Metaphysical Exile

Robert Pippin presents here the first detailed interpretation of J.M. Coetzee's "Jesus" trilogy as a whole. Pippin treats the three fictions as a philosophical fable. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place. While discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin also treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of homelessness--a version that characterizes late modern life itself--and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge.

Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on modern German philosophy, a book on philosophy and literature, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge University Press, 2001); a book on modernist art, After the Beautiful (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and five books on film and philosophy. He is a past winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, a Guggenheim Fellowship, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, and is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. His latest books are Hegel's Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form (University of Chicago Press, 2020).