False Generosity of the State: Parasitic Subjectivity in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K

Abstract

Abstract This paper holds that J. M. Coetzee’s novel, Life and Times of Michael K, demonstrates how apartheid, in order to preserve its domination over the nonwhite population of South Africa, as with other authoritarian regimes, commonly encouraged dependency. Its various institutions and camps aimed precisely to create a culture of dependence and to fashion subjects utterly dependent on the state. A dependent subject is a powerless, exploitable, and controllable subject; this is the right kind of subject for colonizers. The black majority of South Africa, then, could only have a parasitic existence, completely dependent on their white masters. The novel narrates how dependence is created through the false generosity of the state. As Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed argued, false charity is a state strategy that serves to reproduce the relations of domination. Coetzee’s novel, thus, suggests that to undermine the structure of domination, the oppressed have to reject the culture of dependence and the parasitic subjectivity that arise from the false generosity of the state.