This book discusses Jacques Lacan’s contribution to understanding the life and work of James Joyce, introducing Colette Soler’s influential reading to English readers for the first time. Focusing on Lacan’s famous Seminar on Joyce, the reader will no doubt learn much from Lacan, but also, as Soler shows, what Lacan learned from Joyce and what perhaps, without him, he would not have approached with so much confidence. Le Sinthome. This is the title Jacques Lacan chose for his seminar devoted to Joyce in 1975–76. He wrote the word 'sinthome' in its original spelling, from the Greek, and thus used the technique so dear to Joyce: the equivocation between the sound that is heard and the graphic representation that is seen. Is it surprising that the author who recognised in 1956 with 'The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious' that the Freudian practice of speech revealed an unconscious that writes – something Jacques Derrida found quite remarkable – would end in 1975–76 with Joyce? Lacan Reading Joyce will be of great interest to professional and academic readers in the respective fields of Lacan and Joyce studies, including psychoanalysts in practice and training, as well as researchers and students in psychoanalytic and modern literary studies.

What happens when the intellectual giant of twentieth-century literature, James Joyce, is made an object of consideration and cause of desire by the intellectual giant of modern psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan? This is what Joyce and Lacan explores, in the three closely interrelated areas of reading, writing, and psychoanalysis, by delving into Joyce’s own relationship with psychoanalysis in his lifetime. The book concentrates primarily on his last text, Finnegans Wake, the notorious difficulty of which arises from its challenging the intellect itself, and our own processes of reading. As well as the centrality of the Wake, concepts of Joycean ontology, sanity, singularity, and sexuality are excavated from sustained analysis of his earliest writings onward. To be ‘post-Joycean’, as Lacan describes it, means then to be in the wake not only of Joyce, but also of Lacan’s interventions on the Irish writer made in the mid-70s. It was this encounter that gave rise to concepts that have gained currency in today’s psychoanalytic theory and practice, and importance in wider critical contexts. The notions of the sinthome, lalangue, and Lacan’s use of topology and knot theory are explored within, as well as new theories being launched. The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, literary theorists, and students and teachers of literature, theory, or the works of Joyce and Lacan.

In Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History, Christine van Boheemen-Saaf examines the relationship between Joyce's postmodern textuality and the traumatic history of colonialism in Ireland. Joyce's influence on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derrida's philosophy, Van Boheemen-Saaf suggests, ought to be viewed from a postcolonial perspective. She situates Joyce's writing as a practice of indirect 'witnessing' to a history that remains unspeakable. The loss of a natural relationship to language in Joyce calls for a new ethical dimension in the process of reading. The practice of reading becomes an act of empathy to what the text cannot express in words. In this way, she argues, Joyce's work functions as a material location for the inner voice of Irish cultural memory. This book engages with a wide range of contemporary critical theory and brings Joyce's work into dialogue with thinkers such as Zizek, Adorno, Lyotard, as well as feminism and postcolonial theory.

"This new translation makes the intricacies of Lacan's seminar available to the English-speaking world for the first time. The author's accessible, vigorous prose explains the nuances of Lacanian theory with perfect clarity."--BOOK JACKET.

From its very beginning, psychoanalysis sought to incorporate the aesthetic into its domain. Despite Joyce's deliberate attempt in his writing to resist this powerful hermeneutic, his work has been confronted by a long tradition of psychoanalytic readings. Luke Thurston argues that this very antagonism holds the key to how psychoanalytic thinking can still open up new avenues in Joycean criticism and literary theory. In particular, Thurston shows that Jacques Lacan's response to Joyce goes beyond the 'application' of theory: rather than diagnosing Joyce's writing or claiming to have deciphered its riddles, Lacan seeks to understand how it can entail an unreadable signature, a unique act of social transgression that defies translation into discourse. Thurston imaginatively builds on Lacan's work to illuminate Joyce's place in a wide-ranging literary genealogy that includes Shakespeare, Hogg, Stevenson and Wilde. This study should be essential reading for all students of Joyce, literary theory and psychoanalysis.

An original study aiming to explain fully Lacanian thought and apply it to the study of literary texts.

This reading companion and commentary on Lacan Seminar XXIII provides detailed analyses of Lacan's seminar while maintaining an overall continuity and consistency. This book does not purport to provide an exhaustive and systematic line-by-line reading of a very complex and varied seminar. Rather it selects key themes of Lacanian theory that are found present throughout his work. In addition, the book does not try to simplify Lacan's ambiguous style, leaving the text open to different interpretations, while providing theory, commentary, and lines of analysis into some of Lacan's important insights. Finally, this book is not about Joyce the writer, but more about the use that Lacan makes of Joyce. Its purpose is not to apply psychoanalysis to a literary subject, but rather to use the literary text to illustrate and develop psychoanalytic theory, and Lacanian theory in particular. It is an analysis of topology and language, or a linguisterie, as Lacan called it, for clinicians.

Earl G. Ingersoll convincingly argues that his study is a "return to Lacan," just as Lacan himself believed his own work to be a "return to Freud." In this study of trope and gender in Dubliners, Ingersoll follows Lacan’s example by returning to explore more fully the usefulness of the earlier Lacanian insights stressing the importance of language. Returning to the semiotic—as opposed to the more traditional psychoanalytic—Lacan, Ingersoll opts for the Lacan who follows Roman Jakobson back to early Freud texts in which Freud happened upon the major structuring principles of similarity and displacement. Jakobson interprets these principles as metaphor and metonymy; Lacan employs these two tropes as the means of representing transformation and desire. Thus, psychic functions meet literary texts in the space of linguistic representation through the signifier: metaphor is a signifier for a repressed signified, while metonymy is a signifier that displaces another. Rejecting traditional psychoanalytic readings of Dubliners, Ingersoll’s New Psychoanalytic Criticism embraces Shoshana Felman’s view that psychoanalysis is not a body of truths to be applied to literature but rather a literature in itself to be read intertextually with what we more conventionally consider literary texts. In its theoretical framework, this study is Lacanian not by following Lacan as the traditional psychoanalytic critic would follow Freud or Jung as the master explicator of the literary text but by doing Lacan. Ingersoll credits Lacan not as the scientist Freud tried and failed to become but as the poet Freud was, especially in his earlier period. Basing his idea of the connections between gender and the tropes in the writings of feminist theorists and critics such as Luce Irigaray, Jane Gallop, and Barbara Johnson, Ingersoll argues that sex and gender are not necessarily linked. In Dublin, the capital of a patriarchal society, Joyce reveals the relevance of the opposition between metaphor/motion/empowerment as the "masculine" and metonymy/confinement/vulnerability as the "feminine." In this context, metaphor must be privileged over metonymy as "masculinity" is privileged over "femininity"— not because what is is right but because Joyce is describing a world that readers have always recognized as morally and spiritually deficient.

Some of the most well-known psychoanalysts and literary theorists explore Jacques Lacan's influence on literature. The relationship between literature and psychology is long and richly complex, and no more so than in the work of Jacques Lacan, the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud. The Literary Lacan: From Literature to "Lituraterre" and Beyond is dedicated to assessing Lacan's significant contribution to literary studies and the contribution, in turn, of literature to Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first essays in this collection provide close readings of Lacan's literature-related work, specifically his work on Hamlet, his homage to Marguerite Duras and Lewis Carroll, his concept of Lituraterre, and his seminar on James Joyce. Other essays examine Lacan's theories in conjunction with the works of major writers such as Samuel Beckett. The book concludes with essays that investigate Lacan and literature more broadly, including the applicability of literature to psychoanalysis. With well-known contributors including Slavoj Zizek, Jacques-Alain Miller, Russell Grigg, and Ellie Ragland, this volume will appeal not only to specialists in literary and Lacanian theory but also to students and enthusiasts of the master and the literature that inspired him.