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Steven Swarbrick's new book is a compelling read that brings the most up-to-date tendencies in Lacanian theory into ecological criticism with, it seems, two goals in mind: to reconstruct questions of enjoyment and the signifier in early modern British poetry (Spenser, Ralegh, Marvell, Milton) and to provide a sharp rejoinder to proponents of ecocriticism who cling to sentimental notions of pure Nature and, to put it in Hegelian terms, beautiful souls. There are, as well, some forays to bridge the gap between the Lacanians and their great rivals in the intellectual milieu - New Materialism and its Deleuzian forbears - and some not entirely convincing attempts to ameliorate the canonicity of the archive with decolonial and Afropessimist sidebars. But these are only distractions from what promises to be a most heroic exercise in an après-coup reading of the English Renaissance.
Swarbrick's introduction lays out a forcefully convincing argument for the need to think of environmental concerns in a psychoanalytic fashion, drawing on the Freudo-Lacanian theory of the Slovenian school (particularly Alenka Zupančič, Slavoj Žižek) and its American cognates (Joan Copjec, Todd McGowan, Lee Edelman), and also clearing the ground of the dominant theoretical apparatus underwriting ecological criticism today: New Materialism. Such theory, with its object-oriented philosophy that seeks to sideline the subject and leapfrog the linguistic turn, fails to recognize, Swarbrick tells us, that matter, even as it lacks to its constitutive core, has a semiotic excess. Moreover, the poets he reads
all shape their poems around objects that fail to satisfy. The truth that Spenser's Redcrosse Knight pursues is forever unclaimed, coming only in the form of a trauma enacted on trees. Likewise, Ralegh's pursuit of wealth ends disastrously in the tropics, where local ecologies disrupt his adventures. Marvell's vision of home vanishes in the time-lapse of history. And Milton's paradise proves a site o