Empires usually operate on the premise that only imperial centres are carriers of the historical progress of humanity, whereas imperial peripheries are far removed from this progress’s blessing. According to John Maxwell Coetzee, the Dutch Empire considered South Africa as its own land, which deprived that country’s indigenous people of their citizen rights. Like the residents of European imperial peripheries who were relegated to similar zones of historical indistinction, they were doomed to the twilight of legal illegality. Unlike the regulated area of historical progress, their state of exception was ruled by the whims of imperial officials. ‘The security police could come in and out and blindfold and handcuff you without explaining why, and take you away to an unspecified site and do what they wanted to you’, he wrote in Diary of a Bad Year (1977: 171). In his novel Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee strategically ‘unmoors’ and ‘deterritorializes’ this peripheral state of exception, spreading its iconoclastic effects all over the ‘sacrosanct’ territory of history.

帝国运作的前提通常是只有帝国中心才是人类历史进步的载体，而帝国外围则远离这种进步的祝福。根据 John Maxwell Coetzee 的说法，荷兰帝国将南非视为自己的土地，这剥夺了该国土著人民的公民权利。就像欧洲帝国外围的居民被降级到类似的历史模糊地带一样，他们注定要陷入法律非法的暮光之中。与历史进程的规定区域不同，他们的例外状态是由帝国官员的心血来潮所统治的。“安全警察可以进进出出，在不解释原因的情况下给你蒙上眼睛和戴上手铐，然后把你带到一个未指明的地点，对你做他们想做的事，”他写道糟糕年份的日记（1977：171）。在他的小说《等待野蛮人》中，库切策略性地“解禁”和“去领土化”这种外围的例外状态，将其破坏传统的影响散播到整个“神圣不可侵犯”的历史领土。