Abstract
This paper explores the possibility of presenting a philosophical analysis of two novels, Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee, through a Levinasian ethical perspective. Levinas’s philosophy is premised on the ethical responsibility of the self for the other. Redefining philosophy as the wisdom of love, Levinas embarks upon a revisionary approach to re-defining concepts such as love, desire, and responsibility that dominate and mediate the relationship between the self and the other. These reconfigured terms accommodate Levinas’s distinctive ethical standpoint, one that is geared towards valorizing the other over the self. The novels examined in this article similarly manifest a tendency to prioritize the other in its destitution and vulnerability. My discussion of Waiting for the Barbarians will be built around the relationship between the Magistrate and the Barbarian girl. I contend that their non-carnal relationship can be interpreted in terms of a transcendental and nonontological conception of desire. As such, desire becomes an obsession which cannot be shaken off. Desire of this kind liberates the self from egoism. In Disgrace I will explore the concept of love as maternity. Lucy’s refusal to abort her pregnancy reverberates with Levinas’s argument about maternal love as a self-effacing form of devotion. In both novels the question of the ethical body and its vulnerability will also be examined. The aim is to show how insatiable desire and maternal love can be manifestations of the ethical responsibility expounded by Levinas
Highlights
Coetzee and AlterityPublished to critical acclaim, J
Just like the geese and their arrival in Disgrace, this statement, in a way, can serve as an adumbration of the fate of the Magistrate. He is made to ‘live through’ the pain and torture inflicted on the Barbarian girl first by force and later by consent
The question that might be asked is: what is the relationship between corporeality and ethical subjectivity? Or in other words, “why [...] is the ethical body identified with the body as a sensorium, with tactility as vulnerability, as susceptibility to pain?” (Wyschogrod, “Towards” 63)
Summary
The Swedish Academy premised its choice of Coetzee as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2003 on his portrayal “in innumerable guises [...] of the outsider” (Nobel Prize) His attention to living ethically with difference and alterity (Attwell, “Exclusive Interview”) has predisposed critics to read Coetzee’s fiction in the light of Levinasian ethical philosophy; Levinas, like Coetzee, is concerned with salvaging the other from the reign and tyranny of the same. The point is that Levinas tends to avoid terms that indicate completion and closure To this end and to eschew the dialectical inclinations of Western thought he is caught in a double bind: to use language in a way that conveys meaning by simultaneously undermining the sense of semantic completion. I use the two key words of desire and love, to initiate an analysis of the two novels from the standpoint of Levinas to see how these concepts are imbued with a sense of other-orientedness
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