J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism (2013) engages in a wider debate about the form and function of cosmopolitan theory, both as it pertains to the broad question of feeling and to the specific ways scholars of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism position specific strands of feeling, such as sympathy, in relation to ethical engagement. This debate contains a second but equally vital component: the tension Katherine Hallemeier identifies between rational cosmopolitanism, which privileges sympathy as a mode of ethical engagement, and affective cosmopolitanism, which urges a more embodied relationship between reader and text. Hallemeier chooses to focus solely on Coetzee’s later oeuvre, beginning with the second of his semi-fictional memoirs Boyhood (1997) and encompassing his postapartheid output, including Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005), and Diary of a Bad Year (2007). For Hallemeier, Coetzee’s later work challenges the basis for using feeling as the key to ethical engagement in cosmopolitan theory, by way of the “particularity and contingency of transnational and intercultural feelings” (15). Essentially, Hallemeier sets out to achieve two goals: to recuperate Coetzee from scholars who too readily read cosmopolitan sympathy in his work and to critique the preeminence of sympathy as a mode of understanding in the field of cosmopolitan theory.

In linking cosmopolitan theory to the study of Coetzee’s work, Hallemeier asks the reader to consider the question of how to integrate cosmopolitan philosophy with true attentiveness to otherness. The Coetzee works selected here are aptly chosen, each one in explicit dialogue with the question of otherness. In Disgrace, David’s ongoing struggle to understand the other refracts directly through the racial lens of the trauma of rape: his daughter Lucy is raped by three black South African men, and David himself, a white man, rapes Melanie, a student in one of his classes, though he minimizes and downplays the violence of his act (in his capacity as the novel’s only focalizer). Reading Coetzee’s work, for Hallemeier, involves recalibrating otherness to undermine the privilege of both forms of cosmopolitanism (rational or affective). Instead of making Coetzee’s work into an allegory for Derridian or Levinasian ethics, in the vein of critics such as Michael Marais and Derek Attridge, Hallemeier asks us to consider how Coetzee’s writing reimagines cosmopolitanism to transcend binaries of reason and affect. According to Hallemeier, Coetzee’s work suggests that “rational cosmopolitan sympathy can be characterized as a paranoid habit of feeling—which can be translated into, or learned as, a mode of reading—that reinforces faith in one’s own critical powers and engenders isolation” (47). No longer object but subject, the target of this rational inquiry—Lucy Lurie in Disgrace is a particularly strong example—returns the “critical gaze” (47), evoking a sense of Bhabha’s anticolonial mimicry by rendering herself subject, not object, while challenging the primacy of rational cosmopolitan objectivity and distance. Hallemeier sees Coetzee’s others as subjects who reflect the gaze of the rational cosmopolitan, mobilizing shame as an ethical feeling, but turned against the scrutinizing masculine subject.

Conversely, the “implicit threat of visceral feelings of ‘humanity’ found in affective cosmopolitan theory” (81) does not escape critical scrutiny. Hallemeier locates a productive tension between Elizabeth Costello, the fictional author of Coetzee’s creation, and John Coetzee, the fictionalized author of Coetzee’s memoirs, a tension that allows Elizabeth Costello to dramatize the moments when affective sympathy becomes little more than an instinctual and violent reaffirmation of the human (with deadly consequences for the nonhuman other). Here, Hallemeier stages one of the book’s most persuasive critiques, arguing that “Coetzee’s strangely disembodied representation of Costello—wherein her body is represented primarily as that which is read by others—suggests an awareness that the feminine body is culturally constructed in terms of ‘outpourings’ and ‘vulnerability’ that are deemed inherently shameful” (91). The nuance and sensitivity of Hallemeier’s argument give us the conceptual canvas, as it were, on which to situate J. M. Coetzee reading fiction aloud, in the persona of Elizabeth Costello, as an uncomfortable challenge to any critical urge to project embodied sympathy onto other bodies.

The elegance of Hallemeier’s literary analysis, however, highlights a certain problem with focus in the book. Because each chapter begins with a lengthy, sometimes repetitive summary of the debates in cosmopolitan theory. Hallemeier’s examination of Coetzee’s oeuvre sometimes feels like an afterthought within the larger framework of cosmopolitan theory. As well, the rationale for confining the discussion to Coetzee’s later work is perhaps not wholly convincing, given the rich potential for comparative analysis that would inhere in a contrast between (for example) the disembodied Elizabeth Costello and the very embodied Elizabeth Curren of Age of Iron (1990). Lastly, Hallemeier’s prose, though well reasoned, is too frequently opaque, burdened by relentless passive-voice construction and cumbrous syntax that obscure, rather than showcase, the strength of her critical interventions. Nonetheless, J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism is of substantial merit, as much for its sophisticated engagement with critical debates in cosmopolitan theory as for its extension of and contribution to Coetzee scholarship.