Ecology/Echography

Abstract

This essay deploys the theoretical frames of inheritance and echography to recover and redefine the meaning, for environmental philosophy, of Martin Heidegger’s storied hut in the Black Forest in Germany, where large portions of Being and Time and other major texts were written. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, the essay insists that a deconstructive reading is crucial to recovering and sustaining the significance for environmental philosophy of Heidegger’s work, a reading quite different from those found in Deep Ecology. In that context, the essay transforms the hut into a kind of spectral presence that is put into dialogue with other, later “echoes”: the poetry of Paul Celan, the work of experimental film-maker and artist James Benning, and the author’s own current art project, focused on a clearcut site in the mountains of Colorado.