J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) is an odd piece of fiction. On the one hand, its sparse recounting of dramatic narrative events set in post-apartheid South Africa—such as rape, dispossession and euthanasia—lend it a power to fascinate as well as to puzzle readings. Clearly the novel asks to be read as a narrative of negative disclosure. What the narrator presumes falsely at the beginning of the novel, which has to do with his freedom to act as an autonomous and sovereign being, is an illusion. The narrative will show how and why that illusion will not withstand the tests of reality. But, on the other hand, what exactly can it be said that the narrator actually learns through the course of the novel? The text seems to proceed by way of an unrelentingly and peculiar erosion. Everything that David Lurie seemed to “know” at the beginning of the novel comes to be replaced by his inability to know anything at all at the end. Disgrace almost resembles a traditional story of pride before a fall, except that in this case the fall seems never ending, threatening in this way to deprive the fall of any meaning whatsoever. But is this actually the case here? Is Disgrace not rather the means for us to rethink, or think for the first time, outmoded conceptions of freedom, autonomy, and even knowledge? The paper examines Disgrace in the light of these questions, also making reference to the work of Jacques Derrida in order to situate its theoretical considerations.