How the Other Half-Lives: Life as Identity and Difference in Bennett and Schrödinger

This essay deconstructs Jane Bennett’s and Erwin Schrödinger’s theories of life to demonstrate the untenability of defining life on the basis of either identity (relation to self) or difference (relation to other). Because the living thing is undecidably self and other, its traditional bond to the self-relation of teleology is untenable. Yet relinquishing this trait leaves life indistinguishable from its many inorganic and technical others. Biodeconstruction treats organism, organ, and parasite (part and whole, self and other) as undecidable. Finally, it critiques as metaphysical humanism Bernard Stiegler’s attempt to define a negentropy specific to humanity.