6. Age of Iron is explored with relation to secularism, the psycho-social theories of Georges Bataille, angelhood, and the poetics of Rilke.

J. M. Coetzee is widely recognised as one of the most important writers working in English. As a South African (now Australian) novelist composing his best-known works in the latter third of the twentieth century, Coetzee has understandably often been read through the lenses of post-colonial theory and post-war ethics. Yet his reception is entering a new phase bolstered by thousands of pages of new and unpublished empirical evidence housed at the J. M. Coetzee archive at The Harry Ransom Center (University of Austin, Texas). This material provokes a re-reading of Coetzee’s project even as it uncovers keys to his process of formal experimentation and compositional evolution up to and including Disgrace (1999). Following Coetzee’s false starts, his confrontation of narrative impasses, and his shifting deployment of source materials, J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel provides a new series of detailed snapshots of one of the world’s most celebrated authors.

This short chapter examines the degree to which the communal experiences of political prisoners on what Irving Goffman calls a “total institution” like South Africa’s Robben Island Prison might paradoxically exemplify the kind of community that Aristotle requires for the exercise of virtue proper: a sense of communal friendship built on trust and the virtues celebrated by Nelson Mandela: “Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others”. But at the same time, it complicates that utopian vision with the fact that such communities tend to establish their sense of identity on the exclusion of others, regarded as alien, different, or threatening, a tendency present on Robben Island. The chapter consequently opposes the Aristotelean notion of communal virtue with a very different concept of ethics derived from Levinas: in which no community may be established in opposition to another, but in which the ethical imperative is to be open to otherness, beyond to bounds of the Aristotelian polis. It argues that the prisoner’s signing their names against their favourite passage from Shakespeare, in Sonny Venkatrathnam’s copy of Shakespeare’s complete works, is an exemplum of such openness to the stranger.

Chapter 1 starts from conversation’s intimate verbal connection with verse. Conversation – a mode of social care for Victorians – inscribes not only persons but also other beings and things in figures turning together, creating a verbal way of keeping company with others that many nineteenth-century poets explored through the virtual medium of verse. Lyric written with conversation in mind is sociable, as Empson and Adorno both claimed. To create conversation in modern verse requires eliciting voice from text: both figuring voice and configuring it by prosodic means, in David Nowell Smith’s useful account, encouraging an experience of reading that expands the sense of a single, individual voice to accommodate unlike others. Conversing in verse is a way of redesigning social space, at least in a poem. The chapter turns, in its final third, to the considerable body of twentieth-century philosophical writing addressing the ethical and political importance of conversation, especially the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot as they respond to the poetry of Paul Celan.

The second chapter examines heretical re-readings of Borges by Roberto Bolaño and Marcos Peres. Bolaño’s La literatura nazi en América, 2666 and, in particular, Peres’ O Evangelho Segundo Hitler can be read as a function of Harold Bloom’s categories of the ‘anxiety of influence’ amongst poets. Once the authors successfully escape the creative bind of this anxiety, in writing about Nazism, they encounter other challenges to explore such as the dialectical relationship between friend and enemy, and the perceived bind between fascism and resistance to it. In Bolaño’s analysed works, there are two attempted strategies to overcome these binds – the first rhetorical, and the second ethical. The first is explored with reference to Judith Butler’s essay ‘Competing Universals’ from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left and the second in relation to aspects of her reading of Levinas in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence.

This chapter shows how the modern thought that has shaped the current intellectual landscape played a role in the extermination of the Jews. Very often the millennial history of Christian antisemitism is blamed for the Holocaust. It is not so often, however, that the speculative philosophical tradition, particularly in the modern period, is taken to task. This chapter examines the ways in which the modern philosophical period is characterized by a process of thinking God out of the picture. From here Martin Heidegger emerges as the culmination of modern philosophical thought. Levinas has observed, “Heideggerian philosophy precisely marks the apogee of a thought in which the finite does not refer to the infinite … in which every deficiency is but weakness and every fault committed against oneself - the outcome of a long tradition of pride, heroism, domination, and cruelty. Heideggerian ontology subordinates the relation with the other to the relation with the neuter, Being, and it thus continues to exalt the will to power, whose legitimacy the other alone can unsettle, troubling good conscience.” This chapter demonstrates the truth of Levinas’s statement.

In Chapter 5, I extend the social and moral account of scientific work with a similarly social and moral account of scientific justification. My argument is that scientific justification should consist, not simply in the construction of evidentiary rationales, but in the refinement of the whole moral architecture of science. I insist that the “core competency” in training and oversight for psychological inquiry should be the justification – that is, the making just, right, and true – of research practices.Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Helen Longino (among others), I argue that two forms of practice essential to such justification are an open disciplinary politics, or an institutionalized openness to uncertainty, critique, and correction by the widest possible range of qualified contributors, and a committed research praxis, or an approach to research where everyday scientific practices are interrogated and refined to become consistent with explicit values.

The entering into a gathering that discloses time and everything temporal and historical occurs through a submitting to determination by history rather than by turning away from it towards supposedly eternal ideals. Dante’s poem, even in its affirmation of theological transcendence, is remarkable for its showing of language in its emergence in and from historical realities. Dante’s thematization and dramatization of language and its component letters lends itself to suggesting a probe that scrutinizes the sense of language as such. Language speaks to him in the Heaven of Jove directly; it becomes not just an instrument or means, but also in itself immediately a revelation. Heidegger’s philosophy, similarly, culminated in an attunement to what language itself says, for “language speaks” (“die Sprache spricht”). It speaks in the connectedness and disclosedness of things in a world, their lying-together-before us, which is not produced by human activity or techné, but is discovered as unaccountably given. Hence also the astoundingly organized order of the letters that Dante sees spontaneously sparking – as if contingently – into recognizable and even portentous shapes. Language, deeply considered, is the imperative presence of the Other facing us with its ethical demands. The imperative here is justice – the ethical imperative vis-à-vis the Other. Like Levinas, Dante represents language – when it is displayed to him directly as divine revelation in the heaven of Jove – as a revelation of Justice. Levinas’s ethical injunction is already revealed to him in the form of a peremptory imperative: “Love justice.”

Reversing the familiar nostrum that religion – with its omniscient omnipotent onto-theological God - is the buttress of ethics and of all things of value; Levinas follows Kant’s enlightened claim that ethics is the real truth of religion, that the imperatives of kindness (“love thy neighbor”) and of social justice are religions highest teaching, the very essence of holiness, religion for adults. The Akedah is thus a test as much of God’s justice as of Abraham’s faith. Rituals, holidays, traditions, halakha, sacred texts, Talmudic learning, and so on, retain their worth as service to kindness and justice, else, taken sacramentally, they devolve into superstition and fanaticism.

Chapter 4 draws on a series of interrelated ideas including those of Emmanuel Levinas and phenomenological and Buddhist thought concerning ethics as a non-violent relation to the Other; a relation that is marked by one’s response to an other’s singularity. The aim is to outline a key element for creating institutional change that recognises this singularity, appreciating the complexity involved in living with others and the challenges this places on educational institutions. In particular, it argues that changes in educational institutions must encompass both the people who exist in them and the practices that constitute these spaces as institutions in the first place. In this light, while institutions are governed by rules, regulations, policies, legal frameworks and organisational structures, they institute themselves as institutions through cultures, which are composed of relationships, practices, experiences and shared imaginaries. These practices are not only cognitive or intellectual but also embodied, sensate and phenomenal. Thus in order for institutional change to have any real purchase, it is necessary that the transformation of cultures qua embodied practices, and the imaginaries that support them become the focus of our efforts, towards promoting new forms of relationality and new modes of sensibility in pluralistic contexts.

In chapter V, on suffering,I introduce Jewish and Christian post-Shoah reflections on sufferingand develop a profound critique of the Christian notion of redemptive suffering.