Jefferson’s Ecologies of Exception

Abstract

In the age of our current world picture, the momentum of globalization has vastly redefined our geopolitical constitution through an aggressively reductionist ethos that has mediated the ways in which humans relate to the nonhuman world. We find ourselves in the midst of an ecologically precarious moment in which borders are increasingly redefined and threatened by environmental disasters. Despite the ways in which we have sought to implement order and space both nationally and globally, the environment, it seems, cannot be contained or defined. So if we are to think about geocriticism and what it means to examine geocritical practices in literary scholarship, I suggest that we should more carefully consider the relationship between geocriticism and ecocriticism, articulating and examining the myriad ways in which theories of space and geography conjoin with theories of ecology. In this respect, I illustrate the socio-political importance of developing an ecocritical geoontology—an ecologically centered examination of geography. I define geoontology as a critical examination of how Being has been defined and coded spatially according to the hegemonic truth discourse of Western modernity. I derive my definition of “Western modernity” from William V. Spanos, who describes it as a “truth discourse whose origins lay in a totalizing metaphysical interpretation of being that spatialized, structuralized and, more precisely, territorialized temporality (the difference it always already disseminates) in the name of a transcendental principle of identity—an order tethered to an absolute Origin, the anthropologos.”⁴

One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside. Once it crosses over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more and more deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty—non-political life—is immediately transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn.

—Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life ¹

The earth is in effect one world, in which empty, uninhabited spaces virtually do not exist. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.

—Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism ²

Conceiving of the planet as “a lump of minerals,” instead of as “a complex web of life,” capitalism relies on colossal technical “gimmicks” to simplify and homogenize life on earth, thereby “undoing the work of organic evolution” and leading to biospheric breakdown. Capitalism is “the absolute incarnation of social evil,” because of its competitiveness, its egoism, its commitment to endless growth, and its arrogant view that humans can remake the natural world. [ . . . ] If current trends go unchecked, we are told, the future holds two grim scenarios: either nature will take “revenge” on our profligate behavior, or capitalists will replace faltering biological systems with synthetic substitutes.

—Michael E. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity ³