Aestheticized politics in the work of Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee (South Africa)

Apartheid regulated the most intimate details of everyday life in South Africa, perhaps through a process of “aestheticization” in the political sphere that Walter Benjamin first identified with European fascism in 1936. As Terry Eagleton defines it, political aestheticization equates desired political behavior with “natural” impulses. Justifying racial segregation and white supremacy with a rhetoric at once biblical and “natural,” the South African state produced obedience to apartheid. As in the fascist regimes, the concept of inheritance-genetic or cultural-supported apartheid's primary claim: the superiority of a white racial or national identity. Both art and inheritances are evaluated according to the criteria of authenticity, purity, and beauty, indicating a blending of politics and aesthetics in South Africa. English-speaking South African writers Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee revise the model of subjectivity as a collection of inherited cultural and racial features by insisting on the role of authority in discursively conditioning subjective identity.; Gordimer and Coetzee's novels show that political aestheticization occurred under apartheid. But while Gordimer still believes in art and politics as means of transcending racism and complicity, Coetzee focuses on the structural similarities between fascistic or aestheticized authority and the authority claimed by the artist. Like artists, leaders who authorize or engage in racism and torture are performing acts of incarnation, rendering citizens incarnate by forcing them, through deprivation and terror, to live as mere bodies, dependent on the state as their only source of transcendent meaning.; Defining the human subject as a collection of inherited features creates an atomized society in which politics and intersubjective ethical standards are largely forgotten. Fascism represented the apotheosis of this version of subjectivity, which tends to surrender political power to the proud artifacts representing humanity's godlike potential, heroic leaders. Gordimer's portrayals of heroes indicate that she is still attracted to the fascistic cult of power. However, Gordimer makes a valuable argument for increased political participation from the citizens of the nation-state. Coetzee mocks the literary hero and replaces the Modernists' alienated “genius” with a model of the artist as irremediably complicit in the state's corruptions.