After Biodeconstruction in the Neganthropocene

"Qu'entendent-ils donc par événement?", je lisais la question dans son mouvement de retraite.

—Maurice Blanchot, Le Dernier homme

"König Oedipus, der ein Auge zuviel vieleicht hat" […] Dieser Gesang schließt, Leben ist Tod, und Tod ist auch ein Leben.

—Martin Heidegger, Erläuterung Hölderlins Dichtung

It is no overstatement to write that the event of reading Francesco Vitale's Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences will affect those interested in deconstruction, continental philosophy, and contemporary theory like the "bomb" he once spoke of regarding Derrida's then still-unpublished seminar La vie la mort. Like any worthy of the name for Derrida, whether traumatic or happy, an event constitutes something necessarily singular and unprecedented. Some "thing" happens or takes place that nonetheless remains ineffable, unforeseeable, incomprehensible, and inappropriable, denoting our powerlessness to make sense of it. Unlike Heidegger's Ereignis, Derrida explains the event ought not only be thought in terms of appropriation or the proper but also as expropriation, Enteignis. "The undergoing of the event, that which in the undergoing or in the ordeal at once opens itself up to and resists experience, is, it seems to me, a certain unappropriability of what comes or happens. … the event is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend" (Derrida 2003, 90). But although Derrida also explains a traumatic event as the inflicting of a wound onto history, "a traumatic event is not only marked as an event by the memory, even if unconscious, of what took place" (Derrida 2003, 96). It is not something that has merely happened once and for all, "for the wound remains open by our terror before the future and not only the past" (Derrida 2003, 96). This upsets our usual understandings of chronology and temporalization: "it is the future that determines the unappropriability of the event, not the present or the past. Or at least, if it is the present or the past, it is only insofar as it bears on its body the terrible sign of what might or perhaps will take place, which will be worse than anything that has ever taken place" (Derrida 2003, 97).

It is difficult to think of a term that will have been subject to more calls for revision, critique, or outright dismissal than "Anthropocene" to name our current planetary disaster, from which the question concerning technics is not far—the 2019 Global Risks Report listing data fraud, theft, and cyberattacks right alongside environmental and biospherical degradation, as well as climate chaos. Even though the event of the sixth mass extinction is already taking place, we have the terrifying sense that the worst is still to come, for example in our own alternation between mass extinction, Anthropocene, Holocene extinction, climate change, global warming, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, and Trumpocene. The immense, indeed "cosmic" unrest, ill-being or mal-être that has seized the world in our technological geological age devolves into terror for Bernard Stiegler. But it is thinking's very task, he borrows from Deleuze and Guattari, to constantly confront chaos, and in so doing to open an opportunity to bifurcate away from it. The event of Vitale's Biodeconstruction is its role in this very confrontation, in the tools and insights it offers to treat, care for, and think—panser, to borrow Derrida and Stiegler's pun—the wound in time opened up by the Anthropocene disaster; in the opportunities it offers for rethinking bifurcation in the broader space of a cosmodeconstruction. Here, the earth as "planet," outside any terrestrial rootedness or philosophical concept of "world," is revealed in the death and lack that makes it dear, its "dearth." But as Maurice Blanchot's Writing of the Disaster puts it, "the unexperienced experience of the disaster, the retreat of the cosmic too easy to unmask as collapse (the lack of foundation where once and for all, without problems or questions, everything we have to think would be immobilized), obliges us to disengage ourselves from time as irreversible, without Return assuring its reversibility" (Blanchot 1995, 78).

The irreversibility of the arrow of time is...