El apocalipsis es decepcionante: el punto muerto despolitizado del consenso sobre el cambio climático

Abstract

There is now a widespread consensus about the facts of climate change and the urgent need to take immediate and far-reaching action. Nonetheless, despite the scientific concern and alarmist rhetoric, the climate parameters keep eroding further. In the paper, we argue that the denial of the Real of political and socio-ecological antagonisms that mark the present (post-)politicizing process is starkly exemplified by the antics of the ecological predicament in general and the impotent climate interventions specifically. We maintain that the knowledge about the climate becomes mobilized in a post-truth discourse that obscures what shapes the climate situation and, in doing so, keeps the environmental gaze circulating around a fetishized thing, assuring that nothing really changes. We shall mobilize a Lacanian psychoanalytically inflected gaze that might elucidate this impasse, in particular from the standpoint of the most passionate climate activists and movements. We shall conclude that the symptomatic base upon which the legitimacy of the environmental discourse, practice and that of many climate movements rests upon repressed traumas. Opening up different political-ecological trajectories requires transgressing the fantasy that conceals these traumas.