ABSTRACT
What is the relationship between freedom and knowledge? Is it possible to be free without knowing it? Alternatively, is there something about knowledge and its conditions of possibility that impose exacting limits upon the concept and experience of freedom? These are among the questions that emerge from reading J. M. Coetzee’s strangely disturbing novel Disgrace (1999). They have to “emerge” from a reading because they are not there at the beginning. Or, rather, the questions are there from the start, but in the unacknowledged and displaced mode of answers, of presupposed “solutions” for problems that no longer seem of direct concern to the protagonist of the fiction, David Lurie. “For a man of his age,” the novel begins, “he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” (1). David Lurie’s “age,” moreover, is not simply his chronological age of 52 years. It is also the “age” of a certain kind of self-assured knowledge—the knowledge that this particular self, and he alone, can use his mind to solve all the problems with which it is still confronted in what is described as “a post-religious age,” an age that is “post-Christian, posthistorical, [and] postliterate” (4, 32). For a man of his age—in short, the postcolonial era of South Africa—David Lurie has pretty much figured things out. Thanks to the vast body of knowledge he possesses, or believes he possesses, of all things.
