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THE PALGRAVE LACAN SERIES
SERIES EDITORS: CALUM NEILL · DEREK HOOK
Series Editors
Calum Neill
Edinburgh Napier University
Edinburgh, UK
Derek Hook
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh, USA
Jacques Lacan is one of the most important and influential thinkers of
the 20th century. The reach of this influence continues to grow as we
settle into the 21st century, the resonance of Lacan’s thought arguably
only beginning now to be properly felt, both in terms of its application
to clinical matters and in its application to a range of human activities
and interests. The Palgrave Lacan Series is a book series for the best new
writing in the Lacanian field, giving voice to the leading writers of a new
generation of Lacanian thought. The series will comprise original mono-
graphs and thematic, multi-authored collections. The books in the series
will explore aspects of Lacan’s theory from new perspectives and with
original insights. There will be books focused on particular areas of or
issues in clinical work. There will be books focused on applying Lacanian
theory to areas and issues beyond the clinic, to matters of society, politics,
the arts and culture. Each book, whatever its particular concern, will
work to expand our understanding of Lacan’s theory and its value in the
21st century.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans-
mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
v
Praise for Lacan and the Environment
“Lacan and the Environment is today’s version of what Hegel called “infinite
judgment,” the assertion of the link between two dimensions which appear
totally different. 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, Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana and
International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the
University of London, UK
“The defining crisis of our time is ecocide. Upending conventional distinctions
between exterior and interior, psychoanalysis proves an unexpectedly rich
resource for thinking and acting against destruction, displacement, and extinction.
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 Urban and Environmental Change,
York University, Toronto, Canada
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Clint Burnham and Paul Kingsbury
ix
x Contents
Index301
Notes on Contributors
xvii
1
Introduction
Clint Burnham and Paul Kingsbury
C. Burnham (*)
English Department, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada
e-mail: clint_burnham@sfu.ca
P. Kingsbury
Faculty of Environment, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada
e-mail: kingsbury@sfu.ca
but they are also a threat. They smother us—this is the mother that
Jacques Lacan tells us from whom we have to extricate ourselves, the
maternal crocodile or she-wolf or praying mantis. And these figures, in
Lacan, drawn as they are from the animal world, are neither patently
misogynist nor unproblematic turns to nature. Rather, they indicate a
fundamental antagonism or contradiction in our attitudes to the person
who gave birth to us and nurtured us. We resent the earth, because we
depend on it.
And the earth, it turns out, depends on us. Again, our attitude is
ambivalent. To grapple with this ambivalence, we can work through some
of the logic of the earth as child via Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the fan-
tasy “a child is being beaten.”1 Remarking how often his patients “confess
to having indulged in the phantasy: ‘A child is being beaten,’” Freud lists
a variety of permutations: from a boy being beaten by the father, to a boy
being beaten by the mother, to a girl being beaten by the father. Moreover,
Freud wants us to attend to disavowed enjoyment. What does this mean
for the environmentalist subject? What are the unconscious anxieties and
fantasies that subvent contemporary environmentalism? How can such a
politics be confronted in terms of its enjoyment, its jouissance, in order to
understand better why, and how, we oppose resource extraction?
That is, thinking of the environment as mother or child—or, rather,
pointing out that our conflicted cathexes in family dynamics underly our
attitudes towards nature and the climate crisis—suggests a certain psy-
choanalytic universality. We all, presumably, have mothers, and are or
were children. But psychoanalysis is also the science of the particular, and
we each have specific ways in which we act with respect to the environ-
mental crisis; we each have specific ways in which we relate to others in
this particular moment and locales. We act in different ways: we recycle,
or we prep for an apocalypse, we compulsively check that our pet has
enough water, or we save for a Tesla (or a Hummer).2 And we congratu-
late ourselves on our recycling, our environmental “beautiful soul,” as
Hegel put it. We are pragmatic, like doomsday preppers (as Calum
Matheson describes in his chapter), or we even enjoy our large vehicles
and consumerism. But much of this activity is surely a matter of keeping
busy, of obsessively doing nothing—and less such a diagnosis seem beside
the point, it is worth keeping in mind the verbal attacks on climate
1 Introduction 3
activist Greta Thunberg for her Asperger’s syndrome, which she refers to
as her “superpower” for how it helps her attend to her politics.3
The “beautiful soul” adheres to the masculine logic of the exception—I
am a good person because I recycle. This logic, as worked out in Lacan’s
formula of sexuation in Seminar XX, depends for its self-congratulation
on others who do not recycle. The social link is thus fraught. A different
logic, or subjectivity, is at work with climate activisms and protests. Or,
rather, while the “beautiful soul” certainly is to be found, the protestor is
more precisely a hysterical subject, appealing to the master: government,
corporations.4 Environmentalism is a social activity: which means that
for Lacan the problem is others, both the big Other, or authority figures,
and the small other, or other people.
How we think about the environment, about nature, in the age of
climate crisis and the Anthropocene, has psychoanalytic resonances: we
take an unconscious enjoyment in not acting, or we wonder why others
(climate deniers, corporations, and governments) do not listen to science,
do not act. Lacan can help us work through these conflicted desires and
anxieties. Consider a basic tripartite division in Lacanian theory: the
Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The Imaginary environment is
the space around us, as Lacan remarks in the “mirror stage” essay, describ-
ing how the child “playfully experiences the relationship between the
movements made in the image and the reflected environment.”5 That is,
here the environment is an image, it is constitutive of the ego and of our
narcissistic relation with others. The environment is a site of play, of a
“flutter of jubilant activity” as Lacan later says, but also of alienation and
aggressivity.6 These dualisms of affect are crucial if we are to understand
the differing ways in which we relate to and enjoy the environment, and
if we are not to descend into moralistic dismissals of those with whom we
disagree. The environment, or nature, in terms of the imaginary is also
nature as beauty, breathtaking, even sublime.
In terms of the Symbolic, which is to say order, the Law, and language,
the environment is that as described and analysed by science: categorisa-
tion, classification, measurement, and exploration. But present-day sci-
entific claims, or what Lacan refers to as the University discourse, suffer
from a credibility problem. As the Wikipedia page for Slavoj Žižek points
out, today’s “postmodern subject is cynical toward official institutions,
4 C. Burnham and P. Kingsbury
names desire’s inability to really come full circle and gives it a specific locus
in the libidinal economy. As a radical exteriority, the “thing” nevertheless
forms the central point around which the whole economy revolves and at
which desire aims, a “topological” paradox for which he forges the term
“extimité.” While the “thing” indicates the point at which desire aims, as if
at “itself,” it is also what would destroy it as soon as it was reached. This is
why the “thing” is an indispensable element in the cartography of desire.9
The sardine can is garbage: it denotes a loop from the fish (or nature),
and their extraction and processing into a canned good, which is then
discarded (the packaging—perhaps it fell off the side of a truck or boat).
Does garbage see us? Petit-Jean thinks not, and Lacan soon concludes
that he himself, as an intellectual intruding on this dangerous manual
labour, is out of place in the picture. Perhaps the sardine can is also out of
place—or is it? It calmly floats in the water, glitters off the sunlight, and
yet it is waste—industrial waste. Metonymically, it connects to today’s
concerns with the plastic gyre in the North Pacific—a patch of microplas-
tic waste the size of Texas, we are told. But the visual matters as much as
place: we or Lacan could see the sardine can, and yet now we cannot see
the microplastics or nanoplastics that permeate even sea salt and fish
guts—we are talking about anxieties of scale and the gaze.
It is also important to note that Lacan gestures to a history of industri-
alisation of the fisheries: “At that time, Brittany was not industrialized as
it is now. There were no trawlers”—the oceans presumably could not be
over-fished as they have been in the past few decades.11 And this is con-
nected directly to the workers’ danger. The logic is this: first, we over-fish
the oceans, then, or as part of that process, we despoil them with plastic,
fishing nets, and other detritus. In some ways, our attitudes towards
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Kun käyn sisälle tai ulos, kuljen joka kerta hänen ohitseen, ja
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suvaitsee tulla ovelleni?
Heinäkuun pilviset yöt ovat synkät; syksyn taivas on
pehmeänsininen; kevään etelätuuliset päivät ovat levottomia.
21
22
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"En tiedä, millaisen villin unikin viiniä lien juonut, niin että silmiini
on syttynyt tämä mielipuolisuus."
"Oh häpeä!"
"Oh, häpeä!"
"Hyvä, toiset käyvät tietään, toiset jäävät paikoilleen, toiset ovat
vapaita, toiset vangittuja — ja minun jalkani ovat minun sydämeni
taakasta uupuneet."
24
"Kestäisin ne."
25
26
Puhu minulle, lemmittyni! Kerro minulle sanoin, mitä lauloit.
27
28
Salli minun vain halkaista sen pilvet ja levittää siipeni sen auringon
autereessa.
29
Onko totta, onko totta, että lempesi vaelsi yksin läpi aikakausien ja
maailmojen minua etsien?
30
Ellet voi lempiä minua, armas, suo anteeksi minulle minun tuskani.
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Olen tehnyt sen niin usein, että luulet minun pian palajavan.
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