Jacques Rancière and J. M. Coetzee, exact contemporaries, are both interested the worker’s access to aesthetic experience. In Rancière’s case, this involves looking backward to the fact that nineteenth-century workers were able to squeeze time from their working lives for art and literature. In Coetzee’s case, however, this problem of distributing aesthetic sensibility turns out to be a matter of looking forward in history, and of his own practice. How is he to write in a way that does not unfairly exempt him from work?