The Reality of Ghosts: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Abstract People often only recognize their fundamental relationships with nonhuman beings by observing their absence. The eerie feeling they have these days that there is “nothing where there should be something” points to a loss that has not yet been fully realized as such. Against the backdrop of the sixth mass extinction of species, cultivating a sensitivity to the ghosts haunting the landscapes of the Anthropocene means confronting the reality of loss. In this essay, Juliane Rebentisch examines this realist twist on the motif of haunting in eco-critical discourse and discusses its consequences for a politics of mourning, examining the affective, ethical, and epistemological dimensions of species extinction and biodiversity loss and developing a framework for understanding and responding to this form of loss, which largely exceeds direct sensory experience. Beginning with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the concept of the ecological uncanny, Rebentisch argues that the perception of haunted landscapes — environments permeated by the traces of vanished human and nonhuman life — constitutes a politically and ethically significant mode of attunement to environmental destruction. Drawing on Mark Fisher's concept of the eerie as a “failure of presence,” and on eco-critical discourse around the Anthropocene as developed by Anna Tsing, Thom van Dooren, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, she argues that sensitivity to such haunted landscapes requires a radically interdisciplinary and non-exceptionalist rethinking of humanity's place within more-than-human ecological assemblages. But how to respond to this loss? Psychoanalysis helps distinguish between two ways, mourning and melancholia, and Rebentisch critically engages with the accounts of Freud and Judith Butler to propose the concept of “eco-melancholia”: a structural condition afflicting those who fail to register biodiversity loss because they do not recognize their libidinal and existential bonds to other species. Against this backdrop, Rebentisch advocates for a form of melancholia-tinged mourning that resists the logic of progress and replacement, remains faithful to the ghosts of the Anthropocene, and transforms loss into an ongoing ethical and political commitment to the more-than-human world.