The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton

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Bringing psychoanalysis to bear on the diagnosis of ecological crisis

Why has psychoanalysis long been kept at the margins of environmental criticism despite the many theories of eco-Marxism, queer ecology, and eco-deconstruction available today What is unique, possibly even traumatic, about eco-psychoanalysis The Environmental Unconscious addresses these questions as it provides an innovative and theoretical account of environmental loss focused on the counterintuitive forms of enjoyment that early modern poetry and psychoanalysis jointly theorize.

Steven Swarbrick urges literary critics and environmental scholars fluent in the new materialism to rethink notions of entanglement, animacy, and consciousness raising. He introduces concepts from psychoanalysis as keys to understanding the force of early modern ecopoetics. Through close readings of Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, he reveals a world of matter that is not merely hyperconnected, as in the new materialism, but porous and off-kilter. And yet the loss these poets reveal is central to the enjoyment their works offerand that nature offers.

As insightful as it is engaging, The Environmental Unconscious offers a provocative challenge to ecocriticism that, under the current regime of fossil capitalism in which everything solid interconnects, a new theory of disconnection is desperately needed. Tracing the propulsive force of the environmental unconscious from the early modern period to Freudian and post-Freudian theories of desire, Swarbrick not only puts nature on the couch in this book but also renews the psychoanalytic toolkit in light of environmental collapse.

Reviews

"Situating early modern poetry in conversation with Lucretius and Lacan, The Environmental Unconscious resists conventional critical distinctions between linguistic and materialist turns. Steven Swarbrick argues that matter, no less than the unconscious, is structured like a language: lively nonhuman matter, no less than the disembodied Cartesian cogito, is characterized by loss and self-estrangement. Because early modern poets take the environmental unconscious as the model for human desire (rather than vice-versa), Swarbrick shows, this body of work offers an overlooked yet urgent mode of theorizing life beyond the human."Melissa E. Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania

"An overdue methodological detour from historicist business as usual, this sharply original book binds Spenser and Derrida, Ralegh and Glissant, Marvell and Deleuze, and Freud and Milton into vivid new relationships. Steven Swarbricks environmental unconsciousa structurally consequential but radically inhospitable alterity lodged within both conceptions of matter and their literary analoguesdrives thrilling new readings of early modern literature as it renews the possibilities offered by psychoanalysis for thinking poetic form."Drew Daniel, author of Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Author Bio

Steven Swarbrick is assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York.