Vote negative to traverse the 1AC’s fantasy. Refuse the fleeting psychic satisfaction of an aff ballot in favor of a symptomal reading of the 1AC’s ideological edifice for its contradictions and slips. This means when comparing the links to the aff, you should flip “try-or-die” and artificially inflate the value of our links and impacts in your decision process. Err neg because your unconscious attachments to capitalism make you disavow its consequences and prevent you from accurately assessing the alt.

To the extent that critique remains useful in its own right, however, a Lacanian perspective reminds us that it must be approached in a particular way. Acknowledging the implications of the public secrecy dynamic discussed in previous chapters, Žižek echoes Taussig in cautioning that “we must avoid the simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality. We can see why Lacan, in his seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis, distances himself from the liberating gesture of saying finally that ‘the emperor has no clothes’ ” (1989: 25). Rather, Žižek suggests, the aim of critique must be “to detect, in a given ideological edifice, the element which represents within it its own impossibility” (1989: 143), to undertake a “symptomal reading” that seeks to “to discern the unavowed bias of the official text via its ruptures, blanks, and slips” (1997: 10). Or as Kapoor (2005: 1205) paraphrases, “this means tracking and identifying ideology’s Real—its slips, disavowals, contradictions, ambiguities.”

In other words, this Lacanian stance challenges the conventional approach to critique often termed the “education model of social change,” entailing a conviction that provision of more facts concerning the realities of a situation will lead to greater awareness of the problem and, in turn, more effective action (cf. Weintrobe, 2013a). Yet a growing body of research in behavioral economics, social psychology, and related fields demonstrates what psychoanalysts have long asserted, namely that human behavior deviates substantially from this ideal and hence that rather than developing greater awareness and commitment to action, subjects often react to new information by becoming more firmly entrenched in their existing perspective (see Lakoff 2009). For psychoanalysts, this is explained by the fact that attachment to the status quo is commonly cemented by the promise of jouissance that it offers. While this jouissance, as previously noted, is rarely unequivocally pleasurable, rather offering pleasure and pain in equal measure, the fleeting pleasure it does provide reinforces commitment via the fantasy that the pain can be overcome and pure pleasure eventually attained.

Breaking attachment to ideology, therefore, requires loss of both this fantasy of total fulfilment and the limited jouissance actually experienced. Facing this loss requires a process of mourning, entailing acceptance of both the pain of separation and deprivation of pleasure. To avoid this pain, subjects tend to retain attachment at all costs, or when forced to endure loss, to turn away from and repress the suffering, in which case mourning is replaced by melancholia, a state of low-level depression precipitated by the inability to mourn and therefore dissipate the negative affect (Freud 1925). Melancholia is characterized by the movement from desire to drive in that one continually relives failure to attain the object in question. It is supported by a variety of defense mechanisms, one of the most significant of which is disavowal, allowing subjects to half-acknowledge their pain while simultaneously denying its full significance. Manifest as “perversion,” this entails, paradoxically, a (largely unconscious) “ ‘choice’ to feel pain rather than suffer the painful truth” (Layton 2009: 309). One of psychoanalysis’s most important insights is that this dynamic occurs even with respect to circumstances we consider negative and may explicitly claim to want to end. In short, psychoanalysis suggests, as Žižek phrases it in the epigraph to this conclusion, that attaining “freedom hurts.”

To pursue such freedom nonetheless, the quintessential Lacanian injunction is to encourage subjects to “traverse the fantasy.” As Brearley (2013: 160) summarizes this process, “the task of the ego is to wean itself away from its early reliance on magical and wishful thinking and painfully attempt to represent to itself what really is the case.” With respect to neoliberal conservation, this would entail fully acknowledging the Real of capitalism as a self-destructive system driving us toward the brink of ecological catastrophe. And to break the cycle of melancholia and perversion, this would, of course, require consciously confronting the pain resulting from both the loss of attachment to a capitalist society of enjoyment and the recognition of the environmental devastation this society has wrought. As Mishan asserted some time ago: “The psychic cost of such a move into recognition is the cost of the move from the paranoid-schizoid toward the depressive position. The cost is the psychic pain of guilt at damage done, and the necessity of mourning of our grandiose fantasy of self-sufficiency and immortality. Without such a move we risk eco-catastrophe, because we cannot assess the true threat” (1996: 65).

Disavowal of Death

While within neoliberal conservation discourse it may indeed be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, this seeming acknowledgment of the grave existential threat posed by our mounting environmental crisis—which has in fact been interpreted as portending a sixth global extinction event or even “biological annihilation” altogether (see, e.g., Ceballos et al. 2017)—may not be so substantial as it appears at first blush. Rather, the dominant policy response to this acknowledgment embodied in neoliberal conservation and similar approaches, understood in Žižek’s terms as considering the current situation “catastrophic but not serious,” suggests something far more ambivalent at work here. For psychoanalysts, such ambivalence calls to mind what is considered a common human tendency to avoid acceptance of one’s own future death (Becker 1973). As Becker (1973) explains, all people are ostensibly aware of the inevitable fact that they will eventually die, yet this fact, and the existential fear it provokes, are usually suppressed in the course of everyday life. Zilboorg describes this stance as follows:

In normal times we move about actually without ever believing in our own death, as if we fully believed in our own corporeal immortality. . . . A man [sic] will say, of course, that that he knows he will someday die, but he does not really care. He is having a good time with living, and he does not think about death and does not care to bother about it—but this is a purely intellectual, verbal admission. The affect of fear is repressed. (1943: 468–471)

Rather than wholesale denial, this description speaks more to the presence of disavowal, as conceptualized in previous chapters. What analysis in these terms suggests, therefore, is that a particular form of ambivalent disavowal that the environmental crisis wrought by capitalism represents an existential threat to humanity as well as other forms of life on Earth serves to shield us from the fear of death that a deep awareness of this reality might otherwise provoke. Unable to receive full acknowledgment and expression, such fear may instead manifest itself in the growing “ecological anxiety disorder” that Robbins and Moore (2013) diagnose among environmentalists. This disavowal of death may partly explain our widespread failure to truly appreciate and hence act on knowledge of the reality of the impending biological annihilation we face—and thus to take refuge instead in fantasies of future salvation via neoliberal conservation.