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Posthuman Ethics and the Becoming Animal of Emmanuel Levinas

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 55; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14735784.2013.848083

1473-5784

Mary Bunch,

Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

AbstractThis essay considers Levinas' face-to-face ethical relation together with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of ‘becoming animal’ as a response to the radical dehumanisation involved in biopolitics. Framing his analysis in terms of an archaic law banning wrongdoers as wolves, Giorgio Agamben shows that biopolitics strips humans of subjectivity and exposes them to political power. Levinas' answer to radical dehumanisation is an ethical humanism of the other, but his ethical program is barred from politics. Moreover, he writes that in his own experience of dehumanisation, the only ethical being he encountered was Bobby, the camp dog. It seems biopolitics calls for an ethical politics that we might possess as bare life, outside of the autonomous, individualising conditions of the humanist subject. To this aim, I apply Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming animal as a devise to transport Levinas' ethics of alterity to the political realm. Notes1The series that follows Homo Sacer expands Agamben's analysis of the sovereign state of exception (2005), the ethics of testimony and the muselmann as a limit-figure of the human (1999) and an elaboration of homo sacer in the figure of the refugee (2000).2To be clear, ‘bare life’ is not synonymous with natural life, but is, rather, produced when natural life is politicised through its very exclusion from politics.Additional informationMary Bunch is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She completed her dissertation ‘Outlawry and the Experience of the (Im)possible: Deconstructing Biopolitics’ at Western University's Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism (2011). Her research interests include feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, especially sexual minority cultures and activism, disability theory, and biopolitics.