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Just published by Routledge is the fourth and final volume of the Reading Lacan’s Écrits series, edited by Calum Neill, Derek Hook, and Stijn Vanheule. A special event to mark the book launch will take place on Thurs 14th March and is free and open to all. Register on Eventbrite here. The editors will be joined by many of the contributors to the four-volumes series for a discussion on the Ecrits, Lacan, and his teaching. The newly-published volume covers the first eight chapters of the Écrits and encompasses extensive, paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries on the papers from ‘Overture to this Collection’ to ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’. It is the fourth volume in this series – the previous three are available here, here, and here covering the rest of the full Écrits. A 20% discount and free global shipping is available using the link at the top of this page when ordering from the publishers directly.

Ben Ware’s new book, On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End, will appear with Verso in March. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and contemporary popular culture, the book suggests how we might arrive at a new understanding of the multiples catastrophes confronting us today — war, climate chaos, and political rot. Moving from the death drive to anti-natalism, from late capitalist melancholia to the politics of subjective destitution, the book takes the reader on a breathtaking journey through desperate territory. 

Exploring Lacan’s Encore Seminar XX: The Torus of Reason was published last month by Routledge. Raul Moncayo, Barri Belnap, and Greg Farr co-author this consideration of Lacan’s twentieth Seminar which was given between 1972-1973. Developed from a seminar series Moncayo gave at the Austen Riggs Centre between 2016-2018, the book presents his dialogue with Belnap and Farr on the questions Lacan’s Seminar brings up.

The Lacanian Review issue 15, ‘Cut’, is out now. As the journal of the New Lacanian School and the World Association of Psychoanalysis, this latest issue includes a new English translation of Lacan’s, under the title ‘Improvisation: Desire for Death, Dream and Awakening’, and several by Jacques-Alain Miller. Papers in the edition cover the climate crisis, war, conspiracy theories, and Bitcoin among other subjects. It is available by subscription from the ECF shop via the link above. Previous issues are available on Amazon.

Registration is now open for the Lacan Today Conference which will take place in Ghent, Belgium in September, dedicated to the academic exploration of Lacan’s work and its profound impact on the realms of clinical practice, philosophy, cultural studies, and interdisciplinary research. An Early Bird rate is available for registrations before 1st June. Keynote speakers will be Jamieson Webster, Russell Grigg, Evi Verbeke, Dany Nobus, Sophie Marret-Maleval, and Derek Hook. A call for papers is open for proposals to be submitted by 15th April.

Registration is open for Lacanian Compass’ Clinical Study Days 16 on ‘Singularities in Neurosis: Transference and Interpretation’, coming up April 5-6 in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Christiane Alberti, President of the World Association of Psychoanalysis and Laurent Dupont, Secretary of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, will be special guests. More on the Lacanian Compass site.

On YouTube, Todd McGowan considers Lacan’s notion of the gaze, contrasting Lacan’s view of it as “what doesn’t not fit within the look” with the idea from film theory that it is a subjugating view of mastery to be resisted. He illustrates the difference with examples from Silence of the Lambs and Psycho. There is also an excellent summary of the point Lacan makes about Velazquez’s Las Meninas in Seminar XIII, and the difference between Lacan’s interpretation of the painting and Foucault’s.

Also on YouTube, Alireza Taheri is the guest of Lacan Salon for his talk ‘The Late Modern Crisis of Sexuality: What Can Psychoanalysis Provide Beyond the Clash Between the Ideologies of Essentialism and Total Freedom’. In this wide-ranging presentation, he speaks about the political and cultural divisions around sexual identity and asks whether psychoanalysis can provide a path freed from the constraints of older fictions and yet also unfeterred to new ideologies. Taheri’s excellent book, Hegelian-Lacanian Variations on Late Modernity: Spectre of Madness, was published in 2020.

On last month’s Rendering Unconscious podcast Prof Calum Neill talks to Dr Vanessa Sinclair about his new book, Jacques Lacan: The Basics, his work on Lacan in Scotland, and bringing Lacan’s work to a wider audience.

Another new translation of Lacan’s clinical work was provided by the team at Freud2Lacan.com last month. The transcript of Lacan’s interview with the patient Mme Annie Cheval, a 33-year-old hairdresser admitted to the Henri Rouselle hospital in November 1975, is now available under number 99 at the link above. Unfortunately, the transcript is broken off after 26 pages. But – in case you missed it in last month’s update – you can also find on the site the transcripts of the clinical interviews Lacan conducted with a ‘Mme Solado’ (number 101) and a ‘Mlle Boyer’ (number 100) around the same time, at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris.

Finally, readers may be interested to know that a date for publication in June has been announced for Mark Solms’ new 24-volume Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. While grounded in Strachey’s original translation, Solms’ version supplements it with, “substantial editorial commentaries addressing controversial technical terms and translation issues through the lens of modern scholarship. It also includes 56 essays, notes, and letters that were not included in the earlier Standard Edition.” Additionally for Freud scholars it includes a new expanded bibliography, indexes, and annotations in the margins with original German technical terms. More detail from the publishers here.

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