And yet it moves! (Climate) migration as a symptom in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

While the climate-migration nexus raises crucial questions of mobility and climate justice, it is commonly understood through simplistic narratives that reify a complex set of relations. The spectre of environmentally-induced exodus is recurrent in media, policy and activist circles, in spite of numerous studies that reveal the empirical flaws and noxious normative implications of such narratives. This article explores this insistence and the desire(s) for there to be a reified relation between climate and migration such insistence reveals. The article proceeds in three movements. First, it situates discourses on climate migration in relation to the crisis of humanism the Anthropocene signifies. Second, it operates a symptomatic reading of climate migration discourses, drawing on two understandings of symptom elaborated by Lacan – as ‘return of the repressed’ and as ‘Sinthome’. Read as a symptom, the figure of the climate migrant/refugee appears as the return of fundamental contradictions that carve contemporary regimes of socioecological (re)production. Through the concept of ‘Sinthome’, discourses on climate migration can be read as (illusory) attempts to shore up for the waning consistence of modern forms of ‘being human’. Finally, the article proposes a symptomatic reading of the Anthropocene itself, and elaborates on what the dissolution of this symptom/ Sinthome would entail.     

“人类世”视野下西方生态批评的拓展

"人类世"这一概念自21世纪初被提出以来,在西方诸多领域引起了广泛关注和热议,包括将环境、自然作为主要关注对象的生态批评。这一概念迫使研究西方生态批评的学者迅速做出反应,在反思人类对地球的地质影响之时,将学术研究的范围在时间和空间两个维度上延展:从作为研究主体的人到作为研究客体的环境,再到研究具体内容和方法,都在这个新概念的启发和推动下不断得到深化和拓展,包括建立地球意识、推动灾难故事和慢性暴力叙事等。     

The end(s) of immanence in the anthropocene: militarized ecologies and the future of Deleuzian thought

Two features bear down fundamentally on our current historical occasion: structures of security, and breakdowns of planetary ecosystems. This essay argues that Deleuze is not only tracing a “geophilosophy” (that is, a nonhuman-centered theory of history that includes a geohistory of the planet) that moves from nomadic through State and finally through neoliberal forms that extend beyond the power of the State, but that he is also moving toward a theory of “control” that can teach us a great deal about the rise of the security society and its relation to the anthropocene. More specifically, this essay argues that philosophy is at a moment when the stakes of Deleuze’s conceptualizations of “immanence” have changed. This change hinges on the ecological circumstances of the twenty-first century – a set of conditions considerably underway, involving a course unlikely to change in time to reverse the seriousness of the situation (due in part to the supremacy of a self-destructive international neoliberal politics). The essay concludes by more sharply defining the workings of security in relation to immanence in the anthropocene.