Introduction : deconstruction and twenty-first century thought, part 1 : the new realisms

Abstract

In his 2018 article ‘État present: Post-Deconstructive Thought and Criticism’, Ian James identified four thinkers whose reception had produced what he called a ‘post-deconstructive naturalism’ in contemporary scholarship–François Laruelle, Jean-Luc Nancy, Catherine Malabou, and Bernard Stiegler–each of whom had ‘taken up and developed deconstruction in ways which echo Derrida’s thought but which, at the same time, emerge as distinctly un-Derridean’ (James 2018, 85). For James, the ontological, materialist, and realist concerns shared by these four had served to further open the humanities onto engagements with the natural sciences. Questions of physical materiality, energy, organic life, ecology, and artificial intelligence now dominate scholarship in animal studies, ecocriticism, new materialism, posthumanism, and speculative realism. Since 2018, however, three of these thinkers have passed away: Stiegler in 2020, Nancy in 2021, and Laruelle in 2024. [extract]