recoverable onenesswith pristine wilderness, harmony with the environ-
ment, etc. This fantasy forecloses on the necessity of projecting ourselves
into the struggle to confront, arrest, and reverse the globalizing order with
its rapacious need to develop and consume all otherness, including nature.
We must demystify global subjectivity—whether whole or fractured, main-
stream or marginalized—and acknowledge that all social structures neces-
sitate complicity in the abuse of nature, some of which is irreversible. For
a rigorous Marxist elaboration of this dynamic, see Dordoy and Mellor,
who argue: “... the ecological limits to growth give the lie to capitalism’s
promise of (eventual) universal abundance” (2000: 43). For the only
approach to these issues (that I know of) that combines environmental
ethics, poststructuralist critique, queer theory, philosophizing, and nature
writing, see Oates (2003). Perhaps owing to the small size of the island,
overpopulation, urban sprawl, and high levels of pollution, the works of
Liu Kexiang (and other Taiwan nature writers) have demonstrated little
proclivity for the fantasy of an unspoiled pristine wilderness surviving
along the inland periphery of the east coast urban-industrial corridor.- Neologism intended.
- The fate of the black-faced spoonbill was profoundly affected by Liu
Kexiang’s 1992 essay, Zuihou de heimian wuzhe 最b的面c者(The
last black-faced dancers), which touched off one of Taiwan’s most
successful grassroots environmental movements to date (K. Liu 1992b). - A further note on the psychoanalytical specificities of this argument: Julia
Kristeva’s work contains a substantial repository of original discussions
and analysis of what is sometimes formulated as “the threshold of the
unnameable,” the distinction between the known and what cannot be
thought, that which every speaker contains yet will “always remain
unsaid, unnameable within the gaps of speech” (Kristeva 1980: 272).
While this kernel of linguistic unintelligibility is always present in our
relationships to others (see note seven above), it functions outside of
theoretical discourse in radically different ways. That is to say, how I the-
orize the unknowable and unnameable aspects of my relationship to my
familial and social others, no matter how conflicted that relationship, is
vastly different from how I theorize my understanding of nature and the
environment. Writing about nature, especially about the limits of human
understanding and discursive attempts to know nature, takes place within
a larger social discourse that, I am arguing, may very well contribute to,
facilitate, retard, or even arrest the destruction of real living entities
and concrete geographical places. On the other hand, psychoanalytic
formulations of the gaps in language and knowing that intimate an unin-
telligible other within the selfmay contribute to an albeit traumatic
confrontation with one’s psyche (via a regression to presymbolic aspects
of one’s inner world), but will not concretely affect the very earth, air,
water, plants, and creatures upon which all beings rely. - Terms such as “ecosystem,” “environment,” “nature,” etc. reflect the
effort, throughout this essay, to embrace as generous a definition of the
100 Nick Kaldis