The Point of View of the Animal: An Ontology and Ethics of Alterity in Emma Geen’s The Many Selves of Katherine North

This article discusses how Emma Geen’s The Many Selves of Katherine North (2016), a contemporary work of science fiction, represents the construction of human and animal consciousness and selfhood, and the ways in which it adapts and subverts phenomenological principles (Levinas) in order to create the conditions for an ethics of alterity which includes the animal. In this context, this essay considers the ideas of language and communication presented in the work, as well as the limitations and the (mis)uses of the technology described. This article furthermore examines the manner in which Geen’s novel promotes the disruption of the human versus animal apparatus (Agamben) and, lastly, it considers the concept of subjectivity defined in the novel and how it allows for a new kind of human-animal relationship to be conceived.