DIERENLEVEN

The Lives of Animals (1999) is fictocritical novel about animal rights by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, and one of the key references for the exhibition The Lives of Animals (08 June – 22 September 2024) at M HKA, Antwerp. The text is an un­usual and polemic form of philosophical dialogue, in which two lectures given by the main fictional character, the literary scholar Elisabeth Costello, are interwo­ven with the narrative plot. J.M. Coetzee presents various viewpoints on the matter of animals. Often, these are per­spectives that are extremely polarised, which gives the novel an exceptionally contemporary character, reflecting the dynamics of the public debate on the subject of animals. The novel's protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, discusses the foundations of human morality, referring to the ethics of compassion and ‘poetic invention’ (the ability to imagine oneself as someone else). 

“Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object, the ‘another’, as we see at once when we think of the object not as a bat (‘Can I share the being of a bat?’) but as another human being. There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (...) and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.” ― J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 34-35