From Dissensus to Inoperativity: The Strange Case of J. M. Coetzee’s Michael K

ABSTRACT

This article develops a comprehensive reading of Life & Times of Michael K, one of J. M. Coetzee’s most controversial novels, which has provoked strong feelings and an intense debate among critics since its publication in 1983. Scholarly works on the novel have tended to explore the ethical dilemma raised by the enigmatic life of the protagonist and his apparent unrelatedness with its “times”, focusing on the issues of absolute alterity and its (un)representability, while denying any political import to the novel. These interpretations draw on a conformist understanding of politics that transforms the social outsideness of Michael K into his political irrelevance. The argument developed in this article takes instead the reconceptualizations of (emancipatory) politics by Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben as a basis for a thorough political reading of Michael’s outsideness. The notions of “dissensus” and “inoperativity” help to disclose, behind Michael’s apparently unpretentious life, a complex strategy aimed at maintaining his distance from power, while keeping power itself at a distance.

Notes

1 Spivak, 175.

2 Gordimer, 3–6.

3 E.g., Wright, Derek.

4 E.g., Monson; Marais.

5 Attridge, 56, 60.

6 Mouffe, 230–7.

7 All quotations from Life & Times of Michael K are cited parenthetically by page number.

8 Head, 104.

9 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 166-80. The children's institution where Michael grows up and the hospital where his mother dies can accordingly be considered as additional elements of the novel's “axis of camps”.

10 Leist, 200–5.

11 Murray; Neimneh and Muhaidat.

12 Clingman, 57.

13 McColl Chesney, 307–25.

14 E.g. Van Zanten Gallagher, 161–5.

15 Rancière, Dissensus, 189.

16 Later in the novel Michael reflects “I have become an object of charity […] Everywhere I go there are people waiting to exercise their forms of charity on me” (181).

17 Rancière, Dissensus, 189.

18 See Rancière, Disagreement.

19 For instance, when interrogated at the hospital where his mother died, he starts to tell his story but at some point he “began to fear he was giving away too much, and would answer no more questions. The man [a hospital authority figure] gave up and went away” (31). Later on, at a police road block, he thinks that “If I look very stupid, perhaps they will let me through” (40). And when soldiers ask him to tell his story but are answered by silence, Michael “had the feeling they did not know what to do” (123).

20 Deleuze, 73–4.

21 Hardt and Negri, 203–4.

22 Ibid., 203.

23 Morphet, 454.

24 E.g., Woessner, 232.

25 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 188.

26 Michael thus considers himself as “one of the fortunate ones who escape being called” (104) and appears to the medical officer as “a creature beyond the reach of the laws of nations” (151).

27 Agamben, The Open, 92.

28 The officers of the rehabilitation camp in Coetzee's novel refer to the place from where they receive orders as “the Castle” (152); for a study on the Kafkian motives of “Michael K” see Meljac.

29 Agamben “K,” 36.

30 Ibid., 33.

31 Head, 103.

32 Rousseau's discussion of property in part 2 of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality begins with the image of putting up a fence and enclosing the land.

33 Michael also reports this as a fantasy from his childhood: “I used to think about flying. I always wanted to fly. I used to stretch out my arms and think I was flying over the fences.” (133)

34 Coetzee thus states that Michael “can’t hope to keep the garden because, finally, the whole surface of South Africa has been surveyed and mapped and disposed of. So, despite K's desire, the opposition that the garden provides to the camps is at most at a conceptual level.” (Morphet, 456).

35 Agamben, Profanations, 86.

36 Agamben, “Glorious Body,” 100.

37 Meljac, 72

38 Derrida, 360.

39 Agamben, Profanations, 86.

40 Agamben, Highest Poverty, 140.

41 The Marxist (economic) and Nietzchean (moral) understanding and critique of value do therefore strictly interrelate here.

42 Michael is in this respect the diametric opposite of Robinson Crusoe, the homo economicus par excellence, and Coetzee's description of Michael's idleness is an inverted image of Marx's description of Robinson's industriousness: “This our friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production; and lastly, of the labour-time that definite quantities of those objects have, on an average, cost him.” (Capital, 169).

43 Franssen, 459; see also Atwell, 94–7.

44 Wright, Laura, 91.

45 E.g., Renders.

46 Thus, according to Marx, the commodification of the producer through the separation of his/her function as worker from his/her individual life, reduces him/her to “a stomach” which needs to be filled (Manuscripts 19–34; 86–7; 118–19).

47 To the insistence of the medical officer, who wants to feed him, Michael answers that he “can’t eat camp food” whence the medical officer concludes that “He just doesn’t like the food here. […] Maybe he only eats the bread of freedom” (146) hinting also at the possible official classification of Michael's behaviour as a “hunger strike”.

48 Tea and biscuits actually destined for his mother at the hospital; doughnuts and pies; beans and powdered milk bought with the last of his money; worm-eaten fruits lying in an apple orchard; half-grown carrots pulled out of the earth; crushed mealies and bonemeal from a feeding trough; a chicken pie; and a meal of soup and pan-bread offered by benevolent strangers.

49 “His step was so light that he barely touched the earth. It seemed possible to fly.” (102); “So light now that he could not even be sure his feet were touching the ground.” (180)

50 “he felt as insubstantial as air” (58); “He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything as a speck upon the surface of the earth.” (97)

51 “Perhaps I am the stony ground, he thought” (48); “He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone.” (135)

52 Impassibility means that the body is not subjected to “disordered passions,” subtlety is “a sort of extreme rarefaction,” and agility implies “effortless and uninhibited movement” (Agamben, Glorious Body, 94–5).

53 Ibid., 102.

54 Gordimer, 143.