The tail end of disciplinarity

Abstract

Although The Lives of Animals appears to be Coetzee’s least “postcolonial” narrative, concerned as it is with language and human–animal relations, this article argues that the lecture-narrative in fact responds to the fundamental concerns of postcolonial studies. Far from being distinct issues, the narrative’s simultaneous engagement with the limits of disciplinarity and the treatment of animals in the moment of advanced capitalism should be understood as coextensive and indeed as a commentary on the postcolonial as such. The article examines how the question of disciplinarity and the subjugation of animals in The Lives of Animals resound with the power of orientalist discourse and the historical erasures of non-dominant voices. The “tale” that is told in this text is one that cannot be extricated from the “tail” that the narrative’s aging female protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, insists that she hides beneath her clothing. In this lecture-narrative, Coetzee posits a new frame for thinking the postcolonial by challenging listeners/readers to re-conceptualize our ways of thinking and knowing by calling into crisis the human/animal distinction. Coetzee frames the postcolonial as a term that is no longer limited to a set of geopolitical relations, but instead reaches beyond the human and names the global paradox of our time.

Keywords:

• J.M. Coetzee
• disciplinarity
• the animal
• language
• western reason
• the postcolonial

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to Nathan Snaza and John Mowitt for their insightful comments on early drafts of this essay. I would like to thank as well the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Postcolonial Writing for particularly thoughtful comments that have undoubtedly strengthened this essay.

Notes

1. Marjorie Garber coins the term “lecture-narrative” in her “reflection” on the text included in The Lives of Animals (73).

2. My reference to the term “western rational thought” throughout this essay signals Derrida’s formulation of “carnophallogocentrism”, which he coins in “Eating Well”, his interview with Jean-Luc Nancy.

3. Since the oral delivery and print publication of The Lives of Animals in the late 1990s, scholars have begun to consider the intersection of postcolonial and animal studies. See Armstrong. For further reading on the animal in Coetzee’s work, see Mulhall; Puchner. See also Coetzee’s contributions to Cavalieri.

4. Aarthi Vadde’s reading of Elizabeth Costello emphasizes how the novel offers a “politics of discomfort and irresolution in place of heroic redemption” (242). As such, Vadde also reads the novel as one that offers compelling new ways of thinking postcolonial subjectivity.

5. As I discuss later in this essay, Sam Durrant offers a persuasive case for insisting upon the difference between Coetzee and Costello. For further reading on Coetzee and ethics, see Attridge; Leist and Singer.

6. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida argues that the very word or concept of “the animal” enables myriad forms of violence against animals due to the way it generalizes from various animals into a conceptual unity. To call attention to this link, he coins the term “animots”, which signals the role of words in human relations to non-human animals.

7. See Durrant.

8. For a most persuasive account of how the Levinasian concept of the face can and should be extended to the animal, see Calarco.

9. Kojève succinctly explains Hegel’s concept of the paradox of the master–slave relation as follows: “Mastery is an existential impasse. The master can either make himself brutish in pleasure or die on the field of battle as Master, but he cannot live consciously with the knowledge that he is satisfied by what he is” (46–47).

10. See Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, which links the oppression of humans and animals through its narrative descriptions of slaughterhouse practices.