Abstract

This essay theorizes the aesthetic in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace as a tendency of the living-in-general through an emphasis on the protagonist’s devolving chamber opera. The bio-aesthetic in this articulation profoundly exceeds the domain of the human and should be viewed as a creaturely orientation of life to other life. The species barrier is therefore rendered porous through a becominganimal of art in the novel. This becoming leads the protagonist toward an eroticoartistic posture that is on the margins of a properly “human” world.

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