Psychoanalytic political ecology

Abstract

This article outlines a psychoanalytic political ecology that sees both nature and the subject as fundamentally ruptured, rendering it impossible to forge stable human-environmental relationships. It thus stands in opposition to those strands of political ecology (i.e., “environmentalism of the poor” and decolonial “futurality”) that fall back on romanticized notions of reconciliation with nature-culture. Focusing on a case study from the Colombian Pacific, the article critically examines a politics of conservation that, by seeking a coherent nature in the same way that some variants of political ecology tend to do, ends up helping to reproduce capitalist accumulation, while also dispossessing and/or depoliticizing the subaltern. Instead, the article presents a (negative) psychoanalytic political ecology that is thoroughly politicized, one which seeks to address nature's absence rather than overlooking it, and one that emphasizes those most impacted by crisis and instability—the subaltern—rather than taking their struggles for granted.