BOBBY BETWEEN DELEUZE AND LEVINAS, OR ETHICS BECOMING-ANIMAL

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas's cryptic but heartfelt essay “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights” has perplexed critics seeking to integrate it within his humanist philosophy. While most critics focus on Levinas's anthropocentric limitations, this paper proposes a reading of Levinas's encounter with a dog, Bobby, as a moment of becoming-animal. Reading “The Name of a Dog” through Deleuze and Guattari's concept generates a complex set of questions for assessing the continuing importance of Levinasian ethics and the current state of animal studies as it confronts biopolitical violence.

Keywords:

• Levinas
• Deleuze and Guattari
• Agamben
• ethics
• biopolitics

Notes

I am grateful to Elizabeth Grosz, Daniel Sharp, Stephanie Jenkins, Ghosty, and Angelaki's anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Levinas, Totality and Infinity 47–48.

Idem, “Paradox of Morality” 169.

Ibid. 171.

Idem, Totality and Infinity 62.

Idem, “Paradox of Morality” 174.

Ibid. 172.

Idem, “The Name of a Dog” 48.

Ibid. 49.

Derrida 114.

Ibid. 115.

Ibid. 114.

Clark 70.

See also Plant.

Derrida 115.

Calarco 116.

Levinas, “The Name of a Dog” 49.

Calarco 116.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 237.

Levinas, “Name of a Dog” 48.

Uexküll 42.

Ibid. 43.

Ibid. 50–51.

Ibid. 200.

Ibid. 135.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 254.

Ibid. 257.

Levinas, Totality and Infinity 42.

Ibid. 303.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 176.

Ibid. 179; the plateau on faciality contains one of the more extended discussions of race in Deleuze and Guattari's work. They write:

If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first divergence-types, are racial […] They must be Christianized, in other words, facialized […] Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face […] (Deleuze and Guattari 178)

Future research on the ethics/ethology nexus in Deleuze and Guattari's work might examine their recasting of racism as integrative, rather than about exteriority.

Levinas, Totality and Infinity 214.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 181.

Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 17.

Levinas, “Paradox of Morality” 171–72.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 171.

Ibid. 188.

Agamben, The Open 79.

Sax 83.

Stephanitz qtd in Sax 84.

Karalyn Kendall has also invoked the work of Boria Sax in an engagement with Levinasian ethics. I came to Sax's work independently, but it is worth noting Kendall's brief mention of Sax because she focuses on how Levinas posits dogs as accomplices to excessive human violence, to wit the desire to consume flesh (see Kendall).

Agamben, Homo Sacer 6.

Ibid. 1.

Ibid. 88.

Idem, The Open 80.

Braun and McCarthy 804.

See Belcher et al.

Agamben, The Open 91.

Ibid. 92.

Derrida 31.

Laclau 22.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 171.

Ibid. 23.

Ibid. 13.

Ibid. 12.

Thanks to an anonymous reviewer at Angelaki for clarifying this point.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 238.

Ibid. 239.

Ibid.

Ibid. 240–41.

Ibid. 241.

One possible name for this idea is affect. Deleuze and Guattari write: “For the affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it real” (240). The three-fold typology of animals is an interesting way to think about the stakes of affect theory between psychoanalysis, political theory, and queer theory – while keeping in mind, as Deleuze and Guattari warn, that any object of analysis always implicates all three.

Ibid. 243.

Ibid. 247.

Ibid. 244.

Levinas, “Name of a Dog” 49.

On the complex relationship between landscapes and sovereign power, particularly as it resonates with the work of Deleuze, see Bonta.

Sax 86.

Interestingly, haecceity is first mentioned in the section entitled “Memories of a Theologian” which certainly helps us understand Levinas's resistance to the kind of reading performed here. “Theology is very strict on the following point: there are no werewolves, human beings cannot become animals […] because there is no transformation of essential forms” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 252). Deleuze and Guattari are willing to concede this point, in a sense, since they concern themselves only with the “demonic reality of the becoming-animal of the human being” (253).

Ibid. 260.

Ibid. 262.

For instance, Alain Badiou's problematic reading of Deleuzian ontology in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 273.

Ibid. 164.

Levinas, “Name of a Dog” 49.

Ibid.

Levinas, “Paradox of Morality” 177.

Ibid. 176.

Kant 15–16.

Thanks to Liz Grosz for pointing out the connection to Bergson.

Bergson, The Creative Mind 190.

Ibid. 164.

Idem, Time and Free Will 240.

Idem, Two Sources 38–39.

Ibid. 38.

Lawlor 89.

Ibid. 79.

Massumi 35.

Bergson, Two Sources 58.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 264.

Ibid.

Morris 24.

Lawlor xi.

Clark 70; Calarco 132.

Levinas, “Name of a Dog” 48.

Ibid.

Protevi 174.

See Larson and Nethery.

Foucault 157.