Clint Burnham

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Simon Fraser University

Written in December 2022, never published due to editorial difficulties at online venue.

Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media offers an account of internet culture that draws as much on the Marxist theories of Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher, and Maurizio Lazzarato as it does on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Slavoj Žižek (the last of whom falls into bo...

Review of documenta 15, Kassel. Artists and collectives mentioned include Richard Bell, *foundationClass*collective, Centre d’Art Waza, Prodige Makonga, Sada [regroup], The Black Archives, Archives des lutes des femmes en Algérie , Fondation Festival sur le Niger (FFSN), Losso Marie Ange Dakouo, the ADN Collectif, Britto Arts Trust, OFF-Biennale Bu...

An interview with Kevin Chong, Vancouver author of The Plague (2018), conducted over Zoom in late 2020 for an SFU reading group on pandemic literature

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-i...

In this chapter I compare the garbage on the internet to the garbage in Lacan’s texts. I take as my cultural object the 2018 film The Cleaners (Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block, dirs.), which depicts social media content moderators working in Manila, Phillippines. Drawing on Lacan’s theory of objects in the Encore seminar, I then discuss actual gar...

The editors’ final preparation of this volume took place in the spring and summer of 2020—during, that is, the unprecedented global pandemic of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and acute respiratory disease COVID-19. As the world gradually shut down, as schools, factories, and restaurants, first in East Asia, then Europe, then North America, Africa...

Post-foundationalism departs from the assumption that there is no ground, necessity, or objective rationale for human political existence or action. The edited volume puts contemporary debates arising from the »spatial turn« in cultural and social sciences in a dialogue with post-foundational theories of space and place to devise post-foundationali...

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 highlig...

“This outstanding volume throws a new light not only on Lacan but also on environmental issues: we cannot really understand ecology without taking into account all the fantasies that overdetermine our approach to this topic.” - Slavoj Žižek, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities,...

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...

Brief opinion piece on Canadian politician Tony Clement's sexting scandal

Cambridge Core - European Literature - After Lacan - edited by Ankhi Mukherjee

The most exciting change in literary studies over the past forty years is that which challenges the very concept of the “literary”—by this I mean the development of cultural studies. As a methodology, cultural studies challenges the hegemony of Literature both in terms of the canon—and so inquiring into mass or popular culture, pulp fiction, fanfic...

Is the Internet an Event? Does it constitute, as Žižek argues an Event should, a reframing of our experience, a retroactive re-ordering of everything we thought we knew about the social but were afraid to ask Facebook?In this contribution, Clint Burnham engages with Žižek’s recent work (Less than Nothing, Event, Absolute Recoil) as a way to argue,...

I want to introduce three different ways of thinking about Slavoj Žižek with respect to the Internet: methodology, reception, theory. First, the ways in which Žižek constructs his texts and makes his arguments can best be understood in the digital, connected practice of the Internet; second, how we in turn read, or DO NOT read, or consume or watch...

This set of papers was developed in two Committee for Professional Concerns (cpc ) sessions at the accute 2013 conference at the University of Victoria. Together, they offer an ungainly whole (or two halves that do not make a whole, as Adorno would say): on the one hand, the dire and less-dire job prospects both inside and outside the academy for o...

Literary scholars face a new and often baffling reality in the classroom: students spend more time looking at glowing screens than reading printed text. The social lives of these students take place in cyberspace instead of the student pub. Their favorite narratives exist in video games, not books. How do teachers who grew up in a different world e...

Mavis Gallant's Going Ashore - a collection of out-of-print stories and minor satires from the New Yorker - is the proper occasion for hazarding a conception of what might be called the 'synoptic Gallant' (Jameson did the same for Raymond Chandler two decades ago). The synoptic Gallant lies somewhere between Ethel Wilson (overstuffed, suffocating s...

Note: This essay is from a larger work on the poetics and poetry of the Kootenay School of Writing, the body of work primarily being that published in the 1980s, the approach being a Lacanian one. I divide the poetry into three camps or tendencies: the Red Tory neopastoralism of Lisa Robertson, Christine Stewart, Peter Culley, and Catriona Strang,...

Note: This essay is from a larger work on the poetics and poetry of the Kootenay School of Writing, the body of work primarily being that published in the 1980s, the approach being a Lacanian one. I divide the poetry into three camps or tendencies: the Red Tory neopastoralism of Lisa Robertson, Christine Stewart, Peter Culley, and Catriona Strang,...

Note: This essay is from a larger work on the poetics and poetry of the Kootenay School of Writing, the body of work primarily being that published in the 19805, the approach being a Lacanian one. I divide the poetry into three camps or tendencies: the Red Tory neopastoralism of Lisa Robertson, Christine Stewart, Peter Culley, and Catriona Strang,...

Writing about sex is best done with a sense of humour, which is why Eva Moran's Porny Stories is so great. Indeed, this collection of short stories - or flash fictions, or meta-fictions, for we are in the land of formal experimentation - manages to be funny, sexy, and innovative all at once. If the publisher put as much money into proofreading as i...

I suppose the easiest, and most glib, and therefore most important answer to the questions "Why do I have to read?" or "Why do I have to read that?" or "Why do I have to read like that?" is, quite simply, you don't: you don't have to read anything, there is no instrumental value in reading in the ways in which we teach, or I teach, and indeed there...

He goes, so do you really think there’s something redeeming about gentrification?

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 1994. Includes bibliographical references.