From Law/Superego to Love: Law, Violence, and the Possibility of Love in Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor

법/초자아에서 사랑으로 -허먼 멜빌의 『빌리 버드』에 나타나는 법, 폭력, 그리고 사랑의 가능성

This essay aims to explore Herman Melville's recognition and resolution of the vicious link between law and violence in his posthumous Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). In order to investigate the issues, this essay refers to Freud, Benjamin, Derrida, Lacan, and Žižek, all perceptive to the uncanny affinity of law and violence. Especially, Žižek's arguments of "superego" as an embodiment of cruel and destructive violence supplementing the official law and of "love" as an ethical possibility beyond the limit of the problematic law are introduced in this study to make Melville's reflection of the inseparableness between law and violence much clearer. John Claggart and Captain Vere embody the legal (superegoic) violence. Claggart even procurs secret enjoyment, in the name of maintaining positive law. Billy Budd discloses another violence defending his justness according to natural law. However, Melville suggests the possibility of suspending the problematic tie of law/violence through "love," as portrayed at the last part of the story. The two final words from Billy and Vere, as a sort of delayed dialogue between them after the event of their secret interview before Billy's hanging, suggest that they finally distance from the obscene nightly law of superego-respectively from outward punitiveness toward Vere and from inward punishment for Vere's excessive enforcement of Billy's hanging-and identify each other's lack as their own. Their love implicated in the last words is for the real other-in Lacan's sense-who discloses the constitutive lack or incompleteness of beings and aporia of the law. This essay's examination of Melville's representations about the superegoic violence as the (im-)possible condition of law and the possibility of withdrawing from it would help us recognize Billy Budd, Sailor as the author's own last word for the possible vision of love cutting the vicious knot of law/violence.