Mari Ruti and Climate Change

Reviews / Votes

"In this haunting and personal study of the politics of climate grief, Clint Burnham draws on the work of the late Mari Ruti to create a unique cartography of contemporary creativity, desire, and loss. At a moment of climate catastrophe, Burnham's brilliant, genre-defying book provides us with the intellectual resources we need to live with grief without surrendering to despair."

Imre Szeman, Professor of Human Geography and Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability at University of Toronto-Scarborough College, author of Solarities: Seeking Climate Justice and On Petrocultures: Globalization Culture and Energy

"Burnham deftly weaves biography (his own and that of Mari Ruti), climate fiction, environmental world events, and Ruti's psychoanalytic theory to reveal what is so pressingly needed today: an emancipatory theory of (climate) grief, in which the personal and the eco-political are dialecticized and creatively sublimated. A tour de force."

Ilan Kapoor, Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Toronto, co-author of Global Libidinal Economy (2023)

"Love as critique, fidelity as betrayal. In this unabashed meditation, or essaying of/for the other, Clint Burnham bears witness to the force and provocation of Mari Ruti, to her immeasurable impact on his thought and life. We are treated to an irresistibly unruly work. Meanings of grief and trauma multiply; the personal chases and exceeds the universal. If 'clusterfucks' are the new normal, Burnham gifts us a work for the moment."

Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eels Professor of Philosophy and Literature, Professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies, Whitman College, USA, author of Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future and Zizek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future

"In Mari Ruti and Climate Change, Burnham brings together climate change, auto-theory and Lacanian ethics in a dialectical clusterfuck of grief which considers how we deal with the polycrises, both contingent and universal, of the present. Drawing on Mari Ruti's philosophy and, in particular, her late work on sublimation, Burnham contends that grief and enjoyment (jouissance) might intermingle in dangerous ways. Cli-fi, Hitchcock films, forest fires and freedom convoys all operate as sites of stackable, fungible grieving which bundle together with personal grief - of lost fathers, cancerous bodies and relationship breakdowns. At stake in Mari Ruti and Climate Change is a question of ethical subjectivity and how sublimation might well be a risk worth taking, and even enjoying, towards emancipation."

Rosemary Overell, Senior Lecturer in Media, Film & Communication at the University of Otago, New Zealand, editor of Post-truth and the Mediation of Reality: New Conjunctures and author of Fisting the Dead

"Our ecological crisis demands new thinking and Clint Burnham's Mari Ruti and Climate Change offers us the necessary tools. By drawing on Mari Ruti's original Lacanian development with a perspective vital precisely where it diverges from Slavoj Zizek and the Ljubljana school, Burnham demonstrates the transformative potential of sublimation and creativity over the destructiveness of the drives and the Real."

Michael Gray, Host of the Zizek & So On podcast

"This book is a beautiful exposition of grief through a Lacanian lens with the memory of the late philosopher Mari Ruti (1964-2023) in mind. It is an intimate questioning of her writings on the theory of sublimation, progressive social theory, the ethical subject and, ultimately, the question of being when there is no cure. Burnham is also interested in the climate crises and the fungibility of grief, whether it stacks, and what art and fiction might offer to our understanding of climate denialism. The question of temporality, desire, and what it means to know something about one's pending death accompany the reader through Burnham's masterpiece of a book."

Sheila L. Cavanagh, Professor of Sociology, York University, author of Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination and Sexing the Teacher: School Sex Scandals and Queer Pedagogies

"Reader, can't you see that we're burning? This is the question that scorches us throughout this book. The nauseating, tragic odour of burning trees/forest fires infuses the text, we think of ashes (to ashes), the smell of smoke (while we are sleeping), the burning fossils (in Powers' Overstory); in short Burnham doesn't take the heat off from the get-go. (The Lacanian in me cannot resist hearing in "Clint Burnham" the imperative "Clint, burn 'em!" henceforth.) The burning (of the planet) is contemplated through readings of culture, climate change theories and activism, and questioned through Lacan's notion of an ethics of desire in the painstaking, stone-turning reading of (what Burnham calls) Mari Ruti's 'politics of grief'. Burnham's friendship with Mari Ruti, and his respect for and engagement with her work is no hindrance here to his passion and skill in bringing out the paradoxes and contradictions between her early and later writings on lack and sublimation to lead us to a brilliantly articulated and innovative contemplation of climate grief."

Dr Carol Owens, Psychoanalyst, Dublin, and Editor at PCSReview (Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society)

"By way of his creative engagement with the work of the late Mari Ruti, Clint Burnham expertly turns on its head what we thought we knew not only about climate grief but also about loss itself. In a hauntingly beautiful style, what emerges is a new dialectical politics of grief based on a grief as divided and contradictory as we who grapple with it. Burnham asks, what does the fact of our ontological lack mean for the possibilities of grieving, and of whether creativity helps us to sublimate as a response to ecological grief and trauma? Through Ruti, Lacan, climate fiction, art, and the importance of style, methodology, and critique, this book is not only a fitting homage to Ruti but also one in which Burnham's voice undeniably intervenes with something new."

Stephanie Swales, Assistant Professor of Psychotherapy, Dublin City University, author of Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject

"Clint Burnham's Mari Ruti and Climate Change is an absolute must for anyone who wants to understand Mari Ruti's thought. Burnham's book makes clear the urgency of Ruti's theory of sublimation as a way of dealing with trauma through his investigation into climate grief. He bravely tackles the nature of grief in the face of multiple traumas. Through Ruti's work, as well as Lacan and Hegel, the book proposes a new dialectics of grief, one which does not seek easy solutions but rather engages the relationship between contingent lacks and our constitutive lack. Through fascinating readings of psychoanalysis, the fires in Canada, and Hitchcock's Vertigo (just to name a few), Burnham not only honors the singularity of Ruti but demonstrates how to respond meaningfully to our current moment."

Hilary Neroni, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Vermont, author of Feminist Film Theory and "Cleo from 5 to 7" and The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film