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Papers by Michael Peterson

Toxic Timescapes, 2022

This paper appeared in the collection Toxic Timescapes (Eds. Müller and Ohman Nielsen, Ohio UP 20... more This paper appeared in the collection Toxic Timescapes (Eds. Müller and Ohman Nielsen, Ohio UP 2022). This chapter addresses the concept of toxic time-scapes through a reading of American nuclear-waste policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the works of Gramsci and Derrida. The goal here is to take a careful look at how a long-lived, highly contagious toxic site, like a nuclear waste repository, operates as "toxic" in a number of interconnected ways. Accordingly, this chapter is organized so that each section

Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Ethics, 2018

This chapter was published in the collection Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Ethics... more This chapter was published in the collection Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Ethics (eds. Fristch, Lynes, and Wood, Fordham UP 2018). In this piece, I explore the structural similarities between nuclear waste and the permanent markers that will be constructed at the site of nuclear waste repositories in terms of survival and the possibility of intergenerational responsibility. A careful reading of Jacques Derrida’s ‘Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments’ reveals, I argue, that the logic of survival and decay functions as an elaboration or recontextualization of the key Derridean concept of ‘iterability’ and that this logic is at play in an understanding of both radioactive materials and any possible system intergenerational communication. Further, the operation of the logic of survival and decay destabilizes the Environmental Protection Agency’s strategy to allow future generations to bear “full responsibility” for the radioactive waste they would inherit on the condition that they will have been sufficiently informed.

Conference Presentations by Michael Peterson

International Association for Environmental Philosophy, 2023

This paper features a reading of a federal regulation regarding justifiable assumptions when pred... more This paper features a reading of a federal regulation regarding justifiable assumptions when predicting future states of affairs in the context of the recertification of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a disposal site for defense-related transuranic wastes. This paper argues that federal regulations stipulating the assumption of stability with respect to land ownership patterns and population density for up to 10,000 years is symptomatic of the insistence on not only institutional survival over that amount of time, but the survival of present configurations of injustice and social inequity that enabled that site's selection in the first place.

Praxis in Marx and Marxisms Conference, 2022

This paper was presented at the Praxis in Marx and Marxism Conference at the Institut of Philosop... more This paper was presented at the Praxis in Marx and Marxism Conference at the Institut of Philosophy in Prague, CZ, 2022. This paper argues that there is an important connection to be established between the early Gramsci’s philosophy of action and critique of utopian thinking and his later work on language. This connection is best understood as a common concern with the anachronistic. The young Gramsci argues that principles, rather than demands for particular content, must ground political action. This is because demands for particular content risk becoming impossible or irrelevant and so undermine the actions for which they act as an aim. Principles, on the other hand, can survive the vicissitudes of contextual transformations and so can be inherited even as material demands change. The understanding of anachronism and inheritability remains operative in Gramsci’s later philosophy of language, his critique of artificial languages, and his understanding of translatable vs untranslatable language as it relates to creating possibilities for mass social transformation.

Derrida Today, 2022

This paper was presented online at Derrida Today, 2022. This paper seeks to situated the theme of... more This paper was presented online at Derrida Today, 2022. This paper seeks to situated the theme of forgiveness within an intergenetional ethical framework so as to interrogate the possibility and desirability of appealing to forgiveness as a relation linking the present generation to future generations, as in Pope Francis' and Boris Johnson's symmetrical statements threatening that inaction on climate change would render the present generation 'unforgivable'. Following the work on forgiveness undertaken by Jacques Derrida, we argue that forgiveness is an inadequate model for intergenerational responsibility insofar as acting in order to be forgivable amounts to acting in order to determine, in advance, which possibilities are open to future generations. If there is an imperative to act today to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, they must be motivated without foreknowledge of whether or not we shall appear to future generations as forgivable.

Donner le temps II Conference, Texas A&M, 2021

This paper was presented at Texas A&M in November 2021 at a conference organized around the relea... more This paper was presented at Texas A&M in November 2021 at a conference organized around the release of Jacques Derrida's Donner le temps II. This paper seeks to thematize the concept of inheritance as it appears in both Donner le temps II and in Derrida's Specters of Marx. At issue in both of these texts is Derrida's self-understanding of what it means to be an inheritor of Heidegger and Marx, respectively. As such, we establish here the groundwork to think a Derridean theory of inheritance as not only a structural designation but as a 'kind of first ethical and political principle,' to borrow Derrida's phrase.

International Association of Environmental Philosophy, 2017

In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Luce Irigaray famously writes: “Sexual difference is one of th... more In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Luce Irigaray famously writes: “Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue of our age […] Sexual difference is probably the issue of our time which could be our ‘salvation’ if we thought it through.” In an important sense, Irigaray’s oeuvre functions as an attempt to make good on the promise that a thinking through of sexual difference – a recovery of the multiplicity that has persisted sotto traccia in and through our socio-philosophical practices and determinations – could represent for us the opportunity to think otherwise. This paper proposes to think such a possibility in relation to an ethical and environmental problem that appears to us today as particularly intractable: long-term nuclear waste disposal. Put simply: can a thinking of sexual difference, guided by a reading of Irigaray, open up new possibilities in thinking the disposal of nuclear waste? I propose that Irigary allows us to think of this problem as one of ‘monolingualism,’ an exclusion of even the possibility of multiplicity that is both the method and telos of that patriarchal logic that cannot think difference. A logic that would be instantiated in both the waste itself and the warnings we could leave behind insofar as they determine the possible conditions of their reception.

Thesis Chapters by Michael Peterson

Half-Lives of Responsibility: Gramsci, Derrida, and Inheritance in Environmental Ethics, 2022

This is the first chapter of my dissertation Half-Lives of Responsibility: Gramsci, Derrida, and ... more This is the first chapter of my dissertation Half-Lives of Responsibility: Gramsci, Derrida, and Inheritance in Environmental Ethics. This chapter seeks to establish a survey of two issues: 1) the current conception of responsibility found to be operative across various contexts in intergenerational environmental ethics; and 2) the state of nuclear fission as a source of energy production in relation to intergenerational ethical commitments. In so doing, I argue that (2) demonstrates the inadequacies of (1). This is to say that the intergenerational ethical obligations that seem prima facie to follow from the use of fission and the waste that follows from this use cannot be expected to be met following a conception of responsibility that understands present generations to be responsible on condition that a minimum level of political, cultural, geological, and institutional continuity is met. The conception of responsibility under scrutiny is gathered from a variety of contemporary sources in environmental ethics and policy, including U.S. Department of Energy policy statements and intergenerational ethics handbooks for policy makers.