Philippe Lynes

This paper attempts to respond to the environmental difficulties faced by overpopulation by adapting a question of Levinas's, ‘is it ecologically just to be?’, of which ‘is it ecologically just to make more children?’ is an important correlate. I suggest that both an affirmative account of life as deployed in affirmative biopolitics, as well as the pessimistic thought of death in anti-natalist philosophy are insufficient to respond to these questions. An eco-deconstructive account of life:death, however, allows us both to respond to the horror inspired in thinking one's life at the expense of so many others, human and nonhuman, while thinking the affirmation of life otherwise in inventing, each time uniquely, more just responses to overpopulation.

This article examines a certain return to nature in Blanchot, particularly in his readings of Lautréamont, albeit one that cannot be reduced to the triumph of light over dark, dawn over night, and life over death. Building from the expanded scene of vegetal metamorphosis that concludes the recently published manuscript version of his novel Aminadab, I show how Blanchot eschews the vitalist, indeed humanist metaphysics that continue to define much work in ecocriticism, particularly in its new materialist, material-ecocritical or elemental-ecocritical offshoots. Drawing from Blanchot's major writings on Lautréamont—‘Lautréamont’ in Faux Pas (1943), ‘Lautréamont and Miller’ in The Work of Fire (1949) and ‘The Experience of Lautréamont’ in Lautréamont and Sade (1949)—as well as Derrida's unpublished Lautréamont seminar (1970–1), this article proposes a few reflections on what Lautréamont calls ‘our fate, which remains shackled to the hardened crust of a planet’.