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The purpose of this article is to analyse the testimonial task assumed by JM Coetzee in Waiting for the Barbarians, a novel whose reflection on imperial paranoia, preemptive warfare, torture and prisoner abuse seems even more topical in this post-9/11 day and age than when it was first published twenty-five years ago, at the height of the apartheid era. Waiting for the Barbarians does not recover history as a fully narratable subject, but bears witness to it by refusing to translate the suffering produced by colonial oppression into historical discourse. In ‘‘bringing to speech an impossibility of speech’’, 2 in maintaining rather than negating the unsayability it says, the novel can be seen to embrace an anti-historicist ethics of remembrance, an ethics of testimony as theorized by Giorgio Agamben, who will be my main interlocutor here. Instead of colluding with the production and silencing of bare life, instead of taking for …