English

I gave this paper about Charlottesville and region and nation and white mobility, mostly, at the 2018 SSSL Convention.  It's a little "different," especially for me, but I grew up in Charlottesville, my family goes back there over two centuries, and writing it helped.  I'm posting it on the anniversary of the Nazi marches in my hometown.

This talk was given as a keynote at the inaugural conference of the Canadian Network for Psychoanalysis and Culture, University of Toronto, September 2013, and published in the proceedings from that conference in 2015. An earlier version was workshopped at the Vancouver Institute for Social Research, in February 2013.

In my recent book on Fredric Jameson, I averred that while Jameson and Žižek seem to be ideologically aligned, a misperception suggested or affirmed by their frequent citation of each other’s work, these citations were, I argued, a screen that obfuscates more profound differences (Burnham 2016: 10-11). But what are those differences? I propose here to lay some stress on what I take to be some important differences between those two projects, in terms of their attitudes towards the dialectic (that is to say, the impossibility of reconciling those antagonisms, but also the importance of that non-reconciliation). Grounding that dialectic via the vicissitudes of the Lacanian “non-relation,” I then turn to the question of historicism or historicity, articulated via contrasting readings of Jeff Wall’s 1994 photograph Untangling that allegorize via the pictorial not so much mark making (as Walter Benn Michaels would have it) but looking as labor – the labor of the clinic with or without the labor of the workshop.

My teachings come from the mouths of people whose ability to read was basic at best … yet they were unequalled in their ability to relate a story, a story that flowed like water in a stream, soothing, calming, then at times angry, raging like rapids released from the icy grip of winter.

This is a paper I gave recently at the "Can't you see I'm burning?"conference in Aukland, NZ, organized by the Centre for Lacanian Analysis. I drew on 3 Freudian memes: the dreams "Father, can't you see I'm burning?" and "He was dead but did not know it" and the case study "A child is being beaten" to understand the current (2020) confluence of COVID-19 pandemic; state violence against black, brown, indigenous people; and the climate crisis.

Reading Kevin Chong’s 2018 novel The Plague in the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, this article argues that historical conditions, including white supremacy in Canada and liberal democratic anxieties regarding same are rendered in the novel both through representative scenes (a political figure visits patients in a pandemic ward, a protest featuring anti-immigrant and anti-racist participants devolves into a riot) and through such speech acts as trigger warnings and land acknowledgments. An intersection of historicist and psychoanalytic interpretations warn against both simply ascribing textual scenes to a literal writing of the Real, and seeking to cordon off the text from the social.

This chapter adapts its title from Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (2002 [1981]), in which he argued that the Marxist study of culture should take as its motto “always historicize!” What does it mean to shift from historicize to geographize? I answer this question in two different ways: through a genealogy of Jameson’s ideas of space, and then, through considerations or challenges to those ideas via Indigenous theory and geographies. I trace a genealogy of two Jamesonian concepts of space: first, the geographic unconscious, Jameson’s notion of the unconscious, which he frames in specifically spatial terms, as an underside, and indeed as a notion in which everyday life today is dominated by categories of space which can only be understood with his unique fusion of Marxist theory with psychoanalysis. Second, cognitive mapping, which he considers as a spatial form of knowledge or ideology, and draws from the urban geography theory of Kevin Lynch.

Clint Burnham’s chapter on Lacan’s “trash talk” pays attention to utterances and language, finding a parallel between online garbage and how we sort through the Seminars for the “gold” of Lacanian aperçus. Internet garbage, Burnham argues, can be thought of in terms of the three objects: the phallic object (Φ), the barred Other S(Ⱥ), and the objet petit a. He takes as his cultural object a documentary film, The Cleaners, on content moderators, the out-sourced workers who clean up social media feeds, eliminating porn, torture, and other images of political violence. This process he argues is similar to how we read Lacan, who did, after all, refer to the publication of his own books as poubellication, punning on the French for garbage, poubelle.

During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, as workers around the world retreated to “work from home,” we had two bodies: one on the Internet, attempting to attend meetings on Zoom or answer the metastasizing number of emails or conduct virtual counseling sessions, and the other our physical body, attending to children or elderly relatives, cramped into an apartment with one’s partner working, perhaps, nearby. But this is nonetheless a relatively privileged position: there are many who cannot afford such a virtual body, whether frontline workers (in hospitals, delivering food), those crammed into favelas, refugee camps, reserves, or prisons. This splitting of the subject into the “two bodies of the Internet,” or “the two bodies of the coronavirus,” I argue, provides a real-time case study for understanding the social conditions of psychoanalysis today.

What does it mean to bring Marxism and psychoanalysis together at this conjuncture? Such a project has been a throughline, arguably, for Fredric Jameson's work for the past four decades. In this review-article, I read his chapter on Lacan and Hamlet for how it helps us to understand, not only how Jameson's ruminations on desire and neurosis highlight the social tendencies in Lacanian theory (for example, the notion that desire is the desire of the other), but also how that relationship throws new light on both the Marxist project and psychoanalysis proper.

0. A note on method If Todd McGowan’s new book on Hegel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. McGowan is the giant of Vermont, the Bernie Sanders of the academy, the Larry David of Lacanian theory. In my review I make the following argument: desire is algorithmic, and realized in clickbait (clickbait names Hegel’s dialectics). McGowan’s book finds in Hegel a philosopher for the “after theory” era, a philosopher who forbids us from remaining satisfied with particularisms of the left or the right, a philosopher whose theory of contradiction is both universalist and grounded in the singular, a Hegel for whom love and duty are the slamdance of emancipation.

Spike Jonze's Her (2013) is a fi lm about a romantic relationship between a man and an operating system. Using a Lacanian and Žižekian psychoanalytic framework, we interpret this fi lm in the context of what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher has called "capitalist realism." Referring to the Lacanian thesis that "there is no sexual relationship," we discuss the fi lm's unique treatment of our enjoyment of digital technology and how it deals with the parallel deadlocks of the sexual relationship and the work relationship. We address these topics by looking at how Her deals with the sexual relationship, love, work, and fantasy. The premise of the fi lm is original-suited to the zeitgeist of the digital present-and we claim that it reveals important insights about processes of subjectivization.