Eco-Deconstruction marks a new approach to the degradation of the natural environment, including habitat loss, species extinction, and climate change. While the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), with its relentless interrogation of the anthropocentric metaphysics of presence, has already proven highly influential in posthumanism and animal studies, the present volume, drawing on published and unpublished work by Derrida and others, builds on these insights to address the most pressing environmental issues of our time. The volume brings together fifteen prominent scholars, from a wide variety of related fields, including eco-phenomenology, eco-hermeneutics, new materialism, posthumanism, animal studies, vegetal philosophy, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, eco-criticism, earth art and aesthetics, and analytic environmental ethics. Overall, eco-deconstruction offers an account of differential relationality explored in a non-totalizable ecological context that addresses our times in both an ontological and a normative register. The book is divided into four sections. “Diagnosing the Present” suggests that our times are marked by a facile, flattened-out understanding of time and thus in need of deconstructive dispositions. “Ecologies” mobilizes the spectral ontology of deconstruction to argue for an originary environmentality, the constitutive ecological embeddedness of mortal life. “Nuclear and Other Biodegradabilities,” examines remains, including such by-products and disintegrations of human culture as nuclear waste, environmental destruction, and species extinctions. “Environmental Ethics” seeks to uncover a demand for justice, including human responsibility for suffering beings, that emerges precisely as a response to original differentiation and the mortality and unmasterable alterity it installs in living beings. As such, the book will resonate with readers not only of philosophy, but across the humanities and the social and natural sciences.

Eco-Concepts: Critical Reflections in Emerging Ecocritical Theory and Ecological Thought offers an intellectual journey through the ever-evolving landscapes of environmental discourse. This thought-provoking volume brings together contributors from international scholarship to scrutinize and illuminate the contemporary trends reshaping our understanding of the natural environment. From the intricate interplay of rising ecocritical theories like restoration and empirical ecocriticism to the nuanced shifts in the reimagining of ecological concepts, this book unravels the complexities of our relationship with the natural sphere. This scholarly collection serves as a compass, guiding readers through the uncharted territories of environmental scholarship or revisiting existing study through fresh critical perspectives. Eco-Concepts strives to become an essential source of reference for academics, students, and individuals seeking an in-depth exploration of the innovative notions influencing the trajectory of discussions on ecology.

Contemporary continental thought is marked by a move away from the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century European philosophy, as new materialisms and ontologies seek to leave behind the thinking of language central to poststructuralism as it has been traditionally understood. At the same time, biopolitical philosophy has brought critical attention to the question of life, examining new formations of life and death. Within this broader turn, Derridean deconstruction, with its apparent focus on language, writing, and textuality, is generally set aside. This book, by contrast, shows the continued relevance of deconstruction for contemporary thought’s engagement with resolutely material issues and with matters of life and the living. Trumbull elaborates Derrida’s thinking of life across his work, specifically his recasting of life as “life death,” and in turn, survival or living on. Derrida’s activation of Freud, Trumbull shows, is central to this problematic and its consequences, especially deconstruction’s ethical and political possibilities. The book traces how Derrida’s early treatment of Freud and his mobilization of Freud’s death drive allow us to grasp the deconstructive thought of life as constitutively exposed to death, the logic subsequently rearticulated in the notion of survival. Derrida’s recasting of life as survival, Trumbull demonstrates, allows deconstruction to destabilize inherited understandings of life, death, and the political, including the dominant configurations of sovereignty and the death penalty.

This book pinpoints the evolutionary connection between the global ecological crisis and transgenerational learning and education. As Julian Huxley (1887-1975) described, the cumulative passing down of knowledge, skills, and ideas by one generation to the next over eons of time, which has been afforded by the advent of complex languages in the evolutionary past, is chiefly responsible for humanity’s planetary superdominance. However, given that the drive of the human species to increase its control over the natural world has, today, run up against ecological limits, there is an evolutionary-existential choice to be made in relation to the ultimate purposes of formal education. Should humanity “double down” on the anthropocentric humanist project of superdominance, including the goals of unlimited economic growth, development, and scientific and technological progress? Alternatively, should a biocentric anti-humanist and/or postmodernist deconstruction of formal education take place? Or should a holistic organicist orientation, emphasizing biological wisdom, help to shape its future? As this book shows, the answers to these philosophical questions on the parts of educators, prospective teachers, and learners will, going forward, play a key role in deciding the evolutionary trajectories of all life-forms on the planet.

The German poet and mystic Novalis once identified philosophy as a form of homesickness. More than two centuries later, as modernity’s displacements continue to intensify, we feel Novalis’s homesickness more than ever. Yet nowhere has a longing for home flourished more than in contemporary environmental thinking, and particularly in eco-phenomenology. If only we can reestablish our sense of material enmeshment in nature, so the logic goes, we might reverse the degradation we humans have wrought—and in saving the earth we can once again dwell in the nearness of our own being. Unsettling Nature opens with a meditation on the trouble with such ecological homecoming narratives, which bear a close resemblance to narratives of settler colonial homemaking. Taylor Eggan demonstrates that the Heideggerian strain of eco-phenomenology—along with its well-trod categories of home, dwelling, and world—produces uncanny effects in settler colonial contexts. He reads instances of nature’s defamiliarization not merely as psychological phenomena but also as symptoms of the repressed consciousness of coloniality. The book at once critiques Heidegger’s phenomenology and brings it forward through chapters on Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. Suggesting that alienation may in fact be "natural" to the human condition and hence something worth embracing instead of repressing, Unsettling Nature concludes with a speculative proposal to transform eco-phenomenology into "exo-phenomenology"—an experiential mode that engages deeply with the alterity of others and with the self as its own Other.

Life on earth is currently approaching what has been called the sixth mass extinction, also known as the Holocene or anthropocene extinction. Unlike the previous five, this extinction is due to the destructive practices of a single species, our own. Up to 50% of plant and animal species face extinction by the year 2100, as well as 90% of the world’s languages. Biocultural diversity is a recent appellation for thinking together the earth’s biological, cultural and linguistic diversity, the related causes of their extinctions and the related steps that need to be taken to ensure their sustainability. This book turns to the work of Jacques Derrida to propose a notion of ‘general ecology’ as a way to respond to this loss, to think the ethics, ontology and epistemology at stake in biocultural sustainability and the life and death we differentially share on earth with its others. It articulates an appreciation of the ecological and biocultural stakes of deconstruction and provokes new ways of thinking about a more just sharing of the earth.

Collected essays present Weston’s pragmatic environmental philosophy, calling for reconstruction and imagination rather than deconstruction and analysis.