The Madhouse

This essay theorizes an addiction to ecological anxiety that is characteristic of cultural reactions to climate change and made especially palpable in a time of pandemic. Borrowing from J. M. Coetzee’s identification in Franz Kafka of an epistemology of ever-evolving crisis, the essay surveys the growing corpus of scholarship on the Anthropocene, and, in particular, of quarantine writing, to examine the viral nature of first-person accounts of the ecocatastrophic, revealing a perpetual subjunctivity resistant to the ontological prioritization of the actual over the virtual. While such symptomatic thinking might seem to fulfill a psychologically inoculative function against impending catastrophe, the essay contends that it ultimately becomes a kind of autoimmune disorder: a prophetically self-fulfilling panic that makes it increasingly difficult to fathom, let alone to take action against, our current ecological and political crises

Action (physics · Anthropocene · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Function (biology · Identification (biology · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Ecology

• The Noise in the Burrow

  Britta Mache•The German Quarterly•1982

  Incluir item

• Networks of Belief

  William F Morgan, William Henry Morgan et al.•Qui Parle•2021

  Incluir item

• The Rise and Fall of Biopolitics

  Joshua Clover•Critical Inquiry•2020

  Incluir item

• "Time, Tense and Aspect in Kafka's "The Burrow

  J M Coetzee•Modern Language Notes•1981

  Incluir item

• Rituals of Dying, Burrows of Anxiety in Freud, Proust, and Kafka

  Johannes Türk•The Germanic Review Literature…•2007

  Incluir item

• The Rustle of the Anthropocene

  Ian Fleishman, Ian Thomas Fleishman•The Germanic Review Literature…•2017

  Incluir item

• The World Unspoken

  Ian Fleishman, Fleishman Fleishman•Comparative Literature Studies•2019

  Incluir item

• L'obvie et l'obtus

  Vincent B Leitch, Roland Barthes•SubStance•1983

  Incluir item

• Giving Up Control

  Michael O’sullivan, Michael O''Sullivan et al.•Mosaic•2011

  Incluir item

• All ears

  Eric Drott•Sound Studies•2017

  Incluir item

• The Burrow of Sound

  Mladen Dolar•differences•2011

  Incluir item

• Pandemic

  Slavoj Žižek, Brian Willems•Pandemic•2020

  Incluir item

• The Future Will Not Be Calculated

  Orit Halpern•Critical Inquiry•2022

  Incluir item