Reading Through the Gates: Structure, Desire and Subjectivity in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello

Abstract

In 1793 Friedrich Schiller, a German poet and playwright, wrote a series of
letters to his Danish benefactor, Prince Friedrich Christian of Schleswig-
Holstein-Augustenburg, on the subject of aesthetic education (2). These
rather beguiling letters attempt to demonstrate the transition of humanity, in
abstract terms, from a condition of pure, unmediated sensuality to a state of
ordered freedom.1 The aesthetic is the medium through which this transition
is supposed to occur and its work is characterised thus:

In order to describe a shape in space, we must set limits to infinite
space; in order to represent to ourselves an alteration in time, we
must divide the totality of time. So we arrive at reality only
through limitation, at the positive, or actually established, only
through negation or exclusion, at determination only through the
surrender of our free determinability.
(On the Aesthetic Education of Man 91)