, as virgin when it more accurately meant “maiden” or “young woman.”The Eleventh Plague: Thinking Ecologically after Derrida
David Wood
Introduction: The Deconstructive Disposition
Derrida has been condemned by some (“Dogs bark at what they do not understand.”—Heraclitus) and drawn into empty culture wars by others. Derrida himself hardly ever tried to correct or contain this profligacy. But all of us who have followed Derrida and learned from him at some point or other face the question of inheritance. What is it to inherit the work, the writings, the insights of another? This is not unconnected to “what is it to read?” The problem that arises here is not unfamiliar to admirers of Nietzsche, who cautions against those who would be his followers, calling them Folgende, the mathematical expression for zeros. Are we then to follow his proscription against following him? Derrida animates the question of inheritance in Specters of Marx, offering a model that would require selection and creative transformation. Moreover, as he insists, a gift sometimes calls for ingratitude. At what level can or should we apply these ideas to reading Derrida himself? Do we have to transform the idea of transformation to avoid just following him? Or would that not be the most faithful, and hence least faithful, response? To be faithful to Derrida, do we have to betray him?
Derrida might not endorse this language, but I propose here a reworking of Heidegger’s account of what it is to engage with the work of a great thinker—he speaks of not going counter to the other, but going to their encounter (with Being).1 And to do this we have to bring our existing passions and commitments to the table. He is saying that we have to address what is most at stake in the other’s thinking and writing. And we have to have skin in the game. In glossing Heidegger’s claim in this way, I am bypassing the problem that one might seem to have to endorse his thesis about the primacy of the question of Being. A less technical cousin of this claim has legs independent of Heidegger’s specific formulation.
Analogously, thinking about how we can follow Derrida without falling into aporetic elephant traps, we can draw on a distinction between doing as he does because he says so or does so and doing as he does because it’s a smart thing to do. Put less casually, Derrida’s ruminations about reading Marx (again) are themselves not completely original, and no worse for that. Context, and the space of concern, change. Marx was not saying just one thing, but drawing together multiple threads from which we, in our time, cannot but select. Licensing ourselves to do this can enhance the transformative creativity of our response. It is in this spirit that I want to advance the idea of a deconstructive disposition. And in response to the ten plagues that Derrida names in Specters of Marx, I want to insist on an eleventh plague—our growing global climate crisis.2 To honor Heidegger’s formulation at the same time it would be necessary to formulate this reference to an eleventh plague at something like an ontological level without being caught up in the seductions of ontology. Forging an amalgam from Derrida and Heidegger, we would try to show that the eleventh plague was not just one more plague, but was at the heart of the first ten, or at least intimately implied or caught up in them. In the most summary form, this would be to show that questions of violence, law, and social justice are inseparable from ecological sustainability. A similar move would demonstrate that another candidate for the eleventh plague—the animal holocaust—is closely tied up both with those first ten plagues and with ecological sustainability, perhaps serving as something of a bridge. I will only gesture at such an account here.3
What then is meant by a deconstructive disposition? The danger of such an account is that it may seem to dilute what deconstruction has to offer by blurring how it differs from other modes of critical reading. I will address this shortly.
I propose four dimensions to a deconstructive disposition.
Negative Capability
Keats described this as a willingness to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty.4 This is not to license intellectual laziness but rather to caution against premature closure. Derrida’s reference to going through the undecidable could be understood in this way. And indeed, the broader willingness, even passion, to disturb the sleeping dogs of (often binary) complacency.
Patient Reading
The point of reading (and thinking) is not simply to understand, using the handrail of existing meaning, but to open possibilities. This requires patience, even when we have no time! What does such patience yield? It allows us to restore repressed differences and to expose invisible framings and stagings, even of the very occasions at which issues are being discussed. (See Derrida’s prefatory remarks to many of his presentations, raising such questions as, “What is an international conference?”)
Aporetic Schematization
Thinking often takes an essentially aporetic shape: the past that was never present, the gift that resists gratitude, the supplement to what is already complete, the always already, forgiving the unforgivable. These shapes need to be exposed and worked through, if only to grasp the complex underbelly of intelligibility and coherence.
Attention to Language and Terminological Intervention
Language is not neutral. Words, sometimes limiting or regressive, harbor ways of seeing and being in the world. We can intervene in this invisible process with careful attention to these frames and by actively bending old words and inventing new ones.
It might be said that none of these dispositions is exclusive to deconstruction. So is there not a danger of dilution?
Deconstruction in the late ’60s and early ’70s was an event, an interruption, a challenge, one attuned to the time—structuralism, semiology, a quiescent Marxism, pervasive doubts about the complacencies of humanism, of psychoanalysis, of phenomenology and literary theory. (I am trying to cover here the French and Anglo-American situations, which were different.) But it is no longer an event. Its covert influence has waned, even as the scholarly industry prospers, and some of those strongly influenced by Derrida delight us with their own brilliance and originality. Moreover, it is not entirely a bad thing that deconstruction should have metastasized in many directions, even if its pedigree is less visible. Deconstruction would cease to be deconstruction if it became an idol, an orthodoxy, a citadel to be defended. Last, this conference,5 along with the book we are assembling, is something like an event or renewal, a repetition of deconstructive strategies, gestures, and sentiments in the context of a new urgency.
Calculating and naming the inheritance of deconstruction is a thankless and unending task. The most salient threads that specifically address environmental concerns would include language, time, the animal, sovereignty, topological complexity, the new international, inheritance, and death.
I propose to make some remarks here about the first three of these threads.
Unsettling Language
Deconstruction’s bad press began with the phrase “there is nothing outside the text,” which sounded like linguistic idealism. It was later reworked as the ineliminability of con-text, and the impossibility of ever completely specifying that context. But language itself continued to ground both hesitation and creative response. The normative commitments of words like “parasite,” “rogue” (nation), “proper,” and “authentic” all rest on structures of asymmetrical binary privilege that can be exposed, and perhaps destabilized, by inserting an indécidable.
And as Derrida showed in “Des Tours de Babel,” translation, which marks the instability of proper meaning, is a powerful site for deconstructive archaeological excavation.
Consider three classic examples:
1. It is said that the bombing of Hiroshima was ordered after Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki responded to the demand that the Japanese surrender by using the word Mokusatsu, which can mean to “ignore/not pay attention to” or to “refrain from any comment.” The former could reasonably be considered as a refusal to surrender. The latter was asking for more time. Could the subsequent loss of some quarter of a million lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki be put down to a mistranslation of a nuance of meaning?
2. The cult of Mary, the miraculous character of Jesus’s birth, rests on the translation of the original Hebrew almah, , as virgin when it more accurately meant “maiden” or “young woman.”
3. The license given by the translation of rada as dominion, in Genesis 1:16/1:26, as God’s understanding of the relation between man and the other animals and nature more generally has been argued to be the source of much Western complacency over the destructive and exploitative consequences of man’s reign over nature.6 Some have argued that it should be translated as “hold sway” and others as “rule,” with the strong implication of the benign responsibility that might be expected of a thoughtful ruler. Others have pointed out that the literal meaning of rada is “a point higher up on the root of a plant.” Such a point is where the strength of the plant as a whole is centered, offering a more collaborative sense of “privilege.”
This last has direct relevance to eco-deconstruction. The authority of canonical texts is a continuing issue, considering the continuing reverence accorded to the Bible, the Koran, and other religious writings. This would be true even if there were no issues of translation. But the hermeneutic mischief with which they can be treated seems to know no limits. The demonstration that even an authoritative text contains within it competing meanings and possibilities allows other ways of reading it to be opened up. And, of course, this applies not just to the Bible, but to the U.S. Constitution, to the pre-Socratics, to Aristotle, Kant, and so on. Latour’s recent treatment of Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, in which he attempts to empty it of any residue of political theology, is a good example of how the angle of such readings can make a difference to environmental thinking.7
Central too to any eco-deconstruction are the force and meaning of the word “nature,” caught up as it is in binary opposition to culture, to man, and to spirit and functioning repeatedly as a transcendental signified, a ground of meaning that would escape the play of language and the very oppositions in which it is inscribed. We are all acquainted with nature, whether it be last year’s tornadoes or this year’s tomatoes. Nature seems, straightforwardly, to be what’s “out there,” something we realize we are part of when we feel hungry or get lashed by heavy rain. But nature is not just what is real, what is out there. When placed in opposition to culture, it has played a powerful cognitive role in organizing human life and thought. And one of the hallmarks of early deconstruction was to problematize this simple opposition. It is clear, for example, that we approach nature through all kinds of cultural mediations and constructions, which themselves change through history. And these cultural constructions are not just shaping or distorting lenses; they often lead directly to transformations of nature. (When nature is treated as a resource, a mountain becomes a pile of quarry stone.) Eco-deconstruction reflects our hope that we can get clearer about the complex role that nature plays in our thinking, in our understanding of ourselves, and in our practical existence. This issue is important in academic life, not least because university institutions are constructed on the basis of distinctions between natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, as if these were separate fields of inquiry, distinctions that depend on how we think about nature. Deconstruction has made it more normal to inspect the boundaries, the frontiers, the contaminations, the difficulties in making these clear-cut distinctions.
While there are those for whom this distancing (from a naïve sense of nature) comes easily,8 there are others who resist, who recognize the desire to point and say, “That’s nature,” that striving, pulsing force that precisely escapes description, like Roquentin’s black root in Sartre’s Nausea. The question we are left with is this: is it possible to accept that any concept we have of nature, any meaning we give that word, is culturally constructed, riddled with narrative, and as such burdened, while insisting that there is something we are in different ways culturally constructing? Much interesting work has been done critiquing the idea of a return to some original “natural condition,” the restoration of a pristine origin, the protection of the purity of wilderness. As Bill McKibben wrote long ago, there is no nature anymore.9 Nothing with air blowing through it has escaped human influence.
So the analysis is taking place at two different levels. The concept (or sign) of nature cannot escape the cultural conditions of conceptuality. And nature itself, materially, has been contaminated by human activity, destroying the purity by which it could function in opposition to man—all this presupposing that man was not always already part of nature.10
Arguably our dominant modes of engagement with the natural world are the reflection of narratives, often what Jean-François Lyotard would call “grand narratives,” such as man’s God-given sovereignty over the natural world, or man’s place in the great chain of being, or the story of enlightenment, in which inferior races, religions, and cultures suffer the same subordinating fate as nonhuman creatures, a fate in which these various disparagements are often roped together. This presents us with an option: either to abandon the whole grand-narrative scene in favor of multiple, local smaller-scale narratives or to continue with narrativity as indispensable while interrupting it. Or replacing an oppressive grand narrative with one with more of a future. Recall that Derrida wrote of the Bin Laden narrative that it “does not open a future.”11
The upshot of these debates is itself a contested space. Some would use the constructedness of nature as an argument against any critique of technology that would accuse it of sullying our natural condition. Others more reasonably argue that we need criteria other than protecting or restoring purity by which to evaluate our engagement with the earth. These considerations all develop from reflection on the word “nature” and the desire attached to it.
It is not always clear whether these issues are linguistic, conceptual, or empirical, but the scope we give to words like “pain,” “consciousness,” and “person” have direct consequences for ways in which we engage with the natural world. Allowing that animals feel pain qualifies them for our consideration. Crediting them with consciousness bestows further rights. Indigenous peoples often attributed personhood to nonhumans that strongly shaped their engagement with them. And the scope of personhood has major consequences not just for the biopolitics of abortion, but also the rights of corporations to recycle their profits in such a way as to promote climate-change denial through the corruption of political discourse by lies and sophistry. It is as legal persons that Americans protect the freedom of billionaires and multinationals to speak with their wallets.
The issue of whether we are indeed dealing with climate change or global warming is itself contested. Those who deny it tend to call it “climate change,” while those who accept it, its anthropogenic cause, and want to do something about it tend to speak of global warming. Moreover, it is surely remarkable that we do not have much of a name for what is likely in store for us, which is climate catastrophe. Here I have in mind Derrida’s brilliant remarks about 9/11 in which he argues that our use of a date to name this event reflects an inability to grasp what actually happened, much like a traumatic event.12 The real event, he suggests, is not what happened on the day, but the hole it blew in our sense of security, making us wonder—what next?
The matter of the name is of deep significance in thinking about global catastrophe. As Lacan showed in his discussion of the symbolic phase, having a name is an ambivalent phenomenon. On the one hand, it functions as a handle by which others can manage us. On the other hand, it is a source of self-integration, recognition, rights, and so on. In light of this, it is of particular interest that the mass species extinction currently underway is taking place with most of the 8 million+ species not even being identified or named. Their very existence is a statistical extrapolation. If there is something tragic about threats to species we know (like the Snail Darter fish in the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River in 1973), there is something beyond tragic in the extinction of species we humans have never even identified as such. Nietzsche laughs at philosophers’ supposed concern with truth, telling us that, like every other creature, we are really only concerned with what contributes vitally to our lives.13 And yet at another level we are deeply committed to knowing what is going on around us, and, reflectively, at least, anonymous extinction is surely a shameful matter. Joni Mitchell’s “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone” is the optimistic version. More truthfully, you still don’t know—we will never know—even when it’s gone. The power of the name is real. The masses of animals industrially slaughtered for food die without names, many even without numbers. Their individuality is pre-eclipsed as stuff. Even chicken no. 2013783456 is a source of chicken stuff. A name is no guarantee of protection. At times it can be a death sentence.14 But it does draw you in to the symbolic and the possibility of negotiation. Similar issues are raised by concern for future generations of humans, who as yet have no names, and indeed do not exist, and yet arguably have interests that need to be taken into account.
When Derrida talks about animals, three obvious points stand out. First, he claims, the very word “animal” is pretty much a license to eat, or at least to consume in whatever way suits us. It has little if any biological significance, occluding every difference between the creatures it subsumes. And instead of talking of animals, when he is careful, he talks about “those we call animals.”15 He rubs this in by coining the word animot, highlighting the way language has here been captured by the anthropological machine. Finally, consider his willingness to speak of animal genocide and link their fate with the holocaust in the face of those who would reserve the latter expression for the singular horror of Nazi concentration camps. This is a choice that shows evidence of having gone through the undecidable. Perhaps it was the sense that acquiescence in the face of those who seek exclusive ownership of this word would privilege one event of silent horror even as another one continues, at the dead end of other country roads, unacknowledged, largely unsung, protected by new alibis, new myopias.
Returning more explicitly to global warming (or whatever we call it), the significance of language in grasping or hiding its significance is hard to exaggerate. So too are the opportunities for deconstructive engagement with language—both everyday language, the common discourses of legitimation, and the language of philosophy itself. While the percent of atmospheric CO2 rises inexorably, the narratives we construct to justify the things we do that contribute to this rise have continuing legitimacy (George H. W. Bush: “The American way of life is not up for negotiation. Period” [1992]; my italics). The discourse in which employment opportunities trump sustainability has a certain independence from the real, especially where that real is fabricated in part from what is still around the corner. Language lags behind the real and often distorts it, even if there are no perfectly proper words. A deconstructive disposition does not see language as a surface phenomenon we can set aside, but as a deep and fundamental part of the problem. It offers many ways of performatively challenging and displacing the language in which key aspects of global warming are often articulated.
Aporetic Temporality
For phenomenology it was important to step back from objective worldly time to the internal time consciousness that makes it possible constitutively. For Derrida this is an attempt to return to a subjective self-presence that is in fact riven by linguistic and temporal difference in a way that essentially undermines the very presence it seeks. Deconstruction on the one hand abandons any attempt at a postmetaphysical theory of time, but on the other hand it proliferates a slew of aporetic temporalities we would do well to take seriously.16 There is an ongoing resistance to any seamless linear time of progress. Derrida replaces this with an im-possible messianic time of hope in which, as with a democracy-to-come, any literal sense of time seems to be converted into a certain (im)possibility and openness, much as happens in Heidegger.17 If Nietzsche displaces eschatological time with an eternal return that forcibly extinguishes any residues of cosmic teleology, deconstruction is happier with multiple temporalities not subordinated to any sovereign time and with what Albert Hoftstadter once called “strange loops,” such as a past that was never present, or a hauntology that can never fully repay its debt to the past and is always haunted by what it imagines it could forget. Derrida draws on such an idea specifically in thinking through just what kind of Marx we could still inherit, a Marx who, though a materialist, still has room for specters. He treats Marx in much the way that Nietzsche urges us to treat history, as a resource for critically received possibilities for the creative furthering of life, even as elsewhere he will contest the very opposition between life and death.
The 9/11 attack perhaps offers the most striking example of a cluster of competing nonlinear temporalities. It was said that it could not have been anticipated, and yet many did anticipate it. While it all happened on that one day on September 11, images of it were relentlessly repeated, all over the world, in the days that followed. And the meaning of this event took a while to sink in. Early Derrida had written that “the future can only be anticipated in the form of absolute danger.”18 It is hard to see how this can be generally true, but it fits rather well the traumatic effect of 9/11. On his reading, 9/11—identified only by a date—is the explosion of any sense of cosmic security. Bad though that event was in itself, its true significance lies in what it portends. If that could happen, what next? The events of 9/11 fractured our sense of a benignly unfolding future. A new Pearl Harbor. An event in time that shatters the time frame in which it appears. Time becomes irreversibly complex, and we cannot think it without inhabiting such complexity.
At the same time as we become aware of the future as a potential site of danger and dramatic disruption, it also becomes clear that this is nothing other than the past catching up with us. Our past practices, none intrinsically evil or catastrophic, accumulate like DDT in eagles, until they overflow into dramatic change. What comes at us, seemingly from the outside, like the melting of glaciers, is an indirect product of our own agency.
Again, some ask whether global warming will really happen. Others reply that the future is already here. We are witnessing it without being sure what it is, as if only the eyes of the crocodile had broken the surface. And the crocodile deniers spring up everywhere. For with all this talk of the unpredictable, some of the future has happened, and it is well known that the critical 2 percent rise in average surface temperature, after which real unpredictability is predicted, is already in the pipeline. The “always already” is not just a quasitranscendental mantra. We cannot return to simpler phenomenological times in which retention, current awareness, and protention would be happily interwoven with thematic memory and expectation. Some of the ingredients may be the same, but baking them together need not result in a digestible dish. The real objection to the thought that aporetic time is the new normal is that it was already the old normal, but we just did not realize it. If so, we can no more return to a simpler way of inhabiting time than we can return to simpler times or a lost origin. We can at best acknowledge the shape of such desire (for presence), guard against its seductions, and invent new shapes of dwelling.
It is often said that we should adopt a precautionary principle with respect to future environmental damage. In the absence of complete proof, we should still try to prevent harm by acting on the best evidence. In a sense, this is obvious because we cannot have certainty about a future that has not happened and will only ever happen once. In all sorts of areas, we already act like this, taking out insurance, for example, as a precaution. It is something of a complement to being open to whatever comes. And it captures the spirit of a certain middle voice, or perhaps a double voice, blending or mediating between agency and receptivity. Into this mix we need further to inject the disturbing thought that while we may know what kind of earth we would want to inherit, our descendants may not actually conform to our expectations. Our great-grandchildren may not value hiking in the mountains. This raises the question of what it is we should be trying to preserve. But it also raises the question of whether we might cease to care. Both the precautionary principle and a commitment to sustainability presuppose our ability and desire to identify with beings somewhat like us, whether it be narrowly conceived (white middle-class humans) or broadly (complex life forms). What if, like the Atlantic Conveyor, this stream of projective identification ceased to flow? This sounds unlikely, but if one asked again Levinas’s question “Are we duped by morality?” and came to see most other humans as irredeemably violent, short-sighted, and self-interested, would we automatically want to encourage this species? What if we went beyond video games and developed simple nontoxic ways of directly stimulating the brain’s pleasure centers and everything we now know as culture, indirect means to the same end, were set aside as old school? Would such beings be worth saving? These issues arise within the framework of time in that they affect the way we inhabit our temporal horizons—for example, our capacity for future projection, planning, and hope. They are not issues exclusive to deconstruction. But they expand and extend its sense of the subject not as some transcendental constituter, but as colonized by such desires as are captured by the expression “carnophallogocentrism,” open to further colonization.
If the future is a site of profound anxiety, the past is not entirely different. Those who resist the theory of evolution often do so because they cannot stomach the thought that we share a common ancestry with monkeys.19 And while there are some who would remind us that we are made of stardust, there are others (like me) who think of that as bad (reductive) materialism. In what sense is the history of the earth “our” history? Does this extend through to the emergence of primates from mammals (65 million years ago), or early versions of man in Africa,20 some 2.8 million years ago, or only as far back as Homo sapiens (250,000/400,000 years)? Or do we see ourselves as part of the stream of life, itself developing from mineral existence, through organic molecules, to the earliest life forms? Is the Big Bang part of our history? It is not difficult to see what gentle pressures have elicited such questions. We used to be, roughly speaking, located within geological history. Now we have hatched the idea of the Anthropocene that would mark the unprecedented impact of a lifeform on the geological forces of the planet (if we exclude the first oxygenating bacteria), a confluence of two quite distinct temporal scales and streams. And we need some such schematization of multiple semi-independent temporalities to think through what we might call the “uneven development of humanity.” This is well captured by images of boy soldiers wielding AK-47s. We have productive and destructive powers that outrun both our brain development and the political institutions needed to manage them.21 Humans are notoriously bad, for example, at risk assessment when thinking about the medium to long-term future, consistently underestimating the risk of high-cost, low-likelihood events. There may be good evolutionary reasons for this. Ancient man had much shorter lifespans. International law (and bodies like the UN) are obvious resources both for preventing conflict and for combating climate change. Yet their power still rests on the support, or at least acquiescence, of individual states. And they are still prey to all the paradoxes of collective action they were designed to overcome. We need better brains and better mechanisms of collective agency to cope with the powers we have developed. Time, as Derrida said, quoting Hamlet, is out of joint.22
If we (humans) can still use the word, we are and are not animals. Biologically we are animals, and yet “animal” is the name we use for a vast array of nonhuman fellow travelers on the planet. To call an individual human an “animal” is usually to denigrate him (or her) or to set the table for slaughter. Deconstruction takes as its starting point the ways in which our self-understanding as human rests on the construction of the animal as a subordinated other. To the extent that our grasp and treatment of nonhumans is the site of the ongoing and probably interminable operation of the anthropological machine, both our experience of nonhumans and the ways in which we try to think about them require constant vigilance lest we merely use nonhumans as projective screens.23
I argued some time ago that there is no such thing as an animal.24 There are aardvarks, antelopes, armadillos, Australians . . . and there are vast differences between them. Is there not an abyss between man and animal, as Heidegger insists? It would be crazy to deny the gulf, but it too is not one thing, but many and varied.25 What all this argues against is any hierarchical table of species, any attempt to covertly attribute normative rankings to certain key characteristics. It demands a step back, however difficult that might be, from our understandable tendency to value what we humans think we are good at. To speak of the human subject in terms of carnophallogocentrism is to begin to constitute this being in terms of deep desiring practices, including meat eating.26 There are obvious dangers in any reductionism, and yet the rewards—including glimpses of new shapes of thought—are quite real. In this vein, one might speculatively propose a new natural history of philosophy—as a rationalization of power, first over other humans, and then specifically as a justification for kinnibalism.27 Derrida insists that vegetarians do not escape the charge of carnivorousness. We “eat” others in countless other forms of violence, and refraining from meat can be an alibi for a broader blindness to violence.28 Deconstruction need not make any such substantive claim, but it can track (and interrupt) the performative ways in which our use of language and its underlying schematizations sustain such claims.
There may be no one “question of the animal.” Derrida’s ruminations on his cat in the bathroom, allowing himself to be put in question by its gaze, have implications for humans and animals in general (for example, about who is more naked).29 But he is insistent that he is speaking of this specific cat (while strangely supplying no name). The ethical may indeed be born from such singular encounters. And yet, as we have seen, and in his earlier arguments for a hyperbolic responsibility for all cats when he feeds his own, Derrida does not hesitate to cast his net more widely, eventually addressing animal genocide and even the ways in which it exceeds the holocaust by breeding animals for them to be killed. Taking all this seriously would give dramatic new life to Heidegger’s discussion of being-toward-death. It is important too to take seriously the way deconstruction puts pressure on the distinction between active and passive, the temptation to treat self-conscious agency as the paradigm of responsibility. For the other animal genocide, the Sixth Extinction,30 is not the result of a conspiracy of evil, but of creeping negligence. At first we didn’t really know what we were doing, then we didn’t want to know. To keep going in the same way—with habitat destruction, with threats to countless species from climate disruption—is culpable negligence. In other words, while deconstruction can contribute to our thinking of animal rights by liberating the gaze of the individual animal, it also lubricates the path to environmental ethics by preventing us from hiding under the bush of individual agential responsibility. We, indeed, are responsible. But it immediately raises the question of who “we” are. And this is not (if it ever could be) just a semantic issue. The “we” question has itself to do with how any such collectivity is constituted, by whom, to what end, and with what powers. And the “we” that might be needed to effect a change in “our” treatment of those “we” call animals, whether direct or indirect, would need to be set aside if “we” came to include nonhumans in a broader we—this time a “we” of interdependence and common fate.
The interdependence of humans and nonhumans is often invisible. Few study the role of beetles or fungi in recycling dead trees and leaves. And yet without them the cycle would cease and life on earth as we know it would grind to a halt. “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”31 Might we not come to understand Derrida’s democracy-to-come as (impossibly) embracing “animals,” perhaps in alliance with Bruno Latour’s “parliament of things”?
There is an invasion of the “we” on the horizon; both ethically and ecologically we humans are not as separable from other creatures as we would like to think. Traditionally we have tended to suppose that when it comes to microorganisms (such as bacteria, fungi, viruses) we do need to draw the line just to survive. Disease-causing organisms are simply the enemy. But again, deconstruction is well positioned to articulate the difficulty of this position. It looks increasingly as if an oppositional stance is a miscalculation (as in so many other areas). Consider the impact of antibiotics on human health in recent decades. Over-prescription, failure to complete the course, and the routine use of antibiotics in meat production (faster weight gain), have bred drug-resistant bacteria—a phenomenon allied to that of the autoimmune response in its staging of the collapse of oppositional logic: two different failures of sovereign control. Moreover, the microbiome project makes it clear that what I call “my body,” the one that must protect itself against the alien invader, is always already a “we,” crammed full of benign bacteria and other microorganisms, without which I could not, for example, digest. Broad-spectrum antibiotics bomb wedding parties while being aimed at terrorists. We do not know what we are doing to ourselves because we do not know quite how and how much we are a “we” (or many “we’s”).
We have followed three major deconstructive motifs to begin at least to show why the environmental crisis deserves to be treated as the eleventh plague. The question we asked earlier was whether this could just be added on to the previous ten, as if it had been overlooked or forgotten. Or was Derrida just counting on his fingers and ran out of numbers? The answer to this question is important.
First, we need to remind ourselves that his ten plagues (SM) are plagues of the New World Order, the one triumphantly celebrated by Fukuyama. In other words, they represent the dark underbelly of the free-enterprise, free-market world that, albeit imperfectly, is said to have brought so much prosperity to so many. Some of the headings are economic (unemployment, economic war, the burden of foreign debt, contradictions of the free market) but not all. There are various other dimensions of the military-industrial complex (nuclear weapons, the arms industry, and interethnic wars), and then there are failures of democracy (phantom states like the Mafia, the exclusion of refugees from the democratic process, and the broken promise of international law and institutions). Let us admit there is much that is left out—for example, persistent poverty, growing inequality, the power of multinationals—this list is neither complete nor homogeneous. But how would global warming fit in? Can it just be added to such a short list of neglected plagues?
One reason to resist such an approach is that there are intimate connections between some of these first ten plagues and the looming climate catastrophe. Joining a disconnected list would be a missed opportunity to pursue those connections. Some examples: employment issues are some of the most urgent with which governments have to deal and are specifically used as reasons not to pass or enforce environmental legislation. Intense global economic competition accentuates the tendency to externalize every possible cost—seeking states and countries with lax waste-dumping laws, precipitating a rush to the bottom. Nature (in the shape of rivers, oceans, and the atmosphere) then picks up the tab. Interethnic war is often fought over scarce natural resources feeding the insatiable monster of development—the spreading demand for a better lifestyle. This then generates the refugees fleeing from war and destruction. Global warming will accelerate these displacements as people abandon desertified land, with all the tragedy of life in camps with poor facilities for those who survive. Foreign debt is a crushing burden on a country that deprives it of the economic surpluses that would enable investment in alternative energy sources. More generally, poor and deprived people have a greater interest in surviving until tomorrow than in embracing sustainable lifestyles. These interconnections and more suggest that merely adding number eleven to the first ten is not the right answer.
But there are two further levels at which we can pursue this question.
1. It is eminently plausible to think that without the kind of transformation—revolution—in the shape of human desires, and hence lifestyles, we are either doomed environmentally or we face a return to feudalism or military subjugation along North Korean lines. These latter would enforce poverty for the masses while the 1 percent live high on the hog, which would cut the average energy footprint. If we accept that the alternative is either doom or dreadful social and political regression, the prospect of real social justice, the realization of so much unfulfilled promise would cease to be some sort of felicity and become a survival necessity. We could begin to envisage a convergence between social (and interspecies) justice and environmental necessity. Much of what deconstruction has done already in terms of welcoming the questioning and re-visioning of borders, boundaries, limits, and identities and exposing the costs of modes of thinking and speaking and dwelling that hide the costs of constitutive exclusion would enable such a convergence.
Derrida’s remarks about the animal holocaust and about human suffering and misery are set in the context of our denial, blindness, and refusal to acknowledge these phenomena and the way that human suffering especially represents the contradiction, the hidden waste, produced by an ever more efficiently functioning system.
2. There is, however, another step to be taken, which would make it even clearer that the eleventh plague is not just one more plague, but something of a supplement that completes what seemed already to be complete. The naïve and unguarded way of putting this would be to say that climate catastrophe threatens the material ground of our being and so cannot be compared to the other ten plagues, except perhaps the much more uncertain prospect of nuclear war. But does deconstruction have anything special to say about this, or are we stretching to make a connection? As I see it, climate catastrophe would be the material face of the culmination of an emergent contradiction captured in such key deconstructive concepts as the exclusion of the Other and the autoimmune response. The first tells us that establishing and maintaining binary dominance requires the suppression of the lesser force, an operation that will have unintended consequences. The second tells us that attempts at protecting a strong identity will tend to destroy the very identity they seem to serve. Obviously, these are closely connected. To these two we might add a third, from outside deconstruction—that profits, economic value, on which so much of the world turns—rest not just on the exploitation of wage labor, but on the extraction of finite natural capital and the externalization of the costs of waste disposal onto nature—typically such sinks as sea and air. These three comprise a kind of logic. At this point warning bells go off. The detachment of just such a logic from material historical social conditions was Marx’s objection to Hegel: Geist is properly understood through “relations of production.” Are we succumbing again to a kind of idealism, with deconstruction supplying a quasitranscendental underpinning to historical inevitability? Isn’t the lesson of such prognostications that we discount what we cannot anticipate? Capitalism did not wither under its contradictions, nor did it bring about the progressive immiseration of the poor. It bought off its contradictions, at least for a while, and fanned mass consumption into a force for economic growth. And communism did not lead to the withering away of the state.
So, to clarify, this third step, this attempt to show that global catastrophe is not just one plague among others, is not an exercise in counterprovidential history or an attempt to draft deconstruction into the business of prognostication. Rather it marks the site at which, it would seem, some of the fundamental bioexistential parameters for human and nonhuman flourishing might well be breached, for all intents and purposes, irreversibly. And it does so by highlighting the aporetic realities of our thinking and dwelling. Can deconstruction, however, really think about hurricanes, the melting of the ice caps, the release of vast quantities of methane from Siberian permafrost, new disease vectors, mass migration, starvation, and agricultural disruption? Derrida was perhaps more comfortable reminding us that 9/11 terrorists attacked, inter alia, the global communication network that made even their own terrorism possible by broadcasting those images, metastasizing the terror. He is perhaps less comfortable thinking of the earth as a whole, even as a complex system of differences, with all the dangers of totalization that that entails. For all his hesitations about the language of rights and its dependence on traditional notions of the subject, agency, and responsibility, he does in the end strongly defend that discourse. And I cannot think that he would treat with a deconstructive aloofness the prospect that human flourishing might in the course of time be replaced by a life-form with an impoverished trajectory. I am left, then with the question of whether deconstruction is of any direct help in adumbrating a kind of (quasi)transcendental materialism, a materialism that would ground what matters as its condition of possibility, even as it occupies the same one surface on the Moebius strip. It may be that we need an alliance with what has come to be called “New Materialism.”
Exploring these three threads only gestures at presenting deconstruction as an eco-friendly disposition. A fuller account would consider hospitality in the face of mass migration, welcoming the Other, the New International, expanding the idea of a democracy-to-come to include nonhumans, the ineliminability of enlightenment values, thinking the im-possible, the paradoxes of both autonomy and collective action, and shared sovereignty. Each of these so-called topics is in fact the name for a dispositional exhortation. Wittgenstein once wrote, “Don’t look for the meaning, look for the use.” And Heidegger: “This has just been a series of propositions. The point is to follow the movement of showing.” Derrida is indeed what Rorty called an “edifying philosopher,” recommending—in his case—patience, resisting schematizing formulations, noticing the silent ways in which old binaries frame problems, taking the road less traveled, releasing the power of the repressed Other. Deconstruction is not a method, not an algorithm, not a recipe, not a formula, but a complex disposition—a resource we need when addressing the eleventh plague, anthropogenic climate change.
Notes
1. See Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? [1954] (New York: Harper, 1968), 77.
2. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 81–84.
3. I address these issues in a somewhat different way in David Wood, “Specters of Derrida: On the Way to Econstruction,” in Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, ed. Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham, 2007), 264–90; “Derrida Vert?” Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 2 (2014): 319–22; and “Globalization and Freedom,” in The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005).
4. John Keats, the poet, from a letter to one of his brothers (1817).
5. Acknowledging its status as event, I mark that this paper was originally presented at the Eco-Deconstruction conference (Nashville: Vanderbilt University, March 2015).
6. The classic paper is Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” JASA 21 (June 1969): 42–47.
7. See Bruno Latour’s Gifford Lectures (2013), http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/humanities-soc-sci/news-events/lectures/gifford-lectures/archive/series-2012–2013/bruno-latour.
8. See William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).
9. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 2006).
10. I retain the word “man” here because of, not despite, its ideologically regressive legacy.
11. In Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, Le “Concept” du 11 septembre (Paris: Galilée, 2004); trans. as Philosophy in a Time of Terror, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
12. Ibid.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Truth and Falsity in Their Ultra Moral Sense,” in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (London: T. N. Foulis, 1911).
14. The TV program America’s Most Wanted uses names (and images) to apprehend criminals.
15. See Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2006); trans. David Wills as The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
16. I pursue these ideas more systematically in Wood, The Deconstruction of Time (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1989); in Time after Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); and in Deep Time (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming).
17. I have in mind here the shift from Being and Time (1926) to “Time and Being” (1962).
18. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 5.
19. One of the more remarkable comments made by a witness to the Skopes (“Monkey”) trial (Dayton, Tennessee [1925]) was that he couldn’t see what the fuss was about. He didn’t mind being descended from monkeys. But fish? No way!
20. Such as Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis or Homo antecessor, Homo erectus, Homo denisova, Homo floresiensis, and Homo neanderthalensis.
21. It is a tragic but sobering thought that this capacity for (self) destruction might contribute to saving the planet. Genocide to the rescue? Gaia moves in mysterious ways? This surely as obscene a thought as it is sobering.
22. Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 2006); trans. Peggy Kamuf as Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 2006).
23. The anthropological machine is an expression coined by Giorgio Agamben in The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), chap. 9.
24. Wood, “Comment ne pas manger: Deconstruction and Humanism,” Death of the Animal conference, Warwick, Nov. 1993; see also chap. 9 of Wood, Thinking after Heidegger (Cambridge: Polity; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002).
25. Or as Derrida says, “Betise!” See his La bête et le souverain, vol. 1 (2001–2002) (Paris: Galilée, 2008); trans. Geoffrey Bennington as The Beast & the Sovereign, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), passim.
26. “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Who Comes after the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 2001); see also Derrida, Points de suspension: Entretiens (Paris: Galilée, 1992); trans. Peggy Kamuf as Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
27. I introduce this term in Wood, “Kinnibalism, Cannibalism: Stepping up to the Plate,” https://www.academia.edu/6813639/Kinnibalism_Cannibalism_Stepping_Up_to_the.
28. While this can happen, I have strongly argued against this line of thought. Vegetarianism can just as easily be the leading edge of a broader transformation.
29. See Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am.
30. See Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (New York: Henry Holt, 2014). The title has a strange ambivalence to it. It announces the geological scale of what we are bringing about. And yet it’s hardly unprecedented—there were five previous ones; the earth yawns.
31. Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence [1776]. Arguably what is now needed is a Declaration of Interdependence.