無限趨近：論柯慈《麥可•K的生命與時代》中的遁逃路線

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系碩. 士論. 文. Master Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 無限趨近：論柯慈《麥可‧K 的生命與時代》中的遁逃路線. Always Almosting: The Line of Flight in Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K. 指導教授：梁孫傑博士 Advisor: Dr. Sun-Chieh Liang 研究生：成悅滋 Advisee: Yue-zi Cheng. 中華民國一百零一年六月 June, 2012.

(2) ALWAYS ALMOSTING: THE LINE OF FLIGHT IN COETZEE’S LIFE & TIMES OF MICHAEL K by JOY Y. CHENG. A thesis submitted to the Graduate Institute of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, National Taiwan Normal University 2012.

(3) i. 摘要本論文藉由義大利當代哲學家阿岡本的生命政治和神學政治的視角，嘗試探討 JM‧柯慈小說《麥可‧K 的生命與時代》中例外狀態下的脫困之道，並析辨故事主人翁的基進被動性如何帶來彌賽亞的救贖，以重新思考麥可‧K 作為一個弱化的彌賽亞所具有的政治性。本論文開始於一段坎尼爾伍斯(Kenilworth)營地醫務官對麥可‧K 逃脫的描述：麥可‧K 藏匿的菜園不在任何地方，卻也在任何地方(nowhere and everywhere)；他逃，但也不逃。這般的遁逃正是阿岡本挪用德勒茲和瓜塔里的逃逸路線所強調的「不逃往他處的內部逃逸」(a flight with no elsewhere)。阿岡本的思想縱橫於律法、政治、歐陸哲學、宗教、文學等範疇，集中營和裸命則是他反思當今政治現狀的範型。本文企圖揉合阿岡本的《神聖之人》、《潛在性》和《餘留時間：羅馬書注疏》，覓尋貫穿他思想脈絡的核心，作為理論展演的根基，並主張麥可‧K 的遁逃路線踐履了阿岡本暗示的政治出路。此閱讀策略除了顛覆早期評論對麥可‧K 所持的偏狹思維外，同時也迥異於近期研究所希冀的一個美好新世紀的來臨。誠如阿岡本詮釋聖徒保羅的現下時間 (honyn kairos, the time of now)，以及他所側重班雅明式的彌賽亞觀：每一個當下 (Jetztzeit, now-time)都充滿了彌賽亞時刻的碎片。麥可‧K 作為一位逃脫藝術家，他不是等待彌賽亞的來臨，而是參與斡旋其中，進行權力結構的位移和翻轉。第一章著眼於小說和理論的互文比較，鋪陳阿岡本拓樸化例外狀態的理念，並進而提出此一命題：麥可‧K 遁逃於生命政治的莫比氏環的結構場域，其關聯著律法和生命互為滲透的複雜性。第二章引介漸近線的原理，主張麥可‧K 不單單螫伏於不實現的純粹潛能之中(potentiality to not-be)，他體現的無限趨近 (always almosting)，是同時快要實現，卻總是還沒有的潛能(potentiality always not yet to-be)。第三章討論「使不運作」或「閒怠無為」(inoperativity)。我探索麥可‧K 何以讓自己成為不是(Hōs mē, as not) 麥可‧K 的源由。藉由微型調整，麥可‧K 逆反了原本的例外狀態，帶來了彌賽亞時刻。而他的基進被動在完滿實踐律法時也中止了律法。結論再次觸及阿岡本所關注的既定再現框架的還原，呼籲拆卸其中武斷連結的論點，與德希達共在(being-with)的倫理向度有異曲同工之妙。. 關鍵字：遁逃路線，生命政治，阿岡本，例外狀態，潛能，基進被動，閒怠無為，彌賽亞主義，《麥可‧K 的生命與時代》.

(4) iii. Abstract This thesis aims to investigate the possible way out of the state of exception in JM Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K. From an Agambenian perspective on bioand theo-political dimensions, I attempt to analyze how the protagonist brings about the messianic redemption via his radical passivity. I rethink the political significations in Michael K by deeming him as a weak Messiah. The thesis begins with a description of Michael K’s escape. As the medical officer at Kenilworth describes, the garden Michael K hides in is nowhere and everywhere. This peculiar escape has parallels to the concept of “the line of the flight” by Deleuze and Guattari. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben appropriates it as “a flight with no elsewhere.” Following the movement of his thought from Homo Sacer, through Potentialities to The Time That Remains, I attempt to argue Agamben implicates this line of flight full of revolutionary potential could be a response to the present political situation. And I apply it to analyze the text. This strategic reading subverts the early biased and reductionistic phrasings of Michael K. Yet this alternative approach also goes against the mainstream that focuses on the political futurity. I employ Agamben’s interpretation of the Pauline idea of “the time of now,” as well as “the chips of messianic time” in Walter Benjamin. I argue Michael K as a great escape artist does not wait for the coming of the Messiah. Instead, he participates in the political interventions, in which the internal power structures are transformed. Chapter One examines the intertextuality between the fiction and the theory. Agamben’s topological rendering of the state of exception constructs the solid ground for my proposition: Michael K’s line of flight is on a biopolitical Möbius strip, which involves the complexity of the relation of law to life. In Chapter Two, I introduce the mathematical concept, asymptote. In light of its principle, I argue Michael K does not simply dwell on his pure potentiality (potentiality not to-be), but rather, he moves in the mode of always almosting (potentiality always not yet to-be). Chapter Three discusses the concept of inoperativity, or désœuvrement. I observe how Michael K lives “as not” (Hōs mē) Michael K. By making small adjustments, he reverses the state of exception to the messianic horizon. Discussion also centers around Michael K’s radical passivity, by means of which the law is fulfilled in its suspension. The final chapter reiterates the necessity to undo the set categories of representation. Agamben’s assertion to destabilize the arbitrary linkage echoes Jacques Derrida’s ethical concern in his “being-with” politics. Keywords: line of flight, biopolitics, Agamben, state of exception, potentiality, radical passivity, inoperativity, messianism, Life & Times of Michael K.

(5) v. Acknowledgements I would like to thank all of those who help me go through the long course of writing this thesis. First and foremost, my heartfelt gratitude goes to my advisor, Professor Sun-Chieh Liang. It is him that led me into this academic field. I took Professor Liang’s “Ethics and Literature” and “Contemporary Global Novels.” Due to his dedication to teaching and explanation, I could grow to be familiarized with the otherwise abstruse theoretical concepts. His illuminating lectures paved the way for my later academic endeavors. I thank him also for taking my opinions and writing seriously. But for his guidance, patience, and unflagging support, I would not be able to reach this point. I am also indebted to the other two committee members, Professor Han-yu Huang and Professor Frank Stevenson. Professor Huang never turns down my requests for intellectual counseling. His zeal for the theory and his consistent encouragement sustain my commitment to Agamben studies. His insightful and constructive suggestions greatly help the refinement of my thesis. Thanks also to Professor Stevenson for being a conscientious reader. His thought-provoking questions enlighten me on some related issues of which I take less notice. I owe Professor Hung-chiung Li too for he let me audit his “Seminar on Agamben” at NTU. I would also like to thank Professor Ioana Luca, from whom I learn to be brave and tough enough to undergo some pretty bleak moments. I find myself fortunate to have these teachers in this year. Their persistent advice and genuine concerns make this project worthwhile. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my junior, Shih-Han Sheila Chen. Her liveliness and cheerful words serve as a great comfort to my frustrations. Thanks also to my senior, Yu-chun Huang, for her invaluable critique in the preliminary stage of my thesis, and for her continued faith in me. I would also like to thank the other fellows as well as my classmates in the graduate school. Special thanks to Phyllis Li-Fang Fu and Ann Ying-yu Chen, with whom I first set out on a rewarding journey of reading Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K. My greatest debt is to my family. I thank my grandma, father, mother and brother. I thank them for being willing to let go what they initially hold on to. I thank them for allowing me to take a three-year leave from my job in pursuit of my dream. During these years of study, I grow up a bit more and become capable of truly understanding their love and care expressed in a different way. This thesis is dedicated to them, though I know it is barely possible to offset all the troubles I have brought to them over the past decades. (Most of the diagrams are tailor-made by my father, who makes great efforts to transcribe my thought and design with profession. I salute him for his unstinting devotion to what means so much to his daughter.).

(6) vii. Table of Contents. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1. Chapter One The Biopolitical Möbius Strip....................................................................................... 16 “He baulk[s] like a beast at the shambles”: Toward Bare Life ............................. 20 “Just do what you’re told”: The Sovereign ........................................................... 28 “[T]here is a war on!”: The State of Exception .................................................... 29 The Biopolitical Möbius Strip of Exceptional Law and Life ............................... 31. Chapter Two A Dwelling in Always Almosting ................................................................................. 38 (Im-)potentiality .................................................................................................... 38 From Bartleby to Michael K ................................................................................. 45 Before Michael K: Inversion of Kafka’s “Before the Law” ................................. 51 Always Almosting................................................................................................. 57. Chapter Three The Line of Flight with No Elsewhere ......................................................................... 63 The Messiah in Judaism and Christianity ............................................................. 63 The Messianic Inoperativity: Agamben and Michael K ....................................... 65 Michael K’s Radical Passivity: Another Strategic Escaping ................................ 75 The Link between Always Almosting and the Möbius Strip ................................ 79 The Messianic Moment......................................................................................... 90. Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 98. Works Cited................................................................................................................. 103.

(7) Introduction The garden for which you [Michael K] are presently heading is nowhere and everywhere except in the camps. [The garden] is another name for the only lace where you belong… [N]o road leads to [the place] that is merely a road, and only you know the way. (Life & Times of Michael K 166) In Life & Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee has the medical officer inquire about Michael K’s route after he escapes from the camp, and the garden where he hides himself. The officer strives to fathom out the meaning of the garden. Michael K’s garden appears in the beginning as a place of “nowhere and everywhere”—so long as it is outside the camps—but it turns out more like his line of flight. To put it shortly, this epigraph concerns not so much about “a place” as about “a road.” The destination cannot be a place, not because there lacks a road leading to it, but because the destination is itself a road. “The way” that “you only know” at the end of the epigraph not only denotes the road that Michael K takes to escape, but also relates to the trick that qualifies him as “a great escape artist,” as the officer claims (166). Escape is a central motif in the fiction that depicts Michael K’s slip away from numerous internments as well as various forms of entrapment. The concern for emancipation harbors in Coetzee’s awareness as he claims in an interview: I am not a herald of community or anything else, as you correctly recognize, I am someone who has intimations of freedom as every chained prisoner has and constructs representations—which are shadows themselves—of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light. (Doubling the Point 341) What Coetzee implies is that rather than having unlimited boundaries as a fiction writer, he feels the limitations under apartheid. The writer is not free, neither is what.

(8) 2. he writes. Coetzee says, “South African literature is a literature in bondage…It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison” (“Coetzee, Getting Prize, Denounces Apartheid”). Coetzee describes the awareness of justice as “the shadows of ideas flickering on the walls” (Doubling the Points 341). If that partakes of a dimmed prospect for the faintest hope of freedom, it does nothing but reinforces the imperative for Coetzee to “imagine the unimaginable” (11). As stated in the block quote, Coetzee attends to represent those fleeing from the confinement. I believe that Life & Times of Michael K is meant to represent the persistent quest for freedom even in the most unlikely circumstances. Critical Reception of Coetzee’s Michael K Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (from now on “Life & Times”), the one that won him the Booker Prize immediately in the wake of its publication in 1983, starts to enjoy its reputation later than it should have deserved.1 Early critics2 commonly hold that it fails to represent the political and social conditions. Nadine Gordimer charges this novel with “a revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions” (“The Idea of Gardening” 143). “[A] political vision of transformation” is what Gordimer expects, yet she laments its lack, in this novel (Mills 177). Indeed, this is part of the influential neo-Marxist dismissal of Coetzee’s heroes who, in a highly political context, should “ignore history” and suspend themselves in a sense of “ultimate malaise” (“The Idea of Gardening”143). Michael K’s silence also receives sweeping, uneven critique as we turn to Benita Parry, who argues that Michael K is “written as a being without an identity…an exemplar of the mind turned inward” (“Speech and Coetzee received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. In addition to Life & Times, he won the second Booker Prize with Disgrace in 1999. 2 The critics include Nadine Gordimer, Dick Penner, and Benita Parry. Duncan McColl Chesney in his “Toward an Ethics of Silence: Michael K” provides a critical review of their readings. In terms of pessimism about the political change, Catherine Mills notes that Salman Rushdie also passes similar harsh judgments, though he targets Coetzee’s another book, Disgrace. For publication data, see Works Cited. 1.

(9) 3. Silence” 154). Concerning the politico-historical setting of the story in South Africa’s apartheid regime3 during the 1980s, it is understandable how easily Coetzee lends himself to critique that blasts his “obfuscation of black resistance in South Africa” (Poyner 70). For Gordimer, who calls for the protesting writer’s “essential gesture,” Life & Times apparently fails to perform the medium, in which Coetzee could “declare himself positively as answerable to the order struggling to be born” (Essential Gesture 278). She queries why in Coetzee’s work “[t]he presentation of the truth and meaning of what white has done to black stands out on every page; yet it denies the energy of the will to resist evil” (“The Idea of Gardening” 3-6). A reviewer (“Z. N.” as he calls himself) says “[t]he absence of any meaningful relationship between Michael K and anybody else” means that we are dealing with “an amoeba.” Living outside nearly everything, Michael K for him is “too far removed from the norm, unnatural, almost inhuman” and thus, he writes “Certainly those interested in understanding or transforming South African society can learn little from [the book]” (“Much Ado about Nobody” 103). It’s clear, however, that what they regard as Coetzee’s failure actually exposes their failure to appreciate the novelistic vision. Many subsequent more sophisticated readings, by Teresa Dovey, David Attwell, Dominic Head, Sue Kossew, Derek Attridge and so on, refute and disprove these unjust commentaries. Dovey in 1988 contributes the first full-length study of Coetzee in The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Dovey explores three strategies including the parodic, allegorical, and deconstructive aspects, to which previous readings are blind. Ever since Dovey’s intervention, David Attwell stresses, there has been a growing 3. In South Africa, racial discrimination began early in colonial times under the rule of the Dutch and British. However, a system of racial segregation was legalized with the general election as an official policy, known as Apartheid (1984-1994). During Apartheid period, while the Whites hold supremacy, the rights of the majority black inhabitants were severely curtailed (Gallagher, “The Birth and Death of Apartheid”). .

(10) 4. awareness toward “the novels’ discursive complexity and self-consciousness” (2). Attwell in J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing points out many early criticisms of Life & Times neglect “the work’s metafictional features.” The charge of elusion in Michael K is therefore premature. These critics miss “the challenge of the novel’s own self-reflection on questions of power and interpretation and exempts itself, moreover, from the force of this questioning” (93). In addition, Jane Poyner in J. M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship argues that Michael K “is not only racially oppressed but is the exemplar of social alienation, [he] practices alienation” for the purpose of and “by transgressing the very foundations of apartheid law: namely, classification and segregation” (73; emphasis in original). For Poyner, this transgression of apartheid law is also a Coetzean device that enables the book to resist allegorical readings. But, admittedly, the contemporary biopolitical concerns have made certain issues of Coetzee’s earlier fiction, especially this key book Life & Times, stand out a lot more. The ethico-political problematic has seldom been carried out on so extensive a scale. The theoretical adoption helps to open up a political dimension already inherent in Coetzee’s works. Noting this burgeoning discursive industry, Roberto Esposito writes, “Recently, not only has the notion of “biopolitics” moved to the center of international debate, but the term has opened a completely new phase in contemporary thought” (Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy 13). The question of (human) life has a long history in Western philosophy, in which it has occupied a central position from Nietzsche, through Michel Foucault, to Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as Roberto Esposito, to name a few of a long list of extremely decisive figures. “What is ‘life’?” never ceases to be a concern, but questions like this are gaining new.

(11) 5. weight nowadays. The term “biopolitics” first takes shape and is defined by Michel Foucault. Biopolitics, as Agamben later puts it more straightforwardly, is “the growing inclusion of man’s natural life in the mechanism and calculations of power” (Homo Sacer 119). To be more precise, the modern form of government exercises its biopolitical power upon the biological existence of the population. The modality of imposing controls on the population undergoes a dramatic change, as this transformation marks the threshold of modernity, from the thanatopolitics of “to take life or [to] let live” to the biopolitical manipulation of “to make live [or] to let die” (“Society Must Be Defended” 241). Posterior theoreticians, almost no exception, all develop their theses more or less by appropriating or in responding to Foucault’s theorization of biopolitics. Thinking anew of Life & Times in association with biopolitics is of urgent importance, in spite or because of this less explored field of thought.4 Catherine Mills and Duncan Chesney are among a few who pioneer this exploration both in an Agambenian approach, though to different degrees. They situate Michael K in milieu of the modern political reality and thereby, address kinds of potency in Michael K. A time of futurity, as they seem to agree, is prophesized to come. Mills in her “Life Beyond Law” highlights a conception of “political futurity” that she claims to prevail in Coetzee’s works. Also as embodied in the representation of Michael K, Mills takes this title character as “a figure of hope” (194). She suggests an Agambenian approach benefit in reading Michael K as a biopolitical subject before the law. Yet she concludes by showing how, as to the vision, Coetzee differs from Agamben: instead of adopting a new form of life, Michael K in effect “carve[s] out within the ban of the law” (189). 4. Although Martin Woessner in “Coetzee’s Critique of Reason” suggests Agamben’s camp theory can benefit the Kafka-esque reading of Life & Times, his argument is not yet fully-developed. For bibliographical information, see Works Cited..

(12) 6. Whereas Mills shies away the rendering of Michael K as Herman Melville’s Bartleby or, as the Muselmann, Chesney aligns himself more closely with Agamben in every aspect. In his reading, Michael K is “a figure of silence” if we follow Agamben’s account of Bartleby as “a figure of potentiality” (“Towards an Ethics of Silence” 307). Moreover, Chesney elaborates on the role of Michael K’s silence. Its suspension of social speech, he argues, underpins the entire movement that would bring forth another key concept of Agamben: a “coming community” (308-09). Irrespective of the fact that these claims and so many others may well verify themselves by construing Michael K as, for instance, “a figure of silence” or “a figure of hope,” any similar attempt to define what this persona signifies has already simultaneously admitted to a tacit relation to the law. It is against the law that one can examine in Michael K the political and ethical agency all at once. Namely, Michael K’s life disavows, or sublates the law from which it tries to liberate, and vice versa. What interests me most is that the concurrence of law with life doesn’t seem to receive enough critical attention. Also, insofar as they focus on the (im-)potentiality of Michael K’s “eloquent silence” (Chesney 321) and its relation to a futuristic community, this thesis too investigates the radical (im-)potentiality in Michael K’s silence but, as a complement to their discussions on futurity, I would probe into the ways that the silence effects a change on the “here and now” (where and when law meets life). This thesis, henceforth, engages in how Michael K interrupts and intervenes in the course of history, albeit minimally, perhaps. One way in which Michael K’s agency resides is his art of escape: “always almosting.” Michael K’s Line of Flight The major preoccupation of this thesis emerges out of my interest in the “here-and-now,” particularly in relation to a flight that is potential for political.

(13) 7. interventions. I. The Here and Now As plainly suggested in the title, this project is to develop the theme of Michael K’s “line of flight.” This phrase is first used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their assertion about “the line of flight”—which has nothing to do with a simple running-away gesture— teems with Agamben’s central claim. The idea is only reinforced in Agamben’s redefinition of this flight as “a flight with no elsewhere” (121). To elucidate Agamben’s articulation in an interview, David Kishik explicates, “[A] line of flight is an immobile movement in situ, which must be internal to the very life that one lives at this place and time, as long as one manages to be and not to be in the here and the now, to be absent while present, to be perceptible and imperceptible at the same time” (The Power of Life 91; emphasis in original). On the spatial and temporal aspects, Kishik emphasizes the “here” is precisely what one has to flee to and the “now” is when the flight shall take place. Walter Benjamin in his “On the Concept of History” establishes a concept of “now-time,” or “here-and-now” (Jetztzeit).5 He contends that the present is full of “chips of messianic time” (Selected Writings 397). Benjamin’s messianism reflects and sticks to Saint Paul’s belief: The messianic could occur in “the time of now” (honyn kairos). The messianic vision of these two figures has a considerable impact on Agamben’s theopolitical discourse. Their prospect of the messianic shows to us a politics of redemption that Michael K can invent in his line of flight. II. Paradox of “the Escape without Escape” Often inadequately perceived as passive and elusive, the line of flight however is disruptive to bring into a halt the mechanical process of the nation state. In an Different versions of translation of the word Jetztzeit: <http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html> and <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm>.. 5.

(14) 8. interview with David Attwell, Coetzee said, “The book about going off with the guerrillas, the book in the heroic tradition, is not a book I wanted-to-write, wanted enough to be able to bring off” (Doubling the Point, 207-08). The idea of political activism is also absent in Agmben’s theory. Antonio Negri charges Agamben’s political philosophy with “an inability to open a panorama of a revolutionary struggle.”6 Given the common ground shared by Coetzee and Agamben, I suggest Agamben’s philosophy of the concepts like potentiality and inoperativity explains Michael K’s retreat from political movement. It will be helpful to contexualize “the line of flight” in Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical edifice so as to see how their central claims are repeated in Agamben. They all emphasize the need to undo the prescribed mode of being within the state apparatus. The primal argument is to avoid identification and to problematize fetters of sameness. The notion of “nomad” is employed to contest that of sedentary life upon which a nation is founded. For the nomadic tribe, the definition of home is “nowhere and everywhere.” Deleuze and Guattari propose the term Nomadology and see it as a state of being that defies hierarchy and centralization. Living the life of a nomad, one wanders in a line of flight that resists a teleological trajectory. Thinking of nomadic moving draws our attention to another very key term “rhizome.” Deleuze and Guattari set rhizome against an arborescent mode of knowledge for the rhizomatic mode of thought relates to the “between-ness” (entre-deux) rather than the beginning and the end. This way of thinking presents a challenge to the anthropological view toward the concepts of “time” and “history.” The “time” shall no longer be chronological. The “history” shall not be the history 6. Negri, Antonio. “The Ripe Fruit of Redemption: Review of Giorgio Agamben’s The State of Exception.” First published in Italian Il Manifesto quotidiano comunista. 26 July 2003. Accessed 4 July 2012 <http://www.generation-online.org/t/negriagamben.htm>. More scathing criticism is made by Paolo Virno, Oliver Marchart, J. M. Bernstein, Philippe Mesnard, and Claudine Kahan, according to Durantaye (12-13). See Works Cited..

(15) 9. written by the victors, but “a Nomadology,” “the opposite of a history” (A Thousand Plateaus 23). In the struggle for the oppressed past like a Nomadology, Benjamin looks for a messianic chance. For him, the present could be the rupture and crack in the continuum of history. Concerning Michael K’s line of flight that happens here and now, it could explode a specific epoch out of the homogenous and empty course of history. Benjamin argues every second within the time frame is the narrow gate, through which the Messiah enters. III. Textuality and Reflexivity In the novel, Michael K does not provoke a head-on confrontation with the medical officer. He does not at all challenge the officer, but the internal power positioning has been changed and transposed. In mapping out Michael K’s line of flight, we take the officer’s surmise as the sheer source of reference. The question remains: how do we know that our analysis is solid if the medical officer’s narration is fictive? One might also suspect: Is Michael K here not the Michaels of the officer? Perhaps yes. But perhaps it also shows that part of Michael K’s story is brought to visibility, only through the perspective of the medical officer-narrator. This is a concern with textuality, a concern Coetzee thinks of attentively. To question the legitimacy of the medical officer’s account amounts to asking, “[w]ho has the right to speak for whom, and what are the representational, political, and ethical limits of such speaking?” (Chesney 314). “[B]y placing the officer’s narrative at the heart of the novel,” Chesney then argues, “Coetzee is suggesting by its failures that his own ‘narrative’ of Michael K is equally and similarly flawed” (317). And this is also true for any possible reading with anyhow unavoidable restrictions and difficulties. At once Michael K flees from the officer’s epistemological capture, he is able and agile enough to escape our apprehension..

(16) 10. But perhaps it’s no less problematic if we remain completely neutral and disinterested without a say. Instead, to aim at the (im-)possibility of responsibility in thinking, reading and writing is a genuine praxis of ethics. To reaffirm the necessity of the medical officer’s narrative as well as its necessary failure is to acknowledge what Gayatri Spivak calls “the persistent critique of what we cannot not want” (42; emphasis in original). We have to and have to want to narrate, for that is prerequisite for the beginning of an ethical obligation in response. Yet what truly matters, still, is the reflexivity in our reading of the text. As my analysis describes Michael K’s line of flight as a mode of “always almosting,” this interpretation splits itself from within. There is no absolute identification between Michael K and something else. Theoretical Framework I. Giorgio Agamben: Potentiality I propose a re-reading of Life & Times alongside with Agamben with respect to his thought on biopolitics and potentialities. Giorgio Agamben’s significance to contemporary biopolitical discourse chiefly lies in his distinctive and insightful observations of how the camp and bare life become the hidden matrix. It is particularly with the appearance of the Homo Sacer project7 that he becomes known to a much wider audience (Lemke 53). The fame of this project increases with a growing attention toward his fundamental thesis: the “inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism” and the concentration camp as the “biopolitical paradigm of the West” (Homo Sacer 10, 181). I regard it as a shame that while we brood over the darkness on the political scene offered by Agamben, we are very likely to bypass his philosophy of potentiality which as the common thread links his diverse The project includes Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), State of Exception. Homo Sacer II, 1 (2003), The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Homo Sacer II, 2 (2007), The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath. Homo Sacer II, 3 (2008), and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III (1998). 7.

(17) 11. works. Durantaye firmly remarks, “[N]o idea is so important for [Agamben’s] thought as potentiality” (14-15). In Idea of Prose, Agamben has pointed out some secret “connections that link power [potere] and potentiality [potenza]” (51). These connections appear most prominently in Homo Sacer, Potentialities and The Time That Remains. Agamben observes, “[T]he concept of potentiality has never ceased to function in the life and history of humanity, most notably that part of humanity that has grown and developed its potentialities to the point of imposing its power over the whole plant” (Potentialities 177). Agamben cautions us against accepting these abuses of power. He then employs unusual terms like inoperative and decreation to illuminate impotentiality (Durantaye 24). According to his thesis, one should be de-activated from the law, which is therefore made inoperative. This act would consign the law to its (im)potentiality. In so doing, we see things could have been different. To interrogate the link that predetermines the social structures is to “be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same time, return thought to its practical calling” (Homo Sacer 4-5). In White Writing Coetzee argues that early European travel writers oppose “idleness” to “leisure.”8 The “idleness” refers to the “idle Hottentot” (Khoisan). It is associated with the idea of “sloth” seen from the imperialist perspective. What is overlooked is the indigenous people’s refusal to “enter the colonial employment system” (Poyner 83). Idleness for Michael K is different as well. Living in idleness, he is “neither pleased nor displeased when there [is] work to do; it [is] all the same” (115). Poyner remarkably comments, “Michael K is not challenging a work ethic; rather, he yearns unconsciously to stand outside the time of the camps, of apartheid and of South Africa’s bleak history-in-the-making” (83). Michael K’s idleness is to go beyond the work ethic that contrasts work and In White Writing, Coetzee offers the difference, “Leisure holds the promise of the generation of all those differences that constitute culture and make man Anthropological Man; idleness holds no promise save that of stasis” (25). 8.

(18) 12. laziness. Not to recognize the classification and segregation is one way Poyner observes in Michael K’s resistance. I agree with Poyner that “Michael K is not actively resistant” (70). He cultivates his alienation as a means of resisting the commonly accepted beliefs. Michael K expresses his potentiality by suspending such dogmatic doctrine like “work ethic” or “a belief regarding help.”9 When the law is restored back to a point of indifference between potentiality and impotentiality, such a state of law can lead to the state of exception and the state of messianic exception. With respect to these two possibilities, Durantaye explains the seemingly dark political scene is “strangely enough, cause for hope” (16-17). I understand it along with Eleanor Kaufman’s insightful reading of Agamben, It is not, I think, too strong a statement to assert that nearly all of Agamben’s oeuvre is oriented toward demarcating a doubleness, whereby one thing is actually exposed to be two terms in relation, and the slight shift of perception that comes with this insight is, for Agamben, the mark of the messianic. (38) With the slight displacement, the state of exception can turn into the messianic. Also, in different use of the impotentiality, we can free ourselves from the traditional set rules. This is crucially important to my approach toward Michael K’s escape. On that score, I specifically investigate how he makes use of his passivity—with slight adjustment—to live into the messianic. II. Notion of the Camp and Bare Life: (a-)historical conceptualization The thesis conceptualizes in Life & Times the camp and bare life, historically and a-historically. In developing these two concepts, Agamben’s theorization shows a 9. A relevant passage that shows Michael K does not easily accept the set belief. Upon hearing the man saying, “People must help each other, that’s what I believe,” Michael K “allowed this utterance to sink into his mind. Do I believe in helping people? he wondered. He might help people, he might not help them, he did not know beforehand, anything was possible. He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help. Perhaps I am the stony ground, he thought” (48)..

(19) 13. de-historicized tendency. He concerns himself more with the camp and bare life as the secret matrix in our present political existence. But we do not deny the Nazi concentration camps, or contemporary deportation centers as the examples of what he calls as the camp. In my thesis, when I refer to the Jakkalsdrip camp in Life & Times, I tend to approach the concept of the camp by regarding it as a specific historical and political reality. But in discussion of the Kenilworth infirmary, as well as in part three, where Michael K says there are camps for simpletons, camps for children whose parents run away, camps for people with big heads, and so on, these different camps are obviously not the typical ones as the Nazi concentration camps. For me, this book has touched upon the “hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity” (Homo Sacer 123). Namely, for Agamben, the camp can mean more than “a concrete historical place or a defined spatial unity” (Lemke 56). In the present society, the sovereign figure is played by the doctor, the priest, the scientist, and the expert. The hospital and the various kinds of camps mentioned by Michael K, for me, are the “metamorphoses and disguises” Agamben advocates that we have to learn to recognize (Homo Sacer 123). The Task of This Thesis This thesis aims to situate Coetzee’s Michael K in the context of Agamben’s biopolitical discourse. On the theme of escape, I argue the figure of Michael K endures a continuing relevance to contemporary political thought. I focus on three critical dimensions of Agamben’s theory: the topographical structure of the state of exception he deems as a Möbius strip; his adaptation of Aristotelian potentiality as a critical tool for the critique of Melville’s Bartleby; and the messianic kingdom he envisions with reference to Saint Paul and Walter Benjamin. Michael K as an enigma, after all, exceeds this conceptual framework to some extent. As a consequence, I.

(20) 14. suggest that the idea of “always almosting” might help unravel what lies at the root of his escape. This perspective, I argue, is meant to show a step further beyond the level of (im-)potentiality as most-frequently understood. This is especially true for Michael K. In discussions of radical passivity that contributes to the political interventions, I particularly highlight the messianic effect that renders the law inoperative. Chapter One aims to propose a biopolitical Möbius strip, qua the correlation of law and life in their existence of exception. This thesis is grounded upon an understanding that sees law and life join in “a zone of irreducible indistinction” (Homo Sacer 9). This stands out particularly as Agamben theorizes law, life and the state of exception. Topographically, Agamben figures a Möbius strip but I consider the biopolitical governing is very strongly implicated in the structure; thus, it should be a biopolitical Möbius strip. Going through the textual analysis, I argue the course Michael K is running is presented as another Möbius strip. Modeled upon Agamben’s analysis, this Möbius loop consists of Michael K’s life and of the law twined in torsion. In Chapter Two, I discuss Agamen’s theory of pure potentiality. Then I launch a comparative study of Melville’s Bartleby and Michael K for the purpose of examining their likeness in relation to potentiality. As a follow-up to this theoretically-rooted background, as well as to the topographical structure of the Möbius strip, I attempt to pin down when and where the vector due to Michael K’s potentiality “twists and turns” and consequently, his life beyond the law is realized. To do this, I appeal to Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law.” Michael K’s potentiality mediates the power relations between law and life. The consequent displacement will transpose Michael K and the medical officer. I venture on a concept of “always almosting,” and demonstrate how this characteristic is acted out, in order to justify why this feature.

(21) 15. activates the reversal. My argument is that always almosting stands at the core of Michael K’s escape. Chapter Three begins with an account of the Messiah. The religious belief in the Messiah’s arrival is commonly held in both Judaism and Christianity. For Christians, the messianic is not simply meant for a better life, but this event establishes for them a new relationship with the Mosaic Law. Then I extend the notion of the law’s fulfillment to my discussion of Paul’s messianism. Agamben’s analysis of the Pauline word katargesis (inoperativity) shows that this word carries the meanings of both fulfillment and suspension. Bearing in mind the concept “inoperativity” as the underpinning of the Pauline messianic, I propose Michael K’s radical passivity found in the asymptote can bring about the similar effect. Passivity in its radical sense may well reverse into aggressivity. The reversal logic is in no way a new one; it is the mechanism embedded in the biopolitical Möbius strip of law and life. I attempt to theorize Michael K’s asymptote by focusing on how he encounters his bare life while proceeding along the vector of law. Concerning the design of Michael K’s line of flight, the reversal structure serves as the nexus that connects the asymptote and the Möbius strip. I further examine the asymptote with recourse to St. Paul and Benjamin, often by referring to their messianic vocabulary and concepts. Their messianic theses help me uncover in Michael K’s flight the indispensable elements for the state of messianic exception..

(22) Chapter One The Biopolitical Möbius Strip I consider the sense of the inversion toward which many of Kafka’s allegories tend to lie in an attempt to transform life into Scripture. —Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel We have seen the sense [of the inversion] in which law begins to coincide with life once it has [in the state of exception] become the pure form of law, law’s mere being in force without significance. —Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer The purpose of Chapter One is to propound a biopolitical Möbius strip, qua the correlation of law and life in their existence of exception. I aim to provide an overview of Agamben’s theorization of bare life, sovereignty, the state of exception, and power relations. In the meantime, I highlight traces of the Möbius structure already implied. The theoretical discussion would lead to my biopolitical rendering of Michael K’s escape as another Möbius ring. In a word, I explicate how the logic of the Möbius structure works in such signature Agambenian spatial tropes as “threshold” and “zone of indistinction,” and in the course of the inverse intervention entailed in Michael K’s act. Life & Times of Michael K tells the story of the desperate attempt by the title character to escape the war, the institutions, and the camps. Michael K is born with a hare lip and slow-wittedness. Due to these inherent deformities, he is sent to the institution of Huis Norenius where he spends his childhood acquiring basic literacy and manual skills. The novel unfolds with an arduous journey from Cape Town, the urban area that time caught in a massive of riots. Because his mother Anna K is becoming seriously ill, Michael K resigns his gardening job and plans to take her back to her rural homeland. Failing to obtain the required permit for travel out of the city,.

(23) 17. Michael K builds a barrow and pushes his mother all the way back to Prince Albert. Soon afterwards, though, his mother weakens and dies en route in a hospital. Carrying the box of his mother’s ashes, Michael K determines to resume his journey and buries his mother where she wishes to be. Against the turmoil of the civil war in South Africa, Michael K undergoes the looting of the roving armies. At a checkpoint he is detained for not having the proper permit and consequently, he is appointed to toil on a railway track. Finally he escapes the labor camp and reaches the farm. He delights in making the abandoned farm prosperous, until the Visagie’s alleged son appears. Refusing to become a servant, Michael K leaves the farm and takes up residence in the mountain cave till he feels a threat of starving to death, so again, he leaves. At this point, he is taken up and sent to the Jakkalsdrif relocation camp. There the inhabitants are exploited for cheap labor and interned, with no choice, to adopt the camp as their home. But life, as Michael K believes, is outside the camp. His objection to the confinement comes to an unprecedented degree at the point of an atrocious clampdown by the local police commander. Michael K feels the intense humiliation while watching their place of abode searched. He climbs the fence and slips out of the Jakkalsdrif camp. Then he returns to the farm and resumes his gardening. While feeling joyous in being a tender of the soil, he builds a bond with the mother earth and lives on the bounty it provides. He reaps what he sows: the pumpkins and melons. His need for food declines, and he lives more like an animal—nocturnal, dormant and mute. After a while, he is discovered and re-camped, this time, at the rehabilitation center of Kenilworth. At the same time, Michael K is accused of aiding rebels by running a staging post. The narrative point of view, in the second part, shifts to the medical officer in the camp infirmary. His autobiographical statement shows his compulsion of sustaining Michael K’s life, coupled with his.

(24) 18. bafflement of Michael K’s malnutrition and the simultaneous obstinacy toward not-eating. He is consciously struck by the awareness of the operation of the state apparatus, but still bound to it nevertheless. He craves, in his imaginary talk, for the meaning of Michael K with his (dis)approval. Michael K at last disappears and succeeds once again in escaping the camp. The book ends with his fantasizing about going back to cultivate his garden and planting seeds over the veld. He even dreams of giving an old man a tour of the farm. With a teaspoon and a long roll of string, Michael K thinks, they can bring up water from the shaft. Just as he waters the plants and “from one seed a whole handful” he gets, with water in the bowl of the spoon, “one can live” (118, 184). One can live in wartimes, as Michael K observes, “amid broken glass and charred garbage new points of green [are] already beginning to shoot” (172). This narrative is set in a civil war-torn South Africa from 1970s to 1980s, a turbulent period preceded by, and concurring with the apartheid regime and related racial conflicts. On July 20, 1985, the government led by P. W. Botha, officially declared a state of emergency and martial law, and this exigence lasted for four years. Accordingly, the government and the police ruled without referring to the constitution or to the parliament. That might explain why the medical officer tells Michael K, “the laws of nations”—even in the state of exception—“have you in their grip” (151). And we might also be right to speculate this way, since “nothing passe[s] his lips” because “he refuses to be fed by tube,” Michael K is “not fit to walk” (147). If Michael K demolishes the medical officer’s rehabilitation program with the camp food, he disrupts their plan to “effect a change in men’s souls” (134). Whereas he avoids becoming fat to “rejoin the camp life,” Michael K grows “too sick to travel” (133, 137). He gets an injection and is kept on a drip from time to time. Thus in one sense.

(25) 19. Michael K still falls prey to the law which “pin[s] [him] down in a bed” (133, 137, 151). Read in this manner, the care of the natural life of Michael K forms the solid basis for the sovereignty. This interpretation corresponds to Agamben’s theoretical presuppositions on law, life and politics. In his terms, the law constituted as such relates to life by way of producing a biological body. And the camps, among them the most notable the Jakkalsdrif and the old Kenilworth racecourse, serve as the biopolitical paradigm par excellence. Agamben understands the camp as the “materialization of the state of exception” (Homo Sacer 174). The camp, for Agamben, also spatializes “the exceptional nature of the sovereign act of suspending or altering the law” (Murray 186). For the sovereign is “he who decides on the state of exception” (Schmitt 5). At the point of where this “extra-legal violence” (186) and the law are completely intertwined, the bare life figures as “the bearer of the link,” upon which the sovereign power is exercised (Homo Sacer 65). Situated within the cauldron of the South African past, relevancy of these entangled interrelationships—of the state of exception, the camp, bare life and the sovereign power—lends itself to multiple questions. In what manner can we appreciate this fiction Life & Times from the biopolitical perspective? Is Michael K homo sacer to the same degree as those figures in Agamben’s thought? How is Michael K’s life presented when politics, law, and violence are inseparably connected? How can a body in its purest sense of being biological only to be intensely political? And to what extent does Michael K share with Herman Melville’s Bartleby the prospect of, as Benjamin understands, a weak messianic time? To put it more economically, all this, on the juridico-political scene, can boil down to the problem of the relation of law to life in the state of exception, which is also a historical fact that underpins the text. This focal concern serves as the kernel.

(26) 20. idea that maps out the entire structure in the subsequent discussion, and the life issue will be the starting point. “He baulk[s] like a beast at the shambles” (40): Toward Bare Life As this section begins, I first outline Agamben’s theses on life, tracing the trajectory of his re-formulation along with various allusions to Aristotle, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and the ancient Roman law. Meanwhile, I take up the novel with a concern of the different ways in which life, predominantly that of Michael K, presents itself. Turning to Aristotle at the beginning of Homo Sacer, Agamben observes that “[t]he Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word ‘life’” (1). Instead, they used two terms: zoē and bios. Zoē expresses “the simple fact of living common to all living beings” (1), whereas bios is defined as “the form or way of living proper to an individual or group” (1). The distinction between natural life (zoē) and political life (bios), though, undergoes an epochal change according to the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. As is well known, he states, “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (The History of Sexuality 143). In his contention, at the advent of modernity, the growing inclusion of zoē into polis signals a break and thereby, denotes a distinct field of politics: biopolitics. The concept of biopolitics, initially introduced by Foucault, designates “the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques” (The History of Sexuality 141-42). In Foucault’s formulation, biopolitical mechanism dissociates and abstracts “life” from its concrete physical bearer. That is, singular human beings are no longer the targets, but biopolitics has as its objective the “biological features measured and.

(27) 21. aggregated on the level of populations” (Lemke 5). Power would no longer be exercised over legal subjects, but living beings; what is at stake here no more lies in the territorial sovereignty, but the living population (Heron 36). As a result, life becomes an objective factor that can be scientifically measured, interpreted, and thus defined. Through the techniques and strategies of a political authority, life can also be reduced to the statistic data. In Life & Times, there is a passage when four hundred new prisoners in cattle trucks are convoyed to the Kenilworth camp. Noël checks the batch and finds out twenty deaths, at least, are not counted in the papers, which reflect only the number of arrivals. Rather than asking for the embarkation documents, Noël knows the quest would be of no avail for “who,” among the authorities concerned, “is to say that twenty in four hundred is an unacceptable rate?” (160). Surely this margin of error must be tolerated because tolerance is accepted in quantitative processing if life truly can be practically reduced to bodily measurements. Agamben deploys Foucauldian notion of biopolitics, and in his revised fashion, he contributes his own unique adaptation of Walter Benjamin’s “nuda vita,” bare life, also translated as “mere life” or “naked life” (Means Without Ends 143). In addition to the ancient terms for life, zoē and bios, Agamben proposes a third: bare life. If the Greeks separated zoē from bios, Agamben by adding up this new term further demarcates the categories for life. Agamben embarks on the theme of bare life by calling upon the homo sacer and appointing him as the originary exemplar of it. Rendering bare life as the protagonist in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben asserts that bare life is “the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (8 emphasis in original). He continues to explain, homo sacer is “[a]n obscure figure of archaic Roman law, in which human life is included in the juridical order […] sorely in the form of its exclusion” (8). Agamben invokes this.

(28) 22. primeval figure of Roman antiquity from an extant fragment of Sextus Pompeius Festus: “The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide” (71). Peter Fitzpatrick tackles with the specificity of homo sacer, particularly in terms of “the unpunishability of his killing and the ban on his sacrifice” (“Bare Sovereignty” 73). He elaborates this way, in part because this man’s life is not deemed sacrifice-worthy, the life of homo sacer is excluded outside of the divine law, and in part because whoever could kill him does not commit a homicide, that life is also excluded outside of the human law (51). “‘[A]s such’ it is,” Fitzpatrick comments, doubly excluded “‘outside’ human and divine law” (51). As is clearly shown in Agamben’s argumentation, Arne De Boever thus stresses bare life is neither zoē nor bios (“Bare Life” 30). Although Nicholas Heron agrees with Boever that bare life is not “a natural life” nor “a politically qualified life,” he more astutely distinguishes one more difference: nor does it mean “a natural life become political (in Foucault’s sense)” (“Biopolitics” 38). This is determining for Agamben’s renewed approach to the relation between life and the entire political system, in all the most ancient and contemporary way. In other words, the life of this sacred figure is not merely, as Foucauldian thesis proclaims, “the inclusion of zoē in the polis” (Homo Sacer 9). It is, rather, “an inclusive exclusion of zoē in the polis” (7). To briefly conclude, the political order excludes bare life from the human law, and it has already by this very command captured bare life within the law. Bare life presents itself as “what is included by means of an exclusion” (7). Bare life as “an inclusive exclusion” is abandoned in the state of law’s exception. At this point, we miss the core if we fail to query the prior stage before life is bared, or at least what processes are involved in the inclusion and the exclusion, if “life” even before politicization is.

(29) 23. always already irreversibly bare. In order to deal with zoē, bios, and bare life, I resort to the founding texts of the modern democratic republic which, Agamben thinks, most evidently represent the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political system of the nation-state (Homo Sacer 127). Alluding to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, especially the first three articles,1 Agamben maintains, “the very natural life that…is placed at the foundation of the order vanishes into the figure of the citizen, in whom rights are ‘preserved’” (127). The human being plays “the immediately vanishing ground (who must never come to light as such)” of the subject of the citizen (128). Ryan Hansen continues to explain, “zoē becomes the immediate bearer of sovereignty” (“Messianic or Apocalyptic?” 200) such that “the principle of nativity” and “the principle of sovereignty” merge into “the body of the ‘sovereign subject,’” the foundation that constitutes the nation-state. Attribution of the sovereignty effectively dissolves the distinction between natural life, life as men were born to be, and politically proper life, life as a citizen (Griffiths 181). All in all, there can exist “no interval of separation” between a man and a citizen, between birth and nation (Homo Sacer 128). To tackle it another way, at the instant of giving way to nation, birth is subsumed under the heading of the subject of political power, which is invested—as a repay—with the right of citizenship. The right of citizenship and the other concomitant rights, as the Declaration guarantees, will be “preserved” and protected, if and only if one bears the identitarian registers as a citizen. Considering the absorption of zoē into bios to be as intrinsic to the state as problematic, Paul Griffiths makes extremely incisive comments, 1. The first article: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” A famous formulation is found in La Fayette’s project: “Every man is born with inalienable and indefeasible rights.” The second article: “The goal of every political association is the preservation of the natural and indefeasible rights of man.” And the third article: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation” (qtd in Homo Sacer 127-28)..

(30) 24. [W]hen the fact of being human is effectively collapsed into the fact of being a citizen, then should one fail to become a citizen, or having been one cease to be one, one becomes thereby not just stateless but also, and much more disturbingly, effectively nonhuman, a bearer of a life to which anything at all can be done. (“The Cross as the Fulcrum of Politics” 181) Again, the state at one’s birth enforces the entry of his zoē into bios, since then he is included into the political structure. Bios presumably is the only life recognizable by the juridico-political sphere. As Griffiths sharply notes that, “only citizens truly live, only citizens are human” (182). Namely, if one loses bios qua everything as a citizen within the state, he loses all. He is in this way excluded from the law. Once deprived of the protection of the law, not only can one be stripped of all the juridical qualifications, but his life also can be taken by anyone with impunity, indeed, all without any law’s authority or mediation. This process of exclusion does not allow bios to regress back to zoē, for natural life is irrecoverably forever lost. But rather, this is how bare life—an inclusive exclusion—is generated in its exceptional nature.. Let’s turn back to the double meanings of sacredness in terms of homo sacer’s killing. As life is banned from the law’s jurisdiction, life is made bare in the state of law’s exception where the law’s commandment on murder is suspended. In a consequence, life, which normally in a state cannot be killed, paradoxically regains the potentiality to be killed in the exception. Now, we at last attain a complete understanding of the word “can”: on the one hand, the life of homo sacer can be legally permitted to be taken, and on the other hand, it has the capability to be killed. Such an exceedingly bare life, which can be ignored, starved, tortured, imprisoned,.

(31) 25. and slaughtered, is manifested in Life & Times. In the Jakkalsdrif camp, roughly at the same time, when Michal K ceases working with his labour exploited so cheap, he starts to doubt the justice of being locked up in the camp. He even argues with the guard about the possibility to leave: “So can you open the gate?” said K. “The only way to leave is with the work party,” said the guard. “And if I climb the fence? What will you do if I climb the fence?” “You climb the fence and I’ll shoot you, I swear to God I won’t think twice, so don’t try.” K caressed the wire as if weighing the risk…. “You climb the fence and I’ll shoot you dead, mister. No hard feelings. I’m just telling you.” (85) It is obvious that Michael K’s life is wholly bereft of political protection of the law. For the guard, it is so easy and rightful to fire the gun and kill him, if Michael K trespasses the fence. Life as such is bare life, which Agamben conceives of as existing, for example, in the stateless, the salves, the refugees, the asylum seekers and, like what we encounter here, the inhabitants of the camps. Before Michael K is imprisoned in the camp, there is a moment when the law of the state declares his bareness. On the outskirts of the town, Michael K stops at a roadblock and several police vehicles and people clustered densely around them. The policeman asks Michael K to present his document. “Permit?” “I lost it.” “Right. Wait there.” The policeman pointed with his baton. “I don’t want to stop, I don’t have time,” K whispered. Could they.

(32) 26. smell fear on him? Someone gripped his arm. He baulked, like a beast at the shambles….The policeman with the dog made an impatient gesture. Shoved forward, K walked the last paces himself and entered captivity, his fellows shuffling aside as if to avoid contamination. He clasped the box and looked back into the yellow eyes of the dog. (40-41) Without the formal document that can prove Michael K as a legal subject, the policeman all at once revokes his citizenship, as if having Michael K cast off the garb of the proper qualities of political life. This transformation reflects the so-called good life (eu zēn) degrading to life (zēn). The opposition of these two kinds of life, based on Aristotelian definition, rests upon the polis, ie., an undertaking of citizenship work. This opposition, to which Agamben alerts us, is “at the same time an implication of [the second] in [the first], of bare life in politically qualified life” (Homo Sacer 7). Described as “a beast at the shambles,” analogously, Michael K as a human-citizen seems to receive a death penalty and would thereby, start to “live” as a non-human. Once discarding “the additional capacity for political existence,”2 Michael K’s life is laid so bare that it is nothing more than that of an animal, say, here, a dog with the yellow eyes. People at the check point are divided into two groups: with, or without permits. Michael K as bare life—without the legal certificate—results in being excluded and detained in a labor camp. A more striking example allows us to see an intensification of how bare a life can be. There is an account of an accident, which is caused by an explosion of a welding shop. That leads to an uncontrollable fire and ruins nearby buildings, as well as the town’s cultural history museum. The authorities believe the camp people are Agamben alludes to Foucault who in his The History of Sexuality states that man, for Aristotle, is “a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence” (Homo Sacer 7). 2.

(33) 27. implicated in an act of arson. With the captain Oosthuizen as the lead, the police in a squad strike the Jakkalsdrif at dawn: [T]hey moved down the rows pulling out the pegs, collapsing the tents, beating at the shapes struggling in the folds…Half-dressed, some wailing, some praying, some stunned with fear, men, women and children were herded on to the open terrain before the huts and ordered to sit down. From there, under the eyes of dogs and men with cocked guns, they watched while the rest of the squad moved like a swarm of locusts through the lines of tents, turning them inside out, hurling everything they had contained into the open, emptying suitcases and boxes, till the site looked like a trash-heap, with clothes, bedding, food, cooking utensils, crockery, toiletries scattered everywhere; after a while they moved on to the huts and turned them to chaos too. (90) This brutal crackdown seems to dramatically undergo “a stripping away of predicates[,]…attributes” and the possessions, through which bare life of the campers “becomes visible” (Durantaye 203). The police searches and empties everything out of the tents, suitcases and boxes, and dump the refuse, almost, everything in their eyes in the open. The police wreak dreadful havoc. But what is more uneasy, for one thing, is the invasion of the political persecution into the private realm. They turn what the inhabitants contain inside out. In this way, they dismantle the boundary, and pass toward a threshold where the inside and outside are indistinguishable. For another, human beings there are denuded of human markers like freedom, individuality, and dignity.3 In the gesture of their belongings being thrown, deserted, and destroyed,. 3. Later the captain Oosthuizen announces and revokes rights for some other activities: “I’m putting my own men on guard, and I’m locking the gates, and if my men see any of you, man, woman or child, outside the wire, they have orders to shoot, no questions asked! No one leaves the camp except on labour calls. No visits, no outings, no picnics. Roll-calls morning and evening, with everyone present to.

(34) 28. they lose some form of life, and end up as something paltry in formless “shapes struggling in the folds.” As Eva Geulen4 says of bare life, “naked or bare (and bared) life is…what remains after the withdrawal of all forms5” (qtd in Durantaye 82; my emphasis). I argue that the life in the camp (bare life) consists of what remains of life as depicted in the text. After the search is declared over at midday, we witness “the people of Jakkalsdrif scratch in the mess for their belongings” (93). In a word, the proper form of life evaporates; what remains is only the content of life, composed of what they scratch from the trash-heap. A camp is a site of refuses, wastes, rubbishes, which are disposed of, gathered and restored. Continuing these two aspects, I would also like to point out, life as portrayed in the Jakkalsdrif ravage, is not simply subjugated under surveillance, “under the eyes of dogs and men,” but reduced to a mere physically living being aimed by the “cocked guns.” A sovereign decision to pull the trigger or not makes its object the life and death of a human being—or, to be more precise, of a bodily living being. Here at the Jakkalsdrif camp, what confronts us is Agamben’s symmetrical pairing of bare life and the sovereignty. “Just do what you’re told” (42): The Sovereign A command by the overseer when Michael K labors along the Touws River to clear the railway track. As we would commonly read Life & Times in association with the Nazi concentration camps, this command has a considerable bearing on the Führerprinzip, the leader principle. This principle can be most succinctly comprehended as “the Führer's word is above all written law.”6 It prescribes that all. answer” (92). 4 Eva Geulens’ work is the first book-lenth study of Agamben, according to Durantaye (10). 5 Leland de la Durantaye in “Chapter Six: The Potential of Paradigms” traces the trajectory of the term “bare life,” first employed by Walter Benjamin, and later appropriated in Agamben’s works. Geulen’s interpretation of Benjamin’s assertion of bare life is particularly highlighted. The translation is Durantaye’s. For Geulen’s work, see Work Cited. 6 See “Means Used by the Nazi Conspirators in Gaining Control of the German State” http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/resource/document/DOCNAC3.htm..

(35) 29. the governmental policies and decisions ought to be committed toward the completion of the leader’s order. This is precisely how Hitler fortified the political authority under the reign of the Third Reich. Especially after he suspended the constitution of the Weimar Republic on February 28, 1933, the status of citizens can be randomly and legally determined by his dictatorial fiat. From this case, we see “the sovereign stands outside the juridical order and, nevertheless, belongs to it” (Homo Sacer 15). The law grants the sovereign the legal power to suspend the validity of the law itself by proclaiming a state of exception. The sovereign, while declaring that “there is nothing outside the law,” legally situates himself outside the law (15). What is at issue in the sovereignty is, according to Agamben, the very state of law’s exception and, along with it, the very condition of the juridical rule in the realm of the normal case. It is how the law “establish[es] a relation with what is outside relation (the nonrelational)” that we should now turn to (19). “[T]here is a war on!” (138): The State of Exception Following the logic of sovereignty we have discussed above, what calls our attention in Life & Times is that when the sovereign of South Africa declared a state of exception, the declaration announced a legal suspension of the law. All this is constitutional and legislated. For Agamben, the law is “applied in disapplying itself” (The Times That Remains 105) (from now on “The Times”). Sharing the concern for the paradox here, Griffiths reads Agamben and underscores, “In legislating a state of exception, the law erases itself with its own hand, but remains visible under the act of erasure” (“The Cross as the Fulcrum of Politics” 182). Thus the law in its lawlessness “includes…that which is rejected from itself” (The Times 105). Thus juridical claims can still be applied to what lies outside the realm of law. Nothing, apparently, is outside the law. Seeing the blurring boundaries, Agamben absolutizes this.

(36) 30. “indeterminacy between inside and outside” as the first and foremost principle of the state of exception (105). The second principle of the state of exception features the indistinction between observance and transgression of the law. As Agamben elaborates, when the enforcement of the law is carried out in its suspension, the behavior which in a normal condition appears to be in accordance with the law, once placed in this exceptional state, is very likely to imply a violation. And conversely, the transgression could even possibly be viewed as law-abiding acts. Simply walking on the street can be confused with a transgression, in the case of a curfew, for instance. One day before Michael K reaches Prince Albert, he finds himself shrouded within a desolate landscape of a town, an empty town which has far earlier been deserted with all the shops and roadhouses closed down. Against a murky night sky, in front of a window display Michael K stands. Yet this simply standing which, on the point of infringement, is not allowed because “[i]t’s curfew when the bell goes,” as a stranger7 reminds him. To Michael K he strongly suggests, “You’d better get off the street” (47). Here we see, though without the author’s literal and detailed depictions of the historical background, “the sirens” and “the curfew” for Michael K as well as for readers, herald the threshold of emergency (8, 47). This unobservability of the norm gives rise to the unformulability of the law. Agamben marks it as the third principle of exception, in which the law neither orders nor prohibits anything. With no new prohibitions and duties, the status of the law confounds the separation between what is licit and what is illicit. Agamben rephrases the thought further, emphasizing that the exception other than the norm is, in effect, the essence that “defines the proper functioning and structure of the law” (The Times 7. The stranger is the one who in the novel invites Michael K to spend a night with his family. He is the same man who tells Michael K that people should help each other (48)..