Ghost in the Wire

The convention for RSA's 2006 conference, which will be held in Memphis near the end of May, is now available online. For those in the academic blogosphere who will be attending, I look forward to seeing you in person rather than in css. For those in the area who find themselves generally bored and looking for entertainment, feel free to drop by and watch us rhetoric geeks get our geek on. One minor programming note: I was going to give a paper about Zizek and politics, one that focused on the issue of Iranian nuclear acquisition and was, shall we say, rather mocking of Zizek's In These Times editorial "Give Iranian Nukes a Chance" and that attempted to link his particularly impoverished understanding of nuclear politics to his rather limited appreciation for rhetorical agency. I'm no longer going to do so. For those who have followed my increasing annoyance with Zizek, you will understand when I say that I have no desire to beat that particularly injured horse in a public academic setting. To do so would be, I fear, Holbo-esque, and I just don't want to play that game. So instead, I'll be doing a piece about the "genetic privilege" of psychoanalysis within rhetorical criticism, one that I think makes a much more substantive contribution (in that it attempts to place a fairly heavy qualification on the critical utility of psychoanalysis within rhetorical study). It is titled "The Thing is that Ill-named Sign."