Wrestling with Monsters: Critique, Climate Change, and Comets

Abstract

We live, as the Chinese saying supposedly goes, in interesting times. Žižek (2012) argues that our times constitute a state of permanent crisis. This sense of crisis is felt across material domains through climate change or geopolitics, to policy settings that respond to ‘crises’ in our bureaucracies. How are we to respond to such a state? In this chapter, I discuss Žižek’s call not to act, but to think. Žižek’s project uses psychoanalytic ideology critique to pose questions about the way people understand the ‘problems of society’. He uses the metaphors of masks and fantasy to unpack the way particular ‘truths’ are symbolic representations that act to construct hegemonic ideologies that define the world. The intellectual work of the academy—that which ‘has no practical use’ (Žižek, 2012. Counterpoints, 422, 32–44)—involves the interrogation and critique of these masks: to explore how the ways we perceive a problem can themselves be part of the problem. Faced with these complex, mediated rationalities, Žižek argues that there is often a push to act quickly, often in ways that do not create solutions. The challenge is to find ways to re-articulate the problems of our world in ways that transform our understanding and therefore the terrain of possibility. This chapter engages with this challenge through the lens of climate change and the school strike movement.