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Beginning with the latest and upcoming publications, March saw the release of a new collection edited by Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler on Lacan and Romanticism. Published by SUNY, contributions adopt the approach Lacan took to the analysis of Freud’s texts, applying it as “an instrument of canon revision and renegotiation” to authors in the Romantic tradition, such as Jane Austen and John Keats.

In August, Routledge will release the second title in the Reading Lacan’s Écrits series. Volume II cover the papers from ‘The Freudian Thing’ to ‘Remarks on Daniel Lagache’ in a series of paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries. You can preorder now, with a 20% discount and free global shipping on this (and all Routledge titles) using this link and the discount code on that page at the checkout. Relatedy, as previously mentioned the 2019 Lacan’s Écrits Conference will take place in Pittsburgh in October and the call for papers deadline has now been extended to 1st May 2019. Full details on how to submit are here.

From the Palgrave Lacan Series, Yuri Di Liberto’s Being and Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Antinomies of the Object will be published in July in the UK and September in the US. Exploring how psychoanalysis responds to ontology, it proposes a new definition of the Real whilst reinvigorating Ricoeur’s notion of ‘suspicion’ and utilising Piera Aulagnier’s theory of the Other as a word-bearer.

Three books discussing Lacan’s engagement with and relevance for politics will be released during the summer. Firstly, The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory edited by Yannis Stavrakakis is due out from Routledge in August and will be the first reference volume to map the influence of psychoanalysis on political theory. Comprising 35 chapters, it will be divided into five sections dealing with Figures, Themes, Traditions, Concepts, and Challenges/Controversies in the engagement between politics and psychoanalysis.

Shortly thereafter, Lacan and Marx: The Invention of the Symptom by Pierre Bruno will be released by Routledge in September. Offering a commentary on Lacan’s reading of Marx, it surveys the references Lacan makes to Marx across his Seminar, including the oft-quoted claim that Marx “invented the symptom”, and the relation between surplus enjoyment and surplus value. Bruno also considers the work of those who have been influenced by both thinkers, such as Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari, and Zizek.

A third work on Lacan and politics, Discourse and Affect in Foreign Policy: Germany and the Iraq War by Jakub Eberle, promises to use Lacanian theory to examine how foreign policy is made, with particular relation to Germany’s foreign policy position with regards to the Iraq War in 2003. It will be published by Routledge in May.

A new Palgrave Pivot will follow in the summer, when Duane Rousselle’s Jacques Lacan & American Sociology: Be Wary of the Image is published. Using Lacan’s fifth discourse – the capitalist discourse – Rousselle argues that most early American sociology lacked an adequate account of the “symbolic” in subjects’ mental and social lives, privileging the image (the imaginary) in their place. Rousselle seeks to demonstrate that instead the social bond has always been founded on a fundamental and primordial bankruptcy.

In October, Massimo Recalcati’s The Telemachus Complex: Parents and Children after the Decline of the Father will be published by Polity. Looking at what remains of the figure of the father and fatherhood today – at a time in which Recalcati claims “the symbolic authority of the father has lost its power” – the author uses the story of Telemachus from Homer’s Odyssey to present an account of the reversal of the Oedipus complex, one in which the child longs for the structure and order the father could provide instead of harbouring the desire to annihilate him as rival. The dispute between Jacques-Alain Miller and Recalcati may already be familiar to close watchers of the Lacanian scene – you can read Miller’s comments about Recalcati in his Candide a Milan here.

Looking further ahead, announced for publication last month is a new collection edited by Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Zizek, Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, which is due for publication next February but is available for pre-order now. Adrian Johnston, Mladen Dolar, and Todd McGowan are among those contributing chapters.

Among events, the Freud Museum London has announced details of more upcoming events over the spring and summer. Its May conference will be exploring the theme of comedy and psychoanalysis, with speakers from the Lacanian world including Patricia Gherovici, Alenka Zupančič and the Everyday Analysis collective. On 11 May, the day before the comedy conference, Alenka Zupančič will be talking about her latest book, What is Sex?, which has become something of an instant classic in Lacanian circles. Zupančič follows Lacan in situating sexuality at the point of a “short circuit” between epistemology and ontology – details of her talk here. Then on 27th June Derek Hook will be discussing his latest book, Six Moments in Lacan, a lucid illumination of some fundamental Lacanian ideas with examples from the clinic and from popular culture. More details and a link to book for that event here.

Petros Patounas of the Cyprus Society of the School of the Freudian Letter will be giving a seminar on 13th April entitled ‘Breath – The Object of Desire’. It is part of the series of seminars presented by Petros Patounas under the general title ‘The Breath: the object of the Respiratory Drive’ and will raise vital yet basic questions about the nature of desire, jouissance, the desiring body, and the source of the respiratory drive.

Paul Melia, a practising analyst with the School of the Freudian Letter, will be giving a seminar titled ‘Beyond Doubt’ at the next NWRPA event on Friday 12th April at the Manchester Institute for Psychotherapy. The clinically-orientated workshop is organised around a series of extracts from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 thriller, Suspicion. More details here.

In New York, the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) will be organising a roundtable on 14th April titled ‘Psychoanalysis without Walls’. Chris Christian, Patricia Gherovici, and Carlos Padron will join moderator Michael Moskowitz in a discussion of clinical encounters in the barrio. It follows the release at the end of last year of the new collection Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious, edited by Gherovici and Christian, which challenges the notion that psychoanalysis is an expensive luxury only for the rich, instead showing how it can be used in communities of disenfranchised Latino populations. In itself it follows the 2014 documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio. RSVP for the roundtable here.

The University of Essex’s Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies will host a conference on ‘The Unconscious and Everyday Life’ from 30th-31st May. The Call for Papers deadline has now been extended to 12th April and contributions from all psychoanalytic perspectives are welcome. More details are on their Facebook page here.

Gearing up for the XVIIth Congress of the New Lacanian School which will be held in Tel Aviv 1st-2nd June, the event’s blog continues to run short interviews and video monologues on the theme of the conference – Urgent! The conference will look at the concept of urgency in contemporary culture, the response of psychoanalysis, and what urgency means in one’s own analysis. Registration for the Congress is still open and its blog contains more background reading, info on speakers, and practical arrangements in Tel Aviv.

Lastly, thanks to members of the Earl’s Court Collective, English translations of the first six sessions of Lacan’s Seminar IV from 1956-7 – The Object Relation and Freudian Structures – are available on LacanianWorks.net. The translations are made from the unedited tapes of the original.

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