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Abstract
The paper focuses on the interwoven issues of cultural silence and ethics of representation in J. M. Coetzee Disgrace (1999) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Both novels question how gender, racial and colonial power systems determine who is permitted to speak and who is disengaged. The self-interest of patriarchy in David Lurie and the marginalization in Melanie Isaacs reveal the existence of racial and/or gender silence in post-apartheid South Africa. The silence as an intricate form of trauma, resistance, and survival is prefigured by the fact that Lucy refuses to tell her attack. Systematic oppression of the so-called barbarians by the Empire, traumatized muteness of the barbarian girl and the attempt of the Magistrate, ethically contaminated by the need to define the plight of the oppressed, reveal the risks of usurping the experience of the oppressed people in Waiting for the Barbarians. The narrative techniques of Coetzee, such as intentional gaps, partialized views and suppressed entry into the inner world of the marginalized characters, hint at an aesthetics of uncertainty based on ethics. Instead of trying to provide a voice to the silenced, Coetzee reveals the lack of any possibility to completely embody the Other without repeating the perfidies of historical domination. The paper suggests that the silence in the two novels is not staged as the lack of but as a space with ethical undertones where trauma, autonomy, complicity, and resistance intersect. In the end, Coetzee makes the reader deal with the constraints of empathy and ethical weight of any act of representation.