ABSTRACT
Ethical consumption has emerged as a possible response to the climate crisis in the context of the Anthropocene. In this essay, I critique this proposition by historically contextualizing the relations between consumption, capitalism and human passions that have shaped contemporary consumer culture. Starting from Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees and arriving at the Freudian concept of drive, I undertake a genealogy of consumerist passions, suggesting that drive satisfaction is a central notion for understanding the psychic dimensions related to consumption. I reflect on ethics from this psychoanalytic perspective, according to which the world is incomplete and total satisfaction is impossible. This logic is radically opposed to that of consumer culture, on which the discourse of ethical consumption is based. I conclude by proposing that an ethics for the Anthropocene must be a tragic ethics and that the ethics of Psychoanalysis, proposed by Lacan, has something to teach us about this.
KEYWORDS:
Anthropocene; Ethical consumption; Consumer culture; Drive; Ethics