Join us for this online seminar exploring how modernist art and literature shaped Jacques Lacan’s work and vice versa, with Thomas Waller & Sinan Richards
The Modernist Lacan
A notorious presence in French intellectual circles throughout the 20th century, Lacan was personal friends with modernists such as André Breton and Salvador Dalí, and in 1923 was present at the legendary reading ofUlysses at the Shakespeare and Company bookshop by James Joyce, to whom Lacan would devote a year of his seminar in 1975-76. Lacan also contributed to several Surrealist publications, including the famous magazine Minotaure, the inaugural edition of which featured special mention of Lacan’s early work on psychosis. However, despite his affinity with early 20th-century modernism, Lacan’s name is still more routinely associated with the category of so-called “postmodernism,” thus rendering the question of style and periodization somewhat out of focus. This event explores the influence of modernist art and literature on Jacques Lacan, while also emphasizing the valences of Lacanian psychoanalysis for interpretations of modernism.
Speakers
Thomas Waller is a postdoctoral affiliate in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. He is the author of Genres of Transition: Literature and Economy in Portuguese-Speaking Southern Africa (Liverpool UP, 2024), the editor of Roberto Schwarz and World Literature (Palgrave, 2024), and the co-editor, with Sinan Richards, of Understanding Lacan, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury 2025). His writing has appeared in academic journals such as Textual Practice, Rethinking Marxism, Qui Parle, and Paragraph, as well as in other places like e-flux, Parapraxis, and The Brooklyn Rail.
Sinan Richards is a Lecturer in French at University College Cork, Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London, and member of the Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires sur le politique (CRIPOLIS) at the Université Paris Cité. He is the author of Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan(Palgrave, 2023) and co-editor, alongside Christina Howells, of Michel Serres: Ecology, parasitism and the (post)human, a special issue of the Modern & Contemporary France Journal(2024). Richards serves as a member of the French Studies editorial board and is a correspondent, associate, and referee at the European Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is currently finishing a book on Fanon and Lacan to be published by the British Academy and Oxford University Press.
The seminar will take place on Zoom on Thursday 30 October 2025 at 7pm-8:30pm GMT.
The event is open to everyone and free with registration via Eventbrite. The Zoom link will be available for registrants on the ‘Online Event Page’ (found when accessing your ticket on Eventbrite) on the day of the seminar.