Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 2

1. A Grand Mal d’Archive

Could one step outside the type of academic exegesis plentifully represented today—such as the hagiography and mimes of mourning and self-inscription—and imagine that Derrida had lived another decade or two? Since according to certain maps there was a second or “late Derrida” or its simulacrum (denied but tolerated by him), might there not have been a third phase—after the hiatus of what we will call the mainline crowd-pleasers, such as “ethics,” “religion,” and the “political?” Such might have been a final turn to the ex-anthropic strands of early and more marginal texts. [5] May these have been effaced by a “late” phase in which Derrida turned back from the openings toward allo-humanist lines of thought—earlier or scattered openings in his work that may have lost readers at the time (or for decades)?

Might a labor of consignation evident in the aprés Derrida—a “turn” accelerated by public rituals of mourning—have led elsewhere than to the auto-immune phase one witnesses today: that is, not turning to the exegetical normalization of Derrida’s writings to the point of recommending, as some legacy-keepers now do, the retirement of “deconstruction” with a full focus on “Derrida studies,” a Derrideanism without deconstruction that ennobles the proper name? Might it instead have attempted to reconfigure itself toward unprecedented 21st-century horizons that Derrida had not lived (or chosen) to address? In fact, does not a period of consignation not, precisely, converge with what he meant by declaring that his work would disappear after death? [6]

One could imagine a deconstruction after Derrida’s death that did not immediately circle back to his immense production, manage it, congeal imagined orthodoxies, erase the rogue in favor of the saint that presumed that proximity or contact meant inheritance, and so on. This other deconstruction would blink, look about the new 21st-century horizons, and instead ask (as if anew) what “deconstruction” would do before these horizons, those of neither metaphysics nor institutions, but material, biomorphic, geomorphic horizons, as if from outside, from without the human enclave altogether and without face—neither other nor wholly other, since processual and banal. [7] And might it—this absent “deconstruction”—ask what adaptation, what contretemps, what challenge or accelerating catalyst this newly disclosed combinatoire of shifting referentials did not present? Since “deconstruction” after Derrida wraps itself in its auto-immune moment turned toward its own recycling without orientation or clear opponent, does it not pose the question inversely of a deconstruction without “Derrida,” a deconstruction without “deconstruction,” and without the proper name or imaginary of a family or style to retreat to?

Derrida lived to comment upon “9/11” and the intricate discussion of terror and the auto-immune responses (of “America”), just as he made it through the neo-liberal fantasy of totalization entering the 90s. Yet in both cases, his contretemps are inscribed in the topical theatre of the day. In Specters of Marx, Derrida will rise in mock-Mosaic form to address his “ten plagues,” or rather telegraph them, as he says, pretending to do so in ten words: unemployment, homelessness, economic wars, free markets, debt, arms industries, nuclear weapons, inter-ethnic wars, mafia drug cartels, and problems of international law(lessness). [8] Strange Morse code, and stranger still the covert messages thus imparted—since the “ten plagues” in fact are banal enough, human-on-human ills, institutional. In fact, he seems to almost have difficulty finding ten (drifting into weak international laws and mafia-states). There is no mention of “climate change,” oil, mass extinctions, toxification, water, and so on. David Wood, dismayed that these “ten plagues” did not include the environment, reports that Derrida conceded (“willingly”) that ecological catastrophe would be an eleventh. In “On Being Haunted by the Future,” Wood does not consider that it could not be on this list and that its occlusion is also already a textual mark. The problem seems to be that of willing a green deconstruction to begin with.

The swarming logics of climate change arrive to deconstruct the artefactual real of human modernity as if from without (though this arrival discloses that there was no “outside” as such). For Clark, “What Derrida once called ‘Western metaphysics’ is now also a dust cloud of eroded top-soil, a dying forest and what may now be the largest man-made feature detectable from space, the vast floating island of plastic debris that spans a large part of the Pacific ocean” (Toward 49). In addressing terror, Derrida is still analyzing “the political” as he pretended to appropriate it—even where that can appear as a diffuse or undefined “progressive liberalism.” [9] Derrida’s “terrorism” mimes a human-on-human drama, a war of doubles logic, the work of an enemy “other” of sorts (pretending to be like “us,” flying “our” planes, then detonating). Derrida chooses to be for the West, not bin Laden, in whom he sees no future at all. While the West at least can, in time, strive to perfect its institutions, Bin Laden’s “actions and such discourse open onto no future and in my view, have no future. If we are to put any faith in the perfectibility of public space and of the world juridical-political scene, of the world itself, then there is, it seems to me, nothing good to be hoped for from that quarter” (Terror, 106). That is fine, a commitment to Europe, to institutions capable of development, unclosed at least if brutally corrupt if not criminal. But from a perspective of planetary or species survival, it is hard to maintain that Bin Laden’s vision—retreating from Western globalization to 12th-century modes of production—may not be defended, irrespective of ideology. Bin Laden recently attached his Jihad to the cause of stopping those responsible for ecological catastrophe and climate change. Such logic is not essentially different from what Žižek proposes as the sole possible answer to the prospect of ecological disaster. First, concede that the catastrophic is irreversible and no longer avoidable in its worst implications, so that at least one does not go through the gymnastics of denial and hope. This idea is indebted to Dupuy’s suggestion that we already regard the present retrospectively, as a moment that from the perspective of that catastrophic future might have been avoided. [10] Second, Žižek suggests instituting a Maoist-Leninist green state, brutally policing uniform levels of consumption, restitution local denunciations, and so on. [11] Who could say, from a non-Western and non-humanist perspective, that perhaps a thousand years of Taliban would not interrupt a suicidal direction of the species itself, allowing something else to emerge and creating new civilized forms into millennia? If so, the context of a choice is altered. The new aporia of “climate change” are refreshingly bracing and absolutely ruthless, like the future prospect of a geo-engineering scramble that can patch up one catastrophe at one time (e.g., aerosol deflection) but exacerbate another (e.g., monsoons, droughts, pollution).

The trouble seems to be in willing a green deconstruction to begin with—that is, in presuming the green politics of environmental metaphors to be a given or exigency, even in its less organicist forms, or to insist there be a transposition of it, that this name and critical signature be carried on, re-initialized, and so on, by fealty. To inquire of “deconstruction” and “environmentalism” raises a conundrum about both terms. Does “deconstruction” now name a vague network of writings touched by Derrida, or a trans-epochal effect with numerous names and texts, or primarily “Derrida himself” —and if the latter, then which Derrida, at the expense of which others? (The construct of a “late Derrida” here renders this a question.) Or, differently put, which among a multiplicity of Derridas should be now produced, not uniform but contradictory: some “at war” with others, some with themselves (for instance, an ex-anthropoid vector, on the one hand, and the crafted institutional “late Derrida” of hospitality on the other)? [12]

Both Wood and Clark are diplomatic. Each more or less brushes aside, as one might today, the import of a “democracy to come” or “weak messianism” and such maneuvers. Wood asks that the phantom “New International” in Specters of Marx be extended to include other life forms: a new biocentrism (though one ignores that a trace neither living nor dead, or “life/death,” may not simply be “biocentric” at all). Clark asks instead that it include the unborn, the “future,” the generations vandalized in their being and reserves by a feeding frenzy of the artefacted present—a sort of “time bubble” and spellbound telecracy of today. This “new” time of abrupt geomorphic mutation is far more out of joint than the dark underbelly of another “new world order.” This time is not of phenomenology nor of its deconstruction. For however disjointed the phenomenological present was, it was always a present that differed from itself. The logics of “climate change” are even more counter-Hamletian since they inhabit a present that is zombified by what it knows would be now irreversible, yet which it does not see, and hence occludes.

The disclosure of the biosemiotic logics of “climate change” and their impact on historical and cognitive aporia compels a different question—as well as what might be called a future conditional back-glance at “deconstruction” itself, or the deconstruction produced today.

What emerges, then, when a biomorphic and geomorphic turn becomes manifest (since it was never other) that folds the archive in its entirety one more time, scattering its referentials? Must one pretend to address an outer rim to the anarchival, at the point it loops back before and into itself, or is there no “the” archive (but many differentially inter-embedded archival machines, including organic and inorganic processes, genetic codings, eco-niches)? Does what one would have to call human mnemotechnics—out of which memory and world co-derive with their blinds—interface legibly with ex-anthropic “archival” modes that are proleptic and that animate, read, or produce themselves forward? What is called evolution, genetics, photosynthesis, mutation, biomorphism, the transference of biomass, and so on would indicate such monstrous counter-archives where the perpetual anteriority of marking systems whose technics, machines, and inks have accompanied the era of hydro-carbons would collude with, consume, and alter these inorganic and organic effects.

2. No Revelations: Not “Not Now”

The phrase “climate change” is, then, less an encompassing term than one without a prescribed mode of reference—a non-name that is fractal. One can fill in a myriad of macro- and micro-threads, intersecting active backloops and different proleptic narratives from polar ice to microbials, medical toxins to oil, hyperindustrial psychotropies to species extinctions, geopolitical corporate plundering and regime maintenance to food riots, the credit collapse and scientific prospects of synthetic biology and geo-engineering, resource wars and, yes, “weather” militarization and “population culling.” All these narratives correspond to different combinatoires as the calculations of time scales are adjusted. This “long now”—as Stewart Grant’s foundation of that name calls it (stretching 10,000 years in either direction from the putative present)—must be enfabled from geomorphic or biomorphic times, in which scores of years may be noted as a mere point, or suddenly tip into cataclysmic mutations (methane bubbles, abrupt die-offs). “Climate change”—even of the anthropogenic variety (assuming this term is not, still, a plea for human sovereignty, blame, or centrality)—appears outside of short-term calculations of the compressed experience of the daily, memory programs, or mediacratic spells. Yet climate change is not a fable or, as Derrida says of nuclear war, an “apocalyptic imaginary.” That is, the catastrophic possibility imagined by Derrida—the nuclear erasure of life—was, for him, potentially present in the archive before its actuality. Noting this, Derrida did not consider a more radical destruction beyond possibility and potentiality in its “quasi- transcendental” differential forms.

This destruction is not apocalyptic at all. That is: there is no calamitous precise instant, no revelation, and it is in its way irreducibly banal—a matter of chemical compositions, physics, molecules, biomass, and the feeding of energy off organic waste of dead terrestrial species, a form of necrophagy. It suggests a blunt revolution of epistemological settings for which Žižek—who then curiously returns to a Christian apocalyptic wedded to a green Leninist ideal—avers: “everything should be re-thought, beginning from the zero-point” (First as Tragedy 87). It is what contemporary thought seems reluctant to conceive, a force beyond any model of sovereignty.

Thus, 20th-century historical and cultural critical maps are seemingly interrupted as the geographic template shifts from human-on-human events to what lies outside of and encompasses those dramas, a trajectory of dispossession indexed to auto-extinction. These mutations are nonetheless all about “reserves,” representation, survival (ultimately between groups, localities, or national entities), and the wearing away of premises and of whatever we confirm as “life as we know it.” One can insert the topoi of “climate change,” then, into any 20th-century-derived critical idiom (culturalism and … emancipatory thought and … deconstruction and), and step back, allowing some variant of this metamorphosis to proceed as the later breaks, contracts, contradicts itself, must try to mutate—or goes into a blind, a relapse, doubling down on itself, and so on.

What if deconstruction were itself the byproduct or the point of orientation toward a movement of ex-position that could not, finally, be delineated or given one name (Derrida, de Man, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Plato, or just script)—and not only because there might be types or even a typology of trace? It would have to peel back from its current preoccupations and recuperations—reactive gestures of literalizing “ethics,” domesticating the animal, naturalizing deconstruction. [13] It would then be able to interrogate those vectors in Derrida’s work that appear non-recuperable and, for that reason, would never quite have been mourned. [14] These would not have been enough on which to gamble the survival of an imperial production. What if this legacy (a clogged and tiresome term, much as inheritance implies capital and resulting family plots) were best served today (should that be some end in itself) by cutting it up into incompatibles, contradictory pulsions, violent forces that would give themselves over to the fascination of rehearsal in variation?

The perspective of “climate change” questions the rhetorical premise of today’s hagiographic or normalizing readings by recalling the rogue Derrida, but this time in earnest: that is, the limitless strategician and seducer (a term to be heard neutrally). It casts a different light, say, on Martin Hägglund’s recent Radical Atheism—Derrida and the Time of Life, which argues that a systemic misreading and retheologization trends through the mainstream Derridean commentators (it is an impressive list). A persistent relapse and recuperation occurs which Derrida’s early writings patently exceed. [15] However melancholy it is to think that a book of the 21st century needed to point out to Derrideans that Derrida was not theotropic (in the diverse senses of this term), the image that evolves suggests a strategic choice made by Derrida. He would appear to have artefacted a “late Derrida” that he could, at the same time, disown, or whose host discourse he could sabotage after waiting a generation or two. Specifically, that artefacted Derrida would enter into the main arteries of humanistic traditions (religion, ethics, politics, or what we might call REP) in order, as a pivot, to counter the entrapping clichés of him as anti-humanist “post-structuralist” (he saw what happened to de Man). [16]

Did Derrida strategically generate an artefacted “late phase,” a Trojan Horse strategy that would —after the current generation of carriers—deform the predicates of the main arteries of academic and humanist thought over time? If deconstruction assumes that where there is archive there is also a necessary contamination and the imminent extinction generated by techno-genesis, or if Derrida presumed to account for every future reading of his text (as he says of Joyce), then he would have calculated the auto-immune moment and recuperation that his death would trigger. Derrida’s calculation of survival, however, veers from many of deconstruction’s own premises; thus, among the Derridas one might want today to revive and inspect is the rogue—since we have already had the dear friend, Jewish saint, Proteus unbound, and so on.

This is the missing logic implied by Hägglund, since if Derrida tolerated the production of “late Derrida” around him (yet would chase Nancy to the shed for daring to metaphysicize touch), it could only be by a sort of higher duplexity or contamination of strategies—a contamination which his concept of archive accepts as necessary and structural. Rather than slowly turn “deconstruction” into a self-disowning intellectual moralism and stylistic groupthink, still haunted by an imaginary of persecution and the illusion of familial clustering, the figure of “climate change” or eco-catastrophe arrives as a gift and de-orientation—though not in the sense of re-initializing his text as “for” environmentalism or leading to a “green” econstruction (in Wood’s offering). In fact, one might say that Derrida’s “late” phase involved a strategic practice of hospitality according to certain rules, complications, inversions—accepting the deployment of certain words (“justice,” the “wholly other”) without marking them, hovering at the edges of the eco, without summoning the ecologico-graphic dispossession. “Hospitality” appears, instead, as a sort of holding strategem, a jungle-gym for practicing aporetic logics mostly in what appear primarily as “systems of law and communication.” [17]

But “climate change” is not apocalyptic, any more than it enters the combinatoire of hospitality or the home. [18]

Derrida’s analyses of “nuclear” extinction and war, along with the possibility of the extinction of the archive (and life forms), interfaces curiously with “climate change.” He speculates on the literariness of the “nuclear war” as organizing threat, and this threat’s weave into apocalyptic imaginaries. Let us adapt Žižek’s or Dupuy’s premise and imagine a future dissident reader, who would read these “apocalyptic” texts of Derrida, after the apocalypse had been eclipsed by less revelatory destructions. Such a reader would look back from decades hence, perhaps, for we are conjuring this reader, too, as “to come” (from another state or stage in this terrestrial mutation). This reader might regard the entirety of critical culture today as strangely spellbound and, as such, not entirely disconnected from the relapses we witness on the political, international, mediacratic, and cultural fronts. That “deconstruction” today cannot ask itself the hard questions that might be posed by a “reader to come,” cannot turn against itself or play the contretemps, and cannot give Derrida the confidence to respond or reconfigure before them as a plastic force of assault and violence whose referentials survive by mutation, tells its own story. How, today, do we negotiate these revivals of past apocalyptic logics and figures as we face a “to come” that both refuses any revelatory intervention and threatens to annihilate not with a bang but a whimper, not in the form of an intruding other but of an “outside” that was never exterior?

Derrida examines these missiles and missives, yet must align the apocalyptics of the nuclear threat (around which Cold-War geopolitics were organized) with the standoff logics of war between two sides. Yet nuclear war also is analyzed by Derrida as a fable allied to the era of literature. Nuclear war is a fable since it never has happened, so one does not know what is feared and warded against (or unconsciously desired). Thus, Derrida says that deconstruction is itself of the nuclear era, watched over by it (with its Cold War trace). What, however, would exceed the era of literature, or not occur in the mode of nuclear strikes in the reversible suspension of a non-present “present” which the flash of fiery erasure too enphantoms, similar to the model of the impact, the caesura, the sudden blow, the chiasmic exposure, the epoche, and so on? “Climate change,” in contrast with these fabled nuclear apocalyptics considered by Derrida, can be thought of as cinematized, breaching decades and millenia as in a micro-instant, much as the sixth mass extinction event on earth—the only such event accomplished by an organism—might cover a century or be traced back millennia to the megafauna. That is, its time would not be “of literature,” archive or time-space differance but cinematic in terms of its inhuman, machinic, and interrupted temporality.

For Derrida, the nuclear fable is ciphered through a war for recognition, of two human-like others who could commit annihilation (by decision) in the name of mastery, or in this case, “the Name” itself (since there would be no one left to recognize the Master potentially). One reason “climate change” is without “Name,” and doesn’t ascribe to the narrative of human-on-human war in the name of the “Name,” is because it eludes the analytic of the name. Derrida:

Yet “climate change” is not of a human other, does not occur in a flash, cannot occur in the name of “the Name” (and, in essence, is un-nameable). It requires no decision, unless that be the elusive counter-decision against what today accelerates its vortices—a “decision” to throw the brake on, say, hydro-carbon emission in the illusion of a sovereignty that is non-existent (Copenhagen). It is without the agency of war explicitly, but folds all war into itself (resource wars) and redistributes them as invisible wars in which totalities hang in the balance as its own blind-spot. The nuclear strike corresponds with an anti-linear counter-strike on the placeless “event,” which wants to read itself as instantaneous, a decision, the irreversible, the inversion of the non-present “present” or its rhetorical or narrative premises. But perhaps not only this model but its deconstruction would partake of a blind even when in excess. And who would expect or think, in the early 80s and before, that rather than the hypothetical nuclear strike between a binarized standoff modeled on war, recognition, and the pleasures of annihilation, there might be a relentless shrinkage of earth’s ass’s skin of surfaces and biosystems, a dispossession that would proceed from the ground up, as a slow, miserable population culling over decades? Who might have anticipated a turning of the biosphere into an inhospitable zone—as if the figure of the home had forcibly been recast as a trope of its own hyperconsumption? Such a mutation could not be figured as apocalyptic, of the instant, or remotely redeemable.

By asking after the tropology of “climate change” it would be possible to explore the figures and failed personifications by which ecological damage is tracked, politicized, put into media or entertainment vehicles, or gets absorbed as an assented to acceleration. This is a step Wood avoids altogether. He does not ask how a “deconstruction” might read or resist “environmentalism” as a configuration, rather than be accommodated to it. Wood does not consider what modes of ethics may arise from logics of competitive survival that are likely to compel the exact opposite developments of what any progressive program might wish to shape. That is, if the polity is pressured, as if from without, from what can no longer be considered as “environment,” it would usher in events that would not be those of justice or democracy to come. New Orleans after Katerina might be a rehearsal in petto: abandonment of the underclass, a virtual triage, a hole in the symbolic, the invasion of the “homeland” from without. Unlike the missiles become missives of Derrida’s analysis, which launch toward targets and make speed a desideratum, the climactic in general and what issues from it is radically counter-linear, a mutating hive of feedback loops of counter-referential force-lines, tensions, and transferences. It is not deconstructible, is not narrateable, implies “futures” more calculable than archival pasts, is not of the era of “literature”—or even containable within a designated tropology. Yet it “is” and assumes the perspective of non-personifiable agencies.

3. Destructive Affirmatives

“Today,” certain sutures in Derrida can be read against themselves, as “at war” with themselves, and ruptured from the anesthetized routines of mourning and consignation. From such a point of view it is as if—today—nothing of note were occurring beyond the horizons that Derrida was exposed to. It is as though one remains within the Derridean problematic that emerged from the nuclear era, attached to it, to thinking with and against the sudden flash—rather than the relentless anthropogenic draw toward extinction events beyond cognitive maps or precedence in memory formations. We might imagine, in contrast with this fidelity to the apocalyptic, messianic and “to come,” different referentials that would shatter these rehearsals, opening onto a monstrous future whose logics were not anticipated and that would break the very protocols upon which Derrida had more or less gambled. Such different, non-apocalytpic, horizons would suggest not that “deconstruction” be rescued from itself (Wood’s econstruction?), but that its auto-immune phase be left to suicide unimpeded. Only if the legacy that sought to maintain and conserve itself were to spend itself utterly and die its own death would it be possible to release what survives unburdened by the proper name, numbing recitations, the dedicated imaginary of managers and heirs. For this crippling survival of deconstruction that devours its own host also draws a parallel between the systemic relapse of contemporary theoretic tribes. The shudder and attempt to restore, recuperate, or restitute yet a bit longer the familiar order or façade accelerates the very disappearance of a phantom “homeland” it would guard against. Not environmentalism, then, but something else that is no longer “literature” or of its age—and yet which, because of that, rereads the archive in its entirety with different referentials.

Do the horizons of climate change alter and turn against the systemic premises of 20th-century representational and critical practices? Clark mentions the dead-end of a postcolonial ethics that parallels the neo-liberal faux promise, in the era of the democratic imaginary, of a world of American-style consumers, i.e., restored subjectivities. But what does the beyond of an era of literature—which is also to say of the archive in one of its epochal configurations—indicate, if not a mal d’archive in the tropological itself? This would open not the transit circuits of metaphorics and anthropisms, but the contretemps to tropology itself. It would be not a caesura from without, as Wood implies, but an internal break with the very premises that support it, a counter-gaze without personification, a perspective without “man” altogether. Such a perspective affirms even the implications of extinction in order to get on with the clarifications at hand. One should not assume that the auto-immune phase of “deconstruction” today, X-rayed by the problematic of “climate change,” though entirely scripted, was inevitable. That is, it should not appear as seamless and possible that one might simply supplement the corpus of Derrida’s work with “and environment” or “and climate change” that he accidentally failed to mention. It may be conceived as an obvious turn for which an alternative would nonetheless be thinkable, though to consider the ellipses in Derrida’s thought would occur at the expense of the memorialization of the capital of the name, the legacy, the mimic style, and so on. Such untimely questions might ask, for example, what “deconstruction” would do in the 21st century’s model of inhospitality?

That is, rather than playing the standard riffs of the aporia of the ethics of the “otherness of the other,” one might experiment with addressing—as it were, without a net—the entirely new and exitless aporia emerging across every discursive field (the political, the economic, the referential). The seemingly toothless “ethicism” Derrida seemed to license (an all too human “ethics of literature?”), in the name of a “justice” that had no necessary human reference, more pre-Socratic than legalistic in invocation—which, in essence, could turn against a broader criminalization of the human—now enters the Olympics of para-ethical aporetics. What decisionism arrives in the face of an “ethics” of this dimension, the responsibility and irresponsibility toward “futures,” the affirmation of disappearance, or survivalist logics and rationalizations, of triage (long term or short, economic and organic)?

These other aporetics are already emerging. One is named by Clark in scanning the replay of postcolonial orthodoxies—not the identifications of historical injustice and their address, but the premise that such address implies a universal restitution of the oppressed into the equalizing promises of 90s neo-liberalism: that this justice is measured by the model of freedom to consume, thus accelerating the autophagy of resources (China and India normally enter this discussion). Another is the global debt trap itself. One encounters such aporia within 21st-century protocols, such as the rhetorical clash between the wishes of emancipatory agendas and the real, or feminism and advocates of population control. Within critical culture, the prioritization of a rhetoric of praxis marshaled by a return to “history” now seems to have played into this accelerating impasse quite literally—preserving a “political” imaginary that led straight to the implicit suspension of practical effect or politics (and more or less accompanied the advent of the Bush catastrophe). That anything calling itself deconstruction today is not fully immersed in the relative joys of exploring the exitless rhetorical labyrinth of telecratic spells, which are the new “commons,” and the anesthetization of the public and private spheres, seems curious (and suggests curatorial obsessions). Others arise which may give today’s crypto-humanist backwater of “ethical” conundracism and commodified “otherness” chills, having to do with virtual and real triage, the counter-cataclysmic choices of geo-engineering and bio-engineering. One has entered an irreversible zone before which the instincts of deterral, mitigation, sustainability, and the “regressive organicism” (Timothy Morton) of contemporal critical options appears part of the complex itself.

Perhaps one is even more in the time of the relapse that mimes the recreation of a semantic enclave, again and again, an oikos, at the heart of “today’s” accelerations. Today, the “political” is repeatedly mourned (Agamben) while the era of post-democracy proceeds; Deleuzians swarm to the “affect” or embodiment side of the vessel (Protevi) while zombie “deconstruction” melds into an index of exegetical memoirs and academic cohorts (names too numerous to list); the feral eudaimonism and crypto-catholicisms of the “multitude” circulate (Hardt and Negri), while “animal studies” crystallizes as an anthropo-colonial dossier of one’s pets (Haraway). Culturalists ply on, as the narratives of victimology of the 90s are applied to future cyborgs (Hayles); emancipatory faiths deny the calculus not of formal democracies to come but of an encircling era of techo-feudalism (Lovelock) if not species differentiation (the hyper-rich) and emerging survival logics (“human rights,” alone, being all but irrelevant today), while new media studies revert to the phenomenological and pre-critical gesture of restituting a centered “human” (Hansen). [19] And, of course, there is what would call itself the “ethical,” which sometimes speaks in a Levinasian gesture to facial otherness (Butler), peace, and recognition, and makes the practitioner feel part of the “good” (Benhabib). Finally, I suppose, one would include nihilist Lacanians who embrace, as the new ground zero, green Christian Leninism (Žižek). What emerges when the discourse of mourning (for pasts, for futures) recedes?

One turns from the gaze of this reader of the future, who may wonder about all this scrambling to preserve 20th-century legacies and ostrich-postures from the very discourses that, unfinished, promised to exceed that very fold.

This may cast the spellbound “present”—from the back-glance of readers beyond this generation, however far—in a weak and indulgent light. From this perspective, “climate change” arrives as a hyper-referential, ruthlessly positive opportunity, the contretemps of contretemps, invisibly welling up from within an-archival programs and interstices. The prospect of giving something up—from energy consumption or retirement accounts to semantic investments and academic rituals and normatizations of the latter’s capital—disappears here as it does from the cultural programs of hypercapital (see “Copenhagen”). “Deconstruction” would not be killed despite innumerable announcements of its death, yet it would not have to be, since it would innocently enough commit suicide (as “deconstruction”) in a fashion that an auto-immune moment can never read from within itself. Derrida seemed to more or less program this. Gambling on the entrée to academic humanism at its arteries and the bonding of followers with inheritance prescriptions, Derrida succumbed at least in part to a calculation of “survival” that he knew would be scrambled and dashed. He allowed late deconstruction to enter its auto-immune shell, and yet hoped, it seemed, to deliver his text to unborn readers. The irony would be that, as a matter of survival-relevance, Derrida blanked on the defining transmutation in the 21st century. So, if there was anxiety as to the turn “deconstruction” would take in the après-Derrida—between, say, memorialization, canonization, re-circulation, mourning rituals, family capital (what band of translators would put up the shingle “Derrida & Sons?”), and asking, without a map, where this legacy (to speak in familiar codes) might turn and reconfigure itself before radically emerging 21st-century horizons—well, that seems settled. The imbrication of (and with) mourning has been, again, a self-mourning that should not be transferred simply to a mourning for disappearing futures. What emerges to repeat again, when the discourse of mourning and face recedes?

Such rituals of maintenance and memorialization preclude questions of futurity arising precisely by their hysteria about insisting on a radically open or promissory to come. Our earlier imagined future dissident reader in her stupidity cannot bring to the ghosts of deconstruction irrelevant pharmacopic suggestions, with the irritability of future-hindsight. She cannot advise: 1) suspend the misread or supposed ban on addressing “futurity,” which penetrates the “present” today as anteriority had—a memory of “futures” (Toward 52); 2) break the homogenization of the Derridean corpus by releasing incompatible Derridas “at war” with themselves; 3) explore without a net how a certain “spirit of deconstruction” (as Derrida speaks of a “spirit of Marx”) might enter the contemporaneity of a ruptured set of temporal metrics, without a name; 4) practice the contretemps against your own rituals of academic capitalization; 5) relinquish the mourning posture that re-inscribes its carriers in a groupthink which “deconstruction” once (and Derrida always) took as a prime target (now that there is no “metaphysics” or it is proven so systemic as to be the effect of consignation itself).

If Derrida strategized the production of a “late Derrida” whose supposed “turn” he disowned simultaneously, and this to block the clichés of an anti-humanist “post-structuralist” by entering mainstream humanist institutions—even to the point of crowd-pleasing caricatures (“deconstruction ‘is’ justice”)—it would be “monstrous” again if in this calculation of survivability Derrida erred: that is, that it would be, precisely, the side of Derrida drawn outside the human effect and constitution (the oikos) that would arrive, after his death, as the change of referentials spawning a 21st century.

Then someone asks: would a living “deconstructive” project not rather attempt this third phase on its own—the master leaving this task open, incomplete, by default, structurally, like some properly excommunicating challenge and gift? Which would a contemporary “deconstruction” then be: redeploying these energies and strategies, in exploratory fashion, before 21st-century horizons unaccounted for in his text, or blocking those out to rehearse, canonize, and normatize a zombie deconstruction? One would want to say the former, even if (or precisely because) that would mean an unrecognizable turn or departure, without proper name, without rehearsals, without a net, a deconstruction without “deconstruction” (or Derrideanism). That might mean waiting for yet another generation beyond those pretending to a corporate afterlife, or returning to a romantic promise of the 80s, or restaging familiar motifs in conferences (“… and Specters,” “… and Psychoanalysis,” and so on). If a hypothetical “late Derrida” was in part a strategic creation, then those closest to it (translators, truly significant scholars such as Hägglund reviews) would understand that they, too, were to be viral carriers, were to be played, in Derrida’s calculations. This decay of the brand falls into and echoes with a wider relapse today. The return of Deleuze studies to “affect,” the return to phenomenology, the implicit organicism of post-humanists, various forms of embodiment, and liberationist politics running on as if nothing had altered are akin to Obama’s restitution of the term, “Wall Street”: a doubling-down in the idioms in which the 20th-century had long invested. Thus Clark: “It is far easier for critics to stay inside the professionally familiar circle of cultural representations, ideas, ideals, and prejudices, than to engage with long-term relations of physical cause and effect, or the environmental costs of an infrastructure, questions that involve nonhuman agency and which engage modes of expertise that may lie outside the humanities as currently constituted” (Scale, 75). The zombie deconstruction of today—like much else (zombie banks, zombie democracy)—stands to be reinvigorated by what it can only crash against and redistribute itself within, at the sacrifice of (its) capital, and name: the ahorizons of “climate change.” What other aporia? Not the “pathos” of undecidability. Not the enigma of a “democracy to come” whose non-existence would be different than even Derrida projected—since the mutations of “formal democracy” in the U.S. or India contain the logic to spell, as Arundhati Roy observes, the death-knell of human life on earth as such: accelerated hyperconsumption and corporate sovereignty.

Whatever it means for life forms as we know them, climate change is destructively wired to and saturates telemorphic circuits of exchange, biosemantic reserves, protocols of personification, perceptual regimes and spells, the linguistic hypothesis of a home. It encircles the “present” as a hyper-referential that might be considered ruthlessly positive, almost joyously so—at least for thought.

It has been possible to speak, recently, about an emergent “climate change subjectivity” that can be mapped, to its disadvantage, as caught between a sort of will to save and restore (environmentalism, sustainability) and cognitive deflection (denial, derealization). [20] Such suggests the emergence of a climate change imaginary that has permeated diverse discourses without achieving a common template. Yet rather than tracking the arrested doubleness of a “climate change subjectivity” captured by the rhetoric of crisis (as misleading as that of apocalypse and linked to it), one can as easily speak of an asubjectality that does not fit into either option above, for which the premise of irreversibility (and the positive apprehension of extinction, say) serve as a point of departure. Such a concept presupposes what could be called an anecographic thought, un-invested in any proper name it would ennoble or recuperate as legacy. It would integrate new referential agencies and decouple from the hermeneutic reflex of creating an oikos, interiority, home, or “we” in recognizable forms, since it knows it will not recapture a communal politics, a metaphysics to deconstruct, or a perpetuation of the familiar conceptual preoccupations before aporia that, in fact, have always represented one limit of the conceptual machine today—the one which has walked hand in hand with the accelerations now disclosed. Those aporia are not hard to find, from the global debt trap to the calculus of disappearing reserves. What, one might begin again, has writing and archivization ever not had to do with metaphysics (if that ever existed) and the hydrocarbon era, ink with oil, perceptual programmings determined prehistorically with telecratically induced anaesthetics today? The geomorphic fold occurs at the rim of the mnemo-scape that Derrida would patrol, hold vigil over endlessly, invent into, dart beyond, but restrict himself and at times turn back into rhetorically as by a contract to a readership or a constitutive blind. Metaphysics never “existed,” of course, could not be made the pretext of a deconstruction, would turn out to have been all along a referential reflex and hermeneutic effect sanctioned by the social imaginary it conjures. This war between Derridas (the Derridawars) might now be read together with the invisible ones that encircle the earth today, autogenic, accelerant, forecasting not only the obvious “to comes” (water wars, survivalist contests) but those internal to the global system—the spitting away of a hyper-plutocratic class separated in near-speciesist terms and the prospect of techno-feudal states before an era of global population culling. [21]