LAUSR

Abstract:In Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), the anarchists do not do anything, yet they let things happen. Conrad develops a trope of the fat anarchist, into which he instills a set of questions about the political potentiality of passivity or lack of agency, in order to critique the implicitly agential activeness of politics. In doing so, his novel anticipates the concerns of an emerging weak modernist studies. Examining Conrad's depiction of fatness through a wide-ranging lens, combining turn-of-the-century degeneracy discourse, twenty-first century moral panics about obesity, and affect theory, I extract a conceptual triad of passivity-impassivity-impasse to illuminate the different kinds of agency and non-agency imbricated in the novel. Juxtaposing explosion with dissipation, and agency with passivity, Conrad ultimately leaves us with the question of who or what is the "secret agent" of history that moves us toward a future, if a future at all.