The Ethics and Politics of Love and Freedom in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron

Age of Iron is the only novel in J. M. Coetzee’s oeuvre that makes explicit references to the context of late-apartheid South Africa. Strictly speaking, the novel is about the challenges of overcoming the iron logic of the age, i.e. the very rationality of the apartheid regime. Thus, the novel has important implications not only for the context within which it is situated but also for the struggles that have since shaped South Africa. This paper attempts to provide a dialectical alternative to poststructuralist and Levinasian readings of the novel. It examines the ethics and politics of love and freedom in the novel and follows the itinerary of these concepts to the question of forgiveness. Specifically, I argue that Mrs. Curren, the narrator and heroine of the story, can be understood through the lens of the Hegelian Unhappy Consciousness, that is, as the “dual” consciousness of mastery and slavery. As such, she is obsessed with questions of freedom (mastery and slavery), forgiveness, love, evil, and salvation, among others. Through the mediation of its Unhappy Consciousness, in fact, the novel renders possible the transition from the nightmarish real of late-apartheid to a real figuration of a different future.