ABSTRACT
It would seem that in aspiring things such as growth and expansion without limits (through “decoupling”) and recycling without remainders (zero waste); the Circular Economy (CE) demands the impossible. However, if we take a Derridian-Lacanian hauntological approach to the CE, it is the other way around: its demands aren’t impossible enough. We tend to conceive of the impossible as something that cannot possibly be realized. French philosopher Jacques Derrida, however, argues that the impossible is not an inaccessible ideal but that which is “most undeniably real,” that is, the spectrality of being. To be is to haunt and be haunted. Nothing is ever fully present – there is no closing of the loop. Drawing on psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan this “real” should be conceived in psychoanalytic terms as the “real of Nature” that resists the symbolic frameworks we try to squeeze it into – circularity, calculability, manageability, and so on – and is making its presence felt even more as the ecological crisis deepens. From this perspective, CE should finally take on the slogan of the 1968 protest movement, stating we should ‘be realistic and demand the impossible’. Or perhaps it is instead that the impossible demands a new us.
