1 John Maxwell Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Londres: Penguin Books, 1982) Ab. [WB]. En attendant les barbares, traduction de Sophie Mayoux (Paris : Seuil, 1987).
2 «The barbarian tribes were arming, the rumour went; the Empire should take precautionary measures, for there would certainly be war. Of this unrest I myself saw nothing. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters» [WB 8].
3 Constantin Cavafy, « En attendant les Barbares », Poèmes, trad. M. Yourcenar (Paris : Gallimard, 1958).
4 «A world of laws [...], a world of the second-best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures. All we can do is to uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade» [WB 139].
5 «There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it» [WB 155].
6 «Alexandria, though so cosmopolitan, lies on the verge of civilisation. Westward begins an enormous desert of limestone that stretches into the heart of Africa». E. M. Forster, Alexandria, a History and a Guide (1922. Londres: Michael Haag, 1986) 204 (ma traduction).
7 Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux, 472.
8 «The desert could not be claimed or owned – it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East» [EP 139] (ma traduction).
9 «As if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry» [WB 43].
10 «I have only scratched the surface» [WB 15].
11 «I sat watching the moon rise [...] waiting for a sign that what lay around me, what lay beneath my feet, was not only sand, the dust of bones, flakes of rust, shards, ash. The sign did not come» [WB 16].
12 «In my dreams I am again in the desert, plodding through endless space towards an obscure goal» [WB 79].
13 «I face a yard as endless as the desert. There is no hope of reaching the other side, but I plod on, carrying the girl, the only key I have to the labyrinth» [WB 87].
14 «I pamper my melancholy and try to find in the vacuousness of the desert a special historical poignancy» [WB 17].
15 «I have not entered her [...] Lodging my dry old man’s member in that blood-hot sheath makes me think of acid in milk, ashes in honey, chalk in bread» [WB 34].
16 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 27.
17 «It is like caressing an urn» [WB 49].
18 «It is not a face at all but another part of the human body that bulges under the skin; it is white; it is the snow itself» [WB 37].
19 «There are other dreams in which the figure that I call the girl changes shape, sex, size. In one dream there are two shapes that arouse horror in me: massive and blank, they grow and grow till they fill all the space in which I sleep. I wake up choked, shouting, my throat full» [WB 87].
20 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 133.
21 Ibid., 134.
22 «The body of the other one... seems beyond comprehension»; «she is incomplete» [WB 42].
23 «Her incomplete body», «a dummy of straw and leather» [WB 47].
24 «Hoping to capture in her movements a hint of an old free state» [WB 34].
25 «He was trespassing into the forbidden», «the clean and the unclean» [WB 12].
26 «Is it then the case that it is the whole woman I want, that my pleasure in her is spoiled until these marks on her are erased and she is restored to herself; or is the case [...] that it is the marks on her which drew me to her but which, to my disappointment, I find, do not go deep enough? Too much or too little: is it she I want or the traces of a history her body bears? [...] Or perhaps whatever can be articulated is falsely put» [WB 64].
27 «I pass» [WB 2], «... if I ever did more than pass my gaze over their surface» [WB 24].
28 «My features are frozen [...], there seems to be a sheet of ice covering my mouth. I raise a hand to tear it off [...] the fingers are frozen inside the glove» [WB 52].
29 Jacques Lacan, Écrits I (Paris: Seuil, 1966) 137.
30 «Alienation from his own desires» [WB 56].
31 «I grow conscious that I am pleading for them» [WB 4].
32 «How contingent my unease is» [WB 21].
33 «Prisoners are prisoners» [WB 22].
34 «Space is space, life is life, everywhere the same» [WB 16].
35 «What signs can I be looking for?» [WB 35].
36 «I feel the words form in my mouth, then hear them emerge thin, bodiless, like words spoken by someone else» [WB 87].
37 «A subterranean murmur that has begun to take the place of conversation» [WB 44].
38 «With a shift of horror I behold the answer that has been waiting all the time offer itself to me in the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my doubled image cast back at me» [WB 44].
39 Jacques Lacan, Écrits I, 171.
40 Jacques Lacan, L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 65.