Teaching Seminar:

Excerpts from The Exodus of the Real: An encounter with the new psychic economy of Charles Melman

with Quinn Foerch

Date: November 8th, 2026

Time: 02:30 PM – 04:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://zoom.us/j/95692229311

Description: Quinn Foerch is member of the Association lacanienne internationale (where he is currently holding a seminar on topology and the new psychic economy), director at the Lutecium Collective, which is a non-profit group offering many French and English resources in psychoanalysis (and, in particular, psychoanalytic topology), and a PhD student in Clinical Psychology at Nova Southeastern University. The desire that animates his work is the prospect of strengthening the bridge between Francophone and Anglophone psychoanalytic communities, and connecting our English-speaking colleagues with ideas in psychoanalysis that they may not have encountered; as such, he has made close to 100 translations of the works of Jean-Michel Vappereau (under whom he studied for many years!), Charles Melman, Marcel Czermak, Jean Clavreul, Marc Darmon, and others. These translations, as well as his original work in psychoanalytic theory can be found on his website, quinnfoerch.com, or on Richard Klein’s website freud2lacan.com.

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Ongoing Reading Group:

READING GROUP:

Topic: Seminar X: Anxiety
Discussion lead by Meera Lee, Ph.D., LP,

Time: 12:30 PM – 02:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82826952007?pwd=LhdN048pn5I8NdIMYVXGqq2bSA6Iya.1

In his tenth seminar, delivered from 1962 to 1963, Lacan stated that anxiety is “that which does not deceive” and is “not without an object.” Situated between the preceding seminar on identification and the subsequent seminar on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, Seminar X marks a transitional point in Lacan’s teaching, as he moves from the symbolic and the signifier toward the real and affect and, consequently, develops the idea of object a more fully. In this ten-week teaching seminar, we will read Lacan’s Seminar X to understand these axiomatic formulations of anxiety in the context of this crucial shift in his teaching. We will begin with Freud’s two essays, “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,” as Lacan himself begins his seminar in response to the former. We will then proceed to a close reading of Seminar X and conclude with two contemporary commentaries on Lacanian anxiety by Jacques-Alain Miller and Éric Laurent.

Each seminar will consist of a lecture followed by discussion.

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TEACHING SEMINAR:

Title: Psychoanalysis, Antiphilosophy and the Logics of Time and Truth
Presenter: Arka Chattopadhyay, Ph.D.

Time: 02:30 PM – 04:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://zoom.us/j/95692229311

Description: This talk will discuss Alain Badiou’s thesis that psychoanalysis is an anti-philosophy from which philosophy dialectically affirms itself. I will analyze Badiou’s reading of the psychoanalytic act’s irreducibility to time. He calls this a “nontemporal guarantee of time” or a “spatial metaphor of eternity.” The question remains if we can disjoin space from time and whether Badiou’s thesis falls into self-contradiction when he himself considers eternity to be part of temporality in Images of The Present Time (2014, 2023). Why does Badiou think that ‘logical time’ is not sufficient to ground temporality in psychoanalysis? Why does he consider the psychoanalytic act to be atemporal in its ultimate concentration on the topological cut? The talk will raise these questions by close-reading Badiou’s 1994-1995 seminar Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3 (2013, 2018) in which he zooms in on this question of temporality as the key difference between philosophy and psychoanalysis as anti-philosophy. We will see how this logic of time interacts with Badiou’s critique of Lacan’s logic of truth where the desire for formalization meets the desire for matheme on the side of the analyst who hastefully formalizes in order to tackle anxiety. For Badiou, that there can be no knowledge of truth and none of the Real, not to mention that there is no truth of the Real is a triple-negation operating as Lacan’s anti-philosophical signature. If knowledge of truth is unattainable, does it mean that the psychoanalytic discourse which places the S2 of knowledge in the position of truth can never attain itself? The talk will critique Badiou’s critique by situating ‘ignorance’ as a form of knowledge and argue that jouissance without knowledge and knowledge without subject mark the psychoanalytic act as variations in truth or ‘varity.’ 

Bio: Arka Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, India. He has published academic work in several edited volumes including Frontiers of South Asian Culture, Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature and in journals like Textual Practice, Interventions, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Journal of World Literature, Filozofski Vestnik etc. Arka is the founding co-editor of Sanglap and Anthem Book Series Co-editor for Freudian-Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Philosophy. He is the author of Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real (Bloomsbury UK, 2019) and Posthumanism: Politics of Subjectivity (Orient Black Swan, 2025). He has co-edited Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature (2013, Roman), Samuel Beckett and the Extensions of the Mind. (2017, Brill), Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics (Bloomsbury India, 2020) Ecological Entanglements (Orient BlackSwan 2023) and Understanding Badiou, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury US, 2024). He has been awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship 2022-2023 & Harry Ransom Centre Fellowship 2023-2024. He has guest-edited an issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (2025) on the plastic turn in humanities.

READING GROUP:

Topic: Seminar X: Anxiety
Discussion lead by Meera Lee, Ph.D., LP,

Dear Members and Friends of Lacan Toronto,

As we begin a new semester, we want to open with a word of gratitude. To Judith, thank you for founding Lacan Toronto and for your devoted leadership over the past fifteen years. The community we gather in today exists because of your vision and sustained commitment.

To Tej, thank you for your stewardship of the Teaching Program, which continues to anchor our collective study.

With that gratitude in mind, we are delighted to welcome you all to the 2026–2027 Lacan Toronto Program!

Lacan Toronto is a working-group that promotes the study and practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Regular group meetings are held bi-weekly on Sunday and are organized in two inter-related sessions which occur on the same day: 1) a morning Reading Group (10am-1pm EST), and 2) an afternoon guest Teaching Session (1:30-3pm EST). The meetings are hosted online using the Zoom platform.

The Reading Group (10am-1pm EST) meetings are for anyone interested in reading Jacques Lacan’s seminars, writings, and interviews, whether or not you have attended previous study groups or meetings. A participant briefly introduces the week’s selected material followed by a line-by-line recitation of the text by the group for exegesis, elaboration, and associative work. The primary text for 2024-2025  is indicated below. Meetings occur the morning of the dates listed in the Teaching Sessions calendar.

The Teaching Sessions (1:30-3pm EST) are host to a guest who presents clinical material, current research, theoretical innovations, or other novel contributions to Lacanian studies in a supportive interdisciplinary setting.

There is no registration or fee to participate in these meetings. To receive Lacan Toronto announcements along with the  Zoom meeting link or for information about registered membership, please email: jehamilton@rogers.com, Judith Hamilton (Co-ordinator).

Reading Group Text

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVI: From an Other to the other, [1968-1969] ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press, 2024)

Teaching Sessions

This year our guest speakers are welcomed from Australia, Ireland, Scotland, China, England, Germany, Italy, the United States, and Canada. Our contributors examine complex issues such as shame, destitution, segregation, and religion. Philosophical intersections and historical encounters are revisited by closely reading Lacan’s seminars and writings. Femininity and sexuality are addressed with nuance. Topology is reimagined by reading case studies of popular and material culture. New pathways are charted in neuropsychoanalysis as we are reminded of the legacies of colonialism. The clinical setting is returned to as a site of ethical engagement, whether in private practice or in institutions, to confront the diversity of contemporary conditions such as disability and eating disorders, among many others, in group and individual settings. And, we are gifted with commentaries on new translations among other vital contributions. For more information about the guest presenters, please click the highlighted links in the table below. For more information regarding the Lacan Toronto Education Program, please email: tejpalajji@gmail.com, Tejpal Ajji (Curator).

Lacan Toronto is a working-group that promotes the study and practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Regular group meetings are held bi-weekly on Sunday and are organized in two inter-related sessions which occur on the same day: 1) a morning Reading Group (10am-1pm EST), and 2) an afternoon guest Teaching Session (1:30-3pm EST). The meetings are hosted online using the Zoom platform.

The Reading Group (10am-1pm EST) meetings are for anyone interested in reading Jacques Lacan’s seminars, writings, and interviews, whether or not you have attended previous study groups or meetings. A participant briefly introduces the week’s selected material followed by a line-by-line recitation of the text by the group for exegesis, elaboration, and associative work. The primary text for 2024-2025  is indicated below. Meetings occur the morning of the dates listed in the Teaching Sessions calendar.

The Teaching Sessions (1:30-3pm EST) are host to a guest who presents clinical material, current research, theoretical innovations, or other novel contributions to Lacanian studies in a supportive interdisciplinary setting.

There is no registration or fee to participate in these meetings. To receive Lacan Toronto announcements along with the  Zoom meeting link or for information about registered membership, please email: jehamilton@rogers.com, Judith Hamilton (Co-ordinator).

Reading Group Text

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVI: From an Other to the other, [1968-1969] ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press, 2024)

Teaching Sessions

This year our guest speakers are welcomed from Australia, Ireland, Scotland, China, England, Germany, Italy, the United States, and Canada. Our contributors examine complex issues such as shame, destitution, segregation, and religion. Philosophical intersections and historical encounters are revisited by closely reading Lacan’s seminars and writings. Femininity and sexuality are addressed with nuance. Topology is reimagined by reading case studies of popular and material culture. New pathways are charted in neuropsychoanalysis as we are reminded of the legacies of colonialism. The clinical setting is returned to as a site of ethical engagement, whether in private practice or in institutions, to confront the diversity of contemporary conditions such as disability and eating disorders, among many others, in group and individual settings. And, we are gifted with commentaries on new translations among other vital contributions. For more information about the guest presenters, please click the highlighted links in the table below. For more information regarding the Lacan Toronto Education Program, please email: tejpalajji@gmail.com, Tejpal Ajji (Curator).

Dan Collins’s seminar this year, Lacan: The Middle Seminars, will continue a project to study Lacan’s Seminars 12, 13, 14, and 15. These seminars have received very little scholarly attention up to the present in French or English. Last year, we explored Seminars 12 and 13. This year, we’ll continue with Seminars 14 and 15, The Logic of Fantasy and The Psychoanalytic Act. The transitional period of the middle seminars falls between two major turning points in Lacan’s work, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, discussed in Seminar 11, and the discourse theory of Seminar 17. We’ll use these seminars to look both back and forward in Lacan’s career, and we’ll explore Lacan’s trajectory during this time.

All meetings (usually held at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society, 2nd floor, 40 St. Clair Avenue East, Toronto, Ontario) are now being held online.

Reading Group Meetings – online
Alternate Sundays, 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM Open to the Public
Lacan Toronto meets every two weeks on Sundays to do a sustained reading of Lacanian texts. This year we are reading Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960.  Our method is to read the text aloud, passage by passage, and pause for discussion. You will be sent an invitation – announcement a few days before each meeting.                                                                                                                                                   

These meetings begin September 10, 2023.  After each meeting, a record of the discussion at the meeting will be posted.

There is no registration requirement, nor charge for these meetings.

Teaching Sessions – online
After the Reading Group Meetings
1:30 to 3:00 PM
Open to the Public

There is no registration requirement, nor charge for these meetings.

Lacan Toronto Calendar 2023 – 2024

Dan Collins’s seminar this year, Lacan: The Middle Seminars, will continue a project to study Lacan’s Seminars 12, 13, 14, and 15. These seminars have received very little scholarly attention up to the present in French or English. Last year, we explored Seminars 12 and 13. This year, we’ll continue with Seminars 14 and 15, The Logic of Fantasy and The Psychoanalytic Act. The transitional period of the middle seminars falls between two major turning points in Lacan’s work, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, discussed in Seminar 11, and the discourse theory of Seminar 17. We’ll use these seminars to look both back and forward in Lacan’s career, and we’ll explore Lacan’s trajectory during this time.