J. M. Coetzee and nonhuman cosmopolitanism

pp. 123-152

in: Katherine Hallemeier, J. M. Coetzee and the limits of cosmopolitanism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

In the course of outlining current theories of cosmopolitan sympathy and cosmopolitan shame, I have highlighted how the reading of literature has been positioned as that which potentially engenders or exhibits "human" or "humane" feeling. Within rational cosmopolitanism, reading is the purview of the critical reader, whose sympathy for, or shame before, others and the otherness of the text is subjected to the seemingly "reasonable" cosmopolitan project of furthering human equality. Within affective cosmopolitanism, reading is the purview of the unself-conscious reader, whose sympathy or shame allegedly signals a markedly humane openness to, and vulnerability to, difference. While models of cosmopolitan reading premised on sympathy assume the transparency of others, models of cosmopolitan reading premised on shame foreground their ongoing opacity. Reading is alternately cosmopolitan in its potential to engender the experience of being, or becoming like, the other, or in its potential to engender the recognition of the other's significant difference. My discussion has aimed to tease out the problematic idealization of both feeling and the "human" that tends to underlie these extant theories of cosmopolitan reading and, by extension, to suggest that the habits of feeling propounded by such theories may be markedly uncosmopolitan in their effects.