Post-COVID ecology: mutation, immunology, and inequivalence in Jacques Derrida’s aneconomy

Abstract

ABSTRACT If the climate emergency’s imperative has seemingly been delayed by Covid-19, this article identifies a disequilibrium problem applied to the general economical thought of capitalism and ecology. Drawing a correlation, it offers a conceptually communist, aneconomic configuration. Addressing how current practise both privileges the human as differentiated from the non-human, and simultaneously places ontology unequally within unsustainable ecosystems, it reads several texts of Jacques Derrida. Following a summary of recent ecological and non-ecological commentaries on the formulation of aneconomy, and a given revision of Georges Bataille’s general economy, my Derrida exegesis is split between the early notion of différance, and its later concerns in post-1989 texts preceding his final seminar on sovereignty from 2001 to 2003. Concentrating on Derrida’s formulations of immunology, mutation, and inequivalence, my argument for an ecological aneconomy builds by examining Derrida’s deconstruction of oikos and the propre; a differentiation of excess and expenditure in material and idealist dialectics; his identification and subsequent expression of a proposition of irrefutable justice; and a challenge to animal-relegating presuppositions of human propriety. After Derrida, I argue for a necessarily valueless ecology, its imperative ontologically aneconomic and having no possible exception in necessitating a rethinking of the ontology of inequivalence.