20% off and free global shipping on all Routledge titles for LacanOnline.com readers. Use this link and code S031 at the checkout.

Beginning with new books, and Understanding Contemporary Diet Culture through the Lens of Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory: Eating the Lack by Bethany Morris is out now, offering a close analysis of the relationship between diets and identity in modern Western culture. Morris suggests that food and eating behaviours are a means by which we navigate unconscious conflicts, and in locating anxiety as the tension between jouissance and desire she uses Lacanian theory to understand the subjective and symptomatic ways in which we think about dieting and eating.

Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan by Sinan Richards has also just been released and looks at the two authors’ works on love and subjectivity, making the case that love is the subject’s mad wish to reunite what Sartre calls the ‘in itself’ with the ‘for itself.’ It is the latest from the Palgrave Lacan Series.

Just released in French is Lacan’s Seminar XV ‘L’Acte psychanalytique‘ (‘The Psychoanalytic Act’), published by Seuil and Le Champ Freudien, under the editorship of Jacques-Alain Miller. For Miller, the Seminar asks the question: what is an analyst? And Lacan’s answer is: one who has been analysed, one who has brought their analysis to its end. This begins, Miller suggests, with the act of the analysand in bringing their desire into the analysis, to which the analyst’s response is the psychoanalytic act. The subject-supposed-to-know is the field where the unconscious is deciphered, but this subject later evaporates, and the analyst is dropped like the waste product of the analytic operation. Seminar XV ends in mid-1968, and Lacan makes some comments on the events of May that year, which are carried forward into Seminar XVI, which has just published in English. The English translation of Seminar XV is hopefully not far behind. Elisabeth Roudinesco writes a piece for Le Monde to mark the publication of Seminar XV noting that it treats the relation between master and disciple, not just in the context of May 1968 but in Lacan’s introduction of the pass, outlined in the Proposition of 9th October 1967. Roudinesco also notes that two sessions of the Seminar are missing from Miller’s version: the session of 31st January 1968, during which, in Lacan’s absence, his disciples discuss his teaching; and the session of 8th May 1968, where he expressed solidarity with the strike called by the higher education union in France. As such, she suggests, “Most of the interventions which prove to what extent Lacan developed his thought in permanent confrontation with his supporters have disappeared.”

Looking ahead to later in the year, several newly-announced books are due for publication soon and available to pre-order now. In April, Philosophy After Lacan: Politics, Science, and Art, edited by Alireza Taheri, Chris Vanderwees, and Reza Naderi will be released by Routledge, bringing together reflections on contemporary philosophy inspired by and in dialogue with Lacanian theory. In June, Anca Carrington’s The Unconscious as Space will look at psychoanalytic practice in mathematical terms, using models of space from dimension theory to algebraic topology and knot theory. Also in June, a new collection of Critical Essays on the Drive: Lacanian Theory and Practice, edited by Dan Collins and Eve Watson, will be published by Routledge and consider clinical, theoretical, historical and cultural aspects of the drive. Early in July, an original work by Berjanet Jazani will offer a critical reading of smelling, breathing and subjectivity. The Perfume of Soul from Freud to Lacan considers theories of olfaction in psychoanalysis, with examples ranging from the contemporary clinic to ancient literature. Lastly among the just-announced, Stijn Vanheule’s Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy: The Story Behind Hope and Recovery will be published in September and offer a new, humanising perspective on psychosis and how we can respond effectively to mental health crises.

On YouTube, Prof Dr Samuel McCormick has released more of his Lectures on Lacan series, with the latest lectures focussing on Seminar XIX and Seminar XVII. Donald Kunze meanwhile, on his excellent Boundary Language channel, offers us comments on Seminar XIII from a topological perspective, and on the topological ethnology of the tempietto.

Among journals, edition 59/60 of Lacanian Ink is now available for order at Amazon. This issue from Fall 2023 (published in February) is titled ‘A Feminine Fantasm’ and features translated excerpts from Jacques-Alain Miller’s The Trans Solution among other texts.

A new edition of the journal Scilicet, the tenth volume, on the theme of the upcoming World Association of Psychoanalysis Congress (see below), is out now. It contains more than one hundred texts, each the product of work in a cartel by members of the Schools that make up the WAP. The volume also carries a text by Lacan published as ‘Lacan for Vincennes!’ It is available via Amazon now.

Turning to events, and coming up in mid-February is the 2024 Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, under the title ‘Everyone Is Mad’. It will be held 22nd-25th February and will be broadcast online, with simultaneous translations in English. Registration is still open. The programme for the parallel sessions are now available for Thurs 22nd and Fri 23rd.

Meanwhile, the NLS Congress 2024, which this year will be on the ‘Clinic of the Gaze’ has issued its Call for Papers for the clinical parallel sessions that will take place on Saturday 11th May in Dublin.

The California Forum of the Lacanian Field presents its Seminar of Formation 2024 on the Direction of the Treatment, held as monthly meetings on Saturdays from 11am-12:30pm via Zoom, free of charge. It begins on February 24th with Gabriela Costardi on ‘The Ethics of Desire in the Direction of the Treatment’ and runs until mid-November.

The Lacan Circle of Australia will be hosting a series of Weekend Workshops during 2024 on the question of Diagnosis in the Clinic. Beginning 26th-28th April, they will be open to all via Zoom or in-person in Melbourne. The full schedule will be announced soon. There is also a new Lacan Circle Reading Group on Seminar VI, Desire and its Interpretation, convened by Eugenie Austin, starting Weds 13th March. It too is open to all. Finally, Russell Grigg will present a ten-part seminar series on Psychosis and Lacan’s Seminar III, starting in March and open to all either in-person or on Zoom.

Save the date for the Lacan Today conference, taking place at Ghent University, Belgium, 20th-21st September 2024. Keynote speakers will be Jamieson Webster, Russell Grigg, Evi Verbeke, Dany Nobus, Sophie Marret-Maleval, and Derek Hook. More info coming soon from the Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting at Ghent University.

Lastly, the transcript of a clinical interview Lacan conducted with a ‘Mme Solado’ at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris in the 1970s is among the new translations uploaded to the Lacan page (number 87) on Richard G. Klein’s Freud2Lacan.com. As a companion piece, check out the transcript of another consultation, with ‘Mlle Boyer’, also on that page (number 86).

Got news? Get in touch.