Shall I try again?

 Perhaps I need to try a different approach to this blog. Initially, I thought I would focus on a political matters, bringing in commentary on aspects of provincial and federal politics that were not being covered by the Telegram, the CBC, or other mainline media. (I don't watch CTV news, and won't subscribe to the Globe & Mail or the Financial Post.)

But then, after my participation in the last provincial election, and other preoccupations during the COVID lockdown, I have found that my interests focus more on understanding Jacques Lacan's approach to psychoanalysis, translating, at the behest of my New York friend Richard K, who maintains a wonderful resource online, freud2lacan, obscure or little known texts by Lacan, and rekindling my interest in Alain Robbe-Grillet using the optics of Lacan's insights.

For most of the summer of 2022, I struggled to prepare a presentation for a Robbe-Grillet conference in Brest, which was organised to celebrate the centenary of R-G's birth. The conference would have been a great opportunity to test my approach to jouissance in some of R-G's novels, except that I caught COVID just before the conference started. I tried to deliver my paper, but my voice was not really up to it, so I'm not sure how much of it was heard. I submitted a revised version for publication, but have not yet heard if it has been accepted.

I am now exploring a slightly different approach that will include a discussion of R-G's literary production in the light of psychoanalysis and economics. The latter involves a formidable amount of new reading for me. Stay tuned!

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