Epilogue

entanglement and eco-responsibility

Herbert Spiegelberg

pp. 233-235

in: Meliz Ergin, The ecopoetics of entanglement in contemporary Turkish and American literatures, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This chapter argues that the notion of an ecological text and its entangled taxonomies demand a revised readership, one that prevents us from provoking irreversible ruptures in the intricate ecological text and enables us to envisage ecological forms of co-inhabitation. If there is no biological, ontological, or philosophical context that can escape the movement of différance, then the ontology of being is a relational ontology of being-with-one-another and of contact. Contemporary critics and poets replace the human (master) narrative with a more complex account of material and discursive forces, and radically change the way we conceptualize ontic and semantic boundaries. Entanglements regenerate the ecological text toward a future without a teleological content. Rather than reacting to this futurity with anxiety, we may benefit from contemplating the ethical implications of this eco-ontological ambiguity.