Desiring Life: Colonial Violence, the Anthropocene, and the Life/Nonlife Boundary Thinking with Derrida

Abstract

This article explores how Derrida's questioning of the life/death dichotomy intersects with anticolonial and feminist perspectives about the violent tracing of this boundary. From this point of departure, I want to reflect on how Derrida’s unsettling of this dichotomy can open a space to trouble the desires for life and the terror for the inert at the centre of colonial/modern ontologies. His reflections about life and death seem to open avenues to address an un-appropriable negation, a constitutive absence, and otherness at the core of these desires for aliveness. Therefore, the main aim of this essay   is to explore how this way of unsettling the life/nonlife dichotomy can encourage (or not) a reflection on how colonial forms of violence are at the root of desires for life and their capture of being. In the first part of the paper, I bring Sylvia Wynter and Elizabeth Povinelli into conversation, looking into the violent capture of the space of being, life and the human that sustains the modern/colonial order and its centring around Man. Following this, I engage with Derrida’s unsettling of the notion of life and consider the ways in which it can interrupt the logics of this capture and open a space to address the forms of violence that sustain them. In the last section of the paper, I offer a reflection on haptics (touch) through the perspectives of Hortense Spillers and Lorena Cabnal, whose anticolonial and feminist thought highlights the possibilities and limitations of Derrida’s thought to address the violences that permeate the Anthropocene’s intimate entanglements. In this sense, I present here a brief reflection on Derrida’s relevance to thinking through and with the violent entanglements of the “Colonial Anthropocene” (Gómez-Barris).