States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel: Martel, Eugenides, Coetzee, Sebald 9781472542786

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To my parents—for life, love, and language

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book developed out of a PhD dissertation that I wrote at Columbia University. As such, the fi nal manuscript could not have come about without the advice I received from my dissertation sponsor, Bruce Robbins, and from my second and third readers, Stathis Gourgouris and Patricia Dailey. I am also grateful for the comments I received from Eduardo Cadava and Brent Edwards during the dissertation defense. Maura Spiegel supported me during the initial stages of the dissertation project and helped me keep things in perspective throughout, until the submission of the dissertation. I have presented earlier versions of chapters from this book at workshops at Columbia, and I am very grateful to my colleagues in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society for their comments. Each of these chapters has also been presented at international conferences around the world, and I would like to thank the organizers, panelists, and audiences at these conferences for discussing my work with me. A very early, very different version of Chapter 4 was published in a book titled Discourses of Violence—Violence of Discourses: Critical Interventions, Transgressive Readings, and Post-National Negotiations. I am grateful to the editors of this volume for including my work in it. An altered excerpt of Chapter 3 became part of an article titled “Feminism After Rancière: Women in J.M. Coetzee and Jeff Wall” that was published in the online, open access journal Transformations. My initial move to the United States was made possible through the support I received from the Belgian American Educational Foundation and the Francqui Foundation. Throughout my doctoral studies, I was supported by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia. A 2007–08 Reid Hall Fellowship for research in France enabled me to fi nish my fourth chapter, and a version of

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the entire dissertation, in Paris. I learned much about this book by teaching “Contemporary Civilization” in the Core Curriculum at Columbia during the final year of my graduate studies. The book was completed at the California Institute of the Arts, where I benefited greatly from discussions with my colleagues in the School of Critical Studies and the MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics. I want to thank in particular Maggie Nelson, Martín Plot, Janet Sarbanes, James Wiltgen, and Nancy Wood for moving my thoughts on this project forward. I am also grateful to Alecia Menzano, our senior administrator, for assistance with the cover image, and more. To the artists in my courses on September 11 and the novel: I have learned much from your questions and comments, and I could never do the solitary work of writing if it were not for the opportunities you have given me to share my thoughts. My fi nal thanks are to Olivia Harrison, who has lived through the emergencies of this book with me. More often than not, I am surprised to wake up and see she is still there.

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Introduction: Decision time . . . the form of aesthetic production . . . knows no decision. —CARL SCHMITT, Political Theology1

September 11 and the aesthetic decision The September 11 terror attacks placed the entirety of human existence on thin ice. After the impact of the fi rst plane, when the images of the burning north tower started coming through, America still “thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history.”2 Once the second plane hit, however, people realized that what they were witnessing was no accident: “the second plane meant the end of everything,” as Martin Amis put it. “[I]ts glint was the worldflash of a coming future.”3 Watching recordings of the burning north tower and the advent of the second plane online today, and listening to the voice-over commentary of newscasters and private individuals, it becomes strikingly clear that it is only after the impact of the second plane that September 11 became “September 11.”4 Before that, one was merely witnessing the unfolding of a terrible accident in

1

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 35. 2 Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (Toronto: Knopf, 2008), 3. 3 Ibid. 4 Various public and private recordings are available on YouTube.

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time; with the second plane, a sense of purpose was revealed, and with that, the event entered into the realm of history. That does not mean, however, that 9/11 had entered into the realm of knowledge. On the contrary, it was precisely after America gained this sense of purpose—after it realized that this was no accident, but planned—that the nation’s non-knowledge of what was going on became more and more palpable, and more and more frustrating. As soon as the second plane had hit, there came the desire to know: who was behind this attack? Immediately, there also arose another question: how will America retaliate? With the arrival of the second plane, one felt, more so than before, the need for a decision, the necessity of a decision of some kind that would punish those who were responsible for it (like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, America could obviously not undo the terrible crime that had been committed).5 More than ten years after the event, it is becoming increasingly clear that the 9/11 terror attacks produced an era of crises, emergencies, and exceptions, of which we are yet to see the end.6 In such apocalyptic times, the need for decisions—political, ethical, and even aesthetic—has become more and more pressing. Recalling Theodor Adorno’s oft-quoted statement that “[t]o write poetry 5 I am referring to the famous ninth thesis of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where Benjamin writes: “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” (Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 257–8). 6 Of course, the contemporary era of crisis includes much more than just 9/11, and I would not want to give the impression that 9/11 alone can be used to characterize our time as a time of emergency. To do so would mean to Americanize a globe that is, obviously, much more diverse. For an overview of various states of emergency in our time, see Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, eds, Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010).

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after Auschwitz is barbaric,”7 Martin Amis wondered in a short piece published in The Guardian in 2002 whether novelists would still be able to write fiction after 9/11. As author Siri Hustvedt in an autobiographical piece titled “9/11, or One Year Later” recalls, it was not just that artists were rethinking their work after 9/11; for many, it was also a question of how they were to go on living after having witnessed and/or survived such a momentous event.8 Finally, but not unrelated to the previous two questions, there was the question of politics: how was the United States, as a sovereign nation-state, going to respond to this attack? Decisions were needed in all of these realms—aesthetics, ethics, and politics. But which decisions? How is one to decide—and to decide wisely—in a state of crisis? We now know, to give just one example, that the political decision to engage in a war against Iraq after 9/11 was not a wise decision. Psychoanalysis has had much to say about how one is to go on living in the aftermath of trauma. In the ethical realm as well, not all “decisions”—if this term can still be used when discussing trauma—are wise. In response to the question whether one can still write fiction after 9/11, Amis answers with a resounding yes. One should note, however, that he theorizes the novel in the same essay as a form of “reason at play.”9 This association of the novel to reason enables him to oppose the novel to religion, which in his essay ends up taking the blame for the 9/11 attacks: “Religious belief is without reason and without dignity,” he rants, “and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.”10 Amis decides for the novel—but one can have one’s doubts about whether his decision, and in particular, its motivation, is wise. This book sets out to investigate the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of a number of decisions represented in novels that were published around September 11, 2001. I should probably note from

7 Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 34. 8 Siri Hustvedt, “9/11, or One Year Later,” A Plea for Eros (New York: Picador, 2006), 119–30. 9 Amis, Second Plane, 13. 10 Ibid., 14.

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the get-go, however, that none of these novels explicitly deals with the events of 9/11. Although this book is thus very much a work of literary criticism for the post-9/11 era, it is not an investigation into that subgenre of the novel that emerged in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, the so-called September 11 novel. I can refer readers who are interested in the latter to Kristiaan Versluys’ Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel, which covers this particular aspect of post-9/11 literary production.11 This book, by contrast, adopts a different perspective by looking, more generally, at novels published around 2001 that represent crisis situations. It focuses on how characters or narrators in these novels decide in response to these situations. In my readings of the novels, I will be interested specifically in what I call “aesthetic decisions.”12 Although this phrase resonates with Immanuel Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment—a judgment of aesthetic value that would, through reflective contemplation, rise above personal preference—I have something quite different in mind when I speak of an “aesthetic decision.” By this notion, I mean a decision taken with respect to an aesthetic situation or state, a regime of representation—in short: a particular aesthetic. Which aesthetics do the characters and narrators in the novels that I look at adopt in a situation of crisis? I am particularly interested in how these aesthetic decisions relate to other ethical and political decisions represented in the novels. I show that the aesthetic decisions taken in each of the novels represent profound challenges 11 See Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 12 After I came up with this term, I discovered that artist and art theorist Jack Burnham had already used it in his critical and theoretical writings from the late 1960s and early 1970s to refer to a type of decision-making that does not operate according to “fixed rules.” Burnham notes in an essay originally published in Artforum that for this reason, the Pentagon became interested in the aesthetic: because it was interested in a type of military decision that would not operate according to fixed rules. Given the Pentagon’s investment in netwars and in the logic of the preemptive strike today (see Samuel Weber, Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005)), one can only admire the prophetic quality of Burnham’s analysis. At the end of this Introduction, I will also take issue, however, with the reductive understanding of the aesthetic that the Pentagon’s interest in the “aesthetic decision” reveals (see Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Lisa Jevbratt, University of California, Santa Barbara, http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/jevbratt/ readings/burnham_se.html).

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to the ethical and political decisions that are also present in the novels. What can these aesthetic decisions enable us to understand about these other decisions?

The chapters My first chapter is about a novel that very few readers probably perceived to be a political novel: Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. The novel tells the story of how a young boy named Piscine Molitor Patel survived for 227 days in a lifeboat at sea in the company of a fullgrown Bengal tiger after the ship that was supposed to take him and his family as well as some of his father’s zoo animals from India to Canada sank. I argue that the aesthetic decision of the novel’s anonymous author to include in the novel two radically different testimonies of what happened to Pi during his time at sea produces an allegorical “undecidability” that challenges other, much more “decisive” but deeply problematic ethical and political decisions taken elsewhere in the novel: fi rst of all, Pi’s ethical decision to deny the animal, inhuman side of his life; and, secondly, Indira Gandhi’s decision to declare a state of emergency, which is the political situation with which Life of Pi begins. The author’s aesthetic decision and the novel’s allegorical mode of representation challenge the “decisionist” nature of these other ethical and political decisions. In Chapter 2 , I show how Cal Stephanides, the narrator of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, adopts an autobiographical mode of narration that hovers between fact and fiction and is much more effective in terms of representing Cal’s ambiguous sex, sexuality, and gender than his ethical decision—featured prominently in the novel—to go through life as a man. Cal’s aesthetic decision to adopt a mode of representation that is able to do justice to his life’s ambiguous nature becomes particularly relevant when it is read next to the novel’s evocative representation of the precarious situation of Cal’s refugee grandparents in the opening chapters of the novel: this is because Cal’s decision stands in stark contrast to the decision taken by the legal and political orders represented in those chapters to protect only those who are their citizens, and who qualify as humans. Cal’s aesthetic decision will allow me to draw out some of the problematic aspects of rights and human rights politics that are revealed in these chapters.

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My third chapter continues these investigations from a slightly different angle: it looks at how novelist J. M. Coetzee’s decision to narrate his novel Disgrace by focalizing—“relentlessly,” as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has put it13 —through the character of David Lurie, in fact brings to the fore Lurie’s daughter Lucy’s decision not to take the case of her rape to court. Coetzee’s aesthetic decision to thus draw the reader’s attention to the situation of a white, lesbian woman in a predominantly black part of South Africa becomes particularly loaded in the context of postapartheid South Africa in which the novel is set, specifically when it is read against the background of the Truth and Reconciliation processes that were ongoing in South Africa as the novel was published. This became obvious when Disgrace “caused irritation among a number of members of the governing African National Congress and controversial debates in parliament.”14 Studying Coetzee’s aesthetic decision, which is mirrored in the closing chapter of the novel by an aesthetic decision taken by Lurie while he is composing his opera about Lord Byron, will allow me to raise important questions about South Africa’s new national sovereignty born out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. My fourth chapter, fi nally, looks at the ways in which in W. G. Sebald’s testimonial fiction Austerlitz, the narrator’s aesthetic decision to include images within the text of the novel’s fictional testimony does not necessarily contribute (as some have suggested) to the process of uncovering the past that the novel represents. The narrator’s aesthetic decision risks, rather, to be complicit with the political decision—the Endlösung —by which the novel is haunted, because the inclusion of images risks to infect the testimony with a spectrality that would deny the survivor (Jacques Austerlitz) his actual body.15 Geoffrey Hartman considers this denial to be characteristic of the logic of the camps. However, this complicity of the image with the camp is challenged by another aesthetic decision

13 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” Diacritics 32, nos 3–4 (2002): 22. 14 Harald Leusman. “J.M. Coetzee’s Cultural Critique,” World Literature Today 78, nos 3–4 (2004): 60. 15 There is only one image of Austerlitz that is included in the book—it is featured on the cover of the English translation that I am working on for this book—and it is a very spectral one indeed.

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represented in the novel, namely, Jacques Austerlitz’ decision during his archival work to “speed up” or “slow down” the evidence that he comes across so that its spectrality is unworked and its grainy materiality is exposed. I argue that this decision to read against the grain challenges the politics of spectrality that haunts a number of recent theorizations of testimony (most notably, by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben) as well as Sebald’s novel and the camps.

Schmitt, Hobbes, Benjamin, Burnham Taken together, the four chapters thus defy Carl Schmitt’s statement, quoted at the beginning of this Introduction, that the “form of aesthetic production . . . knows no decision.” Schmitt—perhaps the most important theorist of the decision in the twentieth century—makes this apodictic statement at the end of the second chapter of his book Political Theology, titled “The Problem of Sovereignty as the Problem of the Legal Form and of the Decision.” This chapter ends with a discussion of the political theorist Thomas Hobbes.16 Hobbes is praised there as “a classical representative of the decisionist type [of juristic scientific thought]”17 with which Schmitt, from the famous opening sentence of his book—“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”18 —had aligned himself. Unlike the other scholars discussed in the chapter—Kelsen, Krabbe, Wolzendorff, and (in the German edition from 1922) Erich Kauffmann—Hobbes is praised because he understood what Schmitt throughout the chapter calls “the problem of legal form,” and specifically of the “decision.” This is because Hobbes understood that “autoritas, non veritas facit legem” (“authority, not truth makes law”) and because he “advanced a decisive argument that connected this type of decisionism with personalism and rejected all attempts to substitute an abstractly valid order for a 16 Schmitt would return to Hobbes later on in his career, most extensively in an antisemitic text dating from 1938 entitled The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 17 Schmitt, Political Theology, 33. 18 Ibid., 5.

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concrete sovereignty of the state.”19 For Hobbes, it makes no sense to subordinate state power to spiritual power, because doing so would mean, in practice, that “the one who possesses power is subordinate to the other who possesses power”20 —in other words, it does not explain the problem of the legal form and of the decision, of who decides (state power? or spiritual power?). To explain the latter, one needs a type of thought that would do justice to “the concrete decision, one that emanates from a particular authority.”21 In such a thought of the decision, “the subject of the decision has an independent meaning, apart from the question of content.” “What matters for the reality of legal life,” Schmitt writes, “is who decides.”22 Schmitt’s discussion of Hobbes reveals very clearly what Schmitt means by the phrase “juristic form.” The juristic form is associated with a specific kind of subject position that is independent from content; this is the position of the particular authority that decides. As Schmitt states in the closing lines of the chapter, the phrase “particular authority” refers to a particular person who takes up the position of the decider. Juristic form thus “does not have the a priori emptiness of the transcendental form.”23 Schmitt points out that it is not like “the form of technical precision” either, “because the latter has a goal-oriented interest that is essentially material and impersonal [ein wesentlich sachliches, unpersöhnliches Zweckinteresse].”24 Finally, he writes that juristic form “is also not the form of aesthetic production, because the latter knows no decision [Sie ist endlich auch nicht die Form der ästhetischen Gestaltung, die eine Dezision nicht kennt].”25 In his next chapter, which begins with that other famous sentence from the book— “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”26 —Schmitt reveals what type of form he does consider juristic form to be similar to: theological

19

Ibid., 33. Ibid. 21 Ibid., 34. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 35. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 36. 20

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form. Political Theology argues that the juristic form comes about through the secularization of theological form: “The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.”27 Schmitt thus uncovers an isomorphy28 between the theological and political. In his typical style, Schmitt rejects the form of aesthetic production at the end of this chapter because it “knows no decision.” At no point in Political Theology, however, does Schmitt explain why this would be the case. Presumably, it is because the aesthetic does not know the position of an absolute decider that is theorized in the work by Hobbes (and Schmitt). Schmitt rejects the aesthetic as a realm of analysis because it does not know such a position; in this sense, the aesthetic is defi ned as the opposite of the political. Whereas the political is defi ned as the realm that knows the decision, the aesthetic is defi ned as the realm that does not know it. The aesthetic is turned into the realm of nondecision in Schmitt’s book, and thus into the enemy of the political. Although much has already been said about the political disagreements between Schmitt and Walter Benjamin about Benjamin’s notion of “divine violence” and Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty, 29 it has not yet been noted that Benjamin thus seems to have agreed with Schmitt that the aesthetic does not know a decision. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he gives this statement a particular twist by arguing that indecisiveness is the characteristic feature of the sovereign in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German tragic drama. Schmitt was right to say that the aesthetic does not know a decision, but this is precisely what constitutes its political element; Schmitt was also wrong, in other words, to separate the aesthetic and the political on this count. Thus, Benjamin’s study helpfully reintroduces the aesthetic into an argument about sovereignty and decisionism from which Schmitt had previously

27

Ibid. I would like to thank Martín Plot for suggesting I use this term to describe the similarity that Schmitt sees between the theological and the political. 29 See Samuel Weber, “ ‘Taking Exception to Decision’: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt,” Enlightenments: Encounters Between Critical Theory and Contemporary French Thought, ed. Harry Kunneman and Hent de Vries (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1993), 141–61; Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 28

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banned it. It should also be noted, however, that Benjamin thus also appears to preserve Schmitt’s theory of the aesthetic as the realm that knows no decision. His most famous development of it would then be his theory of allegory, as explained in the third part of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, which theorizes allegorical representation in opposition to symbolic representation as an indecisive mode of representation that (unlike the symbolic) never establishes a full passage from one realm of signification to another. When dealing with allegory, one is instead always oscillating between two realms, amidst the ruins of such a passage, haunted by the incapacity to decide whether one fi nds oneself within the one or the other. Appears, would: although such a theory of allegory might at fi rst sight appear to preserve Schmitt’s statement that the aesthetic knows no decision, it can also be read as a remarkable critique of Schmitt’s Political Theology, in the sense that it uses Schmitt’s insights about the political–theological nature of sovereignty in order to undermine, precisely, Schmitt’s decisionist theory of sovereignty and of the legal form. When Schmitt writes, at the beginning of the third chapter of his book, that “[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” and that the jurisprudential notion of the exception is nothing but a secularized version of the theological notion of the miracle, this raises many questions about the precise, decisive nature of the notion of the exception/the miracle: is it a political notion? Is it a theological notion? Schmitt’s point appears to be that it is both, that is, the exception and the miracle are political– theological notions. If one takes this argument seriously, however, and considers it from the perspective of Benjamin’s theory of allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, one would have to recognize that Schmitt thus appears to theorize the notion of the exception/the miracle as an allegorical, and more generally aesthetic, notion. It is a notion that, like Benjamin’s allegory, perpetually oscillates between the political and the theological. It is, quite simply, impossible to decide whether it fi xedly belongs to one or to the other. This would mean, after all is said and done, that Schmitt’s political theological theory of sovereignty is, from Benjamin’s perspective, an allegorical, aesthetic theory of sovereignty that undermines precisely the decisionist theory of sovereignty that Schmitt

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is trying to get across. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” Schmitt writes, but sovereignty itself is a political–theological notion about which one cannot at any time decide whether it is a political or a theological notion. Sovereignty itself is therefore not sovereign, or at least not sovereign in the way in which Schmitt defi ned it. Defi ned by the decision, it is simultaneously riddled by aesthetic indecisiveness. This still leaves one with two major questions: does the aesthetic really not know a decision? And, if we follow Benjamin’s critique of Schmitt, is this really what constitutes its political value? Indecisiveness? Is that what humanity needs after September 11? As will already be clear from what I wrote above, this is not the position that I defend in this book. Instead, I show that the aesthetic knows a decision, and a very specific kind of decision—the aesthetic decision. Although this type of decision is not opposed to the undecidability and indecisiveness that I uncover in the novels, it is importantly also not limited to them. Thus, the aesthetic decision pushes beyond both Schmitt’s political–theological notion of the decision and Benjamin’s aesthetic notion of indecisiveness. In that, my notion of the aesthetic decision follows Jacques Derrida’s attempts in this respect to theorize a notion of the decision that is not opposed to undecidability but can only claim to decide, precisely, if it decides the undecidable. Otherwise it is no decision. Derrida’s understanding of the decision thus draws out a certain risk that is associated with it, namely the decision’s constitutive link to the undecidable.30 It is this link, as Derrida knew well, that reveals its particular importance and dangers for this time, in which political decisions are increasingly taken with respect to an undecidable, in the case of a preemptive strike with respect to a time that has not yet occurred.31 The government’s biopolitical drive to increasingly saturate the lives of human beings with power has culminated in a

30

This understanding of the decision recurs throughout Derrida’s work. Most relevant in this context is probably: Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 31 For an excellent discussion of our time with attention to these aspects and a discussion that develops its argument with reference to Derrida’s work on these matters, see the already mentioned: Weber, Targets of Opportunity.

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political world in which the undecidability of life is decided upon, determined, calculated, named, et cetera by the government in the name of a crisis, emergency, or exceptional situation that poses a threat to security. In such a situation, in which power is desperate to exhaust the potentiality of life, one can hardly expect power to remain within the limits of the law and operate according to fi xed rules. Instead, irregularity becomes the tactic of choice, a strategy of unexpected shock and awe that mirrors the roguish behavior of the terrorist-enemy. In an article from 1968 entitled “Systems Esthetics,” artist and art theorist Jack Burnham already remarked that in such a situation in which the exception becomes the rule, even the Pentagon becomes interested in the aesthetic, because it is traditionally perceived as the realm without rule, the realm of exception. Facing the information age, the government perceives, in Burnham’s words, the need for an aesthetic type of decision-making, a type of decision-making that would not be dominated by fi xed rules.32 Burnham’s analysis explains, perhaps, why Carl Schmitt’s The Theory of the Partisan, 33 which Schmitt presented as a commentary or remark on his earlier The Concept of the Political, turns with surprising frequency to the aesthetic along the course of its analysis of the partisan as an irregular fighter who upsets Schmitt’s clearly defi ned categories of friend and enemy. This book argues, however, that to reject or praise the aesthetic as a realm that “knows no decision,” and to ground its political significance or nonsignificance in this assumption, means to perpetuate a reductive understanding of both the aesthetic and the decision—an understanding that Life of Pi, Middlesex, Disgrace, and Austerlitz resist in very powerful ways. The novels explore instead the previously unidentified theoretical object of the aesthetic decision as an aesthetic and a decision that exist on the far side of both Schmittian decisionism and the aesthetic’s hackneyed association with indecisiveness.

32

See Burnham, “Systems Esthetics.” See Carl Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan: A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of the Political, trans. A. C. Goodson (Michigan State University Press, 2004). 33

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1 States of exception in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi Introduction Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi tells the story of how a young, devout Indian boy named Pi Patel survives for 227 days at sea after the ship that was supposed to take him and his parents as well as some of his father’s zoo animals from India to Canada sinks. As if the story of Pi’s survival were not already miraculous enough, the reader is asked to believe that Pi’s companions in the lifeboat were a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutan, and an adult Bengal tiger. Of course, at the very end of the novel, it turns out that the animals in Pi’s survival story might also have been standing for human beings. The criticism that the novel invites would thus seem to be a crossover between animal studies and testimony studies (both of which arguably co-constitute the so-called ethical criticism that emerged in literature departments as part of a broader “ethical turn” during the 1980s and 1990s). And indeed, this crossover is part of what I am going to undertake. But I want to push such a reading into a realm from which the novel at fi rst sight appears to steer clear: politics. Published in September 2001, a date that has entered into our collective memory because of the 9/11 terror attacks, Martel’s novel

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seems to be far removed from the realities of the post-9/11 political world. Indeed, this may be one of the reasons why the novel was so popular. One can imagine critics, such as John Banville or Martin Amis, criticizing the novel for this very reason: the last thing we need from a novel today is the aesthetic ideology that much of post-9/11 fiction in the view of these critics provides.1 I am going to show, however, that Life of Pi ’s interest in animals fits into the novel’s less obvious obsession with sovereignty. Indeed, it is in the topic of sovereignty that Life of Pi ’s interests in animals and religion meet. In what follows, I argue that the novel challenges sovereignty’s relation to both animals (which it internally excludes or excepts from its realm of protection) and religion (sovereignty’s political theology). Life of Pi does so through its use of allegory as a narrative strategy. The novel thus turns into a powerful aesthetic tool, opening up new forms of individual and collective lives.

Political state of exception Imagine, then, that something like the following happens on a ship or on many ships. —PLATO, Republic2

[A] human being is by nature a political animal . . . —ARISTOTLE, Politics3

Although Life of Pi revolves around Pi’s tale of his survival at sea, it is worth noting that this tale—which constitutes the second, middle part of the novel—is preceded by 36 introductory

1

See Martin Amis, “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,” The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (New York: Vintage, 2008), 11–19; John Banville, “A Day in the Life,” review of Saturday, by Ian McEwan. The New York Review of Books 52, no. 9 (2005): 12–14. 2 Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1992), 162. 3 Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1998), 4.

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chapters in which Pi talks about his childhood in India in the mid-1970s, his father’s zoo, and his love for zoology and religion. In these chapters, the novel reveals that the tale of Pi’s survival at sea has a political origin. As Pi notes early on in the novel, the mid-1970s were “troubled times”4 in India. In 1975, after she had been found guilty of using illegal practices during her last election campaign, Indira Gandhi declared a brutal state of emergency in which her political enemies were imprisoned, constitutional rights were suspended, and the press was placed under strict censorship. When Tamil Nadu—the province where Pi’s family lives and one of Gandhi’s “most vocal critics”5 —is brought down by Delhi, Pi’s father decides that he has had enough, and that the family will emigrate. Undemocratic politics are bad for Pi’s father’s business, a zoo. The life of a zoo, like the life of its inhabitants in the wild, is precarious. It is neither big enough a business to be above the law nor small enough to survive on its margins. To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, rule of law, and everything else enshrined in India’s Constitution.6 It is in response to Gandhi’s sovereign suspension of the law that Pi’s family sets sail for Canada. Life of Pi shows, however, that the state of emergency is not so easily left behind. When the cargo liner that is supposed to take Pi from India to Canada sinks, Pi fi nds himself in a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutan, and a tiger. This is where the actual story of Pi’s survival begins. Very soon, the hyena had killed and eaten the zebra and the orangutan. After the tiger kills and eats the hyena, we are down to Pi and the tiger. It does not take much of a political theorist to recognize in this situation what has been called a “state of nature,” a situation or state before the constitution of a legal and political order in which human beings

4

Yann Martel, Life of Pi (Orlando: Harcourt, 2001), 78. Ibid. 6 Ibid., 79. 5

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are like animals to each other and have not quite made true on Aristotle’s defi nition of the human being as a “political” animal yet. Given that a state of nature, unlike Pi’s state, is technically supposed to precede —in other words: be chronologically prior to —law and politics, the term “state of exception” might be more precise to describe Pi’s situation.7 Unlike a state of nature, a state of exception is a situation or state in which the legal and political order has disintegrated and become dissolved. With Pi, the reader fi nds her- or himself in a lifeboat situation, a situation in which a human being is stripped of all legal and political protections, and is confronting her or his life-world from scratch, outside of the usual guarantees of rights and regulations. How does Pi respond to such a full-blown situation of crisis? At fi rst, he considers his fate to have been irrevocably sealed: in a state of nature—more precisely, a state of exception—in which, as the seventeenth-century fabulist Jean de la Fontaine knew well, “the strong are always best at proving they’re right,”8 Pi’s precarious human life does not stand much of a chance against an adult Bengal tiger. In addition, if for some reason the tiger were not to turn Pi into his “midday snack,”9 there is still a high chance that Pi will die of hunger and thirst before he is saved. In the state of exception in which Pi has landed, his life is thus reduced to a life that comes in close proximity to death, to a life that is barely alive, that is virtually already dead, and has entered into a zone of indistinction between life and death. Very soon, however, Pi also becomes aware of a certain potential that is liberated in this state of exception. He realizes that through the good use of his reason and of his imagination, he might be able to gain the upper hand over the tiger: he might be able to establish a kind of rule over the tiger that would prevent him from being killed and eaten. And so, by providing the tiger with food and drink and by taming him through spinning the lifeboat around so that the animal turns seasick, Pi is able to overcome the state of nature/state of exception in which he is caught 7

On this count, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 105. 8 Jean de la Fontaine qtd. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), x. 9 Ibid.

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up: he implements a state of government that will enable him to survive for 227 days at sea. Pi’s survival tale thus reads like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe all over again. It is through the application of the modern, zoological principles that are expounded in the fi rst part of the book— principles that Pi’s father, a zookeeper, applied with extraordinary success in his zoo—that Pi is able to survive. Once again, modernity and its principles of organization, calculation, and regulation conquer over premodern chaos. Pi—whose full name is Piscine Molitor Patel, and who was named after a pool in Paris called the Piscine Molitor, “the crowning aquatic glory of Paris, indeed, of the entire civilized world”10 —does justice to his name and brings the light of modern civilization to this lifeboat situation. Although at fi rst sight, Pi’s act of instituting a rule over the tiger might appear to be the opposite of Gandhi’s act of suspending the Indian constitution, Life of Pi also shows these two acts to be related. For both Pi’s institution of the law and Gandhi’s suspension of it are executed from the same structural position, namely from the vantage point of a sovereign who takes up a paradoxical place inside/outside the law. That does not mean, of course, that Pi’s and Gandhi’s political acts are identical; what it does reveal, however, is a complicity between Pi and Gandhi that deserves further investigation. Both Gandhi and Pi fi nd themselves in a crisis situation in which a decision needs to be taken. Gandhi decides to declare a state of emergency in which the constitution is temporarily suspended so as to maintain order and guarantee the survival of the state. Pi decides to declare a state of rule, of government, so as to guarantee not only his own survival but also that of the tiger. One could read Pi’s decision as a variant of contract theory that, because it establishes a relation of government between a human being and a tiger, can be said to target, for example, Thomas Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty, in which animals are explicitly excluded from the contract. Pi’s ability to live together with a tiger under such stressful circumstances would disprove the inhuman image of the animal that Hobbes adopts (without providing much evidence for his case) in his classic work of political theory, Leviathan. Although the point against Hobbes certainly has something going for it—the

10

Martel, Life, 11.

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animal does indeed take up a contested position in the history of political theory—it should also be pointed out that because Pi is dealing with an animal, one cannot really speak of a contract, since the animal has no say in the agreement. Pi’s rule is similar, rather, to that of an enlightened despot who will not hesitate to use biological conditioning in order to tame his subject. In this sense, Pi’s decision to institute the law comes very close indeed to that of Gandhi to suspend it. Gandhi suspends the law in order to guarantee the survival of the state. Pi institutes the law in order to guarantee his own survival. As a result of both actions, different subjects—Pi’s family; the tiger—are produced as a kind of life that, although it might survive, is no longer fully alive. Pi’s family can no longer do business in a state in which democratic principles have been suspended; the tiger in the lifeboat is really only the shadow of a tiger, the sad spectacle of a tiger living under Pi’s government at sea. Through both Gandhi’s and Pi’s political decisions, the life of their subjects is reduced to a life-less-than-life, a life that is barely alive, a life in close proximity to death. Pi has escaped his own situation of being barely alive by reducing the tiger to bare life. It turns out that in this lifeboat situation, it is not the strongest, but the one who can apply modern techniques of government, who is right. Whereas Pi’s family used to be in the weaker position with respect to Gandhi’s decision, and whereas Pi used to be in the weaker position in the state of nature/state of exception with the tiger, the tables have been turned and now Pi has taken up the position of Gandhi that he despises, and that his family was running away from. It will enable Pi to survive; but it is also complicit with a position of power that stands at the origins of Pi’s sufferings, and that Pi is very critical of. In his recent work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben has theorized the particular kind of life that is produced by political decisions such as the ones I have analyzed above as “nuda vita,” or “bare life.”11 Agamben adopts this notion from Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” and uses it to refer to the particular life that is produced in a state of exception: neither human life nor animal life, bare life refers to a kind

11

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 65.

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of inhuman life in between all chairs, a life that has been stripped of its ethical and political ways of life, or rather whose ethical and political ways of life have become indistinguishable from the simple fact of its living, its biological life. Although such a defi nition might at fi rst sight only apply to the tiger and not to Pi’s family, one can see that it does if one considers the possible threats of Gandhi’s suspension of the constitution: imprisonment, torture, and fi nally death. In a state in which such a situation has been created, people will no longer enjoy going to zoos—undemocratic states are bad for the zookeeper’s business, as Pi’s father notes. Although Life of Pi does not elaborate this insight of Pi’s father further, one might wonder whether Gandhi’s state of emergency exposes, perhaps, what Benjamin referred to as “something rotten”12 in the business of zookeeping and governing, namely the fact that the zookeeper or the sovereign, as long as the law includes the possibility of deciding on a state of exception, ultimately has the power to put any of her or his subjects to death. This is illustrated in a scene in the fi rst part of the novel, where Pi’s father, in order to convince his sons never to approach any of the animals in the zoo, feeds a terrified goat to a tiger who has been starved for three days. The spectacle is gruesome, and even though it is intended as a lesson to his sons, it also illustrates to the reader the power that the zookeeper has to put any of his subjects to death.13 One of the things that Life of Pi thus brings home to us—and this is also part of Agamben’s work on this subject—is that the particular life as which one relates to power is not animal life, but a kind of life that is different from both human and animal life, namely bare life. This is an important corrective that Life of Pi provides to, for example, Hobbes’ theory of the contract, which suggests that the kind of life that the emphatically human order excludes from its institution is inhuman, animal life. This does not explain, however, why Hobbes is so afraid of the animal returning. His fear reveals, rather, that what he is concerned with is not so much animal life, but what he considers to be the animal-like, inhuman dimension of human life, namely bare life—human life 12 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” Selected Writings: 1913–1926, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard, 1996), 242. 13 Martel, Life, 29–39.

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stripped of its ethical and political ways of living, or a human life whose ethical and political ways of living are reduced to biology. This, however, is not animal life but a third kind of life that both Agamben and Life of Pi bring to their readers’ attention. So far, I have been exploring the political dimension of this third kind of life—the ways in which it is produced by political decisions such as Gandhi’s decision to suspend the law and Pi’s decision to implement it. Bare life also has an ethical dimension, however, and one of the reasons why Life of Pi is such a significant text for the post-9/11 era is because it also explores this ethical dimension. For Pi, at sea, when he decides to establish a government over the tiger, is not only establishing a political rule, but also an ethical rule, a certain code according to which he is going to live in order to survive. In order to see this and to understand the particular nature of the ethical decisions that Pi takes in response to the crisis situation in which he has landed, I need to have a closer look at the story of his survival and the various texts that surround it.

Psychic state of exception After 227 days at sea, Pi safely reaches the coast of Mexico, and the tiger disappears into the jungle never to be seen again. From the fi rst and third parts of the novel, one gathers that Pi was found by locals and taken to hospital to recover. At some point after this, he traveled on to Canada where, at the time of the narration, he has happily settled in Scarborough, a town close to Toronto. Given the novel’s description of Pi’s life (wife, kids, pets, house, garden, and so on) as well as the fact that Pi has now fi nally arrived in the country where his father thought he would be safe from the crisis situation that was threatening him back home, one would expect Pi’s life in Canada to be free from crisis. However, both the fi rst and third parts of Martel’s novel contain clear indications that such is not the case and that Pi, 20 years after his survival, is still haunted by what happened to him at sea. Of course, in Canada, Pi is hardly living in circumstances that in any real way recall Gandhi’s suspension of the constitution in India or the situation in which Pi found himself at sea. However, there are indications in Martel’s novel that another state of crisis continues after Pi has reached land and even after he has settled in Canada.

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Consider, for example, the fi rst part of the novel. Largely narrated by Pi, this part also contains italicized chapters narrated by the anonymous author of Life of Pi. In these chapters, the author comments on his meetings with Pi when he goes to visit him to record his survival story. As the author explains in his introductory note, Life of Pi was put together on the basis of a series of interviews he did with Pi in Canada during the late 1990s, a diary that Pi kept during the events at sea, a few newspaper articles that appeared after the event, as well as a transcript and audio-recording of an interview between Pi and two officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport who came to question Pi shortly after he reached land about why and how the ship on which he was traveling to Canada sank.14 Although the tale of Pi’s survival, as told in the second part of the book, is narrated entirely by Pi, the third part of the book also contains a transcript of the interview between Pi and the officials. Like the italicized chapters in the first part of the novel, this extra-narrative document provides invaluable information about Pi’s survival and about his psychic state after he reached land. When the author of Life of Pi fi rst goes to meet Pi to talk about his miraculous survival, he notes that on a day with “mild fall weather” Pi “puts on a big winter parka with fur-lined hood” for a short walk to the diner.15 A few pages later, when he recalls a conversation that the author and Pi had at Pi’s house, he points out another oddity: “his cupboards are jam-packed. Behind every door, on every shelf, stand mountains of neatly stacked cans and packages. A reserve to last the siege of Leningrad.”16 Both these details—and there are several others in the opening chapters of the novel—indicate that Pi, more than 20 years after his survival, has not yet come to terms with what happened to him at sea. His relation to the weather and to the primary needs of his body—food—is not normal but compulsive. It is governed by the exceptional situation of crisis that Pi suffered while he was at sea. Both details reveal that Pi is living in a perpetual fear of the state of nature/the state of exception returning, in other words of ending up in a situation resembling the one he suffered at sea once again. From the

14

Martel, Life, xi. Ibid., 7–8. 16 Ibid., 25. 15

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interview with the Japanese officials published in the fi nal part of the book, one gathers that Pi was traumatized by what happened to him at sea: throughout the interview, he keeps asking the officials for food, not because he is actually hungry—he is storing the food under the sheets of his hospital bed—but because he is afraid that he will end up in a situation without food once again. Something happened to Pi during his time at sea—on the one hand, he was reduced to a life that was barely alive, that came close to being dead; on the other hand, he took up a position similar to Indira Gandhi’s by establishing a regime of enlightened despotism over the tiger—that Pi has not quite come to terms with. He has not accepted yet what his survival revealed to him as integral aspects of his life. Instead, he has an entire army of protection mechanisms set up to keep the situation of his survival, and the threat it poses of returning him to a life he does not want to be, at bay: a thick winter coat on a mild, fall day; a reserve of food to last through any kind of siege. These are, of course, the marks of a survivor—once again, the reader recognizes Crusoe in Martel’s Pi. No doubt, these measures—clothes, food—are highly efficient in terms of keeping the disturbing aspects of Pi’s survival at bay. But one cannot but notice that Pi’s Crusoe-like behavior—his attempt to separate himself from what happened to him at sea—creates a tense situation that does not actually come to terms with the survival but rather reproduces its state of crisis, emergency, and exception. In fact, Pi responds to the crisis situation he suffered at sea by declaring another situation of crisis: a tense living situation that excludes the experience of his survival, that goes through great lengths to keep the life that Pi led at sea at a comfortable distance. Such a situation, in which a potentially disturbing aspect of one’s life is repressed into oblivion, can be compared to the tense psychic state of trauma. Indeed, both the fi rst and third parts of Martel’s novel reveal that Pi is suffering from trauma more than 20 years after his survival. If Pi’s quasi-military measures to keep his survival at bay are intended to keep the life that he led at sea at a distance, one can immediately see that these measures are ultimately not very effective: Pi’s food reserve does not separate him from the animal but makes him resemble an animal hoarding for the winter; his coat with a fur-lined hood does not only make him appear like an animal but also makes him look like a trapper taking the lives of

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animals at will. Like Hobbes’ Leviathan, who in his spectral towering above the sovereign territory comes to resemble precisely the animal that he is supposed to keep away, Pi’s attempts at attaining normalcy collapse under the latent pressure of the disturbing reality that they repress. Whereas Pi is doing everything he can in order to move away from the life to which he was reduced at sea, his response in fact creates a situation in which the very production of this life continues. Thus, the novel effectively draws out the psychic dimension of the life produced in a crisis situation, a dimension that a theorist of bare life such as Agamben tends to ignore.17 Although this new, third situation of crisis—the fi rst was Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency, the second Pi’s survival at sea—becomes evident from the first and third parts of Life of Pi, the novel also suggests that its proper narration fi lls in the need of fi nding a more efficient way of dealing with crisis situations. Life of Pi suggests, in other words, that if the novel relates a series of displacements of exceptional situations, it also provides closure to the initial crisis that set off this series. Pi is, of course, desperately longing for such a closure. “I am a person who believes in form and the harmony of order,” he confesses toward the end of the novel’s second part: Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape. For example—I wonder—could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less? I’ll tell you, that’s one thing I hate about my nickname [“three-point-onefour” or the irrational number “pi” that is the result of the division of a circle’s circumference by its diameter], the way that number runs on forever. It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.18 This passage reveals that Pi is aware that his story has not received closure yet. The means by which such closure can be attained, according to Pi, is through “form and the harmony of order,” 17 It is in response to this that Eric Santner has theorized the notion of “creaturely life,” which takes into account bare life’s psychic dimension. See Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 18 Ibid., 285.

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through “meaningful shape.” The best example that the novel provides of such form, harmonious order, and meaningful shape is Pi’s descriptions of his father’s zoo in the fi rst part of the novel. What Pi is turning to here once again in order to resolve his situation of crisis are the modern, biopolitical techniques of government described in the novel’s opening chapters, and applied by Pi at sea, not without success. However, these modern techniques of government—these zookeeping techniques—are associated here with something that at fi rst sight might appear unrelated to it, namely the storytelling that is taking place in the novel Life of Pi. The suggestion appears to be that if the author of the book were able to tell Pi’s story in “exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less,” the count of this number would somehow be able to provide closure to Pi’s tale and to his experiences at sea. The novel as a carefully organized zoo would be able to achieve this. Given this obvious metafictional cue, it does not come as a surprise that Life of Pi counts exactly 100 chapters. Thus, the novel appears to live up to Pi’s expectations, in other words, to become the kind of zoo of his life that Pi desires and to fi nally provide closure to what happened to Pi at sea. The only problem, however, is that Life of Pi has already shown that such a response to a situation of crisis is not very efficient, because it keeps separating out and splitting off integral aspects of the reality of Pi’s life. This is why both Gandhi’s and Pi’s political decisions are only effective up to a certain extent. And indeed, Life of Pi makes it clear that one should not conclude too quickly that the sovereign count of 100 chapters marks the end of the crisis situation from which Pi has been suffering. In the third and fi nal part of the novel, Life of Pi turns out to contain a particularly interesting twist-in-the-tale that undermines the illusionary nature of such a solution. The fi nal part of Martel’s novel contains the transcript of the interview between Pi and the Japanese officials. The officials are questioning Pi about why and how the cargo liner that was supposed to take him to Canada sank. In response to their questions, Pi offers them the survival story related in the second part of the book—a story that tells the officials a lot of things, but not why and how the ship sank. After Pi has fi nished his story, the officials reply that they do not believe him. The story is not sufficiently rational for them. Pi argues that it is rational, that there is nothing in the story that contradicts

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the laws of reason. But the officials remain suspicious, and it is in response to their continued questions that Pi ultimately ends up offering another story of what happened to him at sea. After the ship went down, Pi found himself in a lifeboat with his mother, a sailor with a broken leg, and the French cook of the ship. The cook cut off the sailor’s leg to use it as bait. After the sailor died, Pi’s mother caught the cook eating some of the sailor’s flesh. Pi’s mother and the cook got into an argument, and the cook killed Pi’s mother by cutting off her head. He then let himself be killed by Pi, who ate his heart and his liver. Life of Pi suggests, clearly, that Pi’s fi rst survival tale might have been allegorical. Even the officials gather that the animals in the fi rst story might have been standing for the sailor (the zebra with the broken leg), Pi’s mother (the orangutan), and the French cook (the hyena). Such an allegorical turn does not come as a surprise for readers familiar with the genre of the fable, which generally operates through allegory; in addition, Life of Pi contains intertextual references to Edgar Allen Poe’s shipwreck story The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which is a tale of murder and cannibalism.19 Importantly, Life of Pi never reveals which one of Pi’s two tales is true. Pi insists on the fi rst tale, and begs the officials to accept it for their report (since which tale they choose does not make any difference to the question they would like to see answered, namely how and why the ship sank). It is ultimately the fi rst tale that will end up in the official report. But this does not relieve, of course, the novel’s allegorical tension. At this point, a number of aspects of the analysis presented in the earlier sections of this reading need to be reconsidered. If the hyena stands for the cook, the zebra for the sailor, and the orangutan for Pi’s mother, it means the tiger stands for Pi himself. It appears that in order to deal with the animal-like, inhuman dimension of his life that was exposed at sea, Pi might have been using the figure of the tiger as a figure of this kind of life. The tiger may have been a means for Pi to separate himself from the animal-like, inhuman dimensions of his life. Life of Pi also contains a critique

19

For instance, the tiger in Life of Pi is called “Richard Parker,” which is also the name of a cannibalistic sailor in Poe’s novel; see Edgar Allen Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (New York: Penguin, 1999).

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of such a presentation of the animal; but when the novel introduces the infection of allegory into its narration, Pi’s figuration of the tiger begins to appear more problematic than one might, at fi rst sight, have expected, because it would then perpetuate precisely the stereotypes that one might have considered the novel to deconstruct. The practice of splitting that the reader is possibly witnessing here—the way in which a human being separates out or splits off a disturbing aspect of its life-world so as to maintain a distance from this aspect—is of course a commonly witnessed practice when dealing with trauma, something that is, in fact, a defi ning characteristic of trauma itself, given that a trauma always names an event that the subject is incapable of incorporating into its life-narrative. 20 It marks an interruption or break within the psychic whole, a break that is reflected in the story through the break between Pi and the tiger. This means that Pi, when he was making a political decision at sea by instituting a government over the tiger, was also making an ethical decision, and was instituting a mode of self-determination, a way of governing himself that would allow him to preserve his sanity, to survive psychically, during his stressful time at sea. Like Pi’s political decision, which I analyzed as instituting the government of an enlightened despot in which the subject in question— the tiger—had no say, Pi’s ethical decision excludes the animal-like, inhuman dimension of himself from his life-reality, banning it into a zone of subjection where it is not dismantled but from where it continues to agitate in a different way. Pi Patel, who was named after that beacon of civilization, the Piscine Molitor, and who greatly admires the modern techniques by which his father ran the Pondicherry Zoo, confronts at sea a part of his life that civilization and modernity would prefer to deny, namely its barbaric side. His response is to split that side off, to catch it in the figure of an animal that will be given limited reign for a while, but will ultimately disappear into the jungle never to be seen again. However, the jungle into which the tiger disappears is Pi himself—it is the jungle of Pi’s life that underlies the calculated, ordered, and regulated modernity of the Piscine Molitor. There, the tiger is not dismantled

20 On this count, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

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but continues to agitate, to burn bright—hence, Pi’s winter coat on a mild fall day; hence, his reserve of food. The story with the tiger, told in the novel in exactly 100 chapters, thus provides a closure that is ultimately illusory and that is opened up again in the most radical way by Life of Pi’s allegorical tension. Thus, Pi’s political and ethical decisions taken at sea and during the years after his survival, all the way up to his telling the story to the novel’s author in the late 1990s, are challenged in the novel by another decision, namely the author’s “aesthetic decision” to include the second version of Pi’s tale, as well as indications that Pi might be suffering from trauma, in the book. It is this decision—an aesthetic decision—that adds an allegorical tension to the novel that allows the animal-like, inhuman aspect of Pi’s life to be present, but in another, non-exclusionary way. Allegory dismantles the tense state of exception in which Pi, ever since Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India in the mid-1970s, had been caught up. His family responded to this state of exception by leaving; but Pi ended up in a state of emergency once again during his time at sea. In response to this emergency, he declared yet another state of exception that banned the inhuman, animal-like aspects of his self into repression. Even when the author of Life of Pi comes to interview him in Canada in the late 1990s, Pi suggests that it is the modern techniques of government, of zookeeping, that will be successful at providing closure to his story. Although the novel shows such techniques to be effective to a certain extent, it also reveals them to be at risk of creating a permanent state of exception in which the subject, split off from the animal-like, inhuman aspects of its life, risks to remain caught up. All the modern techniques in the world are never going to rid the subject of these aspects. There are no ethical and political decisions (as taken by Gandhi or by Pi’s family and by Pi himself in response to the crises in which these subjects are caught up) that are going to effectively dismantle these crises, because all of these decisions attempt to exclude an aspect of reality that cannot be got rid of. I argue that it is only with the author’s aesthetic decision to represent Pi’s tale in the allegorical mode, in other words, to include the second version of Pi’s tale in the novel, that this vicious circle of law and violence is broken. Rather than providing closure to Pi’s tale and to the political emergency with which the novel began, Life of Pi thus opens up the

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exclusionary ethical and political decisions taken in response to the emergency onto the realm of the aesthetic, which Carl Schmitt— perhaps the most famous twentieth-century theorist of the decision—deemed to “know no decision.”21 Schmitt was able to write this because his model of the political decision was a theological one. In the following section, I analyze the role of religion in Life of Pi with respect to the problem of deciding in response to a crisis situation that I have been dealing with in this chapter. I do so in order to show how Life of Pi as a literary text goes far beyond its main narrator Pi’s problematic, theological attempts at responding to the crises in which he is caught up. I argue that it is ultimately the aesthetic decision that emerges in Martel’s novel as a critique of the other and Schmittian (as I will show) decisions taken at other points in the book.

Theological state of exception One cannot be religious in general. One can only believe in some god(s) to the detriment of others. —SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK, Violence22

With the difference between the author’s aesthetic decision to turn allegory into Life of Pi’s mode of representation and the ethical and political decisions taken elsewhere in the novel, the reader confronts the difference between a decision that provides refuge for a disturbing aspect of the subject’s life-world that the subject might prefer to rule out and a decision that excludes such an aspect from the subject’s life-world in order to ban it into the realm of repression. The aesthetic decision leaves a breathing space precisely where the ethical and political decisions taken elsewhere in the novel draw up a wall of separation, a barrier that splits off. Whereas the aesthetic decision marks a threshold that is the site of a passing, of a passage, a moving through, the other ethical and

21

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 35. 22 Slavoj, Žižek. Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 132.

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political decisions in the novel reinforce blockages that perpetuate the crises that these decisions are supposed to overcome. In this section, I show that Life of Pi invites the reader to understand such ethical and political decisions as theological in nature; the aesthetic decision, on the other hand, is not theological but poetic in nature, and holds many more—and especially, more efficient— ethical and political possibilities. Next to animals, religion—or what I will call here, theology, the structural logic of belief in the divine—holds the most important place in Martel’s novel. The novel begins, as I mentioned in the Introduction to this chapter, by characterizing Pi’s tale as “a story that will make you believe in God.” In the opening chapters of the novel, it quickly becomes clear, however, that although Pi is a deeply religious boy, he does not appear to believe in god in the ways in which the leaders of the religious communities to which he belongs expect him to do. In addition to being a Hindu, Pi is also a Christian and a Muslim, and to his mind, such a pluri-religious practice does not contradict the laws of each of the religions to which he adheres. It is perfectly possible to be a practicing Hindu, Christian, and Muslim at the same time. However, this is not the opinion of the leaders of these three religious communities in Pi’s hometown, Pondicherry. Taking a stroll one day with his parents along the Pondicherry seaside esplanade, Pi is approached by all three of these leaders who until this moment had no idea that Pi was also practicing religions other than the one they represent. When they realize what has been going on, they get involved in a fierce debate in which each leader tries to claim Pi for the religion that he represents. Although the debate starts out on civilized terms, it quickly disintegrates into a back-and-forth of insults in which each leader accuses the other of being an animal or a barbarian. The only thing the leaders can ultimately agree on—apart from the fact that they all enjoy a stroll next to the sea—is that Pi “must choose”:23 he cannot be a Hindu, a Christian, or a Muslim at the same time. Pi retorts by recalling Mahatma Gandhi’s saying that “[a]ll religions are true.”24 The issue remains unresolved.

23 24

Martel, Life, 69. Ibid.

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Given the survival story that is to follow, it is no doubt significant that this scene takes place so close to the sea, where Pi will soon end up in a situation of extreme crisis. Pi’s pluri-religious practice brings a crisis to his life, because it undermines the legal and political order of the religious communities of which he is a member. Indeed, Pi’s subjection to (a) god(s) who is (are) not the property of any particular kind of religion—his subjection across the board to a universal transcendence that exists in excess of any particular religious identity—brings a crisis to the religious communities that are all constituted through exclusion. In other words, Pi’s theological decision brings a crisis to the ethical and political decisions that founded these religious communities, and that require their members to belong to no other community than their own. They demand exclusive allegiance to their god(s). Life of Pi invites the reader to consider the crisis that Pi’s theological decision thus brings to the exclusionary ethical and political decisions on which the religious communities are founded as “messianic”—to read Pi as a messianic figure who is highly critical of established religion and theology. Indeed, the scene by the seaside that I have just described is clearly a rewriting of a scene from the New Testament, “The Visit of the Wise Men,”25 with the three leaders from Pondicherry’s religious communities representing the Persian astrologer-kings who have come to visit the newborn Christ, the messiah or the anointed one, a role that is taken on in the seaside scene by Pi. 26 Although Pi’s messianism does indeed mark a difference from theology, and clearly brings a crisis to the religious communities of which Pi is a member, it is worth noting that this crisis remains within the limits of belief, in other words, that Pi’s messianism, although critical of theology, nevertheless, also remains theological. This situation takes on political resonances very shortly afterward. In a discussion with his mother that immediately follows the unresolved scene on the seaside esplanade, Pi asks his (secular)

25 See Matthew, “The Gospel According to Matthew,” The Holy Bible (New York: Meridian, 1974), in particular Mt. 2.1–12. 26 This figuration of Pi as the messiah recurs at another point in the novel, where Pi’s mother is figured as the Virgin Mary, which makes Pi, her son, the messiah (Martel, Life, 11).

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mother why people, if they can have two passports, cannot have two religions. His mother replies that his comparison of politics to theology makes no sense because although there might be several nations on earth, there is only one in the sky. “One. That’s the point.” “Or none. There’s that option too, you know. These are terribly oldfashioned things you’ve taken to.”27 Pi’s mother may be deciding too quickly when she insists on the separation of the theological and the political. Given that she is a secularist, this is understandable; but that does not mean that the reader should blindly follow her and her rejection of her son’s religious turn. Let me pursue the comparison just for a while, in order to see what insights it might lead to. Pi’s conception of national identity, and specifically of citizenship, as a mode of belonging that would allow one to take part in several communities at once, is one that already challenges existing national sovereignties, many of which do not allow their citizens to have multiple passports or a split national identity. The national sovereignty that Pi envisions, therefore, and after which he would like theological sovereignty to be modeled, is a sovereignty that does not demand exclusive allegiance, as theological sovereignty does. However, many existing national sovereignties do demand exclusive allegiance and are in that sense theological. Pi’s messianism relates to theology in the same way that dual or plural citizenship relates to national sovereignty. In other words, the critique that is expressed here, and that for Pi remains within the limits of religion, is a critique of a conception of theology and national sovereignty as demanding exclusive allegiance, and thus as producing precisely the tense states of exception—the generalized states of trauma—that Life of Pi as a novel works so hard to dismantle. Ideally, neither theology nor national sovereignty would be caught up in such an exclusionary politics, in the production of such states of exception. But history has developed in such a way that they are, which is why Pi runs into trouble when he practices more than one religion. It is also why Pi’s mother—a secularist—is wrong to decisively separate religion from politics. Her son’s question shows that matters are a little bit more complicated than that. The argument that the theological and the political are wrapped up in each other is of course evident from the history of political

27

Martel, Life, 73.

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theory. It has been proposed most forcefully by the German legal scholar Carl Schmitt in a text dating from 1922 entitled Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. In this book, Schmitt famously argues that “[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, not only because of their historical development . . . but also because of their systematic structure.”28 Thus, the jurisprudential notion of the exception—Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency, her decision that the particular situation in India in the mid1970s qualifies as an exception—“is analogous to the miracle in theology.”29 Not only historically but also structurally, the position from where Gandhi as the sovereign head of state decides on the exception is a secularized version of the transcendental position from where god decides on the ways of the world. It is no wonder that Schmitt had a great interest in Hobbes, whose Leviathan was the subject of a short, anti-semitic book Schmitt wrote in 1938.30 Hobbes also shows up toward the end of the second chapter of Political Theology, where Schmitt speaks admiringly about Hobbes as one who understood the problem of legal form because he understood the problem of the decision: its absolutist, authoritarian character, the way in which it united a maximum of power in a single person who could decide on the situation. Schmitt reads Hobbes as an early figure in the history of the secularization of theologico-political concepts; the theory of the decision that he fi nds in Hobbes is—even though Hobbes was very critical of theology—nevertheless a theological one. It is part of a theory of sovereignty in which the sovereign is theorized as a secular version of god. Now, the Hobbesian decision, as I discussed earlier on, is one that separates out and splits off: it is a decision that excludes potentially disturbing aspects from the life-world over which the Hobbesian sovereign governs. Supposedly, this excluded element is the animal. Hobbes establishes an emphatically human political

28

Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. Ibid. 30 Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 29

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order over and against the animal. What Hobbes is really excluding, however, and therefore internally excluding or excepting, is the animal-like, inhuman dimension of human life. This is where the fear that drives his theory comes from: it is a fear of this inhuman dimension returning, of the state of nature—more precisely, the state of exception—breaking out all over again. This is why he needs the sovereign, so as to keep this inhuman dimension at bay. But the sovereign himself, as a spectral creature towering above the landscape represented in the frontispiece of Hobbes’ book, embodies the animal dimension that it is supposed to hold at bay. It is this type of decision—a Hobbesian and Schmittian decision—that the reader witnesses in Life of Pi. Gandhi, Pi’s family, and fi nally Pi himself take these types of ethical and political decisions in response to the crisis situations they face. However, such decisions only exacerbate the crisis, because they declare a tense state of exception that tries to keep the illusion of harmony and order intact, but behind whose scenes trauma is running the show. These ethical and political decisions are stuck, in other words, in the logic of theology, in the history and structure of theology. It is with this history and structure that Pi is desperately trying to break—but he is not willing to break with it at the cost of religion altogether. Therefore, his responses to crisis remain within the limits of religion, within the limits of a religion that attempts to be nontheological. Although this might be Pi’s ultimate aspiration, one cannot but note that it is an aspiration that ultimately fails, since Pi, 20 years after his survival, is still suffering from what happened to him at sea. In fact, after he has told the Japanese officials the second version of his story, he begs the officials to “believe”31 the fi rst story that he told them, the story with the animals. Ultimately, it is this story that will end up in their official report—and thus, the logic of theology is perpetuated. However, it is ultimately Life of Pi as a novel—specifically, the author’s aesthetic decision to turn allegory into the novel’s mode of representation—that breaks with this violent perpetuation and opens up ethical and political possibilities onto the future. This turn to allegory in response to the problems of political theology is not alien to the history of the notion. In fact, after Schmitt launches

31

Martel, Life, 297.

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his decisionist theory of sovereignty in 1922, Walter Benjamin responds to it with a work of literary criticism in which he develops a theory of sovereignty. Footnoting Schmitt’s Political Theology at various points in his text, Benjamin argues—contra Schmitt—that the one who is the sovereign in the baroque, German mourningplay is not the one who decides but who is incapable of deciding.32 The theory of allegory that develops out of Benjamin’s literary theory of sovereignty opposes allegory to the symbol, in that whereas the symbol establishes a passage from one realm of meaning to another, allegory always reduces such a passage to ruins, leaving its beholders incapable of deciding whether they fi nd themselves in one realm or the other. The very notion of political theology itself is, in this sense, an allegorical notion. Although Benjamin helpfully reintroduces the aesthetic into the debates about sovereignty and the state of exception, his association of the aesthetic to indecisiveness does not entirely match the reading of Life of Pi that I have offered. Rather, Martel’s novel appears to reveal a conscious aesthetic decision to include indecisiveness in the novel so as to fi nally break with the vicious circle of law and violence within which the novel’s main narrator, Pi Patel, is caught up. As such, undecidability appears here as constitutive of the aesthetic decision in a way that goes beyond both Schmitt’s statement that the aesthetic is unpolitical because it “knows no decision” and Benjamin’s that it is political because of its indecisiveness. Literature thus becomes the element of another way of deciding that is not theological but aesthetic. It is from this aesthetic that new possibilities can emerge for future ethical and political decisions in response to a situation of crisis.

The politics of allegory Let me conclude, then, by having a closer look at the ethics and politics of the aesthetic as they emerge in Martel’s novel. I would

32 On this, see Samuel Weber, “ ‘Taking Exception to Decision’: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt,” Enlightenments: Encounters Between Critical Theory and Contemporary French Thought, ed. Harry Kunneman and Hent de Vries (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1993), 141–61.

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like to begin with what I have analyzed as Pi’s political and ethical decision, namely the moment when, in response to the crisis situation in which he finds himself, he founds a legal and political rule over the tiger (a rule that is both political, if one accepts the fi rst version of the story, and ethical, if one accepts the second). Here is how Pi represents his decision: Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, hurry to your seats! Hurry, hurry. You don’t want to be late. Sit down, open your eyes, open your hearts and prepare to be amazed. Here it is, for your enjoyment and instruction, for your gratification and edification, the show you’ve been waiting for all your life, THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH! Are you ready for the miracle of it?33 Now, I have argued that his decision is theological in nature, because the tiger has no say in the government that is established and because, as an ethical decision, it internally excludes or excepts an integral aspect of Pi’s life from his life-world. This argument is backed up by the fact that Pi compares the decision that he is taking here to a miracle. But it is also interesting to note that Pi represents this theological decision as a circus performance. The passage really hovers between the theological and the secular, the earthly and the divine. In addition to these two epistemes, however, a third episteme is introduced, and that is the episteme of the aesthetic: of the performative nature of this decision. Pi might, in relation to the tiger, be taking up a theological position of power, but the mystery of that theology is exposed here as performative, as a circus performance. That does not mean that mystery is entirely done away with. Something of it remains in the spectacular nature of this occasion. But the mystery has become wiser, it has gained in self-understanding. If one were to read this passage along the lines that I was suggesting in the previous section, when I discussed Pi’s messianic status, namely with reference to the ways in which Pi’s messianism is highly critical of religion, one might begin to see how the aesthetic comes to function here as well as a critique of theology. It would be a mistake, however, to identify this critique with theology’s

33

Martel, Life, 165.

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opposite, secular reason. The passage that I have just cited clearly also preserves some of theology’s mystery. This, however, does not mean that Pi would somehow be arguing that reason should be replaced by the aesthetic.34 Pi insists that his story illustrates that he “applied reason at every moment. . . . Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away.”35 However, what Pi is critical of is excessive reason: “[B]e excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.”36 It is the aesthetic, in other words, that opens up a space in between theology and the secular that holds possibilities for politics. For Hobbes as well as for Schmitt, this was difficult to think. Although Hobbes’ Leviathan is a highly impressive, literary–political tour de force, Hobbes is very dismissive of literary performance throughout his text.37 Although Schmitt has an extremely interesting aesthetic as a writer and turns to the aesthetic at various moments in his collected works, in Political Theology, he writes that the aesthetic “knows no decision” and casts it aside as unworthy of further research. As I have already indicated, Benjamin interrupts this pattern and introduces allegory into the debates. What becomes clear with Benjamin’s investigation of the aesthetic is that apparently, not all modes of self-determination—of ethical and political decision-taking—demand exclusive allegiance to one realm of signification. It is possible to decide otherwise, even if this means introducing indecisiveness into the decision’s constitution. Like Pi, however, Benjamin remained largely stuck for this theory of allegory within the limits of theology, in the sense that he associates allegory with the messianic. In Benjamin’s case also, the messianic is brought in as a critique of the theological, but the 34 Some critics come close to suggesting as much. See, for example: Florence Stratton, “ ‘Hollow at the Core’: Deconstructing Yann Martel’s Life of Pi,” Studies in Canadian Literature 29, no. 2 (2004): 5–21. 35 Martel, Life, 298. 36 Ibid., 298. 37 Indeed, Hobbes’ theory that the state is an “artificial man” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7) in which all would be acting together as one is ultimately nothing more than a metaphor. Throughout Leviathan, however, Hobbes attempts to convince the reader that the unity and indivisibility of sovereignty that he theorizes are nevertheless “real” (Hobbes, Leviathan, 114). Like Pi in Life of Pi, Hobbes thus ultimately resists a “literary” reading of his work and would like to make the reader “believe.”

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theory of allegory is nevertheless not a full-blown theory of the aesthetic, as separate from the theological and the secular, as a realm of political inquiry. This tendency has continued, to a large extent, in the works of those working in Benjamin’s tracks today, most notably Giorgio Agamben and Eric Santner. For Agamben as well, the messianic and the aesthetic operate at a similar, if not identical level. When Santner in his most recent book on novelist W. G. Sebald notes that the book is a continuation of a previous study on the theologian Franz Rosenzweig, 38 this remark does not come with an effort to think through the differences that such a move assumes, in other words, with a thought of the break or discontinuation between the theological and the aesthetic. One can hardly assume that an analysis of a novelist can be presented as a natural continuation of an analysis of a theologian. It is the same kind of forgetting of the aesthetic from which Life of Pi’s narrator, Pi, suffers. The novel plays out this tragedy in the fi nal part of the book, in which Pi resists literary allegory in favor of the theological—a resistance that ends up perpetuating the state of crisis from which he is still trying to move away. In the fi nal pages of the book, Pi is facing the Japanese officials, who have come to inquire about why and how the cargo liner that was supposed to take Pi to Canada sank. Pi tells them the story with the animals. In response to their persistent questions, he tells them a second story of murder and cannibalism that injects the story with the animals with an allegorical tension. It is immediately clear to the reader why Pi would have turned to allegory to represent his tale: he tells the story with the animals because it allows him to talk about something that he would otherwise not have been able to talk about. But in order for that literary refuge to be efficient, Pi also needs to recognize that his fi rst story is allegorical. And this is, precisely, what Martel’s narrator refuses to do: he begs the Japanese officials to “believe” the fi rst story; he insists that it is true.39 This allows him to deny the disturbing life to which he was

38

Santner, On Creaturely Life, xi. This is why Yann Martel, in an interview about Life of Pi, can state that people who think the animals in Life of Pi are allegorical, are mistaken: Sabine Sielke, “ ‘The Empathetic Imagination’: An Interview with Yann Martel,” Studies of Canadian Literature 177 (2003): 12–32. 39

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reduced during his survival at sea. It also allows him to praise the modern techniques of zookeeping that his dead father applied in the Pondicherry Zoo, and that enabled Pi to survive. It enables Pi to turn storytelling into zookeeping and into theology. Read in this way, Life of Pi is indeed Robinson Crusoe all over again: it is a repetition of Defoe’s theologico-political tale for the twenty-first century. But Life of Pi does not end, of course, with Pi. If it did, the novel would be limited to the story that is told in the second part of the book. The author took the aesthetic decision, rather, to include Pi’s second tale in the novel, thus introducing the aesthetic tension of allegory into the survival tale and challenging Pi’s request to the Japanese officials to “believe” the story with the animals. Believing Pi’s story might allow one to save a great thing, namely modernity, reason, the principles of modern zookeeping, humanism, and so on—but it would mean to save these notions as “theological” ones. That would be the cost. It means to implement them as repressive notions, as tense notions of trauma that in order to exist need to exclude their opposite within. In terms of responding to a state of crisis, this is not very effective, because one risks to create only greater future states of crisis, since all of one’s values will be founded in repression, in an illusory harmony of order and meaning. What the aesthetic decision allows for, rather, is realistic attachment to these notions, as values that one might aspire to in the full knowledge of what such values exclude. If every ethics and politics revolves around the aspiration to a passage from one realm into another, allegory reduces such a passage to ruins, allowing both realms to be present at the same time. A full passage can never be achieved, but that should not mean one is stuck in a single realm forever. I have argued that such an aesthetic holds great ethical possibilities, because it would provide a more efficient way for Pi to confront his experiences at sea. Rather than excluding them into the realm of repression, or having to confront them directly, allegory would enable him to represent his experiences in such a way that he would not have to split them off from his life-world. It is because Pi resists allegory and insists on theology, however, that such a coming-to-terms remains impossible. In addition, I have insisted on the political possibilities of such an aesthetic. Of course, I do not mean that allegory is going to solve the problems of the state of

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exception—Gandhi’s state of exception or the generalized state of exception in which humanity according to some has landed after 9/11. I am nevertheless suggesting, however, that the aesthetic model of the decision as I have developed it here—a decision that is different from both Schmitt’s model of the decision and Benjamin’s theory of indecisiveness—holds important insights for political decision-makers, in the sense that it would aspire to an understanding of the decision as plural, in other words as allowing for differences to be recognized rather than needing to be excluded. With such a model of the decision, Gandhi would not experience opposition to her illegal election practices as a threat, but as part of the political process, which her decision on the situation could recognize. Similarly, after 9/11, the United States could have seized the terrorist attacks as an opportunity to rethink its role in a world that is crucially plural, and not dominated by single, roguish superpowers. It is out of such consideration of the plurality for which the aesthetic allows that another national and international politics—a truly democratic one—might be able to emerge.

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2 Autobiography and human rights in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex A failure of reading In an essay titled “The Worlding of the American Novel,” literary critic Bruce Robbins faults Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex for allowing the “atrocity” with which it begins—“the so-called Megali Katastrophe of 1922, when Turkish troops slaughtered large numbers of Greek and Armenian Christians in Smyrna”— “to dissipate gently into another coming-to-America narrative.”1 If the novel begins with the world, this world quickly turns into a street again (to work within the terms that Robbins sets up in the essay), specifically into “the (relative) happiness of perpetual selffashioning.”2 This is a pattern in the contemporary American novel, Robbins suggests—a “pattern of immigration as redemption.”3 1 Bruce Robbins, “The Worlding of the American Novel,”, Columbia University, http://www.columbia.edu/~bwr2001/papers/Robbins%20Worlding%20w%20 xrefs%205.25.09.pdf, 6. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

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Other examples he cites are Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky and Junot Diaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Although all of these novels are haunted by trauma, in all of them “the scene of the trauma”—the world —“disappears forever.”4 Robbins does not cite Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, perhaps because it is not an American (US) novel. But his analysis could apply to that novel as well: Pi fi nds redemption through immigration. It is by immigrating to Canada that he is able to escape if not his trauma—I have shown in the previous chapter that even when he is happily settled in Canada, he continues to suffer from trauma— then at least the scene of his trauma. Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency with which the novel begins is overwritten by Pi’s coming-to-Canada narrative and dissipates into “the (relative) happiness of perpetual self-fashioning.” Now, Robbins might see this as a fault of this novel, which should—he might argue—have remained more faithful to the world with which it began. But one could also attribute such a reading not to a failure of the novel but of reading itself, which falls short of uncovering the ways in which the novel undermines the narrative of redemption that it also contains, and invites the reader to fracture the novel’s temptation to be read at street level with a more subversive temptation to be read as a world. In this respect, the novel could be said to dismantle the trap that it also sets up. That is, in a nutshell, what I did in the previous chapter: to fracture readings of Life of Pi as a self-congratulatory fiction of redemption with a much more subversive reading that ties Pi’s situation in Canada back to the scene of his trauma, fi rst in India and then at sea. It is a similar critical move that structures this chapter, which revolves, precisely, around Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex. My argument is that the “coming-to-America” narrative describing “the (relative) happiness of self-fashioning” of the novel’s narrator, Cal Stephanides, needs to be tied back to the descriptions of the atrocity with which the novel begins, in order to explore what the precise nature of his self-fashioning—Cal’s particular case deserves much more attention than Robbins can give it in his passing remark—might have to tell the reader about the distinctly worldly situation that is described in the novel’s opening

4

Ibid.

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chapters. The challenge that the novel poses, in other words, is to break with the temptation that Robbins justly uncovers in it, in order to explore in what way the redemptive immigration and coming-of-age narrative is fractured by the scene of the trauma—a scene that Middlesex never quite leaves behind. Indeed, the political event that is featured in the opening chapters of the novel does not merely dissipate in the novel, but returns in the guise of many other political events discussed in the novel’s pages. One can hardly say that Middlesex merely tells the private, street-level story of Cal’s coming-of-age. Rather, this account is fractured by accounts of the Second World War, the Detroit race riots, the Greece–Cyprus conflict, the unification of Berlin, European integration, and so on. If anything, the world that is present in the novel’s opening chapters becomes even more worldly in the narrative that follows, and the question that the novel thus poses throughout its narration is: what might be the relation between Cal’s autobiographical tale and its worldly interruptions? How do these two connect? It is this question that I propose to address in this chapter, specifically with respect to the problems of human rights politics that the novel’s opening chapters expose. Middlesex revolves, of course, around the private story of Cal Stephanides. Although Cal is genetically male, he appeared to be female at birth due to a genetic condition that made him receive more female hormones while he was still in the womb. As a result, he was raised as a girl, a gender identity that becomes troubled when he reaches puberty and his male hormones kick in. This situation is resolved into a situation of “(relative) happiness,” as Robbins might argue, when Cal fi nds out that he is genetically male, and decides to go through life as a man. As I will show, however, the ethical decision that Cal takes in response to the crisis of his sex, gender, and sexuality is undermined by his much more ambiguous life, a life that his ethical decision to be a man fails to represent. In this sense, Cal’s ethical decision mirrors an aesthetic decision he takes while he is under investigation in Doctor Peter Luce’s “Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic”5 in New York, namely to present Luce with an autobiographical narrative that, even though his life-experience is actually much more ambiguous, decidedly presents him as a girl. 5

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (New York: Picador, 2002), 406.

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Middlesex explicitly contrasts itself to this early autobiography, however, as a text that proposes to set this earlier record straight (whatever “straight” might still mean in this context). In adult life, Cal takes another aesthetic decision: he decides to write his autobiography once more, and this time it will be a tale that does better justice to the ambiguity of his life. This does not mean, as will become clear, that Cal will be telling only the truth. Rather, the novel presents an uncertain mix of fact and fiction that is characteristic of autobiographical writing but that, in this particular context, is given a new ethical spin: it is only this indeterminate hovering between two realms of signification—fact and fiction— that can do justice to the ambiguity of Cal’s life. Ultimately, this chapter explores what the significance of this insight might be not just for ethics in the post-9/11 era, but also for the political debates about human rights that are opened up in the fi rst few chapters of the novel.

Reading human rights Middlesex tells the gripping story of how its 41-year-old narrator Cal Stephanides “was born twice: fi rst, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”6 This double birth is due to a genetic condition called “5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome.”7 Although Cal is genetically male, he also has a genetic mutation that made his body follow a primarily female line of development while he was still in the womb, causing it to appear female when he was born. Hence, his birth certificate lists his full name as “Calliope Helen Stephanides.” Calliope’s trouble begins when she hits puberty and her male hormones kick in. In response to these disturbing developments, her parents take her to a “Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic” in New York, where she meets with a specialist in human hermaphroditism called Peter Luce. After a penetrating medical

6 7

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 41.

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examination, Luce is able to determine that Callie is not a hermaphrodite but a pseudohermaphrodite (I will return to the difference between the two later on). Because Luce thinks parents are unable to deal with ambiguous gender assignments, however, he hides this information from both Callie and her parents and tries to determine instead whether Callie thinks of herself as a boy or a girl. After a series of interviews during which they talk about Callie’s hobbies, feelings, likes and dislikes, Luce thinks he has gathered enough information to conclude that Callie thinks of herself as a girl. In his view, her case illustrates that the sex of rearing (nurture) is the most important factor in the determination of a child’s sexual identity, more important even than chromosomal status (nature). For Luce, however, this is not where the story ends. In order to make Callie look “exactly like the girl she feels herself to be,”8 Luce proposes hormonal treatment and feminizing surgery that would turn her body into the body of a normal woman. When Callie accidentally gets to read Luce’s report on her case and realizes that she is genetically male, certain aspects of her biological and psychic life begin to make sense to her, and she realizes that she is not what she and her parents believe she is (a girl). The night before her scheduled operation, she packs up a suitcase full of men’s clothes and runs away, leaving her parents a note in which she declares: “I am not a girl. I’m a boy.”9 This moment is presented in the novel as the last time that Cal ever was his parents’ daughter. Cal’s story can easily be read, even by someone who is only vaguely familiar with late twentieth-century debates about sex, gender, and sexuality, as a story that reflects the so-called nature versus nurture debates, debates about whether it is nature (biology) or nurture (rearing) that determines a child’s sexual identity. Given the power-struggle that develops around Cal’s ambiguous life, one might also be tempted to read the story through the lens of Michel Foucault’s theory of sex and sexuality, domains of the subject that Foucault understood to be “effects” of power, to be entirely “produced” by power. When Foucault writes, in his introduction to the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century French 8 9

Ibid., 428. Ibid., 439.

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hermaphrodite, that “At the bottom of sex, there is truth,”10 the sentence is dripping with irony; it characterizes precisely the position that Foucault wants to distance himself from. For Foucault, there is no truth at the bottom of sex. Instead, sex is discursive; it is entirely constructed. Reading through the lens of Foucault, one is thus not sure what to make of Cal’s story, which seems to resolve the troubling indeterminacy of Cal’s sex—its lack of truth—into the happy resolution of Cal’s nature, and his decision to go through life as a man. In addition, there is the fact that Foucault writes this ironic sentence at the same time when he writes that other famous statement from his work on sexuality, namely “In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king.”11 Foucault’s suggestion that there is no truth at the bottom of sex thus coincides with an explicit rejection of sovereignty and its traditional sites of operation—law, rights, and the state—as privileged sites for the analysis of power. When Middlesex begins with the description of the massacre of refugees in Smyrna in 1922—a description that revolves around the question of how these refugees are to be protected, by what rights—it reintroduces the question of sovereignty into the debates about sex, gender, and sexuality, around which the rest of the novel revolves. This is a particularly important move today, in the post-9/11 era of crises, emergencies, and exceptions, when the sovereign has reentered the political scene as “he who decides on the exception” (as Carl Schmitt’s defi nition of sovereignty goes12). Middlesex can thus be said to side with critics such as Judith Butler who, while working in Foucault’s tracks, have also suggested that today, Foucault’s call to “cut off the head of the king” seems somewhat premature. As a way to approach the novel’s difficult relation to Foucault, whose work on Herculine Barbin is explicitly mentioned at the beginning of Middlesex’ second chapter as one of the novel’s many

10

Michel Foucault, “Introduction,” Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, ed. Michel Foucault, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon, 1980), xi. 11 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 88, 89. 12 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 5.

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intertexts, I will fi rst turn to the problems with human rights raised in the novel’s opening chapters, in order to then move on to a discussion of Cal’s particular sex, gender, and sexuality, and see how the ethical issues that the novel raises in this respect relate back to the political situation that is addressed in its opening chapters. Although the story of the massacre of refugees is part of Cal’s life-narrative, it is really a story about Cal’s grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty Stephanides. The story begins in 1922, in the crumbling Ottoman Empire. The parents of Desdemona and Lefty have died in a recent war between the Greeks and the Turks. To get by, Desdemona makes silk, which Lefty goes to sell at the market in the nearby city of Bursa, where he also spends part of his profits on prostitutes. When his sister asks him why he is always spending the night in the city, he confesses that he is in need of a wife. Although Desdemona tries to hook him up with all the marriageable girls in their village, none of her efforts pay off because Lefty turns out to be in love with Desdemona herself, his sister. Although she resists the attraction at fi rst, she ultimately gives in to his advances as well as her desire, and the two decide to get married. That is how the genetic condition responsible for Cal’s pseudohermaphroditism will eventually be passed on. The scandal of this incestuous relationship is eclipsed by the political events of the time. Although Bursa used to be under Ottoman rule, the city had been Greek since 1919 when the Greek army, with the help of the Allied Nations, invaded the Ottoman Empire to reclaim what the Greeks considered to be ancient Greek territory. This invasion was part of a nationalistic project called the “Megale Idea” or “Big Idea,”13 namely the idea to unite all ethnic Greeks in one nationstate. By 1922, however, Turkish nationalism is on the rise and the Turkish army, led by Mustafa Kemal, is on the victory march. When Desdemona and Lefty notice that the Greek army is retreating, and setting fire to everything in its path, they decide to join the hundreds of thousands of refugees in Smyrna in the hope that a ship will be able to take them to Greece, and perhaps, even all the way to the United States, where their cousin Sourmelina is living. When the two arrive in the Smyrna harbor, the harbor is full of ships: there is the Greek fleet, as well as the British, French, and

13

Eugenides, Middlesex, 21.

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American battleships. The allied ships have received strict orders, however, to protect only their own property and to take only British, French, and American citizens on board. Desdemona and Lefty thus have to put all their hopes on the Greek fleet. When the Greek ships retreat without evacuating any of the refugees, they are effectively abandoned in a land without law or government, in which there is nothing standing between their bare, unprotected lives and the approaching Turkish army. In the previous chapter, I have compared such a situation to what in political theory is called a “state of nature”; given that in this case as well, the particular state in which the refugees have landed does not so much precede the legal and political order but comes about as its dissolution and disintegration, the term “state of exception” might be more precise to describe the particular situation in which the refugees have landed. Indeed, narrator Cal Stephanides repeatedly uses the term “emergency”14 to describe the particular situation of his refugee grandparents, thus suggesting that their situation can be understood as a state of exception, emergency, and crisis. Lefty will only be able to get himself and Desdemona on board of a French ship because he knows a few words of French, just enough to claim he was born in Paris and that he and his wife lost their papers in the Smyrna fi res. But the novel makes it painfully clear that for those who do not have the luxury of knowing either French or English, the situation in Smyrna ends in bloody massacre. By what legal and political order should the refugees be protected? This is the question that the opening chapters of Middlesex are raising. The novel reveals that the protection that the remaining ships in the Smyrna harbor offer is not rooted in a concern with the human being as such, but in a concern with the citizen. Middlesex thus raises an often-voiced critique of the protection provided by human rights, namely that they should not be rooted in the citizen but in the human being as such. In an essay entitled “Beyond Human Rights,” Giorgio Agamben recalls (as others did before him15) that this problem was already evident with the 1789 national “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” “in which it is unclear,” Agamben writes, “whether the two terms [“Man” and

14 15

See ibid., 46, 49. Most notably, Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt.

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“Citizen”] are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the fi rst term is actually always already contained in the second.”16 However, it is not entirely clear in the novel whether even “human rights”—“the rights of man”— would have prevented the Smyrna massacre, since even the notion of the human as it figures in Cal’s description of the event appears to be ridden with problems. When one of the officers on the British ship tries to convince his commander to take some of the refugees on board, the commander replies: Our orders are to protect British property and citizens. . . . I’ve spent years in the Near East. The one lesson I’ve learned is that there is nothing you can do with these people. Nothing at all! The Turks are the best of the lot. The Armenian I liken to the Jew. Deficient moral and intellectual character. As for the Greeks, well, look at them. They’ve burned down the whole country and now they swarm in here crying for help.17 Although the commander’s decision not to take any of the refugees on board is of course fi rst and foremost determined by the order he has received to protect only his nation’s property and citizens, his remarks about the humanity of the refugees reveal that there is an understanding of the human that determines his decision as well, and that prevents the notion of the human from unconditionally applying to all human beings. The commander’s notion of the human is shaped instead by a standard that the refugees would clearly not live up to. (The commander’s defense of the Turks as “the best of the lot” is of course particularly ironic in view of the massacre that is to follow.) Middlesex thus exposes a double problem in which human rights are caught up. First of all, it raises the question of what kind

16 Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 20. Agamben repeats this point in the revised version of his essay, which was published as a chapter entitled “Biopolitics and the Rights of Man”: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 126–35. 17 Eugenides, Middlesex, 52.

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of protection human rights can provide in addition to or outside of the protection that nation-states provide for their citizens. In addition, it raises the issue of the notion of the human within which human rights operate: in order to effectively apply to all human beings, the notion of the human should steer clear of determination and be understood, rather, as what Judith Butler in an essay about the Abu Ghraib photographs calls “a differential norm”: “a value and a morphology that may be allocated and retracted, aggrandized, personified, degraded and disavowed, elevated and affi rmed.”18 This is how she proposes to evade “the nearly impossible paradox of a human who is no human, or of the human who effaces the human as it is otherwise known.”19 For a philosopher such as Jacques Rancière, who explicitly distances himself from the depoliticized understanding of rights that he ascribes to Giorgio Agamben, it is precisely the empty place of the subject of human rights that allows for a human rights politics, in the sense that according to such a theory, human rights become those rights that can be claimed by those who do not have the rights that they have—the rights that a citizen can still claim after he or she has been stripped of his or her citizen rights—and those rights that can be claimed by those who have the rights that they have not— think of illegal immigrants in the United States claiming the right to demonstrate, for example. 20 It is to this double problem, which culminates in the novel’s critical presentation of the notion of the human, that Middlesex’ engagement with human rights politics responds. The novel raises the question of a form of legal and political representation that would do justice to the human understood as what Butler calls a “differential norm,” or as the empty place of the subject of human rights that Rancière talks about. I argue that in the chapters that follow Middlesex’ description of this initial atrocity, the novel explores two aspects of this question: on the one hand, it tries to get a better sense of the life that is exposed in this particular situation, a life that falls in between all chairs 18 Judith Butler, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag,” Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), 76. 19 Ibid. 20 See Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 297–310.

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and escapes any and all attempts at making plain what this kind of life consists of. On the other hand, Middlesex explores what particular mode of representation might be able to do justice to such a life—for it is not by recognizing the limits of representation, as will be clear, that representation should be abandoned altogether. Instead, the novel’s realization of the limits of representation launches the narrator and the reader into an intensive investigation of what other modes of representation might fit the radically indeterminate life that the opening chapters of the novel uncover.

The political life of sex As I already indicated earlier on, Middlesex can easily be read as a story that reflects the so-called nature versus nurture debates, debates about whether it is nature (biology) or nurture (rearing) that determines a child’s sexual identity. Doctor Peter Luce’s theory that the sex of rearing is the most important factor in the determination of a child’s sexual identity, more important even than chromosomal status, can clearly be located on the “nurture” side of these debates. At fi rst sight, Middlesex’ account of how Cal’s chromosomal status overrules that conclusion thus seems to come down on the side of “nature.” However, as Cal points out in a key passage toward the end of the novel, things are not “as simple as that. I don’t fit into any of these theories”21—not in Luce’s theory of nurture, and not in theories of nature either. How does his lifestory reveal this to be the case? What theory might do justice to Cal’s life? Although Cal acknowledges that his nature—his body—was an important factor in his decision “to cross over to the other side”22 (i.e. his decision to become a man), the fi rst thing to note is that Middlesex draws into question the so-called naturalness of Cal’s body and the normalization of a certain kind of nature that such a term implies. What Cal discovers at Luce’s clinic is precisely that his nature is not natural, that it is at odds with the particular kind

21 22

Eugenides, Middlesex, 479. Ibid.

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of nature that is the norm. To a certain extent, this challenges readings of Cal’s ethical crisis situation as a “state of nature,” because the state in which Cal has been thrown is anything but “natural.” It emerges, precisely, from a tension between nature and what is considered natural, which forces Cal into the position of the exceptional “monster,”23 “creature,”24 or “freak,”25 as which he is described in the novel. Rather than simply positing nature over nurture, Middlesex thus undermines the normalization of a certain kind of nature and exposes the state of exception, emergency, or crisis that this produces. Cal’s confession that he was traumatized by what happened to him at the clinic further underlines the conclusion I reached in the previous chapter, namely that such a tense situation can be compared to the psychic state of trauma. In addition, although Middlesex is clearly critical of Luce’s theory of nurture, this does not mean that the novel breaks with nurture altogether. The other factor that Cal cites as having played a critical role in his decision to go through life as a man is desire. This introduces Cal’s sexuality into the story, specifically the fact that as a girl, he feels attracted to girls. Here as well, Cal’s sexuality emerges as a traumatized aspect of his subjectivity. After Callie’s parents moved from the center of Detroit to a house on Middlesex Boulevard outside of the city center, Callie meets a girl called Clementine Stark who proposes to teach her how to kiss. Clementine plays the girl and Callie the man. At this early age, Callie already realized “that there was something improper about the way I felt about Clementine Stark.”26 This vague sense of the improper intensifies into trauma when she thinks her grandfather suffers a stroke because he witnesses Callie and Clementine playing an erotic game in Callie’s parents’ bathhouse. Although the story appears to link Callie’s sexuality to the nature of her body, to the fact that she is genetically male, it also reveals the social and cultural laws—nurture—in which Callie’s sexuality is caught up. This is also the case later on in the novel, when Callie is sent to a private girls’ school in Grosse Point, Michigan, and falls in love with a red-haired girl referred to in the novel as 23

Ibid., 430. Ibid., 431. 25 Ibid., 476. 26 Ibid., 265. 24

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“the Obscure Object.”27 The two girls become close friends during the rehearsals for the school play, Sophocles’ Antigone, in which the Obscure Object plays Antigone and Callie plays the blind, hermaphroditic seer Tiresias. As the play is performed, one of the actors, a girl called Maxine, collapses on stage and dies, and Cal’s description of this event leads to a “terrible confession”:28 after the Obscure Object had thrown herself into Callie’s arms, shaking because of the terrible thing that has just happened, Callie feels “a wave of pure happiness surge through my body. Every nerve, every corpuscule, lit up. I had the Obscure Object in my arms.”29 Clearly, Callie experiences her sexuality as governed by social and cultural laws. Because it is once again associated with death—not the death of her grandfather, this time, but of one of her fellow actors—it enters even further into the realm of guilt and repression. It is thus both these factors—nature and nurture—that contribute to Cal’s decision to go through life as a man. For by taking this decision, Cal was able to conform to both his genetically male body and to normative, heterosexual desire. At fi rst sight, Middlesex thus appears to offer anything but a radical tale of sex, gender, and sexuality: Cal’s decision to become a man appears to confi rm and perpetuate everything that his ambiguous life draws into question. However, although Cal’s decision to go through life as a man might appear to resolve the trouble of his sexual identity on the surface, the novel also shows it to continue at another level, and it is this continuation that one needs to study more closely if one wants to get a better sense of Cal’s ambiguous life. Cal explains, for example, that even though he decided to go through life as a man, he always resisted being turned into a normal man. That is, he always preferred his body to remain the way it was, even if there existed a risk that his undescended testicles might grow cancerous in later years. Cal’s reports on his contemporary life in Berlin show that this actually prevents him from having normal sexual relations with women, because he is unable to expose himself to them as what he really is. More subtly, the trouble also 27

The name is a reference to Luis Buñuel’s film The Obscure Object of Desire (ibid., 325). 28 Ibid., 339. 29 Ibid.

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continues at the level of his gender performance. In order to fit in with the other men, Cal wears “double-breasted suits” and smokes “Davidoff Grand Cru No. 3” cigars.30 Clearly, the performance is an all too desperate attempt to keep his ambiguous sex at bay: the two breasts and the cigar turn out to reveal precisely the ambiguity that they are supposed to disguise. Finally, when Cal is discussing his psychological make-up in a passage that I have already referred to earlier on, he points out that it does not fit into either nature or nurture theories and that it doesn’t accord with the essentialism popular in the intersex movement, either. Unlike other so-called male pseudohermaphrodites who have been written about in the press, I never felt out of place being a girl. I still don’t feel entirely at home among men.31 Never out of place in the identity that he is not, and not entirely at home in the identity that he is, Cal thus emerges as a profoundly uncanny32 subject who falls in between all chairs—the embodiment of Judith Butler’s differential norm as described in the previous chapter section, and Jacques Rancière’s subject who has the rights that he or she has not, and does not have the rights that he or she has. The life that emerges here is much more ambiguous than any theory of nature or nurture can account for and invites, it seems, another theory of sex that would do justice to this indeterminacy. Interestingly, it is the positive possibilities that Cal’s ambiguous life holds that appear to provide in the novel an opportunity for Cal to come to terms with his trauma. Middlesex reveals a narrator who is in the process of coming to terms with—and to an extent already has come to terms with—his ambiguous life, and is fi nding a certain pleasure in the ambiguity to which he is becoming reconciled. For Jeffrey Eugenides, this pleasure is inseparable from the notion of “middlesex” itself, a notion he describes as “a very American concept” marking “a belief in individuality, in freedom. 30

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 479. 32 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” Writings on Art and Literature, trans. Alix Strachey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 193–233. Note that Cal’s uncanny sex is the result of a double birth; the double plays a crucial role in Freud’s essay. 31

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I think we are freer than we realize.”33 Eugenides is echoing the thoughts of his narrator Cal who, at the turn of the twenty-fi rst century, after both essentialist (nature) and constructivist (nurture) accounts of sex have proved inadequate, sees “a strange, new possibility . . . arising. Compromised, indefi nite, sketchy, but not entirely obliterated: free will is making a come-back. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”34 In Cal’s description, “middlesex” becomes a profoundly ambiguous notion, separating the subject from both essentialist and constructivist accounts of subjectivity, and opening up possibilities of what some might perceive as a utopian outside from where the subject can “freely” enter into what Bruce Robbins in his reading of Middlesex calls “the (relative) happiness of perpetual self-fashioning.” In Eugenides’ description, the position in-between-all-chairs that this indeterminate “middlesex” is thus supposed to capture ends up being identified as “very American,” an identification that one might read as flawed for the return to identity it represents or as a profound critique of the notion of American identity, a critique that would return it to its indeterminate origins of immigration. What is striking from my point of view is that in Cal’s description, “middlesex” thus comes to name not any particular identity, but “life” itself. It is ultimately the notion of life that Cal uses to capture the particular ambiguity of his being. But what is this life, precisely? Eugenides comes to our aid when he explains that although Middlesex plays out the debates about nature and nurture theories, and tells the story of how Cal comes to adopt the male sex and gender as well as normative heterosexuality, this does not mean that Cal “is really a man”: “Nor is any man exactly like any other man,”35 he adds, revealing that with the notion of “middlesex,” he is ultimately not interested in the difference between men and women, but in a difference that haunts the identitarian categories of male and female themselves. With Middlesex, Eugenides is not interested in sexual difference but in a more profound difference that divides identitarian categories themselves. It is this difference that is referred to in the novel as “life.”

33

Jonathan Safran Foer, “Jeffrey Eugenides,” Bomb 8 (2002): 80. Eugenides, Middlesex, 479. 35 Foer, “Eugenides,” 80. 34

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Middlesex goes very far in this critique, which ultimately also affects even the identitarian category of “hermaphrodite.” It is, indeed, in this respect that the difference between hermaphroditism and pseudohermaphroditism that I mentioned earlier on becomes particularly significant. In his introduction to the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, Michel Foucault refers to “pseudo-hermaphrodites” to explain that they used to be considered no more than “disguises of nature”:36 all hermaphroditism was ultimately only a disguise, and it was the doctor’s task to uncover which was the real sex that was hiding under the hermaphroditic appearances. Although Foucault clearly brings in this analysis in the service of his argument that there is no truth at the bottom of sex, Judith Butler has faulted Foucault for suggesting in the introduction to Herculine’s memoirs that hermaphroditism marks the truth of sex—that it takes up some kind of utopian outside to power, an outside that would be free from power’s productive effects.37 I argue that the particular understanding of pseudohermaphroditism that Middlesex offers does not leave the possibility of such a reading intact. In the novel, the significance of Cal’s pseudohermaphroditism is precisely that it cannot be reduced to hermaphroditism: Cal is neither a true male, nor a true female, nor a true hermaphrodite. Instead, the truth of his sex is radically determined by the pseudo, a pseudo that prevents him from fitting into any clearly defi ned identitarian category. It marks a logic of disidentification or refuge that separates him from any identitarian category to which one might think he belongs. This becomes startlingly clear in the two self-declarations that Middlesex contains. First, there is Callie’s ethical decision, her declaration that “I am not a girl. I’m a boy.”38 Although the declaration clearly expresses her decision to go through life as a boy, the declaration’s underlining—“not . . . boy”—also appears to bring out the opposite, thus immediately undoing the declaration of identity that has just occurred (it is a speech act that immediately undoes the reality it has just established).

36

Foucault, Herculine, ix. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 38 Eugenides, Middlesex, 439. 37

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Consider, in addition, the self-declaration that happens after Callie has been “raped” by the Obscure Object’s brother, Jerome. Because of complications that occurred during the act, Callie realizes, as she thinks Jerome does as well, that she is not a normal girl. The realization is rendered as follows: We gaped at each other and I knew he knew. Jerome knew what I was, as suddenly I did too, for the first time clearly understood that I wasn’t a girl but something in between.39 The sentence’s disorienting syntax evokes the confusion that Callie must have been feeling at that moment. In addition, it undermines the declaration of identity that appears to occur here. Importantly, the passage does not state that Cal is a boy. It ends, rather, upon the much more ambiguous note of disidentification—the realization that Callie “wasn’t a girl but something in between.”

Sex in theory Middlesex thus reflects Judith Butler’s critique of Michel Foucault— the fact that Foucault, in his introduction to Herculine Barbin’s memoirs, appears to present hermaphroditism as a sex outside of power, a true sex. Indeed, the novel is quite explicit about its dissatisfaction with Foucault, or at least with Herculine’s account that Foucault uncovered: “Her memoirs, which end shortly before her suicide, make unsatisfactory reading, and it was after fi nishing them years ago that I fi rst got the idea to write my own,”40 Cal explains. Butler, whose dissatisfaction is not so much with Herculine’s account but with Foucault’s presentation of it, responds to Foucault’s naiveté by asking what she calls, in her book Gender Trouble, “the alternative Foucaultian question”:41 in what ways could it be argued that Herculine’s sex is constructed by power? Reading Foucault against Foucault, she shows how Herculine’s sex is constructed through narrative conventions, and is thus

39

Ibid., 375. Ibid., 19. 41 Butler, Gender Trouble, 125. 40

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decidedly within power—a within that she considers responsible for Herculine’s tragic suicide. The point of Butler’s analysis, however, is that ambiguity—an ambiguity whose status is constituted by power and needs to be understood as a byproduct of power— need not inevitably lead to suicide. Butler is interested, rather, in theories and practices of subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its “natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.42 For Butler, performance—gender performance—is a key practice within and toward such an open future. The question is, however, to what extent the theory of sex, gender, and sexuality that can be found in Middlesex can be mapped onto the theory that Butler explains here. Butler resists, clearly, any kind of naïve indulgence in an “outside” to power—an outside from where a completely free process of self-fashioning could take place. Rather, all the possibilities for self-fashioning that she uncovers remain within the limits—the terms—of the law; they transform from within rather than from outside. In Butler’s theory, sex is thus—like Franz Kafka’s man from the country, as she herself suggests43 —always standing “before the law,” trying to gain entry into it and (until Foucault and Butler have passed through town) not realizing that this very attempt constitutes the law’s shaping force. In Butler, it is therefore always within the force-field of this trying that sex becomes emancipated. Middlesex, which is packed with an impressive series of performances, and includes numerous references to Kafka, clearly echoes Butler’s theoretical achievements. It also testifies, however, to a desire to go beyond Butler’s theory of sex—but in what way, exactly? Consider, for example, how Middlesex retells Kafka’s story “Before the Law.” The story is alluded to in the closing lines of the novel, where we fi nd Cal guarding the doorstep of his parents’

42 43

Ibid., 119. See ibid., vii–xxvi.

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house, preventing his father’s spirit from returning to the house in the immediate aftermath of his death. It is an ancient Greek custom, apparently, to make sure that the spirit of the one who has died does not return to haunt the survivors. Clearly, Cal is not figured here as the man from the country; rather, he is transformed into the doorkeeper, the one who needs to prevent the man from the country—the spirit of his dead father—from getting in. From the passive position of supplication, he is moved to the active position of power, of the one who guards the inner secrets of the law. For Giorgio Agamben, this would be “even worse” than assuming the role of the man from the country. In a chapter titled “Form of Law” from Homo Sacer, he associates both with deconstruction. “The prestige of deconstruction in our time,” he writes, lies precisely in its having conceived of the entire text of tradition as being in force without significance . . . like the door of the Law in Kafka’s parable, absolutely impassable. . . . What threatens thinking here is the possibility that thinking might find itself condemned to infinite negotiations with the doorkeeper or, even worse, that it might end by itself assuming the role of the doorkeeper who, without really blocking the entry, shelters the Nothing onto which the door opens.44 Instead, Agamben invites his readers to “imagine that all the behavior of the man from the country is nothing other than a complicated and patient strategy to have the door closed in order to interrupt the Law’s being in force.”45 Agamben appears to adopt a radically antiessentialist position that, in contrast to Butler, who still thinks the politics of performance that she theorizes in relation to the law, abandons the law altogether. Given what I have said about the role of the law in the novel so far, this position does not capture Middlesex’ particular theoretical position either. It may be a question, at this point, of “changing difference” once more, as the title of Catherine Malabou’s recent book on “the feminine and the philosophical question” has it. Indeed, when Middlesex closes with a view on “what’s next,” the book invites

44 45

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 54. Ibid.

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the reader to go beyond its closing image of Cal taking on the role of the doorkeeper. Beyond both essentialist and antiessentialist feminisms, Malabou’s project is to think, under the name of “woman,” an empty but resistant essence—resistant because it is empty—that once and for all makes its own disappearance impossible. To ask what remains of woman after the sacrifice of its being could mark . . . a new era of feminist struggle and could orient the fight otherwise.46 In the introduction to her book, she also characterizes this approach as a way of bringing gender studies and queer theory à la Butler together with deconstruction—a perspective that she characterizes as “post-queer theory” (because it goes further than Butler’s performance politics), and that one could also characterize as “postdeconstructive” (because it avoids, I would argue, the pitfalls of deconstruction as Agamben characterizes it in the passage that I have quoted above). Malabou’s woman neither seeks access to the law nor guards its inner secrets. Instead, she claims the law’s emptiness and mobilizes it for a political struggle—but without abandoning the law altogether (for she is still called “woman”). It is on this last count that Malabou’s position can be contrasted with Agamben’s, who would never speak in the name of “woman.” Malabou’s plea “to think, under the name of ‘woman,’ an empty but resistant essence” thus comes very close to Middlesex’ theory of sex. As I hope to have shown, the novel is ultimately interested in a difference that is not the difference between two or more identitarian categories but that marks instead the difference within any identitarian category—a difference that captures an empty materiality that the novel calls “life,” and that ultimately exists at a distance from the law, even though it is not without it. Isn’t this the life where legal and political institutions come from? Doesn’t this life mark a potential that “precedes” or at least exists “next to” legal and political institutions, a life that acts, for example, when people go vote, when there is a revolution, or a strike? The life that Middlesex theorizes is of course not a life that is entirely without the social and

46

Catherine Malabou, Changer de différence: Le féminin et la question philosophique (Galilée: Paris, 2009), “Prière d’insérer” (my translation).

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cultural determinations—norms—that Butler speaks of in Gender Trouble. But it relates to these determinations differently. Thus, the novel, like Malabou’s work in feminism, appears to mark an important change in the thought of difference: for they both think a difference that Butler’s work might not be able to recognize. Whereas Bruce Robbins appears to reject Middlesex’ rediscovery of the happiness of self-fashioning as a naïve overwriting of the novel’s worldly concern that appears to challenge such a happy story—if Cal’s “very American,” twenty-fi rst position of potentiality with the shaping of his self is a happy one, the situation of his twentieth-century Greek–Ottoman grandparents who also exist at a distance from the legal and political order reminds the reader that such a position can obviously also be one of immobility—I would argue that it is also important to note the worldly possibilities that Cal’s rediscovery of self-fashioning thus holds in the post-deconstructive era. Naïve or not, something appears to become possible with Cal’s life-story: Cal becomes the vanguard not only of pseudohermaphrodites, but also of all human beings who, in an age in which their lives have become increasingly saturated by power, are reminded of the fact that when it comes down to it, their lives really fall in between all chairs. It is in this respect that Cal’s position ultimately links up with that of his refugee grandparents and that the pseudohermaphrodite, like the refugee, becomes a figure that marks the radical crisis of the concept of human rights. At a distance from any and all identitarian categories, the pseudohermaphrodite “should be considered for what it is, namely, nothing less than a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed,”47 as Giorgio Agamben writes about the refugee. Now, the link to the refugee illustrates— and this is what I consider to be Robbins’ valuable point—that such enthusiasm about crisis should not be naïve: for the scene from where Cal’s trauma emerges—that of the massacre of refugees in Smyrna in 1922—illustrates that such a situation of crisis is also profoundly dangerous, and not desirable. History enters into the argument to attenuate Middlesex’ utopian aspirations. But the beauty of the novel is that history does not mark the end of

47

Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” 22, 23.

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utopia—rather, it is in response to history that the novel rediscovers the utopian, and embarks on an exploration of modes of representation that might do better justice to Cal’s life than the human rights that are incapable of protecting Cal’s refugee grandparents.

Autobiography and messianism The risk of reading Middlesex as a tale of “redemption,” in which Cal’s position in between all chairs emerges as a position of being “saved,” while the scene of Cal’s trauma—the massacre of the refugees in Smyrna—makes the same position appear as a position of “catastrophe,” emerges perhaps most clearly in the novel’s fl irtation with a messianic discourse that is characteristic of some of the theoretical discourses with which I have engaged above, most notably Giorgio Agamben’s and Judith Butler’s. However, although Middlesex clearly flirts with messianism, it also goes beyond it when it turns to literary autobiography for its exploration of a mode of representation that would be more successful in terms of representing Cal’s ambiguous life. After Cal runs away from Luce and his parents on the night before his operation, he hitchhikes all the way to San Francisco where he starts working as a performer in a club called Sixty-Niners. His act there is called “The God Hermaphroditus”:48 swimming around naked in a pool, he exhibits his body to the club’s customers, who pay to catch a glimpse of Cal’s ambiguous sex. It is through his work as a performer that Cal is able to move from thinking about himself as a monster, a creature, and a freak, to thinking about himself as a god. He explains that he experienced this shift from the monstrous to the divine as therapeutic: although he would usually keep his eyes shut when he is swimming in the pool, he opened them one night and “saw faces looking back at me and I saw that they were not appalled.”49 It is because of his work at the club that his “[s]hame over having a body unlike other bodies was passing away. The monster feeling was fading.”50 It is by passing through

48

Eugenides, Middlesex, 481. Ibid., 494. 50 Ibid. 49

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the point of redemption that Cal is able to work through the monstrous and become reconciled to this humanity. However, in the same way that the human being that is thus born retains a number of aspects of the monstrous (Cal refuses to undergo operations that would turn him into a normal man), it also retains a number of aspects of the divine. Cal’s process of becoming human is explicitly figured in the novel as messianic, as the coming of a new, redemptive kind of life around which an alternative political community will come into being. Consider, for example, one of Cal’s colleagues at the club, a male pseudohermaphrodite called Zora. Zora’s particular condition is that s/he is immune to male hormones: even though Zora is genetically male, s/he thus appears to be a perfect woman. Unlike Cal, however, Zora does not want to be considered either a man or a woman. S/he prefers to identify her/himself as a hermaphrodite. Even as early as 1974, Zora is using the term “intersexual”51 to refer to her/his particular condition. Since the intersex movement would not be founded until 1993, this makes Cal describe Zora as “an early pioneer, a sort of John the Baptist crying in the wilderness.”52 John the Baptist is, of course, the prophet who recognized Christ as the messiah. When it turns out that Zora is writing a book entitled The Sacred Hermaphrodite —a title that may recall the title of Agamben’s Homo Sacer —a book in which s/he announces the coming of a being around which a new politics and political community will be constituted, one understands that the hermaphrodite is figured here as the messiah, as a Christ-like creature that will come to deliver humanity from the problematic politics of identity in which it is caught up. “[W]e’re what’s next,”53 Zora tells Cal toward the end of the novel. When this prophecy is repeated in the closing line of the novel—which features Cal in 1975, standing on the threshold of his parents’ house, thinking about “what’s next”54 —the suggestion appears to be, however, that this “next” has not quite arrived yet, or that it is only arriving, perhaps, with Cal’s account of his life, the novel entitled Middlesex, written many years later. Indeed, that novel seems to take up Zora’s prophecy, when it announces in 51

Ibid., 488. Ibid. 53 Ibid., 490. 54 Ibid., 529. 52

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its opening lines that after having been born twice, Cal now feels “another birth”55 coming up. If this birth arguably fulfills Zora’s prophecy, then it is also worth noting that what comes into being in this particular instance is not the messiah, but a profoundly worldly account of Cal’s life—an account that “aestheticizes” the “theological” signification that Zora’s prophecy appears to attribute to it. Let me explain how I consider this to be significant. The origins of Middlesex can in part be traced back, as I have already mentioned, to Cal’s dissatisfaction with Herculine Barbin’s memoirs. In addition, it can also be traced back to a document that weighs heavily in Luce’s assessment of Callie’s sexual identity, namely the “Psychological Narrative”56 that he asks Callie to write during her time at the clinic. The idea was for Callie to write a true-to-the-facts account of her life that would help Luce decide whether Callie thinks of herself as a girl or a boy. Luce bases his decision not only on the content of Callie’s tale but also on her style: “he measured my jouissance against my linearity,” Cal notes, “picked up on my Victorian flourishes, my antique diction, my girls’ school propriety.”57 It is partly on the basis of this document that Luce concludes that Callie thinks of herself as a girl. Middlesex exposes, however, that Luce is not a very critical reader. Too eager to prove true his hypothesis that nurture overrides nature in the determination of a child’s sexual identity, he fails to notice that in her autobiography, Callie is in fact presenting a “cover story”58 that is intended to convince him of the fact that she is a normal girl. The story does not tell the truth of her sex but instead performs a norm to which Callie desperately wants to confirm (all she wants is to get out of the clinic and get on with her life). Cal confesses that most of the text he submitted to Luce was put together with fictionalized episodes of his life. “Half the time I wrote like bad George Eliot,” he explains, “the other half like bad Salinger.”59

55

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 417. 57 Ibid., 418. Ironically, the operation that Luce proposes afterwards to turn Callie into a “normal” woman risks doing away with Callie’s erotosexual sensation, in other words with the very “jouissance” that he considers to be a defining characteristic of her sexuality. 58 Ibid., 419. 59 Ibid., 418. 56

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One question that arises from the novel’s discussion of this extra-narrative document is: how does Middlesex relate to this earlier text? If the earlier autobiography was a badly written series of lies, does that mean Middlesex will tell the truth? The novel raises these questions when it explicitly compares itself to the earlier autobiography. In spite of all the negative things Cal has to say about his doctor, he also credits Luce with being the fi rst person to have encouraged his writing. When he is discussing Callie’s early autobiography, he contrasts it to Middlesex: That early autobiography didn’t begin: “I was born twice” [the first sentence of Middlesex]. Flashy, rhetorical openings were something I had to get the hang of. It started simply, with the words: “My name is Calliope Stephanides. I am fourteen years old. Going on fifteen.” I began with the facts and followed them as long as I could.60 Callie soon discovers, however, that “telling the truth wasn’t nearly as much fun as making things up.”61 This does not mean, however, that Middlesex is telling the truth. Although the novel may start as a form of truth-telling, as a story that promises to set down “for good . . . this rollercoaster ride of a single gene through time,”62 it does not mean that the novel will stick to the dry facts and steer clear from any kind of fictionalizing. It seems, rather, that what sets Middlesex apart from the earlier autobiography is not the difference between “fiction” and “truth” but between “good fiction” and “bad fiction.” In Cal’s view, bad literature seems to be the type of literature he produced for Luce, the type of literature that merely performs the norm. Good literature, on the other hand, plays with truth and fiction in such a way that it is able to do justice to the ambiguity of life that it sets out to capture. Good literature is the type of literature that is able to capture the uncanny life that Cal is, the differential norm of his humanity, the subjectivity of those who have not the rights that they have, and have the rights they have not. It is in this sense that good literature becomes political, because it is the voice of those who have no voice, counts the uncounted, and represents the part of those who have no part. 60

Ibid., 417. Ibid., 418. 62 Ibid., 4. 61

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Although Middlesex is thus a form of truth-telling, it nevertheless remains an emphatically literary text. The opening pages of the novel evoke Homer, for example; the novel includes references to Sappho, John Milton, Franz Kafka, and Sophocles, to name only the most obvious. Following Butler’s analysis of Herculine Barbin’s memoirs, specifically of the ways in which they are shaped by narrative convention, one can obviously take this to mean—as one should—that Cal’s sex, gender, and sexuality are shaped by power. They are produced, Butler would argue, as ambiguous byproducts of power. In Middlesex, however, this ambiguity does not lead to suicide; rather, it opens up—along very Butlerian lines—possibilities of play within the force-field of the law. This chapter has argued, however, that Middlesex also tends away from Butler, in the sense that it preserves the possibility of truth-telling within performance. There is a sense of difference—of the separation of life from the legal and political order—that is preserved in the novel, and given the name of “middlesex”—of a free will, of the “very American” concept of “freedom.” One might call such a utopian tendency naïve, because it risks slipping back into the embrace of an outside that Foucault (and many writing in his tracks) so powerfully undermined. But it might be that with the return of sovereignty upon the political scene in the post-9/11 political era, humanity is also rediscovering a freedom within the field of power that Foucault’s call for the end of sovereignty risks to disallow. It is, I argue, Cal’s aesthetic decision to relate his autobiography in a mode of representation that plays with fact and fiction that challenges his ethical decision, taken earlier in the novel, to go through life as a man, as well as the political decision, described in the opening chapters of the book, to only evacuate those who are citizens (rather than human beings as such). Middlesex’ particular mode of narration introduces an indeterminacy into the representative regimes produced by these ethical and political decisions that transforms them into plural regimes that are able to do better justice to the ambiguity of Cal’s life. As Eugenides insists, this ambiguity is not just particular to Cal’s pseudohermaphroditic life; rather, “no man is exactly like any other man.” It is that difference—not the difference of everyone to everyone but of everyone to him- or herself—that Middlesex’ mode of narration manages to capture, and that our ethical and political decisions should also reflect. By hovering in between fact and fiction, Middlesex of course does not appear to bring anything new to autobiographical writing.

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Autobiography has, at the very least since Goethe’s Poetry and Truth,63 been caught between these two realms of meaning. But the novel adds to its play with this age-old difference a new ethical and political spin in the post-9/11 era, by showing how this difference matters within the contemporary political world of crises, emergencies, and exceptions. At various points in Middlesex, the novel suggests that the cosmopolitan city of Berlin can function as an instantiation of the political future to which Cal aspires: a city that provides the perfect representation for Cal’s uncanny life. Middlesex compares Cal’s struggle for unification to that of Berlin; Berlin gives Cal hope that a political solution for his hometown of Detroit—torn apart by racial hatred—is possible. The reading of the novel that I have proposed should prevent one from falling into the trap that this figuration sets up, namely of Berlin as a redemptive city-state where all the problems of politics would somehow be overcome. Rather, in the same way that Middlesex invites the reader to consider the “redemptive” story of Cal’s unification with respect to the scene of Cal’s trauma—the catastrophic massacre of the refugees in Smyrna in 1922—the novel invites the reader to consider such a “redemptive” vision of Berlin in relation to the city’s worldly history: Berlin is not merely a city buzzing with cultural and political possibilities. It is also the capital of a nation-state that has been a driving force behind a European politics that has been called both “sovereign” and “imperial,” and that can thus not, without further ado, be hailed as the solution for all our political problems.64 But surely, it would be just as much of a mistake, Middlesex is saying, to leave the city’s other possibilities unexplored, simply because of this darker history?

63

See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, Pt. 1–3, ed. Jeffrey L. Sammons and Thomas P. Saine, trans. Robert Heitner (New York: Suhrkamp, 1987). 64 See Perry Anderson, “Depicting Europe,” London Review of Books 29, no. 18 (2007): 13–21.

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3 Literary economies in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace Why is it so hard to say anything about politics from outside politics? Why can there be no discourse about politics that is not itself political? —J. M. COETZEE, Diary of a Bad Year1

Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part. —JACQUES RANCIÈRE, Disagreement2

Disgrace, once more One of the many remarkable aspects of J. M. Coetzee’s recent fiction Diary of a Bad Year —the second of Coetzee’s works to be set

1

J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (New York: Viking, 2007), 9. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11. 2

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in Australia, the country to which he has recently immigrated—is that the pages of the novel are divided in two. The bottom half develops the account of the relation of an aging author referred to as Señor C to a young woman named Anya. “My fi rst glimpse of her was in the laundry room,” that story begins. It was midmorning on a quiet spring day and I was sitting, watching the washing go around, when this quite startling young woman walked in. Startling because the last thing I was expecting was such an apparition; also because the tomato-red shift she wore was so startling in its brevity.3 Readers of Coetzee, and especially readers of Disgrace as well as the later Slow Man, are familiar with this type of story: it recalls Coetzee’s accounts of the erotic lives of both David Lurie and Paul Rayment in these respective novels. On the top half of the same page, however, an entirely different story develops: “Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that ‘we’—not we readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one— participate in its coming into being.”4 The challenge that Diary of a Bad Year poses is how to relate Señor C’s heady reflections on topics such as “the state,” “democracy,” “Machiavelli,” “terrorism,” “Guantánamo Bay,” and “national shame,” to the story of his erotic life told in the lower regions of the book. In addition, there is the question of Diary of a Bad Year’s formal experiment: what might be the place of the aesthetic in the relation between ethics and politics that the novel thus sets up? What is the place of creative practice in the tense relation between private, erotic life and public, political life that many of Coetzee’s fictions investigate? All of these questions were already present in Disgrace. Their particular theoretical significance has tended to be eclipsed, however, by this novel’s historical setting: postapartheid South Africa. Coetzee’s recent work invites us to consider these questions anew, outside of the immediate context of South Africa, 3

Coetzee, Diary, 3. Ibid. It is because of these reflections on the state that the novel appears in Ian Baucom’s afterword to Contemporary Literature’s special issue on the state: Ian Baucom, “Afterword: States of Time,” Contemporary Literature XLIX, no. 4 (2008): 712.

4

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in relation to the post-9/11 political climate of crises, emergencies, and exceptions. In this chapter, I show that Disgrace (a pre-9/11 novel) approaches the questions I have raised from an economic angle, with careful attention to the different economies—private, public, ethical, political, in the fi rst instance—that it proposes in response to the state of crisis in which its characters are caught up. The main conflict around which Disgrace revolves is that between David Lurie and his daughter Lucy: after they have become the victims of a horrifying crime, they need to take a decision as to how they are going to respond to it. Both decide differently, and for different reasons, and the novel presents Lurie and Lucy’s responses in explicitly economic terms. I argue that Disgrace is an exploration of the viability of different private and public, ethical and political economies in the aftermath of a state of exception. That is why the novel, even though it has already received plenty of discussion, can once again become a meaningful text today. Finally, I show that the novel also explores the viability of these economies at an aesthetic level, in the context of Lurie’s creative practice—specifically, the opera that he is trying to write. Here too, questions of economy, in this case of aesthetic economy, open up within the state of crisis that the novel represents. As was perhaps inevitable with a metafictional novelist such as Coetzee, these questions also become relevant at the level of Disgrace’s writing—in other words, with respect to Coetzee’s own creative practice as a novelist. I am interested in particular in the aesthetic that Lurie and Coetzee choose—the aesthetic on which they decide—to represent various states of exception. The chapter ultimately explores the politics of these aesthetic decisions.

The circular economy of violence After Cape Technical University professor of communications and Romantic poetry David Lurie resigns from his job because he has been accused of sexual harassment by one of his students, he temporarily moves to the predominantly black Eastern Cape province where his lesbian daughter Lucy is living. She survives by selling flowers, renting out watchdogs, and taking care of dogs

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and cats for people who have gone on holiday. One morning, when Lurie and his daughter take one of the dogs out for a walk, they encounter two black men and a boy. The trio turns out to be waiting for them when they get back to the house. They claim to have come from Erasmuskraal, where there is no water or electricity. They need to make a phone call because the sister of one of the men is having a baby. Lucy accompanies one of the men into the house, but when the other follows by his own initiative a few moments later, Lurie knows something is wrong. Finding the front door locked, he works his way into the house via the kitchen, where he receives a blow “on the crown of the head.”5 While he is locked away in the lavatory, his daughter is raped, the house is robbed, and all but one of the dogs are shot. Before taking off in Lurie’s car, the attackers douse Lurie in methylated spirits and set him on fi re. He extinguishes the fl ames with water from the toilet bowl. This horrifying attack opens up a state of crisis for Lurie and his daughter. Even though the attack might at fi rst sight appear to be an intensely private situation, it has an emphatically public dimension, for it cannot be seen in isolation from the time and place in which it is set, namely postapartheid South Africa (Lurie tries to see it as separate from this history, as I will discuss, but his daughter makes it clear that one cannot). With the National-Socialist Third Reich, apartheid South Africa is usually considered one of the most important states of exception of the twentieth century: a textbook example of a situation or state in which the exception became the rule and the law became permanently suspended. The private state of exception in which Lurie and Lucy end up through the attack occurs in part as a result of this other, public state of exception that has shaped the relations between the white and the black populations of South Africa. Whereas under apartheid, it was the white colonizer who legitimately decided on the exception, the colonizer’s place is taken up in the attack by the formerly colonized black, whose violence is not perceived as legitimate but as “criminal.” He is a rapist and a robber—two nouns that, from the black population’s perspective,

5

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Vintage, 1999), 93.

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apply just as well to the white colonizer.6 The attack is disturbing, I would argue, in part because of this exchange of roles. It appears to show that apartheid’s state of exception produces only more states of exception, even after South Africa’s new national sovereignty—which aims to situate itself after the state of exception—is declared. The suggestion appears to be that a law-making decision to institute a new South Africa cannot erase historical violence overnight. This violence will have to be worked through in other ways, for example, in the testimonial courts instituted by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). However, it would no doubt be naïve to assume that the TRC could somehow catalyze all the historical violence by which South Africa is haunted. Disgrace shows that sometimes, violence will return as violence rather than reconciliation (human beings are only human, after all) and the question of the state of exception in Disgrace needs to be reconsidered from this perspective. When, in the aftermath of the attack, the issue arises of how Lurie and Lucy are to respond to the attack, it is the particular issue of the circularity of the state of exception’s violence that is at stake. How can one respond to this self-generative logic of the exception without reinforcing it, by breaking with its intensifying circularity? This is the question that haunts Coetzee’s novel. At the end of the chapter in which the attack is described, Disgrace offers Lurie’s fi rst response: “Count yourself lucky to have escaped with your life,”7 he begins. “Count yourself lucky not to be a prisoner in the car at this moment, speeding away, or at the bottom of a donga with a bullet in your head. Count Lucy lucky too.”8 Lurie’s quasi-mantric repetition of the imperative “count” quickly develops into a full-blown economic theory of the violence to which he and his daughter have fallen victim: A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes.

6 The complicity between legitimacy and criminality is a commonplace in political theory. On the complicity of the figures of the sovereign and the criminal, see for example, Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (Picador: New York, 2003), 93. 7 Coetzee, Disgrace, 98. 8 Ibid.

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Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.9 This passage, which has already received a number of critical commentaries,10 shows Lurie desperately trying to hold on to an economic theory of life. Desperately, because the rhetoric of the passage also reveals that such a theory cannot contain the violence with which it is faced. In response to the state of exception in which he has landed, all Lurie can offer is an economic theory—a theory of counting—that he knows to be inadequate. Indeed, at this point in the novel, Lurie has already realized that economy is not a very effective means to contain the violence of life. Lurie’s economic response to the attack recalls the way in which, in the opening chapter of the book, he is presented to have solved “the problem of sex”11—a problem that, as I discussed in the previous chapter, is closely related to that of the state of exception. Every Thursday afternoon, the novel notes, [p]unctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters. Waiting for him at the door of No. 113 is Soraya. He goes straight through to the bedroom . . . Soraya emerges from the bathroom, drops her robe, slides into bed beside him. “Have you missed me?” she asks. “I miss you all the time”, he replies. He strokes her honeybrown body, unmarked by the sun; he stretches her out, kisses her breasts; they make love.12

9

Ibid. Most notably, in Ortwin de Graef, “Suffering, Sympathy, Circulation: Smith, Wordsworth, Coetzee (But There’s a Dog),” European Journal of English Studies 7, no. 3 (2003): 311–31. 11 Coetzee, Disgrace, 1. 12 Ibid. 10

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The calculated precision of Coetzee’s prose draws out the almost clinical nature of the encounter. The scene is not a scene of passion but of circulation and exchange. The sentences that Lurie and Soraya exchange are hackneyed, devoid of significance. They are entirely perfunctory, like the obligatory few sentences at the beginning of a pornographic film. “For a ninety-minute session,” the novel continues, he pays her R400, of which half goes to Discreet Escorts. It seems a pity that Discreet Escorts should get so much. But they own No. 113 and other flats in Windsor Mansions; in a sense, they own Soraya too, this part of her, this function.13 In response to the problem of sex, Lurie offers economy. Economy solves the problem of his desire. Disgrace reveals, however, that economy alone is not the solution. For it turns out that Lurie “has toyed with the idea of asking her [Soraya] to see him in her own time. He would like to spend an evening with her, perhaps even a whole night.”14 There is, in other words, a fiction that supplements the otherwise economic nature of their encounter. In order for the economy to work, it needs the support of Lurie’s private fantasy, his “play” with the idea that there might be something more between Soraya and himself. This relation between fiction and economy is further emphasized by the explicitly literary dimensions of Lurie’s arrangement. “In the desert of the week,” the novel reveals, “Thursday has become an oasis of luxe et volupté.”15 The French is a quote from Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au voyage,” in which the poet invites his addressee (the reader? Baudelaire’s mulatto mistress?) to travel to a land whose order and beauty would seem to exclude the “desert” of South African life outside of Windsor Mansions. Lurie’s solution to the problem of sex is a poetico-economic regime, a world measured by meter and rhyme within whose borders he considers himself happy. This world brutally collapses, however, when Lurie is in the city one day and spots Soraya with her children. Against his better

13

Ibid., 2. Ibid. 15 Ibid., 1. 14

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judgment, he follows her around and when their gazes finally meet he knows that everything between them is lost. After this encounter, things are no longer the same. Soraya soon disappears from his life without notice. He hires a private detective to find her, but when he finally gets to speak to her on the phone she refuses all contact with him. And so Lurie is thrown back into the problem of sex, and this time economy turns out to be unsuccessful at solving it. He fi rst tries to replace Soraya with another girl, also called Soraya, but he fi nds her unsatisfying. He sleeps with the secretary of his department, but that too is a disaster. Walking home from the library one day, he wonders whether he should perhaps “give up” and “retire from the game”;16 he even considers castration (“they do it to animals every day”17). At that moment, however, just when he appears ready to let go, he runs into his student Melanie Isaacs and “something happened which, not being a poet, I will not try to describe. Suffice it to say that Eros entered. After that I was not the same.”18 This is how Lurie presents his encounter with Melanie to the committee before which he has to appear after the girl has accused him of sexual harassment. In a conversation that Lurie has with Melanie’s father much later in the novel, he explains that although he “lack[s] the lyrical” and “manage[s] love too well [emphasis mine],”19 Melanie “struck up a fi re in me . . . A fire: what is remarkable about that . . . Yet in the olden days people worshipped fi re.”20 Clearly, when Lurie meets Melanie he is in the grip of an uncountable, something that cannot be “managed.” This uncountable is associated by Lurie with both the literary, specifically the “lyrical,” and the divine (“worship”). Lurie, a man who in the opening chapter of Disgrace had solved the problem of sex through a literary economy, now appears to embrace the noneconomic, which he associates (once again) with the literary, and also with the theological. That Lurie’s embrace of the noneconomic—his fall into the problem of sex rather than his mastery of it—is associated with the literary becomes explicit in the novel through the ways in which he is shown 16

Ibid., 9. Ibid. 18 Ibid., 52. 19 Ibid., 171. 20 Ibid., 166. 17

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to identify with Lucifer, the fallen angel in Byron’s poem “Lara.”21 Once Lurie has started a full-blown affair with Melanie, he begins to think of him (and thus also of himself) as a hero of impulse, a hero that he constructs as the martyr of a sexuality that society represses. In his Byron lecture, Lurie takes it up for Lucifer, a creature who in his view is beyond good and evil and “just does it.”22 Lucifer “doesn’t act on principle but on impulse.”23 He is a “creature” with a “mad heart.”24 Already anticipating Melanie’s complaint of sexual harassment and the hearing that are soon to follow, Lurie insists that we are not asked to condemn this being with the mad heart, this being with whom there is something constitutionally wrong. On the contrary, we are invited to understand and sympathize. But there is a limit to sympathy. For though he lives among us, he is not one of us. He is exactly what he calls himself: a thing, that is, a monster. Finally, Byron will suggest, it will not be possible to love him, not in the deeper, more human sense of the word. He will be condemned to solitude.25 The literary figure of Byron’s Lucifer is constructed as a figure of a break with economy that Lurie, at this point in his life, appears to embrace. If the noneconomic is figured in Lurie’s conversation with Melanie’s father as something that is associated with the lyrical and the divine, this passage makes clear that it also inspires terror: it is monstrous and resembles a divine creature that was hurled from heaven and forced to continue its existence outside of the society of human beings. 26 21 The identification can be read as an example of tragic irony, since Lurie will become Lucifer later on in the novel, when the attackers set him on fire. Given my suggestion at the end of this chapter that Disgrace needs to be read, perhaps, more as a comedy than as a tragedy, it might ultimately make more sense to consider this an example of comic irony. Lurie’s identification testifies indeed to a wry kind of humor that can also be found elsewhere in Coetzee’s work. 22 Ibid., 33. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 33, 34. 26 Although I will not go into this here, it is worthwhile keeping in mind in this context my remarks in the previous chapters on the difference between human life and animal life, and specifically on the notion of creaturely life as a name for the particular life that is produced in the state of exception.

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Lurie is clearly constructing himself him in this passage as the martyr of a sexuality that society excludes. Given that this passage comes before Melanie files her complaint of sexual harassment, he is arguably defending himself here against a crime of which he has not yet been accused. One could argue, even—and critics of the novel have left this aspect of the book underemphasized—that Lurie in his lecture and throughout the novel is defending himself against a crime of which he will never be accused. Indeed, the problem that the university has with his affair is not that a man at his age is still sexually active, or even that a man of his age would have a sexual relation with a girl who is 30 years younger than him (as Lurie seems to think). It is, rather, that he is having an affair with one of the students in his class, a student whose grade and attendance records he has falsified. Although one might sympathize with Lurie and his battle for a sexuality that society represses, one must also point out that his battle is quixotic, that his rebellion is without a cause. Lurie, however, is entirely unable to see this. When the committee in front of which he has to appear considers disciplinary measures, he immediately understands this as a proposal to “cure [him] of inappropriate desires.”27 One other aspect of Lurie’s rebellion that must be taken into consideration here, and one that stands in tension with Lurie’s embrace of the uncountable, is that his rebellion remains entirely within the law. Good liberal that he is, Lurie is perfectly willing to plead guilty before the law; what he cannot stand, however, is for the law to have any “business”28 with his private sexuality. Lurie’s transformation from someone who creates a poeticoeconomic world to solve the problem of sex into a hero of the noneconomic and a martyr of excepted sexuality is remarkable, and deserves further scrutiny. Particularly interesting in this context, I would argue, is Lurie’s association of the literary with both the economic and the noneconomic. Given that Lurie is also a professor of literature, he thus appears to be offering two theorizations of literature: one economic (Baudelaire’s land of beauty and order), the other noneconomic (Byron’s lyricism, associated with the unmanageable fi re). Both theories arguably make literature complicit with the state of exception whose presence in Disgrace 27 28

Ibid., 43. Ibid., 66.

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I am investigating: the fi rst reinforces the exception of sexuality that Lurie after his transformation will challenge; Lurie can be figured here as the white colonizer, economizing sex but generating repression. The second gives in to excepted sexuality, figuring Lurie as the black, animal-like colonized, associated not so much with the state of exception and repression but with the state of nature. Thus, Lurie is transformed from the “legitimate” oppressor into the “criminal” resistance hero.29 The problem is, however, that in terms of moving beyond the state of exception, both theorizations are equally ineffective. In fact, what those who are sympathetic to Lurie’s battle against repressed sexuality might blindly consider to be better than the repressive economy represented at the beginning of the book is actually worse from the perspective of the women in the novel. Whereas Soraya at least consented to her relation with Lurie and was getting paid for her services, Lurie forces himself upon Melanie on his living room floor. During their intercourse, she remains “passive throughout.”30 Later on, when Lurie goes to meet Melanie at her house and wants to make love to her even though she urges him not to, he nevertheless forges ahead: “[N]othing will stop him,”31 the novel reveals. “She does not resist. All she does is avert herself . . . Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.”32 Although Lurie might feel that he has made a step forward by taking it up for his excepted sexuality, the situation has actually gotten worse from the perspective of the women in the novel. Disgrace therefore takes up an interesting position with respect to the tension between economy and noneconomy with which it engages. Although the novel is clearly very critical of economy—of Lurie’s counting in the immediate aftermath of the attack; of his economic solution to the problem of sex—it does not mean that the novel takes it up for the noneconomic. Disgrace exposes, rather, that Lurie’s noneconomic response to crisis is even worse than his

29 Indeed, Lurie’s relation to Melanie puts him in alignment with the black men who rape his daughter in the second half of the book. Lurie’s heroic, martyr-like stance in defense of a sexuality that society represses is thus given a particularly dark spin in the second half of the book. 30 Ibid., 19. 31 Ibid., 25. 32 Ibid.

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economic one. It is from this realization, which becomes evident from the perspective of the women in the book, that Disgrace’s exploration of alternative economies will take off. In the next section of this chapter, I situate this feminist concern with economy within a theoretical framework that allows the novel’s political core to rise to the surface.

Reading incest If Disgrace teaches the reader anything, it is that the novel does not revolve around David Lurie. Although Coetzee’s novel is focalized entirely—“relentlessly,” as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it33 —through Lurie, this perspective is not what unlocks the novel’s politics. Instead, one is drawn to the perspective of Lurie’s women: Soraya and Melanie. It is true that Lurie is a figure of the state of exception, at least in the ways in which he considers himself to be: as a heroic martyr of excepted sexuality. But Lurie’s attempt to overcome this situation by taking up a position within the exception does not dismantle it. In fact, from the perspective of the women involved in his transformation, Melanie is worse off than Soraya. It is thus Lurie’s women who are the real figures of the state of exception. It is their relation to the state of exception that must be investigated. The internally excluded or excepted position of women in Coetzee’s novel is of course not without a history. I propose to reconsider it here in light of a cluster of related anthropological writings with which I argue Coetzee’s novel to be intertextual. Indeed, such a reading of Coetzee’s work through the lens of anthropological theories is long standing and goes back to his very fi rst novel, Dusklands. One of the few existing articles on Coetzee and the state of exception was published in an issue of American Anthropologist that was devoted entirely to Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.34 When Lurie suggests, in the aftermath of the attack, that the “real truth” about the attack is “anthropological,”35 one 33

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” Diacritics 32, nos 3–4 (2002): 22. 34 Steven Caton, “Coetzee, Agamben, and the Passion of Abu Ghraib,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 114–23. 35 Coetzee, Disgrace, 118.

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understands that Coetzee is pushing his readers toward anthropology, albeit not outside of the critique of Lurie that Disgrace develops. A particularly productive way into such an encounter is through a motif in the novel that has received little attention in the criticism on Disgrace so far: incest. “Call no man happy until he is dead.”36 Lurie recalls this line from the last chorus of Sophocles’ King Oedipus just before Soraya pulls the plug out of his poetico-economic solution to the problem of sex. The reference does not only appropriately figure “David” Lurie as a “king” in a novel that is all about sovereignty; it also introduces the theme of incest—of Oedipus killing his father Laius and marrying his mother Iocaste—into the novel. Launched in the opening chapter of the book, the incest theme is developed further later on, when Lurie starts a relation with Melanie, a girl who is more than 30 years younger than him. When Melanie spends a night at his house, he puts her up “in his daughter’s old room.”37 In the morning, when he goes to see her and she bursts out sobbing in his arms, he comforts her, saying: “‘There, there . . . tell me what is wrong.’ Almost he says, ‘Tell Daddy what is wrong.’ ”38 Once Lurie has moved in with his daughter Lucy, there are disturbing sexual undertones in the novel’s descriptions of Lucy as well. The theme of incest has a long history in anthropological theory, and one that is particularly relevant to my investigations. In the lesser-known second and third volumes of his The Accursed Share, titled The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, Georges Bataille builds on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ work on incest and economy in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Following Lévi-Strauss, Bataille argues that the incest taboo is the condition for the coming into being of an economy of women that he considers to underlie the archaic institution of marriage. In order to guarantee a balanced distribution of wealth within the tribe, men—fathers and brothers—need to resign their right to their daughters and sisters. They need to “give up” these women so as to bring the wealth that they represent into circulation. Although such a “giving up” might at fi rst sight appear to operate according to a noneconomic principle of the gift, a principle that would be largely free of self-interest and 36

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 26. 38 Ibid. 37

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opposed to “the mercantile spirit, to haggling and self-interested calculation,”39 Bataille points out (still following Lévi-Strauss) that such was not the case. Recalling Marcel Mauss’ influential essay The Gift,40 both Lévi-Strauss and Bataille acknowledge that the exchange of women is not only about giving, but that there is an element of calculation that is involved in it as well. As Bataille explains, this element of calculation has both an individual and a collective dimension. Lévi-Strauss already argued that “the incest prohibition expresses the transition from the natural fact of consanguinity to the cultural fact of alliance”;41 it marks a transition from nature to culture, from alliance through blood to alliances that are established in other kinds of ways—in this case, through the exchange of women. On the one hand, this exchange either within the group or between groups is meant to ensure the group’s existence. It indicates that where relationships are concerned, the individual cannot just do as s/he pleases. Elements of individual security are thus exchanged for collective security. In addition, there might also be an element of personal gain that is involved in this exchange: from the moment I forgo a woman, who then becomes . . . available for another man, there is, somewhere, a man who gives up a woman who becomes, from this fact, available for me.42 According to Bataille, and this is where he parts with Lévi-Strauss, the incest taboo is ultimately a rule that attempts to settle the human being’s erotic life. Bataille’s position is, however, that erotic life “cannot be settled [réglée]”:43 “It was given rules, but these rules could only assign it a domain outside the rules.”44 In other words, it was given a rule (the incest taboo), but this rule could only ban it

39

Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vols 2 and 3, trans. Robert Hurley (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1999), 42. 40 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990). 41 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 30. 42 Lévi-Strauss qtd. Bataille, Accursed Share, 46. 43 Ibid., 49. 44 Ibid.

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into the repressed domain of the exception. It is through the incest taboo that one’s erotic life is produced as a state of exception. In Bataille’s view, the incest taboo thus marks a transition from “animal disorderliness” to “perfect humanity, for which flesh and animality do not exist. Full social humanity radically excludes the disorder of the senses.”45 “[I]t negates its natural principle,” he writes: [I]t rejects this given and allows only the clean space of a house, of polished floors, furniture, window panes, a space inhabited by venerable persons, at once naïve and inviolable, tender and inaccessible. This symbol does not just manifest the limit denying the mother to the son or the daughter to the father; in general it is the image—or the sanctuary—of that asexual humanity, which shelters its values from the violence and dirtiness of passion.46 Eroticism arises out of the symbol of “the clean space of a house,” “perfect humanity,” the incest taboo. It is the return of repressed sexuality within social humanity, not as what it was before— nature—but as what Bataille in the title of his work calls a nature that has become “accursed.” Why am I rehearsing these theories in my reading of Disgrace? First of all, the economic theory of life in South Africa that Lurie formulates in response to the attack recalls Lévi-Strauss’ theory of the exchange of women, a theory that he considers to underlie the archaic institution of marriage. In addition, one does not have to agree with Bataille’s theory of eroticism in order to see that it provides a useful lens for understanding Lurie’s story. After Lurie’s poetico-economic arrangement with Soraya collapses, he is hurled back into the problem of sex, into his accursed sexuality. This time, his response to the state of exception will be to break with the incest taboo that produced it: to sleep with a girl who could be his daughter. Lurie thus breaks with the taboo that Bataille considers responsible for producing his excepted sexuality. By breaking with the taboo in an attempt to escape his sexuality’s state of exception, Lurie turns into a figure of “sovereignty” as

45 46

Ibid., 55, 56. Ibid., 56.

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Bataille understands it. Indeed, although the sovereign is traditionally considered the one who founds the political order and guarantees the preservation of the law, Bataille defines this figure along more Schmittian lines, as the one who refuses “to fully accept the prohibitions on which society is based” and whose motto thus becomes “I have refused to submit, therefore I am.”47 Lurie’s case proves what Bataille already senses, namely that “[t]his reservation is more serious than it appears”:48 in his attempt to escape the state of exception, Lurie merely reproduces it. Something of the state of exception thus continues in Lurie’s resistance to it. Sovereignty, or at least this kind of sovereignty, cannot liberate us from the state of exception. Some might argue that this view of Lurie as a Schmittian sovereign who decides on the exception of his sexuality (instead of suffering from it when he is caught in sexuality’s state of exception), would need to be contrasted with the broken Lurie that one encounters in the closing pages of the book: a man who is profoundly disillusioned about what will happen to his line of existence, a line in which “his share, his gift, will grow inexorably less and less, till it may well be forgotten”49 —note the intertextual references to Mauss (“gift”) and Bataille (“share”). At this point, Lurie is working at the Animal Welfare Clinic close to his daughter’s farm. When Lurie carries his favorite dog into the clinic to be put to death, nurse Bev Shaw asks him whether he is “giving him up.”50 “Yes,” Lurie replies, “I am giving him up.”51 The closing words of the novel echo the attitude that, in Lévi-Strauss’ account of marriage, fathers and brothers need to adopt with respect to their daughters and sisters: they have to be willing to give them up. If the closing line of the novel may thus mark Lurie’s return from breaking the incest taboo to accepting the taboo, in other words, 47 Ibid., 252. Consider, in this context, Giorgio Agamben’s rereading of Hobbes: “[I]n Hobbes, the foundation of sovereign power is to be sought not in the subjects’ free renunciation of their natural right but in the sovereign’s preservation of his natural right to do anything to anyone, which now appears as the right to punish” (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 106). 48 Ibid. 49 Coetzee, Disgrace, 217. 50 Ibid., 220. 51 Ibid., 220.

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his engaging in the economy of women that might make alliances among the different communities of South Africa possible, this does not change one of the main problems that critics have had with Lévi-Strauss’ analysis, namely that it uncovers an economy of women, in which women are exchanged as objects of great wealth. Rather than reading the transformed Lurie in the closing pages of Disgrace as some kind of redeemed figure, one might want to consider whether there might not be an element of personal interest that is involved in this fi nal scene of giving as well: given that the dog that Lurie is giving up could stand not just for Lurie’s stubborn sexuality, but also for his daughter Lucy, might Lurie not be giving up this woman in the hope that somewhere else, some man will do the same for him? What needs to be challenged, in other words, is the objectification (commodification) of women that continues with and even after Lurie’s fi nal words. When Bataille states that “eroticism’s enrichment demanded this reducing of women to an object of possession . . . If women had not become objects to be possessed, they could not have become, as they did, the objects of erotic desire,”52 readers of Disgrace are reminded of Lurie’s statement to the press, during the sexual harassment trial, that he was “enriched”53 by his relation with Melanie. This word, which resonates throughout the novel, is too important to let pass. It reveals that Lurie’s supposedly noneconomic, liberated sexuality ultimately functions in the service of another, more hidden economy that is enriching his life at the cost of the lives of his women. When Lurie tells his daughter later on in the novel that “every woman I have been close to has taught me something about myself,”54 Lucy invites him to consider another perspective: “I hope you are not claiming the reverse as well. That knowing you has turned your women into better people.”55 Lucy’s reply—supposedly spoken in jest—can summarize Disgrace’s important intervention in a long history of anthropological thought about incest. It highlights the position of women in this history. If Lurie and Bataille both take up the cause of a sexuality that society represses, Disgrace invites its readers to consider 52

Bataille, Accursed Share, 139. Coetzee, Disgrace, 56. 54 Ibid., 70. 55 Ibid. 53

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the ways in which both Lurie’s and Bataille’s rebellions against this repression risk to actually worsen the situation of the women involved in the sexuality they claim to speak for. The break with economy that both Lurie and Bataille are in favor of—one should not forget that Bataille’s work on eroticism and sovereignty is part of a larger project on economy in which he advocates a radical economy of expenditure that pushes economy toward the order of the uncountable—thus resolves very little in terms of the problems with the state of exception that Disgrace uncovers.

Lucy’s count I would like to turn now to the most important woman in Coetzee’s novel: Lurie’s daughter Lucy. How does Lucy respond to the attack to which she and her father fall victim? Might her response, as a woman, be more promising in terms of resolving the circular violence of the state of exception through which the attack is produced? As I have already shown, Lucy’s father responds to the event by a quasi-mantric repetition of the imperative “count” that develops into an economic theory of life. Continuing the logic of circulation and exchange that dominates his response, Lurie proposes immediately after the attack that they call the police to lay charge for what happened. He wants to put the event into circulation, to make it enter into an economy of justice. His daughter points out, however, that they can’t call the police because “[t]he telephone is smashed.”56 Instead, she will go to the neighbors to ask for help. This should not be mistaken, however, for an act of circulation and exchange. As she leaves the house, she asks her father to stick to what happened to him when he tells the story of the attack. She will tell what happened to her; he should stick to what happened to him. Although Lucy might appear to be merely resisting her father’s version of the story and not the circulation of the event as such, it turns out that her request is more radical. When two policemen come to the house to question the father and daughter about what happened, Lucy does not tell them about the rape. This angers her 56

Ibid., 99.

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father, who fails to understand why she would leave this aspect of the attack out of circulation. Raising the issue with her as gently as he can, he asks: “Lucy, my dearest, why don’t you want to tell? It was a crime . . . You did not choose to be the object. You are an innocent party.”57 “Can I guess?” he continues. “Are you trying to remind me of something? . . . Of what women undergo at the hands of men”?58 This implicit reference to Lurie’s own trial for sexual harassment provokes a sharp reply from his daughter: This has nothing to do with you, David. You want to know why I have not laid a particular charge with the police. I will tell you, as long as you agree not to raise the subject again. The reason is that, as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place, it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone (emphasis mine).59 “This place being what?” Lurie asks. “This place being South Africa.”60 Lucy, in response to the attack, takes up a noneconomic position. She does not want the rape to be put into circulation and considers it to be a private matter with which the law has no business. Although Lucy insists that her position has nothing to do with her father and with his trial in Cape Town, her refusal of economy and “liberal” insistence on the separation of private and public still appears to recall Lurie’s defense against the sexual harassment charges (he is happy to plead guilty before the law, but he will not allow the law to have anything to do with his private sexuality). Like his daughter, Lurie emphasizes the separation of private and public and the fact that his private life should not be turned into “public business,”61 as he puts it. Disgrace makes it clear, however, that Lucy is nevertheless right to insist on the difference between her own position and that of her father. For whereas Lurie opposes his noneconomic, private 57

Ibid., 111. Ibid. 59 Ibid., 112. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 66. 58

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sexuality to the economy of the law, Lucy refers to the rape as her private business. She thus uses the language of economy, specifically the word her father associated with the public (“business”), with respect to the private. This reveals that the difference between Lurie and Lucy’s positions is marked not by the difference between the economic and the noneconomic, but by the position of these notions with respect to public/private distinction, a distinction that is not without significance in the novel and in the broader historical and political context in which Disgrace was published. The difference between the economic and the noneconomic determines, as I have already shown, the position of women in Disgrace, who are worse off in Lurie’s noneconomic response to sexuality’s state of exception. Although at first sight, one might consider Lurie’s move to separate the private from the economic to be heroic, this sovereign refusal to submit also has serious consequences for whoever else is involved in the sexual relation. Lucy intervenes in this situation by reinstating economy’s importance for the realm of the private, thus restoring economy to the sphere of the house with which it is etymologically associated (economy refers to the laws or “nomoi” of the house, the “oikos”). This does not mean, as the conclusion of Lurie’s conversation with his daughter reveals, that Lucy’s position leaves the public entirely out of consideration: the key components in her decision to insist on the rape being her “private business” are the time and place in which it occurred: postapartheid South Africa. How is one to make sense of Lucy’s response to the attack in this loaded historical and political context? One way to read her decision, as several other critics have done, is in reference to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the culture of confession that it represents. In response to this culture of confession, which is also a politics of confession given that it is supposed to contribute to the rebuilding of South Africa as a nation-state, Lucy appears to insist on the secret, on a historically and geographically situated secrecy of life. Private life appears to mark a difference from the culture and politics of confession, a difference in the name of which Lucy “tyrannically” and “jealously” refuses to present [her]self before the violence that consists of asking for accounts and justifications, summonses to appear

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before the law of men. It declines autobiography that is always also auto-justification, égodicée.62 These lines from Jacques Derrida’s book The Gift of Death —which I bring in here as part of a cluster of texts including Mauss’, LéviStrauss’, and Bataille’s reflections on the economy of the gift that I have discussed above—appear to describe particularly well Lucy’s relation to the TRC. And yet, they also fail to draw out the economic, calculative dimension of Lucy’s position, the ways in which she does not merely refuse but also explores alternative, and positive, ways out of the situation. The lines from Derrida that I have just quoted could apply just as well to Lurie’s position during the sexual harassment scandal: he also refuses jealously, tyrannically, to have to justify his sexual life before the law. Whereas Lurie, however, insists that his private life should not be turned into public business, Lucy insists on the fact that her private life is her business, and hers alone. It is the same jealousy, the same tyranny—but different. Lucy’s position differs from Lurie’s by virtue of her decision to explore economies of the private. The suggestion seems to be that some work might be needed at this level in order for South Africa to be able to break with the circular economy of violence in which it is caught up. The significance of this becomes particularly clear at a later point in the novel, when the confl ict between Lurie and Lucy comes to a head. The occasion for the confl ict’s escalation is a party that Lucy’s black assistant Petrus is organizing: he is celebrating a land transfer that will make him the coproprietor of Lucy’s farm. Although these transfers are part of an effort to restore to South Africa’s black community the land that the whites had stolen, Lurie is incapable of seeing the transfer in this light. He can only think of Petrus as a schemer who is ultimately after his daughter’s property. Part of the reason why he is so suspicious of Petrus is that he happened to be away on the day when the attack happened: this makes him think that Petrus was somehow involved in the attack. When Lurie recognizes among the guests at the party the young boy who participated in the attack, he considers his

62

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 62.

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suspicions confi rmed: he accuses Petrus in front of all the guests and rushes back to the farm to call the police. Once again, however, Lucy tells him not to, and once again Lurie gets upset. “Really, Lucy, from beginning to end . . . I fail to understand why you are protecting Petrus. Petrus is not an innocent party. Petrus is with them.”63 In this case as well, Lurie’s criticism of Lucy provokes a sharp response: Don’t shout at me, David. This is my life. I am the one who has to live here. What happened to me is my business, mine alone, not yours, and if there is one right I have it is the right not be put on trial like this, not to have to justify myself—not to you, not to anyone else (emphasis mine).64 In this passage, Lucy once again uses the word “business” in association with her private life, suggesting that the passage does not simply mark her “jealous” and “tyrannical” “refus[al] to present [her]self before the violence that consists of asking for accounts and justifications, summonses to appear before the law of men,” but that it is also an attempt to explore an alternative economy of the private. It is in this respect that her position is most different from her father’s. Petrus will turn out to play a central role in the alternative economy that Lucy has in mind—and Lurie will like less and less what his daughter proposes. Whereas Lurie would prefer his daughter to move to Europe, Lucy insists that she wants to keep living on the land, not just in South Africa but specifically on the plot of land in the Eastern Cape where the attack happened. In contrast to her father, whose economic theory of life in South Africa—as formulated in the immediate aftermath of the attack—makes no mention of South Africa’s history, Lucy’s calculation is emphatically historical: she even voices the consideration that rape might be the price she has to pay for staying on the land. “Perhaps that is how they look at it,” she says. “They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?”65 Lurie refuses to see things this way: 63

Coetzee, Disgrace, 133. Ibid. 65 Ibid., 158. 64

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“[T]rust your feelings,” he replies. “You said you felt only hatred from them.”66 Finally, when Lucy finds out she is pregnant from the rape and informs her father that she has decided to keep the child, Lurie is profoundly shaken. He thinks she should have an abortion. In short, whereas Lurie’s response to the attack is profoundly ahistorical, and urges Lucy to abandon the land and kill the child that was conceived in her, Lucy’s response is historical, and reveals an attachment to the land and its children (even if they are children generated by violence). If Lurie’s response leads to abandonment and death, Lucy’s response leads to new attachments and life. In the next part of this chapter, I propose to have a closer look at the particulars of the alternative private economy that Lucy is proposing in order to understand how this economy might also function in Coetzee’s novel as a model for politics.

Lucy as “the part of those who have no part” When it turns out that Lucy is pregnant from the rape and has decided to keep the child, Petrus proposes to her father that he will marry her. Although Lurie initially tells Petrus that Lucy will reject his proposal, she surprises her father yet again by accepting it. In a reply that recalls my earlier discussion of the novel with reference to Lévi-Strauss’ work on marriage and the economy of women, Lucy points out that by proposing marriage to her, Petrus is not offering “a church wedding followed by a honeymoon on the Wild Coast”67 but an alliance, a deal. I contribute the land, in return for which I am allowed to creep in under his wing. Otherwise, he wants to remind me, I am without protection, I am fair game.68 Lucy’s father does not want her to enter into such an alliance.69 Although Lucy’s decision to do so against his will might appear 66

Ibid. Ibid., 203. 68 Ibid. 69 Here again, Lurie’s link to incest is affirmed: Lurie is one of those fathers who do not want to give up their daughters to increase the security of the group. 67

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to leave the Lévi-Straussian model of the exchange of women intact, one should note that there is one important element that has changed in the configuration: this time, it is the woman herself— Lucy—who takes the decision to enter into the alliance. And one imagines her decision to be in line with neither Petrus’ nor Lurie’s ideal view of the future. If this decision establishes, as I have been suggesting, an alternative private economy, a new law of the house, what does this economy look like? How does Lucy become a part of it? As she explains to her father, although she will marry Petrus, she will not live with him and really become his wife. Instead, she will remain present on his land as an outsider, a void within the community. Lurie disparagingly compares this internally excluded or excepted position to that of a “bywoner,”70 an Afrikaans word implying poverty and indebtedness—it refers to a tenant farmer who mostly labors for the landowner in addition to doing some farming of her or his own. In response to her father, Lucy affi rms the comparison, and repeats the term—but one understands that it begins to mean something different when she is using it. The term begins to become liberated from its negative connotations and is reclaimed as a potentially positive position from where alternative futures for South Africa might become possible. If Lucy is the paradigmatic example in the novel of a figure whose life appears to be utterly unprotected by the law (“otherwise . . . I am without protection, I am fair game”), the solution to this situation is not a blind submission to the law (neither to the law of the country, to which her father adheres, nor to that of Petrus) but a reconfiguration of both of these orders from the peculiar position inside/outside of the law that Lucy takes up. Thus, the position of internal exclusion or exception is arguably reclaimed here as a position of empowerment from where Lucy will take hold of her life in response to the legitimate and criminal violences that attempt to claim her. Even though Lucy’s position, is of course an extremely precarious one, it is thus transformed into a revolutionary position from where other legal and political futures can become possible. This shift in perspective also informs the work of French philosopher Jacques Rancière, which becomes particularly meaningful

70

Ibid., 204.

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in this context. It is by reading Lucy’s story through the lens of Rancière’s theory of politics that one can understand how Lucy’s private economy might also mark a political position that includes important insights for the political future of postapartheid South Africa. Rancière articulates his theory of politics around the type of disagreement that one finds between Lurie and Lucy. The peculiar fact about the conflict between them is that they at once understand each other and do not understand each other. Clearly, they both calculate; both of them are on the side of economy. But their alliance with economy is fractured by the private/public opposition. Whereas Lurie associates “business” with the public and considers his private life to be separate from public economy, Lucy insists on the same separation but associates “business” with her private life. What is played out in this situation is, quite literally, different kinds of counting: Lurie and Lucy both count, but they count in different ways. In his work, Rancière refers to such a conflict between two kinds of counting, between two different rationalities, as a “disagreement” (“mésentente”). As Rancière sees it, the economy of disagreement—the conflict of counts that it represents—is also the economy of politics, because it brings to light the “part of those who have no part” in the established order (the latter he also calls “the police”).71 By this phrase—the part of those who have no part— Rancière refers to the political order’s internally excluded, excepted, or repressed element: that which belongs to it while falling outside of it. While Lurie’s excepted sexuality can be read as an example of such a part, and while his defiance of the sexual harassment charges can in this sense be read as a political act, I have argued that, as such, it is a blind act because it ends up reproducing precisely the practices of exclusion that it is trying to work against. In Disgrace, it is Lurie’s daughter Lucy who becomes a figure of Rancière’s “part of those who have not part,” since she comes to reside at a distance from the laws of her country, of her father, and of Petrus. The alternative private economy that comes into being around her is crucially one of the “part of those who have no part”: an economy of disagreement that is political in its very constitution. Through the institution of an element that belongs by not belonging, Lucy’s economy is able to break with the circular violence of

71

Rancière, Disagreement, 30.

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the law and its repressive counterpart. Instead, the repressive element becomes the political heart of a new grouping, and the law is transformed in response to the realities of life. Rancière understands this as a shift from “ethnocracy” to “democracy,” from a political order determined by identity to one determined by the radical and proletarian indeterminacy of the people, a notion that undermines any and all identitarian categories.72 One can immediately see how such a conception of community would become relevant in the context of postapartheid South Africa. Whereas Disgrace represents a South Africa that, in its attempt to become a democracy, is still very much stuck in the vicissitudes of ethnocracy, the private economy that comes into being around Lucy breaks with the rationality of ethnocracy to implement instead a democratic community rooted in the “part of those who have no part.” In view of Lucy’s claim to a right that does not exist—“the right not be put on trial like this, not to have to justify myself”—it is worth recalling that Rancière has theorized this politics, in part, through a discussion of rights discourse. For Rancière, the point of Lucy’s position would not so much be, as readers of Derrida’s The Gift of Death might argue, that she insists on the historically and geographically situated secrecy of life in the face of a political order that demands confession (Rancière’s police, represented in Disgrace by the police who come to take Lucy’s testimony), but that this insistence creates a position from where something else can positively be claimed. Rancière thus supplements the difference between the position of “those who have no rights” and “those who have rights” with the position of those “who have the right not to.”73 It is this third position that Lucy takes up. This is why she is a paradigmatic political subject in Rancière’s sense of the term: challenging the rationalities governing her life, and putting into effect what one might call, after Rancière, a “re-partition of the perceptible.”74 72

See ibid., 95–121. Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” And Justice for All? The Claims of Human Rights, ed. Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava, South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 302. 74 On this notion, see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). See also Yves Citton, “Political Agency and the Ambivalence of the Sensible,” Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, ed. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 120–39. 73

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In Rancière’s book Disagreement, the position of the “part of those who have no part” is associated with that of the smallholding peasants in Karl Marx’ The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte who, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has pointed out, both form a class and do not form a class.75 What Disgrace shows is that for Lucy, the smallholding peasant in Coetzee’s novel, this position is not merely a precarious one but also one of empowerment, from where alternative private economies and new political communities can become possible. Disgrace’s politics thus hovers somewhere in between feminism, postcolonialism, and Marxism, for the novel invites the reader to think through the politics of a group constituted by indeterminate figures such as the “bywoner” (think also of the related figures of the refugee and the pseudohermaphrodite that I discussed in Chapter 2) in which both the politics of sexual identity, the postcolony, and class enter into a powerful crossing. It is from the shadowy region of this crossing that Disgrace attempts to push South Africa from the pitfalls of ethnocracy toward democracy—a democracy that is difficult, to be sure, but outside of which any country risks to remain confi ned to the state of exception.

From animals to aesthetic economy If Lucy is the political heart of Disgrace, as I have been arguing, does that mean that white South African women who become the victim of a rape by black men should not lay charge with the police? Am I suggesting, as Lucy does in the novel, that rape is the price these women have to pay to stay on the land? Is this what it means to be a feminist, a postcolonialist, and a Marxist in postapartheid South Africa? When reconsidered through the lens of these critical questions, my discussion of Lucy in the previous sections appears to accrue a quasi-messianic intensity, casting Lucy as a Christ-like figure who, in response to the violence to which she

75 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.

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is subjected, offers her other cheek. But surely, in this world (this time, this place, as Lucy insists), there are limits to the neighborly love that the Holy Bible advocates? There is no doubt that messianism is an element in Disgrace’s representation of Lucy. She is presented in the novel as a Franciscan figure, walking barefoot, taking care of the animals and the plants, and living in poverty. In addition, there is the fact that Petrus is the “rock” on which her alternative private economy, her new political community, is founded. Finally, the question about neighborly love is voiced explicitly in the novel in a discussion between Lurie and Petrus. From Lurie’s literary–theological break with economy in the fi rst part of the novel—his submission to a fi re that is both lyrical and divine— Disgrace appears to have moved to the messianism of Lurie’s daughter, which at the end of the day risks to appear even more naïve than her father’s leap into the fi re. Although Lucy is without a doubt one of the most important political figures in Disgrace, the fi nal section of this chapter argues that the novel’s politics does not end with her. Instead, Disgrace invites one to return to the broken figure of Lucy’s father, Lurie, so as to see whether a more realistic politics—one that is neither lyrical/theological nor messianic—might become possible from his disgraced position. Such a return to Lurie will also mean to reconsider, one last time, Disgrace’s recurrent association of aesthetics with politics. Although Lurie originally went to his daughter’s farm to work on his opera titled Byron in Italy, he ends up spending most of his time at the Animal Welfare Clinic close to his daughter’s house, where he assists a woman called Bev Shaw to put sick, old, and abandoned dogs to death. As many critics of the novel have noted, animals play a crucial role in Disgrace, and one quickly gathers that Lurie through his work on the dogs is in fact at work on himself and his unhappy sexuality. This connection between Lurie and the dogs is established at various moments throughout the novel. When Lurie arrives at his daughter’s farm and Lucy asks him to explain what happened to him in Cape Town, he offers the following story: When you were small . . . the people next door had a dog, a golden retriever . . . It was a male. Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it. This went on until

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the poor dog didn’t know what to do. At the smell of a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide.76 Lucy replies that she does not see the point of the story. “One can punish a dog . . . for an offence like chewing a slipper,”77 Lurie explains. “But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.”78 The implication is, clearly, that Lurie is the golden retriever who was punished for his sexuality by a justice he could not accept. The story about the dog contributes to Lurie’s figuration of himself as a heroic martyr of an excepted sexuality. As I have already shown, such a story can hardly represent what happened in Cape Town: Lurie was not on trial for his sexuality, but because he was having an affair with one of his students, a girl whose attendance and grade records he had falsified. Nevertheless, one can still sympathize with Lurie and his plea on behalf of those who, like Byron’s Lucifer, do not follow society’s rules and are forced to live in solitude, as outcasts, outside of the realm of human love (as Lurie puts it in his Byron lecture). In Disgrace, the old, sick, and abandoned dogs on which Lurie is working stand for these outcasts. They are what Lurie refers to as “superfluous canines,”79 dogs that have fallen outside of society’s count but continue to exist in it as society’s internal outside, an exception that needs to be got rid of (done “because we are too menny,”80 the line from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, is the literary motto that Disgrace uses to sum up the dogs’ biopolitical substance). In this sense, the dogs in Disgrace can also be understood as a more extreme figure of the internally excluded or excepted women that I have already discussed. Through the limit-figure of the dogs, both Lurie and his women thus come to belong to the same group. The Animal Welfare Clinic offers a perverted kind of refuge for these creatures, since they reside there only in the perspective of ultimately being put to death. Part of Lurie’s job at the clinic is to help 76

Coetzee, Disgrace, 89, 90. Ibid., 90. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 142. 80 Ibid., 146. 77

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Bev Shaw administer this death. If the dogs are indeed connected to Lurie, as the novel suggests, this means that Lurie’s position of internal exclusion or exception will ultimately lead to death. Like Herculine Barbin’s sexuality, which I discussed in Chapter 2 , Lurie’s sexuality is death-bound; the rebellion that it represents is one of which the law can guarantee that it will ultimately be defeated. If the dogs also stand for the excepted women in the novel, then the same might be true for them. Lurie’s work on the dogs appears to cast a very dark prospect for the politics of the “part of those who have no part” that Disgrace supposedly defends. To figure the defeat of this politics, Disgrace uses an image that is not foreign to the debates on states of crisis, emergency, and exception, in which I have situated the novel, namely the image of the National-Socialist death camps. When Lurie uses the word “Lösung”81 to describe the particular work that he and Bev Shaw are doing, the implication is that what is going on at the clinic can somehow be compared to the extermination of the Jews and other outcast figures (handicapped people, gypsies, communists, and so on) in the Third Reich. Like Giorgio Agamben’s use of Auschwitz as an analytical paradigm for all the states of exception that he discusses—ranging from the state of exception of the Guantánamo Bay detention center to that of a governmental regulation that requires everyone traveling to the United States with a visa to be photographed and fingerprinted when they enter the country—Lurie’s comparison is problematic, and not simply because of the widely different situations that it brings together (the killing of old, sick, and abandoned dogs; the killing of Jews). As a poet in Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello points out, such comparisons between the killing of animals and the killing of Jews do not so much say that in the death camps, Jews were killed “like animals”; rather, it says that at the Animal Welfare Clinic, animals are put to death “like Jews.” That is the part of the comparison that the poet, who has just heard Elizabeth Costello make a similar comparison, cannot accept.82 However, one should not judge the comparison too quickly on account of its use of the Holocaust. The image of the death camp clearly functions as a critique of a politics that would put the “part of those who have no part” to death. It is called in as a critique 81 82

Ibid., 142. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003), 93, 94.

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of a society in which the position of the internally excluded or excepted could be resolved only through death. In this sense, by establishing the comparison with the Holocaust, Disgrace is raising the stakes: its investigation into the state of exception and the internally excluded position of Lurie’s sexuality, Lurie’s women, and animals turns into an investigation of how a politics that could lead to the Holocaust could be prevented. Dogs operate in the novel as a life-form that is able to bring all these internally excluded figures—Lurie, Melanie/Lucy, animals—together. The politics of the Christ-like Lucy is thus pushed into the realm of the animal, which also appears to be a push back toward Lurie and his struggle with the state of exception. Taking my cue from Disgrace on this count, I would argue that it is indeed through the novel’s closing reflection on Lurie, specifically on the opera on Byron that he is writing, that its politics are revealed. Byron makes an important appearance early on in the novel, when Lurie explains to Melanie that Byron went to Italy to escape a scandal, and settled there. Settled down. Had the last big love-affair of his life. Italy was a popular destination for the English in those days. They believed the Italians were still in touch with their natures. Less hemmed in by convention, more passionate.83 Lurie is clearly identifying not just with Byron’s Lucifer, as I have already discussed, but also with Byron himself. The identification is disrupted, however, by the ways in which Lurie’s life-story ends up reversing Byron’s: like Byron, Lurie goes to the country to escape a scandal, but he will certainly not settle there. His time there turns out to be profoundly unsettling. His description of Italy as a place where people are less hemmed in by convention and more passionate gets a cruel twist when one rereads it in light of what happens to him in the South African countryside. Finally, Lurie will end up having an affair—“the last big love-affair of his life”—with Bev Shaw, a woman he fi nds utterly unattractive. It only adds up to Disgrace’s construction of Lurie’s life as a negative of Byron’s. But what is the effect of these events on Lurie’s plans for his opera? At first, the opera was going to revolve around Byron, his mistress 83

Coetzee, Disgrace, 15.

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Teresa, and her jealous husband. But then Lurie changes track and picks up Teresa in middle age, after she has grown ugly and sick. She is hurt by Byron’s friends, who mention her flippantly in their memoirs as one of Byron’s many conquests. In this version, Byron is dead and Teresa is singing out to him, trying to bring him back from the dead. If Lurie is the dead Byron, then who is Teresa singing out to him? Bev Shaw? Is Lurie himself perhaps Teresa, singing out from his profoundly unbyronic existence to the Byron that he would like to be? Does this mean he is only adopting Teresa’s perspective as a means to get to Byron, and not as an end in itself? Is Lurie the author once again doing violence to women? Is the aesthetic work that Lurie produces one more instance of the state of exception? It turns out that the opera and the silly plink-plonk of the toy banjo on which he composes it teach Lurie a more interesting lesson. Six months ago he had thought his own ghostly place in Byron in Italy would be somewhere between Teresa’s and Byron’s: between a yearning to prolong the summer of the passionate body and a reluctant recall from the long sleep of oblivion. But he was wrong. It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic. He is in the opera neither as Teresa nor as Byron nor even as some blending of the two: he is held in the music itself, in the flat, tinny slap of the banjo strings, the voice that strains to soar away from the ludicrous instrument but is continuously reined back, like a fish on a line.84 Neither Byron nor Teresa nor even some hybrid blending of the two, Lurie ultimately recognizes himself in the opera’s music, in the voice that exceeds all these significations, the life that tries to separate itself from the banjo but cannot. He experiences himself, once again, as the internally excluded or excepted element, as the part of the opera that has no part in it. This time, however, and in stark contrast to his earlier connection of the state of exception to the death camp, he experiences this position not as tragic but as comic. Ultimately, it is this comic element that is able to provide refuge for Lurie’s excepted life.

84

Ibid., 184, 185.

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In a novel that has spent so much of its energies in an investigation of sovereignty and the state of exception, the comic is clearly not merely aesthetic but also political. Its difference marks, I would argue, the radically democratic instability that underlies the political order, the “life” from where politics becomes possible. One could argue, although I do not have space here to explore this suggestion in full, that Disgrace is thus rethinking the age-old relation between democracy and tragedy, which is bound to produce democratic life as a traumatic and repressed element, as a relation between democracy and the comic: a relation that would provide refuge for political life and allow it to be present in another way. It may not be the tragic heroes who are the heroes of democracy, but the comic ones. Of course, one cannot expect opera, or the lyrical, literary qualities that are ascribed to it here, to be able to actually realize the politics that the novel thus theorizes. The only thing Lurie feels he can do in relation to his art and what it does is “hope”: “that somewhere from amidst the welter of sound there will dart up, like a bird, a single authentic note of immortal longing.”85 As Brent Hayes Edwards in a reading of Disgrace has pointed out, to say as much means to say that Disgrace “forecloses any notion of transcendence or ultimate redemption through art, even as it ‘hopes’ for ‘a single authentic note of immortal longing.’ ”86 In Disgrace, this “hope” is ultimately given narrative form through the novel’s play with focalization. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has observed, the novel’s relentless focalization through Lurie ultimately arrests the novel’s economy in order to draw attention to the internally excluded or excepted position of Lucy. Thus, Disgrace invites the reader to counterfocalize: The reader is provoked for he or she does not want to share in Lurie-the-chief-focalizer’s inability to “read” Lucy as patient and agent. No reader is content with acting out the failure of reading. . . . This provocation into counterfocalization is the “political” in political fiction, the transformation of a tendency into a crisis.87 85

Ibid., 214. Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Genres of Postcolonialism,” Social Text 78, no. 22/1 (2004): 8. 87 Spivak, “Ethics,” 22. 86

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However, such a reading nevertheless seems to uphold the fiction that counterfocalization is possible, in other words, that Lurie’s failure of reading can somehow be “corrected” through better reading. I have shown, on the other hand, that the most radical figure of Lucy’s politics in the novel is the animal—for is it possible to counterfocalize through, or better to be provoked into counterfocalization by, the animal, one might ask?88 Perhaps partly in contrast to Spivak, then, I have shown in this chapter how Lurie’s inability to read Lucy is thought through in the novel as what Rancière calls a disagreement, a certain failure not only of listening but also of reading (which is a kind of listening, after all) that does not demand to be overcome but to be recognized in a different way, as a difference that is internal to the very rationality of reading, and that marks a space from where a political claim can be formulated—not by the animal, obviously, but possibly for the animal. To read would thus begin to mean precisely to give voice to the disagreement that literature does not except but for which it provides refuge. It would mean to give oneself over to an aesthetic economy that differs from all of the other economies with which the literary in the novel becomes associated. It is in this way that to read can begin to mean something other than to continue the state of exception, and can be propelled, as Spivak rightly notes, into the political.

88

Indeed, this is a question that is central to Coetzee’s work and the reflection on the limits and limitations of sympathy that it develops.

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4 Architectures of exception in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz Time stands still, like the ticking of a time-bomb, and if we are to take the full measure of [Walter] Benjamin’s point, that the state of siege is not the exception but the rule, then we are required to rethink our notions of order, of center and base, and of certainty too— all of which now appear as state of sieged dream-images, hopelessly hopeful illusions of the intellect searching for peace in a world whose tensed mobility allows of no rest in the nervousness of the Nervous System’s system. For our very forms and means of representation are under siege. How could it be otherwise? —MICHAEL TAUSSIG, The Nervous System1

1

Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 10.

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If the Wall is a bid for sovereignty, it is also a monstrous tribute to the waning viability of sovereign nation-states. From certain angles, it appears as an eerie monument to the impossibility of nation-state sovereignty today . . . —WENDY BROWN, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty2

Architecture, trauma, and the camps Although the Holocaust arguably haunts all of W. G. Sebald’s work, Austerlitz is the only one of his fictions that could be called a Holocaust novel. It tells the jumbled life-story of its titular character, Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who was cut off from an idyllic childhood in Prague when his mother put him on a Kindertransport to London, in the hope that this would save him from the impending destruction of the Second World War. Austerlitz was saved, and saved only too well: his adoptive parents never mention his origins, and his history lessons at school end long before the disasters of the Second World War. Even though he thus escapes from the war, and specifically from the concentration camps in which (as he later comes to suspect) both his parents may have died, the war and the camps haunt Austerlitz in his adult life: they turn into a trauma that prevents him from fi nishing his doctoral dissertation on nineteenth-century architecture. Nevertheless, architecture—and not only nineteenth-century architecture—is featured very prominently in the novel, so prominently in fact that it makes one wonder whether there may perhaps be a relation between Austerlitz’ obsession with architecture and the trauma of the Second World War.3 In this chapter, I approach this relation through the lens of the contemporary debates on states of crisis, emergency, and exception that have been at the center of this book. Austerlitz is a novel

2 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010), 34. 3 The role of architecture in Sebald’s novel has received some attention, but so far no critic has (to my knowledge) focused on architecture’s relation to the novel’s other obvious concerns.

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that is saturated with the state of exception: both with the state of exception defi ned in its narrow, legal and political sense—indeed, the Holocaust and the camps are Giorgio Agamben’s most important example of a state of exception in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life — and with the state of exception used in an expanded way, for example to refer to trauma as a “psychic state of exception.” This close relation of Sebald’s novel to theories of the state of exception has not escaped critical attention: in 2005, Eric Santner already published a study of Sebald’s fiction in which he argued that Sebald is a novelist of the state of exception. My project is to reconsider the novel’s emphatic interest in the state of exception through the lens of its equally emphatic interest in architecture. Given that “space” has been an important concern throughout this book—ranging from the difference between the sea and the land in Life of Pi, to Middlesex’ utopian figuration of cosmopolitan Berlin as the solution to Cal’s problems, to Disgrace’s theorization of the position of the “bywoner” as a figure from where a new politics for postapartheid South Africa becomes possible— this chapter allows me to explore this aspect of my investigations in some more detail.4 In this case as well, the chapter will come to revolve around an aesthetic decision, namely the narrator’s decision to include images in the novel’s text. As I discuss toward the end of the chapter, this decision does not necessarily contribute to the process of uncovering the past that drives the novel. Instead, it also risks to be complicit with the political decision by which the novel is haunted—the Endlösung —because the inclusion of

4 That architecture would be an important component in this investigation comes as no surprise given that the notion of sovereignty, which is closely related to the notion of the state of exception, is traditionally defined as supreme authority within a territory. Indeed, Carl Schmitt drew out sovereignty’s important spatial dimension when he called sovereignty a “borderline concept” (Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 5). Contemporary theorists of the state of exception have talked about the “topology” of the state of exception’s politics of internal exclusion. In a recent essay about the work of Giorgio Agamben titled “Boundary Stones,” philosopher Steven DeCaroli has discussed Agamben’s work within an explicitly spatial framework (Steven DeCaroli, “Boundary Stones: Giorgio Agamben and the Field of Sovereignty,” Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 43–69).

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images risks to infect Austerlitz’ testimony with a spectrality that would deny the survivor his actual body. Literary critic Geoffrey Hartman has suggested that such a denial is characteristic of the camps: he has faulted both Jacques Derrida and Agamben for their embrace of the impossibility to testify—of the spectral, rather than the actual, survivor—in their theoretical writings. The chapter shows, however, that the narrator’s aesthetic decision to include images in the text is challenged in the novel by another aesthetic decision, namely Austerlitz’ decision during his archival work to “speed up” or “slow down” the various images that he comes across. In this way, their spectrality is unworked; their grainy materiality is exposed. This second decision can be applied to Sebald’s own novel as well. I argue that Austerlitz invites a practice of reading that would, precisely, prevent the denial that Hartman is afraid of. The chapter closes with a discussion of a number of ways in which the novel invites such an active—and political—mode of reading.

Reading fortifications [I]t seems to me worthwhile considering whether it is good to build fortresses and whether they are harmful or useful to those who build them. —NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, The Discourses5

From the very fi rst pages of Austerlitz, architecture takes up a prominent place in the novel. Much of the discussion at the beginning of the book revolves around early-modern fortifications. Fortifications show, as Austerlitz explains, how we feel obliged to keep surrounding ourselves with defenses, built in successive phases as a precaution against any incursion by enemy powers, until the idea of concentric rings making their way steadily outward comes up against its natural limits.6 5 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie Walker and Brian Richardson (New York: Penguin, 2003), 352. 6 W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 14.

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As such, however, fortifications ultimately do not serve their purpose. There are three reasons why this is the case: fi rst, because “the largest fortifications will naturally attract the largest enemy forces” so that “the more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive”;7 second, because by fortifying yourself, you “[draw] attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it”;8 and, third, because the time to build fortifications increased (it took longer and longer to complete them) “and with it the probability that as soon as they were fi nished, if not before, they would have been overtaken by further developments, both in artillery and strategic planning.”9 Such was the case, for example, with the city of Antwerp, Belgium, where the novel begins. After Antwerp’s fortifications had been reduced to rubble during an 1832 siege, “the only conclusion anyone drew from it, incredibly, was that the defenses surrounding the city must be rebuilt even more strongly than before.”10 The city’s answer to the violence it had suffered was thus to repeat the very measure that, in Austerlitz’ view, had attracted this violence. The new fortifications continued “the same old logic”11 and were bound to lead to the same violent results. However, before these new fortifications were completed, artillery and strategic planning had already developed to such a degree that a new wall needed to be built even further away from the city center. The question was even raised at this point whether the line of forts should not be moved even further out to include Antwerp’s “rapid industrial and commercial development,” thus “bringing it within the sight of the outskirts of Mechelen,” a neighboring town.12 It now turns out that Austerlitz is particularly interested in the last link of this chain of fortifications around Antwerp, namely the fortress of Breendonk. Completed just before the outbreak of the First World War, the fort was used as a “reception and penal camp”13 during the Second World War. Whereas the fortifications were thus supposed to protect the city, and specifically the human

7

Ibid., 16. Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 17. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 18. 13 Ibid., 19. 8

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life that resided within it, against enemy incursions coming from the outside, they actually ended up destroying it. For Austerlitz, the fortress of Breendonk thus marks the relation between the earlymodern practice of fortification and the destruction of life in the National-Socialist camps. The logic of fortification, and its relation to the camp, will turn out to haunt almost all of the architectures that Austerlitz discusses in the novel—even buildings that one might, at first sight, be reluctant to associate with the camp. One revealing example of a fort- and thus also camp-like building that Austerlitz discusses toward the end of the novel is the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (site François Mittérand) (BnF) in Paris. At this late stage of the narrative, Austerlitz has already uncovered most of his life-story as well as of the life-story of his mother, Agata. He is now in search of his father, who fled to Paris just before the Nazis invaded Prague but was never heard of since. Unfortunately, the BnF proves entirely useless in his search for his father. This is largely due, in Austerlitz’ opinion, to the building itself, which is described in terms that clearly recall his reflections on fortifications, and that thus associates the library with the camp. Echoing his discussions of the fortifications in Antwerp, which he introduces by saying that “it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity,”14 as well as his discussion of the Palace of Justice in Brussels, which states that “somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the fi rst with an eye to their later existence as ruins,”15 Austerlitz describes the BnF as a hideous, outsize building, the monumental dimensions of which were evidently inspired by the late President’s wish to perpetuate his memory whilst, perhaps because it had to serve this purpose, it was so conceived that it is, as I realized on my first visit, said Austerlitz, both in its outer appearance and inner constitution unwelcoming if not inimical to human beings, and runs counter, on principle, one might say, to the requirements of any true reader.16

14

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 19. 16 Ibid., 275, 276. 15

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The building strikes Austerlitz as a defense structure that renders the activity of reading that it is supposed to promote impossible. Like early-modern fortifications, which were supposed to protect life and not kill it, the architecture of the BnF ends up producing exactly the opposite of what it is supposed to produce. Working his way up toward the wooden esplanade that is suspended between the library’s four towers, and then taking an escalator back down to the ground level in order to enter the library, Austerlitz reflects on the absurdity of the building’s construction, “something that must have been devised—I can think of no other explanation, said Austerlitz—to instill a sense of insecurity and humiliation in the poor readers.”17 The closer he gets to the library, the more Austerlitz feels his life to be thrown off track. After he has fi nally managed to gain access to a public reading room, and has seen a bird kill itself by flying into the window, he wonders about the way in which such unforeseen accidents . . . relate to the Cartesian overall plan of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the allembracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability.18 This “dysfunction” and “instability” do not only take the form of “recurrent symptoms of paralysis affecting the [library’s] electronic data retrieval system,”19 but are clearly associated with the paralysis of “life itself”—of both human and animal lives, of both Austerlitz’ life and the life of the bird that flew into the window. Although Austerlitz’ distress and the death of a bird at fi rst sight seem to be incommensurable to, and indeed entirely unrelated to, the National-Socialist death camps with which the library through the rhetoric and logic of Austerlitz’ description is associated, it

17

Ibid., 278. Ibid., 281. 19 Ibid. 18

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turns out that there is nevertheless a relation between the library and the Second World War. For at the site where the library is now built, there used to stand a warehouse where, during the Second World War, all the loot from the Jewish homes in Paris was taken. However, “the whole affair is buried in the most literal sense beneath the foundations of our pharaonic President’s Grande Bibliothèque.”20 Thus, the library does not only make reading impossible, or throw the lives of animals and human beings off track, it also erases the history of the Holocaust. In this sense, the library fits in a long series of fortifications that not only produced the violence of the Second World War but that also separated Austerlitz from his life-story and from these events, and that thus produced the trauma—the psychic state of exception, as Santner has shown—from which Austerlitz is suffering. Fortifications and fort-like architectures are thus related to the state of exception, not only historically but also through their actual effects, through the fact that they throw life off track. Although the BnF is obviously very different from a death camp, Austerlitz still invites one to consider the complicities between the camp and this fort-like building, and the ways in which these two buildings testify to a same logic of construction that throws life into a state of exception. Although both early-modern fortifications and the BnF aim to include life within their “protection,” they end up internally excluding or excepting it; whereas they are trying to make life feel welcome and secure, they end up instilling it with a sense of insecurity and humiliation, thus producing a state of exception that—in the case of fortifications, and in the case of the library also, if one counts the life of a bird—has deadly consequences. 21 The novel’s comparison of the BnF to the camps raises the question of what kind of architecture Austerlitz considers to be better fit to life. In the closing pages of the novel, Austerlitz nostalgically

20

Ibid., 289. In my view, the analogy between the camp and the fort-like building of the BnF that is established here is ultimately a very weak one, the product of an immature anti-modernity that, as critics have argued, also characterizes Agamben’s analysis of the concentration camp as a model for the states of exception in which human life is increasingly caught up today. In what follows, I question this analogy in order to explore instead what other, life-saving dimensions of modernity both Austerlitz and Agamben might be forgetting. 21

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contrasts the fort-like architecture of the new BnF with that of the old BnF in the Rue Richelieu, a site where he used to work but that is now (partly) closed: the domed hall with its green porcelain lampshades which cast such a soothing, pleasant light is deserted, the books have been taken off the shelves, and the readers, who once sat at the desks numbered with their little enamel plates, in close contact with their neighbors and silent harmony with those who had gone before them, might have vanished from the face of the earth.22 Earlier on in the novel, however, when Austerlitz is talking about the time when he used to work at the BnF site Richelieu, he remarks that he could never quite decide “whether there in the reading room of the library, which was full of quiet humming, rustling and clearing of throats, I was on the Islands of the Blest or, on the contrary, in a penal colony”23 —a passage that suggests that even the old BnF is not quite the architecture that Austerlitz embraces, or even that there does not exist a single architecture that he would embrace. Apart from the library in the Rue Richelieu, it is only the house of his school friend Gerald Fitzpatrick’s family—the so-called Andromeda Lodge—that emerges from the novel as an example of an architecture that Austerlitz likes. As its name suggests, it strikes the reader not so much as a real building but as a utopian construction that belongs to a galaxy far, far away. Like Austerlitz’ childhood in Prague, it represents a world irretrievably lost. As such, it can hardly function as a valid response to the state of exception into which Austerlitz fi nds himself. Nevertheless, Austerlitz’ descriptions of the Andromeda Lodge can reveal much about his traumatized relation to architecture.

The cabinet of wonder Austerlitz’ description of the Andromeda Lodge draws attention to an enigmatic feature of Sebald’s novel, namely the lists of animals,

22 23

Ibid., 275. Ibid., 261.

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plants, objects, names, and so on that appear throughout the text. The fi rst example of this occurs on page four, where the narrator lists a series of animals that he “probably” saw at the Antwerp Zoo: “bats and jerboas from Egypt and the Gobi desert, native European hedgehogs and owls, Australian opossums, pine martens, dormice, and lemurs.”24 The novel also closes with a list of names scratched into the walls of the Breendonk fortress. Although these lists are largely descriptive, at times they also appear to have a commemorative function. In the case of the names at the end of the book, for example, they appear to remember those who were at Breendonk. I argue, however, that the lists should also be considered as part of a more ambitious attempt at commemoration in the novel—what one could call the novel’s attempt to archive life. Indeed, any reader of Sebald’s work will have noticed that there is an encyclopedic effort that characterizes his writing (many readers fi nd this overload of information off-putting), a way in which Sebald’s fictions aim to be a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm of life. The novel’s lists can be considered as part of this project. The Andromeda Lodge needs to be understood in this light as well: as a place that is perfectly attuned to life and that carries within it the entirety of life. Indeed, Austerlitz’ descriptions of the lodge contain various examples of the listings I have mentioned. He notes, for example, that in almost every room at the Andromeda Lodge “there was some kind of cabinet of natural curiosities”: cases with multiple drawers, some of them glass-fronted, where the roundish eggs of parrots were arranged in their hundreds; collections of shells, minerals, beetles, and butterflies; slowworms, adders, and lizards preserved in formaldehyde; snail shells and sea urchins, crabs and shrimps, and large herbaria containing leaves, flowers, and grasses.25 Austerlitz’ use in this passage of the term “cabinet of natural curiosities” to describe the collections of natural oddities that make up the lodge’s “natural history museum”26 calls to mind the so-called 24

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 83. 26 Ibid. 25

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cabinet of wonders to which scholars have traced back the existence of our contemporary museums and art galleries. 27 In the Middle Ages, the princes of Continental Europe would have a room in their palaces in which, next to paintings and statues, various kinds of objects would be collected. Giorgio Agamben has written an essay about these cabinets of wonder or Wunderkammer that gives one an idea of what they must have looked like: Alligators, stuffed gray bears, oddly shaped fish, stuffed birds, and canoes used by primitive peoples hang from the ceiling. . . . The upper part of the back wall is taken up by spears, arrows, and other weapons. . . . Between the windows of one of the side walls there are deer and elk antlers, animal hooves and skulls; on the opposite wall . . . hang tortoise shells, snake skins, sawfish teeth, and leopard skins. . . . [T]he walls are covered with shelves overflowing with shells, octopus bones, mineral salts, metals, roots, and mythological statuettes.28 Agamben points out that although this enumeration might strike one as overwhelming, chaos only seemingly ruled in the cabinet of wonder. For the medieval mind, the cabinet was carefully ordered. It reproduced the measurements of the universe. It was a microcosm that in its multiplicity represented the multiplicity of the macrocosm. The human being could recognize her/himself in the cabinet of wonder as a being of natural history, as a neighbor to the various odd objects that the cabinet contained. 29 27 I already wrote about the connection between Sebald’s work and the cabinet of wonder in an early, very different version of this text: “Architectures of Memory in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” Discourses of Violence—Violence of Discourses: Critical Interventions, Transgressive Readings, and Post-National Interventions, ed. Dirk Wiemann, Agata Stopinska, Anke Bartels, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 55–69. See also Dominik Finkelde, “Wunderkammer und Apokalypse: Zu W.G. Sebalds Poetik des Sammelns zwischen Barock und Moderne,” German Life and Letters 60, no. 4 (2007): 554–68. 28 Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Giorgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 30. 29 Of course, not everyone could see the world in this way back then. The Agambenian understanding of the Wunderkammer that I summarize here in fact represents an idealization of life that forgets the reality of medieval social hierarchies. I thank Bruce Robbins for drawing my attention to this. It is a version of this point that this chapter levels against Austerlitz’ escape from trauma into wonder.

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As Agamben observes, however, the sense of coherence and meaning that the cabinet of wonder represents has gone lost with the modern museum and art gallery, which stand at the end of the Wunderkammer’s history. Contrary to the cabinet of wonder, they represent worlds on their own that are cut off from the natural world. I would argue that it is this sense of separation and loss that Austerlitz through its lists and through the inclusion of images in its text also aims to overcome. The novel thus testifies to a desire to be a cabinet of wonder in response to the feelings of separation and loss from which its main character, Jacques Austerlitz, suffers. Austerlitz experiences this loss of the cabinet of wonder’s sense of coherence and meaning when he visits the city of Terezin, formerly the Theresienstadt camp, where his mother was deported and where she probably died. On his walk through the deserted and boarded up town, he suddenly fi nds himself in front of a cabinet of wonder. This one is called the ANTIKOS BAZAR. Looking at the objects that are collected behind the windows of this shop, Austerlitz wonders: What secret lay behind the three brass mortars of different sizes . . . or the cut-glass bowls, ceramic vases, and earthenware jugs, the tin advertising signs . . . the little box of seashells, the miniature barrel organ, the globe-shaped paperweights . . . the model ship . . . the oakleaf-embroidered jacket of light, pale, and summery linen, the staghorn buttons, the outsize Russian officer’s cap and the olive-green uniform tunic with gilt epaulettes that went with it, the fishing rod, the hunter’s bag, the Japanese fan, the endless landscape painted round a lampshade in fine brushstrokes, showing a river running quietly through perhaps Bohemia or perhaps Brazil?30 However, Austerlitz is unable to discover the secret that ties these objects together. The sense of coherence and meaning that the cabinet of wonder is supposed to provide remains shockingly absent. He is unable to recognize in these objects the microcosm within which his existence would appear meaningful. The only link between these objects and his own life is that both the objects

30

Sebald, Austerlitz, 195, 196.

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and Austerlitz himself have survived the destruction of the Second World War. The cabinet that Austerlitz is viewing here is thus not held together by a sense of wonder but by a sense of trauma. It is in the light of trauma that Austerlitz is able to recognize “my own faint shadow image barely perceptible among them.”31 It is thus by way of the experience of a trauma—by way of a psychic state of exception—that the novel’s relation to the cabinet of wonder needs to be understood. The cabinet is a nostalgic attempt to recreate the premodern space in which the human being’s place in the world still made sense. The problem is, however, that such a nostalgic escape into premodern times does not constitute an effective response to the state of exception. Indeed, to respond to trauma by wonder can ultimately only lead to more trauma, because the highly idealized cabinet of wonder is not able to do justice to life’s perils and difficulties. To flee from trauma into wonder ultimately makes whatever caused the trauma to appear even more traumatic. If the Wunderkammer itself arguably already represented a forgetting of, for example, the injustices of medieval social hierarchy, the reality of these injustices will in the end appear only more traumatizing—and history will offer nothing other than the eternal return of the same. The novel’s cabinet of wonder is thus, like the glass in the photograph of what is supposedly a cabinet of natural curiosities at the Andromeda Lodge, 32 cracked and the question that the novel raises is: how is one to respond to this crack? Austerlitz’ problem appears to be that he is caught up between two states of exception: on the one hand, the crack leads into the state of exception of trauma, in which his life is thrown off track. On the other, his response to this trauma—a nostalgic return to the cabinet of wonder—only risks to produce more trauma, since the cabinet of wonder does not do justice to the perils and difficulties of modern life. But are these two architectures—trauma and wonder—really the only two options available when it comes to responding to life’s state of exception? If this question is not only a question of life but also of architecture, what is its place in debates about architecture’s relation to life and the trauma of history and memory? Can architecture perhaps provide a way out of the impasse in which Austerlitz is caught up?

31 32

Ibid., 197. See ibid., 83.

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Architectures of the uncanny As I have already mentioned, Austerlitz is an architectural historian who, although he is obviously brilliant, never finished his doctoral thesis on nineteenth-century architecture. Sebald’s novel nevertheless provides a glimpse into this unfinished work through the numerous discussions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectures that it contains. Austerlitz’ take on architecture shows clear similarities to Michel Foucault’s work on the architecture of hospitals, prisons, schools, and other disciplinary institutions. As such, however, it risks to suffer from similar problems: Austerlitz risks to be unable to look beyond his critique of architecture, and emphasize the potentially positive and empowering aspects of these constructions. One could point out, for example, that although Austerlitz’ critique involves not only nineteenth-century buildings but also twentieth-century buildings, such as the BnF, he never considers buildings that were explicitly conceived in response to some of the questions about life, history, and memory’s relation to architecture that he, and critics like him, are raising. Many of these became crucial in architectural theory after the Second World War. In what follows, I look at some of these buildings and the architectural theories that underlie them. My aim is to show how these new approaches in architecture, even if at first sight they may seem to have very little to do with Sebald’s novel, can ultimately help one understand the novel’s architextural response to the states of exception. There is an interesting debate in the criticism of Sebald’s work about whether Sebald’s fictions should be called “modernist” or “postmodernist.” Most people have argued the latter, emphasizing for example the trope of homelessness that characterizes the novels. Others have argued the former, insisting instead on the characters’ incapacity to ever cut themselves off from home. In this context, John Zilcosky, who makes the modernist case for Sebald’s earlier fictions but argues that Austerlitz is postmodernist, has characterized Sebald’s early writing as a fiction of the uncanny, in which subjects “never become sufficiently uprooted”33

33 John Zilcosky, “Lost and Found: Disorientation, Nostalgia, and Holocaust Melodrama in Sebald’s Austerlitz,” Modern Language Notes 121 (2006): 681.

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and “incessantly return against [their] will to hauntingly familiar places.”34 Austerlitz differs from this because it operates within a paradigm in which returning home is still possible. Although I appreciate the literary historical and theoretical framework in which Zilcosky is situating Sebald’s work, it is unclear to me why the uncanny dimension of Sebald’s early fiction would necessarily qualify it as modernist. Indeed, this seems to be an issue for Zilcosky as well, who in the same article also calls it “post-postmodern.”35 Second, although there is indeed a difference between Austerlitz and Sebald’s other fictions, which are much less like novels and much less explicitly concerned with the Holocaust, I do not agree that this difference is the difference between modernism and postmodernism if this difference is supposed to be marked by Freud’s concept of the uncanny. 36 By situating Austerlitz in the architectural debates about modernism and postmodernism, I propose we understand it as a postmodernist architecture of the uncanny that becomes significant in the context of the theories of the state of exception that I have discussed. 37 Philosopher Mark C. Taylor has noted that “[t]he history of architectural modernism is a story of alternative strategies for making the body disappear.”38 In his view, “[t]he crime of ornamentation provokes” modernism’s “crime of bodily violation in which materiality dematerializes”—in which the body disappears and skin (surface) “grows ever more important.”39 “Transparent buildings turn away from the fleeting world and in on themselves to become reflexive structures whose autonomy mimes a transcendence once limited to gods.”40 Taylor argues that such a dematerialization represents “the desire to escape time by securing stability 34

Ibid., 683. Ibid., 684. 36 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” trans. Alix Strachey, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 193–233. 37 As others have argued, to speak of a postmodernist uncanny is not a contradiction. See, for example, Bart van der Straeten, “The Uncanny and the Architecture of Deconstruction,” Image [&] Narrative 5 (2003): http://www.imageandnarrative.be/ uncanny/bartvanderstraeten.htm. 38 Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 238. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 239. 35

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in the midst of flux.”41 He proposes that the ancient pyramid be considered as a figure for this longing for transcendence. Although the postmodernist aesthetic has of course retained many aspects of the modernist one, it nevertheless also marked several important differences, one of which has to do with architecture’s longing for transcendence, eternity, stability, and security: with postmodernism, “eternity is over” and “a labyrinth undermines every pyramid.”42 Taylor refers his readers here to the work of the Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi. In a 1995 interview, Tschumi observes that for six thousand years architecture was always the symbol of stability, of permanence, of eternity. . . . Architecture is always about stability, either structural stability or the stability of the institution. It’s frozen, it’s there, it never changes. . . . One thing that struck me very early on was that architecture simultaneously was always challenged by the movement of bodies going through architecture, by various activities in it.43 Tschumi relates this movement of bodies through space to film. I was trying to learn about architecture through the cinema, through film, because I felt that the film space was telling me something about architecture, because you had always movement of bodies in space. Space was constantly activated by movement.44 “In the shifty structure of film,” Taylor notes, “Tschumi discerns a way of smuggling time into architecture.”45 By undertaking “the seemingly impossible task of introducing time into formal structures,” Tschumi resists “the struggle to resolve contradictions” and instead “cultivates the creative potential of opposition.”46 Architecture thus becomes the space of the virtual: a non-dialectical

41

Ibid. Ibid. 43 Tschumi qtd. ibid., 241. 44 Tschumi qtd. ibid., 241, 242. 45 Ibid., 243. 46 Ibid., 250, 251. 42

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mean between which the material and the immaterial—the body and the specter—are suspended. I would like to suggest that Tschumi’s critique of architecture’s relation to eternity, stability, and security is a critique of architecture’s exception of life—a life for which Tschumi aims to provide refuge in his own buildings. Although Tschumi’s architecture—for example, the controversial Alfred Lerner Hall on Columbia University’s campus—could not be further removed from the architectures that Austerlitz praises—the old BnF in the Rue Richelieu; the Andromeda Lodge— one immediately notices that Tschumi’s main theoretical concern— smuggling time into the formal structure of architecture as a critique of architecture’s age-old association with transcendence, stability, eternity, security—actually comes close to Austerlitz’. Like Tschumi, Austerlitz desires an architecture beyond fortification that would provide refuge for life, trauma, and history. Although Tschumi articulates this concern through an emphatic attention to the body and Sebald through his exploration of Austerlitz’ psychic afflictions, the two ultimately meet: Tschumi turns out to be interested in the moving body or the body in film—the body-specter. Similarly, Sebald is not so much interested in the purely psychic but in the psycho-somatic, in the ways in which the psyche and the body interact. Finally, Tschumi and Austerlitz also meet in their shared privileging of the labyrinth over the pyramid. As I have shown above, Austerlitz’ critique of the BnF site François Mittérand explicitly challenges the pyramidal dimensions of this construction, and his discussion of the library quite literally reveals the labyrinth that undermines it. Although Austerlitz’ favorite architecture may not be that of Bernard Tschumi, there are thus a number of parallels between the novel and Tschumi’s architecture that invite one to consider further ways in which they might be related. An even better interlocutor in this context, and one to which Mark Taylor has paid extensive attention elsewhere,47 is Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind’s name has been in the news because of his designs for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center in New York. He is an architect whose work has been explicitly concerned with the question of architecture’s relation to history and trauma that Sebald’s novel raises.

47

See Mark C. Taylor, Nots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

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From his early works, such as the 1986 City Edge project onward, Libeskind has challenged the logic of fortification and of the state of exception in architecture. City Edge can be understood, specifically, as a critique of the Berlin Wall (see Figure 4.1). As Taylor has pointed out, Libeskind “uses the structure of the wall to subvert the ideology of the Wall.”48 He addresses the wall’s “violent slicing up of territory” by making drawings of a wall that is “lifting itself up and creating a new public street below,” in other words by “turning the wall against itself” and by “deconstruct[ing] the binary logic of [its] either/or.”49 This deconstruction is continued within the structure of the wall itself, which when one looks at closely is revealed to be a “montage of edges,”50 of pieces of other walls. Taylor notes that paradoxically, “this inward dehiscence does not destroy structure but is a condition of its possibility.”51 For Libeskind, the wall of City Edge is suspended between the architecture of Albert Speer—the architect of the Third Reich, probably the most important example of a twentieth-century state of exception—and that of the modernist architect Mies van der Rohe. City Edge can thus be said to explore the disturbing complicities between certain strands of modernism and fascism. Although the City Edge project was never actually built, the theoretical reflection on fortification and the state of exception that went into it were ultimately realized in one of Libeskind’s later projects: his design—titled Between the Lines—for the Jewish Museum in Berlin (see Figure 4.2). Here also, Libeskind explores the complicities between the history of modernity and the extermination of the Jews.52 As he presents it, Between the Lines is “a project about two lines of thinking”: organization (“a straight line, but broken into many fragments”) and relationship (“a tortuous line, but continuing infi nitely”).53 His design projects these two

48

Ibid., 134. Ibid., 135. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 As will be clear from what precedes, it is precisely this easy association of modernity and fascism that I am drawing into question in this chapter. Is fascism modernity or anti-modernity? The second option has, possibly because of the influence of Agamben’s work, become eclipsed by an uncritical assumption of the first. 53 Libeskind qtd. ibid., 140, 141. 49

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Figure 4.1 City Edge, courtesy of Studio Daniel Libeskind

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Figure 4.2 Between the Lines, courtesy of Studio Daniel Libeskind

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lines into each other so that in the middle of the Jewish Museum, which is built as an extension to the Berlin Museum, there exists a void: emptiness, useless, nonfunctional, excessive space. Libeskind understands such an inscription of an exteriority within a structure that is otherwise whole as a critique of the logic of fortification and the state of exception. As Taylor notes, this critique continues outside of the museum walls as well, where “Libeskind locates three further elements that are ‘integrated’ into the building: the Holocaust Tower, the E.T.A. Hoffmann garden . . . and the Celan Hof.”54 Thus, Libeskind creates a web or a net that interlaces inside and outside and “continues to expand until it entangles the entire city.”55 In addition, by triangulating the addresses of among others Hoffmann, the composer Arnold Schönberg, and Walter Benjamin, “Libeskind defi nes a star, which establishes the coordinates that situate his addition to the Berlin Museum,”56 a star that obviously recalls “the yellow star that was so frequently worn on [the] very site [where the museum was built].”57 In this way, Libeskind aims to create a space in which the repressed history of the Holocaust can return, a space that would provide refuge for Berlin’s “schizoid memory.”58 Although in this case also, Libeskind’s design for the Jewish Museum could not be further removed from the architectures that Austerlitz praises, Libeskind’s and Austerlitz’s theoretical concerns are actually quite close. Although the angular structure of Libeskind’s design and the star-shaped network of which it is a part recall, of course, the David-star that was worn on the museum site, one could also read Libeskind’s compressed and distorted star as an unworking of the star-shaped fortifications that return again and again throughout Sebald’s novel.59 In the same way that Tschumi fi nds a labyrinth under every pyramid, Libeskind locates a labyrinth underneath the Jewish Museum in which Germany’s repressed history can fi nd refuge. Such a labyrinth recalls, as I have 54

Ibid., 147. Ibid., 146. 56 Ibid., 147. 57 Libeskind qtd. ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 See Sebald, Austerlitz, 15. 55

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already noted, the repressed history that Austerlitz inserts underneath the foundations of the BnF on the Quai François Mauriac. Given the fact that it is quite difficult to locate any building in Sebald’s novel that Austerlitz values positively, one should also note that Libeskind began his career by “not building”: he made drawings for buildings that were never supposed to be realized. Taylor explains that Libeskind was never interested in the architectural object but in a kind of architectural residue, in the experience that everything we have is a kind of residue. It is from this experience that he would ultimately move from “not building” to a widely celebrated architectural practice of “building not”—a practice that, rather than resisting building altogether, explores how one can build differently, aware of the thought that “[e]very experience of growth, consciousness, development of one’s work is accompanied by the feeling of loss, destruction, and of passing away.”60 This thought is as central to Sebald’s work as it is to Libeskind’s and although Austerlitz might not contain any actual examples of this other kind of building, this relation between Libeskind’s and Sebald’s thoughts invites one to consider the relations between Sebald’s writing practice, between the architexture of his novels, and Libeskind’s work. At this point, Zilcosky’s characterization of Sebald’s early fiction as “uncanny” can lead the way. Although Freud’s notion of the uncanny allows Zilcosky to mark a difference between what he considers to be Sebald’s modernist fiction and the postmodernist Austerlitz, it would be difficult to deny the uncanny dimensions of Sebald’s last novel. Consider, for example, how the novel in many instances makes it impossible to distinguish between the voice of the anonymous narrator and Austerlitz, thus creating an uncanny Doppelgänger effect. Consider how the novel is populated with a series of characters that appear as if from nowhere, and in more than one case make one suspect they are automata. Consider, fi nally, how the novel is—just like Sebald’s other fictions—packed full of images that only add to the uncanny feeling of the text. Following Anthony Vidler, who has characterized Daniel Libeskind’s postmodernist architecture as “uncanny,” I suggest that there is a relation between the postmodernist architectural uncanny and the 60

Libeskind qtd. Taylor, Nots, 131.

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architexture of Sebald’s text. This relation deserves to be explored further, since it may contain a response to the states of exception that are addressed in the novel—specifically, to Austerlitz’ traumatized relation to architecture.

Moving testimony The question that Austerlitz ’s engagement with the state of exception thus raises is: what kind of architexture would not internally exclude or except history, trauma, and life? What kind of architexture could provide refuge for the precarious life of the body, the psyche, and of time that defies any representation’s potential association with eternity, stability, and security? One of the representations that Sebald’s novel takes on in this context and tries to reinvent beyond the politics of exception is that of testimony. Austerlitz is, as many have noted, a testimonial fiction. The novel’s use of images has already provided a rich topic for debate in testimony studies. In what follows, I present what I consider to be the novel’s intervention in the debates on testimony through the lens of the contemporary debates on the state of exception. As I discussed in Chapter 1, these debates overlap significantly with the field of testimony studies. My focus will be, once more, on the narrator’s aesthetic decision to include images within the novel’s text. What might be the effect of this decision on the novel’s capacity to give testimony? Does the decision enhance it? Does it reduce it? How does the novel as a whole relate to this decision? When Austerlitz recognizes himself in the windows of the ANTIKOS BAZAR in Terezin, the former Theresienstadt camp, it is as a “faint shadow image” that is “barely perceptible” among the objects in the shop. If this moment arguably represents a key scene of self-recognition in the novel in the sense that Austerlitz recognizes himself in this scene as a survivor—as one who, just like the objects in the store, survived the destruction of the Second World War—it is worth pointing out that the figure of this survivor is both immaterial and material, or “virtual” in Tschumi’s sense of the word. On the one hand, it is a “faint shadow image”

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that is “barely perceptible.” On the other, this image is located among objects with a concrete, material reality that is underlined by the novel’s listing of the objects in the shop. The “spectral materialism” (Eric Santner) that characterizes the figure of the survivor in this scene is in fact characteristic of Sebald’s novel as a whole and marks, I will argue, the novel’s particular place beyond a state of exception in which testimony risks to become caught up. As an evocation of the dead and with its extraordinary cast of characters appearing “as if from nowhere” (a signature Sebald phrase), Sebald’s novel is of course a very ghostly book that, given that it is centered around the forever unapproachable Austerlitz, at fi rst sight might seem to internally exclude or except the “full presence” of the survivor.61 One could argue that the images that are added to the novel’s text contribute to this ghostliness. At the same time, however, the images appear to have been added—at least in some cases—to reduce testimony’s ghostliness, in other words, to add a materiality to the story that is told in the novel. One should also note in this context that although Austerlitz is a very ghostly character, the novel continuously emphasizes the physical aspects of his trauma. For example, when Austerlitz is explaining to Tereza Ambrosova at the state archives in Prague that he would like to consult the archives in order to look for traces of his mother Agata, he falls into “such a panic . . . that I began to stammer and could hardly bring out a word.”62 After he has returned from Prague to London, he is plagued at night “by the most frightful anxiety attacks”: All of a sudden my tongue and palate would be as dry as if I had been lying in the desert for days, more and more I had to fight harder and harder for breath, my heart began to flutter and palpitate in my throat, cold sweat broke out all over my body, even on the back of my trembling hand . . . I felt like screaming

61 I do not mean to suggest here that the response to the state of exception that Sebald’s novel in my view presents is able to make the survivor “fully present”; indeed, “full presence” is as theological a notion as the “cabinet of wonder,” and my argument is that Austerlitz as a literary text is highly critical of its main character’s escape into such theological h(e)avens. 62 Sebald, Austerlitz, 147, 148.

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but could not utter a sound, I wanted to walk out into the street but was unable to move from the spot . . .63 Passages such as this undeniably add an emphatically physical dimension to Sebald’s text that pushes its testimony beyond the mere exception of the body. The passage that was just quoted might evoke a sense of psychic blockage, but as such, it throws a particularly illuminating light on the bodily afflictions of which Austerlitz is suffering, and brings their perilous and difficult life into the text. By thus trying to bring the body within the text of Austerlitz’ testimony, the novel participates in debates about the body’s relation to testimony. In an interview with Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay, literary critic Geoffrey Hartman criticized theorists such as Giorgio Agamben and Hartman’s former colleague Jacques Derrida for developing powerful theoretical constructions of the witness that ultimately merely emphasize testimony’s impossibility. Hartman is interested, rather, in testimony’s possibility, in the contexts in which testimony can become possible in spite of a traumatic experience’s recalcitrance to representation. In this context, Hartman discusses the importance of the videovisual for testimony. He argues that it is important to record testimonies by video, because the voice as such, without a visible source, remains ghostly. That is, when you take away the visual, when you just hear the voice, the effect is that of disembodied sound, as from the dead, from an absence. The voice has its own affective quality, but we feel it is essential to add a face to that voice, to reduce the ghostliness, even to re-embody the voice. Embodiment is essential because it was precisely the body—this is one way of putting it—that was denied in the time of persecution. Of course in still photos from the past—as against the cinematic videovisual—you still experience something of that ghostliness.64

63

Ibid., 228. Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay, “The Ethics of Witness: An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman,” Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2002), 494. 64

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Although for Hartman, Sebald’s novel would thus perhaps still be too ghostly, it is nevertheless possible to recognize in the novel, when it is read next to Hartman’s remarks, an attempt to reduce testimony’s ghostliness: for example, by adding a visual element to the text and by the novel’s emphatic attention to the physical aspects of Austerlitz’ condition—to the embodied dimension of his testimony. In this way, the novel works against the body’s exception from the novel’s testimony. Since the novel ultimately offers a testimonial “fiction,” however, one can hardly criticize it for also preserving testimony’s ghostliness, its disembodied dimension. The question is, in my view, whether the strange space of the “virtual” that it thus creates is not ultimately more than what it appears to be at fi rst sight— specifically, whether this space might not actually present a profound critique of Hartman’s insistence on the importance of the video-visual as a means of bringing the body into testimony. To further explain what I mean by this, let me turn to a scene in which Sebald’s novel engages with the video-visual. Whereas Sebald had already provided a metafictional commentary on the photograph when he discussed a forged image of the book burning on the Residenzplatz in Würzburg in his book The Emigrants, in Austerlitz , he takes on the video-visual.65 Of course, the video in question is in no way similar to the testimonial videos of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University that Hartman is talking about. But it is a video nevertheless, and it is interesting to see how Austerlitz engages with it. In my opinion, his reading of the video reveals an important difference between the novel and the theoretical positions that I have mentioned: on the one hand, Agamben’s and Derrida’s theoretical constructs; on the other, Hartman’s insistence on embodiment. Toward the end of the novel, Austerlitz begins to watch a copy of a film he obtained through the Federal Archives in Berlin. It is a film of the Theresienstadt ghetto, the camp to which his mother Agata was deported. He is hoping to see his mother somewhere in the film, but she does not appear. What he does see, however, are

65

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hülse (London: Harvill, 1996), 183–4.

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workers leaving the huts when the siren had sounded . . . a game of football in the inner court of one of the barrack buildings, with hundred of cheerful spectators . . . men under the showers in the central bathhouse, books being borrowed from the library . . . a full-scale orchestral concert and . . . kitchen gardens neatly laid out where several dozen people were raking the vegetable beds . . . whilst at the end of the day others were sitting on benches outside the houses, apparently in perfect contentment.66 This list is not merely descriptive or commemorative, as I have argued above. It also needs to be seen as a symptom of the novel’s desire for the cabinet of wonder or Wunderkammer in which the human being’s place in the world still made sense. As such, it is—like other cabinets of wonder in the novel—cracked: for it turns out that this film, which was originally titled “Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt”67 was actually made “with an eye to the imminent visit in the early summer of 1944 of a Red Cross commission, an event regarded by those authorities of the Reich responsible as a good opportunity to dissimulate the true nature of their deportation policy.”68 The life represented in the film was the product of a so-called “Verschönerungsaktion or general improvement campaign,” a “vast cleaning-up program” that was meant “to suggest the agreeable atmosphere of a resort inviting all passersby to linger for a while.”69 What life in the Theresienstadt camp was really like is evoked in an eight-page long sentence that precedes Austerlitz’ discussion of the film, in which he summarizes a book by H. G. Adler on Theresienstadt. By its upsetting accumulation of horrors, this sentence marks the novel’s most powerful exposure of the fiction of the cabinet of wonder. Thus, this dissimulation of the camp and its exception of the body turn into an allegory of the camp itself because the dissimulation excepts this excepted life. The fi lm thus presents an even greater state of exception, one that excepts the state of exception of the Theresienstadt camp. How does Austerlitz respond to this? The novel suggests that he comes closest to life in Theresienstadt when he decides to slow the 66

Sebald, Austerlitz, 245, 246. Ibid., 246. 68 Ibid., 242. 69 Ibid., 242, 243. 67

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film down in order to see whether this would allow him to study it in more detail. It is by reading the film as it is not supposed to be read, by slowing down the speed at which it is supposed to be shown, that he manages to dismantle its logic of exception and confront the other state of exception that is hiding underneath it. At this point, the film turns into an example of the “spectral materialism” I mentioned earlier on. Suddenly, the fi lm reveals “previously hidden objects and people, creating, by default as it were, a different sort of film altogether.”70 Its damaged sections, which Austerlitz “had hardly noticed before,”71 become visible. In the slow-motion version, the sounds of the film are transformed: a male voice that had sounded high pitched before now resembles a “menacing growl” such as that of a lion or a tiger.72 Playing the film as it is not supposed to be played reveals another reality: The men and women employed in the workshops now looked as if they were toiling in their sleep . . . so heavily did their eyelids sink, so slowly did their lips move as they looked wearily up at the camera. They seemed to be hovering rather than walking, as if their feet no longer quite touched the ground. The contours of their bodies were blurred and, particularly in the scenes shot out of doors in broad daylight, had dissolved at the edges . . .73 Although Austerlitz’ way of reading the film of course adds ghostliness to it, which seems to push it in the direction of Derrida’s and Agamben’s work on testimony that Hartman criticizes because it denies the survivor’s life, the implication is that it also restores the life that the film’s state of exception is dissimulating—a life that already existed in a state of exception that in its turn will have to be dismantled in order to produce a liberation. My point is that this dismantling of the state of exception does not happen through the video-visual as such, through the body that it arguably adds to the voice that without a visible source remains ghostly. Rather, it happens by reading this video-visual against the grain, as it is not supposed to be read, in order to bring to light the 70

Ibid., 247. Ibid., 247. 72 Ibid., 250. 73 Ibid., 247. 71

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conditions of its production. It is because of this critical reading that life is able to find refuge in representation, and be liberated from the state of exception that the video Austerlitz is watching represents. It is at this point that the film’s materialism turns spectral, and its spectrality material. I am not saying, of course, that the video-visual that Hartman is talking about would somehow interfere with testimony rather than enable it. Indeed, Hartman explains how the video’s particular conditions of production are designed in such a way that they would interfere as little as possible with the testimony that is being given (he contrasts the archive’s approach with that of Steven Spielberg’s testimonial project and also with Claude Lanzmann’s multi-hour Shoah project). The Fortunoff Video Archive is clearly a wonderful institution that has contributed a great deal to the study of holocaust testimonies and the field of testimony studies in general. However, the question for me is whether even under the archive’s ascetic conditions the video-visual is able to overcome testimony’s state of exception. Sebald’s novel suggests that this state of exception may only be overcome when testimony is read by default, through detours, as it is not supposed to be read, because it may only be such a reading against the grain that can expose the life that representation is always dissimulating.

The novel in motion; or, the politics of Austerlitz’ aesthetic . . . the effect of all good montage . . . is to shock patterns of connections into quite different patterning, capturing . . . sudden or subterranean connections of dissimilars, catching our breath, so to speak. All of which is to ask, what then? Where will this breath go? —MICHAEL TAUSSIG, The Nervous System74

74

Taussig, Nervous System, 47, 48.

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Neither totalizing structures that repress differences nor oppositional differences that exclude commonality are adequate in the plurality of worlds that constitute the postmodern condition. To think what poststructuralism leaves unthought is to think a nontotalizing structure that nonetheless acts as a whole. —MARK C. TAYLOR, Hiding75

As I discussed in the previous chapters of this book, Giorgio Agamben argues that the concept of sovereignty as theorized by Schmitt—Schmitt defi ned sovereignty as the power to decide on the state of exception—was an attempt to bring the extralegal agency that Walter Benjamin theorizes in “Critique of Violence” within the law, as the paradoxical intra/extralegal power to suspend it. If Benjamin’s extralegal agency arguably represents political life, Schmitt’s sovereignty can be said to bring political life within the law, in other words, to project the legal and political order into each other, a theoretical move that in Agamben’s view has resulted in an eclipse of politics by law. At the same time, however, Schmitt’s theory contains the possibility of undoing this eclipse, precisely because it draws attention to the political life that exists in a disjunction from Schmitt’s juridico-political order. If Political Theology can be read as a text in which the “will to power” over life is played out, Schmitt’s text can be said to mark both life’s subjection to law and politics and its potentiality as a subject of law and politics. Considered in light of this succinct political theoretical history, the questions that the status of testimony in Austerlitz raises turn out to be politically significant, because they revolve around life’s relation to the representative order. If the question of testimony is arguably how one can bring life, specifically traumatized life, within representation, the novel indicates that attempts to do so risk to create or continue a state of exception. This does not mean that the novel rejects testimony altogether. My discussion has shown, rather, that it explores other ways of bringing life into representation: through critical reading, by unworking testimony’s 75

Taylor, Hiding, 325.

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politics. It is ultimately by unworking the archive that the life that the archive is trying to include can be brought to light. In the fi nal section of this chapter, I discuss how the novel incorporates these insights into its own form, in other words, how the critical reading that the novel proposes as a means of bringing life to light also translates itself into a critical writing that is able to provide refuge for life. Although the novel suffers from a nostalgic attempt to archive life and be a cabinet of wonder in which the human being’s place in the world would still make sense, the novel’s particular formal characteristics ultimately unwork such an archive and are thus able to allow life to be present in the novel in a different way. Although most architectures in the novel except life, and seem to push Austerlitz only further into the trauma from which he is suffering, there are also architectures that allow his trauma to be present in another way, and that enable his repressed memories to return. The most important of these is the architecture of Liverpool Street Station in London. Significantly, given the critique of exceptional practices of representation that the novel develops, the novel’s account of Austerlitz’ experiences at Liverpool Street Station begins with linguistic disintegration. The anonymous narrator of Sebald’s novel goes to visit Austerlitz in his house on Alderney Street, and Austerlitz takes up the story of his life exactly where he left it when he and the narrator last met. He begins to explain that until 1991; he had always been a voracious reader and a very productive writer. In this particular year, however, it became impossible for him to read and write. As soon as he had written something down, he saw “the awkward falsity of my construction and the inadequacy of all the words that I had employed.”76 When he attempts to read he could see no connections anymore, the sentences resolved themselves into a series of separate words, the words into random sets of letters, the letters into disjointed signs, and those signs into a blue-gray trail gleaning silver here and there, excreted and left behind it by some crawling creature.77

76 77

Sebald, Austerlitz, 122. Ibid., 124.

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This scene, which (as critics have noted) recalls Hugo von Hoffmansthal’s Lord Chandos Letter (1902), marks a crisis of representation that the novel suggests to be produced by the trauma from which Austerlitz is suffering. In this case, as in the case of Herculine Barbin that I discussed in my second chapter, the state of exception risks to have fatal consequences, because Austerlitz becomes convinced that his only way out of the state of exception is suicide. However, it is also around this time that Austerlitz embarks on his nocturnal wanderings through London and begins to see “what might be described as shapes and colors of diminished corporeality through a drifting veil or cloud of smoke, images from a faded world.”78 As becomes clear from Austerlitz’ account of his experiences at Liverpool Street Station, these lines probably describe Austerlitz’ trauma returning. Following a white turbaned porter into a Ladies’ Waiting Room in a remote part of the station, he has an architectural vision in which he “saw huge halls open up, with rows of pillars and colonnades leading far into the distance, with vaults and brickwork arches bearing on them many-storied structures, with flights of stone steps, wooden stairways and ladders, all leading the eye on and on.”79 He sees viaducts and footbridges thronged with “tiny figures” looking like prisoners, and also birds spreading their great wings and flying away through the blue air. In the middle of this “vision of imprisonment and liberation,” Austerlitz “could not stop wondering whether it was a ruin or a building in the process of construction that I had entered. Both ideas were right in a way at the time.”80 It is in this vision of an architecture that both imprisons and sets free that his trauma returns, that his repressed memories begin to come back to him. For in the gloomy light of the waiting room, he “saw two middle-aged people dressed in the style of the thirties” and “the boy they had come to meet”: “He was sitting by himself on a bench . . . His legs, in white knee-length socks, did not reach the floor, and but for a small rucksack he was holding on his lap I don’t think I would have known him.”81 The rucksack, of course, is 78

Ibid., 127. Ibid., 135. 80 Ibid., 135, 136. 81 Ibid., 137. 79

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Austerlitz’ own. The vision is a repressed memory of his arrival in London after a long trip from Prague; the two middle-aged people who have come to meet him are his adoptive parents. Although the architecture of Liverpool Street Station thus reaffirms Austerlitz’ imprisonment, the ways in which he is caught up in a state of exception, it also liberates his trauma and his repressed memories, or the state of exception from which he suffers. Naturally, this is a freedom that is overwhelming, and that Austerlitz experiences as difficult; but it is a freedom nevertheless, and one that is produced by the architecture of Liverpool Street Station. Austerlitz’ experiences at Liverpool Street Station show, in other words, that architecture is not only imprisoning in the novel but that the novel also develops a reflection—much less prominent, but present nevertheless— of how architecture can present a way out of the state of exception. If the novel partly develops such a reflection through its exploration of the architecture of testimony, it also does so through its own form, through the architexture of the novel itself. One thing to note is that Austerlitz is a collaborative novel: Austerlitz emphasizes at various points in the text not simply that he himself would never have written his own life-story but that without the anonymous narrator of the novel, he would never even have told it. His story requires a specific kind of listener, one who speaks very little and is willing to leave the floor entirely to his “interlocutor.” This does not mean, however, that the narrator makes himself entirely invisible: on the contrary, the text emphasizes its mediated dimension by including (as various passages I have quoted throughout this chapter show) phrases like “said Austerlitz” into the text. Interestingly, the novel does not stop with one degree of mediation: Austerlitz is often reporting someone else’s speech, in which cases the phrase “said Austerlitz” is extended into (for example) “said Austerlitz, said Vera,” thus producing a veritable mise-en-abyme of speech that moves away from a clearly identifiable narrative “voice” into an indeterminate, collectively constituted narrative “sound” that challenges traditional concepts of authorship. If Hartman insists on the video-visual because the voice of the witness needs to be supplemented with a visible source in order not to remain ghostly, it is worth noting that such a supplement would remain ineffective in the case of Sebald’s novel because the testimony it gives is not one that can be traced back to one particular body. The voice of Austerlitz’ testimony defies, rather, such

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an individualized way of bringing “life” into representation and instead gives voice to life through a collective sound. This remarkable mode of representation, which breaks down the divisions through which power operates in order to fi nd another way of bringing life into the text, is continued through the novel’s practice of translation, which has been left largely unexplored. In the novel, which was originally written in German, it gradually becomes clear that Austerlitz’ conversations with the narrator were actually held in French. Thus, the entire German original of the text, which supposedly represents Austerlitz’ conversations with the narrator, is actually a text in translation—a translation that can be said to unwork the representative aspirations of the novel. When at certain points in the novel, untranslated French passages appear in the text, one should be aware that these passages are not irruptions of a “foreign” element within an otherwise homogenous whole, but irruptions of the original language in which the conversations between Austerlitz and the narrator took place. This original, however, does not exist as such, and Sebald’s text is thus an extended Fremdkörper within which traces of this original return. The textual architecture that is produced through such a practice of translation becomes politically significant when one considers it in relation to the critique of fortification and the state of exception that the novel develops. Fortification tries to establish clear boundaries between inside and outside, but its attempts to do so create a state of exception within which the outside is internally excluded. The novel’s practice of translation turns this structure of exception inside out: it does not produce an architecture of the same, as fortification tries to do (this results in the production of a traumatizing uncanny), but an architecture of the foreign that provides refuge for the original language in which the conversations between Austerlitz and the narrator took place (again, an architecture of the uncanny; but this time an uncanny that is liberating). Thus, the novel is able to bring life into the text without internally excluding it. Both the novel’s mise-en-abyme of narrative voice and its practice of translation contribute to the unworking of the novel’s architecture, and produce a text that presents a wholly different practice of self- and life-writing. The novel’s most remarkable formal characteristic in this respect is the fact that it includes images. Although some of these images clearly relate to Sebald’s text, others also seem to be unrelated to it

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and in my view they mostly create a disjunction between text and image that draws out a nondiscursive element in the text, a space where life, history, and trauma can be present in an other-thanexcepted way. Thus, the novel recalls not only Libeskind’s City Edge project, which also turned to montage to criticize the logic of fortification. It also brings to mind the work of Bernard Tschumi, specifically the place that his architectures take up between the material and the immaterial—do the images make Sebald’s text more or less material? It is through these remarkable formal characteristics that the novel ultimately emerges not as a text turned toward death, as some may be inclined to argue, but as a text that is intensely invested in life and in the possibilities that it holds. In the end, Austerlitz is not a text that, like its titular character Austerlitz, is stuck in the trauma of repressed memories. Instead, it is a text in motion that allows life to be present in a different way. Consider, for example, a scene that shows Austerlitz at work on the archive from which the images in the novel were supposedly taken. Sitting at a table in his London house, he puts the photographs face down on the tabletop before him, and then starts turning them around, ordering them in different ways, according to their different “family resemblances.”82 One could, of course, read this as Austerlitz’ attempt to turn his archive into a cabinet of wonder, to create an archive within which his own place in the world will appear meaningful.83 On the other hand, the arbitrariness of his work on the archive—turning around photographs that are face down on the table, as in a card game—suggests that Austerlitz is aware that there are many different ways of combining these elements. There is a fundamental instability of life that underlies them. Although this instability can be profoundly upsetting, it also makes it possible for him to try out different ways of ordering the photographs.

82

Ibid., 119. Given that “family resemblances” play an important role in this archival work, it is not too far-fetched to read Austerlitz’ attempt to turn his archive into a cabinet of wonder as an attempt to reconstitute the family he has lost—this is arguably the quest around which the entire novel revolves. Thus, the novel’s critique of such an attempt that I have uncovered in this chapter does not only unwork the cabinet of wonder but also a certain utopian construction of the family, as well as of archival work. 83

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The scene can certainly be read as a metafictional comment on Sebald’s own narrative practice, which he has characterized as “bricolage.”84 This term, which he attributes to Claude LéviStrauss, refers to a particular type of knowledge about the world: unlike the engineer, who tries to break out of already existing conditions by coming up with new laws that will explain the universe, the bricoleur puts old laws to new uses in order to explore how realities that already exist can be used otherwise.85 If the engineer, as the figure that tries to come up with a law that will provide a sense of meaning and coherence to the universe, can thus be associated with the cabinet of wonder, the bricoleur deconstructs the binary opposition between wonder and trauma by providing refuge for the crack in the engineer’s world—a crack that life inevitably makes appear. It is around this crack that another type of knowing and living can become possible, one that would not except life but provide refuge for it. Such other types of knowing and living become possible, as the novel’s representation of Austerlitz at work on his own archive suggests, through a particular kind of play.86

84 Sebald qtd. Amir Eshel, “Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” New German Critique 88 (2003): 79, note 20. 85 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 1–33. 86 On the significance of this notion for the work of Giorgio Agamben for example, see Catherine Mills, “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice,” The Agamben Effect, ed. Alison Ross, South Atlantic Quarterly 107, no. 1 (2007): 15–36.

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Conclusion: From exception to care Crisis and play The cover image for this book is a photograph by the Macedonian artist Igor Toshevski. In the summer of 2004, I visited an exhibition titled Unbalanced Allocation of Space in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig, Germany. Featuring works by various artists from the Balkans, the exhibition included photographs of Toshevski’s Free Territories. For this project, Toshevski proposed to draw borders throughout Macedonia in order to mark out free zones in which each action, gesture, movement, expression, or object would count as an artistic action or art object. As a consequence, any object that would enter into such a zone would become an art object; anyone who would enter into it would—irrespective of his or her race, sex, language, religious or political opinion, as an accompanying manifesto emphasized—become a free, creative performance activist, and express him- or herself in whichever way suited him or her best. The image on the cover is one of the relatively few photographs of Free Territories that include human beings. There is something fascinating about the human being in this particular image: it is a child, whose ball appears to have landed in the territory, and who thus seems to have entered into the territory in order to retrieve the ball and go on playing. This seems to suggest that the child’s play is going on elsewhere, outside of the territory’s and the photograph’s frames, and that the child has only entered into the free territory by accident, because that is where its ball happened to land. The moment captured in the photograph would then be a transitional moment in between two moments of play—the time spent in between the moment when the ball has left the field and when it

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is thrown back in. However, it could also be that the child is using the free territory to play, as a site for play—that Free Territories is the field of its play. It might not be performance art, but the point of Toshevski’s work is that the play is turned into an artwork by virtue of taking place within a free territory. Free Territories arguably opens up sites for play within the territory of the nation-state. And the nation-state certainly took it seriously: according to the artist’s website,1 one territory was censored by the Macedonian government because it resembled the shape of a Greek cross. Given the ruinous architecture that surrounds the territory in the photograph, there is also an uncanny sense of danger and vulnerability that accompanies the image. I sensed some of this when I stepped into the territory that Toshevski had, on the occasion of the exhibition in Leipzig, marked out in the museum’s garden. My initial enthusiasm for Toshevski’s project made room for some degree of concern about the zone of suspension into which I, by virtue of stepping into the territory, had entered. Perhaps because I am not an artist and do not feel particularly well equipped when it comes to making art, being in Toshevski’s free territory made me feel precarious, and raised some questions about this state of suspension into which I had entered. Thus, Toshevski’s free territory opened itself up to me as a state of exception—as one of those states of exception, crisis, and emergency that, years later, I came to discuss in this book. The relation between crisis and play—the play of the artist, specifically the literary artist and the novelist—is central to each of the preceding chapters. Although the book focuses on the contemporary novel’s representation of states of exception, the main question it raises is ultimately that of response: of how the human beings represented in the novels respond to the disorienting situations in which they are caught up. It is as part of my answer to this second question—the question of response, which is not simply the ethical question of responsibility but also the political question of reaction —that a notion of play turned into one of the book’s latent, but formative, themes. As such, it manifests itself most prominently in the fi nal sections of each of the previous chapters. Associated with allegory in Life of Pi, the tension between truth and fiction in Middlesex, relentless focalization in Disgrace, and the relation

1

See Igor Toshevski, Art in Times of Crisis, http://toshevski.webs.com/.

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between text and image in Austerlitz, play came to present itself as an alternative to various other, less successful responses discussed in the book. Whereas in each of the chapters, characters risk to respond to a state of exception in ways that ultimately exacerbate the crisis, often adding new crises to the ones in which they are already caught up, play somehow manages to dismantle this logic and open up new ways of individual and collective lives. Whereas the logic of the first, unsuccessful response, is related to the mechanism of internal exclusion—closely tied, as Giorgio Agamben and various critics and theorists working in this tracks have shown, to the state of exception2—play interrupts this ethical and political logic in order to provide refuge for the excepted aspects of life. Whether one is thinking about the animal, sexuality, violence, or indeed life as such (which includes all of the previous), to play means to develop what Michel Foucault in his late work called an aesthetic of existence that provides lines of flight in what otherwise risks to become an architecture of fortification.3 Indeed, it is worth considering, as Niccolò Machiavelli does,4 whether fortifications are ultimately useful or harmful for those who construct them. This consideration became particularly meaningful in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, when, as Judith Butler has noted, the United States had the opportunity “to redefine itself as part of a global community.”5 Unfortunately, it did not seize it: “[I]nstead, it heightened nationalist discourse, extended surveillance mechanisms, suspended constitutional rights, and developed forms of explicit and implicit censorship,”6 thus propelling not only its citizens but also the international community at large into a new century of crises, emergencies, and exceptions.

2

See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); for an example that investigates the logic in a concrete, contemporary situation, see Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi, eds, The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (New York: Zone Books, 2009). 3 See Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. Richard Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). 4 See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie Walker and Brian Richardson (New York: Penguin, 2003), 352. 5 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), xi. 6 Ibid., xi.

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The US response is not that different, as this book suggests, from the ways in which Pi Patel, Cal Stephanides, David Lurie, or Jacques Austerlitz confront the various states of exception in which they have landed. My aim was to show, however, that Life of Pi, Middlesex, Disgrace, and Austerlitz ultimately challenge such problematic responses by exploring other, more effective ways of confronting a crisis. It is these other responses that become associated in the book with play. It might appear futile, in light of the events of 9/11, to call for play in response. It is at this point, however, that play’s relation to the aesthetic decision must be considered. As I explained in my Introduction, I use the notion of the aesthetic decision to refer to a decision taken with respect to an aesthetic situation or state, a regime of representation—in short, a particular aesthetic. Play is linked to the notion of the aesthetic decision insofar as each of the novels presents its readers with an aesthetic decision that tends toward a kind of play: the play of allegory, in Chapter 1; of autobiography, in Chapter 2; of focalization and counterfocalization, in Chapter 3; and of the montage of texts and images, in Chapter 4. Clearly, the aesthetic of play that each of the novels mobilizes in response to the state of exception goes beyond the aesthetic’s association with indecisiveness, or the suggestion that the aesthetic does not know a decision (as Carl Schmitt suggests).7 This book shows that the aesthetic does know a decision—but one that differs from those kinds of decisions that perpetuate the state of exception. We arrive then, at another notion of the decision. Indeed, it is worth keeping in mind, as Bonnie Honig in the preface to her book Emergency Politics reminds us, that [i]f we normally think of emergency politics as identified with a “decision” that puts a stop to ordinary life under the rule of law, it might be useful to note that ordinary democratic practices and institutions under the rule of law also feature “decision”, those forms of human discretion presupposed by the rule of law but with which the rule of law is also ill at ease.8 7

See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 35. 8 Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Emergency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), xv.

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I think I tend more toward the possibility of an extralegal emergency than Honig does (at least in her most recent work)—toward a non-coincision of life and law from where politics becomes possible—but the reminder is well taken. The problem is not with the decision; it is with how we decide, and with the particular kinds of decisions we take. With the capture of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, it might seem as if the twenty-fi rst century’s fi rst decade of crisis has ended. Indeed, the event was celebrated in the United States—mostly by a generation that no longer considers the 9/11 attacks to have defi ned their lives—as a milestone that would mark the closing of a history of terror, insecurity, and vulnerability. In the meantime, however, new crises have developed, and it seems unlikely that we will see the end of these soon: in addition to the Hurricane Katrina crisis from 2005—which is ongoing, as Spike Lee’s documentary fi lm project When the Levees Broke shows— there is the economic crisis from 2008, which has developed into a full-blown social crisis affecting employment, education, and health care not just in the United States but also in Europe and the rest of the world. In addition, the planet is suffering a climate crisis that is producing worldwide food insecurity and risks to draw the dividing lines between rich and poor ever more starkly. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein has analyzed some of the twentiethand twenty-fi rst centuries’ worst states of exception, showing how the exception—in particular, the state of shock—is instrumental to the political logic of the present.9 In her book Life as Surplus, Melinda Cooper has further explored these issues by focusing on the connections between “biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era,” as her subtitle puts it.10 Given how central the logic of exception has become to contemporary politics, it is unlikely that the capture of bin Laden is going to bring this governmental machine to a halt. Again, I am not saying that play is the answer to all of this. And yet, as Klein points out in the conclusion to her book, “shock wears off” and the particular play of narrative—literary or 9 See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007). 10 See Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).

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otherwise—can play a major role not only during but also after this process. As this book has shown, there may be something that can be recuperated from the state of exception, and that is related to the possibilities that it creates for play. This takes one back to Toshevski’s work Free Territories: in such a view, the exception becomes a site around what Friedrich Nietzsche called the “will to power” is played out, and it is through narrative—through the aesthetics of existence it provides—that one can speak or write one’s way into this play. I do not mean to suggest, as will be clear from everything that precedes, that any narrative will do; indeed, one of the problems this book has considered—and Foucault does so as well in his work on the technologies of the self—is the ways in which narrative can also play into the state of exception’s techniques of domination. I would hesitate, however, to call narrative “essentially” complicit with such techniques; much depends, obviously, on how the narrative is told, and on how one chooses to listen to it. In this sense, narrative is profoundly pharmacological, to adopt a term from the work of Jacques Derrida (and, more recently, Bernard Stiegler): in relation to the state of exception, it has both curative and empoisoning dimensions.11 Everything depends, therefore, on how one is telling the story, and on how one is listening to or reading the story. Everything depends on how one chooses to play. The aesthetic decision—the decision on the rules of the representational game; the decision on the particular “distribution of the sensible,” as Jacques Rancière puts it—is thus an extremely serious one that should be taken with the utmost of care. Ideally, it is informed by experience. But experience can also be gathered, I have argued, through storytelling, by trying on different kinds of aesthetics within the free territory that narrative practice provides. That too, is part of Toshevski’s project: it is about trying something out within a free territory, as a work of performance art and activism—something from which, outside of the free territory, other modes of individual and collective life can emerge. Thus, Free Territories can begin to infect 11

See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Bernard Stiegler, Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue: De la pharmacologie (Paris: Flammarion, 2010).

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the territory that surrounds it by injecting into it some degree of dehiscence, subversion, and crisis. It is through such a play with and around crisis that other responses to the state of exception can become possible. The relation between art and politics might thus consist, as Steven Corcoran in his introduction to Rancière’s book Dissensus has noted, “in their contingent suspension of the rules governing normal experience”; their emergence “depends on an innovative leap from the logic that ordinarily governs human situations.”12 That, too, is the state of exception—but as free territory.

Biopolitics, the novel, and care Given these conclusions, this book also raises more ambitious questions about the relation of the state of exception to the novel as a genre. If the state of exception is a bio- and psycho-political state in which various kinds of life are produced—bare life, creaturely life, precarious life, to name some that have circulated in this book—and if the novel is traditionally considered to be a genre of life-writing—one that is interested, as Edward Said has pointed out, “in questions of birth, orphanhood, the discovery of roots, and the creation of a new world, a career and society”13 as well as in “the continuity that occurs after birth . . . youth, reproductive generation, maturity”14 —then what might be the novel’s relation to the bio- and psycho-political questions that an investigation of the state of exception opens up? These are old issues, of course, and many of them have been addressed under different names in various theories of the novel. Given Said’s description of the novel, however, and his association of the genre with what François Jacob calls “la logique du vivant,” “the logic of the living,”15 I want to conclude this book by raising the question of the novel’s relation to biopolitics. 12

Steven Corcoran, “Editor’s Introduction,” Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 1. 13 Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 4. 14 Ibid., 5. 15 Ibid.

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Although Michel Foucault in his lectures at the Collège de France does not acknowledge it (the references to literature largely end after his course Abnormal and return only in his very last courses on The Government of Self and Others), the novel as a genre was born around the time when the transformations in the history of power that Foucault is describing—from sovereignty to governmentality, from monarchy to the bourgeoisie, from feudalism to capitalism; from the seventeenth through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries—took place. Clearly, the novel is one of the dispositifs or apparatuses that the modern era brought into being: a technique of life-writing that can be read as a form of government over oneself and over others. Indeed, with the genre of the novel, humanity for the fi rst time produced a literary form that allowed for the lives of “ordinary” human beings—“ordinary” as opposed to mythical beings—to be brought into the representative order of the literary text. Thus, the novel can be understood as a veritable “biologico-literary experiment,”16 as a character in one of J. M. Coetzee’s novels puts it: as a literary form of the governmental biopolitics that Foucault theorizes. As such, however, the novel is a strange kind of apparatus—one could call it a pharmakon—that invites one to critically reconsider the predominantly negative reading of biopolitics that Foucault in his lectures provides. Although the novel might be a literary form of governmental biopolitics, the history of the genre demonstrates that the novel has continuously struggled with these political origins. The novel is thus an apparatus that draws the power with which it is complicit into question. The issue can be traced back to Foucault’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” as he develops it in the fi rst session of his lecture course on The Government of Self and Others.17 It is clear that Foucault is largely appreciative of the emancipatory dimension of Kant’s text, which theorizes Enlightenment as the human being’s exit from cultural and political domination and urges its readers to “Dare to know!” Foucault is interested, however, in a strange turn toward the end of the text, where Kant praises Frederic of Prussia as an enlightened

16

J. M. Coetzee, Slow Man (New York: Viking, 2005), 114. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2010). 17

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ruler to whom one should voluntarily subject oneself. Kant’s answer to the question of Enlightenment is thus essentially split between the human being’s becoming “the subject of” and its becoming “subjected to,” a doubleness that Foucault and many others after him have demonstrated to be characteristic of modernity. After Foucault, all emancipations carry a hidden logic of domination within them. Although Foucault was certainly correct to draw out this ambiguity, one also wonders whether the emancipative dimension of Kant’s text has not become unjustly forgotten, and eclipsed by Foucault’s insistence on domination. Foucault might have had a point about how, for example, the technological, electronic, or mediatic apparatuses of modernity are the means through which governmental power is exercised, but that does not take away Kant’s insight that they can also be the means of the human being’s emancipation and liberation—think, for example, of the role of social media in the recent uprisings in the Arab world. It is this particular insight that the apparatus of the novel also brings home to its readers. The novel provides a particularly interesting case of analysis, however, because from its earliest examples—one could think of early English-language novels such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy —it both participated in governmental biopolitics and provided a critique of it. Such a perspective invites one to reconsider the history of the novel as the history of a genre’s struggle with its political origins. All of the major aesthetic shifts in the history of the novel— from the early eighteenth century, through the Romantic and the Victorian periods, as well as modernism and postmodernism, all the way up to the current biopolitical turn—could then be read as attempts to make another use of the politics with which the genre knew itself to be complicit: in other words, as attempts to continue the novel’s emancipative potential in spite of the genre’s logic of domination.18 Parts of such a history have already been written, but there does not seem to exist a history and theory of the novel that discusses the novel in a biopolitical light, as the imaginary form of

18 I explore this problematic in my next book, Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel.

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146 STATES OF EXCEPTION IN THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL

governmentality. This may partly be due to the fact that Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France have only recently been published, and translated into English. It may also be the current interest in the state of exception and the attempts of various literary critics and theorists to think through the relevance of these debates for literary studies that has ultimately led me in this direction. If Foucault titled one of his publications Birth of the Clinic, it might be that a study entitled Birth of the Novel, which would consider the history of the novel through the lens of Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopolitics, is long overdue. In critical theory, the reading of Foucault that I summarized above is being developed in the works of, for example, Bernard Stiegler. In a book entitled Taking Care of Youth and the Generations,19 Stiegler starts from Kant’s and Foucault’s different answers to the question “What is Enlightenment?” in order to insist on a type of care that, although it might take place within a more or less hidden structure of domination, is nevertheless a care that is desirable; in other words, a care that one should try to see as not only negative. For if one thinks of disciplinary institutions such as schools for example, or apparatuses such as novels or the World Wide Web, one realizes that although they clearly invite the reading that Foucault gives of them, they also still carry within them a Kantian dimension that in Foucault’s wake risks to become forgotten. As Stiegler points out, Foucault was only able to become Foucault thanks to the various institutions through which he was shaped. These questions were on my mind when, in the Spring of 2008, shortly after Stiegler’s Taking Care had come out, I went to see the French artist Sophie Calle’s work Prenez-soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself). Originally mounted in the French pavilion of the 2007 Biennale in Venice, the work was being shown again in the reading room of the old Bibliothèque Nationale de France in the Rue Richelieu, the very same one where Jacques Austerlitz used to work before it was closed to the reading public. Calle’s idea was simple: after she received a breakup letter that finished with the sentence “Take care of yourself,” she started thinking about what this phrase might mean. In an attempt to take care of herself after the breakup,

19

See note 11.

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she asked 107 women to interpret the letter according to their professional activities, and the reading room of the old BnF was filled with the variety of responses she received. Although the phrase “Take care of yourself” was present in Calle’s work in all its absurdity (for what does it mean to take care of oneself?), and appears in it originally within a structure of domination—her partner unilaterally breaks up with her, refusing all further contact, because he wants to continue his affairs with three other women—the work allows it to take on many meanings and to break with this structure of domination precisely through Calle’s exploration of techniques of taking care of oneself. As Daniel Buren, who was the curator of Calle’s work both in Venice and in Paris, has noted, there was no place more appropriate for Calle’s work to be shown than the old reading room of the library in the rue Richelieu. For although this library can clearly be read as a site of domination where the disciplinary will to power over life is played out, Calle’s work also reveals it to be a site of empowerment, where the very practice of taking care of oneself can begin to take on a more positive meaning and one that reinvents the structures of domination within which caretaking is caught up. It is in this way that I ultimately want to begin to reconsider the novel: as a technique or practice of caretaking that does not merely reproduce structures of domination or blindly reject them but tries to practice governing in a wholly different way. The notion of the aesthetic decision is already part of such a project.

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INDEX

9/11 2–4, 13–14, 20, 39, 43, 45, 65–6, 69, 139–41 September 11 1, 3–4, 11 Abnormal see Foucault, Michel Abu Ghraib 49 Adorno, Theodor 2 aesthetics 3–4, 94, 142 aesthetic decision 1, 4–6, 11, 27–8, 33–4, 38, 42–3, 65, 69, 103–4, 123, 140, 142, 147 Agamben, Giorgio 7, 18–20, 23, 37, 47–9, 58–62, 82n. 47, 96, 103–4, 108n. 21, 111–12, 118n. 52, 125–6, 128, 130, 136n. 38, 139 “Beyond Human Rights” 47–8, 60 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life 18, 58, 62, 103 Alfred Lerner Hall 117 allegory 10, 14, 25–8, 33–4, 36–8, 127, 138, 140 alliance 80, 83, 89–90 ambiguity 5, 42–4, 52–4, 56–7, 61, 64–5 Amis, Martin 1, 3, 14 Andromeda Lodge 109–10, 113, 117 Angelus Novus see Klee, Paul animal 5, 13–14, 16–20, 22–3, 25–9, 32–3, 37–8, 74–5, 77, 81–2, 93–7, 100, 107–11, 130

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anthropological 78–9 Antigone see Sophocles ANTIKOS BAZAR 112, 123 anti-semitic 32 Apartheid 6, 68, 70–1, 86, 91–3, 103 apparatus 144–6 archive 110, 124, 126, 129, 131, 135–6 Arendt, Hannah 47n. 15 Aristotle 14, 16 artist 3, 4n. 12, 12, 137–8, 146 Auschwitz 3, 96 autobiography 3, 5, 40, 42–3, 61, 63–6, 87, 140 Banville, John 14 Bataille, Georges 79–84, 87 Accursed Share, The 79 History of Eroticism, A 79 Sovereignty 79 Baudelaire, Charles 73, 76 Baptist, John the 62 Barbin, Herculine 44–5, 55–6, 63, 65, 96, 132 bare life 18–20, 23, 143 Benjamin, Walter 2, 7, 9–11, 18–19, 34, 36–7, 39, 101, 121, 130 “Critique of Violence” 18, 130 Origin of German Tragic Drama 9–10

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INDEX

“Theses on the Philosophy of History” 2n. 5 Between the Lines see Libeskind, Daniel “Beyond Human Rights” see Agamben, Giorgio Bibliothèque nationale de France 106, 146 biopolitics 11, 24, 48n. 16, 95, 143–6 Birth of the Clinic see Foucault, Michel border 73, 137 “borderline concept” 103n. 4 Breendonk 105–6, 110 bricolage 136 Brown, Wendy 102 Buñuel, Luis 52n. 27 Buren, Daniel 147 Burnham, Jack (“Systems Esthetics”) 4n. 12, 7, 12 business 15, 19, 76, 85–8, 91 Butler, Judith 45, 49, 53, 55–61, 65, 139 Byron, George Gordon (Lord Byron) 6, 75–6, 94–5, 97–8 “Lara” 75 bywoner 90, 93, 103 cabinet of wonder 109, 111–13, 124n. 61, 127, 131, 136 Calle, Sophie 146–7 camp 6–7, 96, 98, 102–8, 112, 123, 126–7 cannibalism 25, 37 Caroli, Steven De 103n. 4 castration 74 cinema 116, 125 citizen 5, 31, 47–9, 65, 139 City Edge see Libeskind, Daniel Collège de France 144, 146 colonizer 70–1, 77 postcolony 93

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comedy 75n. 21, 98–9 community 30, 62, 87, 90, 92, 94, 139 Concept of the Political see Schmitt, Carl constructivist 54 Cooper, Melinda 141 Corcoran, Steven 143 cosmopolitan 103 creature 33, 51, 61–2, 75, 95, 131 “creaturely life” 23n. 17 “Critique of Violence” see Benjamin, Walter decision see Aesthetic decision “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” 47 deconstruction 58–9, 118 Defoe, Daniel 17, 38, 145 Robinson Crusoe 17, 22, 38, 145 democracy 68, 92–3, 99 Derrida, Jacques 7, 11, 87, 92, 104, 125–6, 128, 142 The Gift of Death 87 desire 46, 51–2, 73, 76, 83, 95 Diary of a Bad Year 67–8 “differential norm” 49, 53, 64 Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy see Rancière, Jacques disidentification 55–6 divine 29, 35, 61–2, 74–5, 94 “divine violence” 9 dog 69–70, 82–3, 94–7 domination 67, 142, 144–7 Doppelgänger 122 Dusklands 78 Edwards, Brent Hayes 99 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The see Marx, Karl

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INDEX

Elementary Structures of Kinship, The see Lévi-Strauss, Claude Eliot, George 63 Elizabeth Costello 78, 96 embodiment 53, 125–6 emergency 2n. 6, 5, 15, 17, 19, 23, 27–8, 41 state of emergency 2n. 6, 12, 22, 27, 43, 47, 51, 96, 102, 138, 140 Emigrants, The 126 empowerment 90, 147 episteme 35 eroticism 79, 83, 84 erotic 51, 68, 80, 81, 98 essentialism 53–4, 59 antiessentialist 58–9 ethics 2–5, 13, 19–20, 26–30, 33–6, 38, 42–3, 46, 51, 55, 65–6, 68–9, 138 ethnocracy 92–3 expenditure 84 fable 25 feminist 59, 78, 93 First World War 105 focalization 99–100, 138, 140 Fontaine, Jean de la 16 fortification 104–8, 117–18, 121, 134–5, 139 Fortunoff Video Archive 126, 129 Foucault, Michel 44–5, 55–7, 65, 114, 139, 142, 144–6 Abnormal 144 Birth of the Clinic 146 Government of Self and Others 144 Free Territories see Toshevski, Igor freedom 15, 53, 65, 133 Fremdkörper 134 Freud, Sigmund 53n. 32, 115, 122 Gandhi, Indira 5, 15, 17–20, 22–4, 27, 32–3, 39, 41

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155

Gandhi, Mahatma 29 gender 5, 42–6, 52–7, 59–60, 65 ghostliness 124–6 Gift of Death, The see Derrida, Jacques Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 66 Government of Self and Others see Foucault, Michel Guantánamo Bay 68, 96 Hardy, Thomas; Jude the Obscure 95 Hartman, Geoffrey 6, 104, 125–6, 128–9, 133 hermaphrodite 45, 53, 55, 62 pseudohermaphrodite 44, 60, 62 heterosexuality 52–4 History of Eroticism, A 79 see Bataille, Georges Hobbes, Thomas 7–9, 17, 19, 23, 32–3, 36, 82n. 47 Leviathan 17, 23, 32, 36 Hoffmansthal, Hugo von (Lord Chandos Letter) 132 Holocaust 96–7, 102–3, 108, 115, 121, 126, 129 Holy Bible 94 Homer 65 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life see Agamben, Giorgio Honig, Bonnie 140–1 human rights 42–3, 46–9, 60 Hurricane Katrina 141 Hustvedt, Siri 3 identity 30–1, 42–4, 50, 52–6, 60, 62–3, 92–3 ideology 14, 118 imagination 16 immigration 40–2, 49, 54 imprisonment 19, 132–3 incest 46, 78–83, 89n. 69

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156

INDEX

indecisiveness 9, 11–12, 34, 36, 39, 140 inhuman 5, 17, 19, 25–7, 33 intersex movement 53, 62 intertextual 25, 78, 82 Jacob, François 143 Jouissance 63, 63n. 57 Jude the Obscure see Hardy, Thomas Kafka, Franz 57–8, 65 Kant, Immanuel 4, 144–6 “What is Enlightenment?” 144 Kauffmann, Erich 7 Kelsen, Hans 7 Kemal, Mustafa 46 King Oedipus see Sophocles Klee, Paul (Angelus Novus) 2n. 5 Klein, Naomi (The Shock Doctrine) 141 Krabbe, Hugo 7 labyrinth 116–17, 121 Laden, Osama bin 141 Lanzmann, Claude (Shoah) 129 “Lara” see Byron, George Gordon Lee, Spike (When the Levees Broke) 141 Leviathan see Hobbes, Thomas Lévi-Strauss, Claude (The Elementary Structures of Kinship) 79, 83, 87, 89–90, 136 liberal 76, 85, 141 liberation 128, 145 Libeskind, Daniel 117–22, 135 Between the Lines 118, 120 City Edge 118–19 life-writing 134, 143–4 Lord Chandos Letter see Hoffmansthal, Hugo von Macchiavelli, Niccolò 68, 104, 139 Malabou, Catherine 58–60

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marriage 79, 81–2, 89 Marx, Karl 47n. 15, 93 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 93 materiality 7, 59, 115, 124 materialism 129 “spectral materialism” 124, 129 Mauss, Marcel 80, 82, 87 Megali Katastrophe 40 memory 106, 113–14, 121, 133 collective memory 13 Messiah 30, 62–3 Messianism 30, 35–7, 61–2, 93–4 Metafiction 24, 69, 126–36 Middlesex 53–4 military 4n. 12, 22 Milton, John 65 miracle 9–10, 13, 21, 32, 35 modernism 114–16, 118, 122, 128, 145 montage 118, 129, 135, 140 museum 110–12, 118, 121, 137–8 music 98 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, The see Poe, Edgar Allen nation-state 3, 49, 60, 66, 86, 102, 138 national 31, 39, 46–7, 68, 71, 139 National-Socialism 70, 96, 106–7 nature 44–5, 50–5, 63 state of nature 15–16, 18, 21, 33, 47, 51 New Testament 30 Nietzsche, Friedrich 142 nondecision 9 normal 21, 44, 52, 56, 62–3, 142 normalcy 23 normalization 50, 51 normative 52, 54 nurture 44, 50–4, 63

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INDEX

Obscure Object, The see Buñuel, Luis opera 6, 69, 94, 97–9 Pentagon, the 4n. 12, 12 performance 35 pharmakon 144 pharmacological 142 photograph 49, 126, 135, 137–8 Plato 14 pleasure 53, 57 Poe, Edgar Allen (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket) 25 police 84–5, 88, 91–3 Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty see Schmitt, Carl postmodernism 114–16, 122, 145 potentiality 12, 130 precarious 5, 15, 90, 93, 123, 138, 143 private 42, 68–70, 73, 76, 85–94 proletarian 92 protection 14, 16, 22, 47, 49, 89–90, 108 psychic 20–3, 26, 44, 51, 103, 108, 113, 117, 125 psychoanalysis 3 psycho-political 143 public 68–70, 85–6, 91 pyramid 116–17, 121 Rancière, Jacques 49, 53, 67, 90–3, 100, 142–3 Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy 67, 93 rape 6, 56, 70, 77n. 29, 84–6, 88–9, 93 reason 3–4, 16, 25, 36, 38 redemption 40–1, 61–2, 99 refugee 5, 45–8, 60–1, 66, 93

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157

refuge 28, 37, 55, 95, 98–100, 117, 121, 123, 129, 131, 134, 136, 139 religion 3, 14, 28–31, 33, 35 representation 4–5, 10, 28, 33, 49–50, 61, 65–6, 94, 101, 123, 125, 129–31, 134, 138, 140, 142 repress 22–3, 27–8, 75–7, 81, 83–4 repression 27–8, 38, 52, 77, 84, 91–2, 99, 121–2, 130, 133, 135 Robbins, Bruce 40–2, 54, 60, 111n. 29 Robinson Crusoe see Defoe, Daniel Rohe, Mies van der 118 Rosenzweig, Franz 37 ruins 10, 34, 38, 106 Said, Edward 143 Salinger, Jerome David 63 Santner, Eric 23n. 17, 37, 103, 108, 124 Sappho 65 Schmitt, Carl 7–12, 28, 32–4, 36, 39, 45, 82, 103n. 4, 130, 140 Concept of the Political 12 Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty 1, 7, 9–10, 32, 34, 36 Theory of the Partisan 12 Second World War 42, 102, 105, 108 secret 58–9, 86, 112 secular 8–10, 30–2, 35–7 September 11 see 9/11 sexual harassment 69, 74, 76, 85, 87, 91 Shoah see Lanzmann, Claude

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158

INDEX

Shock Doctrine, The see Klein, Naomi Slow Man 68 Sophocles 52, 65, 79 Antigone 52 King Oedipus 79 sovereignty 6–11, 14, 17, 31–2, 34, 36n. 37, 45, 65, 71, 79, 81–2, 84, 99, 102–3, 130 Sovereignty see Bataille, Georges specter 117 spectrality 6–7, 104, 129 body-specter 117 “spectral materialism” see Materialism speech act 55 Speer, Albert 118 Spielberg, Steven 129 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 6, 78, 93, 99–100 Sterne, Laurence (Tristram Shandy) 145 Stiegler, Bernard (Taking Care of Youth and the Generations) 142–6 subversion 57, 143 suicide 56–7, 65, 132 suspension 15, 17, 19–20, 138, 143 symbol 10, 34, 81, 116 “Systems Esthetics” see Burnham, Jack taboo 79–82 Taking Care of Youth and the Generations see Stiegler, Bernard Taussig, Michael 101, 129 Taylor, Mark C. 115–18, 121–2, 130 Terezin 112, 123 Theresienstadt 112, 123, 126 territory 23, 46, 103n. 4, 118, 137–8, 142–3

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terror 1–2, 12–13, 39, 68, 72, 75, 139, 141 testimony 6–7, 13, 71, 92, 104, 123–6, 128–30, 133 theology 29–32, 35–6, 38 political theology 14, 33–4 Theory of the Partisan see Schmitt, Carl Theresienstadt see Terezin Third Reich 70, 96, 118, 127 Toshevski, Igor (Free Territories) 137–8, 142 tragedy 37, 75n. 21, 99 transcendence 30, 116–17 transcendental 8, 32 translation 134 trauma 3, 22, 26–7, 31–3, 38, 41–2, 51, 53, 60–1, 66, 99, 102–3, 108, 109, 111n. 29, 113, 117, 123–4, 130–6 Tristram Shandy see Sterne, Laurence Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 6, 71, 86–7 Tschumi, Bernard 116–17, 121, 123, 135 uncanny 53, 64, 66, 114–15, 122, 134, 138 uncountable 74, 76, 84 undecidability 5, 11, 12, 34 utopia 54–5, 60–1, 65, 103, 109, 135n. 38 Versluys, Kristiaan 4 video-visual 126, 128, 129, 133 Vidler, Anthony 122 violence 2n. 5, 9, 18–19, 27, 34, 69–72, 81, 84, 86, 87, 88–91, 93, 98, 105, 108, 139 virtual 116, 123, 126

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INDEX

“What is Enlightenment?” see Kant, Immanuel When the Levees Broke see Lee, Spike Wolzendorff, Kurt 7 World Trade Center 117 Wunderkammer 111–13, 127

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159

Zilcosky, John 114–15, 122 Žižek, Slavoj 28 zone of indistinction 16 zoo 5, 13, 15, 17, 19, 24, 27, 38 Antwerp Zoo 110 Pondicherry Zoo 26, 38

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