BECOMINGS IN J. M. COETZEE’S WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS AND JOSÉ SARAMAGO’S BLINDNESS

Abstract

A bestial life is turning me into a beast. Há muitas maneiras de tornar-se animal. [There are many ways of becoming an animal.]

A Responsibility to the World: Saramago, Politics, Philosophy

“…Recent interpretations of the lazaret in Blindness are based on Agamben's logic of the exception, of the camp, and of bare life, focusing on structural elements of contiguity between the two authors (see Nashef 2015 andNeiva 2021). But one could also find other analogies in Seeing, where, just to give one example, the peaceful resistance of the besieged capital is readable as a 'deactivation' of the law (Agamben 2005: 98) through which people leave the "state of virtual exception" and enter the "state of actual exception" (Agamben 2017a: 55), thus realizing the "form-of-life" (ibid.…”

“…When Saramago lets the counterfactual of zoē barge into bios, he breaks the perimeter of bare life and shows that the latter and bios are not the only content of the state. Hania Nashef cleverly illustrates the logic of exception and camp through the hospital in Blindness, where the first blind or presumed infected people are confined and deprived of rights (see Nashef 2017), but I would like to suggest another possible interpretation. I think that what is at stake in the novel is that the biological exception swallows up the sovereign in a spiral of indistinction which, instead of confirming its power, destroys it.…”