The bioeconomy, carbon sinks, and depoliticization in Finnish forest politics

The forest bioeconomy in Finland has emerged as a project that seeks to resolve emergent contradictions in the capitalist ecological regime and to reconfigure spatial, temporal, and economic relations. The bioeconomy rose to public consciousness during the 2010s, especially after its adoption as one of the spearhead projects of the 2015–2019 center-right coalition government. The forest industry's bioeconomic plans are also an attempt to hegemonize and depoliticize a particular political view of forests in the era of climate change. In this paper, the politics of the bioeconomy and carbon sinks are scrutinized in the context of the 2019 parliamentary election season, during which forest use was a central political issue due to investments in new biorefineries. A data set of 80 newspaper articles is analyzed through critical discourse analysis. The analysis identifies three key discursive frames that legitimize the political imaginary of the bioeconomy: 1) rural reinvigoration and the defense of the nation's peripheries through spatial populism; 2) a view of forests as high-throughput carbon conveyors that conform to the temporalities of capital; 3) the establishment of the bioeconomy as a high-value accumulation regime that can resolve the profitability crisis of the paper and pulp production model.

“Les Hypothèses Trop Hasardées”

This essay argues that the difficulties Émile Zola faced in closing the Rougon-Macquart novel cycle reveal a political imaginary whose notion of a clean line of progress depends on a technical supplement it disavows. At critical points Zola’s method exposes the disavowal of this technical supplement that functions as the prosthetic by which man overcomes a hereditary deficiency, his original psychosis in Zola’s account, and is also the means by which he allegorizes history as progress. But this supplement must also disappear from view, or operate as a vanishing mediator. Because, for Zola, the immediate political problem of engendering the right kind of political subjects for the Third Empire must be integrated into a larger evolutionary history, the rational overcoming of the original psychosis takes the form of a necessary and indeed automatic process. What is at stake here is not the inhumanism of generalizing the “Anthropos,” which has come under recent scrutiny, but the inhumanism integral to any humanism that imagines itself as teleologically or historically oriented—the inhumanism in humanism that subtends any imaginary of evolution or progress, because such a humanism must have recourse to technical prosthesis.

Medievalism Disoriented

This chapter examines the valency of the Middle Ages in the recent French political imaginary, tracing how the nationalist medievalisms of recent decades can be read as a response to the perceived threats and uncertainties of globalization. The chapter explores the heated debates sparked by neoreactionary commentator Éric Zemmour’s use of the Middle Ages to account for France’s apparent loss of identity in the era of multiculturalism and the globalized economy. It also analyses how these debates play out in three recent novels that offer medievalist explorations of contemporary French identity: Jérôme Ferrari’s Sermon on the Fall of Rome (2012), Michel Houellebecq’s notorious 2015 novel Submission, and Mathias Enard’s 2015 novel Compass. By examining these texts together, the chapter offers an account of how France in the age of globalization has used the Middle Ages to understand its own long, contradictory love affair with ideas of nation, empire, and world.

Qui pense? Qui parle? L’Imaginaire de la Commune ou Passagen-Werk

Comment parle-t-on de l’histoire de la Commune? Comment est-elle traitée? Les tumultes, la révolte, la Commune ont-ils un sujet? Je voudrais aborder les questions de la représentation (Darstellung/Vertretung), en me référant à deux exemples: le Passagen-Werk de Walter Benjamin et L’Imaginaire de la Commune ou Communal Luxury (The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune) de Kristin Ross. Les questions étant: Qui pense? Qui parle?

García Márquez and the Global South

Even when its focus is ostensibly local, Gabriel García Márquez’s literary output registers the global forces—and, specifically, the imbalances of economic, political, and cultural power—that condition those local circumstances. These same forces are the dynamics that define the Global South in the present. Following the most recent work in the field, the Global South is here understood not simply as a place name or post–Cold War substitute for the Third World, but as the resistant political imaginary arising from the mutual recognition of shared or analogous circumstances by marginalized or dispossessed groups throughout the world. This article explores the three principal intersections between García Márquez’s work and the Global South understood as a relational and analytical category. First, it outlines the ways in which his work registers global—and, importantly, South-South—circuits of exchange, opening up new comparative itineraries. Second, it elaborates the ways in which these comparative connections build toward a critique of the global system, such that García Márquez provides both the grounds and a model for what this article calls “Global South thinking.” The final section addresses the circulation and influence of García Márquez’s work in the literatures of the Global South. Much of the existing commentary on this topic (his influence on Third World, postcolonial, or even world literature) has focused on magical realism and One Hundred Years of Solitude. But, the article shows, works such as The Autumn of the Patriarch and Chronicle of a Death Foretold have also had a profound influence, on both individual texts and their reception.