Program

LaConference 2018 ~ Lacan and the Environment

All talks & events take place in the Grand Luxe Hall at the Western Front, 303 East 8th Ave., Vancouver

April 6-7, 2018

Western Front, Vancouver, British Columbia

LaConference 2018 is presented by Lacan Salon; organizing committee: Clint Burnham, Paul Kingsbury. Many thanks to Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology ~ Faculty of Environment ~ Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences ~ Department of English ~ Department of Geography for their generous support, and to the Western Front for hosting. LaConference 2018 takes place on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

The event is free and no registration is required.

FRIDAY, April 6

7 p.m. Opening remarks: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Introduction: Clint Burnham

Roundtable: What does the environment want?

Moderator: Paul Kingsbury

Participants: Todd McGowan, Cindy Zeiher, Matthew Flisfeder, Alessandra Capperdoni, Clint Burnham

Roundtable 7-9 p.m., followed by cash bar

SATURDAY, April 7

doors open 9:00: coffee & snacks

9:30 – 11:00 a.m.: Theory

chair: Clint Burnham

Paul Kingsbury: The supernatural fort-da of UFOs

Alma Krilic: The formula 'I would prefer not to' and Enjoyment in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”

Alois Sieben: The Land-guage of Throat Singing

Cindy Zeiher: Reversing Interpassive Environments: Neighbour as Social Gesture and Enemy as Social Duty

11:15 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.: Lack of Knowledge

chair: Hilda Fernández Alvarez

Chelsea Birks: Lovers in a Dangerous Time: A Cinematic Ethics for the Anthropocene

Juan Luis de la Mora: In Defense of the Subject

Oliver Keane: Science or pseudoscience? A Lacanian journey into Sasquatch investigation

Sasha Langford: The Psychotopology of Climate

12:45 p.m. – 2 p.m.: break for lunch

2 – 3:30 p.m.: Eco-Ideal

chair: Alma Krilic

Alessandra Capperdoni: Does the Animal Desire? Or, the Animal Question and the Lacanian Subject

Hilda Fernández Alvarez: Aokigahara Forest: An aesthetic space of the residual

Miguel Rivera: “Some people like…”: Misapprehension and Effacement of Jouissance in the Environment of Capitalism

Christine Evans: Partial Views: Cinematic Fantasies of Ecology

3:45 – 5:15 p.m.: Apocalypse

chair: Paul Kingsbury

Tamas Nagypal: Man and His World Frozen: The Feminine Topology of the Snowpocalypse in Robert Altman’s Quintet

Calum Matheson: Desiring the End: Environmental Apocalypse and a Sense of the Real

Nathan Gorelick: Psychoanalysis at the End of the World

Matthew Flisfeder: From the Sublime to the Hysterical: Reading the “End of the World” Thesis Against the “General Intellect”

6 p.m.: Keynote address by Todd McGowan: Self-Destruction and the Natural World

introduced by Clint Burnham