Lacan and the Environment

Description

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. Acknowledgments Praise for Lacan and the Environment Contents Notes on Contributors List of Figures 1: Introduction Bibliography Part I: Lacanian Theory 2: Love Thy Enemy: Environment(al) Politics Bibliography 3: “Staying with” the Anxiety: The Ecological objet petit a of Inuit Throat Singing The Ecological Foundation of Lacan’s objet petit a Between Two Others: Tanya Tagaq’s Art Conclusion Bibliography 4: Confinement and Jouissance in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” The Story of Bartleby The Language of Non-Preference I Prefer Not to as Affirmation of Negation Bartleby’s Confinement as a Symptom of Jouissance Jouissance or Beyond the Pleasure Principle Jouissance of Transgression Bibliography 5: Lacan’s Trash Talk: Three Objects for the Internet What Is the Garbage in Lacan’s Seminars? Barnard vs Žižek: en-corps The Internet Is Garbage Bibliography Part II: Our Knowledge on Climate Change 6: The Psychotopology of Climate The Line Chart and the Scientific Visualisation of Climate Change Euclidean Space, Topography, and Universal History Psychotopology: An Alternative Modality of Climate Change? Bibliography 7: In Defence of the Subject Bibliography 8: Enjoying the Heat: Anxiety, Fantasy, and Doomsday Prepping Fort-Da Apocalypse and the Real Silicon Valley in the Shadow of Death Not-Without-Survival Conclusion: A Place for Anxiety Bibliography Part III: Lack of Knowledge 9: Does the Animal Desire? Is the Animal that Enjoys the Animal that Speaks? Desire-In-The-World Bibliography 10: Aokigahara Forest: An Aesthetic Space of Residual Surplus Aokigahara Forest and Its Phantasmatic Representations of Suicide The Aesthetic of the Forest: das Ding or Its Sublimation Reducing the Thing to Produce Excess (Surplus Jouissance) and Loss (Residue) within Discourse Towards a Psycho-Ecological Relationship with Nature Bibliography 11: “Some people like…”: Misapprehension and Effacement of Jouissance in Climate Hostile Advertising Bibliography Part IV: End of the World 12: Psychoanalysis at the End of the World A False Sense of Occasion A Psychotic Hypothesis: From the Museum to the Mausoleum Filmography Bibliography 13: From the Sublime to the Hysterical Sublime: Reading the End of the World Against the Singularity How the Signifier Falls Into the Signified The Most Sublime Hysteric From The Hysteric’s Sublime … … To the Hysterical Sublime Bibliography 14: From Capitalocene to Anthropocene: The Feminine Counter-Ecology of Snowpocalypse Films The Frozen Capitalocene in Quintet The Day after the Capitalocene in The Wandering Earth Conclusion Filmography Bibliography 15: Self-Destruction and the Natural World The Lure of Starry Skies Extreme Satisfactions From Anorexia to Immediacy Bibliography 16: Afterward: COVID-19 and the Environment Bibliography Index