Introduction: Of Biodeconstruction (Part II)

Of Biodeconstruction (Part II) ventures through the door left open by the emergent questions, hesitations, and provocations about deconstruction, the philosophy of life, and the life sciences advanced in Of Biodeconstruction (Part I). Although Jacques Derrida’s writings on autoimmunity, pharmakon, life-death, the question of the animal, Geschlecht, cloning, living-on, the genetic program, and epigenesis suggest an engagement—from the earliest publications to the last seminars—with biology, the life sciences, and the philosophy of life, it remains a question whether or not deconstruction is already “biodeconstruction.” Yet neither a critique of the biological sciences—contemporary or arcane—nor, alternately, a conclusion concerning the historical limits of deconstruction in our postgenomic era is primarily what is at stake. Rather than taking aim at a target from the outside or foreclosing on the future, the critical force of deconstructive readings and writings tends toward implosion and preemption. And yet: a step of retreat (the pas, the “not” of the step) perhaps hinders differential materiality’s foray into biological thought. Catherine Malabou, the honored respondent for the Of Biodeconstruction double issue, interrogates this hindrance in her many books—especially Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction—and further develops for the present Postmodern Culture issue a critical clarification of what she sees as a Derridean blind spot.

In Of Biodeconstruction (Part I), the essays by Vitale, Obodiac, and Senatore, for the most part, hold fast to Derrida’s critique of self-consciousness as living presence—phenomenology’s cornerstone—and the premise that différance and the trace not only organize and constitute all life, from the amoeba to the human being, but also subtend the animate and the inanimate: counter to a logocentric conception of the genetic code, the genome as a mode of arche-writing, a texture of differential traces, allows for an openness to the outside that might be compatible with contemporary findings in epigenetics, systems theory, and research into the plasticity of the genome. In addition, the conversation by Kirby, Schrader, and Timár, which headed up Part I, demonstrates that new materialist feminism, feminist science studies, and the analysis of the political economy of nature-culture find in biodeconstruction a critical ally.

If Part I situates biodeconstruction within the current critical context and the Derridean groundwork, Part II presents focused readings of Jacques Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity; Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the living being; Jane Bennett’s new materialist and Irwin Schrödinger’s genetic determinist conceptions of life; and Jorge Luis Borges’s bio-onto-theologic story “La escritura del dios.”

Framed against the backdrop of Roberto Esposito’s thesis that biopolitics mediates biology and politics by way of the immunity paradigm, the first essay, Elina Staikou’s “Autoimmunity in Extremis: The Task of Biodeconstruction,” explores the radical dimensions of Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity. Arguing that autoimmunity has made its appearance in Derrida’s work under various names—pharmakon, death-drive, the nuclear hypothesis—Staikou suggests that autoimmunity is a central principle for biodeconstruction, one that attends to both the nihilism and the affirmation that characterize life processes such as those played out in endosymbiosysis and apoptosis.

In “Biodeconstructing Merleau-Ponty,” Raoul Frauenfelder turns to the seminars on biology and philosophy Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave in the 1950s at the Collège de France. Frauenfelder identifies the development of the preformationism/epigenesis dialectic as a constitutive stumbling block for Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh of the world”—the master concept of his oeuvre—suggesting that this dialectic flattens out the radically differential nature of life-death: biodeconstruction puts into question the teleological closure reasserted by the phenomenological reading of the living being.

Jonathan Basile’s essay, “How the Other Half-Lives: Life as Identity and Difference in Bennett and Schrödinger,” takes up the work of Jane Bennett, Erwin Schrödinger, Immanuel Kant, and Bernard Stiegler to demonstrate how biodeconstruction differs from new materialist, genetic determinist, and anthropocentric conceptions of life. Binaries such as animate/inanimate, vitalism/mechanism, self/other, human/animal, and especially the binary identity/difference fail to account for the living being’s...