The Earth Is Evil

The Earth Is Evil examines the connection between subjectivity and lack, arguing for a destituent ecology that sees lack as the universalist core of social, political, and environmental struggles. Steven Swarbrick maintains that psychoanalysis does not simply help us integrate our desires into a constituency of multispecies actors. Instead, psychoanalysis destitutes our fantasies of ecological and psychic wholeness. That destitution, he argues, is the unconscious source of our enjoyment. Exploring films by Lars von Trier, Kelly Reichardt, Daniel Kwan, and Daniel Scheinert, among others, and intervening in trenchant debates about negativity and desire, Swarbrick urges a return to the existentialist subject of lack against the flattening of subjectivity by ecocriticism. The Earth Is Evil is a vigorous attempt to construct a leftist environmental movement in dialogue with the most radical currents of critical theory.

Steven Swarbrick is an associate professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton and coauthor, with Jean-Thomas Tremblay, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction.