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Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions

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Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions 5 THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH Derrida lthough the earth does not occupy a central place in Jacques Derrida’s writings, his last seminar is all about the world. More exactly, it is about the Adestruction of the world that results from the death of each singular living being and the disappearance of the world necessary for ethics. Derrida begins his exploration of the receding world by following in the footsteps of Robinson Crusoe as he retraces them over and again on the desert island. Derrida takes up the question of what is an island, and his analysis of Robinson Crusoe revolves around the ways in which the island both is and is not deserted, as well as Robinson Crusoe’s ambivalent relation to the island, his attraction and repulsion. Although Derrida is not thinking of “this island earth,” imagining the Earth as an island, isolated and alone, floating against the vast sea of space, as the astronauts did, conjures the ambivalent reactions he attributes to all islands. In The Beast and the Sovereign Volume II, Derrida asks, “Why does one love islands? Why does one not love islands? Why do some people love islands while others do not love islands, some people dreaming of them, seeking them out, inhabiting them, taking refuge on them, and others avoiding them, even fleeing them instead of taking refuge on them?” (Derrida 2011, 64). He continues this line of question, asking what is it that one flees or seeks when one escapes from, or takes refuge on, an island. He proposes that we find these seemingly contradictory desires in the same person, even in “the same desire” (69). We are both attracted to and repulsed by islands, caught between “insularophilia and insularophobia.” But what is an island that it provokes this “double contradictory movement of attraction and allergy?” (69). While Derrida doesn’t answer these questions head-on, he does suggest that the logic of autoimmunity is operating in figures of islands as isolated or insular and circular or round, floating alone as solitary and unique. Following Heidegger’s discussion of solitude, Derrida finds in islands the double senses of being alone as being lonely and isolated, on the one hand, and being unique and singular, on the other. Certainly, these two senses of “alone” are operative in reactions to seeing the photographs of Earth from space. In the case of Robinson Crusoe, this autoimmunity shows up in his desire to leave his family, particularly to get away from his father’s authority, and the stifling conventions of his home country, only to attempt to recreate that authority and those conventions on the island. Like a wheel turning in on itself, Robinson Crusoe becomes the very thing he is trying to escape. In conjunction with his analysis of Robinson Crusoe, Derrida associates autoimmunity with the wheel turning on its axis. The wheel is not just any circle because, like the Earth, it turns around its own axis. Like the Earth, the wheel is not stationary. And, like the wheel in Derrida’s account, the Earth itself, spinning on its axis, triggers an autoimmune response insofar as images of the Earth as an island, beautiful and blue, floating alone in the darkness of space, are both threatening and reassuring. Circular shapes and circular movements such as Robinson Crusoe’s island and his circumnavigations of it, along with his wheel, appear as metaphors for the return to self that his shipwreck instigates, which signal further parallels with the metaphor of Earth as island. Recall that images of Earth lead us to see the Earth both as our amazingly singular home and as a tiny insignificant pea barely visible from space. The view of Earth from space makes us both want to protect our vulnerable and fragile planet and to escape from this insignificant speck in the universe. It makes us feel simultaneously special and inconsequential. This is the double sense of the loneliness of Earth; it is all alone in the universe and yet unique, a loneliness that resonates with Heidegger’s notion of solitude as being alone as in without others and being alone as in without equal. This double desire is the ambivalent desire that Derrida associates with islands, both wanting to take refuge and wanting to flee. Recall too that the media reports immediately following the Apollo missions’ images of Earth from space are full of rhetoric of “returning home,” returning to self, of man’s finding himself, of man becoming his “true self,” and so on. The iconic images of Earth from space became metaphors for man’s homecoming, united on one planet as “brothers in eternal cold,” and symbols for man overcoming his own worst tendencies in order to master himself. In the words of Time, the hope of Apollo 8’s mission is that “as man has conquered the seas, the air, and other natural obstacles, he has also at each stage, in a small way, conquered part of himself. Therein lies the hope and the ultimate promise of his latest conquest” (Time 1969, 17). Or, in the more optimistic tones of Archibald MacLeish, “man may at last become himself” (MacLeish 1968). Given that the Apollo missions that transmitted the first images of Earth from space were products of the cold war, MacLeish’s remark about brothers in eternal cold might take on a different hue. Indeed, as we have seen the space program was driven by the conflicting rhetoric of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The Apollo missions were both attempts at “winning” the cold war and putting “America First,” and yet they were sold as missions for all mankind, intended to unite human beings across the globe. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism has been a leitmotif in our discussions of both Kant and Arendt. Derrida’s intervention in this debate is well known. For, his discussion of cosmopolitanism revolves around the notion of hospitality, which he extends beyond the Kantian conditional hospitality, insisting on unconditional hospitality and the right of refuge. And yet he also contends that cosmopolitanism, or what he calls cosmopolitics, necessarily puts into tension unconditional and conditional hospitality (Derrida 2001, 4, 5). For Derrida, there is ambivalence at the heart of hospitality. We have seen the ambivalence inherent in hospitality—ambivalence between host and hostage, between hospitality and hostility—as it is manifest in the rhetoric around the Apollo moon missions and the first photographs of Earth from space. On the one hand, these missions were part of a military operation to secure the earth from hostile enemies; on the other hand, they were seen as benefiting all humankind, uniting mankind as “brothers” who share a common world and common goals. In terms of Derrida’s analysis of hospitality, it is clear that implicit in the welcoming gesture of the cosmopolitan rhetoric of uniting all of humankind is the affirmation of the technological superiority of the United States and its concern to dominate not only the earth but also space. As the “victor” in the cold war, America was in the position to extend hospitality to the rest of the world. As Derrida points out, hospitality is not only about generosity, but also always about control and mastery of what one takes to be one’s own home (17). The ambivalence surrounding the Apollo missions and reactions to them resonates with imaging the earth as an island, as NASA did when it published the glossy photo-filled book This Island Earth shortly after Apollo 17’s mission to the moon. The ambivalence of hospitality resonates with the ambivalence of islands, whether it is “this island Earth” or Robinson Crusoe’s island. In the case of Robinson Crusoe, he longs for human companionship more than anything else on his deserted island. And yet, when he discovers the footprint in the sand, he is terrified and longs for solitude. He both wants, and fears, company on his island. The supposedly “deserted” nature of his island “home” is threatened by the “savages” he witnesses on the beach. He is both fascinated and repulsed by these strangers and intends to kill or enslave them. He wants to flee the island, yet he returns to the island, which represents both the terror of solitude and the blissful paradise of solitude. Robinson Crusoe’s ambivalent relationship to his island is akin to the ambivalence witnessed after the Apollo missions, namely the terror of our solitude on earth and the absolute uniqueness of our earthly paradise in the vast emptiness of space. As we have seen, Kant identifies the earth with an inhospitable hospitality that echoes man’s asocial sociability and points to this same ambivalence. For Kant, the goal of perpetual peace through universal hospitality is to overcome this ambivalence for the sake of equilibrium that brings peace, even if this goal is only a regulative ideal and can never be achieved. Derrida goes further when he argues that hospitality is more than a Kantian regulative ideal precisely because there is an internal contradiction inherent within the very notion of hospitality itself (Derrida 2000, 149). He points to this contradiction in this question: “In giving a right, if I can put it like that, to unconditional hospitality, how can one give place to a determined, limitable, and delimitable—in a word, to a calculable—right or law?” (147–149). In other words, the principle grounding all conditional hospitality, namely unconditional hospitality, is at odds with its practice. For, what makes hospitality unconditional not only makes hostility possible, but also inevitable insofar as ultimately there is no calculus with which we determine how to distinguish one from the other.
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