‘Traveling the void’. Law and Abomination in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, has frequently been interpreted as a fictional representation of the processes of Western colonization. However, Conrad’s narrative has both a particular and a universal function. In Heart of Darkness, the recollection of the past and the acceptance of the present take the form of very personal reflections concerning the desolation of living in an indifferent universe without any moral norms, where love and hate are reduced to animalistic sensations produced by the senses. Conrad focuses on the alienation from the life of the British community of the main character, Kurtz, whose perverse humanity may be analyzed in terms of the psychoanalytic philosopher Julia Kristeva’s formulation of “abjection”.