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Beginning with new book releases, and out in mid-July will be Bethany Morris’ Sexual Difference, Abjection and Liminal Spaces: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Abhorrence of the Feminine, courtesy of Routledge. Exploring the question of sexual difference with an interdisciplinary approach, Morris looks at how the presentation of “monstrous” women throughout history can be seen as “an encounter with otherness through the abjected”, and how these characterisations can be challenged. Leveraging Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine to combine it with a Lacanian analysis of ‘feminine monsters’, her book ranges from the Enlightenment presentation of pregnant women, through the mothers of the psychoanalytic clinic in the nineteenth and twentieth century, up to the twenty-first century characterisations of women with borderline personality disorder. It is out on the 17th July.

Lacanians may be interested in a new collection from Routledge due out in early August, The Unconscious: Contemporary Refractions In Psychoanalysis, edited by Pascal Sauvayre and David Braucher. With contributions from a range of psychoanalytic orientations and none, it explores the unconscious from three main perspectives: the metaphysical (linking Jung’s thought with quantum mechanics); the socio-relational (that is, the political, inter-personal and inter-generational); and the linguistic (in terms of language and hermeneutics). Commentaries and critiques of Lacan’s work are peppered throughout its chapters. It is available from Routledge at a 20% discount via the link and coupon code at the top of this page.

Due to be released in November is Berjanet Jazani’s Lacanian Psychoanalysis from Clinic to Culture, the latest publication as part of The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research Library collection. Jazani argues for the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis combining case studies, theoretical expositions, and her personal experiences, with cultural examples drawn from cinema, artificial intelligence, and radicalisation.

Vanessa Sinclair’s Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art: The Cut in Creation has been announced for release by Routledge in November. Sinclair’s book begins at the dawn of photography and extends up to present day contemporary art to illustrate various psychoanalytic concepts by examining artists working in a multitude of mediums. Lacan’s use of scansion to disrupt a narrative is combined with the long and fertile association of psychoanalysis and the fine arts from Freud onward. Encompassing music, poetry, collage, photography, film, performance art, technology, and body modification, Sinclair’s perspective treats scansion as “a generative process often inherent of the act of creation itself.”

Relatedly, Sinclair is also the host of the excellent Rendering Unconscious podcast which brings together a great range of psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners using Lacan’s ideas in particular across a broad range of disciplines. Most episodes are also available on YouTube, with recent highlights from the past few months being Amanda Diserholt’s discussion of her work on fatigue, S Alfonso Williams’ interview on theory and analysis, Dany Nobus on the unconscious in times of coronavirus, and the latest discussion with Eve Watson on psychoanalysis in Ireland and the Freud-Lacan Institute which she co-established last year.

Announced for publication in December by Routledge is Liam Gillespie’s The Psychosocial Imaginaries of Defence Nationalism: Far-right Extremism in Australia and the UK . Working with Lacan’s theory, Gillespie explores the emergence of far-right nationalist ‘defence leagues’ in the UK and Australia, using psychoanalytic and psychosocial theory to identify such groups as primarily concerned with “constructing and then enjoying themselves as the nation’s self-ordained defenders”, rather than with realising a political project as such.

Turning to events, the NLS Congress 2021 on ‘Bodily Effects of Language’ has been announced to take place in Ghent, 22-23rd May next year. After the unfortunate cancellation of the Ghent conference which was due to take place at the end of June this year, a preamble written by the new president Alexandre Stevens presents the theme of the next Congress as broad but precise, to encompass topics “From the mortification of the signifier in the first stage of Lacan’s teaching, to the striking of the signifier on the body and jouissance effects in the later Lacan.” ‘Bodily Effects of Language’ “is also the body event, by which the title is inscribed in the continuation of the theme of interpretation, from truth to event.” Stevens also emphasises the continuity of effort behind analytic training. To this end, a day devoted to the Pass and the Formation of the Analyst is planned in Dublin on 16th January next year. In the meantime, various NLS groups and affiliates around the world will be continuing their activities via Zoom seminars. In the US, Lacanian Compass has published its July-August programme, while in the UK the London Society will conclude its Reading Lacan’s Seminar XVII series with Eric Laurent tackling the final chapter of the Seminar on 5th July. Recordings of all previous seminars in this series are on the London Society’s site for those who missed them.

The EuroFederation of Psychoanalysis has announced its PIPOL 10 European Congress of Psychoanalysis to be held in Brussels on 3rd-4th July 2021. Its theme will be ‘Wanting a Child? Desire for Family and Clinic of Filiations’. More details are expected to be announced soon on the EuroFederation’s site.

The Freud Museum London continues to livestream its events, and two in particular will be of interest to Lacanians. First, on 9th July Dr Keith Barrett will run a day course livestreamed from Freud’s study on ‘Psychoanalysis After Freud: Jacques Lacan’. The course will take place over three two-hour sessions with breaks in between, and cover Lacan’s work on paranoia and the imaginary, the ‘Return to Freud’, and sexuation. Second, Dr Jordan Osserman and guests will be running a two-day course on Friday 10th July and Sat 11th July on ‘Psychoanalysis, (Trans)gender, and Sexuality’. It will feature lectures and a close reading of texts on the emerging field of transpsychoanalytics on day one, and on day two presentations and discussions with a series of invited clinicians and scholars working at the cutting edge of psychoanalysis, and queer and trans studies. Recordings for both will be available for registered attendees to access at their convenience for 7 days after the event.

The Lacan Circle of Australia is beginning a four-part reading seminar on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, the series of essays that constituted his penultimate work and which Lacan described in Seminar XVII as “absolutely fascinating… makes absolutely no sense at all”. Starting on 11th July and running till 1st August, they will be conducted via Zoom, and are free and open to all.

The Austen Riggs Center last month announced a guest lecture by Sheldon George on Race and Psychic Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, and the Politics of Race. The lecture will be held as a virtual event for online attendance, and comes as George helps prepare a new collection on Lacan and Race for publication by Palgrave next year. The talk will provide a psychoanalytic reading of slavery as a manifestation of the aggressive drive, and a mode of jouissance “that lures the subject to perilous transgressions that stabilise American society into its consistently oppressive racial configuration”.

The Toronto Psychoanalytic Society & Institute has announced a course on Reading Lacan: Lacan’s Seminar IV: Object Relations and Freudian Structures. 1956-57 over 6 evenings in April and March 2021. It coincides nicely with the publication in English of Seminar IV, under the editorship of Jacques-Alain Miller, due out in January next year. With the course Coordinator Judith Hamilton will be seminar leaders Carlos Rivas and Alireza Taheri. Registration is now open via the link above.

Lacan Salon continues to provide psychoanalytic perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic, with more added over the course of the last month to its ‘Listening to COVID-19’ collection. Additionally, a ‘Listening with Black Lives Matter’ series has now begun, with several texts added already engaging with the somewhat mixed history of psychoanalysis with race, colonialism and anti-black racism. Lacan Salon is also running its schedule of summer 2020 events online, details of which can be found here.

Finally, issue number 15 of 4+1, the NLS Cartels Newsletter was released last month. It includes contributions for members of cartels around Europe, including from Anguel Anguelov (Sofia), Alan Rowan (Berlin), Violaine Clément (Friborg), Elisabeth Müllner (Vienna) and Sarah Birgani (Vienna).

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