Human Sovereignty Eclipsed? Toward a Posthumanist Reading of the Traumatized Subject in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace DENIZ GÜNDO ˘ GA N ˙ IBRI Ş IM Department of Comparative Literature, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA. Email: deniz@wustl.edu The main aim of this article is to analyse J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) from a post- humanist perspective. By focusing on the character David Lurie, this article analyses the complex materiality of bodies and the agentic powers of nonhuman entities in coping with individual trauma, where agency is no longer considered to be the distinguishing quality unique to humans. In so doing, it highlights the interdepen- dence of the human and the nonhuman and the idea that environment is not a mere canvas onto which characters’ traumas are being reflected. On the contrary, it is a material-affective matrix which becomes a catalyst for making sense of the world in post-apartheid South Africa. At the same time, as this article argues, it decentres the sovereignty of the human subject. Introductory Remarks Queer studies scholar Jose Esteban Mu ˜ noz aptly describes ‘disidentification’ as a way of reading that ‘scrambles’ the intended meanings of a given text (Mu ˜ noz 1999, 31). The reader both explores and exposes its ossified hegemonic scope such as racialized, classed, gendered meanings and limitations (Mu ˜ noz 1999, 31–32). For Mu ˜ noz, disidentification is powerful because it transforms the encoded mean- ings of a text into the ‘raw material for representing a disempowered politics or posi- tionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture’ (Mu ˜ noz 1999, 31–32). Working in the spirit of this interventionist mode, this study primarily seeks to disidentify with the idea of centralizing and universalizing the human figure, or what Giorgio Agamben calls an ‘anthropological machine’ which altogether makes up the conceptual, material, philosophical, and political production of the human as such European Review, page 1 of 14 © 2020 Academia Europaea doi:10.1017/S106279872000071X https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S106279872000071X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 71.14.88.249, on 13 Jan 2021 at 23:02:33, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at