| Summary: | In this article we analyze the novel Waiting for the Barbarians, by the South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee. We read the novel from the perspective of some ethical insights of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, associating them with the emphasized domination of the political in the novel. In this unequal relationship, however, political domination gradually cedes place to the ethical doing, the beginning of which is marked by aporia, that is, by an attempt to reconcile two irreconcilable perspectives: that of loyalty to political authority and that of individual responsibility for the other human being. When the latter takes place, the main character – the unnamed Magistrate – becomes an ethical subject. But this is not an easy process, and in order for this to happen, he must experience physical pain and risk his own life. In doing so, he undergoes the journey from a position of political power to complete disempowering. However, taking responsibility for the other is a much more complex and precarious process than Levinas would have it. As the Magistrate finds out from his own experience, physical suffering and the recognition of immediate death deprive the human being from the possibility of apprehending the world because the body is completely focused on the pain it suffers. Bodily integrity is a precondition of any moral concepts, and identification with the other through pain therefore rarely happens at the subject’s own will and much more often is a result of circumstances. In this particular novel, those circumstances are defined and imposed by politics.
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