Staging the Ethical in the State 
of Emergency in J. M. Coetzee’s 
Waiting for the Barbarians
Stevan Bradić
Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Comparative literature, Dr Zorana Đinđića 2, 21000 Novi Sad, 
Serbia
stevan.bradic@ff.uns.ac.rs
In this article I analyze the novel by J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), 
in an attempt to show how it stages an insufficiency of the ethical reaction, by 
positioning it upon a social stage which determines its reach and effects. I proceed 
by reading this stage in the categories of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the state of 
emergency, which spans throughout all of the novel”s events, and defines the relations 
between its main characters, the Magistrate (novel’s narrator and protagonist), 
the “barbarian girl,” and Colonel Joll. My main focus rests on two episodes: firstly, I 
present how the Magistrates supposed humane treatment of the “barbarian girl” is in 
fact only a humanization of the imperial domination, and secondly I analyze the 
scene of mass torture of the “barbarians,” led by Colonel Joll, in which the Magistrate’s 
reaction is shown to be misplaced and insufficient. Finally, by reverting to Badiou’s 
understanding of ethics, I show that both the Magistrate and Colonel Joll function 
within the boundaries of the imperial logic, and how the Magistrate’s ethical reactions 
remain ineffective precisely because they do not question the very foundations, 
the supposed universal law, from which they stem, and therefore never manage to 
reach the objective level of action. In this sense Coetzee’s novel, on the level of form, 
fulfills that which is presented as lacking on the level of its content – by making its 
readers find a position outside of the logic of its characters, it presents them with the 
insufficiency of ethics devoid of any relation to politics.
Keywords: literature and ethics / South African literature / Coetzee, J. M.: Waiting for 
the Barbarians / Agamben, Giorgio: Homo Sacer
137
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 40.2 (2017)
Upon its publication the novel of the famous contemporary South 
African writer J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) was 
welcomed as a masterpiece of the so­called late-modernist literature, 
which resonated significantly in the emerging field of postcolonial 
studies. Its complex story raised numerous questions about race, impe­
rialism, the “dangerous” other, the use of torture, responsibility, desire, 
PKn, letnik 40, št 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2017
138
and the relation of power and truth that unfortunately seem to be as 
relevant today as they were when the work was first published. My 
primary focus in this essay will be the perspective internal to the narra­
tive itself – I will analyze the staging of the ethical response of its main 
protagonist to the imperial acts of violence, in order to show its depen­
dency upon the situation in which it is taking place. For this purpose I 
will focus on two episodes from the novel, the first one being the often 
commented upon (Attwell, Attridge, Hayes) encounter between the 
Magistrate and the “barbarian girl,” and the second one the mass beat­
ing of the “barbarians” in the central square of the town, in which most 
of the novel takes place. In both of these episodes the character of the 
Magistrate seems willing to act ethically, but in both cases his actions 
seem to be insufficient, either when he functions as the representative 
of the sovereign power or when he acts against it.
For this analysis, instead of Greek understanding of ethics as the 
“good way of being,” a more appropriate approach seems to be the one 
outlined by the Stoics and in the modern sense Kant. As Alain Badiou 
notices, for the Stoics the “wise man is he who, able to distinguish those 
things which are his responsibility from those which are not, restricts 
his will to the former while impassively enduring the latter” (Badiou 
1). This is how we find the character of the Magistrate in the beginning 
of the novel – an elderly man attending to his duties as the head of 
the imperial outpost, awaiting for his retirement. But after the events 
of the novel start to unravel, he reluctantly accepts to fulfill the duty 
of the subject bound by a universal law, in the Kantian sense. This is 
immensely important particularly because the regular rule of law is all­
ready suspended at this point,1 and I intend to show how the apparent 
insufficiency of his response does not originate in some kind of flaw in 
his character or inconsistency of his actions but precisely in the logic of 
the general law he aims to enact.
I will therefore start from what I understand to be the “stage” of 
the events in this novel. By this I do not mean the spatial location 
of the plot, which is undeniably important, but from the juridical 
circumstances under which the plot takes place.2 In the very begin­
ning of the novel we are informed of the arrival of Colonel Joll of 
the Third Bureau, a representative of the emergency powers, as the 
Magistrate notes: “We do not discuss the reason for his being here. 
1 In this sense his ethical response is based on the Kantian “principle that judges 
the practice of a Subject” (Badiou 2).
2 These two are indeed related, since both deal with the question of the border, the 
inner and the outer, the inclusion and the exclusion. 
Stevan Bradić:     Staging the Ethical in the State of Emergency in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting …
139
He is here under the emergency powers, that is enough” (Coetzee 4). 
The said “stage” is therefore explicitly defined in the terms of the state 
of emergency.3 In his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life 
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben offers a complex explanation 
for these circumstances and their implications. Summed up, they can 
be described as the state of suspension of juridical order, based on 
the decision of the sovereign, which as an effect reduces his subjects 
to bare life. The sovereign is the one “to whom the juridical order 
grants the power of proclaiming a state of exception and, therefore, 
of suspending the orders own validity” (Agamben 17). Because of this 
he “stands outside the juridical order and, nevertheless, belongs to it” 
(Schmitt, qtd. in Agamben 17). The situation created by the emer­
gency “has the peculiar characteristic that it cannot be defined either 
as a situation of fact or as a situation of right, but instead institutes 
a paradoxical threshold of indistinction between the two” (Agamben 
18). In addition to this, the life “caught in the sovereign ban […] is 
originarily sacred” (53), and by definition may be killed and yet not 
sacrificed (12), becoming in a sense totally exposed to the violence of 
the sovereign power.
This setting of the “stage” therefore implies that the power is redis­
tributed from the very start of the narrative – the Magistrate still func­
tions in his official role, but the real power now resides with the repre­
sentatives of the state of emergency (i.e. Colonel Joll). Nevertheless, the 
novel, does not start from the potential “chaos” of indistinction, it rather 
proceeds gradually, through localized events of violence that, from the 
juridical point of view, do not demand a response from the Magistrate. 
In this manner his reactions are delegated to the sphere of ethics, that 
is, to the sphere of his private decisions. At the same time, with each act 
of torture committed by Joll, the Magistrate becomes more and more 
involved with his prisoners. Through this we are witnessing the split in 
the very structure of the imperial power: the Magistrate, who is officially 
no longer in charge, sees it as his moral duty to intervene in the ac­
tions of the new imperial official, in order to enact the values he believes 
to be fundamental for the Empire, values which have been suspended 
3 Once put in the historical context the novel seems to, paradoxically, predict the 
state of emergency that was instituted in South Africa from “the mid to late 1980s” 
(Engle 123), with the emergency mirroring the fictional text by consisting “of a con­
frontation between a white state power which claimed to be European in its core 
beliefs and an oppressed non­white majority which had encountered European tradi­
tions in the form of colonialism, racist capitalism, and white owned technologies of 
oppressive power” (123).
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140
precisely to be “protected” and “preserved”. Accordingly he claims the 
following: “I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is fin­
ished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble” 
(Coetzee 34–35). It can therefore be said how the Magistrate stands in 
for the imperial ethics and politics during the regular rule of law (which 
is supposedly based on them), and his interventions serve to protect the 
Empire from itself, to protect its “better nature”, compromised by this 
state of emergency, which is supposedly motivated by the “barbarian” 
threat. 4 But this is only an internal perspective on the situation, a per­
spective of an imperial subject and an administrator, and its limitations 
become apparent through his relation to the “barbarian girl”.
The character of the “barbarian girl” appears in the narrative only 
after she was partially blinded, crippled and effectively reduced to a 
beggar by Colonel Joll’s torture (Coetzee 37). After the Magistrate 
notices her, he leads her to his quarters, where the following scene 
takes place:
The fire is lit. I draw the curtains, light the lamp. She refuses the stool, but 
yields up her sticks and kneels in the centre of the carpet.
“This is not what you think it is,” I say. The words come reluctantly. Can 
I really be about to excuse myself? Her lips are clenched shut, her ears too no 
doubt, she wants nothing of old men and their bleating consciences. I prowl 
around her, talking about our vagrancy ordinances, sick at myself. Her skin 
begins to glow in the warmth of the closed room. She tugs at her coat, opens 
her throat to the fire. The distance between myself and her torturers, I realize, 
is negligible; I shudder. (Coetzee 39)
After this the Magistrate proceeds to bathe her body, and then falls 
asleep – this scenario repeats regularly while she remains at the outpost 
(40, 42, 43, etc.). Her relation to the Magistrate can be, and often was 
read allegorically, where she supposedly stands in for the colonized as 
such, while Colonel Joll and the Magistrate represent different faces of 
the Empire.5 In addition to this I propose to read their relation in the 
4 Similarly, in his analysis of the novel Thomas P. Crocker describes how the state 
of emergency shows that “constitutional commitments are not absolute, and under 
conditions of necessity, can be abandoned in order to protect the physical survival 
of the state. Constitutional commitments, on this view, depend on perceived neces­
sities” (309). Therefore, ordinary law, “which includes prohibitions against the use 
of torture” (308), is seen as something that “should not stand in the way of official 
necessity” (308).
5 At this point the “national allegor[y]” (Jameson 69) in which the “psychology 
and […] libidinal investment is to be read primarily in political and social terms” 
Stevan Bradić:     Staging the Ethical in the State of Emergency in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting …
141
terms of sovereign and bare life. Form this standpoint, even before they 
meet, the power that Magistrate potentially has over her, as a citizen 
and an official of the Empire, is total, and what he does with her com­
pletely depends on his personal decisions .6 Here the indicated ethical 
dimension of their interaction becomes crucial: once the ordinary rule 
of law is suspended the actions of the individual are no longer limited 
by an external force, and will instead depend upon his/her personal 
relation to the supposed universal law. The described relation forms 
one of the decisive splits within the novel – even though the Magistrate 
is in the position of the sovereign he does not use his power in its full 
extent, like Joll does, because he presumes the existence of some kind of 
boundary even though no such boundary is legally in effect.
In his book J. M. Coetzee and the Novel (2010) Patrick Hayes pro­
poses two readings of the interaction between the Magistrate and the 
“barbarian girl”: on the one hand, “the Magistrate shudders because 
he is horrified at the thought that what he is doing has a kind of 
moral equivalence with what Colonel Joll and the torturers did: that 
he might be dominating and abusing the girl in the very impulse of 
his charitableness” (67); on the other he proposes the possibility that 
the shudder “reveals the Magistrate’s sadism” (67), and after a similar 
assessment of the Magistrate’s constant sleepiness after bathing her, he 
concludes that “[t]he text oscillates between these alternatives, keeping 
them in play” (70).
What I propose instead is the parallel existence of both of these 
motivations, one being foundational for the other, in a structure de­
liberately constructed in such a way as to offer distinct and alterna­
tive sources of satisfaction to the Magistrate. He is absolved from the 
guilt of the committed violence by the “Christlike charitableness” (65), 
and allowed still to enact the hierarchical relation to the “barbarian 
girl.” His constant bathing of her body is directed at wiping out the 
text of the colonization in an obvious attempt “to wash himself clean 
(72), seems to be an unavoidable frame of reading. It should, of course, be approached 
carefully, and with an awareness that it does not exhaust all of the possibilities. As 
a “metonymy” of the colony, the body of the “barbarian girl” becomes a text of the 
colonization, and the Magistrate is “metonymic of the settler culture itself, ambivalent, 
‘schizophrenic’, both colonized and colonizing” (Ashcroft 154).
6 As Patrick Hayes notes: “[The Magistrate] and Colonel Joll have the girl entirely 
in their power: she is quite literally powerless to resist, and both are (albeit with osten­
sibly different motivations) trying to interpret her” (67). This power is based upon the 
state of emergency through which all of the “barbarians” are reduced to bare life, and 
simultaneously, at this point in the novel, all of the imperial citizens function as the 
representatives of sovereign power in relation to the “barbarians.”
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142
from his sense of complicity with Empire” (Poyner 61), especially in its 
new form, introduced by the state of emergency. But the result of this 
practice is only the reemergence of blankness, incompleteness of the 
“barbarian girl”7 – there can be no absolution while reproduction of 
the relations of subordination is taking place. One can therefore claim 
that the supposed ethical reaction perpetuates the colonial domination.
In the final move of their relationship, the Magistrate returns the 
“barbarian girl” to the population he sees as “her people,” revealing the 
implied ideology of the “stage” from which he acts: “Only, now that I 
have brought you back, as far as I can, I wish to ask you very clearly to 
return to the town with me. Of your own choice” (Coetzee 97). She 
has to be made into a free subject so she could freely choose him8 as her 
ruler/lover: in order to fulfill the fantasies framed by the logic of (his) 
universal law, he has to be freely chosen and thus absolved of any guilt, 
and one can see that the absence of such choice was the obstacle in his 
previous advances. This is how his ethical response is dependent upon 
his imperial desire. On the other hand his recognition of the need for a 
free choice is an implicit recognition of the failure of the “pure” ethical 
relation, devoid of political context, and a signifier of the inadequacy 
of the supposed law itself, which requires individuals to be inscribed in 
it as imperial subjects in order to be fully recognized.
In other words, the Magistrate wants her to become an imperial 
subject of her own free will and thus retroactively accept the violence 
she has been subjected to, and also, paradoxically, he wants her before 
this violence took place. Following the allegorical reading instead of the 
7 The Magistrate notes: “‘She is incomplete!’ I say to myself. Though the thought 
begins to float away at once, I cling to it. I have a vision of her closed eyes and closed 
face filming over with skin. Blank, like a fist beneath a black wig, the face grows out 
of the throat and out of the blank body beneath it, without aperture, without entry” 
(Coetzee 58).
8 By providing her with a choice, it can be said how the Magistrate is staging a sort 
of a social contract, in an attempt to justify the Empire in its ideal form. But even in 
this form the Empire does not get chosen: “It is only outside the limits of the Empire 
that he can present her [barbarian girl] with a free choice, but she knows that this 
freedom would be undermined the minute she accepts” (Attwell 81). In addition to 
the need to be desired it is precisely his implied knowledge that he will never be desi­
red that blocks his attempts at constructing her. That is why he is not merely a sadist, 
hiding behind altruism, or an altruist that even at his best remains a torturer. One can 
rather claim that his dominating and objectifying desire is formed by such a discourse 
that it needs to be willed in order to be justified. In other words – at this point in the 
novel, he is, paradoxically, both, a sadist and an altruist, his objectification and domi­
nation being based on his altruism.
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143
“literal one” (Attridge), it can be said that the colonizer who is always 
already in a situation after the violent colonization took place wants 
from the colonized to desire this colonization, and therefore projects 
himself as the object of desire in the past, before any of it took place. 
The Magistrate wants her to be willingly included in the Empire before 
her actual inclusion.
From Badiou’s perspective, one could say how he does not want her 
to be just any possible other, but the good other,9 whose differences one 
could respect: “The problem is that the ‘respect for differences’ and the 
ethics of human rights do seem to define an identity! And […] as a re­
sult, the respect for differences applies only to those differences that are 
reasonably consistent with this identity” (Badiou 24).10 And the “bar­
barian girl” once faced with a choice refuses this imperial game, and 
remains in its eyes the inassimilable other, or rather the other which is 
included only through its exclusion, as the starting point of the impe­
rial juridical order, its identity and ideology.
Similar logic, taken to its extreme, can be seen in the second epi­
sode I intend to analyze. It takes place after the Magistrate returns 
from the “barbarian lands,” and is incarcerated because he has sup­
posedly “treasonously consort[ed] with the enemy” (Coetzee 105). 
At this point the “barbarians” are fully recognized as the “enemy” 
by the representatives of the Third Bureau, but the inhabitants of 
the outpost, the citizens of the Empire, have known them mainly 
through the exchange of goods. In this sense the violence that takes 
place in the town square can be understood as organized mainly for 
their “benefit.” It starts with Colonel Joll’s return from his military 
raid, with a group of prisoners. At first, the crowd gathers to meet 
their supposed victorious defender. Through this process the people 
of the whole town are transformed into a singular “subject,” and their 
relation to the law is suspended through the presence of the represen­
tative of the state of emergency.
In contrast to this, the Magistrate, who has escaped his confine­
ment, joins the crowd, but refuses to accept its logic: “For me, at this 
moment, striding away from the crowd, what has become important 
above all is that I should neither be contaminated by the atrocity that 
is about to be committed nor poison myself with impotent hatred of 
its perpetrators” (140). His refusal of the crowd logic is also a refusal to 
9 Badiou points out: “As a matter of fact, this celebrated ‘other’ is acceptable only if 
he is a good other – which is to say what, exactly, if not the same as us?” (Badiou 24)
10 Attridge similarly notices how the imagined other of the Empire in this novel is 
“its other” which is “still […] part of its system” (Attridge 30).
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144
identify Joll as the embodiment of the law. At this point the “barbar­
ians” make their appearance: “[A]t the end of the rope, tied neck to 
neck, comes a file of men, barbarians, stark naked […]. A simple loop 
of wire runs through the flesh of each man’s hands and through holes 
pierced in his cheeks. ‘It makes them meek as lambs’” (138–139). After 
this introduction a peculiar and violent scene takes place – Colonel 
Joll inscribes onto the prisoners bodies the word “ENEMY,” and the 
people start beating them until this words is “washed clean” by the 
blood from their wounds (141). It can be said how the purpose of 
this spectacle is the creation of the enemy out of bodies that are being 
beaten. This is why the word “enemy” must be “washed clean” from 
their backs – their bodies must be transformed into the word itself. As 
Patrick Lenta claims: “The guards inscribe the tortured bodies in a way 
that produces the victim’s status as enemy” (76), but it is the crowd of 
spectators that puts this word into circulation. The enemy is therefore 
“arbitrary” and “consensual,” and the spectacle can be seen as a social 
contract of sorts, between Joll and the townspeople. Through this pro­
cess the outer is incorporated in the inner, and the “barbarians” are 
assigned with a body.
Only after all of this has taken place does the Magistrate decide 
to intervene, and his attack is directed not at the people but at the 
leader of the spectacle: “When I turn to Colonel Joll he is standing not 
five paces from me, his arms folded. I point a finger at him. ‘You!’ I 
shout. Let it all be said. Let him be the one on whom the anger breaks. 
‘You are depraving these people!’” (Coetzee 144) He then addresses 
the crowd in the following words: “‘Look!’ I shout. ‘We are the great 
miracle of creation. But from some blows this miraculous body cannot 
repair itself!’ […] ‘Look at these men!’ I recommence. ‘Men!’” (144). 
Because of this ethical intervention the Magistrate is than severely beat­
en on the spot by the officers of the Third Bureau, in a similar manner 
to the prisoners, him being the first imperial citizen in front of whom 
the law has withdrawn itself (now reducing him to bare life, a category 
which will be expanded in great measure further in the novel).
Described violence can be interpreted from the standpoint of 
Badiou’s understanding of contemporary dominant ethics which he 
designates as nihilism (Badiou 30). Namely, “ethics is conceived here 
both as an a priori ability to discern Evil (for according to the modem 
usage of ethics, Evil – or the negative – is primary: we presume a con­
sensus regarding what is barbarian), and as the ultimate principle of 
judgment, in particular political judgment: good is what intervenes 
visibly against an Evil that is identifiable a priori” (Badiou 8). In the 
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described scene we are precisely faced with this a priori inscription 
onto the blank bodies of the prisoners – Colonel Joll designates the 
“enemy” and the “barbaraian,” and in turn he and the power he repre­
sents are elevated to the status of the good. In such situations Badiou 
claims how the politics is ultimately “subordinated to ethics, to the 
single perspective that really matters in this conception of things: the 
sympathetic and indignant judgment of the spectator of the circum­
stances” (9). The described scene in the novel offers something more – 
not only judgment but also punishment, which is possible and accept­
able precisely because of this mechanism. In this sense we, as readers, 
are faced with the final consequences of such ethics, and at the same 
time, with its starting point in the reaction of the Magistrate. It is one 
and the same movement.
This is why the mass beating of the prisoners can be described as the 
simulacrum of truth: “When a radical break in a situation, under names 
borrowed from real truth­processes, convokes not the void but the ‘full’ 
particularity or presumed substance of that situation, we are dealing 
with a simulacrum of truth” (73). An emancipatory action indeed is a 
brake in the situation, an exception to the rule, but this exception is 
proclaimed from the position of the supplement of the situation, not 
from its very center. Sovereign power of the Empire here proclaims the 
state of exception and this is one of the main reasons why such an event 
is only a simulacrum. What is at stake, what this ethics legitimates, is 
in fact the “conservation by the so­called ‘West’ of what it possesses. 
It is squarely astride these possessions (material possessions, but also 
possession of its own being) that ethics determines Evil to be, in a cer­
tain sense, simply that which it does not own and enjoy” (14). Hence 
fidelity to such “simulacrum (and it demands of the ‘few’ belonging to 
the […] [collective] substance prolonged sacrifices and commitments, 
since it really does have the form of a fidelity) has as its content war and 
massacre. These are not here means to an end: they make up the very 
real [tout le reel] of such a fidelity” (74). In other words, the creation 
of the enemy, the violence (torture or collective beating), and follow­
ing conflict are not coincidental, but at the very heart of the ethics of 
the Empire. The simulacrum of this event can best be uncovered in a 
simple fact that it is not universally addressed,11 but rather based on the 
11 As Badiou claims: “What allows a genuine event to be at the origin of a truth – 
which is the only thing that can be for all, and can be eternally – is precisely the 
fact that it relates to the particularity of a situation only from the bias of its void. 
The void, the multiple­of­nothing, neither excludes nor constrains anyone. It is the 
absolute neutrality of being – such that the fidelity that originates in an event, altho­
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substantiality of the imperial subjects, their identity, community etc. 
being an event of exclusive inclusion, through which the Empire is to 
reassert itself.
The Magistrate is, in this situation, a naive, ridiculous figure, which 
cannot make this connection, and continues to enact the starting point 
of the suspended law, by appealing to the humanity of the victims. 
Simultaneously, just as with the “barbarian girl” he does not intervene 
before the beating starts but only after it passes a point of no return – 
which can be read either as his reluctance to expose himself, or as an 
acceptance of certain amount of violence, necessary against the “bar­
barians” that “threaten” the Empire. His reaction, because it takes place 
upon the stage of the imperial logic, is consistent with its nihilist eth­
ics – it reduces the prisoners to the “status of victim, of suffering beast, 
of emaciated, dying body,” to their “animal substructure […] to the 
level of a living organism pure and simple (life being, as Bichat says, 
nothing other than ‘the set of functions that resist death’)” (11). By 
invoking their status of “men” the Magistrate designates them as bare 
life, which inhabits all of the bodies of citizens present at the square, in 
their relation to the representative of the sovereign power. But at this 
point this is still not clear, and only when the military campaign starts 
to descend into chaos will the imperial citizens experience this identi­
fication. He never invites townspeople to collectively resist the impera­
tives of imperial power, through which a space of immanent exception 
form its logic could be created.
The conflict of the two representatives of the Empire, and therefore 
of two extremes of singular ethics, at least on the level of the story it­
self, has no clear resolution. In this sense the Magistrate’s humanness 
was made impotent precisely because of his reliance on the “universal” 
law which was proven not to be universal because it did not take into 
account the particular and the objective. The question the novel poses 
can, therefore, be read as a question on how to ground an ethical re­
sponse in a space that is groundless, in a state of exception, which does 
not exclude the worst kinds of violence. For a possible answer we could 
look in the direction of what is absent from the novel, namely, the 
emancipatory collective action. Throughout the story the Magistrate’s 
responses were always delegated to his private sphere, and have never 
transgressed onto the level of the community. In this sense, subjective 
was always presented as determined by the objective, ethics by politics. 
ugh it is an immanent break within a singular situation, is none the less universally 
addressed” (73).
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147
This novel can thus be understood as an intervention in the fabric of 
the common, because it does not offer any certain point for readers to 
identify with in the world it creates, but rather invites them to create 
such a point for themselves. It provokes a political response by present­
ing us with inadequacy of the purely ethical one. It could be said how 
it shows that no act of resistance to power can be accomplished in soli­
tude, while at the same time questioning the basis of what is common.
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Uprizarjanje etike v izrednem stanju: V 
pričakovanju barbarov J. M. Coetzeeja
Ključne besede: literatura in etika / južnoafriška književnost / Coetzee, J. M.: V 
pričakovanju barbarov / Agamben, Giorgio: Homo Sacer
V članku analiziram roman V pričakovanju barbarov (1980) J. M. Coetzeeja in 
pri tem poskušam prikazati, kako avtor uprizarja nezadostnost etičnega odziva 
tako, da ga umesti na družbeni oder, ki določa njegov domet in učinek. V na­
daljevanju ta oder razlagam s kategorijami koncepta izrednega stanja, kakor ga 
je razvil Giorgio Agamben, ki zaobjema vse dogodke v romanu in opredeljuje 
razmerja med glavnimi liki, torej med Uradnikom (pripovedovalec in prota­
gonist), »barbarskim dekletom« in polkovnikom Jollom. Posebno pozornost 
posvečam epizodama: najprej predstavim, kako je Uradnikovo domnevno hu­
mano obravnavanje »barbarske deklice« dejansko le humanizacija imperialne 
dominacije, nato pa analiziram prizor množičnega mučenja »barbarov«, ki ga 
vodi polkovnik Joll, v katerem je Uradnikov odziv prikazan kot neumesten in 
nezadosten. V sklepnem delu se vrnem k Badioujevemu razumevanju etike in 
prikažem, da tako Uradnik kot tudi polkovnik Joll delujeta znotraj meja impe­
rialne logike. Uradnikovi etični odzivi ostajajo neučinkoviti, ker ne postavljajo 
pod vprašaj temeljev, torej domnevnega univerzalnega zakona, iz katerega iz­
hajajo, in zato nikoli ne dosežejo objektivne ravni dejanj. V tem smislu Coe­
tzeejev roman kot forma izpolnjuje, kar je v njem na ravni vsebine prikazano 
kot manjkajoče – nas bralce prisili, da najdemo stališče zunaj logike literarnih 
likov, sooča nas z nezadostnostjo etike, ki se ne povezuje s politiko.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 821.111(680).09Coetzee J. M.:17