Starting with new publications out now and newly-announced, coming later in the year is Arka Chattopadhyay’s Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real, due to be released by Bloomsbury Press in December. Chattopadhyay’s work “proposes writing as a mathematical and logical operation to build a bridge between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Samuel Beckett’s prose works”. A preview and contents is available on the publisher’s site here. It is the second such work combining Beckett and Lacan to be released in the past six months, with Llewellyn Brown’s Beckett, Lacan, and the Voice published by Ibidem at the end of last year.

A number of new journal publications have been released recently from the NLS’s affiliates in advance of the organisation’s 2018 Congress, ‘In a State of Transference: Wild, Political, Psychoanalytical’, which will take place in Paris from 30th June-1st July. Registration for that event is now open and details of preparatory events at the NLS’s various national organisations throughout April can be found here. Publications in advance of the Congress include, from the London Society, Psychoanalytical Notebooks #32 on ‘Lacanian Politics and the Impasses of Democracy Today’; The Lacanian Review 4, ‘Family Dramas, Family Traumas’; Les cahiers de l’ASREEP-NLS, #2, ‘Les addictions sans substances’; and the latest edition of the revived journal Scilicet (translated into English) which heralds the WAP Congress taking place in Barcelona in April, ‘Ordinary Psychosis and the Others Under Transference’. The latest in a series of preparatory papers for the latter Congress – published under the title ‘Psychosis and Contemporaneity’ – is also now available free online.

Coming up next month, May will see the publication of a special issue of the journal Sanglap on Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Logic of the Cut. This invite-only issue, edited by Arka Chattopadhyay, Arunava Banerjee and Dipanjan Maitra will feature prominent scholars working in the field, from places as diverse as France, Slovenia, Australia and America.

Look out also for the latest edition of Lacanian Ink, number 51, Spring 2018, on ‘The Political’. Excerpts from its various papers (and those from previous editions) can be read at Lacan.com.

Recapping more recent publications, the latest New Books Network podcast on new books in psychoanalysis interviews Alenka Zupančič about her most recent work published at the end of last year, What IS Sex? Approaching it as an ontological problem, Zupančič locates sex as emerging from the same fault in signification as subjectivity itself, rather than from a pre-human nature. The interview, conducted by Anna Fishzon, also ranges over topics such as the disappearance of the hysteric, the post-oedipal, and the status of love at the end of analysis. Listen here.

Among events, Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association in New York has a number of upcoming seminars and workshops in April. On 13th and 14th April, Jean-Pierre Cléro will conduct a workshop on ‘Lacan and the English Language’, which will also look at the other languages to which Lacan often refers – German, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. This will be followed on 26th April by Angelo Villa’s ‘Denied Origin: The Koran and the Question of Subjectivity’ on the elements for understanding the founding scripture of Islam. Members of Après-Coup will then present on ‘Psychoanalytic Ethics and the Social Link’ on 28th April. All events will take place at the School of the Visual Arts on West 21st St. More details are on the group’s Facebook page.

On 20th-22nd April the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis will present its first International Lacan Seminar for 2018 on ‘The differences between the sexes in the psychoanalytic clinic of today’. Dr Luiz Izcovich and Dr Anita Izcovich will present a public lecture on the Friday night followed by a series of four sessions over the Saturday and Sunday. Full details of the programme are available here. Details of the Centre’s other public seminars, program of studies, and psychoanalytic clinic are available on its site. Additionally, video of the public lecture given by Colette Soler at the group’s last International Lacan Seminar in September 2017 is available on YouTube (in French, with English translation by Dr Leonardo Rodriguez).  

Also in Australia, the Lacan Circle of Melbourne will be hosting a study day on Saturday 21st April on ‘The Children of Psychoanalysis: Little Hans to Lacan’s ‘Note on the Child’. Speakers will be David Westcombe, Kate Briggs, and Russell Grigg.

The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London has now released the schedule for its public seminar series over the summer term. Among the guest speakers will be Raul Moncayo from San Francisco, speaking on ‘The Other Psychoanalysis and the Other in Psychoanalysis’ on 21st April; novelist and academic Oliver Harris, on ‘Lacan’s Return to Antiquity’ (also the title of his recent book); and Pierre Smet from Brussels, on ‘Psychoanalysis in institutions with ‘delinquants’: passage to the act and radicalisation’. CFAR’s Annual Conference has also been announced for 7th July, under the title ‘Forgetting the Past: Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Politics’.

The Freud Museum, London will be hosting two events of interest to Lacanians in April and May respectively. On 25th April, Raul Moncayo will be in conversation with Dany Nobus on ‘The Psychoanalytic Organization and the Lacanian School’, looking at Lacan’s organisational innovations within his own School, why it ultimately led to dissolution, and the current conditions of the Lacanian school in the US. Secondly, on 25th May Lorenzo Chiesa will lead a one-day intensive course on Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze and Structuralism. The event will examine Lacan’s thinking on the subject from the perspective of how Milner’s notion of hyper-structuralism better describes Lacan’s approach to structure as inextricable from the the subject; Foucault’s anti-humanist ‘death of structure’ (strongly criticised by Lacan); and Deleuze’s definition in his seminal 1967 essay ‘How do we Recognise Structuralism?’

A final reminder as reported last month that the Kingston Shakespeare Seminar series of symposia on Shakespeare in Philosophy will feature a symposium on Lacan and Shakespeare on Saturday 7th April. Speakers will include Catherine Belsey, Matthew Biberman, Peter Buse, Penny Georgiou, Will Greenshields and Scott Wilson. The evening concert will be of music on the theme of love and desire, including Debussy’s ‘Syrinx’ and ‘Bid Adieu’, the only known composition of James Joyce. Booking is open via Eventbrite here.

Finally, at the end of March French radio station France Culture carried a piece about Lacan and his practice from the perspective of those who remembered their time on the couch with him. Those interviewed include psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jean Oury and the architect Roland Castro. Listen here.

Got news? Get in touch.