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Beginning with new books coming out in the next month, and the English translation of Lacan’s Seminar VI – ‘Desire and its Interpretation’ – was released in the UK at the end of May and will be out in North America in early July. Bruce Fink returns as translator for the Jacques-Alain Miller-edited edition, in which Lacan discusses – among other topics – dream interpretation (Freud’s book, of course, and an extended examination of a dream from Ella Sharpe’s practice), Hamlet, and gives an elucidation of his graph of desire above and beyond the commentary that can be found in the Ecrits. To quote Miller, quoting Lacan, “This Seminar predicted ‘the revamping of formally established conformisms and even their explosion.’ We have reached that point. Lacan is talking about us.”

Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer edit Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory which will be released by Routledge later in June. See the link at the top of this page for a 20% discount when ordering direct from the publisher. The collection approaches the study of gender and sexuality from a clinical, cultural, and theoretical perspective, taking in perspectives from object relations, queer theory, and film studies as well as Lacanian scholarship.

Boštjan Nedoh’s Ontology and Perversion: Deleuze, Agambon, Lacan will also be released in June, looking at the three thinkers’ contributions to perversion less as a cultural and sexual phenomena and more in terms of its philosophical, ontological, and political import.

Matthew Clarke’s Lacan and Education Policy: The Other Side of Education comes out in June and will be using Lacan’s theory of the four discourses to interrogate the neo-liberal model of political economy and its effects on education policy. It proposes a perspective on education based around the shift from ‘being’ to ‘becoming’.

Maria Balaska’s Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: Meaning and Astonishment has its release date later in June and focuses on ‘astonishment’ as a theme consistent between both thinkers – in particular their shared disappointment or dissatisfaction in the reconciliation of language to meaning that pervades both their bodies of work.

Last among new books due to be released in the next month, MIT Press will publish A Father: Puzzle, by Lacan’s estranged daughter Sibylle, in June. Attempting to make sense of the relationship with her absent father (the author being the product of her father’s first marriage) this short book is of course highly personal but addresses a topic – paternity – which was at the heart of so much of Lacan’s own thinking.

Looking further ahead in the year and just announced for publication in October is Esoteric Lacan, edited by Philipp Valentini and Mahdi Tourage. Looking specifically at Lacan’s engagement with religion, and in particular non-European traditions, it provides a critical examination of how Lacan’s reading of Taoist texts (which he himself translated), Sufism, and Kabbala informs our reading of capitalism and the internalisation of a history of colonialism.

At the end of this year, from Palgrave Macmillan will come Moran M. Mandelbaum’s The Nation/State Fantasy: A Psychoanalytical Genealogy of Nationalism, due to be published in December. Mandelbaum “deploys a Lacanian-psychoanalytical reading of nationalism and the nation/state that goes beyond methodological nationalism and state-centrism critiques”, to examine the origins of nationalism in early modern European thought and the continued endurance of the nation-state ideal in contemporary international politics.

Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, edited by Ben Ware, will be published in January 2020 and is the latest work to examine the Irish artist and his work from a psychoanalytic perspective. Drawing together leading philosophers and psychoanalytic critics, it seeks to bring Bacon into a dialogue with thinkers such as Aristotle, Hegel, Adorno, Heidegger, and of course Freud and Lacan.

Among the journals, the latest edition of The Lacanian Review – Issue 7, ‘Get Real’ – has now been published with its theme to “interrogate what is real in psychoanalysis”. It features a landmark translation by Philip Dravers of Lacan’s late seminar ‘The Third’, and several texts that explore the ‘Borromean clinic’, alongside three new translations of Jacques-Alain Miller’s commentary and work from his seminar.

The excellent journal Psychoanalytic Discourse carries new papers by a range of scholars from different orientations, creating an interdisciplinary mix of perspectives and counterpoints. Its latest edition is available now, having been published in May. Among the Lacanian contributions are Judith Feher-Gurewich’s paper ‘Is Lacan Borderline?’; Alireza Taheri’s review of Sergio Benvenuto’s What is Perversion?, ‘Baroque Perversions and Counterpoints of Love and Hate’; and Duane Rousselle’s review of Thomas Svolos’ Lacanian Psychoanalysis in the Twenty-First Century. Previous issues of the interdisciplinary journal are freely available on its site here, and many articles engage Lacanian thought with that of other analytic traditions. Honorary mention goes to the Kleinian clinician Dr Donald Carveth, who in this issue offers a reply to Ali Taheri’s article and whose series on Klein’s work on YouTube will provide a good introduction to Lacanians less familiar with Klein’s thought and that of object relations in general.

The latest edition of Lacanian Ink – 53/54 – will be released in late June, featuring new work and translations on the theme of ‘Object Jouissance‘. Jacques-Alain Miller, Eric Laurent, and Georgio Agamben all contribute papers in English.

Among events, Lacan In Scotland will be hosting Annie Rogers, Professor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in Edinburgh on 19th June to discuss ‘A Lacanian Approach to Dreams and the Unconscious’. Rogers is the author of several very accessible and personal books on the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis in clinical settings including, most recently, one of the best clinical accounts of psychosis to emerge in the last few years, 2016’s Incandescent Alphabets. The seminar is free and open to everyone. Reserve at Eventbrite or see more details on the Facebook event. 

Coming up 11th-13th October in Pittsburgh will be the 2019 Lacan’s Écrits Conference, organised by Duquesne University Psychology Department. The poster for the conference has just been released (below) and more details expected to follow shortly via the link above. Keynote speakers will be Patricia Gherovici, Todd McGowan, Calum Neill, Jean-Michel Rabate, Stephanie Swales, and Stijn Vanheule. The event will also act as the launch for the latest volume of Reading Lacan’s Ecrits, which will be released in early August.

The Irish Circle of the Lacanian Orientation (part of the NLS) published a Special Issue of its journal Scriobh in April on child and adolescent analysis, with particular focus on autism and plural practice. The table of contents for this edition, and information on past editions together with details of how to subscribe, are available here.

Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association in New York will be hosting workshops on Friday 21st June on child analysis under the title ‘Education and Perversion: Today’s Clinical Work with Children’. Liliana Donzis and Angelo Villa will be presenting with clinical examples addressing forms of autism, psychosomatic symptoms and hyperactivity. Check out the Facebook event for more.

Finally, the new translation of Seminar IV on Object Relations by the Earls Court Group has now reached the seventh session of the Seminar, with all translations up to 16th January 1957 available on Lacanian Works, complete with extensive references and commentary on Lacan’s citations during his presentation.

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