“Visiting himself on me” ‐ the angel, the witness and the modern subject of enunciation in J.M. Coetzee's age of iron

Abstract

Summary In the particular historical locale of South Africa's late apartheid, J.M. Coetzee's novel Age of Iron (1990) assumes a narrative position that, while fundamentally impeded by sociohistorical clusters, succeeds in articulating and subverting its own impediment. The essay seeks to account for the double bind of the novel's narrator, who finds herself simultaneously subjected to and outside of historical discourse, by designating the problem of postcolonial agency in the allegorical transition from the figure of the angel to that of the witness. To back up and elaborate on its claims, it reassesses modern subjectivity in light of the experience of racial and totalitarian violence. In this reassessment, it takes recourse to recent theories of cultural modernity by Homi K. Bhabha, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, which, however diverse, all rely on a concept of subjectivity based on acts of enunciation ‐ not on what is said but on language taking place. The ultimate aim of the essay is to describe testimony, in a theoretical rather than in an empirical sense, as an ethical category of modern processes of subjectification.