Geotraumatics and the polar weird: Contamination and the negotiation of subjectivity in The Terror (2018)

This article attempts to explore how the notion of geotrauma allows us to understand the negotiation of subjectivity of the Anthropocene human as it is contaminated by the nonhuman other. The concept of geotrauma or geotraumatics was developed by theorists including Nick Land, Reza Negarestani and Robin MacKay as a full materialist extension of the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious, relating the techniques of subject formation to violent external processes that inscribe their traces on the subject. In this essay, the American historical horror television series The Terror (2018) will be analysed as a weird narrative in which contamination, as contact with the outside, here referring to both the unmapped landscape and the monstrous ‘Tuunbaq’, renders possible a geotraumatic account of the explorer-subject. It will also examine The Terror as a narrative that frames the pretrauma of Anthropocene anxieties by exploring how geological changes, especially the freezing-thawing of glacial landforms, impact the human body and psyche.