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The main purpose of this paper is to apply Theodor W. Adorno’s non-identity thinking and negative dialectic to the major themes of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Elizabeth Costello is a dying female writer who travels around the worlds and gives lectures in the novel. Among many other issues, she accuses the deceitfulness of human subjectivity and its violence against animal others by the name of the Reason. Another question this paper examines is Coetzee-Costello’s writing ethics and how it can be used as a strategic tool or a distorting apparatus reflecting reality. This paper approaches Coetzee-Costello’s writing ethics and their rhetorical strategy through Adorno’s commitment to the formative nature of writing. Moreover, Coetzee’s critique of any kind of essentialism and attempt at illuminating different kinds of values, more immanent to the objects, are well demonstrated in Costello’s effort to embrace the (im)possibility of hearing the voices of the others. This paper, focusing on the commonality between Adorno and Coetzee-Costello writer, argues that their bleak and indifferent narrative style—that often uses the inter-contradictions to criticize the work itself—reveals the very limit of representation and proceeds toward the recognition of unknowability of others.