Presentation short abstract

How psychoanalytic insights can help confront obstacles that inhibit and thereby enable post-capitalist transformation in pursuit of degrowth.

Presentation long abstract

Rapidly expanding discussion of the potential to enact degrowth within political ecology and related fields has thus far focused primarily on political, economic, cultural and environmental dynamics either inhibiting or facilitating degrowth at both micro and macro scales. While such issues are of course important, researchers have also highlighted the significance of attention to more intimate (inter- and intra-personal) dynamics influencing potential to realize degrowth in practice. Within this latter line of inquiry, however, psychoanalytic perspectives have been relatively absent thus far. Yet psychoanalysts, particularly those in the Lacanian tradition, have long emphasized how a demand for infinite growth can be seen as inscribed not only in the capitalist political economy but also in the very structure of human subjectivity. Lacanians view the subject as defined by an essential lack that can never be filled but which individuals still nonetheless seek to satisfy through various forms of enjoyment, thus giving rise to an insatiable desire. This understanding of the subject has important implications for degrowth politics that have yet to be systematically explored in the literature, highlighting the importance of transforming our relationship with enjoyment as an essential aspect of the degrowth project. I explore how Lacanian insights can help to confront obstacles that inhibit and thereby enable post-capitalist transformation in pursuit of degrowth.