Â鶹Éçmadou

Abstract

This paper is part of a book manuscript called "Act in Time". Via a Lacanian interpretation of Hume's theory of the passions, the project investigates the collective imagination of time under the condition of ecological disaster, and how such configurations of the imagination contribute to paralyzing our capacity to act. One chapter of the manuscript develops a concept of ecological injustice as time-theft with a view to clarifying some of the ideological confusion that has surrounded environmental politics since its inception. Analysing ecological disaster into pollution, resource depletion, mass extinction events, and climate change, the project constructs a series of temporal schemas inspired by Lacan's four discourses in Seminar 17. These schemas plot the different ways in which ecological disaster is subjectivized. The goal of the current paper is to construct a concept of ecological anxiety - faced with the classificatory confusion and vulgar empiricism of existing psychological literature on the phenomenon.

Bio

Oliver Feltham is Professor of Philosophy at The American University of Paris. He is translator of Alain Badiou’s magnum opus Being and Event (2006), and author of Anatomy of Failure: Philosophy and Political Action (2013) and Alain Badiou: Live Theory (2008). Feltham's research interests include Marxism, critical theory, the history of metaphysics, psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan.