Queer Ecologies: An Interview with Professor Steven Swarbrick

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Shane:

At the start of 2025, the Queer Ecology Tutorial Group gathered to theorise the relationship between queerness and our ongoing ecological turmoil. Whereas “queer ecology”  has sought to analyse the intersection of nature and sexuality, our mobilisation of queer in the tutorial group did not necessarily seek referent in sexual politics or identity categories. Queer to us is a force of negativity; a drive and a disruption, an unruly and alien refusal of the myriad of social fantasies that organise our lives. Not confined to the realm of sexual practice, queerness bursts through into the representational, the structural, and the political. Thus to theorise queer ecology, is to theorise the very force that prohibits nature as a closed and understandable totality—as a harmoniously experienced and coherent object, merely waiting an analytical gaze.

Steven is an associate professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. Steven is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spencer to Milton and coauthor, with Jean-Thomas Tremblay, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction. Both of these books deal with the relationship between negativity and ecology. His next book, The Earth Is Evil, will be published later this year by the University of Nebraska Press. Thank you for joining us, Steven. 

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Steven Swarbrick: 

Thanks so much for having me, and for the warm introduction.

I'm excited for the conversation. 

 

Shane:

So, we must think nature and ecology for its negativity and its contradictions. Rather than thinking with a romanticised image of multi-species entanglement or enmeshment, we wish to argue that nature is not coherently knowable, but rather accessible only through a minus or particular negativity, a tear in our vision of the world. The harmonious world of correlation, a world constructed so often in the environmental humanities, is still a world that needs an outside, something that is not in the world (just as, to Lee Edelman, a social order needs queer elements that figures as its outside). We think it productive to ask, what is outside the frame of ecology?

What inhabits the realm of negativity, the outside, the excluded, the antagonism, the queer, and how does it provide the condition for thinking otherwise? As Steven claims in The Environmental Unconscious, and again, Negative Life, imaginaries of coherency and harmony must disavow negativity. Against the willfully optimistic theories of new materialism or object-oriented ontology, which have placed “a premium on coherence” (Swarbrick and Tremblay 3), Steven’s solo and coauthored work registers an exhaustion around eco-critical positivity—instead calling for an attentive focus on circumstantial negativity, wounding, decentering, and suffering: “the natures that cannot bear us, the natures we may never call home” (13).

Steven, negativity in your coauthored book Negative Life is taken up from queer theory; specifically, you mention Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman (8–9). Negativity is definitely a word that we hear a lot, especially in debates around psychoanalysis and dialectics (re. Lacan and Hegel). I think a lot of people might be a bit intimidated by it or confused. I guess that shifts towards my question to you: how do you understand negativity, and how do you take it up from psychoanalysis, for example? 

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Steven Swarbrick:

Yeah, that's a great question. Maybe I'll begin by offering one definition, and then we can talk together about the history of “negativity” as a concept.

The way I usually think about negativity in my work is that it's the gap within the signifying structure that we all, as speaking beings, depend on in order to make sense or to communicate with each other. Negativity is a constitutive feature of the signifying system.

You probably noticed in my various writings that I often use terms like “gap,” “minus,” or “cut” to articulate this negative force within cultural objects and text. An important thinker informing what I'm doing is the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who had a massive influence on twentieth-century thought. Saussure’s definition of language is that it's a system of negativities without positive elements. By that, he means that meaning is really just a contingent byproduct of the arrangement of signifiers. There's a fundamental gap between the signifier and the signified. We visualise what we think, i.e., what we imagine we’re saying when we communicate with each other. There's also a gap between the signifier and the referent. So, in Saussure’s understanding of the signifying system, it's riddled with negativity, riddled with gaps: that's part of what I'm thinking about when I talk about negativity. 

What really interests me is what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan does with this structural notion of how language works. Lacan is interested in the intersection between the signifying system and subjectivity: what is happening subjectively when we are communicating through signifiers. Lacan is not known for his clarity, but on this point, he's actually quite illuminating. He said that we derive conscious pleasure from wanting to communicate our ideas and meanings to each other; we feel pleasure when we think we've done that effectively. But his point is that we're actually enjoying the gap that Saussure identifies in that process. And it’s the repetitive, relentless force of returning to that gap within the signifying structure that Lacan defines as the drive.

Figures like Lee Edelman, Slavoj Žižek, or, more recently, Alenka Zupančič will make a lot of this: how the drive works as a structure of enjoyment, which is different from pleasure. So, this is a part of what Lacan is getting at: pleasure is something we're conscious of, whereas enjoyment is this negative force that tears at the seams of what we think we're doing when we communicate with others. Those are some basic conceptual coordinates for thinking about negativity. You mentioned Hegel also, who's an important figure in all this.

And then, of course, there's Freud, whose basic idea about the unconscious is that we are not masters of our own house. So there's this underlying negativity—the site of fantasy and repressed wishes—that are constantly undermining our intentions.

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Alex:

That was brilliant, thank you. I was interested in what you were saying about how what we enjoy is the gap in Lacanian terms. I was reminded that in The Environmental Unconscious you wrote about a poetics that enjoys loss; I was really interested in this way of thinking about poetry. I think you termed it as “structured by loss” (1).

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that, and maybe also its relationship with what Leo Bersani calls the “culture of redemption,” as theorised in his book The Culture of Redemption—the idea that poetry can restore our wholeness, which you also criticise in The Environmental Unconscious (19–21).

 

Steven Swarbrick:

Yeah, sure. If I could lead with an example—I recently watched a movie  called La Chimera, directed by Alice Rohrwacher. It's this fabulous film that came out in 2023, and it’s about art, particularly art objects.

The protagonist is an archeologist who illegally unearths artifacts from past civilisations and sells them on the underground art market. There's one fantastic, pivotal scene in the film, where he has a bust of this statue that he's unearthed, and he’s about to make a lot of money by selling it. He's standing on a boat, holding the bust, and ultimately decides to throw it overboard, into the water. 

It's not really explained in the film, but to me it's significant: my interpretation is that the protagonist realises that the value of the art object is its absence. In other words, to go back to the term that we've been talking about, its value is the negative: it's the negativity of the art object that gives it its worth, its splendor that makes it, to quote Žižek, a sublime object. Casting it away, throwing it into the sea where no one can have it, is, I think, saying that the emptiness of this thing gives it its inherent meaning and value, not what it would sell for on the market. 

This is my way of addressing your question, Alex. Part of what I’m trying to get at when I talk about a politics of loss is that loss is constitutive; it’s what makes cultural objects desirable. I'm trying to contest what I see as a pervasive tendency in cultural criticism to see the practice of criticism—of reading, analysis, and critique—as a reparative project. It's true of ecocriticism, too. 

You're probably familiar with these terms from Eve Sedgwick’s influential essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.” Whether or not it was Sedgwick's intention, I believe that essay has had a negative impact on the course of criticism. It’s derailed criticism for decades. Because what we've seen happen across fields (and I'd say it's true of queer theory, ecocriticism, and so on) is this tendency to see the critic as a kind of mender of lives: of fractures, tears, and the kind of fissures and dissonance that we encounter in ourselves and the world, and certainly in art objects. 

This is what Bersani is getting at in The Culture of Redemption, which is a really excellent book on sublimation. And it's what I'm trying to address too, in The Environmental Unconscious and with Jean-Thomas Tremblay in our coauthored book Negative Life. It’s an approach that tries to smooth over the contradictions within a given text or object. Our goal is to say that no, actually, it's the fissures or it's the absence that matters, and that these objects make absence indirectly tangible. That is where the enjoyment as readers, as critics, and so forth—that's where it arrives from: the gap. 

I think there's something politically dubious in seeing our job as simply trying to patch these things together, instead of trying to really dwell within the negative. The textbook example of what I'm talking about comes from Lacan in Seminar VII, when he defines sublimation as elevating the ordinary object to the status of the Thing. He means Das Ding as this kind of unknowable void that inhabits the Other, but I think, more broadly, inhabits the things that we are drawn to, that we are desiring. Lacan’s point would be that what we're actually desiring is the gap within those objects or within the other.

So, that's what I'm trying to get at when I'm thinking about the poetics of loss, both what I think art is doing and the political stakes of that kind of gesture. 

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Shane:

Thanks for that wonderful answer, Steven. I wanted to ask a bit more about this politically conservative trend that you see in the environmental humanities. I think previously you've called this a “pastoral function”—regarding new materialism and other strands of thought wrestling with ecology (Swarbrick and Tremblay 11–13, 20). Understanding queerness as negativity, how would you see your queer ecology as countering those pastoral functions?

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Steven Swarbrick:

It's interesting, right? Because I think a lot of what you're identifying is present in the major theoretical movements of, let's say, the last couple of decades. When I was in graduate school, ecocriticism, new materialism, object-oriented ontology, animal studies, and so forth: those were the hot new things. And I was very much swept up in that work. That's why The Environmental Unconscious is, in part, an internal critique of that theory. I don't think it’s wrong to say that there is a kind of human exceptionalism to how we live our lives or that there is indeed a kind of sentience and vitality to nonhuman life, as the new materialists argue. The new materialisms (that are now not so new) haven't quite gone away; rather, their theoretical intervention has been absorbed into so much of what we now take for granted in theory. My eventual opposition or antagonism to that work starts from the fact that it doesn’t, to my mind, leave any room for a theory of subjectivity—and with that, everything that we're talking about: lack, negativity, the unconscious, which is constitutive of what I mean by subjectivity—so not human, not identity—but subjectivity as a vehicle of lack.

Your question raises an interesting point: a lot of what you cite—new materialist work, ecocriticism—presents itself as queer. It presents itself as a “queer ecology.” Today what we're seeing is a landscape of many queer ecologies, and now trans ecologies are on the map, too.

One thing to say is that there are different versions of queerness that are being mobilised here. From my perspective, the dominant version of “queer ecology” emphasises relationality as 1) ethical, 2) emancipatory, and 3) subversive. This is the refrain of a lot of this work, where you see terms like “saturation,” “entanglement,” and “transcorporeality,” which is a bit of a mouthful. The argument is, by and large, that seeing yourself as separate from the natural world was wrongheaded, was Cartesianism. A lot of these critics will lump in what is often pejoratively called “nineties theory” (deconstruction and psychoanalysis) as positing a kind of human exceptionalism, where the subject is seen as outside of nature, mastering it from above. The intervention in queer ecology was to focus on relationality as a way of destabilising those positions and, within a certain idiom of queerness, to “queer” those positions too, so now everything is entangled with everything else. What's interesting to me is that within that version of “queer ecology,” I don't often see sex per se theorised. It's left out of the equation. Or, maybe a better way of putting it is that it's just under-theorised.

Alenka Zupančič’s What Is Sex? is indispensable for this reason: Zupančič defines sex in ways that we have been talking about here, as a “gap”. Another way of thinking about it would be in terms of enjoyment: what do we enjoy? We enjoy the gap. I see my intervention and my work with Jean-Thomas Tremblay as a defense of the contradictions within this networked way of thinking about queer ecology. It is an attempt to, rather than smooth over those contradictions, or eliminate the subject of desire as a kind of retrograde humanism, to actually see the unconscious as something inhuman and as a starting point for rethinking nature too—this is a Hegelian move. 

You probably know Lacan's aphorism: “The Big Other does not exist.” By this, he means that the signifying system, which we suppose guarantees our meaning, doesn't exist. It's hole-d, it's gap-ed in the way that we've been talking about. It's incomplete. 

Part of what I've been trying to work through in my various projects is to think about ecology as the biggest Other imaginable and to radicalise Lacan for environmental criticism and leftist environmental politics. To try and forge environmentalism on the basis of that premise: that the Big Other does not exist. Hegel was already onto something similar, because in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel said—I'm going to get it wrong—but something like “substance is already subject” or “substance is equally subject.” Subjectivity for Hegel is this vehicle of negativity: the subject is divided, it's split. And from that we can suppose that substance is also divided and split. Everything, substance included, is contradictory in Hegel's philosophy. And again, when you start thinking in those terms, then the reparative move that we've been talking about, which is, “The world is exploding. We need to suture it together and entangle everything,” that starts to look like more of a problem, in my view, than anything. So, rather than being queer or emancipatory, reparativity actually refuses to really engage with queerness as this force of negativity.  

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Alex:

You were talking a little bit about subjectivity before, and how maybe new materialist theories don't leave so much of a place for thinking about the position of the subject. Alenka Zupančič, who you've spoken about a little bit, says that the speaking being is neither part of organic nature nor its exception, but its real; that is, the point of its own impossibility, its impasse. I was wondering about your own thoughts on where the subject fits in with nature? 

 

Steven Swarbrick:

Zupančič is so good at writing short, dense sentences like that one. That sentence alone feels like it could be its own book! But let me first say what I think Zupančič is identifying, and then maybe go from there, and please jump in if you are hearing it differently.

I think part of what Zupančič is getting at is trying to see the subject as the quilting point for negativity or the Real in Lacanian parlance. Subjectivity articulates this gap qua Real. But here's the thing: I'm not sure, based on my reading of Zupančič, whether Zupančič would go so far as to say (as we were just saying before about Hegel), that that “gap” qua Real is already part of substance or that substance or nature is already split (in the same way that we’re saying subjectivity is split). I know I'm the one being interviewed, but I would genuinely be curious to hear what you think about that. At a minimum, Zupančič is trying to say that the subject is different from what we mean by “human.” In other words, talking about the subject is not the same as talking about human exceptionalism as “better than” or “standing above” the rest of the natural world. She's also saying that, nonetheless, subjectivity is something different—      insofar as it sticks out from the natural world. The subject is this eccentric point within the chain of being; it’s the gap within the chain of being that produces what we call subjectivity. And that sounds absolutely right to me. In my work—both The Environmental Unconscious and Negative Life, but much more so in the book that's coming out this year, The Earth Is Evil —I try to push back against the new materialist (a catchall for various theoretical trends of the past few decades) allergy toward subjectivity, which too often gets conflated with the human, or with identity, and so forth. There's actually something powerful and worth holding onto about the Cartesian subject, which is this vehicle of doubt, of negativity, that is eccentric to the world.

What I would want to say in addition to Zupančič’s point about the Real (and this is more of a dialectical argument) is that I think we can say that the subject is divided or the subject is the vehicle for the Real, insofar as nature, too, has this division/contradiction/split within it. And I'm not sure that is an argument that all of the thinkers we've been citing would want to make. Žižek, with his latest work on quantum physics, basically from Less Than Nothing onward, has been theorising nature or matter as structurally incomplete. Alain Badiou’s work is also interesting in this regard, because his mathematical approach to thinking about materialism sees the universe as multiplicities all the way down, so there's no core substance to it. That's how I would paraphrase what Zupančič is up to, while adding my own twist. 

 

Shane:

Yeah. I actually have a follow-up question then. Personally, in that quote, what really struck me is the idea of the speaking being: It's almost as if there's an implication of the speaking being within/onto/alongside nature. That is to say, as subjects of language, we transfer our discourse onto ‘’nature’’ to make it knowable—we are implicated in it. And I think for me, it then turns less into a question of whether or not the negativity in nature is a constitutive feature of nature, in and of itself, or of the necessity of ‘’using’’ language. It just is. I know you talk a bit about this as well, in terms of how the Symbolic works—that kind of inescapability (from language) and incapability (to fully articulate all). But as speaking beings, we still have to put that there in nature in some way... the double-bind being that the usage of language to access nature is necessary, but radically flawed…

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Steven Swarbrick:

I think that's exactly right. That would be Zupančič's point. The point at which we are inserted into the natural world is the Real. Lacan has this saying when he's talking about what it means to love: you love what is in the Other more than the Other. By this, he means basically that what you're attracted to in the Other is their unconscious. You love what is in them more than them. And I think that's maybe a good way of thinking about subjectivity: that we're in the world more than the world. At a biological level, we're like any other animal, but our desire puts something else into the equation that wouldn't be there otherwise. It inserts a gap. And that gap is the attractor for our desire. For me (and Zupančič and others), this gap is the site of politics, too. That opening of lack within the world is what animates what we might call progress: radical change as opposed to the ecological view of things, which I read as a cynical political gesture: “this is it, this is the world, all we can do is entangle ourselves in this immanence.” Immanence-thinking preserves the status quo. Psychoanalysis ruptures it. 

The philosopher Frédéric Neyrat has a great term: saturated immanence. Within the world of ecocriticism there is saturated immanence, which some critics might think of as queer or emancipatory. I don't, because it eliminates what we've been talking about: this force of negativity. Once you eliminate that, you can't really have a theory of subjectivity. Moreover, part of what these late materialisms have been trying to do is precisely that: to liquidate the subject. This is especially true of object-oriented ontology, where there is no subject to speak of. It's just a flat ontology of objects, in which everything is an object.

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Anna:

I'm really interested in this idea of ecology as an inherently cynical project. As well as being, as you say, almost naive in its attachment to entanglement, interdependency, interconnectedness—the whole idiom.

You mentioned before we began this conversation something about psychoanalysis being particularly unpopular right now. I think your work speaks about, or at least hints that the rise of eco-criticism is in some ways responsive to a crisis of purpose within the humanities, which now has to be seen as doing something. And ecology provides an ethical imperative that seems neutral—because, as you say, it's just “everything is relational.” I wonder how and whether you see your own work as intervening within that development, as resisting this trajectory? 

 

Steven Swarbrick:

Yeah. Thank you for that. I'm certainly trying to think with that bigger picture, including the rapid collapse of everything: ecology, the humanities, politics.

You've probably encountered this—as people interested in psychoanalysis and working on negativity—that you receive pushback, because it's easy when you're doing that kind of work to be associated with nihilism, defeatism, or political quietism. I've been speaking a lot lately about Negative Life, which came out last year. It's interesting: people can only go so far with psychoanalysis. The fact of the matter is that for decades, there's been a lack of training and education in psychoanalysis, so that you have generations of graduate students, and now, in many cases, faculty, who just don't read Freud or Lacan. They can’t or won’t. So I think a lot of the antipathy towards psychoanalysis comes from a basic ignorance of psychoanalytic theory. A version of, “I don't know why I hate it, but I hate it.” At the same time, many people now feel frustrated with what they perceive as the limitations of ecocriticism and reparative reading. There’s an opening for psychoanalysis to do what it does best: to be a wound to thought. 

Oftentimes, the questions I receive are, okay, but what do we do with this? How do we turn negativity into an ethics or practice? The question of praxis is important. And I'm not by any means immune to that question, but I tend to think we need to get the concepts right first. Otherwise, the way we think about praxis will also stumble. To go back to what you were saying before about the cynicism of ecocriticism, what strikes me as contradictory is that ecocriticism cannot entangle, within its ever-expanding pluralistic sphere, the thing we’ve been discussing: negativity. So, Edelman's sinthomosexual (No Future), and Bersani’s gay outlaw (“The Gay Outlaw” 5-8) these figures of negativity are fundamentally excluded from a body of theory, ecocriticism, that otherwise thinks of itself as including everything. The field of ecocriticism is inherently contradictory.

Do I think it's symptomatic? I do think there is something symptomatic about the field of ecocriticism, insofar as it promises that we'll be able to enjoy without limits. Enjoyment without limits is built into this thinking of entanglement or thinking about things as constantly mutating into everything else: the Darwinian conception of things, a vision of life in flux.  And especially within the version of queer ecology we’ve been talking about, the queerness of it is that you can enjoy without limits.

But psychoanalysis is all about limits. In fact, Lacan will say it is the limit—or the barrier—that we enjoy. We may yearn for fusion or immersion in an unfettered ecological commons, but that wish obscures the structure of our desire—that is, the gap that stirs our desire in the first place. On the one hand, environmentalism is undoubtedly concerned with limits to sustainability, growth, and so on. On the other hand, the object of environmentalism is always some kind of excess: excess pleasure, excess leisure (in a degrowth economy), excess communal wealth (freed from capitalisation). To be clear, I am all for shared abundance. However, abundance must be tethered to lack, understood as an internal, subjective limit—not simply an external one. A strong, Lacanian argument would be that abundance comes from lack—which should not be confused with material scarcity. Ecocriticism is not exactly a monolith, but these are dominant trends within the field. Isn't it funny how much its rhetoric maps onto a capitalist discourse of enjoying without limits? I think the two things are actually in parallel.

And the fact that it's emerging at a time when… The humanities are always in crisis. As long as I've been doing this, people have been talking about the humanities being in crisis. But it’s different today insofar as jobs are becoming increasingly scarce. So it is interesting to have this discourse of repair emerging at this time instead of—what to my mind would be a more radical politics—what we're calling a politics of the negative, which isn't relational in the same way. I like to use Lacan's term, “the non-relation,” for thinking about this. The non-relation is a little bit hard to handle, because what Lacan is getting at is a non-relation within relations. It's the gap within the relational sphere. I tend to think of that gap as being the very thing that we all have in common. It's perhaps the only thing that we all have in common. And that has to be a starting point for any kind of thinking about politics or praxis. 

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Shane:

And I think that's a beautiful last line. I'm afraid we're coming to the end—our one-hour free zoom is running out and my neck is getting sore from nodding in agreement! Thank you so much for speaking with us today, Steven. We’ve learnt a lot, and it’s also put a lot of the things we've been discussing into context.

 

Anna:

Yeah, definitely. 

 

Shane:

Before you go—if there's anything else you'd like to say—or, I know you have a new book coming out soon, The Earth Is Evil. I'm excited for it to be released. If you have anything you'd like to say on that or any last words?

 

Steven Swarbrick:

I was just talking about capitalism, so I will be a good capitalist subject and promote The Earth Is Evil. It comes out in October through the Provocation Series at the University of Nebraska Press. I just want to say thank you again for having me. It's been a lot of fun chatting about these ideas with you all. 

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