Beginning with a round-up of new books published in the last month, Touria Mignotte’s Cruelty, Sexuality, and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, and the Body of the Void was released at the start of December, aiming to integrate the life sciences and quantum physics with the themes in its title. Cruelty, she argues, “makes it possible to integrate the main psychoanalytic currents, notably Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, Klein, and the thinkers of autism, while renewing the place of psychoanalysis as a human science.”

Sergio Benvenuto’s Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan was also released last month. Presented as an accessible introduction to Lacan’s works exploring the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, it also includes discussion of alienation and separation, apres-coup, and the Lacanian theory of temporality.

New for 2020 and due at the end of January is Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, edited by Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Zizek. Through eleven essays it presents the case for the importance of the notion of subjectivity for materialist thought, in response to the recent object-oriented turn in the humanities and social sciences. “Approaching matters through the frame of Hegel and Lacan”, the authors argue, “the contributors… agree with neovitalist thinkers that material reality is ontologically incomplete, in a state of perpetual becoming, yet they do so with one crucial difference: they maintain that this is the case not in spite of but rather because of the subject.” It will be released by Northwestern University Press on 30th January.

Reading Lacan’s Seminar VIII: On Transference, edited by Gautam Basu Thakur and Jonathan Dickstein and part of the Palgrave Lacan Series, now has a release date of 18th February. It brings together 18 lively commentaries on Lacan’s 1960-61 Seminar from clinicians and scholars, across chapters which either comment directly on Lacan’s text or relate it to other theoretical or practical concerns. Pre-order now.

Also coming up from Routledge next month is Dan Mills’ Lacan, Foucault, and the Malleable Subject in Early Modern English Utopian Literature. In contrast to much theoretically-informed scholarship on this topic which undertakes a Marxist approach, Mills instead explores it through Lacan and Foucault’s understanding of subjectivity, a reading which evades strict characterisation as either structuralist or post-structuralist. Readers are reminded that LacanOnline visitors get 20% off and free global shipping on all Routledge titles. Use this link and the discount code on that page at the checkout.

Newly-announced to be released in May is Danièle Brillaud’s Lacanian Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Casebook. Illustrating the theory with clinical case examples, Brillaud offers a Lacanian understanding of psychiatric classifications including delusional misidentification syndromes, paranoid psychosis and schizophrenia, hypochondria, Cotard delusion, fetishism, the differential diagnosis of neurosis and psychosis, and more. Use the discount link above to get 20% off and free global shipping.

Among journals and other publications, a new volume of ‘Language and Psychoanalysis’, the peer-reviewed online journal published twice a year, was released in December. The Winter edition contains articles from the past few months and reviews some recently-published books from other authors.

The latest edition of 4+1, the newsletter of the NLS Cartels, is now available. Included in this issue are texts by, among others, Florencia Shanahan on the link between knowledge and satisfaction in a reading of Lacan’s late texts, and Henrik Lynggaard on ‘The Logic that Haste Determines’, part of his recent work on trauma and urgency.

Turning to new events in the year ahead, the 2020 Lacan’s Écrits Conference has been announced to take place in Edinburgh, 12th-13th September 2020. Following the previous two successful conferences in Ghent and Pittsburgh respectively, it is sure to be one of the highlights of the Lacanian calendar. The Call for Papers is now open and more information will shortly follow on the event’s site.

Registration is now open for the 2020 NLS Congress, which will take place on 28th-29th June in Ghent. The early bird rate is available until 1st March. The excellent Argument for the theme of the Congress – ‘Interpretation: From Truth to Event’ – written by Eric Laurent can be read here.

Relatedly, Alexandre Stevens (Vice President of the NLS) and Luc Vander Vennet (from the Kring Voor Psychoanalyse) will be the guests of the London Society of the NLS on Saturday 18th January for its Knottings Seminar to discuss the theme of the upcoming NLS Congress. Full details on this and other events coming up in the Society’s calendar, with links to book, here.

London-based CFAR has announced the schedule for its Spring Term of public lectures, beginning on 18th January with a roundtable on whether doubt is an emotion, and encompassing talks on climate change, anger, and Queer analysis among the topics it covers up to 28th March. Full details here.

In the US, Lacanian Compass has updated its list of events taking place in January across New York, Miami, Omaha, Columbia, and Houston. These include various readings of Lacan’s Seminar V (New York), Seminar XVII (Miami), Seminar XXIII (Houston), and Seminar XXIV (Columbia).

The Philadelphia Lacan Study Group has announced its new 2020 Seminar on ‘Author, Authority, and Authorization in Psychoanalysis IV’ to begin on 29th April. Curated by Patricia Gherovici these reading seminars are free and open to all. Full details via the link above.

The Lacan Circle of Australia has also announced its 2020 calendar of events beginning in March and running through to the end of November with a series of seminars and conferences, including its international conference on ‘Sexuation: Between Desire and Jouissance’ which is planned for 11th and 12th July.

Carole Owens and Stephanie Swales will be in conversation with Dany Nobus at the Freud Museum London on 18th March in a talk entitled ‘In Two Minds About it: Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan’ . The topic is close to that of their newly-published book Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: On and Off the Couch, which was released by Routledge in December.

In the latest podcast from New Books in Psychoanalysis, Vanessa Sinclair and Manya Steinkoler discuss On Psychoanalysis and Violence: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives, which they edited and which was published by Routledge in 2018. A brief review mentioning some of the essays it contains, followed by the recording of the interview itself, is here.

From RadioLacan a podcast is now available of Roger Litten’s Seminar of 22nd December at the London Society of the NLS, ‘Introduction to Lacanian Interpretation. Irma, Still.’ Litten presents a re-reading of the analysis Lacan gives in Seminar II to the dream of Irma’s injection as part of the work towards the 2020 NLS Congress on Interpretation. RadioLacan has plenty more recordings of Lacanian events in languages other than English, for those who speak them.

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