Futures of Life Death On Earth Derridas-1 PDF

Futures of
Life Death on Earth
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Future Perfect:
Images of the Time to Come in Philosophy,
Politics and Cultural Studies
Series Editors: Michael Marder, IKERBASQUE Research Professor of

Philosophy, University of the Basque Country, Spain, and Patricia Vieira,
Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese, Georgetown University, USA.
The Future Perfect series stands at the intersection of critical historiography,

philosophy, political science, heterodox economic theory, and environmental
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Futures of Life Death on Earth: Derrida’s General Ecology
Philippe Lynes

Futures of
Life Death on Earth
Derrida’s General Ecology
Philippe Lynes
London • New York

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MATTHIAS FRITSCH
in Verehrung und Freundschaft zugeeignet
Pour la vie, c’est à dire . . . ,
for
JENNIFER SCHADE
for her love and unwavering support,
and for
FRANKY AND SCHMOO
my research assistants, le mort/la vivante. Meow, meow.

La Terre
Le mort
saisit le vif
et l’oiseau ferme la marche.

—Georges Bataille,
Œuvres complètes IV: Œuvres littéraires posthumes, 29/39.

Contents
Abbreviations xi
Introduction: General Text, Death, and Time xiii
§0.1: General Ecologies xxx
§0.2: General Texts xxxiv
§0.3: Death, Time, and Entropy in the Ecological Model xxxix
§0.4: Futures: Extinction and Sustainability xlv
1 Survivance and General Ecology 1

§1.1: Survivance: Life and Death in Différance 4
§1.1.1: The Economy of Repetition and the Impossible:
Freud and Jacob 4
§1.1.2: Doublings of Life Death: Blanchot 11
§1.2: From General Economy to General Ecology 16
§1.2.1: Bataille’s Ecology of the Impossible 16
§1.2.2: From General to Strictural Ecology 20
§1.3: How the Organism Structures Its Environment:
Immanence and Transcendence 25
§1.3.1: Immanence: Concept, Metaphor, and Norm
in Canguilhem’s Knowledge of Life 25
§1.3.2: Transcendence: Levinas and the Ethics of the
Beyond-Within 28
§1.4: Futures of Life Death 31
vii

viii Contents
2 Transcendence and the Surviving Present 43

§2.1: The Restricted Ecology of the Living Present in Husserl
and Derrida 48
§2.1.1: The Dialectical Form of the Living Present in
Organic Life: Time, the Other, Hylè 50
§2.1.2: Teleology: Science, Earth, and World in the
Living Present 56
§2.2: Tra(nscenden)ce: Death, Ethics, and Violence in the
Living Present 65
§2.3: The Arche-Writing of Ecological Relationality 71
§2.3.1: The Living-Dead Present 71
§2.3.2: The Sur-viving Present 77
3 Resistance and Ex-Appropriation: Letting Life Live-On 85
§3.1: Heidegger and Res(is)tance 87
§3.1.1: Dasein’s Resistance and Transcendence: World,
Others, and Things 87
§3.1.2: Letting Beings Be: Beyond the Economy of Eidos
and Idea 94
§3.1.3: Death, Time, and Powerlessness 99
§3.2: Derrida and Ex-Appropriation 103
§3.2.1: The Destruktion of the Living Present 103
§3.2.2: Ethical Transcendence, Nonreal Resistance, and
Letting Life Life-On 109
§3.2.3: Ent-eignis, Ent-fernung, and Ex-Appropriation:
Walten and Life Death on Earth 112
§3.2.4: The Zusage and Letting the Earth Be 118
4 Animmanence: Life Death and the Passion and Perpetual
Detour of Difference 123
§4.1: Heidegger’s Nietzsche and Planetary Domination 127
§4.2: Deleuze, Double Affirmation, Double Death, and
the Outside 132
§4.2.1: Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Spinoza: Double
Affirmation and Eternal Return 133
§4.2.2: The Plane of Immanence and the Resistance
of the Outside 139
§4.2.3: The Syntheses of Individuation and Double Death 143
§4.3: Animmanence in Bataille and Blanchot 147

Contents ix
§4.4: Derrida, the Double, the Transgression to Powerlessness,

the Infinitely Finite Revenance of Différance 154
§4.4.1: Doubling Heidegger’s Nietzsche 154
§4.4.2: The Transgression to Powerlessness 160
§4.4.3: The Infinitely Finite Revenance of Différance 163
5 Biopolitics and Double Affirmation: Steps/Nots Beyond
an Ecology of the Commons 171
§5.1: Derrida: Performative Powerlessness and the Event
of Ecology 176
§5.2: Foucault: Resistance, Mortalism, and the Outside 180
§5.2.1: Making and Letting Live and Die 180
§5.2.2: Rethinking Life and Death in Cuvier and Bichat 183
§5.2.3: Transgression and the Outside 187
§5.3: Hardt, Negri, and Affirmative Biopolitics 190
§5.3.1: The Plane of Immanence and Dominion over
the Earth 190
§5.3.2: Biopower and Biopolitical Resistance 193
§5.3.3: Immaterial Labor, the Machine Economy, and
the Ecology of the Commons 198
§5.4: Esposito: Steps/Nots Beyond an Ecology of the Commons 199
§5.4.1: Inverting Biopolitical Sovereignty, Inverting
Affirmative Biopolitics 199
§5.4.2: Individuation, the Impersonal, and the Impolitical 205
§5.4.3: Par(t)ages, or Terra-che-si-ritira 208
Index 217
About the Author 000

Abbreviations
Page numbers first refer to the original French or German text, then to the
English translation. Translations have been modified where necessary to en-
sure consistency in vocabulary. I have provided translations from the French
where no published versions exist, all errors in translation therein being, of
course, my own. Translations, whether modified or my own, will be indicated
with a lowercase, italicized t. A lowercase, italicized e denotes a modification
of emphasis.
WORKS BY GEORGES BATAILLE
OC4 Œuvres complètes IV: Œuvres littéraires posthumes (Paris: Gallimard,

1971); relevant texts trans. Mark Spitzer as The Collected Poems of Georges
Bataille (Chester Springs: Dufour Editions, 1999).
OC5 Œuvres complètes V: La Somme athéologique Tome I (Paris: Gallimard,
1973); relevant texts (g) trans. Bruce Boone as Guilty (Venice: The Lapis
Press, 1988); (i) trans. Leslie Anne Boldt as Inner Experience (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1988); (u) trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall as The
Unfinished System of Nonknowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2001).
OC6 Œuvres complètes VI: La Somme athéologique Tome II (Paris: Gallimard,
1973); relevant texts (n) trans. Bruce Boone as On Nietzsche (London: Con-
tinuum, 2004).
OC7 Œuvres complètes VII (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); relevant texts (a) trans. Rob-
ert Hurley as The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume
I: Consumption (New York: Zone Books, 1991); (r) The Bataille Reader
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).
xi

xii Abbreviations
WORKS BY MAURICE BLANCHOT
BAO L’Attente l’oubli (Paris: Gallimard, 1962); trans. John Gregg as Awaiting
Oblivion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
BCI La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1984); trans. Pierre Joris as The
Unavowable Community (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1988).
BED L’Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); trans. Ann Smock as The
Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
BEI L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); trans. Susan Hanson as The
Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
BEL L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955); trans. Ann Smock as The Space
of Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).
BFP Faux pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943); trans. Charlotte Mandell as Faux Pas
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
BPA Le Pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); trans. Lycette Nelson as The Step
Not Beyond (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
BPF La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); trans. Charlotte Mandell as The
Work of Fire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
BVA Une Voix venue d’ailleurs (Paris: Gallimard, 2002); trans. Charlotte Mandell as
A Voice from Elsewhere (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).
WORKS BY GEORGES CANGUILHEM
CC La Connaissance de la vie: Deuxième edition revue et augmentée (Paris:

Vrin, 2003); trans. Stefanos Groulanos and Daniela Ginsburg as Knowledge
of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
CE Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences: Troisième Édition (Paris:
Vrin, 1975).
CN Le Normal et le pathologique, augmenté de Nouvelles Réflexions concernant
le normal et le pathologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005);
trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen as The Normal and the
Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
WORKS BY GILLES DELEUZE (AND FÉLIX GUATTARI)
DF Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit, 2003);

trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Aormina as Two Regimes of Madness: Texts
and Interviews 1975–1995 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006).
DR Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968); trans.
Paul Patton as Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994).

Abbreviations xiii
F Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986); trans. Seán Hand as Foucault (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
ID L’Île déserte: Textes et entretiens 1953–1974 (Paris: Minuit, 2002); trans.
Michael Taormina as Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974 (New
York: Semiotext(e), 2004).
LS Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969); trans. Mark Lester as The Logic of
Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
MPl Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980); trans.
Brian Massumi as A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
N Nietzsche (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965); trans. Anne Boy-
man as “Nietzsche” in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (New York: Zone
Books, 2001).
NP Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962);
trans. Hugh Tomlinson as Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2006).
PP Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit, 1990); trans. Martin Joughin as
Negotiations: 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
QP Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 2005); trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchill as What Is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994).
SPE Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Minuit, 1968); trans. Mar-
tin Joughin as Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone
Books, 1992).
SPP Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Paris: Minuit, 2003); trans. Robert Hurley
as Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988).
WORKS BY JACQUES DERRIDA
A Apories (Paris: Galilée, 1996); trans. Thomas Dutoit as Aporias (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1993).
AEL Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997); trans. Pascale-Anne
Brault and Michael Naas as Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford
AL “Derrida avec Lévinas: ‘entre lui et moi dans l’affection et la confiance par-
tagée,’” Le Magazine Littéraire (2003): 1–6.
ALT Altérités (Paris: Osiris, 1986); trans. Stefan Herbrechter as “Alterities” in
Parallax 10, no. 4 (2004).
AS L’Animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006); trans. David Wills as The
Animal that Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
AV “Avances” preface to Serge Margel, Le Tombeau du dieu artisan (Paris:
Minuit, 1995); trans. Philippe Lynes as Advances (Minneapolis: Univocal
Publishing, 2017).

xiv Abbreviations
AVE Apprendre à vivre enfin: Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Galilée,
2005); trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas as Learning to Live Fi-
nally: The Last Interview (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007).
AWD Arguing with Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001).
BS1 Séminaire: La Bête et le souverain: Volume I (2001–2002) (Paris: Galilée,
2008); trans. Geoffrey Bennington as The Beast & the Sovereign Volume II
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
BS2 Séminaire: La Bête et le souverain: Volume II (2002–2003) (Paris: Galilée,
2010); trans. Geoffrey Bennington as The Beast & the Sovereign Volume II
CH La Conférence de Heidelberg (1988): Heidegger: Portée philosophique et
politique de sa pensée (Paris: Lignes, 2014).
CP La Carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980);
trans. Alan Bass as The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond
CU Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Paris: Galilée, 2003); ed. Pascale-Anne
Brault and Michael Naas as The Work of Mourning (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001).
DB Demeure: Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998); trans. Elizabeth Rot-
tenberg as Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000).
DDP Du Droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990); 2 English volumes, 1 trans.
Jan Plug as Who’s Afraid of Philosophy: Right to Philosophy 1 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 2 trans. Jan Plug and others as Eyes of the
University: Right to Philosophy 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
DE Heidegger et la question: De l’Esprit et autres essais (Paris: Champs Es-
sais, 2010); trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby as Of Spirit:
Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
DG De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967); trans Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
as Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
DJ Le Dernier des Juifs (Paris: Galilée, 2014); trans. Gil Anidjar as “Avow-
ing—The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance and Reconciliation,” in Living
Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, ed. Elisa-
beth Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 18–45.
DM Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999); trans. David Wills as The Gift of
Death and Literature in Secret: Second Edition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008).
DN Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed.
John Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997).
DP Dire l’événement, est-ce possible? (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), trans. Gila
Walker as “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Critical
Inquiry 33 (2007): 441–61.

Abbreviations xv
DQ De Quoi Demain . . . Dialogue (Avec Elisabeth Roudinesco) (Paris: Fayard/

Galilée, 2001); trans. Jeff Fort as For What Tomorrow (Stanford: Stanford
DS Deconstruction Engaged: the Sydney Seminars (Sydney: Power Publica-
tions, 2006).
DT Donner: Le Temps 1. La Fausse monnaie (Paris: Galilée, 1991); trans. Peggy
Kamuf as Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1992).
É Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche/ Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1978).
EA “Autour des écrits de Jacques Derrida sur l’argent,” in L’Argent, ed. Marcel
Drach (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), 201–32.
EAP États d’âme de la psychanalyse: Adresse aux États Géneraux de la Psych-
analyse (Paris: Galilée, 2000).
ED L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967); trans. Alan Bass as Writing
and Difference (London: Routledge Classics, 2001).
ET Échographies de la télévision: Entretiens filmés (Paris: Galilée/INA, 1996);
trans. Jennifer Bajorek as Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews
(Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
FA “Fors: Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok,” in Nicolas Abra-
ham and Maria Torok, La Verbier des hommes aux loups (Paris: Flammarion,
1976); trans. Barbara Johnson as “Fors: the Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham
and Maria Torok” in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Wolf Man’s Magic
Word: A Cryptonomy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
FF “La forme et la façon (plus jamais: envers et contre tout, ne plus jamais
penser ça ‘pour la forme,’” preface to Alain David, Racisme et antisémit-
isme: Essai de philosophie sur l’envers de concepts (Paris: Ellipses, 2001).
FL Force de loi (Paris: Galilée, 1994); trans. Mary Quintance as “Force of Law,”
in Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), 228–98.
FP “Fidélité à plus d’un: Mériter d’hériter où la généalogie fait défaut,” in
Idiomes, Nationalités, Déconstructions: Rencontre de Rabat avec Jacques
Derrida (Casablanca: Les Éditions Toubkal, 1998).
FSC For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy, ed. and trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2014).
G Glas (2 tomes) (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, 1981); trans. John P. Leavey and
Richard Rand as Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
HC H. C. pour la vie, c’est à dire . . . (Paris: Galilée, 2002); trans. Laurent Milesi
and Stefan Herbrechter as H. C. for Life, That Is to Say (Stanford: Stanford
HF “Interviews of July 1 and November 22, 1999,” in Dominique Janicaud, Hei-
degger in France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).

xvi Abbreviations
HJR “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,”

in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Richard
Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999), 65–83.
HQ Heidegger: La Question de l’Être et l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 2013); trans.
Geoffrey Bennington as Heidegger: The Question of Being & History (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
IOG “Introduction,” in L’Origine de la géométrie (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1962); trans. John P. Leavey Jr. as Edmund Husserl’s Origin of
Geometry: An Introduction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
L Séminaire: La Vie la mort 1974–5, unpublished. Jacques Derrida papers.
MS-C001. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Ir-
vine, California. Box 12, folders 10–19. Accessed May 2014.
LD La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972); trans. Barbara Johnson as Dissemina-
tion (London: Athlone Press, 1981).
LI Limited Inc. (Paris: Galilée, 1990); trans. Elisabeth Weber as Limited Inc
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
LT Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000); trans. Christine Iriz-
zary as On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2005).
MP Marges: De la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972); trans. Alan Bass as Mar-
gins of Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982).
MPD Mémoires: Pour Paul de Man (Paris: Galilée, 1988); trans. Cecile Lindsay
et al. as Memoires for Paul de Man: Revised Edition (New York: Columbia
MS Marx & Sons (Paris: Galilée/Presses universitaires de France, 2002); trans.
G. M. Goshgarian as “Marx & Sons,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Sympo-
sium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinkler (Lon-
don: Verso, 2008), 213–69.
NG “Nous autres grecs,” in Nos grecs et leur modernes, ed. Barbara Cassin
(Paris: Seuil, 1992); trans. Pascale Anne Brault and Michael Nass in Derrida
and Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 18–39.
NII Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2002 (Stanford: Stanford
OA L’Oreille de l’autre: Otobiographies, transferts, traductions (Montréal:
VLB Éditeur, 1982); trans. Peggy Kamuf as The Ear of the Other: Otobiog-
raphy, Transference, Translation (New York: Shocken Books, 1985).
P Parages: Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée (Paris: Galilée, 2003); trans.
Tom Conley et al. as Parages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
PA Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994); trans. George Collins as The
Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 2005).
PC “Performative Powerlessness—A Response to Simon Critchley,” Constella-
tions 7, no. 4 (2000): 466–68.

Abbreviations xvii
PCM “La Phénoménologie et la clôture de la métaphysique: Introduction à la

pensée de Husserl,” Alter, Revue de phénoménologie 8 (2000), trans. Ronald
Bruzina as “Phenomenology and the Closure of Metaphysics: Introduction
to the Thought of Husserl,” in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy III (2003).
PDS Points de suspension: Entretiens (Paris: Galilée, 1992); trans. Peggy Kamuf
and others as Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1995).
PE Positions: Entretiens (Paris: Minuit, 1972); trans. Alan Bass as Positions
PG Le Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1990); trans. Marian Hobson as The Problem of
Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003).
PM Papier Machine (Paris: Galilée, 2001); trans. Rachel Bowlby as Paper Ma-
chine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
PM1 Séminaire: La Peine de mort: Volume I (1999–2000) (Paris: Galilée, 2012);
trans. Peggy Kamuf as The Death Penalty: Volume I (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2014).
PM2 Séminaire: La Peine de mort: Volume II (2000–2001) (Paris: Galilée, 2015);
trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg as The Death Penalty: Volume II (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2017).
PV Penser à ne pas voir: Écrits sur les arts du visible 1979–2004 (Paris: Édi-
tions de la différence, 2013).
P1 Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (tome 1) (Paris: Galilée, 1997); ed. Peggy Ka-
muf and Elizabeth Rottenberg as Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume I
P2 Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (tome 2) (Paris: Galilée, 2003); ed. Peggy Ka-
muf and Elizabeth Rottenberg as Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume II
RM “Reste—le maître, ou le supplément d’infini,” in Le Genre humain, special
edition Le Disciple et ses maîtres: Pour Charles Malamoud (April 2002):
25–64.
RP Résistances: De la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 1996); trans. Peggy Kamuf,
Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas as Resistances of Psychoanalysis
SM Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993); trans. Peggy Kamuf as Spectres of
Marx (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006).
SP Sur parole: Instantanées philosophiques (La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de
l’Aube, 1999).
SQ Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham

xviii Abbreviations
TA “Le Temps des adieux: Heidegger (lu par) Hegel (lu par) Malabou,” Revue
Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 188, no. 1 (1998): 3–47; trans.
Joseph D. Cohen as “A Time for Farewells: Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read
by) Malabou,” in Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Tem-
porality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005).
TS A Taste for the Secret (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
UG Ulysse gramophone (Paris: Galilée, 1987); trans. Tina Kendall as “Ulysses
Gramophone,” in Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992).
V Voyous (Paris: Galilée, 2003); trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
as Rogues (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
VeP La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); trans. Geoffrey Bennington
and Ian Mcleod as The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987).
VP La Voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967);
trans. Leonard Lawlor as Voice and Phenomenon (Evanston: Northwestern
WA Without Alibi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
WORKS BY MICHEL FOUCAULT
DE1-4 Dits et écrits 1954–1988: 4 tomes (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); all relevant texts
trans. Robert Hurley and Others in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault
Volume 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New
Press, 1998).
IF “Il faut défendre la société”: Cours au Collège de France, 1976 (Paris:
Seuil/Gallimard, 1997); trans. David Macey as “Society Must Be Defended”:
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–6 (New York: Picador, 2003).
MC Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1966); trans. Anonymous as The Order of Things: An Archaeology
of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge Classics, 2002).
NC Naissance de la clinique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963);
trans. A. M. Sheridan as The Birth of the Clinic: An Aracheology of Medical
Perception (London: Routledge, 2003).
VS Histoire de la sexualité 1: La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976);
trans. Robert Hurley as The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

Abbreviations xix
WORKS BY ROBERTO ESPOSITO (PAGE NUMBERS

REFER SOLELY TO ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS)
E3 Terza Persona: Politica della vita e filosofia dell’impersonale (Turin: Guilio

Einaudi editore, 2007); trans. Zakiya Hanafi as Third Person: Politics of Life
and Philosophy of the Impersonal (London: Polity, 2012).
EB Bíos: Biopolitica e filosofia (Turin: Guilio Einaudi editore, 2004); trans.
Timothy Campbell as Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2008).
EC Communitas: Origine e destino della communità (Turin: Guilio Einaudi
Editore, 1998); trans. Timothy Campbell as Communitas: The Origin and
Destiny of Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
ECI Categorie dell’ impolitico (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 1999); trans.
Connal Parsley as Categories of the Impolitical (New York: Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 2015).
EI Immunitas: Protezione e negazione della vita (Turin: Guilio Einaudi Editore,
2002); trans. Zakiya Hanafi as Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of
Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).
ET Termini della Politica. Communità, immunitià, biopolitica (Milano: Mimesis
Edizione, 2008); trans. Rhiannon Noel Welch as Terms of the Political: Com-
munity, Immunity, Biopolitics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
WORKS BY MICHAEL HARDT AND/OR ANTONIO NEGRI
HD Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (London: UCL Press, 1993).

HNC Commonwealth (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2009).
HNE Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
HNL Labour of Dionysus: A Critique of State Form (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994).
HNM Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin
Press, 2004).
NOB “At the Origins of Biopolitics,” in Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, ed. Ver-
non W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2016), 48–64.
NSS “The Specter’s Smile,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques
Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 2008),
5–16.

xx Abbreviations
WORKS BY MARTIN HEIDEGGER
GA 2 Sein und Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977); trans. John
MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).
GA 3 Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klos-
termann, 1991); trans. Richard Taft as Kant and the Problem of Metaphys-
ics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
GA 5 Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977); trans. Julian
Young and Kenneth Haynes as Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2002).
GA 6.1 Nietzsche: Erster Band (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996);
trans. David Farrell Krell et al. as Nietzsche [four volumes] (San Francisco:
Harper San Francisco, 1991).
GA 6.2 Nietzsche: Zweiter Band (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997);
trans. David Farrell Krell et al. as Nietzsche [four volumes] (San Francisco:
Harper San Francisco, 1991).
GA 7 Vorträge und Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000);
relevant material (o) trans. Joan Stambaugh as “Overcoming Metaphysics,”
in The End of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973);
(b) trans. Albert Hostadter as “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry,
Language and Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
GA 9 Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976); ed. William
McNeill as Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
GA 12 Unterwegs zur Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985);
trans. Peter D. Hertz as On the Way to Language (New York: Harper and
Row, 1971).
GA 15 Seminare (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1986); trans. Andrew
Mitchell and François Raffoul as Four Seminars (Bloomington: Indiana
GA 20 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, 1979); trans. Theodore Kisiel as History of the Concept of
Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
GA 24 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, 1975); trans. Albert Hofstadter as The Basic Problems of
Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
GA 26 Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (Frank-
furt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978); trans. Michael Heim as The
Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1984).
GA Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit (Frank-
29-30 furt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983); trans. William McNeill and
Nicholas Walker as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World,
Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

Abbreviations xxi
GA 40 Einführung in die Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,

1983); trans. Gregory Fried and Michael Polt as Introduction to Metaphys-
ics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
GA 65 Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, 1989); trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu
as Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 2012).
WORKS BY EDMUND HUSSERL
EU Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik (Prague:

Academia/Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1939); trans. Karl Ameriks and James
Churchill as Experience and Judgment (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1975).
Hua 1 Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1973); trans. Dorion Cairns as Cartesian Meditations: An Intro-
duction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960).
Hua 3 Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Phi-
losophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführungin die reine Phänomenologie
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977); trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson as Ideas:
General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London: Routledge Clas-
sics, 2012).
Hua 4 Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philoso-
phie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1991); trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André
Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenom-
enological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 1989).
Hua 10 Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewussteseins (1893–1917) (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969); trans. John Barnett Brough as On the
Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1873–1917) (Dor-
drecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).
Hua 11 Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsm-
anuskripten, 1918–1926 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966); trans.
Anthony J. Steinbock as Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Syn-
thesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Press, 2001).
Hua 17 Formale and transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen
Vernunft (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974); trans. Dorion Cairns as
Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969).
Hua Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte (Dor-
M8 drecht: Springer, 2006).

Introduction
General Text, Death, and Time
We are currently approaching (or undergoing, depending on who you ask)

what is being called the sixth mass extinction, also known as the Holocene or
Anthropocene extinction. While species extinction is certainly a fact of life
(scientists estimate that 95 percent of all species that have ever lived are now
extinct), it has been argued that species are dying out at a rate 1,000 to 10,000
times faster than the normal—natural, so to speak—“background” rate, with
up to 50 percent of all species facing extinction by the year 2050.1 Unlike the
previous five extinctions, this is the first due to the effects of the actions of
a single species: our own, human beings. Ninety-nine percent of species cur-
rently threatened are said to be so because of anthropogenic climate change,
habitat destruction, and the introduction of foreign species into their balanced
ecosystems.2 The journal Nature currently lists 41 percent of amphibians,
26 percent of mammals, and 13 percent of birds as currently under threat of
extinction.3 However, it is impossible to accurately know the extent of this
extinction because, of the estimated 8.7 million species on earth today, only
less than 20 percent have been “discovered” (or cataloged in the annals of
biology).4 Another study in Nature lists as many as 21.4 million possible spe-
cies of animals, fungi, and plants with only 1.8 million described, while yet
another study includes microbial life in positing a possible one trillion species
on earth, with only one thousandth of a percent identified.5
A related challenge is currently facing the world’s languages, the most
widely cited study from 1992 anticipating the loss of as many as 90 percent
of languages by the year 2100, with more recent estimates placing this figure
somewhat more optimistically at 50 percent.6 National Geographic calcu-
lates that a language dies every fourteen days.7 Like biological species, it is
difficult to say how many languages exist, with an average figure of around
xxiii

xxiv Introduction
6,000 to 7,000 (and as many as 10, 000) usually proposed, with perhaps as
many sign languages. Ethnologue currently lists 6,809 languages, 95 percent
of which have fewer than one million speakers.8 Another study adds that
of all the world’s languages, some 5,000 have less than 100,000 speakers,
3,000 less than 10,000 speakers, 1,500 less than 1,000 speakers, and 500 less
than 100 speakers.9 Four to five thousand of all languages are indigenous
and endemic to a single country and ecosystem, spoken by a very small
number of people, their loss thereby entailing that of an entire culture, of a
wholly singular manner of relating to the world, perhaps the end of a world,
of the world itself. As a report jointly released by UNESCO (The United
Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), the WWF (The
World Wide Fund for Nature), and Terralingua, an organization commit-
ted to biocultural diversity, puts it, “languages have been called ‘the DNA
of cultures’—they have encoded the cultural knowledge that people have
inherited from their ancestors, and each generation continues to add to this
heritage.”10 And while a certain amount of language extinction and evolution
has also always occurred, one can read the intensification and acceleration of
this process as bound up with the causes responsible for species loss: envi-
ronmental degradation and climate change, which operate alongside the dis-
placement of indigenous communities and the hegemony of Anglo-American
popular culture in the globalization of capitalism. Global capitalism requires
unencumbered translation and thus fosters the increasing spread of English
and other “mega-languages” whereby traditional languages and knowledge
systems are abandoned, either willingly as a means of survival or as a result
of violent coercion; Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Bengali, Portuguese,
Arabic, Russian, Japanese, and German constitute less than 1 percent of all
world languages, but are spoken by 95 percent of its population, 50 percent of
which as a mother tongue. It’s in this sense that Jason W. Moore’s preferred
reference to the Capitalocene over the Anthropocene seems equally appropri-
ate in thinking through the extinction of biocultural diversity.11
It is surprising, given the increasing amount of interest in posthumanist
discourses in responding to our ecological crisis—highlighting the necessity
to go beyond the classical metaphysical oppositions of culture and nature,
the human and its others, the organic and inorganic—that more attention has
not been given to thinking that biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity
are mutually and inextricably threatened. Biocultural diversity is defined as
“the diversity of life in all its manifestations—biological, cultural, and lin-
guistic—which are interrelated within a complex socio-ecological adaptive
system.”12 Throughout these chapters, I will argue that the loss of this diver-
sity is something to be grieved and mourned for its own sake, but also due to
the fact that the ecosystems most capable of enduring and living-on are those

Introduction xxv
characterized by difference and diversity.13 Preserving biocultural diversity is

both the right thing to do and what we have to do if we want to keep on living
together. Ethics and ontology, the norm and “form” of the living, so to speak,
are thus inextricably bound up one with the other when it comes to thinking
the futures of life and death on earth—although the logic of this bind is by no
means simple and will require patient elaboration.
Deconstruction, in the seemingly never-endingly renewed caricatures of
its stakes within and outside academia, will perhaps seem to some a strange
way to think biocultural sustainability because its name can evoke taking
something apart or breaking it down. An even cursory reading of the work of
Jacques Derrida, however, reveals that questions of life, nature, the earth, and
ethics have been present from his earliest texts and remained at the forefront of
his thought until his death. Derrida has always been a thinker of the living, and
particularly of life-supporting contexts, and so always a thinker of ecology,
the biosphere, and the earth for me.14 But relatedly, it will seem problematic
to others that a study concerned with biocultural survival and sustainability
will place death at the forefront of its analyses. But what if the only reason
that we could care about the loss of species, languages, and cultures was that
their survival could be threatened, that they could die out and become extinct?
An immortal, invulnerable life after all is not grievable or even sustainable.
Ecological relationality exposes all life to others and to this vulnerability be-
fore death and extinction, and species and nonhuman languages or semiotic
systems will continue to live and die out long after we have gone (barring, of
course, an apocalypse of such cataclysmic proportions that all life on earth
would be immediately wiped out, but even cockroaches, tardigrades, fruit
flies, and scorpions have been said to be capable of surviving a nuclear war).
But if death is so constitutive of natural life, one might press on, why bother
with sustainability? This question, however, loses much of its pertinence when
the imperative of sustainability itself is understood to gain its fullest urgency,
indeed to only make sense in light of an abnormal, “unnatural,” or monstrous
degradation or extinction, precisely what we currently face in the Anthropo-
cene extinction of the earth’s species and languages.
General ecology is for me a manner of thinking life on earth by radically
relating to this death as co-constitutive of survival and sustainability, just as
it ultimately exceeds them. It is an epistemological, ontological, and ethi-
cal framework that differentially and heterogeneously exposes any manner
of being on earth (or any other world)—from the amoeba to the human in
their relations to organic, inorganic, and technic matter—to nonknowledge,
nonsense, disjunction, interruption, impossibility, aneconomic, or entropic
expenditure of energy and a nonorganic death that cannot be survived. This
follows from one of Derrida’s earliest definitions of différance:

xxvi Introduction
How are we to think simultaneously, on the one hand, différance as the eco-
nomic detour that, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to
the pleasure or presence that have been deferred by (conscious or unconscious)
calculation, [this is what I would call restricted economy/ecology] and, on the
other hand, différance as the relation to an impossible presence, an expenditure
without reserve, as irreparable loss of presence, irreversible usage of energy,
indeed, as the death drive, and as the relation to the wholly other apparently in-
terrupting every economy? It is evident—and this is the evident itself—that the
economical and the non-economical, the same and the wholly other, etc. cannot
be thought together. (MP 20/19t)
If deconstruction, as Derrida defines it in “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” is

an experience of the impossible, it is because it attempts to nondialectically
enter these two movements (the restricted economic and the aneconomic) into
relation, albeit a relation without relation, as he often borrows from Maurice
Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas.15 Everything about the deconstructive af-
firmation of living-on or “survivance” that Derrida places at the center of his
oeuvre takes place across the gap or spacing of this relation.16 The seemingly
negative contagions of death, interruption, and aneconomic expenditure thus
do not contradict (especially not dialectically so) the values of communica-
tion and relationality one might imagine as being more conducive to think-
ing ecology and sustainability. Rather, they make these relations possible in
their affirmation of difference and diversity, across processes of differentia-
tion and diversification. To affirm biocultural diversity must thus in a sense
renounce the attempt to actively control and master these processes in their
self-identity or presence and instead let them live on, and ultimately die, in
leaving them the futures that are most “proper” to them, futures foreclosed
and expropriated by the sixth mass extinction, futures that, as inappropriable
as they may be, and precisely because of this inappropriability, we must give
back—or let return—to them.
These reflections, however, will no more attempt to vitalize inorganic pro-
cesses such as languages than deploy “life” as a metaphor for thinking these,
or generalize “ecology” as a metaphor for the totality of human/nonhuman,
organic/inorganic relationality tout court. Furthermore, I intend to differenti-
ate my approach from one grounded in the immanent abilities, capacities,
forces, intensities, powers, and so on of Life itself, subtending what has
been called the “affirmative turn to life,” particularly in affirmative biopoli-
tics.17 I do this as much to circumnavigate and interrogate the dark history
of vitalism and biologism, what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a “vitalo-spiritualist
fascism”—a history very present in Derrida’s thinking of life death and that
will preoccupy this book’s final three chapters on Martin Heidegger, Fried-
rich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Roberto Esposito on Nazi biologism

Introduction xxvii
and biopolitics—as to suggest that the mourning and compassion for mortal
life and finitude ultimately at stake in any thought of sustainability is better
apprehended through a recognition of life in its passivity, powerlessness, and
originary contamination by death, as is the affirmation of living-on itself.18 To
refuse this contamination in the name of property or propriety has important
biopolitical consequences for ecological thought; as David Wills points out,
if ecology in its most restricted sense is understood as an organic relation be-
tween a living entity and its territory, then “blood and soil are the two poles
of every anthropo-ecological impulse and enterprise, the two oikoi or (home-)
bases upon which rest both the private and public versions of environmental-
ization in general.”19 As he continues,
The greatest political-ecological threat resides precisely in an effervescence

that preserves contact in a communosphere without contagion, more precisely
still in the absolute anthropocentrism of such homogeneous contiguity. For the
pure congealed humanism of Nazism was precisely what allowed it to purge
heterogeneous members of its communities by calling them sub- or nonhuman.20
If Georges Bataille’s thought of general economy (or ecology), by contrast,

leads us to think a certain inorganicity of the outside for Wills, which he calls
an “originary environmental rupture, prosthetization and technologization”
that would somehow resist this threat, then it behoves us to examine this
contagion between the inorganic and organic more closely in our study of life
death.21 Elsewhere, in Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life, Wills draws
from Derrida’s La Vie la mort seminar—one of the central focuses of this
present book—in outlining two such possible contaminations between life
and death; on the one hand an enlivening of the inanimate or a vitalization of
matter, and on the other an originary technicity or inorganicity of the living he
follows Derrida in calling life death. The former notion is ascribed by Wills
to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, also having its adherents in Foucault’s
readings of Xavier Bichat and Georges Cuvier. For Wills, both trends are
really two sides of the same coin, and both are affirmative philosophies of
life.22 I follow Wills in preferring life death, but will demonstrate in this book
through a close reading of Derrida’s oeuvre that any vitalization of matter
or the inorganic is itself an effect of life death, finding the sole possibility
of its dialectical coinage through its relation to aneconomic expenditure and
death. Derrida’s notion of survivance, I’ll show in chapter 1, owes an im-
mense debt to Blanchot’s notion of a double death, occurring in the gap that
separates a dialectical relation of life to death (the death organic life survives
by delaying, deferring, or postponing death) and a nondialectical, inorganic,
impossible death (the one life cannot survive; extinction). This double death,
I’ll demonstrate in chapters 4 and 5, can also be shown to structure Deleuze,

xxviii Introduction
Foucault, and Esposito’s ideas on life, time, and the earth as well, with im-
mensely important implications for rethinking our technobiopolitical predica-
ment, as well as understanding ecology itself.
An ethics of sustainability oriented around this shared finitude will thus
be concerned with the survival of species and languages as much for their
own sake as in the interest of pluralizing the interruptive possibilities they
pose to the dominant ethico-politico-juridical frameworks responsible for
environmental degradation, a degradation materialized in what Bernard
Stiegler reads as the acceleration of entropy in contemporary technocapital-
ism. Stiegler understands technics as
an acceleration of entropy—not just because it is a process of combustion and of

the dissipation of energy, but because industrial standardization seems today to
lead to the destruction of life as the burgeoning and proliferation of differences:
biodiversity, cultural diversity, and the singularity of psychic individuations as
well as collective individuations.23
It’s here that survivance, in entering into relation both a mourning for bio-
cultural extinction and its possible sustainability, allows us to reimagine what
kind of future we want for the earth. Kelly Oliver, for example, refers to this
as an ethics of the earth against the global; a notion of “peace through, rather
than against, both cultural diversity and the biodiversity of the planet . . . an
ethics and politics of the earth that is not totalizing and homogenizing . . . [an]
earth ethics and politics that embrace otherness and difference rather than co-
opting them to take advantage of the global market.”24 Drawing from Derrida’s
famous remarks in the second volume of The Beast and the Sovereign, the fact
that no living being shares a world is because the earth and earthlings refuse
us; “earth ethics, then, is an ethics of limits, it is an ethics of remainder, what
cannot be assimilated.”25
In line with Oliver’s ethics of limits and refusal, and as unfashionable as
this may seem, I think confronting the sixth mass extinction requires dust-
ing off the notion of “nature” in order to assess what seems so unnatural, so
monstrous about the rate and scale at which the planet’s biocultural diversity
finds itself threatened, whether we adapt a Blanchotian syntax in calling this
a “nature without nature,” or Derrida’s notion of nature de-naturing itself,
in contrast to the more popular affirmations of “ecology without nature” or
“after nature.”26 Frédéric Neyrat suggests thinking of nature as a necessary
detour in what he calls an ecology of separation, against any notion of nature
as a well-balanced homeostatic order, drawing instead from Donald Wor-
ster’s 1970s notion of an “ecology of chaos.”27 To think nature as this gap
or material limit to absolute relationality opens up a possibility for saying
“no”: as Neyrat puts it; to say, as David Wood opens our Eco-Deconstruction

Introduction xxix
collection, “we cannot go on like this!”28 Or even as found in the thirty-six

“no”s of Ignacio Ramonet’s “Résistances,” endorsed by Derrida in one of his
last public addresses: “To resist is to say no . . . no to the destruction of the
environment.”29 The thought of ecology as pure interconnectedness, for its
part, like many other hyperaffirmative philosophies, “does not allow us to not
want.”30 It only asks that we do away with limits, restraint, “treading lightly
on the earth,” and, as Neyrat cites Bruno Latour, “develop more, not less.”31
It is in this sense, in direct confrontation with such notions, that I follow
Neyrat’s exhortation to think nature as a detour, although Derrida’s notion of
life death interprets this detour quite differently. “Nature, the system of the
earth and the sun” is not simply an external or outside accident disrupting the
restricted economy or ecology of the death drive in the organism’s attempt
to die its own, proper death” (CP 377/354). Rather, life’s restricted, organic
relation to death is part of a broader, more general ecology that inscribes its
transcendent, inorganic, external, natural-earthly-solar death within, in what
Derrida calls “the general Umweg, of the (no) step of the detour [pas de dé-
tour] which always leads back to death. Leads back—here again it is not a
question of going, but of returning [revenir]” (CP 377/354t).
I’ve shown in earlier works like “The Posthuman Promise of the Earth” and
the introduction to my translation of Derrida’s Advances (“Auparadvances”)
that this detour is wholly a matter of temporality; the time of absolute ex-
penditure and loss at stake in the Platonic demiurge’s finite promise of the
world is somehow “older” than Husserlian-transcendental or Heideggerian-
ontological time.32 In this book, I argue that the futures of life death on earth
must be thought through a detour that also opens a return—not of the same,
or eternal, but an infinitely finite revenance of différance. Such a conception
of time answers to Karen Barad’s suggestion that the habitual positing of a
new, better temporality in contrast to linear, homogenous, capitalist time, for
example, risks “fall[ing] into the logic of progress and supersessionism. What
is needed is an understanding of temporality where the ‘new’ and the ‘old’
might coexist, where one does not triumph by replacing and overcoming the
other.”33 All the chapters that follow will attempt to elucidate this temporality,
passing through Freud’s death drive, Hegel’s temporal plasticity, Husserl’s
Living Present, Heidegger’s auto-affective temporalization, Nietzsche’s Eter-
nal Return, as well as Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, and Esposito’s
readings thereof, to think through a more just future of life death on earth, to
give biocultural peace a chance.
This detour of nature also allows us to interpret the biocultural paradigm,
as Samantha Frost suggests, as a matter of cultivating, “not as a noun but as
a verb, as in ‘to culture,’ to cultivate, to provide some kind of medium within
which a thing or things can grow . . . in short, the material, social and symbolic

xxx Introduction
worlds we inhabit.”34 And, as Luce Irigaray also points out, cultivation “can-
not happen without us taking on a cut, a void, an insuperable negative and
ensuring another relation to transcendence with respect to our natural envi-
ronment and belonging.”35 As she concludes her section of Through Vegetal
Being, such cultivation requires “taking on the void or the nothing of na-
ture.”36 A cultivation of life for Irigaray is a matter of freeing, developing, and
making use of a surplus of energy as the relation to another’s temporality, the
opening of another future beyond my death and projects, which returns me to
myself otherwise than my own temporalization would.37 Here, “I welcom[e]
the future that will happen to me from the encounter with the other. A future
irreducible to the mere unfolding of my past.”38 For me, however, the cultiva-
tion required to think through biocultural survival must also relate to this sur-
plus of energy as an aneconomic entropic loss. This excess can precisely not
be made use of, nothing can be done with it, it cannot be made the subject of
some work, labor, or economy or—more difficultly—any ethical or political
program because it exhausts itself in a time of pure expenditure, inoperativity,
and powerlessness. But here, the ineradicable possibility of death and extinc-
tion determine the temporality of the other, each an irreducible and singular
form of alterity, “one other or some other persons, but also places, animals,
languages,” each time uniquely the end of the world, as well as, through the
detour of this temporality, the other’s decision in me as my passive decision
to let it live on (DM 101/71).
In this introduction, I’ll begin by elaborating what I understand as Der-
rida’s general ecology in distinction from other recent interpretations of the
term and examine how it might give us to rethink the notion of the general
text at work in his La Vie la mort seminar, building on and departing from ex-
isting scholarship on these sessions. I’ll then conclude with some preliminary
remarks on the matters of temporality and futurity at stake therein.
§0.1: GENERAL ECOLOGIES
The book you’re beginning to read constitutes a heavily rewritten version of

my doctoral dissertation “General Ecology: Life Death on Earth in Derrida
and Others,” defended in the fall of 2016.39 It was with a mixture of ter-
ror and excitement, then, that I approached Erich Hörl and James Burton’s
edited collection General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm a few
months after my book’s initial submission in the spring of 2017. Hörl’s work
in particular, however, as well as the already-mentioned essays therein by
Neyrat, Stiegler, and Wills, challenged me to rearticulate the stakes of my
own project within the context of a complex and cutting-edge constellation

Introduction xxxi
of thought, an opportunity for which, despite important distances taken, I am

quite grateful. Although I’d been using the term “general ecology” in my
publications since 2012, for reasons I hope will become clear throughout this
book, “general ecology” on my interpretation would really be a strange term
to feel possessive or proprietary about (as should any deconstructive term or
text) because it designates the very logic through which any propriative cir-
culation is bound to an ex-propriation without return. I was aware of Timothy
Morton’s mention of the term in his 2007 Ecology Without Nature, and Hörl’s
introduction also alerted me not only to Guattari’s mention of a “generalized
ecology” in his 1992 Chaosmosis, but Edgar Morin’s “écologie généralisée
(oikos)” in his 1980 La Vie de la vie.40 The stakes of Hörl’s project, however,
are very different from mine, even if he borrows from Derrida’s “Faith and
Knowledge” in proposing an ecology dislodged from “the undamaged and
unscathed, the unspoiled, intact and immune, the whole and holy.”41 In intro-
ducing the Derrida’s General Ecology in my (now somewhat inverted) title,
a closer examination of Hörl’s work will be necessary.
Although Hörl, like myself and others, adapts the concepts of restricted
and general ecology from Bataille, he interprets the emergence of the general
from the restricted as contemporaneous with the advent of contemporary
cybernetics. Here, “the restricted ecology of nature transmutes into a tech-
noecology.”42 General ecology rejects the earlier values of nature, proximity,
and immediacy in favor of a broader account of relationality. The generaliza-
tion of ecology to include the nonnatural, technics, and new media occurs
for Hörl as a supplementary fourth phase in a series of encyclopedisms of
technology and media as theorized by Gilbert Simondon, passing through the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and first-wave cybernetics. Building from
Simondon’s critique of cybernetics and the ensuing capitalist exploitation of
the resulting mediation, Hörl deems it necessary to “invoke a new, fourth,
indeed ecological encyclopaedism, which is able to work out the new sense
of mediation and processuality at the level of the evolution of technical ob-
jects and of the historicity of objecthood or objectivity in general, advancing
relational thinking.”43 Hörl identifies early proponents of this new relational
thinking in the work of Donna Haraway, Latour, and Isabelle Stengers, and
in more contemporary attempts to come to terms with the new ecological
paradigm via concepts such as “assemblage, ensemble, montage, composi-
tion, hetero-genesis, symbiogenesis, being-with (être-avec, Mit-Sein), being-
together (être-ensemble), appearing-together/compearance (comparution), as
agency or as the entanglement of human and non-human entities or actors.”44
Likewise, Hörl reads the generalization of ecology as brought about by the
shifts and reorganizations in human/nonhuman relations formulated by cy-
bernetics in terms of power, control, and information. First-order cybernetics

xxxii Introduction
instigated a “control revolution” with the notion that life itself implies con-
trol, and the second-order cybernetics of Luhmann, Maturana, and Varela
furthered an ecologization of this notion with its concepts of auto-control and
autopoiesis, along with Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia hypothesis of the earth
as a living organism, and Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Our
present, neocybernetic stage (which Hörl dates from around 2000), however,
is allegedly the first to constitute a truly environmental culture of control.
Hörl identifies this general ecologization of thought itself as emblematic of a
shift from what Foucault understood as modern governmentality (biopower,
in a word, the productive control, management, and development of life) to-
ward a contemporary nonmodern environmentality: “the capture and the con-
trol, the management, the modulation of behaviour, of affects, of relations,
of intensities, and of forces by means of environmental (media) technologies
whose scope ultimately borders on the cosmic.”45 As he elaborates,
This environmental culture of control undoubtedly constitutes the apex of the

cybernetic imaginary of our time, the pervasive triumph of the cybernetic hy-
pothesis of universal controllability and a corresponding ideal of regulation. It
entangles us in a new technology of power that has begun to operate in a spe-
cific, ecological way and has, in any case, environmentalized itself.46
Here, the enlightening (if not emancipatory) aim of Hörl’s general ecology is
to return cybernetic regulation and control against the technocapitalist power
that birthed it. It constitutes a critique of environmentality and not a roman-
ticization of relationality. But this critique is inseparable from affirmation.
General ecology, he writes, “stands for the critical analysis and affirmation
of this environmental turn and thereby marks the key content of a neocritical
project that is no longer negativistic but characterized by a non-affirmative
affirmation.”47 The overlaps between Hörl’s general ecology, technological
positionality in the Heideggerian sense, and affirmative biopolitics cannot
be overstated, and the problematic notions of life, death, time, and the earth
therein—however technomedially ecologized—will form one of the key axes
around which this book will turn. Must we think the living, in all its ecotech-
nicity and ecological relationality as a counter-power, counter-force, counter-
control, to technobiopolitical positionality to think a future sustainability?48 Or
do sustainability and survival not require an altogether different resistance?
One of the most consistent figures in Hörl’s formulation of general ecol-
ogy, however, is Nancy, whose oft-cited phrase from The Sense of the World
“an ecology properly understood can be nothing other than a technology”
stands as Hörl’s introduction’s epigraph. This phrase, I think, can be helpfully
read alongside Nancy’s own endorsement for the Eco-Deconstruction col-
lection: “ecology is nothing new: It even risks having overtaken [dépassée]

Introduction xxxiii
itself in the sense of no longer marking any specific domain. It is clear that
ecology traverses all spheres of all existences.”49 What seems to draw Hörl to
Nancy is a shift in the culture of sense within which, as the former interprets
it, the primordiality of relation imposes itself, preceding individual relata and
extending across all and nonhuman assemblages; “it must traverse all modes
and levels of Being.”50 For Hörl, a nonteleological account of technics, of the
purposelessness and finitude of sense, characterizes contemporary cybernet-
ics, and the corresponding emergence of technoecological sense is precisely
what marks the shift from restricted to general ecology. In the latter, however,
sense becomes redefined as fundamentally a-significative, beyond the sign,
meaning, and primordiality of language. In this generalized ecology, we
either face a loss of the sense of the world in globalization or rediscover the
world as sense: the creation of the world.
As Ted Toadvine interprets Nancy, however, “this ambivalent interpretation
of the end of the world—the end of the world as cosmos that is the renewal
of the world as sense—would seem as far as possible from Derrida’s own
treatment of the end of the world . . . where it is most often associated with
death.”51 If I follow Hörl in reading general ecology as a relation to a loss of
sense, my interpretation of the term will relate to this loss otherwise, as an
experience of the impossible, of the aneconomic death drive and irrecoverable
expenditure of energy without return. And these losses will be shown to con-
stitute the only chance through which to resist biocultural extinction, where we
must appeal to what Derrida might call “a temporality that seems to defy all
the senses of the word sense” (P 283/n.a. t). A key disagreement between Hörl
and I may lie in the interpretation of Nancy’s “ecotechnics,” that is, whether
one reads an ex-propriation by technics as the originary condition of ecology,
as I would, or whether one understands it as emblematic of our contemporary
technomedial epoch. Regardless, a certain rapprochement between Hörl and
my interpretations of general ecology for the future could be found in a shared
critique of what Nancy calls the “general equivalence” of all local semiotiza-
tions brought about by capitalism in the technoecological condition (one that
could be argued to subtend the accelerated extinction of minority languages
and cultures). As Toadvine points out, general equivalence has important im-
plications for how we think of time and the future, specifically its calculable
manageability on the basis of deep past trends. What Toadvine calls temporal
justice, however, would constitute the “extraction [of ecotechnics] from the
general equivalence of capitalism and therefore its return to the technē of fini-
tude or the spacing of existence.”52 It is precisely in this temporal “in-finition
or unfinishability of the finite” of ecotechnics that the aneconomic, the incal-
culable, or the nonequivalent can allow us to think through the role Derrida’s
general ecology can play for the futures of life death on earth.

xxxiv Introduction
§0.2: GENERAL TEXTS
My initial interest in heading to the University of California, Irvine, in 2014

to study and transcribe Derrida’s La Vie la mort seminar was—perhaps like
many others—a desire to further probe his claim in the last interview before
his death that an originary dimension of “survivance” informed the entirety
of his work, adding that everything in deconstruction proceeds from an af-
firmation of life, and enjoining his mourners “affirmez sans cesse la survie,”
in his last words read by family at his funeral.53 La Vie la mort was given in
1974–1975 and is perhaps best known for its final four sessions published
as “To Speculate: On ‘Freud’” in The Post Card. Several of the sessions on
Nietzsche have also been published: the second, “La Logique de la vivante,”
in The Ear of the Other, and the entirety of the eighth, “Cause ‘Nietzsche,’”
along with the first part of the ninth, “Chaos de l’interprétation,” were pub-
lished as “Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions.”
The seminar also engages Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures (sessions 7–10) as
well as the work of Georges Canguilhem (session 3).
It is La Vie la mort’s unpublished sessions on biologist François Jacob’s
Logic of Life (sessions 1, 4–6), however, that have garnered the most atten-
tion thus far. A hasty reading of this scholarship, particularly the notions of
“general text” therein, might lead one to anticipate the stakes and conclusion
of my study here: “Derrida’s general text extends from the biological to the
cultural, frees Derrida from his almost always misread notion that ‘there is
nothing outside the text’ and the correlated accusations of linguistic ideal-
ism by disclosing the adherence of the general text to structures in physics,
chemistry and biology—its materialist or ecological ex-scription—and this,
coupled with a generalization of ecology to include the cultural and lin-
guistic, and read alongside a deconstructive affirmation of survival, would
culminate in a theory of biocultural sustainability.” I hope that I would not
be disappointing such a reader by claiming that this is not really the argu-
ment of this book, or rather that the truth therein (it is not a false argument)
finds itself heavily circumscribed by the fact that my invocation of a general
ecology from Derrida’s work does not issue from a conceptual necessity
of generalizing ecology to the linguistic, the cultural, the technomachinic,
and the institutional brought about by whatever epochal-encyclopedic shift
in cybernetics (a periodization for which Derrida, I think, would have little
patience), but rather to think through the sixth mass extinction of biological
species, indigenous cultures, and languages, of all the futures we are foreclos-
ing, and the role played therein by contemporary technobiopolitics. General
economy in Bataille and Derrida’s sense allows us to do this because it relates
any meaningful transcendental, dialectical, phenomenological, or ontologi-

Introduction xxxv
cal living economy to an aneconomic, irreparable loss of sense, presence, or

energy, to a death that does not live on. Any future survival or sustainability
of biocultural diversity on earth can only be negotiated between an unwork-
able metaphysics of living presence and its complicity with technobiopolitical
positionality on the one hand, and an extinction without possible return on
the other. In contrast to Hörl’s emphases on assemblages, symbiogenesis,
sympoiesis, being-with, and being-together in his generalized ecology, Der-
rida’s general ecology could be said to constitute an interruptive excess “with
regard to symbiosis, to a symbiotic, gregarious or fusional living together.
. . . All living together that would limit itself to the symbiotic or that would be
regulated according to a figure of the symbiotic or the organic is a first lapse
of the sense [un manquement au sens] and of the ‘must’ of ‘living together’”
(DJ 33–34/26–27).
Vicki Kirby has published some important work on La Vie la mort, with
perhaps her most pressing question concretized in the title of her recent edited
collection: What If Culture Was Nature All Along? Derrida’s famous idea that
“there is no outside-text” must be understood as suggesting that there is noth-
ing outside of Nature or matter; culture and nature are two expressions of the
same phenomenon. While acknowledging Arkady Plotnitsky and Christopher
Johnson’s work on deconstruction in relation to quantum physics and biol-
ogy, respectively, as rare attempts to engage the relation of deconstruction
to the sciences, an important part of Kirby’s argument confronts Derrida’s
notion of the text with Barad’s quantum-physical notions of “intra-action”
and entanglement, which on Kirby’s reading disclose the materiality of inter-
pretation, language, and representation, profoundly displacing the humanism
of classical concepts of science. If entities do not preexist their relationality
but rather emerge through their quantum involvement, scientific inquiry or
interpretation do not originate from a human inquirer but rather constitute na-
ture’s own investigations, readings, and rewritings of itself.54 Kirby, however,
resists the idea that thinking a posthuman assemblage of nature and culture
can somehow evade the ecologically destructive aspects of humanism. A gen-
eralized ecology, to adapt her argument, would maintain the nature/culture
divide by simply extending ecology to include the technomachinic and the
neomedial, presuming the problem of relationality “resolved” via notions of
conjunction, aggregation, assemblage, and connection. Instead, Kirby devel-
ops the quantum implications of Derrida’s notion of general text as ecology,
one that “open[s] the text, or any individual identification, to an interiority
whose articulating energy is the entire system.”55 All individuations and
speciations reinvent the scene of writing that is the general text of ecology.
Species and languages “might be likened to a ‘restricted writing’ which the
general bodies forth.”56

xxxvi Introduction
We must thus be careful to resist the temptation of thinking Derrida’s no-

tion of the general text as a mere assemblage of nature and culture, of the
biological, cultural, and linguistic. Derrida’s twofold reading of Jacob on the
notion of the program is helpful in this respect. First, Kirby writes, Derrida
“wants to acknowledge the evidence of a generality of language that encom-
passes the ‘cerebral-institutional,’ to cite Jacob, or what Derrida will gloss
as ‘psychic, social, cultural, institutional, politico-economic etc.’ (L1, 19)
as well as the genetic.”57 But Jacob here gets caught up in differentiating the
progress from rigidity of the amoeba or annelid’s program to the suppleness
and openness of the cerebro-institutional. As Francesco Vitale, author of the
recently published Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sci-
ences on the La Vie la mort seminar, puts it, “in the annelid and the amoeba
. . . the program and its execution are very restricted because of the extreme
simplicity of the nervous system; in man, the program is very open because
of the great complexity of the nervous system and the brain, which is able
to operate a much greater number of connections than the brain of the other
animals.”58 At stake here, he writes, is simply a difference in degree from
lesser to greater flexibility “towards the semi-freedom of man, in order to
respond to the necessities of survival, which, in turn, vary a lot from the cell
to social life, to the sphere of scientific knowledge.”59 A freedom that would
culminate in Hörl’s general ecology where technological objects “take on a
majority and autonomous status.”60 Timothy Clark, on the other hand, points
here to a potential reductivism in this view, which “risks still sounding like
a homogenous and continuous process, not one involving scale discontinui-
ties and unpredictable retroactive effects.”61 Scale discontinuities, perhaps,
through which we could approach the Anthropocene monstrosity of biocul-
tural extinction. Derrida himself cautions against this blurring of differences
and erasure of oppositions into homogeneity; problematizing the oppositions
between the genetic and cerebral programs must not “give way to the homo-
geneous but to a heterogeneity or a differentiality; for . . . the functioning of
opposition always has the effect of erasing differentiality. What interests me
with respect to the beyond and the step/not beyond [pas au-delà] is indeed
this limit without opposition of opposition and difference” (L1, 17–18).
This notion of the beyond, the Outside, transcendence, but also its interrup-
tion or negation captured in Blanchot’s pas au-delà will be at stake in every
chapter of this book. Where I somewhat depart from Kirby’s reading, then,
is in proposing what may at first appear as something of a heterodox reading
of Derrida. As she writes, “If différance is a general animation, an epigenesis
of infinite mutation that arises within the scene of writing, indeed, if it is the
scene of writing, then we might risk the suggestion that différance is Life
itself.”62 In Life’s ongoing re-production, reinvention, and differentiation, ac-

Introduction xxxvii
knowledging nature’s originary humanity comes to constitute a “reconfigured

vitalism, albeit one whose internal ‘machinery’ is comprehensive, [within
which] even the fact of death as something final, the absolute and definitive
cut that divides time into separate packets and guarantees there will be no
haunting, no afterlife—even this truth is put into question.”63 To understand
the general text as shot through with quantum dis/locations implies that “there
is no outside, no remainder that is not already involved and evolving as
text.”64 The epistemological-ontological entanglement of subject and object
in any interpretation “appears to involve no transition through a passage of
time or a gap in space.”65 Barad’s notion of intra-action, on Kirby’s reading,
where entities are said to not preexist their relations, “breaks the equation of
mediation with an ‘in-between,’ a dead space, a gap, nothing or absence.”66
Derrida’s general text, like intra-action, is thus seen to contest the very notion
of an in-between. As she cites La Vie la mort, “the text is not a third term in
the relation between the biologist and the living being, it is the very structure
of the living being as the structure common to the biologist as a living be-
ing—to science as the production of life, and the living being itself” (L4, 5t).
This reconfigured biologism or naturalism would be justifiable for progres-
sive politics for Kirby “if the capacity to think stretches across an entire eco-
logical landscape.”67 Indeed, Derrida himself points to a possible biologistic
interpretation of his notion of the general text.
Have I not myself yielded to such a biologism in claiming that life was not one
model amongst others since it was defined as the very power to reproduce itself,
that is to say to produce itself as a model, or, taken from the other side that the
text as life or life as texts were not models among others, which perhaps comes
down to making of it the ultimate model. (L7, 2t)
In a sense, everything at stake here—concerning the biologism of the

general text as it develops in Life Death, or the “ecologism” of a generalized
ecology—hinges on how radically one reads the alterity, the beyond, the out-
side really, and death at play within. The next phrase from Derrida, already
often cited in the scholarship, would merit many rereadings in this respect.
It is because alterity is irreducible therein that there is nothing but text, it’s be-
cause no term, no element is sufficient or even has an effect if it does not refer
to the other and never to itself that there is text, and it’s because the text-set
cannot close in on itself that there is only text, and that the so-called “general”
text (an evidently dangerous and only polemical expression) is neither a set nor
a totality. (L6, 4t)
For my part, I don’t believe the full breadth of Derrida’s general text and its
implications for the futures of life death on earth, of biocultural sustainability

xxxviii Introduction
can be grasped in immanence, without an apprehension of the impossible

finitude of death, the outside, dead time, the remainder, the gap, the space, the
in-between. Even Barad’s more recent work posits the void as “a lively tension
that troubles the opposition between living and dying (without collapsing their
important material differences,” and nothingness as “the place where living and
dying meet.”68 As Derrida follows this citation, “a text without external refer-
ence [is] wholly outside because it has no other reference than a text remarking
a text” (L6, 4e). This will require an elaboration of the notion of the “beyond-
within,” or the transcendence in immanence Derrida develops in works such as
Adieu.69 The exteriority onto which the text opens exceeds the classical inside/
outside opposition. If the general text is simply the indefinite threading of death
in life and life in death, the relay between metaphysics and its other, then it
cannot help us to think biocultural extinction (or its sustainability in the face of
this extinction). But if the general text is broadened to encompass the totality
of the relations between a dialectical economy of life and death, protention and
retention, same and other, nature and culture, and an aneconomic death drive, a
past that has never been present, a wholly irreducible alterity, an irrecoverable
loss of energy, the impossible, the real, in a word, another possibility opens up.
It is because deconstruction takes place within this very gap, as the experience
of the impossible that a future for life death on earth can be affirmed.
In proposing a realist theory of deconstruction as general ecology, I think
one has to show what in ecology (or life) resists its generalization, encyclo-
pediazation, its universal applicability and circulability as a model throughout
the totality of human/nonhuman assemblages, what gap or detour holds the
circle open, breaks the wheel, in other words, and lets us say “enough, no
more.” Here, one has to take seriously what Derrida says when he describes
deconstruction both as realist and as an experience of the impossible, a par-
ticularly important discussion of which takes place in his discussion of biol-
ogy and quantum physics via the work of Johnson and Plotnitsky.
With respect to the deconstruction of logocentrism, of linguisticism, of econo-

mism (of the “proper” and the at-home, oikos, the same), etc., with respect to
the affirmation of the impossible, these have always been advanced in the name
of the real, of the irreducible reality of the real—not of the real as an attribute
of the thing (res), objective, present, sensible or intelligible, but the real as the
coming or event of the other, where it resists all reappropriation, even ana-onto-
phenomenological appropriation. The real is this non-negative im-possible, this
im-possible coming or invention of the event, the thinking of which is not an
onto-phenomenology. (PM 315/96t)
What I understand as Derrida’s general ecology is precisely this relation

to this real, nonnegative impossible, the phenomenological and ontological

Introduction xxxix
excesses of which I’ll explore in chapters 2 and 3, respectively. In light of

this discussion, however, Plotnitsky’s work is particularly helpful as he de-
velops Niels Bohr’s notion of quantum complementarity by way of Bataille
and Derrida’s general economy, noting the influence of quantum physics on
Bataille’s own development of the concept. As Plotnitsky suggests, classical
science ought to be understood in terms of a restricted economy: a restricted
economy of science takes the relations between its objects as always mean-
ingful and controllable, privileges consciousness, meaning, presence, and
truth, and aims at the development of a fully coherent and unified system
of knowledge beyond error, loss, or contingency. General economy relates
these to nonsense, unproductive loss, and multiplicity. Quantum theory can
be understood as a question of general economy because it relates any of its
descriptions to an ineluctable and ineradicable loss of sense. Far from consid-
ering this loss as an external accident befalling the description of a system, it
must be considered as its very condition of possibility. The irreducible loss
introduced by complementarity—always already affecting the representation
of any quantum system— paradoxically provides the only possible complete-
ness of its description.70 In fact, this loss “prohibits one from assuming that
there is somewhere a complete or unified system, existing in itself or by
itself, concerning which system some information is lost in the process of
observation, measurement, and interpretation.”71 In other words, quantum
theory fractures in advance any attempt to control, master, or encyclopedize
the objects of one’s investigation. The structure of general economy, how-
ever, allows complementarity to relate to this impossible loss of meaning and
unknowability. As Plotnitsky cites Derrida, recalling that general economy is
indeed a scientific writing, “it is not the loss of meaning, but . . . the ‘relation
to this loss of meaning.’ It opens the question of meaning. It does not describe
unknowledge, for this is impossible, but only the effects of unknowledge”
(ED 397/270). To think quantum theory as general economy is thus a matter
of taking into account this alterity and heterogeneity without appropriating it
into a generalized encyclopedic system of knowledge: to excise a phrase from
La Vie la mort’s context, “what appears as a limit to objectivity is also the
condition of scientificity” (L6, 5).
§0.3: DEATH, TIME, AND ENTROPY

IN THE ECOLOGICAL MODEL
Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” had identified a common move to

contemporary biology and communication sciences as “the translation of the
world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which

xl Introduction
all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can

be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.”72 The
often-misread notions of situated knowledges and cyborg politics through
which she proposed a new concept of science were positioned as interrup-
tions to the instrumental power of perfect communication and cybernetic
control. How, then, does Derrida’s general ecology resist the generalization
of ecology as a cybernetic model, concept, or metaphor for all human/nonhu-
man technomachinic assemblages? Ecology would somehow have to resist
its becoming part of a scientific system of knowledge and sense, resist its
operational function in the description of a unified system. By way of illus-
tration, we can turn to Derrida’s reading of Canguilhem in the third session
of La Vie la mort. Canguilhem distinguishes between the proper, scientific
Concept and the improper, nonscientific metaphor in understanding life as
communication, message, coding, and decoding. Canguilhem turns to Claude
Bernard, who proposes his thought of life across two axioms: life is death and
life is creation. Of these, only creation is properly vital: the physico-chemical
functioning of an organism is that by which the organism destroys itself;
death. Because one can understand and calculate these physical phenomena,
one mistakes them for life. Truly vital, organic creativity, however, oper-
ates according to form-giving morphological syntheses already at work in
the chemical syntheses in the protoplasm. These syntheses are, for Bernard,
not yet a purely chemical substance but rather the hereditary continuation
of another protoplasmic ancestor whose origin escapes us. Bernard refers to
this as “‘the primitive action of an instruction [consigne] that nature repeats
after having regulated it in advance’” (CE 358t). In his thought of life as cre-
ation, Bernard had thus anticipated for Canguilhem the notion of biological
heredity as occurring through the transmission of coded information. All the
terms used in his work, “instruction [consigne], guiding idea, vital design,
vital pre-scription [préordonnance], vital plan, sense of phenomena,” are for
Canguilhem metaphors used in the stead of an adequate philosophical and
scientific concept (CE 358t). However, after Watson and Crick referred to a
code of instruction, information, and program in describing DNA, contempo-
rary biology began to change its language, grounding itself in the language of
communication. Communication, message, coding, and decoding, thanks to
new scientific advances, would now form the new concepts of life. But these
concepts, Canguilhem writes, are no longer metaphors in the way Bernard’s
were. Derrida describes this problematic interplay between the concept and
the metaphor as a three-step waltz in Canguilhem’s discourse.
Canguilhem wishes to show that Bernard was still within the metaphor but
already within the concept, that the concept within which he already was was
only a metaphor but that the metaphor within which he still was was already

Introduction xli
a concept that nonetheless remained a metaphor within which one could see a
concept announce itself that nonetheless kept within itself some pre-conceptual
metaphorics prefiguring a quasi-metaphorical concept retaining a metaphor
within itself. (L3, 21)
And the same three-step waltz takes place in Hörl’s generalization of ecol-
ogy as the semantic paradigm for contemporary neocybernetics. Hörl writes
the following:
These programmatic discoveries show how a new semantics describing the con-
temporary techno-medial condition is beginning to crystallize around the concept
of ecology, whereby the concept of ecology itself is situated indisputably in
processes of displacement, reformulation, and indeed revaluation. Notably, this
is not about the mere metaphorization of a term that, in its original definition,
would be bound to strictly biological, ethological, or life-scientific references.
Quite the opposite, it is more likely the case that the traditional concept or
discourse of ecology causes a breakthrough and imparts a principle form to the
conceptual constellation, which as a consequence in the course of techno-medial
development, ascends to the level of a critical intuition and model for the de-
scription of the new fundamental position.73
In other words, the traditional, restricted “natural” concept of ecology would

have been a mere metaphor for the contemporary technomedial condition had
not new technological innovations refined its preconceptual sense to permit
its nonmetaphorical generalization to the “nonnatural,” and thus its ascen-
sion to the level of a critical conceptual intuition and operative function in
contemporary scientific discourse and a new ecological paradigm sufficient
to differentiate this intuition from the mere metaphorization of ecology. Hörl
thus maintains Canguilhem’s distinction between the scientific objectivity
of the Concept and the metaphor, both thus presupposing one might call a
restricted economy of science; the Concept corresponds to notions of pro-
priety, adequacy, and proper encyclopedic knowledge, relates its objects to
a meaningful configuration (for which, of course, there can still be a loss of
sense). But in defining the Concept in terms of its practical and operational
use (or critical intuition) for science, Derrida writes, Canguilhem neglects the
fact that both metaphors and concepts can provide just as much an obstacle
to knowledge as they can contribute to the progress of science. Both concept
and metaphor are two sides of the same dialectical coin, economically refer-
ring back to one another.74 But, as he suggests, if both the Concept and the
metaphor are effects of life death—that is, effects without essential cause, as
I’ll show shortly—the discovery of the living in terms of writing or program
(or of cybernetics as ecological) is neither an epistemological break in sci-
ence nor an illustration of its continuous teleology. If metaphor and Concept

xlii Introduction
are more indissociable than one thought, “one must perhaps, like life death,
save or lose them at once, in one blow. It’s impossible, of course” (L3, 24t).
The reasons why Derrida favors “text” as opposed to the cybernetic notions
of message, coding, and information are complex but necessary in identifying
what ought to interrupt the indefinite circulation of “ecology” made possible
by its generalization. As Vitale puts it, Derrida’s notion of the program must
be understood in the context of cybernetics, “but cybernetics is itself intel-
ligible only in terms of a history of the possibilities of the trace as the unity
of a double movement of protention and retention.”75 Because of this weaving
of the trace, the text “allows us to account for the logic of the living in more
rigorous terms than those which biology imported from cybernetics, and,
therefore, to liberate biology itself from the metaphysical residues that still
remain in the naïve use of the notions of ‘message’ and ‘communication.’”76
Still, for reasons that will become clearer in the next two chapters, if only
thought in terms of protention and retention, the trace itself remains meta-
physical, phenomenological, within the dialectics permitting the economic
circulation, the generalization of “life,” “text,” and “ecology.” The general
ecology I’m envisioning, however, would relate this protention and retention
in the trace to a past that has never been present, a time of absolute aneco-
nomic expenditure of energy and inorganic death, as the very condition of a
just, sustainable future-to-come. Let us turn to Derrida’s reading of Jacob in
the sixth session of La Vie la mort to flesh out this argument in more detail.
As Jacob writes, what was understood as the vital force of living beings
at the beginning of the nineteenth century came to be replaced by two new
concepts in physics: energy and information. The living being today is seen as
what he calls a “triple flux” of matter, energy, and information. While Bichat
had interpreted life as the sum of forces resisting death, “with the develop-
ment of thermodynamics and with the total synthesis of organic compounds,
the barrier erected between the chemistry of life and that of inanimate mat-
ter collapsed.”77 Entropy, introduced in the second law of thermodynamics,
is the tendency of every system—living or nonliving—from order toward
disorder, from hot to cold, toward an irrecoverable loss of energy and an
increase in entropy, if no outside energy is brought in. For Jacob, thermody-
namics overflows the distinction between beings and things, the living and
inanimate, biology, physics, and chemistry, all of which are subject to the
same law of the conservation of energy. Thermodynamics heralds the col-
lapse of vitalism, of Life with a capital L, and shifts the biologist’s concern
to living beings alone. Living beings, however, seem to constitute a local and
temporary exception to entropic loss; if the living system as a whole irrevers-
ibly oriented toward its degradation, “because they receive energy from their
surroundings in the form of food, living beings are able to preserve their low

Introduction xliii
level of entropy through time.”78 By way of this understanding of the internal

regulation of living beings, biology would provide Norbert Wiener with the
concepts on which cybernetics would be founded, where, as Jacob cites the
latter, “there is no obstacle to using a metaphor ‘in which the organism is
seen as a message.’”79 Statistical thermodynamics, moreover, would show
that entropy is not some vague mysterious thing but can be measured; the
universe’s tendency from order toward chaos is simply billions of billions of
times more likely than the reverse, which is not for all that impossible; even
the universe’s ultimate randomness is bound to a calculable law. This intro-
duction of statistical approaches to thermodynamics would indeed largely
come to shape how we understand nature today: “a world of relativity and
uncertainty subject to quantum laws and information theory, a world in which
matter and energy are merely two aspects of the same thing.”80
Statistical thermodynamics, however, only concerned itself with popula-
tions and found itself incapable of analyzing the internal order or structure
of organisms. Living beings, Jacob writes, are not statistical phenomena. Cy-
bernetics would introduce the notion of organization as the integration of and
communication between the various levels constituting the living being. In
the middle of the twentieth century, Jacob writes, the concept of information
comes to interpret this organization, playing an “isomorphic” role to that of
entropy. “Entropy and information are as closely connected as the two sides
of a coin. In any given system, entropy provides a measure of both disorder
and our ignorance of the internal structure; and information of both order and
our understanding. Entropy and information are evaluated in the same way.
One is the negative of the other.”81 When the exchange of information comes
to join those of matter and energy as constitutive of and uniting the elements
of any organized system, whether living or nonliving, “every interaction
between the members of an organization can accordingly be considered as
a problem of communication. This applies just as much to a human society
as to a living organism or an automatic engine. In each of these objects, cy-
bernetics finds a model that can be applied to the others.”82 Any system can
now be defined by reference to a) the transmission of a message and b) the
retroactive regulation of its entropic loss. Cybernetics, in other words, comes
to authorize the limitless circulation of the model of the message or of infor-
mation, its traversal of all spheres of all existences. And neocybernetics, to
pick up Hörl’s thread, becomes what authorizes the circulation of the model
of “ecology” from the relations between organisms and their environments to
the totality of technomedial assemblages.
What I’m trying to develop as Derrida’s general ecology, it bears repeat-
ing, is both what permits this circulation of the ecological model as it radi-
cally interrupts it and leads it into nonsense, impossibility, nonknowledge,

xliv Introduction
expenditure without reserve and death. For Jacob, information—insofar as

it is always bound to the exchanges of matter and energy in any organized
system, living or nonliving—becomes the general concept par excellence.
Since information is inseparable from entropy, since there is just as much

exchange of matter and energy as there is of information, there is nothing but
exchange. And the concept of exchange coming into the dominant position of
the most general concept, one passes from exchange to communication and
privileges exchange as the exchange of information with respect to the exchange
of matter and energy. (L6, 8e)
This privileging of an economic energetic exchange of information is what

allows Jacob to read information as the dialectical other side of the coin to
entropy. But information, Derrida writes, or the transmission of messages is
inseparable from an act of filtration, selection, indeed a difference of force.
This would prevent one from isolating a purely communicative model from
relations of matter or energy, which would come to structure and interrupt
the transmission of information, as well as the circulation of the model, from
within. What was always necessary to eliminate in the privileging of form and
communication—matter and energetic loss—cannot be bracketed,
does not let itself be reduced and is not content to add itself to or couple itself
with the message, but structures—for example as selection or principle of selec-
tion—the message, the informational activity itself. And henceforth when one
speaks of textuality, the value of relations of force, difference of force, the eco-
nomic agonistics will be just as irreducible. Just as the opening to the outside of
any textual system at the very moment when it re-marks and re-inscribes itself.
Re-production itself involves this agonistics. (L6, 10)
Indeed, Derrida argues, the constitutive operation of filtering, selection,

“economy,” or difference of relations of forces at stake in the operativity
of any message is itself subject to this aneconomic loss. In the “natural”
tendency of every system, as he puts it, toward degradation, wear and tear,
gain in entropy, and loss of energy, along with its economic regulation or
compensation for these losses, even this regulation is subject to the second
law of thermodynamics. “This work or this local supplementary energy is
itself subject to the same law, the same tendency” (L6, 12). The economic
difference of forces that permit selection, filtration and inheritance in the ac-
tive transmission of a message thus finds itself bound twice over to an aneco-
nomic loss, nondialectical weakness, powerlessness, inoperativity, passivity,
or impossibility as the structural opening of any system, text, or ecology to
its outside, death, or extinction. This is perhaps why Wolfe engages a thought
of two kinds of finitude in his analyses of second-order cybernetics: both the

Introduction xlv
radical passivity and vulnerability we share with the living in general and that
of every semiotic system.
That second form of finitude derives from the fundamental materiality of mean-
ing and communication itself, of any form of semiotic marking and iterability to
which both human and nonhuman animals are subject in a trace structure that,
as [Derrida] puts it, exceeds and encompasses the human/animal difference, and
indeed “the life/death relation” itself.83
However, this dual finitude structuring the genetico-institutional program

constitutes the only site, however inaccessible, for imagining a possible
future for biocultural sustainability. The dialectical waltz between Concept
and Metaphor in generalized ecology, the circular ring or round-dance of
the model “ecology” must be understood as the effect of a nondialectical life
death, and the possibility of any living-on infinitely precariously balanced
in the relation without relation between this dialectics and anti-dialectics. If
what interrupts the circulation of the “information” model is life’s constitu-
tive exposure to an inorganic death it cannot survive, what interrupts the cir-
culation of the “ecology” model is the structural opening of the text and the
program to its material/energetic Outside, its beyond-within, as the chance for
inheriting, selecting, and choosing a more sustainable future.
§0.4: FUTURES: EXTINCTION AND SURVIVAL
An immense challenge in thinking through the futures of life death on earth

and biocultural extinction, then, is Claire Colebrook’s claim that decon-
struction—particularly its notion of writing (or general text)—cannot think
literal extinction.
Derrida’s arrow of time and promising went in one direction only and tended
towards mobility and ability . . . the emphasis is on the promissory and the “to
come” —so much so that what is put out of play is a closed death, a death that
does not repeat. Death is always tied to a future, and the future can never end,
once and for all. That is to say . . . death is not literal (in the sense of actual),
for anything that dies in the narrow sense haunts the present and opens it to pos-
sibilities it may have thought were impossible. . . . On the other hand, death is
truly literal: it bears the structure of a trace, for anything that “is” has an identity
by way of sustaining itself through time, marking out what is the same only by
way of relations that are never present in any one moment.84
For Colebrook, this is because any trace’s living-on through time presup-
poses its retention of a past trace and its protention of a future one through

xlvi Introduction
constantly surviving a certain death, through making possible a certain

impossibility. The notion that the general text blurs two senses of the word
“literal” is echoed by Kirby: Derrida’s scene of writing “complicates the
accepted division between the letter of life, its genetic and reproductive
programs, and the life of the letter in literature and representation, because
reproduction/re-presentation is discrimination/judgement.”85 My sense is,
however, that according to many possible interpretations of the general text,
the trace and living-on in the literature, Colebrook would probably be right.
But there’s something else at play in what I’m trying to develop via Der-
rida’s general ecology—something materialist, realist, and indeed affirmative
(albeit a heavily circumscribed materialism, realism, and affirmation, hence
paradoxically unlimited) that exceeds what I’d call here restricted relations,
whether dialectical or Hegelian (life surviving death), phenomenological or
Husserlian (the interplay of protention and retention), or ontological or Hei-
deggerian (the possibility of an impossibility), in all cases being a matter of
life death, as Dawne McCance might put it,86 a death that life cannot survive,
a material and inorganic death, whether we call it matter or the absolute
expenditure of energy, a realist impossible outside the opposition of impos-
sibility and possibility, and a matter of time: an affirmative relation to a past
that has never been present, an an-archic, immemorial past anterior to reten-
tion that constitutes the only possible opening for the coming or returning of
a just future. Rethinking the general text in relation to death and time would
give us the thought of extinction Colebrook finds lacking in deconstruction;
“would allow us to think about texts and their relation to a counter-vitality
without assuming that texts were living beings (or it would allow us to think
of living beings as texts, as in some part detached from the life from which
they emerge and must distinguish themselves).”87
Colebrook’s mention of the unresolved physics problem of the arrow of
time, then, is more than instructive here. As Jacob writes, Darwin had shown
that the time of evolution is irreversible, it is impossible to return to an ante-
rior state once natural selection has taken place. Statistical thermodynamics
would itself introduce this irreversibility of time into physics in showing the
tendency of every system toward degradation and a gain in entropy. “In nei-
ther the organic nor the inanimate physical world can the film sequences dis-
closing evolution be run backwards.”88 It’s against this entropic irreversibility
of the arrow of time that Stiegler develops his notion of the neganthropocene,
one he insists can only be read in terms of Bataille’s general economy, just
as I would argue Derrida’s notion of survivance can only be read in terms of
general ecology. The specific intensification of entropy in the Anthropocene
for Stiegler “fundamentally weakens the theory of information conceived as a
regime to entropy and negentropy.”89 The neganthropocene for Stiegler does

Introduction xlvii
not oppose entropy but only delays and defers it in the sense of Derrida’s
différance. At stake here would be differentiating (if only temporarily, but
hopefully as long as possible) a future we want, a future that is important—a
future of biocultural sustainability—from the irreversible time of the sixth
mass extinction. But this will require reinterpreting the time of living-on it-
self, not as transcendental, dialectical, phenomenological, or ontological, but
as detour, in the sense that Blanchot reads Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the
Same as the Perpetual Detour of Difference, or what I’ll call the Infinitely
Finite Revenance of Différance. This detour is what allows one to filter what
one inherits, to rewrite the program, so to speak, against the Western meta-
physics of Living Presence and its ineradicable complicity with technobiopo-
litical positionality toward an affirmation, however un/limited, of the futures
of life death on earth.
At stake here is nothing less than temporal justice itself: to return the infini-
tude of the finite against both general equivalence and the neganthropocene
toward biocultural sustainability. But the most difficult negotiation, perhaps
insurmountably so, rests on determining how our responses to biocultural
extinction might extract themselves from this system of general equivalence.
Faced with the world’s finitude in terms of its irreversible loss, after and be-
fore the loss of the sense of the world, of the world as mundus or cosmos, does
the creation of a new world, of new possibilities, new affirmations not simply
risk substituting an essential cause, another grounding metaphysics, where
the essential stability and propriety of such a system never existed? But if life
death is nonessential, if the general ecology and ecotechnics that structure
the earth and its organic and inorganic matter originarily ex-propriates any
“proper” sense of the world, then the best and the worst futures—biocultural
sustainability and extinction—must be said to be effects without causes, ef-
fects of life death. General ecology thus requires that we confront the cre-
ation, the rediscovery of the world in a restricted sense with the invention of
the earth as the experience of the impossible: the end of the world as death.
Following Derrida, to return to our discussion of Hörl and Nancy, this would
impart a new sense to the word “create,” and consequently a new sense, a
different thought of the just, of justice. For Nancy, the creation of the world
as its own ex-pulsion, rejection, as the ecotechnical spacing of bodies entails
a thought of creation “‘without a creator,” and even “impossible,” the impos-
sible of an impossibility that is in truth what takes place: “the impossible is
what takes place” (LT 71/57). But if this impossible taking place constitutes
an ex-propriation of or interruption in the continuity of “nature,” this is not
due to whatever advance or evolution in the environmentalization of techno-
medial assemblages; there was never any proper “nature” before and outside
the spacing of ecotechnics; the a-significative, finite sense of the world is

xlviii Introduction
arche-originary and the possibility of extinction has always been biocultural.

A future sustainability for life death on earth will certainly require an imagin-
ing as material as it is discursive or semiotic, one facilitated by the notion of
the general text, but this weighing and thinking will inevitably find the earth
in its inaccessibility, the finite earth without world, without us as its very
limit, its impossibility. As Derrida cites Nancy, “the act of thinking is an
actual weighing: it is the very weighing of the world, of things, of the real as
sense . . . the co-appropriation of sense and the real is precisely that by which
existence always precedes itself, as itself, that is to say, insofar as it is with-
out essence—insofar as it is the without-essence” (LT 88/72). The mutual
appropriation of thinking and weighing for Nancy is itself the creation of the
world, but insofar as it is without essence, it remains absolutely inaccessible,
relegated to a site-without-access. This absence of ground thus attests more
rigorously to an ex-appropriation of the material and the discursive and, as
Derrida suggests, “this site without access seems to overdetermine itself, if I
am not being imprudent or flighty here, in a belonging to a sense of the world
as earth” (LT 88/72–73t). One must thus think and weigh the unthinkable
and unweighable, the impossible itself: peser-penser l’impe (n) sable, (pe(n)
ser) l’impossible.90 The impossible invention of the world as earth (to invent
is also to find): this could be the chance for the event of biocultural sustain-
ability. I conclude this introduction with brief summaries of the six chapters
in this book to give my reader an overview of its argument and hopefully
facilitate its navigation.
In chapter 1, “Survivance and General Ecology,” I examine what a dia-
lectics of organic life both makes possible and prevents in a just thinking
of the futures of life death on earth, beginning with Derrida’s reflections
on the organism in Freud and Jacob. Through Bataille’s notion of general
economy, I refigure the ontology through which the living being structures
and is structured by its environment and turn to its epistemological and ethi-
cal implications through Derrida’s reading of Canguilhem. Against the dia-
lectical, immanentist account proposed by the latter, I argue that Levinas’s
ethics better allows for the thought of transcendence required to maintain the
unknowability and alterity of the other and the future. I conclude by contrast-
ing Catherine Malabou’s dialectical account of futurity and organic life with
Derrida’s in introducing the temporal stakes of the following chapters.
The argument of chapter 2, “Transcendence and the Surviving Present,”
is that Edmund Husserl’s concept of the Living Present, one at stake from
the very beginning through to the very end of Derrida’s philosophy, is an es-
sential point of entry to understanding the deconstruction of life, its structural
transcendences or exteriorizations in time, alterity, death, and matter. This
“trace-structure” of the Living Present operates at the level of organic life,

Introduction xlix
just as it does in the inorganic structures through which the organism and its
environment relate to one another, of particular importance here being epis-
temologically, scientifically, and historically. However, Derrida’s reading of
the Living Present, arguably by way of an encounter with Levinas, enjoins
one to consider these structures beyond the sole purview of the human, pro-
viding an important opening for thinking the aporetics and ethics at stake in
differentially sharing an earth with its other living beings.
Chapter 3, “Resistance and Ex-Appropriation: Letting Life Live On,”
attempts a radicalization of Heidegger’s concept of auto-affective tempo-
ralization as being-in-the-world in order to stage the ex-appropriation of
its exclusive conferment on the human. In doing so, I attempt to disclose a
thought of the living in its arche-material remaining, restance but also resis-
tance, anterior to the question of Being and to what Derrida calls ontological
violence. In Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s ontology, I argue, the
notions of Gelassenheit (releasement) and the Zusage (acquiescence) reveal
not only the sharing of a radical passivity and vulnerability before death
shared by all living beings but also a thought of responsibility as letting
beings be, indeed of ethics as letting life live on, resisting the biopolitical,
technoscientific, and indeed linguistic objectification of beings complicit
with environmental and biocultural degradation.
In chapter 4, “Animmanence: Life Death and the Passion and Perpetual
Detour of Difference,” I begin by taking seriously Heidegger’s argument
that Nietzsche’s biologism has potentially destructive consequences for the
earth, consequences that, I argue, are shared by many contemporary philoso-
phies of immanence. However, I identify in Deleuze, Bataille, Blanchot, and
Derrida’s readings of Nietzsche both a thought of the Will to Power as the
passion of the Outside or of difference, as well as of the Eternal Return as
the perpetual detour of difference. These readings, I argue, reveal a certain
doubling in life death (where death is refigured both as inside and outside,
personal and impersonal, possible and impossible), a powerlessness at the
heart of the living, as well as the ex-appropriation of temporality necessary
in thinking a selective affirmation of life, one more amenable to resisting the
techno-biopolitical positioning of the earth and all its beings and welcoming
more sustainable biocultural futures.
Chapter 5, “Biopolitics and Double Affirmation: Steps/Nots Beyond an
Ecology of the Commons,” stakes its argument on distinguishing between an
affirmative biopolitics that, I suggest, maintains important similarities to the
ecological dangers highlighted in Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, as well
as Hörl’s generalized ecology, and a deconstruction of biopolitics by way
of Derrida’s notion of double affirmation. I argue that the reconceptualiza-
tion of the living in its relation to death and its environment (scientifically,

l Introduction
epistemologically, linguistically, and politically) suggested in Foucault’s

readings of Bataille, Bichat, Blanchot, Cuvier, Canguilhem, and Nietzsche
points to a more complex and, I argue, preferable framework in responding
to these dangers. I illustrate this by distinguishing two approaches to “affir-
mative biopolitics,” that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that, I argue,
remains at a restricted account of power and resistance, of making and let-
ting live and die, and that of Esposito that, particularly through his readings
of Bataille and Blanchot, suggests a logic more akin to general ecology, one
more in tune with letting life live on and a sustainable biocultural future.
December 2017
NOTES
1. E. Chivian and A. Bernstein, eds., Sustaining Life: How Human Health De-
pends on Biodiversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
2. Holly Dublin, “Endangered Species,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2015,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/186738/endangered.species. Cf. also
“The Extinction Crisis,” The Center for Biological Diversity, http://www.biological
diversity.org/programs/biodiversity/elements_of_biodiversity/ extinction_crisis/.
3. Richard Monastersky, “Biodiversity: Life—A Status Report,” Nature, 2014,
http://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-life-a-status-report-1.16523.
4. Lee Sweetlove, “Number of Species on Earth Tagged at 8.7 million,” Nature,
2011, http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110823/full/news.2011.498.html.
5. “Indiana University Researchers Find Earth May Be Home to 1 Trillion Spe-
cies,” IU Bloomington Newsroom, 2016, http://news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2016/05/
microorganism-study.shtml.
6. Michael E. Krauss, “The World’s Languages in Crisis,” Language 68, no. 1
(1992): 4–10. See also Karin Wiecha, “New Estimates on the Rate of Global Lan-
guage Loss,” The Rosetta Project, http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02013/mar/28/new
-estimates-on-rate-of-language-loss/.
7. Russ Rymer, “Vanishing Voices,” National Geographic, 2012, http://ngm
.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/vanishing-languages/rymer-text.
8. http://www.sil.org/ethnologue.
9. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Luisa Maffi, and David Harmon, Sharing a World
of Difference: The Earth’s Linguistic, Cultural and Biological Diversity (Paris:
UNESCO, 2003), 22.
10. Ibid., 20.
11. Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the
Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016).
12. Luisa Maffi, “Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity,” Annual Review
of Anthropology 34 (2005): 602.

Introduction li
13. Cf. the July 15, 2016, article in Science, Tim Newbold et al., “Has Land Use
Pushed Terrestrial Biodiversity Beyond the Planetary Boundary? A Global Assess-
ment,” Science 353, no. 6296 (2016): 288–91.
14. A growing interest in deconstruction and environmental ethics and philosophy
has sprung up since David Wood’s landmark paper “Spectres of Derrida: On the Way
to Econstruction,” in Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, ed. Laurel
Kearns and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 264–87.
In 2015, following an eponymous conference at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee,
Matthias Fritsch, David Wood, and myself began co-editing Eco-Deconstruction:
Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press,
2018). Three special issues of the Oxford Literary Review edited by Timothy Clark,
“Deconstruction, Environmentalism, and Climate Change” (2010), “Deconstruction
in the Anthropocene” (2012), “Overpopulation” (2016), and the forthcoming “EXT:
Writing Extinction” (2019) edited by Sarah Wood attest to the OLR’s ongoing sup-
port of eco-deconstructive thought. See in the latter two issues my “Is It Ecologically
Just to Be? Antinatalism in Eco-Deconstruction,” Oxford Literary Review 38, no. 1
(2016): 99–126, and “Extinction and Thalassal Regression” (forthcoming 2019).
15. Cf. P1, 27/15.
16. Cf. AVE 26/26. I will discuss the relation between survivance and the impos-
sible in much more detail in chapter 1.
17. For more on the “affirmative turn to life,” see Cary Wolfe’s reading of Roberto
Esposito in Before the Law: Humans and Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2013), 63.
18. Against these notions of the capacity, force, and power of life, Derrida cites
Nancy’s reference to “a rather common tendency of the most robust ideologies of the
‘body,’ that is, the crudest ones (of the type ‘muscle-bound thinking’ or ‘sacred-heart
thinking,’ vitalo-spiritualist fascism—with, no doubt, its real and secret horror of
bodies” (LT 321/285–86).
19. David Wills, “Ecologies of Communion, Contagion, &c, Especially Bataille,”
in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, ed. Erich Hörl and James Burton
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 237.
20. Ibid., 246.
21. Ibid., 237.
22. David Wills, Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2016), xi, 17, 27.
23. Bernard Stiegler, “General Ecology, Economy, and Organology,” in General
Ecology, ed. Hörl and Burton, 140; emphasis modified.
24. Kelly Oliver, Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 4; emphasis modified.
25. Ibid., 40. Cf. BS2, 8–9/30–31.
26. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthet-
ics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn,
eds., Philosophy After Nature (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017).
27. Cf. Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the
Ecological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 162–67.

lii Introduction
28. Fritsch, Lynes, and Wood, “Introduction,” in Eco-Deconstruction, ed. Fritsch,

Lynes, and Wood, 1.
29. Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Une Europe de l’espoir,” Le Monde Diplomatique, No-
vember 1, 2004, 3. Derrida is referencing here Ramonet’s editorial “Résistances” in
Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1, 2004.
30. Frédéric Neyrat, “Elements for an Ecology of Separation: Beyond Ecological
Constructivism,” in General Ecology, ed. Hörl and Burton, 112.
31. Cited in Neyrat, “Elements for an Ecology of Separation,” 110.
32. Philippe Lynes, “The Posthuman Promise of the Earth,” in Eco-Deconstruction,
ed. Fritsch, Lynes, and Wood, 101–20; “Auparadvances,” in AV, ix–xlvii. Regarding
Husserlian and Heideggerian temporality and the promise, cf. AV 24/22–23, 27/29,
29/31–32.
33. Karen Barad, “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning,
Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable,” in Eco-Deconstruction, ed. Fritsch,
Lynes, and Wood, 221.
34. Samantha Frost, Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 4. Frost, however, does not seem to draw the
term “biocultural” from work in environmental sustainability but from a rather differ-
ent constellation of thought. Cf. Lennard J. Davis and David B. Morris, “Biocultures
Manifesto,” New Literary History 38, no. 3 (2007): 411–18; Anne Fausto-Sterling,
“The Bare Bones of Race,” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 5 (2008): 657–94; Alan
H. Goodman and Thomas L. Leatherman, Building a New Biocultural Synthesis:
Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 1998); Arun Saldanha, “Reontologising Race: The Machinic Geography of
Phenotype,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no. 1 (2009): 9–24.
35. Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophi-
cal Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), x.
36. Ibid., 96.
37. Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World (London: Continuum, 2008), 79–83.
38. Ibid., 93.
39. This project was defended September 2, 2016, at Concordia University in
Montréal. The dissertation was supervised by Matthias Fritsch, with Pier-Pascale
Boulanger and Amy Swiffen as secondary supervisors. Emilia Angelova served as
“internal/external” evaluator, and David Wills (Brown University) as external evaluator.
40. Cf. Hörl, “Introduction to General Ecology: The Ecologization of Thinking,”
trans. Nils F. Schott, in General Ecology, ed. Hörl and Burton, 53n42 and 57n71.
Félix Guattari, Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 128, as Chaosmosis: An Ethico-
Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 91; Edgar Morin, “L’Écologie généralisée (Oikos),” in La
Méthode tome II: La Vie de la vie (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 17–100; Morton, Ecology
without Nature, 109.
41. Erich Hörl, “A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cyberneticization and
General Ecology,” trans. Jeffrey Kirkwood, James Burton, and Maria Vlotides, in The
Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside, ed. Diedrich Died-
erichsen and Anselm Franke (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 128.

Introduction liii
42. Hörl, “Introduction to General Ecology,” 10.

43. Hörl, “A Thousand Ecologies,” 123.
44. Ibid., 127. While the reference to agency and entanglement seems to point
to Karen Barad’s work, I have important reservations about the habitual inclusion
of her work into these quasi-holistic relational ontologies, as her thinking to me has
always expressed something else, perhaps something secret, that I find elided in
many of her readers.
45. Hörl, “Introduction to General Ecology,” 10.
46. Ibid., 5
47. Ibid.
48. I follow here the more recent translation of Heidegger’s Gestell as “positional-
ity” rather than the more common “enframing.” As Andrew J. Mitchell puts it, “We
cannot think positionality as some kind of framework or scaffolding thrown over
the world. To do so is to persist in the belief that this incursion of the technological
would be something that came to us from the outside. . . . To think positionality as a
frame casts it as something extractable from all that presences around us, and that is
simply not the case.” Andrew J. Mitchell, The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 50–51.
49. Jean-Luc Nancy, endorsement for Eco-Deconstruction, emphasis modified. I
can of course in no way do justice to Nancy’s immense corpus of work in this book
and must reserve a closer engagement for a future work.
50. Hörl, “A Thousand Ecologies,” 122; emphasis modified.
51. Ted Toadvine, “Our Monstrous Futures: Deconstruction and Last Things,” in
Eco-Deconstruction, ed. Fritsch, Lynes, and Wood, 63; emphasis modified.
52. Ibid., 61.
53. Cf. “Jacques Derrida,” Rue Descartes 2, no. 48 (2005): 6.
54. Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2011).
55. Ibid., xi.
56. Vicki Kirby, “Un/Limited Ecologies,” in Eco-Deconstruction, ed. Fritsch,
Lynes, and Wood, 130; emphasis modified.
57. Kirby, “Tracing Life: ‘La Vie La Mort,’” CR: The New Centennial Review 9,
no. 1 (2009): 117.
58. Francesco Vitale, “The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology
and Deconstruction,” Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 1 (2014): 102. Vitale’s Biode-
construction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018)
was only published a few weeks after the submission of this manuscript, and while I
regret not being able to engage its nuanced arguments in this book, I also see this as
an opportunity for an open-ended conversation for future scholarship on Derrida and
the Life Death seminar.
59. Ibid., 110; emphasis modified.
60. Hörl, “A Thousand Ecologies,” 124.
61. Timothy Clark, “Scale as a Force of Deconstruction,” in Eco-Deconstruction,
ed. Fritsch, Lynes, and Wood, 96n23.
62. Kirby, “Tracing Life,” 118.

liv Introduction
63. Vicki Kirby, “Foreword,” in What If Culture Was Nature All Along?, ed. Vicki
Kirby (The Tun: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), xi.
64. Ibid., ix; emphasis modified.
65. Vicki Kirby, “Matter Out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” in What If
Culture Was Nature All Along?, ed. Kirby, 10.
66. Ibid., 16.
67. Kirby, “Foreword,” x.
68. Barad, “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness,” 232, 240.
69. Cf. §1.3.2.
70. Arkady Plotnitsky, Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology After Bohr and Der-
rida (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 75, 37, 2, 1.
71. Ibid., 8.
72. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(London: Routledge, 1991), 164.
73. Hörl, “A Thousand Ecologies,” 126; emphasis modified.
74. See also on this Derrida’s “White Mythology,” in MP, 323/270–71.
75. Vitale, “The Text and the Living,” 101.
76. Ibid., 108.
77. François Jacob, La Logique du vivant: Une Histoire de l’hérédité (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1970), 199–200, as The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, trans. Betty E.
Spillmann (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 181–82.
78. Ibid., 213/194.
79. Ibid., 272/252; emphasis modified.
80. Ibid., 220/201.
81. Ibid., 271/250–51; translation and emphasis modified.
82. Ibid., 271/251; translation modified.
83. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2009), xxviii.
84. Claire Colebrook, “Extinguishing Ability,” in Eco-Deconstruction, ed. Fritsch,
Lynes, and Wood, 263.
85. Kirby, “Tracing Life,” 118.
86. Cf. the two special issues of Mosaic on the proceedings of the A Matter of
Lifedeath conference edited by Dawne McCance: Mosaic 48, no. 2 (2015) and 48,
no. 3 (2015). McCance’s forthcoming monograph The Reproduction of Life Death:
Derrida’s La vie la mort (New York: Fordham University Press) will surely provide
a wonderful opportunity for further discussion on these issues.
87. Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, 209. [AQ2]
88. Jacob, La Logique du vivant, 216/198.
89. Stiegler, “General Ecology, Economy, and Organology,” 134; emphasis modi-
fied. Stiegler’s The Neganthropocene (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2018)
was published at the time of this manuscript’s copyediting, and I must put aside a
deeper consideration of its argument for another work.
90. Cf. LT 89/73.

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Life Death on Earth

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Series Editors: Michael Marder, IKERBASQUE Research Professor of

The Future Perfect series stands at the intersection of critical historiography,

Titles in the Series

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London • New York

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Selection and editorial matter © Philippe Lynes, 2018

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et l’oiseau ferme la marche.

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1 Survivance and General Ecology 1

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2 Transcendence and the Surviving Present 43

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§4.4: Derrida, the Double, the Transgression to Powerlessness,

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WORKS BY GEORGES BATAILLE

OC4 Œuvres complètes IV: Œuvres littéraires posthumes (Paris: Gallimard,

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WORKS BY MAURICE BLANCHOT

WORKS BY GEORGES CANGUILHEM

CC La Connaissance de la vie: Deuxième edition revue et augmentée (Paris:

WORKS BY GILLES DELEUZE (AND FÉLIX GUATTARI)

DF Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit, 2003);

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F Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986); trans. Seán Hand as Foucault (Minneapolis:

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A Apories (Paris: Galilée, 1996); trans. Thomas Dutoit as Aporias (Stanford:

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DQ De Quoi Demain . . . Dialogue (Avec Elisabeth Roudinesco) (Paris: Fayard/

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HJR “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,”

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PCM “La Phénoménologie et la clôture de la métaphysique: Introduction à la

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WORKS BY MICHEL FOUCAULT

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WORKS BY ROBERTO ESPOSITO (PAGE NUMBERS

E3 Terza Persona: Politica della vita e filosofia dell’impersonale (Turin: Guilio

WORKS BY MICHAEL HARDT AND/OR ANTONIO NEGRI

HD Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (London: UCL Press, 1993).

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WORKS BY MARTIN HEIDEGGER

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GA 40 Einführung in die Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,

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EU Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik (Prague:

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We are currently approaching (or undergoing, depending on who you ask)

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characterized by difference and diversity.13 Preserving biocultural diversity is

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If deconstruction, as Derrida defines it in “Psyche: Invention of the Other,” is