This review article offers an introductory overview of a distinctive broadly ‘deconstructive’ body of work which deserves to be more widely known. Two books in particular, by Claire Colebrook, Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller, are an especial focus, with their uncompromising readings of many of the assumptions and evasions in the environmental humanities. These are Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin (London, Routledge, 2012), and Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (Open Humanities Press, 2016).
{"title":"An ‘Inhumanist’ School?","authors":"Timothy Clark","doi":"10.3366/olr.2023.0408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2023.0408","url":null,"abstract":"This review article offers an introductory overview of a distinctive broadly ‘deconstructive’ body of work which deserves to be more widely known. Two books in particular, by Claire Colebrook, Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller, are an especial focus, with their uncompromising readings of many of the assumptions and evasions in the environmental humanities. These are Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin (London, Routledge, 2012), and Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (Open Humanities Press, 2016).","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69623213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
These are the first published extracts of a Covid-19 diary, co-written over two years (2020–22). The authors are concerned to both record and analyse the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic altered the sense and experience of inside and outside, home and world, self and other. Grief—both personal and ecological—is uncircumventable. At the same time, the virus provokes critical thinking on how ‘another life is possible’. Literature and music are key forces in the authors' shared and interweaving reflections.
{"title":"Even the Plague Journal: Everything Is Happening Extracts (1)","authors":"T. Morton, N. Royle","doi":"10.3366/olr.2023.0407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2023.0407","url":null,"abstract":"These are the first published extracts of a Covid-19 diary, co-written over two years (2020–22). The authors are concerned to both record and analyse the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic altered the sense and experience of inside and outside, home and world, self and other. Grief—both personal and ecological—is uncircumventable. At the same time, the virus provokes critical thinking on how ‘another life is possible’. Literature and music are key forces in the authors' shared and interweaving reflections.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46882183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Although much headway has been made since the Derridean notion of the ‘general text’ was recuperated by eco-critics to imbue the philosophy of life with deconstructive rigor, the recent publication of Jacques Derrida’s Life Death seminar provides an opportunity for a renewed engagement. Parallel to his sustained elaboration of a non-dialectical reckoning with life (death) were a series of developments in the study of thermodynamic complex systems that similarly sought to demystify the pervasive vitalism within the life sciences. Derrida’s grammatological interrogation of the life/death dialectic takes the ‘textualization’ of genetic life as a starting point for articulating a logic of supplementarity that reorients our position in relation to our lived environments. ‘Writing’, however, cannot help but invoke the archive along with all its destructive impulses ( Destruktionstrieb). If the archive invokes the law of the house ( oikos), then the archive perhaps names the archive of the archive, which Derrida was all too aware of as the site for the annihilation of memory and the release of pure loss. A grammatological reading of this entropic textuality would thus consider how the irreducibility of absolute destruction might nevertheless offer a path ‘toward the incalculability of another thought of life.’
{"title":"The House That Jacques Built (Goes up in Flames); or, Mal d’Écologie","authors":"Adam Koutajian","doi":"10.3366/olr.2023.0404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2023.0404","url":null,"abstract":"Although much headway has been made since the Derridean notion of the ‘general text’ was recuperated by eco-critics to imbue the philosophy of life with deconstructive rigor, the recent publication of Jacques Derrida’s Life Death seminar provides an opportunity for a renewed engagement. Parallel to his sustained elaboration of a non-dialectical reckoning with life (death) were a series of developments in the study of thermodynamic complex systems that similarly sought to demystify the pervasive vitalism within the life sciences. Derrida’s grammatological interrogation of the life/death dialectic takes the ‘textualization’ of genetic life as a starting point for articulating a logic of supplementarity that reorients our position in relation to our lived environments. ‘Writing’, however, cannot help but invoke the archive along with all its destructive impulses ( Destruktionstrieb). If the archive invokes the law of the house ( oikos), then the archive perhaps names the archive of the archive, which Derrida was all too aware of as the site for the annihilation of memory and the release of pure loss. A grammatological reading of this entropic textuality would thus consider how the irreducibility of absolute destruction might nevertheless offer a path ‘toward the incalculability of another thought of life.’","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":"19 3‐4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41268988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the relationship between textuality and materiality through a reading of the work of Derrida alongside that of the experimental poet Christian Bök. Bök’s poetry exemplifies how a playful manipulation of the materiality of a text can differentially enact what might be thought of as a textuality of matter, and, in doing so, it enacts an eco-deconstructive reading of itself that draws attention to the wider eco-deconstructive nature of language. In its self-reflexive absorption with the materiality of its own form, this poetry fixes its gaze inwards, revelling in the difficulty of its linguistic structures and the proliferation and frustration of meaning that they make possible. But it is precisely at the points of these inward turns that this poetry also reveals itself to be most intimately connected with other material realities. It is at the moments in which language appears most singularly itself—where the differentiality of its structures appears most particular and peculiar to it—this poetry suggests, that its differentiality replicates, touches, transforms and differs from itself in the equally differential movements of other material forms of existence.
{"title":"Eco-Deconstructive ‘Misreadings’: Textuality and Materiality in Derrida and Christian Bök","authors":"Marija Grech","doi":"10.3366/olr.2023.0405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2023.0405","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the relationship between textuality and materiality through a reading of the work of Derrida alongside that of the experimental poet Christian Bök. Bök’s poetry exemplifies how a playful manipulation of the materiality of a text can differentially enact what might be thought of as a textuality of matter, and, in doing so, it enacts an eco-deconstructive reading of itself that draws attention to the wider eco-deconstructive nature of language. In its self-reflexive absorption with the materiality of its own form, this poetry fixes its gaze inwards, revelling in the difficulty of its linguistic structures and the proliferation and frustration of meaning that they make possible. But it is precisely at the points of these inward turns that this poetry also reveals itself to be most intimately connected with other material realities. It is at the moments in which language appears most singularly itself—where the differentiality of its structures appears most particular and peculiar to it—this poetry suggests, that its differentiality replicates, touches, transforms and differs from itself in the equally differential movements of other material forms of existence.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42000503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Whether deconstruction is relevant to environmental philosophy, and if so, in what ways and with what transformations, has been subject to considerable debate in recent years. I will begin by discussing some reservations regarding deconstruction’s relevance to environmental thought, and argue that they stem from an older misreading of Derrida’s work in particular as hostile to the natural sciences, and as a cultural textualism of relevance only to the interiority of a traditional canon, but unable to reach the materiality of the outside environment. This attempt at refutation will permit a better understanding of the deconstructive argument for what has been called an ‘originary environmentality’ of life. On this basis, I seek to argue that deconstruction tends to be most promising to environmental questions when it shows responses to the call, not primarily for a new ethics, but for far-ranging analyses of our conception of politics. The reason for this lies in the overall deconstructive goal of exposing political and legal sovereignty, including its modern democratic understanding, to what I will elaborate as contextual or environmental finitude.
{"title":"Carnophallogocentrism and Eco-Deconstruction","authors":"Matthias Fritsch","doi":"10.3366/olr.2023.0401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2023.0401","url":null,"abstract":"Whether deconstruction is relevant to environmental philosophy, and if so, in what ways and with what transformations, has been subject to considerable debate in recent years. I will begin by discussing some reservations regarding deconstruction’s relevance to environmental thought, and argue that they stem from an older misreading of Derrida’s work in particular as hostile to the natural sciences, and as a cultural textualism of relevance only to the interiority of a traditional canon, but unable to reach the materiality of the outside environment. This attempt at refutation will permit a better understanding of the deconstructive argument for what has been called an ‘originary environmentality’ of life. On this basis, I seek to argue that deconstruction tends to be most promising to environmental questions when it shows responses to the call, not primarily for a new ethics, but for far-ranging analyses of our conception of politics. The reason for this lies in the overall deconstructive goal of exposing political and legal sovereignty, including its modern democratic understanding, to what I will elaborate as contextual or environmental finitude.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46198228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Biodeconstruction (2018) I argued that Derrida, in the Life Death seminar (1975–76), would have anticipated the most recent developments in epigenetics, a field in which the dogma of genetic determinism is radically challenged by noting the influence of the environment in the production of mutations in the genetic program, particularly when a genetic population is faced with a radical change in its environmental conditions, which I propose to call an ‘ecological event’. I explore a comparison between the Derridean deconstruction of genetic determinism and the theoretical elaborations of epigenesis, referring to the work of Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions (2005). Jablonka and Lamb propose a theory of genetic variation in which mutations would be the result of the interpretation of unpredictable environmental events by the individual whose survival would be in danger. Through this comparison, I show that the study of ‘interpretive Mutations’ as reactions to unpredictable environmental events can be helpful in understanding the Derridean theme of the ‘event’, rearticulating it in relation to the radical environmental changes that humanity will sooner or later face.
{"title":"Differing the Ecological Event: Interpretive Mutations between Bio- and Eco-Deconstruction","authors":"F. Vitale","doi":"10.3366/olr.2023.0403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2023.0403","url":null,"abstract":"In Biodeconstruction (2018) I argued that Derrida, in the Life Death seminar (1975–76), would have anticipated the most recent developments in epigenetics, a field in which the dogma of genetic determinism is radically challenged by noting the influence of the environment in the production of mutations in the genetic program, particularly when a genetic population is faced with a radical change in its environmental conditions, which I propose to call an ‘ecological event’. I explore a comparison between the Derridean deconstruction of genetic determinism and the theoretical elaborations of epigenesis, referring to the work of Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions (2005). Jablonka and Lamb propose a theory of genetic variation in which mutations would be the result of the interpretation of unpredictable environmental events by the individual whose survival would be in danger. Through this comparison, I show that the study of ‘interpretive Mutations’ as reactions to unpredictable environmental events can be helpful in understanding the Derridean theme of the ‘event’, rearticulating it in relation to the radical environmental changes that humanity will sooner or later face.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44238971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
With rapidly spreading extractive practices on a global scale, the amount of residue generated raises the question of waste management and economic externalities. Are humans, and most crucially the Earth, equipped to welcome such an exponentially increasing quantity of restants? Artworks, as inexhaustible in their readings, are congenial to this idea of irreducible remains. In this paper, I argue Derrida’s treatment of remains might provide a waste-based approach to ecocriticism which, in turns, can be leveraged to articulate an insightful reading of some artworks in times of extractive overconsumption and environmental destabilisation. Lee Bae’s Issu du feu (2000) and House of Moon (2014), Emerson Pontes’s Mil Quase Mortos: Boiúna, and Rochelle Goldberg’s Cannibal Actif (2018) are three contemporary artworks that directly challenge those externalities by explicitly engaging with remains ranging from charcoal, human-made waste and oil. Through a formal analysis of these artworks and a close reading of Derrida’s Feu la cendre, ‘Biodegradables Seven Diary Fragments,’ and the seminars Manger l’autre and Rhétorique du cannibalisme, it appears that eco-deconstruction is perhaps above all a matter of engaging with the structure of remains.
随着采掘业在全球范围内迅速蔓延，产生的残留物数量引发了废物管理和经济外部性的问题。人类，最重要的是地球，是否有能力欢迎数量呈指数级增长的餐馆？艺术作品在其阅读中取之不尽，用之不竭，与这种不可还原的遗迹的想法是一致的。在这篇论文中，我认为德里达对遗骸的处理可能会为生态批评提供一种基于废物的方法，反过来，在采掘业过度消费和环境不稳定的时期，可以利用这种方法来阐述对一些艺术品的深刻解读。李（Lee Bae）的《问题》（Issu du feu）（2000）和《月亮之家》（House of Moon。通过对这些艺术品的正式分析，仔细阅读德里达的《Feu la cendre》、《可生物降解的七个日记碎片》，以及Manger l’autre和Rhétorique du comparisme研讨会，似乎生态解构最重要的是参与遗迹的结构。
{"title":"Resisting Ex-Appropriation: Artistic Remains at Times of Environmental Instability","authors":"J. Dubé","doi":"10.3366/olr.2023.0406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2023.0406","url":null,"abstract":"With rapidly spreading extractive practices on a global scale, the amount of residue generated raises the question of waste management and economic externalities. Are humans, and most crucially the Earth, equipped to welcome such an exponentially increasing quantity of restants? Artworks, as inexhaustible in their readings, are congenial to this idea of irreducible remains. In this paper, I argue Derrida’s treatment of remains might provide a waste-based approach to ecocriticism which, in turns, can be leveraged to articulate an insightful reading of some artworks in times of extractive overconsumption and environmental destabilisation. Lee Bae’s Issu du feu (2000) and House of Moon (2014), Emerson Pontes’s Mil Quase Mortos: Boiúna, and Rochelle Goldberg’s Cannibal Actif (2018) are three contemporary artworks that directly challenge those externalities by explicitly engaging with remains ranging from charcoal, human-made waste and oil. Through a formal analysis of these artworks and a close reading of Derrida’s Feu la cendre, ‘Biodegradables Seven Diary Fragments,’ and the seminars Manger l’autre and Rhétorique du cannibalisme, it appears that eco-deconstruction is perhaps above all a matter of engaging with the structure of remains.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45717107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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