The iconography of Asphyxiophilia: From fantasmatic fetish to forensic fact

This is a post print version of the article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below

The Irredeemable Debt: On the English Translation of Lacan's First Two Public Seminars

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Psychoanalysis and History . The Version of Record is available online at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/pah.2017.0214Drawing on archival sources and personal recollections, this essay reconstructs the troubled history of the first robust attempt at making the works of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan newly available to an anglophone readership, after his death in 1981. It details how the project was initiated by John Forrester as part of a large-scale initiative to generate translations of both Lacan’s own texts and seminars, and various books written in the Lacanian tradition. If, almost seven years after it was conceived, Forrester’s project only resulted in the publication of English translations of Lacan’s first two public seminars, the essay demonstrates that this was not owing to disagreements over the quality of Forrester’s work, but because of two consecutive sources of resistance. External resistance from publishers first led to the initial project being reduced to the translation of two seminars, whereas internal resistance from Lacan’s son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller to Forrester’s vision of presenting the seminars with a full scholarly apparatus subsequently brought about delays in its execution

When Words Fail. A review of Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: Meaning and Astonishment, Maria Balaska (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

In his 1955-’56 seminar on psychosis, which was primarily devoted to an intricate analysis of Freud’s case-study of the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber, Lacan at one point invited his listeners to contemplate the possibility of their being suddenly overcome, at the end of a stormy and tiring day, by a peculiar subjective experience which expresses itself in the thought of “the peace of the evening [la paix du soir]”. What is the relation, Lacan asked, between this symbolic expression and the experiential condition associated with it? What does “the peace of the evening” mean to the subject who is unexpectedly and quite involuntarily overcome by the thought? What exactly does the thought capture? What, if anything, does it point towards