Cosmopolitanism and Material Ethics 81Jonathan Friedman, such conciliatory values are expressed in the
cosmopolitan agent’s predilection for “participating in many worlds
[... and having pieces] of cultures come into our lives from different
sources.”^12 David Held also emphasizes the importance for a cosmo-
politan individual to cultivate a vision that looks beyond singular
sociocultural viewpoints.^13 Such preoccupations and potentialities
are exhibited by a number of protagonists in Coetzee’s mid-career
novels, particularly those in Waiting for the Barbarians (2000), Age
of Iron (1990), Foe (1986), and Life & Times of Michael K. However,
while most of these characters are eager to “understand” or empa-
thize with the Other, such attempts are rarely straightforward suc-
cesses. Indeed, the kinds of cosmopolitan conciliation we observe
are almost always conditional, incomplete, or otherwise compro-
mised by various sociopolitical or cultural pressures. In keeping with
Coetzee’s signature aversion to the straightforwardly tendentious,
there is never a grand moment of perfect sociocultural conciliation
and understanding between the characters; nor does the writer pre-
sent conclusive d é nouements that provide a sense of didactic clo-
sure to the narratives. What we have instead are possibilities and
highly contingent moments of cosmopolitan conciliatory promise,
in which protagonists occasionally (but not always) gain momentary
insights into the limitations of their respective worldviews and value
systems.
This is an interpretation that finds some resonance with Katherine
Hallemeier’s thesis on the role of sympathy in Coetzee’s fiction. In
her recent monograph, Hallemeier maintains that moments of con-
ciliatory failure in Coetzee’s fiction serve to foreground the inad-
equacy of sympathy as a viable basis for cosmopolitan practice.^14
She then puts forward a sophisticated argument that a consider-
able number of Coetzee’s recent works dramatize this potentially
insidious gulf between the practical achievement of cosmopolitan
conciliation and the “seemingly cosmopolitan feelings” that might
motivate it.^15 For Hallemeier, an important and recurrent indicator
for this type of disjunction is the presence of shame, which signi-
fies the “ongoing failures of mutuality” between the characters.^16 I n
other words, she sees shame as a psychological by-product, result-
ing from unequal human relations. However, she also argues that