Coetzee and Eros

In Chapter 7, Eileen John uses Coetzee’s exploration of sexual desire to pose questions about the normative claims of moral philosophy. She argues that Coetzee’s fiction complicates Thomas Nagel’s conception of altruism by its insistence that desire must form part of any account of apparently moral motivation, of how we are moved by the suffering of others, and moved more broadly by the good. Coetzee responds in complex ways to Plato’s model of eros, granting its transformative power, while portraying it as too deeply interwoven with aggressive and self-absorbed drives to constitute an unequivocal path to the purely ‘good’ action. Coetzee’s treatment of the self relating to itself further engages with Nagel’s and Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the moral significance of solipsism. John argues that Coetzee’s fiction explores the limits of moral philosophy, and attunes readers to the elements of risk within moral life.