Conserving the Cogito: Rereading Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist

Setting itself within the ongoing debate surrounding the political and aesthetic commitments of the author's work, this essay provides an alternative to broadly political readings of Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist, rereading the novel as an exploration of the disabling effects of radical alterity upon the symbolic totalities of both subjectivity and politics. Using a theoretical framework of concepts derived from Emmanuel Levinas and Julia Kristeva, the paper analyzes the ethical position of the novel within a psychoanalytic model of the self, explores the limits of the text's ethics, and evaluates its function as a literary work.