L’Entre d’eux: Lacan, Serres and the climate emergency

Abstract

ABSTRACT My article claims that the acceleration of the generalised planetary ecological crisis has been worsened by a form of collective reasoning called disavowal. To understand why and how this mode of reasoning in the Global North is accelerating climate boiling, I turn to Michel Serres’s Le parasite and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis. I seek to bridge the gap between Serres and Lacan on the question of language and its connection to human intersubjectivity, and show how their conclusions reveal the mechanisms behind the cognitive dissonance at hand in the climate crisis. I claim that we can connect these two philosophers through the concept of the ‘d’eux’, as it relates to intersubjectivity, and I show how they both deploy and rely on the polyvalence and ambiguity of language as a rhetorical strategy to highlight the presence of a ‘third’, which I claim is the Serresian parasite and Lacanian big Other. This theoretical foundation underlines that one of the key aspects of our linguistic reasoning is to simply accept the imperatives of the parasite or the big Other, and thus enables the argument that our collective psychotic reasoning is, through this evil ‘third’, contributing to the generalised planetary ecological crisis, that we disavow. In the words of Jean Oury: ‘hasard’eux’.