Inscrutable Malice: Moby Dick and the Resistance to Capital

The white whale attacks out of what Ahab calls an “inscrutable malice” or what Starbuck calls “blind instinct”; Bartleby might be said to succumb to an atrophied intentionality, and Billy Budd’s deadly blow has all the qualities of a reflex response. If we read these confrontations as figurations of revolutionary violence, then how might we read Melville’s suggestion that such resistance is characterized by an equivocal intentionality? Examining such moments in the context of the whaling industry, this essay argues that the white whale’s “inscrutable” malice names a series of actions that simultaneously communicate and resist the violence of extraction and exploitation. What makes Ahab the central figure in a liberal tragedy is precisely his inability to read the whale’s actions as anything but “monstrous” or “demonic,” and it is by coming up with other ways of describing such actions that we can begin to articulate the model of post-liberal, post-anthropocentric political agency that Melville’s writing repeatedly imagines.