Abstract
Although it can be somewhat difficult to identify the enemy of environmental politics, it is even harder to identify who the friend of the environment could be. We are all complicit in both preserving and harming the environment but how we do so has become a question for politics. This chapter interprets the environment as those places where we encounter the natural world and try to understand our place in it, also where increasingly, we are asking the strange, politically charged question, what does the environment want? Here we can think of ourselves in two ways: either as passive in the face of environmental catastrophe or interpassive in that as good, environmentally aware citizens we are potentially able to respond positively. Yet either way, in the end the environment doesn’t need us. Instead its presence as a political force hystericizes us to pursue new and ever better ecological Masters.
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Notes
- 1.
Written by Guy Debord in 1971, A Sick Planet, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 1971; repr. 2008), was intended for publication in Internationale Situationniste 13, but never appeared.
- 2.
Debord, Sick Planet (2008), 77.
- 3.
Robert Pfaller, On the Pleasure Principal in Culture: Illusions Without Owners (London: Verso, 2014).
- 4.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde. (London: George Bell, 1896; repr. New York: Prometheus Books; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), § 150.
- 5.
Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton and Norton, 1966; repr. W. W. Norton, 2002).
- 6.
David Pavón-Cuéllar, “Extimacy,” in Encyclopaedia of Critical Psychology, ed. Thomas Teo (New York: Springer, 2014), 662.
- 7.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1969–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton; London: Routledge, 1992), 22.
- 8.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (London and New York: Routledge, 1993; repr. 1997), 146.
- 9.
See Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker and Humboltm 1976); and Political Theology: Four Chapter on the Concept of Sovereignty trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
- 10.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 18.
- 11.
Fredric Jameson, “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 27, no. 9 (1982): n.p., https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/27/jameson.html (accessed May 23, 2020).
- 12.
Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with Neighbours (London: Penguin Press, 2016).
- 13.
Slavoj Žižek, On Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: St. Martins Press, 2008), 19.
- 14.
Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
- 15.
Aaron Schuster, “Beyond Satire: The Political Comedy of the Present and the Paradoxes of Authority,” in Sovereignty Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment, ed. William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 168.
- 16.
Jean-Luc Marion, Étant donné. Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997); and the English translation, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
- 17.
See Eric Santner’s, “Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Freud, and the Matter of the Neighbor,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 76–133; On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
- 18.
Slavoj Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, 134–90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 134–90; and Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail.
- 19.
Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting,” in The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 9–10.
- 20.
Greta Thunberg, at the 2019 United Nations’ Climate Change Action Summit in New York, said: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” A more critical and sophisticated response is provided by Slavoj Žižek, “Yes, It Is a Climate Crisis. And Your Tiny Human Efforts Have Never Seemed So Meagre”, Independent, September 4, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/amazon-fires-rainforest-capitalism-bolsonaro-climate-crisis-zizek-a9091966.html (accessed May 23, 2020). This is an interesting comparison, as if Greta’s words alone would make a difference to the crisis we are facing (notwithstanding that she is commanding us to act rather than speak), whilst Žižek at least alerts us to how our tiny human efforts are no more than a virtue-signalling acting out .
- 21.
Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17 (1972–1973): 151–65.
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———. 2011. The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2013. Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Freud, and the Matter of the Neighbor. In The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, 76–133. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schmitt, Carl. 1976. Der Begriff des Politischen. Berlin: Duncker and Humboltm.
———. 2006. Political Theology: Four Chapter on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schuster, Aaron. 2019. Beyond Satire: The Political Comedy of the Present and the Paradoxes of Authority. In Sovereignty Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment, ed. William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster, 161–250. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2013. Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence. In The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, 134–190. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2016. Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with Neighbours. London: Penguin Press.
———. 2019. Yes, It Is a Climate Crisis. And Your Tiny Human Efforts Have Never Seemed So Meagre. Independent, September 4, 2019. Accessed May 23, 2020. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/amazon-fires-rainforest-capitalism-bolsonaro-climate-crisis-zizek-a9091966.html.
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Zeiher, C. (2021). Love Thy Enemy: Environment(al) Politics. In: Burnham, C., Kingsbury, P. (eds) Lacan and the Environment. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67205-8_2
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