Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth

Specters of Derrida: On the Way to Econstruction

 Specters of Derrida: On the Way to Econstruction D AV I D W O O D The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. —jacques derrida, Of Grammatology Never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected so many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. —jacques derrida, Specters of Marx And provisionally, but with regret, we must leave aside here the nevertheless indissociable question of what is becoming of so-called ‘‘animal’’ life, the life and existence of ‘‘animals’’ in this history. This question has always been a serious one, but it will become massively unavoidable. —jacques derrida, Specters of Marx A N I M A L R I G H T S A N D EN V I R O N M E N TA L I S M I do not claim that Derrida explicitly saw environmentalism as the next step for deconstruction. It could be argued, indeed, that the direction he took cuts against environmental concerns.1 In an extension of our broad responsibility for the human other, he has on a number of occasions attempted to articulate a face-to-face relation to his cat.2 There is, however , a well-documented tension between those who take up questions of individual animals’ rights and/or their well-being, and those who pursue environmental issues. The animal rights advocate will rescue the bison trapped on the ice; the environmentalist will think of the bear and d a vi d w ood 兩 265 her cubs who depend for their survival on such unfortunate accidents. Derrida does indeed problematize the ethical focus on the privileged individual (his cat), but he does so by asking how we can justify ignoring all the other (individual) cats. He does not talk about mice or birds, or the snakes so unwanted in Egyptian homes that the Egyptians domesticated cats. In taking this path, Derrida follows Levinas in seeing the movement from the ethical to the political in terms of the importance of the third, who is always implicit in the otherwise privileged face-to-face relation, muddying the waters. Still intact is the implication of a potential personal relationship with a discrete individual—that the other typically has a face, and that it is hard to know how to deal with the many others whose faces are indistinguishable from those we happen to meet. Arguably there is a residual humanism in this approach, as is also the case with Levinas. The first stage of otherness, at least, opens us up to creatures a bit like us, or those with whom we share our lives. Moreover, the ethical focus on the unidirectionality of obligation, on the gift that seeks no return, that (in Levinas, for example) is even compromised by that possibility, suggests an awkwardness in thinking deep interdependency with other life forms, which is surely our condition. But we may properly ask whether Derrida does not offer us elsewhere the resources to take our thinking further. In her essay ‘‘The Preoriginal Gift—and Our Response to It,’’ elsewhere in the present volume, Anne Primavesi argues that Derrida worries about the logic of the gift ‘‘not as a rejection of the possibility of gift but as a conscious, formalized subversion of the prevailing capitalist logic of exchange relations.’’ My sense is that Derrida goes further, and casts doubt on what we might call the ‘‘purity’’ of the gift in whatever setting it occurs, that it is never entirely free from the flows of interaction and exchange. Primavesi’s account of the preoriginary gift offers us a powerful way of understanding our very existence as life-forms in a community of living beings as a gift from the past, an endowment, or what Heidegger might call an ‘‘original indebtedness.’’ It is perhaps in this light that Heidegger will come to translate es gibt (there is) in a more literal way as ‘‘it gives.’’ The recognition of our original dependency on the whole life process, both in an evolutionary sense, and in terms of our current sustenance , is an important counterweight to the humanism implicit both in 266 兩 e c os p i ri t a rigid economy of exchange, and in understanding the space of the ethical in terms of a pure gift. This question of humanism arguably taints even the very word ‘‘environment ,’’ in its suggestion that we concern ourselves...