Cover-Page -- Half-Title -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Notes -- Introduction: 'An emotion of thought' -- Encounters -- The moon and the halo -- The chorus -- Notes -- Prologue: Revisiting 'Heart of Darkness Revisited' (in the company of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) -- Notes -- Part One: Mythic Darkness -- 1 Heart of Darkness revisited -- Notes -- 2 Modernism, myth and Heart of Darkness -- Notes -- 3 Civilization and its darkness -- Degeneration -- Perversion -- Primeval density -- The metaphysics of oblivion -- Notes -- Part Two: Conrad avec Lacoue-Labarthe -- 4 A frame for 'The Horror of the West' -- Philosopher-poet -- Framing the frame -- Mythic mimesis -- Western barbarity -- Notes -- 5 The horror of the West -- Notes -- 6 Philippe's lessons of darkness -- The darkness of a sacrificial heart -- Coda: The darkness at the heart of genocide -- Notes -- Part Three: The Affect of Ideology -- 7 La lettre, Lacan, Lacoue-Labarthe: Heart of Darkness redux -- Social organization -- Family romance -- Notes -- 8 The voice of darkness -- The textual voice as literary artefact -- Pardon my French: The linguistic conundrum as textual voice -- Ideological darkness versus textual voice -- Notes -- 9 The horror of trauma: Mourning or melancholia in Heart of Darkness? -- Affective politics: Kurtz's myth and Marlow's response -- The assertion of melancholia -- Notes -- Part Four: The Echo of the Horror -- 10 Conrad's Dionysian elegy -- Notes -- 11 Sounding the hollow heart of the West: X-rays and the technique de la mort -- Body politics and the heart of the matter -- Seeing through colonialism -- The hollow body: Kurtz, Marlow and co. -- Notes -- 12 The horror of mimesis: Echoing Lacoue-Labarthe -- The mimetic frame -- Mimetic sexism and colonial ideology -- The racist pathos of mimetic rhetoric.

The barbarity of mimesis -- Notes -- Postface: A talk with Avital Ronell (about Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.