Removing the Fantasmatic Blindfold: Enjoyment as a Political Factor in Climate Justice

Progress on climate justice—the fair sharing of climate harms—is at an impasse. In this article, I analyze climate justice as an organizing signifier in ecological politics, relying on the Lacanian psychoanalytic concept of enjoyment ( jouissance ) to explain the (lack of) appeal of climate justice along class lines and thus the ideological limits of its contemporary articulation. Today, the climate justice movement in the Global North is dominated by a limited constellation of professional class (and activist) allies libidinally invested in the fantasy of an eventually just and ecologically harmonious future that facilitates disavowing the core fossil capitalist drivers of distributive climate injustices. Meanwhile, this same fantasy alienates much of the Northern working class. A reinvigorated climate justice must therefore traverse this fantasy to rearticulate justice as a unifying demand capable of building solidarity across the professional–managerial class/working-class divide against the fossil capitalist interests that benefit from their separation.