Celebrating self-destruction

The ending of Heartbreak House—in which the characters not killed by bombers celebrate the recent destruction and ecstatically hope that it will come again—continues to trouble me, and I have been wondering this week if Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” might have something to say to it. Certainly, Heartbreak House was explicitly written by Shaw in order to explore the condition of the British state at the beginning of the twentieth century, while Mbembe’s article is set at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and argues that “contemporary forms of subjection of life to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance, sacrifice, and terror” (39; emphasis added). And yet there are some startling parallels between Mbembe’s descriptions and various moments of Shaw’s play. He goes on to say that “what connects terror, death, and freedom is an ecstatic notion of temporality and politics” (39).

If the house in Heartbreak House is the ship of state (see earlier posts for textual analysis!), it is also a physical space with “boundaries and internal frontiers” that resonate with the “spatialization of colonial occupation” in Mbembe (26). This is not to say that it stands for a colonized space, but rather that the state described by Heartbreak House is a place of spatial regulations with specific and enforced borders, as is the occupied colonial territory used as an example of the “state of exception” in “Necropolitics.” This suggestion goes against Mbembe’s claim that there is a move in colonial politics to create “a distinction between, on the one hand, those parts of the globe available for colonial appropriation and, on the other, Europe itself” which is “crucial in terms of assessing the efficacy of the colony as a terror formation” (23-4). Heartbreak House erases that distinction by describing the state in the same terms as the colonized territory—both operate as a “state of exception.” And both are populated by people “alive but in a state of injury” (Mbembe 21).

I want to be careful about this comparison of people “alive but in a state of injury.” In Mbembe, this means real people suffering from real violence. In Shaw this means characters reduced so much by their surroundings that they are figuratively incapacitated: they sleepwalk; they are trapped by the bounds of the house. Only as a metaphorical claim about the condition of the state could the stakes of Heartbreak House be taken as comparable, and perhaps not even then, because the kind of violence that Mbembe describes is absent from the play. Nevertheless, I think this very difference between the two descriptions might be the key to the ending of the play.

In Mbembe’s article, there is a clear source of oppression—a place from which violence is enacted. In Shaw’s play, on the other hand, there is no source for the oppression of the characters. They behave as though they are in a constant state of spiritual siege, but this siege has no location. If it stems from anywhere, it stems from each of the other characters in turn: it is diffuse. Thus I wonder if what we see in the final moments of Shaw’s play is the characters’ attempt at the resistance and transcendence that Mbembe portrays at the end of his article. And I wonder if, further, this moment is ultimately the same kind of false hope that Mbembe and Bataille describe in the death of a “suicide bomber.” Mbembe explains Bataille’s argument about the “suicide bomber,” as someone who “ ‘dies seeing himself die, and even, in some sense, through his own will, at one with the weapons of sacrifice. But this is play!’ And for Bataille, play is more or less the means by which the human subject ‘voluntarily tricks himself’ ” (38).