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Reviewed by:
  • Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy ed. by Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes, David C. Wood
  • Thomas H. Bretz (bio)
Review of Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy Fritsch, Matthias, Philippe Lynes and David C. Wood (Eds). New York, NY. Fordham University Press, 2018. 334 pages.

At first glance, it might seem strange to consider Derrida as an environmental philosopher. There is still a sense with many that Derrida is primarily a thinker of poetry and texts rather than of “leaves or soil” (Shepard 1995, 20). While this is still a common view, even a cursory glance at Derrida’s work and at this volume shows that it is based on a misunderstanding. What it ignores is the fact that ‘text’ for Derrida is “coextensive [at least, T.B.] with mortal life” (7) and indeed can be said to include every aspect of the (material) world (Derrida 1988, 136). Moreover, Derrida challenges the idea that we can understand culture independently from its material manifestations in the world and from its relations to what we call nature.

Nevertheless, given the urgency of the current “environmental crisis” (11) readily acknowledged in the volume’s introduction, one might wonder whether the best use of our time is to read a philosopher who is so notoriously difficult and whose writing is anything but straightforward. A somewhat evasive answer to this worry would insist that the problem of taking too long when there is no time is not limited to deconstruction, but is a possible charge against (environmental) philosophy in general. Against this charge, we might insist that thinking about how to change our cultural and conceptual infrastructure in a way that makes it less violent in the long haul is as necessary as taking the time to change, say, our energy and transportation infrastructure. We need to know how we got here, so that we might hope to avoid ending up here again, and, as David Wood put it in his essay, “[t]his requires patience, even when we have no time!” (31). Similarly, Michael Marder insists in his essay that before [End Page 121] rushing to an application of what we think we already know, we should pause and ask whether the conceptual frameworks we apply are in fact up to the task (164).

Beyond this somewhat common response, Derrida himself—based on his conception of ethics and experience as organized around necessary and irresolvable points of contradiction and tension (Derrida 1993)—could readily acknowledge the bind in which philosophical reflection finds itself here. Slow and careful thinking seems necessary if we do not want to face the same problems over and over again. At the same time, it can also seem somewhat frivolous and even obscene to do so when so many (humans and non-humans) have suffered and died, are dying, and are bound to die because of the environmental violence constitutive of the world we have inherited. The task is an impossible one, which is precisely what ethics is about for Derrida (333). We have to respond to the calls of all these others, to their deaths—which for Derrida are each time as serious as the end of the world, because they are each time the end of the world understood as an irreplaceable whole (265). However, as we respond, we always find ourselves wanting. We never know enough and we can never do enough or do anything we can know to be exactly right. The current volume, maybe like all (environmental) philosophy, is thus a wager that writing and reading it is worth the time when it seems we have none, a wager “driven by an emancipatory interest” in “truth, justice, and happiness” (3).

Indeed, for those who find themselves lacking the time to engage with Derrida’s extensive corpus directly, this volume does provide an overall quite accessible overview of some of the contributions deconstructive thinking can make to environmental thinking. Over the years, Derrida’s texts have proposed and enacted several shifts in the basic conceptual terrain that a lot of (environmental) philosophy presupposes. Concepts such as responsibility, world, or self and other have been rethought in a way that would make it impossible to...

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