This paper begins with a series of observations of how J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy—The Childhood of Jesus (2013) followed by The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019)—manifests a poetics of inoperativity. It is striking how the writing and reading of each of these three novels gravitates towards study and contemplation, repeatedly privileging redemptive gestures towards the experience of language as such over the quest for truth or meaning. Placing Coetzee’s writing in conversation with Giorgio Agamben’s thinking on the act of creation, the paper asks if and how an ethics of being-together might potentially be recovered from/analogous to such a poetics of inoperativity. This exploration is prompted in equal measure by 1) an attraction to the affirmative potential inherent in predominant philosophical discourses of inoperativity, 2) a certain dissatisfaction with the opacity of their possible practical implications, and 3) a belief in the special affordances of literature in general—and of Coetzee’s writing in particular—when it comes to opening up and giving shape to thought.