pain in nature itself, the pain which gets expressed/resolved in human speech – the Freudian Unbehagen in der Kultur thus gets supplemented by an uncanny Unbehagen in der Natur itself: imagine all of nature waiting for the gift of speech so it can express how bad it is to be a vegetable or a fish. Is it not the special torment of nature to be deprived of the means of conveying its pent-up aggravation, unable to articulate even the simplest lament, ‘Ah me! I am the sea’? And does not the emergence on earth of the speaking being effectively release this terrible organic tension and bring it to a higher level of non-resolution? While there are some intriguing passages in Lacan’s seminars where he speculates on the infinite pain of being a plant, raising the possibility of an Unbehagen in Der Natur, for the most part he conceives the relationship between nature and culture to be one of radical discontinuity.

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