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Ground zero for a post-moral ethics in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Julia Kristeva’s melancholic

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Abstract

Perhaps no other novel has received as much attention from moral philosophers as South African writer J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. The novel is ethically compelling and yet no moral theory explains its force. Despite clear Kantian moments, neither rationalism nor self-respect can account for the strange ethical task that the protagonist sets for himself. Calling himself the dog man, like the ancient Cynics, this shamelessly cynical protagonist takes his cues for ethics not from humans but from animals. He does not however claim much in the way of empathy or understanding of animals, and his own odd motives remain a puzzle throughout the stages of his ethical transformation. Many scholars approach Coetzee’s text through an ethics of alterity, and even argue that Disgrace is exemplary in this regard. Kristeva’s rendition of alterity ethics brings us close to the novel’s vision, and yet the novel points towards a more primordial basis for ethics in the search for meaning through the human encounter with other animal species.

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Notes

  1. Spivak (2002, pp. 17–31).

  2. For a discussion of this issue, see Attwell (2002) and McDonald (2002).

  3. Coetzee (1999a, p. 160).

  4. De Waal (2006, pp. 75–80).

  5. See Nietzsche (1956, pp. 231–299).

  6. For an understanding of the history of race and frontier in white supremacist South Africa, see Crais (1992). And for an expansion of the trajectory of racism beyond cultural and biological racism to a neoliberal racialization of space via Merleau-Ponty, see Willett (2004).

  7. Coetzee (1999a, p. 33).

  8. Coetzee (1999b) and Coetzee (2003).

  9. Coetzee (1999a, 142).

  10. Coetzee (1999a, 73).

  11. Coetzee (1999a, 143–144).

  12. Cf. Kuzniar (2006) for a reading of the novel that emphasizes the importance of sympathy and empathy. In my current essay, I am interested in the limits of empathy or any other social bond for characterizing the ethical concern that Coetzee’s protagonist develops for the abject and unsympathetic. Elsewhere, I discuss how our cultural or subjective associations as well as our resentments, identifications, and other sources of motives and images inform empathy. There I argue that if there is not an unmediated ethical approach to others, ethics requires tropes as well as a social and political infrastructure not usually thought of as essential to its practice. My example from Disgrace: The protagonist associates the abandoned pit bull, Katy, with the veterinarian, Bev, and with Lord Byron’s abandoned lover, Teresa. This association composes the basis for an empathy that will later include the maimed dog in the final chapter. Empathy is not direct from one person to another, and so is never free from associations; moreover, it is challenged by creatures that are abject. Among other sources, I examine Butler (2004, p. 150). In this context, I am critical of the assumption that the subaltern or Other could speak, if only their cry weren’t blocked through our failure to represent them, or allow them to be represented, adequately.

  13. Cf. Heidegger’s infamous parallel between the Holocaust and the mechanized food industry; cited in Rockmore (1995, p. 150). On a related note, the film Downfall (2005) portrays Hitler as concerned about his secretary and his dog and as a vegetarian in contrast with his lack of concern for the fate of his fellow German citizens at the end of the second world war. For a discussion of this contrast, see Lara (2007, p. 8).

  14. See also Taylor (2008); Taylor draws beautifully upon Coetzee’s novel to extend Bulter’s Levinasian ethics of non-violence to animals.

  15. See Diamond (2008, pp. 71–72) along with other essays in Cavell, Stanley, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking and Cary Wolfe (2008). For an extensive reading of Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello novels from this tradition, see Mulhall (2009).

  16. See Lawlor (2007) and see Willett (2001) for communal ethics of eros and hubris in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and other literature.

  17. See Perpich (2008) and Katz (2003). See also Oliver (2009) for a rich exploration of the role of animals in the assertion of the human for Derrida, Freud, Kristeva, and other major figures for continental ethics.

  18. Kristeva (1991). See Beardsworth (2004) for a compelling reading of Kristeva’s work through her response to modern nihilism and the loss of meaning. And see McAfee (2004) for a rich interpretation of the relevance of Kristeva for political ethics.

  19. Kearney (2003). And for my earlier concerns with representation of mother in Kristeva, see Willett (1995, pp. 19–23); and for an extensive discussion of the origins of ethics in music and dance, see the discussion that follows especially with regard to Daniel Stern, Nietzsche, and Frederick Douglass.

  20. For an interpretation of earlier novels through Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic, see Parry (1996, pp. 37–65). Parry discusses Coetzee’s use of female narrators in various novels and the notion of the body as progenitor of woman’s language as a language of the heart. She argues that these narratives remain sealed from the heterology of other voices, and in this respect is critical of Spivak (2002).

  21. Kristeva (1989).

  22. Kristeva (1989, pp. 13–14).

  23. Coetzee (1999a, p. 219).

  24. Coetzee (1999a, p. 146).

  25. Coetzee (1999a, p. 146).

  26. Patton (2004, pp. 101–112).

  27. Coetzee (1999a, p. 219).

  28. Coetzee (1999a, p. 2).

  29. Coetzee (1999a, p. 91).

  30. Coetzee (1999a, p. 74).

  31. Coetzee (1999a, p. 74).

  32. Coetzee (1999a, p. 205).

  33. Gordon (1995, p. 76); but see note 32; my concern here is the reduction of the crime of rape to the politics of race.

  34. In the context of discussing the current high crime rate, and especially the crime of rape, as a legacy of apartheid in post-apartheid South Africa, Helen Moffett explains the “tacit social understanding that certain kinds of white-on-black violence were ‘necessary’ as a kind of oil that kept apartheid hierarchies running smoothly” Moffett (2006, p. 140). At the same time, she points out the possible political damage of Coetzee’s representation of black as the rapists of white women, and thus as “barbarians” Moffett (2006, p. 135). The novel accounts for that political legacy in such a way as to contribute to a posthumanist ethics. It does not claim to tell its story from the positions of white women or black Africans, and it in fact fails to do so. Again Moffett: “South African women are sick of hearing that apartheid is to blame for the brutality that men mete out to them” Moffett (2006, p. 143). The protagonist has difficulty finding a role for himself other than predator or protector of women. He does though identify with women through his relation with dogs (see footnote 12). Hence, the radical and progressive element of the novel is the relation with dogs, not women, which remains problematic.

  35. Moffett (2006, p. 137).

  36. Coetzee (1999a, p. 218).

  37. Coetzee (1999a, p. 215).

  38. Coetzee (1999a, p. 146).

  39. Coetzee (1999a, p. 215).

  40. On the importance of the seriocomic, the Cynic as dog men, of shameless disregard of conventions, and of the learning ethics from animals, see Branham and Goulet-Gazé (1996, pp. 1–27).

  41. Coetzee (1999a, p. 214).

  42. Coetzee (1999a, p. 215).

  43. For a discussion of the role of race in the selective punishment of rape in South Africa, see Scully (1995). Scully explains how race figures in the view that male sexuality is a result of uncontrollable passions and female seduction in South Africa.

  44. Coetzee (1999a, p. 4).

  45. Derek Attridge reads the novel as the search for grace, understood as a receiving of external beneficence; see Attridge (2004, pp. 162–191).

  46. Kristeva stays close to Freud, who argues that the Oedipal complex lies at the beginning of religion, morality, culture, and society, even as she modifies his claim to include the pre-oedipal phase. See Freud (1913, p. 156).

  47. For a discussion of Husserl’s ethics as an idea of a world, with numerous origins and distinct subjects, see Derrida (1982, pp. 125–126). See Perpich (2008, pp. 71–72) for an elaboration of Derrida’s critique of Levinas and the latter’s response with regard to the difference between having meaning in the world and having a world; she also discusses the tensions in Levinas due to the need to represent oneself in this world rather than appearing out of the blue unmediated by any mode of representation.

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Bettina Bergo, Clifton Crais, Robert Gooding-Williams, David Peña-Guzmán, Lynne Huffer, Eduardo Mendieta, Kelly Oliver, Pamela Scully, Gary Shapiro, and many others from audiences at PhiloSOPHIA, the Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy session at the Eastern American Philosophy Association and at the CRÉUM at the Université de Montréal, all of whom provided helpful comments and assistance for this essay.

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    Cynthia Willett

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Willett, C. Ground zero for a post-moral ethics in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Julia Kristeva’s melancholic. Cont Philos Rev 45, 1–22 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-011-9207-4

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