Jacques Derrida’s work on deconstruction is regularly understood as depicting a world of forces in conflict, in which all entities and identities emerge from the play of the tensions between force and counter-force, power and counter-power. Much more rarely, however, have any attempts been made to explain Derrida’s ‘ontology’ or his ‘physics,’ if you can call it that, in terms of energy. One might imagine that such an account would closely resemble a fragment from Nietzsche’s The Will to Power:
And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? […] This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; […] as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms.
However, the energetics of deconstruction are somewhat more complex. The monster-world of energy Nietzsche describes is ‘a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income.’ Its oikos, the Greek word for ‘household’ that gives us ‘economy’ and ‘ecology,’ is one of perfect circulation in a complete whole without remainder.
Derrida, however, invites us to think both this economic or ecological circulation, aimed at the indefinite conservation and restitution of energy – this is what, drawing from Georges Bataille, he calls ‘restricted economy’ – and a movement of aneconomic ‘expenditure without reserve, […] irreparable loss of presence, […] irreversible usage of energy.’ General economy, or what I’ve elsewhere called Derrida’s general ecology, is the system that takes into account both this economic circulation and this aneconomic expenditure. Think of it as a system that considers the first two laws of thermodynamics; restricted economy corresponds to the first, the law of conservation of energy, while general economy also engages the second law, the irreversibility of natural process which leads to an increase in entropy, and ultimately to the heat death of the universe.
Now, I’m often asked how this aneconomic expenditure of energy can possibly be useful for ecological and sustainable thinking: aren’t our environmental and energy crises precisely a result of excess and wastefulness? However, I believe that our thinking of sustainability is severely hampered by conceiving of the ecological in terms of circulation, closure, and reappropriation. This kind of thinking underlies what in environmental economics is called ‘weak sustainability’: the idea that natural and human capital are ‘fungible’ or interchangeable, such that a loss in natural capital can still be deemed sustainable if counterbalanced by a gain in human capital.
Strong sustainability, however, suggests that nature has a value that is incommensurable with human capital. Weak sustainability, in other words, depends on nature having a certain calculability, whereas strong sustainability affirms the properly incalculable value of nature. The aneconomic moment of deconstruction has several such names throughout Derrida’s work, one of which is the gift: a gift given out of duty, out of a demand for restitution, a gift that is conditional is really no gift at all. To truly be a gift, it must be given outside and beyond every horizon of calculability and conditionality, the real gift can and must only be unconditional. An energetics of deconstruction thus yields a thought of nature as a gift, one that mandates the preservation of its incalculability and unconditionality.
A further difficulty with elaborating such an energetics of deconstruction is the loaded metaphysical baggage that comes from the Greek term energeia. His early book Of Grammatology constitutes a thorough deconstruction of Rousseau’s metaphysics of nature, whose notions of birth and rebirth, essence, origin, and presence are grounded ‘on the classical metaphysics of the entity as energy, encompassing the relationship between being and time in terms of the now as being in action (energeia).’ Derrida elsewhere likewise lists energeia alongside terms like actus, dynamis, entelecheia, potentia, and possibilitas, all of which he claims are bound by what he calls ‘the powerful concept of the possible that runs through Western thought, from Aristotle to Kant and Husserl (then differently to Heidegger), with all its meanings, virtual or potential: being-in-potential, in fact, dynamis, virtuality (in its classic and modern forms, pretechnological and technological), but also power, capacity, everything that renders skilled, or able, or that formally enables, and so on.’
Against this binding of energeia to the possible, indeed to power, Derrida invites us to seek a disempowering, undecidable, indeed impossible movement at the heart of deconstruction. This is why Derrida expresses his uneasiness with notions of ‘force’ and ‘power’ altogether. As he explains, ‘there is never anything called power or force, but only differences of power and of force. […] In short, it seems to me that one must start, as Nietzsche doubtless did, from difference in order to accede to force and not vice versa.’ To think difference at the origin of force is indeed to think a differantial energetics, where energy is at once conserved and expended without reserve, yielding a certain energetics of powerlessness, irreducible to the opposition of force and counterforce, power and counter-power.
An energetics of deconstruction, then, affords us a different conception of sustainability than that offered by New Materialism. Jane Bennett’s conclusion to her well-known Vibrant Matter challenges the well-known environmentalist maxim of ‘treading lightly on the earth.’ As she explains,
If I live not as a human subject who confronts natural and cultural objects but as one of many conative actants swarming and competing with each other, then frugality is too simple a maxim. Sometimes ecohealth will require individuals and collectives to back off or ramp down their activeness, and sometimes it will call for grander, more dynamic and violent expenditures of human energy.
Derrida’s energetics, by contrast, allow us to think treading lightly on the earth precisely as an aneconomic expenditure of energy, and precisely not as one of human activity. The aneconomic energetics of deconstruction instead reveal the fundamental passivity humans share with all living beings on earth, our shared finitude and vulnerability on a planet in the midst of an energy crisis.
Phillipe Lynes