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sustained inquiry.8 But Derrida did make it clear from early on that
the structural logics he identified worked against the closure or self-
sufficiency of the human, and of life more generally. What always
interested him, in his own words, was the: ‘. . . arch-phenomenon of
‘memory’, which must be thought before the opposition of nature and
culture, animality and humanity, etc., . . . . this trace is the opening of
the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living
to its other and of an inside to an outside; spacing’.9
While this excerpt from Of Grammatology may not be unfamiliar,
it’s worth noting that I sourced it, word for word, from an article in
a biology journal. Rather than taking Derrida to task for his scientific
or environmental oversights, natural scientists who find his approach
useful have recognised that deconstruction characteristically sets out
from those experiences, texts and fields with which researchers are
accustomed — in order to unleash the strangeness harboured within
the familiar (Craw and Heads, 507). Citing Derrida to the effect that
‘The movements of deconstruction do not destroy concepts from the
outside’ (Of Grammatology, 24), biologists Robin Craw and Michael
Heads, among others, have reworked the resources of their own
discipline to explicitly deconstruct ‘the opposition biology/geology’
(510, 513).
Following recent reassertions by Vicki Kirby, Martin Hägglund and
Karen Barad that Derrida’s logic of the trace was always intended
to apply to fields beyond the human,10 it is timely to consider the
contributions deconstruction has made and might yet make to a
speculative geophysics. It is, at this moment, necessary to ask how
our species became a geologic agent of such forcefulness that we are
undermining the material conditions of our existence.11 However, a
sensitivity to the complexity and enigma of origins — the suspicion
that beginnings might be ‘already alive with what has yet to come’ —
can pull this question in different directions (Kirby, 30). It prompts us
to also inquire what kind of planet is this that births a creature capable of
doing such things?
Taking inspiration from the prescient attempts of ‘deconstructionist
biologists’ to work through the imbrications of biology and geology,
I look at some recent hypotheses about the role of active tectonic
processes in the emergence of our own species. In the light of
speculation about the volcanic origins of human fire use, I ask how
262 Oxford Literary Review
Continental rifting
Though it has yet to be framed in deconstructive terms, the idea
that major zones of crustal deformation play a galvanising role in
biological evolution is currently being extended to the emergence
of our own species. Until recently, tectonic activity has tended to
feature only incidentally in the origin story of the genus Homo: usually
as a contributing factor to climate change, and thereby an indirect
influence on the availability of food for our hominid ancestors. But
paleoanthropologists and earth scientist are now suggesting that the
exceptionally active tectonics of the rift valley system of east Africa
may have played a vital role in the evolutionary trajectory of our
human ancestors and near-relatives. ‘A key point about the African
Rift’, paleoarchaeologists Geoffrey King and Geoff Bailey note, ‘is that
tectonic activity has been continuous throughout the time span of
human existence.’35
The rifting of Africa’s Ethiopian plateau is the largest and most
enduring example of the extentional tectonics that occurs when a
landmass overlies a major upwelling or ‘super-plume’ of the molten
rock that makes up the earth’s mantle. As rising magma pushes the
crust upwards, fault-lines open in the stretched rock — resulting in
great chunks of subsidence between rising flanks — while the rock-
melting effect of heating from the mantle often gives rise to volcanic
activity (King and Bailey, 269). This tends to generate a landscape
268 Oxford Literary Review
Notes
1
Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, translated by Elizabeth MacArthur and
William Paulson (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995), 31.
2
Alan Robock, Allison Marquardt, Ben Kravitz, and Georgiy Stenchikov, ‘Benefits,
Risks, and Costs of Stratospheric Geoengineering’, Geophysical Research Letters 36
(2009), 1–9.
3
Melissa Leach, James Fairhead and James Fraser, ‘Green Grabs and Biochar:
Revaluing African Soils and Farming in the New Carbon Economy’, Journal of
Peasant Studies 39:2 (2012), 285–307.
4
On the Anthropocene see Paul J. Crutzen, ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature 415:
6867 (2002), 23.
5
See Claire Colebrook, ‘Matter without Bodies’, Derrida Today 4:1 (2011), 1–20
(13); Nigel Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (London,
Sage, 2011), chapter 1.
6
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University
Press, 1993).
7
See for example Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing
of the Earth (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2008); Etienne Turpin,
‘Reflections on Stainlessness’, Fuse 35:1 (2011), 11–15; Kathryn Yusoff, ‘Geologic
Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures, or do fossils fuels dream of geologic life?’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (under review).
8
Graham Harman, ‘Response to Shaviro’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental
Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman
(Melbourne, re.press, 2011), 291–303 (293).
9
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 70, quoted in
Robin Craw and Michael Heads, ‘Reading Croizat’, Rivista di Biologia Biology
Forum 81:4 (1988), 499–532 (507).
10
Vicki Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Durham and London, Duke
University Press, 2011); Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time
Nigel Clark 275
of Life (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2008); Karen Barad, ‘Quantum
Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities,
SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come’, Derrida Today 3:2 (2010):
240–68.
11
See Tom Cohen, ‘The Geomorphic Fold: Anapocalyptics, Changing Climes and
“Late” Deconstruction’, The Oxford Literary Review 32:1 (2010): 71–89 (71).
12
Stephen J. Pyne, World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth (New York, Henry Holt,
1995), 312.
13
Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origins of Geometry: An Introduction, translated
by John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 81.
14
Mike Davis, ‘Cosmic Dancers on History’s Stage? The Permanent Revolution in
the Earth Sciences’, New Left Review 217 (1996), 48–84.
15
See Peter Westbroek, Life as a Geological Force: Dynamics of the Earth (New York,
W. W. Norton, 1992), chapter 4; Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution,
Dynamics, and Change (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003), chapter 5.
16
Michel Serres, Hermes III, La Traduction (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1974) 21,
quoted in Christopher Johnson, System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques
Derrida (Cambridge, NY, Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3. See also Alberto
Gualandi, ‘Errancies of the Human: French Philosophies of Nature and the
Overturning of the Copernican Revolution’, Collapse V (2009), 501–48.
17
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, translated by Samuel Weber (Evanston,
Northwestern University Press, 1988), 134.
18
Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies, 6.
19
Jacques Derrida, ‘As if it were Possible, “within such limits” . . . ’, in Questioning
Derrida: With his Replies on Philosophy, edited by Michel Meyer (Burlington, VT,
Ashgate, 2001), 115, quoted in Henry Staten, ‘Derrida, Dennett, and the Ethico-
Political Project of Naturalism’, Derrida Today 5:1 (2008), 19–41 (20), italics
added.
20
See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, 332.
21
Craw and Heads, ‘Reading Croizat’, 514.
22
John R. Grehan, ‘Panbiogeography and Conservation Science in New Zealand’,
New Zealand Journal of Zoology 16:4 (1989), 731–41 (734).
23
Robin Craw and George Hubbard, ‘Cross Pollination: Hyphenated Identities and
Hybrid Realities (or ALTER/NATIVE to What?)’, Midwest 3 (1993), 32–3; Roger
Cooper, ‘New Zealand Tectonostratigraphic Terranes and Panbiogeography’,
New Zealand Journal of Zoology 16 :4 (1989), 699–712.
24
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London,
Murray, 1859 (382), quoted in John R. Grehan, ‘Panbiogeography and Evolution’,
Rivista di Biologia Biology Forum 81:4 (1988), 469–98 (471).
276 Oxford Literary Review
25
Robin Craw, ‘New Zealand Biogeography: A Panbiogeographic Approach’,
New Zealand Journal of Zoology 16:4 (1989), 527–47 (528).
26
John R. Grehan, ‘Panbiogeography and Evolution’, Rivista di Biologia Biology
Forum 81:4 (1988), 469–98 (479).
27
Craw and Heads, ‘Reading Croizat’, 502, 511.
28
Russell Gray, ‘Oppositions in Panbiogeography: Can the Conflicts Between
Selection, Constraint, Ecology, and History be Resolved?’, New Zealand Journal
of Zoology 16:4 (1989), 787–806.
29
John R. Grehan, ‘The Natural Biogeographic regions’, Rivista di Biologia Biology
Forum 81:4 (1988), 569–75 (571).
30
Cooper, ‘New Zealand Tectonostratigraphic Terranes’, 700.
31
Craw, ‘New Zealand Biogeography’, 536.
32
Gray, ‘Oppositions in Panbiogeography’, 801.
33
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 9; Craw and Heads, ‘Reading Croizat’, 513.
34
Michael Heads, ‘Integrating Earth and Life Sciences in New Zealand’, New Zealand
Journal of Zoology 16:4 (1989), 549–585 (563–6).
35
Geoffrey King and Geoff Bailey, ‘Tectonics and Human Evolution’, Antiquity 80
(2006), 265–86 (270).
36
Beth Christensen and Mark Maslin, ‘Rocking the Cradle of Humanity’, Geotimes,
January (2008), online at: http://www.geotimes.org/jan08/article.html?id=
feature_humanity.html, consulted 8 August 2012, 10.00 p.m.
37
Michael J. Medler, ‘Speculations about the Effects of Fire and Lava Flows on
Human evolution’, Fire Ecology 7.1 (2011), 13–23.
38
Pyne, World Fire.
39
Stephen J. Pyne, Fire: A Brief History (Seattle and London, University of
Washington Press, 2001), 10, 25.
40
James E. Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, ‘Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the
Biosphere: the Gaia Hypothesis’, Tellus XXVI (1974), 1–2.
41
Tim Lenton, ‘Gaia Hypothesis’, in Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences, edited by
James R. Holton, John Pyle and Judith A. Curry (London: Academic Press, 2002),
815–20.
42
See Derrida, Dissemination, 334.
43
Jacques Derrida, Cinders, translated by Ned Lukacher (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 43.
44
Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford,
CA, Stanford University Press, 1995), 243; Derrida, Cinders, 43–4, 57.
45
Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies, 10–12.
46
Martin Hägglund, ‘The Non-Ethical Opening of Ethics: A Response to Derek
Attridge’, Derrida Today 3:2 (2010), 295–305; see also Radical Atheism, 19.