Beyond Justice: Reading Coetzee’s ‘Disgrace’

JM Coetzee’s critically acclaimed novel Disgrace (Penguin 1999) explores, among other themes, the relationship between law and justice. This compelling work is focalised through its protagonist David Lurie, a white university professor in South Africa. Its plot centres around two incidents of rape. Here I focus on the first of these incidents to deconstruct the ideas of justice through a central event in the novel: the trial of David Lurie by an official enquiry committee constituted by the university.

Two ideas of justice

In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, where the story is set, there are two prevalent frameworks of justice that inform the novel. The first is represented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the second, by the liberal, rational ‘rule of law’ framework embodied in the South African Constitution.

The TRC was set up by the South African government in 1995 as a way of reframing race relations after apartheid through a restorative framework of justice, premised on reorienting perpetrators towards society and restoring their humanity. Rather than employing a punitive approach, this model of justice relies on acknowledgement of guilt—assumed to reflect the pure interiority of the person who articulates it—as facilitating transformative change. Perpetrators, upon a serious admonishing of guilt, are to be given amnesty.

The second framework of justice is represented by the South African Constitution, which enshrines a classical set of values such as supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law as founding values of the new nation. It adopts a punitive idea of justice, rooted in Enlightenment thought, which believes in the primacy of the individual and his rationality. Within this frame, the law is necessary for the rational self-interested citizen to be able to find a way to exist with the ‘other’ through this civilisational mechanism. Law exists to protect individual liberty in the first instance, and a breach of liberty must be compensated by justice. Punishment is therefore justified and necessary.

The TRC was set up by the government, and in a definitional sense is ‘legal’. However, the underlying principles governing these two modes of justice are different. These two antagonistic frameworks of justice represent a tension within the book. Both are disrupted in the course of David Lurie’s trial under the university administration.

The trial

Lurie approaches the university’s official enquiry committee without nervousness, guilt or visible signs of remorse. He is confident and self-assured. The first charge against him, made by a student, Melanie, concerns sexual assault. A second charge, made by the Registrar, concerns an instance of falsification of academic records.

The exact details and nature of the charges beyond their titles are unknown to the reader, as Lurie—through whose eyes we see the story unfold—refuses to read them during the trial. Nor do we have access to Melanie’s point of view, or her interaction with the enquiry committee. Lurie refuses. Instead, he immediately pleads guilty to both charges.

The role of the committee can be summarised in the words of Manas Mathabane, who occupies its chair. ‘I think we had better restrict ourself to the legal sense’ (48), Mathbane says while responding to Lurie’s charge that he had philosophical reservations regarding the committee’s constitution. The content of this philosophical question, and therefore Lurie’s philosophical defence, are left beyond the scope of the story world, and conveyed to us only through Lurie’s inner monologue. He considers himself a subject of Eros.^[1]

Lurie’s approach before the committee is one of removed rationality. He pleads guilty to charges he has not read. The limits of the legal machinery are captured in this plea which fails to produce any change or real effect on Lurie. The committee takes a sympathetic tone, seeking to help Lurie navigate ‘the nightmare’ he is going through. Ironically, it is Lurie who points out a gap:

‘In this chorus of goodwill,’ he says, ‘I hear no female voice.’ (52)

The women members of the committee point out the problem with Lurie’s plea. The first to interject, Faroodia Rassool states;

We are again going round in circles, Mr Chair. Yes, he says, he is guilty; but when we try to get specificity, all of a sudden it is not abuse of a young woman he is confessing to, just an impulse he could not resist, with no mention of the pain he has caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which this is part. That is why I say it is futile to go on debating with Professor Lurie. We must take his plea at face value and recommend accordingly (53).

Rasool’s protests and objections leave Lurie unmoved. In asserting his position as a rational being, he points out that the committee asked him for a confession, not a response. His desire to ‘stick to the facts’ and respond only as necessary points to the limits of liberal rational frameworks in producing self-transformation in the course of fulfilling the obligations of the law.

A more sympathetic committee member, Desmond Swarts, tries to convince the others to treat Lurie with the familiarity of a colleague. Others urge him to co-operate with the process in order to expedite it. Towards the end of the trial, Lurie is given a statement of an admission of guilt. If he signs it, his punishment would be minimal. To this he replies,

I told you what I thought. I won’t do it. I appeared before an officially constituted tribunal, before a branch of the law. Before that secular tribunal I pleaded guilty, a secular plea. That plea should suffice. Repentance is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse (58).

The Failure of Justice

The committee’s approach to dispensing justice as law, or to ensuring justice through its enforcement, echoes the liberal rationality embedded in the South African Constitution. The committee performs what is required of it within the scope of the legal process. The objections raised by some committee members point to the failure of the law in capturing the interiority of David Lurie. While Lurie may have fulfilled his legal duties, there is no acknowledgment or outcome possible if he refuses to read the charges. There is nothing ‘illegal’ about Lurie’s position and refusal to read the charges either.

There is a difference between pleading guilty and admitting guilt. The first is a legal obligation, the second, more personal. While the law stops at requiring a plea, the TRC requires admission of guilt. Lurie fulfils the legal obligation, but refuses repentance. The logic of the TRC is implicated here, though less apparently than the critique of liberal rationality. The TRC focuses on dialogue and therefore privileges speech acts, such as verbal declarations of guilt or complicity.^[2]

Critiques of the TRC argue that this framework sacrifices justice for reconciliation. According to Mamdani,^[3] the TRC played a role in ‘dehistoricizing and decontextualising’ apartheid. Its functioning and philosophy placed an emphasis on an individual as the bearer of injustice through action, rather than assessing apartheid’s roots in written law. Apartheid is not understood as systematically abusive social engineering under this framework, but, for Mamdani, refocuses responsibility onto the individual actor. Mamdani also points out the strong sense of theological messianism that underpins the idea of forgiveness and restoration in the TRC.

Narratively, the novel denies access to David’s inner reflections, foreclosing the possibility of ascertaining the sincerity of his guilt. David’s declaration of guilt during the trial remains a performance.

Reading Disgrace through Derrida

The emphasis on spoken admission of guilt is significant in constructing the metaphysical opposition between the two frameworks of justice underlying the story world. Jacques Derrida alerts us to how the privileging of speech is rooted in a logocentric assumption—that speech is closer to the core of the Self and therefore more authentic. The TRC’s emphasis on remorse and repentance, Rasool’s insistence that Lurie clearly state the charges levelled against him, all point to this role of speech in lending a fullness to Lurie’s acknowledgement of guilt. The novel displaces this logocentrism by denying us complete access to Lurie’s Self.

In so doing, the novel unsettles the idea of justice underlying the TRC and of liberal rationality, focusing instead on whether such mechanisms of justice can reach the inner personhood. This raises the larger question around the limits of frameworks of justice: if the goal of justice is to produce inner, transformative change to prevent the occurrence of wrongdoing, can the frameworks we have achieve this?

Lurie’s concern for a dog represents a significant development towards the end in the novel. Despite the racial implications of a white man reclaiming his ability for care through a dog,^[4] and Lurie’s unchanging inner monologue, the reader is left asking if the possibility for compassion and care emerges through something that lies beyond the frameworks of justice the novel deals with. In the residue from the failure of both models of justice, the end of the novel seems to hold a trace of transformative potential through the reclaiming of humanity and care.

Acknowledgements

This piece is a coming together of things I have learnt in two classrooms, from my teacher, Ananya Parikh, and from my students in the ‘Language and Power’ elective.

Notes

^[1] ‘Eros’ was a common theme for the Romantics. Lurie sees himself as Byron through the novel.

^[2] In another event in the book, Lurie apologises to the family of Melanie. Interestingly, he apologises mainly to her father and does not apologise to her. If Lurie’s apology to the family was sincere, would this offer a redemption arc for Lurie? Moreover, under the logic of the TRC, would this mean Lurie should be forgiven or given amnesty?

^[3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566444?seq=1

^[4] Dogs are seen as representing the police and liking dogs is considered something white people do in post-apartheid South Africa.

About the Author

Ishika Saxena is Guest Faculty of Political Science at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Prior to this, she was an Academic Fellow at NLSIU during 2022-24. Her areas of interest relate to political thought and theory, public policy, critical theory, literature and aesthetics, philosophy, and ethics.