Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (Groundworks: Ecological Issues in Philosophy and Theology)

__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has already proven highly influential in posthumanism and animal studies, the present volume, drawing on published and unpublished work by Derrida and others, builds on these insights to address the most pressing environmental issues of our time.The volume brings together fifteen prominent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. "The contributors are an impressive group of philosophers and literary and cultural theorists.The first book to comprehensively explore the possibilities deconstruction has to offer to environmental thought and practice.Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophylaunches 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"-- JSTOR 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. Cover 1 Contents 6 List of Abbreviations 8 Introduction 14 Part I: Diagnosing the Present 40 1 The Eleventh Plague: Thinking Ecologically after Derrida 42 2 Thinking after the World: Deconstruction and Last Things 63 3 Scale as a Force of Deconstruction 94 Part II: Ecologies 112 4 The Posthuman Promise of the Earth 114 5 Un/Limited Ecologies 134 6 Ecology as Event 154 7 Writing Home: Eco-Choro-Spectrography 178 Part III: Nuclear and Other Biodegradabilities 198 8 E-Phemera: Of Deconstruction, Biodegradability, and Nuclear War 200 9 Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable 219 10 Responsibility and the Non(bio)degradable 262 11 Extinguishing Ability: How We Became Postextinction Persons 274 Part IV: Environmental Ethics 290 12 An Eco-Deconstructive Account of the Emergence of Normativity in "Nature" 292 13 Opening Ethics onto the Other Shore of Another Heading 316 14 Wallace Stevens's Birds, or, Derrida and Ecological Poetics 330 15 Earth: Love It or Leave It? 352 List of Contributors 368 Index 374 A 374 B 375 C 375 D 375 E 377 F 378 G 378 H 378 I 378 J 379 K 379 L 379 M 380 N 380 O 381 P 381 Q 381 R 382 S 382 T 383 U 383 V 383 W 383 A collection bringing together a wide-varietyof world-renowned scholars on the import of Derrida's philosophy with respectto the current environmental crisis, our ecological relationships to 'nature'and the earth, our responsibilities with respect to climate change, pollution, and nuclear destruction, and the ethics and politics at stake in responding tothese crises