‘None but lost heads on none but lost bodies’ : nihilism and affirmation in J.M. Coetzee

Abstract

J.M. Coetzee (1940-) is one of the most important and serious writers of the last couple of decades. Indeed, the introduction argues that Coetzee is the most appropriate choice for this study on nihilism and affirmation in the world precisely because (among other things) of his seriousness. It is a seriousness that is born out of an apprehension of the world darkened by the very instability that existence brings. These are spaces of possibility in which narratives about ‘happ(i)ness’, about what happens to us in life take place, namely the tragi-comic as rehearsed in millennia of instability. This instability will mostly be understood in light of Schopenhauer’s idea of the Will which sees humans as the embodiment of a struggling, suffering energy that animates everything in the world. In relation to both Coetzee’s work and several philosophical texts, the first chapter deals with the question of birth as an accidental affair of the highest order which determines, both on an individual and social level, how we view life; birth is seen as the primary attachment to life which may incline one towards either affirmation or anti-natalism. In relation to this, the second part of this chapter also deals more directly with the problem of nihilism as found in several of Coetzee’s works and tries to see how these problems may relate to existence on as a bare a level as possible, once they are stripped of their intellectual veils—Elizabeth Costello and The Master of Petersburg feature most prominently in this part. The following chapter then deals with the two inter-related themes of ‘Abjection’ and ‘Resignation’, as well as ‘Singularities’. Among the subjects considered in relation to Coetzee’s work in the first two sub-chapters are (broadly construed) the problem of evil, loss and forgetting, and death. Through close reading and further exemplification, a pattern emerges that strongly signals the tragic-comic nature of both Coetzee’s world and ours. In the third sub-chapter of ‘Singularities’, Benjamin Noys’ take on Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of the figure of the refugee in relation to bare life is reapplied, this with the intention of aiding in the reading of various characters in The Childhood of Jesus and other of Coetzee’s works, the argument being that it is precisely in such socially dispossessed, disaffected and bare states that these figures find their own individual ‘affirmation’. Finally, the concluding chapter retraces the various interlinked arguments and leitmotifs throughout the dissertation. It draws a line around both Coetzee’s characters and landscapes, which are deeply reflective of our own, and assays the myths of human thinking there present—in particular instances and in deeply significant ways—as active agents of needless suffering, chaos and abstrusion in human life in general. It suggests that we might be better served in finding the ‘good life’ in what the philosopher John N. Gray calls ‘coping with tragic contingencies’, rather than in the false myths and failed projects that populate human history. In this respect a brief reflection on quietism is also offered.