may say that these encircled men are “ungovernable,” but contra Whyte and Agamben, they are not unproductive or workless. See Whyte, Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 166.

37. Thanks to James Martel, who says that we can therefore read the whale as a messianic figure in Walter Benjamin’s sense, disrupting the fetishes we project onto it. Martel’s own work on fetish and Benjaminian messianism is very useful here. See Martel, Textual Conspiracies. Butler too, in “Solidarity/Susceptibility,” invokes Benjamin and (following José Muñoz) the weakness of gesture as an element of weak messianism.

38. Thanks to Kevis Goodman for referring me to this chapter of Leviathan.

39. Since this reading of the image also notes that in the water of the frontispiece are ships firing onto shore, Kristiansson and Tralau identify water, which is also the base of the sea monster, with death (specifically the Spanish Armada, fear of which reportedly caused Hobbes’s mother to go into labor). Kristiansson and Tralau, “Hobbes’s Hidden Monster.” This contrasts with the vitalism with which Ishmael in his rumination on art associates water. Or perhaps these are two sides of the same coin.

40. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, trans. Jean Khalfa (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 11.

41. See Toni Morrison’s 1988 Tanner Lectures, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 368–400, esp. 380–84.

42. Jane Bennett and Alexander Livingston, “Philosophy in the Wild: Listening to ‘Things’ in Baltimore,” Scapegoat, no. 2 (2012), http://www.scapegoatjournal.org/docs/02/02_Bennett_Livingston_PhilosophyInThe.pdf, quoting Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walden, or, Life in the Woods; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod, ed. Robert F. Sayre (New York: Library of America, 1985), 403.

43. Butler, “Solidarity/Susceptibility,” 16–17.

44. On the significance of forks in time, see my Emergency Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 59, on slow food and the idea of new rights, in conversation with the work of William Connolly.

45. Quoted in Elisa New, “Bible Leaves! Bible Leaves! Hellenism and Hebraism in Melville’s Moby-Dick,” Poetics Today 19, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 281–303.