The Question of Alterity and Derrida’s reading of Joyce’s Ulysses (original) (raw)
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Cross-Disciplinary and Cross-Cultural Awareness: Essays in Honor of Madeleine Danova. St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, 2023
The following paper addresses key ethical questions concerning subjectivity and the body in relation to history and the socius from a semiocritical perspective. The scientific advances made by Thomas Sebeok reveal the ethics behind the humanism of a "global semiotics" and combine it with a critical reading of signs so as to undertake an analysis of all sign activity from a transdisciplinary perspective. And now, a hundred-odd years after the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), some semioethical dimensions anticipated by one of its main characters, Stephen Dedalus, can consciously be approached. The question of how Stephen reads the signs of life and, in anticipation, how we read this modernist text, seems especially pertinent and even urgent considering the modern scholastic analytical and theoretical trends in literary criticism and higher education. In this respect, fitting conclusions in relation to discursive otherness understood in terms of alternatives and the interpellative dangers of semiotic communication can be drawn from Stephen Dedalus's inconclusive oscillation between his autonomous but unstable self and the powerful constitutive discourses of human history. In an age in which people are simultaneously drawn and repelled by the homologization of a global communicative-productive system, considerations of a non-dichotomous kind can be especially revealing of the life-affirming nature of all communication. By considering this humane call for justice and authenticity, the conclusions, drawn from the powerful confrontation of Stephen Dedalus with the word and the world of others and their absolute otherness, experienced through the phenomenal character of his own body, are especially relevant even today. Keywords: semioethics, otherness, authenticity, subjectivity, identity, history, ontology, textuality
James Joyce's Father Foreclosure: The Symbolic Order of Language and Social Existence
2013
In symbolising society, the father is a significant cultural representation of authority or power. James Joyce’s works are commonly read for Irish history, his unique style of writing, and as sources of autobiography. However, his Finnegans Wake (1939) stands out for its unanalysable textuality, creating a form of authority in itself. The omnipresence of the father figure as a performer of paternal authority in almost every page of Joyce’s final work reflects an obsession within Lacanian psychoanalysis, that of imaginary and symbolic ‘fathers’ standing in for the biological father. This study thus attempted to identify the role of the father in Joyce’s own life, as well as in Finnegans Wake, based on Jacques Lacan’s definition of the father. In order to examine James Joyce’s father foreclosure, that is, his expulsion of the father from the Symbolic order, this article focuses on the connections and functions of the writer’s Real father, John Joyce; the Imaginary father in Finnegans ...