Jonathan Basile

Virality Vitality explores the history and present of the life sciences and virology, focusing on moments of disruption that reveal the instability of the most basic concepts guiding scientific knowledge and their practical or political consequences. From their "discovery" to present-day experiments in synthetic virology, viruses have given rise to upheavals in our models of life because of the difficulty of rigorously distinguishing life from virus, self from other. The virus has been compared to a gene, to an agent of life's heredity and immunity, and we humans depend on the fossils of ancient viral infections in our genome in order to bear children. Can a parasite give birth to its host? To interpret the nonoppositional relationship of virality and vitality, this book draws on the work of Jacques Derrida and the growing field of biodeconstruction that has emerged from his posthumously published work on genetics. In turn, Virality Vitality suggests a novel approach to questions of the agency of "matter" or the "nonhuman," often raised in Anthropocene studies, the material turn, and ecocriticism. Nothing is more natural than the artificiality of the borders drawn, maintained, and displaced by the living and their viruses, by virality-vitality. The inscription of these borders remains to be read, and thus deconstructive textuality is anything but opposed to the sciences and what they call life.

What biologists have called the Tree of Life, an outline of evolutionary history as the branching descent of species, can be taken as an instance of the instability of fundamental scientific concepts. The tree-structure is fundamental to the point of necessity; as I will explain, even those models that aspire or claim to oppose it today, such as the web, network, or rhizome, unwittingly presuppose it. Despite this inevitability, or rather because of this non-oppositionality, the tree is an unstable foundation, whose displacements propagate through the histories and taxonomic concepts built upon it. This generalized non-self-identity, leaving science and its objects and subjects (life, life scientists) exposed to an... Read More.

Lynn Margulis’s writing about symbiosis has profoundly influenced contemporary evolutionary theory, as well as continental and analytic philosophy of science, the materialist turn, and new materialism. Nonetheless, her work, and all symbiosis or evolution, is founded on a paradox: symbiosis fictionalizes customary accounts of the origin and evolution of species, yet it is impossible to speak of symbiosis (cross-species association) unless species-boundaries have been posited in advance. Thus, a tension is legible throughout Margulis’s work between the drive to surpass the limits of species-definitions as they have been traditionally understood, and a need to maintain them in order that there can be “symbiosis” at all. Margulis criticized neo-Darwinian accounts of evolution in part because she saw symbiogenesis as debunking the theory that life was defined by individualistic competition. More recently, Myra Hird has suggested that the gift, such as it has been theorized by certain anthropologists and philosophers, could adequately figure symbiosis and the ethical relations founded on it. I turn to Derrida’s writing on the gift to suggest that, if a gift worthy of the name chances to happen, it necessarily exceeds scientific, theoretical, and philosophical knowledge.

This article examines the conflicting representations of plasticity and epigenetics in the work of philosopher Catherine Malabou and evolutionary theorists Mary Jane West-Eberhard and Eva Jablonka. In order to speak of a new biological ‘paradigm’ and to attribute values of novelty or inventiveness to life itself, Malabou has to suppress the unsettled debates within the life sciences. The aporias of evolutionary narrative and causality reveal a necessary differentiality and textuality that belongs neither to life nor science itself, but leaves a haunting remanence within every corpus. New materialism resists this necessity of life-science, which calls for a deconstructive reading.

Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway relies on mutually incompatible grounding gestures, one of which describes the relationality of an always already material-discursive reality, while the other seeks to ground this relation one-sidedly in matter. These two materialisms derive from the gesture she borrows from the New Materialist (and other related) fields, which posits her work as an advance over the history of “representationalism” and “social constructivism.” In turn, this one-sided materialism produces a skewed reading of the quantum mechanical phenomena with which she engages. Her attempt to create an ontological (not epistemological) interpretation of quantum mechanics proves deconstructible. Instead, a science of undecidability or science of quant à helps us to understand debates among scientists and philosophers over the completeness or incompleteness of quantum mechanics and its epistemological or ontological status – by demonstrating that these questions will necessarily remain unresolved.

In Kant's Critique of Judgment, his exploration of how something like life (organized matter) can appear to the faculties of a finite consciousness makes life as possible as it is impossible. A passing reference Kant makes to the idea that every organ of an organism can be seen as a parasite is taken as a lever to deconstruct his notion of organized beings as forming an ultimately coherent nature (an ethicoteleological whole). This reading is placed alongside Paul de Man's deconstruction of the sublime as Augenschein and Darstellung von Ideen to show that the unity of the third critique, sometimes viewed as a fractured work, comes from the similar failures of sublimity and purposive organization. This reading is offered to suggest the importance of biodeconstruction for an engagement with the history and present of thought about the natural sciences.

Misreadings of Derrida's Of Grammatology were prevalent from the time of its debut, up to the present day. For fifty years, Derrida's generalised textuality has been misread as though he meant there was nothing outside text in the traditional sense. This misreading always serves to re-institute notions of linear temporal progress, either among self-styled avant-garde authors who would like to break with past traditions, or among self-styled conservatives who hope to repeat them. If the binaries that divide these works from past texts are undecidable, the ground for such temporal progress disappears, along with the divisions by which we create linear narratives of history. The misreading of Derrida is an attempt to exorcise this undecidability and regain the intellectual and market value of novelty or repetition.

The foundational gesture of New Materialism and Speculative Realism dismisses vast swaths of past philosophy and theory in order to signify their own avant-garde status. The violence of this gesture, which tries to corral difference within past texts in order to feign its own purity, can be considered as a theoretical quarantine. Examples of medical and spiritual quarantine, the 2014 ebola epidemic and Jesus’ temptation, are analyzed to show that the figure is inherently compromised – the harder one fights to keep the other away, the more one becomes inseparable from it. Derrida's reflections on the reactions against deconstruction show that this desire for progress is always inherently conservative; Meillassoux and Jane Bennett are considered as contemporary examples. A deconstruction of corralation and the academico-capitalist forces driving these ‘innovations’ might open us to reading the never-simply-past text, and to the possibility of the event.

Among those speaking in the name of materialism, whether speculative, dialectical, or "new," it is commonplace to dismiss with a single gesture a vast field of theoretical and philosophical endeavor, indicated as the last 50 or 250 years of theory and philosophy. Self-styled "speculative" writers who would surpass all philosophy since Kant, and various New Materialists who sequester decades of thought under the heading of "constructivism," manufacture the avant-garde status of their own work by claiming to delineate a simple break with the past. We would be at a loss, and perhaps at risk of missing the point, if we sought to uncover the common essence underlying this "new" work, either by looking for an agreement...