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

In the face of full-scale climate disaster, Theodor W. Adorno’s (2006, 151–152) proclamation that ‘human beings [must] become conscious of their own naturalness and call to a halt their domination of nature’ seems prescient. Andreas Malm (2020, 173), who cites this quote in Climate, Corona, Chronic Emergency, draws attention to Adorno’s use of the term ‘conscious’, here. ‘[A] politics of conscious intervention is precisely what now must be revived’, he argues (Malm 2020, 119). For Malm and like-minded ecological Marxists, the path to environmental sustainability lies in consciousness raising—that is, in mobilizing the discontent caused by climate inaction against the political and economic drivers of ecological catastrophe. Marxist or not, most climate activists, artists, philosophers, and scientists would likely be drawn to Malm’s conclusion. Consciousness raising seems to be the most pressing task facing any project for environmental sustainability today.

To treat the existential challenge of climate change as a matter of consciousness raising is, however, to radically misdiagnose the psychical conflict that the climate crisis arouses in us. A far more urgent challenge than becoming conscious of our own naturalness is recognizing that we might be deriving unconscious enjoyment—or what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls jouissance—from the very worsening of the crisis. As Timothy Morton (2016, 129) observes in Dark Ecology, there is an unmistakable pleasure to be found in the self-destructive pain wrought by anthropogenic climate change—‘delicious guilt, delicious shame, delicious melancholy, delicious horror, delicious sadness, delicious longing, delicious joy’—at work in each of us without our conscious knowledge. In psychoanalytic terms, the conscious wish to overcome the climate crisis may conceal an unconscious satisfaction in the repetition of loss and failure afforded by the crisis. ‘We take an unconscious enjoyment in not acting [in response to climate change]’, write Clint Burnham and Paul Kingsbury (2021, 3, italics in original), just as we consciously ‘wonder why others […] do not listen to science, do not act’. For Lucas Pohl and Erik Swyngedouw (2023, 3, 7), this unconscious enjoyment ‘is at work for both those who cling to the forces that are destroying the planet and those who are trying to save it’—it is as latent in Sarah Palin’s conservative rallying cry to ‘drill, baby, drill’ as it is in the liberal injunction to ‘sacrifice oneself for “the rights of Nature”’. A psychoanalytic response to the existential challenge of climate change, then, would focus not on consciousness raising but on revealing where and how our unconscious enjoyment has become implicated in the very crisis that, consciously, we may accept or deny.

Adorno might respond by imploring us to become conscious of, and thus ‘call to a halt’, our unconscious enjoyment of ecological catastrophe. But psychoanalysis demands that we do something much more dialectical and, at first blush, something deeply counter-intuitive, with what Sigmund Freud (1961a) would call our ‘death-driven’ enjoyment. As I explore in this article, psychoanalysis demands that we incorporate our death-driven enjoyment into our political project for environmental sustainability. It makes this demand not because it harbours an accelerationist or eco-pessimist agenda to expedite humanity’s extinction, nor because it equates enjoyment with a state of disruptive or carnivalesque hedonism. Rather, psychoanalysis insists that our death-driven enjoyment is environmentally relevant because the unconscious drive to enjoy is what makes us at once both vulnerable to collective destruction but also capable of forming an emancipatory social bond. As Todd McGowan (2013, 21) argues in Enjoying What We Don’t Have, our unconscious enjoyment of loss and failure is not a psychical defect in need of a cure but a ‘foundation for reconceiving’ emancipatory politics. ‘Rather than looking to the possibility of overcoming loss,’ McGowan (2013, 22) argues, ‘our political projects must work to remain faithful to it and enhance our contact with it’. In this sense, an ecological politics of the death drive demands that we wrench our unconscious enjoyment from the hold of self-destructive capitalism and redirect it toward environmentally sustainable ends.

To better understand this seemingly contradictory political project, we have an unlikely aid in the medium of the videogame. As Lawrence May (2021, n.p.) argues, an ‘ecocritical encounter with ecological monstrosity’ demands a confrontation with ‘the monstrosity within’—that is, a confrontation with the ‘bitter form of “pleasure”’ derived from the various forms of suffering wrought by climate inaction—and videogames, he suggests, may be the ideal medium through which to encounter this ‘bitter form of “pleasure”’. Taking inspiration from May, 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 (Esposito 2018), 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.

Enjoyment and Donut County

Elsewhere, I have drawn on Lacan’s concept of jouissance to argue that the enjoyment of videogame play consists not, as one might expect, in the conscious wish for pleasure or mastery, but rather in the unconscious drive to fail (Nicoll 2022; 2023 forthcoming). According to psychoanalysis, we are unconsciously driven to repeat self-destructive patterns and behaviours—to, in Freud’s terms, bungle our actions—because by doing so we reproduce, and subsequently enjoy, the constitutive loss that inaugurated us as subjects. When we seek out psychoanalytic treatment (or indeed other forms of therapy), it is usually because we want to overcome a seemingly external pattern or disorder that disrupts our conscious wish for pleasure or mastery. But the aim of psychoanalysis is very often to reveal that the patient’s unconscious desire is implicated in the very patterns and disorders that, prior to undergoing therapy, appeared foreign to them. We enjoy our symptoms, to borrow Slavoj Žižek's (2001) turn of phrase, and psychoanalysis encourages us to identify with rather than repress the source of our enjoyment. Few people consciously set out to play videogames to enjoy in the psychoanalytic sense of the term—that is, to derive unconscious satisfaction from the repetition of loss and failure—but the desire to play videogames nonetheless stems from the enjoyment of this very repetition (Nicoll 2022; 2023 forthcoming). It is for this reason that the locus of our unconscious enjoyment in videogame play normally remains obscured by conscious fantasies of pleasure and mastery. However, there are some videogames that buck the trend by making the source of our enjoyment visible to us through their ludonarrative structures.

One such videogame is Donut County, developed by Ben Esposito and published by Annapurna Interactive in 2018. On its surface, Donut County seems to have very little to do with climate change, but closer analysis of its ludonarrative structure reveals a sophisticated theory of what Lacan (1997, 139) would call the ‘extimacy’, or intimate exteriority, of ecological catastrophe.

Donut County’s narrative centres on Mira and her racoon friend BK, both of whom work at a donut shop in the town of Donut County. At the start of the videogame, Mira finds BK addicted to an app on his touchscreen device when he should be out delivering donuts (Figure 1). BK explains to Mira that if he earns enough XP (experience points) in the app, he will be awarded a real-life quadcopter drone. The narrative then flashes forward six weeks, when we find Mira, BK, and the Donut County townsfolk (all of whom are animals, except for human Mira) trapped in a hole beneath the town. It turns out that BK had been using his app to open a series of physical holes in the town. Using his touchscreen device, he directed the holes to swallow residents, homes, and entire ecosystems, all in the name of earning enough XP to win his coveted quadcopter. From here, the videogame’s narrative unfolds through a series of flashbacks and flashforwards. The townsfolk take turns recounting the events that led to them being swallowed by one of BK’s holes. The player’s task is to enact the townsfolks’ memories by taking control of BK’s holes (Figure 2). Swallowing objects makes the holes grow large enough to engulf not only the townsfolk but also the environments in which they live.

Figure 1. Screenshot from Donut County (Esposito 2018). Retrieved from: http://donutcounty.com, by permission of Annapurna Interactive.

Figure 2. Screenshot from Donut County (Esposito 2018). Retrieved from: http://donutcounty.com, by permission of Annapurna Interactive.

BK, who vehemently denies any wrongdoing to begin with, eventually accepts responsibility for his use of the app, which he explains was designed by the Trash King, a racoon entrepreneur who also owns the donut shop where Mira and BK work. The Trash King created the app to enlist users in the accumulation of ‘trash’—his term for literally anything swallowed by the hole—which, like data for the platform capitalist, he uses to expand his corporate empire. Once the townsfolk recognize that the Trash King was responsible for channelling BK’s enjoyment into a framework of ecocidal accumulation, they band together to open a hole big enough to swallow the Trash King’s corporate headquarters. Though BK is tempted by the Trash King’s offer of an aircraft-sized quadcopter (‘the king quadcopter’) in exchange for lifelong servitude, even he gets on board with the town’s collective rebellion. He recognizes that the enjoyment he gains from giving up the king quadcopter is an enjoyment that can be politically mobilized toward environmentally sustainable ends.

Donut County makes two arguments about the extimacy of ecological catastrophe, both which I will briefly sketch here before discussing in more detail later in the article. Its first argument is that the enjoying subject is a hole in material reality. Here, Donut County advances a far more sophisticated theory of subjectivity than that of the various schools of new materialism and realism (wherein the subject is demoted to the status of an object) and historicism (wherein the subject is viewed as a relic of Enlightenment humanism) that predominate in ecocriticism today. For Donut County, as for psychoanalysis, subjectivity is not a synonym for the consciously thinking person. Subjectivity is, rather, a gap, void, or cut in material reality—what Russel Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek (2020, 14) call ‘an excremental piece of the Real, a recalcitrant, unsymbolizeable remainder of every signifying process’. Through the figure of the hole, Donut County makes an important distinction between the subject of the unconscious—‘the cut in and of the Real’ (Sbriglia and Žižek 2020, 13)—and the consciously thinking person. The subject of the unconscious (the hole) appears alien and inexplicable to the consciously thinking person (BK) because it enjoys in ways that exceed, disturb, and undermine the latter’s conscious intentions. BK refuses to accept responsibility for the hole even though it is clear to everyone but him that he is the hole. Once he reconciles himself to the death-driven enjoyment of the hole, however, both he and the townsfolk realize that the hole is not their enemy. Instead, they see the hole as a shared absence, or what I will later call a universal lack-in-common, that provides a literal opening for their political project.

If, as psychoanalysis claims, the subject of the unconscious always finds a way to undermine and thus produce enjoyment for the consciously thinking person, then it would seem as though psychoanalytic theory is incapable of articulating a positive vision for environmental sustainability. Shouldn’t any ecological project aim to overcome the subject’s self-destructive tendencies rather than avow them? Donut County’s second critical point is that we must find a path to environmental sustainability that avows the subject’s death-driven enjoyment, even in the face of the latter’s colonization by self-destructive capitalism, or what I will later call the capitalist superego. The capitalist superego is embodied in the figure of the Trash King. The Trash King uses his app to capture BK’s enjoyment and mobilize it toward ecocidal accumulation. BK’s enjoyment subsequently becomes caught up in the environmentally destructive logic of capitalism. As speaking subjects, human beings are and will always be enjoying subjects, but this does not mean we are doomed to enjoy in the destructive ways dictated by the capitalist superego. Once we recognize that our enjoyment has been hijacked by the capitalist superego—as BK and Mira do once they recognize themselves in the holes engineered by the Trash King—we open a path to a collective form of enjoyment aimed not at ecocidal accumulation but at the (self-)sacrifice of the capitalist superego. BK must give up the king quadcopter—an object of unfathomable desire for him—as a price for rejecting the Trash King’s injunction to enjoy on capitalist terms. By making this sacrifice, however, BK does something quite radical: he inflicts the destructiveness of the hole on himself as opposed to having it thrust upon him in the form of a superego injunction to enjoy. This gesture creates the condition of possibility for the town’s political project.

Grasping these two points—the enjoying subject as hole in material reality and the capitalist superego as barrier to the emancipatory potential of death-driven enjoyment—is key to navigating the psychical bind of the climate crisis. Before unpacking these ideas in more detail, however, I want to preface my analysis with a brief defence of the value of textual analysis and psychoanalytic theory for ecocriticism.

An unknown known

At a time when the window of opportunity for reversing or even stalling the effects of climate change approaches permanent closure, the project of using videogames to change hearts and minds about climate change seems utterly inconsequential. This is Benjamin J. Abraham's (2022) position in Digital Games After Climate Change. For Abraham, the design of eco-friendly videogames is a distraction from the more pragmatic task of reducing the carbon emissions produced by the making and playing of videogames. A truly ecological videogame, he argues, need not contain eco-friendly content but must instead be made and played in an environmentally sustainable way. ‘A virtual explosion on a screen powered by carbon-free energy,’ he argues, ‘could be more ecologically-oriented, and be doing materially less harm than a similar climate friendly story in a game that is played on a machine powered by fossil fuel generation’ (Abraham 2022, 81, italics in original). To this end, Abraham critiques the solutionist ideology underlying the ‘serious games’ and ‘games for change’ movements. I agree: we should be sceptical of any videogame that claims to transmit a social justice message to players through the alleged power of its interactive design (cf. Kunzelman 2021, 117).¹ That said, textual meaning holds a certain value for ecocriticism that Abraham’s materialist critique misses.

For psychoanalysis, the power of a text such as a film or videogame lies not in its capacity to persuade or educate us into acceptance of something that is already known—the need to take climate change seriously, for example—but rather to ‘articulate what a culture cannot directly articulate for itself’ (McGowan 2017, 92). Great texts point beyond their historical conditions of possibility. They do not simply reflect what a culture consciously knows about itself but instead confront us with what Žižek (2008, n.p.) calls ‘unknown knowns’, or knowledge that is unconsciously known. Donut County, for example, does not simply communicate an existing idea or argument about climate change in ludic form. Instead, it confronts players with what Mark Bould (2021) calls ‘the Anthropocene unconscious’—that is, with an unknown known that even the most cutting-edge climate science and ecocriticism cannot articulate for itself. Like any great text, then, Donut County stages a confrontation between the consciously thinking person (or player, in this case) and the subject of the unconscious. It reveals that our unconscious desire is not where or what we expected it to be.

Without texts like Donut County, we would remain stuck in the realm of ‘known knowns’, or knowledge that is consciously known. We know that climate change poses a significant threat to the continuation of diverse life on Earth; we know that a revolutionary reconstitution of society is the only path forward; and we know that we must take this path today rather than tomorrow. Indeed, the frequent repetition of these known knowns in popular, critical, and scientific discourses has begun to function as what Robert Fletcher (2018, 57) and Sally Weintrobe (2013, 7) call a form of ‘fetishistic disavowal’, which Žižek (1992, 27) characterizes as follows: ‘I know very well (that the situation is catastrophic), but … (I don’t believe it and will go on acting as though it were not serious)’. In this context, the unknown known that our enjoyment has become implicated in the climate crisis will continue to remain inaccessible to conscious thought, and this is where texts such as Donut County come in.

A materialist objection, here, might be to claim that climate change is a political economic problem rather than a psychological one. According to this objection, psychoanalysis is complicit in the neoliberal project of psychologizing (and thus individualizing) political economic problems, wherein one must take personal responsibility for climate change by, for example, using green bags, buying local, or investing ethically. However, this objection not only mischaracterizes psychoanalytic theory—as we will see, psychoanalysis concerns itself with the subject of the unconscious rather than the psychology of the individual—but more importantly, it fails to recognize that political economic structures are themselves psychical.

Psychoanalysis teaches us that our unconscious desires are inextricably intertwined with political economic structures (see, for example, McGowan 2016). This is why the most influential critical theorists of the twentieth century saw fit to supplement their Marxist critiques of political economy with psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious. Thinkers such as Adorno and Horkheimer recognized that people had become psychically invested in the very economic structures that, according to Marxist doctrine, they were meant to reject. For Adorno and Horkheimer, it was not enough to simply reveal the political economic basis of alienation and expect revolution to follow; critical thought also needed to recognize where and how our unconscious enjoyment had become entangled (vis-à-vis the culture industry) in the very system of exploitation Marxism would have us oppose. In this sense, the psychical—which manifests itself most clearly in cultural texts—is always and already material. To refashion an old maxim of critical theory, what is needed today is an environmental politics that supplements ecological Marxism with ecological Freudianism.

Scholars trained in the historicist tradition may balk at the universalism underlying this claim and, perhaps, all psychoanalytic claims made thus far. To make universal claims about the power of texts or, perhaps more troublingly, the structure of the psyche, seems to violate the historicist principle that we should never generalize about subjective experience. For the historicist, universality—especially regarding matters of subjectivity—is not just philosophically antiquated; it is actively dangerous in its apparent affinity with totalitarian and colonialist regimes of subjugation. As Jacques Derrida (1982, 213) sees it, universality is nothing but a ‘white mythology’ wherein ‘the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form’. The white philosopher, in other words, mistakes their personal experience of subjectivity for a universal structure of subjectivity. Derrida’s argument against universality certainly holds true for any theoretical position that presents subjectivity as a set of qualities one must possess to qualify as a subject. We should dismiss out-of-hand any theory of subjectivity that, for example, claims that subjects must be able to think rationally to qualify as subjects. Such theories can and do form the basis for regimes of subjugation. However, the universality of psychoanalysis should never be conflated with the false universality of Enlightenment humanism, the latter of which is rightly critiqued by Derrida and others.

As will be explored in the following sections, psychoanalysis defines subjectivity not as a set of qualities we each possess in common but rather as a universal lack-in-common (McGowan 2020a). The fundamental claim of psychoanalysis is that we are lacking subjects because we are speaking subjects. Our alienation in and by language occasions a constitutive loss that sets our desire in motion. While this process of ‘symbolic castration’ is, as its name implies, symbolic rather than biological, it nonetheless compels us to enter the social field in search of what we feel we have lost. What we invariably find, however, is that the social field is itself lacking. It does not hold the answer to our lack but instead reflects our lack back to us in the form of a shared absence. In this sense, lack is what Lacan (1997, 139) would call an ‘extimate’ phenomenon: it is at once both intimate and uncannily exterior to the subject. On this basis, McGowan (2020a, 23–24) claims that ‘[t]he key to emancipatory politics is the recognition that the universal is what we don’t have in common’.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, McGowan (2020a, 200) postulates that the climate crisis ‘presents us with a unique opportunity for recognizing universality’. As he writes, ‘[w]hat every society shares today is the environmental catastrophe it cannot master. This hole within every society doesn’t affect every society in the same way, but it marks the limit that no society can eliminate’ (McGowan 2020a, 200). The climate crisis, in other words, is a psychically extimate phenomenon, not just an environmental or political economic one. It is a shared absence or hole in the social field that acts as a catalyst for our death-driven enjoyment. Rather than seeking to repress or avoid our unconscious enjoyment of ecological catastrophe, then, psychoanalysis demands that we identify with it as an opening for emancipatory politics. Fortunately, we have Donut County to render this theoretical project more concrete.

‘Is a hole a thing? Or is a thing holed?’

In Donut County, you play as a hole. Or, more accurately, you play as either BK or Mira playing as a hole. In the first half of the videogame, the townsfolk take turns recounting the events that led to them being swallowed by one of BK’s holes. The common denominator is that each resident recalls ordering a donut from BK moments before being swallowed by a hole. This is because BK had been using the GPS coordinates from the townsfolk’s donut orders to open holes at their locations via the hole-making app on his touchscreen device. Once the scene for a memory is set, the player is transported back to that scene, and their task is to enact the resident’s memory by taking control of one of BK’s holes and swallowing all objects in sight.

At the start of each level, holes are only big enough to swallow small objects such as weeds, tennis balls, and coffee mugs. But the more objects they swallow, the larger the holes grow, until they become big enough to swallow not only the townsfolk but also the communities and environments in which they live. The challenge of playing Donut County lies in figuring out how and in what order to swallow the objects in any given scene. Some objects, if swallowed in a particular order or in combination with other objects, produce effects that are useful for solving puzzles. Swallowing a corncob followed by a burning tree, for example, causes popcorn to erupt from hole. The popcorn can then be swallowed to make the hole grow even larger than it was when it first swallowed the corncob and burning tree. Once all objects in a scene are successfully swallowed, the player is taken to a victory screen, where the objects accumulated are converted into XP and tallied toward BK’s quadcopter goal. This screen serves as a reminder that the videogame play in Donut County is twice mediated: first through the player’s videogame system and screen display, and second through BK’s app in the diegetic world of Donut County.

In the first half of the videogame, BK refuses to accept responsibility for the death-driven enjoyment of the hole. Whenever the townsfolk accuse him of opening the holes that destroyed their town and livelihoods, he either insists on his innocence or defers responsibility onto the townsfolk themselves. ‘THEY ordered the donuts, dude’, he says to Mira. ‘I give the people what they want!!’. While BK’s refusal to accept responsibility in the face of mounting evidence is humorous, there is a grain of truth to his claims. Some of the townsfolk, such as crocodile Coco, seem unconsciously aware that ordering donuts from BK will result in their disappearance but order donuts anyway. ‘I want to see what they taste like’, says Coco, moments after speculating that BK’s donut deliveries might be related to the recent spate of disappearing residents.

While BK receives much of the blame for the destruction of the town and its inhabitants, his best friend Mira is not entirely blameless. In one of the resident’s memories, we learn that Mira knew that the racoon owners of the donut shop were responsible for creating the hole-making app but turned a blind eye. Once we reach Mira’s memory, we also learn that Mira destroyed BK’s quadcopter (which BK had only just earned in exchange for swallowing most of Donut County) and stole his touchscreen device so that she could use the hole-making app to swallow both him and his broken quadcopter. In an act of autoerotic enjoyment, Mira then swallows herself with the very same hole she uses to swallow BK, which is how both characters end up trapped in the hole with the rest of the town. While the rationale for Mira’s act is not explained, we can assume that she swallows herself because she recognizes that the only way to act politically is to repeat a loss she initially believed was thrust upon her into a loss she identifies with and thus inflicts on herself—an act of self-sacrifice BK will later take inspiration from.

The ontological ambiguity of the hole leads the townsfolk to ruminate on the ontology of holes more generally while they are trapped underground. ‘What is a donut without a hole?’, asks rabbit Roma. ‘A donut without a hole is still a donut’, says Coco. Mira agrees, pointing out that jam donuts, long johns, and fritters are donuts, even though they do not have holes. As are donut holes, adds Coco. ‘Wait. Donut holes don’t have holes?’, asks BK. ‘They don’t HAVE holes’, says Coco, ‘[t]hey ARE the hole’. The ontological ambiguity of the hole is a key theme in Donut County. In a promotional trailer for the videogame, a racoon turns to the camera and asks, ‘is a hole a thing? Or is a thing holed? Philosophers disagree’ (Annapurna Interactive 2017). Indeed, the figure of the hole is ontologically ambiguous, not only in terms of what it is or isn’t, but also in terms of its uncanny relation to the subject. None of the townsfolk recognize themselves in the figure of the hole, even though they each share an intimate relation to it. This is because the hole seems to enjoy according to a logic of its own—an undead logic, we might say—that exceeds even BK’s conscious wish for a quadcopter. Yet, despite the hole’s apparent autonomy, BK’s unconscious enjoyment is clearly caught up in the hole, as is that of the townsfolk and the player. We thus seem to be dealing with what Lacan (1997, 139) would call an ‘extimate’ object—an object that is, quite literally, at once both intimate and uncannily exterior to the subject—and this is where Donut County enables us to rethink the place of the subject in the Anthropocene.

An extimate materialism

By representing the enjoying subject as a hole, and by prompting the player to inhabit this figure of the hole, Donut County advances a theory of the subject that differs quite markedly from that of the various schools of new materialism, realism, and historicism that predominate in ecocriticism today. New materialism and realism encompass several schools of thought, such as actor network theory, object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and vital materialism. Historicists, on the other hand, typically share an overarching commitment to what Raymond Williams (2020) calls cultural materialism, though rarely do they identify as being part of a school of thought. Despite their differences, however, new materialists, realists, and historicists are united in their disdain for the philosophical category of the subject. This disdain for the subject has infiltrated ecocriticism to such an extent that ecocritical thought has, in recent years, become largely committed to a kind of anti-humanism, wherein the privileging of the subject is viewed as a barrier to environmental sustainability (see Fluss and Frim 2022). As Mari Ruti (2017, 39) puts it, the ‘all-too-predictable battering of the subject represents a theoretical repetition compulsion in the strictly Freudian sense, indicating, among other things, a traumatic fixation that keeps us from moving to new conceptual terrains’.

On its surface, the philosophical attack on the subject seems commonsensical. For new materialists and realists, any theory that grants ontological priority to the subject is philosophically and scientifically bankrupt because it privileges the subject’s phenomenal experience of reality over that of an allegedly objective understanding of reality. New materialists and realists therefore want to demote the subject to the status of an object in the name of a ‘flat ontology’ or ‘democracy of objects’ (Bryant 2011). In this view, the subject is just one object among many others. Its experience of reality is no more or less valid than that of other objects, or indeed other species. Historicists, meanwhile, view the subject as a relic of Enlightenment humanism. In this view, the philosophical category of the subject is nothing but a reified abstraction of the human being or individual. The subject of Enlightenment humanism perceives themselves as a unified and self-mastering individual who is entitled to dominate their environment. The philosophical wager for new materialists, realists, and historicists alike is that the erasure of this subject from our thinking will occasion an ontological rupture whereby humans will no longer perceive themselves as ontologically above the natural world (see Ruffino 2020 for a relevant example of this philosophical wager in the context of game studies).

This wager is appealing, but to bring us on side, it relies on our acceptance of a questionable presupposition: the idea that subjectivity is synonymous with conscious thought and agency. For new materialists, realists, and historicists, the subject is just another word for the human being or individual. From this perspective, the idea of there being a distinction between the subject and the individual may seem odd. But this distinction has a long history in philosophy, which makes its omission from new materialist, realist, and historicist critiques of subjectivity surprising. While the distinction between the subject and the individual can be found in the philosophy of ancient materialists such as Heraclitus (see McGowan 2019, 22–24), it reaches its height in G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy of objective idealism in the early nineteenth century and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious at the turn of the twentieth century.

In The Phenomenology of Spirit, first published in 1807, Hegel (1977) rejects the idea that there exists a world of pure or undivided substances. This is the opposite of what common sense tells us. Common sense tells us that there exists a ‘great outdoors’ of objects or substantialized ‘In-itself’ of material reality that, as subjects, we are incapable of fully comprehending with our limited sense-perceptions. But Hegel contends that substances are, like subjects, divided against themselves. As he puts it, ‘everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject’ (Hegel 1977, 10). For Hegel, all forms of matter are riven by contradiction. When we experience material reality as contradictory—which we inevitably do once we start asking the big metaphysical questions, such as that of how something can emerge from nothing—we are not, for Hegel, encountering the limits of reason to grasp the transcendent In-itself of material reality. We are instead encountering, at the level of our subjectivity, an ontological incompleteness that inheres in material reality itself. This ontological incompleteness defines and undermines all forms of being, all forms of substance. As McGowan (2020b, 72) puts it, ‘[t]he moment at which reason runs into contradiction indicates a contradiction in being itself that reason grasps through its own contradiction’. Hegel’s philosophical move, in Pohl’s (2020, 71) words, is to ‘introduce dialectics into matter itself’.

In Lacanian terms, material reality is ‘not-all’—it is ‘immanently out of joint’ (Pohl 2020, 67)—and this division in material reality is the very same division that gives birth to the lacking subject. We encounter this division in subjectivity whenever our conscious intentions fail to coincide with our unconscious desires. Freud did not (closely) read Hegel, yet he nonetheless rediscovered Hegel’s philosophy in his clinical research. For Freud, the subject of the unconscious is not a mechanism located deep within the consciously thinking person. Depth models of the psyche, which are often misattributed to Freud, misrepresent the unconscious as an agent located within the basement of one’s mind or beneath the waterline of consciousness. Freud’s theory of the unconscious is, however, much more surface-oriented, and thus much more Hegelian. For Freud, the subject of the unconscious is ‘out there’, hidden in plain sight. The unconscious manifests itself in, for example, slips of the tongue and bungled actions, all while remaining imperceptible to the person doing the talking or bungling. This is where Freud stakes a claim for the clinical application of psychoanalysis. When we undergo analysis, our therapist helps us identify with our unconscious desires—desires that would otherwise appear foreign to us, as external patterns and disorders—so that we do not blindly repeat them.

Riffing on Descartes’s maxim ‘I think, therefore I am’, Lacan (2006, 430) formulates the psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity as follows: ‘I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking’. The subject of the unconscious always eludes the consciously thinking person by appearing ‘where I do not think I am thinking’ (Lacan 2006, 430). ‘To grasp the true import behind Lacan’s claim,’ according to Sbriglia (2021, 120), ‘we must distinguish between the phenomenal “my”/“me,” the person viewing the [world], and the (objet) a priori “I,” the “stain,” the “blind spot,” the “bone in the throat,” that embodies, that phenomenalizes, the alienated, extimate core of subjectivity’.

In Donut County, the extimate core of subjectivity manifests itself as a hole in material reality. The characters first encounter the hole as an external thing, as a substance. But gradually, they come to recognize that their unconscious enjoyment is implicated in the hole, in that which appears alien and inexplicable to them. A thing is holed: substance is subject. Conscious thought is stained by an excessive enjoyment that exceeds, disturbs, and undermines it from without. For Donut County, then, lack and enjoyment share a topological relation. The hole is a gap, void, or cut in material reality—it is quite literally a lack—but it is also the site of an excessive enjoyment. It is thus not simply the case that the subject is like a hole in material reality, or that the figure of the hole is a good metaphor for subjectivity. Rather, the subject is a hole in material reality. As Sbriglia and Žižek (2020, 10) write, ‘the hole in reality, the inaccessibility of the transcendent In-itself, is a result of the inscription of the perceiving subject into reality’. The subject is, in other words, the point at which the ontological incompleteness of material reality obtains its most singular expression.

For psychoanalysis, then, the subject is a kind of object, but it is a very peculiar one. Unlike other known objects, the subject does not just suffer its self-dividedness blindly. As McGowan (2020b, 74) puts it, the subject’s ‘privilege’ is that it can ‘undermine itself rather than just submit to its ruin as all other entities do’. The subject is capable of unconsciously enacting its self-dividedness through, for example, slips of the tongue and bungled actions. It does not just submit to its destruction like other objects do but is instead capable of destroying itself. But the subject can also grasp its self-dividedness by, for example, undergoing psychoanalytic treatment, or by encountering its unconscious desire in textual form, as we see in Donut County. This ability to inflict one’s self-dividedness on oneself rather than suffer it blindly is, as we will see, the condition of possibility for the townsfolk’s political project in Donut County.

The ecological point, here, is not the familiar new materialist or realist one that the subject’s ‘objecthood’ renders moot the nature/culture divide. To claim that the subject is a hole in material reality is not to make some new age point about nature being within us and us within nature. Such thinking would imply that nature exists in a pure or undivided state—that nature is whole or harmonious in a way that we cannot comprehend with our limited sense-perceptions—wheras as we have seen, nature is, like subjectivity, divided from itself. By cutting into material reality and rendering it not-all, the subject-as-hole ruins any hope of fusing nature and culture, of realizing a true democracy of objects. As Pohl (2020, 75) sees it, the subject-as-hole creates a ‘ruined unity’ out of nature and culture. ‘As soon as nature no longer functions as the exception of culture, as the non-castrated One,’ says Pohl (2020, 80), ‘the sphere of culture dissolves and inscribes itself into nature’. Once we abandon the idea that nature exists in a pure, undivided state, ‘[w]e end up with an unnaturalness, where nature and culture melt together without creating a new Whole’ (Pohl 2020, 80). This ‘ruined nature’ is, for Pohl (2020, 79), ‘neither natural nor cultural and also not simply a mix between the two’. Instead, the subject-as-hole enables us to articulate a ‘third possibility between nature and culture, just like the undead obtains a third option between life and death’ (Pohl 2020, 79).

BK, Mira, and the Donut County townsfolk initially see the hole as an external thing, as an alien substance thrust upon them from the outside. The player may likewise view the hole as an external thing they are required to control, without recognizing the extent to which their own enjoyment is implicated in its disturbing, death-driven logic. But once the Donut County townsfolk identify with the death-driven enjoyment of the hole, they rally around it as a shared absence, and the player is invited to do the same. The Trash King, who acts as a conduit of what I will call the capitalist superego, created the hole-making app to channel the townsfolk’s enjoyment into a framework of ecocidal accumulation. In this context, BK’s refusal of the Trash King’s injunction to enjoy on capitalist terms must be read as a political act, whereby he wrenches his enjoyment from the hold of self-destructive capitalism and mobilizes it toward environmentally sustainable ends.

Giving up our quadcopters and enjoying them too

Although the hole ultimately provides an opening for the townsfolk’s political project, it is mobilized toward capitalist ends by the Trash King. The Trash King’s app channels the emancipatory potential of the hole into a framework of ecocidal accumulation. It prompts BK, for example, to accumulate an excessive amount of trash in exchange for future reward in the form of a quadcopter. While enticing, this promise of future reward alienates BK from the true source of his enjoyment, which is the unconscious satisfaction he derives from the repetition of loss and failure afforded by the app. The Trash King demands that BK enjoy because, like any good capitalist, he recognizes that BK’s unconscious drive to enjoy can be made amenable to the logic of commodity capitalism. The problem with commodity capitalism, as McGowan (2016) sees it, is not that it is unsatisfying but that it is psychically satisfying. By repeatedly failing to provide the fulfilment it perpetually promises, commodity capitalism satisfies our unconscious appetite for enjoyment. It thus demands that we enjoy according to its dictates, thereby alienating us from the radical negativity of our death-driven enjoyment. By demanding that BK enjoy in this way, the Trash King becomes a conduit of what call the capitalist superego. Before unpacking this idea, it is necessary to define the concepts of death drive and enjoyment in more detail than I have thus far, as this will set the scene for a more complete understanding of the capitalist superego.

The foundational example of the death drive and its relation to enjoyment is Freud’s (1961a, 8–11) account of his grandson’s ‘fort-da’ (gone-here) game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The fort-da game bears a striking similarity to the core gameplay conceit of Donut County. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes watching his grandson, Ernst, play a game with a reel on a string. When alone, Ernst would cast the reel from his cot and, seemingly satisfied with its disappearance, pull it back in before casting it off again. When the reel disappeared from his view, Ernst would mutter ‘o-o-o-o’, which Freud deduced was his attempt at saying ‘fort’ (gone). When he retrieved the reel, Ernst would say ‘da’ (here). While Ernst ultimately derived ‘greater pleasure’ from the act of retrieving the reel, he was more psychically invested in ‘the first act, that of departure,’ which he ‘staged as a game in itself far more frequently than the episode in its entirety’ (Freud 1961a, 10). This puzzles Freud because it seems to contradict the primacy of the pleasure principle. While Ernst found ‘greater pleasure’ in the diminution of excitation occasioned by the retrieval of the reel, he nonetheless seemed more invested in compounding his excitation by repeatedly discarding the reel and, on frequent occasion, not even seeing the game through to its ‘pleasurable ending’ (Freud 1961a, 10).

Freud was unable to square the fort-da game with his framework of the pleasure principle because he lacked a theory of enjoyment, or jouissance. That is, while Ernst attained a sense of pleasure and mastery from the retrieval of the reel, he derived a more powerful unconscious satisfaction, or enjoyment, from the act of losing the reel. This is because the act of losing the reel enabled Ernst to restage the constitutive loss that marked his entry into the social order—his alienation in and by language—and to enjoy the repetition of this loss under the guise of a playful game. In this sense, the reel is a surrogate for a constitutively absent object—what Lacan calls the objet a (see, for example, Lacan 1998a, 178)—that Ernst, like all speaking subjects, sacrificed into existence as a result of his inauguration as a speaking being. There is, then, something cruelly optimistic about Ernst’s psychical investment in the first act of the fort-da game. By repeatedly casting off the reel, it is as though Ernst is hoping that perhaps this time it will return with his objet a in tow. But of course, the retrieval of the reel only compounds Ernst’s experience of loss and failure, because it never returns with the objet a in tow. The name for this compulsion to circle the objet a without attaining it—and to derive enjoyment from the repetition of this circular movement—is the death drive.

The death drive compels the subject to repeat experiences of loss and failure. Its presence can be detected in, for example, bungled actions, wherein the subject unconsciously undermines its conscious intentions so as to reproduce, and subsequently enjoy, its constitutive loss (as in Ernst’s fort-da game). The drive is not actively malicious, however. Its only imperative is to reproduce its circular movement, and this repetition produces a surplus of enjoyment as a by-product. ‘[W]hat is profoundly disturbing about the “death drive”’, as Alenka Zupančič (2017, 104, italics in original) theorizes it, is ‘not that it wants only to enjoy, even if it kills us, but that it wants only to repeat this negativity, this gap in the order of being, even if this means to enjoy’. The drive is indifferent to the enjoyment it generates, and this is what sets it apart from the superego.

The superego, as Freud (1961b, 53) defines it in The Ego and the Id, is ‘pure culture of the death drive’. The superego channels the subject’s death-driven enjoyment into repetition compulsions that serve the dominant norms, values, and ideals of the reigning social order (McGowan 2021). While the drive is indifferent to the enjoyment it generates, the superego actively ‘forces’ the subject to enjoy (Lacan 1998b, 3). Coca-Cola’s long-standing slogan, for example, is ‘enjoy’. As Žižek (2000, 22–23) notes, this slogan is fitting given that the psychical satisfaction of drinking Coke lies in the dissatisfaction—or enjoyment—it provides: drinking Coke only makes one thirstier for more Coke. This circuit of dissatisfaction generates surplus value for Coca-Cola, and this is why the company’s demand to enjoy can be understood as a superego injunction: it wants to channel the subject’s death-driven enjoyment into surplus value.

As Zupančič (2017, 104) sees it, ‘[t]he superego (and its culture) reduces the drive to the issue of satisfaction (enjoyment), making us hostages to its vicissitudes, and actively blocking access to the negativity that drives it’. By forcing the subject to enjoy on its terms, the superego alienates the subject from the radical negativity of their death-driven enjoyment. It does this by promising the subject a fantasmatic or non-lacking form of enjoyment in return for the subject’s capitulation to its demands. But of course, the superego repeatedly fails to deliver on its promises. When we capitulate to the superego’s injunction to enjoy, we allow the radical negativity of our enjoyment to be co-opted by the interests of the reigning social order. While the superego appears in the guise of the Trash King in Donut County, it is important to remember that the superego is a psychically extimate phenomenon rather than a substantial other. As Bruce Fink (1997, 129) understands it, the superego is the ‘sadistic Other within us’. When we obey the superego’s commands, ‘it is as if we were obtaining jouissance for the Other, not for “ourselves”’ (Fink 1997, 129, italics in original).

The Trash King demands that BK (and other users of his app) enjoy through the figure of the hole, because by doing so, he accumulates more and more trash, which enables him to expand his corporate empire. In return for meeting these demands, the Trash King promises BK a quadcopter prize. This superego injunction to enjoy compels BK to unleash the destructiveness of the hole on the town and its inhabitants. Filling the hole with trash, and thus capitulating to the capitalist superego, only makes the hole bigger, more voracious, and more destructive. If BK is guilty of anything, then, it is of capitulating to the demands of the capitalist superego and giving up on the radical negativity of his death-driven enjoyment. As Žižek (1994, 68) writes, the ‘[s]uperego draws the energy of the pressure it exerts on the subject from the fact that the subject was not faithful to his desire, that he gave up on it. Our sacrificing to the superego, our paying tribute to it, only corroborates our guilt’.

Once the Donut County townsfolk recognize that BK’s death-driven enjoyment has been hijacked by the Trash King’s app, however, they devise a plan to use the hole to swallow the Trash King and his corporate headquarters. They recognize that although the Trash King has successfully channelled BK’s enjoyment into a framework of ecocidal accumulation, the hole can nonetheless be reclaimed as a shared absence, a universal lack-in-common. At a critical point in their mission, BK is summoned by the Trash King to engage in negotiations. In a gesture befitting the capitalist superego, the Trash King offers BK an aircraft-sized quadcopter in exchange for BK’s cooperation. BK, however, remains faithful to his death-driven enjoyment by refusing the Trash King’s injunction to enjoy on capitalist terms. He collaborates with the townsfolk to use the hole to destroy the king quadcopter, the object he most desires. By sacrificing the king quadcopter, he severs his attachment to the capitalist superego, the sadistic Other within. In doing so, he recognizes that the enjoyment of the hole is not something thrust upon him from the outside but is instead something both he and the townsfolk share an extimate relation to. Rather than seeing his lack as something that must be overcome to attain a future excess of enjoyment (which is the logic of the capitalist superego), he embraces the excess that inheres in lack itself. His sacrifice—of both the king quadcopter and his investment in the capitalist superego—generates an enjoyment that strengthens the social bond, enabling the town to act politically on the basis of their universal lack-in-common.

BK’s sacrifice is not simply an act of consumerist renunciation (as Pohl and Swyngedouw (2023) argue, consumerist renunciation can itself function as a means by which to enjoy the worsening of the climate crisis), and nor is it an act of what Žižek (2001, 44) calls ‘subjective destitution’, ‘an act of annihilation, of wiping out’ (see Ruti 2017, 131 for a relevant critique of subjective destitution). At the very end of the videogame, after the townsfolk have prevailed, BK can be seen playing with his toy quadcopter—the very same quadcopter that prompted him to unleash the destructiveness of the hole on the town in the first instance. What this reinforces for us is that the very drive to enjoy that created the crisis is the same drive that must be mobilized to undo the crisis. An ecological politics of the death drive recognizes that because we cannot eradicate our death-driven enjoyment, we must incorporate it into both our political project for environmental sustainability and our vision of a post-climate change future. Donut County implores us to identify with our death-driven enjoyment rather than misidentify it as an external enemy or allow it to be counter-mobilized against us in the form of a superego injunction. Identifying with our enjoyment will enable us to organize a climate politics around the conflictual, or self-contradictory, nature of the death drive, rather than the fantasy of overcoming it. Importantly, such a politics need not entail an act of self-annihilation, of subjective destitution. As Donut County reveals, an ecological politics of the death drive allows us to give up our quadcopters and enjoy them too.

Conclusion

The major challenge of the climate crisis is accepting that our unconscious enjoyment has become implicated in the very worsening of the crisis. Here, Donut County and psychoanalysis both make the—at first deeply counter-intuitive—claim that we must avow our death-driven enjoyment rather than eradicate it. This is what puts them at odds with other theoretical and scientific responses to the climate crisis. As we see in Donut County, any attempt to repress or avoid our death-driven enjoyment will result only in the latter’s foreclosure and subsequent colonization by the capitalist superego. The capitalist superego alienates us from the radical negativity of our enjoyment by convincing us that we can attain a fantasmatic enjoyment in the form of, for example, a quadcopter prize. BK can only attain the quadcopter if he capitulates to the demands of the capitalist superego.

However, we derive enjoyment from the repetition of loss and failure, not from some future promise of non-lacking enjoyment. Recognizing this, BK refuses the Trash King’s injunction to enjoy on capitalist terms. He inflicts the destructiveness of the hole on himself, which takes the form of his sacrifice of both the king quadcopter and his investment in the capitalist superego. This sacrifice politicizes the social bond, as it reveals that the death-driven enjoyment of the hole is not something thrust upon the Donut County townsfolk from the outside—it is not some external pattern or disorder—but is instead a shared absence, a universal lack-in-common. Once they recognize their unconscious enjoyment in the hole, the Donut County townsfolk become capable of mobilizing it toward environmentally sustainable ends. For Donut County, then, the first step in overcoming the climate crisis will involve psychically reorienting ourselves to it, such that we not only recognize our enjoyment implicated in it, but that we collectively redirect this enjoyment toward anti-capitalist—and thus environmentally sustainable—ends.

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.

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

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Notes on contributors

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).

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).