Cosmopolitanism and Material Ethics 103ostensibly rigid liberal sensibilities appear to regulate behavior, Lurie
is defiantly uncooperative in the university’s procedures (p. 66). For
Adriaan van Heerden, Lurie’s resistance is primarily directed toward
“the collapse between the private and public sphere.”^48 For Head,
such a collapse has allowed the “tramlines of liberal thinking” arbi-
trarily to prescribe “certain normative codes.”^49 S u c h s h o r t c o m i n g s
do indeed become visible in the Kafkaesque exchanges that take
place during the hearing. For, once it is ascertained that Lurie had
sought sex with a student and abused his professional capacity by
fixing her academic records, the aim of the committee appears not
only to extend beyond simply administering formal disciplinary
measures, but also to regulate and “correct” his behavior through
sensitivity training or counseling.
While this form of “repression” is certainly not comparable to
the physical ordeal suffered by the Magistrate in Waiting for the
Barbarians , it does offer some parallels in terms of its psychological
procedures, particularly in its resemblance to what Foucault labeled
“judicial inquisition,” in which the individual is subjected to disci-
plinary treatment that seeks to produce a pliant, morally healthy
subject.^50 Indeed, the committee demands not only an admission of
guilt, but a full surrender of any claim to being right: an approach
represented in its most extreme form by Dr. Farodia Rassool, who
reproaches Lurie for not yielding himself completely to the will of
the committee: “He is guilty; but when we try to get specificity, all
of a sudden it is not abuse of a young woman he is confessing to,
just an impulse he could not resist” (p. 53). Lurie vehemently rejects
these demands on the philosophical grounds that his rights to pri-
vacy as an individual are being impinged upon: “What goes on in
my mind is my business, not yours” (p. 51). This attitude of Lurie’s
clearly finds common ground with many of the values that underlie
the Western liberal tradition, particularly those of John Stuart Mill,
in which the right to individual choice and the exercise of one’s will
is postulated as the ultimate philosophical horizon. Indeed, more
specific to Lurie’s defense, his attitude finds strong resonance with
Mill’s position on human inclinations as outlined in On Liberty.
According to Mill, people “whose desires and impulses are their
own—the expression of their own nature, as it has been developed