As we enter autumn and a new academic year, plenty of new titles in the Lacanian field have started appearing.

Of those published last month, Karnac released Antonio Quinet’s Lacan’s Clinical Technique: Lack(a)nian Analysis in early September. Quinet is a founding member of the EPFCL-Brazil, psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and playwright. His book is a straightforwardly clinical introduction to Lacan, with chapters entitled ‘Starting’, ‘Couch’, ‘Time’ and ‘Money’. Darian Leader writes the preface.

Dany Nobus’ The Law of Desire: On Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’ is the latest in the Palgrave Lacan Series and was released last month. It is the first full commentary on one of the most difficult papers in Lacan’s Écrits. A preview of the content chapter-by-chapter is available on the publisher’s site. Read more from Nobus in his excellent paper on ethical questions discussed here.

Also from the same series, Adrian Johnston’s Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan’s ‘The Freudian Thing’ is now available. Johnston’s book is a close reading of one of the major papers from the Écrits. Contrary to the temptation to circumvent Lacan’s own text in favour of easier, secondary commentaries, Johnston promises to show how “each and every page, paragraph, sentence, phrase, and word of this paradigmatic Lacanian essay is expressive of anything but obscurantism and bluff”.

Of those using Lacan’s work in other areas, Llewellyn Brown’s Beckett, Lacan and the Voice was published by Ibidem Press last month. Jean-Michel Rabaté writes the foreword. Brown argues that “Lacanian psychoanalysis offers the means to approach the voice’s multiple and fundamentally paradoxical facets” through a study of Lacan’s work on the invocatory drive.

Routledge published Art, Death and Lacanian Psychoanalysis by Efrat Biberman and Shirley Sharon-Zisser in September. The book looks at the death drive and repetition compulsion as a means of approaching the work of artists such as Gerhard Richter and Jeff Wall, and writers Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. The cover features Israeli artist Yitzhak Livneh’s DSIII, part of a series of paintings based on marble sculptures depicting the moment of death in soldiers, dating back to the eighteenth century.

John L. Roberts’ Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject was also published by Routledge last month, a book which uses Lacan alongside Heidegger and Levinas to argue that modern subjectivity is “structurally traumatic, founded in its finitude as self-withdrawal in time”.

Finally among new books published in September, the latest in the Short Circuits series from MIT Press is Alenka Zupancic’s What IS Sex? In this short treatise Zupancic argues that sexuality is at the point of a ‘short circuit’ between ontology and epistemology.

Looking slightly further ahead, later in October Polity will publish a collection of lectures Lacan gave at Sainte-Anne Hospital in 1971 and 1972 under the title Talking to Brick Walls. It will be released on 23rd October in the US, but the volume is already available in the UK where it was published on 1st September (the French original, Je Parle aux Murs, was released in 2011).

At the end of the year, Karnac will release The Lacan Tradition edited by Lionel Bailly, David Lichtenstein, and Sharmini Bailly. The book is a compendium of papers by leading Lacanians, including Bernard Burgoyne and Dany Nobus, examining the evolution of Lacanian theory over the decades.

Finally among new publications, announced for next year is the release of the English translation of Catherine Millot’s Life with Lacan, coming out March 2018, courtesy of publishers Polity. The book is an account of her time as Lacan’s analysand – and lover – between 1972 and 1981. The book received favourable reviews when it was first published in France last year, Elisabeth Roudinesco’s piece for Le Monde among them. It was also awarded the Prix de littérature André-Gide.

Turning to events, seminars and conferences, the new academic year means the schedule is filling up with a rich calendar for the coming year.

In Ireland, the Psychoanalysis & Sexuality Today conference will take place on Saturday 21st October at the National Museum of Ireland, featuring an interdisciplinary roster of Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian, Jungian, and relational analysts. The conference builds on the book Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory, edited by Eve Watson and Noreen Giffney, which was published by Punctum in March.

The Freud Museum will also host Paul Verhaeghe, professor of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of Ghent, for a discussion with Dany Nobus on 20th October of his latest book Says Who? The Struggle for Authority in a Market-based Society. Verhaeghe’s latest book is a companion to his 2014 What about Me? The struggle for identity in a market-based society. More details and links to join here.

A reminder also that the Freud Museum’s international conference on Fashion and Psychoanalysis will take place the week before, on 14th and 15th October, bringing together psychoanalytic thinkers and fashion experts to discuss a range of topics where the two fields intersect.

Additionally, in a conference to mark the centenary of Freud’s groundbreaking paper, the Museum will be bringing together psychoanalysts, academics, writers, and performers for ‘Mourning and Melancholia: Life in the Face of Loss’ on 11th November.

In London, the next Open Meeting of the Earls Court Clinical Group will be on Sunday 5th November. Each of the four speakers will present a paper on clinical and theoretical issues, and the event is open to all. Register here.

The London Society of the NLS will be holding an Open Day on 14th of October. The theme of ‘Transference’ is chosen in anticipation of the next NLS Congress, taking place in Barcelona next year. The event is free and open to all.

Relatedly, registration for the aforementioned Barcelona Congress is now open on the event’s site, as is a call for papers for the Clinical Study Day. Meanwhile, a number of new papers preparatory for the Congress have also been published in English. The blog from the last NLS Congress, which took place in Paris in April, has also been updated to include the speeches from several participants, including that of Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris.

Lacanian Compass in the US will be hosting a video conference on 22nd October, with Gil Caroz as speaker, on ‘The Ego of the Obsessional’. The seminar will be broadcast online through Webex, details of which can be obtained on request. A full list of events spanning New York, Miami, Omaha, Missouri and Houston are listed on the group’s site.

Finally, those in Paris may be interested in a series of three introductory seminars on psychoanalysis organised by the Corpo Freudiano on 18th, 19th and 20th October. The seminars will be given by Marco Antonio Coutinho Jorge, psychoanalyst in Rio de Janeiro. More details and how to sign up are here.

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