Eco-Deconstruction

Derrida and Environmental Philosophy

Edited by Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes and David Wood

Contributor(s): Karen Barad, Timothy Clark, Claire Colebrook, Matthias Fritsch, Vicki Kirby, John Llewelyn, Philippe Lynes, Michael Marder, Dawne McCance, Michael Naas, Kelly Oliver, Michael Peterson, Ted Toadvine, Cary Wolfe and David Wood

Groundworks: Ecological Issues in Philosophy and Theology

ISBN: 9780823279500

Page Count: 334

Trim Size: 152.400mm x 228.600mm

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Price: $125.00

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Description: Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy launches a new mode of philosophical and ethical reflection with respect to the challenges posed by 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has already proven highly influential in posthumanism and animal studies, the present volume, drawing on published and unpublished work by Derrida and others, builds on these insights in addressing and responding to the most pressing environmental issues of our time. The volume brings together 15 scholars, many of which have achieved world renown, 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-final, non-totalizable ecological context, both quasi-ontologically and quasi-normatively, with attention to diagnosing our times. Accordingly, the book is divided into four sections—Diagnosing the Present, which suggests that our times are marked by a facile, flattened-out understanding of time and thus in need of deconstructive dispositions; Ecologies, which mobilizes the spectral ontology of deconstruction to argue for an originary environmentality, the constitutive ecological embeddedness of mortal life; Nuclear and Other Biodegradabilities, in which contributors reflect on the remains, by-products, and disintegrations of human culture, including nuclear waste, environmental destruction, and species extinctions; and Environmental Ethics, which 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 may resonate with readers not only in philosophy, but across the humanities and the social and natural sciences.
Reviews: Derrida’s last seminars proved inspirational for the burgeoning field of animal studies, but the ecological tenor and wide-ranging environmental implications of his deconstructive approach has received much less attention. This timely, original, and extraordinarily innovative, collection of essays by many of the key thinkers in the field does much to rectify this. It will be an invaluable reference point for all those interested in the intersection of ‘continental’ philosophy, literary criticism, posthumanism, and environmental concerns. - Mick Smith, Queens University

In 1998, Derrida hailed ecology as a 'new dimension of ‘living together.’ Almost twenty years later, ecology is nothing new: It even risks having overtaken itself in the sense of no longer marking any specific domain. It is clear that ecology traverses all spheres of all existences. The eco-deconstruction undertaken in this volume means both an ecology of deconstruction (what is a disseminated oikos? a differing-deferring one? a prosthetic one?. . .) and also a deconstruction of ecology, thus of economy, ecopolitics, ecomythics, and ecosophy - Jean-Luc Nancy, University of Strasbourg

Ecology, in its semantic disposition, relates the oikos to the logos, two concepts that Derrida never stopped analyzing. Eco-Deconstruction affirms that in rich, diverse, and inventive ways, and repositions the now extensive work on Derrida and the animal within a broader context of planetary viability. Quite simply, the stellar contributions of this volume manifest a deconstruction that welcomes a whole new environmental space. - David Wills, Brown University

A terrific collection of essays penned by a stellar group of scholars, Eco-Deconstruction definitively demonstrates the continued relevance of deconstruction in our era of ecological disaster. More than a decade after Derrida’s death, Eco-Deconstruction incisively shows us how the tools and concepts central to deconstruction are likewise crucial for thinking about today’s pressing environmental problems (nature, life, animals, sustainability, the world, extinction, ecology). No mere echo chamber of agreement, Eco-Deconstruction likewise shows us where deconstruction can be helpfully supplemented with other approaches going forward into an uncertain ecological future. This is essential reading for anyone interested in environmental philosophy. - Jeffrey Nealon, The Pennsylvania State University
Table of Contents: Abbreviations for Works by Jacques Derrida
Introduction
Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes, and David Wood
Part I. Diagnosing the Present
1. The Eleventh Plague: Thinking Ecologically after Derrida
David Wood
2. Thinking after the World: Deconstruction and Last Things
Ted Toadvine
3. Scale as a Force of Deconstruction
Timothy Clark
Part II. Ecologies
4. The Posthuman Promise of the Earth
Philippe Lynes
5. Un/limited Ecologies
Vicki Kirby
6. Ecology as Event
Michael Marder
7. Writing Home: Eco-choro-spectrography
John Llewelyn
Part III. Nuclear and Other Biodegradabilitie
8. E-phemera: Of Deconstruction, Biodegradability, and Nuclear War
Michael Naas
9. Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: On the Im/Possibilities of Living and Dying in the Void
Karen Barad
10. Responsibility and the Non(bio)degradable
Michael Peterson
11. Extinguishing Ability: How we Became Post-Extinction Persons
Claire Colebrook
Part IV. Environmental Ethics
12. An Eco-Deconstructive Account of the Emergence of Normativity in “Nature”
Matthias Fritsch
13. Opening ethics onto the other shore of another heading
Dawne McCance
14. Wallace Stevens’s Birds, or, Derrida and Ecological Poetics
Cary Wolfe
15. Earth: Love It or Leave It
Kelly Oliver
List of Contributors
Index
Details: ISBN-13 9780823279500
Published: 2018-03-27
Contributors: Contributions: Karen Barad
Contributions: Timothy Clark
Contributions: Claire Colebrook
Contributions: Matthias Fritsch
Matthias Fritsch is Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University, Montréal. He is the author of The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida and Taking Turns with Earth: Ways to Intergenerational Justice through Phenomenology and Deconstruction and co-translator of Heidegger’s The Phenomenology of Religious Life.
Contributions: Vicki Kirby
Contributions: John Llewelyn
Contributions: Philippe Lynes
Philippe Lynes is Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Chair in Environmental Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is the translator of Derrida’s Advances.
Contributions: Michael Marder
Contributions: Dawne McCance
Dawne McCance is Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba. Her books include Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction and Derrida On Religion.
Contributions: Michael Naas
Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His books include The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida's Final Seminar and Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (both Fordham).
Contributions: Kelly Oliver
Kelly Oliver is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, where she also holds appointments in the departments of African-American Diaspora Studies, Film Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies. She is the author of more than one hundred articles, fifteen scholarly books, and three novels.
Contributions: Michael Peterson
Contributions: Ted Toadvine
Contributions: Cary Wolfe
Contributions: David Wood
David Wood, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, is the author or (co-)editor of eighteen books, including Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy; Thinking Plant Animal Human; Time after Time; The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction; and Thinking after Heidegger. He is also an earth-artist and Director of Yellow Bird Artscape in Tennessee.