The Rhizome Body in Conflict with the Imperialistic Regimes: a Deleuzian reading of J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

J. M. Coetzee in his Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) pays much attention to the body and its functions in the imperialistic and totalitarian regimes. The conflict between the barbarians as a group of uncivilized people and the central government, which is named the Empire, is the central one in this novel. This research is an attempt to analyze the way that the Empire treats the barbarians as a threat to its totality and order. In addition, this article analyzes the government’s torturing of the barbarians’ bodies in order to break their resistance against the hegemony of the Empire. In Coetzee’s novel, the barbarians are a group of nomads who do not stay in one place; do not build any house; they have no land and migrate to other places in the cold and warm seasons. These characteristics make them either strong or weak against the Empire and their moving bodies in different geographical places are not neglected by the power structures. This research studies the relations between the barbarians’ bodies and the destructing power of the Empire, considering the rhizome analysis of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattary in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980).