Melancholic Man and the Encrypted Earth

This essay argues that much of humanity is in a state of interminable mourning in relationship to the climate emergency. The endlessness of this mourning suggests that what we are experiencing is not merely mourning but its more troublesome sibling, melancholia. Freud theorizes melancholia as a form of interminable mourning that involves an unconscious, internalized lost love object or ideal. The melancholic incorporates this lost object into the psyche, where it simultaneously berates and remains attached to it. The melancholic object, in this case, is Enlightenment man, a gendered and Eurocentric fantasy figure whose time has passed, even as the legacy of the Enlightenment remains both crucial and ambiguous. Paired with this figure is another fantasy object: the earth itself imagined as a living world ecology. On a conscious level, the earth has been rendered dead, so much inert materiality that can be appropriated and exploited and that is thoroughly quantified by what Beverley Best theorizes as the automatic fetish of Marx’s law of value. This conscious apprehension of the earth as so much inert matter is subtended by what Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok describe as encrypted (i.e., secret and buried) identification with the earth as a living system. The paper argues that those of us transfixed by melancholia and encryption must work through our relationship to both dynamics. Only by such a working through can we move past inaction and build a just and flourishing political economic and ecological response to the climate emergency