Elizabeth S. Anker

Anker 233
f
human rights, social justice,
and j. m. coetzee's disgrace
Elizabeth S. Anker
Affronts to the innocence of our children or to the dignity

of our persons are attacks not upon our essential being
but upon constructs—constructs by which we live, but con-
structs nevertheless. . . . The infringements are real; what
is infringed, however, is not our essence but a foundational
fiction to which we more or less wholeheartedly subscribe,
a fiction that may well be indispensable for a just society,
namely, that human beings have a dignity that sets them
apart from animals. (It is even possible that we may look
forward to a day when animals will have their own dignity
ascribed to them, and the ban will be reformulated as a ban
on treating a living creature like a thing.)
The fiction of dignity helps to define humanity and the status

of humanity helps to define human rights. There is thus a real
sense in which an affront to our dignity strikes at our rights.
Yet when, outraged at such affront, we stand on our rights
and demand redress, we would do well to remember how
insubstantial the dignity is on which those rights are based.
—J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense
Questions of criminality and legal reparation dominate both the

trajectory of the plot and the philosophical quandaries at issue in J.
M. Coetzee's Disgrace. Most conspicuously, Disgrace invokes human
MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 54 number 2, Summer 2008. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
234 Human Rights, Social Justice, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
rights and juxtaposes important alternatives to the term: first, its
protagonist David Lurie's claim to "rights of desire" to act on his own
sexuality (89); and secondly, a communitarian ethic based on "anthro-
pological" and nonanalytic forms of bearing witness (118). Concerns
with human rights have been particularly visible in South Africa, as it
grapples with apartheid's legacy and the aftermath of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (the TRC) hearings, and its human rights
successes and failures have consistently preoccupied the international
human rights monitoring community. In turn, the status of human
rights in South Africa has often been read to betoken a prognosis for
the global future of the human rights paradigm. However, Disgrace
enacts key philosophical and practical challenges to human rights
discourse as well as to discrete rights enforcements, and it thereby
identifies damaging limitations inherent to the logic of rights at the
same time as it asserts the need for a tempering and modification
of our expectations for social justice, thus offering a pointed rebuke
to prevailing accounts of human rights. Among other objections,
Disgrace exposes human rights to be indebted to an individualist
logic, encouraging of possessive self-interest, grounded in reasoned
abstractions that obscure ethical singularities, and premised on an
exclusionary category of the human that denies society's outcasts
human rights protections.
Beyond its emphasis on the supra-legal construct of human
rights, the novel also evinces a general absorption with the mecha-
nisms of the law. By exposing both its oversights and its frequently
violent intrusions, Disgrace suspends the expectation that the law
plays a determinate role in advancing justice and effectuating social
restoration. The novel interrogates the law for its excessive reliance
on procedure, its distortions and denials of nondominant epistemolo-
gies, its dependence on the vagaries of disembodied principles, and
its ready enlistment to serve inequitable causes. Much like human
rights, the law in Disgrace is revealed to be a particularly blunt tool
for intervening within the murkiness of interpersonal relations. But
despite its deficiencies, the law remains an object of passionate am-
bivalence throughout the novel, reflective of the common postcolonial
equivocation toward the judicial system. In short, the protagonist
Lurie's disposition at the novel's end cannot be understood without
recourse to his encounters with criminality, failed reparation, and
legal enforcement, and the law is ultimately disclosed to be a source
of both longing and disappointment for Coetzee's characters.
Disgrace, moreover, is a novel with significant ethical purchase,
although not because its narrative translates into concrete political
truths about human rights and the rule of law, but instead because
it refuses any such pretense of certitude. Disgrace is an unsettling,
Anker 235
unnerving novel, and this essay suggests that it is precisely this air
of contingency and disquiet that engenders its social and political
force. Disgrace embraces the inconstancy of its own vision, and this
indeterminate posture is what makes it an urgent vehicle for thinking
about human rights in our ailing and tumultuous time.
This essay first discusses the significance of the novel's troping
of the law and the very conflictual, even competing attitudes it evinces
toward the function of legal remedy. This investigation of the law is
followed by an examination of human rights in the novel. While Lurie
opposes his "rights of desire" to human rights, "desire" in Coetzee's
writing is strikingly overdetermined, variously signifying: the object of
the censor, the impetus that compels both the creation and reception
of literature, and the inextricable human appetites for cruelty as well
as productive passion. Due to its focus on unreasoned desire, I read
Disgrace to suggest that the axioms of human rights fail to adequately
account for this fundamental human motivation. The essay then
explores another surrogate to human rights proposed in Disgrace:
a communitarian ethic of collective interdependence. By repeatedly
questioning the efficacy of legal and analytic speech, Disgrace implies
that a thicker, more complicated mode of "anthropological" narration
is necessary to articulate the terms of such an unprecedented but
urgent social order (118). Finally, the essay concludes by proposing
that the novel pursues, through the character of Lurie, an alternate
means of representation, one free from the injustices inscribed within
language and the prescriptive confidence operative in the discourse of
reason. Because the novel's conclusion ultimately offers no axiomatic
ethical solution, I argue that this forces the recognition of states of
radical indeterminacy—states that can serve as a corrective to the
many dangers that accompany human rights when they are employed
in the negotiation of social justice.
Principles, Agency, and the Law

The trope of the law recurs throughout the corpus of Coetzee's
fiction.1 On the one hand, this preoccupation might be understood as
a simple consequence of Coetzee's writing in South Africa, a nation
that enlisted the rule of law under apartheid not only to perpetuate
but also to mandate gross violations of human rights. But on the other
hand, such a transparent diagnosis fails to account for the paradoxical
status that the law assumes in Disgrace. As the novel's entire denoue-
ment centers on definitions of crime, the ramifications of trials, and
legal rectification's unavailability, Disgrace evinces at once a fixation
with the law and a significant anxiety about its capabilities. Most im-
mediately, Disgrace's characters extensively debate whether the law
can or should embody and promulgate "principles" (188). In short,
it plays a pivotal though compromised role not only in the constitu-
tion of social reality in postapartheid South Africa, but in the more
amorphous processes through which Disgrace's characters develop
their subjectivities. For one, the law is determinant in authorizing
speech, which bears fraught implications for agency and the tangled
logic of self-possession. Moreover, the narrative's reservations about
the risks of authorial complicity that arise through the representation
of certain horrific realities, most prominently rape, are not merely
theoretical when confronted by the law. In turn, an analysis of the
law's shortcomings as well as potential excesses in the novel is pre-
cursory to understanding its position on human rights.
First, the plot of Disgrace revolves around two crimes, a trial
of the first offense, and a conspicuous absence of legal redress for
the second violation. As its protagonist, David Lurie, assumes anti-
thetical roles in these two crimes—in one the perpetrator, the other
a victim—his and his daughter Lucy's attitudes toward legal enforce-
ability are dynamic and even dialogic over the course of the novel's
progression. Throughout, Lurie and Lucy hold diametric views about
the appropriateness of legal remedy despite the fact that both undergo
reversals in response to the second crime. This foregrounding of legal
variability also highlights the law's role in developing (or, rather, fail-
ing to develop) Lurie's and Lucy's senses of self. By revealing their
attitudes toward the law to be aporetic, Disgrace underscores certain
impasses in the legal categories made available to its characters:
the Manichean binary between perpetrator and victim, the myth of
self-possession, and the function of legal redress.
Lurie himself commits the first offense in the novel. Melanie
Isaacs is a young female student in his Romantic poetry class whom
he rather aggressively and coercively seduces into a short-lived af-
fair. 2 After some time, and due most likely to the involvement of her
parents and a rebellious boyfriend, a complaint is lodged against
Lurie that requires him to participate in a widely publicized disciplin-
ary hearing. Lurie scoffs at the hearing, refuses to defend himself
in basic ways, and flouts the disciplinary committee's requests (for
example, that he sign a statement acknowledging the nature and
scope of his wrongdoing).
The narrative indicates a range of reasons why Lurie thwarts the
committee's demands, all due, as he states, not to "challenges in a
legal sense" but rather to "reservations of a philosophical kind" (47).
Here, Lurie offers his first of many contradictory statements about
the law and its questionable relation to principles and higher ideals.
At this point, Lurie regards his own dubious "principles" as antitheti-
Anker 237
cal to the law; quite ironically, however, these prerogatives relate to
Lurie's "rights" to seduce his student Melanie and violate her bodily
integrity and thus appear thoroughly benighted, if not fully immoral
within conventional understandings of human rights. In this manner,
Disgrace indirectly challenges the virtues of the interpenetration of
the law and extralegal values, in that the "principles" Lurie counter-
poses to law are decidedly not on the side of dominant conceptions
of justice. Lurie's dichotomizing of the law and supralegal ideals is
not automatically a remonstrance to the law's abstraction, but rather,
justifies vigilantly maintaining its rigid boundaries.
As Lurie's "philosophical reservations" are overdetermined, so
too are the resonances of his disciplinary hearing. Most conspicuously,
the proceedings self-consciously allude to the TRC.3 The first-person
narrative insinuates various objections to his hearing by Lurie, each
of which parrots common critiques of the TRC: Lurie refers to his
proceedings as forged by "the gossip-mill, he thinks, turning day and
night, grinding reputations" (42), evoking the TRC's highly sensation-
alized and comprehensive media coverage. Lurie envisions himself
as the object of a prurient community scapegoating. When a group
of spectators accosts him in a university hallway, he imagines that
"[t]hey circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange
beast and do not know how to finish it off." The narrative, here, alludes
to allegations that the TRC was premised on a communal pillorying,
its rhetoric of healing creating the expectation that the identification
of apartheid's worst perpetrators would perform a public purgation
or catharsis.4 Further, Lurie's committee's demand for his compliance
with a particular "package" involving his "confession" and willing
"abasement" (56) in exchange for exculpation parodies the contro-
versial bargain reached by the TRC: the "truth for amnesty" provision
in the postamble to South Africa's Interim Constitution that allowed
the most severe offenders to go free and without penalty (Gutman
24).5 Finally, Lurie construes the committee's agenda as deriving
from a religiously inflected moralism, as he visualizes himself accused
under the "cross of righteousness" (40). He perceives the demand
for his contrition as modeled on religious confession, from which he
abstains: "Before that secular tribunal I pleaded guilty, a secular plea.
. . . Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of
discourse."6 Accordingly, Coetzee invokes another widely deliberated
feature of the TRC—that its leaders, namely its Chairman, Archbishop
Desmond Tutu, the country's most senior Anglican clergyman, and its
deputy Chairman, Alex Boraine, a Methodist minister, were foremost
church leaders and imposed their religious inclinations on the TRC's
understanding of justice. Similarly, theorists have argued that the
TRC's vocabulary of "repentance" and forgiveness (58), also quoted
by Coetzee, was obtained from and tainted by religious grammars
of confession and atonement.7
However, despite Lurie's objections, the novel's subsequent
turns of events argue against a hasty reading of it as solely skeptical
of the law and legal process. The second crime in the novel induces
a polar reversal on Lurie's part, and he instead laments the failures
of, and fully desires, legal redress. This crime occurs shortly after
his arrival on his daughter Lucy's farm in the rural Eastern Cape,
where Lucy lives alone after the breakup of a commune and farms
and boards dogs. Three black South African men approach the
farm one afternoon, force entry into the home, shoot and kill the
boarded dogs, and steal Lurie's car and other valuables. They then
lock Lurie in the bathroom and set his head on fire, causing him to
lose consciousness and barring him from the scene of the crime that
haunts the remainder of the novel—the brutal gang rape of Lucy.8
This violation remains unspoken and unrepresented for most of the
text. Lurie himself is denied access to it not only due to his physical
removal from its commission but also by Lucy's refusal to relate or
describe her injury to him. And when they report the attack to the
police, Lucy again denies the rape to the law enforcement officials.
She insists to Lurie, "You don't know what happened" (134) and that
the rape is her "business" alone (133).
Lurie's own assault and his vicarious experience of violation
through Lucy's rape, albeit a questionably patriarchal cooptation of
her harm, instigate Lurie's reversal in his attitudes toward the law.
In lieu of his earlier disparagement of legal redress, after becom-
ing the object of crime, Lurie seeks not only retribution but also the
symbolic verification offered by the law. Suddenly, Lurie embraces
rather than derides the law's normative function and aspires for it to
incorporate and even enforce "principles" for meting out justice. As
Lurie asserts, society "can't leave it to insurance companies to de-
liver justice"; instead there must be "a principle involved" (137). He
explains himself: "I am Lucy's father. I want those men to be caught
and brought before the law and punished. Am I wrong? Am I wrong
to want justice?" (119). Whereas earlier he deplored the public's con-
demnation of his own wrongdoing, demanding a "freedom to remain
silent" (188), as impotent victim Lurie assumes the opposite stance.
Lurie now advocates the law's role as an indispensable instrument
in the production of social values. Rather than reproving the sway
of extralegal ideals on the law, he instead proclaims the need for an
intimate relationship between the law and broader, aspirational axi-
oms of justice. In effect, Lurie's waverings stage a quasi-theoretical
debate about law's fraught relation to "principles," emergent social
ideals, and political transformation.
Anker 239
In a similar manner, Lurie dismisses the disciplinary committee's
calls for "abasement" as unseemly and inappropriate when he himself
is publicly reviled; yet, when he is thereafter transposed into the
role of victim, he swiftly inverts his opinions and instead demands
the outward contrition of Lucy's rapists, a posture that would seem
to vindicate the aims of the TRC. A short while after the assault, he
identifies the youngest of the rapists, an adolescent, at a party on
their neighbor Petrus's farm. When the boy "does not appear to be
startled" as Lurie confronts him, Lurie finds that "his throat is thick
with rage" and "his whole body shakes with violence" (131-32).
As he accosts the boy, Lurie's own unacknowledged though widely
overheard words of accusation are inadequate. He also demands a
display of contrition from the youth, saying to Petrus, "[b]ut let him
tell you what it is about. Let him tell you why he is wanted by the
police" (132). Ironically, Lurie now pursues the very performance of
public penitence that he had scorned earlier. Notably, each of these
transformations on Lurie's part occurs after his own experience of
personal dispossession. At the beginning of the novel, when Lurie
wields entitlement, he cannot fathom the predicament of those out-
side the law's sphere of protection. However, after his own loss of
relative social privilege, he finds himself alienated from and beyond
representation within the grammar of the law. Only in this marginal-
ized position does he begin to endorse its embodiment of principles
and its affirmative role in augmenting a more just social order. Lurie's
vicissitudes, then, disclose the extent to which his former dichoto-
mization of principle and law was self-serving, a comforting luxury
available only to those wholly within the law's circumference.
Lucy too undergoes a reversal in her stance toward the law, but
in the opposite direction from her father.9 Before the attack, she chides
Lurie for his insipid self-defense: "Shouldn't you be standing up for
yourself?" (88). But thereafter, following her rape, Lucy adamantly
denies the law's ability to ameliorate her own injuries by refusing to
lodge a formal complaint, for which she offers a range of justifica-
tions. For one, she seemingly is cognizant of the fury unleashed on
the victim in allegations of rape. In appealing to one of the novel's
many conversations about rights, Lucy claims "the right not to be put
on trial like this, not to have to justify myself" (133), and, by refusing
to submit her violation to the law, she safeguards it from its intrusive
scrutiny. Lucy suggests in shielding her rape not that it is inherently
unrepresentable, but that it is unspeakable before a certain audience,
one both including her father and exemplified by the law. Indeed, we
might say that these audiences are disqualified from bearing witness
precisely because of their excessive reliance on a particular mode of
analytic, rationalistic thinking that cannot countenance the type of
vulnerable acceptance represented in Lucy's character.
Notwithstanding her abstention from legal speech, like her
father Lucy explains her silence in terms of a similar law-principle
binary, although Lucy interrogates the very salience of principles and
refuses to let them dictate her actions. When Lurie chides her for
her decision to remain on the farm, she explains her choice: "It was
never safe, and it's not an idea, good or bad. I'm not going back for
the sake of an idea" (105). Here, Lucy demarcates the competing
domains of the idealistic-theoretical and the pragmatic in a different
arrangement from her father and guides her life according to the latter.
When Lurie rebukes her through the vocabulary of reparations—"Do
you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the
present?"—Lucy denies his very logic. She informs him that he is
"misreading" her and insists on the specificity of her predicament,
stating, "Guilt and salvation are abstractions. I don't think in terms
of abstractions." Moreover, by asserting her injury's "private" status
instead of permitting its appropriation as a "public matter," she in-
sulates it from the impulse to universalize and prescribe that often
attends appeals to principles, including human rights (112). Lucy
conceals her story from the moralizing gaze of the public, thereby
impeding its transformation into a cautionary tale. In the context of
South Africa, Lucy apparently recognizes that the only "principle"
her narrative of violation could give expression to would fuel inter-
racial animosity of the sort systematized under apartheid.10 Lucy's
view, strangely paralleling her father's although for entirely opposed
reasons, reflects the impetus to isolate the law from broader ideals,
grounding it instead in minimalist neutrality—not in order to justify
individual malfeasance, but to make cognizant the dangers of the
institutional regularization of appropriately singular tenets.
Beyond exposing these substantive oversights afflicting the
law, Disgrace also stages a series of debates about the epistemic
violence activated by its procedural norms and vocabularies. On one
level, discussed in this essay's final section, its concerns about the
deficiencies of legal speech and representation occur on a much wider
plane, extending to questions about the limits of English itself. But on
another more concrete and practical level, the narrative of Disgrace
is troubled by how the law demands conformity as it adjudicates
social reality and truth. Most immediately, Disgrace impugns the
law's formal requirements for impeding unmediated self-presenta-
tion and, as a consequence, for falsifying realities that cannot fulfill
the protocols of the legal process. For example, in a conversation of
Lurie's with his ex-wife Rosalind, the two characters rehash Lurie's
response to his disciplinary hearing. Lurie defends himself according
to the principle of "[f]reedom of speech. Freedom to remain silent."
However, Rosalind disabuses him of this naiveté, chiding him, "That
Anker 241
may be so, David, but surely you know by now that trials are not
about principles, they are about how well you put yourself across"
(188). Rosalind voices a scathingly pragmatic view of the law, sug-
gesting that its truths are contingent on individual performance—an
ability dependent on class, gender, and race—thus ridding Lurie of
his illusions about the law's intimacy with justice.
The dialogue before Lurie's actual hearing also interrogates
the conventions of legal procedure. Dr. Rasool, the committee chair,
seemingly quells her own anxieties about the charge against Lurie
by clinging to a faith that formality will guarantee equity and fair-
ness. She assures Lurie: "It's always complicated, this harassment
business, David, complicated as well as unfortunate, but we believe
our procedures are good and fair, so we'll just take it step by step,
play it by the book" (41). Here, Dr. Rasool problematically appeals
to the structural predictability of the law in order to legitimate the
substantive values it prescribes and to deflect reservations about
the cogency of her committee's definition of Lurie's crime. In South
Africa, a nation that legally codified the violence and oppressions of
apartheid, this appeal to the rule of law resonates with particular
hollowness.
Even more, Lucy's refusal to submit her rape to the scrutiny of a
court of law or legal authority raises pressing questions about whether
certain types of experience—of violence, pain, suffering, and viola-
tion, all falling under the purview of abuses of human rights—simply
resist legal symbolization. Many theorists have argued that the artistic
expression of events such as Lucy's rape entails narrative fragmenta-
tion, disequilibrium, and inconclusiveness—aesthetic qualities alien
to the law, qualities its procedures emphatically strive to curtail.
But, paradoxically, the law most frequently intervenes with greatest
confidence in response to precisely such destabilizing, incoherent
experiences—experiences otherwise explained as inherently defiant
of speech, language, and symbolic representation.11 Disgrace, then,
asks us to contemplate the consequences of legal deliberation, to
question if the sanitized discourse of the law distorts the psychologi-
cal contours of trauma, and to recognize that the law obscures its
devastating impact on the individual. To transfer such quandaries to
the TRC: its efforts to render publicly intelligible otherwise linguisti-
cally defiant violations might have been, in a fundamental sense,
misguided.12
Following the attack, Lurie and Lucy debate in similar terms
the basic possibility of narrating Lucy's injury, the perils of publiciz-
ing her story, and the law's role in condoning particular instances of
speech. Each of these concerns is seen by Lurie to bear directly on
Lucy's agency and self-possession, which he erroneously perceives
as coconstitutive. The language of property and ownership abound
in Lurie's thinking, revealing his indebtedness to an egoistic individu-
alism, although Disgrace, at the same time, implicitly deconstructs
such presumptions. Imagining circulating gossip about Lucy's rape,
Lurie believes that an intimate relationship exists between speech
and self-ownership, fearing that the story, "[l]ike a stain is spreading
across the district. Not her story to spread but theirs: they are its
owners" (115). Lurie additionally explains the mission of the rapists as
primarily economic, calling them "debt collectors, tax collectors" par-
ticipating in "[b]ooty; war reparations; another incident in the great
campaign of redistribution" (158). But although Lurie longs for public
ratification of his injury, he fixates on types of restitution that are
financial or otherwise inscribed within the economy of property rights
at the expense of alternative, potentially more effective avenues to
symbolic remedy. That is to say, Lurie's fetishization of property rights
both discloses his lingering thralldom to the logic that legitimized
apartheid and, at the same time, invokes a common denunciation of
the South African restoration process—that its failure to redistribute
property held by whites under apartheid enfeebled its efforts over
the long run. In sum, Lurie's insistence on material self-possession as
a necessary marker of personal integrity is ironically revealed to be
an ideological barrier to the forms of reconciliation in postapartheid
South Africa that might have prevented Lucy's rape.13
Unlike her father, Lucy refuses the vocabulary of property rights
altogether. Claiming her rape's status as a "purely private matter"
(112), she argues, "What happened to me is my business, mine alone,
not yours, and if there is one right I have it is the right not to be put
on trial like this, not to have to justify myself" (133). This abnegation
has been read as a renunciation of her violation, or a "refusal to be
raped" (Spivak, "Ethics" 21) and alternatively as "a radical interven-
tion . . . in the cycle of retributive violence which had (or has) for so
long defined human relations on the 'frontier'" (Cronwell, "Disgrace-
land" 46).14 Even more importantly, her silence represents a rejection
of the axiomatics of self-possession that inform entitlement-based
theories of justice.15 By abjuring the rhetoric of property rights and
eschewing legal self-assertion, Lucy highlights an important limita-
tion of the human rights paradigm, namely, that rights derive from
the (illusory) presumption of individual autonomy.16
Yet, despite the law's disappointments for Lucy and Lurie alike,
its presence is foregrounded throughout Disgrace, attesting to its
inescapable role in organizing human affairs. Coetzee's characters'
prolonged debates about the appropriate provenance of the law, its
connection to ideological principles, and the task of legal remedy sug-
gest not the irrelevance of the law, but its very necessity. However,
Anker 243
at the same time as Coetzee's characters indirectly accede to its
transformative potential, a deep regret for the law's inability to coun-
tenance indeterminacy also underlies the novel. In order to preserve
its own fragile authority, the law must deal in totalizing abstractions
and suppress competing political, social, and ethical frameworks. Its
dependence on the fiction of a fully reconciled, universally applicable
field of justice entails that it must submerge antithetical values and
discredit their opposing grammars. Accordingly, we turn now to
Disgrace's examination of those ideals and epistemologies occluded
through the particular legal construct of human rights.
The Impasse of Human Rights Logic and the

"Rights of Desire"
In addition to its preoccupation with legal procedure in general,
Disgrace is centrally concerned with human rights and the ways
that rights-based theories of justice structure human interactions,
politically and socially. However, it does not accept human rights
uncritically; rather, Disgrace insists on core inadequacies afflicting
the current state of the liberal discourse of rights, both in terms of
rights talk's ready misappropriation and its incommensurability with
the vision of human subjectivity depicted in Disgrace. In contrast,
Disgrace proceeds from an ambivalent and paradoxical understanding
of human selfhood and interpersonal relationality, an understanding
that the legal construct of human rights, due to the universalizing
disposition of the law and its faith in reason, must suppress. It ac-
cordingly wrestles with alternate conceptions both of humanness
and what should qualify as a motivation or right that are more ac-
commodating and open-ended than dominant Western legal and
philosophical conceptions of individuality.
Disgrace explicitly deploys "human rights" in a questionable
sense. The disciplinary committee charged with punishing Lurie for
his sexual affair requires him to publicly concede in a confessional
statement: "I acknowledge without reservation serious abuses of
the human rights of the complainant" (57). Such terminology is ex-
ceptionally charged within the political environment of South Africa.
Most immediately, human rights violations were the linchpin for the
TRC hearings.17 And reports on the status of human rights in South
Africa continue to dominate not only the South African media but
also international activist and scholarly communities.
The disciplinary committee's attaching the label of a human
rights violation to Lurie's affair with his student, Melanie Isaacs, then,
inspires diverse and polarizing resonances. Most immediately, the
use of this designation to mediate between competing versions of
consent prompts speculation about the term's scope of applicability,
and, indeed, similar debates about over-expansiveness arose in re-
sponse to the TRC's construal of human rights. The TRC significantly
amplified standard categorizations of human rights offenses to incor-
porate crimes that were not covered by former truth commissions
conducted within other national contexts. In addition to "killings,
disappearances, and torture," which are widely accepted violations of
human rights, the TRC broadened its definition of rights violations to
condemn "severe ill treatment"—a potentially vague and amorphous
description that unsurprisingly spawned heated criticism within South
Africa (Rigby 131). Under the TRC's formula, Lurie's actions toward
Melanie might well have satisfied its widened rubric, though no less
problematically. In turn, Coetzee's employment of human rights in
a suggestively imprecise way echoes concerns with the TRC's overly
broad demarcation. When a term's range of significations proliferate
so expansively as to cause it to forsake its specificity, overuse risks
producing not only "rights inflation," but also its very obsolescence
and irrelevance (Ignatieff 90). Disgrace, then, seems to suggest
that the frequent deployment of human rights as a barometer for
the overall health and prosperity of South Africa forebodes a parallel
sacrifice of their critical purchase.
On another level, calling something a human rights violation is
a particularly forceful allegation through which to castigate behavior.
Precisely because of its potency, the erroneous or cavalier applica-
tion of human rights to condemn a behavior risks punitive excess.
Lurie's dismissal from his professorship might be read as such an
instance. Likewise, the authority to make such a charge of infringed
human rights belongs to those in positions of relative political power.
In postapartheid South Africa, the social capital of the white male
David Lurie is in the process of being revoked and bestowed on the
disciplinary committee's chairperson Dr. Rassool, a black female. With
Lurie's exorbitant penalty, the narrative thus suggests a risk attend-
ing any reconciliation process: that the former victims of oppression
will inflict similar abuses on their earlier perpetrators.18 While Lurie
undoubtedly deserves his reprimand, Disgrace cautions that human
rights talk is neither always appropriate nor palliative, but equally
readily engenders renewed cycles of vengeance.
Affixing this label to Lurie's behavior additionally raises ques-
tions about the characterization of harassment, particularly when it
is tinged by gross power disparities historically systematized through
a long legacy of rights abuse. While subtly referenced, Lurie's first
two sexual liaisons in the novel are with nonwhite women (Soraya
is "honey-brown" and "Muslim" and Melanie "the dark one" [1, 3,
Anker 245
18]), thus implicating him within a colonialist heritage. Dr. Rassool
further situates Lurie's behavior within the historical trajectory of
racial disparity in South Africa by alluding to "the long history of ex-
ploitation of which this is a part" (53). In essence, yet another peril
of the rights violation epithet becomes evident: to what extent should
Lurie be reproved for profiting from the offenses of his forebears,
especially if his behavior would not otherwise be deemed a crime?
While Lurie's capacity to exploit may indeed derive from the vexed
residues of apartheid, Dr. Rassool's comment implicitly interrogates
her own assumption that Lurie should be punished for simply failing
to disavow his historically accumulated social prerogative.
In a contrasting sense, enlisting human rights to denounce a
type of rape seems to applaud feminist complaints that human rights
have typically failed to speak to women's realities, namely to pros-
ecute sexual violence again women.19 Even Lurie partially concedes
his offense's proximity to rape by describing it as "[n]ot rape, not
quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core" (25).
Likewise, his plea to Melanie Isaac's father for forgiveness in the latter
part of the novel attests to a recognition of his behavior's seriousness.
By exposing Lurie's reliance on colonialist power structures, Dr. Ras-
sool, then, would lead us to commend the disciplinary committee's
definition of rape as appropriately within the purview of human rights.
While Lurie's "disgrace" might be a casualty of interpretive activism,
it nonetheless induces a necessary amplification of human rights
protections. As such a tension in the novel divulges—the dangers of
overreliance on human rights paradoxically are intertwined with their
continued potential to enlarge the scope of social justice, which only
increases with their preeminence in popular discourse.
Beyond these isolated critiques of human rights discourse, the
novel conducts a series of more global, philosophical challenges to
the rights paradigm, the first being Lurie's opposing his "rights of de-
sire" to human rights. In doing so, Disgrace discloses the imprecision
and reductiveness of the discourse of human rights; the remainder
of the novel then examines if desire is an accurate supplement or
alternative to this discourse. Explaining his affair to Lucy, Lurie justi-
fies his behavior by claiming that he acted according to "the rights
of desire." He informs his daughter: "My case rests on the rights of
desire. . . . On the god who makes even the small birds quiver" (89).
This apologia summons a range of complex interrelations between
entitlement-based justice, law, and desire.
Most immediately, Lurie's "rights of desire" erect an antithesis
between legality and impulse, or human instinct, that automatically
trumps the law. By endorsing instinct, experienced by "even the small
birds," Lurie attempts to naturalize desire and its claims, deeming
it authentic in contrast to the falsifying norms of the law.20 In many
ways parroting Byron's views about desire, Lurie's description of de-
sire as induced by a "god" mythologizes and romanticizes it as fated
and inescapable. Thereafter, Lurie follows his initial appeal to desire
with a lengthy description of the behavior of a dog owned by some
former neighbors who would beat it whenever it was in heat. Lurie
explains that "that poor dog had begun to hate its own nature," "was
ready to punish itself," and concludes that "[n]o animal will accept the
justice of being punished for following its own nature" (90). Blithely
and rather outrageously, Lurie tries to redeem desire as innate and
thus acceptable, perceiving unspent desire as a source of shame or
embarrassment.
On first impression, Lurie's vision of "justice" appears perversely
self-serving. However, under closer scrutiny his claims also exhibit
a certain wisdom that works to illumine critical limitations of hu-
man rights and the available diagnoses that they offer. Significantly,
Lurie's appeal suggests that the construct of human rights denies
the prevalence and naturalness of sexual and other manifestations of
desire. Human rights are often understood to have two philosophical
origins of descent. First, they are seen to derive from natural law and
theories of the natural; yet Lurie offers a competing explanation of
human nature and one insufficiently accounted for by human rights.
Secondly, human rights are widely held to extend the Enlightenment
faith in human reason. But in Disgrace, impulse and the unjustifiable
repeatedly overrule rationality and seem to offer more accurate ex-
planations for human motivation. Lurie's valorization of desire thus
highlights chronic insufficiencies in the law, namely that it disavows
forms of unreason and passion. By only validating deliberate, agentive
actions, the law ostracizes the irrational and impulsive, motivations
that equally account for human behavior. Consequently, Disgrace
suggests that human rights spuriously depend on a vision of the
human agent that, by only endowing reasoned intentionality with
legitimacy, neglect other innate human realities.
In a different through related sense, the disciplinary committee's
facile impugning of Lurie also neglects questions of deterrence, where-
as Lurie's appeal to biological instinct fully guarantees his actions'
widespread repetition. In other words, the label of violated human
rights estranges Lurie's behavior, making it appear anomalous and
aberrant instead of quite routine. We might, then, wonder if a more
accurate explanation of his offense would acknowledge the preva-
lence, particularly in South Africa, of rape and, by normalizing the
transgression, enable its fuller accounting and prevention. While it
would be a mistake to read Coetzee as apologizing for Lurie's actions,
the repercussions of desire in Disgrace are multiform and ubiquitous,
Anker 247
and it would be naïve to think that it could be easily enjoined, through
the "fiction" of human rights or any other legal construct.
To turn to the more precise resonances of Lurie's "rights of de-
sire," desire, unsurprisingly, cannot be thought outside of the central
yet fraught position of sexuality in the novel. Indeed, Disgrace begins
with a reference to erotic desire and Lurie's belief that "he has, to his
mind, solved the problem of sex rather well" (1). Lurie, as we have
already seen, is an at times unlikable protagonist and has engendered
strong critical reaction, much of which has heatedly centered on the
contentious politics surrounding the novel's two sexual offenses.
As one might expect, a good deal of this furor revolves around the
similarities between Lurie's liaison with Melanie and Lucy's rape. Was
Coetzee's intent to elide or rigorously maintain their distinctions?21 Yet
beyond whether the novel should be read to condone Lurie's infraction
or instead to cultivate readerly outrage, the sheer prevalence and
centrality of sexuality cannot be eschewed. In sum, Lurie's instinctual
rights constitute an indisputable, though competing human universal,
and Disgrace suggests that they too demand reckoning by the law.
To the extent that human rights fail to countenance sexual and other
irrational manifestations of desire, Disgrace implies that the rights
paradigm is, in a basic sense, structurally inadequate.
Lurie's "rights of desire" also bear kinship with the imperialist
mindset. Apart from the ethnicities of Melanie Isaacs and Soraya,
Lurie's fetishization of property cannot be extricated from a colonialist
compulsion toward insatiable acquisition. Furthermore, Lurie's roman-
ticization of Lucy's role as cultivator of the land reflects an objectifying
eroticization of the pastoral, rural landscape endemic to the breed of
colonialism in South Africa. In his 1987 Jerusalem Prize Acceptance
Speech, Coetzee discusses both of these attitudes reflected in Lurie's
character as inherent to apartheid. Coetzee describes apartheid as
emerging from a desire for the land, intertwined with the anxiety of
contamination: "[Apartheid's] origins . . . lie in fear and denial: denial
of an unacknowledgeable desire to embrace Africa, embrace the body
of Africa; and fear of being embraced in return by Africa" (Doubling
97).22 Lurie's conflicted attitudes toward both Soraya and Melanie
reveal such vicissitudes of desire and anxiety. Lurie's attraction to
Soraya is contingent on the compartmentalization of their relationship,
the assurance of its being "functional, clean, well-regulated" (5). In a
parallel manner, Lurie wavers in his attraction toward Melanie when
she begins to make promises to and demands on him (28).
Despite his ability to understand others as performing their
South African inheritances, Lurie's recognition of his own thralldom
to imperialism is chronically impeded. He is able to understand Lucy's
rapists in terms of "history speaking through them. . . . A history of
wrong . . . [that] came down from the ancestors" (156); however, he
cannot recognize a parallel complicity on his own part. Lurie abjures
not only his behavior's colonialist resonances but also the notion that
his ideological commitments are deeply proprietary. Instead, and
contrary to his own beliefs, Lurie's rights cannot be separated from
either the recurrent paternalism with which he treats Lucy and Bev
Shaw or his economically self-interested frame of reference. Lurie's
character, in turn, not only demonstrates the obvious residues of co-
lonialism infecting contemporary South Africa, but it also indicts less
clearly insidious ideologies for perpetuating neocolonialist convictions.
Regardless, in clinging to his own solipsistic rights, Lurie fails to see
that their very logic inspires the ire of Lucy's rapists and effectively
cultivates his own destitution at the novel's end.
In sum, Lurie's "rights of desire" most immediately appear to
contribute to infringements of justice. But these "rights of desire" are
much more complicated and ambivalent. Rather, desire, in particular
as it relates to legality, is profoundly overdetermined in senses that
Coetzee has thematized throughout his writing.23 Desire, for Coetzee,
represents a conflictual, truly layered force, being tied simultaneously
to the darker, corrosive aspects of human nature—as made manifest
in Lurie's treatment of Melanie Isaacs—and also to the human capac-
ity for engaged and ethical affirmation, which is exemplified in the
types of sentiments aroused by art. As we shall see, desire in Dis-
grace actuates authorship as well as the act of reading, consequently
implicating both writer and the reader not merely in whatever ethical
unfolding is induced by literature but also in the hazards inhering
within the aesthetic act.
Moreover, "desire"—in its affirmative as well as compromised
senses—is a particularly redolent word for understanding literary
production in South Africa. Under apartheid, The Publications Act of
1975, in effect until 1990, categorized literary production according
to its impact on illicit desires and defined publications subject to
censorship as "undesirable" (Van Rooyen 7).24 Coetzee has written
extensively on the impact of censorship in his 1992 Doubling the
Point and 1996 Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, and in the
introduction to the latter collection he explains the censor's task as a
tracking of the undesirable. Coetzee describes the goal of censorship
as extending beyond the text itself: "an eager appetite for the books
or pictures or ideas under interrogation is precisely what the censor
seeks to curb. . . . What is undesirable is the desire of the desiring
subject" (viii). According to Coetzee, censorship ramifies beyond mere
silencing in that it seeks to enjoin a basic human attraction toward
a given subject matter. Coetzee thus derides the censor's interdic-
tion as naïve, because it neglects the circularity of its own logic. By
Anker 249
erecting a prohibition, the censor in fact creates the appetite for the
law's transgression.
Coetzee has also elucidated the interconnections between art
and desire in a less circular sense. In the Doubling the Point inter-
views, Coetzee describes the writing process itself as fueled by a
dynamic interchange between passion and inspiration, in which writ-
ing unleashes formerly dormant desire. Privileging the literary as a
means of accessing desire, Coetzee comments: "Writing shows or
creates (and we are not always sure we can tell one from the other)
what our desire was, a moment ago" (18). Likewise, attributing fiction
with a unique relation to desire, toward which analytic discourse is
hostile, Coetzee explains that, while the novel "allows the writer to
stage his passion" within "the medium of prose commentary I can't
be passionate without being mad" (61).
This all pertains to Disgrace because Lurie is a spokesman
for desire in all its contradictory manifestations. Even his attitudes
toward his own sexuality are overwhelmingly divided. While Lurie's
character unabashedly pursues romantic conquest, he at the same
time despairs of his thralldom to sexuality, viewing sex as a "problem"
(1) and "desire [as] a burden we could well do without" (90). These
qualms about desire are most conspicuous when Lurie considers
the possibility of self-castration: "He ought to give up, retire from
the game. At what age did Origen castrate himself?" Castration,
he surmises, must be "[a] simple enough operation, surely: they
do it to animals every day, and animals survive well enough, if one
ignores a certain residue of sadness" (9). The throes of aging, unre-
ciprocated desire, and the waning of sexual vigor all inspire shame
in Lurie. Toward the end of the novel, contemplating his role in the
animal clinic putting lame and dying animals to death, he considers
the predicament of the euthanized dogs as comparable to his own,
namely that unrestrained desire generates their self-destruction. The
dogs, he thinks, suffer "most of all from their own fertility. There are
simply too many of them" (142).
In many ways, the entire progression of Disgrace revolves
around Lurie's attempts, although unsuccessful, to persist in a state
of figurative castration. As one of its most haunting dialogues de-
scribes, he aspires to live "like a dog" (206). Accordingly, metaphori-
cal castration in Disgrace serves to map the murky ethical terrain at
the boundary between love and desire. Additionally, it questions if
ethical actions can be possible after a wholesale relinquishment of
desire. Lurie struggles on multiple occasions to relate both ethically
and without self-interest, for instance in the animal clinic when he
tries to perform acts emanating solely from the emotion of "love"
(219). Likewise, Lurie's affair with Bev Shaw seemingly represents
sexual interaction devoid of egoistic ardor, as Lurie describes their
intercourse as "without passion but without distaste either" (150).
And perhaps most importantly, the creation of art exemplifies such
tensions. Initially, Lurie endeavors to conceive of the creative process
as motivated solely by love, as he refers to his opera as composed of
"melody without climax" (121). He considers his protagonist Teresa:
"Can he find it in his heart to love this plain, ordinary woman? Can
he love her enough to write music for her?" (182) However, Lurie
comes to realize that such a unilaterally selfless comportment can-
not be sustained—that both creativity and ethics are ineradicably
dependent on the ego, paradoxically derived from the messy duali-
ties of desire.
All the while, Disgrace demonstrates the literary medium to
be uniquely capable of preserving and energizing these tensions
surrounding the ambivalent dualities of desire. Literature need not,
as do legal and analytic discourse, quell or sanitize the passion on
which human creative activity depends. Instead, in Coetzee's words,
"the novel . . . allows the writer to stage his passion" and to protract
its multifarious permutations (Doubling 61). Similarly, unlike human
rights claims, which necessitate reductive and generalizable catego-
rizations of individual behavior,25 literature can refuse to consign a
subject to the binaries of either victim or perpetrator, maintaining our
equal complicity and tenuous status within both—much as Disgrace
urges us to evaluate Lurie as both ethical and cruel. Disgrace does
not discriminate between its antithetical explanations for the natural
elements of human behavior, but preserves in tension the reasoned
and the instinctual. Through Lurie's character, it self-consciously
enacts the extent to which all writing, all desire, and similarly all
reading are infected by the voracity of self-interest.
In turn, by forcing us to attend to the passion that unleashes
authorship, Disgrace compels the recognition that corresponding
"rights of desire" similarly precipitate the act of reading. As readers,
we impose expectations on a text, assumptions that it will live up to
the promises it generates. These expectations placed on storytell-
ing are even more stringent within the law, with its requirements of
closure, coherence, resolution, reconciliation, and justice. But the
narrative of Disgrace, both through its prose and the treatment of its
two crimes, flouts these conventions and instead refuses teleology
and certitude. Nor can one attribute any fully actualized agency to its
characters. Their actions lack correspondence between intention and
result. Lurie becomes increasingly alienated from his daughter Lucy.
Moreover, he appears progressively irrational, which is manifest in
his growing retreat into his imaginary opera. By thus thwarting the
conventional modes through which justice and resolution are em-
Anker 251
plotted, Disgrace provokes its readers' "rights of desire" to dramatic
vindication—though in the end it refuses to gratify them. Like the
prohibitions underwriting the law, the novel's refusals, silences, and
narrative indeterminacies interrogate the yearnings that it inextricably
arouses and obstructs. By baffling our readerly desires for assurance
and certainty, Disgrace exposes them to be ensnared in the same
logic informing Lurie's "rights of desire." More broadly, it denies the
presumptive self-confidence often found in appeals to human rights.
In sum, the literary medium can prolong and sustain the vexed
dualities of desire, thus rendering it a fertile register through which
to challenge the unyielding convictions that frequently accompany
human rights.
"Starting Again At Ground Level": Obligation and

Collective Equilibrium
In addition to the challenges that Lurie's "rights of desire" pose
to human rights, Disgrace offers a vision of human interrelatedness
disposed of all fictions of rights and entitlements. The novel imagines
a route to justice cleansed of the logic of rights and based instead on
notions of obligation, solidarity, and personal sacrifice. In many ways
a species of communitarianism, this alternate conceptualization of
interpersonal relationality is premised on the sustaining of a collective
equilibrium, or a balance of intertwined dependencies and account-
abilities. Significantly, Disgrace implies that legal speech fails to give
expression to such an organization of the social order. It suggests
that an "anthropological"—more complicated and layered—mode of
thought is required to begin to articulate such an emergent manner
of affiliated being.
Of the many philosophical reservations about human rights, one
of the most frequent and enduring critiques is that the construction
of the "human" subtending human rights fails to account for notions
of responsibility and interdependence. This complaint has often been
advanced from a feminist perspective. For example, Iris Marion Young
argues that the premium on "self-determination" underpinning rights
is inaccurately construed to mean "independence and noninterfer-
ence"; whereas, in reality, selfhood arises through reciprocity and
commitment (26). Likewise, the corresponding idea of an unim-
peded, sovereign will has been exposed as fictive. Homi K. Bhabha,
for one, challenges the autonomy of the liberal humanist subject by
objecting that cultural "choice" is instead "double and displaced" and
(55), because it is determined by social interactions, always occurs
"belatedly" (48). At the same time, other critics argue for the need
to supplement human rights with appreciations of obligation. For in-
stance, Gayatri Spivak maintains that conceptions of "responsibility"
are not only underived from but also antonymic to the genealogy of
"rights" and, therefore, that human rights discourses must be aug-
mented to explain ethical commitments.26 Likewise, Achille Mbembe
and Deborah Posel posit that democracy should address more than
"simply the idea of rights" and also undertake questions of "obliga-
tion" with equal earnestness (284).27
Echoing such theoretical reservations, Disgrace's communitar-
ian alternative extends from a sense not of entitlement but of suf-
ficiency, resignation, and responsibility to both the collective and the
environment. This posture of ethical interdependency is repeatedly
instantiated in Lucy's actions and demeanor. Lucy originally moved to
her smallholding farm with a commune, and after its dissipation she
remains, to her father's incomprehension, content with the "simple"
life, "[d]ogs and a gun; bread in the oven and a crop in the earth"
(60–61). When Lurie asks her, "And you? Is this what you want in
life?" Lucy responds with a sense of humble adequacy: "It will do"
(70). Furthermore, such a stance of simplicity is exemplified in Lucy's
capacity to be "adaptable" (210), namely in her decisions to keep the
child produced by the rape, to marry Petrus, and to stay on the farm
regardless of her safety. Lucy additionally manifests this comportment
through her rootedness to land, place, and the natural environment,
as she embraces a lifestyle utterly foreign to Lurie: "what comes after
the end of roaming" (175).
This bearing is also modeled on the behaviors of animals in
Disgrace, suggesting yet another competing version of the natural.28
Lurie, as he begins to acknowledge his own dependency, repeatedly
evaluates his own conduct based on the relations of animals. He
observes of Lucy's dogs: "They are very egalitarian, aren't they. . . .
No classes. No one too high and mighty to smell another's backside"
(85). Here, the animal world provides a vision of a society free from
the class and race hierarchies afflicting postapartheid South Africa.
Exhibiting Lucy's sense of adequacy, animals in the novel demonstrate
a simple comportment of being "greatly relieved," as Lucy describes
the dogs brought to the animal welfare clinic (73).
And while Lurie contemplates the fates of "Africa's suffering
beasts" in need of a place "of last resort" (84), he slowly adopts a
comparable disposition—finding himself "[t]rying to accept disgrace
as [a] state of being" (172). Once again exemplified in the opera,
Lurie's creative "desire," while it remains intact, is increasingly ori-
ented toward attempts at self-effacement and altruism. Lurie thinks
to himself, albeit at Lucy's bequest: "A good person. Not a bad reso-
lution to make, in dark times" (216). This unfolding humility on the
Anker 253
part of Lurie finds its clearest expression when he newly comes to
envision his relationship with Lucy at the end of the novel, after he
has moved off the farm and as she awaits the birth of the child. When
he stops by one afternoon and is invited in for tea, he thinks: "Good.
Visitorship, visitation: a new footing, a new start" (218). Through this
renewed sense of kinship with his daughter, Lurie relinquishes both
his formerly paternalistic attitude and claims to self-sufficiency.
Central to Lurie's posture of "visitorship" is the discarding of his
illusions of autonomy and self-reliance. As Lurie gradually accepts his
own wounds, he acknowledges his beholdenness and vulnerability to
other people. Significantly, this evolving cognizance of his own fallen
condition of "disgrace" arises through his meditations on the nature
of the collective and of the social bond. Lurie contemplates the as-
sistance lent to him by Bill Shaw in the aftermath of the attack:
Bill Shaw believes that, because he and David Lurie once

had a cup of tea together, David Lurie is his friend, and
the two of them have obligations towards each other. Is
Bill Shaw right or wrong? Has Bill Shaw, who was born in
Hankey, not two hundred kilometers away, and works in
a hardware shop, seen so little of the world that he does
not know there are men who do not readily make friends,
whose attitude toward friendships between men is corroded
with scepticism? Modern English friend, from Old English
freond, from freon, to love. Does the drinking of tea seal
a love-bond, in the eyes of Bill Shaw? Yet but for Bill and
Bev Shaw, but for old Ettinger, but for bonds of some kind,
where would he be now? On the ruined farm with the broken
telephone amid the dead dogs. (102)
Here, Lurie engages in his recurrent mode of disengagement from the

emotion at hand through theoretical, academicized abstraction. But
underlying his tone of condescension, Lurie accedes to the folly of his
"scepticism" and pretense of independence. Instead, he imagines the
possibility of a "love-bond" created not by rights and entitlements but
forged through the most rudimentary fellowship and sodality. Lurie
conceives of unconditional, freely given, and yet tenuously maintained
"obligations," "friendships," and "bonds."
What's more, Lurie himself undergoes a similar "bond" with
animals—alive and dead—indicating that his ethical obligation to-
ward the cooperative extends far beyond the limited category of
the human. Lurie, to his surprise, experiences an affinity with two
sheep that his neighbor, Petrus, prepares for slaughter, although
"he does not know how." Lurie frames this connection as "not one of
affection," but instead he thinks: "It is not even a bond with these
two in particular, whom he could not pick out from a mob in a field.
Nevertheless, suddenly and without reason, their lot has become
important to him" (126). The paradigmatic instance of such ac-
countability on Lurie's part is his decision to care for the corpses of
the dead dogs euthanized in the animal clinic—"to save the honour
of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it." By
voluntarily assuming responsibility for the bodies of the deceased
animals, Lurie engages in a gesture of beneficence so excessive as
to be wasteful, or, in Lurie's thoughts, "stupid, daft, wrongheaded"
(146). Perhaps most importantly, Lurie's attachment to the sheep
and the dead dogs derives not from the individualistic language of
logic and reason, but emerges from insights that would be deemed
irrational, if not fully insane, within persuasive, propositional speech.
Instead, Lurie seems to be cognizant of an unreasoned, unspeakable,
and thoroughly tragic interdependence of beings.
The expediency of legal process and the law importantly fail to
account for these emergent claims of the collective. Disgrace thus
implies, once again, that the truth-producing procedures of the law
will inevitably furnish a false, impoverished interpretation of social
reality. Most notably, Lurie strives to comprehend Petrus's changed
status in South Africa and confronts conventional legal terminology's
inability to stipulate the terms of his new role as a "neighbor" (116).
Lurie struggles to understand: "He sells his labour under contract,
unwritten contract, and that contract makes no provision for dismissal
on grounds of suspicion. It is a new world they live in" (117). Even
though Lurie attempts to expand the resonances of the rote legal
constructs of the "contract" and "selling labour," such constructs
fail to address the unprecedented arrangement arrived at by Lucy
and Petrus. In a similar manner, Lurie bemoans the obsolescence of
"provisions for dismissal" and enforceability of his contractual rights
vis-à-vis Petrus; instead, his only guarantee of Petrus's continued
performance resides in the hope that Petrus too will abide by the
imperatives and accountabilities that govern their mutual but delicate
interdependence.
Likewise, when Lucy proposes a new character of "alliance"
or "deal" with Petrus, a marriage to ensure her physical protection
on the farm, Lurie responds dismissively, seeing Petrus's offer as
"blackmail" (203). As Lucy attempts to delineate the provisions of
her counterproposal to Petrus, Lurie concludes that the law in South
Africa cannot account for the complexity of such an interracial alli-
ance, commenting: "Legally it's not workable" (204). Because from
a legal perspective Lucy's position represents radical destitution and
self-compromise, Lurie can only berate it as "humiliating." In contrast
to Lurie's antiquated views, Lucy instead accepts her deprivation
Anker 255
as the starting point necessary to reforge the delicate bonds of the
South African collective. She concedes:
"Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a

good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must
learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not
with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no
property, no rights, no dignity."
"Like a dog."
"Yes, like a dog." (205)
Embracing the need for an existence divested of economies of

dominance, superiority, and subordination, Lucy instead endorses
equality not only with other people but also with other beings. What
Lurie perceives as shameful dehumanization, Lucy celebrates as a
reciprocal willingness to "start at ground level" precursory to class,
race, and gender oppression and other social stratifications. At the
same time, we might say that Lucy's embrace of ubiquitous injury
and vulnerability is the very stance required for a revisioning of hu-
man rights.
Notwithstanding his disparagement of Lucy's plight, Lurie "sus-
pects" that a different register of discourse is required for articulating
the collective equilibrium on which social justice in postapartheid
South Africa must be founded, a discourse in marked contrast to
the law and the "unfit medium" of English (118, 117). He imagines
that "[t]he real truth . . . is something far more—he casts around
for the word—anthropological, something it would take months to
get to the bottom of, months of patient, unhurried conversation
with dozens of people, the offices of an interpreter" (118). Unlike
the anthropological thinking that Lurie welcomes, human rights and
legally ratified narratives entail a thin, abstracted understanding of
universal human personhood, one that forsakes the embeddedness
and density that Disgrace associates with the fabric of the collective.29
In turn, Disgrace's narrative stages a series of pleas for the pursuit
of alternate routes to witnessing, offering up both Lurie's opera and
its own narrative as exemplars of such intricately resonant modes of
recasting the social bond.
Art and the Quest for Non-Analytic Registers of

Discourse
These recurring questions of legal authority and social justice
in Disgrace are inextricable from much broader debates about the
representational capacities of language, the constraints of analytic
discourse, and the search for more accommodating registers of imagi-
nation. Lurie's ethical development is in many ways fueled by sudden
insights into the limitations inherent to language—failings intensified
by the law—and his attempts to relate interpersonally are directly
implicated in his quests for other, more ecumenical mediums of com-
munication free from the detritus and denials afflicting the English
language. This goal is in many ways embodied in his aspirations for
the opera he is in the midst of composing. Moreover, Lurie's posture
at the novel's conclusion is of an ultimately indeterminate purchase,
of a challengingly redolent ambiguity that I argue to be essential to
a more accommodating conception of human rights.
On one level, legal and discursive representation depends on
the precondition of having access to speech, and Coetzee, as in
his other novels, depicts characters barred from full self-revelation
in language. Due to Disgrace's predominantly realist mode, these
foreclosures are in part wrought through the novel's limitation of
its focalization through Lurie. These foreclosures cause Petrus's and
Lucy's perspectives to be most conspicuously occluded.30 However,
at the same time as the reader contends with the solipsism of Lurie's
perspective, Lurie himself meditates on both the insufficiencies of
language and its contamination through a legacy of wrongdoing. In
a sense, Lurie partially accedes to Lucy's opinion that certain forms
of personal injury are resistant to linguistic symbolization when he
too fails to attain closure after the attack and thinks, "[t]he day is
not dead yet but living. War, atrocity: every word with which one
tries to wrap up this day, the day swallows down its black throat"
(102). Encountering propositional discourse's incapacity to give tan-
gible shape to his own subjective experiences, Lurie is victim to the
poverty of language as well.
Lurie also confronts the more insidious inequities built into
language. On two separate occasions, while considering Petrus's
historically denuded perspective, Lurie ponders the prejudices and
injustices inscribed within English. First, he surmises:
Doubtless Petrus has been through a lot, doubtless he has

a story to tell. He would not mind hearing Petrus's story
one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and
more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for
the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole
sentences long have thickened, lost their articulation . . .
Pressed into the mould of English, Petrus's story would
come out arthritic, bygone. (117)
Discounting English because of its inability to "articulate" Petrus's

chronic marginalization within South Africa, Lurie additionally fears
Anker 257
that English has become impotent in its ability to induce social change.
Later in the narrative, Lurie derides Petrus's caustic use of the word
"benefactor" to describe Lucy as "distasteful" in similar terms, due
not to Petrus himself but because "[t]he language he draws on with
such aplomb is, if he only knew it, tired, friable, eaten from the inside
as if by termites" (129). In sum, these passages portend a tentative
awareness by Lurie of his own interpersonal myopia. In addition, they
remind us that a being must have full entrance into language before
all of the rights and entitlement ascribed to the fully human will be
afforded. In such a manner, Lurie despairs that language might be
incapable of accommodating chronically disenfranchised viewpoints,
that it is a depleted archive and doomed only to repeat its routine
violences.
It is this awareness of the accumulated foreclosures and op-
pressions afflicting language that eventually inspires Lurie's search
for another, less exclusionary register of communication, namely his
opera. But before turning to the opera, we must note that Lurie's
wholesale indictment of language is in many ways disingenuous. For
by ascribing fault for Petrus's silence to language alone, Lurie jettisons
his own personal responsibility to remedy Petrus's predicament, a
miscarriage that, if anything, is compounded in light of Lurie's voca-
tion as professor of English literature. Lurie does not personally try
to surmount the obstacles inherent to language, to rejuvenate the
linguistic medium; rather, he abandons his overtures to Petrus and
retreats into the hermitic sphere of the artwork. In the end, Lurie's
regrets about language problematically allow him to neglect his onus
to concentrate on society's oppressed, and he thus fails to impugn
his own self-enclosure.
Nevertheless, Lurie's experiment in his opera speaks to the
novel's meditations on the ethical dilemmas of giving voice to the
historically disenfranchised. After moving out of Lucy's home due to
protracted friction following the attack, Lurie rents a small room in a
neighboring township and increasingly secludes himself in his opera.
While he belittles this undertaking, calling himself "a mad old man
who sits among the dogs singing to himself" (212), Lurie regards the
project with heightened ardor and seriousness. Indeed, the success
of the opera begins to represent to Lurie his ability both to vindicate
his "disgrace" and to find solidarity with others. Significantly, Lurie
abandons his original intent to thematize the Romantic poet Lord
Byron and instead works to recuperate the story of Byron's aging
Italian lover Teresa, a figure typically subsumed under the towering
identity of Byron.31 Denouncing his Romantically inflected claims to
"rights of desire," Lurie believes that Teresa offers the proper material
for his creativity precisely because she is "beyond honour" (209) and
a "plain, ordinary woman." He describes his imaginative task as the
cultivation of sympathy, the determination of whether he "love[s] her
enough to write music for her" (182). This work of compassion, while
not explicitly conceded to by Lurie, clearly extends beyond the frame
of the artwork, rendering Teresa a figure at once for the Soraya's,
Melanie's, and Bev Shaw's of his life, for society's excluded—such as
Petrus—and also for his own newly fractured subjectivity. Lurie seem-
ingly accepts his status as an outcast, no longer a Byronic hero but
instead a tragic figure akin to the scorned Teresa, and wrestles with
the possibility that his own artistic speech will transgress the horizon
of the socially intelligible and render him "[m]ad indeed" (212).
While Lurie expresses the hope that "Teresa may be the last
one left who can save him" (209), hers is not the only convention-
ally silenced perspective that he tries to incorporate into his opera.
He also attempts to include the non-human, truly "radical other" in
Disgrace: the dog that he adopts—"a young male with a withered left
hindquarter that it drags behind it" that "he has been careful not to
give a name." As Lurie performs the unfolding score of the opera in
the company of the dog, he imagines the dog on the verge of com-
municating, "on the point of singing too, or howling."32 Testing the
representational bounds of art, the dog's participation impels him to
meditate on the dualities of creation, its inextricably redemptive and
deceptive attributes. He thinks, "Would he dare to do that: bring a
dog into the piece, allow it to loose its own lament to the heavens
between the strophes of lovelorn Teresa's? Why not? Surely, in a work
that will never be performed, all things are permitted?" (215). With
this imaginative leap, Lurie crystallizes a core dilemma surrounding
the capacities of art. On the one hand, art is beyond the dictates
inherent to legal and theoretical discourse; it, in part, resists being
translated into nonsingular abstraction. In turn, art can challenge
the scope of the norm and the rule. Because it need not conform
to dominant standards, art can posit alternate, evolving images of
reality and ethical intercourse.33 Yet Disgrace repeatedly tempts us
to read Lurie's self-immersion in the realm of art as an ethical cop-
out. Beyond his evasion of his obligations to Petrus, Lurie's belief that
the dog has offered a response is problematic.34 Lurie, in attributing
engagement to the dog, although one informed by a resistance to
logos, nonetheless risks anthropomorphizing and erasing its alter-
ity, thereby appropriating its subjectivity to serve his own desires.
In consequence, the question remains: is Lurie able, by turning to
music, to escape the risk of violence incurred in speaking for the
chronically suppressed?
Likewise, although Lurie experiments with new terms of relating
to Lucy and Bev Shaw, there remain fundamental impediments to his
Anker 259
vision. While Lurie imagines giving voice to the woes of the scorned
Teresa, he neglects a similar attention to his lover Bev, failing to draw
any connection between his fascination with Teresa and growing ten-
derness to her. In this light, Lurie's generosity toward dogs and his
fictional characters appears a relatively easy, uncomplicated act of
beneficence. For if neither the animal nor Lurie's opera are capable
of making a demand on him, his investments are fundamentally
nonreciprocal and unthreatened by dialogue and mutuality. In turn,
the reader is forced to question the endurance of the ethical insights
engendered for Lurie by art. Ultimately, we do not know whether
Lurie's imaginative sympathy and humility culminate in a renegotia-
tion of his real world interpersonal life, and in this way Lurie's opera
works to underscore Disgrace's own tenuous status and to enact the
unavoidable limits of the artistic medium.
However, such uncertainty is precisely what lends Disgrace its
ethical purchase. That is, it gains its resonance for contemplating
issues of social justice not in spite of, but because of, its essential
indeterminacy. While our discomfort with Lurie's character might be
explained as evidence of his moral failures, such reductive interpre-
tations feel inappropriate within the realm of art, which is precisely
what establishes it as a necessary alternative to legal and analytic
reasoning. In comparison to literature, legal and propositional dis-
courses must always resolve, settle, and provide a final precept or
answer. Reason proceeds by imposing closure and certainty even
on the apparently irresolvable and ambiguous; it must definitively
adjudicate incommensurate claims. In this way, the economies of the
law, analytic thought, and, similarly, human rights depend on their
being unyielding, absolute, and authoritarian. In contrast, literature
bears the capacity to defy such mandates and to refuse to mediate
conflicting truths, values, and ideals. In other words, it can preserve
the very types of productive antagonism repeatedly encountered in
Disgrace. Accordingly, the insights grasped by Lurie in his opera are
fruitful precisely because they thwart the conventions of the legal-
analytic and remain ambivalent and unresolved. Indeed, Disgrace
suggests that the ethical resides in the interstices between principles
and absolutes, in the murky territory of the contingent and the an-
tinomian.
By evading the fixity of theory, Lurie's quest for an alternate,
less restricted register reflects the hope of a privileged site for social
and political intervention. Beyond the sense in which literature enables
forms of consciousness suppressed within logos to emerge (such as
the dog's), its deep indeterminacy induces a radical openness to the
possibility of unaccounted for vantages and claims in an even more
pressing way. Because its conclusions are never adamant or resolved,
it cultivates a sensibility essential both to divesting rights of their
arrogance and rigidity and to imagining them through a newly inclu-
sive and accommodating frame. Disgrace thus alerts us to the folly
of entreaties to rights when they are heroic and self-aggrandizing;
it suggests that genuine claims for social justice can only succeed in
the context of a common, tragic human contingency.
Such an aura of profound indeterminacy surrounds the conclu-
sion of the novel, engendering its overwhelmingly haunting force.
Disgrace refuses to ally Lurie's final gesture—his decision to "give up"
and prematurely put to death the lame dog—with either the ethical or
the unscrupulous (220). His action does not fit tidily into our dichoto-
mizing categories of right versus wrong, good versus bad, and legal
versus reproved. On the one hand, by thwarting the law's binaristic
strategies for containing the complex calculations that underlie de-
terminations of social justice, it suggests that the ethical exists in a
much more riddled, ambiguous, and fraught location than we might
customarily expect. On the other hand, Lurie's decision concretizes
the very tragic dilemmas that accompany the enforcement of human
rights in the contemporary political order. That is to say, Disgrace
urges us to see that human rights can never be certain or absolute
outside of a purely fictional state, but must always proceed from a
tragic recognition both of the perplexities of the human condition
and of the insurmountably difficult, ethically precarious real-world
choices that inescapably must be made.
Notes
I would like to thank the many people who have offered helpful com-
ments on this essay at its various stages: Peter Brooks, Rita Felski,
Michael Levenson, Jennifer Wicke, David Golumbia, Paul Kahn, Roy
Anker, Omaar Hena, and the anonymous MFS reader. I benefited
immensely from insightful and attentive audiences at the University
of Virginia, Wake Forest University, Cornell University, and the 2005
SIAS Institute at Yale Law School.
1. Dusklands, Coetzee's first novel, published in 1974, contains two
separate but interrelated narratives exposing the travesties of
colonialism: the first about the moral contamination wrought by
psychological warfare in Vietnam, the second imagining the travels
of "Jacobus Coetzee," an original Christian colonizer of South Africa
who concludes that the white South African "believe[s] in justice but
ha[s] never taken kindly to laws" (109). In the Heart of the Country
(1976) narrates the trauma of the crimes of murder and rape on
the South African frontier—"a district outside the law" (138)—from
a female narrator's perspective, which Coetzee returns to in Age of
Anker 261
Iron (1990). Age of Iron enacts the culpability and guilt of white in-
tellectual South Africans through its aging narrator dying of cancer, a
metaphor for South African culture, who indicts her class for "going
by the rule" (80) and "holding up the rule" (82) in order to enable the
perpetuation of and evade responsibility for the atrocities of apartheid.
Likewise, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) concerns the Magistrate
of an outpost in a colonial empire who is unseated from his authority
and subjected to various forms of torture legitimated "through one
of the closed trials they conduct under the emergency powers" (94).
Additionally, Life and Times of Michael K (1983) theorizes the state
of exception in civil war and the politics of the internment camp.
Finally, The Master of Petersburg (1994), in many ways deploying
the quasi-legal themes in and even anticipating Disgrace, is pre-
eminently concerned with the law. A fictionalized account of Fyodor
Dostoevsky's grappling with the political radicalism and likely murder
of his son (Coetzee's own son was killed shortly before his writing
the novel), it debates the private versus public status of fiction in a
climate of censorship, the ethics of the act of reading, the failures
of the law, and the contours of the spirit of justice. Furthermore, the
novel describes itself as centrally concerned with "how one enters
disgrace" (59).
2. The novel indicates that Melanie—"the dark one"—is not a white
South African (18).
3. For other criticism that reads the novel as allegorizing the TRC see
Jane Poyner, Mark Sanders's "Disgrace," and, for a more straightfor-
ward comment on the TRC, see Jacqueline Rose. In an article relating
Disgrace to the TRC, Rebecca Saunders also richly and incisively ad-
dresses different aspects of the issues relating to justice, economic
restoration, legal intrusion, and confession that I touch on in this
section.
4. See Martha Minow for a discussion of the consequences of the un-
derstanding of the TRC's project as therapeutic (63).
5. Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson describe this policy as the most
problematic practice in that, while only a relatively small number of
applicants were granted amnesty, they were often the "most egre-
gious perpetrators" (24).
6. Several critics have observed this connection, discussing the pervasive
role of confession in the text and construing Lurie's later exchange
with Melanie Isaacs's father in a similar manner. See Sue Kossew
and Mark Sanders's "Disgrace" for a discussion of the interminable
nature of secular confession.
7. See Susan VanZanten Gallagher (118–20) for an extended discus-
sion of the influence of religion on confessional literatures in South
Africa and informing the origins of the TRC. See also Robert Rotberg,
Andrew Rigby, and Henry J. Steiner.
8. Rape, including pack rape, has become increasingly prevalent in South
Africa. See Dennis Altman (8). South Africa has one of the highest
rape rates in the world, close to half of which are child rapes.
9. Much criticism of Disgrace has protested the omission or silencing
of Lucy's perspective. Commentators have interpreted this lacuna
as yielding a range of consequences, typically either construing the
absence of Lucy's viewpoint as reinforcing the ethical failings and
limitations of Lurie's character or maintaining that the obstruction
of Lucy's viewpoint places heightened demands for active reading
on the part of the reader. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Ethics
and Politics" and Lucy Valerie Graham's "Yes, I Am Giving Him Up."
However, the one set of issues with respect to which the novel makes
Lucy's beliefs and opinions decidedly clear involves the law and its
circumscribed reprisal for her rape.
10. As readers barred from Lucy's perspective, we can only speculate as
to Lucy's motives for sheltering it from mass appropriation. Various
critics, however, have read her refusal in light of the historical de-
ployments of rape narratives. See Graham's "Reading the Unspeak-
able" for a discussion of the history of "black peril" scares and their
responsibility for oppressive legislation in South Africa (435). Coetzee
himself has made a comment in reference to Breyten Breytenbach's
novel Dog Heart that would seem to support such an explanation, that
"the circulation of horror stories is the very mechanism that drives
white paranoia about being chased off the land and ultimately into
the sea" (Stranger 256).
11. For discussions of the impediments to the representation of forms
of violence, such as torture, see Elaine Scarry, Cathy Caruth, and
Shoshana Felman.
12. This question about the essential impossibility of the project of the
TRC might further explain the omission of rape narratives from the
preponderance of the victim testimonies. See Minow for a discussion
of this issue (84).
13. Likewise, this emphasis on material ownership is hostile to more
communitarian forms of justice and interpersonality, as I discuss in
the final section of this essay.
14. See Gareth Cornwell, in "Disgraceland" (46). See also Grant Farred's
construal of Lucy's action as a "refusal to resist" (19).
15. For a discussion of cultural rights claims as resistance to economic
globalization, see Rosemary J. Coombe. Coombe argues that "[i]t
remains to be seen if the modern discourse of rights is sufficiently
elastic to interpretively accommodate forms of alterity that seek
negotiated autonomies from market relationships" (37).
16. Lucy, here, similarly can be seen to refuse the fiction of self-deter-
mination underlying human rights, asserting instead the reality of
interdependence. See Iris Marion Young for the argument that "self-
determination ignores the relations of interdependence people have
with one another" (26).
17. The appropriateness of the term "human rights" for addressing
South Africa, however, has inspired considerable debate, and some
Anker 263
critics have argued that its efficacy was already problematized by
the original law authorizing the TRC. The 1993 Interim Constitution
also invokes the African conception of "ubuntu," which is commonly
interpreted to carry a multiplicity of meanings, although primarily to
connote "humaneness, or an inclusive sense of community valuing
everyone" (Minow 52). Desmond Tutu has been acclaimed as a key
proponent of alternate formulations of justice and quoted for offering
a definition of ubuntu: "A person with ubuntu is open and available
to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others
are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that
comes from knowing the he or she belongs in a greater whole and
is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when oth-
ers are tortured or oppressed" (31). Ubuntu has been analyzed in
contrastive ways in terms of its bearing on human rights. Scholars
such as Martha Minow have understood the values embedded within
ubuntu to be virtually indistinguishable from the entailments of human
rights (52). Other critics, however, have interpreted it as stemming
from an ideological orientation incommensurate with rights logics.
For example, Mark Sanders sees it as grounded in "responsibility,
not the rule" that understands the self as "com[ing] into being in a
response to and for the other." In this Derridean sense, for Sand-
ers, ubuntu provides a "communitarian alternative to human rights"
that refuses a single, static formulation for approaching questions
of justice (Complicities 127). See especially (121–27).
18. See Minow (10).
19. Rape and other forms of violence against women were not widely
acknowledged as human rights abuses until the 1980s, and Amnesty
International did not issue its first report on rape until 1992. See
Altman (123).
20. Of course, Lurie's appeal to the "natural" to legitimize a competing
scheme of rights likewise can be read to counter the natural law
justifications for human rights. See Talal Asad (57).
21. See Graham, "Reading the Unspeakable" for the viewpoint that Coe-
tzee sought to "dissolve clear boundaries" between the two attacks
(443). Alternately, see Cornwell, "Realism, Rape, and J. M. Coetzee's
Disgrace" for the argument that they should be read as distinct
because of the difference in the extent to which they are narrated
within the novel.
22. Similarly, in Giving Offense Coetzee writes that apartheid "did indeed
flower out of self-interest and greed, but also out of desire, and the
denial of desire" (164). This dialectic of contagion and desire more
generally underlies Coetzee's depictions of all interpersonal relations.
Additionally, Mark Sanders describes apartheid in terms of an inter-
diction of forms of desire and reads the TRC's project as "to restore
the conditions of possibility for desire" ("Remembering" 65).
23. Coetzee has meditated on the role of desire in his nonfictional writings
as well; for example, see his essay "Triangular Structures of Desire
in Advertising" in Doubling the Point.
24. The criteria stipulated in the Act define a publication as "undesirable"
if:
(a) it is "indecent or obscene or offensive or harmful to public

morals";
(b) it is "blasphemous or offensive to the religious convictions
or feelings" of a "section";
(c) it "brings any section . . . into ridicule or contempt";
(d) it is harmful to inter-section relations;
(e) it prejudices security, welfare, peace and good order;
(f) it discloses part of a judicial proceeding in which offensive
material is quoted. See J. C. W. Van Rooyen (7).
25. See Makau Mutua, for a discussion of the dangers of the highly meta-
phorized and idealized labels compelling the drama of international
human rights enforcement.
26. Spivak has further demonstrated that responsibility originates from an
agency outside the self (or a responsiveness) that both is ingrained
in subaltern cultures and, importantly, can be cultivated in humani-
ties education. See "Righting Wrongs" (534).
27. However, none of these theorists have demonstrated how such pre-
cepts, necessary though they may be, could begin to find codification
and expression in the law, a limitation that raises critical questions
about, first, whether such principles are capable of institutionaliza-
tion, and, second, what type of vocabulary might be most germane
to their symbolization.
28. The inconsistencies in how the characters interpret animal life in the
novel speaks once again to the ease with which understandings of the
"natural" can be manipulated. Disgrace reminds us of the arbitrariness
of all appeals to the natural and innate, suggesting that we instead
might better conceive of political thought as premised on deliberate
choices between equally tenuous explanations strategically calculated
to produce just and equitable socio-political arrangements.
29. For the argument that preserving thick understandings of identity is
of particular importance to political transitions, see Carla Hesse and
Robert Post.
30. Spivak makes such an argument about the novel in "Ethics and Poli-
tics."
31. In the earlier portion of the novel, Lurie is depicted teaching his poetry
class on Byron, who he describes as "the man who found himself
conflated with his own poetic creations," and accordingly can be read
as an alter-ego for Lurie's character (and for that matter Coetzee),
particularly at the beginning of the book (31).
32. The Master of Petersburg contains a similar passage in which Dos-
toevsky responds to the "unhappy wail of a dog" in the middle of the
night and ponders the significance of this call. Dostoevsky deciphers
Anker 265
this demand to signify that "he must answer to what he does not
expect" (79–80).
33. In her response to The Lives of Animals, Marjorie Garber describes
Coetzee's approach as both staging "a debate between poetry and
philosophy" and derived from a Platonic philosophic dialogue (79).
Elizabeth Costello, in Coetzee's novel of the same name, makes such
a connection when she justifies her failure to persuade her listeners
to the animal rights stance by urging them instead "to read the poets
who return the living, electric being to language" (111).
34. Derrida offers a helpful description of the central conundrum regard-
ing the question of the animal's responsivity, which extends from the
intertwined risks of purporting to ascribe a voice to, and claiming
to ascertain a "response" from, the animal. As Derrida states, "one
cannot treat the supposed animality of the animal without treating
the question of the response and of what responding means. And
what erasing mean" (401).
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CONTRIBUTORS
JESSE ALEMÁN <jman@unm.edu> is an associate professor of Eng-

lish at the University of New Mexico where he teaches nineteenth-
century American and Chicano/a literatures. His articles appear in
MELUS, Azltán, Arizona Quarterly, American Literary History, and in
numerous edited collections. He edited Loreta Janeta Velazquez's
1876 autobiography, The Woman in Battle; co-edited Empire and
the Literature of Sensation: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century
Fiction; and is working on "Wars of Rebellion," a book that considers
nineteenth-century Hispanic writings about the US Civil War.
ELIZABETH S. ANKER <elizabethanker8@mac.com> will join the
English Department at Cornell University as an Assistant Professor in
the fall of 2008 after teaching at Wake Forest University for the past
two years. She has also published in the James Joyce Quarterly and
Theory & Event. She is currently completing a book-length project
on human rights and the postcolonial novel.
HILLARY CHUTE is a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.
She is working on a book about women's contemporary graphic narra-
tive and is Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman's forthcoming MetaMaus
(Pantheon), as well as a Contributing Editor on graphic narrative to
the Heath Anthology of American Literature (Houghton Mifflin). Recent
essays include "Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative" in
PMLA and "The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis"
in Women's Studies Quarterly.
SARA CRANGLE is a lecturer at the University of Sussex and a re-
search fellow at Queens' College, Cambridge. She is writing a book
that addresses banal, everyday desires such as waiting and risibility,
and is co-editing an essay collection with Peter Nicholls on bathos.
She has chapters in British Fiction After Modernism and Complicities:
British Poetry 1945-2007; her articles have been accepted by the
James Joyce Quarterly and the Journal of Narrative Theory, among
others.
BARBARA BRINSON CURIEL <bc7@humbodt.edu> is Associate
Professor of English at Humboldt State University, where she is also
currently Ethnic Studies Program Director. She has published on the
work of Sandra Cisneros in the collection Reading U.S. Latina Writers:
Remapping American Literature, and her essay "The General's Pants:
A Chicana Feminist (Re)Vision of the Mexican Revolution in Sandra
Cisneros' 'Eyes of Zapata,'" appeared in the journal Western American
Literature. Her current scholarly work focuses on the intertextual ties
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Elizabeth S. Anker

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Anker 233

and j. m. coetzee's disgrace

Affronts to the innocence of our children or to the dignity

The fiction of dignity helps to define humanity and the status

Questions of criminality and legal reparation dominate both the

Principles, Agency, and the Law

The Impasse of Human Rights Logic and the

"Starting Again At Ground Level": Obligation and

Bill Shaw believes that, because he and David Lurie once

Here, Lurie engages in his recurrent mode of disengagement from the

"Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a

Embracing the need for an existence divested of economies of

Art and the Quest for Non-Analytic Registers of

Doubtless Petrus has been through a lot, doubtless he has

Discounting English because of its inability to "articulate" Petrus's

(a) it is "indecent or obscene or offensive or harmful to public

JESSE ALEMÁN <jman@unm.edu> is an associate professor of Eng-

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Elizabeth S. Anker

Enviado por

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Elizabeth S. Anker

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Anker 233

and j. m. coetzee's disgrace

Affronts to the innocence of our children or to the dignity

The fiction of dignity helps to define humanity and the status

Questions of criminality and legal reparation dominate both the

Principles, Agency, and the Law

The Impasse of Human Rights Logic and the

"Starting Again At Ground Level": Obligation and

Bill Shaw believes that, because he and David Lurie once

Here, Lurie engages in his recurrent mode of disengagement from the

"Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a

Embracing the need for an existence divested of economies of

Art and the Quest for Non-Analytic Registers of

Doubtless Petrus has been through a lot, doubtless he has

Discounting English because of its inability to "articulate" Petrus's

(a) it is "indecent or obscene or offensive or harmful to public

JESSE ALEMÁN <jman@unm.edu> is an associate professor of Eng-

Você também pode gostar

(a) it is "indecent or obscene or offensive or harmful to public