The Force of Language in <i>Billy Budd</i> : An Inside-Outside Narrative

Alain Badiou wagers that “what is in immanent exception is the universal.” The universal, in other words, is neither this nor that: it is nothing anyone could identify, because it includes what any given determination of identity necessarily excludes. Taking Billy Budd, Sailor as its touchstone, this essay modifies Badiou’s hypothesis in view of something philosophers are often apt to occlude—namely, that ideas are made of language. While language is immanent, it is also, in Melville’s imagining, an exceptional force of change. Striking at the heart of the “lawful rigor” underlying ontologies of difference and equations of equivalence, it comes from nowhere, belongs to nobody, and acts in the name of no one in particular. Coursing its way throughout Melville’s corpus, it—this curious power in and of language—is everyone’s: harboring an emancipatory appeal to universality, it figures what he calls the “unconditional democracy in all things.”