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“Staying with” the Anxiety: The Ecological objet petit a of Inuit Throat Singing

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Lacan and the Environment

Part of the book series: The Palgrave Lacan Series ((PALS))

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Abstract

This chapter argues that Jacques Lacan’s Anxiety establishes an ecological foundation for his concept of the object a. Dislocated from an organic environment into a symbolic one at birth, the subject can still detect its dislocation through the singular affect of anxiety. At a time of climate change, when humans need to figure out how to live ethically alongside the organic environment, anxiety offers an epistemological method for ascertaining the urgent necessity of this task. This chapter turns to Inuk multimedia artist Tanya Tagaq, whose work blurs the line between the human’s organic and symbolic environments, achieving a sense of dislocation in audiences, and producing anxiety with an ethical resonance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Seth Klein, “When It Comes to Climate Action, the Public Is Ahead of Our Politics: Analysis of National Climate Poll,” Policy Note, August 12, 2019, http://policynote.ca/climate-poll-2019 (accessed May 24, 2020).

  2. 2.

    Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 184.

  3. 3.

    Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3.

  4. 4.

    Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke UP, 2016), 144.

  5. 5.

    Haraway, Staying, 31.

  6. 6.

    Colette Soler, Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work, trans. Bruce Fink (London: Routledge, 2016), 19.

  7. 7.

    Soler, Lacanian Affects, 20.

  8. 8.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 1962–1963, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 89; emphasis in the original.

  9. 9.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 97.

  10. 10.

    Bruno Latour, “Waiting for Gaia. Composing the Common World Through Arts and Politics,” lecture, French Institute, London, November 2011, 2, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/124-GAIA-LONDON-SPEAP_0.pdf (accessed May 24, 2020).

  11. 11.

    Latour, “Waiting,” 9.

  12. 12.

    Latour, “Waiting,” 10.

  13. 13.

    Latour, “Waiting,” 9.

  14. 14.

    Soler, Lacanian Affects, 54.

  15. 15.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 327.

  16. 16.

    Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 11.

  17. 17.

    Drew Nelles, “Howl: The Rise of Tanya Tagaq,” Walrus, January 15, 2015, https://thewalrus.ca/howl (accessed May 24, 2020).

  18. 18.

    Julia LeConte, “Tanya Tagaq: Animism,” NOW Toronto, May 22, 2014, http://nowtoronto.com/music/album-reviews/tanya-tagaq (accessed May 24, 2020).

  19. 19.

    Herb Mathisen, “NOTY Shortlist: The Throat Singer,” Up Here, December 1, 2015, http://uphere.ca/articles/noty-shortlist-throat-singer (accessed May 24, 2020).

  20. 20.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Cambridge UP, 1988), 171; emphasis in the original.

  21. 21.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 199.

  22. 22.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 327.

  23. 23.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 326.

  24. 24.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 326.

  25. 25.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 326.

  26. 26.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 326

  27. 27.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 326–27.

  28. 28.

    Brian Robertson, Lacanian Antiphilosophy and the Problem of Anxiety: An Uncanny Little Object (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 173.

  29. 29.

    Robertson, Lacanian Antiphilosophy, 174.

  30. 30.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 326

  31. 31.

    Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 27.

  32. 32.

    Dolar, Voice, 28.

  33. 33.

    Soler, Lacanian Affects, 15.

  34. 34.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 160.

  35. 35.

    Soler, Lacanian Affects, 15.

  36. 36.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 148.

  37. 37.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 105.

  38. 38.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 219.

  39. 39.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 101.

  40. 40.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 63; emphasis in the original.

  41. 41.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 297.

  42. 42.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 297.

  43. 43.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 297.

  44. 44.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 297.

  45. 45.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 47.

  46. 46.

    Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), 223.

  47. 47.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 108.

  48. 48.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 48; emphasis in the original.

  49. 49.

    Freud, Works, Volume XVII, 235.

  50. 50.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 48–49.

  51. 51.

    Laura Stanley, “Tanya Tagaq,” Canadian Encyclopedia, January 11, 2019, http://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/tanya-tagaq (accessed May 24, 2020).

  52. 52.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 274.

  53. 53.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 315.

  54. 54.

    Robyn Taylor-Neu, “‘All There Is’: The Reconciliatory Poetics of a Singing Voice,” American Anthropologist 120, no. 1 (March 2018): 113, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13003.

  55. 55.

    Taylor-Neu, “All There Is,” 113.

  56. 56.

    Taylor-Neu, “All There Is,” 114.

  57. 57.

    Taylor-Neu, “All There Is,” 118.

  58. 58.

    Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 13.

  59. 59.

    Dolar, Voice, 11.

  60. 60.

    Taylor-Neu, “All There Is,” 114; emphasis in the original.

  61. 61.

    Dolar, Voice, 156–57.

  62. 62.

    Dolar, Voice, 73; emphasis in the original.

  63. 63.

    Dolar, Voice, 28.

  64. 64.

    Dolar, Voice, 29.

  65. 65.

    Freud, Works, Volume XVII, 240–41.

  66. 66.

    Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. Abraham A. Brill, (New York: Cosimo, 2009), 98–99.

  67. 67.

    Tanya, Tagaq. “Caribou,” Animism (Toronto: Six Shooter Records, 2014).

  68. 68.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 275.

  69. 69.

    Taylor-Neu, “All There Is,” 121.

  70. 70.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 119.

  71. 71.

    Tagaq, Split Tooth, 113–14.

  72. 72.

    Evans, Dictionary, 124.

  73. 73.

    Tagaq, Split Tooth, 113–14.

  74. 74.

    Tagaq, Split Tooth, 114.

  75. 75.

    Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 76.

  76. 76.

    Tagaq, Split Tooth, 116.

  77. 77.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 175.

  78. 78.

    Jackie Price, “But You’re Inuk, Right?” YouTube video, 1:31:44, lecture, IGOV Indigenous Speakers Series, April 8, 2013, http://youtube.com/watch?v=W36cGxXpjWw (accessed May 24, 2020).

  79. 79.

    Nelles, “Howl.”

  80. 80.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 299.

  81. 81.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 325.

  82. 82.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 218.

  83. 83.

    Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 77.

  84. 84.

    Javier Blas and Laura Millan Lombrana, “Greta Thunberg Tells Davos: You’re all talk, no action on climate change,” National Post, January 21, 2020, http://nationalpost.com/news/world/thunberg-tells-davos-youve-done-nothing-on-climate-change (accessed May 24, 2020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Alois Sieben

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  1. Alois Sieben
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Correspondence to Alois Sieben .

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  1. English Department, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Clint Burnham

  2. Faculty of Environment, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

    Paul Kingsbury

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Sieben, A. (2021). “Staying with” the Anxiety: The Ecological objet petit a of Inuit Throat Singing. 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_3

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