Abstract
As capitalism advances in its global reproduction, it has become evident that its civilisatory project is incompatible with life and its diversity. Our forms of extraction and accumulation of wealth depend on the modern conception of nature: a trove of resources ready to be dominated and exploited. The capitalist economic imperative has elevated consumption as the practice that defines subjectivities, and it is precisely the subjectivity of the consumer that is reproduced by hegemonic discourses. This is achieved by a series of micropolitical operations that capture and abuse the potency of desire. These operations result in what I call subjective depredation: the violent weakening of a subject’s symbolic and imaginary resources. This text explores the mechanisms by which this form of depredation occurs, as well as some of the effects it bears. Finally, I offer one example that illustrates how psychoanalysis and contemporary art can create spaces of uprising and revolt that allow to recover the potency of desire.
Tlalticpac toquichtin tiez
(The earth shall be as men are)
—Náhuatl proverb
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Notes
- 1.
I think of macro and micropolitics in the way Suely Rolnik presents them in Esferas de la insurrección: Apuntes para descolonizar el inconsciente, trans. Cecilia Palmeiro, Marcia Cabrera, and Damian Kraus (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2019).
- 2.
Juan Camilo Cajigas-Rotundo, “La biocolonialidad del poder: Amazonia, biodiversidad y ecocapitalismo,” in El giro decolonial: Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, ed. Santiago Castro-Gómez and Ramón Grosfoguel (Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre, 2007), 169–93.
- 3.
Cajigas-Rotundo, “La biocolonialidad del poder,” 171.
- 4.
Karl Marx, Contribución a la crítica de la economía política, trans. Marat Kuznetsov (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2003), 18.
- 5.
For more on a history of nature in Western culture see Cajigas-Rotundo, “La biocolonialidad del poder,” 170.
- 6.
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3–35.
- 7.
Global Witness, “Enemies of the State?: How Governments and Businesses Silence Land and Environmental Defenders,” Global Witness (report), July 30, 2019, https://www.globalwitness.org/es/campaigns/environmental-activists/enemies-state/ (accessed May 29, 2020).
- 8.
In 2017 and 2018, I participated in two colloquia, organised by 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, Asamblea Nacional de Afectados Ambientales, Unión de Científicos Comprometidos por la Sociedad, and ETC Group. The subject of these gatherings was environmental chaos. What I listened to then became the seeds of this text. See “Coloquios,” 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, 2017–2018, https://17edu.org/coloquios/ (accessed September 14, 2019). For more information on these three types of depredation, readers can refer to the works presented there by experts and social leaders.
- 9.
Yásnaya Elena Aguilar, “Los pueblos indígenas no somos la raíz de México, somos su negación constante,” El País, September 9, 2019, https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/09/08/actualidad/1567970157_670834.html (accessed May 29, 2020).
- 10.
Cajigas-Rotundo, “La biocolonialidad del poder,” 181.
- 11.
Jacques Lacan, “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse,” in Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 245-47.
- 12.
Jacques Lacan, L’envers de la psychanalyse (1969–1970), 41 http://staferla.free.fr/S17/S17%20L'ENVERS.pdf (accessed September 14, 2019).
- 13.
Michel Foucault, Vigilar y castigar: Nacimiento de la prisión, trans. Aurelio Garzón (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1978), 199.
- 14.
Gilles Deleuze, “Post-scriptum sobre las sociedades de control,” in Conversaciones, trans. José Luis Pardo (Valencia: Pre-textos, 1996), 277. On page 119, Deleuze says “modern power” is what Burroughs calls “control.”
- 15.
Manuel Hernández has shown how, after World War II, there was a coordinated effort to produce a new kind of subjectivity that would substitute the citizen in Western democracies: the consumer. See Manuel Hernández. Subjetivaciones neocoloniales (Mexico City: Litoral Editores, 2019) ePub.
- 16.
Ignacio Lewkowicz, “Subjetividad adictiva: un tipo psicosocial instituido: Condiciones históricas de posibilidad,” in Las drogas en el siglo… ¿qué viene? eds. Juan Dobón and Gustavo Hurtado (Buenos Aires: FAC, 1999).
- 17.
For a detailed description of this logic, based on Heidegger’s concept of anxiety, see Juan Luis de la Mora, Pensar la nada: Del consumo a la adicción (Mexico City: Casa Editorial Abismos, 2016), 63–69.
- 18.
Jacques Lacan, “Le séminaire sur ‘La Lettre volée,’” in Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 59.
- 19.
See de la Mora, “Una historia de dispositivos y subjetivaciones,” litoral n. 49. El dispositivo psicoanalítico (Mexico City: Litoral Editores, 2020).
- 20.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, Project Gutenberg, 1996, produced by Judith Boss, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/600/600-h/600-h.htm (accessed September 14, 2019).
- 21.
Gilles Deleuze, Derrames entre el capitalismo y la esquizofrenia, trans. Equipo Editorial Cactus (Buenos Aires: Cactus, 2005), 290–92.
- 22.
Andy Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life (New York: State University of New York, 2002), 165.
- 23.
When we listen to those who deny global warming, those who oppose a more just society, those in favour of the continued persecution of indigenous peoples and the extractive madness; when we listen to the actual form of discourse, the arguments, the discussions—we are talking about the highest spheres of power, CEOs, bankers, lawmakers, presidents—when we realise the level of blindness, the irrationality, the violence of the solutions that are designed and peddled to go to any and all extents to just not stop, it all appears to be a joke. It must be a joke that, facing a global environmental apocalypse, we keep building oil pipes and dams, we keep rescuing banks, and we are willing to develop geo-engineering techniques to counteract the consequences of our actions, but not to stop, never to stop.
- 24.
Jacques Lacan, “Du discours psychanalytique,” in pas-tout Lacan, http://ecole-lacanienne.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1972-05-12.pdf (accessed September 14, 2019).
- 25.
See Jacques Lacan, “La chose freudienne,” in Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 403.
- 26.
Descriptions taken from the curatorial texts of Georges Didi-Huberman, “Sublevaciones,” Curatorial texts from museum exhibition (MUAC, Mexico City. 2018) https://muac.unam.mx/exposicion/sublevaciones; and http://soulevements.jeudepaume.org/ (accessed September 14, 2019). See also the show’s website, http://soulevements.jeudepaume.org/ (accessed September 14, 2019).
- 27.
See Baruch Spinoza, Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata, 3p56 and scholium, n.d., http://ethicadb.org/pars.php?parid=3&lanid=0#356 (accessed September 14, 2019).
- 28.
Lacan stated that “only love allows enjoyment to condescend to desire.” Jacques Lacan, L’Angoise (1962–1963), 117, http://staferla.free.fr/S10/S10%20L'ANGOISSE.pdf (accessed September 14, 2019).
- 29.
Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology, 63.
- 30.
“A world in which many worlds can be”. See EZLN, “Cuarta declaración de la Selva Lacandona,” Section III, first published January 01, 1996, http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/1996/01/01/cuarta-declaracion-de-la-selva-lacandona/. There is an English translation available, although it’s quality leaves much to be desired: https://radiozapatista.org/?p=20287&lang=en (accessed July 25, 2020).
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de la Mora, J.L. (2021). In Defence of the Subject. 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_7
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