Climate Change and the Death Drive

ABSTRACT

Using James Bradley’s novel Clade (2015) and the real-life example of Kaylen Ward (aka the Naked Philanthropist, 2020), this article argues that the death drive—as it manifests in normative Western subjectivity—has generated destruction on a macro scale in the form of global climate change. However, the death drive is not always-already destructive, but is rather something that can be partnered with creatively. This necessitates constructing a novel psychic flexibility, whereby the target at which one directs their sadism is the individuated ego. Paradoxically, some version of the world as we know it can be saved by first annihilating the self. This brand of ecological ethics, as advanced by Bradley and Ward, must be cultivated lest apocalyptic climate change—which is a macro-scale materialization of the death drive—bring homo sapiens to literal extinction.

KEYWORDS:

• Clade
• James Bradley
• Australia
• climate change
• death drive
• Naked Philanthropist

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Jodi Dean, who convened the Fisher Center for the Study of Gender and Justice fellowship during which this article was developed. I am also grateful to Kristen Brubaker and Sarabeth Rambold for their incisive feedback, to my wonderful students at Hobart and William Smith in whose company these thoughts originated and grew, and to the peer reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, too, Freud’s footnote: ‘What are commonly called the sexual instincts are looked upon by us as the part of Eros which is directed towards objects. Our speculations have suggested that Eros operates from the beginning of life and appears as a “life instinct” in opposition to the “death instinct” which was brought into being by the coming to life of inorganic substance. These speculations seek to solve the riddle of life by supposing that these two instincts were struggling with each other from the very first’ (1920, 73n).

2. In a similar but ultimately different vein, Louise Squire has written on ‘death-facing ecology’ which she defines as humans’ active recognition that ‘we are beings whose material lives are finite like those of any living being’ (2020, 2). Where Squire’s concerns are principally with the fact of literal death, mine are with the psychoanalytic death drive.

3. In his more recent cli-fi novel, Ghost Species, Bradley similarly presents a character who takes ‘pleasure in destruction’ with regards to climate change (2020, 196).

4. That Noah is intended as a biblical namesake is clarified by Bradley’s church-cum-ark storm shelter that houses many during a catastrophic flooding event, including Noah, his mother, and Adam: ‘the church now seems to move with the wind like a ship on the ocean’ (2015, 119, my emphasis).

5. In her formulation of ‘the maternal death drive’, Lisa Baraitser has similarly argued, ‘the death drive includes rather than negates developmental time and holds out the possibility of a time that breaks free of the ego’s imaginary sense of past, present and future. Developmental time, from this perspective, is precisely a suspension of the flow of time, a capacity to wait for the other to unfold. Maternity […] implies a return, again and again, to a scene that matters, a kind of repetition […] that might after all have something to do with generativity, indeed with freedom, not of the self, but of the other’ (2020, 509).

6. See, for one, Kerryn Higgs’s Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (Higgs 2014).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Fisher Center for the Study of Gender and Justice, Hobart and William Smith Colleges [Faculty Research Fellowship].

Notes on contributors

Robinson Murphy

Robinson Murphy is on faculty in the Environmental Studies program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has a PhD in English from the University of Notre Dame. His book Castration Desire: Less Is More in Global Anglophone Fiction is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.