In this important new study, Hamilton establishes and develops innovative links between the sites of postcolonial literary theory, the fiction of the South African/Australian academic and Nobel Prize-winning writer J.M. Coetzee, and the work of the French poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Centering on the key postcolonial problematic of representation, Hamilton argues that if one approaches the colonial subject through Gilles Deleuze’s rewriting of subjectivity, then a transcendent configuration of the colonial subject is revealed. Importantly, it is this rendition of the colonial subject that accounts best for the way in which the colonial subject is able to propose and offer instances of resistance to colonial structures of subjectification. In elucidating this claim, the study turns to the fiction of Coetzee. Offering unique Deleuzean readings of three of Coetzee’s most theoretically beguiling novels – Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Foe – On Representation will prove to be essential reading to those interested in Coetzee studies, the literary terrain of Deleuze’s philosophy, and those engaging with contemporary debates in postcolonial literature and theory.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Absurdity and the Outside
The Body of Dusklands
Structures of Subjectification: The Enlightenment
Bodies, Incorporeals, and Becoming
Infinite Identity
Simulacra and Simulation
Suspension: The Body without Organs
Judgment
The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians
A Strong Geography
A Weak Geography
Smooth and Striated Space
The Nomad and the War Machine
The Language of Foe
The Structure-Other
The Collapse of the Structure-Other
A Missing People
The Exhaustion of Language as a New Condition of Struggle
A Minor Language and a Minor Literature
Conclusion: The Other Question
Introduction: Absurdity and the Outside
The Body of Dusklands
Structures of Subjectification: The Enlightenment
Bodies, Incorporeals, and Becoming
Infinite Identity
Simulacra and Simulation
Suspension: The Body without Organs
Judgment
The Space of Waiting for the Barbarians
A Strong Geography
A Weak Geography
Smooth and Striated Space
The Nomad and the War Machine
The Language of Foe
The Structure-Other
The Collapse of the Structure-Other
A Missing People
The Exhaustion of Language as a New Condition of Struggle
A Minor Language and a Minor Literature
Conclusion: The Other Question
Grant Hamilton is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has published in the fields of African literature, postcolonial literature and theory, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
