The kinds of specifically ethical questions we can meaningfully ask about the environment are rapidly becoming fewer as the climate emergency intensifies. The article argues that there is something fundamentally inadequate about the traditional conceptions of ethics regarding the climate crisis because they all tend to presuppose that we can somehow get it right. The problem is that we got it wrong and must start dealing with the consequences.

This article represents an attempt at identifying a lack (of a lack) in analytic philosophy. It claims that one of the central features common to a variety of analytic philosophies is the absence of an investigation of what Jacques Lacan has identified as the lack of being ( manque à être ). This lacking lack is investigated through what could be termed a Lacanian intervention into one of the finest (relatively) recent products of the analytic tradition, Robert Brandom's Making It (...) Explicit . The aim of the intervention is twofold: first, to identify some of the (maybe surprising) similarities between Brandom and the Lacanian tradition; second, to identify the lacking lack within analytic philosophy by focusing on what Brandom (`explicitly') does not say — and to argue that what is thus usually passed over in silence in the analytic tradition contains a perspective of fundamental significance to understanding humans and their societies. Key Words: analytic philosophy • Robert Brandom • drive • Jacques Lacan • lack • original accumulation • psychoanalysis • Slavoj Zizek. (shrink)

In the opening of The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus establishes the essential relation to otherness that characterizes the human self. He also defines two different modes of failing to live in accordance with this relation, which are subsequently described as “feminine” and “masculine” despair. Starting from this somewhat surprising gendering of despair, the article compares Kierkegaard’s understanding of self and other to that of psychoanalysis. It is claimed that psychoanalysis offers a fruitful reinterpretation of the meaning of “the Other,” while (...) Anti-Climacus, on the other hand, gives new inspiration to the analysis of the despair of being a sexed being. (shrink)