A soft man in hard times: Lionel Abrahams: writing the state of emergency

Smith, Robert Alex

A soft man in hard times: Lionel Abrahams: writing the state of emergency

Master Thesis

2022

Abstract

This thesis has the principle aim of providing a critical reading of the work of Lionel Abrahams, intending to provide the first serious scholarly interpretation of his thought. The argument that it purses is that what is at stake in his work is a thinking through the state of emergency. The state of emergency, however, is not approached as the formal legal periods in South African history under apartheid. Instead, following the insights of the Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, it treats the legal state of emergency as the singular apparatus of the governing metaphysical paradigm that underpins modernity and its colonial instantiations. It adopts Agamben's notion of the ban as the paradigm for this metaphysic, using this as an entry point to understand Abrahams' participation in the debates of literature and the status of art in South Africa under apartheid. Throughout this study, the status of art is extended as an allegory for the status of life more generally. The movement is always the same: something is divided, with one element being excluded as illegitimate, and precisely through this exclusion is included in the other as its foundation. In sphere of art, the separation is between prose and poetry, commitment and autonomy, black and white art, with each working as the negative foundation of the latter. This too holds for notions of citizenship, where a line of distinction is drawn between the Bantu and the European, with the former's exclusion from the metropole serving as the foundation of the rights of the latter. So too for humanity, which is split into the distinct races, each of whose identity is the negation and the distorted image of the other. Having established the ban as the operative structure that defines the state of emergency, the study then turns to Abrahams first novel, The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan (1976), as well as several collections of poetry with a specific task: interrogating strategies of its overcoming. By taking the ban as being primarily a structure of relation (between language and things, the subject and the other, as well as the subject's relation to their own capacity for action), the study concludes with an examination of two principle and interrelated themes in Abrahams' work: community and the literary act; or, put differently, what is the principle that founds and sustains both literature and community? Through a close reading of his fictional and poetic work, this thesis will argue that it is Agamben's notion of inoperativity, which is elaborated on most notably in the essay “What Is the Act of Creation?”, which resides at the heart of and is the key to understanding Abrahams' thought.

Keywords

English Language

Literature

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