Abstract: This essay argues that J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians reveals the dangers of linguistic skepticism. While Coetzee's protagonists and critics often celebrate the failures of language after violence, finding hope for ethical futures in those failures, Coetzee's work demonstrates how the idea of illegibility replicates the logic of torture. I use Stanley Cavell's discussion of the "fantasy of a private language" to explore the skepticism expressed by the colonial magistrate who narrates the novel, and finally, I relate both Coetzee's and Cavell's critiques of skepticism to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.
Kathryn Van Wert (2026) studied this question.