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4: Disgrace and the Neighbor: An Interchange with Bill McDonald

Kenneth Reinhard

IN HIS ESSAY, “‘IS IT TO LATE TO EDUCATE THE EYE?’: David Lurie, Richard of St. Victor, and ‘vision as eros’ in Disgrace,” Bill McDonald is primarily concerned with the nature of erotic vision in Coetzee’s novel, and the pos- sibilities — and limitations — of the redemption that vision represents. The central character in Disgrace, David Lurie, is a literary critic, and McDonald has taken seriously the account we are given of Lurie’s main scholarly works, in particular, his monograph on the twelfth-century Christian mys- tic, Richard of St. Victor. McDonald shows how this work, as well as Lurie’s books on Boito’s opera Mefistofele and Wordsworth’s sense of history, informs the development of Lurie’s character, as well as Coetzee’s novel on a more structural level. McDonald describes the transformation of Lurie’s “disgrace” into a kind of “grace,” parallel with, as McDonald writes, “the contemplative, ascetic spirit” if not the precise stages of the soul’s journey to redemption described in Richard’s writings. Coetzee’s novel, however, works in a modernist or perhaps postmodernist mode, with an ambiguous conclusion — ironic, ambivalent, indeed, according to McDonald, incon- clusive. Although he does not discuss in detail the surprisingly harsh criti- cism Disgrace has received for the various perspectives on post-apartheid South Africa that some readers have attributed to it, McDonald makes it clear that the novel’s politics must not be understood as either an independ- ent issue or as an allegorical counterpart to the various sexual relationships presented in it. Rather, the politics of Coetzee’s novel are intrinsically erotic. No “vision” that the novel may present for the future of South Africa can be separated from the varieties of violent sexual experience it represents or imagines, from seduction and rape to prostitution and adultery. Moreover, McDonald shows how this violence is not merely understood as associated with sexuality, as we might expect, but with love; such “violent love” may not only be inevitable in the traumatized landscape of South Africa, it may be the very condition of salvation. As McDonald indicates, such an account of love’s salutary violence is central to Richard of St. Victor’s thinking, especially in his Four Degrees of Violent Charity, as is evi- dent from its title (“charity” of course is the translation of caritas, the Latin version of agape, used by early Christianity to signify non-erotic modes of

Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzee's Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700. Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:16:47.

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love). McDonald’s reading does not condemn Coetzee for the violence of his representations of eros, but sees that whatever political vision the novel may have must be understood as not incidentally but necessarily, and even redemptively, bound up with that violence.

I have two sets of related questions and comments about Bill McDonald’s reading of Disgrace, both of which ultimately involve the role of Richard of St. Victor’s writings in the novel. The first has to do with the nature of vision in the novel, and the possibilities of redemption that may or may not be available through it; the second has to do with the nature of social relations between people who are neither friends nor enemies, the question of the neighbor in the novel. Both vision and the neighbor are, finally, bound up with love in Richard of St. Victor’s writings and Coetzee’s novel. And for both Richard and Coetzee, love implies a certain violence that cannot remain merely contemplative.

First, what are the redemptive possibilities and limitations of vision? For Richard of St. Victor, in the tradition of the Pseudo-Dionysius and earlier Neoplatonism, contemplative “vision” is a spiritual tool that har- nesses erotic drives for the purpose of mystical union with God. In St. Augustine’s distinction, it is for the goal of the enjoyment (frui) of its object rather than instrumental “use” (uti) — an enjoyment that is for its own sake and, finally, only completely realized in the form of enjoyment of God.1 For David Lurie in Disgrace, vision is not only the primary conduit for his sexual attractions but, as McDonald points out, the rhetorical lure that he uses to seduce Melanie Isaacs in (and out of) his literature class, in tendentious figures such as his description of poetry as a “flash of revela- tion and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love” (13). Lurie’s question, which is taken up by McDonald, “is it too late to educate the eye?” could be reformulated as the question of whether Lurie can find in his own personal and intellectual history the resources to transform his erotic “use” of the object of vision into something closer to Augustine’s notion of enjoyment. McDonald writes, “It is above all in his visionary life . . . that David achieves a measure of self-knowledge and aesthetic break- through that culminate in loving ethical action.” The three central visions that McDonald describes in the novel — Lurie’s “re-envisioning” of his opera; the stream of images of women from his past during Melanie’s play; and, at the end of the novel, Lurie’s vision of his daughter Lucy and the possibility of a new life — all point to what McDonald calls “an ethic that resituates desire in full recognition of the other.”

My first question is not only whether or not it is indeed “too late” for David Lurie to redeem his vision, to transform it from sexual “use” to higher “enjoyment,” for the sake of self-knowledge and ethical action, but whether it is possible at all. That is, can a transformation of the nature of vision — whether erotic, intellectual, or spiritual — constitute ethical transformation? Does it have such resources in the novel or is it fundamen-

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tally limited, bound up with a model of knowledge that remains spectato- rial (and even specular) and without either sufficient passivity or activity to be transformative? And even if a certain possibility of subjective change were available to David Lurie by means of vision, would it really have any significance for political change in South Africa? Insofar as Lurie is the central character and consciousness of the novel, we might expect the question of whether or not his personal disgrace can lead to any kind of redemptive grace to be key to the novel’s ethical or political significance. Indeed, I would argue that Lurie’s personal path of penance as the loving Angel of Death for abandoned animals is merely personal — rather than an act meant to transform the world he lives in, it merely serves to change his relationship to that world. Finally, Lurie’s subjective transformation, such as it is, is not what the novel — or the reader — really cares about. Lurie is a dead end, the last of a line. His grandchild will not be his, will not transmit his culture or values, but will be part of something completely unknowable and absolutely independent of him. I think it is clear that the character of David Lurie changes to a certain extent over the novel, at least in terms of his erotic objects; although he continues to frequent prostitutes when inclined, he also has had a less illicit and pathetic, if still not quite legitimate, relationship with a (married) woman of his own age, Bev, and we are inclined to doubt that there will be many more Melanies in his life. But all David has ever gained from relationships is “self-knowledge” as a mode of intellectual narcissism and that is all that he seems to achieve by the end of the book. It is fine for David to accomplish some measure of understanding of himself, but such knowledge is not the same as transfor- mation, and may not be an indication of real change — either on a per- sonal or on a political level. Indeed, it may be an impediment to change, an imaginary screen against a vision that David cannot face. “Love of the neighbor,” we should recall, is not predicated on or conditioned by self- knowledge, but self-love — and “love” must be taken, as both Richard of St. Victor and Freud do, as intrinsically violent, ambivalent, and potentially not only self-transformative, but transformative of a world. As McDonald indicates, David Lurie’s characteristic vision at the beginning is erotic in a detached, analytic mode; vision as sexual knowledge, we might say, whether in evaluating his regular prostitute Soraya or Melanie, the young student on whom he fixes his eye. Vision is the first moment of sexual penetration for Lurie, and the end is possession, consumption, and finally evacuation of the object. This kind of erotic vision is fully parallel with Lurie’s literary critical methodology, which is again more about self- knowledge than knowledge of something outside of himself, something truly other. Lurie’s sexual and critical vision are both, we might say, “jaded”: he sees merely what he has already seen, and there is nothing new under the sun, merely variations on a theme (whether poetic, musical, or feminine).

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The first of the three visions that McDonald describes in the novel centers on David Lurie’s opera on Byron and Teresa Guiccioli; as McDonald indicates, Lurie finds himself surprised by his own rewriting of Teresa, who comes to resemble the middle-aged Bev, a comic figure, rather than the sort of suggestible younger woman that is his usual fare. Whereas Lurie had originally planned to “borrow” the melodies for his opera from a composer such as Gluck, this revised Teresa now acts as his muse for the composition of a simple, folk-based but original score. For McDonald, this transformation of Teresa-as-Bev represents Lurie moving “beyond the narcissism” that had prevented him from being open to something truly other than himself. Nevertheless, as McDonald also writes, “she becomes his guide to a new purpose, and a new self-understanding.” However, I wonder if Lurie’s “self-understanding” is anything more than that: self- understanding, a more intellectualized mode of his fundamental narcis- sism? Is he not a character who, in this scene of re-visionary understanding and the similar scenes that follow, merely comes to reflect more deeply on himself? Do his visions ever show him anything other than himself, that is, any other human being? Indeed, even his work at the animal shelter and crematorium does not directly involve him with other people; it is as if he does it for the sake of seeing himself as charitable, as relating to and offer- ing loving service to another creature, even in a mode as violent as provid- ing the mercy of an easy death to an unwanted animal.

The second sequence of Lurie’s visions remains just as solipsistic. In his reading of the scene where David watches Melanie acting in Sunset at the Globe Salon, McDonald argues that “David’s eye has been educated by his reflections,” and he no longer sees Melanie as an object of sexual desire, but more as “a surrogate daughter whose excellent performance he wishes to take pride in.” This leads to a visionary sequence in which Lurie sud- denly is flooded with “images of women he has known on two conti- nents,” the women he has slept with and, sometimes, loved. McDonald understands this image as “an empathetic rather than narcissistic upwelling”; and even though he points to the irony in Lurie describing the women as having all “enriched” him, using the same infelicitous word that he had earlier used to justify his relationship with Melanie, McDonald neverthe- less regards this sequence of visions as representative of authentic ethical or spiritual progress, along the lines of the path described by Richard of St. Victor. But once again it is simply Lurie himself who is the focus of this “enrichment”: the women swirling in his vision like leaves, “a fair field of folk” as Lurie puts it, quoting Piers Plowman and alluding to a tradition of such visions in Homer, Dante, and elsewhere, are dancing on his private stage, as supporting actresses or foils for, again, his self-discovery. Once again, vision is a path of development, but one that has little to do with the encounter with other people; once again Lurie is working out his own psychodrama in a vision that is hardly his own, but borrowed from other

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writers and artists. Indeed, McDonald agrees that the vision has “limited impact . . . on David’s action,” insofar as, upon leaving the theater, he comes across a pathetic, drugged-out prostitute, even younger than Melanie, and has sex with her. McDonald writes, “Plainly, even violently, Coetzee refuses any idealization of David’s vision; by itself it is not enough. But it may clear the ground for a more important new beginning with his flesh and blood daughter, Lucy.”

There is little indication, however, that David Lurie’s increasing self- knowledge, as demonstrated by this sequence of visions, has any conse- quences beyond, well, self-knowledge. Has he become more ethical? Has he changed in other than purely subjective ways? And even if his self- reflection has indeed transformed his sense of himself, should we care? Is Coetzee and the novel really very interested in David Lurie’s personal transformation or lack thereof? Perhaps; but I believe that Lurie is some- thing of a “lure” in the novel, a red herring that leads the unwary reader into the trap of identification and the illusory assumption that a change of vision is the same as a vision of change. We are likely to regard Lurie as debauched or at least foolish and strangely self-destructive at the begin- ning of the novel; but are not his attempts to connect with his estranged and damaged daughter, his relationship with Bev, and his growing care for abandoned animals, all presented to us as invitations to empathize and even identify with him? There is no doubt that he has been “enriched” as a character by these developments, but if we are satisfied by these signs of his ethical growth, aren’t we also tacitly endorsing his unrepentant claim that he has “enriched” Melanie by seducing her? And further, doesn’t this slippery slope become even more unstable when we realize that such a claim could similarly be made by Lucy’s rapists, if they were as educated as Lurie — that they were merely “enriching” her? To understand the ques- tion of his development as an ethical individual or as a literary character as being central to the novel’s mythos and ethos is to remain within a para- digm of subjectivity and responsibility that may not operate in the new South Africa. David Lurie, I believe, will be left out of whatever brave new world it is that Lucy’s child will be born into.2

The third vision that McDonald describes involves a painterly scene of David watching his pregnant daughter, Lucy, working in her fields. Here Lurie seems to accept Lucy’s decision to keep the child and to marry Petrus, even accepting the fact that she will become a member of the same family as the men who raped her. Lurie sees himself as the grandfather of a new lineage that will derive from the birth, and convert its violent origins into a new beginning, a new race mixing whites and blacks in South Africa — even if his contribution to it will quickly dwindle and likely be forgot- ten. So what do we make of Lurie’s vision of his daughter as a figure in a painting, “a Sargent or Bonnard”? No longer does he see her in more or less erotic terms, but as something more aestheticized and allegorical, “the

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eternal feminine” as he puts it, a sort of earth mother, or Principle of Generation. “The truth is,” Coetzee writes, Lurie “has never had much of an eye for rural life, despite all his reading of Wordsworth. Not much of an eye for anything, except pretty girls; and where has that got him? Is it too late to educate the eye?” (218). I think that we must take this as a real question, not merely rhetorical; and I am inclined to respond, Yes — it is too late for David Lurie, but for Lucy, her child, and South Africa, and finally for us, the book’s readers, the question of David’s vision must be subordinated to larger questions and concerns. In contemplating the scene of the pregnant Lucy working in the fields, “becoming a peasant,” David sees her world as a painting, a study in color and light, figure and ground; he may not have had much of an eye for rural life, but with his daughter at the center, allegorized and redeemed, he is happy to compose a pretty picture of the future. And what about Lucy in this painterly scene? Is she gazing into a brave new post-apartheid world on the horizon? No; she is absorbed in the world in which she is living and working; she is making a world, not painting one. After having watched his daughter from a dis- tance, and self-consciously composing her as the subject of a painting, Lurie finally breaks the “spell” he had cast by calling out to Lucy, and she replies, surprised, “I didn’t hear you”; but she might have said, I didn’t see you. And as if to suggest just this, the narrator remarks that Lucy’s dog, Katy, “stares shortsightedly in his [Lurie’s] direction” (218). There is no real place of significance for Lurie in Lucy’s future, in the future of South Africa; she simply can’t see him. But more that this, she does not “see” in a visionary sense at all: she is not a subject who imagines possible futures, but she is fully caught up in the activities of making. And this may involve a certain degree of willful blindness, both to the terrible past and to the uncertain future.

The world that David Lurie gazes upon is what Heidegger calls a “world picture,” an aestheticized and allegorically pre-interpreted image.3 It is true that he is not “in the picture,” but no matter: he is the artist who has set up the picture and the subject for whom it is composed. For David, vision always means seeing himself seeing: ultimately, whatever the object, his vision is always for the sake of establishing himself as Seer. Lucy and her offspring will always remain no more than an image for his eye, a moral for his story, rather than fellow creatures with whom he may share a history and a world. But this suggests another reading of the question “is it too late to educate the eye?”: David’s eye and his consciousness dominate the novel, and finally there is no redemption available for him. But it is perhaps not too late to educate the reader’s eye, and this involves precisely breaking with the perspective determined by Lurie, realizing that it is not exemplary but a visual “lure,” the lure, precisely, of the visual. Finally, vision by itself, no matter how redeemed or transfigured, no matter how spiritually or historically informed, is not adequate to the requirements of a new South

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Africa; it is the visual opposition of “black” and “white,” after all, that was the basis of apartheid’s regime. To build a new world, or to bring some- thing radically new into the world (a child?), what is required is not vision or knowledge, but, I would like to suggest, love, which, after all, is blind.

My second set of comments, which are connected with the first, have to do with McDonald’s remarks on social love in the novel and on Richard of St. Victor’s notion of condilectio and “violent love.” McDonald describes Richard’s account of the mystical journey as “a path that empha- sizes relationships with others and the importance of full community where love may be enacted.” What Richard calls condilectio, “shared love,” or neighbor love, implies the need for a third party who, as a common object of love for two others, allows their love to achieve a more perfect union without solipsism. Just as the trinitarian account of God requires a triple unity of poles within the Godhead so that God can reflect on himself by means of a mediating element, and in turn be fully loving, so human relations need a third person in order to avoid specular dualism and to transform love from a private to a social affect.

In French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s terms, condilectio would be the love that breaks through the tendency to “imaginary” insularity for the sake of a more authentically “symbolic” relationship, one based on differ- ence and mediation rather than the immediacy of fusion. But for Lacan, neighbor love ultimately aims at something else, a third element, neither imaginary nor symbolic, but real. The neighbor as “real” implies the trau- matic alterity that the other embodies or includes within him or herself, as an “intimate exteriority” — the unfathomable desire of the other that is more fundamental to the subject than its sense of self. For Lacan, “to love our neighbor as our self” is to encounter what is most singularly strange and disturbing in the other person, what is most rageful, perverse, or dis- gusting, and unknowable, not available for empathy, not recognizable — yet to acknowledge that dark abyss as the figure of our own unconscious desire. In his seminar from 1959–60, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan distinguishes the easy gestures of a “philanthropy,” the charity (if not caritas) that imagines the other’s desires and needs on the model of one’s own, from a more radical possibility of loving the neighbor. Lacan draws on the example of the fourth-century bishop, Saint Martin of Tours, who famously shares his cloak with a naked beggar he happens upon, as a negative exemplum of neighbor love, beyond the ethics of the Good:

As long as it’s a question of the good, there no problem; our own and our neighbor’s are of the same material. Saint Martin shares his cloak, and a great deal is made of it. Yet it is after all a simple question of training; material is by its very nature made to be disposed of — it belongs to the other as much as it belongs to me. We are no doubt touching a primitive requirement in the need to be satisfied there, for the beggar is naked. But perhaps over and above that need to be clothed, he was begging for

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something else, namely that Saint Martin kill him or fuck him. In any encounter there’s a big difference in meaning between the response of philanthropy and that of love.4

Lacan’s critique of Saint Martin’s gesture, as characteristic of a certain mode of ethical reason and moral utilitarianism, is that it remains at the level of the other’s need, never touching on the question of desire — on what the other is lacking on a more fundamental level. It is of course of primary importance to recognize the purely animal requirements of every human being — clothing, shelter, food, etc. — but the response to the neighbor in terms of such needs does not require my encounter with what is truly other in the other, and in that sense is not really what Lacan means by ethical. In fact such a gesture risks acting as a screen designed precisely to conceal from myself what might be disturbing in the other, what Lacan calls the other’s jouissance: its strange, unfathomable “enjoyment,” intrin- sically transgressive and singularly human, and profoundly more difficult to address than animal needs. Lacan’s notion of the neighbor’s jouissance is by no means identical with Richard of St. Victor’s Augustinian account of condilectio as “enjoyment,” but in both cases the relationship to the other is understood as non-instrumental, as an absolute end in itself, and as addressed to something that exceeds my possibilities of vision or knowl- edge and may in fact undermine my most fundamental self-certainties. The love of the neighbor that Lacan goes on to describe in the acts of other (women) saints involves incorporating the horror of the other: joyfully eating the excrement of a sick man, drinking water in which a leper’s feet had been washed, etc. These are not acts of “perversion” according to Lacan, but on a fundamental level, acts of neighbor love, attempts to love the other person not in spite of what is most horrific and vile in them, but precisely for that horror, as the sign of their alterity, which is elevated to the status of a sublime object.

Can we see Lucy’s response to her rape and impregnation as a version of neighbor love? Is her willingness to marry Petrus and to merge her life with those of her assailants a kind of loving-kindness that has nothing to do with religious obligation or social necessity, but enacts a fully conscious and self-willed decision? There is clearly no “identification with the aggres- sor” going on here; Lucy does not see herself as “like” Petrus’s family, does not make herself one of them, will clearly always remain outside, even when she lives within Petrus’s walls and sleeps between his sheets. Indeed, she does not will herself to see him as “my neighbor” — there is no act of charity, no Christian self-abasement in her action. Can we even suggest that her decision is a response to a call she has heard — a call not from some transcendental source, but from the boys who have raped her, a reply to their obscene, perverse, cruel acts of neighbor love?

In the post-apartheid South Africa of Disgrace, the relationship that best describes the situation of blacks and whites is that of neighbors, with

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all its complex ambivalence, and all its sense of ethical or political impera- tive. Already before the rape, the relationship between Lucy and Petrus was complicated; certainly not one of master and servant, nor exactly one of friendship. But after the rape, with David’s lingering question of whether Petrus was in some way complicit with the crime, and Petrus’s emerging independence and unpredictability, things have changed:

In the old days one could have had it out with Petrus. In the old days one could have had it out to the extent of losing one’s temper and sending him packing and hiring someone in his place. But though Petrus is paid a wage, Petrus is no longer, strictly speaking, hired help. It is hard to say what Petrus is, strictly speaking. The word that seems to serve best, how- ever, is neighbour. Petrus is a neighbour who at present happens to sell his labour. 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, he and Lucy and Petrus. Petrus knows it, and he knows it, and Petrus knows that he knows it. (116–17)

The relationship of neighbors is bound more by unwritten and tacit agree- ments than by written law or explicit rules. Its rules are local rather than universal, and are constantly evolving, constantly reformulated, for the sake of maintaining equilibrium and a certain possibility of openness between worlds that allows for the inhabitation of any particular world. The situation of a neighborhood is singular and contingent: one does not usually settle in a place because of one’s neighbors, nor does one usually leave simply to escape particular neighbors. When violations of the unwrit- ten agreements that regulate neighborhoods become intolerable, the level of aggressivity tends to escalate, since there is no clear path to outside adjudication. But the neighbor is also the object of an injunction in Judaism and Christianity, to love your neighbor as yourself; and this com- mandment confronts the ambiguous and ambivalent actual relationship with the neighbor, always provisional, always contingent, with a transcen- dental moral imperative — the imperative, precisely, to come closer to that strange contingency.

I think that McDonald is absolutely right in suggesting that Richard of St. Victor’s writings on social love are central to Coetzee’s understand- ing of the issues faced by his characters in his novel, and the novel as such. Perhaps the novel’s central question for post-apartheid South Africa can be articulated most simply as a variation of the lawyer’s question to Jesus in the parable of the Good Samaritan: who is my neighbor? What does it mean to love my neighbor? Neighbor love in post apartheid South Africa may indeed be a “violent love,” one that is fundamentally ambivalent, essentially mixed with hate, but one that may lead to a new kind of social relationship. This is not to say that Coetzee has romanticized the violence of neighbor love as the “necessary” price that the white South Africans must pay for their long oppression of the black South Africans. Although

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it is never completely clear how Lucy herself regards her rape and marriage, it is never portrayed or imagined as a “just” violence that must be accepted as penance for the years of apartheid and other forms of institutional vio- lence. Rather, as Lucy understands it, and Coetzee seems to concur, the rape is simply violence, motivated by pure, personal hatred, and as such unredeemable. It is not the price that must be paid, the retributive justice that will allow for the annealing of the country’s wounds. But however non-signifying the event of the rape itself was, however blind was its fury, reasonless its commission, even with the weight of history and suffering that seems to unleash it, Lucy’s decision to accept the child that has resulted from it has consequences. The outcome is unforeseeable, not without risk, not necessarily for the good; but her decision is absolutely her own. And it is not motivated, as far as we can tell, by anything like self- reflection, self-knowledge, self-interest, or any other mode of vision. It is as if Lucy gazes blindly into the future, neither confident nor despairing; she acts but does not know the consequences of her action. That is, her act exceeds calculation, its results are infinite, and in this sense it opens the space for something truly new to emerge in the world.

In Coetzee’s recent book, Diary of a Bad Year, the opening section entitled “The Origin of the State” interrupts a meditation on the nature of citizenship and subjection with a series of encounters between the writer-narrator and his younger female neighbor. A half-imagined open- ing conversation between them centers on the question of urban neigh- boring: “I live on the ground floor and have since 1995 and still I don’t know all my neighbours, I said. Yeah, she said, and no more, meaning, Yes, I hear what you say and I agree, it is tragic not to know who your neigh- bours are, but that is how it is in the big city and I have other things to attend to now, so could we let the present exchange of pleasantries die a natural death.”5 The narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with this attractive neighbor, and his interchanges with her continue to punctuate his reflec- tions on politics and ethics. In the section “On Machiavelli,” Coetzee takes up the question of what it is that allows the common man, our most generic neighbor, to hold fundamentally contradictory political and ethi- cal positions:

The kind of person who calls talkback radio and justifies the use of torture in the interrogation of prisoners holds the double standard in his mind in exactly the same way: without in the least denying the absolute claims of the Christian ethic (love thy neighbour as thyself), such a person approves freeing the hands of the authorities — the army, the secret police — to do whatever may be necessary to protect the public from enemies of the state. (18)

The “typical reaction of liberal intellectuals” to this, according to Coetzee, is to simply see it as a contradiction, an impossible position,

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incoherent. But Coetzee argues that this belief in a necessity that can com- mand incompatible moral and political positions is a defining characteris- tic of modernity. Yes, this member of the talk radio hoi polloi seems to insist, we must love our neighbor; and yes, this may include at times the necessity of torturing our neighbor, if he is also the enemy of the state. Coetzee argues that one cannot counter this by claiming higher moral ground or the virtues of political-ethical consistency. “Rather,” he writes, “you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and show that to be fraudulent.” The problem is not simply that we have ambivalent attitudes towards and contradictory beliefs about our neigh- bors, that we do not know the difference between “loving” and “tortur- ing” them, but that we treat our relationships to other people as bound by one or another mode of necessity. Our relationship to our neighbor is not ruled by necessity, but is fundamentally contingent. If there is an imperative that verges on necessity in the command to love the neighbor, it is the necessity of contingency — that is, you must love your neighbor as yourself, whatever that might mean in a particular situation. And that is something that cannot be determined in advance, cannot be codified, any more than can the vagaries of neighboring. It is a universal rule, a cate- gorical imperative, but one that does not operate according to the assumption that it will provide a guide to ethical behavior or a moral rule that could be predictive or prescriptive.

Finally, there is no room in the new world that Lucy is helping build for Lurie and his visions; there is no moral education that can redeem his eye — there is no place for the mode of vision and knowledge that are intrinsic to Lurie’s way of being in the world. The neighbor love that Lucy has embraced, as a real possibility, a serious act and ongoing labor, requires a certain blindness or abandonment of vision, the knowledge it implies, and the subjective position it assumes. But this does not mean that Lurie can- not find personal redemption — it just doesn’t matter to anyone, nor should it. Lurie’s redemption comes in the form of the service he assumes of euthanizing sick or unwanted pets. Earlier in the novel, we are told that what the people who leave their dogs and cats with the Animal Welfare clinic really want is not for them to be “killed,” but simply and naïvely that they “disappear”: “What is being asked for is, in fact, Lösung (German always to hand with an appropriately blank abstraction): sublimation, as alcohol is sublimated from water, leaving no residue, no aftertaste” (142). This characterization of the desire to dispose of the animals as simply the need to find an answer, a Lösung, to their problem without nasty moral residue is clearly criticized as an ethical failure, an act of denial of the pain- ful realities entailed by our responsibility for animals, and perhaps even hints at the “final solution to the Jewish problem” (Endlösung der Judenfrage) proposed by the Nazis. By the end of the book, however, Lurie has found another way of understanding his work of animal eutha-

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nasia; it is still the execution of a solution, a work of “Lösung” — but now he also understands that this is indeed a euphemism; now “he no longer has difficulty in calling [the killing] by its proper name: love” (219). For Lurie the killing is no longer a Lösung, a “solution,” but an act of Erlösung — that is, redemption, in the sense of release, ransom, or even deliverance in a messianic sense. Whatever personal redemption Lurie achieves at the end of the novel is not by means of vision, but by love, a kind of neighbor love that does not exclude violence but, in his case, even requires it. But the mode of neighbor love that Lurie discovers does not involve him directly in the world of his daughter, her new family, and the new world they are creating (also not without violence). Indeed, that world remains only a picture to him. Lurie’s neighbors are the animals to whom he gives a gentle death, and the world that he finds for himself in this work remains, as Heidegger would say, poor. This is not to scorn the work or the world that it involves; indeed, it is an authentic act of love, albeit a modest one. Not an act of world building, but perhaps for the first time in his life, something real.

Notes 1 In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine writes, “Some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others which are to be enjoyed and used . . . To enjoy something is to cling to it with love for its own sake. To use something, however, is to employ it in obtaining that which you love. . . . Thus in this our mortal life, wandering from God, if we wish to return to our native country where we can be blessed we should use this world and not enjoy it . . . The things which are to be enjoyed are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” 9–10. 2 Mark Sanders suggests that Lurie’s seduction of Melanie, as well as the rape of Lucy, can be understood as acts of “manic-reparative colonial phantasy.” But these attempts at “reparations” are undermined not only by the violence that they neces- sarily involve, but by a resistance to closure that is expressed in the novel’s gram- mer. Sanders traces the distinction in Disgrace between the functions of tense and “aspect” — the relative perfection or imperfection, completion or incompleteness, of an act, as in the series “burned, burnt, burnt up” — and argues that the novel uses imperfection to suspend closure and the possibility of a transcendental futurity. See Sanders 2007, 168–85. 3 In his essay “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger writes, “The fundamen- tal event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as a picture” . . . “Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and have set before himself . . . Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and

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grasped as a picture.” To have a “world view,” a vision of the world as a picture, is to see it as composed, ordered, and flattened; structured as a picture set up for us, framed and presented as an object for the speculative eye (Heidegger 1977, 134; 129). 4 See Lacan, 186. Also see Reinhard 1997. 5 Diary of a Bad Year, 5.

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