People
Dr. Ziwei Yan, SFU sessional instructor
Dr. Ziwei Yan specializes in 20th-century and contemporary American Literature, psychoanalysis, and posthumanism. Her PhD thesis Jouissance of the Paranoiac Machine: Posthumanism and Futuristic Bodies deploys Jacques Lacan’s theory to demonstrate the correlation between posthumanism and paranoia. Weaving together the notion of quantum entanglement and the Lacanian “extimacy,” her thesis interrogates the hierarchy between the human and the nonhuman, in the formation of agency, subjectivity, desire, and consciousness. It proposes a dialectical relationship of posthumanism and psychoanalysis, seeking to advocate an ecological understanding of the Lacanian topology.