structural:expansion
Politics

Coetzee has never specified any political orientation nor overtly criticised apartheid, though he has alluded to politics in his work, especially the part that language plays in supporting the political and social structures of colonialism and nationalism. South African author Nadine Gordimer suggested that Coetzee had "a revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions", and he has been both praised for his condemnation of racism in his writing and criticised for not explicitly denouncing apartheid.

Writing about his past in the third person, Coetzee wrote in Doubling the Point:

Politically, the raznochinets can go either way. But during his student years he, this person, this subject, my subject, steers clear of the right. As a child in Worcester he has seen enough of the Afrikaner right, enough of its rant, to last him a lifetime. In fact, even before Worcester, he has perhaps seen more of cruelty and violence than should have been allowed to a child. So as a student, he moves on the fringes of the left without being part of the left. Sympathetic to the human concerns of the left, he is alienated, when the crunch comes, by its language—by all political language, in fact.

Asked about the latter part of this quote in an interview, Coetzee answered: "There is no longer a left worth speaking of, and a language of the left. The language of politics, with its new economistic bent, is even more repellent than it was 15 years ago".

In February 2016, Coetzee was one of 61 signatories to a letter to Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and immigration minister Peter Dutton condemning their government's policy of offshore detention of asylum seekers.