How would Derrida understand ‘sustainability’?

At first glace, a silly question. What on earth does deconstruction, or dead French philosophers who spent their lives in literary theory or in the post-structuralist stratospheric cerebral world, have to do with that most vogue of political touchstone issues - the green.

Maybe it is a silly question, but it is one I believe there is mileage in. Although, I haven’t found anything that Derrida has written specifically on this topic, can we seek to apply the principles of deconstruction to sustainability? Or can we ensure that deconstruction is sustainable?

Again and again in deconstruction, we run up against a brick wall, Derrida repeatedly reminds us of the folly of principles. That as soon as anything becomes anywhere close to a principle, a standard, belief, a law even. That is that very point at which deconstruction becomes, or ought to become active. Taking root, seeking to disturb and dislodge prior assumptions and universals.

Probably the best book I've yet read on deconstruction is (not by Derrida for sure!) Jack Caputo's Deconstruction in a Nutshell. In he attempts to explain what deconstruction is in a nutshell (duh!), before realising that deconstruction is all about nuts and the breaking of nutshells to get to the nuts.

So, even if we could pithely define what deconstruction is all about, that definition would then need a whole deconstruction to act upon it. It seems that undefinability is built into the very concept.

Into the fray, we have sustainability, a concept we also have yet to define.

It’s a rather widely used term these days. The anthropologist Malkowski talked about the ‘phatic’ meaning of words. For a word to become phatic, it is over used so often, and use in so many different contexts, that it loses all point of referent in meaning. The word becomes phatic, essentially rendered meaningless. Granted this, sustainability is generally used to connote some variable on the ability to sustain. To keen going, to hold up. In environmental terms, it basically refers to ‘how much we can get away with’. To keep society going, whilst always questioning where we need to question and reappraise the demands we exert on our surrounding environment.

So, both terms 'sustainability' and 'deconstruction' are equally hard to define, but for different reasons. Maybe we can begin to broadly see the connection between the two concepts?

But is this so in practice? Are the issues linked in the realm of the tangible? Well, no. So much of sustainability, and Green activism is about principles, and ways of carrying out ones actions in accordance with some higher authority. Zizek’s point here is perhaps useful to bear in mind. He talks of the transition from religion to ecology as the ultimate arbiter of our morals/decisions. Where in Derrida’s writings he heralds the return of the transcendent (the waiting, messianic and ‘to come’, the hote even), can we then talk of the sustainability being such a transcendent/other in our decisions, or ability to act?

Sustainability is that which seeks to sustain. To keep up with. To carry on society, without undermining the natural basis upon which that is built.

One of Derrida’s lesser known points about deconstruction is that it is life-affirming. It seeks to unsettle and dislodge laws and precepts that can become stifling and staid. Life, as we all know, requires, nae implies, movement. Death, is that condition at which no further movement is possible. Sustainability likewise, seeks to keep ‘on the move’, to enable the conditions under which life can live in full abundance, both across space and time. So sustainability, like deconstruction, seeks to keep institutions, societies and people fully alive. They both seek to unsettle that which can stifle life.

Both are also concerned with continuation. They’re much more Trotskyite than Leninist, if you'll pardon a wee far left analogy. The act of deconstruction is certainly not ‘once and for all’, neither also is that of sustainability. Both are ongoing processes, daily slogs, where one is called to wake up, shake up to the realisation that we have far more agency that we though possible, and that life to the full is a readily graspable option. Although, also recognising that once that is grasped, we need to go through the whole deconstructing/sustainablising process all over again. Trotsky over Lenin, continual revolution.