Abstract
Lucy Graham
Coetzee and the Camp
Not the city but the concentration camp, Giorgio Agamben has famously argued, presents “the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity”. But while Agamben focuses on Europe in his search for a genealogy of “sovereign power and bare life”, the fact that concentration camps developed almost simultaneously during colonial wars in Cuba and South Africa has been pushed back into the folds of history. This paper aims to elaborate an alternative genealogy of the camp via Coetzee's fiction, raising questions about imperial war, racism and the state, “bare life” and the distinction between human and beast. Beginning with The Life and Times of Michael K (1983), whose increasingly skeletal protagonist finds himself twice interned in concentration camps (which are partly modeled on those of the South African war, and partly modeled on the Nazi camps), I discuss the varying meanings that attach to hunger, labour and the body – within the camp and outside it. The paper demonstrates that conceptualizations of biopower and of the camp itself recur in Coetzee's fiction: in Dusklands imperial war is rendered in terms of the power to kill; in Foe a slave's muteness gestures to the shadowy extremities of colonial power; in The Lives of Animals the slaughter of animals is likened to a holocaust; and in Disgrace David Lurie works with dead dogs “for his idea of the world, a world in which one does not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing”. In fact Elizabeth Costello (as we finally see her) ends up in barracks reminiscent of a concentration camp, waiting to be recalled before a tribunal which demands that she make a confession. Reading Michael K and Elizabeth Costello alongside debates around Guantanamo Bay , the paper elaborates the ways in which Coetzee's early fiction yields a view in which the camp, “bare life” and colonial history are intertwined, while his later work focuses on an erosion of the difference between the human and the animal.