Three new works in the Lacanian canon were released last month. Firstly, Mahitosh Mandal’s Jacques Lacan: From Clinic to Culture is especially interesting because it is perhaps the first work of its kind to be published on the Indian subcontinent. It presents an overview of Lacan’s theory and a detailed analysis of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It is available to buy from the publishers Orient BlackSwan and will also be available on Amazon shortly, both in print and electronic forms. Secondly, as heralded in previous news updates, Daniel Bristow’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory is the latest from the Palgrave Lacan Series, looking at Lacan’s work through his contemporary, Stanley Kubrick, on overlapping themes such as cuts, space, silence, surrealty and das Ding. Thirdly, Duane Rousselle’s Lacanian Realism: Political and Clinical Psychoanalysis was published by Bloomsbury last month and is a Lacanian contribution to the recent speculative realism movement, offering a new reading of the category of the Real, in opposition to its presentation by thinkers such as Badiou and Zizek.

Due out in February will be Tomasz Dobrogoszcz’s Family and Relationships in Ian McEwan’s Fiction: Between Fantasy and Desire. The book takes a Lacanian view of relationships between partners and family members in McEwan’s work, drawing on concepts of desire, fantasy, the symbolic order, and the Name-of-the-Father.

This will be followed in March by Adina Sorian’s Reading the Real: Toward a Re-evaluation of Lacanian Theory in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Film. Sorian suggests a new path for the novel and film after the era of poststructuralist postmodernism, towards ethical questions, utilising Lacan’s notion of the Real. Sorian is a lecturer in English at Augsburg University and this book is based on her doctoral dissertation. It is available or pre-order via the publishers Königshausen & Neumann or via Amazon.

Looking further ahead, Lacan Contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, and Politics, edited by Nadia Bou Ali and Rohit Goel, is scheduled for publication in October by Bloomsbury. Contributions will examine both thinkers’ overlapping but divergent theories on sexuality, the theory of the subject, history and historicism, scientific formalisation, and ultimately politics. A Table of Contents is available on the publisher’s site as a preview.

Lastly, arriving later in the year will be Calum Neill’s Jacques Lacan: The Basics, which is due for release in November from publishers Routledge.

Among the journals, the latest edition of ‘The Lacanian Review’ was released last month, the theme this time being ‘Family Dramas-Family Traumas’. As well as providing orientation texts by Lacan and other analysts, it also contains interviews with lawyers and sociologists asking what is the family today from the perspective of their respective disciplines.

Some previous editions of Lacanian Ink are now available as Kindle ebooks. Numbers 26 (‘Anxiety’); 27 (‘The Names-of-the-Father’); 28 (‘Profane Illuminations’); and 29 (‘From an Other to the other’) were released at the end of January. Also worth mentioning is that Lacan.com has collected together texts (in French) of Jacques-Alain Miller’s course L’orientation lacanienne from 1989 to 1994. French psychologist Jonathan Leroy has the full transcripts running up to 2011 on his site here.

Thanks to Richard G. Klein some great new resources have been uploaded onto his site, Freud2Lacan.com, over the last month. A new English translation of Lacan’s Seminar IV, ‘The Object Relation’, adds some pages missing from earlier versions, corrects the page order, and makes legible some characters often rendered unreadable in the transfer to PDF. Additionally, thanks to Anthony Chadwick’s translation, the last part of Klein’s bilingual version (with three side-by-side English translations) of Lacan’s ‘Founding Act’ from 1964, the ‘Note pour l’annuaire’, is on his site too. Other new uploads in January include a cleaner bilingual version of Lacan’s La méprise du sujet supposé savoir (from Jack Stone’s translation); Sur l’expérience de la Passe, which is not available in the published version of the Autres écrits; and an updated version of ‘Kant with Sade’, with James B. Swenson Jr’s Annotations.

Among the events, the full programme is now available for Lacanian Compass’ Clinical Study Days, which takes place in New York from 9th-11th February on the theme ‘Delights of the Ego’. Registration is still open for last minute attendees here.

The Centre of Psychoanalysis at Middlesex University has announced a one-day Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society Postgraduate Conference in London on 9th June, designed to give postgraduate students from all disciplines who are interested in psychoanalysis an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 4th May. Full details here.

The School of the Freudian Letter will be hosting a two-day seminar in London, 17th-18th March, titled ‘Coextension of Psychoanalysis and Subjective Topology; a Future for Psychoanalysis’ with Jean-Gérard Bursztein. From the Argument for the seminars: “Bursztein will develop the Lacanian theory of the structure of the unconscious as cut and the Borromean knot with the concept of Lalangue, where Lalangue refers to the first mnemic traces, termed “Letters” by Lacan, which coat the signifiers of language with traces of lack of jouissance and trauma.”. Registration is open here.

The Cyprus Society of the School of the Freudian Letter is also organising two seminars on 10th of February presented by Dr. Giorgos Mitropoulos, Psychiatrist and Lacanian Psychoanalyst and Dr. Dimitra Gorgoli, Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst. Links to register are here and here.

The Lacan Circle of Melbourne will hold an Open Day on 17th February about its training, teaching and research activities for 2018. It is an opportunity to learn about the Lacan Circle’s seminars, conferences, and study groups or cartels – all open to anyone interested in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The Eurofederation of Psychoanalysis will host its European Forum in Rome on Saturday 24th February, and last month announced that simultaneous translations from and into English will be provided for English-speaking attendees. Italian, French, and Spanish will also be provided. The Rome Forum follows the one in Turin last year on ‘Determined Desires for Democracy in Europe’, which attempted to find a place for psychoanalysis in the political sphere. This time it picks up the same theme under the title ‘The Stranger: Subjective Unease and Social Malaise in the Phenomenon of Immigration in Europe’.

French speakers may be interested in listening to Radio Lacan’s special broadcast from the Soirée of the WAP at the end of January, on ‘The Politics of the Psychoanalyst in the Era of the Freudian Field, Year Zero’. As well as recordings of the presentations there are also ‘Echoes’ in the form of interviews with other participants and attendees.

Finally, the New Books Network has a podcast of a great interview with Derek Hook about his new book, Six Moments in Lacan: Communication and Identification in Psychology and Psychoanalysis, which was published by Routledge last year. Jordan Osserman discusses with Hook some of the examples used in the book to illustrate Lacanian concepts, including a great explanation of the big Other through obituaries and gravestones, and an illuminating commentary on Richard Nixon’s Watergate mea culpa in the famous interviews with David Frost. Listen to the recording here.

 

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