We are happy to invite you to a lecture that is part of the new event series THINKING NATURE that will take place at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, 2025–2026 (more information below), organised by Eva-Maria Aigner and Ralf Gisinger.

The first lecture will take place on Friday, June 6, 6-8pm, online and in a hybrid setting, Room 3A (NIG):

Philippe Lynes (Durham University): "Anecological Dwelling: Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot"

Abstract: In the second year of his The Thing seminar (1976), Jacques Derrida undertakes a comparative analysis of Martin Heidegger's "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" with the literary work of Maurice Blanchot. For Derrida, if Heidegger's bridge signals a gathering of two shores, a gathering wherein mortals may learn to properly dwell in saving the earth, the bridge for Blanchot would hint at an infinite distancing of the two shores, a devastation that knows no salvation. This interplay of the economical and the aneconomical, the ecological and the anecological would organize all of Derrida's readings of Heidegger and Blanchot almost twenty years later in the Secret et témoignage seminars. In unfolding these readings, we will ask what it might mean, in reconsidering the relations and non-relations between thinking and nature, to dwell anecologically? Might the anecological open onto a new thinking that leaves nature to its secrecy without us?

Bio: Philippe Lynes' research situates itself at the intersections of the environmental humanities, continental philosophy and ecocriticism. He has held an Addison Wheeler Fellowship with the Institute of Advanced Study and the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, and held the Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Chair in Environmental Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Lynes is the author of the two-volume Dearth: Deconstruction after Speculative Realism, forthcoming with Northwestern University Press in 2025 and 2026, and Futures of Life Death on Earth: Derrida's General Ecology (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018). He is co-editor (with Matthias Fritsch and David Wood) of Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy, (Fordham University Press, 2018) and (with Timothy Clark) of the Oxford Literary Review special issue "What Might Eco-Deconstruction Be?" (2023) Lynes is also a translator and editor of French philosophy and literature, notably of the work of Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot. He is associate editor of the journal Derrida Today, and one of the lead editors of Blanchot's literary estate. He is currently working on two books, Ecologies of Emptiness, on the Kyoto School, and an introductory book on The Environmental Posthumanities.

There will be two short responses to the lecture by Eva-Maria Aigner and Noemi Call (both University of Vienna).

We will send out the zoom-link closer to the lecture.
Here you find more information about the event series:

Poststructuralism has long been accused of a general indifference to questions of materiality and natural philosophy. From this perspective, and in light of the urgent philosophical problem of the looming climate crisis, poststructuralist theory does not seem ideally suited to contribute to the question of nature. In recent years, however, numerous authors have shown how poststructuralist theories can be made fruitful in ecology, geo-philosophy or a philosophy of nature.

The lecture series, organised and curated by Eva-Maria Aigner and Ralf Gisinger (Research Group “Poststructuralism, Gender Theory, Psychoanalysis”), brings together some of the most intriguing contemporary theorists in this field who will be invited to the Department of Philosophy Vienna to give their philosophical perspectives on “Thinking Nature” in the Anthropocene.

Events 2025