5 - Evolution and the ‘life’ sciences

Summary

Every system involving life or mind, or simulating life or mind, is an open system.

In biology there is an awakening tendency to inquire beyond the definitions which mechanism and vitalism have given for ‘life’ and ‘organism’, and to define anew the kind of Being which belongs to the living as such.

My own view is that deconstruction and everything else are ultimately contained by Darwin's tale – but that is another story and will wait for another day.

In their general approach, the preceding chapters have been for the most part ‘internal’ commentaries of specific texts and passages, ‘internal’ in the sense that they have studied Derrida's treatment of system and writing in its own terms, giving due attention to the specificities and peculiarities of Derrida's philosophical idiom. Reference to the wider context of contemporary thought, as outlined in the Introduction, has been at most brief and episodic. In this chapter, I shall begin by inverting this perspective, dealing in more detail with the aspects of contemporary thought which contain important parallels with Derrida's work. This will serve as a means of introduction to a reading of Glas, La dissémination, and some of the more recent publications.

In the Introduction, I argued that the general conversion to the linguistic paradigm in French philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s could not be properly explained with reference to the dual influences of Heidegger and structuralism alone.