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The Melancholy Intelligence and the Ends of Modernity: On John le Carré

Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's reading of Hobbes's Leviathan, I propose to analyze how the fiction of John le Carré contributes a discourse of self-reflection to the mutating modern body politic. With a steady focus on intelligence in its different and interlocking meanings, le Carré suggests that modern political intelligence is metonymic and paratactic, which is why metaphors of the body politic, even though they may amount to an operative fantasy, ultimately serve to derail the modern project. If this means that modern intelligence coincides with the pitfalls of melancholy subjectivation, it also means that the end of the Cold War, cohering fast into a privileged metaphor of political reason, was how modern melancholia gave way to uncritical fantasies of self-sufficiency, in narrative, political and psychoanalytic terms. Finally, I argue that le Carré criticizes Brexit precisely as one such fantasy of self-sufficiency.

John le Carré ; Giorgio Agamben ; Thomas Hobbes ; body politic ; modernity ; melancholy ; spy fiction

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