Materialism of numbers in J. M. Coetzee's The Schooldays of Jesus

Abstract

The article explores the materialist dialectic of numbers in J.M. Coetzee's The Schooldays of Jesus (2016). Coetzee's philosophy of numbers maintains a dialectical structure by contesting a mundane mathematical realism wherein objects represent numbers with an alternative metaphysics of numbers in which they are only numbers and not objects. These numbers reside in the stars and the dancing body is treated as a corporeal site to enact this cosmic materiality. I explore political resonances of this mathematical philosophy and show how the numerical dialectic offers a critique of the instrumental rationality of the state. It opens up a subversive mythology of numbers that resists statist reduction of migrant identity to a rigid numerical schema. Coetze's novel questions the politics of census by foregrounding the migrant society in the allegorical Estrella. As Simon and Ines hide David from the census, he himself incarnates a crack in the statist number game. To underline the political critique of what Coetzee calls "ant numbers," I deploy Alain Badiou's mathematical ontology and show how it breaks into the politico-numerical law to suggest a radical possibility of de-coupling number from calculation.