Dogging the Subject: Samuel Beckett, Emmanuel Levinas, and Posthumanist Ethics

Abstract

This article examines the figure of the dog in Samuel Beckett’s fiction and Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, demonstrating dogs’ special capacity to confound humanist subject formation. Scholars have noted how Beckett’s depictions of animal suffering collapse the Cartesian distinction between the human as rational animal and the animal as living machine, yet for Beckett and Levinas, the dog does not merely represent “the animal” in this generic sense. Analysis of human/dog encounters in Beckett’s Watt and Molloy and Levinas’s essay “The Name of a Dog” reveals dogs’ paradoxical position within what Derrida deems the sacrificial structure of Western humanism. As animals, dogs define through negation the humanist subject, yet their participation in systematized violence against other animals complicates humanism’s ethical quandary vis-à-vis “the animal.” Through the dog, Beckett and (more reluctantly) Levinas expose the need for a posthumanist ethics that abandons the myth of rational autonomy and responds to animals in their radical alterity and heterogeneity.

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