Cosmopolitanism and Material Ethics 97sense of shamelessness—an act that makes for a surprisingly unset-
tling and haunting read.
The fact that the Magistrate is described as becoming “like a
dog,” a “filthy creature” and a “starved beast,” suggests he has fallen
through the bottom of the social hierarchy (below women, below
even “barbarians” of either gender) and has reached the undignified
realm where empathy rarely has purchase: the absolute Otherness and
subalternity of the animal (p. 136). Such a fall in social status subse-
quently has a dramatic effect on the character’s worldview, enabling
him to break from the values and epistemology of the Empire. In
the sobering moments he spends awaiting possible execution, the
Magistrate reflects on his complicity in the very disciplinary vio-
lence to which he is being subjected, and asks himself: “What is it
I object to in these spectacles of abasement and suffering and death
that our new regime puts on but their lack of decorum?” (p. 131).
Searching for an answer to this question, the character arrives at a
profound moment of introspective awareness that re-frames his con-
ception of the world and his place within it.
This reorientation involves an almost dreamlike state of con-
sciousness in which he appears to apprehend and interface with
his surroundings in a new way, unmediated by the conditioning
effects of prior knowledge or value systems. Anticipating his exe-
cution, and wearing a salt-bag over his head that completely cov-
ers his eyes, he nonetheless “sees” a lucid picture of the world his
body inhabits—one that appears free from the taxonomical and
hierarchical signifiers we have so far seen him employ: “I can see
every hair of the horse’s mane, every wrinkle of the old man’s face,
every rock and furrow of the hillside” (p. 132). The very fact that
the images are imagined, that they are conjured up from the nar-
rator’s sensory stock and are not merely a description or naming of
extant a priori happenings, invests them with a highly epistemolog-
ically and ontologically subversive quality. Crucially, we can also
detect a visual appreciation of his special surroundings that is much
more attentive to the singularity of particular features. Gone are
the “hazes” and “wastes” we hear him describe earlier; these have
been replaced by meticulous descriptions (albeit imagined) of the
land, down to the last “rock and furrow of the hillside” (p. 132).