Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man

Coda: Dark Freedom in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

282 Coda: Dark Freedom in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace 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 imposes 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.1 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 biological age of fifty-two years. It is also the “age,” or epoch, of a certain kind of self-assured knowledge—the knowledge that this particular self, and he alone, can use his mind to solve rather well 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 Coda: Dark Freedom in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace 283 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, about all things. This is David’s profession, after all, for he is a professor of European romanticism who, in this postcolonial age that is as posthistorical as it is postliterate , can have only one real student—himself. “He continues to teach,” the novel continues, “because . . . it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing” (5). What is most ironic, perhaps, is the way in which “humility ” is originally paired in David’s own mind with an attitude of “irony.” Even before anything in the novel is allowed to “happen,” so to speak, David ’s own understanding of his “humility”—precisely because he considers it “ironically”—quickly reverses itself into the most compulsive form of subjective superiority. The irony that David possesses is one of the legacies he seems to have inherited from his study of European romanticism. Detached, refined, urbane, self-assured—Professor Lurie appears to hover at an infinite height— not only with respect to his unfortunate students, but in relation to everyone else as well. What kind of teacher is this? To teach others in order “to bring it home to him [who teaches] who he is in the world,” could that not also be said to have characterized the kind of ironic teaching Socrates practiced? In Socrates, however, the appearance of subjective self-consciousness did not go without the potential for others to learn something as well—at least in the case of Plato, for starters. But while David thinks that through his own teaching he “learns the keenest of lessons,” he also considers that “those who come to learn learn nothing.” The teaching power of Socratic irony, according to Kierkegaard, whose thesis, On the Concept of Irony, remains among the most perspicuous and far-reaching analyses ever undertaken, was a result of Socrates ’ ignorance. Socrates could actually learn something, because in fact his ignorance was at least in part “serious,” or genuine. The kind of “irony” David Lurie appears to possess, the irony that does not “escape” him, also has a relationship to ignorance: he derives his own sense of superior intelligence and understanding from comparing these qualities to everyone else’s ignorance. As a result, this heir of European romanticism, who shows no awareness of any limits to his capacity to exercise “keen” thought and self-understanding, “has long ceased to be surprised at the range of ignorance of his students” (32). As a teacher who has no serious interest in his students, David will there- 284 Coda: Dark Freedom in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace fore not compare himself to Socrates. If he has a model in mind for his own ironic attitude, it...