The Improper Apocalypse: Vitalism with and against a Psychoanalytic Approach to the End of the World

The chapter argues that while psychoanalysis gives us important resources for thinking through anthropogenic climate change it can also be a hindrance because it lapses into a form of metaphysical thought that can be linked to the conventional concept of a ‘proper death’, which is exhibited in a magnified form in apocalyptic thought. To establish this position, the chapter makes use of the biological work of Xavier Bichat, showing that his vitalistic account of life from the turn of the 19th century created a distinctively modern, non-metaphysical and pluralised concept of death that can be scaled to a societal level without evoking apocalypticism. It is in relation to this model that Sigmund Freud’s theory of the death drive is both a step forward and a step backwards, accounting for the phenomenon of climate change in a way that Bichat’s model cannot, and yet also elevating a concept of the ‘proper’ end of the world that is counterproductive to political action.