‘To be or not to be’ of Eco-Deconstruction

Abstract

This paper aims to unravel a tension between the act of naming and ‘differential relationality’. Derrida has taught us that ‘naming’ is an essentialising, and thus metaphysical gesture that works to define and circumscribe a field of work (for instance, ‘Eco-Deconstruction’), the human, and ecology. ‘Naming’ entails the beginning of the institutionalisation and sedimentation of a field, despite a ‘field’s’ claim to the opposite. The danger of such sedimentation is that it perpetuates what Derrida calls ipseity that in the history of western philosophy and metaphysics has worked in contradistinction to the nonhuman (animals, environment, ecology).