Maybe World Environment Day is Žižek's 'pseudo-activity'?

-       Robert McLean

World Environment Day is well intentioned, but I fear falls foul to what Slavoj Žižek calls “pseudo-activity”.

The Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher, cultural critic, Hegelian-Marxist, and author has written in “Trouble in Paradise” that we have an urge to be active.

He says that in “pseudo-activity” we have “the urge ‘to be active’ to ‘participate’, to mask the Nothingness that goes on.

“People intervene all the time, ‘do something’, while academics participate in meaningless ‘debates’, and so on, and the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from all this,” he said.

World Environment Day obviously focusses our thinking, but is it just another example of Žižek’s “pseudo-activity”?

Check out what the United Nations says about “WorldEnvironment Day.”