Elizabeth Costello, Embodiment, and the Limits of Rights

Critics have commonly interpreted J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello as a defense of animal rights. However, this essay argues that it more accurately demonstrates the liabilities of enlisting the idiom of rights to advocate for animal welfare. It thus develops a phenomenology of embodiment indebted to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as an analytic through which both to elucidate the status of the animal in Coetzee’s text and to probe the limits of the liberal logic of rights. In doing so, it argues that liberal discourses of rights paradoxically occlude the ontological condition of embodiment. Although the text of Elizabeth Costello often appears closer to philosophy than literature, this essay further maintains that its narrative stages a plea for art’s superior ability to manifest animal being—in particular its deeply embodied texture.