Coetzee’s Disgrace can be read as an engagement with the post apartheid constitution
of South Africa. However, the novel does not focus on a legal text. It draws attention
to what could be called an ethics of social being or the psychic life of
constitutionalism. Disgrace thus resonates with the broader argument that a
constitution is a complex of political, social and psychic economies that are bound up
with (and in certain senses prior) to positive law. Any proper elaboration of these
themes cannot be made from within the terms of legal discourse itself, at least as
presently composed. This paper is therefore an exercise in deconstruction or, an
attempt to develop a “language that is foreign to what [a] community can already hear
or understand only too well”; a practice that will allow a cultural unconscious to speak
through the text of Coetzee’s novel. But this problematic is not simply a question of
language. An ethics of social being is also necessary. A culture must be held
responsible for the symbolic forms of the secrets that it holds. How can we think
about this strange matter? Our first task will be to engage with notions of being and
social life that have not generally been deployed in constitutional discourse. We will
then see how these terms relate to a psychoanalytic account of constitution at both a
political and a personal level. The final section of this paper will be a reading of
Disgrace
