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The Polluted Subject: Capitalism, Identity, and Ecology
Summary
This theoretical paper critiques how capitalism shapes human identity and disconnects people from the natural environment. It argues that addressing ecological crises requires rethinking the subject-object divide that underlies modern environmental exploitation.
Subject-object dualism is not the essential root of our disrespect for non-human things; distance and difference are inherent to a collective ecology. This paper considers the origins of Nature’s transformation into the mythical sublime, the mirror for human experience, alongside capitalism’s enclosure of subjectivity into the space of identity: a container that creates both the illusion that we are separate from our environment and can make choices independent from it. Drawing out fragments of personal narrative, I incorporate the theories of Jean Baudrillard, Rem Koolhaas, Timothy Morton, and Silvia Federici to question the structure of “being in” as an ethical and sustainable environmental model. Instead of utopian monism as the panacea to environmental destruction, I posit polluted duality as a metaphor for how we are to ethically engage with an ailing world.
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