“Let’s howl, said the dog”: Dissent, Potentiality, and the Politics of Voice in José Saramago’s Seeing

Abstract

This article rereads José Saramago’s Seeing (2004) by foregrounding the dog whose howl frames the novel. Moving beyond human-centred interpretations of political dissent, it brings Jacques Rancière’s distribution of the sensible into dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s critique of biopolitical sovereignty. While the novel presents the dog’s invitation to howl as a possible interruption of political violence and narrative closure, critical and authorial interpretations tend to translate the animal voice back into a humanist framework. The article asks what it would mean to resist this impulse to “control the narrative” and hear the howl as a challenge to the anthropocentric limits of political and literary intelligibility.