Abstract

Life on earth is currently approaching or undergoing what has been called the sixth mass extinction, also known as the Holocene or anthropocene extinction. Unlike the previous five, this extinction is due to the destructive practices of a single species, our own. Along with the up to 50% of plant and animal species facing extinction by the year 2100, as many as 90% of the world’ s languages are expected to meet the same fate by this time. Biocultural diversity is a recent appellation for thinking together the earth’ s biological, cultural and linguistic diversity, the related causes of their extinctions and the related steps needing to be taken to ensure their sustainability. In this dissertation, I turn to the work of Jacques Derrida to propose a notion of ‘ general ecology’ as a way to respond to this loss, to think the ethics, ontology and epistemology at stake in biocultural sustainability and the life and death we differentially share on earth with its others. Through readings of a variety of contemporary continental philosophers, I develop the interdisciplinary applicability of general ecology in the areas of translation studies, biopolitics, science and technology studies and ecolinguistics. My hope is to give readers not only an appreciation of the ecological and biocultural stakes of deconstruction, but to provoke in them new ways of thinking a more just sharing of the earth.