Sovereignty, Affect and Being-Bound

Sovereignty, Affect and Being-Bound

Stacy Douglas and Daniel Matthews

If ever it left us, sovereignty has returned. The protectionist and nativist instincts that In such conditions, the allure of sovereignty with its promise to 'take back control', as the Brexit campaign had it, is quite understandable. If 'waning sovereignty' (Brown 2014) has accompanied these 'twin vertigos of placelessness and landlessness' (McGee 2017), its recent revival offers -some would believe -a line of defence against the forces of globalisation and increasing precarity.

Against this background we engage with the theme of obligation in two ways. Firstly, we explore the ways in the which juridically enforceable obligations installed and defended by modern constitutional sovereignty are crucial to giving shape to the affective life of a community. We approach sovereignty through the sentiments that it produces -or claims to produce -and the particular effect that it has in enframing the world and giving scope to a sense of our political attachments and modes of belonging.

We dwell on the sensibilities associated with sovereignty and on how the mobilisation of the rights and duties associated with the protection of sovereignty affectively enframes the way a political community attaches to place, past and an imagined future.

Secondly, continuing our emphasis on the register of affect, we explore a sense of 'being-bound' that both precedes and exceeds juridically defined obligations. The binding quality of obligations -evidenced in the root word ligare, which we find in ligature, ligament, allegiance and religion -evokes a set of values and practices that range beyond the more limited notion of an obligation at law. It is this more expansive sense of 'being-bound' that we explore in what follows, underscoring the affective, political and existential dimensions to the bonds that give form to collective life.

Ultimately, we are interested in unsettling the affective life of sovereignty, in revealing and attuning our selves to a sense of 'being-bound' that challenges sovereignty's power to re-centre an autonomous legal subject, and its attendant national community, within an anthropocentric horizon. Such a horizon is today increasingly compromised. In particular, the 'twin vertigoes' of globalization and climatic change ought to attune us to a set of relations that transcend the assumed bifurcation between human and nonhuman life, ushering in a sensitivity to the bonds that sustain habitability beyond the far more limited set of relations honoured by modern sovereignty.

We find possibilities for such an unsettling of sovereignty's affective force in artistic practices coming out of South Africa, namely in the work of J. M. Coetzee and Nandipha Mntambo, and explore the implications of their work for re-thinking what it means to 'be-bound' beyond the juridical proscriptions associated with sovereignty.

The complex challenges associated with the constitutional settlement in South Africa is not our central concern. Rather, by attending to the practices of two artists working within this context we hope to shed light on a broader problematic. The oldest questions of legal and political theory -the nature of the body politic, the territorial limits of political power, and the aspirations of the common good -are today being reposed with a renewed urgency. It is our contention that turning to art and literature helps unseat the predominant affective disposition installed by contemporary juridico-political techniques. We think that the South African case, as it has been tumultuously unfolding for the past nearly 25 years, can offer some important insights here, especially as it demonstrates how the affective force of sovereignty reaffirms a deeply held anthropocentricism that we must today begin to challenge if we are to avoid an eternal return of well-worn scripts that equate constitutional sovereignty with justice. We begin by unpacking our approach to affect before moving to discuss sovereignty, South Africa, Coetzee, and Mntambo.

Affective attachments

Affect has been a matter of concern for philosophers and cultural theorists for generations -from Baruch Spinoza to Giles Deleuze, Eve Sedgwick to Brian Massumi -but in the context of legal studies, participation in what Patricia Clough has called the 'affective turn' in the humanities and social sciences (2007) has been less than enthusiastic. The reasons for this are clear. Normative power is traditionally understood as the capacity to shape the reasons one has for acting. By constructing a set of rules that call for either rule-following or rule-breaking behaviour, the law's power to coerce is predicated on the ability for all actors to make considered, putatively rational -and at least conscious -choices. Legal culpability is assigned on this basis, with judges and juries acting as the ultimate arbiters of the 'reasonableness' of one's actions. Central to the law's own account of its justification to pass judgment and to forcefully coerce is its unique form of rationality that is said to be un-troubled by other less predictable forces like morality, religion or politics. As Edward Coke famously argued over 400 years ago, the common law depends on an 'artificial reason', cultivated through lengthy study and an immersion in legal texts that is quite distinct from the 'natural reason' to which any individual may lay claim (1658). This distinct form of rationality has been central to the history of modern law.

To speak of affect is to evoke a different and murkier terrain. Affect refers to that dark hinterland between instinct and emotion, the ungraspable 'feelings' associated with a beautiful place, a moment of terror, an atmosphere of joyful abandon or stoical defiance. Studies of affect invite an engagement with the non-cognitive, the nonrepresentational, and the non-rational, paying close attention to those forces that are 'beneath, alongside or generally other than conscious knowing' (Seigworth & Gregg 2010, p. 1). To be affected by an encounter, an artwork, place or event is to be 'gripped' or 'moved' in a way that we often struggle to explain. Is it any wonder, then, that law and legal theory has generally avoided affect? 1 If the great achievement of modern law has been to define itself as a distinct form of rationality, predicated on the assumption that subjects are capable of making considered choices about rule-following behaviour, a focus on affect troubles the very basis on which the law claims its authority to judge.

Moreover, to equate the law's normativity with an affective force would be to reject the focus of most orthodox and critical accounts of law's normativity by pointing to something other than the law's (either 'compromised' or 'successful') mode of reasongiving (Matthews and Veitch 2016). Though we are not alone in exploring the relation between law and affect, given that this represents an unorthodox approach to legal study, let us begin by unpacking this concept a little and explaining the form of analysis that a focus on affect allows us to make.

We start with a rather bald definition that nonetheless helps orientate our thinking: studies of affect examine the capacity that bodies have to affect and to be affected (Anderson 2014, pp. 79-84;Seigworth & Gregg 2010, pp. 1-25). A body could be anything: human or non-human animals, material objects, landscapes, artworks, a bank of memories, a set of institutions, an oeuvre of written texts. In this sense, studies of affect embrace a post-human landscape in which human agency is neither the necessary measure nor the point of entry for any given study (Braidotti 2013). Attention to networks and assemblages that 'cross-hatch' the human and non-human, and in which affects are traced across these divides, is perhaps the sine qua non of the literature associated with the affective turn. The capacity to affect, refers to the force of a body in potential. An oft-cited passage from Deleuze, whose work is central to one of the most prominent strands of affect theory, illustrates the point: 'you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination' (Deleuze 1988, p. 125). In this sense affect can describe a force that is understood as an open potentia within a body and its entanglement with others. It is this that makes affect so elusive, it is either latent, and therefore in potential, or it is exuberant and excessive, ranging beyond the particular categories or contexts in which it appears. To put it another way, if we know precisely what an 'affect' is, then it ceases to be such cannot be unlinked from affect. Similarly, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos explores the normative force of affect in Spatial Justice (2015). and becomes something else: a concept, an emotion, a thought, a memory, an idea. 2 Affect, then, is something sensed at the fringes of these more definite determinations.

To speak of a capacity to be affected is a testament to the necessary mediation of affective life, asserting that we always find affect in medias res; bodies are always already in relation with other bodies. The forces that affect a body are multifarious: biological and physical, cultural and institutional, geographic and material. The excessive quality that is often associated with affect, then, should not obscure the ways in which we are affected by any number of habitual, material, social and bodily constraints. Affects testify to the fact that bodies are bound up, one with another, and thereby both produce and are the repository of a set of forces which are beyond the control of any one body in isolation.

In what follows we are less concerned with elaborating a definition of affect than we are with exploring what thinking with and through an affective register allows us to explore in the context of constitutionalism. Our particular concern in this regard is to examine the tension between two aspects of affective life, briefly outlined above. On the one side, we are concerned with the juridico-political techniques, institutions and practices that mediate affective life by delimiting and enframing the capacity that bodies have to be affected. We are concerned with how a constitution allows a set of affects to appear, register and be given value, with how a constitution produces a set of affective attachments or affective bonds to community and place, to the past and future. 3 2 By distinguishing between affect and emotion we suggest that the former refers to a-signifying forces that tend to be articulated in non-narrative forms whilst the latter refers to more concrete semantic determinations that are more easily defined and their experience more easily narrated across time (Anderson 2008, p. 12). An emotion is tied to a subjective experience and can be more or less easily delimited, whereas affect refers to something that is unexpected and elusive. As Anderson and Ash have argued, the full force of an 'affective atmosphere', for instance, is usually only approachable in retrospect (2015) whereas the nature of an emotion is, in a more definitive sense, knowable at the time of its occurrence. Notwithstanding this distinction, much of the literature on affect moves easily between 'emotions' and 'affects' describing both as part of the same discourse and area of study. Sara Ahmed's study of the 'politics of emotion' for instance, traces the political feelings and sensibilities that are often unarticulated, instinctive and connected to bodily sensations, traits that are often more readily associated with affect than emotion (Ahmed 2004). Elaborating the nice conceptual distinctions between 'emotion' and 'affect' is not central to our concerns here. For clarity, however, we will retain the division, using affect to refer to a broader and more nebulous set of feelings and attachments that arise in an unexpected way and that defy easy codification.

On the other side, we are concerned with a more refractory sense of affect, with an eruptive and unexpected potentia that breaches a given disposition by affirming an alternative set of affective attachments and dispositions, ushering in and allowing to be felt something beyond the frame that the constitution installs -something that we explore below in relation to artistic practices. In both registers, then, we are concerned with a particular form of binding, of understanding how a set of bonds are fashioned and implemented and, too, whether they can be made plastic; perhaps, even, broken and reformed. It is our contention that the bonds of sovereignty consign the aspirations of political community to a narrowed horizon that obscures a broader set of allegiances -particularly bonds to non-human animal life -that are imperative in the current conjuncture. Through a reading of artistic practices, we suggest that the importance of bonds and allegiances that transcend those of sovereignty can be sensed and articulated.

In foregrounding questions of sensibility and affect we follow Jacques Rancière in tying an account of the political to an understanding of the aesthetic in that our focus is on 'frames' or 'filters' that give shape to the social field. 4 However, here we are concerned less with the specificities of political speech or with the conditions of in/visibility within the polis (Rancière 1991) than we are with a more nebulous, but nonetheless related, set of concerns that we bracket under the notion of 'affect'. It is perhaps Raymond Williams's (1985, pp. 128-135) 'structures of feeling' that comes closest to our own thinking. In lieu of focusing on fixed social forms -like class or the institutions of government -Williams draws attention to 'a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material but… in an embryonic phase' (ibid., p. 131). If a political or constitutional settlement deliberately allows a set of questions and concerns to appear or 'register' within the polis -effecting what Rancière calls a 'distribution of the sensible' -there are also a set of more elusive forces that are nonetheless significant in constituting our sense of the present. These 'emergent' feelings condition the experience of everyday life (Williams 1985, p. 132). Whilst we wish to examine the role that constitutional discourse plays in enframing affective life, we take from Williams a due attention to those 'embryonic' or 'emergent' forces that can be traced in artistic and cultural forms. Art -and here we discuss both the literary and visual arts 7 -offers an 'impression' or a 'sense' of those affective forces and attachments that push against or experiment with the limits of an established aesthetico-political order.

The limits of sovereignty

Constitutions seek to enframe affective life. The promise of civil and political rights organised as a set of normative expectations can supply populations that feel entitled to draw on and deploy such protections with a sense of security, ownership, and belonging. New constitutions, written after extreme domestic conflict, legacies of colonialism or imperialism, or transformations from monarchical, parliamentary, or dictatorial sovereignty, often elicit feelings of great hope and change, as they promise better futures for individuals, especially those historically excluded from the political or legal landscape. The 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa is an apt example with such affective investments, and one that provides an important backdrop for our argument. After almost fifty years of legally instantiated apartheid, the once 'new' South African Constitution promises more than mere civil and political rights. It goes so far as to guarantee justiciable socio-economic and third generation rights.

Undertaking to protect and provide for the flourishing of every individual in South Africa, the Preamble to the 1996 document declares that it will 'improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person'. The new code includes environmental and water protection as part and parcel of the bounded legal community; it re-draws the boundaries of who is within and who is without in many radical ways to affect a 'transformative constitutionalism' that has been since described as 'postliberal' (Klare 1998). And this has been greatly celebrated, with good reason. The promises of political and legal transformation, beyond a mere extension of voting rights to the previously disenfranchised majority, were necessary for real change to occur in a country with such long and deep roots of legally instantiated racism and concomitant injustices.

However, these promises also carry with them inherent limitations to what is imaginable as transformative. While the Constitution's assurances contain affective attachments to a hopeful future of prosperity and belonging, they also have a disciplining effect on the boundaries of that future; in other words, as the Constitution deploys laudable and lofty aspirations, it also delimits the kinds of feelings appropriate for the new, post-apartheid nation. Indeed, the Constitution establishes, at an affective register, a project of national identity that links the people to a new legal code and circumscribes feelings of belonging and boundedness within the framework of sovereignty. While this is true of every national constitution, we want to briefly examine how this was achieved in the South African context before turning to explore how contemporary South African artistic practices seek to make space for alternative affective attachments.

The critique of the assimilative properties of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa, established by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act in 1995, with hearings conducted in 1997/8, is well known.

Mahmood Mamdani, one of the process's most forthright critics, has powerfully argued that the TRC 'individualized the victims of apartheid… was unable to highlight the bifurcated nature of apartheid as a form of power that governed natives differently from non-natives… [and] extended impunity to most perpetrators of apartheid' (Mamdani 2002, pp. 33-34). In particular, he claims that the TRC was unable to account for the role of the rule of law in creating and sustaining apartheid; in this sense the law, as an instrument of repression, was simply left 'off-stage'. In a similar vein, Emilios Christodoulidis and Scott Veitch claim that the TRC and the new Constitution both proceeded on the basis of a compromised division between the political and economic realms. The false distinction between political and economic claims of injustice meant that some considerations -namely those of property rights and sovereignty -were sidelined from the conversation about the future of democracy in South Africa: 'whilst the political constituency is democratised, the economic constituency is not. Responsibility for the latter is hived off to the market, in such a way that suffering consequent on economic immiserisation does not register as a matter of political choice' (Christodoulidis &Veitch 2008, p. 18).

The post-apartheid transition deployed a political-legal framework that illuminated some considerations, while dissimulating others. 5 However, where Christodoulidis and Veitch, in keeping with scholars like Tshepho Madlingozi, critique the bracketing of economic considerations, we want to highlight the erasure of an affective landscape. 6

As the reconciliation project was bound up with feelings of reunification, ultimately aspiring to create a sense of belonging for a once (legally) divided nation, contrasting feelings of anger, disgust, and disassociation were structurally suspended. The project of national sovereignty, beginning in 1994 with the election of the African National Congress, needed to conjure a set of affective attachments to a closed and delimited identity to ensure the supremacy of its juridical power.

This dynamic can be seen in AZAPO & Others v President of the Republic of South

Africa & Others, 1996 (AZAPO). Here it was argued that the TRC, in violation of the Constitution, took otherwise justiciable claims outside the normal parameters of law by dispensing amnesty and thereby contravening citizens' rights to have criminal violations settled by a court of law. 7 The Constitutional Court did not agree with this argument and held that amnesty for such violations was permitted by the Constitution, by international norms, and indeed was pivotal to the negotiated transition from apartheid, perhaps even for the creation of the new Constitution itself. Where the applicants attempted to contest the hegemonic turn to reconciliation for national unity, the Court denied it, in the name of constitutional sovereignty. The Court made clear that this transitional framework was required for the security of a national sense of belonging and for the maintenance of the law's own authority. The AZAPO decision, then, was not simply concerned with questions of justiciability and the rule of law, it was also invested in policing the boundaries of a community's affective responses to long-standing injustice by relying on the logics of sovereignty. Feelings of disgust, anger and instincts for revenge were filtered through the framework of sovereignty and effectively silenced; and a sense of national identity and belonging achieved supremacy over these rival claims. The closed, operative and juridically delimited political community involved side-lining other affective claims and attachments. at the institutional level the risk of reconciliation meant countenancing the possibility that it might not occur? ' (2008, p. 17).

The sense of the world that sovereignty produces is one concerned with legal parameters that keep central a clear and autonomous legal subject, linear temporality, and delineated disputes, all subject to state justiciability. Our contention is that the deep problems facing South Africa, but also the globe, are beyond such narrow proscriptions.

In this sense, we suggest that the limitations associated with the constitutional enframing of affective life in South Africa also gestures towards a larger set of issues that confront sovereignty today: issues of globalisation, a warming Earth, mass migration, and ecological degradation. The modes of thinking and, most significantly, feeling that sovereignty installs limits the range of what registers in political life. Our thought here is that moving beyond sovereignty will take more than a set of legal changes in the direction of globalized cosmopolitanism or the expansion or reimagining of rights discourse. Indeed, the expansion of rights, central to the South African constitutional innovations, should be salutary in this context. As the present collection of essays underscores, the proliferation of rights discourse has tended to undervalue the register of obligation. And it is precisely a critical attention to the work of obligation that might unsettle the affective power of sovereignty.

Obligations are often simply understood as a correlate to rights -to have a right to something means that someone else has corresponding obligation, and vice versa -but as Scott Veitch has argued, this approach misapprehends the more expansive and dynamic register of obligation which precedes rights, allows for their institutional implementation and provides the means for securing for their content (Veitch 2017).

Our interest in privileging obligation ahead of right is related to the more general effort of this chapter to move away from a thinking of the political that is predetermined by the framework of modern constitutional sovereignty. The history of rights is unthinkable apart from the history and theory of modern sovereignty. As Martin Loughlin suggests, the culmination of modern political rationality holds that 'rightsbearers do not possess rights either because they are inscribed by nature or because they can be understood to be expression of human reason, but only because they have been conferred as a product of the legalisation of the sovereign' (Loughlin 2006, p. 72).

Rights, therefore, are inextricably tied to the form of modern law that presupposes a natural correlation between rights and the sovereignty of the state.

A distinct set of ethical, political and ontological concerns are too easily disregarded if we favour a 'rights talk' that is amenable to the forms of authority instantiated by the state. The binding quality of obligations, in contrast to rights, attunes us to modes of attachment that precede the juridical register in which rights move. As Simone Weil reminds us, 'the notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former' (1952, p. 3). The sense of the 'rootedness' of the human condition that Weil found within the language of obligation, should be our guide here.

Obligations -with its evocation of ties, bonds, ligaments and allegiances -are situated, relational, affective and material in a way that rights seldom are. On this point, it is worth recalling that pre-modern understandings of law's normativity did pay proper attention to the obligations that arise out of a given place and a network of situated and affective relations. As Sir Edward Coke articulates it in Calvin's Case (1608), the law's capacity to bind subjects emerges from the 'ligaments that connect minds and souls to one another' that both exceed and precede the positive law. 8 Similarly Sir John Fortescue, writing in the fifteenth century, found the etymological origins of law in ligando (binding), rather than legendo (reading) and analogised the ligaments of law with the nerves that unify the physical body (1942). 9 It is this notion of the bonds that emerge out of the primary situatedness of human life and the web of relations through which it can sustain, institutionalise and protect habitability that are lost from view with emergence of modern legal and political forms.

This notion of primary obligations that bind us in community, ahead of the articulation of right, signals a mode of thinking that might attune us to the ligaments that extend beyond the limited sphere of modern constitutional sovereignty. In an effort to remain sensitive to these bonds, perhaps it is a re-articulation of our very nature as boundbeings that we need to undertake. And this, we argue, is an affective and aesthetic task perhaps more than it is a political or juridical one. As we set out below, one way to stimulate a confrontation with this reality is through the experience and openness to the affective force of art and literature. 10 In what follows we read Coetzee's lectures alongside his celebrated novel Disgrace, published shortly after the Tanner Lectures. 11 We argue that it is precisely the nature and limits of political community that preoccupies Coetzee in these two texts. As we observe below, Coetzee stages a complex encounter between the affective, the aesthetic and the ontological in The Lives of Animals and Disgrace that speaks directly to the constitutional settlement in his native South Africa. He thinks through what it means to central to law's function and, therefore, looks to art for ways to navigate the confounding problems of violence, transition, and reconciliation (van Marle 2007). belong to a polity and seeks to show the forms of life that are occluded by 'the people' that grounds the political community's authority. Coetzee, we suggest, asks what it might mean to take seriously, and quite literally, the promise that political community belongs to all who live in it, 12 despite presumed demarcations across species divisions.

Being-bound / becoming-minor

The Lives of Animals opens with Coetzee's fictional Costello taking aim at the supposed supremacy of 'reason' in determining the differential responsibilities that attach to human and non-human life; something to which Descartes and Kant (amongst others) have confidently subscribed. As Costello suggests: 'seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology. Of course, reason will validate reason as the first principle of the universe -what else should it do? Dethrone itself?' (LA, p. 25). Instead of pursuing a 'reasoned' argument on her subject, Costello turns to the literary in order to evoke a set of values and sensibilities that are irreducible to the 'vast tautology' of reason. It is literature that allows us to approach the animal as an animal, rather simply an object of argumentation. Costello examines this notion in relation to Ted Hughes's poem 'The Jaguar': 'By bodying forth the jaguar, Hughes shows us that we too can embody animals -by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no one has explained and no one ever will' (LA, p. 53). The imaginative realm is where new solidarities might be fostered, new assemblages between the human and non-human given voice, and where our sensibility to new bonds and duties might emerge. As her son John rightly points out, argumentation is 'not her métier' (LA, p. 36), it is not even the appropriate register for her subject. The bonds that tie us to animal life are not reasoned out, Costello insists, but are something that we can only encounter if we adopt an appropriate aesthetic sensibility.

Attuning ourselves to an altered aesthetic sensibility is for Coetzee something embedded within the affective potentia of a literary event. In this sense, the form of Coetzee's lectures is crucial to understanding their impact. From the opening sentence, without preamble or introduction, the audience is thrown into a fictional world (LA p. This response evidences the growing significance of a bond that is first introduced when David discoverers two Persian sheep tethered outside a neighbouring house, ready for slaughter:

A bond seems to have come into existence between himself and the two Persians, he does not know how. The bond is not one of affection. It is not even a bond with -who, like Coetzee, is a southern hemisphere novelist of some renown -on a trip to an American university where she delivers a lecture on the topic of obligations to animal life. Costello and Coetzee not only share the same first letter to their surnames, but, as Garber points out, Coetzee, 'like Elizabeth Costello, is a novelist addressing an audience of college students and faculty. Costello herself, like Coetzee, the author of Foe, is celebrated for her rewriting of a classic -in her case Joyce's Ulysses' (LA,p. 75.) The mise en abîme staging of Coetzee's intervention is central to understanding its effectiveness. Author, narrator and principle character move within a Trinitarian economy, with audience and reader encouraged to revel in the slipperiness of each constructed persona. these two in particular, whom he could not pick out from a mob in a field. Nevertheless, suddenly and without reason, their lot has become important to him (D, p. 126).

As Paul Patton (2004, p. 104) argues, this encounter sets Lurie off on a deterritorialised line of flight, where he is -in Deleuze's terms -'becoming-minor', a trajectory that refers to any divergence from, or resistance to, 'the standard or norm in terms of which the majoritarian identity is defined'. As Patton's reading of the novel shows, Lurie's transformation is operative at an ontological register. His very sense of being is gripped and re-cast through his affective attachment to these animals. This reminds us that 'to be' is to 'be-bound' in a given constellation or assemblage. It is the possibility of testing or re-configuring such bonds that Lurie experiences in his encounters with animal life.

And, significantly, this altered sense of being is co-terminus with a new set of duties or obligations, something Lurie realises as he seeks to explain why he has taken on the job of disposing of the euthanized strays from the clinic, something he insists on doing on his own terms: Why has he taken on this job? To lighten the burden on Bev Shaw [manager at the clinic]? For that it would be enough to drop off the bags at the dump and drive away. For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing (D, pp. 145-6).

Perhaps the obligation that David feels towards the dogs is best described in aesthetic terms: he is bound -not in order to ease the workload of another, nor by virtue of the dogs themselves, their value or dignity -but because of a certain sense of the world that such an obligation implies and the ugliness of a world in which such obligations are not honoured. Or perhaps David's sense of obligation comes as a result of him seeing his own reflection in the dogs; he is an 'old dog' himself, one that had a place in the old South Africa, but which is now being obliterated by the likes of the young black intruders that come to Lucy's house. Here too, however, it is the affective register (even if a somewhat selfish impulse) that propels David into action and care for another. In this interpretation, it is his unspoken attachment to a sense of the world and his privileged place in it that drives his new-found sympathies for animals. In either case, Lurie is gripped by an affective attachment, which he cannot rationally grasp, that reorientates his position within a network of relations. He becomes newly aware of how he affects and is affected by a set of relations he once dismissed and through this he begins to assume a disposition in which the privileged, and largely isolated, position he once held becomes friable.

If Lurie's newly formed bonds evidence his 'becoming-minor', what sense of obligation is 'majoritarian' in this context? Lurie's 'minor' obligations to animal life are contrasted in the novel by a form of thinking that reduces all bonds and duties to a matter of cost/benefit, calculation and debt. As Derek Attridge (2004, pp. 162-191) has argued it is the 'great rationalisation' that Coetzee attacks in this novel. This 'rationalisation' is as much a part of the neoliberal economy as it is lying behind a certain form of constitutionalism and memorialisation that seeks to put to work or render operative and useful any and all resources at its disposal in an effort to build national unity. It is this rationalising impulse, in which all are united in a kind of communal accounting exercise, that Coetzee challenges. Perhaps the most striking, and troubling, account of this form of thinking is in Lucy's own 'rationalisation' of the vicious sexual assault she suffers: But isn't there another way of looking at it? What if… what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves (D, p. 158).

There is a sense conjured here of a debt to the past, the obligations owing by virtue of historic injustice. Evoked too is the fact of taxation as the fundamental obligation owed to political community, the just contribution required to building and maintaining a state. In one interpretation, there is a disturbing acceptance of a kind of accounting where the cost of remaining in South Africa is measured in terms of sexual violence and female submission to male sexual desire. In another sense, it is Lurie that is deeply attached to the bond of a debt-obligation that needs to be worked out in the ledger books of public life. Indeed, it is Lurie himself that is so keen on going to the police, to have his justice carried out by a familiar institution, one that maintains the landscape of law and order that he is used to in the old South Africa. It is Lurie that stubbornly adheres to the easy-to-hand narrative of 'Lucy as victim', needing recompense and recognition from the state even as she refuses it. 14 Tellingly, Lucy avoids this 'national accounting exercise' by refusing to make her rape public, favouring the curation of a localised sense of belonging that ultimately involves giving up 'her' land 'in order to preserve a sense of home' and personal integrity (Motha 2013, p. 107).

We might read these 'minor' bonds of attachment as bearing witness to the utter failure of the public sphere or a wilful turning away from the challenges of civic reconciliation.

But in a nation where the public was formerly defined by the exclusion of the majority, such affective attachments to 'minor' concerns have their own power and piquancy.

The point that we wish to stress here is that Coetzee -through Lucy -allows his readers to sense a 'universe of discourse' (D, p. 58) beyond the calculating impulses of the tax and debt collector, beyond the regime of secular tribunals and a narrowed 'national unity', towards a sense of being-bound that exceeds the anthropo-and state-centric discourses of constitutionalism that are as rife today as they were in 1996. Similarly, the bonds and attachments that come to dominate Lurie's life as Disgrace closes -to the dogs at the clinic, to his incompleteable and unperformable opera, to the prospect of grandfatherhood -reflect the dwindling affective attachments of a man that had a privileged place in a nation that is rapidly changing. The novel does not close with a complete transformation of Lurie, nor could it. Coetzee reveals to us that sovereignty can and does also operate on deeply psychic, affective levels, inaccessible via mere legal change. Lurie's 'rights of desire', associated with the domination and patriarchy of the 'old' South Africa become increasingly fragile in the novel's final chapters. 15 And it is through these newly formed bonds that we glimpse the possibility that Lurie's allegiances to the former regime might wither away.

Through an examination of Lurie's affective transformation; the depiction of Lucy's 'minor obligations' to place and privacy; and the depiction of Costello's sensitivity to the duties and allegiances humans owe to animals, Coetzee allows us witness the possibility of an altered set of affective attachments to those installed by the 'postliberal' constitution in South Africa. Coetzee evokes a set of bonds that must be approached through both ontological and aesthetic registers. Such bonds, most prominently, allow us to sense that our very being is bound up and affected by nonhuman life. Such an expanded sense of political community and the obligations that it might infer, is 'emergent' or 'embryonic' -in Raymond Williams's terms -and therefore approachable only at the outer limit of what can be thought within the current disposition. But the bonds that Coetzee foregrounds can be felt or sensed. In this way, Coetzee points to the deep grip that sovereignty has on our affective and aesthetic regimes, in turn exposing the limits of legal transformation. But so too does his writing show that it is the register of affect, rather the putative 'rationality' of law and politics, that is integral to how we might challenge the bonds of the constitution and through which we might glimpse the possibilities of 'being-bound', otherwise.

Being-bound / becoming-undone

Coetzee, although globally celebrated as the literary voice of caution and critique during South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and transition from apartheid to democratic constitutionalism, is of course not the only artist that asks his audience to consider the role of affect in thinking about what it means to live together differently. Another such voice that offers provocative contemplations on the slippery relationships between human and animal, birth and death, and other overly-drawn dualisms, is that of artist Nandipha Mntambo. Mntambo works in the realms of sculpture, painting, drawing, and photography, and is most well-known for her fascinating use of cowhide to create ghost-like casts of bodies (sometimes specific and sometimes abstract) evocatively arranged in exhibition spaces.

Emabutfo, 2009

Cowhide, resin, polyester mesh, waxed cord. This, as well as her other work, which blends the use of cow hair, paint, and bronze, has attracted international attention and much speculation regarding her commentary on gender, race, and South African tradition. 16 However, speaking about her work herself, Mntambo rejects simple interpretations that re-cast the centrality of these dualisms. 17 She insists that, as these binaries are alluded to in criticism about her work, critics re-deploy the very boundaries they refer to -boundaries circumscribing ideas of gender, race, the human, and indigeneity. Years after Coetzee's acclaimed novel was published, Mntambo continues to ask similar questions about community and belonging in South Africa -but also beyond these national boundaries -by using provocatively produced materials that offer unique insight into the role of aesthetics in ontic and ontological questions of community.

Europa, 2008.

Archival ink on cotton rag paper.

Photo: Tony Meintjes ©Nandipha Mntambo. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Mntambo's work challenges the anthropocentric supremacy that lies at the heart of our legal and political world by presenting visceral, object-focused, and trans-speciesinspired art. But more than de-centralizing the human subject, Mnatmbo's work also blurs the very distinction between animal and human. In her work, there is rarely the presence of any one clearly distinct body, instead she explores the 'cross-hatching' of species relations. In Europa, the artist herself dons the horns of a bull, transforming her body into an indeterminate form between the animal and human. In her haunting sculptures, she uses animal skin -cowhide -to reproduce empty, abstract figures that sometimes resemble human form, and other times do not. She uses her own body for these casts. The result is a refusal to inscribe either the human or the animal in any simplistic binary. As A. Moret suggests, 'while the human form is absent in Nandipha Mntambo's sculptures, the vestiges of its curves and lines remain in the fibrous memory of the cowhide' (Moret 2013).

This mere trace of the human and animal, a challenge to the representational capacities of art, encourages a confrontation with anthropocentrism, but also with the bonds that persist across life forms. The cowhide in ghostly form simultaneously reminds us of both cow and human, as well as death and life, and the uncertain borders between the two. Interestingly, Mntambo's exploration of this theme is not only limited to her art exhibits; the very process of art-making forces her to reflect on the way our very sense of being is bound-up with and traverses any staid opposition between human/animal; organic/inorganic: 'When I first started working, I didn't have a handle on the chemical process and how to control it so there was a lot of decay and rot and flies and maggots' (Mntambo 2016, p. 120). Mntambo's process conjures an interstitial space between living and dying, ruled by the forces of rot and decay that are themselves strangely fecund. A related theme arises in the very practice of sculpting her materials. She tells us that, yet again, the process of her art production disrupts any illusions of human mastery over the cowhide, because the material actively resists her intentions:

I was thinking about material memory and the fact that cowhide, as much as I try to control it through chemical processes or stretching it over mould, if I were to re-wet it, it would continue to remember a particular shape. So, the control that I think I have isn't a reality because the material functions in a way that it remembers and even chooses to remember (Mntambo 2016, p. 127).

Here the supposedly lifeless cowhide continues to act against the sovereignty of the artist, taking positions that speak to its own history and memory, rather than bending to the ultimate will of its new-found sculptor. And this is not the only element of her work that disrupts and unsettles the myth of the sovereign human and its concomitant horizon of law and politics. She also actively interrogates the strict division of gender between male and female. Mntambo claims about her work Europa that '…no one speaks about the female body, the animal-human; how we understand sexuality, how we understand the border between the male and the female…and that, for me, is what the work is about' (Mntambo 2011, p. 19). 18 Mntambo's art evokes an ontology or sense of being-bound that disrupts assumed borders between animal and human; female and male; life and death. Hers is a practice that renders legible the non-autonomy and non-sovereignty of our being in community, thereby actively interrupting the hegemonic distribution of the sensible. She represents, through her painting and sculpture work, the complicated relations that exist between frequently deployed categories, and in doing so, disrupts their presumed dualisms.

However, her solution is not to endorse a straightforward program of illumination but, rather, to analyse 'the things that you don't necessarily hear or understand immediately…that underlying unclear, complicated space that you can't really articulate' (Mntambo 2016, p. 125). In this sense, Mntambo's work operates at an affective register that challenges the dualisms that structure our experience. Her art intervenes in these fictions to thwart our attempts to sterilize and simplify them (Mntambo 2016, p. 128). Surfacing within the messiness of a life radically bound-up with others, and otherness, Mntambo forces us to reconsider the question of what matters and, indeed, what matter is. Her sculpture, in its very performance and embodiment of a materiality that crosses human and non-human, questions the anthropocentric horizon of being and inspires a confrontation with an expanded network of obligations. Mntambo's sculptures trouble the centralization of the human subject, a necessary strategy for a culture set on ensuring protections for all that live in it, helping us recognize that the bonds that shape our being in the world traverse the ethnic, national, or anthropocentric.

In this sense, Mntambo's work is directly resonant with, but also extends, Rancière's account of the politics of aesthetics. It too makes an incisive critique of the way in which the organization and delimitation of 'what is valuable' constitutes the polis.

Mntambo, like Rancière and Coetzee, wants to challenge not only subjects that are deemed to be authorized members of political community, but also how, and crucially in what manner, politics are enacted; for all three, the role of the aesthetic in constituting -but also disrupting -the sensible is central, even though it has been largely side-lined by the gatekeepers of the political-juridical world. Mntambo's art practice forces open the frameworks that determine 'what counts'. Her refusal of individual and national sovereignty therefore speaks to the limits of the juridical and quasi-juridical processes of redress that dominated the South African transition and its aftermath. Through exhibition art, Mntambo demonstrates how affect can both be introduced as something that 'counts' in the political-juridical world, and something that sends ripples of uncertainty into the self-assured, anthropocentric parameters of legal subjectivities.