The home of Friday : Coetzee's Foe

In Coetzee's Foe, Susan Barton struggles to give voice to Friday based on Cruso's claim that Friday cannot speak by force of a cruel slave master having cut out his tongue. Susan develops an absolute aversion to his mouth and refuses to look inside it, which means that she never verifies that he is lacking a tongue. We therefore cannot rule out the possibility that his silence may be wilfully performed rather than oppressively imposed. This essay explores how Susan's outwardly altruistic impulse to restore language to Friday denies what Edmund Husserl characterizes as the analogical appresentation of the other: an indirect relation to alterity that undermines Susan's narcissistic, auto-affective desire to access Friday's interiority. I argue that Susan's failed encounter with alterity is not solely due to linguistic deficiency, but attests more generally to how we can only know others obliquely through the traces they imprint on us.