Derrida on Non-Human Others Thomas Helmut Bretz Loyola University Chicago

Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2016 “But Who, We?”: Derrida on Non-Human Others Thomas Helmut Bretz Loyola University Chicago Recommended Citation Bretz, Thomas Helmut, "“But Who, We?”: Derrida on Non-Human Others" (2016). Dissertations. 2121. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2121 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2016 Thomas Helmut Bretz LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO “BUT WHO, WE?”: DERRIDA ON NON-HUMAN OTHERS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY BY THOMAS HELMUT BRETZ CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2016 Copyright by Thomas Helmut Bretz, 2016 All rights reserved. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iv CHAPTER 1: DERRIDA AND ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY ............................ 1 Two Terminological Clarifications ................................................................................. 6 The Secondary Literature ................................................................................................ 9 The Primary Literature .................................................................................................. 18 CHAPTER 2: DERRIDA'S ETHICS OF UNLIMITABLE RESPONSIBILITY ............ 39 The Structure of Ethics as the Structure of Experience ................................................ 42 Derrida's Ethics of Responsibility: The Undecidable, Free Decision and Duty ........... 79 CHAPTER 3: THE ONTOLOGICAL SUPPLEMENT OF DERRIDA'S ETHICS ...... 160 Originary Performativity: Time, Violence and the Urgency of Justice ...................... 165 The Aporetic Double Movement of Différance .......................................................... 176 Différance and the Link Between Ethics and Experience .......................................... 210 CHAPTER 4: THE POSSIBILITY OF EXPERIENCING INANIMATE BEINGS AS OTHERS .................................................................................................................... 219 The Singularity-Based Parallel Between Conscious and Inanimate Beings ............... 223 The Experience of Another According to Husserl ...................................................... 226 The Link Between Ontological Difference and Epistemic Fragility .......................... 230 Generalizing the Experience of Another as Presence qua Absence ........................... 246 CHAPTER 5: THE EXPERIENCE OF A CORPSE AS LIVING DEAD ..................... 264 Textual Indications for a Different Conception of the Inanimate ............................... 265 The Experience of the Corpse in The Beast and the Sovereign .................................. 272 Beyond the Corpse ...................................................................................................... 292 CHAPTER 6: THE POSSIBILITY OF SHARING A WORLD WITH INANIMATE NATURE .................................................................................................................... 308 The Question of the Earth ........................................................................................... 313 The Possibility of Sharing a World ............................................................................. 333 A Brief Note on Animism ........................................................................................... 369 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 377 VITA ............................................................................................................................... 393 iii ABSTRACT In this dissertation I establish the possibility of social and ethical relationships with non-human natural (and in particular inanimate) beings. I do so based on the work of 20th century French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In chapter 1 I discuss the relatively sparse secondary literature that addresses the intersection between Derrida's work and environmental philosophy. I also go over some textual indications that show that Derrida has been concerned with non-human beings throughout his career. In chapters 2 and 3 I establish the impossibility of conclusively excluding any kind of being from the purview of ethical responsibility. While chapter 2 develops the nature of Derrida's ethics, chapter 3 ties this conception of ethics back to more theoretical considerations that we find in Derrida's texts. Chapters 4 to 6 serve to illustrate in a more positive fashion how Derrida might help us to understand the possibility of social and ethical relationships with inanimate beings. Chapter 4 focuses on the notion of the trace in order to show that the presence qua absence that characterizes our experience of human persons can also be discerned in our relationships to inanimate beings. Chapter 5 focuses on Derrida's discussion of a corpse as neither alive nor dead. I argue that this experience of life/death is possible with regard to non-human inanimate beings as well. Finally, in chapter 6 I argue for the possibility of sharing a common world with non-human (including inanimate) beings based on Derrida's conception of habitat and of the world as fractured and constructed. iv CHAPTER 1 DERRIDA AND ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY When asked to devise a syllabus for an environmental philosophy class, very few philosophers, I dare say, would think of Jacques Derrida as an important or even relevant author to be included on such a syllabus. And it might seem hard to argue otherwise. Although Derrida did, especially towards the end of his life, explicitly address issues concerning the concept of animality as well as our relationship to animals, he seems to have been conspicuously silent throughout this career on issues concerning environmental destruction or the link between such destruction and anthropocentrism. What I argue in this dissertation is that Derrida, contrary to that first impression, is an author whose work is worth considering in the context of environmental philosophy, i.e. philosophy insofar as it concerns itself with the relationships (ethical, political, social, conceptual, ecological etc.) between humans and non-humans against the backdrop of the multiple forms of environmental destruction that characterize our contemporary way of life. One of the basic points of connection between environmental philosophy and Derrida's work consists in the fact that both try to understand the possibility of what many today might still consider impossible. One of the driving motivations of Derrida's thought can be found in his tireless examination of conceptual boundaries, limits and divisions insofar as they structure our sense of what is possible. It is in examining and 1 2 putting pressure on these boundaries and limits that Derrida also opens these structures to the possibility of what we would, for now, understand as impossible. Derrida writes: “The interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible: that is,…the experience of the other as the invention of the impossible, in other words, as the only possible invention.”1 For Derrida, this often takes the form of probing the limits of what he sometimes calls the metaphysics of presence, i.e. a way of understanding reality as primarily that which is unequivocally given as present to a consciousness which is present to itself. In the case of environmental philosophy, one form the thinking of the (currently) impossible can take is the attempt to conceptualize ethical, social or political relationships to non- human beings. In this dissertation, I propose several interrelated ways in which such a deconstructive invention of the impossible (of metaphysics) can be seen to overlap with the impossible of environmental philosophy and of human/non-human relationships. In other words, I aim to show one way in which Derrida's deconstruction of the logocentric tradition (i.e. the tradition that puts a certain capacity to make the world present by means of reason and language as the center of what is and of what has value) is also, as Derrida puts it in his last seminar, a deconstruction of the “humanist and anthropocentric 1 Derrida, “Psyche” 15(26f.): “L'intérêt de la déconstruction, de sa force et de son désir si elle en a, c'est une certaine expérience de l'impossible: c'est-à-dire, j'y ferai retour à la fin de cette conférence, de l'autre, l'expérience de l'autre comme invention de l'impossible, en d'autres termes comme la seule invention possible.” Where available and appropriate I will, in what follows, always provide the French text in addition to the English translation (or, at times, the English original) and indicate the French pagination in parenthesis. 3 tradition.”2 What I aim to show is that Derrida, in performing this deconstruction, can help us to understand the conceptual possibility of both ethical and communal relationships with non-human beings – a possibility, which, as we will see, cannot be strictly separated from material possibilities (such as, for instance,

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