Queering the NonHuman by Myra J. Hird Noreen Giffney

Author:Myra J. Hird, Noreen Giffney [Myra J. Hird, Noreen Giffney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781409491408
Google: gMehAgAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2012-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

The Face of a Dog: Levinasian Ethics and Human/Dog Co-evolution

Karalyn Kendall

‘I am thinking of Bobby’, Emmanuel Levinas explains in ‘The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights’ (151). This short essay, first published in 1975, stands out among Levinas’s work as his only explicit attempt to address the ethical question posed by nonhuman animals. It has thus elicited commentary from a number of critics interested in ‘the animal question’ (Atterton 2004, 51). But thinking of Bobby has proven to be no easy task. Peter Atterton observes that, as a ‘hybrid mixture of biblical criticism, whimsy, autobiography, and philosophy, written with humor and pathos, [the essay] leaves the reader amused and bemused, ultimately unsure how to interpret it in the context of Levinas’s work as a whole’ (51). Indeed, it is difficult to determine the nature and degree of Bobby’s significance even in the context of this essay, let alone in relation to Levinas’s entire philosophy. Despite its title, the text avoids sustained discussion of Bobby. Levinas names the dog in question in only the first and penultimate paragraphs, and it is not until the second half that he describes his imprisonment in the Nazi prisoner-of-war camp where he and Bobby met. The essay’s focus shifts rather abruptly from the banal cruelties of modern meat consumption to the dogs who ‘will not growl!’ in Exodus 11:7 to the dehumanising experience of Camp 1492 and, finally, to Bobby (152). ‘And then’, Levinas recalls as the essay nears its conclusion:

… about halfway through our long captivity, for a few short weeks, before the sentinels chased him away, a wandering dog entered our lives. One day he came to meet this rabble as we returned under guard from work. He survived in some wild patch in the region of the camp. But we called him Bobby, an exotic name, as one does with a cherished dog. He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men. [153]

Perhaps the brevity of his appearance is befitting the wandering dog who, though he appears only to bookend this short essay, seems to haunt Levinasian humanism. My chapter will likely engage in some meandering of its own, winding its way to an exploration of how and why Bobby is uniquely equipped to queer Levinas’s concept of the human.

Several critics have argued that Bobby presents an especially potent challenge to Levinasian humanism, which reserves full subjectivity for the human alone. David Clark notes that ‘Bobby doubles for the human, yet he is not human, and this indeterminacy about his ontological and moral status at once triggers Levinas’s most dogmatic claims about nonhuman life and tests the limits of their coherence’ (1997, 166). In particular, the dog seems to trouble the ontological boundary between the humanist subject and the nonhuman animal, as evidenced by Levinas’s provocative assertion in the essay’s final paragraph that Bobby ‘was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives’ (153).

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