Writing & Society Research Centre 'Writing by the River' Event: 'Erotics and Language in J.M. Coetzee's "The Pole"'

This talk traces the relation between erotics and language in J.M. Coetzee’s novella The Pole (2023)—a 2nd language romance between a Spanish (Beatriz) and a Polish speaker (Witold) of the English language. The novella shows how erotics is blocked by 2nd language English, but how does this reflect on the dialectical link between erotics as a psycho-amorous dimension of human sexuality and language as lacking expressive apparatus for the erotic affect? The problem of erotics here does not concern language in general or a particular (2nd) language. As we shall see, it ontologically intertwines the generic (language) and the specific (a language). I name this formation ‘(a)-language.’ By mobilizing the psychoanalytic thesis about eros as hesitation between ‘one’ and ‘not-one’ from Freud to Lacan, the talk shows how Coetzee’s 2nd language romance engages with erotics and language in the novelistic form. Though fundamentally resistant to language, erotics in the novella emerges as a narrative—a poetic-mnemonic construction through language. How does erotics translate into a language (English) that hides the ghost of another (Spanish or Polish) and how does it problematize both love and sexuality as a relation? Can language express the erotic affect and how does the erotic creation have its afterlife beyond mortality? The talk addresses these questions and demonstrates how The Pole finally makes room for an exception to its own thesis that erotics is blocked by 2nd language English. It is through this exception that a fragment of eros can finally be expressed in ‘(a)-language.’   

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ARKA CHATTOPADHYAY is Associate Professor in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, India. He has published academic work in multiple edited volumes including Frontiers of South Asian Culture, Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature and in journals like Textual Practice, Interventions, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Sound Studies, Critique, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Journal of World Literature, Filozofski Vestnik etc. Arka is the founding co-editor of Sanglap and Anthem Book Series Co-editor for Freudian-Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Philosophy. He is the author of Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real (Bloomsbury UK, 2019) and Posthumanism: Politics of Subjectivity (Orient Black Swan, 2025). He has co-edited Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature (2013, Roman), Samuel Beckett and the Extensions of the Mind (2017, Brill), Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics (Bloomsbury India, 2020) Ecological Entanglements (Orient BlackSwan 2023) and Understanding Badiou, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury US, 2024). He has been awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship 2022-2023 & Harry Ransom Centre Fellowship 2023-2024. He has guest-edited an issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (2025) on the plastic turn in the humanities.