“The Absoluteness of the Knowledge Once Possessed”: 1968 Ethics and Consensual Ethics in Uwe Timm's Novel Rot

Summary

“How is it possible for one to no longer be the subject of a truth?” asks Alain Badiou, one of the most significant and original French philosophers of the generation succeeding Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard. The protagonist of Uwe Timm's novel Rot (2001), Thomas Linde, a former activist in the student movement, had tried to shut out such unsettling questions as much as possible. Twelve days before the story begins, though, he learns that a former comrade, of whom he had lost track for more than twenty years, has died. The news functions as a catalyst for a process in which the protagonist is again gripped by the “Rigorismus seiner Jugend.” Linde is killed in a car accident, and the novel leaves it open whether he would have been able to become “the subject of a truth” and to commit himself to the “Unbedingtheit des einmal Erkannten” (R 379). However, much of the richness and complexity of this novel originates from the clash between what one might call his revived 1968 ethics and what Alain Badiou would term the “consensual ‘ethics’” of this protagonist's social environment (E 32).