Contracts without covenants?: political authority in Moby-Dick and the confidence-man

Abstract

This chapter examines perhaps liberal theory’s favorite and ostensibly atheatrical political concept and legal instrument: the contract. Reading Herman Melville’s work, particularly Moby-Dick and The Confidence-Man with Early Modern articulations of contract in Thomas Hobbes and The Merchant of Venice, we find that Melville insists upon contract’s performativity through its necessary iterability and reliance on theatrical conventions at the moment of ratification and fulfillment. In Moby-Dick, Melville stages a conflict between two antimonious contracts to insist upon contract’s constitutive iterability and doubleness while also highlighting its necessary aesthetic and affective, that is to say dramatic, elements. The Confidence-Man takes this observation a step further. Near the text’s end, Melville holds out contract as a panacea to authority’s absence aboard the riverboat Fidele. However contract turns ironically against itself because of its theatrical dimensions. The aesthetic and performative dimensions of contract require a transcendent, supplemental authority to have any force, one found in Moby-Dick but not in The Confidence-Man. Melville thus asserts the contract’s ultimate groundlessness under liberalism and suggests, once again, that a political theology that appropriates the force of covenant must supplement liberalism’s political economy.