2. C o s m o p o l i t a n i s m a n d M a t e r i a l

Ethics in J. M. Coetzee

I

t is widely appreciated that physical suffering is a recurring
theme in Coetzee’s novels. In an interview with David Attwell,
Coetzee comments that his fiction presents a “simple (simple
minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever
else, the body is not ‘that which is not,’ and the proof that it is is the
pain it feels.”^1 However, what is not so broadly acknowledged is the
degree to which the writer has persistently juxtaposed human and
nonhuman suffering in his work. It could therefore be said that the
subtle omission of the adjective “human” before the noun “body”
in the quotation above is also revealing in that it suggests, I believe
entirely deliberately, some form of parity between the pain humans
and animals both experience. In this chapter I shall argue, more
precisely, that this feature in Coetzee’s work signifies a radical eth-
ics that is material in constitution and cosmopolitan in orientation.
Focusing predominately on three novels from different periods in
his career, Waiting for the Barbarians ([1980] 2000), Disgrace ([1999]
2000), and Elizabeth Costello (2004), but also drawing on many of
the intervening works, I shall apply Foucault’s theoretical concep-
tions of power as a corporeal phenomenon to Coetzee’s fiction and
demonstrate that a substantial portion of the author’s work sug-
gests a consistent ethical stance that seeks to expand the univer-
sal reach of ethical discourse beyond the realm of human beings.
I maintain that Coetzee also appears to suggest that this expanded
ethical scope is a potentially invaluable model for a more robust cos-
mopolitan morality—one that is ultimately grounded in a material
framework.