Trolling the Global Citizen: The Deconstructive Ethics of the Digital Subject

Abstract

This article compares two contemporary rhetorical figures: the ‘internet troll’, a name invoked to represent a variety of offensive and disturbing online discourse, and the narrator and main character of avant-garde English author Tom McCarthy’s debut novel Remainder (2005). By thinking about how these two figures relate to Levinas’ brand of deconstructive ethics, I attempt to develop an idea about how global communication technology (which is, including literature, an essential ingredient, inspiration and sometimes ‘form’ of the ‘global citizen’) bends our perception and performance of what is ethical. Both the troll and McCarthy’s narrator represent the necessity of understanding in a world caged in technical language describing itself. And at the same time, each figure will be shown to represent the motivating force of a global society that strives for total understanding: an absence of understanding, or in Levinasian terms, the face of the other.