Teaching Theory: Seminars on Lacan

SSHRC standard research grant  $65,000

The substantive objective is to theorize the teaching of social theory through Lacanian psychoanalysis and with teacher-theorists influenced by Lacan. The formal objective is to demonstrate that teaching itself is an effective research method for theory—that is, this is what the project aims to contribute through the very form of its psychoanalytic method, rather than through any “results” or conclusions. The structure of theoretical research used in this project is the seminar. The OED defines the seminar as "a select group of advanced students associated for special study and original research under the guidance of a professor." By its most orthodox and time-honored definition, the seminar simultaneously teaches and researches, which was precisely the function of the legendary seminar of Lacan.

My research collaborators are Terence Carson, Chair, Secondary Education, University of Alberta, and Kirsten Campbell, Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London. My research assistant is Lucy De Fabrizio, PhD student, Secondary Education, University of Alberta.

True Love Stories: Writing Love Through Memory

Popular discourses of love, whether romantic, familial, narcissistic, or other, are, of course, much more crucial and immediate to people's lives than their scientific or academic counterparts. This project works those discourses through a strategic tension between autobiographical narrative and a critique of autobiography, especially autobiography as a way of teaching. Research results to date include "Remembrances of Love Past," "This Is Leave-Taking," and "The Passionate Shortfall of Autobiography," which was presented at the 1999 American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference.

Sex and Muscle

The female bodybuilder opens up a singular way to theorize the general problematic of sex and the body. She materializes spectres of the monstrous and the grotesque that crowd the radiance of celebrated bodies. This is a version of the favorite Zizekian topos of how the most precious thing in the social universe can suddenly invert into a stinking pile of shit. In this way, the odd force of the bodybuilding body demonstrates the inadequacy of the familiar "progressive" political response to the equally familiar framing of "normal" bodies by idealized images—that is, the quasi-Lacanian "forced choice" between abjection of the non-supermodel body and the mundanely hyperbolic narcissism of "loving yourself for who you are."

In this project, I have published "Sex and Muscle: The Female Bodybuilder Meets Lacan" (Body & Society 2, no.4 (1996)) and "Posing the Subject."

Are You a Loser? Rejection and the Academic Subject

The nether side of the recognition and reward of exceptional scholars is that the rest of us are compelled to crave an entire career of institutionalized rejection. Of course, the only thing that make this bearable is our Schadenfreude when even exceptional scholars get rejected, too. The familiar trajectory of academic life is overdetermined by moments and cycles of opportunities for our work to be rejected: doctoral and postdoctoral fellowship applications, job searches, grant applications, publication in refereed venues, book proposals, manuscript submissions, book reviews, tenure applications, promotions, academic awards. At the same time, as academics, we are extraordinarily invested in that imperiled work. This is not a happy situation. The project will think about how academics must negotiate rejection in the academy in order to sustain any subjective dignity, as intellectuals and as persons. To put this another way, 50% of us must be below average, but very few us can afford to think of ourselves that way.