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The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis,

Volume 1, 2014, pp. 85-101 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/ujd.2014.0007

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 Haunting from the Future
Psychic Life in the Wake of Nuclear Necropolitics

gabriele schwab

The breaking of the mirror would be, finally, through an act of

language, the very occurrence of nuclear war. Who can swear that
our unconscious is not expecting this? Dreaming of it, desiring it?
—Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now”

I have chosen Derrida’s provocative invocation of what I will call

the “nuclear unconscious” as a stepping-stone toward a larger
exploration of the legacies of the Manhattan Project and its im-
pact on the formation of subjectivity. The nuclear age, and espe-
cially nuclear disasters like those of Chernobyl and Fukushima,
continue to mark the cultural imaginary profoundly and nourish
the fantasies and phantasms that structure subjectivity more gen-
erally. I will argue that “nuclear subjectivities” and the “nuclear
unconscious” also challenge psychoanalysis to reconceptualize
its notion of the subject and his or her environment.
“Just as the unsuspected reality of the subatomic world con-
tributed to changing science’s conception of itself, so the reality
of environmental processes must lead psychoanalysis to change
its own conception of itself as both scientific and therapeutic”
(2000, 136), writes Alan Bass in his analysis of Hans Loewald’s
“Psychoanalysis in Search of Nature.” Insisting that a psychoana-
lytic theory of unconscious processes needs to be grounded in
a theory of nature, Loewald states: “Nature is no longer simply
an object of observation and domination by a human conscious
86 The Undecidable Unconscious 1, 2014

mind, a subject, but an all-embracing activity of which man, and

the human mind in its unconscious and sometimes conscious as-
pects, is one element or configuration” (Bass 2000, 137). If Freud
demonstrated that conscious mind is unable to perceive psychic
reality directly, nuclear subjectivities compel us to extend this in-
sight to material reality. The materiality of radioactivity is liter-
ally invisible, yet those affected by it, and especially those who
are dying from it, experience it as a deadly material agency. In
this respect, nuclear subjectivities assume an almost allegorical
function in relation to the trans-individual subject-formation in
today’s precarious ecologies. The material world, including na-
ture as well as techno-scientific objects, can no longer be seen
as an outside to this subject-formation. Rather, the boundaries
between the subject and the material and immaterial forces that
he or she encounters are continually renegotiated in processes of
dynamic exchange.
These processes also challenge conventional notions of objec-
tivity in psychoanalysis. Seen from the perspective of Loewald’s
theory and its elaboration by Bass, conventional assertions of
objectivity appear as a defensive attempt to control the dynamic
exchange between inner and outer nature by rendering it static
(Bass 2000, 138). In this respect, the traditional objective sciences
belong to the genealogy of the (Western) colonizing project of
dominating and domesticating nature. According to Bass, the
mind’s substitution of static objects for differentiating processes
in order to create perceptual certainty is a form of fetishism. By
contrast, Bass sees psychoanalysis offering a “powerful theory
of the intersection of mind and nature.” As he points out, this
ecology favors natura naturans (nature as active process) over
natura naturata (nature as the assembly of created objective enti-
ties). In other words, a psychoanalytically informed ecological
theory—in the larger sense of Gregory Bateson’s “ecology of
mind”—belongs into the genealogy of postmodern fluid onto-
epistemologies. Matter—or more specifically, material objects,
including textual or artistic materialities—is endowed with an
impersonal agency that becomes as formative of the ego and the
Schwab: Haunting from the Future 87

unconscious as the fantasies and phantasms that emerge from the

subject’s encounter with them. We know about nature and real-
ity, argues Loewald, by “being open to their workings in us and
the rest of nature as unconscious life” (Bass 2000, 140). According
to Loewald, the traditional subject-object opposition as well as
the rigid opposition of psychic and material reality belong to a
pre-psychoanalytic conception of mind (2000, 140). The origin of
individual psychic life is a trans-individual field that includes not
only others but also “nature as unconscious life” more generally.1
Freud’s theory of “nature as unconscious life” rests heavily on
his agonistic model of Eros and Thanatos. Nuclear subjectivities
compel us to rethink the psychoanalytic theory of life and death
in the context of today’s nuclear necropolitics.2 To the best of my
knowledge, it was Jacques Derrida who first addressed the issue
of a “nuclear unconscious.” In his rarely discussed early essay
“No Apocalypse, Not Now” (published in 1984 in the special is-
sue of Diacritics on nuclear criticism), he speaks about the possi-
ble future occurrence of nuclear war, asking the pointed question
I used in my epigraph: “Who can swear that our unconscious in
not expecting this? Dreaming of it? Desiring it?” (1984, 23).
When I first read the essay, I stumbled over the almost shock-
ing “Desiring it?” Could we truly harbor an unconscious desire
for nuclear war? And wouldn’t such a desire be the ultimate
manifestation of the death drive? Derrida emphasized that at this
point in history the vision of a “remainderless destruction,” that
is, a total nuclear war that would destroy our species, if not all
life on Earth, cannot be anything but a fantasy, a phantasm. I am
interested in exploring what role the nuclear imaginary plays in
the formation of subjectivities and subjections after World War II
and the inauguration of the so-called nuclear age with the bomb-
ing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “No single instant, no atom of
our life (of our relation to the world and to being) is not marked
today,” says Derrida, “by the cold war arms race”—Derrida calls
it a “speed race”—“and by the nuclear imaginary that engenders
it and is engendered by it” (1984, 20).
Thirty years after Derrida made this strong assertion, we still
88 The Undecidable Unconscious 1, 2014

live with the legacy of the Manhattan Project and the fantasies
and phantasms of nuclear destruction. While the overt Cold War
and the debates about the nuclear arms race have ended with
the collapse of the Soviet Union, we now live in the shadow of
the fallout of the so-called benign use of nuclear power and the
nuclear disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima. In what follows,
I will revisit Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now” in order to
raise a sequence of questions regarding the impact of the trans-
generational legacies of the Manhattan Project and the ensuing
nuclear necropolitics. The nuclear age is now marked by global
nuclear power industries, the irresolvable problems and dangers
of storing the obsolete weapons arsenal as well as the nuclear
waste from power plants, and the specter of the production of
nuclear arms by so-called rogue states or terrorist organizations.
Thirty years ago, Derrida reminded us that the (phantasm of) the
nuclear war triggers not only the “senseless capitalization of so-
phisticated weaponry” but also “the whole of the human socius
today, everything that is named by the old words culture, civili-
zation, Bildung, schole, paideia” (1984, 23). Not much has changed
in this respect, only that, except in the immediate aftermath of
nuclear disasters, the discourses of nuclear war or nuclear catas-
trophes have largely moved underground. Have we managed, as
Derrida feared, to domesticate the terror of the death machine?
I want to return to these submerged legacies of the nuclear imagi-
nary via the detour of testimonies by those for whom the nuclear
threat has become a reality, namely, the survivors of Chernobyl.
More specifically, I explore the fact that even those who have gone
through the real horrors of nuclear destruction cannot escape the nu-
clear phantasms Derrida places at the center of his analysis. Looking
at such phantasms, I will trace the impact of the nuclear imaginary
on the formation of postnuclear subjectivities.
The phantasms that aggregate around the nuclear imaginary
range from apocalyptic to idyllic scenarios. The power of an apoc-
alyptic imaginary is related to a haunting from the future that
comes from the global destruction of sustainable ecologies. At the
same time, however, it is necessary to disentangle the apocalyp-
Schwab: Haunting from the Future 89

tic imaginary from notions of a haunting from the future. “No

Apocalypse, Not Now” was written at the height of the nuclear
arms race. Derrida insists that the massive stockpiling and capi-
talization of nuclear weaponry and the (apocalyptic) fantasies of
a nuclear war are not two separate things. Calling the nuclear war
“an event whose advent remains an invention” (1984, 24), Derrida
invokes a haunting from the future that requires one to rethink
the relationship between knowing and acting. Imagining nuclear
war seems to become a precondition for (collective) actions that
may be able to avert it. Yet the imagination of a remainderless de-
struction depends upon the performative and persuasive power
of texts, discourse, and figurations. “The worldwide organization
of the human socius today hangs by the thread of nuclear rheto-
ric. . . . The anticipation of nuclear war . . . installs humanity . . .
in its rhetorical condition,” Derrida writes. He concludes that the
imagined remainderless destruction would foreclose any cultural
or symbolic “work of mourning, with memory, compensation,
internalization, idealization, displacement, and so on” (28).
Because of its apocalyptic undertones, however, nuclear rheto-
ric is immensely commodifiable. The uncanny attraction to the
nuclear imaginary, including fantasies about a remainderless
destruction, has generated its own rhetorical and figurative his-
tory. Thirty years after the catastrophic accident, Chernobyl, for
example, has been commodified and exploited for astounding
disaster tourism. Francesco Cataluccio (2012) calls his chapter on
Chernobyl “The Disneyland of Radioactivity.” More than fifteen
thousand people visit Chernobyl and Prypjat every year; the ar-
eas have become the site of films and novels whose apocalyptic
imaginary draws on a “nuclear sublime” (see Masco 2006). The
latter is marked by a fundamental ambivalence: on the one hand,
there are the terrors and dread of life in a contaminated zone and
the illnesses, deaths, and psychic toxicity that come with it; on the
other hand, we find people with a pervasive sense of recasting the
disaster zone as an idyll of freedom, a zone outside the law that
generates a new conviviality with other species and a flourish-
ing of new life philosophies. Cataluccio speaks of a “postnuclear
90 The Undecidable Unconscious 1, 2014

optimism” expressed in assertions that around Chernobyl plant

life seems to thrive, the fields are planted again, and people have
moved back to the contaminated areas (see Cataluccio 2012, 132).
This commodification of a nuclear aesthetic of ruins bears upon
Derrida’s insistence on the “fabulously textual” nature of the prob-
lem of nuclear power and the question of how we are to get speech
to circulate in the face of the nuclear issue. “Nuclear weaponry de-
pends,” he writes, “more than any weaponry in the past, it seems,
upon structures of information and communication, structures of
language, including non-vocalizable language, structures of codes
and graphic decoding” (1984, 23). We may ask then how literary
or artistic works or even oral histories and “ethnographies of the
future” (Strathern 1992) relate to apocalyptic phantasms on the one
hand and the foreclosed mourning of a remainderless destruction
on the other. Derrida links the two through the “paradox of the
referent” (1984, 28): Like nuclear war, literature is “constituted by
the same structure of historical fictionality, producing and then
harboring its own referent” (27). This is why, Derrida argues,
literature and literary criticism must be obsessed by the nuclear
issue, albeit not in a naively referential sense. “If, according to a
structuring hypothesis, a fantasy or a phantasm, nuclear war is
equivalent to the total destruction of the archive, if not of the hu-
man habitat, it becomes the absolute referent, the horizon and the
condition of all the others” (28). While, according to Derrida, the
symbolic work of culture and memory, their work of mourning,
limit and soften the reality of individual death, the “only refer-
ent that is absolutely real is thus of the scope or dimension of an
absolute nuclear catastrophe that would irreversibly destroy the
entire archive and all symbolic capacity” (28). In the absence of
but under the compulsion to imagine this catastrophe, literature
then cannot but produce “concord fictions” (Kermode 1966), that
is, fictions that convey the sense of such an ending in ever-new
modes of indirection by inventing, as Derrida says, “strategies of
speaking of other things, for putting off the encounter with the
wholly other” (1984, 28). Because of this paradox of referentiality,
Derrida believes, “the nuclear epoch is dealt with more ‘seriously’
Schwab: Haunting from the Future 91

in texts by Mallarme, of Kafka, or Joyce, for example, than in the

present-day novels that would offer direct and realistic descrip-
tions of a ‘real’ nuclear catastrophe” (27).
Apocalyptic texts and films, and the apocalyptic imaginary
more generally, inevitably entail a form of symbolic domestica-
tion of the ultimate threat of nuclear destruction. They may per-
form a displaced anticipated mourning of the end of our planet
and of human life along with that of most other species, but they
cannot convey the horrors of an “absolute self-destructibility
without apocalypse, without revelation of its own truth, with-
out absolute knowledge” (Derrida 1984, 27). Perhaps the differ-
ence between the more narrowly referential works about nuclear
disasters and the experimental texts Derrida invokes lies in the
fact that the former try symbolically to contain the terror of re-
mainderless destruction, while the latter try to evoke them via
structural approximations, indirections, and displacements.
Samuel Beckett, for example, uses indirection to evoke a possible
nuclear catastrophe in works such as Endgame (1958), Happy Days
(1961), The Lost Ones (1972), and “Catastrophe” (1994) by tracing
the nuclear imaginary per se as it manifests in the dark comedy
of humans who are haunted by the vague and brittle knowledge
of the likelihood of catastrophes that would end the precarious
lives on their planet. Beckett’s visions are evocative rather than
referential and performative rather than conclusive, thus radi-
cally undercutting any of the familiar thrills and consolations of
an apocalyptic imaginary. It is their very darkness that is replete
with a haunting from the future.
In contrast to experimental literary texts, oral histories are first
and foremost histories of survivors. Rather than creating fictions
of a full-scale nuclear war, they testify to the material and psychic
impact of nuclear catastrophes. As the testimonies of survivors
demonstrate, they too must install themselves in the rhetorical
condition of nuclear destruction. This rhetorical condition is in-
separable from a traumatic psychological condition that I call
“haunting from the future.”
In the early 1990s, journalist Svetlana Alexievich gathered the
92 The Undecidable Unconscious 1, 2014

oral histories of Chernobyl survivors. She ends her book with the
following words: “These people had already seen what for ev-
eryone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future”
(2005, 236). In a similar vein, anthropologist Adriana Petryna, in
Life Exposed, speaks of Chernobyl’s “zone of exclusion” as “ma-
chines for designing the future” (2002, 26). If the testimonies of
Chernobyl survivors can be read as allegories of a haunting from
the future, we may ask how psychoanalysis theorizes the uncon-
scious impact of pending yet predictable catastrophes.
After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, the nearby town
of Pripyat was evacuated and declared a contaminated “zone of
exclusion.” Secretly, however, many of its citizens returned and
resettled there illegally. In what follows, I trace the emergent sub-
jectivities and “political economy of emotions” (Scheper-Hughes
1993, 203) of Chernobyl survivors, reading them as hallmarks of
a posthuman future determined by a political economy based on
“expendability” (Petryna 2002, 219), “sacrifice zones” (Churchill,
1997; Masco, 2006), and the global production of disposable peo-
ple.3 Chernobyl survivors share a sense of living perpetually in
the shadow of death and madness in a world in which “the order
of things was shaken” (Alexievich 2005, 37) In the testimonies of
these survivors, certain features emerge that mark nuclear sub-
jectivities: the psychic toxicity of living in a nuclear zone, an epis-
temology of deceit and denial, and a fascination with the nuclear
sublime. The condition of a haunting from the future encompass-
es and links all other features.
Joseph Masco’s concept of the “nuclear sublime” resonates
with Derrida’s notion of nuclear fantasies and phantasms. Mas-
co highlights a fascination with nuclear power that generates a
particular philosophical sense of the increasing precarity of life
on our contaminated planet while simultaneously nourishing a
fascination with the sublime power of unfathomable destruction.
“Chernobyl . . . happened so that philosophers could be made”
(Alexievich 2005, 93), says one of the disaster’s survivors. “It’s . . .
a philosophical dilemma,” says another. “A perestroika of our
feelings is happening here” (93). Cataluccio portrays the zone
Schwab: Haunting from the Future 93

as an area of “extreme emotions” (2012, 126), replete with the

strange attraction and freedom that come when all familiar ori-
entations become obsolete. The forms of life that flourish in “the
zone” are marked by intensities that provoke a philosophical atti-
tude toward life, a radical contemplation of the human condition
and confrontation of mortality or its inverse, a willful embrace of
the lures of the nuclear sublime and its apocalyptic phantasms.
“Sometimes I turn on the radio,” says one of the survivors. “They
scare us . . . with the radiation. But our lives have gotten better since
the radiation came. I swear! Look around: they brought oranges,
three kinds of salami. . . . What’s it like, radiation? Some people
say it has no color and no smell. . . . But if it’s colorless, then it’s
like God. God is everywhere, but you can’t see Him. They scare
us! The apples are hanging in the garden, the leaves are on the
trees, the potatoes are in the fields. . . . I don’t think there was any
Chernobyl. They made it up” (Alexievich 2005, 52).
The invisible danger that emanates from radiation has an ele-
ment of the uncanny. Paradoxically, it creates a feeling of hyper-
vigilance while maintaining the lure of deniability. Radiation as
invisible matter is a material force in the world that possesses vi-
brancy, albeit one that cannot be experienced, except in its deadly
force on all things living. Survivors apprehend radiation as a “vi-
brant matter” (Bennet 2010) only indirectly through mass-media
warnings and coverage of dangers, through the circulating ru-
mors in the community, and finally through its deadly impact on
their or others’ bodies. The likening of radiation to a godlike sub-
stance highlights not only the fundamental ambivalence of the
nuclear sublime but also its inevitable entanglement with will-
ful denial and self-deception and a larger epistemology of deceit.
Transformed into a godlike omnipresence, the invisible danger of
radiation is neutralized and contained in a familiar structure of
quasi-religious belief. Ultimately, nothing is new in the nuclear
Garden of Eden. And yet, nothing will ever be the same. Like
Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, an Angel of History is blown toward
a forever-contaminated future he cannot see because his face is
turned toward the ruins of past nuclear devastation.
94 The Undecidable Unconscious 1, 2014

At the same time, however, people are keenly aware of the fact
that they live in a world where, as one of the survivors says, “the
order of things was shaken.” After the nuclear disaster, nothing will
ever be as it was before. More than ambivalence, this is actually a
paradox reminiscent of imaginary transitional spaces that suspend
the laws of the real. The “zone of exclusion” outside Chernobyl is
literally a space beyond the law, since the people who have returned
to live there do so illegally and clandestinely. Unmoored from their
former lives and social worlds, they enjoy a paradoxical freedom.
Shared by both soldiers and civilians, tropes of freedom are among
the most common rhetorical invocations of a nuclear imaginary. A
returnee to Pripyat says: “I was running away from the world. . . .
Then I came here. Freedom is here. . . . I fell in love with contempla-
tion. . . . I go to the cemeteries. People leave food for the dead. But the
dead don’t need it. They don’t mind. In the fields there is wild grain,
and in the forest there are mushrooms and berries. Freedom is here”
(Alexievich 2005, 64).
This “freedom” generates a new conviviality with animals
and, almost paradoxically, a new connection with the natural
world. Survivor Sergei Gurin says: “A strange thing happened
to me. I became closer to animals. . . . I want to make a film to see
everything through the eyes of an animal” (Alexievich 2005, 64).
Human subjectivity can no longer be neatly separated from its
entanglement with that of other species. The surviving animals
are a sign of life in a zone of catastrophic loneliness, bare survival
and living death, a space that is uncannily familiar, yet radically
alien at the same time. It is as, if in the zone of exclusion, science
fiction has become the condition of the present. In nightmares
about being evacuated, Kovalenko finds herself in an unknown
place that’s “not even Earth” (28). Her testimony about her lonely
companionship with animals and plants expresses the core of the
nuclear subjectivities that emerged in the wake of the Chernobyl
disaster: the disbelief about the uncanny invisible power of radia-
tion, the clinging to life in the wake of catastrophe, the symbiotic
bond of survival with animals who, unlike humans, can sense
radiation, and the precarious denial that creates a simulated re-
Schwab: Haunting from the Future 95

turn to normality. “What radiation? There’s a butterfly flying,

and bees are buzzing” (31), Kovalenko says, and starts crying.
The body’s affect counters the denial of the mind. Perhaps the
future belongs to insect societies that can live underground until
the contamination is less lethal.
With their superior sensory organs for the registration of radi-
ation, animals also function like nature’s own dosimeter. Sensing
the nuclear explosion, bees stayed in their nests for three days,
and wasps only came back six years later (Alexievich 2005, 53).
Other species succumb to a fate similar to that of humans. The
vanishing of May bugs, maggots, and worms is an indicator for
radioactive contamination. After the disaster, people find mutat-
ed fish, especially pike, in the rivers around Pripyat. Phantasms
of the mutated body signal a return of the dark underside of the
phantasmatic idyll of a postnuclear Eden, thus highlighting what
is repressed in the nuclear sublime. Phantasms of the mutated
body can be seen as a radicalized version of Lacan’s phantasms
of the fragmented body. While the latter testify to the precarity of
the formation of the ego, phantasms of the mutated body signal
the precarity of life in the nuclear age as well as the transgenera-
tional genetic damage, thus functioning as allegorical hallmarks
of nuclear subjectivities and the nuclear unconscious.
The zone of exclusion has thus become a mutant transition-
al space of the living dead, a death world that has radically
changed the nature and status of the human, other living spe-
cies, and technologies. The soldiers who are brought in to pa-
trol the evacuated zones encounter Pripyat and the surrounding
villages as ghost towns, death worlds marked off-limits, with
sealed up houses and abandoned farm machinery. Animals
have become dangerous carriers of radioactive materials, des-
tined for extermination. A commander of the guard units who
calls himself “the director of the apocalypse” tells of “empty vil-
lages where the pigs had gone crazy and were running around”
(Alexievich 2005, 46) and where native plants—burdock, sting-
ing nettle, and goosefoot—were taking over the untended com-
munal graves of radiation victims.
96 The Undecidable Unconscious 1, 2014

Life in the zone of exclusion has created new types of assem-

blages between humans, animals, plants, and technology that
reveal beyond doubt that it is no longer possible to define the
boundaries of the human in isolation from other living species as
well as, centrally, human technologies. To begin with, Chernobyl
was a technologically induced disaster, but it also turned out that
radiation destroys the technological tools humans have created
to domesticate nature. A helicopter pilot describes the scene near
the Chernobyl reactor: thin roes and wild boars move in slow mo-
tion eating contaminated grass. Next to them, a ruined building
and a field of debris with an assemblage of dead machinery: “The
robots died. Our robots, designed by Academic Lukachev for the
exploration of Mars. And the Japanese robots—all their wiring
was destroyed by the radiation” (Alexievich 2005, 51).
Characterized by the logic of death worlds, new makeshift as-
semblages between humans, animals and technological objects
manage survival in the zone. These assemblages exist in a tran-
sitional mode of being between life and death. Together with
the corporeal effects of radiation, grief and catastrophic loneli-
ness turn humans into walking dead, their ambition of exploring
Mars with robots shattered before their very eyes. Radioactive
animals walk in slow motion, emaciated by contaminated plants.
Erosion breaks technological objects, turning them into obsolete
debris, ruins that testify to a force stronger than any hard materi-
al. Genetic mutations affect all living species, either immediately
or transgenerationally. Epidemic cancers cast a shadow of death
over everything.
“You can’t understand anything without the shadow of death”
(Alexievich 2005, 191), says Chernobyl photographer Victor La-
tun, who concludes with a forceful recourse to the nuclear sub-
lime: “Some say that aliens knew about the catastrophe and
helped us out; others that it was an experiment, and soon kids
with incredible talent will start to be born. Or maybe the Belar-
ussians will disappear, like the Scythians. We’re metaphysicians.
We don’t live on this earth, but in our dreams, in our conversa-
Schwab: Haunting from the Future 97

tions. Because you need to add something to this ordinary life, in

order to understand it. Even when you’re near death” (193).
These invocations of a nuclear sublime testify to the fascina-
tion with nuclear power as something beyond comprehension,
something unfathomable, surreal, alien. “We heard rumors that
the flame at Chernobyl was unearthly, it wasn’t even a flame. It
was a light, a glow,” says Viktor Latun (Alexievich 2005, 191). The
collapse of all categories of measuring and judging one’s world
may well feel like an artificially induced madness (versania).4 It
is no longer possible to distinguish between reality and fantasy,
between real danger and freely floating fear. Not only can radia-
tion block the function of certain organs; it can also block certain
functions of the mind and induce something akin to a specific
nuclear repression at the level of “nature as unconscious life”—to
reiterate Loewald’s term. Rumor reigns supreme; a new “life of
public secrets” (Petryna 2002, 73) emerges along with “informal
economies of knowledge” (213). When people find pike in the
lakes and rivers without heads or tails, rumors are spreading that
something similar is going to happen to humans: “The Belarus-
sians will turn into humanoids” (Alexievich 2005, 129). A teacher
says: “The fear is in our feelings, on a subconscious level” (119).
An ever-present, pervasive unconscious fear generates what
Masco called the “psychic toxicity” of radioactive ecologies. “It’s
not just the land that’s contaminated, but our minds” (183) says
another Chernobyl teacher.
Psychic toxicity has many facets beyond the mere internalization
of fear. It also translates into various forms of denial necessary to
continue with everyday life. The very fact that the danger of radioac-
tive toxins is invisible and that everything seems normal on the sur-
face enhances the ability of denial. Combined with the official cover-
up, a collusive willful denial facilitates living on borrowed time.
The normality, however, is but a precarious facade that masks the
fact that the zone is a death world. Chernobyl, I argue, must be seen
within the context of a more general sociopolitical production of
ever-increasing death worlds with populations condemned to a form
of death-in-life. Life in “the zone” is a radical manifestation of what
98 The Undecidable Unconscious 1, 2014

Achille Mbembe has described in terms of a new form of necrop-

olitics. The latter emerges under contemporary conditions of global
mobility in which entire populations are targeted, their living spaces
sealed off and cut off from the world and transformed into zones of
exemption, abandonment, and exclusion (Mbembe 2003, 30). What
Mbembe says about African states that can no longer claim a mo-
nopoly on violence and the means of coercion within their territory
is also true for other parts of the world. Many countries around the
world generate urban militias, private armies and separatist groups
that claim the right to exercise violence and kill. As the sovereign
right to kill is privatized, “coercion itself has become a market com-
modity” (Mbembe 2003, 30). The Zone has become a similar space
populated by outlaws . . . not only those who return legally to live
there but also scavengers who run a black market selling radioactive
materials, including contaminated meat and vegetables in Moscow
or even across the border in other countries (32).
Mbembe traces this new dissemination of necropower back
to the new linkages that have emerged “between war making,
war machines, and resource extraction” (33). In this context, the
Manhattan Project may well appear as an inaugural event. The
building of the first nuclear weapon during World War II was
dependent upon uranium as the prime resource. Its extraction
in the service of war as well as the nuclear tests happened on
indigenous lands that were designated as sacrifice zones. To the
extent that the indigenous inhabitants were not protected from
the lethal consequences, they were treated as disposable popu-
lations. This nuclear necropolitics is undoubtedly related to the
emergence of an unprecedented form of governmentality that
consists in the management of multitudes, a governmentality
that Mbembe links directly to the new geography of resource ex-
traction (34).
The Chernobyl disaster is, of course, also intimately tied to the
extraction of uranium and the management of multitudes in the
aftermath of the disaster. As the oral histories of survivors clearly
demonstrate, the management of the multitudes affected by ra-
Schwab: Haunting from the Future 99

dioactive contamination was performed by a veritable war ma-

chine of soldiers, citizens and scientists who oversaw the evacu-
ation of people, the burial of the dead under cement covers, the
cordoning off of a vast zone of exclusion, and the shooting of sur-
viving pets. In addition, organized crime flourishes on the illegal
trade of radioactive goods, headed by criminals who, similar to
warlords, arrogate the sovereign power over life and death. As
Mbembe argues, this necropolitics and necropower lead to the
“creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social exis-
tence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life
conferring upon them the status of living dead” (40). Humans
are left with the legacy of a world in which peace has become the
continuation of war with other means.
To understand the connection between necropolitics and a neo-
liberal economy based on resource extraction we need a “politi-
cal ecology” (Latour 2004) that encompasses politics, economy,
and psychology. I have chosen Chernobyl’s “zone of exclusion”
as a prime example of such necropolitics. Nuclear subjectivities
emerge within the larger context of today’s increasingly spread-
ing necropolitical spaces around the globe. They assume allegori-
cal valence in relation to a haunting from the future and a world
to come that, while anticipated by a nuclear imaginary, has en-
tered the space of the real with catastrophes such as Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Derrida’s seminal ques-
tion: “Who can swear that our unconscious in not expecting this
[nuclear war]? Dreaming of it? Desiring it?” (Derrida 1984, 23)
reminds us that the death drive looms large in theories of nuclear
subjectivities just as it looms large in Mbembe’s theory of necrop-
olitics. Ultimately, I would argue that today’s nuclear necropoli-
tics follows a logic of the death drive that we can only counter by
strengthening the forces that affirm life. As the oral testimonies
of Chernobyl survivors demonstrate, nuclear subjectivities show
an incredible resilience and hold on life. The problem, however,
is that this resilience is inextricably intertwined with denial. “No
Apocalypse, Not Now” could almost be taken as a silent mantra
that straddles the boundaries between the two.
100 The Undecidable Unconscious 1, 2014

Epilogue
Will the growing anti-nuclear movement turn the nuclear econo-
my around in time to save the planet? Or is it too late, as Rosalie
Bertell worried more than two decades ago, to reverse human
extinction or “species suicide” (Churchill 1997, 346)? Will we end
like Samuel Beckett’s last humans, buried like Winnie in a desert
under a merciless sun on an earth that has lost its atmosphere?
Are we indeed straddling the boundaries between denial and re-
silience by conjuring the inverse idyll of Happy Days? Or will some
“lost ones” survive, hovering in a cylinder in outer space, looking
down upon a dead earth? Perhaps Sergei Gurin, the cameraman
from Chernobyl was right when he said: “We’re all—peddlers of
the apocalypse” (Alexievich 2005, 112).

notes
1. “What is needed is a natural science that realizes that the interpretation
of nature in terms of (individualistic) consciousness limits our view, granted
that . . . it appears to enhance man’s domination of nature” (Bass 2000, 142).
2. I use the concept of necropolitics in the sense defined in Mbembe (2003).
3. The concept of “sacrifice zones” is central to Masco’s The Nuclear Border-
lands as well as Churchill’s “Cold War Impacts on Native North America.”
4. For the concept of vesania see also Lyotard (1988).

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