Heart of Darkness e la teoria lacaniana dei registri

This essay analyzes Heart of Darkness, developing two principles: (a) the idea that there exists a “conflictual” aesthetics, formalized by Nietzsche, according to which a work of art is alive because of a noble and productive struggle among different forces and styles; (b) an equally conflictual view of identity, which characterizes human beings as essentially plastic beings that fluctuate between the tendency to coincide with what they are and a drive to outstrip, transcend their identity. It was with this view in mind that Bakhtin made a distinction between Racine’s and Dostoevsky’s characters. Heart of Darkness demands that we develop further his suggestion, because the two “limit-surpassing” characters, Kurtz and Marlow, are very different: Kurtz is a figure of excess, the man who breaks the principium individuationis, to immerse himself in the wilderness. Marlow is the need to understand the complexity of human beings with the help of language. In Register theory we find the tools best suited to approach the dangerous attraction alterity can exert. Marlow is not the double of Kurtz, and does not cut off the link with the Symbolical. His voyage toward the Real, towards the incandescence of das Ding, is knowledge rather than dissolution.