My friend Brad Bolman has a new article out in the International Journal of Žižek Studies, “Seeking Peace, Finding the Violence of the Real: Traumatic Ecologies and the Post-Political Present.” The abstract:
There is something queer about the social inability to act upon or to even fully think massive, impending ecological change. It is both obvious and confounding: on one level, we all know it is coming; on the other, we do not want to believe it and we refuse large-scale action to stop it. There is a game of political blame-shifting but there is also, and more importantly, an inability to ideologically engage with the contemporary ecological dilemma. Here I use the novel Butcher’s Crossing and the film Grizzly Man to investigate this dilemma through the psychoanalytic concept of “the passion of the Real.”
Absalom, Absalom! 