Content area
Abstract
This thesis explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) by attending to features of the novel that resonate strongly with the ethical vision elaborated in the late works of Jacques Derrida. I argue that the autoreferential and autoimmune structures in Never Let Me Go provide oblique but powerful insights for reconsidering questions of knowledge, power, and above all, sovereignty. Ultimately I suggest that ethical readings of Ishiguro’s novel made on the basis of bioethical principles governing cloning, linguistic constructivism, or biopolitics are inadequate; instead, only with an acute sensitivity to the irreducibly opaque, the disposable, and the remainder, can one be responsive to the text without reinscribing the logic of sovereignty at the heart of the human/non-human distinction that structures existing ethical readings of the novel.