Waiting for the Barbarians

J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians narrates the body as a site of control and resistance. While the body is dissected to the voyeuristic eyes of the reader, it is simultaneously rarefied and consequently escapes interpretation. This paper focuses on Coetzee’s textual exploration of the body. Informed by representational as well as non-representational theories of the body, it aims at showing that the body in Coetzee’s narrative is not a mere docile site of inscription, but also a space of active dissent.

The devolution of the struggle for power from the centre to the periphery happens in three mutually dependent levels. First, there are power-allocating narratives made. As Joseph Conrad shows, they legitimise the dominance of the centre over the peripheries by circulating homemade “re-presentations” of the “other.” Second, the “grand narratives” are dismantled into small local ones without simultaneous dismantling of the universal “re-productions” of “the other” already existent within them. Third, the local narratives are taken to the peripheries where they are purged of their generalising “sentimental pretences” of unquestionable authority. It is John Maxwell Coetzee who, in Waiting for the Barbarians, devolves the power struggle to the peripheries to show that in the history of human conquest of the “dark” world “the outside” has been irreplaceable for this is where the authority begins. To avoid Conrad’s “tragic limitation,” he refrains from specifying what that “outside” might be. He leaves it up to the reader to decide.

Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.

Ghosts are figuratively roaming in J. M. Coetzee's well-known postcolonial novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, which is set in an undefined time full of strife and unrest. In the novel, being mysterious and threatening to the Empire, the barbarians represent the spectral others. This paper is concerned with the question of how to approach the figurative ghosts of the barbarians and deal with their haunting when they usually appear in a horrified, irrational or obscure way. I will suggest that the concept of a medium, which refers to a person who acts as gobetween between the living and the spiritual world, can be used more figuratively as an attitude that presupposes a mode of negotiation through which a person approaches the spectral other and establishes a mutual understanding with it. In addition, I will argue that the protagonist, the Magistrate, plays the role of "passive medium," which refers to a person who originally belongs to the class of the authorities, or is restricted to the dominant cognitive frame, but is haunted by the foreignness of the repressed other and forced to establish identification with this ghostly other. By examining how the Magistrate experiences his emotional and social ambivalence in his encounter with his inner otherness as well the external otherness, I investigate how the concept of passive medium functions productively to challenge the hierarchy between the Empire and the barbarians, self and other, and to re-imagine a dialogic world to come. KEYWORDS ghost; medium; trance; J. M. Coetzee; postcolonial Lee The Magistrate as the Passive Medium 25 柯慈《等待野蠻人》中之靈媒角色與他者翻譯 李佳穗 荷蘭萊登大學文學系博士候選人 摘要 在文學和文化研究領域中，幽靈的概念已被廣泛引申為他者(如土著、 移民、罪犯、少數族裔、邊緣人)，被壓迫的、不可見的、被消音的族群以 及歷史，近年來受到德希達《馬克思的幽靈》一書的啟發，陸續有研究強調 霸權永遠無法驅逐被壓抑的幽靈，因此這些幽靈會不斷纏繞當下，迫使主體 反思並追求正義的可能。但是，纏繞主體的幽靈往往處於邊緣，無法被看見 以及被理解，因此，本文將提出「靈媒」此一概念，證明它不僅作為連結自 我與他者，當權者與被壓迫者、文明與蠻荒、主流與非主流之間的中介者， 也可以被視為企圖建立多元社會的原則與態度，提供不同情境下對立與鬥爭 的解決之道。 筆者將以南非作家柯慈著名的後殖民作品《等待野蠻人》為例，分析書 中主角，即管理帝國邊界的地方官，如何在面臨帝國對土著的剝削和酷刑 中，以及與野蠻人的交涉中，重新檢視自我身分和帝國二元論述的正當性， 進而轉換立場，扮演起靈媒的角色；由於地方官在思想和語言上還是受制於 帝國的固有思維，因此無法真正了解野蠻人的歷史、語言與想法，但透過深 入蠻荒、遭逢酷刑以及夢境等脫離主體意識的過程(trance)以及消極反抗 (negation)和誤讀(mistranslation)等策略，主角被動地保留及傳達了野蠻 人的聲音，並赤裸地呈現帝國論述本身的幽靈性，筆者將稱他為「被動的靈 媒」(the passive medium)，並深入探討此一特定概念如何提供讀者另一種 自我與他者對話的模型與希望。 關鍵詞：鬼魂、靈媒、通靈、柯慈、後殖民 23.1 ○ © Fiction and Drama 23.1 December 2013 26 The Magistrate as the Passive Medium in J. M. Coetzee's

C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1904) has been adapted and restaged in art, music, and literature throughout the twentieth century. Since the early 1990s, and especially since the events on 11 September 2001, however, it seems to be haunting the Western imaginary. Its various allegorical uses in the press and cultural theory demonstrate the poem’s prominent figuration in debates about post-Cold War and post-9/11 realities. Cavafy’s poem is mobilized in critiques of the American Empire. It helps express the fear of others or of the unknown after the purported rupture of 9/11. But it also captures the desire for overturning saturated systems and forming new narratives and communities in the context of the financial crisis and recent protest movements. Besides functioning as an allegorical formula for capturing contemporary (global) realities, the poem also assumes a mediating function in current debates: it seeks alternative expressive modes, beyond metaphysical truths and essentialist oppositions, as well as beyond cultural relativism. This function takes effect through the poem’s evocation of two genealogies of “barbarism”: a negative and an affirmative one. The poem neither rejects nor fully affirms either of these genealogies. It thereby generates a kind of irony that can be termed “reluctant” in its questioning of and simultaneous attraction to metaphysics and presence. Through its reluctant irony, the poem seeks a viable practice of living in liminal times—a practice much needed in (our) times of crisis.

The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee by Jan Wilm. Bloomsbury. 251pp, $108.00. , a strong academic conversation on literature and philosophy has developed around the writings of J.M. Coetzee. As literary scholars and philosophers have approached this nexus, they have confronted questions about what counts as "philosophy" or "literature," and what benefits are afforded by conversing across the disciplines. So, as this dialogue continues moving forward, there may be some benefit in also slowing down, pausing, and looking back at the one monograph to expressly locate Coetzee's writings on a spectrum between literature and philosophy. Although not the most recent publication on the topic, Jan Wilm's The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee (2016) merits renewed attention for its use of both literary and philosophical tools in explicating how Coetzee's texts act upon their readers' very modes of thinking.

La figura del corpo, atipico e in decadenza, con allusioni animalesche e e intertestuali, visionario e mortale, sembra costituire un’ossessione della scrittura coetzeeana. Questo studio si propone di investigarne i molteplici livelli interpretativi attraverso le analisi di Waiting for the
Barbarians e Life and Times of Michael K, ove il corpo è al centro di un problematico rapporto  con le categorie di linguaggio, violenza e verità. L'ineludibile questione della valenza politica dei testi è dunque affrontata con l’ausilio di metodologie critiche decostruttive, che esplorano i meccanismi narratologici comuni ad entrambi i testi ed evidenziano la necessità di letture non mutualmente esclusive.
The figure of the body, atypical and decandent, visionary and substantial, with animal and intertextual features, seems to emerge as an obsession in the writings of J. M. Coetzee. This work is an attempt to investigate multilayered interpretations through the analyses of Waiting for the Barbarians and Lives and Times of Michael K,  where the body confronts categories such as language, violence and truth. The political relevance of the novels is therefore explored by allowing deconstructive critical metodologies to reveal the narratological devices shared by the two texts and point up the need for readings that are not mutually exclusive.

in Itinerari nella letteratura italiana, a cura di Nicola Bonazzi, Andrea Campana, Nicolò Maldina, coordinamento di Gian Mario Anselmi, Roma, Carocci, 2013, pp. 439-451; cfr. la versione estesa del documento "Barbari benefici o apocalisse?" in "Letteratura italiana: portale di letteratura online" (http://www.letteraturaitalianaonline.com/novecento/barbari-benevoli-o-apocalisse-natale.html)

“Becoming-animal” is a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia which at times can designate a movement towards denigration. With a “becoming,” a threshold is, invariably, crossed and the boundaries that have existed between the animal and the human become blurred. Moreover, “becoming” challenges an existing order. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that at times, it could function as a source of creativity. In this paper, I propose to show otherwise. This paper examines the process of “becoming-animal” in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, and José Saramago’s novel, Blindness, and how this process invariably is one of degradation. This paper will also be discussing the issue of blindness and how in Saramago’s novel it functions as the catalyst behind the becoming.

Waiting for the Barbarians is the story of the barbarian girl's resistance to being defined by the Magistrate despite all her passivity in her relationship with him. She is the site for affirming the Magistrate's identity, which can be attained by understanding her world and ends in failure. Assimilation and resistance are present in the girl's struggle to define herself. The purpose of this presentation is to examine the significance of the colonized female body in the process of oppression and identification in Coetzee's novel. As Fanon states, the body or what he calls "locus" can be the site of repression and resistance, or both at the same time. Fanon's psychoanalytic and political method emphasizes how the colonizer attempts to get his self-identification by assigning otherness on the colonized to stabilize his position as the colonizer and defend his privileges. The main issues Fanon deals with are "look," "locus," "land," and "language," while the focus of this presentation is on locus and land. With this purpose in mind, this study will survey how her body becomes the site of defining her identity and reality by the Magistrate and his identification process. Does her body raise any erotic desire in him? What is the relationship between nature and her body? Additionally, how does she resist the inscription of identity regarding the body?

This paper considers how J. M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians situates pain as a mode of political protest. I argue that Coetzee is not merely criticizing the prevalence of human and non-human suffering within the Empire, but is positioning the human exploitation of non-human animals as a foundational element of the ideology of Empire.

This essay examines the mechanisms of the construction
of the ”barbarians” in their relation to the
identity of the Empire. It will concentrate on the specific
imperial epistemology, as presented both in the
characters of Colonel Joll and the Magistrate, and
show how the categories of the inner and the outer,
the phenomenal and the noumenal, form the central
pair in its logic. The Magistrate will be understood as
a representative of pedagogic, and Colonel Joll as a
representative of performative side in the process of
construction of the collective identity. Special attention
will be given to the relation of the Magistrate
and the ”barbarian” girl, where moral ambiguities of
the imperial discourse are most complex. It will then
move on to the question of the production of the
”enemy” out of the ”barbarian”, as a necessity of the
imperial self. Finally it will present the structures of
war as the foundations of biopower of the Empire,
and relate them to its epistemology.

A Foucauldian reading of Disgrace and Barbarians.

PS. I am only a casual reader of Coetzee. From Summertime („Fiction“), I learned he has been professionally and romantically involved with a considerably younger French professor: ‘Mme Denoël’ judges his French below spectacular. There are also few remarks about Foucault’s History of Madness and the clash with Derrida in Coetzee’s essay on Erasmus, in Giving Offense. Stay tuned, more may emerge.

In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche suggested that the most effective mnemonic, that is, a way to remember something, for example, a new meaning or even a whole language, is when what must be remembered “does not stop hurting”. Is then a good teacher an effective torturer? J.M. Coetzee seems to argue in Waiting for the Barbarians that pain can sometimes function as a mnemonic tool used to teach others a language by means of which they would be able to know and communicate with their master, to use Nietzschean terms once again, and to “speak the truth”. The language of the culture they are installed to, then, is one of violence. The culture of that language, as Coetzee seems to suggest, is that of the Western civilised world. It appears that the language J.M. Coetzee muses about in the novel is the same “open and simple speech” that Kipling referred to when he wrote on the white man’s educative burden in the uncivilised world.

This paper will use Rasmussen’s risk theory (2001) as a tool of analysis to examine issues of security, authority and meaning in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (2004). Articulated around the tripartite concepts of ‘risk management’, ‘presence of the future’ and the ‘boomerang effect’, our interrogation will outline the powers - discursive and disciplinary - employed by the Empire and the Magistrate to frame and manage ‘risk’ personified by the uncontrollable, protean barbarians. It will concludes by showing that the quixotic quest for total control results in the collapse of all authority, agency and selfhood.

This essay aims to explore how the concept of a medium serves as a productive narrative device in mediating the ghostly other/otherness and in re-imagining a dialogic society in two Southern African postcolonial novels: J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness. Noting the medium's affinity-as a figure or a person who acts as go-between of the living and the spiritual world, I use the term more figuratively as an attitude that presupposes a mode of negotiation through which a subject approaches his or her internal and external alterity and establishes a mutual understanding with it. Since every ghost or haunting has its specificity as it appears in specific moments or locations, mediums also perform their work in a differentiated way. In the article, I elaborate how the main protagonists in these two novels represent two different kinds of mediums-the passive medium and the active one-as they encounter different historical and social situations. In other words, I demonstrate the varied ways in which these characters negotiate binary entities, such as the living and the dead, self and other, tradition and modernity, nature and culture, in order to settle down the present crisis and provoke a dialogic world.

Este trabajo pertenece a una colección de ensayos de varios académicos colombianos sobre la obra de J.M. Coetzee y su impacto en el contexto local. En particular, el artículo se centra en Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) y en cómo la novela reflexiona sobre las maneras específicas en que ejerce poder un Estado y los mecanismos del discurso literario para reimaginar la realidad del poder. Sugiero que Coetzee, de manera polémica, postula la necesidad de una verdad de la ficción frente a la inevitabilidad de las políticas del Estado. En ese sentido, Coetzee enlaza la posibilidad de una promesa de futuro de la que es capaz la literatura con una crítica a la violencia.