Margret Grebowicz

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the previous century’s most provocative
thinkers. Can his work help us address the crisis currently facing the humanities?

The dominant economic discourse sees the humanities as “low-value,” an irritation at best. Lyotard helps us to think against this pervasive dismissal of creative activity, not by defending the honor of the humanities, but by inviting critical practices which aggravate this irritation. Critical practices trouble what counts as critique, embrace incertitude, and listen for silenced voices.

Twelve essays by artists and researchers take up Lyotard's invitation and begin to develop the idea of critical practice in the contemporary context. Three sections titled “What resists thinking;” “Long views and distances” and “Why art practice?” address contemporary concerns like affectivity, aesthetics, economic imperatives, militarism, pedagogy, posthumanism, and the closure of what in Lyotard's time was called "the West."

Four short pieces by Lyotard intervene in and buttress the discussion: “Apathy in Theory” and “Interview with Art Présent,” here published in English for the first time, and “Affect-phrase” and “The Other’s Rights” republished here to highlight his prescient concern for that which cannot be articulated.

With chapters by Karen Barad, Timothy Clark, Claire Colebrook, Matthias Fritsch, Vicki Kirby, John Llewelyn, Philippe Lynes, Michael Marder, Dawne McCance, Michael Naas, Kelly Oliver, Michael Peterson, Ted Toadvine, Cary Wolfe, and David Wood.

Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy launches a new mode of philosophical and ethical reflection with respect to the challenges posed by 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has already proven highly influential in posthumanism and animal studies, the present volume, drawing on published and unpublished work by Derrida and others, builds on these insights in addressing and responding to the most pressing environmental issues of our time. The volume brings together 15 scholars, many of which have achieved world renown, 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-final, non-totalizable ecological context, both quasi-ontologically and quasi-normatively, with attention to diagnosing our times. Accordingly, the book is divided into four sections—Diagnosing the Present, which suggests that our times are marked by a facile, flattened-out understanding of time and thus in need of deconstructive dispositions; Ecologies, which mobilizes the spectral ontology of deconstruction to argue for an originary environmentality, the constitutive ecological embeddedness of mortal life; Nuclear and Other Biodegradabilities, in which contributors reflect on the remains, by-products, and disintegrations of human culture, including nuclear waste, environmental destruction, and species extinctions; and Environmental Ethics, which 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 may resonate with readers not only in philosophy, but across the humanities and the social and natural sciences.