A Psychoanalytic-Philosophical Investigation of Climate Disavowal

Abstract: In this paper, the distance between climate science (what is known of climate heating and its consequences) and human modes of reacting to it, is approached in terms of psychoanalytic disavowal. Individuals' resistance to scientific knowledge about a crisis that severely questions future life on the planet, is considered here a resistance to knowledge about death as immanent to human life. This not-wanting-to-know accounts in affirmative terms for the insufficiency of the measures taken to mitigate the crisis. Climate disavowal is neither a behavioral lapsus nor an epistemic deficiency, and it cannot be considered a denial of reality. This paper unfolds the meaning of this not-wanting-to-know by returning to Freud and to the psychoanalytic notion of the death drive . Climate disavowal is analyzed in terms of a disavowal of one's own death , suggesting that disavowal affirms, rather than ignores the disavowed.