And yet it moves! (Climate) migration as a symptom in the Anthropocene

Giovanni Bettini

Mobilities, 2019, vol. 14, issue 3, 336-350

Abstract: While the climate-migration nexus raises crucial questions of mobility and climate justice, it is commonly understood through simplistic narratives that reify a complex set of relations. The spectre of environmentally-induced exodus is recurrent in media, policy and activist circles, in spite of numerous studies that reveal the empirical flaws and noxious normative implications of such narratives. This article explores this insistence and the desire(s) for there to be a reified relation between climate and migration such insistence reveals. The article proceeds in three movements. First, it situates discourses on climate migration in relation to the crisis of humanism the Anthropocene signifies. Second, it operates a symptomatic reading of climate migration discourses, drawing on two understandings of symptom elaborated by Lacan – as ‘return of the repressed’ and as ‘Sinthome’. Read as a symptom, the figure of the climate migrant/refugee appears as the return of fundamental contradictions that carve contemporary regimes of socioecological (re)production. Through the concept of ‘Sinthome’, discourses on climate migration can be read as (illusory) attempts to shore up for the waning consistence of modern forms of ‘being human’. Finally, the article proposes a symptomatic reading of the Anthropocene itself, and elaborates on what the dissolution of this symptom/ Sinthome would entail.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17450101.2019.1612613 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rmobxx:v:14:y:2019:i:3:p:336-350

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rmob20

DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2019.1612613

Access Statistics for this article

Mobilities is currently edited by Professor Kevin Hannam, Professor Mimi Sheller and Professor John Urry

More articles in Mobilities from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().