Book Description

"For both Giorgio Agamben and J.M. Coetzee life is a precarious matter which, by virtue of its relation to the nation-state, is constantly threatened with the spectre of political power, often manifest in forms of security, violence, and exclusion. As their respective writings make clear, the body, or existence, is the principal site upon which such power is inscribed, revealing that what is at stake in the contemporary Western nation-state is, alongside the liberty and flourishing (or not) of populations, the ontic condition and basis of human being as such. Given Agamben's prediction that 'politics is in a lasting eclipse,' it seems timely to explore the ethical and political implications that, as the product of this eclipse, the suffering body foregrounds. J.M. Coetzee's oeuvre has much to say about bodies which suffer; this thesis presents an investigation of the politicised nature of them in his work, largely centring upon two novels produced in the 1980s, Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K. Although much has been written about these texts, this thesis finds that Agamben's philosophy offers a fruitful if currently under-explored means by which to conceptualise the particular lived experiences of Coetzee's protagonists, especially in terms of thinking about bodies as sites which are shot through, or written, with political techniques of power. The protagonists of Waiting and of Michael K both live in 'exceptional' times. However, what quickly becomes clear in both texts is the extent to which the normal rule of law has been indefinitely suspended, owing to the declaration of a state of emergency. The state, by contorting or abandoning law, thereby incorporates the logic of sovereign power into its own operation. Consequently, Agamben goes as far as to suggest that those living under Western democracy today may be considered potential refugees; such a possibility would appear to be ongoing in as much as the continuously self-justifying rhetoric of 'necessity' and 'protection' reveals that the state of exception has no visible end. Power / Body / Writing: J.M. Coetzee, Life and Politics critically explores the many sites of exclusion (camps) in Coetzee's texts, thinking upon them as spaces in which life has been divorced from its forms and has become bare life. Finally, it reflects on the nature of literature as an ethical project that is fundamentally irresponsible, and vitally so".