IN3’s Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory (TURBA Lab) is pleased to invite you to the seminar Enjoying Climate Change: Jouissance as a Political Facton, given by Dr. Erik Swyngedouw, professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester.
This seminar is part of the Urban Transformation and Global Change Seminar Series.
Venue
Can Jaumandreu
Perú Street, 52
08018 Barcelona
Espanya
When
14/06/2022 11.30h
Organized by
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, IN3's Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory (TURBA Lab)
Program
Abstract
In this seminar, Dr. Swyngedouw explores this dissonance between knowing and acting that produces the current climate deadlock by focusing on ‘enjoyment’ as a political factor. Considering the enjoyment that infuses the climate change consensus and climate activism stands as an avatar for the wider impasse that characterizes most attempts to inflect the trajectory of the future away from ‘accumulation for accumulation sakes’ and its associated socio-ecological catastrophe. Considering enjoyment as a political factor might open avenues for re-framing the impasse of the present socio-ecological condition. He engages the Lacanian notion of enjoyment (jouissance). Its overall argument is that climate, and its change, is not only a threat to the world, but also something that is enjoyed in one way or the other. He differentiates between two dominant strands of enjoying climate change: First, a passionate engagement in destroying Nature based on an imperative to enjoy fossil fuels and what this metonymically stand for, and second, an equally passionate commitment to saving Nature based on an imaginary enjoyment that stems from renunciation and sacrifice. The seminar proceeds by arguing for the need to traverse the fantasies that sustain the very deadlock of the current situation, a process that requires re-scripting the process of political subjectivation and our libidinal attachments to the enjoyment of climate and its change.
Dr. Erik Swyngedouw
Professor of human geography at the University of Manchester. Swyngedouw has committed his studies to political-economic analysis of contemporary capitalism, producing several major works on economic globalization, regional development, finance, and urbanization. His interests have also included political-ecological themes, and the transformation of nature, urban governance, politics of scale, notably water issues, in Ecuador, Spain, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe. His recent work focuses on the democratic politics and the strategies and tactics of new political movements, and the political ecology of desalination. He has published over 100 academic papers in leading academic journals in geography and cognate disciplines, and in scholarly books.
To take part in this seminar, please contact blancacb@uoc.edu.