“The Shock of being hated". VulnerabilIty, Ethics and Responsibility in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

The article analyses Disgrace as one of Coetzee’s most interesting works to dramatize the imbrications of trauma, vulnerability and responsibility in the private and public sphere. While all of his previous output offer a powerful staging of vulnerability and precarious lives, with a specic focus on aging, disability and dependency in Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year, Disgrace is probably the most forceful fictional dramatization of an embedded vulnerability, a vulnerability that affects the protagonists in several predicaments and that subsumes gender, historical and anthropologic perspectives, in so far as it hinges on vulnerability and trauma as conditions of the ethical encounter with the other, and on the bond between vulnerability and responsibility.