Paul Kingsbury’s research while affiliated with Simon Fraser University and other places

Although literary geography has become an established subfield, to date, there are no in-depth geographical studies on literary groups that gather to celebrate a specific author and/or genre. To address this lacuna, my paper investigates Vancouver’s official Sherlock Holmes society, The Stormy Petrels of British Columbia (hereafter Petrels). Drawing on the methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviews, as well as Jacques Lacan’s concept of ‘le sinthome’ (hereafter sinthome), which defines how creative modes of (un)conscious enjoyment knot together psychical and social space, I explore three ways through which the Petrels’ enjoyment of Sherlock Holmes gives consistency to their individual and collective lives: first, through ‘nomination’ wherein the Petrels identify with Sherlockian characters and make names for themselves; second, through what Lacan refers to as ‘lalangue,’ that is, enigmatic meanings produced by the musical flows and babbles of speech; and third, through the surplus accumulation of memorabilia, what I call ‘sintholmes,’ which hold a powerful attraction as sublime objects of Sherlockiana. The article concludes by considering the political dimensions of the sinthome in terms of the changes in the Petrels’ demographics and the wider context of Sherlock Holmes fandom.

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, South Asia, Oceania, and South America, all closed or dramatically pivoted to online operations, an early ray of light, of perhaps desperately sought for hope, was the temporary abatement of pollution due to industry, commuting, and tourist travel. The Himalayas were suddenly visible from Punjab rooftops, NASA reported that pollution in China had plummeted, and deer were spotted wandering down city streets. Furthermore, as governments responded to COVID-19 with huge outlays of social programs and quickly moved to support industries and communities in need, activists pointed out that such state actions demonstrated the resurgent possibilities for Keynesian public outlays.

In their chapter The Most Sublime Geographer: Žižek with Place, Distance, and Scale, Lucas Pohl and Paul Kingsbury engage with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Based on the premise that spatial thinking is key to Žižek’s project, Pohl and Kingsbury highlight how Žižek seriously engages the spatial entanglements of the political, cultural, social and emotional realm, and il- lustrate how his works draw on and contribute to geographic understandings of place, distance and scale. While political theorists have criticized Žižek for developing an a-spatial theory of the political, Pohl and Kingsbury end up highlighting that Žižek’s notion of the political ultimately leads towards a post-foundational approach of space.

“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, UK “These smart, urgent essays consider a broad range of cultural contexts, illustrate the centrality of fantasy, desire, and symbolization to ecological transformation, and should inspire and terrify readers of many stripes.” - Anna Kornbluh, Department of English, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA “This brilliant edited volume not only reveals the environment to be an enduring theme in Lacan’s oeuvre, but also rethinks and reworks Lacan environmentally, showing ‘nature’ to be a site of both play and anxiety, interiority and radical externality, pleasure and pollution. Our study of the environment will never be the same.” - Ilan Kapoor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Canada In this exciting new collection, leading and emerging Lacanian scholars seek to understand what psychoanalysis brings to debates about the environment and the climate crisis. They argue that we cannot understand climate change and all of its multifarious ramifications without first understanding how our terrifying proximity to the real undergirds our relation to the environment, how we mistake lack for loss and mourning for melancholy, and how we seek to destroy the same world we seek to protect. The book traces Lacan’s contribution through a consideration of topics including doomsday preppers, forest suicides, Indigenous resistance, post-apocalyptic films, the mathematics of climate science, and the relevance of Kant. They ask: What can you do if your neighbour is a climate change denier? What would Bartleby do? Does the animal desire? Who is cleaning up all the garbage on the internet? Why is the sudden greening of the planet under COVID-19 no help whatsoever? It offers a timely intervention into Lacanian theory, environmental studies, geography, philosophy, and literary studies that illustrates the relevance of psychoanalysis to current social and environmental concerns. Clint Burnham is Chair of the Graduate Program and Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, and President of the Lacan Salon, Vancouver, Canada. Paul Kingsbury is Professor of Geography and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Environment at Simon Fraser University, and Vice President of the Lacan Salon Vancouver, Canada.

In recent years, cultural geographers have begun to scrutinize the relationships between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’. These studies assert that the ordinary and extraordinary are not fixed and discrete, but rather, mutable and connected. The main goal of this article is to explore how landscape can combine the ordinary and the extraordinary by reflecting on my participation in the 2017 Summer Lectures Crop Circle Conference in Devizes, England, and drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s work, Discourse, Figure (1971). My argument is that crop circles and the conference participants’ research practices landscape the ordinary and extraordinary by magnifying disruptive yet alluring rifts (écarts) between textual acts of reading and visual acts of seeing. I illustrate how such rifts, which Lyotard aligns with ‘figural space’ (l’espace figurai), occur on and off the conference site as follows: first, through an awkward slowness demanded by drawing crop circles in a sacred geometry workshop; second, as a result of the opaque thickness of the local countryside wherein researchers struggled to locate crop circles in fields and navigate country lanes; and third, in the operations of desire in group consciousness workshops that propelled disagreements over how to access the sacred. The article concludes by acknowledging some of the limitations of my reading of figural space, as well as some reasons why we should ‘go figural’ in cultural geography.