The Games Body-Politics Plays: a Rhetoric of Secrecy in Ian McEwan’s The Innocent

Abstract

‘I know something you don’t know’ is a mischievous, if not cruel, gnostic chant often heard on children’s playgrounds. Even children know that flaunting secrets encourages life’s most scintillating, though pernicious, game: the quest for power. Little do our children know that they are preparing for a life of diplomacy and international relations when they play such games.

We know, or should know, that every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence — if only because those who hold power and feel it slipping from their hands, be they the government or be they the governed, have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to substitute violence for it. Hannah Arendt, ‘On Violence’

Ideology pretends to be science, while the very admission of its concept leaves morality suspect. The least suspicion of ideology delivers to morality the most severe blow it has ever sustained. This suspicion probably signals the end of traditional ethics, and, in any case, overthrows the theory of duty and of value. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ideology and Idealism’