Abstract
ABSTRACT Using James Bradley’s novel Clade (2015) and the real-life example of Kaylen Ward (aka the Naked Philanthropist, 2020), this article argues that the death drive—as it manifests in normative Western subjectivity—has generated destruction on a macro scale in the form of global climate change. However, the death drive is not always-already destructive, but is rather something that can be partnered with creatively. This necessitates constructing a novel psychic flexibility, whereby the target at which one directs their sadism is the individuated ego. Paradoxically, some version of the world as we know it can be saved by first annihilating the self. This brand of ecological ethics, as advanced by Bradley and Ward, must be cultivated lest apocalyptic climate change—which is a macro-scale materialization of the death drive—bring homo sapiens to literal extinction.
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