Beyond representation : Coetzee, Deleuze, and the colonial subject

This thesis concerns the colonial subject, subjectivity, and resistance in postcolonial theory and literature. It argues that contemporary attempts within the practice of postcolonial theory to retrieve a colonial subject from a representation that issues from a dominating colonial discourse can only be met with failure. Thus, this thesis follows Spivak's claim that the colonial subject is merely a production of positions granted by its very representation, which is to say, a given. However, this thesis also recognises that Spivak's assertion cannot account for moments of resistance to colonial discourse that abound in postcolonial literature. As such, this thesis claims that the colonial subject is not wholly given; that if one approaches the colonial subject through Gilles Deleuze's re-writing of subjectivity, demonstrated in the concept of 'the body without organs', then a transcendent configuration of the colonial subject is revealed. In elucidating this claim, this thesis turns to the fiction of South African academic and novelist, J.M. Coetzee. It is argued that Coetzee writes the Other by 'staging it', that is by testing the limits and eventually going beyond the authoritarian regime of representation.Thus, this thesis is constructed by three main chapters that offer both a rethinking of postcolonial theory in light of the work of Deleuze, and a reading of a selected cynosure of texts authored by Coetzee. The first chapter is a reading of Coetzee's Dusklands that concentrates on the body as a site of resistance to the manoeuvres of representation, demonstrating it to be a site that takes authority in the production of truth from the 'objective', structured methodology of reason, while the second chapter offers a reading of Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians that interrogates the postcolonial concern with 'space'. It is in this novel that Coetzee renders space in terms of its dynamic relationship with the nomad, which ultimately problematises the colonial endeavour to organise, represent, and thereby, 'know' the world. The final chapter engages Coetzee's Foe by way of a sustained critique of the operation of language, and demonstrates how Coetzee manages to test the boundaries of representation through language use. As such, each chapter offers a specific account of an entire programme that tends towards the transgression of the binds organised by the operation of representation