Against positive affects: Cosmic and entropic pessimism

As mentioned in the introduction, Dark Pedagogy rejects the notions of progress and positive affects that underpin much of contemporary politics and, consequently, pedagogical frameworks. Setting aside the most obviously problematic positions – such as faith in technological salvation or quasi-religious belief in progress, which rest on a superficial conception of science, which in turn underpin even conspiracy theories – there remains something equally troubling in approaches that foreground hope and love as the sole forces of resistance. It is this problem that I now address in order to develop, in response, cosmic pessimism as a theoretical stance and entropic pessimism as its practical complement.

Maria Ojala, in her foundational essay on hope and its relation to ecological catastrophe, distinguishes between ‘blind’ hope, which involves denial of the most traumatic consequences of climate disruption, and ‘constructive’ hope (Ojala, Reference Ojala2012). A Spinozist perspective already reveals the ambivalence of hope: it is a passion that combines an element of joy with something dubious (Spinoza, Reference Spinoza, Kisner, Silverthorne and Kisner2018, p. 219). Fear, its opposite, is similarly ambivalent but bound to sadness. In this sense, if hope is still preferable to fear, both ‘blind’ and ‘constructive’ hope nonetheless carry an unavoidable dimension of illusion.

To say that hope contains illusion is not to reject illusion itself. On the contrary, we need some forms of illusions – as even Lysgaard and Bengtsson, in their foundational work on Dark Pedagogy, recognise, noting how our current society ‘seem to be fixated on the powers of insight and reason’ (Reference Lysgaard, Bengtsson and Laugesen2019, p. 26) – and the ones most obsessed with not-being deceived are the most problematic of all: conspiracy theorists. As Lacan reminds us, ‘les non-dupes errent’: those who believe themselves free of illusion are the most deceived (Reference Lacan1974). As Lysgaard and Bengtsson clearly show, the relationship between this fixation on insight and knowledge and denial’s (individual and collective) features can be understood with the metaphor of the Möebius strip, ‘where the inside is inseparable from the outside’ (Reference Lysgaard, Bengtsson and Laugesen2019, p. 27). What is at stake, then, is not illusion as such, but the specific configuration Ojala presents that calls for closer scrutiny: not as a tension with some dimensions of reality, but as a displacement of it. She traces constructive hope to three sources: positive reappraisal, which risks softening the gravity of ecological collapse by turning it into a matter of perspective; trust in external actors, such as technology or organisations, which may foster passivity by shifting responsibility away from collective political engagement; and belief in everyday actions such as recycling, which can encourage good intentions but may also obscure the structural drivers of climate disruption, including extractivism and fossil capitalism. In this way, constructive hope risks reproducing the very ideological displacements that climate pedagogy ought to resist. It is precisely this particular form of hope, rather than its illusory dimension per se, that risks reproducing the very ideological displacements climate pedagogy ought to challenge.

What Lysgaard and Bengtsson describe as the ‘positive aspect of denial’ (Reference Lysgaard, Bengtsson and Laugesen2019, p. 25), which for them is ‘the reason why we don’t just jump off a cliff or lie down and wait to die’ (Reference Lysgaard, Bengtsson and Laugesen2019, p. 25), raises several difficulties. First, Freudian psychoanalysis has shown that denial can have significant repercussions in the Real in multiple forms, which makes it challenging to treat it as straightforwardly beneficial (Freud, Reference Freud and Strachey1957a, Reference Freud and Strachey1957b, Reference Freud and Strachey1961). Psychoanalytic practice is premised on bringing what has been repressed into consciousness in order to expand the subject’s capacity to act. Moreover, what they characterise as denial appears closer to disavowal, which is related but not identical. Their emphasis on the capacity not to be paralysed also does not fully address what we need to confront in the context of the climate crisis. It is therefore unclear whether this is the kind of ‘positive’ stance that is pedagogically desirable.

Both paralysis and what they call a positive form of denial seem to share a structural difficulty in relation to reality: the former involves seeing only one thing, while the latter involves seeing everything except that thing. Later in their argument they acknowledge that denial ‘presents poor ways of dealing with these problems’, and that such responses may serve to preserve a conventional ‘narrative of reason and progress in the face of hyperobjects and wicked problems’ (2019, p. 29). They also note that ‘rarely do simplistic ideas and concepts severely influence these monstrous wicked problems’ (2019, p. 29). This concession, however, invites a further question: should such simplifications guide our educational commitments? Are we not obliged, as educators, to recognise the complex relations between belief, affective response, reason and insight and to aim to cultivate an orientation towards complexity? These may remain aspirations, but to set the bar significantly lower seems to risk compromising the very aims of education and offers, paradoxically, a more dispiriting outlook than the alternative.

Moreover, it is less clear why we should apply the same term to more ‘constructive’ approaches. Actions seeking to confront climate disruption can take many forms: they may be reparative, involve a broader comprehension of reality, or adopt a more critical and doubtful stance towards existing structures, sometimes leading to revolt, even in violent terms. To treat these heterogeneous responses under the same label risks neutralising their differences. This is why I remain sceptical about maintaining the same label, hope, as Ojala does, for two distinct orientations towards reality. Moreover, I struggle to embrace a politics of hope in the face of irredeemable losses, suffering and injustices. In this respect, pedagogies centred on hope risk operating as ideological displacement. Instead, I propose two complementary forms of pessimism: cosmic pessimism, which aims at reorienting our theoretical horizon, and entropic pessimism, which guides practical engagement within collapse. Yet if one still wishes to preserve the pragmatic force of hope, it may perhaps be reframed as a ‘desperate’ or ‘tenuous’ hope, one that survives only in close proximity to despair.

Cosmic pessimism, as developed by Thacker (Reference Thacker2011, Reference Thacker2015), differs from moral pessimism (the belief that it is better never to have been born) and metaphysical pessimism (the view that this is the worst of all possible worlds). Cosmic pessimism instead aims at thinking the unthinkable: a planet not only indifferent to humanity but capable of existing without us, an effort to think what resists thought. It is not the effort of imagining some distant catastrophe or apocalypse, which is actually easier to think because, as Zupančič explains, ‘our future (even if imminent) death seems less scary than the idea of our existence, our being as it is now, possibly constituting a scam – because it bears on our present (and past) reality rather than on our future reality’ (Reference Zupančič2024, p. 17).Footnote ⁵ This is not directly linked to a ‘fear of fearing’, but rather to what in psychoanalysis is the dynamic of the doppelgänger: to face ‘the possibility of our (present) non-reality and non-existence, the fact that it could be that we are not’ (Reference Zupančič2024, p. 17). Cosmic pessimism is the recognition that what we once called “the world” is only the world-for-us, suddenly revealed through climate collapse as the Planet: not merely a world-in-itself – the Earth – but a world-without-us. It requires confronting the unsettling possibility that our existence, as we understand it, might be fundamentally precarious or illusory. This revelation destabilises the anthropocentric and progress-driven assumptions underpinning traditional education, exposing their limits in addressing the volatile and interconnected realities of the geological present. Any attempt to grasp the world-in-itself either transforms it into the world-for-us or confronts its fundamental ungraspability: it is the Planet – the world-without-us – that bites backFootnote ⁶ .

Dark Pedagogy builds on this recognition. Our current ecological and climate crises reveal a deeper level of complexity and entanglement that traditional educational approaches fail to address. Dark Pedagogy aims to remain at the stage of absurdity, incomprehensibility and the weird. If, as Thacker observes, ‘the world is increasingly unthinkable’ (Thacker, Reference Thacker2011, p. 1), thought must still confront this unsettling reality. Planetary climate disasters originate from human activities, yet they also emerge as unpredictable, non-human events. This duality – both human-caused and beyond human control – compels the educational realm to question its practices, models and assumptionsFootnote ⁷ . The natural world can no longer be portrayed as something entirely at humanity’s disposal. Current educational systems remain anchored in anthropocentrism and speciesism. These frameworks, as Jason Wallin notes, reveal that ‘the image of the future posited educationally has fallen out of sync’ with the external world (Wallin, Reference Wallin2016, p. 2). Pedagogies that emphasise interconnectedness are necessary but insufficient, since they can inadvertently suggest that relationships between entities are linear, harmonious, or equal. In reality, ecological relations are complex, asymmetric and often antagonistic. The survival of one species may entail struggle with others: viruses with their hosts, bacteria competing for resources, predator–prey dynamics, or human-perceived ‘pests’ disrupting crops and ecosystems. Even mutualistic relationships involve intricate dependencies and trade-offs. No ecological relation is simple or fully controllable.

All beings belong to the ecological web, and humans are inseparably entangled within it. Yet interconnectedness does not imply homogeneity. As Georges Bataille argues, individuality itself arises from this primal intimacy: the very conditions that bind us into a web of ontological continuity, also generate difference, opening an abyss (Bataille, Reference Bataille1987). Unique forms of life emerge from relational entanglement, often in antagonistic or unpredictable ways. Confronting this duality – our inextricability from the whole and our irreducible individuality – is, according to Bataille, always accompanied by anguish, as we will explore. Recognising this is vital for education, since it highlights the limits of pedagogies that presume harmony and affirms the need for approaches such as Dark Pedagogy, which embrace complexity, conflict and the ethical demands of entanglement. The ‘dark’, then, points to an ontological reality: a world not made for us, not centred on us, never reducible to our categories. Dark Pedagogy does not seek reconciliation or clarity, but cultivates the ability to remain with this ontological strangeness, to accept that existence is unstable, indifferent and at times hostile.

Entropic pessimism translates this recognition into practice. Developed through my reading of Leopardi (Li Mandri, Reference Li Mandri2025), it affirms the inevitability of loss and decay while insisting that not all losses are the same. Drawing on the laws of thermodynamics, which state that within an enclosed system energy inevitably diminishes until no energy remains to sustain life, it also recognises that every use of energy influences entropy and can therefore be judged as more or less reasonable expenditure. In other words, if we are destined to lose, we can nevertheless lose differently. Behind certain logics of expenditure we must discern logics of sacrifice and sacrificability that are no longer acceptable. Entropic pessimism therefore opens a field for differentiated engagement with socio-economic structures and for pedagogical practices that prepare us to act within ecological collapse.

Although cosmic pessimism and entropic pessimism present some alternatives to engage with suffering and injustices produced by climate catastrophes, we still need to explore more in detail the dynamic at play within many different reactions towards this crisis. In the next section, I turn to the mechanisms of disavowal and denial, examining how these psychoanalytic concepts illuminate our responses to disturbing realities.

Waking up to keep dreaming: The logic of disavowal

As it should now have become clearer, the orientations labelled as hope-inspired (whether ‘constructive’ or otherwise), as well as those that involve business-as-usual, are to be understood as forms of disavowal, albeit in different registers. In the case of business-as-usual, which can be framed as the most extreme form of disavowal, it’s knowledge itself that has become a fetish, leading to a ‘perversed’ disavowal. As Zupančič explains, ‘the precipitated knowledge (the awareness of how things really stand) makes it possible for us to ignore what we know and even to actively support what we know to be wrong’ (Reference Zupančič2016, p. 422). This paradox can be further illuminated by another psychoanalytic concept that helps explain our responses to disturbing realities: the nightmare. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud briefly discusses a case that Lacan would later examine in greater detail.

A father, exhausted after many days and nights watching over his sick child, lay down in a nearby room after the child’s death, leaving the door open to see into the room where the body lay surrounded by candles. An elderly man had been asked to keep vigil and prayed beside the body. After some hours of sleep, the father dreamed that his child appeared at his bedside, touched his arm and reproached him: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’. Awaking, the father saw light from the other room, rushed in and discovered that the watchman had fallen asleep and a candle had toppled over, setting fire to the wrappings and scorching the child’s arm (Freud, Reference Freud and Strachey1958, p. 509.)

As Zupančič observes,

This logic is evident in our responses to ecological collapse. Consider, for example, a catastrophic oil spill. Public reactions often involve outrage, grief, or fear, yet within hours we return to our routines: commuting, shopping and depending on oil-derived products without pause. This dynamic illustrates Zupančič’s notion of ‘perversed disavowal’: we loudly proclaim what is wrong while simultaneously relying on, and reproducing, the very conditions that make it possible. She writes:

Even when some action is undertaken, it is typically relegated to a fragmentary part of the picture, while the larger structures that sustain the problem remain unquestioned. This has been termed ‘fetishist disavowal’. Let us return to the example of the catastrophic oil spill. A fetishist reaction will likely treat it either as an isolated problem or as the only real problem: for instance, stopping the use of fossil fuels is seen as the sole necessary action, and everything else will be assumed to fall into place. The main distinction from perversed disavowal lies in their respective logics of avoidance. In perversed disavowal, the subject uses knowledge itself in order to ignore it: we know perfectly well, yet we act as if we did not. In fetishist disavowal, by contrast, an object (the Lacanian objet a) functions as the pivot that sustains both knowledge and action. Rather than ignoring what we know, we organise our awareness and practices around a fetishised point that gives the illusion of mastery. This logic is particularly common in certain strands of environmental activism, where climate and ecological breakdowns are framed as the result of (a) a single isolatable problem (for example, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere), which in turn can be the outcome of (b) the degenerate actions of humans who are destroying an otherwise perfect and harmonious order.

Fetishist disavowal relies on Lacan’s notion of ‘imaginary jouissance’. As explained by Todd McGowan, imaginary jouissance ‘allows the subject to remain securely rooted in its symbolic identity; it respects symbolic barriers, even as it offers the subject the illusion of transgressing them, which is why it doesn’t threaten the stability of the symbolic order’ (Reference McGowan2004, p. 71). Fetishist disavowal creates a fantasy: a wholeness, a unity that has been lost (Nature with Capital N), that can be regained only if we act in a certain way (vegetarianism or veganism; stop using fossil fuels to switch for renewable energies; stop using plastic; etc.). While all these actions are necessary and extremely virtuous, they nonetheless don’t even scratch the surface of the structures surrounding climate and ecological breakdowns, if taken singularly. This is also why Dark Pedagogy doesn’t aim to engage with certain types of ‘ecological grief’ (Cunsolo & Ellis, Reference Cunsolo and Ellis2018) or ‘solastalgia’ (Albrecth et al., Reference Albrecht, Sartore, Connor, Higginbotham, Freeman, Kelly, Stain, Tonna and Pollard2007) feelings, which, according to Lucas Pohl and Erik Swyngedouw, often posit that ‘the world prior to climate change, or even “Nature” more generally, is posited as some-Thing, which provided us with a sense of wholeness and completeness which is now lost’ (Reference Pohl and Swyngedouw2023, p. 6). As they explain:

If perversed disavowal allows us to acknowledge catastrophe to go on ignoring it, and fetishist disavowal allows us to act while remaining bound to the symbolic structure that produced the catastrophe in the first place, here, in contrast, appears another sense of the ‘dark’ that Dark Pedagogy wants instead to engage with: dark awareness. Ecological awareness, as Timothy Morton describes it, is ‘dark’: it resists and disrupts our conventional ways of understanding natural phenomena (Morton, Reference Morton2016). In this sense, it is not a way of mastering ecological realities but by really being unsettled by them. It wants to interrupt the comfort of waking up in order to go on dreaming, exposing us to the inescapable dimension of ecological awareness. It is dark, first, because in attempting to comprehend ecological realities we resemble detectives discovering that we ourselves are the criminals. Second, it denies the fantasy of reconciliation: recognising our interconnectedness does not dissolve the strangeness or absurdity of these realities; rather, it teaches us to coexist with absurdity and antagonism. Third, it insists on the traumatic dimensions of ecological reality, forcing us to confront the shocks, traumas and cataclysms that have made life possible.

The logic of disavowal, which can be understood as a defence mechanism, shows why ecological awareness is inescapably dark: it undermines our sense of innocence, reveals our entanglement in what we denounce and forces us to face realities that exceed our control. At the same time, the logic of the fetishist disavowal shows that it is no longer possible to rely on metaphors of balance and harmony to describe the natural world. To confront ecological realities is, after acknowledging our role as criminals, to confront the violence and ruptures of reality itself, allowing yet another veil that conceals reality to fall away.

Contemporary climate disasters driven by global warming sit uneasily with any harmonious conception of nature. Rising temperatures, desertification, sudden storms, tornadoes, tsunamis: all exhibit violence, unpredictability and uncontrollability that cannot easily be reconciled with an image of ordered serenity. While exacerbated by anthropogenic factors, these elements are nonetheless intrinsic to natural systems themselves. The categories of ‘harmony’ and related notions such as “order,” “beauty” and “equilibrium” are therefore reductive if we are to take seriously the actual functioning of natural systems, whose causal relations are more complex than such categories can contain. Climatic disasters, moreover, are often the unintended outcome of human actions, and every attempt to remedy them entails significant unpredictability due to the feedback processes of these systems.

For these reasons, I argue that a more fruitful (and more realistic) ecological perspective is one in which nature is understood as an order that incorporates disorder, as in Leopardi’s vision: an order in which evil is not accidental but constitutive. This perspective also brings into sharper focus the practical implications of entropic pessimism. In the following section, I turn to Leopardi’s unfinished Hymn to Ahriman, where this figure gives poetic form to this entropic horizon, compelling us to rethink pedagogy in light of a world where destruction is not an anomaly but the ground of existence itself.

Ahriman, or the sovereign of evil

Ahriman is the spirit of evil in the dualistic religion of Zoroastrianism, where it stands opposed to the spirit of good, Ormazd, but with equal power. In Leopardi’s fragment, however, only Ahriman appears. In the sole completed portion of the hymn, he is invoked as ‘King of things, author of the world, arcane malice, supreme power and supreme intelligence, eternal giver of evils and ruler of motion’. What remains beyond this passage are fragments and preparatory notes, one of which reads:

Ahriman stands for nature. The reality depicted in the hymn is one in which the human is not relevant, but instead is solo una menomissima parte dell’universo, ‘only a tiniest part of the universe’ (Leopardi, Reference Leopardi2017, p. 323). In another work, nature itself speaks to a man who accuses her of being insensible to human needs. Her reply to this accusation is glacial:

What nature is, in Leopardi, is particularly complex, and scholarship continues to debate the essential meanings contained in the word, as well as how to reconcile such a stark view with the more general love for the natural realm – a biocentric view – that Leopardi consistently displays. To explain this last point, I must go back a little.

Leopardi’s encounter with a reality entirely alien to human desires and will does not occur immediately. Before arriving at the conception of nature suggested in Ad Arimane, he explores a range of possible solutions to the problem that torments him: how to account for the existence of evil and suffering. In the initial phase of his thought, nature appears as a benevolent mother, a harmonious system oriented towards the happiness of living beings. Evil is interpreted as accidental, not inherent to this system, and dependent only on humanity’s transgression of its natural limits. At this stage, original sin provides, for Leopardi, the perfect explanation of the world’s condition: spirit exceeding matter, breaking the natural order. Leopardi, alongside Hegel, is one of the very few to read original sin in this way, although with diametrically opposed conclusionsFootnote ⁸ . The thirst for knowledge, the growing power of reason over the other human faculties, had led humanity out of a condition that might be called ‘blessed’, which Leopardi names the ‘primitive’. A stark opposition is thus established between nature, understood normatively as humanity’s original condition, and reason, as the corrupting force of an otherwise perfect order.

The difficulty, however, is that over time the attempt to justify nature becomes increasingly untenable in light of ever-new evidence of its guilt. For years, Leopardi strives to find explanations that might exonerate nature. From this early phase, through a series of intermediate positions (too numerous to examine in detail here) he eventually arrives at a position that is in some sense the opposite. If reason has succeeded in advancing and expanding its power, then this possibility must have been inscribed in humanity from the beginning. There is no ‘right’ condition, no predetermined path. The teleological framework collapses, leaving Leopardi before a desolate, horrific scene.

A return to a primitive, original state was never a real option, for no such origin ever existed. Evil is not accidental, nor is it merely the outcome of human choices. The nature once praised and cherished by Leopardi reveals itself for what it has always been: a malignant entity, wholly indifferent to our suffering. It continues to exhibit order, but this order is no longer harmonious, at least in a superficial sense: suffering and evil are inscribed within it as necessary laws governing all living beings, and even inanimate entities. This is the stage of Ahriman.

This conception emerges from Leopardi’s polemic with Rousseau and his theory of the accidental nature of evil. Rousseau maintains that evil derives solely from the choices of humanity, thereby preserving an image of nature as original and innocent. Leopardi, by contrast, writes, commenting on a passage from Rousseau:

It is from the final questions Leopardi poses in this passage – ‘What epithet are we to give to that reason and power which includes evil in order, which founds order in evil?’ – that the Inno ad Arimane must be readFootnote ⁹ .

Leopardi’s rejection of the idea of a perfect system and of teleology mirrors the epistemic and ethical challenge posed by the structure of disavowal. His horrific realisation exemplifies the principles of dark awareness: confronting reality without attempting to master it. Moreover, his final reflections on the place of humans in this picture capture the essence of entropic pessimism. If humanity is, from an ontological point of view, innocent, it is not from a historical point of view. Loss is an eternal law of nature, but humanity has chosen to replicate only the most violent and extreme features of nature, instead of opting for a more compassionate and reasonable way of dealing with its ephemerality, loss and fragility. This is why, in one of his last poems, Leopardi chose some verses from the Gospel of John as the opening epigraph: ‘And men chose darkness rather than light’ (John 3:19).