Announced last month for publication by Wiley in June 2018 is …or Worse: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, the English translation of Lacan’s Seminar of 1971-1972. Dealing with the impossibility of the sexual relation, the artificiality of the semblance, and the singularity of a “One-all-alone”, Seminar XIX is the gateway to Lacan’s late teaching. Under the editorship of Jacques-Alain Miller, this Seminar marks the overhaul of Lacan’s work of the 1950s and 1960s. Out goes the primacy of the big Other in favour of the One; desire is exchanged for a privileging of jouissance; and an ontology of Being is replaced with a henology of what Miller describes as “The radical thought of modern Uni-dividualism”. A chapter summary and blurb can be found on the Wiley site. The volume also contains as appendices a Report on Seminar XIX by Lacan himself, and Miller’s ‘Library of Seminar XIX’. Pre-order via the publishers Wiley or from Amazon.

Also announced as forthcoming for May next year is an English translation of Colette Soler’s Lacan: Reader of Joyce, which will be published by Karnac as part of the CFAR Research Library series. While Lacan’s interest in Joyce and the question of diagnosis starts as early as 1967, it is on the 1975-76 Seminar ‘Joyce the Symptom’ that Soler’s book focuses. Originally published in France in 2015, an interview with Soler on occasion of its publication is on YouTube here (in French).

From the open access journal Acta Psychopathologica, Derek Hook’s short paper ‘The Failings of Depression: A Review of Lacanian Psychoanalytic Critiques’ is an excellent appraisal of a diagnostic concept often eschewed by Lacanian clinical classification. In particular, Hook tackles Lacan’s difficult remarks in Television where depression is referred to as ‘sadness’ and labelled a “moral failing”. Worth a read.

With the sad news of the death of Serge Cottet last month, his paper ‘Four Preliminary Questions to a Renewal of the Clinic’, first published in Psychoanalytic Notebooks in 2000, is worth revisiting, especially for the critique he launches of supposedly new symptoms (a “new garden of species”, as he calls them here) based on mono-symptomatic complaints. For more from Cottet, check out his Freud and the Desire of the Psychoanalyst published by Karnac as part of the CFAR Research Library in 2012.  

The latest edition of Lacanian Ink is now available to order via Lacan.com. On ‘The real unconscious’ – taken from the title of Miller’s paper which is included therein – it also includes contributions from Josefina Ayerza, Yves Vanderveken, Marie-Hélène Brousse, and filmmaker Richard Kern.

Potentially of interest to Lacanians is Donald Carveth’s new book Psychoanalytic Thinking: A Dialectical Critique of Contemporary Theory and Practice which was announced for publication in July 2018 last month. It takes an interdisciplinary approach which combines Lacan with Klein, Bion, Fromm, and Kohut among others. Carveth is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto. He is also the previous Director of the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis and a past Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis/Revue Canadienne de Psychanalyse.

For French speakers, some more publications of note in France last month. Firstly, released in November from publishers Ithaque was the new volume Après Lacan: le retour à la clinique which brings together a series of interviews with some of the main figures in the psychoanalytic movement who worked alongside Lacan in the 1960s and 1970s. Interviews with Jean Laplanche, J.-B. Pontalis, Piera Aulagnier, Joyce McDougall and André Green, conducted between 1992 and 2011 by Fernando Urribarri, are collected here. Being first students of Lacan, each interviewee went on to diverge from him to later develop their own theories inspired first and foremost by their clinical experience. Order on the site of the publishers Ithaque (site in French) or from Amazon.

Also published in France last month is Jean Allouch’s latest book, La scène lacanienne et son cercle magique: Des fous se soulèvent, from publishers Epel. At its heart is four propositions on freedom, revolt, alienation, and separation. Through a study of madness, Allouch situates Lacan’s work on this topic in opposition to that of his friend and contemporary Henri Ey and closer to that of Foucault’s later developments. The book is available on Amazon.com for Kindle or Amazon UK to order in paperback.

On a similar theme, David Monnier’s two-volume history of different disciplines’ approach to the handling of transference in psychosis was released last month. Histoire du traitement des psychoses par la psychanalyse contextualises Lacan’s ideas on the topic alongside those of other post-Freudians like Sechehaye, Kohut, and Bion.

Among French-language journals, ‘Mental’ published its 36th edition in November, entitled L’inconscient, intime et politique. Looking at the “heretical” status of the unconscious in the era of ‘big data’, it offers papers presented at the recent PIPOL 8 Congress from July on a ‘Non-Standard Clinical Practice’, and the EuroFederation’s Congress in Turin last month on ‘Determined Desires for Democracy in Europe’. Recordings from these recent events can be found on Radio Lacan. A communiqué (in English) from EFP President Domenico Cosenza, which followed the Turin event, also announces the next meeting on the same topic in Rome next February. 

Among upcoming events, the Lacan Circle of Melbourne has announced details of its 2018 Seminar Program which will run in conjunction with the group’s Study Days, special lectures, a conference, and cartels as part of the NLS. Starting 24th February, the first semester will see two Saturday Seminars of ten weeks duration each, running through to 2nd June. Full details on the group’s Facebook page.

For the festive season, Lacan in Scotland will be hosting ‘A Lacanian Analysis of ‘A Christmas Carol’ on 14th December at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. Claudia Di Gianfranscesco will give a Lacanian psychoanalytic analysis of ‘A Christmas Carol’, based on Charles Dickens’ novel and Robert Zemeckis’ (2009) movie adaptation. Full details on Facebook here.

Finally, ahead of next year’s WAP Congress, the third edition of preparatory commentaries, Papers, ‘Discontinuity-Continuity – From the Oedipal Clinic to the Borromean Clinic’, is now available online. The Congress’s site itself carries a number of other preparatory texts on the theme. Among those from last month, Pierre Sidon’s ‘Bye Bye Ordinary Clinic, Hello Singularity’ may be worth a read.

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