Giving Him Up: The Ethics of Renunciation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Abstract

Critics of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace have long read its ending through the vocabularies of shame, grace, and redemption. This article argues that the novel systematically dismantles the social preconditions of redemption itself. On Lucy Lurie’s farm—a space that answers closely to Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception”—both of redemption’s ordinary channels fail: the university hearing’s demand for performative confession collapses because no authority remains capable of granting absolution, and Lucy’s refusal of legal recourse confirms that the law’s protection has been withdrawn. What remains for the degraded subject? Drawing on Georges Bataille’s economy of expenditure and Frances Restuccia’s reading of the “unsavable”, the article names the ethical stance that emerges from this impasse an ethics of renunciation: a clear-eyed acknowledgment that redemption is impossible, joined to a re-anchoring of one’s relation to the vulnerability of the other. David Lurie’s ritualized labour at the animal clinic, and his final gesture of “giving up” the crippled dog, enact this ethic—not as despair or quietism, but as the only honest form of ethical life available to bare life.