Abstract
Russell Samolsky
“The Work of Mourning: Empathy and Alterity in J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Disgrace ”
In this paper I risk not a formula, but the proposition that the sublimate of the work of mourning in Disgrace is the work of art. I say risk, because what I attempt to demonstrate is at stake in this claim is not the beguilingly simple economy of the conversion of the work of mourning into the work of art, but rather the question of the ethical relation between empathy and alterity in Coetzee's texts.
I begin with a contradiction between Elizabeth Costello's claims for the unlimited powers of empathy and Jacques Derrida's formulation of an impossible or inconsolable mourning. “There is no limit to the extent that we can think ourselves into the being of another,” Elizabeth Costello asserts in The Lives of Animals , “there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination” (35). She supports her claim by pointing to the dislocating contradiction of thinking one's own death, of looking back upon oneself from the position of death. Confronted with the force of this contradiction, the limits of sympathetic knowledge expand. If one can think through the aporia of death, why, she asks, “should we not be able to think our way into the life of a bat?” (32-3). Derrida's theorization of the structure of melancholia as ethical or inconsolable mourning, on the other hand, points to an opposition between his claim that death marks a limit to thinking our way into the full being of the Other and Elizabeth Costello's claim that it is precisely the contradiction of being able to think one's death that demonstrates that there is no limit to the extent that we can think ourselves into the being of another. What is at stake here is not simply the ethical limits of mourning, but precisely the question of genocide. For Costello, it is the failure to think our way into the full being of the Other that makes possible the structure of genocide. For Derrida, consuming the Other by act of introjection or non-mourning marks the totalitarian project of eradicating difference. How might Disgrace, I ask, gesture to a way through this impasse?
One way into this question might be through David Lurie's work of mourning in relation to the burnt dogs. Part of David's task of escorting the dogs to their end, we recall, consists of the disposal of their corpses by feeding them into an incinerator. The passage through the furnace is not smooth however and “[t]he dead legs caught in the bars of the trolley, and when the trolley came back from its trip to the furnace, the dog would as often as not come riding back too, blackened and grinning, smelling of singed fur, its plastic covering burnt away” (144-45). The attention David gives the charred corpses – breaking the bones to facilitate their passage through the course of the furnace – is not one of utility but of profound mourning of each dog in the singularity of its being with the full understanding that the dog's corpse also marks the unassimilable limit of the Other. It is not finally in the sense of lösung (perfect sublimation), but as the limit of the cinder, I try to show, that the sublimate of the work of mourning is the work of art.
I close the talk by drawing a political allegory between the return of the charred corpses of the dogs and the return of the disinterred bones of the tortured ANC fighters. Apartheid's project was one of lösung , after all, and the interdiction of mourning. Refusing lösung, the dogs return offering what we might call after Derrida the gift of death, or what I would prefer to call here the gift of mourning. The bones of the tortured return encrypted in the collective consciousness of the new South Africa. They return, that is, in defiance of what must always go unmourned, apartheid's totalitarian project of the erasure of difference and its replacement with the self-same.