A Political Ecology of Desire

Bibliographic Data

ID18985183
AuthorsJoseph Margulies (0000-0003-2029-4424, University of Alabama, corresponding author), Jared Margulies
Year2022
Volume14
Issue2
Pages241-264
Publication date2022-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-9712357
OpenAlexW4289531762
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited70

How does attention to exertion and absence of care illuminate possibilities for avoiding extinction amid global biodiversity declines? This article brings together feminist technoscience and more-than-human theory on care with Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of anxiety and desire. It does so to diagnose the threat of extinction anxieties and consider their material and political consequences for impedances to caring for nonhuman life and their flourishing. The article is developed through the empirical case of Arrojadoa marylanae, an endangered species of cactus in Bahia, Brazil, as a political ecology of desire. In bringing psychoanalytic thought into conversation with care, it considers how desire sits at the heart of more-than-human care and yet may be thwarted by anxiety. Contending with his own extinction anxieties as they became focused through an endangered cactus on a mountain destined for mining, the author excavates routes toward flourishing geographies: geographies of care-full interspecies alliances composed against Anthropocenic thinking. In concluding, the author urges for greater attention to the work of desire in studies of environmental change and the wider environmental humanities

Aesthetics · Art · Conversation · Environmental ethics · Flourishing · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Social science · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Social Psychology

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