Green Fantasy and the Real of Nature: Elements of a Lacanian Critique of Green Ideological Discourse

It seems that the field of our relationship to nature is one of the fields in which the Real, in the psychoanalytic sense of the word, is continuously intersecting with our symbolic and imaginary reality. It is in that sense that Žižek, in Tarrying with the Negative, presents the ecological crisis as initiating a period of continuous, everyday encounter with the Real. The unpredictability and severity of natural forces have prompted people, from time immemorial, to attempt to understand and master them through processes of imaginary representation and symbolic integration. This usually entails a symbolization of the Real of nature. The product of this symbolization has frequently been described as a “story” or a “paradigm” about how the world works. We can trace such a story, or many competing stories, in any civilization or cultural ensemble. Primal people often understood planetary forces and natural disastrous events as acts of God. As Mircea Eliade has pointed out, in The Myth of the Eternal Return, for traditional societies, historic profane events such as natural catastrophes, disasters, and misfortunes—that is to say, all encounters with the Real of nature—denote the “void,” the non-existent, the unreal par excellence. Thus, they can only produce unbearable terror. They can be tolerated only if conceived as produced by the breaking of a taboo, by a magical action of an enemy or by the divine will—only if integrated, for example, in a schema of indefinite repetition of archetypes revealed ab origine by Gods and heroes and repeated by men in cosmogonic recreative rituals and myths. As soon as the cause is pinpointed, the suffering of the encounter with the Real of nature becomes tolerable, we have the symbolization of the Real. The suffering now has “a meaning and a cause, hence it can be fitted into a system and explained” (Eliade 98). It is symbolically integrated into a “story” or a “paradigm.”

In modern secular societies, it is usually science that provides