Psychoanalysis – mags neg General 1NC

Extinction K

Two Death Cards

The aff’s attempt to ascribe a meaning to extinction and mass violence relies on a big Other with access to the truth of existence. Imagining extinction is the purest fantasy of observation without a location for the human subject which sets up a meaningful “nature” versus a constructed “human world.” For the aff, nature must then be the big Other and all violence must have a hidden purpose which plays on our inner pathologies. This sets up a division between our observed environment and the catastrophe the aff depicts which makes us unable to act against ecological collapse and the real threat of extinction. We should instead acknowledge the meaninglessness of their impact, not to accept it, but to overcome the symbolic separation of human and nature that makes us incapable of addressing their impact and all other threats of destruction

The lesson to be fully endorsed is thus that of another environmental scientist who came to the result that, while one cannot be sure what the ultimate result of humanity's interventions into geo-sphere will be, one thing is sure: if humanity were to stop abruptly its immense industrial activity and let nature on Earth take its balanced course, the result would have been a total breakdown, an imaginable catastrophe. "Nature" on Earth is already to such an extent "adapted" to human interventions, the human "pollutions" are already to such an extent included into the shaky and fragile balance of the "natural" reproduction on Earth, that its cessation would cause a catastrophic imbalance. This is what it means that humanity has nowhere to retreat: not only "there is no big Other" (self-contained symbolic order as the ultimate guarantee of Meaning); there is also no Nature qua balanced order of self-reproduction whose homeostasis is disturbed, thrown off the rails, by the imbalanced human interventions. Indeed, what we need is ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on.

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is a vision of what would have happened if humanity (and ONLY humanity) were suddenly to disappear from the earth - natural diversity blooming again, nature gradually regaining human artefacts. We, humans, are reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence. (As Lacan pointed out, this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a, the gaze which observes the world in the condition of the subject's non-existence - like the fantasy of witnessing the act of one's own conception, the parental copulation, or the act of witnessing one's own burial, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. A jealous child likes to indulge in the fantasy of imagining how his parents would react to his own death, putting at stake his own absence.) "The world without us" is thus fantasy at its purest: witnessing the Earth itself retaining its pre-castrated state of innocence, before we humans spoiled it with our hubris. The irony is that the most prominent example comes from the catastrophe of Chernobyl: the exuberant nature taking over the disintegrating debris of the nearby city Pripyat which was abandoned, left the way it was.

Against this background, one should also render problematic Badiou's distinction between man qua mortal "human animal" and the "inhuman" subject as the agent of a Truth-procedure: man is pursuing happiness and pleasures, worrying about death, etc., it is an animal endowed with higher instruments to reach its goals, while only as a subject faithful to a Truth-Event does it truly raise above animality. The problem with this dualism is that it ignores Freud's basic lesson: there is no "human animal," a human being is from its birth (and even before) torn out of the animal constraints, its instincts are "denaturalized," caught in the circularity of the (death-)drive, functioning "beyond the pleasure principle," marked by the stigma of what Eric Santner called "undeadness" or the excess of life. This is why there is no place for "death drive" in Badiou's edifice, for the "distortion" of human animality which precedes fidelity to an Event. It is not only the "miracle" of a traumatic encounter with an Event which derails a human subject from its animality: its libido is already in itself derailed. One should thus turn around the usual criticism of Badiou: what is problematic is not the quasi-religious miracle of the Event, but the very "natural" order disturbed by the Event.

And therein resides the horror of the Chernobyl accident: when one visits the site, with the exception of the sarcophagus, things look exactly the same as before, life seems to have deserted the site, leaving everything the way it is, and nonetheless we are aware that something is terribly wrong. The change is not at the level of the visible reality itself, it is a more fundamental one, it affects the very texture of reality. No wonder there are some lone farmers around the Chernobyl site who continued to lead their lives as before - they simply ignore all the incomprehensible talk about radiations. Do these farmers not behave like the madman in the old joke circulating among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other's knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man; however, when he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back very trembling of scare - there is a chicken outside the door and that he is afraid that it would eat him. "Dear fellow," says his doctor, "you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man". "Of course I know that," replies the patient, "but does the chicken know it?" The chicken from the joke stands for the big Other which doesn't know. In the last years of Tito's life, he was effectively such a chicken: some archives and memoirs show that, already in the mid-1970s, the leading figures around Tito were aware that Yugoslavia's economic situation was catastrophic; however, since Tito was nearing his death, they made a collective decision to postpone the outbreak of a crisis till his death - the price was the fast accumulation of external debt in the last years of Tito's life. When, in 1980, Tito finally dies, the economic crisis did strike with revenge, leading to a 40 per cent fall of standard of living, to ethnic tensions and, finally, civil and ethnic war that destroyed the country - the moment to confront the crisis adequately was missed. One can thus say that what put the last nail in the coffin of Yugoslavia was the very attempt by its leading circle to protect the ignorance of the Leader, to keep his gaze happy.

For Freud, if external violence gets too strong, we simply exit the psychic domain proper: the choice is "either the shock is re-integrated into a pre-existing libidinal frame, or it destroys psyche and nothing is left." What he cannot envisage is that the victim as if were survives its own death: all different forms of traumatic encounters, independently of their specific nature (social, natural, biological, symbol...) lead to the same result - a new subject emerges which survives its own death, the death (erasure) of its symbolic identity. There is no continuity between this new "post-traumatic" subject (suffering Alzheimer's or other cerebral lesions, etc.): after the shock, literally a new subject emerges. Its features are well-known from numerous descriptions: lack of emotional engagement, profound indifference and detachment - it is a subject who is no longer "in-the-world" in the Heideggerian sense of engaged embodied existence. This subject lives death as a form of life - his life is death-drive embodied, a life deprived of erotic engagement; and this holds for henchmen no less than for his victims. If the XXth century was the Freudian century, the century of libido, so that even the worst nightmares were read as (sado-masochist) vicissitudes of the libido, will the XXIst century be the century of such post-traumatic disengaged subjects whose first emblematic figure, that of the Muslim in concentration camps, is not multiplying in the guise of refugees, terror victims, survivors of natural catastrophes, of family violence...? The feature that runs through all these figures is that the cause of the catastrophe remains libidinally meaningless, resisting any interpretation.

The constellation is properly frustrating: although we (individual or collective agents) know that it all depends on us, we cannot ever predict the consequences of our acts - we are not impotent, but, quite on the contrary, omnipotent, without being able to determine the scope of our powers. The gap between causes and effects is irreducible, and there is no "big Other" to guarantee the harmony between the levels, to guarantee that the overall outcome of our interactions will be satisfactory. The problem is that, although our (sometimes even individual) acts can have catastrophic (ecological, etc.) consequences, the big Other prevents us from believing in it, from assuming this knowledge and responsibility: "Contrary to what the promoters of the principle of precaution think, the cause of our non-action is not the scientific uncertainty. We know it, but we cannot make ourselves believe in what we know." This situation confronts us with the deadlock of the contemporary "society of choice" at its most radical. In the standard situation of the forced choice (a situation in which I am free to choose on condition that I make the right choice, so that the only thing left for me to do is the empty gesture of pretending to accomplish freely what is in any case imposed on me). Here, on the contrary, the choice really is free and is, for this very reason, experienced as even more frustrating: we find ourselves constantly in the position of having to decide about matters that will fundamentally affect our lives, but without a proper foundation in knowledge - as John Gray put it:

we have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. New technologies alter our lives daily. The traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. At the same time we have little idea of what the future will bring. We are forced to live as if we were free.

It is thus not enough to vary the standard motif of the Marxist critique: "although we allegedly live in a society of choices, the choices effectively left to us are trivial, and their proliferation masks the absence of true choices, choices that would affect the basic features of our lives..." While this is true, the problem is rather that we are forced to choose without having at our disposal the knowledge that would enable a qualified choice.

The lesson is thus the old Lacanian one: there is no big Other. The first to get it was Job - after Job is hit by calamities, his theological friends come, offering interpretations which render these calamities meaningful, and the greatness of Job is not so much to protest his innocence as to insist on the meaninglessness of his calamities (when God appears afterwards, he gives right to Job against the theological defenders of faith). The function of the three theological friends is to obfuscate the impact of the trauma with a symbolic semblance.

The little one began to fall behind, the SS were howling behind them and then the dogs began to howl too, the smell of blood was driving them mad, and then the bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller... together they covered a few more yards... till the blows of the clubs felled them and, together they dropped, their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all eternity.

One can easily imagine how this scene should be filmed: while the soundtrack renders what goes on in reality (the two children are clubbed to death), the image of their hands clasped freezes, immobilized for eternity - while the sound renders temporary reality, the image renders the eternal Real. It is the pure surface of such fixed images of eternity, not any deeper Meaning, which allows for redemptive moments in the bleak story of the Shoah. One should read this imagined scene together with the final shot of Thelma and Louise: the frozen image of the car with the two women "flying" above the precipice: is this the positive utopia (triumph of the feminine subjectivity over death), or the masking of the miserable wreck the car IS in reality at that time? The weakness of the final shot from Thelma and Louise is that the frozen image is not accompanied by the soundtrack depicting what "really" went on (the car crash, terrible cries of the dying women) - strangely, this lack of reality undermines the very utopian dimension of the frozen image. In contrast to this scene, our imagined filmed scene from Semprun would fully assert the Platonic duality of temporal empirical reality and eternal Idea.

What this means is that, without shame, in conceiving art, we should return to Plato. Plato's reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city - a rather sensible advice, judging from my post-Yugoslav experience, where ethnic cleansing was prepared by poets' dangerous dreams (the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic being only one among them). If the West has the industrial-military complex, we in the ex-Yugoslavia had a poetic-military complex: the post-Yugoslav war was triggered by the explosive mixture of the poetic and the military component. So, from a Platonic standpoint, what does a poem about the holocaust do? It provides its "description without place": in renders the Idea of holocaust.

Melancholy Alt

Imagining the narrative of extinction and its ethical value domesticates the event and permits an attitude of mourning where we attach ourselves to humanity understood as an object outside of nature. We should adopt a melancholy perspective instead—don’t imagine the death of humanity and mourn for the loss, but accept it in the narrative of this debate to revise our relationship to the world and threats of ecological destruction

MATTS AND TYNAN 2012 (Tim Matts holds a Ph.D in Critical Theory from Cardiff University, Aidan Tynan also holds a Ph.D in Critical Theory from Cardiff University, “The Melancholy of Extinction: Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" as an Environmental Film,” M/C Journal, Vol. 15, No. 3)

The discoveries of Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century constituted a major thought event which placed the emergence of humanity within a temporal context extending far beyond the limits of human memory. Claire Colebrook suggests that the equivalent event for present times is the thought of our own extinction, the awareness that environmental changes could bring about the end of the species: “[the] extinction awareness that is coming to the fore in the twenty-first century adds the sense of an ending to the broader awareness of the historical emergence of the human species.” While the scientific data is stark, our mediated cultural experience provides us with plenty of opportunities to, in Colebrook’s words, “[domesticate] the sense of the human end” by affirming “various modes of ‘post-humanism’” in ways which ultimately deny the shattering truth of extinction.

This domestication obviously takes place in one sense on the level of a conscious denial of the scale of the ecological crisis. On another level, however, environmentally conscious representations of “the planet” or “nature” as a sheer autonomous objectivity, a self-contained but endangered natural order, may ultimately be the greatest obstacle to genuine ecological thinking. By invoking the concept of a non-human nature in perfect balance with itself we factor ourselves out of the ecological equation while simultaneously drawing on the power of an objectifying gaze. Slavoj Žižek gives the example of Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us which imagines a contemporary world in which all humans have disappeared and nature reasserts itself in the ruins of our abandoned cities. Žižek describes this as the ultimate expression of ideology because:

we, the humans, are here reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence [...] this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze observing the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence—like the fantasy of witnessing the act of one’s own conception, parental copulation, or the act of witnessing one’s own burial (80).

In many ways, the very spectacle or fantasy of our own destruction has provided us with a powerful means of naturalising it—environmental catastrophe occurs to and in a “nature” whose essence excludes us—and this renders it compatible with a psychology by which the human end is itself internalised, processed, and normalised. Ironically, this normalisation may have been affected to a great extent through the popularisation, over the last ten years or so, of environmental discourses relating to the grave threats of climate change. A film such as Wall-E, for example, shows us an entirely depopulated, desertified world in which the eponymous robot character sorts through the trash of human history, living an almost-human life among the ruins. The robot functions as a kind of proxy humanity, placing us, the viewers, in a position posterior to our own species extinction and thus sending us the ultimately reassuring message that, even in our absence, our absence will be noted. In a similar way, the drama-documentary The Age of Stupid presents a future world devastated by environmental collapse in which a lone archivist presides over the whole digitised memory of humanity and carefully constructs out of actual news and documentary footage the story of our demise. These narratives and others like them ultimately serve, whatever their intentions, to domesticate the end of humanity through the logic of a post-human mastery of the story of our own obliteration.

The starker truth with which Melancholia confronts us is that the end of humanity cannot and will not be internalised by any process of human memorialisation. Von Trier’s film does not portray any post-catastrophe world from which we might be able to extract a degree of psychological comfort or residual sense of mastery. Rather, the narrative frame is entirely bounded by the impact event, which we witness first in the film’s opening shots and then again at its close. There is no narrative time posterior to the impact and yet for us, the viewers, everything happens in its shattering aftermath, according to the strange non-successional logic of the future-anterior. Everything begins and ends with the moment of impact.

If the narrative itself is concerned with the lives of the characters, particularly the effects of the main character’s depression on her family relationships, then the film’s central event remains radically disjunctive, incapable of being processed on this interpersonal level through the standard cinematic tropes of the disaster or survival genres. The value of regarding Melancholia as an environmental film, then, is that it profoundly de-psychologises the prospect of our extinction while forcing the burden of this event’s unfathomable content onto us. Von Trier’s film suggests that melancholy, not mourning, is a more apt emotional register for ecological crisis and for the extinction awareness it brings, and in this sense Melancholia represents a valuable alternative to more standard environmental narratives which remain susceptible to ideological reinscriptions of human (or post-human) mastery. As ecocritic Timothy Morton suggests, “melancholy is more apt, even more ethically appropriate, to an ecological situation in which the worst has already happened, and in which we find ourselves [...] already fully implicated” (75–6).

The most influential account of mourning and melancholia comes from Sigmund Freud, who described these attitudes as two different ways of dealing with loss. In the process of mourning, Freud states that there comes the realisation “that the loved object no longer exists” which “[demands] that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object” (245). The healthy outcome of this very painful process is that our libidinal attachments are free once again to take on another object of love; the lost object can be replaced according to a logic of temporal succession. Melancholia also results from a loss, says Freud, but this time it relates not simply or primarily to a replaceable external object but, more complexly, to something in the ego itself, not a discrete thing in the world but a certain way of being in the world which the lost object facilitated. Freud writes that the trauma of melancholia is thus manifested by the ego itself taking on or embodying the loss.

The ego, stripped of its sense of being, comes to mimic the non-existence of that which once supported it. The “delusion” of the melancholic’s depressive state, says Freud, stems from the fact that something has ruptured her affective and libidinal attachment to the world, but this cannot be psychologically processed in terms of a replaceable loss since what is lost was never simply an external object. Her world is struck by an absence that cannot be mourned because it is kept alive as a non-being which she is. She has taken on the burden of this structural impossibility and does not pursue an imaginary resolution of it which, to invoke Žižek’s Lacanian terms once more, would involve her submitting to the subjective position of fantasy (i.e. becoming a witness to her own non-existence). The melancholic’s attitude is, Freud observes, “psychologically very remarkable” because it involves “an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life” (246). The melancholic carves out an existence apparently contrary to nature.

This is the context in which Justine remarks that the earth, as an ungrievable object, is “evil.” Her melancholia is never explained in the course of the film, and, indeed, we see little of her personality apart from the events which manifest her psychological crisis. The film opens with the moment of interplanetary impact itself. The great blue planet of Melancholia approaches and begins to swallow the earth into its atmosphere. We cut immediately to Justine and her sister in the moments just before the impact: the air is electrified by the approaching collision and birds cascade from the trees. Our way into the narrative is this moment of chaos and dispersion, but von Trier’s depiction of it, his use of highly choreographed slow-motion shots resembling tableaux vivants, distance us from any sense of urgency or immediacy. It is as if the closer we come to the collision, the less real and the more stylised the world becomes; as if the impact holds a content which cannot be rendered in realist terms.

By contrast, the subsequent scenes focusing on Justine’s interpersonal drama use a shaky, handheld camera which embeds us in the action. The narrative follows Justine on her wedding day. As events unfold we see cracks appear in the wedding party’s luxurious facade: Justine’s divorced parents argue viciously; her wealthy brother-in-law, who funded the wedding, fears that the occasion may be ruined by petty squabbling, to his great expense. Beneath these cracks, however, we realise that there is a deeper, more inexplicable crack opening up within Justine herself. At one point she retreats with her newlywed husband from the tumult of the wedding party. We expect from this scene an articulation or partial resolution, perhaps, of Justine’s mental conflict, or at least an insight into her character. In a more conventional story, this moment of conjugal intimacy would allow Justine to express an “authentic” desire, distinct from the superficial squabbling of her family, a means to “be herself.” But this doesn’t happen. Justine inexplicably rejects her husband’s overtures.

In clinical terms, we might say that Justine’s behaviour corresponds to “anhedonia,” a loss of interest in the normal sources of pleasure or enjoyment. Invoking Freud, we could add to this that the very objective viability of her libidinal attachments has been called into question and that this is what precipitates her crisis. If such attachments are what ground us in reality, Justine’s desire seems to have become ungrounded through the emergence of something “nonobjectifiable,” to borrow a term from philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (What is Philosophy?, 209). This “something” is revealed only in the second half of the film with the appearance of Melancholia and the prospect of its obliterating impact. Justine is drawn to this new planet, in one scene luxuriating naked beneath its blue glow. We could argue, in one sense, that she has discovered in Melancholia a correlate to her own self-destructive desire: the only thing that can possibly gratify her is the annihilation of the earth itself.

However in another, more constructive sense, we can say that her melancholic desire amounts to a kind of geophilosophical critique, a political and ultimately ecological protest against the territorialisation of her desire according to a supposed acceptability of objects. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that, if desire’s libidinal attachments form a kind of ground or “territory” then all territories interact with one another at some level because they are all equally founded on “lines of deterritorialization” sweeping them towards a mutually shared, extra-territorial outside (A Thousand Plateaus, 9). Or, putting it in plainer terms: beneath every ground is a non-ground such that the earth cannot ultimately ground itself in itself. Every mental, material, or social territory is founded upon this global movement of ungrounding.

The trauma of Justine’s melancholia refers us to something which cannot be resolved within the given territories of her social or interpersonal milieus. While her illness can be registered in terms of the events of the film’s narrative time, the film’s central event—the collision with Melancholia—remains irreducible to the memorial properties of storytelling. We may thus argue that the impact event is not strictly speaking an element of the film’s narrative, but rather a pure cinematic sign evoking a radical form of ecological openness. The film moves through different territories—conjugal, familial, economic, scientific—but what propels us from one territory to another is the impact event whose content is reducible to none of these territories.

Of all the film’s characters, only Justine is “open” to this absolute irreducibility, this resistance to closure. Her openness to Melancholia is not determined by whether or not it can be objectified, that is, rendered assimilable to the terms of a given territory. Both her brother-in-law (an amateur astronomer) and her sister attempt to calculate the chances of impact, but Justine remains open to it in a manner which does not close off that which precludes survival. In the end, as Melancholia bears down on the Earth, Justine’s attitude—which in Freud’s terms is antithetical to the instinct for life—turns out to be the most appropriate one.

The point of this article is certainly not to argue that we should acquiesce to the traumatic realities of environmental crisis. Its aim, rather, is to suggest that well-being and harmony may no longer describe the appropriate emotional register for ecological thinking, given the current urgency of the crisis. Human and ecological health may, after all, be radically different and incommensurable things. The great anthropologist and structuralist thinker Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked:

I am concerned with the well-being of plants and animals that are threatened by humanity. I think ecologists make the mistake of thinking that they can defend humans and nature at the same time. I think it is necessary to decide if one prefers humans or nature. I am on the side of nature (qtd in Conley, 66).

Lévi-Strauss may well be right when he says that a common human and ecological health may be an illusion of wishful thinking. However, what if there is a common trauma, whose ineradicability would not be a tragedy but, rather, evidence of radical openness in which we no longer have to pick sides (humans or plants and animals)? What if the proper “base” from which to begin thinking ecologically were not a conception of a harmonious human-ecological whole but a foundational non-harmony, an encounter with which contains something ineliminably traumatising? In a recent paper, the philosopher Reza Negarestani proposes just such a traumatic account of ecological openness. All existence, understood geophilosophically, is, says Negarestani, “conditioned by a concatenation of traumas or cuts [...] there is no single or isolated psychic trauma [...] there is no psychic trauma without an organic trauma and no organic trauma without a terrestrial trauma that in turn is deepened into open cosmic vistas.” Ecological openness, in this sense, would be necessarily melancholic, in the terms described above, in that it would necessitate the perpetual precariousness of those links by which we seek to ground ourselves.

Ecology is all too often given to a “mournful” attitude, which is, as we’ve argued, the very attitude of psychological incorporation, healing, and normalisation. Similarly, “nature,” we are told, holds the key to harmonious self-regulation. But what if today such notions are obstacles to a genuine awareness of the ecological realities facing us all (humans and non-humans)? What if this ideal of nature were just a product of our own desire for stability, order, and regularity—for some imaginary extra-social and non-human point of reference by which to attain to a position of mastery in the telling of the story of ourselves?

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