Contemporary French Environmental Thought in the Post-COVID-19 Era

✍ Scribed by Keith Moser

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 255
• Series: Sustainable Development Goals Series, 13
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Contemporary French Environmental Thought in the Post-COVID-19 Era is focused on the fields of biosemiotics, linguistics, ecocriticism, and environmental ethics. Closely aligning with Sustainable Development Goal 13.1, Keith Moser’s study aims to strengthen resilience to climate-related hazards by drawing on ecological theories developed by French philosophers in conversation with biosemiotic principles. Not only does the novel theoretical framework offered by biosemiotic interpretations of the universe and our place in it represent an indispensable conceptual tool for understanding the unprecedented medical challenges at the dawn of a new millennium, but it also beckons us to think harder about the environmental crisis that threatens the continued existence of all sentient beings who call the biosphere home. This book also highlights the richness, diversity, and utility of the ecological theories developed by the French philosophers Michel Serres, Edgar Morin, Jacques Derrida, Dominique Lestel, and Michel Onfray in addition to how they engage with biosemiotic principles. Taken together, the book probes the scientific, linguistic, philosophical, and ethical implications of biosemiotic theories in a post-pandemic world from an environmental and medical perspective.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Praise for Contemporary French Environmental Thought in the Post-COVID-19 Era
Contents
About the Author
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Chapter 2: Michel Serres’s Biosemiotic Thought: Writing the “Immense Rhapsody” or “Great Story” of Life
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Contextualization of Michel Serres’s Decentered Ecological Thought
2.3 Re-envisioning Ubiquitous “Background Noise” as the “Score of Nature”
2.4 Listening to the Universal Symphony of Life and Recounting the “Great Story” from a Biosemiotic Lens
2.5 Understanding the Human Primary Modeling Device of “Language” as a Form of Over-Compensation or Evolutionary Adaptation
2.6 Conceiving a More Sustainable Roadmap at the Dawn of the Anthropocene/Technocene: Serres’s Semioethical Reflections
2.7 Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Edgar Morin’s Complex, “Ecologized” Thought: The Ubiquity of “Informational Capital” on the Battlefield of Life in the COVID-19 Era
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Contextualization of Edgar Morin’s Ecological Thought
3.3 Morin’s Concept of “computo” and the Omnipresence of “informational capital”
3.4 Morin’s Biosemiotic Description of DNA as a “communicative tissue” and the Autopoietic, Semantic Theory of the Cell
3.5 Morin’s Promotion of Endosemiotic Principles and the Notion of the Informational Battlefield in the COVID-19 Era
3.6 Morin’s Semioethical Reflections About the Ecological Crisis and the Expansive Human Umwelt
3.7 Morin’s Promulgation of a New Form of Historiography and Conception of the Divine
3.8 Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: The Biosemiosic Gaze of the “wholly other” and the Philosophical Exercise of “limitrophy” in Jacques Derrida’s Posthumous Philosophy
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Contextualization of Derrida’s Posthumous Philosophy
4.3 The Biosemiosic Gaze of the “wholly other”
4.4 Derrida’s Deconstruction of Outmoded Cartesian Dualities
4.5 Derrida’s Promotion of the Philosophical Exercise of “limitrophy”
4.6 Derrida’s Semioethical Reflections: “The war without mercy against the animal”
4.7 Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Michel Onfray’s Biosemiotic, Materialistic, and Post-Monotheistic Reworking of Human and Other-Than-Human Semiosis
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Contextualization of Onfray’s Environmental Thought
5.3 Onfray’s Biosemiotic Deconstruction of the Judeo-Christian, Cartesian Vision of the “animal”
5.4 Onfray’s Promotion of Semiotic Materialism: Matter as a “communicative tissue”
5.5 Onfray’s Sensualist Rehabilitation of the Human Body: A Communion with the Elemental Sublime
5.6 Onfray’s Reflections About the Ubiquity of Human Semiosis: The Advent of Hyperreality
5.7 Onfray’s Nuanced Semioethical Perspectives and Rejection of Deep Ecology
5.8 Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Dominique Lestel’s Pioneering Biosemiotic Vision of “the Enchanted Space of Trans-Specific Communication” within Hybrid Societies
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Contextualization of Lestel’s Environmental Philosophy
6.3 Lestel’s Biosemiotic Deconstruction of the Animal-Machine Hypothesis and Cartesian Dualities
6.4 Lestel’s Expansion of the Concept of an Umwelt in Hybrid Communities or Mixed Societies
6.5 Lestel’s Exploration of the “Enchanted Space of Trans-specific Communication”
6.6 Lestel’s Reflections About the Creation of “Fully Mixed” Societies
6.7 Lestel’s Nuanced Biosemiotic Vision of Climate Change as an Existential Crisis
6.8 Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Conclusion
References
Index