Robert Briggs

In Politics of Friendship Derrida characterises his extended discussion as a contribution to a genealogical deconstruction of the link that ties democracy to autochthony. In Rogues a few years later, he adds to this work by articulating what might be figured as an extensionist hypothesis, raising the question of ‘how far’ ‘the people of democracy’ is to be extended. Here, I read these two lines of problematisation alongside each other, seeing in each a certain decentring of the place of ‘people’ in the formation of democracy. Reading the later gesture for its potential to usher in a ‘more-than-human’ politics in view of anthropogenic climate change, I take recent efforts to develop a program of a multispecies, environmental justice as indicative of this impulse. At stake here is what Derrida characterises as an ambivalent logic of ‘fraternisation’ whose operation in theories of more-than-human politics I trace with reference to the Schmittian concept of the political. Driving the investigation from the beginning, however, is a more speculative question of what happens to the very idea of democracy when the place of ‘people’ is doubly decentred in this way. In what sense, moreover, could a deconstruction along these lines be engaged and still keep the old name of democracy?

Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) presents a sustained reflection on a concept of ‘the animal’ that has underpinned the work of much of the philosophical tradition. Based on a series of lectures originally presented in 1997 Derrida's speculation on the question of the animal was thus written at a time when Derrida's thought was often turned to the motif of ‘to-come’ (see Derrida 1992; 1994) such that one may wonder at the apparent evasion, both in Derrida's text and in its subsequent review, of the chance to think the two themes together, in the guise of ‘the animal-to-come’. Picking up on Derrida's asides on the verb ‘to follow’, this discussion considers what it might mean to follow, ‘methodically’ perhaps, the thought of ‘the animal-to-come’? What problems might it help to bring into focus and what forces and lineages may yet bear upon its very thought? And where in our thinking goes the animal if it is to remain always to come?

Although environmental ethics has become more familiar and comfortable with the work of postmodernism, “deconstruction” in particular continues to be depicted as “destructive” and “nihilistic.” A close examination of some specific works of deconstruction, however, shows that, far from denying responsibilities to the environment, deconstruction seeks to affirm a radical obligation toward the “other.” Because this possibility is habitually ruled out by denunciations of deconstruction’s imputed relativism, I begin with a dramatized account of the possible reception of deconstruction within environmental ethics in order to stage the ethical implications of modes of criticism. I then discuss specific parallels between the work of deconstruction and that of environmental ethics, and suggest that a deconstructive spirit is at the heart of environmental philosophy’s recent—and most important—work on the question of “universal consideration.”