AustLit

''Waiting for the Barbarians' (1980) recounts the rebellion of the Magistrate of an Empire frontier outpost against the torture inflicted on those the Imperial administration which employs him considers as "barbarians." The first-person narration is a strategy enabling the author to personalize the Magistrate whose name he never reveals, above all because through it we are allowed to witness the workings of conscience. The novel is a drama of the opposition between justice and law, and of what happens when men who are supposed to uphold the law in fact neglect justice and abuse their power, themselves becoming worse than "barbarians." Within this complex moral and ethical framework the essay at hand proposes to explore the modalities of personhood as established by Coetzee, and its limits.' (Publication abstract)

'In her well-read work on contemporary feminist theory titled Nomadic Subjects (2011), Rosi Braidotti gets to grips with the Deleuzian notion of ‘becoming-woman’. Noting that the concept has experienced a good deal of criticism in feminist circles (and from some important feminists too, such as Luce Irigaray), Braidotti argues that there is still something of extreme importance in this concept for the feminist to recover. For Braidotti, ‘becoming-woman’ allows for ‘a nonunitary and multi-layered vision’ of the subject. That is to say, it allows for the description of ‘a dynamic and changing entity’ (5) – one that challenges the striated formulations of ‘woman’ found in phallo- and Euro-centric master codes. Importantly, however, it does so not by posing an essentialised subject position of ‘woman’ for others either to mimic or aspire to (often the grounds for the misreading of the concept), but rather by referencing ‘woman’ as an intensity of sorts, an intensity that is the pre-condition for both revolutionary thought and action (249-250).

'This paper takes the Deleuzian concept of ‘becoming-woman’ and uses it as a way to understand the enigmatic relationship that develops between the Magistrate and the barbarian girl in Coetzee’s early novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Beginning with a brief characterisation of the barbarian girl as an agent of transformation, this paper goes on to offer an explanation for why the encounter between the Magistrate and the barbarian girl necessarily results in the Magistrate’s turn away from the State.'  (Publication abstract)

'Deconstructing colonization and the colonizing discourse is a long and continuing process. Many intellectuals participated, and still participate, in this noble mission. However, "Waiting for the Barbarians" is a literary work that resists the colonial ideology through raising the colonizer's, and consequently the reader's, awareness of the pervasive ideology of dehumanization; it is this ideology that makes possible the severe torture of the prisoners without the torturers' feeling or awareness of their criminal deeds. This ideology of dehumanization and the struggle against its domination is manifested by the character of the protagonist who, as a representative of the colonizer, experiences a gradual process of confusion, introspection, and remorse that enables the reader to experience closely, rather than merely witness from a distance, an exemplary process of self-questioning. This theme of self-questioning is one of the main themes of Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. The novel creates in us an ability to question the different ideologies that enslaved us unconsciously, especially at our modern time when It seems that we became so obsessed with materialism and our existential needs that risking one's physical safety or financial security to stand up for one's principles will never be an issue for most people, especially those living in what was known as colonizing countries or, in modern terminology, the developed or first world. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate how the novel creates in its reader a revival of a moral and ultimately political sensibility that is usually inhibited by the ideology of dehumanization.' (Publication abstract)