Survival Subjects: On the Psychic Life With(out) Resilience

Abstract

Geographers study resilience at various scales, with human geography critically addressing its spatiality, power, and agency. However, the resilience of the subject receives less attention, as geography tends to focus on systems, cities, and infrastructures. This paper develops a critical geography of the resilient subject. Following a psychoanalytic approach, I aim to understand how the politics of resilience operates on and through the subject without the subject actually becoming resilient. My critical approach to resilience is based on the assumption that resilience is an ideological fantasy with a profound impact on various subjective political relations. Based on this, I illustrate how the desire for resilience revolves around the specter of a subject that reduces life to mere survival, how it requires a fantasmatic figure of a “less-resilient other” in order to perceive oneself as “more resilient,” and how climate resilience in particular rests on the dichotomy between a stable inside and an unstable outside that together form a fearful and apocalyptic imaginary. Stemming from these considerations, I conclude with a take on a politics of non-resilience. Instead of rejecting the concept of resilience altogether, I argue in favor of retaining resilience as a negative condition. I argue that all living beings share a certain lack of resilience. On this basis, a new politics can be thought that addresses challenges posed by the climate crisis through new relationships of equality and solidarity.