Enjoyment in the Anthropocene: the extimacy of ecological catastrophe in Donut County

ABSTRACT

Consciousness raising seems to be the most pressing task facing any project for environmental sustainability today. A psychoanalytic interpretation of the climate crisis, however, reveals that a far more urgent challenge is recognizing that we might be deriving jouissance, or unconscious enjoyment, from the very worsening of the crisis. This article contends that videogames are the ideal medium through which to grasp the form that our unconscious enjoyment takes—and, if mobilized against self-destructive capitalism, the emancipatory form our enjoyment could take—in the Anthropocene. Drawing on an analysis of the videogame Donut County, it makes two psychoanalytic interventions in ecocritical theory. The first is that any theory of the climate crisis must account for the subject of the unconscious—not as a nature-dominating individual, but as a hole in material reality. The second is that any project for environmental sustainability must avow the subject’s death-driven enjoyment rather than repress or avoid it.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• climate change
• death drive
• jouissance
• Lacan
• psychoanalysis
• videogames

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Christopher Boerdam, Ben Egliston, Brendan Keogh, Erin Maclean, Dan Padua, and Tony Thwaites for providing feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While videogame theorists interested in ecocriticism tend share with Abraham a scepticism toward the power of videogames to change hearts and minds about climate change, there are some who nonetheless maintain that videogames can or could be helpful for intervening in or reconceptualizing the climate crisis (see, for e.g., Chang 2020; Kunzelman 2021; May 2021; Ruffino 2020).

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Benjamin Nicoll

Benjamin Nicoll is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and a Chief Investigator in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. His research focuses on the critical theory of media, particularly videogames. His recent books are Minor Platforms in Videogame History (Amsterdam University Press, 2019) and The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, co-authored with Brendan Keogh).