LACK 2017
Program (updated Oct 17th, 1:50pm)
Thursday, October 19th
8:00 – 9:00am Registration (Cornerstone Arts Center, Main Space)
9:00 – 9:45am Introductory Remarks and Plenary #1
Celeste Theater, Cornerstone Arts Center
LACK Central Committee Remarks
Molly Ann Rothenberg (Tulane University)
“Enjoyment and the Social Tie”
10:00 – 11:15am Panels
Universal (Room 131)
Chair: Cindy Zeiher
Felicia Cosey (Jackson State University)
“Retreat From the Sunken Place: Three Ways the Black Subject Digs Herself Out of a Hole”
Ryan Engley (University of Rhode Island)
“Mobilizing the Universal: Black Lives Matter against the Postmodern ‘All’”
Todd McGowan (University of Vermont)
“Universality in a Particular Age”
Trans (Room 301)
Chair: Carmen Anstreasian
Carmen Antreasian (Community College of Denver)
“Artistic Trans-formation: Understanding the Performance of Transgender Identity through a Feminist Psychoanalytic Lens”
Ciara Cremin (University of Auckland)
“Transwoman Does Not Exist: On Transvestite Enjoyment”
Andrew Kravig (Claremont Graduate University)
“Trans Ex Machina: Questioning Othered Bodies in Transgender and Cyborg/AI Film Representations”
Mathematical (Room 302)
Chair: Hilary Neroni
Jonathan Michael Dickstein
“A Lacanian Politics of the Cut of Divination”
Tyler Theus (Brown University)
“The Importance of Frege for Lacan’s Theory of Surplus”
Bree Wooten (European Graduate School)
“A Renewed Thinking of the Transferential Unconscious in Freud via Lacan’s Matheme and Sinthome”
11:30 – 12:45pm Panels
Objectal (Room 131)
Chair: Molly Anne Rothenberg
Russell Sbriglia (Seton Hall University)
“Allergy to the Real: Cultural Materialism, New Materialism, and the Subject of Psychoanalysis”
Nathan Gorelick (Utah Valley University)
“The Body Eclectic: On the Curious Materiality of the Drive”
Martin Scherzinger (New York University)
“Physics and Metaphysics of Post-Truth (Or, Do Realia Deliver Us from Fake Facts?)”
Other (Room 301)
Chair: Bruno Xavier
Olga Cox Cameron
“Psychoanalysis and Politics: A Necessary and/or an Impossible Conjunction?”
Bruno Xavier (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
“One Flew Over the Military’s Nest: Psychoanalyzing the Order”
Gila Ashtor (Tufts University)
“Wo Es War, the Other has Been: Lacan, Laplanche, and the Critique of Queer Theory”
Trump (Room 302)
Chair: Christian Sorace
Jeremiah Bowen (SUNY Buffalo)
“Owed to the Father: Permissive Mediatization and Its Reference to the Real in Alt-Right White Supremacy”
Jill Gentile (New York University)
“Tugging at the Umbilical Cord: Birtherism and Trump’s Delivery to the White House”
Shane Herron (Furman University)
“From Egotism to Narcissism: Theorizing Conservatism Through Trump”
Aesthetics (Studio C)
Chair: Sam Boyles
Sam Boyles (Aberystwyth University)
“Understanding Activism: An Exploration of Political Jouissance through Robert Frost’s The Exposed Nest”
Cassandra Guan (Brown University)
“Dreams of Non-Indifferent Nature: The Apophatic Subject in Soviet Film Theory”
Colin-Uriah Johnson (University of New Brunswick)
“Initials BB: Object-Voice, Sensory Reversals, and Sovereignty in Silence of the Lambs”
1:00 – 2:00pm Lunch (Rastall Dining Hall, Worner Center, arrive by 1:30pm)
2:00 – 3:15pm Panels
Solidarity (Room 131)
Chair: Cindy Zeiher
Brian Wall (State University of New York–Binghamton)
“Sublation and Fantasy: Lacan and the Dialectic”
John Waldron (University of Vermont)
“Postcolonial Desire and Solidarity in Latin American Studies”
Ahmet Yuce (Georgia State University)
“An Impossible Cohesion: Lacking Vision and Wounding Touch in A Short Film About Love (1988)”
Ideology (Room 301)
Chair: Paul Eisenstein
Darren Borg (Los Angeles Pierce College)
“Ideology, Literary Form, and Lacan”
Tamas Nagypal (York University)
“Cinema’s Topologies of the Real: Rethinking the Apparatus in the Age of Post-Ideological Cinephilia”
Maren Thom (Queen Mary University London)
“Ulrike Meinhof as Antigone: The Rewriting of Myth in the Post-Political”
Postcoloniality 1 (302)
Chair: Gautam Basu Thakur
Ilan Kapoor (York University)
“Žižek and Politics Now: Three Recent Controversies”
Dan Bousfield (University of Western Ontario)
“Aspirational Whiteness and Settler Fantasies: Ignorance and Failure as Political Categories”
Andrew Young (University of Toronto)
“Modernity’s Disavowal: The Spectre of the Haitian Revolution”
Avec (Studio C)
Chair: Jennifer Freidlander
Jasper Feyaerts (University of Ghent)
“Expression and the Unconscious: Lacan and Wittgenstein on the Cogito”
Philip Sayers (University of Toronto)
“The Imaginaries of Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes”
Iven Heister (SUNY Buffalo)
“A ‘Self-Sacrifice Loaded with Sadism’: Black Desubjectification and the Exclusion of Desire”
3:30 – 4:45pm Panels
Dupes (Room 131)
Chair: Todd McGowan
Jennifer Friedlander (Pomona College)
“Living Together in Their Own Time: Roland Barthes with Jacques Lacan”
Scott Krzych (Colorado College)
“I know you are, but what am I?: Hysterical Deflections in Conservative Documentary”
Cindy Zeiher (University of Canterbury)
“The Problematic Politics of Nostalgia and the Tenacity of the Neighbor”
Impossibility (Room 301)
Chair: Anna Kornbluh
Paul Eisenstein (Otterbein University)
“Time, Messianism, and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival”
Rithika Ramamurthy (Brown University)
“Filming a Fake Discourse: Form and Capitalism in The Big Short”
Dipanjan Maitra (SUNY Buffalo)
“Two Impossible Professions: Approaching the Real in the Impossible in Governing and Analyzing”
Psychosis (Room 302)
Chair: Derek Hook
Alan Bristow (University of London) and Derek Hook (Duquesne University)
“A Culture of (‘Ordinary’) Psychosis…?”
Junior Ingouf (Ghent University)
“Interpellation and Psychosis: A Reading from the Later Teachings of Jacques Lacan”
Jamil Khader (Bethlehem University)
“Frankenstein‘s Excremental Subject: The Haitian Revolution, Divine Violence, and the Disavowel of Internationalist Politics”
Friday, October 20th
8:00 – 9:00am Registration
9:00 – 10:00am Panels
Unknown (Room 131)
Chair: Sheila Kunkle
Sheila Kunkle (Metropolitan State University)
“A Crude Approximation to the Truth: Lessons from the Unabomber”
Hilary Neroni (University of Vermont)
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”
Visual (Room 301)
Chair: Todd McGowan
Jessica Datema (Bergen Community College)
“Leviathan Surveillance, Counter-Surveillance, and Leakers”
Arzu Karaduman (Georgia State University)
“Love in the Imaginary: Exscriptions in Bad Guy”
Donald Kunze (Penn State University)
“Fantasy, Desire, Contronyms, and the Ideology of the Forced Choice”
Bonds (Room 302)
Chair: Jean Wyatt
Jean Wyatt (Occidental College)
“Enigmatic Signifying in Jean Laplanche, Toni Morrison, and Helen Oyeyemi”
Laura Stephenson (University of Auckland)
“Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of the Real and the Politicized Corporeal Reality in Black Swan”
Christina Soto van der Plas (University of California–Riverside)
“The Politics of Love: The Impasse of Representation and Identity” (representation, identity, Badiou)
10:30 – 12:00pm Panels
Affect (Room 131)
Chair: Adrian Johnston
Lev Asimow (Harvard University)
“Chiasmic Love: Lacan and Merleau-Ponty between the Signifier and the Flesh”
Tom Ryan (University of Denver)
“Repeating Repetition: On the Specter of Kierkegaardian Repetition in Lacan”
Jackie Wang (Harvard University)
“Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect”
Mari Ruti (University of Toronto)
“How to Do Phenomenological Things with Lacan”
Work (Room 301)
Chair: Ron Brooks
Ron Brooks (Montclair State University)
“Resembling Transfer: Lacanian Transference, Pedagogy, and Politics”
Banu Guler and FTC Manning (CUNY Graduate Center)
“The Revolutionary and Her Superego”
Antonio Garcia (Žižekian Institute)
“A Philosophical Premise, Not a Promise”
David Gabbard (Žižekian Institute)
“Collective Learning: From Research to Pedagogy”
Romanticism (Room 302)
Chair: Daniela Garofalo
Daniela Garofalo (University of Oklahoma)
“Abandoned by Providence: Loss in Jane Austen’s Persuasion”
David Sigler (University of Calgary)
“To Cut across the Reflex of a Star / That Fled”: Lacan, Žižek, and Wordsworth’s The Prelude”
Ed Cameron (University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley)
“The Eros of Thanatos: The Sublimatory Politics of Graveyard Melancholia”
Colin Carman (Colorado Mesa University)
“Jacques Lacan & John Keats’s ‘Noble Animal Man’”
Redistribution (Studio C)
Chair: Daniel Gonzalez
Daniel Gonzalez (University of Illinois-Chicago)
“‘Your Money or Your Life’: The Politics of Jouissance and Contract in Frank Norris’s McTeague”
Lina Hoyos (University of Illinois-Chicago)
“La Mésentente: A Redistribution of Signifiers”
Óscar Campo (University of Illinois-Chicago)
“The ‘Dis-identification’: A Dialogue between Lacan and Rancière”
Luiza Morena Zanchi (University of Illinois-Chicago)
“The Transgressive Star: Deciphering Desire in Lispector’s A Hora da Estrela”
12:00 – 1:00pm Lunch (Rastall Dining Hall, Worner Center)
1:00 – 2:15 Panels
Act (Room 131)
Chair: Russell Sbriglia
Anna Kornbluh (University of Illinois–Chicago)
“Political Lack”
Tracy McNulty (Cornell University)
“Intersubjective Acts”
Michael Bruner (University of Nevada–Las Vegas)
“Political Psychoanalysis and Rhetorical Unconsciousness”
Technology (Room 301)
Chair: Henry Krips
Hugh Manon (Clark University)
“ASMR Mania, Trigger Politics, and the Anxiety of Digital Repletion”
Sarah Moore
“Generating Anxiety, Short Circuiting Desire: Batteries and the Capitalist Phantasy of Total Waste Management”
Scott Contreras-Koterbay (East Tennessee State University)
“Digital Objects, the New Aesthetic, and Lacan: Autonomous Desires of the Programmed Other”
Drive (Room 302)
Chair: Jonathan Lee
Amanda Duncan (Pacific University)
“‘Profaning’ the Body: Capitalism and the Death Drive in Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays”
Jason Goldfarb (Duke University)
“Capitalism and Lacan’s Four Discourses: Towards a Politics of Drive”
Calum Matheson (University of Pittsburgh)
“Limos as a Metaphor for the Drive”
Woman (Studio C)
Chair: Daae Jung
Kyle Allen (University of South Carolina)
“Immolation, Exorcism, and Psychoanalysis: The Treatment of Hysteria from Loudon to Lacan”
Daae Jung (SUNY Buffalo)
“A Plea for the Feminine Ontology”
Bethany Morris and Alexander Aronson
“Understanding Borderline Subjectivity as the Site of Radical Potential through Lacan’s Feminine”
2:30pm Plenary #2
Celeste Theater, Cornerstone Arts Center
Slavoj Žižek (University of Ljubljana)
“Moebius Strip, Cross Cap, Klein Bottle: The Twisted Space of Subjectivity
Saturday, October 21st
9:00 – 10:15 Panels
New Media (Room 131)
Chair: Russell Sbriglia
Louis-Paul Willis (Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue)
“‘Make Nostalgia Great Again’: Political Fantasizing in the Televised Adaptation of The Man in the High Castle”
Matthew Flisfeder (University of Winnipeg)
“Algorithms and Ideology: Parallax Encounters in Smart Technologies”
Clint Burnham (Simon Fraser University)
“The Desire Called the Dick Pic: On Suture, Rigid Designators, and the Gaze in Digital Culture”
Changes (Room 301)
Chair: Adrian Johnston
Ed Pluth (California State University–Chico)
“Working with Anxiety, Capitalism, and Dystopian Fears: Three New Works on the Cure in Psychoanalysis and Politics”
Jennifer Yusin (Drexel University)
“The Potentiality of the Letter: Or the Question of the Place of Lalangue in the Political”
Matthew Merskey (Boston College)
“Did I Ever Know a Temperate Time: On Psychoanalysis and the Environment”
Postcoloniality 2 (Room 302)
Chair: Michael Sawyer
Robert K. Beshara (University of West Georgia)
“A Lacanian Discourse Analysis of Kanye West’s Sacramento Concert Speech”
Sharanya Sridhar (University of Massachusetts–Amherst)
“From ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ to Who Is Allowed to Eat Pizza?: Reading Manikandan’s Kaaka Muttai (The Crow’s Egg) as a Counter-Narrative to Rags to Riches Film Narratives”
Gautam Basu Thakur (Boise State University)
“Third World Fantasy and the Politics of Enjoyment; Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012)”
Demons (Studio C)
Chair: Jennifer Friedlander
Alex Bove (Pacific University)
“Eco-Uncanny, Bio-Uncanny, and Ontological (In)Difference: Some Psychoanalytic Concepts for the Capitalocene as Mirrored in The Neon Demon”
Matthew Gannon (Boston College)
“The Dialectic of Dreaming and Awakening in Marxism and Psychoanalysis”
Mitchell Therieau (Tulane University)
“‘Half Psychotic / Blueprint Electronic’: Alethospheric Poetics in 2000s Pop”
10:30 – 11:45 Panels
Materialism (Room 131)
Chair: Todd McGowan
Pietro Bianchi (Duke University)
“From the Signifier to the Mathematical Letter”
Samo Tomšič (Humboldt University)
“What is Dialectical Materialism?”
Juan Pablo Lucchelli (Paris)
“Lacan and the Frankfurt School”
Time (Room 301)
Chair: Scott Krzych
David Denny (Marylhurst University)
“On the Motif of Tuche in the ‘New’ Documentary Form”
Timothy Richardson (University of Texas–Arlington)
“What Will Have Been Sexy: Fantasy, Capital, and a Future to Enjoy”
Daniel Cho (Otterbein University)
“On Guilt: An Examination of Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo and Roberto Esposito’s Two”
Nation (Room 302)
Chair: Christian Sorace
Hanna Baranchuk (Georgia State University)
“The ‘Funny Business’ of Resistance: The Potential and Limitations of Artful Protest Action”
Mina Ivanova (Agnes Scott College)
“Saddam Hussein as Objet a”
Nigel Mulligan (International College of Personal and Professional Development)
“Irelantis: Can the Fantasy of a United Ireland Be Translated into a Reality?”
12:00 – 1:00pm Catered Lunch (Cornerstone Main Space)
1:00 – 2:15pm Panels
Race (Room 131)
Chair: Michael Sawyer
Christopher Chamberlin (University of California–Irvine)
“Structured Racism”
Sheldon George (Simmons College)
“The Jouissance of Race and the Singularity of Desire in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Sanctified Church”
Wesley King (Flagler College)
“Race and the Psychoanalytic Objects of Melville’s ‘Whiteness of the Whale’”
Economy (Room 301)
Chair: Geoff Pfeifer
Deniz Coral (University of Minnesota)
“Causes After Consequences: Glancing Over Financial Markets”
Geoff Pfeifer (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)
“Marx with Lacan: Mood Economies, Individuality, and Class Consciousness in the 21st Century”
Michelle Rada (Brown University)
“Not-All Men: Reading Reactionary Politics with Lacan’s Pas-Toute”
Influence (Room 302)
Chair: Jonathan Lee
Concetta Principe (Trent University)
“The Latest Iteration of Paul’s Messianic in Contemporary Radical Politics: Lacan and Insurrectionism”
Alireza Taheri (HamAva Psychoanalytic Institute)
“On the Identity-in-Difference of Religiosity and Atheism: From Narcissistic Suicidal Aggression to Symbolic Castration”
Jonathan Lee (Colorado College)
“From Delirium to Confession: The Early Lacan’s Influence on Frantz Fanon’s Revolutionary Psychiatry”
2:30 – 3:45pm Panels
Action (Room 131)
Chair: Henry Krips
Tad Delay (Denver, CO)
“What Does the Populist Want?: On the Enjoyment of Rhetoric, Ideology, and Political Movement”
Clarisse Gurgel (UNIRIO)
“The Political Party and Its Symptomatic Insistence: Performatic Action as an Acting Out”
Henry Krips (Claremont Graduate University)
“Politics of Death and Redemption”
Interpretation (Room 301)
Chair: Russell Sbriglia
Alois Sieben (Simon Fraser University)
“The Computer’s Gaze: Stepping In and Out of the Human Perspective and the Stains Left Behind”
Seth Brodsky (University of Chicago)
“Music, Drive, Politics: A Return?”
Rajarshi Roy (Jadavpur University)
“Filming Phantasies: Negotiating the Vicissitudes of Male and Phantasies in and Their Trajectory in Bollywood Songs”
Extremes (Room 302)
Chair: Carol Owens
Mohammed Arefin (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“Hoarding: Capital, Value, and Space”
Carol Owens (Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland)
“Why the Zombies Ate My Neighbours: Whither Ambivalence? Part I”
Stephanie Swales (University of Dallas)
“Why the Zombies Ate My Neighbours: Whither Ambivalence? Part II”