| Summary: | This article explores the question of the limits of ethical responsibility in the context of the contemporary ecological crisis. Drawing centrally on a selection of writings by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and, in the second half of the article especially, Timothy Morton, it attempts to show how the conceptualization of the Earth/environment/biosphere (tropes for the ‘ecological whole’) as an object of ethical concern is problematic and exacerbated in the context of the posthumanist critique of anthropocentrism. If a generalized anthropization of the planet represents the ‘ethical failure’ of the Earth by ‘the human’—the material mark of which is the geo-physical terraforming associated with anthropocene—who or what, might be anticipated to be able to bear, or to live-up to, the ethical responsibility for its continued survival? The article critically brings elements of the philosophy of these thinkers into conjunction to discuss how the future of life/death might be properly considered an ethical matter at all, or alternatively, as the ‘end’ of ethical responsibility. Whilst Morton appears to recognize the potential of deconstructive thinking and Levinasian ethics for ecological thought, it is argued here that his reading of these is at odds with the object-oriented ontological thinking he more stridently identifies with. This messy collision in Morton’s ecological theory is used here as a springboard to explain how a strategic reprise of a certain humanism—or theoretical human exceptionalism—might be key to appreciating how humans taking responsibility for the current ecological crisis is the condition of a futural ethical openness to the non-human.
|
|---|