질병과 균열의 힘: J.M. 쿳시의 『철의 시대』

This paper aims to explore the cracking power of illness in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Age of Iron by drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theories of illness and death. Illness in our culture is regarded as life-threatening to embody negative connotations. However, from Deleuze’s perspective, the core of illness cracks or splits us from the healthy body and self, which creates an impersonal or a non-personal life. As a white old woman, Elizabeth Curren in the novel has terminal cancer because of her accumulated shame she has lived in apartheid South Africa. In the turbulent years of the State of Emergency, the black young revolutionaries sacrificed their youth to struggle for their freedom. Yet, by positioning herself as a liberal humanitarian, Mrs. Curren criticizes both apartheid and the black revolutionaries as the politics of death. Nevertheless, by echoing the symptom of the societal sickness of apartheid, Mrs. Current’s personal cancer forces her to experience the cracks of her body and the self-dissolution and then to embrace the death of the young revolutionaries. This enables Mrs. Current to transform their actual death into a state of impersonal death that can be neither the death of black people nor that of white people, opening a conjunction between the past and the future in South Africa. Thus, the personal illness of Mrs. Curren invents a mode of the impersonal subject and the impersonal death for a new vision of South Africa to come.