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Forthcoming
Enjoying Climate Change:Why We Keep the Planet Burning
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Ebook
Forthcoming
A sharp diagnosis of why societies resist climate action, Swyngedouw and Pohl uncover what psychoanalysis can teach us about radical environmental politics
Enjoying Climate Change shows why conventional climate action cannot break today’s accelerating ecological and political deadlock. Pohl and Swyngedouw reveal how our attachment to the current system is sustained not only by political economic conditions but by a libidinal economy: the unconscious investments that keep people attached to destructive capitalist structures even as conditions worsen. It is this strange kernel of ‘enjoyment’ that persists despite (or because of) the destructive relations between economic and ecological conditions in times of climate crisis that this book focuses on. By shifting the lens from the climate as the cause of our troubles to the political effects of the unconscious, the authors expose why societies repeatedly fail to act at the scale required – and what must be confronted to enable radical change. Drawing on Lacanian and Marxist perspectives, the book offers both a sharp diagnosis of the climate impasse and insights for building a more egalitarian world.
Reviews
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Enjoying Climate Change is a forceful and genuine intervention in the climate debate: it dares to ask what most climate politics desperately tries to conceal-how we enjoy the crisis. Lucas Pohl and Erik Swyngedouw shift the perspective decisively: the obstacle is not ignorance, nor the lack of facts, nor even the cynical "denialism," but the libidinal economy that binds us to catastrophe. Drawing on Lacanian theory and political analysis, they show how climate activism, populism, and even "good intentions" can function as circuits of jouissance-ways of sustaining the very deadlock they claim to oppose. This is not another book calling for "more awareness." It is a book that explains why awareness changes nothing-and what it would take to break the spell.
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If ever reading a book constituted an existential necessity, that’s the case with Enjoying Climate Change. It meticulously shows how those engaged in an assault on the climate are winning by fostering a mode of enjoyment that climate activists have yet to counter adequately. Hopefully this pathbreaking book is the first step in a mobilization of enjoyment that can make defending against climate change as appealing as destroying the habitability of the planet.
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A tour de force that dares us to confront the unconscious dimensions of our present-day hyperactivity on climate change: that we might actually prefer the enjoyment of meaningless activity to seriously addressing planetary crisis.