Recognition and receptivity : forms of normative response in the lives of the animals we are

Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee’s tragic fable, The Lives of Animals, is a difficult and troubled person. The difficulties that trouble her create trouble of one kind or another for all those who encounter her, as characters and as readers. A celebrated Australian writer of literary fiction, invited to a fictitious American college to deliver a pair of public lectures, one on “The Philosophers and the Animals,” the other on “The Poets and the Animals,” Costello immediately generates unsettling confusion about what it is that she wants to say, and what she wants to do in saying it. It is clear that there is something she wants from us, that she’s calling for a certain kind of response, but it is not altogether clear what, exactly, that something is. Indeed, as we will see, both the characters in the book and readers of the book seem unable to recognize who Costello is, unable to hear exactly what she is saying. If there is a failure of recognition here, what kind of recognition failure is it? And what would success mean in this case, the case of Elizabeth Costello? Can political theories of recognition offer any illumination? After all, much of what has driven recent developments in political theories of recognition has been the attempt to diagnose recognition failures as particularly salient forms of injustice - be they distributive or cultural in form - that plague the deeply diverse, late-capitalist societies in which we live. If we wish to bring literary theory into dialogue with political theory around questions of recognition, as Rita Felski has proposed, perhaps the case of Elizabeth Costello is a particularly good, because particularly difficult, place to start.