‘Nothing But Us’

Philippe Lynes interviewed by Timothy Clark

In this interview, Timothy Clark (Durham University) interviews Philippe Lynes (University of Dundee/University of Glasgow) about his new two-volume book Dearth: Deconstruction after Speculative Realism (Northwestern University Press).

Timothy Clark: The back cover of Dearth describes the book as ‘exploring Jacques Derrida’s prefiguration of speculative realism’ but could it not at least as easily be described as a reading of Derrida that even bursts at times the arguably inflated bubble of speculative realism?

Philippe Lynes: Thanks for the question and for the invitation to discuss my books with you. I suppose I’d first want to probe this question of ‘inflation’ a little further; is the speculative realist bubble self-inflated? over-inflated by others? was a specific reading of Derrida necessary to burst it, or had it already popped on its own? Admittedly, things look very different for speculative realism in 2026 than they did when I first started reading its authors around 2013, and even then, Ray Brassier had already branded the movement ‘an online orgy of stupidity’ in a 2011 interview.^[1] Three of the original four ‘Goldsmiths’ speculative realists – Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux – never really took up the ‘speculative realist’ mantle; Brassier now works on rather different things, and I haven’t seen much new work by Grant or Meillassoux. Only Graham Harman continues to regularly publish careful, fascinating material in his own offshoot of speculative realism, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO for short), while its most famous proponent for the environmental humanities and beyond, Timothy Morton, now focuses more on questions of gender and religion, albeit still in the ‘spirit’ of OOO.

However, a crop of newer scholars has come to probe the speculative realist critique of correlationism in novel ways. I’m thinking of the excellent 2025 collection After Speculative Realism,^[2] edited by Charlie Johns and Shajara Bensusan, which features work by outstanding scholars like Niki Young and Lee Braver, as well as ‘adjacent’ thinkers like Maurizio Ferraris, Katerina Kolozova and Thomas Nail. But I think the ‘After’ in that title, as well as in mine (pure coincidence! unfortunately I hadn’t read it when Dearth was already in production), can come off as somewhat misleading; we’re still thinking with and about speculative realism, standing before speculative realism, in a sense, which brings us back to this question of its purported self- or over-inflation and its relation to deconstruction.

Not being a very ‘online’ person, I completely missed the blogging frenzy that characterised the early days of speculative realism. This meant that I only approached it through its major books. And I was riveted; I devoured everything Brassier, Grant, Harman and Meillassoux wrote, just as I did when I’d first discovered Derrida. Because I think some degree of ‘inflation’ is necessary to jolt scholarship out of dogmatic slumber, out of repetition without difference, to move the needle. When Heidegger declared that the past 2500 years of Western thought were founded on a forgetting of the question, truth or site of being, was that an inflated claim? When Derrida went a step further and said that even Heidegger’s ontological difference between being and beings still belonged to a broader framework called ‘logocentrism,’ was that overinflated? And when speculative realism goes a step further by saying that even Derrida belongs to an even broader framework called ‘correlationism,’ is that overinflated?

Well, one could say that grand, sweeping, indeed ‘inflated’ metaphysical claims simply are the business of continental philosophy, if we’re to believe the analytics. And when you make such a sweeping claim, you simply have to risk looking like an idiot, a blowhard, or like you don’t know anything about the history of philosophy. But any such claim ultimately has to stand on its own merit; one can gather evidence both for or against the forgetting of ‘beyng’ or ‘carnophallogocentrism,’ or such claims can simply be compelling on their own, or not. And I happen to think the speculative realist identification of correlationism as a problem for contemporary philosophy is very compelling, and indeed for the same reason I’m drawn to deconstruction, which is our environmental crisis: species extinction, global warming, environmental degradation. At issue here is the major argument in environmental philosophy since the 1970s. This has been that our ecological crisis is grounded upon a certain individualist metaphysics, and that the corrective to this is a different, more relational metaphysics. And this relational metaphysics, which still dominates in philosophical schools today, has obviously had some important implications for our thinking of multispecies entanglements and the like. But one could also argue that, as Heidegger did with Nietzsche’s inverted Platonism, it simply flips the script while leaving the logic intact. Deconstruction says something similar, and I believe that speculative realism does too. So I wouldn’t say that Dearth bursts the bubble of speculative realism, however inflated it was or deflated it now may be: it asks how Derrida’s reflections on the nonhuman thing, on the non-relational, hold up in light of the critique of correlationism, a critique sometimes directed at Derrida himself.

TC: You present ‘correlationism’ as ‘the single most enduring problem for the ecological imaginary in the history of Western philosophy.’^[3] I read Dearth as placing speculative realism (SR) (despite its dismissals of Heidegger) and your reading of deconstruction in what remains a broadly Heideggerian diagnostic of occidental metaphysics as forming a trajectory of thought underlying Western existence which ‘culminates in the technological positioning of the planet and all its living and non-living matter in view of its calculability and use-value.’^[4] Is there a danger, however, that an intense and urgent awareness of the current age as one of extinction may become a new force of interpretative closure in reading the past (something perhaps already exemplified in some thinkers in SR caricaturing both Derrida and the later Heidegger as ‘correlationists’)? Derrida also wonders critically in his ‘On Reading Heidegger’ that while Heidegger’s ‘history of Being’ is not some historiological period ‘it is still a large ensemble or totality gathered toward a single sense.’^[5]

PL: This is a hugely important question, which gets right to the heart of what eco-deconstruction means to me. Now, the first part of your question asks whether there’s difference between on the one hand a) the speculative realist argument that correlationism, specifically, is constitutive of our ecological crisis and b) the more Heideggerian argument that technological enframing is the necessary conclusion of Western metaphysics. I’ve recently been rereading Heidegger’s Der Satz vom Grund [The Principle of Reason] as part of a new book project called After the University: Teaching in the Ruins with Benjamin and Derrida—coauthored with my colleague at Dundee, Dominic Smith—especially Derrida’s reading of that text in his 1982-3 seminar La Raison universitaire. A few sessions from that seminar were published in Right to Philosophy, the most important for our purposes here being ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils.’ In that essay, Derrida explains, glossing Heidegger, that ‘the modern dominance of the principle of reason had to go hand in hand with the interpretation of the essence of beings as objects, an object present as representation (Vorstellung), an object placed before a subject. This latter, a man who says “I,” an ego certain of itself, thus ensures his own technical mastery over the totality of what is.’^[6] In other words, the modern dominance of the principle of reason goes hand in hand with Kantian correlationism. In the longer seminar discussion, Derrida shows how this subject-object correlationism underlies modern humanism for Heidegger, and how this humanism and the technological domination of nature belong to one and the same metaphysical system. This has deep implications for how both deconstruction and speculative realism can contribute to environmental posthumanist thinking. ‘Heidegger sees in the humanism of the principle of reason and technics a single assemblage that instead of allowing us to think the proper of the human, tears the human from its humanity, from its ground, from what is proper and familiar to it, heimisch.’^[7] This humanism for Heidegger ‘threatens the heimisch of the human, or that tears the human away from itself; this reason is unheimlich, strangely worrying, threatening, like technoscience and like the institutions to which it gives rise (the modern university).’^[8]

But here’s where Derrida’s intervention follows Blanchot very closely, rather than Heidegger, a move I think speculative realism echoes. This is from a contemporaneous 1983 discussion with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy called “Discourses of the End” that I translated for the OLR last year:

there is thus a gesture of accusation or denunciation, of devaluation of Unheimlichkeit on Heidegger’s part. The proper of the human is torn away by the principle of reason, by modern technics. Which immediately implies that it is in spite of or beyond this principle of reason or this modern technics that the human must recover its ownmost, what is proper to it. While for Blanchot the movement is, I believe, rather different: Unheimlichkeit is never held under suspicion in the name of a reappropriation of the essence of the human.^[9]

So, with the help of Blanchot, Derrida allows us to critique both technological positionality and humanist correlationism, but without seeking to resituate the human and thinking into its supposed proper gathering with being. This is precisely what Derrida targets when he writes that Heidegger’s history of beyng ‘is still a large ensemble or totality gathered toward a single sense.’ This is the movement of Versammlung that Derrida says lies at the heart of his entire confrontation with Heidegger.

So, from an eco-deconstructive standpoint, what’s the difference between, on the one hand, a modern Kantian subject-object correlationism and, on the other, a Heideggerian history of being that culminates in the technological dominion over the planet, which he sees as defined by the human rapacity for atomic energy? Well, I argue that what Meillassoux critiques in correlationism seems very close to Parmenides’ claim that ‘thinking and being are the same.’ Heidegger says so himself in What is Called Thinking? – the ‘to auto’ (Same) of ‘noein’ (thinking) and ‘einai’ (being) is the basic metaphysical presupposition that runs through the entirety of Western philosophy, including Kantian correlationism; ‘though Kant says something absolutely different, his thinking moves nonetheless in the same (not the identical) sphere as the thinking of the Greek thinkers.’^[10] Heidegger says something similar in The Principle of Reason with respect to Parmenides, Kant and the principle of reason:

concealed behind the formula ‘a priori conditions for the possibility’ is the rendering of sufficient reasons, of ratio sufficiens, which as ratio is pure Reason. According to Kant it is only by having recourse to Reason (ratio) that something can be determined as to what it is and how it is a being for the rational creature called ‘man.’ […] We now see what a fragment of early Greek thinking says within a quite a different light: τὸ γαρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν καὶ εἶναί – that, namely the same, is perceiving as well as being.^[11]

Now, you know that everything in The Principle of Reason hinges on the question of its tonality; there’s one tonality of the principle of reason that leads to the technological enframing of the planet, and another that leads to something like Gelassenheit, letting beings be, nature without ‘why?’ The principle of reason states that nihil est sine ratione, nothing is without reason. One can hear it in the ordinary metaphysical tonality as ‘nothing is without reason’—every ontic being has its sufficient reason—or in a different tonality as ‘nothing is without reason,’ as a principle about being, denoting an ‘accord [Zusammenklang] between being and reason.’^[12] Heidegger writes in the lecture’s conclusion that ‘we only hear the principle of reason in the second tonality – that is, in a being-historical manner and hence in an inaugural manner – when we say the theme of the principle in Greek: τὸ αὐτό (ὲστιν) εἶναί το καὶ λόγος: εἶναί and λόγος (are) the same.’^[13] Being and logos are the same; note that Heidegger substitutes logos for Parmenides’ noein. What does λόγος mean here? ‘it means “to gather” [sammeln].’^[14] Gathering means to orient one thing to another, an orienting ‘we still more generally call “the relating of something to something.” Λόγος can mean the equivalent of the Latin relatio: relation.’^[15] So we have a sameness without identity of logocentric gathering (Versammlung) and relationalism or correlationism (relatio) that I think deconstruction—when it defines Heidegger’s history of beyng as ‘a large ensemble or totality gathered toward a single sense’—allows us to critique head-on, a critique that speculative realism allows us to sharpen.

Now, as to whether defining our current era as one of extinction risks an interpretive closure with respect to the history of philosophy: I don’t think it does at all! Brassier notes in Nihil Unbound that the scientific question of extinction has come to displace the focus on (an always all-too-human) death that characterises contemporary continental thought. Here, Brassier draws from Wilfrid Sellars’ opposition between ‘the manifest image of man as he has conceived of himself up until now with the aid of philosophical reflection’^[16] and the scientific image, which understands the human as a complex physical system with the aid of physics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Now, the notion of death for thinkers like Levinas, Blanchot and Derrida certainly interrupts the sovereign consciousness of the manifest image. But as Brassier explains, ‘just as the phenomenon of death indexes an anomalous zone in the conceptual fabric of the manifest image […], so, by the same token, the concept of extinction represents an aberration for the phenomenological discourse which sought to transcendentalize the infrastructure of the manifest image precisely in order to safeguard the latter from the incursions of positivism and naturalism.’^[17] But philosophy for Brassier must resist choosing one discourse or the other; it should seek to identify the ‘transpositions’ ‘between the existential-phenomenological characterization of death, and the natural-scientific phenomenon of extinction, […] the phenomenology of trauma and the extinction of phenomenology.’^[18] This is why SR indeed frequently turns to the history of philosophy to identify alternatives to correlationism: Grant’s influential readings of Schelling, Brassier’s readings of Nietzsche, or even Harman’s turn to obscure doctrines of medieval Arabic occasionalism. And of course, the importance of Aristotle runs throughout so many of its authors.

TC: A commitment in SR to arguments that ‘correlationism’ has been so definitive in Western thought finds its corollary in thinkers staging themselves as a bold new start, as a back-to-fundamentals, a beginning-again. In part this must reflect the pressures of self-presentation in the professional academic attention market, but it is also vital to the claimed topicality of SR. Two questions then, if the above seems a fair summary. Is there a contrast here with Derrida’s engagement with inherited metaphysical modes of thought in terms that could only naively be presented in terms of ‘escape’ or of thought’s self-liberation? And could you say more about the topicality of SR here? Dearth also is relating Derrida’s question of ‘comment s’habituer à rien?’ to thoughts of extinction in the empirical sense of ‘the sixth mass extinction’ event.

PL: I’d be tempted to respond that both deconstruction and speculative realism, to me, engage with inherited metaphysical modes of thought, and that there is also a commitment in both to a certain ‘escape,’ albeit the nature of this escape varies even among the speculative realists themselves. Meillassoux and Brassier seek to overcome the finitude of thinking through mathematics and science, whereas Harman sees no need for such a liberation, and instead generalises the Kantian finitude of human thought to every entity in the cosmos. What about deconstruction? Well, to come back to this question of tonality, I think it depends on how seriously one takes Derrida when he asserts – in Psyche or in ‘Force of Law’ – that deconstruction is ultimately an experience of the impossible: ‘the interest of deconstruction (…) is a certain experience of the impossible,’^[19] ‘deconstruction is possible as an experience of the impossible.’^[20] On the one hand, one can hear this in the tonality of deconstruction letting us experience the impossibility of any escape, of any liberation of being from thinking according to logocentric (or correlationist) metaphysics; deconstruction is an experience of the impossible. On the other hand, one can hear it in another tonality: deconstruction is an experience of the impossible, of an impossible real irreducible to any thinking/being correlation, which is how I’m more tempted to hear it. Permit me a longer citation from Paper Machine,

The deconstruction of logocentrism and linguisticism and economism (the ‘own’ and home, the oikos of the same), etc., as well as the affirmation of the impossible, have always come forward in the name of the real, of the irreducible reality of the real—not the real as an attribute of the thing (res), objective, present, sense-able or intelligible, but the real as a coming or event of the other, where it resists all reappropriation, even onto-phenomenological appropriation. The real is this non-negative im-possible, this im-possible coming or invention of the event, the thinking of which is not an onto-phenomenology. What this is about is a thinking of the event (singularity of the other, in its coming that cannot be anticipated, hic et nunc) that resists being reappropriated by an ontology or a phenomenology of presence as such. I attempt to dissociate the concept of event and the value of presence. It is not easy but I try to demonstrate this necessity, like that of thinking the event without being. In this sense, nothing is more ‘realist’ than deconstruction. It is what or who comes along [arrive].^[21]

To me, it seems that what Derrida is proposing here is precisely a non-correlationist thinking, indeed an escape from the correlationism that persists in Husserlian phenomenological and Heideggerian ontological thinking. What does it mean to think the event, the im-possible real without being? something similar, I’d say, to what Derrida intends when he asks ‘comment s’habituer à rien?’

To push it further, what could it mean to ‘think’ the real without being or thinking? Is ‘thinking’ still the right word? Consider Derrida’s 1960 seminar Penser c’est dire non – Thinking Means Saying No, just published in 2022, which Derrida unwittingly evokes in one of his last public addresses on the thirty-six ‘no’s of Ignacio Ramonet’s ‘Résistances’: ‘to resist is to say no… no to the destruction of the environment.’^[22] Derrida borrows the expression ‘penser c’est dire non’ from antifascist and pacifist thinker Alain, penname of Émile-Auguste Chartier. The head that nods ‘yes’ is the head that is falling asleep, nodding off into slumber, whereas the head that shakes ‘no’ is the head that wakes up, rouses itself to attention. The no refuses the yes’s peaceful complacency with how things are, with the way the world is, with our ruined environment. This no is thus immensely important for eco-theory today, particularly within the context of the so-called ‘affirmative turn to life’ drawing from Spinoza, Bergson or Deleuze, as we see in many New Materialisms and affirmative biopolitics. As Derrida remarks commenting Bergson, negation—and we can gloss extinction here—simply has no place in a philosophy of psychological intuition, immediacy and plenitude. Importantly, the matter of thinking as saying ‘no’ is both ontological and ethico-political for Derrida; it involves both the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’ As he asks,

what is refusal if not resistance to that which is? To resist that which is, is first of all to oppose it to what ought to be. Refusal is thus moral in its essence. Therefore, insofar as every consciousness is this primordial refusal of that which is, every consciousness is above all moral. The most elementary, the most larval phenomenon of waking presupposes this will to resist passivity, the magic of appearance, the determinisms of the body, etc. The will to resist which is a certain courage, a certain act of duty and a moral experience. With the no, consciousness opens up the space that separates being from value.^[23]

So I’d say that the topicality of SR precisely has to do with what thinking might be, or might not be, in light of extremely pressing ethical, moral, political and ecological quandaries regarding extinction. Whether the authors themselves take this up is another question. Brassier and Meillassoux aren’t really concerned with extinction in an environmentalist sense; the asymptopia Brassier describes, when all of matter decays into the cosmic void, is trillions and trillions of years away, there’s not really anything in his work about the purported sixth mass extinction of terrestrial species. And the metaphysics of Meillassoux’s Fourth World of human resurrection are resolutely anthropocentric, engaging ‘the legitimate superiority of humans over anonymous nature, as well as their evident duty of preserving nature.’^[24] Off the top of my head, there’s not much about environmentalism in Grant’s Naturphilosophie. Harman and Morton, however, approach this question differently, by leaning into finitude rather than attempting to escape from it, which I think has been key to OOO’s worldwide success with ecocritics and environmental philosophers. I discuss this in more detail in the prologue to Volume 2: Art and Dwelling. Harman writes that species extinction ‘horrif[ies] me and challenge[s] my existence in a way that the hypothetical distant decay of all atoms simply does not.’^[25] Morton echoes this concern for more urgent finitudes in their description of the hyperobjects of mass extinction and global warming, remarking that ‘there is something deeply anthropocentric about absolutes and infinities.’^[26] So you might say that there’s a break between a more ‘transcendental’ notion of extinction in Brassier, for example, and a more ‘empirical’ one in Morton. But Derrida’s thought begins precisely by remarking the irreducible contamination of the transcendental with the worldly, the infinite and the finite, as early as The Problem of Genesis in 1953. And if we accept that, then it’s easy to see how Brassier and Meillassoux’s reflections on finitude can remain topical for environmental thought.

Derrida says something similar in Thinking Means Saying No. Bergson, Sartre and Husserl all remain incapable of conceiving of nothingness outside its correlation to the human, whether in psychological intuition in Bergson, transcendental subjectivity in Husserl, or the for-itself in Sartre. This is why ‘one must go beyond this consciousness-world, for-itself in-itself opposition, which is still too marked by the traditional subject-object opposition, to understand nothingness as the nihilation of the totality of beings.’^[27] This need to ‘think’ extinction, nihilation, nothingness outside the consciousness-world, being-thinking, transcendental-empirical correlation, as the irreducible reality of the real, this to me is precisely the topicality of both deconstruction and speculative realism, and denotes their shared resistance to inherited metaphysical modes of thought.

TC: A question about arbitrariness and the term ‘speculative’ in SR and its various commitments to metaphysical claims. I confess that when I first read of Meillassoux writing of ‘our future rebirth’ and the resurrection of all human dead the thought was irrepressible: ‘pretentious twaddle.’ If the affirmation of the necessity of contingency is so crucial to SR, and also so evident in its internal and external disputes, does not even anti-intellectualism become in effect, paradoxically, a philosophical stance?

PL: I’ll admit that Meillassoux’s images of the Fourth World of Justice and the eternal resurrection of the human dead is the most bizarre aspect of his philosophy, and perhaps of the entire Speculative Realist movement. But as Harman puts it, ‘while it is no doubt that Meillassoux will convert few readers to his strange theology, one should not just admire those philosophies with whose content one happens to agree.’^[28] I recall Harman writing somewhere else that he reads Carl Jung not because he necessarily agrees with it, but because it’s good for his imagination, and that really resonated with me. For example, I don’t at all believe that the OOO fourfold, for example (or Heidegger’s for that matter) puts forward a true account of how the world really is—I’m at bottom a very boring scientific realist/naturalist in my commitments—but reading Harman’s Tool Being for me was as exciting as any Lovecraftian cosmic horror, Borges story, or Christian mysticism. And inhabiting that world of tool-being, where Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian ontology find themselves extended to nonhuman objects, is not only imaginatively interesting, but allows us to return to deconstruction otherwise, to ask different questions of its own critiques of Husserl and Heidegger. So I think that sense of the ‘speculative’ is essential for shaking things up in philosophy and theory.

But there are two senses of ‘speculative’ we might want to consider. The first, more general, echoes Freud’s own ‘speculative’ works around the time of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he cautions against the notion that he has ‘abandoned [him]self entirely to speculation.’^[29] As Derrida writes in the Life Death section that would eventually be published in The Post Card as ‘To Speculate: On “Freud,”’ ‘this speculation is…foreign to philosophy or to metaphysics; it is not, for example, the speculative in Hegel.’^[30] One could even say that such speculation is anti-intellectual, or at least anti-philosophical. But it’s important to recall that Meillassoux’s ‘strange theology’ is really at the heart of the entire speculative materialist project. This is something Alain Badiou remarks in the introduction to After Finitude, which he notes is ‘a fragment from a particularly important philosophical (or “speculative,” to use the author’s own vocabulary) enterprise.’^[31] That speculative enterprise begins with his doctoral dissertation, L’Inexistence divine, which Meillassoux stresses represents only an early formulation of his published positions. But later essays like ‘Spectral Dilemma’ and ‘The Immanence of the World Beyond,’ to me anyways, remain quite close to this initial thesis. Now, I’d say that two things surprised me with Meillassoux’s factial theology. The first was how closely it echoes the language of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx: justice, the messianic, spectres, etc. Here, Derrida has influenced countless reflections on posthumanist, ecological or nonhuman communities, etc., what David Wood called a ‘parliament of the living.’ Rogues mentions a ‘democracy to come’ that might extend to the dead, animals, trees and rocks, and so on. On that level, to the outside observer anyway, Meillassoux’s humanist and Derrida’s posthumanist communities of spectres would appear similarly ‘speculative,’ farfetched, utopian, even impossible as one another, certainly ‘non-philosophical’ in an analytic sense.

But there’s another more technical sense of the speculative that I think requires our attention, particularly where speculative realism risks becoming the specular image of its idealist counterpart, with important implications for our thinking the oikos in ecology. Derrida writes in Clang that ‘Aufhebung is the amortization of death. It is the concept of economy in general in speculative dialectics. Economy: law of the family, of the family house, of possession. The economic act renders familiar, proper, intimate, private. The meaning of property in general is gathered in the oikeios.’^[32] The speculative is indeed an economic term in the most basic sense; it names the recuperation of every exteriority, of all of nonhuman nature, into its absoluteness, and this is true both on the level of planetary capitalism and on an ontological or metaphysical level. This is why its deconstruction remains necessary across the board. Consider the first three worlds of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism: matter, life, and thought. It’s a tripartite distinction Derrida targets early on in François Jacob in Life Death, and much later in On Touching in his reading of Husserl: ‘an architecture and a teleology that are classical: matter, life, spirit.’^[33]

So it becomes a question of asking where the ‘speculative’ in the general, anti-philosophical sense does in fact join up with the ‘speculative’ in the dialectical or economic sense, and where this speculative specularity finds itself exceeded by deconstruction, life death, the thing, and so on; ‘my “hypothesis” – you can see now in what way I am using this word – is that the speculative structure, in the way it imposes itself on Freud, finds its place and its necessity in this logic. How, then, is death at the end of this structure, that is, at all of its ends[?]’^[34] How is it that extinction finds itself at the end of the speculative structure? This is one of the key questions of Dearth.

As to whether an anti-intellectualism is now required from an environmental or ecocritical standpoint, I’d say in a lot of ways, yes. The eco-theory industry is a rapidly proliferating one, and the publish-or-perish nature of contemporary academia has resulted, at least to me, in a total saturation of philosophical and theoretical reflection on the environment, a kind of molecular crowding where nothing can move. The rare attempts at saying something new are completely drowned out by the cacophony of repetition. Now, Derrida had long analysed Marx’s thesis on Feuerbach that philosophers had only interpreted the world, and that the task was now to change it. But this also requires a transformation in the very notion of interpretation, a transformation of the question ‘what to do?’ que faire? what to do with the earth? And here, Derrida’s Advances speaks volumes about the necessity for such a philosophical engagement with finitude as Meillassoux’s. Derrida writes that ‘it is thus up to “us” to make what “we” inadequately call the human earth survive, an earth that “we” know is finite, that it can and must exhaust itself in an end.’^[35]

TC: An issue that pervades SR, without always seeming explicit, is the relation of philosophy to the natural sciences, and the contested spaces between physics and metaphysics. Is scientism variously at issue here as much as humanism is more legibly?

Once again, I think it’s important to differentiate the various individual projects within speculative realism to answer this. Meillassoux follows Badiou in saying that ontology must give way to set theory, and I’d say that Brassier, who draws from both, is the most scientistic of the bunch. As he writes, ‘where a belated philosophical Romanticism continues to bewail the “nihilistic” consequences incurred by science’s disenchantment of the world and capital’s desecration of the earth,’ Badiou and Meillassoux enable philosophy to ‘take up the challenge posed to it by the annihilating vectors of science.’^[36] So Badiou, Meillassoux and Brassier all side with the Enlightenment project against a certain Romanticism. With Harman, it’s another story, as OOO maintains a much closer relationship to aesthetics than it does to mathematics or the sciences. As he puts it, ‘aesthetics is first philosophy.’^[37]

With Grant, the matter becomes more complicated still, as Science in the Schellingian sense places art and poetics at its foundation. We see this in his early work On University Studies, discussed by Derrida in La Raison universitaire, whose twelfth session was reworked as ‘Theology of Translation’ in Right to Philosophy. Derrida explains that, for Schelling, ‘poetry is at the heart of philosophy; the poem is a philosopheme.’ As he elaborates, ‘as a “living science” (lebendige Wissenschaft), philosophy requires an “artistic impulse.” There is (es gibt), the Fifth lecture tells us (in fine), “einen philosophischen Kunsttrieb, wie es einen poetischen gibt” (an artistic impulse for philosophy, just as there is a poetical one).’^[38] Now, Derrida finds much to critique in Schelling’s notion of the Ein- und Allheit of the university, its gathering and totalising movements, not to mention its naturalism, organicism and vitalism. But he explains that his plans for the Collège International de Philosophie are in one sense more Schellingian than Kantian, particularly as concerns

a place of poetics and of artistic performativity, of departitioned philosophy, and so forth. But there is something very anti-Schellingian about them as well. For the principle of uni-formation or uni-totality can also be worrisome, both from Kant’s point of view and from our own present perspective. As we will see, the State can surreptitiously recover in such a principle all its power, the very power of totality.^[39]

As I mentioned above, Heidegger saw scientism and humanism as belonging to one and the same movement, but sought to counter these through a different gathering of being and logos, a gathering which Derrida’s career-long reading of Heidegger sought to problematise. But Heidegger nonetheless always linked the question concerning the thing to poetics. This is at the heart of Derrida’s own The Thing seminar, which is itself ultimately a comparative literature seminar and not a critical philosophico-scientific return to things themselves. As Derrida explains,

It would be a matter here not of swinging the pendulum the other way to return to a naïve referentialism operating within the sacrosanct signifier-signified-referent trinomial (let us understand here the real thing, the thing equalling the real), but of reelaborating this entire problematic on text, on the Heideggerian text or on the Pongian text, on that of Blanchot, on Blanchot’s récits.^[40]

Much of contemporary scholarship on Derrida, particularly since the publication of Life Death (1975-1976), has focused on deconstruction’s relationship to the natural sciences; this was at the heart of Francesco Vitale’s influential work on Biodeconstruction, and can be seen in the recent work of Jonathan Basile, Deborah Goldgaber and Adam R. Rosenthal, much like Christopher Johnson, Christopher Norris and Arkady Plotnitsky a generation before, who were held in high esteem by Derrida. But it’s interesting that La Chose, almost entirely contemporaneous with Life Death, concerns something wholly otherwise. At bottom, the literary and the poetic for Derrida point to something beyond the reversals between the thing-in-itself and the thing-for-us, the noumenal and the phenomenal, beyond naïve, scientistic realism and correlationism. Derrida explains in a 1989 interview that the literary ‘shows nothing without dissimulating what it shows and that it shows it.’^[41] The literary in this sense thus recuses the amphibology between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the thing and its showing, and opens onto ‘a nothing which counts, which in my view counts a lot,’^[42] the nothing of the-thing-that-is-not, autre chose, l’achose, etc. La Chose is indeed contemporaneous with the Du droit à la littérature seminar (1978) – Derrida even wanted to publish them together. As he explains, I cite this in the intro to Dearth 1, the Kantian or correlationist question ‘concerned science (under what conditions are science or an object of science or experience as bound to a synthetic a priori judgement possible), this question also concerned the possibility of philosophy or metaphysics, or further still aesthetic judgement in general, but it never concerned something like literature.’^[43] One should also note that Derrida’s reading of Mallarmé in “The Double Session”—a poet also of importance to Meillassoux—was first developed in a 1968-69 seminar called Literature and Truth. The two-year Theory of Philosophical Discourse seminar (1969-71) on metaphor and materialism is likewise where Derrida first formulated his thoughts on a khōra irreducible to mythos or logos; khōra also being important to Grant’s reading of Schelling. And if we recall that Harman deems aesthetics as first philosophy, I’d be very reluctant to characterise SR as scientistic across the board; again, even Brassier identifies a necessary ‘shuttling’ between scientific and non-scientific images in order to properly think extinction.

TC: Next, a difficult but surely inevitable question about meeting, in the 2020s, the ethical call ‘to let nature be nature, let nature be nothing.’ Ingolfur Blühdorn’s recent work is concerned with the increasingly unignorable ‘glass ceiling’ of mainstream environmental politics, the impossibility of its gaining support for green measures when they begin to be seen to threaten given modes and norms of consumer society, even when these are also widely known to be unsustainable. How would you see the arguments in SR and your reading of deconstruction as reaching and affecting a less-specialist audience? How might one, for example, meet the challenge of giving an invited talk on Dearth to, say, interested members of the UK Green Party?

PL: I guess I’d start by stressing that Dearth is a specialist and technical, but also rather experimental work of philosophy. And I side with Harman when he says that he doesn’t think clarity is the most important or interesting thing about doing philosophy. I know it’s a risk, but it’s where I’m happiest writing and thinking, and I believe one needs to be honest with oneself about such things. It’s why I have a serious issue with what we in the UK call ‘impact,’ the mandate that academic research must be of some economic, social or policy-based value to nonacademic ‘stakeholders.’ That’s not to say I don’t see the value of engaging people and causes outside the university, but I think we have to be careful in how we formulate such demands from academic research, and not just from philosophy. This is something that Derrida discusses in his critique of la finalisation of research—translated in English as ‘end-orientation’—building on similar arguments by Kant, Schelling and Heidegger. As Derrida defines it, ‘the finalisation of research, finalised research (not so long ago, we said applied research), is research that is programmed, oriented, organised its view of its utilisation – technical, economic, medical, military.’^[44] Now, this recherche finalisée is opposed to so-called recherche fondamentale, allegedly disinterested research such as pure mathematics or physics, philosophy, he adds, being the paradigmatic case of such foundationalism or fundamentalism. But of course, the opposition between finalised and fundamental research doesn’t hold up for Derrida, as ‘fundamental’ research can always be reengineered into use-value for the military-industrial complex, not just physics, biology and medicine, but ‘artistic creation, as one says, literary theory and finally, since everything I have just named involves it at every instant – philosophy. It can always be of use.’^[45]

By contrast, what Derrida envisioned for the International College of Philosophy (which was open to all, academics and nonacademics alike), was a new ‘community of thought’ that would question the very opposition between fin and fond, end and ground. It would interrogate even the Principle of Reason that Heidegger saw at the foundation of the modern university, the Satz vom Grund, the Grund that constitutes ‘fundamental research.’ And I’d say that Dearth is itself at bottom a problematisation of ground, and an attempt to rethink or reimagine nature from out of this abyssal dearth of ground, the unthinged, unconditioned, unbedingte nature of the thing. Derrida says in ‘The University Without Condition’ (Die unbedingte Universität as it’s translated in German) that the task of the humanities of tomorrow—the posthumanities, why not—is to

produc[e] events (for example, by writing) and by giving rise to singular œuvres (which up until now has not been the purview of either the classical or the modern Humanities). With the event of thought constituted by such œuvres, it would be a matter of making something happen to this concept of truth or of humanity, without necessarily betraying it, that is, to the concept that forms the charter and the profession of faith of all universities.^[46]

Maybe Dearth was my attempt to write such an œuvre, not for a second assuming I could measure up to what Derrida is proposing here, but rather only hesitantly, modestly trying to write something different, something not only unfinalisable, with all the professional risks involved, but also ungroundable.

These concerns do translate to a more pragmatic level for me, which ties into my own paradoxical anti-intellectualism as an academic. I’ve been saddened to see the Green socialist parties I always vote for in Canada and the UK increasingly lose support due to infighting and lack of focus, reformulating environmentalism more as a pet cause of the professional managerial class, alienating the working class, and unwittingly reinstating the liberal humanist subject it claims to critique. On this point, I’m both very close to and very distant from Jason W. Moore’s work on the Capitalocene, for example when he writes that the view of climate change as anthropogenic by academics and major environmental organisations in fact serves to smuggle in a bourgeois humanism. And while such views may well be critical of capitalism, he explains, capitalism only

manifests as a subset of a general category, Humanity. In a breathtaking instance of the ‘ideological unconscious,’ even many socialists accept Man and Nature as innocent descriptive categories. They are anything but. These are fetishes, ahistorical and asocial ideological constructs, ‘ruling ideas’ invented through capitalism’s becoming a biogeological force – and refined ever since. Man and Nature…drip with blood and dirt; far from merely cultural expressions, they have been crucial instruments of bourgeois ideology and the endless accumulation of capital from the very beginning.^[47]

Personally, I absolutely do believe that anthropocentrism lies at the root of the environmental crisis. I think that technocapitalism is structured by anthropocentrism—like Heidegger, I think they form one and the same system—and that its ubiquity enables that anthropocentrism to run roughshod over the entirety of the planet’s living and non-living matter. I think any other economic system founded upon a similar anthropocentrism with that wide a reach would ultimately reach similar destructive effects on nature. But of course, following Derrida again, these fundamental questions on the essence of humanity always risk being reabsorbed into capitalist end-orientation, as I think Moore would agree here. Blühdorn’s claim that ‘democratic procedures, which environmental movements had always regarded as an essential tool for, and prerequisite to, any socio-ecological transformation, now suddenly appear as one of its main obstacles’^[48] says something similar. Now, what Derrida calls democracy to come is certainly irreducible to any existing forms of democracy, but we must again be careful here. Even when such discourses claim to be revolutionary, Derrida writes, they do not trouble ‘the most conservative forces of the university…The academic landscape accommodates such types of discourse more easily within its economy and its ecology (my emphasis), however, if it does not simply exclude those who raise questions at the level of the foundation or nonfoundation of the university.’^[49] A lot of so-called ‘critical’ environmental humanities and posthumanities likewise find themselves quite easily recuperated into this conservative bourgeois humanist ‘ecology’ precisely for that reason, into what Blühdorn calls ‘the environmental state’ in distinction to an eco- or green state.

And not just in the university. I do think that left Green politics have a huge PR problem at the minute. Let me give a personal example. As a child, my family would spend our summers in a little cottage in a small, beautiful but very economically disadvantaged village in Québec, where my mother’s side of the family had set up around 1850. I was always fascinated by the natural knowledges that the people there held; where in the creek was the best place to catch catfish, and where was best for smallmouth bass, the migration patterns of deer, the right years for coppicing (cutting trees to the stump to foster new shoots), the plant remedies, none of which seemed to be written down anywhere. I remember going back when I was around 18 and asking my second cousin about his fishing, noticing the creek overgrown with algae blooms, and him shrugging and telling me c’t’un lac mort; it’s a dead lake. Bluntly, I don’t know how these people would have reacted to a Green representative telling them that their mourning for so-called ‘nature’ was really due to their preconceived notions of gender, their racism or their enthusiasm for colonialism, but I can be fairly sure they wouldn’t vote for them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a hundred percent in favour of a more intersectional account of the environmental crisis. I agree that we mustn’t ‘compartmentalise’ environmental issues from social ones. And yet, I think some compartmentalisation is necessary to avoid total paralysis, not just for pragmatic but for metaphysical or ontological reasons. I think the view of ecology as implying that ‘everything is everything’ may once have been emancipatory but no longer fulfils that function. It’s become a massive alibi for evading any ecological responsibility while feigning profundity and sensitivity, and I think that’s what makes it so enticing for the university and centrist politics. So what can the speculative realist interruption of correlationism teach a non-specialised audience? Well, I’d say it’s a broad invitation to take yourself out of the picture. That’s nature, as I cite Bill McKibben in the prologue, ‘we have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it, there is nothing but us.’^[50]

TC: The recurrent reference in Dearth is to an inceptual correlationism in Western philosophy, with references to the ‘epoch of Western metaphysics’ and so on. The question is always latent here: does SR’s ‘opening of Occidental thought to its other’^[51] also relate to non-Western traditions of thought? And what could such a relating mean if it were to be more than a sort of intellectual briefing?

PL: I think that there’s a lot of space for SR to engage non-Western philosophical traditions as it continues to grow. But Harman wrote quite early on about medieval Arabic philosophy, and continues to do so in his latest book, Waves and Stones, and Morton has explored resonances between ecological thought and Buddhism in many works, for instance ‘Buddhaphobia: Nothingness and the Fear of Things’ in the triple-authored Nothing: Three Inquiries into Buddhism. But what might it mean to carry on this comparative analysis beyond what you call an ‘intellectual briefing?’ Well, there’s a passage in Heidegger’s travel journal Sojourns (which I examine in Volume 2) where, as his boat approaches Rhodes off the coast of Asia Minor, Heidegger affirms that ‘the confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] with the Asiatic element was for the Greek Dasein a fruitful necessity.’^[52] This confrontation today involves the destiny of the Western world itself, ‘as the entire earth—and not only the earth any more—is enclosed and penetrated by the radiation zones of modern technology and the atomic fields that technology has activated.’^[53] I take Heidegger here to mean that comparative philosophy can’t remain at the level of mere conceptual comparison; it must allow one to take up the task of philosophy from a different starting point, open up a new, other beginning for philosophy. But I don’t know if one can call that ‘relat[ing] to non-Western traditions of thought.’ Here again, the non-relational would demand a certain ‘priority,’ and not just to guard against whatever risk of ‘appropriation’; this would determine ‘whether the East could be for us another sun-rising of light and clarity, or rather whether these are illusionary lights that feign the revelation to come from there and thus are nothing more than historical fabrications artificially sustained.’^[54]

This practice of taking up a foreign tradition in a transformative manner is beautifully exemplified in the fearlessness in the Kyoto School’s approach to Western philosophy. And it’s in this spirit that I’ve been working on a new book tentatively titled Ecologies of Emptiness: Cosmic Pessimism and the Kyoto School, which builds on the brilliant work of Eugene Thacker—often associated with SR—who briefly engages Nishida Kitarō and Nishitani Keiji in his three-volume The Horror of Philosophy. There’s a fascinating move in Japanese philosophy that, unbeknownst to me while I was writing Dearth, differentiates a relative nothing from an absolute nothingness. This is something I track throughout the various SR attempts to think beyond the correlationist closure of Western philosophy: Brassier’s distinction between the non-being of thinking and the being-nothing of being, Meillassoux’s between le rien and le néant, Morton’s between the oukontic and meontic nothing, and so on. Nishida contrasts a relative nothingness, still thought with respect to being, within which the world of the subject-object correlation is ‘emplaced,’ and an absolute nothingness (zettai mu) within which both being and thinking are themselves emplaced. Nishitani likewise attempts to overcome the relative nihility (kyomu, 虚無) of nihilism by way of an absolute emptiness (ku, 空). As Nishida succinctly puts it, ‘I think that we can distinguish the West to have considered being [有] as the ground of reality, the East to have taken nothingness [無] as its ground. I will call them reality as form and reality as formless, respectively.’^[55] Now, reality as form comes quite close to what we call the subjective phenomenon, the thing-for-us, and so on. But it’s not enough to turn our attention to its reversal in terms of an objective thing-in-itself, which would still belong to a certain correlationism; we need to go deeper towards reality as formless to reach the thing without us, the-thing-that-is-not, Autre chose, etc. For Nishida, the Brahminic religion that gave way to Buddhism states that ‘there must be even a denial of all things. This meant an absolute negation-qua-affirmation. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, it attained to the philosophy of 色即是空,空即是色 (“phenomenal being, precisely as it is, is emptiness; emptiness, precisely as it is, is phenomenal being”).’^[56] Here, Nishida is echoing a passage from the Diamond Sutra that ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form,’ but more specifically intends the absolutely contradictory self-identity—the différance, why not—between form or being (within which the reversals between thing-for-us and thing-in-itself occur), and emptiness or nothingness, taking place without ‘us.’ As he puts it in ‘Human Being,’

the world that merely confronts us as cognitive epistemological object is not the truly objective world. However far one might pursue such thinking, the world will never be more than a merely external world; it would necessarily be no more than something like a world of the Kantian thing in itself. The truly objective world must be a world that absolutely negates us, but at the same time is the world from which we are born.^[57]

This is why Nishida’s later work always seeks to move from the formed to the forming, the created to the creating, the made to the making, to disclose the thing’s poiesis—and as we just noted, poiesis is essential to Derrida’s own understanding of the Thing—a move Nishida sees reflected in the Greek notion of physis. Like Meillassoux, Nishida distinguishes three worlds: the world of matter, the world of life, and the historical world. But the historical world is in fact the world of historical nature: ‘the site wherein each thing is absorbed and from which it is born. It is a self-determination of absolute nothingness.’^[58] In the historical world, he writes in ‘The Self-Identity and Continuity of the World,’ ‘nature does not come down to material nature: it must be the ground of these relations.’^[59] But this ground, like the Unbedingte, unconditioned, unthinged condition of the thing, is determining without a determiner. ‘I believe that here, nature is conceived of in a profound and broad sense. […] An infinity of things must be born from there. In my mind, the Latin natura and the Greek physis already bore this signification.’^[60]

In closing, I’d say that Speculative Realism’s potentially greatest contribution to philosophy is how it furthers the deconstructive project of opening Western thought to its other, whether it does this by showing how philosophers within this tradition give us the tools to resist correlationism—Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Badiou, Laruelle—or by attempting the step beyond on its own. I think a fascinating area for future research would be to consider how the caesurae, gaps, insterstices, interruptions, and withouts theorised by SR appear in systems of indigenous philosophy, and what consequences might follow for an environmental thought better attuned to the planet’s biocultural diversity. Some 60% of the planet’s 7200 or so languages are indigenous, but are almost always assimilated to the same holistic, processual cosmologies, to one singular ‘indigenous thought.’ I think that SR gives us good reasons to resist this assimilation for metaphysical reasons, and enables us to consider different worldviews in their singularities. As with deconstruction, it invites us to cherish an alterity that isn’t my alterity, a difference that isn’t my difference. And I think that’s what environmental thought and ecotheory need most of all. Without that, again, there’s nothing but us, and that’s not a world anything can survive in.

1. Ray Brassier, ‘I am a Nihilist Because I Still Believe in the Truth,’ Kronos – metafizyka, kultura, religia (2011). ↑

2. Charlie Johns and Hilan Bensusan, After Speculative Realism (London: Bloomsbury, 2025). ↑

3. Philippe Lynes, Dearth: Deconstruction after Speculative Realism, Volume 1: The Nothing and Nothingness (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2025), 5. ↑

4. Ibid. ↑

5. Jacques Derrida, ‘On Reading Heidegger: An Outline of Remarks to the Essex Colloquium,’ Research in Phenomenology 17 (1987), 174. ↑

6. Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug & Others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 139. ↑

7. Jacques Derrida, La Raison universitaire, unpublished. Session 3, page 6. ↑

8. Derrida, La Raison universitaire, session 3, page 7. ↑

9. Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Discourses of the End’; trans. Philippe Lynes, Oxford Literary Review 47.2 (2025). ↑

10. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?; trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 243. ↑

11. Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason; trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 72-73. ↑

12. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 50. ↑

13. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 105-106. ↑

14. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 107. ↑

15. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 107. ↑

16. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 3. ↑

17. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 231. ↑

18. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 231. ↑

19. Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I; eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 15. ↑

20. Jacques Derrida ‘Force of Law’ in Acts of Religion; ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 243. ↑

21. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine; trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 96. ↑

22. Jacques Derrida, ‘Une Europe de l’espoir,’ Le Monde diplomatique, November 1, 2024, 3. ↑

23. Jacques Derrida, Penser c’est dire non (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 26. ↑

24. in Lynes, Dearth, Volume 1, 122n25. ↑

25. Graham Harman, Speculative Realism: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 33. ↑

26. Graham Harman, Art and Objects (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 9. ↑

27. Derrida, Penser c’est dire non, 84 ↑

28. Graham Harman, Skirmishes with Friends, Enemies and Neutrals (Earth: Punctum Books, 2020), 111. ↑

29. In Jacques Derrida, Life Death; trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 221. ↑

30. Derrida, Life Death, 229. ↑

31. Alain Badiou, ‘Preface’ in Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency; trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), vii. ↑

32. Jacques Derrida, Clang; trans. Geoffrey Bennington and David Wills (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021, 152. ↑

33. Jacques Derrida, On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy; trans. Christine Irizzaray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 167-68. ↑

34. Derrida, Life Death, 235. ↑

35. Jacques Derrida, Advances; trans. Philippe Lynes (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2017), 47-48. ↑

36. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave, 2007), 97. ↑

37. Graham Harman, Skirmishes: With Friends, Enemies and Neutrals (Earth: Punctum Books, 2020), 157. ↑

38. Derrida, Eyes of the University, 69. ↑

39. Derrida, Eyes of the University, 287n9. ↑

40. Jacques Derrida, La Chose. Séminaire (1975-1977); ed. Philippe Lynes (Paris: Seuil, forthcoming). ↑

41. Jacques Derrida, ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’ in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 48. ↑

42. Jacques Derrida, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, 73. ↑

43. Derrida, Du droit à la littérature, unpublished. Cited in Lynes, Dearth, Volume 1, 4. ↑

44. La Raison universitaire, session 2, page 1. ↑

45. Derrida, La Raison universitaire, session 2, page 3. ↑

46. Jacques Derrida, ‘The University Without Condition’ in Without Alibi; trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 204. ↑

47. Jason W. Moore and John Peter Antonacci, ‘Good Science, Bad Climate, Big Lies: Climate, Class, and Ideology in the Capitalocene,’ 291. ↑

48. Ingolfur Blühdorn, ‘The Legitimation Crisis of Democracy: Emancipatory Politics, The Environmental State and the Glass Ceiling to Socio-Ecological Transformation,’ Environmental Politics 29.1 (2020), 40. ↑

49. Derrida, Eyes of the University, 149. ↑

50. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York, Anchor, 1989), 58. ↑

51. Lynes, Dearth, Volume 1, 5. ↑

52. Martin Heidegger, Sojourns: The Journey to Greece; trans. John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 25. ↑

53. Heidegger, Sojourns, 25-26. ↑

54. Heidegger, Sojourns, 26. ↑

55. Nishida Kitarō, Fundamental Problems of Philosophy; trans. David A. Dilworth (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1970), 237. ↑

56. Nishida, Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, 240. ↑

57. Nishida Kitarō, Ontology of Production: Three Essays; trans. William Haver (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 164. ↑

58. Nishida Kitarō, Projet de système philosophique: Essais philosophiques I; trans. Jacynthe Tremblay (Éditions Mimesis, 2024), 237. ↑

59. Nishida, Projet de système philosophique, 83. ↑

60. Nishida Projet de système philosophique, 84. ↑