Chapter 10 - Coetzee and Wittgenstein on Play the Law

It is only because literature is probably the most appropriate means to express, without falsifying them, the indeterminacy and the complexity of moral life that it can teach us something essential in this domain. To take up Wittgenstein’s phrase, it can help us to watch and to see many more things than what ordi- nary life would allow us to watch and to see. Coetzee’s three ‘Jesus’ fictions are not realist novels, although he has not made up a new world. Here, his true South, with complex histories of colonization, is difficult to identify. Historical contingencies do not frame his ethical enquiries. At the core we find self-re- flexive linguistic questions. Here I follow Pippin (2021) and Mulhall (2022) in investigating the trilogy’s philosophical commitment, with particular attention to the way Coetzee manages to make literature a device for the human search for meaning and understanding, starting from the particular jurisdiction that it realizes in the very act of serving language.