This study aims to reimagine J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man and The Childhood of Jesus in terms of cosmopolitan concepts of sympathy, shame and limits. In this regard, an eclectic theoretical approach in this qualitative library research is adopted. The explication of Coetzee’s distinct cosmopolitanism is approached in terms of emphasis on law and ethics in Coetzee’s philosophy of living and extra-textual effects of such philosophy on the reading process, author, and reader. As a narrative miniature of a global project, Coetzee’s novels promote a distinctive individualism which reveals the inadequacy of sympathy and shame as contributive to cosmopolitan philosophy of humanity. Not thoroughly attended to in previous critical approaches to Coetzee’s fiction is significance of the initial traumatic event in descent of the subject to the other’s stance and in facilitation of the project of feeling. The subject’s shame in the face of other’s impassivity, extra-textual denial of agency and authority, and ambivalent contribution of feeling to reason challenge the basic premises of cosmopolitanism. One may conclude that the two novels by Coetzee promote a faithbased association between the cosmopolitan subject and the other where the subject experiences otherness via difference. The outstanding expanse of Coetzee’s literary output suggests the need for further studies on problematics of subject-other association, stasis or evolution in such association and role of socio-politics of the imaginative hosting community in this essential transition.
