Presentation of Philippe Lynes

In my Ph.D. thesis, General Ecology: Life Death on Earth in Derrida and Others, I turn to the work of Jacques Derrida to propose a notion of ‘general ecology’ as a way to think the ethics, ontology and epistemology at stake in biocultural sustainability and the life and death we differentially share on earth with its others.​ Life on earth is currently approaching or undergoing what has been called the sixth mass extinction, also known as the Holocene or anthropocene extinction. Unlike the previous five, this extinction is due to the destructive practices of a single species, our own. Along with the up to 50% of plant and animal species facing extinction by the year 2100, as many as 90% of the world’s languages are expected to meet the same fate by this time. ​Through readings of a variety of contemporary continental philosophers, I develop the interdisciplinary applicability of general ecology in the areas of translation studies, biopolitics, science and technology studies and ecolinguistics. My hope is to give readers not only an appreciation of the ecological and biocultural stakes of deconstruction, but to provoke in them new ways of thinking a more just sharing of the earth.

I am the co-editor (with Matthias Fritsch and David Wood) of Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2017) and currently co-editing and translating (with Ellie Anderson) a two-volume set of Derrida's untranslated interviews (in preparation for the Posthumanities series with University of Minnesota Press). My work and translations have appeared in the Oxford Literary Review, Pli, and The Ecolinguistics Association.

You can find me on Academia​.