penwithlit

Dear readers, I am delighted to inform you that Calum Neill will join us for two events in Germany in the following weeks. Calum is an Associate Professor of Psychoanalysis & Cultural Theory at Napier University (Edinburgh, Scotland). He is the author of Jacques Lacan: The Basics (2023), Ethics and Psychology: Beyond Codes of Practice (2016), Without Ground: Lacan Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity (2014) and co-editor of the Palgrave Lacan Series and Reading Lacan’s Écrits Series.

Calum has agree to join me for an open workshop at the Ruhr-University Bochum on Lacan’s discourse theory. We will then head together to Berlin, where Calum will give a lecture at the International Psychoanalytic University (IPU) on the subject of gender. Both events are hybrid: all you need to do is register for free.

Here are the details for the events:

1. Workshop:

Stuck in a Revolving Door: Understanding Lacan’s…

I read my first novel by Damon Galgut last year, his Booker-winning The Promise (which I loved, and reviewed here). I just finished reading an earlier book, The Good Doctor, published in 2003. This was another excellent, psychologically astute novel, although it is missing the black humour that made The Promise a standout of 2021 for me.

The book is written from the first-person perspective of Frank, a doctor from a privileged background, in early middle age. Pragmatic, or simply disillusioned, he works under Dr Ngema in a small, dilapidated hospital in the South African homelands, which an author’s note states “were impoverished and underdeveloped areas of land set aside by the apartheid government for the ‘self-determination’ of its various black ‘nations'”. Dr Ngema is well-meaning and has her own ambitions, but her insecurities about her position, as a black woman hospital director in a country that has…