READING IN THE ABORTION CLINIC: MEANINGS OF THE BODY IN DERRIDA AND COETZEE Richard John Lyus A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Brighton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, October 2019 1 Acknowledgements I would not have begun this research without the encouragement of (in order of appearance) Annalise Acorn, Bobbie Farsides, Sophie Ratcliffe, and Alec Grant. I thank all these people for the considerable time they gave to me, and for their positive responses to the confused thoughts that were the basis of this research. My biggest thanks go to my supervisors, John Wrighton, Arianne Shahvisi, and Mark Devenney. It is only because of their extraordinarily patient and thoughtful guidance that this project has ended up looking anything like a doctoral thesis. 2 Abstract This interdisciplinary thesis brings together a Derridean reading of J.M. Coetzee's 1999 novel Disgrace and my own clinical experience of working as a doctor, to examine how the fetal body and its destruction are experienced and conceptualised in the practice and discussion of abortion. In Derrida, ethics is frequently reframed as responsibility. This reframing makes ethics a matter of our ability to respond and of the interpretation of our responses. The ambiguity of these terms is exploited by Derrida to open up the field of ethics to concern any kind of response, including those made automatically by living beings. Consequently, Derrida sketches an account of ethics in which responsibility operates at the level of anatomy and physiology. Fetal life and its destruction both illuminates, and is illuminated by, this account of responsibility. Coetzee’s novel further illuminates the networks of sexual response and responsibility in which abortion exists and is interpreted, and again bridges the domains of physiology and ethics. Chapter One examines the 2010 report produced by The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which concludes that fetuses are not capable of awareness, and specifically are not capable of pain. This conclusion informs both medical practice and political debate. However, I argue that while the report claims to restrict its remit and methodology to scientific evidence, it in fact provides no scientific answer to the question of fetal awareness, and I demonstrate how the report depends in various places on a circular reasoning that the report both acknowledges and ignores. I suggest that the RCOG report is best understood as an argument for a certain philosophical attitude towards the question of what meaningful subjectivity is and is not. This question is framed in the report by a distinction between meaningful and meaningless gestures or signs. To examine this distinction, I use Derrida’s analysis of the Husserlian concept of the sign in Speech and Phenomena (1967), and Derrida’s critique of a comparable distinction in Descartes, which Derrida analyses in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2002). I argue that rendering certain gestures meaningless derives from a deeply unsympathetic and Cartesian disposition towards the body, and to animality in general, including the kind of animality to which the RCOG report itself explicitly compares the fetus. Chapter Two is concerned with Coetzee's Disgrace, and in particular the decision of Lucy Lurie to continue a pregnancy forced upon her by rape. I examine readings that frame this decision as an act of self-sacrifice, and which thereby tacitly frame the abortion Lucy does not have as a form of fetal or child sacrifice. I develop Andy Lamey’s sacrificial reading of Lucy’s decision in the volume J.M Coetzee and Ethics (2010), in which Lamey draws on the work of René Girard, but I do so by using a more general account of abortion that is offered by the Girardian anti- abortion activist Bernadette Waterman Ward. I explore the implications of framing abortion as sacrificial, suggesting not that the term is inappropriate, but that sacrifice and abortion should be used to cultivate responsibility, rather than to determine the conditions of responsibility as Ward—and perhaps Coetzee and his readers—try to do. Chapter Three is concerned with the hand as a figure for thought, which plays an important role in the reading of Disgrace offered by Cary Wolfe in the collection Philosophy and Animal Life (2008). I explore the figurative hand-of- thought that is presented by Wolfe, which derives from his reading of Heidegger, Stanley Cavell, and Derrida. I argue that if the hand is a figure for various peculiarly human responses such as thought, this thought must concern our responsibilities. While Heidegger uses the figure of the hand to bring thought into the body, Derrida uses it to bring responsibility into the body, and I give an example of my own bodily experience of responsibility to suggest that our most responsible responses breach the dualist distinctions examined in Chapter One. I conclude that we can meaningfully develop our discourse about abortion, the body, and responsibility, if instead of aspiring to normative ends we follow Derrida’s example, and focus our attention on the space between the responses of the speaking ‘I’ and the responses of a body that exceeds what can be said. 3 Everything that I am about to entrust to you no doubt comes back to asking you to respond to me, you, to me, reply to me concerning what it is to respond. If you can. The said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am “I wouldn’t want someone doing it for me who didn’t mind. Would you?” J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace 4 Contents Introduction 6 Chapter One: The RCOG Working Party Report on Fetal Awareness 27 From Fetal Gestures to Fetal Awareness 27 The Argument of the Report 36 Derrida and Two Types of Gesture or Sign 42 Descartes’s Vivisections 48 Agamben’s Inclusive Exclusion 52 The Concept of Reflex 58 The Concept of Communication 65 Mirroring the Reaction or Response 68 Chapter Two: Abortion in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace 71 Lucy Lurie’s Non-Abortion 79 Girard’s Theory of Sacrifice 84 Girard and Coetzee on Abortion 88 Derridean Responsibility 95 Chapter Three: The Hand as Sign: Wolfe Reading Coetzee 107 The Coming Apart of Thought and Reality 108 Wolfe’s Hand 112 Pollux’s Reaction 121 The Experience of Sacrifice 125 Conclusion 130 Appendix: Text Box from the RCOG Report 136 Bibliography 137 5 Introduction This thesis is, in large part, a Derridean reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999).1 Many of Coetzee’s fictional works engage with their own status as literature, demonstrating a reflexivity and intertextuality that seems to be informed by and to build on the developments in literary theory that Jacques Derrida pioneered. David Attwell, in a biography of Coetzee that includes detailed reference to Coetzee’s old notebooks and drafts, writes that Coetzee has often been ‘in ideological sympathy’ with Derrida and other post-structuralists,2 and it is not surprising therefore that his works have been read alongside Derrida by various commentators. One of the best-known Derrida-influenced readers of J.M. Coetzee is Derek Attridge. In The Singularity of Literature (2004), Attridge puts forward an argument for conceiving of literature as an ‘event,’ a form of reading which is not simply a hermeneutic exercise or the passive absorption of fictionalised authority, but a performative co-creation of meaning between author and reader, in which the reader is spurred on by the work to respond to it in new and responsible—that is, ethically sensitive—ways.3 The motivation for this thesis, preceding my familiarity with Attridge’s argument and the work of Jacques Derrida by which he is influenced, can be traced back to just such a literary event: my reading of Disgrace, and in particular the various moments in that novel in which I experienced what Attridge terms, in his reading of the novel, ‘a shudder of understanding’.4 Many of these moments occur in one particular strand of the plot concerning the novel’s principal character and his relationship to animals. David Lurie loses his teaching position at a university after the exposure of his affair with a student, and having retreated to his daughter Lucy’s farm he ends up assisting one of Lucy’s friends, Bev Shaw, at the nearby ‘Animal Welfare Clinic.’ It is quickly made clear that the work of the clinic consists largely of putting-down unwanted animals, mostly dogs. David helps Bev as she administers one lethal injection after another, and eventually he volunteers to transport the corpses to the incinerator at the local hospital. At first, David leaves the dead dogs for the hospital workmen to load onto the conveyer that carries the bodies into the furnace, but then he observes what happens. The stiffened corpses are not gently committed to the fire to liberate their souls from a failed and frustrated bodily existence; on the contrary, when the conveyor emerges from the incinerator, the dead dogs also emerge, their bodies merely mutilated by the flames, in a grotesque parade of failed disposal. In response to these 1 J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 1999). Hereafter the page references to this volume appear in the text in brackets. 2 David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee and The Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (London: Penguin, 2016), 9. 3 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), i. 4 Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2004), 186.