Coetzee and the ethics of illegibility

Through Living On/Borderlines, a work divided into two stylistically divergent bands of ‘untranslatable’
and ‘translatable’ text, Jacques Derrida envisages that the most dangerous thing to the institution of the
University is a tampering with form rather than content of language:

‘It can bear more readily the most apparently revolutionary ideological sorts of "content", if only
that content does not touch the borders of language […] and of all the juridico-political contracts
that it guarantees’.

J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Homage’ inveighs similarly against the idea of the writer’s office being ideas in
themselves, counterposing the ethical lessons of style (that which gets under the skin, and becomes
‘part of the self’), to ‘ideas that operate in novels and poems […] unpicked from their context and laid
out on the laboratory table’; ideas which turn out to be ‘uncomplicated, even banal’. That Coetzee’s
writings refuse to stage as ‘object lessons in social conduct’ their ethical encounters (rather enacting
such encounters through the ‘event’ of the text) is a critical response that has settled into something of
mannered posture. ‘Every orthodoxy’, Coetzee notes, ‘grows lazy’, and with a well-established
architecture of Levinasian ethics looming over much Coetzee scholarship, something of a
‘domestication’ has occurred, ironically, under the aegis of ‘ethicality’. Pursuing a critical mode that
best approximates to the singularities of Coetzee's writings, ethically-informed critics often run the
risk of occluding the very text they seek to host. Diary of a Bad Year, interleaving (a la Derrida)
contrasting registers of text provides a useful way into this often unquestioning equation (or elision) of
form and ethical engagement. Peter Boxall surmises that for Coetzee, ‘the failure of realism, the failure
of the text's capacity to sustain itself- opens onto an ethical realm’. Beyond attesting to the ‘mute
expression’ of its interstitial spaces, Boxall (possibly for reasons of economy) gives over little space to
quite how the curious spatialisation of DOABY constitutes is own failure. In a sustained reading of the
Diary of A Bad Year, Maria Lopez could well engage the ethical import of its estranging spatio-temporal
narrative relation. In the ‘tension’ she locates between the ‘public and private’ threads, Lopez’s reading
encounters a possibility to unpack this relation, but takes instead the idea of Senor C’s refusal to close his
blinds, as an exemplary instance of unconditional hospitality, and by extension, the condition of its author.
While not without import, this canonical ‘image’ of the writer’s window and visitation (a nod one imagines
to fellow nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz), is subject to a misleading exemplarity, isolated from its
polyphonic formal construction, ‘uncomplicated, even banal’. The shadows cast by the adjacent texts, both
‘about’ and contributing to a vexed sense of authorship of terrorist reconnaissance footage (‘the
amateurishness was feigned’) and literary writing ‘perhaps that is what she thinks it is to be a writer: you
rave into a microphone, saying the first thing that comes into your head; then you hand over the mishmash
to a girl, or to some aleatoric device, and wait to see what they will make of it’, this idea indeed seems
‘uncomplicated, even banal’. The accents of misinterpretating madness,

with

There is o course a problem of exemplarity in isolating these underreadings of Diary of A Bad Year/

Betokens a bizarre fidelity to a conception of the narrative mode as self-identical, surmisable through
exemplarity

. Without retrenching to a pre-theoretical stance

a credulous theoreticist assumption that failure equals ethics or tensions are resolved
The isolation of this detail from the physical work of the text

of the writerly wind

Derrida puts it in typically gnomic, but eminently sensible terms.

exemplary

Material inscription, readings that challenge normative referential grammar,

Untranslatable.

Absolute untranslatability, unassimilable blankness of the blank space.

The untranslatable/translatable materiality is

This unarrestability is (dis)figured in Derrida’s text by the two parallel bands which at once mark and
overrun the borders of the text. The overrunning of the border from one language to another indicates a
problem of translation, as well as complicating the notion of what constitutes the identity of a text.
There is also an institutional resistance to the limitless translatability which Derrida outlines here, that is
limitless in so far as it can never be exhausted -always leaving a remainder, that which
survivestranslation - and so would appear to be limited in the traditional sense of translation:

How can the thought of responsibility to the singularity of the Other express itself in writing without thus
becoming, by its own definition, irresponsible and appropriative? This pragmatic contradiction lies at the
heart of Coetzee’s writing (‘split writing, from a split heart’), and modulates precisely through this how of
the written.

The modality

‘in which the writer seems to be aware of the fact he cannot leave his blinds entirely closed’
Occludes The work that the text is doing at that moment.

. Although contributing invaluably to the body of Coetzeean ethics scholarship, one wonders why Marais
feels compelled to apologise in advance for a critical ‘formalism’ that is hardly inimical to the ensuing text.
Indeed the critique he provides of his self-styled formalism betrays its own suspect foundations, a ‘literary
fundamentalism’ that he sees as given to overcoming or ‘mastering’ the text, and ignoring the ‘invisible’.
Without retrenching to a pre-theoretical position, and building from marais’s work, it is, I would contest,
the ‘invisible’, and its slippage between the absent, the illegible, the unreadable and the blank as a matter of
form, and occasionally as material properties of the text itself, which require a scrupulous exegesis. The
content marais deems unamenable to close-reading

Scrupulous pedagogy

. Maria Lopez’s Acts of Visitation likewise

Indeed peter boxall’s

Derrida, in the Gift of Death himself is willing to sacrifice the concept of ethics itself when the word implies
any calcualability or schematic drive behind obligation.

Confrontations with the ‘un-understandable language’. A language>

The accidents, of coetzee’s prose

‘Experience’

‘Invisibility’ or the content unamenable to close-reading,

A preoccupation with blankness that collapses, or maybe ‘a simple bridging problem’ between the vexed
relation of form to ethical import.

The slippage between invisibility, as blankness, illegibility, are not just mediated through thematizable
content and the interaction of characters as such

Like the signature, the invention is constituted by its originality and yet wholly dependent upon recognition
and legitimation.

is not just a formal

ethics & form; linguistic, graphic, spatial, temporal, coalesce around what I will call the figure of the blank.
Alterity that is not thematizable, or conceptualizable.

that reduces its irreducible alterity to an affectless passivity, instrumentalised in the service of
enumerating set pieces of continental theory.
Scrupulous exegesis of Diary of a Bad Year has been unforthcoming

may prove inattentive to the text at hand.

. Under a rubric which schematically valorizes the capacity of singularity to transform conventions of
reading and interpretation which made up its initial legibility,

Coetzee’s fictions “owe nothing to knowledges which are not of european provenance... his failure
to articulate a transfigured social order"

Will not stage its interclass or intercultural encounters as object lessons in social conduct.

often has the effect of

Fidelity to blankness, estrangement, that modulates through coetzee’s formal innovations, as much
as its thematizable content. Late Coetzee

To the detriment of the text’s formal innovations.

The singularity of DOABY may

"he has, if the truth be told, been putting it off for months: the moment when he must face the
blank page, strike the first note, see what he is worth. Snatches are already imprinted on his mind of
the lovers in duet, the vocal lines, soprano and tenor, coiling wordlessly around and past each other
like serpents.

Movement of an engagement with ethics, but one that changes.

The face announces the corporal absence of the other: corporeal emblem of the other’s otherness.
merleau ponty looking for the invisible within the visible, the untouchable within the touchable.

Levinas ERUPTIVE.

Otherness manifests itself as the extradoridnary: not as something fiven, or intended, but as a
certain disquietude, as a derangement which puts us out of our common tracks. The human face se

Phenomenologically oriented ethics turns into moralism when starting immediately from the other,
instead of trying to show that it has always already done so.
How the extraordinary is not assimilated into order.

Cannot stage

face noun/verb

Ethics that are rooted in a phenomenology of the body, and the bodily experience of

The otherness does not lie behind the surface of that corporeal boundary, to be seen, touched,
violated, it precisely is that otherness, as a destabilising threshold that is nonetheless embodied
between surface/depth, interiority/exteriority, as the textual page reveals/conceals simultaneously,
as Elizabeth Costello asks, “What would life itself be if there were only heads or tails and nothing in
between?”

The face is metonym,

Central zone where the play of features take place, a place that takes place, the only thing that will
have taken place, is the place. A covering and exposure

Totality vs infinity: otherness which resists & exceeds delimiting totalizing.

Appropriative movement of philosophical conceptuality, and ontological categorisation, as argued in

Derrida’s ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. ‘There was the ontological terminology. I have since tried to
get away from that language. To put altogether too fine a ‘said-ness’ upon it, the saying is ethical,
while the said is ontological. Saying, is a corporal and sensible exposure to the other, or rather the
inability to deny the approach of, and to the Other, irreducible to constative propositions, the fact
not of their content but the utterance itself. A non-thematizable

Ethics of opacity
The deformative trea

Where attitude becomes form.

Materiality of the text & the body,

What cannot be read is that which must be read.

European colonialism was predicated upon the ivisibility of the white body and the visibility of the
dark one. The discrepancy in this relation has nothing to do with pigmentation and everything to do
with what Jacques Ranciere has characterized as the 'distribution of the sensible': 'the system of a
priori forms determing what presents itself to sense experience"

When considering the overall tenor of the novel, it is no surprise to discover that Disgrace moves
away from what Munro calls coming-out mode of national allegory (Munro 20098. Munro, Brenna
M. 2009. Queer Family Romance: Writing the ‘New’ South Africa in the 1990s. GLQ, 15: 397–439.

View all references, 399) and toward a politics of illegiblity and opacity which aligns more readily
with anti- identitarian queer theory instead of rights- and recognition-based human rights
discourses. Although my arguments about the status of Lucy's lesbian identity have followed two
contradictory paths—the national allegorical reading that erases her rights of lesbian desire in the
transmission of racialized and sexual historical debts and Lucy's refusal to become legible as a
lesbian in the national narrative and legal structures because of those structures’ inability to contain
this racial and sexual economy of debt—I want to insist on their co-presentness. Illegibility and
opacity do not always mean erasure, erasure does not always guarantee non-transmission, and
legibility does not always lead to justice; it is through non-entailments such as these that the
category of lesbian obtains, even under the heavy weight of historical and allegorical pressure.

Encounters with illegibility, blankness,

"there is a hole. Its inside the page. You don't see it because you don't see anything"

"we start anew here. We start with a blank slate, a virgin slate. And ines is not a stranger. I
recognised her as soon as i set eyes on her, which means I must have some kind of prior knowledge.'

"you arrive here with no memories, with a blank slate, yet you claim to recognize faces from the
past. It makes no sense.'
"it is as if the image of her were embedded in me'
Gaps. – The demand that one should be intellectually honest amounts mostly
to the sabotage of thought. It means to hold authors accountable, to explicitly
portray all the steps which led them to their conclusion, and thus enable every
reader to follow the process along and, where possible – for example, in
academia – to duplicate it. Not only does this operate according to the liberal
fiction of the popular, general communicability of every thought and inhibit its
factually appropriate expression, but is also false as a principle of representation
[Darstellung]. For the worth of a thought is measured by its distance from the
continuity of what is familiar. It is objectively devalued by the diminution of
this distance; the more it approaches the previously established norms, the more
its antithetical function disappears, and its claim is founded only in the latter,
in the apparent relationship to its opposite, not in its isolated existence. Texts
which anxiously undertake to document every last one of their steps, decay
unavoidably into what is banal and into a boredom which relates not just to the
tension during the reading, but also to its own substance. Simmel’s texts, for
example, suffer everywhere from the incompatibility of their distinctive objects
with the painfully lucid treatment. They establish what is distinctive as the true
complement of that mediocrity which Simmel wrongly believed to be Goethe’s
secret. But far beyond this, the demand for intellectual honesty is itself
dishonest. Even if one followed for once the dubious instruction, that the
representation [Darstellung] ought to model itself precisely on the thought-
process, then this process would no more be one of discursive progress from
step to step, as the reverse, that insights fall to the seeker of knowledge from
heaven. Cognizing involves on the contrary a network of prejudices, intuitions,
innervations, self-corrections, assumptions and exaggerations, in short in dense,
grounded experience, which is by no means transparent in all places. Of this the
Cartesian rule, that one should only turn to objects, “to whose clear and
undoubted knowledge our mind [Geist] seems to suffice,” including all order
and disposition which relates to such, gives as false an account as the opposing
doctrine of the apperception [Wesenschau], which is nevertheless inextricably
entwined with the former. If this latter denies what is logically right, which in
spite of everything validates itself in every thought, then the former takes what
is logically right in its immediacy, in relation to every individual intellectual act
and not as mediated through the stream of the entire life-consciousness of the
 cognizer. Therein however lies simultaneously a confession of deepest
inadequacy. For if the honest thought unavoidably amounts to mere repetition
– whether of what is already known, or of categorical forms – the one which
renounces the full transparency of its logical genesis for the sake of the
relationship to its object, always incurs a certain guilt. It breaks the promise
which is posited with the form of the judgement itself. This inadequacy
resembles that of the life-line, which runs on bent, diverted, disillusioning
according to its premises, and yet solely in this course, because it is continually
less than what it should be, may it portray under the given conditions of
existence an unregimented one. If life fulfilled its determination straightaway,
then it would forfeit the latter. Whoever died in old age and in the consciousness
of a guiltless, as it were, success, would secretly be the model pupil, who
completes every grade with an invisible backpack, without gaps. Every thought
which is not idle, however, remains marked by the impossibility of the full
legitimation, as we know in dreams, that there are mathematics lessons which
we miss for the sake of a blissful morning in bed, which can never be made up.
Thought waits for the day that it is awakened by the memory of what was
omitted, and is transformed into teaching.

eminetly legible in the communication of an items illegibility. Therefore the move to ‘illegibility’: not
just a demonstrative exercise in the self-enclosed conceptualization of ethical alterity- already
conceptualized as

 coetzee requires the formal departure.

‘one of the most famous chapters of Moby Dick concerns looking into the face of the white whale.
Of course, as we know, whales don’t really have faces; when you look into the face of the white
whale you see just the white wall in front of you. The question which that chapter in Moby Dick
raises is how is one to see through that white wall to see what animates Moby Dick the whale, how is
one to see through the outside of Moby Dick and into the mind of Moby dick, and what a terrifying
experience that might be to actually break through the wall and see what Moby Dick as a
representative of nature really is like; what sort of message it has about nature, about our place in
the world. If we're really going to extend the comparison between the wall and the whale, that is
part of the equation, and potentially what Bartleby is up to, looking at the wall in the way that one
looks at the whale’

one of the strangest expressions in agamben's writing is 'reading what was never written'. Its
strangeness stems from walter benjamin, who although he was not its author, repeatedly emplyed it
in the notes for his arcades project. The true historian reads what has never been written in the
book of life. For Benjamin and Agamben, as we shall see with coetzee, this paradoxical injunction

Written law, as the spehere of the polis, vs the oikos, unwritten laws of family, honour, obligation

insensible realm of writing, that constitutes "the fullest archive of nonsensous resemblance"

to express his most fundamental problem the "supreme theme of metaphysis" aristotle evoked his
wax tablet on which nothing had yet been written.

Answering the call, without conceptualizing alterity;

The contradiction between the ‘what-is’ and the ‘what-is-made’ as both its vital element, but also its
‘shame,’ art, as that which is ‘made’, follows, however obliquely, ‘an existing pattern of material
production […] art as akin to production cannot escape the question ‘what for?’ which it aims to
negate.

The problem of madeness.

“the reading before all languages”

Bartleby, a scrievener who does not simply cease writing 'but prefers not to' writes nothing but his
potentiality to not write.

On errands of life these letters speed to death

Reading the unwritten, and the written that cannot be read

The scene of writing as a blankness,

Scrivener

Peculiar constellation of whales, stones, walls, scripts

Paralysis is not quite the right word. It was more like nausea: the nausea of facing the empty page,
the nausea of writing without conviction, without desire. I think I knew what beginning would be
like, and balked at it. I knew that once I had truly begun, I would have to go through with the thing to
the end

But the most brutal way is to say that he is afraid: afraid of writing, afraid of women. He may pull
faces at the poems he reads in Ambit and Agenda, but at least they are there, in print, in the world.
How is he to know that the men who wrote them did not spend years squirming as fastidiously as he
in front of the blank page? They squirmed, but then finally they pulled themselves together and
wrote as best they could what had to be written, and mailed it out, and suffered the humiliation of
rejection or the equal humiliation of seeing their effusions in cold print, in all their poverty

She is incomplete!” I say to myself. . . . 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. I shudder with revulsion

In the night the dream comes back. I am trudging across the snow of an endless plan towards
a group of tiny figures playing around a snowcastle. As I approach the children sidle away or
melt into the air. Only one figure remains, a hooded child sitting with its back to me. I circle
around the child, who continues to pat snow on the sides of the castle, till I can peer under
the hood. The face I see is blank, featureless; it is the face of an embryo or a tiny whale; it is
not a face at all but another part of the human body that bulges under the skin; it is white, it
is the snow itself.

They form an allegory. They can be read in many others. Further, each singleslip can be read in many
ways. Together they can be read as a domestic journal, orthey can be read as a plan of war, or they
can be turned on their sides and read asa history of the last years of the Empire – the old Empire, I
mean. There is no agreement among scholars about how to interpret these relics of the
ancientbarbarians. Allegorical sets like this one can be found buried all over the desert

The ethical call is unassimilable, blankness is the condition of engagement.

Production of an Other that consolidates an inside, its own subject status.

“masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves”
“in the european seventeeth century tbere were three kinds of prejudices operating in histories of
writing which constituted a “symptom of the crisis of European consciousness”
THEOLOGICAL PREJUDICE
CHINESE PREJUDICE
HIEROGLYPHIST PREJUDICE
The concept of chinese writing thus functioned as a sort of European hallucination… this functioning
obeyed a rigorous necessity… it was not disturbed by the knowledge of chinese script… which was
then available… a hieroglyphist prejudice had produced the same effect of interested blindness. Far
from proceeding from ethnocentric scorn, occultation takes the form of a hyperbolical admiration. We
have not finished demonstrating the necessity of this patter. Our century is not free from it; each time
that ethnocentrism is precipitately and ostentatiously reversed some effort silently hides behind all the
spectacular effects to consolidate an inside and to draw some domestic benefit.

"thought is here for me a perfectly neutral name, the blank part of the text, the necessarily
indeterminate index of a future epoch of difference. In a certain sense thought means nothing. Like all
openings this index belongs within a past epoch by the face that is open to view. This thought has no
weight. It is, in the play of the system that very thing which never has weight. Thinking is what we
already know we have not yet begun; measured against the shape of writing, it is broached only in the
episteme