Humanity and the Animal Other: A Derridean Analysis of Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

In “Humanity and the Animal Other,” Jacob Sandler explores animality as a pervasive metaphor for radical otherness in South African writer J. M. Coetzee‘s Waiting for the Barbarians, his famous allegory about the durable human drive to subjugate, torture, and enslave. Sandler‘s theoretically adroit and carefully argued analysis links the dehumanization that makes it possible for people to create divisions such as barbarian/civilized with animalization. As Sandler writes, in the end, “the animal is the only other,” and the surest way to make human beings ethically unrecognizable is to reduce them to the status of beasts.

Dr. Alice Brittan