On South African violence through Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical framework: A comparative study of J.M. Coetzee’s "Disgrace" and Z. Mda’s "Ways of Dying"
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Date
2014
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
In this article I argue that the developments of countries going through transition from
authoritarian to democratic rule are always stamped by numerous references to formerly
sanctioned and fully operational institutionalized violence. A perfect exemplification of this
phenomenon is [post-] apartheid South Africa and its writing. In the context of the above, both the
social and the literary realm of the 1990s might be perceived as resonant with Giorgio Agamben’s
‘concentrationary’, deeply divisive imaginary. Escaping from, and concurrently remembering,
past fears, anxieties, yet seeking hope and consolation, the innocent but also the formerly
outlawed and victimized along [interestingly enough] with [ex]perpetrators exemplify, as
discussed in J. M. Coetzee’s and Z. Mda’s novels, the necessity of an exposure of the mechanism
of South African ‘biopoliticization’ of life. Their stories prove how difficult the uprooting of the
mentality of segregation, hatred and the policy of bracketing the other’s life as insubstantial, thus
vulnerable to instrumental violence, in [post-] apartheid society was. In view of the above what is
to be highlighted here is the authorial perception of various attempts at disavowing past and
present violence as detrimental to South African habitat. In the end, coming to terms with the
past, with the belligerent nature of local mental maps, must inevitably lead to the
acknowledgement of guilt and traumatic suffering. Individual and collective amnesia conditioned
by deeply-entrenched personal culpability or personal anguish is then construed as damaging, and
as such is subject do deconstructive analysis.
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Keywords
bare life, [post-] apartheid novel, violence, Giorgio Agamben, the other
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 49.4 (2014), pp. 21-36