The Absolute Other (a guest) vs. The Government (a host)
As mentioned above, Derrida has always been concerned with the relation with
the other. He deconstructs the traditional theories of ethics and philosophical understanding of the ethical. In order to probe into any form of violence exposed to
the other, Derrida “suspects that it is here, in the attempt to universalize thatcharacterizes the very first step in any philosophical ethics or morality, that we destroy the key characteristic of ethics, and become unethical and violent towards ethics itself” (Reynold 38).
Similarly, Coetzee actually shares the same concern with Derrida and Coetzee’s language distinguishes from the other authors because in his novels “the force of the other can be most strongly represented” (“Ethical Modernism” 669). Coetzee often writes stories of marginalized and disenfranchised protagonists, and he shows his concerns with the other and fights against any form of violence upon the marginalized.
As Derrida ponders upon the problem of violence, Coetzee’s literary works expose the readers to various kinds of violence. Derek Attridge describes this ethical effect “as textual otherness, or textualterity: a verbal artifact that estranges as it entices… that speaks while it says that it must remain silent—and in so doing stages the ethical as an event” (“Ethical Modernism” 669). Michael K centers on a homeless hare-lipped and retarded man, and it is indeed “a work of textualterity,” Michael’s being of a stranger, the completely other, and a heterogeneous powerless guest in the society posits an ethical problem of “hospitality.”
To link the theoretical framework with the fictional structure, I would like to introduce my first theoretical hypothesis that places Michael K, the simple homeless,
as a guest in the society. The South Africa, as a state with its centralized government23, in the light of Hobbes, is the most powerful host who tries to offer Michael K
hospitality with a hidden impetus to grasp him back into its system. Hospitality is thus one strategy the state adopts to transform Michael K into a useful “docile body.”
Firstly, I should verify Michael K’s identity as the other in contemporary
discourse on ethics. From Derrida’s point of view, Michael is “the absolute other” that can be understood as “an anonymous new arrival and someone who has neither name, nor patronym, nor family, nor social status” (Of Hospitality 25). Michael is really an anonymous man for two reasons—he possesses no exact patronym 24 and his name and patronym are given and changed by the authority. For instance, the medical officer always calls Michael K as Michaels even though he knows that “his name is not Michaels but Michael” (Coetzee 131). In fact, he does have patronym, but it is an ambiguous one with a literary allusiveness. Apparently, Coetzee’s creation of the protagonist’s name as Michael K is influenced by Kafka’s creation of Josef K in The
Trial (1925) and K in The Castle (1922). “Critics have been much exercised by the
apparent reference to Kafka in the name Michael K” (Head 54), but Coetzee himself, in one of a series of interviews conducted by David Attwell just teasingly touches upon the allusion of the letter K: “There is no monopoly on the letter K” (Doublingthe Point 199).
25 In addition to the name, Michael’s alienation is similar to Kafka’s23 Here we should notice that the differences between “a state” and “a nation.” “A state is a geographically bounded territory with governmental structures and sovereignty, while a nation is a groups of people who consider themselves linked in a cultural and political togetherness” Duncan 240) As the Bible records Abraham as “a father of many nations” (Genesis 17:4) while Sarah as “a mother of nations” (Genesis 17:16), this suggest that a nation refers to a group of people who shares
consanguinity or same culture and language while in the social sciences, a state is the compulsory political institution of a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory.
24 Throughout the novel, Coetzee does not provide him with a proper family name but a letter “K.”
25 In addition to this acknowledgement of Kafka’s influence, Coetzee’s Michael K and Kafka’s K share something in common. Both the two writers touch the issue of hospitality. In The Castle, Kafka describes an inhospitable system for the travelers K, the land-surveyor who spends most of his time trying to register with authorities. As Kafka denounces the abuse of power and ridicules the bureaucracy, similarly, Coetzee depicts how the official power abuses and manipulates the life of
protagonists: “it is clear that elements of Coetzee’s treatment of marginalization and alienation are informed by Kafka” (Head 54). Michael has no family after the death of his mother and he has no social status. Without a family, patronym, proper name and social status, Michael is indeed the “absolute other.”
Some of Coetzee’s weird narrations of Michael endorse this phenomenon of the other. As the doctor says to him, “’Your stay in the camp was merely an
allegory…how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it’” (Coetzee 166). As the doctor suggests, Michael is a stranger in the society and his heterogeneous being cannot be easily assimilated into the
contemporary society. As a non-white, Michael is “subjected to the oppressions of apartheid (enforced labour, incarceration, and so on)” (Head 55). As the novel is set at a time of violent social turbulence, in order to survive, Michael must obey the social rules and ask for the sharing of resources. However, even when he stays in
governmental charity foundations, he still denies the “apartheid’s obsessive system of classification” (Head 55). He is resistant to all social, political and systematical afflictions. Indeed, as Head argues, Michael “embodies a principle of apolitical withdrawal (Head 57)” when he argues that he is “not in the war” (Coetzee 138). He is a heterogeneous being that refuses to be socialized into the ironclad system.
Coetzee describes Michael as “a stick insect [that]…defence[s] against a universe of predators” (Coetzee 149) and “a human soul above and beneath classification, a soul blessedly untouched by doctrine, untouched by history” (Coetzee 151). Even Michael himself senses his unsuitability to the system and depicts himself as “an
earthworm…on a cement floor” (Coetzee 182).
In addition to his weird outward appearance, anonymous social status and unreasonable resistance to be socialized, the fact that Michael keeps wandering at
Michael at its liberty.
different places and social institutions verifies his identity as a “stranger” or a “guest”
in the society. Throughout this novel, he travels through many places, from the City of Cape Town (Michael’s hometown), to Stellenbosch, Worcester, Albert Prince,
Jakkalsdrif, Kenilworth and so on. At first, he constructs a barrow to transport his mother and they leave Cape Town to seek Anna’s hometown near Prince Albert district. During this long journey, he loses his mother in the hospital in Stellenbosch, loses all of his money and has no place to stay. As a stranger at the society, he has no choice but to sleep in the streets, begs for jobs, and works in different camps.
In order to live, he is nailed down in a passive, submissive and obedient position.
He receives hospitality from individuals, families and governmental institutions. For example, Michael once receives one stranger’s money to buy “back two hot chicken pies” (Coetzee 30). Also, he has a meal and stays in the house of a young man who believes that “people must help each other” (Coetzee 48). In this sense, Michael plays the role of a guest who is “absolutely passive and dispossessed, awaiting humanitarian intervention and redemption” (Huang 7). What he has to do is to wait for other’s charity and take it with tears of gratitude. Coetzee ridicules the charitable ones who believe that they practice hospitality upon the other but what they do is purely a violent act. As discussed above, Derrida’s theory ingeniously deepens our thinking of charity, tolerance and hospitality while he claims that tolerance is actually the
opposite of hospitality and distinguishes the unconditional hospitality from the
“conditional hospitality.” Derrida states the impossibility of unconditional hospitality and clarifies the concept of conditional hospitality as the once most commonly practiced by “individuals, families, cities, or states” (Philosophy in a Time of Terror 128). Coetzee’s depiction of hospitality practiced in Michael K is consistent with Derrida’s theories. Theses written events of conditional hospitality in the text unmask and verify the violence behind the conditional hospitality. The most significant
example is at chapter three. Michal K meets another stranger named December, and he offers Michael with a hyperbolic hospitality in which he believes as good deeds of unconditional hospitality. He offers Michael with lots of food: “[t]he stranger
recovered and cut a thick slice of bread, which he decorated with loops and swirls of condensed milk and presented to K” (Coetzee 174). He gives Michael bottles of wine to drink and even assigns women to have sexual intercourse with Michael (Coetzee 178-179). He plays a powerful host who decides to treat Michael as a poor passive guest. In a word, December’s good deed is done out of self-satisfaction. In Michael K, there are numerous examples that prove that Michael is in a passive position in the society. His fixed-position, as a passive wretch that receives charitable deeds, confirms my assumption.
To put him in the contemporary biopolitical discourse, Michael can be defined as an Agambenian homo sacer for his “being abandoned—through concentration (camps) or marginalization— by the law” (Chensney 310). In a word, Michael K is “the one [who] cannot be understood, who is precisely dissimilar, unassimilated—in short, the
other” (Cheasney 136).
To embrace the social otherness, social norms require the self to be a hospitable guest. For centuries, hospitality has been a cross-cultural norm, an established sociological phenomenon that becomes a social duty for each individual, society and government. To take care of its citizen, the government should take the responsibility to offer hospitality to the unfortunate. Thus, the state apparatus becomes an
accountable agent to perform hospitality on the other. As the novel shows, the South African government must play the role of a holy “host” (who assigns its resources) to take care of Michael. However, as Derrida disputes that tolerance, one form of
conditional hospitality is “a good face of sovereignty,” this metaphoric expression that describes a state as a human being echoes the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679).
In 1651, Hobbes published his most famous work Leviathan concerning the
“extreme sovereignty.” Leviathan, a biblical sea monster26, is used to describe his ideal state whose structure of society and legitimation established upon a powerful central government. According to Hobbes, the structure of commonwealth should be established upon “the final cause, end, or design of men (who naturally love Liberty, and Domination over others)” (Hobbes 117). He parallels “the design of a state” with
“an artificial man whose name is Leviathan,” and he states “by Art is created that great Leviathan called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man” (Hobbes 9). This huge body of a state comes into life when he is given dominating power— “the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body” (Hobbes 9).
In the light of Hobbes, I provide a reading strategy that takes the state as the most powerful host while Michael as the absolute other, and then I go on to explore the state’s hospitality ethics. To extend the duty as a host and to extend his power to normalize Michael, the state tries repeatedly to grasp Michael back into the social control. By establishing hospitality institutions, the state plays his role of a “host” and it tries to open the hearts of the marginalized in a soft way. Hospitality thus turns out to be one strategy that the state adopts to transform “the other,” the stranger in the society, from an “untamed body” into a useful “docile body.” At length, Michael separates himself from these hospitality institutions. He refuses to be a good guest and escapes from the state’s control. His “resistance” of this bio-political strategy proves the experience of hospitality is aporetic—“the experience of that which we cannot experience…an experience of the impossible” (Derrida qtd. in Jacques Derrida and
26 Leviathan, is a sea monster in the Tanakh (the Old Testament). The word leviathan has become synonymous with any large sea monster or creature. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathans
the humanities 170). The case of Michael and his experience of hospitality endorse for
Derrida’s theorization of impossible hospitality.Chapter Two:
Hospitality and Power: Foucault, Discipline and Governmentality
As I have discussed in the previous chapter, hospitality ethics has its aporetic moments and is involved with power struggle. I would draw attention to Foucauldian genealogy of power to trace the practical operation of hospitality upon the other, as Boyne indicates that “the concept of power that is only implicit in Derrida’s work is made explicit by Foucault” (Boyne 2). As one of the most influential scholar, Michel Foucault has a sharp insight of bio-political manipulation. His practical observation on the governmental punishment, discipline, and medical institutions prepares a solid grounding for discussion on the practical and physical aspects of hospitality ethics in
Life & Times of Michael K. The combination of Foucault’s genealogical methodology
and Derridean concept of hospitality locates the power flow over human bodies, as Foucault claims, “Genealogy…is situated within the articulation of the body”(Foucault Reader 83). A Derrida-Foucault correspondence not only helps to locate Derrida’s philosophical abstract ideas of hospitality in its physical and practical
context, but also facilitate my analysis of “the hospitality experience of Michael K” as
practical evidence of the impossibility of hospitality.On the premise that the state plays the role of the most powerful host who arranges to take care of the powerless marginalized guest, Michael K, I would apply Foucault’s genealogy of power to analyze Michael’s hospitality experience. Then, the following question is: what kind of power is involved in that particular case? How can we observe the power flow that intervenes in the practice of hospitality? How does this power work to influence characters in Michael K? An in-depth analysis requires a close observation of the interaction between the “power” and “hospitality,” which is my focus in the second chapter.
Michael K is particularly hospitalized in two institutions—the hospitals and the camps. As Foucault suggests, both are disciplinary fields filled with “power flow,”
and in this chapter I would focus on Michael’s hospitalization experience in the medical system. To better understand hospitality ethics and Michael’s corresponding experience in hospitals, I would start from Foucault’s scholarly research on hospitality practiced by the medical system. At the beginning, I would elucidate that Foucault’s studies on history as “a history of otherness” and “a history of hospitality.” In the second section, to further probe into hospitality ethics and its implication with power, I would introduce the genealogy of power and biopower. To pinpoint the nature of power flow and its relation with hospitality, Foucault tells us that the medical system offers “hospitality experience” upon social otherness for the interest of nation state.
His model of modern disciplinary power and his observation of hospitality are concordant with the operation of hospitality in Michael K. Thus, in the third part, through the analyses of Michael’s “hospitality experience” in three hospitals, I would point out that the state tries hard to hospitalize Michael K with a concealing political and economic intention. With its medical knowledge/power, the medical network separates Michael from the normal, imposes the universal values of normality, and aims to transform Michael into a normal disciplined citizen whose well-being benefits the state. After all,the medical institution becomes a useful biopolitical tool, and indeed in Foucault’s terminology, it reveals an “art of government” to control populations. Therefore, I would conclude that the medical system, as a useful
“apparatus of hospitality,” assists the government in normalizing, controlling and managing populations.27
27 In the next chapter, I would further explore Foucault’s idea of governmentality and biopolitics in accordance to Giorgio Agamben.