For Want of a Respondent: Climate Guilt, Solastalgia, and Responsiveness

Abstract

Discourses on the climate crisis and the Anthropocene are shaped by a defect in relationality: by the want of a respondent, that is, by both the will for someone to respond to the discourse and the definite lack of one. The want of a respondent testifies to an interdependence between psychic organization and the shape of the earth, in which the concept of guilt is a key regulator, articulated as economical, juridical, and moral indebtedness. This article discusses the concept of solastalgia to describe the complication of responsiveness that culminates in negotiations of guilt, and analyzes the super-ego, according to Freud the psychical organ that produces the sense of guilt, as linking the human psyche to climate history. The aim of the article is to carve out the temporalities entangled in the concept of guilt, which tends to be comprehended as only backwards-oriented causation, but also comprises obligation, which provides an opening for futurity and transgenerational concern. In order to show this, the article reads the last poem by Droste-Hülshoff (An einem Tag wo feucht der Wind) as renegotiating the metaphysical position that could respond to evocations of guilt.