Abstract

There is something queer about the social inability to act upon or to even fully think massive, impending ecological change. It is both obvious and confounding: on one level, we all know it is coming; on the other, we do not want to believe it and we refuse large-scale action to stop it. There is a game of political blame-shifting but there is also, and more importantly, an inability to ideologically engage with the contemporary ecological dilemma. Here I use the novel Butcher’s Crossing and the film Grizzly Man to investigate this dilemma through the psychoanalytic concept of “the passion of the Real.”