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Planning for the 2020 Lacan’s Écrits Conference is gathering momentum, with just over a month to go until the Call for Papers deadline. Hosted by Lacan in Scotland, the Conference will take place September 12-13 at Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland. The Conference poster was been released last month and you can find full information on the Conference site at lacanecritsconference2020.com, as well as joining the Event on Facebook.

At the Freud Museum London, two upcoming events in March will appeal to Lacanians. The first, on 18th March, will see Carol Owens and Stephanie Swales in conversation with Dany Nobus on the subject of their new book released last December by Routledge. ‘In Two Minds About It: Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan’ will present ambivalence – or, hainamoration (hateloving), the term Lacan preferred – as a central topic in psychoanalysis, implying a subject who is fundamentally split by language. The second, on 1st May, will be with Dr Vicente Palomera who will give an ‘Introduction to the Lacanian Clinics of Psychosis’, presenting Lacan’s work on the topic in three phases, from the Name of the Father and the paternal metaphor, to the Borromean clinic of Lacan’s late work, to the contemporary clinic of ordinary psychosis. Palomera has also published a number of works on the subject of psychosis in Spanish. All upcoming Freud Museum London events can be found on its site here.

Among books newly-available and coming, last month saw the release of a short work by Jean-Gerard Bursztein, The Unconscious, its Space-Time: Aristotle, Lacan, Poincaré, translated by Richard Klein. Bursztein discusses various aspects of the unconscious – its temporality (or, according to Freud, lack of), subjective or intra-subjective space, and the topological models of the Mobius and Borromean knots that Lacan referenced across his teaching.

March will see the release of The Son’s Secret by Massimo Recalcati courtesy of publishers Polity with the English translation by Alice Kilgarriff. Recalcati pivots from the Oedipus story to that of the biblical parable of the prodigal son to argue that children are subtly coerced into realising the dreams harboured by their parents at the expense of allowing them the space to create their own desires. Recalcati’s work has been the subject of a pointed attack by Jacques-Alain Miller, the details of which can be found by reading their exchange of letters here (in French).

Among papers, Derek Hook’s ‘Fanon via Lacan, or: Decolonization by Psychoanalytic Means … ?’ was published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology last month. Arguing against the idea that Lacanian psychoanalysis is antithetical to Frantz Fanon’s decolonising political project, Hook points to Fanon’s citation of Lacan’s work on psychosis and the conceptual affinities both thinkers share on the master-signifier of whiteness.

Issue 14 of the NLS Cartels Newsletter, 4+one, which contains papers on theory, practice and society, came out last month. It features contributions from Ruzanna Hakobyan, Heleni Koumidi, Greg Hynds, Isabel Barata-Adler, Karina Tenenbaum, and Veronique Voruz. Previous editions of the newsletter are on the NLS’s site.

The open access journal Language and Psychoanalysis is currently accepting manuscripts for Volume 9, Spring/Summer 2020. The submission due date is 30th April and works can be sent in via the site at the link above.

In Berlin on 11th March, Arka Chattopadhyay will speak at the Psychoanalytische Bibliothek Berlin on his recent book Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real. Marcus Coelen will moderate. More information on the Facebook event page here.

The Cyprus Society of the School of the Freudian Letter will be hosting a two-part seminar and discussion on 14th March, presented by Lacanian analyst Francine Danniau from Ghent, Belgium. She will present on ‘Interpretation today: Jouissance, the body and language’. More details and a link to book are here.

In Ireland, a seminar organised by The Freud Lacan Institute (FLi) is coming up on Saturday, April 25th at The Museum of Ireland. ‘Different Not Less’: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Autism’ will be a one-day multi-disciplinary seminar seeking to inspire dialogue about autism. It will feature a range of international speakers, with keynote speaker Bice Benvenuto being joined by Leon Brenner, Paul Moore, Stuart Nielson, Breda Dwyer, and Marie Walshe. The day will also feature a video installation and visual art exhibition by Stuart Nielson.

With the 2020 NLS Congress on ‘Interpretation: From Truth to Event’ coming up in June in Ghent, Belgium, the event’s site is now live and offers a number of preparatory commentaries by noted analysts. Recent posts include those by Bernard Seynhaeve, Alexandre Stevens, and (some citations from) Jacques-Alain Miller. What’s more, contributions for texts are being welcomed: commentaries on a powerful reference relating to interpretation, of 2,000 characters max, can be sent to the email address on this page. Registration for the Congress is also now open here.

From past events, on Radio Lacan you can now find a recording of the seminar by Fabian Naparstek on 15th December, ‘The Raw and the Cooked of the Dream’. The event was hosted by Lacanian Compass and the NLS as part of the preparatory work towards the Clinical Study Days 13 on Jouissance, which took place last month.

Finally, Chenyang Wang is interviewed by Jordan Osserman in last month’s New Books in Psychoanalysis podcast about his recent book, Subjectivity In-Between Times: Exploring the Notion of Time in Lacan’s Work. As well as discussing the topic of his book, Wang also gives some insight into the situation of psychoanalysis in China and its burgeoning Lacanian scene. This is the first interview in the new series on Psychoanalysis and Time, produced in collaboration with Waiting Times, a multidisciplinary research project on the temporalities of healthcare.

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