An Infinite Question: The Paradox of Representation in Life & Times of Michael K Tamlyn Monson Birkbeck College, University of London, UK As for thought, its true well-being is to be ill with the absolute. Thought is in a good state only when this ‘‘state’’ signals to thought its vocation, which is to think the absolute, but with the resistance that the ‘‘fundamental measure’’ of all representation opposes to the actuality of the absolute. 1 The authentic answer is always the question’s vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open. 2 As identified by Mike Marais in the closing sentences of his article on Life & Times of Michael K – ‘‘Literature and the Labour of Negation’’ – there appears a fundamental ambiguity in J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, 3 which can be seen to threaten the integrity of the work’s purpose. The novel aims to portray the violence of subjectivity and the negation upon which representation is predicated, and indeed Marais reads this attempt as pointing to the ethical importance of literature and its capacity to ‘‘disturb the self-consolidating relation that is at the base of sociality’’. 4 But in Coetzee’s own drive to represent, in his intentional staging of the writer’s encounter with the other, he exercises the very same powers of negation and self-constituting subjectivity engaged with thematically in the novel. This paper will suggest that the theme of Life & Times of Michael K – the necessary paradox of representation resulting from the irreducible nature of alterity – cannot be read simply as the final word on the novel’s ethics. The problematic meta-representational theme of the novel, and the ethical position of the work, will be investigated Copyright # 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 38(3): 87–106 [0021–9894 (200307) 38:3; 87–106; 039590] An Infinite Question