The politics of life after death: Ondaatje’s Ghost

Abstract

This essay relates Ondaatje’s novel to the philosophical fictions of Foucault and others in order to signal the contribution that literary texts can make to a “political and ethical enterprise that carries anti‐racist dissidence into a deeper confrontation with the history, philosophy, and jurisprudence of ‘transmodernity’” (Gilroy 53). Situating the Sri Lankan civil war within broader geopolitical and legal struggles, Ondaatje’s anti‐war novel diagrams the coming‐to‐dominance of new power–knowledge networks across national and ideological divides – biopolitics (defined by Foucault as the fostering of life in each individual and the population as a whole) as it is overtaken by necropolitics (described by Mbembe as the exercise of power through the wholesale threat and dispensation of death). Anil’s Ghost also elaborates alternate forms of power–knowledge relations with the reader. Thus the novel’s object (emergent transmodernity) and method (experimental dislocation of characters’ and readers’ experiences) can contribute significantly to the rerouting of postcolonial studies towards what Negri terms the “non‐place of Empire” (34). Part I analyses how, through a series of dialogical encounters, Anil’s Ghost displaces fundamental axioms that regulate the politics of truth and the politics of international systems of governance. Part II examines the novel’s method: the aesthetic strategies that both perform the displacements and enlist the reader in this ethical project.