Tag: zizek

Ecology and “the passion of the Real”

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.”

This is his second article for the IJZS (here’s the first), which is pretty impressive for such a young scholar (guess how young). 

Ecology and “the passion of the Real”