Negative Life
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hi. Theory. Welcome to Hi Theory. In this podcast, we get high on the substance of theory. I'm Sharanik Boshu. And I'm Kim Adams. We are two tired academics trying to save critique from itself. So today I'm talking with Stephen Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay about negative life. May I ask you to introduce yourselves?

Sure, I'll start off. So hi, thanks, Kim, for having us on the show. Really happy to be here. My name is Stephen Swarbrick. I'm an associate professor of English at Baruch College at the City University of New York. I'm a literary scholar and theorist working in the environmental humanities, sexuality studies, and psychological theory.

And I'm Jean-Thomas Tremblay. I'm an associate professor at York University in Toronto. I'm also the director of the graduate program in social and political thought.

I'm also a scholar of literature, film, gender and sexuality studies, and the environment. And I'm also the author of Breathing Aesthetics, which came out a couple years ago. And so we are excited to have you here to talk about your new book, which is called Negative Life, the Cinema of Extinction. And so let me ask you our first question, which is, what the heck is negative life?

Yeah, I'll get us started here. So negative life for us names the misalignment of individual and species survival. So in a very basic formula, if we live longer, we are producing more waste, more carbon footprint is magnified, and that might produce a certain foreclosure of the worlds that we might wish to protect. Worlds that are characterized by a plenitude of resources for future generations.

In this book, we posit negative life as the condition of thought and film. And so how do we get from negative life as a set of contradictions to negative life as a condition of thought and film? So one way of thinking about this might be to... Can we just, can we go back to the definition of negative life at the beginning before we get to its application in cinema? Because I think it went by really fast.

So maybe some folks who are listening might not have put it all together. So the idea, if I'm getting it correctly, is that our existence, our daily lives have in some way a negative impact. So like what counts as a positive life for us has a negative impact on the lives of others.

Is that the basic or? No, no, that's not how we would. Explain it to me better then, because I didn't catch it. Right. I don't know. Stephen, do you want to take this? Yeah, sure. So one of the ways that we define negative life is a concept in this book. And this is part of the polemical tone that readers may pick up on in the book is that negative life is a concept that tries to be ableist.

A pedagogical. Okay. We talk about a pedagogy quite a bit throughout the book. And that is in part our way of responding to this, this common tendency, this trope within the environmental humanities to appoint teachers or pedagogues more times than not non-human animals, plants, fungi, minerals, the list, the list goes on. It's quite nearly infinite, right? Within the environmental pedagogy.

kinship that are teaching us as readers, as environmentalists, as activists, how to be better entangled with our environment. So the background to so much environmental discourse is this idea of a human nature split

Or a kind of human exceptionalism where we're standing above and dominating the world and so forth. And of course, we are in so many ways. But part of our critique and what we're trying to do by mobilizing this idea of negativity within our book

is to zero in on the gaps within this rhetoric of entanglement. So those things that fall out of the equation when we try to turn ethics into a kind of all-encompassing relationality. And one of the ways that we define that element that falls out

negative life being the master trope, is contradiction, the contradictoriness of desire. So we draw heavily on psychoanalysis in this book. And as I was going to say a well-known, but I don't know how well-known psychoanalysis is these days, even within academia, within critical theory land. But as I think a classic example of the contradiction within the psyche between our conscious symbolic identities and then the unconscious is that which kind of

tears at those identities and does them. So building on this psychoanalytic queer theoretical discourse, we're trying to push against this sort of tendency to stitch everything together and call that ethics and call that politics. And to say instead that ethics and politics has to begin

For us, this would be our argument that environmental politics has to begin by recognizing the gaps within these structures and starting there. So rather than saying the mushrooms can teach us how to be, what you guys are saying is that there are gaps between our desires for kinship with the broader environment and

And like, what's the counterpoint? So we have this desire for kinship and maybe our desire to be taught by the mushrooms? Yeah, well, I think the counterpoint in a very simple way might be something like, okay, if we just accept a basic theoretical truism that as speaking beings,

sense-making abilities are governed by the symbolic universe that we inhabit. That symbolic logic, it has negativity inherent to it, right? Something has to be missing from the symbolic structure

for signifiers to start swirling around and making sense, for meaning making to happen. So from that perspective, we, on the one hand, have this desire to be fully immersed, saturated by the world, fully integrated with it. And yet the very structure of our desire, again, from a psychoanalytic perspective, which we take on board, means that there are inherent obstacles to that. And I think one really clear example of this comes in the introduction to,

the book where we analyze the film, The Wall, which for listeners who have never seen the movie, it really simply, it's about a woman, an unnamed woman who goes off into the country wanting to, just as we were saying, connect and commune with her natural surroundings and then hits inexplicably an invisible wall. The film doesn't explain it, doesn't tell us how it got there. The woman never finds a way outside of it.

This is going back to what I was saying before about pedagogy, about films that don't necessarily provide a tidy lesson on living with one's environment. The woman instead has to rule with this obstruction, literally this negativity. It's an absence, although it is present. It confines her.

And that for us is a really great, hopefully clear example of what we're trying to theorize under the heading of negative life. That on the one hand, we live in a symbolic universe that opens up the world to us, but it's also what prevents us from actually communing with it. And I think the broader point that we're trying to make is that in rushing to the language of entanglement, eco-criticism,

tends to overlook these more basic structural points that we've sort of inherited from much earlier theoretical discourses that eco-criticism has, for the most part, I think, just tried to chop into the waste bin, right? Like psychoanalysis, like reconstruction, like all this kind of, like, quote, unquote, 90s theory that we're trying to reanimate in this book in an environmental framework.

And to return to maybe the idea of contradiction, there is no dearth of contradictions in environmental studies. And environmental studies has identified a set of contradictions in the way we live or the way we consume or produce. And there's an account of capitalism, of colonialism, of imperialism that is quite rich in that field.

But we are trying to wrestle with the fact that the field tends to think of those contradictions as remediable through the psyche or at the level of the psyche, that an attitudinal adjustment, which is to say a desire for better relations, as though the desire were something we were entirely present to, would be enough in order to certify our status as good ecological subjects and maybe even good environmental citizens.

One thing we're bemoaning and also trying to rectify because there's something productive or generative about this book is we're saying, well, there's no concept of the unconscious in ecological studies. And ecological studies would really benefit from having such a concept of the unconscious so that we would understand that the things that we call desirable might have a negative or dark underbelly.

And that politics really is activated when we try to think about the relation between what we want and what we don't want, not just when we look at what we want and we say, well, we want this. Okay, I think I know where you guys are coming from. So let me ask you my second question, which is, how do I use negative one?

Okay, so as you can imagine, based on everything that we were saying before, this is a bit of a tough one. I have two thoughts on this, and they are appropriately at odds with each other. So first, I'll just say that we are not opposed to instrumentalizing the concept of negative life, which as our book's master trope connects with queer and black theories of negativity, which we engage with quite closely in our book.

So we're all in favor of its use and, in fact, to deliver several related concepts and phrases such as the minus one, the horror of entanglement. We have these interlude chapters on horror where we talk about the horror of entanglement and so on.

All of which I think can be used to signify the incompletion of any text, literary text, film text, or in the language of Ecclesiastes, ecological text or entanglement. On the other hand, because it is a theory of negativity, I think it's probably right to say that there's no telling how negative light will manifest.

emerge, and thus there's no straightforward use for it. So, you know, like to take an example, it emerges for Freud unexpectedly in the hysterical symptom and slip of the tongue, all these sort of unexpected moments where you're suddenly alienated from yourself.

But what these examples for us have in common is that they all introduce this idea of a gap or a kind of a hitch, a blunder in form that intrudes on everyday habits and discourse. So going back to what I was saying before about our filmic example of the woman who unexpectedly encounters this hitch and this interruption to her kind of idyllic country setting, these are the kinds of moments that we actually gravitate toward a lot.

throughout our films in this book. So

I guess one way of thinking about the usefulness of negative life is that it provides a hitch in life's program, certainly a hitch in eco-theory's program, because it presents a stumbling block to our ordinary habits of sensemaking. We're using these metaphors a lot, even just talking about it, so lack, gaps, hitches, these sorts of things, they all testify to a type of enjoyment, right?

What, in psychoanalysis, is Ottawa a specifically masochistic form of enjoyment? Say the word, jouissance. So the Lacanians, some Lacanians, not all, hate

um translating jouissance into enjoyment um right so are you one of them who hates translating no i just think it's fine it was funny to just like talk around the word as as to not pronounce it yeah but no so i'm glad you paused me because i that that is important right because i think when you hear enjoyment most listeners hear enjoyment they think um oh yeah like i i enjoy scrolling on my phone i do love a you know

Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. But in psychoanalysis, there is this, I think, useful distinction between pleasure, so the things that we consciously seek out and take pleasure in, versus enjoyment or results, right? Which are experiences that are often undermining, right? So I mentioned before the classic example from Freud is the slip of the tongue, right?

oh, what do we all do when we have a slip? Like we say, oh, I didn't mean that. Or that was just, you know, whatever. We immediately try to repress it or conceal it or pretend like it didn't happen. But that interruption and the alienation you feel during that interruption, that is encyclical analysis, jouissance, or the enjoyment that is proper to the unconscious, right? It's the unconscious asserting itself and interrupting the regular habits of our conscious lives.

Yeah. And jouissance is kind of scary, right? Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Because it puts you outside yourself. Yeah. Yeah. It's a rupture. I mean, I have to say also before hearing your question, Kim, I had not thought about how the term might be applied by others, but

but it is, you know, a term that could travel in ways that might surprise us. For us, the term negative life is very tied to the cinema. So we're interested in the ways that films as these kind of narrative objects that we dare call text's

which is, you know, maybe not the kind of modus operandi in film studies right now, how they produce these encounters with negative life because they're not giving characters or spectators access to this ethical horizon, right? That we call relation or entanglement or admission.

And so they produce these encounters with negative life that are traumatic encounters, right? To return to the idea of jouissance. And it matters to us that we're talking about film because for us, film is a negative medium. Like aliveness or life are created through the cut primarily. The film strip itself decays. Most films are no longer printed on the film strip. So it's a kind of absent medium, right? Or a misnomer. The question for us will be what kind of,

transformation maybe the concept undergoes when it leaves its logical home or site right which would be the cinema and

How will negative life save the world? I mean, we're cheating, but it won't. But it matters to us that it won't. Because we talk about the fact that eco-criticism has been stuck in the book quite a bit because it misrecognizes its own stuckness as openness, possibility, potentiality, or the otherwise.

And it always wants to create more worlds. And this is very similar to the kind of gesture that we identify in liberalism, right? Where you imagine progression or progressiveness through the eligibility and admission of populations previously excluded. But as many theorists of liberalism have shown us,

A gesture of inclusion is an infinite number of muted gestures of exclusion. And so we're interested in the kind of sadism that comes with utopian thinking of people saying, okay, well, I want this world. Okay, well, then what are all the worlds that you're not willing to protect or that you want to let die or that you want to kill, right? With this kind of animus by claiming this one world as the one that's desirable, right?

We still make no secret of the fact that psychoanalysis entails stuckness of a different kind, right? So what's wrong to us about eco-criticism being stuck is not that it's stuck, it's that it disavows that kind of

And one of the big lessons of psychoanalysis in terms of its elaboration as a therapeutic practice is that the point is not to overcome your being stuck through some kind of expressive practice, right? Like I've emptied out my unconscious. Now it's all in my consciousness and now I'm fine. I'm healed. I'm cured, right? Instead,

The point of analysis is really to learn to live with the fact that there are things about you that are intractable and there are things about the world that you internalize that are also intractable. Yeah. And if I could just jump on there, I mean, I think that's what JT said is really beautifully put. We're not going to save the world with negative life because a big part of the thesis is that the world is just inherently split or broken and there's no, there's no obviating that.

So as JT was saying, I think there is this tendency to try to proliferate worlds, think of alternative worlds and multiple worlds, et cetera, the kind of multiverse of theory. But we insist throughout the book that, no, there's just this world and it's lacking. It's split from within. And that eco-criticism has a real hard time grappling with. And maybe just the critical communities broadly has a really hard time grappling with that.

I think one way of reading negative life, I think this is incorrect, but one way of reading it might be to say that we're just sort of edgelords and that the whole point is just to burn everything down. That's not right. Because again, the idea of negative life is that negative life is already in shears in the worlds, the relationalities, social configurations that we have. We are the ones that we want, the ones that we want to imagine. And I'll just say a read.

You know, we don't want everyone to go extinct. We want a better world. But I think the starting point for us for creating that better world has to always be with what we call negative life or this structural absence.

So with acknowledging the impossibility or the split, the brokenness within the present. Yeah, and that impossibility being of our world, right? And because we are maybe quite romantically attached to ideas of externality or contingency. I mean, this is why we keep returning to existentialism.

In this book, existentialism is a philosophy that imagines that the world can be impressed upon by forces that are beyond us.

what might be legible within that world. And that's the absurdity, right? But the absurdity is not just a source of sorrow. It's also a source of immense potential. And by being so staunchly imminent, which is to say allergic to transcendence, which is to say, you know, everything has to be of the world, of relations, of our entanglements. I think eco-criticism has really diminished the possibility of thinking about

surprise as a philosophical idea. There are forces that might be acting upon the world that are not yet known and not yet part of its fabric. I think that might be a good note to end on. So thank you guys both so much for coming and talking with us. Thanks to you. Thanks, Kim. It's been a real pleasure. And thank you for listening to High Theory. If you like our podcast, please review and subscribe wherever you get your podcast fix.

Owen Quinn composes our theme music, Sharonic Bosu and Kim Adams edit our audio, and Sharonic Bosu manages our social media. You can find High Theory on the NewBooks Network and also on hightheory.net. We hope you have a highly theoretical day.