Enjoyment in the Anthropocene: the extimacy of ecological catastrophe in Donut County

Abstract

EXTENDED ABSTRACT Consciousness raising seems to be the most pressing task facing any project for environmental sustainability today. As Andreas Malm (2020, p. 119) puts it in Climate, Corona, Chronic Emergency , “a politics of conscious intervention is precisely what now must be revived”. A psychoanalytic interpretation of the climate crisis, however, reveals that a far more urgent challenge is recognizing that we might be deriving what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls jouissance , or unconscious enjoyment, from the very worsening of the crisis. For psychoanalysis, the conscious wish to overcome the climate crisis may conceal an unconscious satisfaction in the repetition of loss and failure afforded by the crisis (Burnham and Paul Kingsbury, 2021, p. 3; McGowan, 2020, p. 200; and Morton, 2016, p. 129). A psychoanalytic response to the existential challenge of climate change, then, would focus not on consciousness raising but on revealing where and how our unconscious enjoyment has become implicated in the very crisis that, consciously, we may accept or deny. To better understand how our unconscious enjoyment has become entangled in the climate crisis, we have an unlikely aid in the medium of the videogame. As Lawrence May (2021, n.p.) argues, an “ecocritical encounter with ecological monstrosity” demands a confrontation with “the monstrosity within”—that is, a confrontation with the “bitter form of ‘pleasure’” derived from the various forms of suffering wrought by climate inaction—and videogames, he suggests, may be the ideal medium through which to encounter this “bitter form of ‘pleasure’”. Taking inspiration from May, this paper contends that videogames are the ideal medium through which to grasp the