This paper presents a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) which explores the author’s struggle with the question of how art might remember suffering without forgetting it. Against claims that he “abstains” from or “holds himself clear” of history, I argue that Coetzee does engage with history in his work, albeit not in any straightforward manner. Waiting for the Barbarians does not recover history as a fully narratable subject, but bears witness to it by refusing to translate the suffering engendered by colonial oppression into historical discourse. The barbarian girl with whom the novel’s protagonist becomes involved is a figure of alterity that embodies a material, unverbalizable history of suffering. Rather than attempting to gain imaginative access to the experience of the other and thereby reducing the other to the same, Coetzee insists on the need to respect the irreducible otherness of the other. Only by opening itself up to a radical experience of abjection, of becoming other, can the self truly witness the suffering of the other.

While Waiting for the Barbarians offers little in the way of resolution or redemption, the text does seem to me to affirm the ground of a certain solidarity. The antihistoricist ethics of remembrance which Coetzee’s novel can be seen to embrace points towards the creation of a more inclusive collectivity, a community that would not be dependent on the affirmation of identity or sameness but founded on a recognition of our infinite difference. This desire to redraw the boundaries of community aligns Coetzee’s novel with the ethico-political project undertaken by Giorgio Agamben in the Homo Sacer series. I will consider Waiting for the Barbarians in the light of Agamben’s analysis of the contemporary biopolitical conditions of existence, which the novel graphically dramatizes, and of his account of testimony as a quintessentially ethical practice in relentless opposition to sovereign power’s reduction of human life to bare life.