Polity Press announced last month the forthcoming publication of Lacan’s Seminar V, The Formations of the Unconscious, due to be released April 2017. Originally published in French in 1998, this translation by Russell Grigg is the latest in the series to be published by Polity under the editorship of Jacques-Alain Miller. Seminar V is one of the more accessible from Lacan’s teaching, and was given at the point in time that he presented many of the papers which would later be collected together as the Écrits. As such, the themes addressed here are much more expansive discussions – and much easier to follow – than their corresponding papers in the Écrits. Readers will find, for example, ‘The Subversion of the Subject’ paper heralded here by chapters 20-28 of this edition; ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ paper by chapters 14-19; and elements from ‘The Freudian Thing’ and ‘The Agency of the Letter’ in chapters 1-13. The full contents of the new volume is given on the Polity site and a link to pre-order is availble via Wiley.

More details of the next NLS Congress, taking place in Paris, 29th-30th April, 2017, were released last month. Under the title ‘About the Unconscious – Place and Interpretation of the Formations of the Unconscious in Psychoanalytic Treatments’ – new NLS President Lilia Mahjoub presents the argument that will orientate preparation for the Congress. The piece notes that Lacan’s conception of the status of the unconscious – much like Freud’s before him – did not remain static throughout his teaching. The unconscious cannot be reduced to the workings of an autonomous signifying order (witness the reconceptualisation around Seminar XXIII, for instance) and the manifestations of the unconscious are not the unconscious. Mahjoub points to the fact that the unconscious appears most often in the form of a failure, rupture, or discontinuity of some kind. But what then can be said about the nature of the unconscious? As the argument concludes, ‘About the Unconscious’ “indicates this hole around which the formations of the unconscious are produced, formations which must vary with the elaboration, the elucidation of the unconscious”. Read the argument in full here.

The Italian Cultural Institute is organising a talk by one of Italy’s most prominent Lacanian psychoanalysts, Massimo Recalcati, in London on Friday 11th November, 7pm. Recalcati will be giving a presentation entitled ‘The Complex of Telemachus – Parents and Children after the Father’s Sunset’. The title refers to one of the leading characters from Homer’s Odyssey, a warrior in search of his absent father, Odysseus, who kills the potential suitors of his father’s wife while the latter is away. The tale therefore presents a man who is less the rival of the father than the one who guarantees his patriarchy by assuring the continuity of the family bloodline. Recalcati teaches at the University of Pavia and Verona. He is the founder of Jonas Onlus, the psychoanalytic clinical centre for new symptoms, and Scientific Director of the School of specialisation in psychotherapy, IRPA. The talk will take place at the Italian Cultural Institute, 39 Belgrave Square, London SW1X 8NX. RSVP to cristina@codognato.co.uk. In the meantime, Recalcati’s article ‘The Empty Subject – Un-triggered Psychosis in the New Forms of the Symptom’, originally published in Lacanian Ink, no.26, Fall 2005, is available here.

As mentioned last in last month’s news update, Lacanian Ink no.48 – titled ‘Humpty Dumpty’ – was published in September. It features articles by Jacques-Alain Miller and Pierre-Gilles Gueguen, among others. Buy it on Amazon.

NYFLAG, the New York Freud Lacan Analytic Group, will commence its October schedule of events on 5th October with a clinical seminar on obsessional neurosis. Also coming up later this month will be two special guest lectures. The first, by psychoanalyst Gustavo Dessal, is titled ‘On Some Almost Unnoticed Ways of Being Crazy’; and the second is a lecture by psychoanalyst Adrian Price entitled ‘Flat Surface Painting and the Plan of Alterity.’ Details of both to follow so keep an eye on the Group’s site. Meetings are free and open to all.

Commencing in London this October is a series of seminars by Lacanian psychoanalyst Bogdan Wolf of the London Society of the New Lacanian School, under the title ‘Between Anxiety and Love’. Over the course of ten lessons, the series will explore Lacan’s Seminar X, Anxiety, a Seminar that marks a turning point in Lacan’s work away from a re-reading of Freud (here, in Seminar X, a contribution to psychoanalytic topics such as the counter-transference, perversion, and the nature of anxiety itself) and towards the genuinely new concepts he introduces to the field (most famously in this Seminar, the object a). The series will take place on Tuesdays from 6pm at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London. The full programme and a link to book are on the London Society’s site here.

The Centre for Lacanian Psychoanalysis in New Zealand has announced its 2016 conference, coinciding with its tenth anniversary. Its theme will be Lacanian Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century – Psychoanalysis, New Technologies and Social Media. The conference takes place on Friday 18th and Saturday 19th November in Auckland. Full details here.

The College of Psychoanalysts, UK is organising an international conference to take place in Manchester on 26th-27th June 2017 on Islamic Psychoanalysis/Psychoanalytic Islam. The conference promises to explore “the relationship between the clinic and culture in the contemporary world focusing on the challenge that Islam poses for psychoanalytic theory and practice, and the response of psychoanalysts to Islamic theory and practice.” Abstracts for papers should be submitted by 31st January, 2017. Keynote speakers include Fethi Benslama, author of the somewhat controversial Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, published in 2009.

A preliminary schedule has been released for the Ninth Annual Meeting of The International Society for Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (SIPP/ISPP), with the title ‘Any Body, Anybody: The Matter of the Unconscious’, taking place in New York, November 10-12.

Finally, for French speakers, the Argument for the 4th European Congress of Psychoanalysis (PIPOL 8) was published last month. The event takes place in Brussels next year, 1st and 2nd July 2017. The title chosen is ‘A Non-Standard Clinical Practice’ (La clinique hors-les-normes).

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