58 (3/2020), pp. 1–1 The Polish Journal DOI: 10.19205/ of Aesthetics Philippe Lynes * World, Earth, Planet: A Time and Place for Nihilation in Ecocriticism Abstract This essay argues that opening a space and a time for the questions of ecological, terres- trial and cosmic nihilation in ecocriticism, one that takes seriously the end of the relational notion of ‘world,’ implores us to imagine or invent alternatives for a more just living- together. While speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology in particular, have made important advances in describing the withdrawal of the real from its relations, I suggest that deconstruction affords us a more radical way to think this withholding, particularly where it intersects with the literary. Drawing from two unpublished seminars of Derrida’s, I contrast speculative realist criticism in supernatural horror, romanticism and science fiction with a notion of habituating oneself to nothing; not to the thing, but to its radical and irreversible annihilation. Keywords Deconstruction, Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, Object-Oriented Ontology, Speculative Realism Since its inception, deconstruction has operated by reinscribing carno- phallogocentric distinctions into broader contexts, distinctions including human and animal, life and death, organism and environment, but also phi- losophy and literature. As early as his 1968 “Différance,” Derrida suggested that the thought of nature de-naturing itself, or physis in différance, consti- tuted the site for a reinterpretation of mimēsis, and therefore the literary, outside of its opposition to the natural. (Derrida 1982, 17) A few years later, in Dissemination’s “Hors livre,” the solicitation of physis as mimēsis came to s * Durham University Department of English Studies Email: philippe.g.lynes@durham.ac.uk