Abstract
This chapter develops an eco-deconstructive account of normativity in relation to well-known but divergent accounts of the emergence of ‘value’ in nature. Value has been argued to emerge with the individual capacity for suffering, with individual self-valuing, or with holistic ecological entities (species, eco-systems, etc.), these three often being seen as at odds with one another. I argue that an entity can become individualized, and thus acquire individual ‘value,’ only in on-going confrontations with other beings and the
wider environment. Each living being can be seen as valuing its own life, then, only in response to a vulnerable exposure to its environment that it cannot just claim as its own:
its self-affirmation necessarily affirms others and its environment. In this way, the three
sources are interconnected in an aporetic matrix of ecological normativities.