Volume 16

Ruinance and General Ecology  

30 July 202430 July 2024By Rafael Fernandez

Alberto Moreiras
Texas A&M University  

Volume 16, 2024

I

I am not going to talk directly about Gaia or the khora.  In preparing for this panel something preliminary, hence more urgent, came to mind, and it happened as I read Phil Lynes’ book, which I will mention in a minute.  Hence my change of title.  

I also read François Raffoul’s extraordinary book, Thinking the Event. I think it is fair to say that Raffoul, most of whose book is on Heidegger, with some final chapters on Nancy and Derrida, never comes close to directly tackling the issue of ecology, whether restricted or general. He remains within an understanding of being as happening, as event, which he makes consistent, in its Heideggerian determination, with the later thought of Derrida and Nancy. And yet, in the back of my mind, I kept wondering why Raffoul would suspend acknowledgment of the facticity, or factuality, of the so-called Anthropocene as the event of our time.1 There is something, though, in a few superb pages in Raffoul’s book, that I find of great help not just to think the Anthropocene as contemporary predicament but also to help us find a thinking position that would be commensurate to it. I am referring to the pages where he discusses the Heideggerian notion of ruinance, developed in an early reading of Aristotle. I will come back to this. For the moment, let me just suggest that, if complete nihilism, under its Anthropocenic form, is the event of our time, and if thought is to be understood as a counterevent or a counterruinance or as a countermovement to the ruinance, the goal of thought cannot be thought of as the overcoming of such radical expropriation (since ruinance is a form of radical expropriation)–rather, it is to be thought of as an understanding of the ruinance itself.  Incidentally, I think this acknowledgment, or submission to, or non-avoidance of the ruinance is what makes it possible to avoid the charge of biocentrism in our thinking. 

Raffoul says: “The going-against the going-against-itself of life–thinking–does not overcome ruinance but reveals it as such” (Raffoul, Thinking the Event, 185). I guess it is possible to think that the counterruinance that only accomplishes its own understanding avoids perdition. Perhaps. The word “perdition” is used by Heidegger several times in Introduction to Metaphysics–the German term is Verderb. Heidegger is discussing the first choral ode of Sophocles’ Antigone. He is opposing the overwhelming violence of Being (das Überwältigende, associated with diké) to the violence-making of the human (das Gewalt-tätige, associated with techné). And he says: “Every violent taming of the violent is either victory or defeat.  Both throw one out of the homely, each in a different way, and they first unfold, each in a different way, the dangerousness of the Being that has been won or lost.  Both, each in a different way, are menaced by perdition” (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 179-80).  And: “In the opposition of beings as a whole as overwhelming and of the human being as violence-doing Dasein, the possibility arises of plunging into what has no way out and has no site: perdition” (181). What has no way out is aporos and what has no site is apolis. Perdition is therefore one of the poles of the human (pantoporos and hypsipolis, you will remember, are the opposite poles) as the uncanniest of beings. But, this is a crucial clarification, “neither perdition nor its possibility first occur at the end, when the violence-doer does not succeed in a particular act of violence and mishandles it; instead, this perdition holds sway and lies in wait (waltet und wartet) fundamentally in the opposition of the overwhelming and doing violence” (181). Perdition is therefore irreducible: an irreducible element in the Greek understanding of Being as physis, which means: in Greek anthropogenesis, that is, in the anthropogenesis of the first inception of the West. It is a tragic anthropogenesis–and tragedy is always already expropriation.  And it is an expropriation of life, and of life as such. Think Antigone, or Oedipus.  

I was musing such things and then I read Philippe Lynes’ book Futures of Life Death on Earth.  Derrida’s General Ecology. I was impressed in particular with Lynes’ reading of Heidegger within the constellation of a possible thinking of the difference between restricted and general ecology, which is of course Lynes’s ostensible project in the wake of his reading of the import of Derridean thought for countering biocultural extinction. It is not an idle issue. The stakes are, if I may sum them up succinctly, whether or not it is possible to find in Heidegger’s work the possibility of going beyond anthropocentrism (more properly, not anthropocentrism but its decentering toward Dasein-centrism, but discussing this would be intricate); and beyond that, whether the Western philosophical tradition has the resources to abandon not just modern subjectivity, which makes the world into a standing reserve of beings present-at-hand ready for exploitation and consumption, but also to abandon an understanding of Being that continues to depend on the affirmation of an overwhelming dominance of human privilege–since the human can access Dasein in ways that other animate and inanimate beings cannot–opening the way to planetary domination, elusive as it may be as we now know.  A derived but essential issue is whether it is possible to conceive a “politics” “beyond power and impotence,” as Heidegger called for in one of his black notebooks from 1939.2 You may imagine that this would be a politics–if such were to be still the term, but it probably isn´t–on the other side of perdition, requiring therefore an alternative anthropogenesis that Heidegger may (or may not) have addressed under the phrase “an other beginning.”3 These are big questions. Any answer to them will be indicative of a position of thought vis-à-vis the anthropocenic predicament, which, I think it is fair to say, remains and will from now on remain the very condition of possibility of thought for us, and for our children.  For Lynes Derrida is an essential thinker along those lines.4 

What I propose for the following is simple: I will indicate Lynes’s general argument and then I will present Lynes’ argument in chapter 3 of his book, which I find persuasive. I will supplement it with a brief comment on the notion of ruinance in the early Heidegger and with an equally brief reference to some notes from the very late Heidegger, perhaps from the late 1960s or early 1970s, recently published under the title “The Argument Against Need.”5 There will be no time for anything else and, even for that, time will be insufficient. My apologies.

II

Lynes proposes a “general ecology” to be opposed to a “restricted ecology.”  His overarching question is: “Must we think the living, in all its ecotechnicity and ecological relationality, as a counter-power, counter-force, counter-control to technobiopolitical positionality to think a future sustainability?  Or do sustainability and survival not require an altogether different resistance?” (Lynes, Futures of Life Death, xxxii).   The Derridean engagement with life death is for Lynes the very possibility of such altogether different resistance.  General economy is to that extent always in every case the deconstruction of restricted economies: “General economy in Bataille and Derrida’s sense . . . relates any meaningful transcendental, dialectical, phenomenological, or ontological living economy to an aneconomic, irreparable loss of sense, presence, or energy, to a death that does not live on” (xxxiv-xxxv).   It is therefore an alternative relation to death that might open up a future on earth.  This is proposed rather than shown, as one can imagine.  The efforts of the book will oscillate between critical deconstruction of restricted ecologies and the attempt to come to terms with the possibilities offered by a certain passing to the outside of technobiopolitical positionality, ciphered in a relation of sorts to life death, that is, to an alternative understanding of death, also understood as a “resistance” whose concept remains to be decided.  But this remains enigmatic: “General ecology,” Lynes tells us, “requires that we confront the creation, the rediscovery of the world in a restricted sense with the invention of the earth as the experience of the impossible: the end of the world as death” (xlvii).  What could this mean?   How is “letting life live on” (xlix) to be understood as an alternative, resistant mortification connected to the Heideggerian notions of Gelassenheit (releasement) and Zusage (acquiescence) that might enable us to twist out of planetary degradation?   For Lynes this will mark the possibility of a passage “beyond power and impotence,” hence also beyond what Heidegger presents as “the unconditional empowerment of power for unrestricted violence” (see note 2), which is the essential condition of anthropocentrism, hence of biocentrism.   

Not through affirmative biopolitics.  Lynes is constantly careful to avoid dogmatism and to be generous in the sense of always allowing alternative possibilities for reading what he detects as dead-ends in contemporary thought–the exemplary case is certainly what he makes of what Heidegger understood as final metaphysical positions in Nietzsche, namely, the doctrines of the Will to Power and of the Eternal Return of the Same.  He reads those doctrines, not just as Heidegger did, that is, as the justification for the total domination of the world by the human now understood as the “overman,” but also  through Bataille and Blanchot, and eventually through Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida, as enabling a double affirmation opening toward a beyond of power and impotence, which is the site of the other mortification now understood as ex-appropriation and the radical passivity humans share with all living and non-living beings.6 I will however take a risk of interpretation and propose that Lynes’ unfailingly generous reading does not preempt but rather delivers the thought of affirmative biopolitics as the common denominator of restricted ecologies in our recent past.  Hardt and Negri are certainly easy targets but many other more complex thinkers and theoretical positions (Foucault, Deleuze, Esposito, Haraway, Braidotti) are made to come through the grinder as thinking of restricted dedifferentiation either incapable of reaching possible sustainability or threatened by such liminal incapacity. Essentially, to the extent these thinkers, these modalities of thought, oppose planetary domination and world-appropriation by the human in any of its forms, they can only do so counter-hegemonically, even if they often finally complicate their own gesture. But counterhegemony is always already dependent on the hegemony it purports to leave behind: “Affirmative biopolitics could be read [that is, if I may translate, should be read] as the affirmation of a restricted survival over death, of a restricted future counteractualizing environmentalized or governmentalized biopower and technobiopolitical control” (212).  General ecology, by contrast, exposes us to a common mortality without exception, without restriction: “the survival at stake in sustainability does not triumph over death, at least not indefinitely, but it may organize the originary condition of mourning that structures biocultural diversity on earth more justly, in a compassion for mortal finitude as the binding/unbinding of ecological relationality” (213).  

III

In my reading of Lynes’ book, Chapter 3 is the crucial one.  I will propose that, in this chapter, Lynes starts, without quite mentioning it, the difficult task of elaborating a second existential analytic, over against the existential analytic offered by Heidegger in Being and Time. Heidegger himself left indications that such a task was needed in the 1962 lecture “On Time and Being.”7 Lynes does it by reading Heidegger through the Derridean critique.  It is, therefore, a Heidegger against the grain of his own restricted ecology, or the temptation of it, a Heidegger subjected to Derridean ex-appropriation.  Derridean ex-appropriation, however, was made possible by Heidegger’s twin notions Ereignis/Enteignis, often translated as appropriation/expropriation, and above all by his understanding of Being as a temporal event, the event of temporalization.  

“To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out.  Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from boundless spoliation” (Heidegger quoted by Lynes, 89).  Lynes links this thought to a “letting life live-on” that “cannot go on without a thought of death, . . . as the originary expropriation of the proper to the human” (89).  The key issue is whether Heidegger resists this originary expropriation by holding on to a privilege of Dasein as the owner, and the sole owner, of what is proper to it.  As Lynes puts it, “the questions of authentic temporalization in ecstasis and auto-affection, death and finitude–insofar as they can be shown to be the sole property and propriety of the human Dasein–will restrict Heidegger’s thought to the propriative circulation of a restricted ecology” (99).  Through an exquisite and very precise analysis of several Heideggerian texts, however, Lynes detects in Heidegger the awareness of “powerlessness before death as the original expropriation of the human, as the originary finitude of life differentially shared by all living beings” (102) in the face of the non-living: “Even the immense suffering which surrounds the earth is unable to waken a transformation, because it is only experienced as passive” (Heidegger quoted by Lynes, 102).  It is at this point in his development that Lynes wonders about the consequences of such insights for the existential analytic, that is, for the transformation of the existential analytic as bequeathed to us in Being and Time. 

Everything hinges, thus, on what the first existential analytic says about being-toward-death as the most proper possibility of the human Dasein, the possibility of its impossibility.  Derrida’s corrective, in Lynes formulation, is: “Dasein’s most proper possibility . . . is the possibility of an impossibility, and is thus in a sense its least proper and personal possibility. . .  Proper, organic, personal death is originarily contaminated by the inauthentic, inorganic, impersonal modes of finishing common to the living in general” (116-17).   This being the case, “the entire existential analytic” finds itself “compromised, as would a certain thinking of the Ereignis of the event” (116).   A renewed, general-ecological second existential analytic would have to start from the experience of the radical and immemorial Zusage, acquiescence, prior, and infinitely so, to the question of Being:  “This discloses for Derrida a dimension of experience as Gelassenheit . . . In hearing the call of the other issuing from an immemorial past, the Zusage promises to prepare a place for the other, to let the other come, and thus leave what is most proper to the other as my own absolute expropriation.  It lets return a future for the other.  And death being this radical ex-propriation shared by all living beings, the promise to the other becomes to let live-on” (118).

I am out of time, so I will address the notion of ruinance in Heidegger’s 1921-1922 lecture course Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle through François Raffoul’s comments on it (which means doing it properly will remain a pending task).  My suggestion for now is that ruinance is an anticipatory exposition of radical Dasein-expropriation.  Ruinance, as ruined facticity, is expropriation and perdition, hence consistent with Derrida and Lynes’ correction to the Heideggerian text in the sense of general ecology.  Through ruinance Dasein is exposed to an irreducible passivity that will not be transcended through the violence-doing of techné, which reveals itself as merely compensatory (and tragic).  Here is Raffoul: 

What is thinking?  It is a going against life’s ‘own’ tendency to go against itself and fall into ruins.  Thinking the event is thinking against the expropriation of the event.  Thinking is the countermotion to the countermovement of life, as if thinking the event meant thinking against the expropriation or ‘uneventing’ in the event.  Heidegger speaks of the need to bring life back from its ‘downward fall,’ from its tendency to fall into decline, from its ‘ruinance,’ which designates the ‘ex-propriation’ that tears life apart from itself.  It is therefore ruinance that is the origin of philosophy: not wonder, but ruinance. 

(Thinking the Event, 183).

And Raffoul quotes Heidegger: “This could be called a logic of negation.  ‘Here the “counter to” as a “not” attests to a primordial achievement that is constitutive on the level of being.  In view of its constitutive sense, negation has an original primacy over any “position-taking”‘ (184).

The negation of ruinance as ex-propriation of life is, I would like to submit, the possibility of a Heideggerian general ecology.  But let me complicate things a bit by making the shortest of references to what Heidegger says in his very late text, “The Argument Against Need.”  There is a note there that says: “The independence of entities-in-themselves from the existing human does not exclude, but rather includes that, presumably, even the ‘being’-in-itself of entities needs the human essence, which is itself what is needed in the event (das im Ereignis Gebrauchte) and thus belongs to ‘being’ [here, crossed out]” (533).  Da-sein remains as the very possibility of thought.  We could even speak of a certain privilege of bios here, since it Is still life that resists.  But then: is that a restriction of general ecology or is it rather its impassable condition of possibility?

Notes

  1.  I am grateful, and indebted, to Rafael Fernández for having urged me to read Raffoul’s book out of his own engagement with the Anthropocene as event, and with the special eventfulness of the anthropocenic predicament.   See Fernández, “Thinking in Times of Emergency.” 
    ↩︎
  2. See for instance: “To be decided is the truth of beyng itself: whether the blindness of power (taken not morally, but as an event of the history of beyng) can be experienced as the forgottenness of beyng–or whether the human being is deemed worthy by beyng to be installed beyond power and impotence, for the sake of the truth of beyng” (Ponderings, 14). ↩︎
  3.  The theme of “the other beginning” is fairly constant in Heidegger from the early 1930s on.  It is connected to a renunciation of “the unconditional empowerment of power for unrestricted violence” (Ponderings, 10) and also, and this is pertinent to the analyses in Lynes’ book, to Nietzsche: “Nietzsche is a transition only in the sense that he metaphysically anticipates the consummation of modernity and thereby posits the end appropriate to the history of being, and with this end (which he himself was not able to recognize and know as such, because he still thinks metaphysically, as the ultimate and definitive proponent of metaphysics) the possibility of a preparation of the decision in favor of the other beginning is made ready” (10).  This “other beginning” is undecidably an other beginning of thinking or something else, which might at the same time include and destroy “politics” in the sense of the tradition of the West. ↩︎
  4. See also Lynes, “Introduction.  Auparadvances” in Derrida, Advances, ix-xlvii. An expansion of this paper will engage with that text, and with the Derridean text it introduces. ↩︎
  5. On this text, published in English translation in 2022, see the special section of Gatherings 13 (2023), with several important contributions.  An analysis of those contributions is a pending task.  See also Keiling and Moore, “Heidegger and Deep Time.” ↩︎
  6. I think it would be important to consider here Heidegger’s comments on the Nietzschean overman in What is Called Thinking (59-81) and also his essay Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, which concludes:  “That Nietzsche experienced and expounded his most abysmal thought from the Dionysian standpoint, only suggests that he was still compelled to think it metaphysically, and only metaphysically. But it does not preclude that this most abysmal thought conceals something unthought, which also is impenetrable to metaphysical thinking” (431). ↩︎
  7. “Being and Time is on the way toward finding a concept of time, toward that which belongs most of all to time, in terms of which ‘Being’ gives itself as presencing.  This is accomplished on the path of the temporality of Dasein in the interpretation of Being as temporality.  But this means that what is fundamental in fundamental ontology is incompatible with any building on it.  Instead, after the meaning of Being had been clarified, the whole analytic of Dasein was to be more originally repeated in a completely different way” (Heidegger, On Time and Being, 32).  Needless to say, a second analytic of Dasein was never explicitly provided. ↩︎

Works Cited

  • Derrida, Jacques.  Advances.  Translated and with an Introduction by Philippe Lynes.  Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2017.
  • Fernández López, Rafael.  “Thinking in Times of Emergency: Event, World, and Worldlessness.” Unpublished Typescript. 
  • Heidegger, Martin.  “The Argument Against Need. (For the Being-In-Itself of Entities).” Translated by Tobias Keiling and Ian Alexander Moore.  British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30.3 (2022): 519-534. 
  • —. Introduction to Metaphysics.  Revised and Expanded Translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt.  Second Edition.  New Haven: Yale UP, 2014.
  • —. On Time and Being.  Translated by Joan Stambaugh.  New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972. 
  • —. Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle.  Initiation into Phenomenological Research. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz.  Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001.  
  • —. Ponderings XII-XV.  Black Notebooks 1939-1941.  Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2017.
  • —. What is Called Thinking.  Translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray.  New York: Harper & Row, 1968. 
  • —. “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?”  Translated by Bernd Magnus.  Review of Metaphysics 20.3 (1967): 411-431.  
  • Keiling, Tobias and Ian Alexander Moore.  “Heidegger on Deep Time and Being-In-Itself: Introductory Thoughts on ‘The Argument Against Need.'”  British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30.3 (2022): 508-518. 
  • Lynes, Philippe.  Futures of Life Death.  Derrida’s General Ecology.  London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. 
  • —. “Introduction.  Auparadavances,” in Derrida, Advances, ix-xlvii.
  • Raffoul, François.  Thinking the Event. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2020.