ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the phantom human subject, whose imagined extinction is discursively productive in that it generates for realism the referent of “the real.” The appraisal of realism as a truth-discourse propped up by an affirmation of the truth of pain is not intended to underestimate the satisfactions offered by the realist enterprise. Much like the analytic of the sublime, which narrates an overcoming of an experience of perceptual distress by recourse to a compensatory cognitive pleasure, the sting of the real is cut with the gratification of its knowledge. In the humanities, two prevailing theoretical tendencies for addressing climate change in the academy of the global north-namely, the analytic of the Anthropocene and the revival of realism and ontology- must be treated, not in isolation but as each other’s doublet. Both rooted in Eurocentric intellectual traditions of representing reality and fantasizing about one’s own death, precipitated by reflexive circuits of productive activity, they generate inverse modes of perception.
