ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the emergence of South African public intellectuals as political figures. It explores South African resistance literature, and more particularly André Brink’s commitment to political struggle, vis-à-vis Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of politically committed art. I read Coetzee’s writing as a challenge to resistance literature with striking similarities to Theodor Adorno’s criticism of committed art, which Adorno leveled at Sartre in his two-part essay “On Commitment.” As both Coetzee and Adorno demonstrate, committed art remains close to the power it criticizes, and fails to break free from it. Both Adorno and Coetzee in his essays (including “The Politics of Dissent: André Brink” and “Into the Dark Chamber”) move further away from an oppositional approach to repressive cultural orders. Coetzee instead emphasizes the intellectual’s need to acknowledge his or her complicity in prevailing political orders: he sees such complicity as an unavoidable contamination that accompanies one’s work against the system. Coetzee’s understanding of intellectual commitment thus requires one to see intellectual commitment to a cause as deeply imbricated with what it seeks to oppose, which keeps informing and dictating the nature of opposition. For Coetzee, this is a form of contamination that cannot be undone. Coetzee maintains that it is the constant task of the writer to resist the binaristic logic of the state by avoiding the lure of such forms of self-deception and maintaining an awareness that the writer, too, is implicated in state violence. Coetzee’s approach to state violence bears striking similarities to his portrayal of the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, as the magistrate is greatly distressed by his close proximity to the nondemocratic order.
