The Ethics of Animal Excess: Violence and Bataillean Vigilance in Ian McEwan's Black Dogs

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay offers a different reading of the ethical imagination in Ian McEwan's fiction from that of human responsibility towards otherness propounded by Emmanuel Levinas. Long regarded as a natural philosophical interlocutor to McEwan, Levinas's concepts of alterity and the transcendence of the other seem to crystallize intersubjective encounters in McEwan's fiction and promote an ethical attitude of peaceable relations between human beings who do not negate the primordiality of the other's presence. I suggest certain difficulties with an unqualified adoption of a Levinasian ethical approach, centered around contradictions inherent in Levinas's qualifications of otherness which negate its radical impact on a coherent account of subjectivity. These objections will allow me to turn to an ethics of transgression and loss as set out by Georges Bataille. Bataille's ideas about excess sets up a dialectical thinking about limits and their fracture which enables an alternative reading of ethics and narrative structure in Ian McEwan's Black Dogs . I demonstrate how Bataille offers a more compelling reading of otherness and the eccentric nature of the ethical self than Levinas, and how this reading is enacted in McEwan's handling of narrative structure and metafictional technique in the novel, stringing together a powerful reimagining of responsibility and political vision in the aftermath of excessive violence.