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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Jacques Derrida
• ecology
• aneconomy
• ontology
• Georges Bataille

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Marx (1992, 114).

2 Morton (2017).

3 There is an interesting developing argument around the extent of Derrida’s non-published engagements with Marx (Derrida 2011; Mercier 2020).

4 [le concept de l’économie] [All translations mine unless otherwise indicated] (Derrida 1972b).

5 [comme un tombeau […] ce lieu, résidence familiale et tombeau du propre où se produit en différance l’économie de la mort].

6 [puisque le désir ne peut s’éveiller et sortir de sa réserve que par l’imagination qui rompt aussi l’équilibre].

7 [le rapport entre la raison, la folie et la mort, est une économie, une structure de différance dont il faut respecter l’irréductible originalité].

8 [l’excédant et la totalité excédée: la différance de l’excès absolu].

9 Engels and Marx (1976, 5, 8).

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Sam La Védrine

Sam La Védrine after receiving a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Nottingham in July 2019 for a thesis on ecology and comparativism in French and English Poetics, La Védrine is an independent researcher working on: a post-Marxist genealogy of ecological thought in twentieth century and contemporary French philosophy; and a comparative review of the creative and critical writings of an avant la lettre ecology in French and English (language) surrealism. He has published journal articles and book chapters in French and English on the ecological poetry and poetics of Kenneth White, Édouard Glissant, and Michel Deguy.