Eco-Deconstruction

Derrida and Environmental Philosophy

Philippe Lynes, David Wood, Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes, David Wood

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823279524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Eco-Deconstruction marks a new approach to the degradation of the natural environment, including habitat loss, species extinction, and climate change. While the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), with its relentless interrogation of the anthropocentric metaphysics of presence, has already proven highly influential in posthumanism and animal studies, the present volume, drawing on published and unpublished work by Derrida and others, builds on these insights to address the most pressing environmental issues of our time.The volume brings together fifteen prominent scholars, from a wide variety of related fields, including eco-phenomenology, eco-hermeneutics, new materialism, posthumanism, animal studies, vegetal philosophy, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, eco-criticism, earth art and aesthetics, and analytic environmental ethics. Overall, eco-deconstruction offers an account of differential relationality explored in a non-totalizable ecological context that addresses our times in both an ontological and a normative register.The book is divided into four sections. "Diagnosing the Present" suggests that our times are marked by a facile, flattened-out understanding of time and thus in need of deconstructive dispositions. "Ecologies" mobilizes the spectral ontology of deconstruction to argue for an originary environmentality, the constitutive ecological embeddedness of mortal life. "Nuclear and Other Biodegradabilities, " examines remains, including such by-products and disintegrations of human culture as nuclear waste, environmental destruction, and species extinctions. "Environmental Ethics" seeks to uncover a demand for justice, including human responsibility for suffering beings, that emerges precisely as a response to original differentiation and the mortality and unmasterable alterity it installs in living beings. As such, the book will resonate with readers not only of philosophy, but across the humanities and the social and natural sciences.

PART I

Diagnosing the Present

CHAPTER 1

The Eleventh Plague: Thinking Ecologically after Derrida

David Wood

Introduction: The Deconstructive Disposition

Derrida has been condemned by some (“Dogs bark at what they do not understand.”—Heraclitus) and drawn into empty culture wars by others. Derrida himself hardly ever tried to correct or contain this profligacy. But all of us who have followed Derrida and learned from him at some point or other face the question of inheritance. What is it to inherit the work, the writings, the insights of another? This is not unconnected to “what is it to read?” The problem that arises here is not unfamiliar to admirers of Nietzsche, who cautions against those who would be his followers, calling them Folgende, the mathematical expression for zeros. Are we then to follow his proscription against following him? Derrida animates the question of inheritance in Specters of Marx, offering a model that would require selection and creative transformation. Moreover, as he insists, a gift sometimes calls for ingratitude. At what level can or should we apply these ideas to reading Derrida himself? Do we have to transform the idea of transformation to avoid just following him? Or would that not be the most faithful, and hence least faithful, response? To be faithful to Derrida, do we have to betray him?

Derrida might not endorse this language, but I propose here a reworking of Heidegger’s account of what it is to engage with the work of a great thinker—he speaks of not going counter to the other, but going to their encounter (with Being).¹ And to do this we have to bring our existing passions and commitments to the table. He is saying that we have to address what is most at stake in the other’s thinking and writing. And we have to have skin in the game. In glossing Heidegger’s claim in this way, I am bypassing the problem that one might seem to have to endorse his thesis about the primacy of the question of Being. A less technical cousin of this claim has legs independent of Heidegger’s specific formulation.

Analogously, thinking about how we can follow Derrida without falling into aporetic elephant traps, we can draw on a distinction between doing as he does because he says so or does so and doing as he does because it’s a smart thing to do. Put less casually, Derrida’s ruminations about reading Marx (again) are themselves not completely original, and no worse for that. Context, and the space of concern, change. Marx was not saying just one thing, but drawing together multiple threads from which we, in our time, cannot but select. Licensing ourselves to do this can enhance the transformative creativity of our response. It is in this spirit that I want to advance the idea of a deconstructive disposition. And in response to the ten plagues that Derrida names in Specters of Marx, I want to insist on an eleventh plague—our growing global climate crisis.² To honor Heidegger’s formulation at the same time it would be necessary to formulate this reference to an eleventh plague at something like an ontological level without being caught up in the seductions of ontology. Forging an amalgam from Derrida and Heidegger, we would try to show that the eleventh plague was not just one more plague, but was at the heart of the first ten, or at least intimately implied or caught up in them. In the most summary form, this would be to show that questions of violence, law, and social justice are inseparable from ecological sustainability. A similar move would demonstrate that another candidate for the eleventh plague—the animal holocaust—is closely tied up both with those first ten plagues and with ecological sustainability, perhaps serving as something of a bridge. I will only gesture at such an account here.³

What then is meant by a deconstructive disposition? The danger of such an account is that it may seem to dilute what deconstruction has to offer by blurring how it differs from other modes of critical reading. I will address this shortly.

I propose four dimensions to a deconstructive disposition.

Negative Capability

Keats described this as a willingness to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty.⁴ This is not to license intellectual laziness but rather to caution against premature closure. Derrida’s reference to going through the undecidable could be understood in this way. And indeed, the broader willingness, even passion, to disturb the sleeping dogs of (often binary) complacency.

Patient Reading

The point of reading (and thinking) is not simply to understand, using the handrail of existing meaning, but to open possibilities. This requires patience, even when we have no time! What does such patience yield? It allows us to restore repressed differences and to expose invisible framings and stagings, even of the very occasions at which issues are being discussed. (See Derrida’s prefatory remarks to many of his presentations, raising such questions as, “What is an international conference?”)

Aporetic Schematization

Thinking often takes an essentially aporetic shape: the past that was never present, the gift that resists gratitude, the supplement to what is already complete, the always already, forgiving the unforgivable. These shapes need to be exposed and worked through, if only to grasp the complex underbelly of intelligibility and coherence.

Attention to Language and Terminological Intervention

Language is not neutral. Words, sometimes limiting or regressive, harbor ways of seeing and being in the world. We can intervene in this invisible process with careful attention to these frames and by actively bending old words and inventing new ones.

It might be said that none of these dispositions is exclusive to deconstruction. So is there not a danger of dilution?

Deconstruction in the late ’60s and early ’70s was an event, an interruption, a challenge, one attuned to the time—structuralism, semiology, a quiescent Marxism, pervasive doubts about the complacencies of humanism, of psychoanalysis, of phenomenology and literary theory. (I am trying to cover here the French and Anglo-American situations, which were different.) But it is no longer an event. Its covert influence has waned, even as the scholarly industry prospers, and some of those strongly influenced by Derrida delight us with their own brilliance and originality. Moreover, it is not entirely a bad thing that deconstruction should have metastasized in many directions, even if its pedigree is less visible. Deconstruction would cease to be deconstruction if it became an idol, an orthodoxy, a citadel to be defended. Last, this conference,⁵ along with the book we are assembling, is something like an event or renewal, a repetition of deconstructive strategies, gestures, and sentiments in the context of a new urgency.

Calculating and naming the inheritance of deconstruction is a thankless and unending task. The most salient threads that specifically address environmental concerns would include language, time, the animal, sovereignty, topological complexity, the new international, inheritance, and death.

I propose to make some remarks here about the first three of these threads.

Unsettling Language

Deconstruction’s bad press began with the phrase “there is nothing outside the text,” which sounded like linguistic idealism. It was later reworked as the ineliminability of con-text, and the impossibility of ever completely specifying that context. But language itself continued to ground both hesitation and creative response. The normative commitments of words like “parasite,” “rogue” (nation), “proper,” and “authentic” all rest on structures of asymmetrical binary privilege that can be exposed, and perhaps destabilized, by inserting an indécidable.

And as Derrida showed in “Des Tours de Babel,” translation, which marks the instability of proper meaning, is a powerful site for deconstructive archaeological excavation.

Consider three classic examples:

1. It is said that the bombing of Hiroshima was ordered after Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki responded to the demand that the Japanese surrender by using the word Mokusatsu, which can mean to “ignore/not pay attention to” or to “refrain from any comment.” The former could reasonably be considered as a refusal to surrender. The latter was asking for more time. Could the subsequent loss of some quarter of a million lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki be put down to a mistranslation of a nuance of meaning?

2. The cult of Mary, the miraculous character of Jesus’s birth, rests on the translation of the original Hebrew almah,

, as virgin when it more accurately meant “maiden” or “young woman.”

3. The license given by the translation of rada as dominion, in Genesis 1:16/1:26, as God’s understanding of the relation between man and the other animals and nature more generally has been argued to be the source of much Western complacency over the destructive and exploitative consequences of man’s reign over nature.⁶ Some have argued that it should be translated as “hold sway” and others as “rule,” with the strong implication of the benign responsibility that might be expected of a thoughtful ruler. Others have pointed out that the literal meaning of rada is “a point higher up on the root of a plant.” Such a point is where the strength of the plant as a whole is centered, offering a more collaborative sense of “privilege.”

This last has direct relevance to eco-deconstruction. The authority of canonical texts is a continuing issue, considering the continuing reverence accorded to the Bible, the Koran, and other religious writings. This would be true even if there were no issues of translation. But the hermeneutic mischief with which they can be treated seems to know no limits. The demonstration that even an authoritative text contains within it competing meanings and possibilities allows other ways of reading it to be opened up. And, of course, this applies not just to the Bible, but to the U.S. Constitution, to the pre-Socratics, to Aristotle, Kant, and so on. Latour’s recent treatment of Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, in which he attempts to empty it of any residue of political theology, is a good example of how the angle of such readings can make a difference to environmental thinking.⁷

Central too to any eco-deconstruction are the force and meaning of the word “nature,” caught up as it is in binary opposition to culture, to man, and to spirit and functioning repeatedly as a transcendental signified, a ground of meaning that would escape the play of language and the very oppositions in which it is inscribed. We are all acquainted with nature, whether it be last year’s tornadoes or this year’s tomatoes. Nature seems, straightforwardly, to be what’s “out there,” something we realize we are part of when we feel hungry or get lashed by heavy rain. But nature is not just what is real, what is out there. When placed in opposition to culture, it has played a powerful cognitive role in organizing human life and thought. And one of the hallmarks of early deconstruction was to problematize this simple opposition. It is clear, for example, that we approach nature through all kinds of cultural mediations and constructions, which themselves change through history. And these cultural constructions are not just shaping or distorting lenses; they often lead directly to transformations of nature. (When nature is treated as a resource, a mountain becomes a pile of quarry stone.) Eco-deconstruction reflects our hope that we can get clearer about the complex role that nature plays in our thinking, in our understanding of ourselves, and in our practical existence. This issue is important in academic life, not least because university institutions are constructed on the basis of distinctions between natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, as if these were separate fields of inquiry, distinctions that depend on how we think about nature. Deconstruction has made it more normal to inspect the boundaries, the frontiers, the contaminations, the difficulties in making these clear-cut distinctions.

While there are those for whom this distancing (from a naïve sense of nature) comes easily,⁸ there are others who resist, who recognize the desire to point and say, “That’s nature,” that striving, pulsing force that precisely escapes description, like Roquentin’s black root in Sartre’s Nausea. The question we are left with is this: is it possible to accept that any concept we have of nature, any meaning we give that word, is culturally constructed, riddled with narrative, and as such burdened, while insisting that there is something we are in different ways culturally constructing? Much interesting work has been done critiquing the idea of a return to some original “natural condition,” the restoration of a pristine origin, the protection of the purity of wilderness. As Bill McKibben wrote long ago, there is no nature anymore.⁹ Nothing with air blowing through it has escaped human influence.

So the analysis is taking place at two different levels. The concept (or sign) of nature cannot escape the cultural conditions of conceptuality. And nature itself, materially, has been contaminated by human activity, destroying the purity by which it could function in opposition to man—all this presupposing that man was not always already part of nature.¹⁰

Arguably our dominant modes of engagement with the natural world are the reflection of narratives, often what Jean-François Lyotard would call “grand narratives,” such as man’s God-given sovereignty over the natural world, or man’s place in the great chain of being, or the story of enlightenment, in which inferior races, religi...