Abstract
J.M. Coetzee’s novels frequently comment on male preoccupation with female beauty that often leads to women’s disempowerment. Giles provides critical insight into Coetzee’s interrogation of Platonic ideas of love and Kantian disinterested aesthetics, inflected by Cervantes and Samuel Richardson, in her examination of three novels: Disgrace, Slow Man, and The Schooldays of Jesus. Arguing that Coetzee engages the question of whether a ‘male-writer-pornographer’ can represent power and desire ethically and philosophically, Giles observes that the novels exhibit a desire to take ownership, as a man, of male violence against women by examining the forces behind that violence. Reading Coetzee as performing a postcritical feminist critique of the traditional aesthetics that ignored sexual politics, she concludes that for Coetzee there is no disinterested aesthetic.
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Notes
- 1.
Because Plato puts himself at two removes from Diotima’s arguments it is problematic to assert they are Plato’s own, however often they are treated as such.
- 2.
The sublime, for Kant, goes a step further to actually realise this unification; see ‘Of Gods and Dogs’ (Giles, 2012). The grounding for this lies in a sensus communis or ‘common sense’ (Kant, 2001a, 5: 238) but Kant fails to answer the ‘everything is beautiful’ conundrum, that is, why every intuition doesn’t appear beautiful as a result of a common sense: there must be a third component for judging, but a third element could introduce contingency (Derrida, 1987: 35; Guyer, 1997: 285–287, 2009: 204). Kant does not assert that we do share judgements of beauty, but that we feel that we ought to share them (Kant, 2001a, 5: 211).
- 3.
- 4.
For this and other insights, I wish to thank the members of the Prato J.M. Coetzee Reading Group for their conversation: Patricia Álvarez, Michael Deckard, Lucy Graham, Agata Szczeszak-Brewer, and Aparna Tarc.
- 5.
- 6.
See May on the body’s resistance to metaphor and on postmodern dance and the body in Coetzee (2001: 404, 408, 410).
- 7.
On dance as the art form forgotten by aesthetic theory, and its pan-cultural and evolutionary origins, see Sheets-Johnstone (2005).
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Giles, J.M. (2019). ‘Beauty Does Not Own Itself’: Coetzee’s Feminist Critique of Platonic and Kantian Aesthetics. In: Kossew, S., Harvey, M. (eds) Reading Coetzee's Women. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19777-3_6
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