- Lacanian treatments of this linguistic issue refer to the “primordial
signifier,” the “structurally necessary” limit of meaning that both energizes
the subject’s restless quest for relationship to otherness, and reveals an
impossible and dangerous desire for complete understanding of otherness,
for modes of signification and representation that would reveal otherness
without leaving an unknowable remainder, a residue of inscrutability.
From this perspective, the desire to understand our experiences with nature
through language involves some unwillingness to accept a nature that will
always at some level remain impervious to the meanings that we project
into it. When taken to a rational, objective extreme, the disavowal and
denial of an impenetrable kernel of nonsense in nature is an epistemologi-
cal, literary, political, and ecological error (see Eisenstein 2004). While I
know of no Taiwan nature writers who are committed Lacanians, many of
Liu Kexiang’s works demonstrate self-consciousness about the impossibility
of any signifying quest—literary or otherwise—to capture the full presence
and meaning of nature and our experiences in it. The last section of this
essay will discuss the pervasive tone of anxiety underlying these works. We
might distinguish such works from others that betray a faith in the fullness
of representational presence and mimetic completeness (this is not to cate-
gorically dismiss all types of nature writing that fall into the latter group,
nor those that demonstrate both tendencies). - Joseph Grange combines both spiritual and philosophical influences in his
discussion of the otherness of nature, perhaps most provocatively in his
discussion of space and the “inscape of natural space”: “Space is both the
most prominent and the most reserved dimension of nature. Its public
quality is shown by the way it appears before our very eyes. Its hidden and
private character is revealed by the fact that we cannot touch or feel it”
(Grange 1997: 91, and passim). - This section implies the rejection of a cherished myth among some nature
enthusiasts, academic and otherwise, the myth that the alienation of mod-
ern/industrial/global life is tolerable in part because there is still an intact
and centered other in nature, preserving the possibility of an unspoiled
nonexploitative harmony between self and other (in some versions, a rela-
tionship between man and nature that existed in the past [especially with
certain races, such as the native Americans] and can be revived). Man, the
tale goes, only needs to abandon his wasteful, consuming, urban-industrial
lifestyle and return to a more “natural” way of living. Discourses that
sustain this fantasy of nature as an unexploited entity at the periphery of
society, getting along quite well elsewhere(in parks, preserves, mountains,
forest, deserts, glaciers, oceans, etc.), awaiting our return to her restorative
embrace, turn a blind eye to the fact that global ecological devastation is
the hidden condition underlying every standard of living, it is the cost of
most—if not all—local societal development. Nature is therefore being
defiled and diminished with a degree of complicity shared across all
(modern) cultural formations, all social strata and lifestyles. This
complicity, I’m arguing, is in part sustained by the fantasy of a lost and
“Anxiety-Reflex” and Liu Kexiang 99