Joyce: Lacan's Sphinx (original) (raw)

The Real Imaginary: Lacan's Joyce

S, 2008

In his twenty-third seminar, Jacques Lacan framed the sinthome as a radical unknotting of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. He offered le sinthome not as a mere technical addition to the battery of psychoanalytic tools, but as a concept of paramount importance, for its ...

A Joycean Interface: Re-Territorializing between Deleuze and Lacan

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2018

This article argues that aspects of Jacques Lacan's late seminar on James Joyce supplements his failed attempt to work with Gilles Deleuze. Lacan's Seminar XXIII (1975–76) was presented shortly after the publication of Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972), and he asserts that Joyce's use of language, particularly in Finnegans Wake (1939), exemplifies how creative and potentially psychotic self-naming can operate as an Oedipal traversal, transforming the symptom into what Lacan terms the sinthome. This article argues that Lacan's theory of the sinthome significantly reconfigures his prior psychoanalytic frameworks due to engagement with concepts found in Anti-Oedipus. Critically fortifying this correlation provides the means for etching out a theoretical intersection between Deleuze, Guattari, and Lacan, and it consequently provides an innovative interpretation of Lacan's late work.

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 ...

THE SYMBOLIC ORDER OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL EXISTENCE: JAMES JOYCE’S FATHER FORECLOSURE

PERTANIKA, 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 attempts 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 Wake, HCE; and the role of the Symbolic father, performed conceptually by religion. John Joyce and HCE, his literary projection, prove impotent in performing their patriarchal responsibilities; while Joyce himself rejects the influence of the Church. In short, despite the paternal function being absent from Joyce's life, the father figure is very much present in his works. Studying the function of these fathers in Joyce's life indicates that he suffered from father foreclosure for two reasons: the failure of his real father, and his refusal to accept any other form of paternal authority.