A forma é uma expressão de conteúdo: John Coetzee contra o pensamento ético de substituição

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating how one of Martha Nussbaum’s central claims in Love’s Knowledge fits one specific work of contemporary literature. Nussbaum’s claim is that style or form of writing are not redundant in conveying meaning in general and ethical thought specifi cally, both in philosophical and in literary texts. Through a deep analysis of John Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, the present paper ends up showing how the formal construction of Coetzee’s (literary) text performs two interrelated tasks. On the one hand the paper displays the question of whether it is possible for a work of literature to convey ethical thought without slipping into some form of Ersatz ethical thought; on the other hand it defends the idea that it is through that very questioning that Coetzee found an unusual way of conveying genuine ethical thought, thus confirming Nussbaum’s claim that the form of writing is by no means redundant in conveying ethical content.
Keywords: Ethical-thought; style of writing; Ersatz ethical thought.