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A Deleuzian Reading of Kureishi and Coetzee A Deleuzian Reading of Kureishi and Coetzee: Towards an Ethics of Life Hyun Sook Oh MPhil Royal Holloway University of London 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Hyun Sook Oh, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Dated: 2 Abstract This thesis aims, firstly, to articulate Hanif Kureishi’s and J.M. Coetzee’s novels through a Deleuzian ethics of life, and secondly, to explore how Gilles Deleuze exhibits literature’s potential for the ethical transformation of our lives. Kureishi’s and Coetzee’s presentations of ethical and political life have been discussed by relating them to the conceptions of “hybridity”, “alterity”, “unlimited responsibility” and “bare life” approached through Bhabha, Levinas, Derrida and Agamben. These theories are rooted in incommensurability between black and white, the colonizer and the colonized, and a human and a non-human animal. Homi K. Bhabha’s account of hybridity is focused on “difference within”, Emmanuel Levinas’s and Jacques Derrida’s ethics of alterity and unlimited responsibility, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life are articulated through an abyssal difference between the subject and the Other. These approaches are ultimately concerned with the ethics of the Other. Yet, Deleuze’s ethical questions of life are focused on how we become the Other and how we live an impersonal life. The Deleuzian ethical principles of life are related to affective and reciprocal becomings between self and the Other in diverse milieus. This thesis argues that a Deleuzian ethical reading of Kureishi and Coetzee provides us with ways of understanding our existence in terms of affective relations to the Other and the community. In particular, this thesis aims to demonstrate, through a Deleuzian ethical reading of both authors, how Kureishi in The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album and The Body presents transformative subjectivity in terms of hybridity situated in metropolitan spaces. However, from the perspective of Deleuze, Kureishi does not provide reciprocal becomings between an individual, the Other and the community. Compared to Kureishi, Coetzee in Michael K, Foe and Disgrace, creates a Deleuzian ethical mode of life: an inventive mode of living, an 3 affective and mutual transformation and an impersonal life. Coetzee’s novels are thereby linked to Deleuze’s ethics of an affirmative and immanent life without reverting to systems of judgement and the morality of transcendence. 4 Contents Statement 2 Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 Part I. Hanif Kureishi’s novels 31 Chapter 1. The Theatre of Difference in The Buddha of Suburbia 32 Chapter 2. An Ethics of Betrayal in The Black Album 54 Chapter 3. The Predicament of Hybridity in The Body 83 Part II. J.M. Coetzee’s novels 106 Chapter 4. Politics of bare life in Life & Times of Michael K 107 Chapter 5. An Ethics of Becoming-Animal in Foe 130 Chapter 6. An Ethics of the Exchange of Suffering in Disgrace 154 Conclusion 189 Bibliography 195 5 Acknowledgments During the course of my research, I have benefited greatly from the guidance of my supervisor, Professor Robert Hampson, for whose constructive advice, intellectual guidance and constant hospitality I am deeply grateful. His supervision made the completion of my thesis possible. I am also highly grateful to Professor Philip Tew in Brunel University and Professor Lucia Boldrini in Goldsmiths, University of London for many helpful comments. I would like to thank my family members and friends for their constant encouragement and support. 6 Introduction This thesis aims to investigate Hanif Kureishi’s and J.M. Coetzee’s works in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s conception of an “ethics of life”. Deleuze explores the fundamental classical question of ethics: how should we live? Yet, this question is not immediately assimilated into the question: “what life morally ought one to live?” He instead explores the ways available for subjects to affirm their existence and invent their own singular modes of life in affective relations to the Other. Deleuze’s ethical question is thereby linked to our capability: “what can we do?” Both Kureishi and Coetzee, as postcolonial writers, also examine ethical forms of life in relation to the Other and the community in conflicting social and cultural milieux, whilst demonstrating the myriad ways in which political and cultural problems have unsettled and reshaped people’s lives. Thus, the goal of this thesis is, firstly, to investigate Kureishi’s and Coetzee’s novels through Deleuze’s ethics of life. Secondly, this thesis attempts to articulate more precisely Deleuze’s ethics of life and also to explore how Deleuze exhibits literature’s potential for the ethical transformation of one’s life without reverting to the teleology of virtue ethics. In order to develop a reading of Kureishi and Coetzee, firstly, we need to examine Deleuze’s conception of an “ethics of life”. Deleuze’s “ethics of life” can be articulated through two different questions about ethics and life, but my ultimate aim is to discuss the link between the two terms within Deleuze’s theory. Firstly, one can investigate Deleuze’s idea of life by comparing it to Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s thoughts of life, in order to understand why Deleuze’s idea of life eventually has ethical implications. Secondly, through Foucault’s and Agamben’s assertions of life, Deleuze’s account of life can be more specifically addressed, because the term “life” has 7 been broadly and at the same time importantly discussed in diverse domains. In fact, recent years have seen an increasing range of studies devoted to research on the conception of “life”. Since Foucault commented on “biopower” and “biopolitics” in The History of Sexuality, Volume I (1976), “life” has been substantially debated in politics and philosophy. According to Thomas Lemke, “when life itself becomes an object of politics, this has consequences for the foundations, tools, and goals of political action. No one saw this shift in the nature of politics more clearly than Michael Foucault”. 1 Specifically, as Louis-Georges Schwartz asserts, Foucault observes that “modern states regulated the lives of subjects instead of governing through the power to kill”. 2 In this context, Foucault’s notion of life, according to Leonard Lawlor, bears the meaning of “powerlessness”, 3 because life has been dominantly regulated and shaped by what Foucault calls bio-power. As Lawlor asserts, Foucault’s account of life does not provide us with the power to fashion our own life, because “there is no desire or will for power”.4 This power is contrasted with what Foucault calls biopower on the grounds that power means the individual’s capability of inventing his/her life. Agamben conceptualizes the relation between “bare life” and bio-politics by contesting Foucault’s notion of bio-power and Aristotle’s account of “political life”. According to Agamben, our life has been divided into bare life (mere or naked life) and political life (good life) by sovereign power. This sovereign power exerted by biopolitics reduces citizens to the status of “bare life” as 1 Thomas Lemke, Bio-Politics, trans. Eric Frederick Trump (New York and London: New York University press, 2011), 32. 2 Schwartz, Louis-Georges, “Introduction to the <strike>Meaning</strike> of “Life”, Discourse, 33:2 (Spring 2011), 136. 3 Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 123. Lawlor examines the conceptions of “life” in the final writings of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault. “The signs can be found in the final writings of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault: Deleuze’s ‘Immanence; a Life’, Foucault’s ‘Life: Experience and Science’, and Derrida’s ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’. Derrida reminds us that life is always denied by irritability, spontaneously, auto-affection. Deleuze tells us that ‘a life contains only what is virtual’. And, finally, Foucault tells us that there are two approaches to the concept of life: lived-experience and the living” (Lawlor, 2). 4 Lawlor, 126. 8 non-human life or “raw material”5 and then decides their death in terms of a state of exception. As a result, Agamben assert that “the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics”.6 Lemke also notes that in bio-politics “the production of life is articulated with the proliferation of death”.7 In this context, according to Rosi Braidotti, Agamben’s account of “life” is “defined as extreme ontological vulnerability”. 8 This vulnerable as well as powerless life produced by biopolitics and biopower is deeply fraught with ethical demands on life. From within Deleuze’s theoretical framework, as Daniel W. Smith claims, life is powerful in having a “complex ontological and ethical status”. 9 This diverges significantly from the approaches taken by Foucault and Agamben. For Deleuze and Guattari, life cannot be determined and confined by any structures of power and language, but is rather characterized as a “non-organic” power. Deleuze and Guattari claim that “if everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organized but, on the contrary, because the organism is a diversion of life. In short, the life in question is non- organic, germinal and intensive, a powerful life without organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs, everything that passes between organs”.10 In order to examine the “non-organic life”, we need to consider the debates on Deleuze’s conception of life discussed by commentators. An increasing range of studies on Deleuze’s conception of life has recently been focused on the thinkers important to the development of vitalism and biophilosophy.
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