Lacan and the Environment
Abstract
“This outstanding volume throws a new light not only on Lacan but also on environmental issues: we cannot really understand ecology without taking into account all the fantasies that overdetermine our approach to this topic.”
- Slavoj Žižek, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, UK
“These smart, urgent essays consider a broad range of cultural contexts, illustrate the centrality of fantasy, desire, and symbolization to ecological transformation, and should inspire and terrify readers of many stripes.”
- Anna Kornbluh, Department of English, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA
“This brilliant edited volume not only reveals the environment to be an enduring theme in Lacan’s oeuvre, but also rethinks and reworks Lacan environmentally, showing ‘nature’ to be a site of both play and anxiety, interiority and radical externality, pleasure and pollution. Our study of the environment will never be the same.”
- Ilan Kapoor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Canada
In this exciting new collection, leading and emerging Lacanian scholars seek to understand what psychoanalysis brings to debates about the environment and the climate crisis. They argue that we cannot understand climate change and all of its multifarious ramifications without first understanding how our terrifying proximity to the real undergirds our relation to the environment, how we mistake lack for loss and mourning for melancholy, and how we seek to destroy the same world we seek to protect. The book traces Lacan’s contribution through a consideration of topics including doomsday preppers, forest suicides, Indigenous resistance, post-apocalyptic films, the mathematics of climate science, and the relevance of Kant. They ask: What can you do if your neighbour is a climate change denier? What would Bartleby do? Does the animal desire? Who is cleaning up all the garbage on the internet? Why is the sudden greening of the planet under COVID-19 no help whatsoever?
It offers a timely intervention into Lacanian theory, environmental studies, geography, philosophy, and literary studies that illustrates the relevance of psychoanalysis to current social and environmental concerns.
Clint Burnham is Chair of the Graduate Program and Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, and President of the Lacan Salon, Vancouver, Canada.
Paul Kingsbury is Professor of Geography and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Environment at Simon Fraser University, and Vice President of the Lacan Salon Vancouver, Canada.
... The notion of total 'otherness' achieves its maximum when family members allow themselves to disconnect from any moral responsibility for what happens to 'it.' In and of itself, this moral chasm is humiliating (Burnham, 2021). To put it another way, the parent says it again and again: "if he could only comprehend us" (Kafka, 1915:76), and Grete begins to wonder, "How can that be Gregor?" ...
... Gregor elevates society above himself, reverting to the exploited laborer he used to be. The Lacanian triangle and the Freudian super-ego are viewed in this way (Burnham, 2021;Minar & Sutandio, 2017). ...
This research is focused on Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, which is described in the main character in Franz Kafka's novel The Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa is the main character of The Metamorphosis. Gregor was a traveling salesman who was the Samsa family's sole son and earner. He mysteriously transforms into a massive bug, causing him to be estranged from his family. The author finds out why Gregor’s family members do not care about him and can't perceive him as a complicated human being with his own needs. As a result, Gregor has been estranged from his family and himself. The author argues that Gregor has another alienation from his physical reality after the transformation. His family views him as a terrifying, unpleasant monster, as seen by their fear of his existence and their decision to get rid of him. Gregor, who suffers from humiliation, views himself in the same light. He and his family unwittingly reject Gregor's potential as an individual, making him feel alienated. This research aims to identify how Gregor's conditions make him feel alienated and the connection between his identity crisis and alienation, as depicted in The Metamorphosis. Although humans are free human beings, society contributes to the perspective of self-identity and the decision of their own goals.
This article presents a methodological argument for examining the affective dimensions of political identity formation, with a pivotal focus on the role of practice . Grounded in a psychoanalytically inspired discourse theory framework, it advocates for expanding research beyond textual sources to investigate the affective investment inherent in political engagement and the process of collective identity formation. Through an examination of two empirical case studies — the Just Stop Oil movement in the United Kingdom and the ascent of Javier Milei in Argentinean politics — the article proposes four principles to study the articulation of political identities through practice: Signifiers are not just words; beyond counting words; policy is central, and fantasy is a cipher. By underscoring fantasy as a critical dimension in identity formation and, suggesting that, by transcending the conventional Schmittian friend/enemy divide, novel avenues for analysing collective identities will surface.
This study is a critique of two overlooked shorts of Jia Zhangke, a leading figure from the sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers: Smog Journeys (2015) and The Condition of Dogs (2001). Contemplating the imminent demise of human and animal lives represented, it argues that the looming ecological crises in the films stress biological finitude to such an extent that fear and pity disavow the truth about capitalist co-optation. To understand capitalism’s operation behind a catastrophic Anthropocene, I put the films into dialogues with Lacan’s “University Discourse” and “Hysteric’s Discourse”, formal structures that challenge and reshape the immediate identification of a narrative. With their attention to signifiers and affect, these formal structures enable us to understand how images and sounds focalize the viewers’ experience of fear and pity while unearthing the truth about the foreclosure of capitalist ideology. But instead of performing a strictly close-reading of each film, my critique elaborates more on the very psychoanalytic logic of Lacan’s two structures. My wish is that it allows us to see how complex visual and acoustic experience could be in shaping our identification beyond socio-cultural reflections and pure aesthetics. Article received: April 23, 2021; Article accepted: June 21, 2021; Published online: September 15, 2021; Original scholarly paper
Consciousness raising seems to be the most pressing task facing any project for environmental sustainability today. A psychoanalytic interpretation of the climate crisis, however, reveals that a far more urgent challenge is recognizing that we might be deriving jouissance, or unconscious enjoyment, from the very worsening of the crisis. This article contends that videogames are the ideal medium through which to grasp the form that our unconscious enjoyment takes—and, if mobilized against self-destructive capitalism, the emancipatory form our enjoyment could take—in the Anthropocene. Drawing on an analysis of the videogame Donut County, it makes two psychoanalytic interventions in ecocritical theory. The first is that any theory of the climate crisis must account for the subject of the unconscious—not as a nature-dominating individual, but as a hole in material reality. The second is that any project for environmental sustainability must avow the subject’s death-driven enjoyment rather than repress or avoid it.
Toxic Temple pursues an interdisciplinary approach toanthropocenic issues in criticism and the arts. By integrating aesthetic andeducational perspectives, the book offers new approaches for understanding thecultural and environmental ramifications of the Age of Extinction.@font-face{font-family:"Cambria Math";panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:1;mso-generic-font-family:roman;mso-font-format:other;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0 0 0;}@font-face{font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:auto;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073786111 1 0 415 0;}@font-face{font-family:等线;mso-font-charset:134;mso-generic-font-family:auto;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-1610612033 953122042 22 0 262159 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:等线;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:EN-US;}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:等线;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:DE-AT;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}
Abstract The existence of nature is vehemently called into question in the Anthropocene. The standard image of nature as a pristine, harmonious, and stable background no longer holds, especially as ecological changes increasingly penetrate the collective consciousness. Consequently, there has been growing interest in the psychological effects of this end of nature. A recent wave of scholarship shows how climate change and the Anthropocene more generally affect people's daily lives and present significant threats to psychic well‐being. This paper follows on from these debates. In contrast, however, we ask if and how nature is still considered as providing a subjective sense of (ontological) security today. We argue that, even under postnatural conditions, nature still maintains an imaginary existence in the social reality of the subject. We address this argument empirically by focusing on everyday life perceptions of nature in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, and theoretically by following the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Drawing on image‐based interviews (photo‐elicitation), we demonstrate that a psychoanalytic approach to imaginary environments allows us to understand why people state that they love nature even though it does not exist. We show how this love works by pointing out how nature is considered as (m)other and, through this, engaged as a place to retreat and escape from the burdens of everyday life while being perceived from a certain distance. In conclusion, we emphasise the broader political consequences of the imaginary existence of nature and call for further engagement with the persistence of nature's fantasy in times when nature seems to no longer fit the purpose.
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