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This book of burning topicality is based on four foundational texts, written by scientists, writers and psychoanalysts, all attuned to the environmental crisis. This inner ring of authors is then debated by an outer ring: scientists, philosophers and psychoanalysts whose attunement to the environmental crisis resonates with each other. The readers themselves could form a further encompassing ring of resonance, nurtured by emotions and thoughts aroused by the reading of this book, and driven to action by their engagement.
The texts are introduced by Dominique Bourg, philosopher and assistant professor of geosciences and environment, and Luc Magnenat, psychoanalyst. A reflection is initiated about the neoliberal society in which we live – with its violence, its injustices and its risk of collapse – and its resonance to the period before World War II, about which Freud wrote in his text Civilization and its Discontents. For several decades, humanity has been confronted with alarming scientific data, including population data, and the state of resources and of planet Earth, without any individual or collective human conduct having being able to fully take on the situation. Over the course of the Industrial Revolution, and then the digital, robotics and genetic revolutions, humanity has acquired certain powers, which have modified and put the environment in crisis, even though humanity is only a “link in the chain of the ecosystem of life” and depends on the biosphere for its own life. This environmental crisis has in return affected humanity by bringing it to a state of crisis and preventing it from reflecting. Among the many disciplines that are interested in ecological issues, past psychoanalytic silences are addressed. Resistances to the environmental crisis are compared to similar resistances, perhaps not so distant, that are observed in the face of psychoanalysis; both speak of deep anxieties and of things we do not wish to acknowledge. And yet the search for self-t