Cosmopolitanism and Material Ethics 87the most notable example.^27 However, as well as evoking an image
of Nazi violence, the Magistrate’s words also reference another,
more subtle, form of violence by emblematizing what the protago-
nist comes to appreciate as the ineluctable nature of imperial soci-
ety, with its rigidly hierarchical structure, based on discipline and
violence.
In this sense then, the use of the “pyramid” signifier also ref-
erences an iconic symbol of human organization and exploitation,
with the famous Egyptian constructs being considered not only
great cultural artifacts but also statements of the inherently hier-
archical social structures in which they were made. This pyramid
metaphor is not unique to Waiting for the Barbarians , but reemerges
conspicuously in Coetzee’s other novels (ones that are similarly pre-
occupied with the corporeality of social power structures). In Life &
Times of Michael K , the unnamed doctor confides that he is begin-
ning to feel that K is “more than just another patient, another brick
in the pyramid of sacrifice that someone would eventually climb
and stand straddle-legged on top of, roaring and beating his chest
and announcing himself emperor of all he surveyed.”^28 In a similar
vein, Susan Barton in Foe cogitates on the significance of the ter-
races Cruso and Friday built on the island, which seem “less like
fields waiting to be planted [... and] more like tombs: those tombs
the emperors of Egypt erected for themselves in the desert, in the
building of which so many slaves lost their lives” (pp. 83–84). In
the case of Waiting for the Barbarians , the full extent of the Empire’s
Foucauldian reliance on violence only comes into view when the
Magistrate attempts to renounce its authority and to commit what
would be termed “civil disobedience” today.
This act puts into play a sequence of events from which the char-
acter will, in his own words, “learn a great deal” about humanity.
The events also reveal the degree to which great social inequality
can sabotage ethical attempts at cross-cultural cosmopolitan concil-
iation (p. 126). The point at which we see this “educational” pro-
cess begin comes when the Magistrate happens upon a “barbarian
girl,” whose father was killed in the Colonel’s captivity and who
was herself crippled and partially blinded during her interrogation.
Seeing her begging outside his quarters, the Magistrate appears to