The suffocating enjoyment of the Other: An ideology critique of enjoyment in the mediatisation of the climate crisis

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores how the Lacanian concept of ‘the enjoyment of the Other’ (la jouissance de l’Autre) can be applied to break open normative understandings of the political factors shaping the climate crisis deadlock. The principal aim is to investigate how ostensibly disconnected environmental debates may be regarded as linked by an economy of enjoyment, more precisely by the promise of enjoyment by which the subject is libidinally attached to an ideology. Analysis of text proceeds by way of a psychoanalytic critique of ideology on two case studies from UK news media, namely, i) the development of onshore wind turbines and, ii) the appearance of direct-action environmentalist groups, in particular the activities of the group Just Stop Oil. This thesis finds that rhetorical devices across the discourses analysed are sustained by an ideological belief that the subject’s enjoyment has been stolen or ruined by the Other, that is, the external symbolic framework of language, morals and other people that shapes and influences subjectivity. On the one hand it is argued that the mediatisation of the climate crisis in terms of the enjoyment of the Other, that is, the belief that the Other has access to a full enjoyment which the subject is denied, portrays environmental politics as an empty display or ‘spectacle.’ On the other hand, it is suggested that the experience of environmental politics as a spectacle is a symptom of the decline of the state’s symbolic role in late capitalism.