Suchergebnisse

Intro; Contents; Abbreviations; Introduction: General Text, Death, and Time; Chapter One: Survivance and General Ecology; Chapter Two: Transcendence and the Surviving Present; Chapter Three: Resistance and Ex-Appropriation: Letting Life Live-On; Chapter Four: Animmanence: Life Death and the Passion and Perpetual Detour of Difference; Chapter Five: Biopolitics and Double Affirmation: Steps/Nots beyond an Ecology of the Commons; Index; About the Author

This essay examines certain intersections between writing and extinction through an eco-deconstructive account of the psychoanalysis of water. Jacques Derrida has often drawn attention to the interplay between the sound 'O,' and 'eau,' in Maurice Blanchot's own proper name, as well as in his novels, récits and theoretical works; both the zero-degree of organic excitation towards which the death drive aims and the question of water. Sandor Ferenczi's notion of thalassal regression suggests that the desire to return to the tranquility of the maternal womb parallels a response to a traumatic prehistoric extinction event undergone by organic life once forced to abandon its aquatic existence. Through Gaston Bachelard's Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, however, one can double the imaginary of water along the axes of a personal death organic life defers and delays, and an impersonal extinction it cannot. Derrida's unpublished 1977 seminar on Blanchot's 1941 novel Thomas the Obscure, however, allows us to imagine an exteriority to extinction, the possibility

This paper attempts to respond to the environmental difficulties faced by overpopulation by adapting a question of Levinas's, 'is it ecologically just to be?', of which 'is it ecologically just to make more children?' is an important correlate. I suggest that both an affirmative account of life as deployed in affirmative biopolitics, as well as the pessimistic thought of death in anti-natalist philosophy are insufficient to respond to these questions. An eco-deconstructive account of life:death, however, allows us both to respond to the horror inspired in thinking one's life at the expense of so many others, human and nonhuman, while thinking the affirmation of life otherwise in inventing, each time uniquely, more just responses to overpopulation.

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