With a response by Oisín Keohane: “Acclimatising oneself to nothing?”
3-5pm, 11 March
Dalhousie Building, Room 2F15
University of Dundee
And online on Teams: SCCP Seminar – Phillippe Lynes book launch | Meeting-Join | Microsoft Teams
The first of two volumes exploring Jacques Derrida’s prefiguration of speculative realism, The Nothing and Nothingness examines the transcendental naturalism of Ray Brassier and Iain Hamilton Grant and the speculative materialism of Quentin Meillassoux. Philippe Lynes proposes nothing less than a radical reconceptualization of deconstruction as a call to bear witness to nothingness: let the earth be the earth, let nature be nature, and leave them to their reality, secrecy, and withdrawal without us.
Dearth: Deconstruction After Speculative Realism argues that Derrida’s seminars on Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot, La Chose (The Thing), anticipated many of the philosophical, literary, and aesthetic questions animating speculative realism today: an anti-anthropocentric critique of Kantian correlationism; an overcoming of the apocalyptic nihilism of extinction through a deeper, affirmative habituation to nothingness; and poignant reflections on the literary and poetic aspects of living and dying in impossible worlds. His is an anti-correlationist plea that resounds now more urgently than ever.
Books will be available at the launch for the low price of £20. Cash or card accepted.
Bio for the author Philippe Lynes:
Lynes is a researcher with the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and the Philosophy programme at the University of Dundee, and a visiting scholar with the School of Modern Languages & Cultures at the University of Glasgow. Lynes is the author of the two-volume Dearth: Deconstruction after Speculative Realism (Northwestern University Press 2025 and 2026) and Futures of Life Death on Earth: Derrida’s General Ecology (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is the editor (with Matthias Fritsch and David Wood) of Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2018) and of two special issues of the Oxford Literary Review: A Green Blanchot Revisited (2025) and What Might Eco-Deconstruction Be? (with Timothy Clark, 2023). He is currently working on three books: Ecologies of Emptiness: Cosmic Pessimism and the Kyoto School, an introductory book on Environmental Posthumanities, and Teaching in the Ruins (co-authored with Dominic Smith).
Bio for the respondent Oisín Keohane:
Keohane is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. Previously, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. His first book, Cosmo-nationalism (Edinburgh University Press) examines Derrida’s seminars on philosophical nationalism. His next book, The Philosophical Nude (forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2027) is about the nude as a genre of art and its relationship to the idea of nudity in philosophy using five central naked figures – Truth, Aphrodite, Christ, Muhammad, and Nature. His other ongoing book project examines the globalisation of English (‘Anglobalisation’) and issues of translation from a philosophical and political point of view. He has published in numerous journals, such as Derrida Today, Paragraph and Film-Philosophy, as well having book chapters in such volumes as the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy and Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference.