Abstract
This chapter explores survivalism as one aspect of response to apocalyptic discourses. Survivalism demonstrates the operation of fort-da—a repeated fantasy of control over presence and absence which serves as an anchor for enjoyment. A danger of lurid descriptions of potential climate catastrophe is that they may enable a fantasy of survival and rebuilding which serves to distance subjects from collective efforts to preserve Earth. The post-apocalyptic survival is intoxicating because it promises access to the impossible, unmediated Real. Dramatic survivalist plans illustrate this argument, especially those espoused by Silicon Valley executives whose resources, money, and social power would be necessary for an effective mitigation of climate change if indeed such a thing is still possible.
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Notes
- 1.
Jeffrey T. Kiehl, Facing Climate Change: An Integrated Path to the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 142
- 2.
Kiehl, Facing Climate Change, xi
- 3.
Calum L. Matheson, Desiring the Bomb: Communication, Psychoanalysis, and the Atomic Age (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019), 102–6.
- 4.
Kiehl, Facing Climate Change, 142.
- 5.
For a discussion of a similar structure of fantasy in relation to the Real and its mediation in another context, see Jesse Proudfoot and Paul Kingsbury, “Periscope Down! Charting Masculine Sexuation in Submarine Films,” in Psychoanalytic Geographies, ed. Paul Kingsbury and Steve Pile (New York: Routledge, 2016), 241–43.
- 6.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 13–17
- 7.
Matheson, Desiring the Bomb, 16
- 8.
Jacques Lacan, “Columbia University: Lecture on the Symptom,” in Applied Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Culture/Clinic 1, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and Maire Jaanus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 13; emphasis in the original.
- 9.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum Publishing, 2009), 14.
- 10.
Georges Bataille, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 9–28, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930112.
- 11.
Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 75–81.
- 12.
See Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 89.
- 13.
Matheson, Desiring the Bomb.
- 14.
Alenka Zupančič, What is Sex? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 48.
- 15.
Frederick Jessett, “Shelters and Self.” Letter to Christian Century, December 13, 1961, 1496.
- 16.
See Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Patricia Nelson Limerick, Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Deserts (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), on deserts landscapes; and on colonial nuclearism see Valerie L. Kuletz, Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (New York: Routledge, 1998).
- 17.
Vinod Khosla, “The Silicon Valley Culture,” Medium, January 16, 2018, https://medium.com/@vkhosla/the-silicon-valley-culture-bdc86db0b524 (May 30, 2020).
- 18.
Rachel Riederer, “Doomsday Goes Mainstream,” Dissent (Spring 2018), https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/doomsday-goes-mainstream-liberal-preppers-silicon-valley (accessed May 30, 2020).
- 19.
Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand,” Guardian, February 15, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand (accessed May 30, 2020).
- 20.
Evan Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” New Yorker, January 30, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich (accessed May 30, 2020); Jon Henschen, “Tech Exec Doomsday Preppers: Protecting Themselves from the Automation Monster They Created,” Intellectual Takeout, February 22, 2018, https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/tech-exec-doomsday-preppers-protecting-themselves-automation-monster-they-created (May 30, 2020).
- 21.
Olivia Carville, “The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan,” Bloomberg, September 5, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-rich-new-zealand-doomsday-preppers/ (accessed May 30, 2020).
- 22.
Eric King Watts, “Postracial Fantasies, Blackness, and Zombies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 317–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2017.1338742.
- 23.
O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires are Prepping.”
- 24.
Catherine Clifford, “Jeff Bezos: I spend my billions on space because we’re destroying Earth,” CNBC, July 17, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/17/why-jeff-bezos-spends-billions-on-space-technology.html (accessed May 30, 2020).
- 25.
Isobel Asher Hamilton, “Jeff Bezos says space travel is essential because we are ‘in the process of destroying this planet,’” Business Insider, July 18, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-space-travel-essential-because-destroying-planet-2019-7 (May 30, 2020); for parallels between the rhetoric of space exploration and the frontier myth see Linda Billings, “Overview: Ideology, Advocacy, and Spaceflight: Evolution of a Cultural Narrative,” in Societal Impact of Spaceflight, ed. Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration Office of External Relations History Division, 2007), 483–84.
- 26.
Jonathan Shieber, “Elon Musk Is the Ultimate Doomsday Prepper,” Tech Crunch, March 12, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/12/elon-musk-is-the-ultimate-doomsday-prepper/ (accessed May 30, 2020).
- 27.
Scott Kirsch, Proving Grounds: Project Plowshare and the Unrealized Dream of Nuclear Earthmoving (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
- 28.
Fred Pearce, “Geoengineer the Planet? More Scientists Now Say It Must Be an Option,” Yale Environment 360, May 29, 2019, https://e360.yale.edu/features/geoengineer-the-planet-more-scientists-now-say-it-must-be-an-option (accessed May 30, 2020).
- 29.
Janko Roettgers, “Big Tech Has Some Wild Ideas to Save the Planet, but Will They Really Work?” Variety, September 10, 2019, https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/jeff-bezos-tesla-robert-downey-jr-silicon-valley-climate-change-1203329012/ (accessed May 30, 2020).
- 30.
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.
- 31.
Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 160.
- 32.
Ira Chernus, Dr. Strangegod: On the Symbolic Meaning of Nuclear Weapons (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986), 158–59.
- 33.
Jacques Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School,” trans. Russell Grigg, 6–7, http://iclo-nls.org/wp-content/uploads/Pdf/Propositionof9October1967.pdf (accessed May 30, 2020).
- 34.
Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 6–8.
- 35.
Matheson, Desiring the Bomb.
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Matheson, C. (2021). Enjoying the Heat: Anxiety, Fantasy, and Doomsday Prepping. 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_8
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