Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 42, No. 4  •  Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University  •  DOI 10.2979/jmodelite.42.4.11 Finitizing Life: Between Reason and Religion in J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Novels Marc Farrant University of London, Goldsmiths College J.M. Coetzee’s Te Childhood of Jesus and Te Schooldays of Jesus typify the con- cerns of his later writings. Tese concerns are crystallized around the concept of life and the dynamic relation between a post-secular valorization of life as sacred and the risk of sacrifce inherent to any attempt to both count, or account, for life. Tis dynamic is not simply thematized. Rather, through what I am terming Coetzee’s literary thinking, the ethico-political import of ‘life’ in Coetzee’s late works is bound up with the question of their meaning as literary works. Accordingly, Coetzee’s literary thinking helps to address the interaction of life and form that is at the center of debates about afect and the body, animal and posthuman life, and the formal distinctiveness of the literary work. Keywords: J.M. Coetzee / Te Childhood and Schooldays of Jesus / fnitude / crea- turely life / late-romantic modernism INTRODUCTION Te heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. —Blaise Pascal, PENSÉES I t can be fairly said that J.M. Coetzee’s post-South African novels have puzzled critics. Poised between philosophy and literature, Coetzee’s two most recent Jesus fctions, Te Childhood of Jesus (2012) and Schooldays of Jesus (2016), appear to continue in this vein, as Yoshiki Tajiri argues: “while it is easy to read the political conditions of South Africa in the earlier novel[s] the deceptively obvious Marc Farrant (m.farrant@gold.ac.uk) recently fnished his PhD, on Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee, at the University of London, Goldsmiths College. He is a senior editor at Review 31 and his writing has appeared in Textual Practice, Te Cambridge Humanities Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and numerous other publications.