고려대학교

초록/요약

Nationalization, canonization, and "hydrophasia" have overshadowed the debt which Melville's Moby-Dick owes to the vast, yet still understudied archive of maritime plundering. In this essay, I untether Melville’s great novel from nationalistic and "terracentric" concerns, and let it navigate through the deterritorialized waters of the high sea. I start by claiming that Moby-Dick is a story of an extraterritorial and extrajudicial war waged on the ocean. Melville's sea romance has rarely been regarded as the saga of war. But Ahab’s battle with the whale, precisely like piratical plundering, is an internecine war of revenge on the oceanic theater where all contend with each other without restraint. Although only a sovereign state has the legalized power to wage a war, both Ahab and pirates as private individuals illegally appropriate the rights of war in order to claim sovereignty or reclaim damaged sovereignty. Such conflation of Ahab and pirates seems at first unwarranted, inasmuch as Ahab’s war is professedly anti-economic, while the piratical war is glaringly economic. But Ahab’s apparent disdain of profits in favor of a pure war should be read against Carl Schmitt’s insight that all non-political conflicts end up in a divide that is profoundly political and agonistic. Thus, I contend that Ahab’s pure war is entirely compatible with the piratical war of commerce, and ultimately war is the indelible kernel of capitalism.