This paper is an attempt to read Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure as an example of anti-Bildungsroman, which criticizes the ideology of improvement and the privileged concept of linear time in the late Victorian and capitalistic social order. What the text problematizes is not only the exclusivity of the right to bildung but the very concept of bildung itself. Hardy views the concept of bildung as the individual and aesthetic version of unbounded progress that the Enlightenment champions and that privileges the dramatic sense of public performance and the economic sense of productivity and materialization. Hardy attempts to liberate human life from any association to instrumentality and embrace what Agamben calls “form-of-life,” life in which life and its form become inseparable. Jude the Obscure effectively illustrates the “form-of-life” by the conflict between time and space, and eventually by promoting the spatialization of time. Only by reconnecting the subject to its surrounding “place” could he or she recover his or her life in its most “authentic” sense. Jude is neither a passive victim or a pathetic failure but a true dweller of the place, who possesses the “negative potency” of not achieving bildung.
