The empire as the embodiment of modern intellect: a critical reading of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians through Levinas

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to read Waiting for the Barbarians from the standpoint of an approach which is critical of modern intellect and its underlying foundations including the belief in universalism and foundationalism. Taking the Empire as the material and intellectual manifestation of the modern intellect, I will focus on the way foundationalism and universalism are likely to lead to totalization. As a result, modern intellect, despite its pretensions to holding liberal and universal views, has become inevitably reductive and exclusionary in relating to the other. The desire for boundary-drawing and closure is named ‘metaphysic of comprehension’, a term introduced by Robert Eaglestone who has been inspired by Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of ethics. I want to argue that Coetzee’s novel lends itself to a reading in which this yearning for comprehension is exposed and criticized. The question of representation, the pursuit of truth and the implementation of justice are areas which my analysis will be concerned with.