Responsibility and justice at the edges of the human Responsibility and justice at the edges of the human. Gaia and deconstruction
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Abstract
In this article, I aim to analyze the notions of responsibility and justice in times of climate change. First, I argue that the responsibility characterized by Derridean deconstruction, heir to the metaphysics of Levinasian alterity, be founders in an impossibility that can no longer motivate any modification of the law—not so much because the other as other is an uncontainable surplus , but because undecidability and the undeconstructible must presuppose the construction of what "other" means. Indeed, non-human and non-animal entities such as plants, protists, bacteria, and abiotic agencies can now occupy the place of alterity—thus, it would make no sense to propose respect toward them. I then present a conception of justice oriented toward assemblages, drawing on the work of Latour, Haraway, and Tsing, and contrast it with the descriptions of Margulis and Lovelock, for whom the human does not seem capable of destroying life on the planet, but only the life of certain living beings.
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