Abstract
How can educators and their students interrogate the ethics and politics of suffering in ways that do not create fixed and totalized narratives from the past? In responding to this question, this essay draws on J. M. Coeetze’s Disgrace, and discusses how this novel constitutes a crucial site for bearing witness to the suffering engendered by apartheid through inventing new forms of mourning and community. The anti-historicist stance of the novel is grounded on the notion that bearing witness to suffering without betraying it means refusing to represent it, that is, refusing to translate history and speak of it; instead, the novel’s characters remain inconsolable before history. The essay builds on these ideas and considers whether educators and their students need to (re)learn the limits of historicism in comprehending conflict, oppression, otherness and suffering; also, it examines the educational implications of such a pedagogical task.
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Notes
It is for this reason that this particular novel is chosen; it captures the ambiguities of responsibility towards the Other and the complexities in the work of mourning. As Durrant notes: “[W]e... momentarily come to align ourselves with the mournful gaze of the other and to implicate ourselves in an inconsolable work of mourning” (Durrant 1999, p. 431).
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Secker and Warburg 1999). Further references to Disgrace are noted in the text as (D followed by page number).
Lurie’s relation with Melanie is definitely one filled with ambivalent desire (on both sides). This ambivalence in evident in that Lurie is having an “affair” with a student and then is signaled as a “rapist.” But it is precisely this “vacillation,” this inability for the reader at first to “decide” or pronounce ultimate judgment on desire itself (because it is so messy) that is carried throughout the book and into Lucy’s rape and its transformative aftermath. This has pedagogical implications, as I indicate later, especially in light of the idea that the materiality of suffering is to become an “element” in critical witnessing; this ambivalence makes witnessing difficult and thus painful. I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for raising this issue.
My reference to “students” here implies an inclusive category of those students whose age would be appropriate for the teaching of such a difficult book, that is, secondary school and university students. Generally speaking, however, the idea of learning about the complexity of life and our moral/philosophical choices that oppose an either/or perspective particularly in relation to the issue of suffering, can be taught beginning from an early age (see Haynes 1999; Lipman 2003; Splitter and Sharp 1995).
“Critical witnessing” is different from “testimonial listening” in that the former is theoretically grounded in critical pedagogy and focuses on interrogating trauma testimonies in ways that create openings so that students can engage in critical praxis. The latter term is used more generally to denote the engagement with listening trauma testimonies.
Boler (1999) uses the term “passive empathy” to refer “to those instances where our concern is directed to a fairly distant other, whom we cannot directly help” (p. 159). Kaplan (2005) uses the term “empty empathy” to refer to seeing fragmented images of suffering that hardly seem real (there is no context through which to organize empathic feelings for others) and aim to construct sentimental responses rather than focusing on the larger issues. Both terms warn us about the dangers of sentimentality; their difference is that Boler’s term is theoretically grounded in feminism and poststructuralist thought whereas Kaplan’s term is theorized from a psychoanalytic perspective.
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Zembylas, M. Bearing Witness to the Ethics and Politics of Suffering: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Inconsolable Mourning, and the Task of Educators. Stud Philos Educ 28, 223–237 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-008-9108-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-008-9108-0