Futures of Life Death on Earth: Derrida’s General Ecology by Philippe Lynes (review)

If Jacques Derrida’s différance designates the simultaneous differing/deferral that destabilizes any opposition between same and other then life, as différance, can no longer be thought of as the origin of death because it is always already contaminated. Deconstruction would even seem to suggest that life is death. But this would be weak relativism and is precisely what is problematized in the title of Derrida’s recently published seminar La Vie la mort, posed without liaison in order to make an opening argument about their relationality: If ‘la vie est la mort’ would be a simplistic equivalence, ‘la vie et la mort’ would imply a safe and unproblematic opposition. Philippe Lynes here takes up the difficult relationality of Life Death, reinterpreting Derrida’s work in terms of a ‘general ecology’, following Georges Bataille’s ‘general economy’. This rereading of Derrida aims at nothing less than articulating the relevance of Derridean thinking for biocultural sustainability in the face of the Anthropocene extinction. Bataille’s general economy as starting point allows a thinking of the inorganicity of the Outside that offers an alternative to overly affirmative philosophies of Life, resisting the various vitalisms and the neofascist political offspring so often latent in such philosophies. Against the ‘restricted economy’ of system, Bataille’s ‘general economy’ refers to the blind spots and excess of any system, where the surplus energy produced by all beings would not be put to profitable use but instead squandered as excess. For Lynes, this opens up a thinking of the outside that exceeds any straightforward inside–outside dialectic and forms the basis of a general ecology which attempts to relate any system ‘to a loss of sense, an impossibility, and an outside for which the system cannot account’ (p. 18). This is pursued on various levels, including a critique of Deleuzian immanence and a reconsideration of biopolitics from Michel Foucault to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The Introduction suggests the book will be much more critical of the various vitalisms operative in these thinkers than it actually turns out to be. The Introduction also notes the irony of pursuing such urgent ecological questions via a body of thought unfairly caricatured as being caught in endless deferrals (p. xxv). Lynes is right to note the omnipresence of such pressing themes throughout Derrida’s work and this book is an impressive and valuable contribution to Derrida scholarship, full of creative readings and illuminating connections. However, it does not convey the urgency of these questions beyond Derridean scholarship, as it ambitiously sets out to. Some of the most suggestive moments come in brief dialogue with Erich Hörl and Bernard Stiegler in the beginning, with interesting connections drawn between cybernetics, information theory, and the Neganthropocene, but the persistent focus on French Heideggerianism and poststructuralism in the main body leaves one with the impression that despite the different routes of enquiry opened up, all roads lead back to the rue d’Ulm, and this feels less and less like the place from which one can adequately address the kinds of urgent questions posed by the Anthropocene.