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Thurston, Luke (1997) Writing the symptom : Lacan's Joycean knot. Doctor of Philosophy
(PhD) thesis, University of Kent.

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Writing the Symptom: Lacan's Joycean Knot

Thesis for Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

University of Kent, Canterbury

Luke Thurston
October 1997
Writing the Symptom: Lacan's Joycean Knot
 Wrfting the Symptom: Lacan's Joycean Knot

iv
Intraduction: the question of writing
Thesis Summary x

I. Identifying Aesthetics: Psychoanalysis Before Art 1

II. Speaking the Truth: the Lacanian Subject 20

64
III. Raiding Joycesens
107
iv. Dénouements
117
Bibliography
124
Appendix: Le Sinthome
 Abstract of the Thesis
Writing the Symptom: Lacan's Joycean Knot

The thesis explores the encounter between psychoanalysis and literature in Lacan's
reading of Joyce, and the new possibilities it opens for literary theory. In introduc-
tion, it considers how the publipation of Lacan's work in English has obscured these
possibilities, and contributed to certain misunderstandings of Lacan (for instance,
around the term 'writing' as invoked by some Joycean critics). Part I sets out
the question of the aesthetic in Freud (his readings of Hamlet and Michaelangelo's
statue Moses), and traces its transformation in Lacan's earlier work, up to the
introduction of anamorphosis. Part II returns to Lacan's introduction of the term
'subject' to psychoanalysis, in a representational economy governed by a specifically
'phallocentric' politics (the privileging of the Name-of-the-Father as the safeguard
against psychosis); and charts the 'subversion' of this economy by writing—firstly
in its contestation by Jacques Derrida in the name of an ungovernable différance of
writing, and subsequently (in the 1970s) in Lacan's own elaboration of a 'writing'
which is increasingly associated with a 'real' incommensurable with the subject's
truth. The final avatar of this real is Lacan's Borromean knot, which the thesis
presents in order to show how it provides the basis for the reading of Joyce as
sint home. Part III traces this reading, weaving it together with an account of
the encounter between Joyce and psychoanalysis, both in the historical real and
'in theory' (chiefly, the encounter with Jung). The question of the author is re-
worked in terms of Lacan's notion of Joyce as a 'writing-being'; the 'death of the
author' proposed by Roland Barthes is shown to elide precisely the central stake of
Lacan's concept of writing: its non-metaphorical relation to the real. A translation
of Lacan's seminar Le Sinthome (SXXIII, 1975-6) is given as an appendix to the
thesis.

11
Abbreviations

References to Lacan's work use footnotes to give title, date and publication details,
rather than a simple reference to the Ecrits or Seminar volume.

References to Freud are to the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological

Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey et al, London:
Hogarth, 1953-74, abbreviated SE with volume number and date.

The following abbreviations are used to refer to Joyce's works:

P: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson,

New York: Viking, 1968.
U: Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, London: Bodley Head, 1986.

FW: Finnegans Wake, London: Faber, 1939.

Translations
All translations of quotations from French texts are by the author unless otherwise
noted.

Figures
Page
1. The Borromean Knot*53
2. The Borromean Knot R .S .I* ....................................57
3. Sinthome as reconstitution of knott .............................80
4. Knot including sinthomet .......................................81
5. Sinthome prevents unknotting* ..............................91
6. Split between symbol and symptoms ............................97

* from Scilicet 6/7, pp. 49 and 57.

from Pierre Skriabine, 'Clinique et Topologie', La Cause F'reudienne, 1989, pp. 131
and 149.
from Seminar Le Sinthome (18/11/75), Ornicar? 6, 1976

111
 Intraduction: the question of writing

In your analytic discourse, you suppose the subject of the unconscious to know how to read.
It is nothing but that, your story of the unconscious. Not only do you suppose it to know
how to read, but you suppose it able to learn how to read.
- Jacques Lacan, 1973'

I) 'I shall speak of Joyce'

Joyce, c 'est cc qui arrive lorsqu 'on refuse une analyse—'Joyce is what happens
when you refuse an analysis': this is Philippe Sollers' paraphrase of something he
claims is 'suggested by Lacan in the English preface to the Ecrits'.2 Sollers is
interviewing Shoshana Felman for Tel Quel in 1978, following the publication of
her book La Folie et la Chose littéraire; he sees in this statement about Joyce a first
outline of the differences between Lacan's approach to literature and the 'applied
psychoanalysis' of Freud. If Freud had wondered whether or not Dostoevsky was
a hysteric 3 —and even speculated about what might have been the results of an
analysis for him—Lacan's turn to Joyce, for Sollers, embodies a desire to read
literature as a movement beyond the discursive field of analysis. Although, certainly,
Lacan's reading of Joyce raises clinical questions—around the diagnostic category of
psychosis and its relation to the 'subject' of analysis—this is precisely, Sollers insists,
in order to problematize the established interpretive protocols of psychoanalysis.
We will return to the narrative sketched out by Sollers in concluding the thesis,
once we have given our own account of the psychoanalytic relation to literature
established by Freud, its adoption and transformation by Lacan, and finally its
place in the topological developments of the 1970s. Firstly, to begin to outline
the field of our thesis and the central stakes of its argument, we should follow up
the reference to the statement Sollers paraphrases: a statement by Lacan about
Joyce in a preface to the English translation of the Ecrits. As we will see, the
relation between psychoanalysis and literature is peculiarly entangled in histories
of publication and translation; and a consideration of the fate of Lacan's work in
English can shed light on some of the ways it has been misunderstood—particularly
so with regard to his work on Joyce.
A selected edition of Lacan's major collection of writings appeared in English
in 1977, translated by Alan Sheridan; it was published by the Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psycho-analysis, together with the first English translation (again, by
Sheridan) of one of Lacan's seminars—Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psycho-analysis. It is in fact the latter text which includes the preface mentioned
by Sollers. There, Lacan writes:
I shall speak of Joyce, who has preoccupied me much this year, only to say that he is
the simplest consequence of a refusal—such a mental refusal!—of a psychoanalysis,
'Seminar of 9th January 1973 (SXX), Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Seuil, 1975,
p. 38.
2 'La Chose Littéraire, sa Folie, son Pouvoir', entretien de Philippe Sollers avec Shoshana Fel-
man, Tel Quel 81 (Autumn 1979), p. 41.
3 1n 'Dostoevsky and Parricide' (1928), SE XXI, pp. 173-94.

iv
 which, as a result, his work illustrates. But I have done no more than touch on this,
in view of my embarrassment where art—an element in which Freud did not bathe
without mishap—is concerned.4
The preface is dated 17th May 1976—thus from the middle of the seminar Le
Sinthome (SXXIII), where Joyce becomes a central concern of Lacan's work. If
Sollers was wrong to locate these comments in the English edition of the Ecrits,
perhaps the slip had its own logic: for it is indeed a question, in this 'mental refusal',
of the 'function of the Ecrit', which Lacan had already presented in the 1972-
3 seminar Encore. 5 It is writing—defined in 1976, as we will show, by Lacanian
topology—which is at stake in this alleged Joycean refus, the rejection, 'of a psycho-
analysis', of the 'transference' or 'legibility' which makes analysis possible.
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, the seminar Lacan gave
in 1964, was thus the first of his seminars to appear in English. This dense, chal-
lenging text was in one sense a singularly bad 'introduction' to Lacan's thought: it
marked, as Jacques-Alain Miller recalls, precisely a break with the first ten years
of his teaching, where the famous 'return to Freud' had been mapped out each
week through careful readings of Freudian texts. 6 At the same time, as the founda-
tion of a distinctively Lacanian orientation of psychoanalysis—it coincided with the
establishment of the Ecole freudienne de Paris, which the official Freudian body
(the I.P.A.) refused to recognize—Seminar XI was perhaps an appropriate place to
begin understanding how Lacan's thought, in transforming and re-inventing Freu-
dian concepts, sought to carve out its own 'field' in the practice and theory of
psychoanalysis.
The fundamental concepts of Lacan's title were the unconscious, repetition,
the transference and the drive. 7 However, the seminar does not simply present
these concepts in an evenly-balanced, symmetrical list: it sets them out with a
particular 'bias', in accordance with the 'trajectory' of Lacan's teaching, as Pierre
Skriabine puts it. Skriabine sees Seminar XI as an exemplary moment in 'the
passage from an axiomatic of desire, which takes its point of departure from the
Other, to an axiomatic of jouissance which is radically acephalic, autistic'. 8 Thus,
by distinguishing between the Freudian unconscious as it had been re-theorized in
Lacan's seminar during the 1950s—'the law of desire suspended in the Name-of-
the-Father', in the compact formula Lacan gives in 1964 9 —and the drive, bound
up with its 'accomplice' the objet a in fantasy, Seminar XI aimed 'beyond' the law
of Freudian theory; in Miller's view, indeed, it marks the point where Lacanian
thought begins to 'throw the Name-of-the-Father into question'.'°
4 Preface, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (SXI), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans Alan Sheridan, London: Hogarth Press & Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977, P. ix.
5 cf. the seminar of 9th January 1973 (SXX), op. cit., pp. 29-38.
6 Jacques-Alain Miller, 'Contexts and Concepts', Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Funda-
mental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink & Maire Jaanus, New York:
SUNY, 1995, pp. 5-6.
7 Seminar of 15th January 1964 (SXI), op. cit., p. 12.
8 Pierre Skriabine, 'Clinique et topologie', La cause freudienne, 1989, p. 127.
9 Seminar of 5th February 1964 (SXI), op. cit., p. 48.
'°J-A Miller, 'Contexts and Concepts', Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundamental Con-
cepts of Psychoanalysis, op. cit., p. 7.

V
 As we will seek to show in this thesis, Lacan's turn to Joycean writing over
a decade later in Seminar XXIII brings this jeopardization of the Name-of-the-
Father to its logical conclusion. If at first sight it seems strange for Lacan to
announce his intention to 'speak of Joyce' in a preface to Seminar XI, we could
see in the discussion of jouissance in 1964 an early version of the problematic of
Joycesens which emerges a decade later. The question of representing the real,
which in Seminar XI is addressed through a reference to aesthetics (to Holbein's
anamorphic painting, whose significance for Lacan we will explore), is given a final
answer in the topological 'writing' which produces the Joycean sinthorne.

ii) Traducing Lacanian Writing

If Lacan thus first emerges into English 'entangled' in Joycean writing, so to speak—
referring his 'foundational' work in Seminar XI ahead to the key developments
around writing in the 1970s—he had already associated the publication of that
seminar (in France, three years before) with the name of Joyce and the problematic
of the écrit it stood for. Lacan adds a postscript to the edition of Seminar XI
published by Seuil in 1973, where he links the very presence of the written text to
a certain blockage of reading or failure to 'transfer'. It is to Joyce that he turns for
an instance of this lack-of-reading:
aprês tout, l'écrit comme pas-h-lire, c'est Joyce qui l'introduit, je ferais mieux de
dire: l'intraduit, car a faire du mot traite au-delà des langues, il ne se traduit qu'à
peine, d'être partout êgalement peu a lire.
after all, the written as the not-to-be-read is introduced by Joyce—I'd do better
to say intraduced (both introduced and not translated), because to deal with the
word is to negotiate beyond languages, Joyce hardly translates himself at all, so that
he is equally little-to-be-read everywhere.1'
In Seminar XI, then—where the foundation of Lacan's school is marked by the
opening of a gap between desire and drive—a certain illegibility, something un-
translatable, is introduced to the field of psychoanalytic interpretation. A decade
earlier, the 'law of desire', which Lacan had posited as the basis of the Freudian
unconscious, had served as the guarantee that its 'letters' could be read—this was
what Lacan set out to show in the famous Seminar on 'the Purloined Letter' in
1955, where Poe's story was held to illustrate the mechanism of unconscious repe-
tition by making visible 'the supremacy of the signifier'.' 2 By 1964, in contrast, it
was to mark the lack in this consistent economy of representation, the point where
its 'logic of signification' broke down, that Lacan brings in his concept of objet
a—an object 'for which there is no idea', as he would put it later.' 3 Our thesis will
11 Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XI, 'Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de la psychana-
lyse', Paris: Seuil, 1973, p. 252; I quote Lacan in French here to bring out the jeu de ,not.e, together
with Cohn MacCabe's translation (from James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, London:
Macmillan, 1979, p. 12).
12 Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', trans. J. Mehlman, in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida
and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. J. P. Muller and W. J. Richardson, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,
1988.
' 3 'La ftoisième', Lettres de l'dcole freudienne, 16, 1975, p. 183.

vi
trace how Lacan elaborates this paradoxical instance beyond representation, until
it opens onto an engagement with the Joycean text where the essential legibility of
the subject—and even the act of 'reading' itself—will be put in question.
This notion of writing as somehow constitutively incommensurable with la
traduction takes on a certain irony in the context of the history of the translation
and interpretation of Lacan's own work. His notoriously quirky French both resists
translation and demands interpretive labour, amounting to a broad, though largely
implicit, challenge to our habits of reading and comprehension. Here, the comments
about an 'untraducible' Joyce interest us in particular because of the way we can
relate them to the actual practice of interpreting Lacan (and Joyce).
If the broad church of Joyceans has tended to share Joyce's own well-known
reservations about psychoanalysis, two ground-breaking studies in the 1970s—by
Cohn MacCabe and Margot Norris—sought to include a reference to Lacan in an
approach to reading Joyce informed by new developments in literary theory.' 4 This
gesture, in the search for new resources of reading, had the paradoxical effect of
effacing or glossing over the essential point Lacan was seeking to make about writing
(for which the name of Joyce serves as an emblematic figure): the idea that it was
pas a lire, could not be absorbed into the interpretive field of the psychoanalytic
subject, however 'decentred' that field might be. The theoretical 'chiasmus' here
entailed, on one side, the search by Joyceans for an exegetical 'heterology'—a way
of breaking with a critical tradition lagging far behind the 'revolution of the word'
embodied in the Joycean text—while, on the other, at around the same time (the
mid-1970s), Lacan was seeking to reconceive writing as autonomous, irreducible to
symbolic alienation or articulation in the 'discourse of the Other'.
Thus, while the 'decentred universe' in Norris' work could designate at once
the Joycean text and the Lacanian unconscious, Lacan himself read in Joyce an
exemplary showing-forth of the défaut dans 1 'univers, the lack in the consistent
universe of signification which was mapped out in analysis.' 5 Lacan was thus, in a
certain paradox, 'traduced'—translated and betrayed—at the very point where he
had posited 'intraduction'. The introduction of Lacanian theory to Joyce studies, its
transference from the analytic 'scene of reading' to the domain of literary criticism,
constituted in itself the 'traducement' or betrayal: for in Lacan's last definition it
was the very movement of 'transfer', of metaphorical substitution, which writing
'foreclosed', rendered impossible.
'Perhaps more than any other writer of this century', comments Jean-Michel
Rabaté, 'Joyce has forced criticism to acknowledge its theological nature'.' 6 We
might see one aspect of this 'theological' response at work in attempts to invoke
Lacanian theory to dispel the enigma of the Joycean text, which contrast so sharply
with Lacan's own view of Joyce as an enigmatic limit to theoretical mastery. This
'theological' dimension of criticism could be formulated (in terms our thesis will
investigate) as the restoration of the Other, and the corresponding effacement of
'4 Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, op. cit.; Margot Norris, The
Decentred Universe of Finnegans Wake, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976.
' 5 The phrase 'le ddfaut dons l'univers' is from Lacan's paper 'L'Etourdit', Scilicet 4, Paris:
Seuil, 1973, p. 34.
16 Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce, Authorized Reader, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1991, p. 1.

vii
 the objet a which marks the lack or inconsistency in signification. The irony of
turning to Lacan for knowledge with which to treat (to deal with or write a treatise
on) Joyce was that in Lacan's opinion Joyce's writing was essentially intraitable,
bodied forth an unaccountable real beyond the universe of subjectivation.'7
Our thesis will show how the logic of the 'transference' of literature into the
domain of psychoanalysis, as it first emerges in Freud's discovery, is to radically
exclude this 'untreatable' instance of writing that Lacan so much enjoys at the end
of his teaching. However, this is in no sense to characterize this 'traducement' of
literature as a specifically psychoanalytic error, a symptom of its myopic failure to
construe the text correctly: as we have indicated, even those Joycean critics with
an avowedly iconoclastic, innovative agenda can be seen to participate obliquely in
the erasure of 'writing' as Lacan conceives it.
More recent work has 'traduced' Lacan's work on Joyce in a more direct way:
proclaiming itself as 'the first book to make use of Lacan's writings and seminars
on Joyce', Sheldon Brivic's The Veil of Signs: Joyce, Lacan and Perception (1991)
is a manifestly 'theological' treatment of Joycean writing, its very chapter-headings
('The Author as Other') announcing its intention to use Lacanian knowledge to
efface precisely what Lacan's teaching used to put that knowledge in question:
the unaccountable real of the Joycean text. 18 Brivic pursues the project he began
in 1980 with Joyce between Jung and Freud: to invoke psychoanalytic 'insights'
in order to apply them to the 'mind' which gave birth to the Joycean text.' 9 Our
thesis will seek to show how Lacan's work on Joyce completely subverts the methods
of such a 'freudful' variety of 'applied psychoanalysis'.

iii) Reading Backwards

One of the most overtly 'theological' readings of Joyce is that of Carl Jung. In
Part III of our thesis we explore this reading, together with the overall 'diagnosis'
of Joyce formulated by Jung and incorporated into his psychological theory. As
we will see, Jung's article on Ulysses stands out as an exemplary moment in the
history of efforts to translate Joyce—in the sense we have outlined: to make his
writing fully legible. Nevertheless, from the theological mists of Jung's reading
something emerges which might offer us a clue as to the problem of 'intraducing'—of
working through or elaborating, without 'translating' and misrepresenting—Lacan's
teaching around the sinthome.
Having failed to make much progress trying to read Ulysses in the conven-
tional way, Jung announces that he '... started to read the book backwards': only
an experimental reversal of reading practices allows Jung to attain any level of en-
gagement with Joyce's text. 2 ° Here, Jung stumbles across an essential dimension of
'i take the term intraitable from Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe's paper on Antigone, and the
significance of the Greek tragedy for Lacanian ethics; De l'thique: a propos d'Antigone in Lacan
Avec les Philosophes, ed. Michel Deguy, Paris: Albin Michel, 1991, p. 27.
18 Sheldon Brivic, The Veil of Signs: Joyce, Lacan and Perception, Chicago: University of
Illinois, 1991.
19 Sheldon Brivic, Joyce Between Jung and Freud, New York: Kennikat Press, 1980.
2O Ulysses: A Monologue' (1932), in The Collected Works of C. G.Jung, XV, London: Routledge,

1966, p. 111.

vu
Joycean writing which is brought out by Lacan: the way it challenges our imaginary
relation to sens, demanding that we take part in its reweaving of signifying texture
as jouis-s ens.
Lacan has to be 'read backwards' if we are to avoid 'traducing' his work on
Joyce. As we have noted, there is a sense in which Lacanian theory first comes into
English 'backwards': the 1976 preface is written in the last period of Lacan's teach-
ing, when the new conception of writing has utterly transformed the theoretical
field presented in Seminar XI (let alone that of the major Ecrits from the 1950s,
published simultaneously). The miscomprehension of this last period—implicit in
MacCabe and Norris, explicit in Brivic—is bound up with a failure to take account
of the radical shift of perspective it entails, its break with some of the key themes
of the earlier work.
Slavoj Ziek has shown how reading Lacan 'backwards'—in the perspective
of the late work, which seeks to alter the fundamental presuppositions of psycho-
analytic theory and its teaching—would involve a radical change in our position as
readers. 'All the effort of Lacan's last years is directed... at breaking through [the]
field of communication qua meaning', notes Ziek: thus, once Lacan has established
the Other as the structure of symbolic exchange, where the real is 'alienated' into
the domain of signifying difference,
in Seminar XX, we stumble upon a certain One ... that is not one-among-the-
others, that does not yet partake of the articulation proper to the order of the Other.
This One is of course precisely the One of jouis-sense, of the signifier in so far as
it is not yet enchained but rather freely floating, permeated with enjoyment: it is
this enjoyment which prevents it from being articulated into a chain. To indicate the
dimension of this One, Lacan coined the neologism Ze sinthome.2'

The sinthome thus emerges as a real irreducible to a chain of signifiers, an opaque

blur disfiguring the field of communication. As our thesis will seek to show, for
Lacan to make this signifying aporia the starting-point for a reconceptualization
of subjectivity was to 'hystericize', to throw into question dramatically, the entire
body of psychoanalytic knowledge as it had been drawn up in his earlier work.
To read Lacan backwards is to start with perhaps the most ambitious moment
of his teaching: its attempt to map out—to write, as Lacan tirelessly insists—a psy-
choanalytic structure beyond discourse, able to embody the real without recourse
to signification. This is the endgame of the 'mathematical' formalisation which
fascinated Lacan; our thesis will seek to assess its importance in Lacanian theory
and trace its re-invention of the question of writing—and return that question to
the Joycean text, to explore a new way of conceiving its author's 'cruelfiction' (FW,
192) without the certainties provided by a critical theology.

21 Slavoj Ziek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture,
Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T., 1991, p. 132.

ix
 Thesis Summary:
Writing the Symptom: Lacan's Joycean Knot

In Part I, the thesis sets out the question of the aesthetic in Freud by considering
his reading of Hamlet and his encounter with Michealangelo's Moses. The 'solu-
tion' (Losung) of the artistic enigma is for Freud a moment in which the aesthetic is
'identified'—given a name—and thus rendered compatible with the psychoanalytic
account of subjectivity. However, this 'solution' also relates to another sense of
identification, an aspect of the Freudian uncanny: thus psychoanalytic reading is
'implicated' in the artistic riddles it claims to solve. The thesis links this problem-
atic to Lacan's readings of Hamlet and Antigone, where the figure of anamorphosis
is used to rethink the psychoanalytic accounts of fantasy and sublimation. An ap-
proach to art where it is it not simply 'explained with the unconscious' emerges as
Lacan's ultimate goal, whose realization the thesis sets out to show in the Joycean
sinthome.
Part II of the thesis charts the predominantly philosophical status of the Lac-
anian subject up to the last period of Lacan's work. Firstly, the encounter between
Lacan and Heidegger (in theory and in real life) is discussed in order to outline
the manifestly anti-Heideggerian bias of Lacan's 'return to Descartes'; this leads
us to trace Lacan's establishment of the subject in psychoanalysis, its basis in the
cogito as a pure auto-enunciation; and how it appeared to conflict with the scientific
project of structuralism (the 'mathematics of the signifier'). The thesis shows that
Lacan's solution to this theoretical conflict was to develop topology as an account
of 'the real of the subject's economy'.
Lacan's theory of the subject is shown to entail a distinct politics, which the
thesis seeks to link to the fate of Lacanian 'topology' (which is synonymous with
'writing', for Lacan, by the 1970s). The concept of 'foreclosure' designates a break-
down of the subject's 'economy', which Lacan associates with a crisis in paternity;
the 'mortification' of the maternal body by the Name-of-the-Father is posited as the
only way to prevent the onset of psychosis. The thesis argues that writing—first
in Derrida's critique of Lacan, then in a new sense developed by Lacan—comes to
contest the 'phallogocentric' politics of the Lacanian subject. The purest form of
this writing, for Lacan, is the topology of the Borromean knot—which the thesis
situates in relation to Lacanian theory as it leads up to the reading of Joyce as a
particular 'symptomatic' form of knot, in a reformulation of the Lacanian theory
of psychosis and a new development in the psychoanalytic approach to art.
Part III of the thesis explores in detail Lacan's 'topological' reading of Joyce,
interweaving it with an account of the historical encounter between Joyce and
psychoanalysis (chiefly, his contact with Jung). Thus, the question of the 'real'—in
historical narrative and in Lacanian 'writing'—is outlined as a new way to approach
authorship (in contrast to the 'death of the author' proposed by Roland Barthes)
and subjectivity.

x
 I. Identifying Aesthetics: Psychoanalysis Before Art

We laymen have always been intensely curious to know.., from what sources
that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make
such an impression on us with it and to arouse in us emotions of which,
perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable.
—Sigmund Freud, 1908'

art is in its essence an origin [Ursprung]: a distinctive way in which truth comes into
being, that is, becomes historical. -
—Martin Heidegger, 19352

i) A letter, a litter

IF PSYCHOANALYSIS begins with a letter—one in which Freud tells Fliess, on 15th

October 1897, of his discovery of the Oedipus complex—its origin also marks its
immediate involvement with literature. Freud finds the first 'response' to the discov-
ery, the first confirmation of the new knowledge, in a literary text—in the literary
text, in fact: Shakespeare's Hamlet. What Freud seems to begin as a casual after-
thought ends in a full-blown theory of the art-work's Ursprung, one which will set
the agenda for decades of 'applied' psychoanalysis:
Fleetingly the thought passed through my head that the same thing might be at the
bottom of Hamlet as well. I am not thinking of Shakespeare's conscious intention,
but believe, rather, that a real event stimulated the poet to his representation, in
that his unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero. How does Hamlet the
hysteric justify his words 'Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all'? How does
he explain his irresolution in avenging his father by the murder of his uncle—the same
man who send his courtiers to their death without a scruple and who is positively
precipitate in murdering Laertes? How better than through the torment he suffers
from the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against
his father out of passion for his mother.. .
'At the bottom' of Hamlet (underneath the stage, perhaps; lurking beneath the
representational surface of the drama) Freud imagines another scene, closer to the
truth (which might simply be another play: this time by Sophocles). This 'solution'
to the 'riddle' of Shakespeare's tragedy is incorporated, carefully reformulated,
in the foundational text of psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
The central enigma of the play, which has baffled generations of critics, is, Freud
writes, that it 'offers no reasons or motives for [Hamlet's] hesitations'. 4 This double
'Der Dichter end das Phantasieren, translated as 'Creative Writers and Day-dreaming', (1959),
SE IX, p. 141.
2 Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, translated as 'The Origin of the Work of Art' in Basic Writ-
ings, tr. & ed. David Farrell Krell, San Francisco: Harper, 1977, p. 187.
The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, translated and edited by J M Mas-
son, Cambridge, Mass: Bellknap, 1985, p. 272-3. (Note the aptly 'Oedipal' Freudian slip—the
substitution of Laertes for Polonius).
The Interpretation of Dreams (SE IV–V), pp. 264-5.
lack—of dramatic coherence and of critical mastery—will be abolished by Freud's
interpretation, now supported by some broad historical brush-strokes. Because of
the 'secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind', a change has
taken place in the representational position of fantasy:
In [Sophocles'] Oedipus, the child's wishful phantasy that underlies it is brought into
the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed;
and—just as in the case of a neurosis—we oniy learn of its existence from its inhibiting
consequences. Strangely enough, the overwhelming effect produced by the more
modern tragedy has turned out to be compatible with the fact that people have
remained completely in the dark as to the hero's character.5
In an oneiric, golden Hellenic past, fantasy could be directly enacted, given public
representation. If modern representation is incapable of such a bold Realisierung,
Freud immediately marks this as a sign of repression; and in case there is any doubt
here as to who represses (in other words, about the subject of this 'psychical' event),
he adds: 'Here I have translated into conscious terms what was bound to remain
unconscious in Hamlet's mind'.6
On the one hand, then, Hamlet seems to bear with it, in a strange trans-
cultural historical transference, the Oedipus as its 'repressed' truth, whose 'obscure
memory' exerts an inhibiting influence on the drama, stains the diegesis with quasi-
symptomatic blurs. At the same time (and in the same gesture, as it were), Hamlet
is supplied in Freud's LTbersetzung with an unconscious set of Oedipal fantasies of
his own. What has left audiences and critics 'in the dark' over the centuries is the
play's secret: that it conceals 'within' it another play, entitled not 'The Mousetrap',
but Oedipus Rex. 'The conflict in Hamlet is so effectively concealed that it was left
to me to unearth it', writes Freud in 19O5, as if to echo his earlier comment
that the play 'has its roots in the same soil' as Sophocles' tragedy. 8 We will see
how these metaphors—of buried secrets, occult truths lying beneath the 'skin' of
representation—'root' Freud's reading of Hamlet in the metaphorical economy of
Shakespeare's text itself; and with what consequences.
Before we begin a more detailed exploration of this—the way in which psy-
choanalytic reading remains embedded in the aesthetic 'soil' it investigates—it is
worth pausing to consider Freud's own conception of the relation between the in-
terpretive activity in analysis and in the criticism of art-works. In one sense, these
analogous forms of 'riddle-solving' appear oddly indistinguishable. If Freud can
open his paper on Jensen's novel Gradiva with the remark that it is 'a settled fact
that the essential riddles of dreaming have been solved by the efforts of the author
of the present work', 9 he will imply that a similarly decisive Lösung ('solution'; also
the 'dissolution' of a symptom) has been effected in the case of Hamlet: its secret
'unearthed', the symptomatic critical perplexity surrounding it should immediately
evaporate. In this sense, Freud sees psychoanalysis and the interpretation of art as
entirely compatible, their interpretive continuity signaled by a shared vocabulary
pp. 266-7.
6 lbid, p. 268.
7 'Psychopathic Characters on the Stage'(1905-6), SE VII, p. 309.
8 The Interpretation of Dreams, op. cit., p. 266.
9 'Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva' (1907), SE IX, p. 1.
(each faces its Rätsel, riddle or enigma, the opacity of which it strives to dissolve
or solve through a 'pharmaceutical' Losung).
If this continuity between analyst and critic is restated in a paper Freud wrote
in 1914, it is simultaneously—and dramatically—suspended. This article, entitled
'The Moses of Michaelangelo', appeared in the journal Imago that year with the
author's name substituted by * * Beneath this veil of anonymity, Freud writes
the following extraordinary passage:
Long before I had any opportunity of hearing about psycho-analysis, I learnt that a
Russian art connoisseur, Ivan Lermonlieff, had caused a revolution in the art galleries
of Europe by questioning the authorship of many pictures, showing how to distinguish
copies from originals with certainty, and constructing hypothetical artists for those
works whose former supposed authorship had been discredited. He achieved this by
insisting that attention should be diverted from the general impression and main
features of a picture, and by laying stress on the significance of minor details, of
things like the drawing of the fingernails, of the lobe of an ear, of halos and such
unconsidered trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate and yet which every artist
executes in his own characteristic way [...] It seems to me that this method of
inquiry is closely related to the technique of psycho-analysis. It, too, is accustomed
to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the
rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations.'1
The 'supposed authorship' of the critical or interpretive 'revolution' in question is
itself soon 'discredited': Freud was later, he continues, 'greatly interested to learn
that the Russian pseudonym concealed the identity of an Italian physician called
Morelli' (ibid). Just as he finds in an art criticism which focuses on 'unconsidered
trifles', a mirror-image of the methods of psychoanalysis, so Freud's own decision
to remain anonymous, his refusal to give his signature to the article, seems to be
doubled by the pseudo-signature of this Russian or Italian, this 'hypothetical' man
Freud has only heard about, who is supposed (ironically enough) to know 'how to
distinguish copies from originals'. In a letter to Freud, Karl Abraham has doubts
about the strategy of anonymity, wondering, a la Morelli, whether the style of
the writing itself might betray the master's hand: 'Don't you think that one will
recognize the lion's claw?"2
The question of authorship—ultimately always a question of the institutional
organization and control of knowledge—is one of the central stakes in the en-
counter between psychoanalysis and the aesthetic. A first approach to that ques-
tion might be to wonder why Freud withholds his signature—effectively refusing
to acknowledge this hypothetical 'layman's' work as an authorized psychoanalytic
production—from the same text where he notes (in the quoted passage) how 'closely
related' the two interpretive techniques are (so closely related, one is tempted to
add, that like twins they were intertwined at birth). The gesture with which Freud
seeks—like one of the copyists exposed by Morelli—to pass off his work as another's,
sets up a curiously self-undoing effect in a text which argues that the authentic trace
of an author is to be read only in stylistic traits, the 'rubbish-heap' of significant
10 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Times, London: Macmillan, 1988, P. 314.
' 1 'The Moses of Michaelangelo' (1914), SE XIII, p. 216.
' 2 Gay, ibid.
 details which subvert the closing authority of a signature. And if Freud's signa-
ture, the mark of 'the lion's claw' concealed by the asterisks, has finally only one
meaning—this is psychoanalysis, I authorize this—Abraham's question could be
rephrased as a question about the relation between psychoanalysis and aesthetics:
what is it that allows us to distinguish 'copy' from 'original' here, where can the
line be drawn between authentic analysis and its identical twin?
All of Freud's writings on aesthetics are responses to such a question; they
are also, as I hope to show, a series of attempts to situate psychoanalysis in the
right position before art, to take up a certain stance or posture which will allow the
'mastery' of an overwhelming encounter: in essence, an act of self-mastery.

ii) Hamlet's Secret Unearthed

'Some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unsolved
riddles to our understanding', writes Freud in 1914.13 The contributions to literary
or art criticism made possible, in Freud's view, by the discoveries of psychoanalysis
are invariably announced as definitive solutions to age-old enigmas, as if Freud's
intervention were provoked not so much by the art-work itself, as by the critical
'symptom', the interpretive difficulty. We will find,, however, that the key stake in
this intervention will emerge as the possibility of maintaining a distance between
a theoretical discourse and its aesthetic object, of criticism freeing itself from the
'obscure memory' of the art-work before it.
Hamlet, then, constituted a riddle because of a central gap in its structure:
the lack of 'reasons or motives' for Hamlet's famous hesitation to act; a lack which
Freud's Oedipal narrative would do away with. We can begin to glimpse what
this reading overlooks—how what it sees is caught up with a certain 'symptomatic'
blindness—by comparing it with another view of the play, that of T. S. Eliot.
Writing in 1919, Eliot passed his notorious judgement that Hamlet was an artistic
'failure'. The quality of 'artistic 'inevitability'', which
lies in ... complete adequacy of the external to the emotion ... is precisely what
is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is
inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed
identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet's bafflement
at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement
of his creator in the face of his artistic problem.14
For Eliot, what is lacking is not some specific psychological content—'repressed'
from the drama, unknown to the critics—but a proper aesthetic fit between the
textual surface and the emotional diegesis. The inexpressible affective trauma which
disfigures the play is precisely what resists analysis, what leads to the 'bafflement'
of character and artist; and of critic, we would add. For Eliot's reading reminds us
of what Freud somehow fails to see: that if Hamlet is a riddle, it is first of all so in
Hamlet's eyes. ''Sblood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy
could find it out' (II.ii.363-4) 15 mutters the prince: a crisis of interpretation is the
' 3 SE XIII, p. 209.
' 4 Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, London: Faber, 1975, p. 48.
15 References are to the Arden edition, ed. Harold Jenkins, London: Methuen, 1982.
play's very 'subject'. Thus the 'prolongation' of the riddle from author to character
hypothesized by Eliot could be extended to the audience, left 'in the dark', not
because of a particular, contingent dramatic flaw (the playwright's failure to include
in the text the required details about Hamlet's complex motivations) but because
of the essentially opaque, 'inexpressible' quality of what confronts Hamlet.
So the first critic baffled by the play's 'excess'—the gap which opens in it
between representation and an 'undiscovered country', an unnamable other—is
Hamlet himself. The map of this undiscovered country supplied by Freud will
blindly trace the outline of a topography already written in Shakespeare's play. To
show this, we need to turn to the text of Hamlet itself.
At the opening of the play, Hamlet is faced by a flagrant breach of social
protocol: his mother's failure to respect the full term of widow's mourning. Ger-
trude's 'o'erhasty marriage' is, writes critic R. M. Frye, 'in sixteenth-century terms
utterly scandalous'.' 6 Its effect, in Hamlet's first soliloquy, is the image of an
ever-expanding, all-devouring feminine jouissance:

Must I remember? Why she would hang on him

As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on; and yet within a month—
Let me not think on't—Frailty, thy name is woman. (I.ii.143-6)
Mourning, as Lacan will put it in one of his seminars on Hamlet, is a response
to a 'hole in existence'.' 7 if the death of the royal father tears a hole in the
socio-symbolic fabric of the state, this is made far worse by the queen's flouting
of her mourning duties: a traumatic gap opens up between social existence—the
'government' whose coherence depends on conventional forms, consistent symbolic
protocols—and the particularity of individual existence: here, the recalcitrant self-
sufficiency of an irresponsible enjoyment.
Hamlet's first response to, or defence against, the opening of this 'hole in
existence' (his own existence, as prince and son, is at stake—as is shown by his
sense of the danger of even allowing himself to acknowledge it, to admit the 'hole'
into his memory: 'Let me not think on't') is the act of naming. His first task of
the play is to find a name for both the dead father and the excessive life-force of
the mother, to provide some symbolic forms which might begin to 'patch up' the
trauma.
Freud, in 'Psychopathic Characters on the Stage' (1905-6), also sees the riddle
of Hamlet as a matter of names: throughout the play, he writes, 'the impulse that is
struggling into consciousness... is never given a definite name'; 18 thus by speaking
that name, Freud will undo the riddle. If the first attempt at this is a formula so
succinct as to sound almost banal—the epithet 'Hamlet the hysteric' appears as
' 6 R. M. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600, Princeton: P.U.P., 1984,
p. 84.
' 7 Seminar of 22 April 1959 (SVI); 'Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet', tr. J. Hul-
bert, in Literature and Psychoanalysis, The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Fel-
man, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, p. 38.
' 8 'Psychopathic Characters on the Stage' op. cit., p. 309.
vacuous, as clichéd, as 'Frailty thy name is woman'—Freud has to re-work, re-
write, the act of naming in exactly the same way as Hamlet: by writing another
play into the play we are watching.
Hamlet discovers early in the play that mere repetitive signifiers—'Words,
words, words' (II.ii.192)—fail to do justice to the experiential wealth 'beneath'
them, do not 'fit' the rich complexity of the things they name (something Eliot
will express, in his terms, as the lack of 'artistic 'inevitability''). The conventional
misogyny ('Frailty, thy name. . . ) with which Hamlet ends his search to express the
scandal of his mother's behaviour is a last resort, uttered with a despairing irony,
a sense of the gulf between the trite platitude and the unspeakable truth; likewise,
he is unable to get away from empty formulas when called upon to name his dead
father, to sum up the essential quality of his life: 'A was a man, take him for all in
all' (I.ii.187).
If these rhetorical inadequacies point to the play's preoccupation with a dis-
crepancy between the visible scene or surface of representation and some obscure
'depth' beyond it, this finds its fullest realization when the ghost of Hamlet's father
appears. The ghost emerges 'in breach of', as an utter disruption of, the discursive
space of the play (both metaphorically and 'in act', when it speaks from the 'cellar-
age' beneath the stage: the voice of royal authority emanating from the allegorical
'Hell' of the medieval mystery plays). Hamlet has to encounter it away from the
court, outside the consistent socio-symbolic scene where its 'questionable shape',
refusing to speak or be addressed, can only appear as a traumatic enigma. The
ghost's initial warning to him indicates a radical incommensurabilty between its
voice and what can be heard 'by ears of flesh and blood':

But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul... (I.v.13-16)

The ghost's secret is an ear-poisoning: the metaphorical economy of Shake-

speare's verse turns the uncanny tale—of the 'lazar-like' corrosion of '[ajil my
smooth body'—into a figure for the effect upon the play's signifying surface (and
the 'body politic') of a traumatic 'secret', at once beyond it and secretly con-
cealed within it. 19 The motif runs throughout the play in oppositions of the 'skin'
of representation and a subjacent wealth—treasure or ulcer—'mining all within'
(III.iv.150). Hamlet's immediate response is to dream of an absolute represent-
ational purity, freed from the mundanity of everyday discourse, which would be
capable of writing down, re-tracing, the ghost's word:

I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
19 For a discussion of 'the ear of the other' and the Derridean questions of the signature, naming
and 'wounding' in the encounter between Shakespeare and psychoanalysis, see Nicholas Royle,
'The remains of psychoanalysis (ii): Shakespeare', in After Derrida, Manchester: M.U.P., 1995,
pp. 85-123.
 And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter. (I.v.99-104)

The worn formulas of convention—the only tools Hamlet could find in his vain
efforts to symbolize his mother's jouissance or his father's finished life—are to be
erased from his memory, to allow the pure inscription of the ghost's final 'Remember
me!'. This desire for a pure writing suffers an ironic reversal as soon as it passes
into action:

My tables. Meet it is I set it down

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain—
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. [Writes]
So, uncle, there you are. (I.v.106-11O)

For all the emotional intensity of its author, the note scribbled down remains
mired in the banality of signifying convention (as the rhetorical simplicity of the
phrase emphasizes: 'one may smile... and be a villain'). Representation 'unmix'd
with baser matter', signification pure enough to allow Hamlet to utter the name
which will restore the symbolic consistency of the court (and the play) can only be
envisaged in Hamlet as the performance of a play. This is made clear, in the famous
'Mousetrap' scene (III.ii), by Hamlet's 'directorial' remarks: his instructions to the
players combine conventional wisdom about theatre ('to hold as 'twere the mirror
up to nature'; III.ii.22) with a specific injunction to avoid the 'pitiful ambition'
(III.ii.44) of actors who mar the overall effect of the drama by some personal in-
tervention or emotional involvement (some 'pitiful' or pathetic element). Hamlet's
'solution' to the riddle of the play must be situated exclusively on the level of the
signifier: it can have no truck with the 'poison' of any contingent, pathological
depth.
During the performance of 'The Mousetrap', Hamlet's gleeful answer to Ophe-
ha's question about the play's meaning—'The players cannot keep counsel: they'll
tell all' (ll.ii.137-8)--encapsulates the effect of Hamlet's paradoxical mise en abyme.
Whereas in Act I, the revelation of the ghost's secret caused a dramatic disloca-
tion of symbolic space, Hamlet has now arranged for that secret to be represented,
unveiled, centre-stage—in the royal presence, supposedly the guarantee of the con-
sistency of the legal/political court. The players are fulfilling their duty as royal
subjects by openly confessing the secret in court—a confession which has the para-
doxical effect of driving its legal addressee, the King, offstage. The truth about
the King has 'passed into act' in an open ('extant') play, emerged into the public
socio-symbolic realm, where things can be named. Hamlet's triumphant naming
of Claudius contrasts notably with the earlier attempts to 'set down' his criminal
essence:

For thou dost know, 0 Damon dear,

This realm dismantled was
Of Jove himself, and now reigns here
A very, very—pajock. (III.ii.275-8)

7
 By a kind of contract Hamlet has arranged beforehand, Horatio is to observe
the effects of the play on the court. His first comment—to object that 'pajock'
does not fit in the verse because it doesn't rhyme (III.ii.279)—is therefore, pre-
cisely, the point: something 'doesn't rhyme', just as 'something is rotten' in the
state; there is a symbolic inconsistency at work in the court, now that it is ruled by
a 'pajock' or patch-cock, 'a king of shreds and patches' (III.iv.103). 2 ° Claudius is
nothing but the semblance of a king, a being of signifying convention: his subject-
ive position is dependant on the supposition, the surface appearance, of social and
representational consistency (metonymically figured in Horatio's demand for con-
ventional rhyming couplets). 'The Mousetrap' is Hamlet's solution to the riddles of
the play—the traumatic obscurities surrounding his father's death and his mother's
desire—because it constitutes a scene of representation which allows him to take
up a position of identification, makes space for the clear utterance of a decisive,
definitive name ('pajock'). If his encounter with the ghost (in I.v) risked annihil-
ating the very inscription of Hamlet's identity, re-staging that encounter, making
visible and meaningful the ear-poisoning it embodied, restores the prince's posi-
tion in socio-symbolic space. Hamlet thus accomplishes the task of avenging his
father—on the symbolic level (the symbol being, as the Kojevean formula Lacan
adopts has it, 'the murder of the thing') •21 The rest of Shakespeare's tragedy shows
once again, with dark irony, how great a gulf may separate this level from that of
'flesh and blood'.
Is Freud's response to the riddle of Hamlet no more than an exact repetition or
re-staging of Hamlet's? We have seen how their 'solutions' share a pre-occupation
with naming, with finding the right signifier to unlock the mystery 'underlying' the
play (which is, for both Hamlet and Freud, an Urszene of parental trauma, the
'inhibiting consequences' of which the 'extant' play is). If Freud's first attempt—
simply labelling Hamlet a hysteric—seemed too abrupt, lacking a historical dimen-
sion, by The Interpretation of Dreams the term 'repression' will be used to offer a
more authoritative-looking solution. What could be 'brought into the open' in Oed-
ipus Rex 'remains repressed' in Hamlet, due to a neurotic modernity which somehow
consigns fantasy to a kind of socio-cultural 'unconscious', the storehouse of that
which can no longer be given open symbolic acknowledgement. Freud then briskly
shifts from historical speculations to a conventional character-based approach—'I
have translated into conscious terms what was bound to remain unconscious in
Hamlet's mind' (as if the text of Hamlet were being read here—confirming Eliot's
worst fears—as somehow identical with the subjectivity of its central character, as
nothing but 'the book and volume of [Hamlet's] brain'). What this shift reveals is
the true status of an 'Oedipal' Hamlet: the insertion by Freud of another play—the
primal scene whose 'obscure memory', emanating from some mysteriously invisible
site of 'repression', dominates the inhibited, hesitating, 'neurotic' drama we actu-
ally see. This play, grafted on to the pure supposition of 'Hamlet's mind', would
20 cf. Harold Jenkins Longer Notes in the Arden edition of Hamlet (op. cit., pp. 509-10).
21 cf. Ecrits: A Selection, tr. A. Sheridan, London: Tavistock, 1977, p. 104; for an account of
Lacan's theoretical debt to the work of Alexandre Kojhve, see Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen, 'Alibis of
the Subject', in The Emotional Tie, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, pp. 155-75.

8
 be a visible scene which could introduce coherence, representational and diegetic
consistency: like 'The Mousetrap', the Oedipus reveals the truth masked by the
symptomatic compromises in the 'manifest' scene which is its inauthentic copy.
Claiming to have 'unearthed' the play's secret, to have freed culture of its ob-
sessive inability to understand Hamlet, Freud remains entirely caught in the signify-
ing economy of Shakespeare's play. Freud's reading traces Hamlet's—the 'solution'
to a traumatic encounter with what exceeds or eludes socio-symbolic representa-
tion (the 'lack in the Other' which, as we will see, is to be given a central place
in Lacanian theory from the 1960s on)—while it remains blind to the paradoxes of
this strange mirroring or repetition, its 'abyssal' structure of theory-within-theory,
play-within-play.

iii) Maintaining Authority

To discover why Freud's reading of Hamlet repeats the essentials of the play's central
reflexive 'solution' to the enigmas it opens up, to free our argument from its sense
of uncanny or unconscious co-incidence, we need to turn to another of Freud's
encounters with the aesthetic: one which shows more clearly the positioning of
authority central to the encounter. The best way to approach this—and a good
example of the 'intrication' of these questions—is to quote Jacques Lacan quoting
Hamlet in his 1959 seminar. In question is the 'distance' a subject takes before the
object of fantasy; Lacan finds this well illustrated by a scene from Shakespeare's
play:
[Ophelia] has the good fortune to be the first person Hamlet runs into after his
unsettling encounter with the ghost, and she reports his behaviour in terms that are
worth noting.
My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced,
No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled,
Ungartered, and down-gyvOd to his ankle,
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors—he comes before me.
He took me by the wrist and held me hard
Then goes he to the length of all his arm,
And with his other hand thus o'er his brow
He falls to such perusal of my face
As a would draw it. Long stayed he so. (II.i.77-91)22
We will return to the complexities of Lacan's reading of Hamlet and its key
place in the development of Lacanian theory; for now, we should simply note this
invocation of the play as offering a mise en scene of the subject's relation to fantasy.
Hamlet's posture is that of a spectator confronted by a traumatic, enigmatic object;
the texture of his symbolic identifications having been 'unbraced' (like his doublet)
22 Seminar of 15th April, 1959 (SVI); in Felman, ed., op. cit., p. 21.

9
 by the ghost's harrowing, inhuman voice, his encounter with Ophelia becomes a
search to position himself, to take up a place within a structure of inter-subjective
meaning. It is no accident that this search is compared in Shakespeare's verse to an
artistic activity—'As a would draw it'—the attempt to trace out a form, introduce
a minimal mark of representational difference which might serve to stave off the
threat of obliteration.
Freud, in a letter to Edoardo Weiss in 1933, tells of a similar encounter:
Every day for three lonely weeks of September 1913, I stood in the church in front
of the statue [the Moses by Michaelangelo], studying it, measuring it and drawing it
until there dawned on me that understanding which I expressed in my essay, though
I only dared to do so anonymously.23
'The very interpretation of the figure is open to complete contradictions', com-
ments an art historian quoted approvingly by Freud: like Hamlet, Michaelangelo's
statue Moses is surrounded by a buzz of critical activity, symptom of a complete
lack of interpretive consensus. For Freud, the 'inscrutable' statue emits a gaze of
blinding mastery:
How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the
lonely piazza where the deserted church stands, and have essayed to support the
angry scorn of the hero's glance!24
Like the hero of a Western at high noon, Freud has to walk away from the
everyday world to take up his position in the fateful encounter (again, the parallel
is Hamlet's retreat from the scene of the court to face the ghost). 'No piece of
statuary has ever made a stronger impression on me than this', says Freud; with
the insistence of the Trieb circling its object, he returns to confront the enigma, to
try once again to measure or trace out its 'inscrutable' meaning.
What is Freud's first interpretation of the statue's mysterious 'source of power'
(located, like that of Hamlet, beyond what is immediately legible in the represent-
ational surface)? 25 In a gesture characteristic of all of his writings on art, and
which goes beyond simple 'academic' convention, Freud identifies aesthetic power
with the mastery of an author. Having listed the bewildering range of critical opin-
ions about the Moses, he asks whether the lack of consensus can be due to the
'master-hand' having 'traced... a vague or ambiguous script in the stone': 26 only
the artist (together with a closed, 'intentional' psychical space) can be the origin
of the fascinating enigma. Freud never takes the step of positing, as the cause of
the symptomatic critical dissent, something irreducible to the narratives swirling
around it; he simply adds one more narrative (but his is the right one, based on
the 'cryptic' hermeneutic of a Morelli).
The maintenance of mastery is the theme of Freud's interpretation of Michael-
angelo's statue. The 'master-hand' of the artist is to be salvaged, as the principle
of a firmly centred meaning, from the vociferous 'crowd' of critics; likewise Freud's
23 Sigmund Freud as a Consultant. Recollections of a Pioneer in Psychoanalysis (Letters from
Freud to Edoardo Weiss), New York, 1970.
24 'The Moses of Michaelangelo' (1914), op. cit., p. 211.
p. 211.
p. 213.

10
obsessive attention to the hand of the statue seeks to trace there the heroic safe-
guarding of authority against disruptive, centrifugal forces:
Nor will [Moses} throw away the Tables so that they will break on the stones, for it
is on their especial account that he has controlled his anger; it was to preserve them
that he kept his passion in check. In giving way to his rage and indignation, he had
to neglect the Tables, and the hand which upheld them was withdrawn. They began
to slide down and were in danger of being broken. This brought him to himself.27
Hamlet also had recourse to his 'tables' (I.v.106) as a defence against the
tearing-open of his symbolic world—they offered a surface for the inscription of a
name, the first attempt to restore things to order, to salvage some representational
consistency. Freud's Moses is caught between his 'mission'—to maintain God's
law, to uphold its written surface in his hand—and the overwhelming affective
disturbance which dislodges the Tables, loosens the grip on them and threatens
(literally) to break the law. Moses comes to himself—assumes his identity, his
self-mastery—in this moment when disruptive 'passion' almost undoes his grasp of
the law: Freud imagines the statue's poise—a violent twisting movement suddenly
frozen—as encapsulating the essence of a restoration of logos, the checking of 'infant'
emotion (unspeakable, unrepresentable affect) by symbolic law.
Freud's 'solution' to the riddle of the statue is to draw it—or rather, to pro-
duce drawings which are 'emancipated... from the visual image of the statue' and
represent 'an analysis of the motive forces behind it' (p. 228). Like the Oedipus in
Freud's reading of Hamlet, these 'hypothetical' sketches reveal the repressed truth
of the art-work, its invisible origin; they offer a dramatic narrative to account for
the aesthetic enigma.
A very 'Freudian' approach to this interpretation of Freud's—one adopted by
Ernest Jones in his biography—would be to re-inscribe the drama 'behind' Moses
as a version of another 'unconscious' play, the struggle taking place around 1914 for
authority in the psychoanalytic movement (principally the conflict between Freud
and Jung). One could look for stylistic traits to support such a reading, perhaps
finding a despairing 'unconscious' pun in 'the remnants of a terminated movement'
Freud observes in the statue's posture. In Jones' view, it is 'pretty obvious' that
Freud identifies with Moses as the law-giver confronted by the unruly crowd, caught
between the maintenance of the law and an overwhelming experience of affect.28
Such a reading, by dispelling the enigma of Freud's obsessive fascination with
Michaelangelo's statue, restores the psychological consistency of the master, and
thus his authority; it restores Freud's name. As an author—even one who adopts
the enigmatic mask of anonymity—he must be the site of 'motive forces' which can
be accounted for, which make sense (which are law-abiding). What Jones, faithful
to Freud, seeks to efface is any question of the aesthetic as a disturbance of the
psychoanalytic narrative, an encroachment upon its—psychical or theoretical or
political—space.
27 Ibid., p. 229.
28 'The winter of 1913-14 ... was the worst time in the conflict with Jung. The Moses was
written in the same month as the long essays in which Freud announced the seriousness of the
divergences between his views and Jung's...', Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work,
Volume Two, London: Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 366-7.

11
 In his 1959 seminar, Lacan mocks interpretation of this kind, based on the
'pretty obvious', as 'the psychoanalytic wisdom of Polonius'. C'est l'amour! he
hears Polonius cry in response to Ophelia's account of her traumatic encounter
with Hamlet; a comic version, in Lacan's view, of the psychoanalytic hermen-
eutic which remains blind to the 'agency of the letter', prefers to deal with banal
commonplaces—adolescent romance, rebellious disciples—rather than address the
crucial question of the economy of signification. 29 Lacan's reading of Hamlet turns
around his efforts to work out a theory of the relation of the subject to the 'object
of fantasy': it offers no anecdotal account of the art-work to restore its full legibility,
but rather invokes it as testifying to a fundamental opacity at the heart of our fant-
asmatic investments. The subject is positioned in the fantasy relation, held in place
by fascination there, like Hamlet as he gazes over his shoulder at Ophelia. Lacan
tries to capture this in his formula or 'matheme' for fantasy, o a, where the lozenge
between the subject and objet a indicates a relation of 'conjunction-disjunction', a
tensely balanced pulling to-and-fro.3°
If for Lacan the Shakespearean text illustrates a relation of fantasy resist-
ant to 'psychoanalytic wisdom' of the kind which would reduce it to a transpar-
ent, 'pretty obvious' meaning, the 1959 seminar does not, however, take the next
step: to posit the relation between psychoanalysis and aesthetics as just such a
relation of 'fantasy', of 'conjunction-disjunction'. Freud's desperate manoeuvring
around Michaelangelo's statue stages his confrontation with an aesthetic trauma
which seems to lie almost beyond the analytic gaze, at its outer limit (thus Freud's
Hamlet-like hesitation about owning up to authorship: is this just inside—or just
outside—psychoanalysis?). The aesthetic must be kept at precisely the right dis-
tance from psychoanalysis—near enough for the analytic subject to take up a po-
sition, elaborate a narrative; but not so near that distance collapses into uncanny
doubling, loss of self-mastery. Psychoanalysis must be able to address questions
of aesthetics, send out messages into the field of art, be recognized as a certain
'authority'—but its true authority, where it recognizes itself, must remain in place.
If Freud was able to establish his relation to Hamlet by doubling 'the play
with Oedipus (and thus in a sense, as we have seen, himself 'unconsciously' doub-
ling Hamlet), the essay on the Moses shows more vividly the reflexive logic of the
Freudian narrative. The story of 'aesthetic' (bodily, affective) disturbance and its
control by the firm hand of the law narrates nothing so much as the upheaval pro-
voked in psychoanalytic discourse by the confrontation with the aesthetic, how the
'Tables' where it is inscribed begin to slip, then are returned—by the 'master hand'
writing the essay—to their proper place. To introduce the drama of psychoanalytic
politics is to be beguiled by the signified, to fail to follow Morelli's lead and confine
one's attention to the surface of representation.
29 Seminar of 15th April 1959; in Felman, ed., op. cit., pp. 20-21. Jones' book, Hamlet and
Oedipus (1949) may be the implicit target of Lacan's satire.
30 See 'The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious'
(1960), in Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., pp. 313-4.

12
 The paradox of 'Freudian aesthetics' (to use Lacan's phrase) 3 ' is that in order
to assume a certain position before art—one which will mark a distance from the
aesthetic, a refusal to plunge into the affective turmoil it embodies—Freud's dis-
course has to unconsciously or uncannily mimic the logic of the art-work in question.
The art-works which interest Freud themselves represent the reflexive mastery of
the aesthetic, the portrayal of a law-bearing interpretive centre struggling to main-
tain its self-identity, its semantic consistency, in the face of affective disruption. To
identify with the author of the work—to take up an identical position, not 'psy-
chologically', but through an uncanny inter-textual mirroring—is then to call into
question the very gesture seeking support in such an identification, which would
establish a definitive, regulating distance between subject (here, psychoanalysis)
and traumatic object (art).

iv) Anamorphic Revelations

Why did we begin our reading of Freud's essay on 'The Moses of Michaelangelo'
by framing it with Lacan's quotation from Hamlet? An illustration of how Lacan's
work constantly re-works itself (constituting, as Slavoj Ziek writes, 'a succession of
attempts to seize the same persistent traumatic kernel') 32 is that the clearest answer
comes in 1960, a year after the seminars on Hamlet. In Seminar VII, The Ethics
of Psychoanalysis, Lacan introduces a specifically aesthetic motif to psychoanalytic
theory:
[An anamorphosis] is any kind of construction that is made in such a way that by
means of an optical transposition a certain form that wasn't visible at first sight
transforms itself into a readable image. The pleasure is found in seeing its emergence
from an indecipherable form.33
Lacan's favourite example of anamorphosis is Holbein's great double portrait
The Ambassadors: a pair of resplendent Tudor noblemen stand beside a table laden
with emblems of Renaissance knowledge, while a strange, 'phallic' form dominates
the foreground of the picture; this image only becomes 'readable'—as a skull, a
token of Vanitas—from a specific, oblique point of view, from which the general
field of 'meaning' in Holbein's picture, its elaborate text of allegorical references,
recedes into a blur.
The anamorphic 'optical transposition'—in which an insignificant or illegible
blur is transformed into a 'readable image'—captures precisely what is at stake in
Freud's invocation of Morelli: the emergence of symptomatic truth through a shift
of focus from 'the general impression and main features of a picture' onto stylistic
details, which 'at first sight' were paid no attention. Moreover, Morelli's critical
'revolution' matches psychoanalysis, in Freud's view, as a decisive turning-point in
the history of interpretation: just as what was previously invisible in the field of
art criticism is now shown by Morelli to be the privileged trace of an author, so
31 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, SVII, ed. J-A Miller, tr. D. Porter, London: Routledge, 1992,
p. 159.
32 Slavoj iek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, London:
Verso, 1994, p. 173.
33 Seminar of 3rd February, 1960 (SVII), op. cit., p. 135.

13
for Freud the re-positioning of authority in the encounter between psychoanalysis
and art permanently alters the domain of aesthetics, ridding it forever of one of its
riddles.
Hamlet's fascinated 'perusal' of Ophelia could be understood as the subject's
desperate search for such an anamorphic transformation, a sudden epiphanic vision
in which the enigma would dissolve, allow the subject to assume the right position
from which to encounter the object in its truth, give it its proper name. If Freud's
obsessive return to confront the Moses underlies a similarly fantasmatic relation,
it is one which, as we have seen, fihds its resolution, its Lösung, in the final recon-
firmation of authorial mastery. To read Hamlet 'anamorphically'—as if it were a
picture, say, by Shakespeare's contemporary, Holbein—might allow us to see more
clearly the ambiguous place of Lacan's reading of the play, its Janus-faced position
between very different moments of his teaching.
For Lacan, anamorphosis dramatizes a 'split', an incommensurability, in rep-
resentation (as is emphasized particularly when he takes up the trope again in
1964). In front of The Ambassadors, we see either a pair of well-dressed no-
blemen or, re-positioning ourselves, a death's head; there is no 'metalanguage'
position, from which we could take in both images at once. What anamorphosis
reveals is precisely the illusory nature of perspective: the moment when the blurred
form becomes legible, when the spectator finds the right spot from which to master
the only remaining obscurity in the visible field, co-incides with the obliteration
of the 'background', the revelation that its apparent perspectival consistency was
itself dependent on a particular viewpoint. It was no accident, Lacan thought, that
it was at the very moment (circa 1600) when our modern illusion of perspective
established itself, that the anamorphic 'trick' appeared.35
We have seen how in Hamlet there is an analogous divergence or incommensur-
ability of scenes: the ghost can only be encountered away from the symbolic domain
of the court, represented by the open, public space of the stage; its uncanny voice
impinges upon the stage from below, threatening to disrupt the conventional space
of the drama as well as the fictional consistency of the court. if Hamlet's first re-
sponse to the ghost seems to entail the risk of jeopardizing, 'dismantling', the entire
realm of signification ('I'll wipe away all trivial fond records... '; I.v.99), it is only
away from that realm that a truthful, real scene can unfold (and thus Hamlet is only
able authentically to 'encounter' Ophelia outside the court, off-stage: in the grave);
until, that is, the performance of 'the Mousetrap', which we can thus situate pre-
cisely as the moment of anamorphic revelation. The transformation of the opaque
blur of the ghost's story into a 'readable' text, an 'extant' play, simultaneously
'dismantles' the symbolic scene of the court, by driving the king off-stage.
In Seminar VI, Lacan sees in Hamlet 'the tragedy of desire', where the subject's
fate is 'expressed in terms of a pure signifier'. 36 It is Hamlet's condition as a subject
unable to act—prevented from realizing his desire, constantly 'at the hour of the
Other', trapped in the defiles of signification—that is the focus of interest for Lacan
in 1959. This required, of course, a very specific reading (even, we might say,
34 cf. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (SXI), op. cit., pp. 67-122.
35 cf. Seminars of 3rd & 10th February 1960 (SVII), op. cit., pp. 135-6, 140-2.
36 Seminar of 15th April 1959 (SVI); in Felman, ed., op. cit., pp. 11-12.

14
 a heavily 'edited' version) of Shakespeare's play, one which places its theoretical
emphasis upon Hamlet's brooding contemplation of the riddles confronting him,
rather than the prince's 'solution' (the reflexive paradox of the play-within-a-play).
As we have seen, Lacan picks out the scene of Hamlet's 'perusal' of Ophelia-
in which Hamlet is shown as having 'lost the way of his desire', as caught up in
a desperate search for a position from which to desire—as an illustration of the
fantasmatic relation. But this conception of fantasy as an impasse—focusing on
the subject's position as alienated in, thwarted by, the discourse of the Other—is
by no means a definitive or concluive one for Lacan. The shifting theorizations of
fantasy in his thought can be traced as another 'version' of the Lacanian subject as
it is constantly rewritten. These transformations are wrongly conceived as merely
theoretical 'developments': a certain 'symptomatic' resistance to theory on the side
of its 'object' can be traced in them.
In 1967, Lacan writes in the résumé of the seminar La logiqne du fantasme
that fantasy provides 'the subject's window onto the real'. 37 The fantasy object—
objet a, in Lacari's terminology—comes to be conceived no longer—or not only—as
a fluctuating imaginary mirage screening the enigma of the Other's desire, but
now as an anamorphic revelation: the mark of a real irreducible to the law of the
signifier.
This shift in the conception of fantasy, which can be marked as the hinge
between two moments in Lacan's theory of the subject (or 'the two faces of the
subject', as Bruce Fink would have it) 38 is matched by a corresponding transform-
ation of the psychoanalytic relation to the aesthetic. We could begin to understand
that transformation by comparing Lacan's reading of Hamlet in Seminar VI with
his reading of Sophocles' Antigone the following year. Because, in Seminar VII, the
engagement with the literary text is bound up with a new theorization of the psy-
choanalytic concept of sublimation (a concept famously left 'unfinished' by Freud),
we need to situate briefly Lacan's refiguring of sublimation in order to grasp what
emerges with Antigone.

v) Circumscribing the Real

'The lack of a coherent theory of sublimation remains one of the lacunae in psycho-
analytic thought', comment Laplanche and Pontalis. 39 The theoretical obscurity of
the term is given a certain 'legendary' quality by the rumour about its 'repression':
Freud is supposed, for some unknown reason, to have destroyed the chapter which
would have dealt with sublimation in the synoptic metapsychology he had planned
in 1915.° What is certainly true is that Sublimierung constitutes, in psychoanalytic
terms, a kind of coincidentia oppositorurn, almost a paradox. For how, we might ask,
putting the question at its most naive, is sexuality—elsewhere affirmed by Freud
37 La logique du fantasme (SXIV), 1966-7, Résumé: Annuaire de l'EPHE; quoted in Armand
Zaloszyc 'Contrariété et satisfaction' in Une Touche de Reel, Paris: Z'Editions, 1990, pp. 90-1
38 Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton: P.U.P,
1995, pp. 140-1.
The Language of Psychoanalysis, tr. D. Nicholson-Smith, London: Karnac 1973, p. 433.
40 For a sceptical view of this rumour, see Jo Attié, 'Trait pervers et sublimation', in Une Touche
de Reel, op. cit., pp. 59-60; see also Peter Gay, Freud: a Life for our Times, op. cit., pp. 372-4.

15
 as essentially recalcitrant, at odds with any egoic interest—to be 'translated' into
the 'higher' activities of artistic or intellectual pursuits? As a Triebshicksal ('drive
destination'), sublimation seemed to entail for Freud the absence of repression, the
notion that the drive could be fully absorbed, at once emerging and disappearing
in some rarefied, symptom-free domain. The term owes more to chemistry, where
it describes the direct transition from a solid to a gaseous state, than to aesthetics:
Freud nowhere links sublimation to the Kantian category of the sublime.
Lacan's introduction of anamorphosis as a way of rethinking sublimation im-
mediately sets a new agenda for the concept: one bearing on questions of aesthetics,
as well as of the 'topography' of the subject. If for Lacan it is 'as a function of
the problem of ethics that we have to judge sublimation', 41 this problem emerges
as inseparable from a certain aesthetics. In his reading of Seminar VII, Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe pin-points this by coining the term esthéthique: Lacanian ethics
can only emerge 'with the support of an aesthetic'.42
In Sophocles' play Antigone, the heroine's decision to defy Creon's edict and
perform funeral rites for her brother Polynices marks her as an outlaw, one who does
not recognize the authority of the polis. For Lacan, this defiance is the manifestation
of a special kind of beauty or lustre: as in an anamorphosis, 'a marvellous illusion in
the form of a beautiful image of the passion appears... whereas something decom-
posed and disgusting spreads out around it'. 43 What shines forth is an irreducible
self-sufficiency, a jouissance that 'knows itself', obeys its own law (Lacan notes how
in the Sophoclean text the chiming epithets aOtóy'vtog and aOtó'voFloc make Anti-
gone's 'self-knowledge' echo her 'autonomy') ;44 compared with Antigone's blinding
éclat, the mundane political laws embodied by Creon appear sordid, debased.
'A work of art always involves encircling the Thing', Lacan now states, as a
reformulation of sublimation. Das Ding, a concept referred back to the origins
of Freudian metapsychology in the 1895 Project, is an unimaginable 'prehistoric'
object, an otherness irreducible to the symbolic universe of the subject. In terms
of the history of Lacan's thought, it can be situated, so to speak, as a 'transitional
object' between a conception of the objet a as imaginary (as fantasmatic mirage) and
its re-conception as real (in the 1960s, from the seminar Identification onwards,45
objet a is increasingly thought together with, as inseparable from, the lack in the
Other, the incompleteness or inconsistency of the symbolic order).
If the artwork fait le tour de la Chose, circles round or entraps the pre-symbolic
void of the real, this is doubly true of Sophocles' play: just as Antigone is 'encircled'
by the socio-symbolic laws of the community, so the text raises her figure 'to the
dignity of the Thing' (in Lacan's formulaic definition of sublimation) •46 The central
place of the representational field, the 'vacuole' around which its discourse turns, is
a place of extimité, of 'intimate exteriority': Antigone transcends the laws of signi-
41 Seminar of 20th January, 1960 (SVII), op. cit., p. 107.
42 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 'De l'ethique: a propos d'Antigone', in Lacan Avec les Philosophes,
op. cit., p. 31.
43 Seminar of 8th June, 1960 (SVII), op. cit., p. 273.
44 Lacan Avec Las PhiLosophes, op. cit., pp. 273, 282.
45 ldentification (SIX), 1961-2, unpublished.
46 Seminar of 20th January 1960 (SVII),op. cit., p. 112

16
fication, the 'symbolic castration' invoked elsewhere by Lacan as the sole guarantee
of the subject's 'normalisation'. 47 Conversely, Hamlet's aim—which, as we have
seen, finds a certain realization in his deployment of 'The Mousetrap'—is to integ-
rate the extimate trauma (ear-poisoning, unspeakable jouissance) into the scene
of open, 'extant' representation and so seal up the 'hole in existence', restore the
consistency of his own position as subject; this could be 'translated' as an act of sub-
limation, in its Freudian definition: the absorption of sexuality—of the death-drive
in its blind, 'infant' violence—into the law-abiding domain of representation.
Lacan's comments on the 'fascinating image' of Antigone show the extent of his
redefinition of sublimation, its distance from the Freudian conception of a translated
or sublated sexuality:
it is Antigone herself who fascinates us, Antigone in her unbearable splendour.
She has a quality that both attracts us and startles us, in the sense of intimidates
us; this terrible, self-willed victim disturbs us.48
Antigone's dazzling éclat shines forth, leaving us, like Hamlet confronting Oph-
elia, speechless. The position of the subject, the desire in representation which
sustains it, is at risk: Lacan talks of 'the extinction or the tempering of desire
through the effect of beauty', before fleetingly linking this to 'the disruption of any
object on which Kant insists in The Critique of Judgement'. 49 Antigone's beauty
is incompatible with desire: it is sublime (although Lacari uses the term 'beauty',
le Beau, and never really discusses the Kantian sublime in Seminar VII, as Lacoue-
Labarthe notes). 50 For Kant, the sublime phenomenon surpasses the powers of
the human imagination, pushes representation to the point of breakdown, so that
only by recognizing the inadequacy of its representational faculties in the face of
such sublime grandeur, can reason recover any ideational hold. In Lacanian terms,
Antigone is sublime because she incarnates a jouissance which has 'turned its back
on the Other', 51 refused to yield up its 'autistic' enjoyment to the castrating law
of the symbolic: she is irreducible to signification, autonornos, beyond symbolic
'alienation'.
There appears to be a stark shift of emphasis, then, between seminars VI
and VII. If Lacan reads Hamlet as a 'tragedy of desire', perhaps overlooking the
play's interrogation of its own representational economy in order more securely to
outline the position of the desiring subject there, in Antigone 'the appearance of
beauty intimidates and stops desire'. 52 The register of the drive—now conceived as
- 47 Cf. 'The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious', in
Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., pp. 320-4.
48 Seminar of 25th May 1960 (SVII), op. cit., p. 247.
49 Thid., p. 249.
5O• the Kantian analytic of the sublime (the examination of which Lacan endlessly defers,
although he knows for certain that it is there that the secret of sublimation lies)', Phillippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, 'De l'ethique: a propos d'Antigone', in Lacan Avec les Philosophes, op. cit.,
pp. 33-4.
51 'In a sense, sublimation as first sketched out by Lacan relates to the signifier, in a sort of
short-circuit of the structure of discourse: fundamentally, it turns its back on the Other, while it
remains within the structure of language'. Jean-Robert Rabanel, 'Sublimation et jouissance', in
Line Touche de Reel, op. cit., p. 28.
52 Seminar of 18th May 1960 (SVII), op. cit., p. 238.

17
 'ontological', hors discours—is privileged as the site of ethics (which is thus always
esthethique, bound up with bodily or aesthetic enjoyment). The 'law of desire'
invoked by Lacan at the end of 'Subversion of the subject' 53 —which would entail
the 'refusal' of jouissance in the interests of a consistent scene of representation
where the subject could appear as a pure signifying effect, unhampered by any
'symptomatic' idiosyncrasies—seems to yield, as it were, to its antithesis: a 'law
of drive', an ethic of enjoyment situated beyond social or symbolic norms, beyond
meaning.
If this brisk theoretical re-orientation at the beginning of the 1960s marks the
opening of a period in Lacan's teaching where it will be increasingly preoccupied
by the goal of cerner le reel—defining, outlining, circumscribing the real—it also
signals a radical change in the psychoanalytic relation to the aesthetic. We have
seen how the Freudian approach to the creation and experience of art follows a logic
encapsulated by the near synonyms Uberträgung and Ubersetzung: for the aesthetic
to be 'translated' by Freudian theory, there has to be the 'transference' of a whole
psychoanalytic scene of representation (which will allow the theorist to assume,
identify with, a position of self-mastery). Likewise, sublimation, the 'blank chapter'
in Freudian metapsychology, names the process by which the traumatic force of
the aesthetic is supposed to be fully absorbed or translated by the psychoanalytic
subject, somehow transformed into a component of authorial mastery.
With Lacan's reading of Antigone, the place of the aesthetic in psychoanalysis
changes dramatically. The invocation of anamorphosis to figure the sublime image
of the heroine, its quality as immonde, in excess of the field of worldly signification,
also reflects upon the theoretical discourse framing the aesthetic instance. Just as
a spectator, in assuming the position from which the anamorphic image becomes
legible, forfeits the perspectival space in which it could have taken on a meaning,
so there is no over-arching discursive space which could 'translate' the significance
of Antigone: her passion is intraitable, in Lacoue-Labarthe's phrase, 54 in the same
way that no 'trait' or signifying mark can be inscribed which would allow us to
include the anamorphic image within a consistent perspective.
Antigone, then, is certainly not for Lacan the kind of illustration that Hamlet
was for Freud (Shakespeare's play illustrated, we recall, 'the secular advance of
repression'). The Greek tragedy offers no analogy or paradigmatic structure to
psychoanalysis; it can only be termed an 'illustration' in an etymological sense of
the term: it 'shines forth', displaying the lustre of the aesthetic Thing it encircles. If
the sublime artwork, created ex nihilo, takes shape by outlining an irreducible void,
Lacan will seek to trace its outlines and thus repeat, rewrite its circumscription of
the real. Far from desiring to translate or transfer such writing to the scene of
psychoanalysis (always, for Lacan, a dit-mension, the site of a speaking subject),
the seminar will seek there what lies beyond that scene, what escapes the 'topic' of
its subject.
The seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60) is often read as a
turning-point in Lacanian theory. If the preoccupation with desire and significa-
53 Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 324.
54 Lacan Avec les Philosophes, op. cit., p. 27.

18
tion, the privileging of the symbolic order which characterised Lacan's 'structuralist'
period, seems to make way for a new problematic—that of jouissance conceived as
particular, opaque, resistant to theorization—the question of the aesthetic is inev-
itably transformed. In Seminar VII, Lacan is careful to quote Sophocles' play in
the original Greek: likewise, the artwork is no longer to be 'translated' by psycho-
analysis, made to yield up a meaning to be purloined or re-positioned by theory.
Sublimation, in its Lacanian definition, now marks the place of an untranslatable
Thing, 'extimate' to the field of representation (which amounts to a precise reversal
of the Freudian sense of the term—sublimation as full translation, the deployment
of the sexual drive by an author-subject).
Lacan's remarks to an American audience in 1975 reveal how this non-Freudian
notion of the aesthetic was bound up with a reconceptualization of some of the
basic psychoanalytic categories. With characteristic sangfroid, Lacan states that
'to explain art with the unconscious seems to me to be highly suspect; but it is
what analysts do. It seems to me more serious to explain art with the symptom'.55
The idea of disconnecting symptom from unconscious—unthinkable for clas-
sical psychoanalysis—is Lacan's radical solution to the problems raised by the psy-
choanalytic approach to aesthetics. The remainder of my thesis will seek to show
how Lacan's reconception of the subject in psychoanalysis ended in a thought of
the symptom inseparable from a certain writing; and to show that this dénoue-
ment offers us a new way to conceive the encounter between psychoanalysis and
the aesthetic.

55 Yale University seminar, 24/11/1975; Conferences et entretiens dans des universités nord-
américaines, Scilicet 6/7 (1976), p. 36.

19
 II. Speaking the Truth: the Lacanian Subject

The truth is grounded in the fact that it speaks {ca pane].

—Jacques Lacan, 19651

It is with a graphematics still to come, rather than with a linguistics dominated by an ancient
phonologism, that psychoanalysis sees itself as destined to collaborate.
—Jacques Derrida, 19662

Sink deep or touch not the Cartesian spring! (FW, 301)

i) Translating the Logos: Lacan and Heidegger

IN FREUD, we have argued, the relation to the aesthetic is always mediated by an

Ubersetzung, a movement of transfer or translation which safeguards the psychoana-
lytic Topik against disruption by the 'extimate', the traumatic; thus, psychoanalysis
is able to incorporate its encounter with art into the body of its doctrine without
altering the language in which it interprets the human psyche. We have seen this
'maintenance' of consistent law clearly enacted, re-presented, in Freud's 'identific-
atory' reading of Michaelangelo's Moses (where the Tables of the law, dislodged by
an 'aesthetic' or bodily force, are finally held in place by the master's hand).
Lacan is famous—or notorious—for seeking to change the language of psy-
choanalysis, to re-invent Freud's discovery by introducing into it a philosophical
vocabulary (and thus produce, according to the title of one American book, a
'philosophy of psychoanalysis'; one which can presumably be consigned to mere
'theoretical' scholasticism). 3 We might begin to examine this supposed transfer-
ence by Lacan of a philosophical discourse to the scene of psychoanalysis—and
explore how it might relate to questions of aesthetics in Lacan's thought—by ex-
amining his encounter ('in the real' of biographical events as well as 'in theory')
with perhaps the most important figure in post-war French philosophy: Martin
Heidegger.
In a seminar with an English-speaking audience in 1989, Jacques-Alain Miller
is asked a question about Heidegger's influence on Lacan. Miller responds with an
anecdote:
An American Heideggerian came to see me some ten years ago, convinced that Lacan
was a follower of Heidegger's. I disappointed him a great deal. . .
The American's supposition was not, though, completely groundless; indeed, it
might have been founded on several of Lacan's own statements. Heidegger seems
1 'Science and Truth', tr. Bruce Fink, Newsletter of the Freudian Field 3, 1989, p. 16.
2 'Freud and the Scene of Writing', in Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass, London: Routledge,
1978, p. 220.
3 Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Chicago: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1986.
4 'An Introduction to Seminars I and II: Lacan's Orientation Prior to 1953 (III)', in Reading
Seminars I and II: Lacan's Return to Freud, ed. R. Feldstein, B. Fink & M. Jaanus, New York:
SUNY, 1996, p. 13.

20
to haunt the margins of Lacan's texts in the 1950s, either vaguely invoked as an
inspiration—as in the parenthetical reference to the 'sovereign significance' of the
philosopher's discourse in l'Instance de la lettre 5 —or 'paraphrased' in tropes which
seem to echo a patently Heideggerian motif (such as the 'being-unto-death' invoked
at the end of Seminar VII, which Miller's questioner mentions).
Elisabeth Roudinesco gives an account of the relations between the two men
which seems to lend weight to this sense of a strangely oblique encounter, one
characterized by an odd mixture of 'transferential' supposition and silence. 6 It was
one of his analysands in the early 1950s, Jean Beaufret, who provided Lacan with his
first chance to meet Heidegger, in a kind of transferential ménage a trois. Beaufret
played a leading role amongst those Heideggerians who wished to dissociate the
master's philosophy from the shadow of his involvement with Nazi Germany before
the war, seeking to present a 'new' Heidegger, purged of his political errors, to
the intellectual community in France. On entering analysis with Lacan, Beaufret
was able to use his connection with Heidegger as a kind of transferential 'trap':
maddened by Lacan's methodical silence during the analytic session, he let slip
one day that 'Heidegger has been talking about you'. 'What did he tell you?'
Lacan instantly demanded, thus revealing a lively 'transferential' interest in the
philosopher's opinion, a flaw puncturing the smooth surface of the analytic silence.7
Through Beaufret, Lacan established contact with Heidegger and arranged to
translate (with the help of a Germanist) a lecture given by the philosopher in 1944,
entitled 'Logos', for publication in the first edition of La Psychanalyse (which ap-
peared in 1956 as the organ of the newly-founded Société française de psychanalyse).
Roudinesco notes two features of this translation which reveal certain 'editorial'
decisions Lacan makes there: firstly, he chose to work with Heidegger's 1951 text,
despite his knowledge that a second version, with substantial revisions, had ap-
peared in 1954. The later text contained, alongside its commentary on a fragment
of Heraclitus, a supplementary paragraph in which Heidegger re-iterated one of his
core beliefs: that only the German language could offer hope of salvation from the
degradation which had permeated Western culture, its estrangement from its vi-
tal Ursprang in pre-Socratic Greece. As well as the 'amputation' of this paragraph
and the explicitly ideological position it emphasizes, Roudinesco points out another
related aspect of Lacan's 'editing'. Where in the original text Heidegger plays on
the homophony between the Greek verb legein and the German Legen to produce
an etymological genealogy linking 'to speak', 'to read' and 'to gather'—and thus
indicate the essential kinship of the languages and their philosophical potential-
Lacan adds to this family the French leguer and legs ('to bequeath'; 'legacy'); thus,
writes Roudinesco, 'reducing to nothing the Heideggerian claim about the supposed
philosophical superiority of the German language'.8
5 Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 175.
6 'Vibrant hommage de Jacques Lacan a Martin Heidegger', in Lacan Avec las Philosophes,
op. cit., pp. 225-36.
7 lbid, p. 229; It should be noted, of course, that Roudinesco's information, deriving from
'private sources' (presumably Beaufret himself, or someone close to him), might itself form part
of the transferential 'circuit' here.
8 jbid, p. 231.

21
 The semantic difference or 'errance' between legein and leguer lends Lacan's
translation a curiously 'Joycean' note: the 'transcription' between languages allow-
ing the signifier to scatter or 'disseminate' sense (as in Finnegans Wake, where, as
Lacan will put it in Seminar XX, le signifiant vient truffer le signiflé, the signifier
'riddles' the signified, packs the domain of meaning with the compact 'truffles' of
linguistic matter) . This quasi-Joycean use of etymology, its deployment for carni-
valesque semiotic dispersal, would seem to clash starkly with Heidegger's notion of
etymology as a 'gathering' (and perhaps to correspond, rather, to his vision of the
amnesic 'degradation' of the West).'°
The translation of Heidegger by Lacan—a translation both literal and figur-
ative, in the sense of conceptual or thematic 'transference'—serves as a support
for specific moments in Lacanian theory, while at others it recedes or fades away.
Roudinesco points to two instances, before and after the appearance of Lacan's ver-
sion of 'Logos' in La Psychanalyse, showing how the reference to Heidegger changes
with the altered status of the reference to linguistics in the 'return to Freud'. In
1953, the famous Rapport de Rome seemed shot through with a Heideggerian con-
ception of truth as 'unveiling' (alethia, Heidegger's theme in 'Logos'); Saussure is
invoked as testimony to the absolute power of language, the primordial significance
of human parole. 1 ' But by 1957, Lacan has moved to a very different conception
of language, as he adopts a structuralist methodology which aspires to a certain
'scientific' rigour: linguistic structure is now the site of truth, where it emerges, not
in some originary revelation, but through impersonal, objective effects of combina-
tion and difference. In L 'Instance de la lettre, Saussure is read alongside Jakobson
to construct language as a symbolic machine, with no place for any 'ontology'.'2
It is as if, Roudinesco suggests, Lacan's homage in the later text to the 'sovereign
significance' of Heidegger's word has, above all, a rhetorical function: to set up a
clear distance between the philosopher's magisterial discourse, on the one hand,
and a psychoanalytic 'science of the signifier', on the other.'3
By 1964, Lacan is able to look back and suggest the absurdity of ever linking
his ideas to those of Heidegger:
for a time at least, I was thought to be obsessed with some kind of philosophy
of language, even a Heideggerian one, whereas only a pro padeutic reference was in-
volved.14
9 Seminar of 9th January 1973 (SXX), op. cit., p. 37.
10 Note that Samuel Beckett chooses exactly the same etymology—lax, legere—to show how
'every word expands with psychological inevitability' in Joyce's 'Work in Progress'; 'Dante...
Bruno.Vico... Joyce', Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in
Progress, Paris: Shakespeare & Co, 1929, p. 11.
"The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis', Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit.,
pp. 30-113; cf. especially pp. 102-4.
' 2 'The agency of the letter in the unconscious; or reason since Freud', Ibid, pp. 146-75; cf. es-
pecially p. 175; see also Lacan's remarks on cybernetics in Seminar II, where he states that 'the
symbolic world is the world of the machine': Seminar of 8th December 1954 (SlI), The Ego in
Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, tr. Sylvana Tomaselli with notes by John
Forrester, Cambridge: CUP, 1988; p. 47.
13 Lacan Avec las Philosophes, op. cit., p. 234.
' 4 Seminar of 22nd January 1964 (SXI), op. cit., p. 18.

22
 So while the reference to Heidegger may have served the interests of his teach-
ing, Lacan now claims, he never espoused the philosophical positions in question.
Indeed, even a very cursory consideration of Heideggerian thought is enough to
indicate its radical incommensurability with any possible 'philosophical reading of
Freud'.
To start with, Heidegger's few comments about psychoanalysis are explicitly
hostile. Freudian metapsychology, declared the philosopher in a seminar in 1966,
amounts to 'a transference of neo-Kantian philosophy onto man'. With its founding
gesture—the positing of an unconscious—psychoanalysis sought to secure a 'flaw-
less' (Liickenlosig) causality in the field of human action, to produce an entirely
comprehensible, representational 'soul'.' 5 Freud was thus, in Heidegger's view, a
typical instance of the degradation, the amnesic errancy of Western thought (which
had begun with Plato): its 'forgetfulness of being', its enthrallment to the idea, the
Vorstellung which could only re-present before a subject violently split off from an
object. Any attempt to somehow re-invent Freud's legacy through an explicitly
philosophical turn (one which would in fact come to make precisely the subject
its cardinal signifier) must surely have seemed to Heidegger a hopeless dead-end;
his few remarks about Lacan indicate a lack of interest, a failure of 'transference',
which verges on a refusal even to acknowledge the psychoanalyst's existence.'6
Throughout his lifetime, Heidegger's philosophy worked with determined con-
sistency toward its ultimate aim: to renew the language of thinking by breaking
out of the 'onto-theological' closure of Western metaphysics. If we could locate as
the principal 'target' of this philosophical 'destruction' the subject of representa-
tion, Lacan's definition in 1964 of the psychoanalytic subject—one 'represented by a
signifier ... for another signifier' 17 —clearly shows Lacan's move to introduce philo-
sophical terms into psychoanalysis to have been emphatically anti-Heideggerian. If
Lacan's 'logocentrism' (to adopt a term of Derrida's we will return to) is vividly
illustrated by his choosing to translate a text by Heidegger entitled 'Logos', what
will become clear by the time of the major 'structuralist' texts is that this centring
of the human universe on a logic of the signifier is in no sense complementary to
a Heideggerian view of language: it overlooks or elides precisely the 'ontological
difference' essential to that view. For Lacan, analysis of language is always situated
at an 'ontic' level, that of mere beings: the operation of the signifier is inevitably
mundane, indissociable from the world of cultural exchange and the production of
meaning.'8
The stubborn privileging of the subject in Lacan's work—where it is always
coupled with the Saussurian signifier in an inseparable 'doublet'—signals its debt
to a metaphysical tradition Heidegger set out to think beyond, to 'exceed'. Jacques
Derrida notes how in 1953 Lacan can be seen caught between irreconcilable philo-
sophemes, striving to bring about an impossible 'translation' between Heideg-
15 Martin Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987, P. 260.
' 6 See lisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: Esquisse d'une vie, histoire d'un système de pensée,
Paris: Fayard, 1993, PP. 305-6.
17 'Position de l'inconscient', Ecrits, op. cit., p. 835.
18 For a clear and concise discussion of 'ontological difference' in Heidegger, see George Steiner,
Heidegger, London: Fontana, 1992, pp. 80-84.

23
 gerian alethia ('the birth of truth in speech') and the representational subject:
this amounts to an attempt to 'resituate Dasein in the subject' (which, Derrida
comments laconically, is rather 'surprising').19
What is shown by Lacan's strange 'transference' to Heidegger—the search for
a philosophical confirmation of his attempt to re-think the unconscious as a dit-
mension, a place where truth is spoken—is a certain opening of Lacanian theory
onto a way of thinking about language other than that which, centred on a lin-
guistic subject, it subsequently adopts. It was by engaging with writing—first of
all 'empirically' in literary texts, subsequently in an effort to develop an instance,
the 'letter', distinct from the signifier—that this theory eventually came to open
again, exposing the 'subject' it had developed to a radical mise en cause. In 1975,
just before Heidegger's death, Lacan travelled with Catherine Millot to visit the
philosopher, at Freiburg. For an hour, Lacan talked about his latest work with
Borromean knots; Heidegger remained silent.2°

ii) Return to Descartes: the Lacanian cogito

Did Lacan in fact, then, 'introduce' philosophy to psychoanalysis, reformulate

Freud's discovery in philosophical terms? For Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen, 'even the
most cursory reading of the Ecrits' is enough to uncover a whole philosophical
discourse—'dialectic', 'truth', 'being', in addition to the central pillar, 'subject'—
supporting the edifice of Lacanian theory. 2 ' If, for Freud, 'the first shibboleth of
psycho-analysis' had been the absolute resistance of philosophers to the very idea of
anything psychical which was not reducible to consciousness, 22 Lacan is at once less
naive about philosophy and more explicitly invested in it, argues Borch-Jakobsen;
his conclusion is that Lacan's Besetzung, his stake in philosophy, finds its fullest
realization in the subject of representation.23
Psychoanalysis is 'certainly not a philosophy', declares Lacan in 1974.24 As
we have already seen, Lacan was not, in any manifest or unequivocal sense, a
Heideggerian; yet we might take the question with which Heidegger opens one of
his seminars— Was ist das—die Philosophie ?—as an appropriate starting-point for
a consideration of the status of the 'philosophemes' in Lacanian thought. 25 'What is
this thing—philosophy?' asks Heidegger, refusing to allow the astonishment opened
by the question to contract into any received or academic doza. Lacan's confident
distinction between psychoanalysis and philosophy comes very late in a career in
which the two discourses have been constantly entangled, to form a rich theoretical
hybrid which one would seek in vain to separate into 'philosophical' and 'analytic'
' 9 Jacques Derrida, 'Le facteur de Ia verité', in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and
Beyond, tr. Alan Bass, Chicago: UCP, 1987, p. 470.
20 Elisabeth Roudinesco, in Lacan Avec les Philosophes, op. cit., p. 235.
21 'The Alibis of the Subject', tr. Douglas Brick, in The Emotional Tie, op. cit., p. 157
22 The Ego and the Id (1923), SE IXX, p. 13
23 See in particular Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen, Lacan: the Absolute Master, tr. Douglas Brick,
Stanford: SUP, 1991.
24 'Freud àjamais', interview conducted by Emilia Granzatto in Panorama, November 21, 1974,
p. 160.
25 What is Philosophy? tr. W. Kiuback & J. T. Wilde, New York: Twayne, 1958.

24
components. The famous 'return to Freud' announced in the Rapport de Rome is
preceded, seven years before (in 1946), by the 'return to Descartes' Lacan invokes
in Propos sur la Causalité Psychique. 26 Likewise, Lacan's constant re-writing of
the Freudian 'ethic' Wo Es War, soil Ich Werden is matched by his re-workings of
the Cartesian cogito: we might read the two enunciations side by side as the double
inscription of the Lacanian subject.
Why does Lacan wish to use a term—subject—which is almost entirely absent
from Freud's texts? Claude Conté gives us a first response:
If Lacan introduces the term without fear of 'getting involved with philosophy', this is
because what is in question is the speaking subject, the pure subject of the utterance;
and this is what allowed him to rejoin the dialogue with philosophers Freud wished
so strongly to avoid.27
The speaking subject, eventually to be given the name parlêtre ('speaking-being'
written as a punning neologism), would thus be Lacan's 'alibi', his pretext for
'importing' the philosophical problem of the subject to the scene of analysis. As we
will see, this equation of the subject and the 'punctual' act of speech will turn out
to be decisive: it immediately cuts out the Lacanian subject, sharply delineating
whatever potential 'dialogue' with philosophy it might entail.
The Lacanian subject has taken on its essential form by the mid 1960s, around
the time of the foundation of the Ecole freudienne de Paris. Our approach to
it should begin by noting the traces it bears of the work of two thinkers Lacan
admired, dubbing them his 'masters': the philosopher Alexandre Kojève and the
historian of science Alexandre Koyré. 28 If these oddly similar names refer to very
different theoretical projects—in one case, an idiosyncratic reading of Hegel, in the
other, the epistemology of modern science—they nonetheless converge, at the most
important point, in Lacan's theory of the subject: that of the cut, understood as
constitutive of modernity, defining the modern subject. For Kojève, modernity was
divided from antiquity by a radical coupure or 'epistemological break', indicating
an absolute lack of synonymy between these historical moments. 29 As a historian,
Koyré sought to locate this moment of historical rupture at the level of specific
material events: in the emergence, with the work of Gallileo, of modern science as
a mathematized and empirical system of thought.3°
Lacan opens his seminar on 'The Object of Psychoanalysis' (SXII), in 1965,
by adapting this notion of the 'cut' to the theory of the subject in psychoanalysis:
Might I say that I established the status of the subject in psychoanalysis last year?
I went so far as to develop a structure which accounts for the state of splitting or
Spaitung at the point at which the psychoanalyst detects it in his praxis.3'
26 Ecrits, op. cit., p. 267;163.
27 'Lacan et la fonction du symbolisme', in Lacan Avec tes Philosophes, op. cit., p. 110.
28 For a concise account of the theses of Kojeve and Koyré, see Jean-Claude Mimer, 'Lacan
and the Ideal of Science', in Lacan and the Human Sciences, ed. Alexandre Leupin, University of
Nebraska Press, 1991, pp. 27-42.
29 cf. Mimer, ibid, p. 28.
30 Ibid, p. 29.
31 'Science and Truth', op. cit., p. 4.

25
 Invoking Koyré as his 'guide', Lacan goes on to locate the historical moment
at which the subject emerges as 'an essential correlate of science', in 'the moment
Descartes inaugurates, that goes by the name of cogito'.32
The modern subject, first articulated in the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, con-
stitutes, Lacan adds, 'a division between knowledge and truth'. If the hyperbolic
doubt of the Cartesian thinker encompasses the entire field of positive or substan-
tial knowledge, only the 'punctual and vanishing' instance of its utterance—'I am
thinking, therefore I am' (or in Lacan's version which emphasizes the spoken qual-
ity: 'I am thinking "therefore I am" ') 33 —can be the evanescent but indubitable
site of the subject's truth, its basis as subject of science. Freud's discovery of the
unconscious would have been unthinkable, Lacan contends, without this primordial
split opening up the domain of modern science; thus, he is able claim in Seminar
XI that 'Freud's method is Cartesian—in the sense that he sets out from the basis
of the subject of certainty'.34
It is worth pausing over this claim, with its resituation of psychoanalysis within
a rigidly-defined modernity, as part of a field whose epistemic foundations were es-
tablished by Descartes. For Freud, the Cartesian cogito surely embodied in its
purest form the philosophical Verwerfung, total rejection, of the unconscious—
exemplifying the supreme self-assurance of a consciousness blind to its 'castrated'
position as the play-thing of drives. On one level—at one moment of his theory-
Lacan agrees with such a position, locating in the cogito a manifestation of the ego,
an instance of pure méconnaissance; thus, the early paper on 'The Mirror Stage'
begins by warning that psychoanalytic experience 'leads us to oppose any philo-
sophy directly issuing from the Cogito'. 35 Understood as imaginary self-presence,
the illusory centring of the subject by an 'omnipotent' ego, the Cartesian 'sub-
ject of certainty' could be nothing but an impediment to analytic work (the ego is
'structured exactly like a symptom', as Lacan puts it in Seminar J).36
However, a very different understanding of the cogito supports Lacan's theory
of the subject, which begins in an effort to distinguish the 'I' of an utterance -
the Ich in Freud's Wo Es War—from the 'orthopaedic' straight-jacket of the ego.
This distinction is bound up with Lacan's use of structural linguistics to separate
the operation of the signifier—effects of combination and difference at work on
the 'surface' of language—from any semantic 'depth' or referential substance. In
32 Ibid., p. 5.
33 Ibid., p. 13 (The translation of the cogito is from Descartes, Philosophical Writings tr. J. Cot-
tingham, Cambridge, 1986). Lacan's use of quotation marks in this version of the cogito also draws
attention to the logical problem of 'mention' (which had been isolated by analytic philosophers
such as Ryle), by which a linguistic 'object' is de-coupled from the logic of a statement, and thus
set apart from its semantic or conceptual content; the punning description of the unconscious as a
dit-mension comprises another oblique (and trans-linguistic) reference to 'mention', which fits in
with Lacan's desire to theorize an unconscious 'logic' in cybernetic terms. Cf. Bruce Fink, 'The
Nature of Unconscious Thought or Why No One Ever Reads Lacan's Postface to the 'Seminar on
'The Purloined Letter'', in Reading Seminars I and II, op. cit., pp. 173-90.
34 Seminar of 29th January 1964 (SXI), op. cit., p. 35.
35 'The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience'
(1949), Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 1.
36 Seminar of 13th January 1954 (SI), Freud's Papers on Technique, tr. with notes by John
Forrester, ed. J-A Miller, Cambridge: CUP, 1988, p. 16.

26
'Science and Truth', this is developed through a critique of 'deviations' from Freud's
teaching (such as Jung's), which aimed to 'incarnate' the subject, to 'reinstate a
subject endowed with depths ... ie., a subject constituted by a relationship ... to
knowledge'. 37 For Lacan, the subject has no other location than the 'punctual and
vanishing' moment of signification; it is literally constituted by the flickering pulse
of signifiers as they are combined and displaced in enunciation. Thus, any 'ego
psychology', or hermeneutical approach to analysis, which would seek to explore
layers of meaning in the analysand's speech or collaborate with the patient in
his search for self-understanding, would constitute the abandonment of Freud's
'Cartesian' method: the obliteration of the subject as pure Spaltung, substanceless
linguistic instance.38
The Lacanian cogito represents a subject split off from the ego, radically di-
vorced from the sense-making realm of the imaginary; so that analysis sets up an
antinomy between subject and ego: 'it is in the disintegration of the imaginary
unity constituted by the ego that the subject finds the signifying material of his
symptoms'. 39 This 'signifying material', however, is in no sense equivalent to the
Cartesian res cogitans, as Lacan makes clear in Seminar XI:
In effect, if anything is established by the cogito, it is the register of thought, in so far
as it is extracted from an opposition to extension—a fragile status, but a sufficient
status in the order of the signifying constitution. Let us say that it is by taking its
place at the level of the enunciation that the cogito acquires its certainty.40
The subject can never constitute a res extensa or substantive body; Lacan reads
the move whereby Descartes posits a 'thinking thing' as the basis of the cogito as
a lapse from the precarious level of pure Enonciation to the security of a meta-
physical 'ground'. (As we are about to see, this characteristic of the Lacanian
subject—its 'bodiless' verbal essence, split off from any hypokeimenon or substan-
tial continuity—has a very precise philosophical paternity: that of Kojève).
As early as his first seminar, Lacan anticipates the later theorisation of the
subject as radically non-ontological by stressing the need to think of a subject
irreducible to any 'reality principle'. In psychoanalysis, he states in 1954,
What is at stake is the realisation of the truth of the subject, like a dimension peculiar
to it which must be detached in its distinctiveness [originalité] in relation to the very
notion of reality... 41
Just as the subject is distinct from the ego, so its auto-enunciation severs it from its
environment, opening up the need to formulate, beyond the traditional opposition
of Innenwelt and Umwelt, a specific, autonomous dimension of the speaking subject.
Here, Lacan implicitly invokes the central theme of Kojève's work: the subject as
annEantisation, a moment of the 'annihilating' force of language, where human
37 'Science and Truth', op. cit., pp. 6-7.
38 Slavoj Ziek notes that in his early work, before the structuralist formulation of the subject,
Lacan adopted precisely the hermeneutic approach he was later to criticize; see 'Hegel with Lacan;
or the Subject and its Cause', in Reading Seminars I and II, op. cit., pp. 397-413.
59 'The Freudian thing' (1955), Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 137.
40 Seminar of 22nd April 1964 (SXI), op. cit., p. 140.
41 Seminar of 20th January 1954 (SI), op. cit., p. 21.

27
desire manifests itself as 'the revelation of an emptiness', the negation of the inert
objectality of nature. 42 This 'para-Heideggerian' 43 view of language is referred to
more directly in the 1953 Rapport de Rome:
Thus the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death
constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire.44
This Kojevean tag—the symbol as 'murder of the thing'—will be given a prom-
inent place in Lacan's theory of the subject: the subject carves out a space for
itself—a space that is its 'self'—in the real; its self-representation is essentially an
effect of negation.
If in this respect Lacanian theory drew on Heideggerian motifs, in another
it was resolutely opposed to Heidegger's thought: in its insistence on the repres-
entational status of the subject. The introduction of a transcendent subject to
psychoanalysis clearly raised immediate questions of theoretical consistency: how
could this 'voidance' of nature, this constitutive negativity with its eternal desire,
co-exist with a Freudian 'materialism', the privileging of the concrete stuff of libid-
inal bodies?
Lacan's adoption of a fully-fledged structuralism by the 1960s exacerbated this
theoretical problem of the subject, presenting it in a more sharply paradoxical guise.
Structuralism in its 'purest' form, as exemplified by the structural anthropology of
Claude Levi-Strauss, had no need of a theory of the subject. Indeed, it usually
viewed any such theory with suspicion, as it sought to extend Saussurian linguist-
ics to develop a scientific analysis of sign-systems, in opposition to the humanist
existentialism of a Sartre (whose inspiration, of course, had been Heidegger). For
Lacan to invoke 'the mathematics of the signifier' in 'Science and Truth' would
seem to align his vision of psychoanalysis squarely with a semiological project like
that of Levi-Strauss; for there to be a place for the subject in such a methodology,
it would have to be, Lacan deduces, 'a non-saturated but calculable subject', one
reducible to the systematic logic of signification. 45 But how would it then be pos-
sible to retain anything of the philosophical sense of 'subject'—always, in the end,
the mark of a certain transcendence or irreducibility?
The 'only index' he can find, Lacan claims, for the change in the status of the
subject brought in by structuralism is a topological one. The 'generating sign of the
Moebius strip' in the form of an 'internal eight' is invoked to show how in struc-
turalism 'the subject is, as it were, internally excluded from its object'. 46 Here,
as Joel Dor argues, the introduction of topology (or as Dor would prefer, 'topolo-
gery', a term he borrows from Juan-David Nasio to denote Lacan's transformation
of mathematical symbols into stylistic motifs) serves a crucial function in Lacanian
42 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the reading of Heget, (1947) tr. James H. Nichols, Ithaca,
N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1969, P. 13. Lacan attended Kojéve's lectures at the École des
Hautes Etudes in the years leading up to World War Two, to hear expounded a theory of the
human subject as, in essence, annihilation.
43 1n Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen's phrase, from 'The Alibis of the Subject', op. cit., p. 168.
44 'The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis', Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit.,
p. 104.
45 'Science and Truth', op. cit., pp. 10-11.
p. 10.

28
theory: it allows it the appearance of 'mathematization', while in fact it opens a
metaphorical space: the space, precisely, of the subject. 47 Topology is brought in as
a supplement to structuralism, to support the paradoxical notion that the subject
somehow 'exceeds' the signifiers which nevertheless (according to a central thesis
of Lacan's teaching) constitute it.
In the seminar which marks the beginning of the 'topologisation' of Lacan's
teaching, Identification (SIX, 1961-2, unpublished), the torus emerges as the em-
bodiment of 'certain properties related to the dynamics of the desiring subject
and more generally to the function of the subject as such', as Dor puts it. 48 The
topological figure could represent something of the subject only if understood dia-
chronically, as embodying a certain 'scansion' to show the 'metonymic' logic of
desire. Likewise, the Moebius strip, introduced in the same seminar, could only
provide a 'monstration' of the subject if it was topologically transformed, by the
act of cutting it, from a 'non-orientable' to an 'orientable' object. 49 Juan-David
Nasio shows how this relates to the theory of the subject:
it is not sufficient to represent the subject in space, we also need the act of cutting,
of tracing a closed curve. The act of saying is of the same order, since the signifier
determines and splits the subject in half: it represents it and makes it vanish.50
By supplementing the synchronic logic of the signifier with the temporal logic
of the act (tracing, 'scanding', cutting), topology figured the 'ex-sistence' of the
subject in the symbolic dimension where it appeared; (with 'ex-sistence', Lacan
deployed an etymological trope which Heidegger had used to designate a debased,
factitious 'existence' in contrast to authentic Being; as we will see, its use by Lacan
varied with the changing emphases of his teaching, but in this context it underlines
the non-ontological status of the subject).
If Lacan uses the term aphanisis (adapted, with a little irony, from Ernest
Jones' work, where it designated the fading away of libido) to indicate the subject's
relation to signification—disappearing the very moment it is represented, constantly
'fading' 51 —it was by deploying topological figures that he sought to give that sub-
ject a mise en scene beyond the semiological axes of structuralism. Responding to
the questions of a group of philosophy students in 1966, Lacan insists that topology
constitutes a privileged showing-forth of the structure of the subject, without which
'it is impossible to grasp anything of the real of its economy'.52
The idea that through topology Lacanian theory could bring within reach some-
thing beyond the logic of the signifier was to be given a new impetus in the 1970s,
when Lacan's interest shifted from the topology of surfaces, with its dramatization
47 Joël Dor, 'The Epistemological Status of Lacan's Mathematical Paradigms', in Disseminating
Lacan, ed. David Pettigrew & Francois Raffoul, New York: SUNY, 1996, PP. 109-121.
48 Ibid, p. 110.
49 cf. Joel Dor, Introduction a Ia lecture de Lacan, 2: La structure du sujet, Paris: Denoël, 1992,
pp. 129-138.
50 Juan-David Nasio, 'The Concept of the Subject of the Unconscious', in Disseminating Lacan,
op. cit., p. 30.
51 cf. Seminar of 3rd June 1964(SXI), op. cit., pp. 216-29.
52 Jacques Lacan, 'Réponses a des étudiants en philosophie sur l'objet de la psychanalyse',
Cahiers pour I'Analyse 3, Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 7.

29
 of paradoxes resistant to the logic of discourse, to the very different topological field
of knot-theory. With knots, as we will see, Lacanian theory sought to move outside
the theoretical space in which it had situated the subject, into a domain explicitly
declared to be beyond metaphor. In the strict terms Lacan set out to lend theoret-
ical (and diagnostic) coherence to the field of analysis, the non-metaphorical space
of knot-theory would fall within the logic of foreclosure. In order to approach these
theoretical problematics, we need to turn to foreclosure, to explore this concept's
key position in Lacan's theory of the subject.

iii) Foreclosure: Shaking the Rock of Gibraltar

'The unconscious is the discourse of the Other': Lacan's well-known formula of 1956
highlights one of the ostensible paradoxes at the heart of his work—the indissoci-
ability of the theory of the subject and the concept of the Other. 53 Jacques-Alain
Miller has shown how Lacan's use of topology in the 1960s makes visible a crucial
aspect of this 'other scene' of subjectivity. '[T]he place of the Other (which is the
unconscious and discourse), for Lacan, has no depth', writes Miller; he is thus able
to adapt the triple 's' of Lacan's formula for transference (sujet suppose savoir) in
order to designate the subject as sujet sans substance: a pure being of surface, a
subject lacking any intuitive essence or interiority.54
Foreclosure, the term developed by Lacan to account for the aetiological struc-
ture of psychosis, has a strange, double history: if its place in analytic theory was
first to designate a crisis in the Other at the level of an individual's history, it
would eventually lead to a theoretical crisis—the radical problematization of the
concept of the Other—which we hope to show can be conceived as the symptomatic
return of the 'substance' banished by the theory of the subject.
The notion of the Other is first introduced by Lacan in 1955, as part of a
reconceptualizion of Freudian topography. L 'Autre is distinguished—as the site
of the authentic speech of the subject—from l'autre, the 'specular' other of the
imaginary domain, an other confronted by the ego in a 'fundamentally alienated'
identificatory relation. 55 By the time Lacan has begun to invoke the 'mathematics
of the signifier' in 1965, the Other has developed into a principle of representational
consistency denoting the mechanism of a symbolic machine, in which the subject is
represented in a chain of signifiers, free from any trace of ontological particularity.
As Lacan assembled this theoretical machine, finding its components in structural
linguistics and the Kojevean subject-as-void, he simultaneously re-worked the Freu-
dian distinction between neurosis and psychosis to formulate the notion of a primal
moment (a decision) constitutive of an individual's relation to the Other. Slavoj
Ziek gives a clear indication of how this theory of a 'decisive' moment situates
Lacan in relation to the philosophical subject he wishes stubbornly to retain:
53 'Le Séminaire sur 'La Lettre Volée', Ecrits, op. cit., p. 16.
54 Jacques-Alain Miller, 'La Topologie dans l'ensemble de l'enseignement de Lacan', Quarto
2, September 1981, p. 16. For the concept of sujet suppose savoir see Seminar VIII (1960-1),
La &ansfert, ed. J-A Miller, Paris: Seuil, 1991; or for a succinct account, see Dylan Evans,
Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 196-8.
55 Seminar of 25th May 1955 (SIT), op. cit., pp. 235-47.

30
 Lacan ... insists that our 'being-in-the-world' is already the outcome of a certain
primordial choice: the psychotic experience bears witness to the fact that it is quite
possible not to choose the world—a psychotic subject is not 'in the world', it lacks the
clearance [Lichiung] that opens up the world. (For that reason Lacan establishes a
link between Heidegger's Lichtung and the Freudian Bejahung, the primordial 'Yes',
the assertion of being, as opposed to the psychotic Verwerfung.) In short, 'subject'
designates this primordial impossible-forced choice by means of which we choose (or
not) to be 'in the world'—that is, to exist as the 'there' of being.56
'Forciusion' is the translation Lacan jroposes in 1956 (in his third Seminar, The
Psychoses) for Freud's term Verwerfung. 57 The adoption of the term comes at
the end of a prolonged meditation on the 'discourse of the Other'—the linguistic
modalities mediating the subject's existence—whose principal aim was to recon-
ceive the different modes of 'negation' in Freudian theory by relating them to
philosophical ways of thinking negativity, to provide the rigorous foundations of
a subject of speech in psychoanalysis. In February 1954, Lacan turned to a philo-
sopher for assistance in this exploration of language, inviting the leading Hegelian
scholar Jean Hyppolite to give a presentation on Freud's 1925 text Die Vernein-
ung ('Negation', SE XIX, 233_9).58 Hyppolite's talk unearths the original German
terms—Bejahung, Vereinigung, Verwerfung —from the French translation which
had sometimes falsified them (obliterating, Hyppolite claims, the 'assymmetry'
between different senses of negation for Freud by using the single term negation).
Lacan is able to build on this to propose that Bejahung, 'affirmation' or 'yes-saying',
constitutes 'the condition such that something exists for a subject', and that the
absence of such an affirmative moment (which in concluding Seminar III he will
term 'foreclosure') can be situated as the Urszene of psychosis. The case of the
Wolf-man provides an example:
There was no Bejahung for him, no realisation of the genital plane. There is no trace
of this plane in the symbolic register. The only trace we have of it is the emergence,
not at all in his history but really in the external world, of a minor hallucination.59
Because of the Wolf-man's Verwerfung 'it has always been for him as if the genital
plane did not exist'. This radical failure of symbolization consigns the individual
to an experience of infancy ('speechlessness'), the 'feeling of a catastrophe that
is so inexpressible that he doesn't even dare to talk of it'. In the Wolf-man's
hallucination, an encounter with 'a primitive . . non-symbolized real' takes the
place of one mediated by the register of human discourse.
Foreclosure designates, then, a breakdown in the relation to the Other: the
failure of the subject to assume its place as speaking-being, to play its part in a
consistent scene of representation; in other words, the failure to be a subject, stricto
sensu. Kojève's emphasis on the subject as a force of 'nihilation' could be combined
56 'Taking Sides: A Self-Interview', in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Sir Essays on Woman
and Causality, op. cit., p. 185.
57 Seminar of 4th July 1956 (SIll), The Psychoses, ed. J-A Miller, tr. with notes Russell Grigg,
London: Routledge, p. 321.
58 'A spoken commentary on Freud's Verneinung by Jean Hyppolite', Appendix to Seminar I,
Freud's Papers on Technique, op. cit., pp. 289-97.
59 Seminar of 10th February 1954 (SI), Ibid, p. 58.

31
with a close reading of the Freudian text to formulate the psychotic experience as
a 'return in the real': in the absence of the symbolizing negativity of the subject,
consciousness would be invaded by a crushing, meaningless presence—the psychotic
symptom. The idea of a 'real' detached from any Freudian conception of 'reality'—
'beyond the reality principle', as the title of a 1936 text already announces—will
become the central focus of Lacan's later seminars; it can be seen in nuce in this
early concern with the 'disintegrated' experience of the psychotic.
If foreclosure entails a linguistic catastrophe, for Lacan this must immediately
constitute the collapse of any potential for social existence. Just as the infant
Wolf-man is unable to give words to the traumatic hallucination and thus fails
to implicate the other in a dialectic of discursive recognition, so the foreclosed
horizon of the psychotic disables the opening of any 'intersubjectivity'. The Other
is inseparably linguistic and social, as is clearly expressed in Lacan's 1964 formula
where 'a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier'.6°
As a good Freudian, Lacan aims to situate this defining moment of social
existence—the opening of intersubjective recognition or its 'autistic' collapse—in
the primal situation of the new-born child, whose Hilflosigkeit, 'helplessness', throws
it necessarily upon the care of others, into a social tangle of desires and symptoms
(as Freud had argued) •61 In this sense, foreclosure entailed not simply a breakdown
of language, a child's failure to 'fit' its place as speaking subject properly, but a
crisis in its relation to the immediate familial environment. In Seminar III, Lacan
specifies this crisis as bearing upon the 'function' of the 'paternal metaphor': what
is foreclosed, in the aetiology of psychosis, is the Name-of-the-Father.62
By thus linking it to paternity, Lacan sought to prevent the concept of fore-
closure from being understood as a merely linguistic phenomenon, to embed it in
the material situation of a child's first encounter with the Other (in its first real-
ization as parental desire) and thus accord the concept a place in the structural
determination of a subject's destiny. Reacting partly to the contemporary Kleinian
privileging of the child-mother relation, Lacan wished to re-centre psychoanalysis
on the figure of the father: the central question of Freud's work, declares Lacan
in 1957, is 'What is it to be a father?' 63 Throughout his career, Lacan seeks to
address this question by reformulating it in linguistic terms—as a question, that is,
of nomination.
In its first development during the 1950s, the Nom-du-Père brought the Freu-
dian Oedipal drama—the Nom of the father punning the non of the interdiction
of incest—together with the Kojèvean subject of symbolic nihilation. As a syn-
thesis of law and desire (as manque-à-être, 'lack-of-being'), the Nom-du-Père was
the ideal, normalizing mediation of the child's relation to its mother's jouissance.
In 'On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis', Lacan gave
this starkly misogynistic scenario an 'algebraic' form:
60 Seminar of 27th May 1964 (SXI), op. cit., p. 207.
61 cf. Freud, 'Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety' (1926), SE XX.
62 Seminar of 27th June 1956 (SIll), op. cit., p. 306.
63 Seminar of 6th March 1957 (Sl y), La relation d'objet, ed. J-A Miller, Paris: Seuil, 1994,
pp. 204-5.

32
 Name-of-the-Father Desire of the Mother
—+ Name-of-the-Father (Phl )
Desire of the Mother Signified to the subject

'Let us now try to conceive', Lacan continues,

of a circumstance of the subjective position in which, to the appeal of the Name-
of-the-Father responds, not the absence of the real father, for this absence is more
than compatible with the presence of the signifier, but the inadequacy of the signifier
itself.64
This formula and the circumstance of its breakdown form a densely-woven
summary of Lacan's first response to Freud's 'Oedipal' question about paternity.
It is worth tracing its strangely literal 'algebra' carefully. The Nom-du-Père, its
conceptual status indicated by the hyphenation, is introduced in ascendancy over
the 'Desire of the Mother', something non-conceptual which dominates (literally,
sits on top of) the infant subject in search of some signiflé, some semantic control;
here, Lacan takes up the Freudian notion that adult sexuality presents the child
with a Rätsel, a traumatic enigma—but situates this bewildering otherness firmly
on the side of the mother. The 'result' of the 'paternal metaphor', its substitutive
intervention, is a new 'sum' in which the Other (not a zero, as one might think
on the basis of the English translation) is set 'over' something new—a capitalized
Phallus—inside a parenthesis in turn dominated by the Name-of-the-Father (placed
as if to 'multiply' what is in parenthesis).
The Name-of-the-Father, comments Serge André, 'allows the child to outline
what the desire of the Mother means for him; it is as it is determined by the function
of the phallus that this desire becomes legible to him, that its meaning becomes
less obscure'. 65 We will explore further the importance and scope of the supposed
'legibility' introduced to the relation between adult and child; but the 'function'
of the Name-of-the-Father is clearly that of a kind of hyperbolic signifier, linking
up with the Phallus to provide 'a signifier of jouissance', as André puts it. 66 The
Phallus is, as it were, the trump-card of the Nom-du-Père, a signifier with which it
orients maternal desire away from an exclusive absorption in the child, rendering
the Oedipal triangle consistent, non-psychotic; it is 'the signifier which does not
have a signified', Lacan will remark much later in Encore (which might be as much
as to say that it signifies nothing; an idea to which we will return).67
The foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father entails, not the mere empirical ab-
sence of a father figure, but the carence, the absolute lack of the signifier. The
deliberate ambiguity of Lacan's phrase here underlines the status of the Nom-du-
Père as a 'Master signifier': the lack of this signifier constitutes the lack of the
signifier, the breakdown of the entire 'battery of signifiers' in the Other. Bruce
Fink's commentary is revealing:
a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis' (1957-8), Ecrits: A Selec-
tion, op. cit., p. 200.
65 Serge André, 'Clinique et noeud borroméen', Actes de l'école de Ia cause freudienne 1982,
p. 88 (my translation).
66 fl,jd, p. 89.
67 Seminar of 13th March 1973 (SXX), op. cit., p. 75.

33
 The Name-of-the-Father is thus our Rock of Gibraltar. Lacan says that it is a signifier,
but it is quite clearly different from most, if not all, others. If one word in a language
becomes antiquated or goes out of style, other related terms tend to take up the
slack; in other words, their meanings broaden to include those of the word that
has disappeared. The Name-of-the-Father, on the contrary, is neither fungible nor
pronounceable.68
An imperial outpost of the Other in the wilds of maternal desire, the Name-
of-the-Father erects a 'solid barrier' between mother and child, continues Fink,
which in psychosis breaks down, allowing anarchic libidinal forces to 'overwhelm
and invade' the subject. (Freud, of course, had situated castration as the irreducible
'rock' with which analysis ultimately collides; for Fink to seek to re-invent such a
metaphor in an overtly imperialistic style, with recourse to what in Ulysses Stephen
Dedalus dubs 'the brutish empire' (U, 485), raises political questions I hope to be
able to return to).69
The phallic, monolithic connotations of the Name-of-the-Father in Fink's pre-
sentation is belied by the fate of the concept in the development of Lacan's work.
If in 1957, Lacan's formula of the paternal metaphor includes a single, capitalized
Nom-du-Père, perhaps recalling the Freudian Urvater in its non-fungible singular-
ity, by 1963 he gives as the title for his seminar Les noms du père, thus seeming to
reduce the erstwhile Name to the status of a nom commun. Only a single session
of the names of the father was delivered before the seminar was interrupted by
what Lacan was to call his 'excommunication' from the I.P.A., and the subsequent
institutional crisis leading to the foundation of the École freudienne de Paris in
1964. (Lacan was to interpret this disruption of his teaching as an indication that
the world was not ready for him to encroach further upon the prerogative of pa-
ternity). 70 He never resumed Les noms du père, but a decade later gave as the
title for Seminar XXI, Les non-dupes errent, rewriting the 'lost' seminar as a comic
pun: 'those who are not duped (who don't 'fall for it'), go astray'. 7' This was to
suggest that a feature of psychosis was the refusal to be 'taken in' by the ruse of
the nom-du-père, the failure to identify with the fictional structures which would
have allowed the dimension of the subject's truth to open.
Serge André characterises the evolution of Lacan's teaching as in essence 'a
progressive purification of the Name-of-the-Father'. 72 In effect, this amounts to
the gradual dissociation of nomination and paternity, the increasing recognition
that it is not so much the name of the father that has such crucial significance
in an individual's destiny, but rather the separation it effects; the separation from
a traumatic real (which will be marked, from 1960 onwards, as objet a) in which
representation affords the subject a space, a position of identification. This shift
is bound up with the changing conception of the Other in Lacan's work: if the
'Freudian' father of the 1950s provides the signifier of a 'complete', consistent Other,
68 Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject, op. cit., p. 74.
69 Freud, 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable' (1937), SE XXIII, p. 27.
70 cf. Serge Andrb, 'Clinique et noeud borromben', op. cit., p. 88; and also Jacques Lacan,
'Excommunication', the introduction to Seminar XI, op. cit., pp. 1-13.
71 Le SEminaire, Livre XXI (1973-4), Las non-dupes errant, unpublished.
72 André, 'Clinique et noeud borroméen', op. cit., p. 88.

34
 serving as the guarantee of a certain representational closure, in the 1960s Lacan
will increasingly emphasize that the Other is 'barred' (Autre to be written as
lacking systemic coherence. By the time Lacan writes les non-dupes errent he has
moved into a predominantly topological mode of teaching, aiming to theorise the
various modalities of sup pléance, the 'suppletion' or making-up-for this lacking or
dysfunctional Other, the breakdown of its representational economy. By proposing
variable, plural 'names of the father' in 1963, Lacan had already begun, in a sense, to
undermine the theoretical coherence of the concept; what was there to differentiate
a name of the father from another kind of suppléance that interested Lacan in the
1970s—the symptom? -
Let us return to the quotation from Ziek, where foreclosure is figured as a
refusal to say 'Yes' to existence and instantiate the Lichtung of the symbolic, human
universe. The spoken dimension of this primordial Bejahung should be stressed, for
here Ziek is invoking a specific aspect of Lacan's theory, the concept of the subject
as parlêtre, 'speaking-being'. Another way of approaching foreclosure would be to
think of it as the 'choice' (with no sense of voluntaristic 'agency') of writing over
speech, the infant's refusal of the 'legibility' of desire introduced by the Name-
of-the-Father, its preference of a particular kind of jouissance to the 'mortifying'
universal dimension of the symbolic. This would be to invoke a peculiar sense of
'writing', one which in the last period of his work Lacan seeks to outline by inventing
new forms of theory. The Ecrit is finally posited as an instance utterly distinct from
the signifier, with a radically different 'function' in the signifying economy of the
subject.73
But before we can begin to understand the special status accorded to the letter
by Lacan in the 1970s, we first have to work through an earlier drama in which
psychoanalysis engages with writing. If, as we have seen, Lacan put forward in
the paternal metaphor the opening of the subject as a certain legibility, the space
of a consistent logic of the signifier, it was in a famous reading of a literary text
that he sought to establish that subject, provide its theoretical mise en scene. In
this 'odyssey of the letter', as he called it, 74 Lacan's thought was to emerge onto
a scene of philosophical (and political) contestation where it encountered a very
different approach to language, in Jacques Derrida's critique. Avoiding too swift an
invocation of 'influence', we will have to trace the emergence of a distinct sense of
'writing' in Lacan's work in the context of the 'exchange of letters' with Derrida,
and more generally, of how it can be situated in relation to questions of 'writing'
in deconstruction, with its critique of psychoanalysis. We will eventually find these
differences at work avant la lettre in Joyce's writing.

iv) Undelivered Letters

Speaking at a conference organized ten years after Lacan's death, Jacques Derrida
tells the following anecdote about his first meeting with Lacan, at Baltimore in
1966:
73 'The written is in no sense of the same register, of the same tobacco, so to speak, as the
signifier', Seminar of 9th January 1973 (SXX), op. cit., p. 31.
74 Seminar of 27th April 1955 (SIl), op. cit., p. 204.

35
 the other worry Lacan confided in me concerned the binding of his Ecrits, whose
publication was imminent. Lacan was concerned, a little cross, I thought, with the
people at Seuil who had advised him to have it all put together into a single great
volume, more than 900 pages long, whose binding was in danger of being too weak,
of giving way. 'Wait and see', he said to me, waving his hands, 'it won't hold'.75
Derrida's playfully literal interpretation of Lacan's definition of letter (at least,
the one given in 1957 in l'Instance de la lettre—'By 'letter' I designate that material
support that concrete discourse borrows from language' 76 ) allows him to designate
the opening article in Lacan's book, the Seminar on La Lettre Volée, as its true
'binding', that which was supposed to provide the 'material support' to hold the
unwieldy tome together, offer its diverse writings a unifying principle or coherence.
The irony of Derrida's retrospective anecdote is, of course, that the whole
tenor of his later critique of Lacan's Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' had been
precisely that ça ne va pas tenir: that the argument Lacan had constructed through
his reading of Poe's story—his claim that it showed 'the decisive orientation which
the subject receives from the itinerary of a signifier' 77 —did not 'hold together',
that its ostensible coherence was unsustainable. The year after his encounter with
Lacan in Baltimore, in 1967, Derrida laid the foundations for that critique with
the publication of 'Freud and the Scene of Writing' (in Writing and Difference).
Before we can grasp the stakes of Derrida's deconstruction of the 'phallogocentric'
economy at work in Lacan's text, we need to follow the course (or the 'flight', le
vol) of the Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', from its first delivery in 1955 to its
re-publication in the Ecrits, and plot its significance within Lacanian theory.78
In the mid-1950s Lacan is attempting to develop a theory of the symbolic order,
the site of subjectivization, as a register of pure syntax. Thus, he sought to link
psychoanalysis to cybernetics, a 'conjectural science' which, he claimed in a 1955
lecture, 'clearly highlights ... the radical difference between the symbolic and the
imaginary registers'. 79 This was to reconceive the unconscious as a combinatoire,
a logical sequence of symbols (like the results of dice-rolling or rules in a game)
producing automatic effects of signification, with no room for any depth or plenitude
of meaning (the cybernetician, comments Lacan, constructs a system which cannot
translate a Gestalt, is unable to comprehend the forms of the human imagination).80
La Lettre VolEe, Baudelaire's translation of the story by Poe, is read by Lacan as
a mise en scene of such a symbolic machine in operation. 'Everything which could
T5 Jacques Derrida, 'Pour l'amour de Lacan', in Lacan Avec les Philosophes, op. cit., p. 407.
76 Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 147.
77 Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', tr. J. Mehiman, The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and
Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. J.P.Muller and W.J.Richardson, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1988,
p. 29.
78 Lacan gave the seminar on 27th April 1955, wrote it up the following year, and first published it
in Volume 2 of La Psychanalyse (P.U.F., 1957); it was then extensively re-written for its inclusion
in the 1966 Ecrits.
79 'Psychoanalysis and cybernetics; or, on the nature of language', lecture given at the Clinique
de la Faculte de Medecine, 22nd June 1955; in Seminar IT, op. cit., p. 306.
80 Ibid, p. 306; see also the article by Bruce Fink, 'The Nature of Unconscious Thought or Why
No One Ever Reads Lacan's Postface to the 'Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'', in Reading
Seminars I and II, op. cit., pp. 173-90.

36
serve to define the characters as real—qualities, temperament, heredity, nobility—
has nothing to do with the story'; so that its essential structure—the circulation of
the eponymous letter—could be formalized by a psychoanalyst, written 'with small
alphas, betas, gammas'. 8 ' The letter, circulating between the Queen, the Minister,
and the detective Dupin, 'is ... synonymous with the original, radical subject',
'the symbol being displaced in its pure state' 82 —it realizes the unconscious as
the 'insistence' of the signifier. Lacan re-writes the proverb Verba volant, scripta
rnanent in a chiasmic jeu de mots:
Has it occurred to you that a letter is precisely speech which flies [vole]? If a stolen
letter is possible, it is because a letter is a fly-sheet [feuille volante]. It is scripta which
volant, whereas speech, alas, remains. It remains even when no one remembers it
any more.83

In his lecture on psychoanalysis and cybernetics, Lacan makes the same point
by contrasting the symbolic order with the real operation of a machine: 'With a
machine, whatever doesn't come on time simply falls by the wayside and makes no
claim on anything. This is not true for man, the scansion is alive, and whatever
doesn't come on time remains in suspense'. 84 The repressed unconscious corres-
ponds to these suspended paroles, spoken words whose untimely utterance consigns
them, perhaps permanently, to the scene of the Other.
The chiasmic reversal of the proverb highlights the curiously 'interchangeable'
status of speech and writing. On the one hand, a letter is speech, but simply
removed from the flawless consistency of the symbolic order by its materiality, its
contingent fate as a piece of paper which can be stolen or fly away (Lacan plays on
the double meaning of voler); at the same time, when speech remains 'in suspense'
it is like a letter en souffrance, left undelivered at the Post Office. The letter,
in 1955, is quite simply a metaphor for the signifier, although unlike the latter
it is insufficiently detached from the real, the realm of chance in which an actual
letter goes astray, 'wanders all by itself' away from the tightly-organized grid of the
symbolic order. 85 In Lacan's idealized vision of the letter-as-signifier, the last shred
of its materiality seems to dissolve into a virtual space of symbolic negativity:
This letter, this speech addressed to the Queen by someone, ... to whom is it really
addressed? As soon as it is speech, it may have several functions. It has the function
of a certain pact, of a certain trust. . .. There it is, disguised in a kind of presence-
absence, there it is, but it isn't there, it only has value in relation to everything it
threatens, to everything it violates, to everything it flouts, to everything it places in
danger or suspense.86

The answer is that the letter is addressed to the Other. 'Speech is founded
on the existence of the Other', as Lacan will announce a month after the seminar
on 'The Purloined Letter'; in other words, the subject is an effect of symbolic
81 Seminar of 27th April 1955 (SIl), op. cit., p. 205.
p. 196.
83 Jbjd, p. 198.
84 'Psychoanalysis and cybernetics', op. cit.pp. 307-8.
85 Seminar of 27th April 1955 (SIl), op. cit., p. 198.
86Jbjd

37
alienation, a non-ontological Es (where the Freudian 'id' is made to rhyme with
the 'S' of the Saussurian signifier). 87 As the 'radical subject' in the story, the letter
is a purely diacritical effect: it has no 'value' in itself, indeed it only exists at all as
an element in a network of signifying relations.
By presenting the letter as a signifier, utterly devoid of any inherent substance
or content, Lacan was able to sidestep all the 'psychobiographical' issues which had
traditionally gone along with 'applications' of psychoanalysis to art (such as Marie
Bonaparte's work on Poe, which Lacan cannot take seriously). This sense of the
Other as essentially 'soulless', alien to human psychology, is given a new stress when
the seminar is re-written for inclusion in the 1966 Ecrits. 'The Purloined Letter',
writes Lacan, illustrates the psychoanalytic discovery that
the displacement of the signifier determines the subjects in their acts, in their destiny,
in their refusals, in their blindness, in their end and in their fate, their innate gifts and
social acquisitions notwithstanding, without regard for character or sex; and that,
willingly or not, everything that might be considered the stuff of psychology ... will
follow the path of the signifier.88
Because the letter is a signifier, we never learn about its contents, whether it
is a love-letter or part of some political intrigue; its 'supremacy' over the subjects
in the tale is a purely formal function, one determined by its position. The only
letter Poe does allow us to read is a counterfeit, the copy inserted by Dupin in
the place of visible-invisibility where the Minister has 'concealed' the letter he has
purloined. At some future moment beyond the story, when the Minister might try
to 'strike his blow' against the Queen by opening the letter to view, he will read
the quotation from Crebillon's play Atrée: '... un dessein si funeste / S'il n'est
digne d'Atrée, est digne de Thyeste'. 89 The rather cryptic allusion refers to the
Minister's 'scheme' of blackmail going awry, falling on his own head with 'funereal'
consequences. Lacan is able to read this, characteristically, as a pun—allowing him
to refer to the Heideggerian questions which his work, especially around that time,
seemed to address (the translation of 'Logos' appeared in 1956, we recall). Thus,
the Minister's dessein indicates a particular, pathological state of his Dasein, its
detachment 'from any inscription in any kind of order', the 'limit of madness' where
an individual seeks to wrench himself free from the socio-symbolic network in order
to give free vent to a deadly jonissance. We will see how this pun is given another
destiny, a decade later, in the Ecrits.
The publication of Lacan's major collection of his writings in 1966 was to
become a significant turning-point in his teaching (as Derrida has argued). 9 ° It can
be marked as a crucial moment in the 'destiny of the letter', to adopt the rhetoric
of the 1955 seminar: a certain change in the status of the letter consequent on
its transition from the spoken domain of the seminar (where speech was advanced
as the dit-mension of the subject's truth) to a precarious fate beyond it, caught
87 Seminar of 25th May 1955 (SIl), op. cit., pp. 244-6.
88 Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', op. cit., pp. 43-4.
89 Seminar of 27the April 1955 (SIl), op. cit., pp. 204-5.
90 Jacques Derrida, 'Le Facteur de Ia Vérité', trans Alan Bass, in The Post Card: From Socrates
to Freud and Beyond, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 462-3; see also idem, 'Pour
l'amour de Lacan', in Lacan Avec les Philososphes, op. cit., p. 397.

38
 up in the swirl of feuilles volantes, the flimsy sheets of paper which a publisher's
binding might not be strong enough to prevent from flying away or falling into the
wrong hands. If the seminar had already appeared in print (in 1957, in the second
volume of La Psychanalyse) it had at least been in the journal of the S.F.P., over
which Lacan retained editorial control and which was unlikely to be read outside
psychoanalytic circles.
The sense of writing as object, its materiality as an écrit, posing a threat
to the subject—a subject constituted in the immaterial purity of speech (in a
phonocentrism which is perhaps too manifest, 'a little too self-evident', to be over-
emphasized in Derrida's critique) 91 —is in the end an effect of Lacan's theoretical
privileging of separation: the subject only comes to ex-sist through its separation
from the register of the objectal real, as is shown in the Lacanian version of the
cogito, 'I think where I am not'. 92 Only as distinct from the immediate being of the
body could the Lacanian subject emerge, its fleeting utterance lending it a fragile,
momentary coherence in the space of analytic listening. We could perhaps interpret
Lacan's ça ne va pas tenir as a symptom of his anxiety about the fate of the subject
'out there' in the debased public domain of poubellication (where 'publication' is
made a pun for 'chucking in the dust-bin').93
If the act of publication gives a new emphasis to the need to theorise different
'logics' in speech arid writing, the re-writing of the Seminar on 'The Purloined
Letter' in 1966 seemed to respond, in a certain prolepsis of the later work, by
outlining a place for the 'letter' beyond the formal logic of the signifier:
how could [the cops] have seized the letter? in what they turned between their
fingers what did they hold but what did not answer to their description. 'A letter, a
litter': in Joyce's circle they played on the homophony of the two words in English.94
The examination of the letter by the police is fruitless; the bit of paper does not
correspond to the 'purloined letter' as signifier circulating between the subjects and
articulating the structure of their desires. The 'litter' or shred of material support
does not 'answer' to the Other: it eludes the symbolic network of subjectivization
('One is always responsible for one's position as subject', as Lacan states in 'Sci-
ence and Truth'). 95 The proleptic reference to Joyce—to the point, ten years later,
when Lacan would turn to Joycean writing to extend his exploration of 'the letter'
beyond the doublet signifier/subject—is characterized by a singular 'symptomatic'
slip, one faithfully and silently reproduced by the editors of the English translation.
A footnote refers Lacan's quotation to the collective pamphlet Joyce had prepared
in 1929 (with the help of Beckett and others) as an introduction to Finnegans Wake,
91 Lacan picks out this phrase from Poe's text as an indication of the paradoxically 'hidden'
place of the letter in the visible domain of truth. cf. Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', op. cit.,
p. 38.
92 'The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud', Ecrits: A Selection,
op. cit., p. 166.
93 cf. Seminar of 9th January 1973 (SXX), op. cit., p. 29.
94 Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', op. cit., p. 40; for the original erroneous foot-note, see
Ecrits, op. cit., p. 25.
95 'Science and Truth', op. cit., p. 7.

39
 whose title already warned of the verbal experimentalism of his last text: Our Exag-
mination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. In Lacan's
text, however, the reference is erroneous or 'parapractic' in an intriguing sense: it
'corrects' the Wakean term 'Exagmination', as if it wished to perpetrate a vol de
la lettre, allow the 'g' distinguishing Joyce's litter from the proper word 'examin-
ation' to vanish, fly away. The 'homophony' posited by Lacan between letter and
litter—evoking a spoken English, even one with an Irish accent—is precisely what
is disrupted by writing (as Lacan himself will later insist by linking writing to an
'equivocation' which undoes semantic closure). 96 The Lacanian 'slip', by stealing
the stray letter, seems to return 'exagmination' to the Other as the scene of rep-
resentational consistency—a scene where the subject is, precisely, 'examined', held
responsible to the symbolic Law (the Other is 'the locus from which the question
of [the subject's] existence can be put to him', in Lacan's 1958 formula).97
The emergence of the letter in Lacanian theory, as a 'remainder' of signification,
an instance apart from or incommensurable with the logic of the signifier, is thus
checked, contained, by the text published in 1966. Lacan adds a special prefatory
note to explain his decision 'to give La Lettre volée the privilege of opening the series
of texts, although this contravenes their diachronic order'. 98 It is clear that it is
the seminar's illustration of la vérité—the privileged, quasi-Heideggerian domain
of spoken Truth—which qualifies it as the 'binding' of the book, its synchronic
structural 'spine':
The reader must give the letter in question, beyond those who were once addressed
by it, that which he will find as its last word: its destination. Namely, the message
of Poe deciphered and returning from him, the reader, in that to read it, it says itself
to be no more feigned than the truth when it inhabits fiction.99
It is as the mise en scene of truth that the seminar deserves its position as
the privileged first word of Lacan's teaching. In a characteristic stylistic blend of
convoluted rhetoric and dramatic bluntness, Lacan links this opening-of-truth to
the last word of the text: the arrival of the letter at its destination. This last
word returns or sums up the opening message, in a text whose construction seems
almost rebus-like, as if one way to read it might be as a concrete 'shape' of writing,
graphically spread across the space of the pages: we could thus read the opening
phrase, Notre recherche nous a mené a ce point.., together with the closing,
arrive toujours a destination, to frame the seminar with the central notion of the
circular closure of truth, the return of the letter to its proper place in the economy
of signification.
Thus, 'The Purloined Letter' announces the destiny or destination of truth
as a pure tautology: truth is destiny, the arrival of the letter at its destination.
The pun which in 1955 Lacan had used to move from the dessein si funeste of the
counterfeit letter to the question of Heideggerian Dasein, thus has to be extended
96 cf. Jean-Guy Godin, 'Du symptôme a son épure: le sinthome', in Joyce Avec Lacan,
ed. Jacques Aubert, Paris: Navarin, 1987, pp. 184-6.
a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis' (1957-8), Ecrits: A Selec-
tion, op. cit., p. 194.
98 Ouverture de ce recueil, Ecrits, op. cit., p. 9.
99 Ibid, p. 10.

40
 to include this teleological destin. The quotation from Crebillon appears twice in
the 1966 version, first in its proper form as quoted above, and then at the end of
the seminar, in a distorted form (like a Freudian joke): '... un destin si funeste /
S'il n'est digne d'Atrée, est digne de Thyeste'.'°°
It is by putting in question this teleology of psychoanalytic truth that Derrida
is able to formulate one of the opening moves in his reading of Lacan's la Lettre
volée: 'What happens—and what is dispensed with—when a text ... puts truth
on stage?' 101 If the question seems naive in the face of the intricate weave of word-
play and rhetorical paradox in Lacan's seminar, Derrida's initial problem—as he
explained retrospectively in the 1991 conference—was to know how to begin, where
to begin, this critical reading which in his view had finally become necessary ('Le
Facteur de la vérité' was not published until 1975, when, as we will see, Lacan's work
had evolved to the point where a certain 'debate' with Derrida became possible;
however, Lacan's remarks about Derrida have remained unpublished).
In what Derrida terms the 'chiasmus of the 1960s', there occurred a strange
situation of 'crossed-wires' between psychoanalysis and philosophy in France:
This was the form taken by the chiasmus: I found myself faced with a powerful
philosophical, philosophizing reconstitution of psychoanalysis, which articulated, as-
sumed and bound together with the gravest consequences all the figures which were
elsewhere being subjected, not without resistance, to something like a genealogico-
deconstructive interpretation.'02

As early as 1967, Derrida had begun attempting to unpick the knot of psycho-
analysis and philosophy, by clearly distinguishing his project, 'the deconstruction
of logocentrism', from any psychoanalytic deployment of or intervention in philo-
sophy. 103 'Freud and the Scene of Writing' brought the resources of a critique
inspired by the methods of Nietszche and Heidegger to bear on the text of Freud,
seeking to separate from 'the metaphysical concepts and phrases ... condensed
and sedimented' within it, a certain resistance to the logocentric closure of Western
philosophy; a resistance articulated in its figural recourse to writing: 'through the
insistence of his metaphoric investment [Freud] makes what we believe we know
under the name writing enigmatic'.104
If Derrida's terms resemble those Lacan was developing ('insistence' was the
translation proposed for Freud's Zwang, 'compulsion', in the Seminar on 'The Pur-
loined Letter'), his essay points to another destiny for psychoanalysis than the one
being powerfully enacted in Lacan's 'return to Freud': 'It is with a graphematics
still to come, rather than with a linguistics dominated by an ancient phonologism,
that psychoanalysis sees itself as destined to collaborate'.'° 5 There is no need for
the sub-clause to contain Lacan's name for the target of the compact critical aside
to be clear. The linguistics of Saussure, one of the fundamental references of Lacan's
loO Ecrits, op. cit., p. 14; P. 40.
10l'Le Facteur de Ia Verité', op. cit., p. 414.
i02 'Pour l'amour de Lacan', op. cit., p. 409.
103'Freud and the Scene of Writing', tr. Alan Bass, in Writing and Difference, London: Routledge,
1978, p. 196.
104 Ibid, pp. 198-9.
1° Ibid, p. 220.

41
work, was shown by Derrida to encapsulate the generalized 'censorship of the text'
in Western thought, through its self-centring on the presence of the speaking sub-
ject ('phonocentrism') and, indissociably, on that of the unitary, consistent idea
('logocentrism').'° 6 For a project seeking a philosophical 'reconstitution' of psy-
choanalysis to turn to this tradition—to make it its destination—already seemed
to Derrida to risk effacing or misunderstanding the opening of an 'enigmatic', yet-
to-be-thought dimension of psychoanalysis.
'Le Facteur de la vérité': Derrida's title is an ironic soubriquet for Lacan,
making him at once 'truth's postman', the one able to deliver the purloined letter to
its truthful destination, and the 'truth-maker', the fabricator of something declared
to be the truth (who resembles, perhaps, the one who deposits the counterfeit
letter in Poe's story). The letter Lacan delivers is, for Derrida, an idealized one;
even when he re-iterates Freud's insistent return to hieroglyphics, inscriptions or
rebuses, Lacan always falls back on a concept of writing which is relevé par la voix,
'raised up' or 'spiritualized'—auffieben, in the language of Hegelian dialectics—
by the speaking subject. 107 In a painstakingly close reading of Lacan's Seminar,
Derrida seeks to set out how the 'staging' of truth in that text is complicit with
a logocentric metaphysics which has repressed, censored or erased, the 'enigmatic',
unthought force of writing.
'This would be easy to show', remarks Derrida. One of the real problems
in his essay, and perhaps one of the reasons for the delay in its publication, is
the obviousness of many of his points about Lacan: of course Lacan is complicit
with Western philosophy, with his 'return to Descartes', his constant references
to Hegel and Heidegger, and so on. What is most obvious, however, is precisely
what is hardest to grasp or theorize ('to see', in its etymological derivation)—which
is precisely the lesson Lacan reads in 'The Purloined Letter'. Derrida's reading,
partly through recourse to Freudian texts, aims to make visible a possible destiny
(or destinerrance, 'wandering-destiny') away from the epistemic traditions invoked
by Lacan.
Indeed, the destiny of truth presented in an exemplary way by Lacan's Seminar
is 'lost in the unfolding of the return to Freud', according to Derrida: it cannot
be located in the Freudian text, it slips in from elsewhere. In fact, two kinds of
philosophical truth-value, Derrida claims, are propped against each other in Lacan's
thought, in a theoretical étayage ('propping', Freud's term for the relation of an in-
stinct to a drive) which does nothing to hide their incommensurability: the concept
of truth as adequatio, the 'circuit of adequation'; and the Heideggerian alethia or
'unveiling' of truth.'° 8 The truth which is unveiled is that of castration, which
Lacan makes the sole guarantee of the proper circulation of signifiers, the guaran-
tee that 'lack', the condition of the subject, is 'kept in place' (Derrida brings out the
double sense of man que a sa place: both 'lack in place' and without an accent, 'lack
' ° 6 Cf. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatoiogy, tr. Gayatri Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976;
also idem & Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993,
pp. 23-42.
'°7 'Le Facteur de la Vérité', op. cit., pp. 463-4.

42
 has its place).'° 9 Thus, Lacan solders logocentrism to a sexist iconography, pro-
ducing a 'phallogocentric transcendentalism': the phallus—'the signifier intended
to designate as a whole the effects of the signified', as Lacan puts it in l958'10—is
the indispensable support of Lacanian theory, a principle of representational self-
presence or 'indivisibility' without which its entire edifice would collapse.11'
Derrida's argument, then, concludes that the supposed illustration of the 'su-
premacy of the signifier' in Lacan's Seminar in fact masks a 'psychoanalytico-trans-
cendental semantics': the substitution of the enigmatic letter which is never read in
Poe's story for a 'signifier' representing a speaking subject, in an economy of truth
governed by the phallus. What Lacan proposes as the operation of the rigorous
mechanism of signification is in fact, claims Derrida, that of a specific organization
of meanings, with manifest, intricate philosophical and political implications.
But 'The Purloined Letter' finally eludes Lacan's attempt to 'decipher' its
'message' definitively (decisively: that is by cutting out a 'subject' from its textual
materiality): it is clear, for Derrida, that the Seminar 'cannot read the story it tells
itself'. Poe's tale, for instance, is framed by a structure of narration completely ig-
nored by Lacan, a 'disseminal structure' which from the first word installs a textual
'drift' undoing any unity or centre, rendering its 'message' ultimately undecidable
by catching it in an interminable play of significations (Who is the 'subject' of
the text? Who signs it as its author, if its 'message' is precisely the subversion of
human agency by the signifier?). Poe's writing exceeds, strays from, the interpret-
ive 'formalisation' Lacan superimposes upon it, the letter remaining en souffrance,
undelivered to the truth-destination.112
We can perhaps best grasp the antinomy between Lacan and Derrida as it
emerges in the 'debate' over 'The Purloined Letter' in terms of their different views
on the significance—or possibility—of a decision. If for Lacan the subject is given
a 'decisive orientation' by the signifier," 3 cut out as a symbolic ex-sistence, we
have seen that it is on the basis of a primordial Bejahung in which the subject
decides to be—says 'Yes' to the call of the Other, to its 'interpellation' in the
field of consistent representation guaranteed (at least in Lacan's early work) by
the Name-of-the-Father." 4 Derrida would overturn this régime of signification and
subjectivation by reversing its terms: where Lacan seeks to cut away the logic of
the subject from its material textual 'ground', deconstructive interpretation shows
how the uncanny framing of the text undoes or traverses any such 'decisive' reading;
and if for Lacan the phallic 'master signifier' must retain a rock-like irreducibility
as the transcendental condition of all signification, Derrida questions why any sig-
nifier (and why that signifier in particular) should be considered exempt from the
'divisibility' of semiosis, its endless play of difference.
109 Ibid, pp. 436-41.
110 'The Signification of the Phallus' (1958), in Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 285.
111 'Le Facteur de la Vérité', op. cit., pp. 478-9.
112 Ibid, pp. 483-96.
' l3 Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', op. cit., p. 29.
" 4 The concept of interpellation is developed by Louis
Althusser in a theory of ideology draw-
ing on Lacanian thought; cf. 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', Essays on Ideology,
LondOn Verso, 1984, pp. 44-57 and Slavoj Ziek's 'revision' of the concept in The Metastases of
Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, op. cit., pp. 58-62.

43
v) Rewriting the Letter: Litura

In opening his Ecrits with the Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter, writes Serge
Viderman, Lacan sought 'to show the scientific status of analysis by giving it, in a
rigorous linguistics, a letter of introduction to the field of respectable knowledge'.
Thus, continues Viderman,
Lacan tries to link the 'Purloined Letter' to a signifier with only one natural locus,
one rigorous trajectory, both determinate and able to be traced. Thus, he hoped to
found the logic of the signifier by inscribing it in a transcendental topology. This
project was pursued by Lacan with talent, but the very nature of the unconscious
—its ambiguities, its multiple logics, the wavering of a space in which words spoken
in one place find signification in another—rendered it either hopeless or capable of
producing nothing but new illusions."5

If Derrida's critique aimed to deconstruct this 'topology', however, we have

seen that it did so, not by invoking any psychoanalytic 'fact' such as an inherent
quality of the unconscious, but by showing how effects of signification were falsified
in the Lacanian reading, how what was advanced as the 'logic of the signifier' in fact
entailed a highly idiosyncratic 'semantics'. Derrida—sharing, perhaps, Heidegger's
unease with the term—never makes an 'attributive judgement' about the uncon-
scious, which might then allow him, like Viderman, to locate it (ca) as the cause of
the failure of representational logic or the breakdown of theoretical coherence. To
make such a judgement would be, in a Lacanian perspective, to raise the question
of the real.
In a seminar in 1976, Lacan mentions Derrida in precisely this context—that of
how the 'writing' in the name of which deconstruction went to work might relate to
psychoanalytic concepts—in particular, to the sense of 'writing' Lacan himself was
then developing in his explorations of the topology of knots. For Derrida, claims
Lacan, writing corresponds exclusively to a 'precipitation of the signifier'; restric-
ted to the symbolic register, writing as differance should be sharply distinguished
from what the same term now meant for Lacan (whose latest work, he claims, has
'changed the very meaning of writing'): an 'autonomous' instance, irreducible to
any of the themes of deconstruction, any mere linguistic undecidability or logical
aporia. 116 Without explicitly mentioning Derrida's recently-published Le Facteur
de la vérité, Lacan clearly wishes to shift the phantom 'debate' from its terms of
ten years before to the very different terms of his work in the mid-1970s with Bor-
romean knots and Joycean writing. We will return to this re-scripting by Lacan of
his confrontation with Derrida—which Lacan's heirs have decided to exclude from
the official published version établie of the seminar—when we have explored further
the trajectory of 'writing' from the early work to the Borromean knot.
What is foreclosed from the symbolic re-appears in the real, Lacan tells us
in Seminar 111.117 The psychotic symptom is thus by definition something unas-
similable to the symbolic order, something unheard of, inédit (the French for both
'unpublished' and 'original'): something non-interpretable. In his reading of La
ll5 Serge Viderman, 'Un psychanalyste hegelien', in Lacan Avec les Philosophes, op. cit., p. 325.
" 6 Seminar of 11th March 1976 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, unpublished (version P. G., p. 3).
117 cf. Seminar of 11th April 1956 (SIll), op. cit., pp. 190-1.

44
 Lettrc voles, Lacan stressed the incommensurability between the 'real' of the letter,
the scrap of refuse handled by the police, and its negativity (or 'nullibiety') as sig-
nifier; and as we saw, the 'symptomatic' slip in the reference to Joyce—where the
Wakean 'exagmination' became a detective-style 'examination'—offers a confirma-
tion of the incompatibility of letter and litter, showing how the letter-as-signifier
sought to absorb the last shred of materiality into its 'transcendental topology'.
Lacan's erroneous footnote seems to return, as it were, from his future work (which
in 1976 will present itself as, in one sense, a kind of footnote to the Joycean text)
with the message that the 'logic of the signifier' he seeks to trace decisively at the
opening of the Ecrits is destined to remain a work-in-progress.
To write Es as 'S'—in other words, to reformulate the residual biologism of
the Freudian unconscious (encapsulated in the 'id' of the second topography) in
the rigorous terms of structural linguistics: such would be a concise formula for the
ambition of the 'transcendental topology' of 1966.118 If the real is thus 'foreclosed'
(although no such inversion of the term is possible in Lacanian theory, we could
deploy it to figure the 'hyperbolization' of the symbolic act or Bejahung founding
the subject, whose effect we could imagine to be a pure 'bodiless' subject, a fully-
spiritualized voice), it will make a powerful return as the 'letter' which—Lacan will
insist in his later work—cannot be thought within the logic of the signifier.
In an article written in 1971 entitled Lituraterre, Lacan looks back to the Sem-
inar on 'The Purloined Letter', declaring it to be 'a good account of what distin-
guishes the letter from the signifier it bears'." 9 If this article proposes a new sense
of writing, one linked to the real—litura, a 'littoral' trace, the track or shore-line
of jouissance across meaning—this leads on to no auto-critique or explicit revision
of the earlier work, with its privileging of the (spoken) signifier as the subject's
'nihilation' of the real. There are simply two 'registers' of language, Lacan now an-
nounces, which correspond to the division of the subject: 'one of these registers can
be satisfied by referring to writing, the other to speech'.' 2 ° Although Lacan never
explicitly retracts this notion—that of the peaceful cohabitation of these violently
heterogeneous registers (which one of his inheritors will portray as the 'two faces of
the subject')' 21 —we hope to show that such a neat dualism is radically unsettled
by the later work, which develops the idea of a writing antagonistic to the domain
of the subject's truth, a writing which constitutes a 'subversion of the subject' (to
adapt the title of one of Lacan's écrits).
Seminar III, Les Psychoses, which first establishes foreclosure as a theoretico-
clinical term, forms part of Lacan's central project in the 1950s—to found a logic of
the Other as site of the subject's constitution through la parole, the act of speech.
Thus, Freud's work on the 'case' of Schreber, based of course entirely on a reading
of Schreber's 'Memoirs of my Nervous fllness', is re-read as an exemplification of
" 8 An ambition already outlined a decade before: 'The Es with which analysis is concerned is
made of the signifier'., Seminar of 5th December 1956 (Sl y), La relation d'objet, op. cit., p. 49
(quoted in Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London: Rout-
ledge, 1996, p. 79).
119 'Lituraterre', Littérature 3, 1971, p. 4.
120 Ibid, p. 9.
' 21 Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject, op. cit., pp. 72-9.

45
 how the psychotic fails to relate to the Other in a foundational, attributive act of
speech. Unlike his colleague Octave Mannoni, whose essay (published more than
a decade later, in 1969) entitled Schreber als Schreiber ('Schreber as a Writer')122
will pay special attention to the significance of the écrit for Schreber, Lacan does
not dwell specifically on Schreber's text or accord to its textuality any privileged
status in the structure of the psychosis. Twenty years later, though, addressing
an American audience, he will draw a bold line between Freud's discovery of the
unconscious—in its essential dimension, that of speech—from psychotic phenomena,
which only entered the field of psychoanalysis through Freud reading a text.' 23 By
then, writing will have acquired a special importance in Lacan's understanding
of psychosis, which will come to re-orient the conception of foreclosure and the
diagnostic criteria it entails.
For Lacan to have overlooked writing as a specific linguistic instance in the mid-
1950s is perhaps less surprising in the context of the 'phonocentric' view of language
he shows in the Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', where the scrap of written 'litter'
is relévé by the speaking subject, freed from its materiality by being absorbed
into the consistent scene of the Other. It nevertheless runs counter to a very
powerful impetus in his work, evident from as early as his doctoral thesis in 1932
and returning as one of the major themes of the 1970s: the wish to ascribe to writing
a special status in the psychical economy, one irreducible to a truth grounded in
speech. As is already clear from the introduction of foreclosure in 1956, as a 'mis-
firing' of the speaking subject in the Other, this opening of a linguistic dimension
beyond the logic of the signifier will be especially associated with psychosis.
Lacan's thesis, De la psychose paranoIa que dans ses rapports avec la person-
nalité, took him 'to the threshold of psychoanalysis', as he puts it in 1958; (he
began his analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein as he was completing the thesis in
1932) . 124 The distinction he later makes between Freud's teaching—as originating
in, essentially based on, hysterical speech—and his own as the opening of a new
chapter of psychoanalysis whose starting-point is psychotic writing, is already tak-
ing shape in the 1946 'Remarks on Psychical Causality'; there, Lacan claims that
the patient whose case is discussed in his thesis first attracted his attention because
of 'the burning signification of the writings she produced'.'25
The patient was Marguerite Pantaine (she was given a literary name—Aimée-
in Lacan's thesis), who had been detained at Sainte-Anne hospital after she had
stabbed an actress in an episode of paranoiac delusion. Her productions écrites con-
sisted of two novels dedicated to her phantasmatic 'guardian', the Prince of Wales,
and some poems; by including quotations from these in his thesis, Lacan was able
to combine the presentation of the psychiatric case with a 'literary analysis' which
might have interested the Surrealist circles he was beginning to frequent (he had
written two articles for the journal Minotaure). Thus, writes Roudinesco, Lacan
was 'the first to effect a synthesis between the two major routes by which Freu-
122 Octave Mannoni, 'Schreber als Schreiber', in Clefs pour l'Imaginaire; ou l'Autre Scene, Paris:
Seuil, 1969; cf especially pp. 79-86.
"3 YaIe University, Kanzer Seminar, 24th November 1975, Scilicet 6/7, p. 10.
124 cf. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, op. cit., pp. 101-10.
l25'Propos sur la Causalité Psychique', Ecrits, op. cit., p. 168.

46
 dianism came into France': the thesis argued for the establishment of a Freudian,
psychogenic unconscious in psychiatry, at the same time as it offered a portrait of
Aimée as a Surrealist heroine who, like the Papin sisters, embodied the ideal of a
feminine passion rebelling against the constraints of bourgeois mediocrity.126
In the terms of Lacan's later formulations, the case of Aimee is characterized
by a radical breakdown of the Other, the normalizing symbolic function which en-
sures a certain rationality in intersubjective communication. Marguerite Pantaine
attacks the actress, she says, to defend her son from the woman's threats; messages
come from nowhere, while others fail to reach their addressee, like the parcels of
manuscripts returned unopened by Buckingham Palace. For Aimée, the consistent
Other does not exist, does not 'hold' in her attempts to get across her message,
take up her place as someone to be recognized and addressed.'27
In the 1972-3 seminar Encore, Lacan outlines a change in the status of the
Other within his theory, which in turn is bound up with the new conception of
writing he had evoked in Lituraterre. If, as we recall, on the publication of the
Ecrits in 1966 he was worried that ça ne va pas tenir, he is now prepared to give
an 'algebraic' form to a certain theoretical 'untenability': by introducing a 'barred'
A in a new formula,
I have added a dimension to this place of the A, by showing that as a place it does not
hold, that there is a flaw, a hole, a loss. The object a comes to function in relation
to this loss. This is something absolutely essential to the function of language.128
Objet a begins, from the 1960s on, to mark the point of this inconsistency in the
Other, this paradoxical 'loss' where something emerges which is irreducible to the
'topology' of the Other: the 'remainder' of signification, that which the symbolic
leaves in the wake of the nihilation constitutive of the subject.' 29 Alan Sheridan,
one of Lacan's English translators, notes that 'Lacan insists that 'objet petit a'
should remain untranslated, thus acquiring, as it were, the status of an algebraic
sign'.' 3° Lacan's a thus presents a striking instance de la lettre: the use of a letter
to mark a certain limit to the domain of meaning, of what can be interpreted.
Francois Baudry relates the problematic of a—whereby something 'absolutely
essential to the function of language' comes into play around a fault or gap in
the symbolic order—to the question of writing in Lacan's work, by positing an
'equivalence' between object a and a theoretical trope Lacan introduces the year
before Encore, and which he will eventually declare to be the 'purest' figure of
writing in his work: the Borromean knot.' 31 We will return to Baudry's hypothesis
when we have explored the development of the knot in Lacanian theory.
'26 Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, op. cit., p. 78; also cf.pp. 93-9; and see David Macey's excellent
account of Lacan's involvement in the Surrealist cult of 'Convulsive Beauty' in Lacan in Contexts,
London: Verso, 1988, pp. 44-74.
' 27 cf. Roudinesco, ibid, pp. 69-70.
l28 Seminar of 9th January 1973 (SXX), op. cit., p. 31.
'29 cf. Seminar of 4th March 1964 (SXI), op. cit., pp. 103-4.
1sO'Translator's Note', Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. xi.
13lJ'rançois Baudry, 'Le noeud borroméen et l'objet a', in Lacan Avec les Philosophes, op. cit.,
Ou Pire (SXIX) (see below,
pp. 179-87; the Borromean knot first appears in the seminar ...
p. 52).

47
 If the Other does not hold together in psychosis, Lacan seems to indicate—
as early as 1957 when he first strikes a 'bar' through the A—that it is no longer
tenable either in the theory of psychoanalysis. We should pause, though, to consider
the significance of this 'bar'. In L 'Instance de la lettre, Lacan's appropriation (and
inversion) of the 'Saussurian algorithm' posits a barre as the 'primordial distinction'
between signifier and signified, that which separates the operation of the signifier,
in the first instance, from any hermeneutics (Lacan's anagrammatical word-play
with barre and arbre seeks to emphasize the arbitrary function of signification).132
So here the 'bar' indicates or delimits the theoretical place of the psychoanalytic
subject, severing it (Es as 'S') from any incarnation in the realm of meaning.
The 'bar' Lacan invokes in Seminar XI appears to have shifted from this abstract
designation of theoretical space to a literal place, the site of a real inscription:
In my own vocabulary ... I symbolize the subject by the barred S [s], in so far as it
is constituted as secondary in relation to the signifier. In order to illustrate this, I
will remind you that the thing may be presented in the simplest possible way by the
single stroke [trait unaire]. The first signifier is the notch by which it is indicated, for
example, that the subject has killed one animal, ... The subject himself is marked
off by the single stroke, and first he marks himself as a tattoo, the first of signifiers.'33

Sheridan's translation of trait unaire as 'single stroke' perhaps risks effacing

the importance of this 'unitary trait' in Lacan's teaching; in particular, its place
in what Pierre Skriabine describes as Lacan's transition 'from an axiomatic of the
Other to an axiomatic of the One—in other words, of jouissance'.' 34 The 'bar'
which divides the subject is also the inscription first 'marking it off', that which
first installs it in the field of signification. Trait unaire was the translation Lacan
had proposed in the seminar on Identification (SIX, 1961-2) for einziger Zug, a
phrase used by Freud in 'Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego' (1921).'
A primal mark, inscribed as 'one', allows the subject to enter the field as an effect
of the chain of signifiers: like the paradoxical number zero in Frege's definition, the
unitary trait installs the economy of signification without itself 'counting' as a term
within that economy.'36
If the 'bar' in Lacan's quasi-algorithmic formulas first guarantees the symbolic
instance of the subject by ruling out any imaginary misprision of it, by the 1960s
it stands for the subject's inscription, in a primal moment of identification or 'fixa-
tion', in the real. Thus, the subject's very foundation, the anchorage which prevents
its dissolution in the flow of signification, is posited as a moment of writing. Writing
corresponds to a primary level of structure, of more weight in the subject's des-
tiny than its subsequent experience as parldtre as mapped out in analysis (Lacan's
reversal, in the seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', of the proverbial Verba volant,
scripta manent here seems to be undoing itself).
' 32 'The agency of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud', Ecrits: A Selection,
op. cit., pp. 149-55.
l33 Seminar of 22nd April 1964 (SXI), op. cit., p. 141.
' 34 Pierre Skriabine, 'Clinique et topologie', op. cit., p. 127.
' 35 S1X, L'Identification (1961-2), unpublished, version P. G., pp. 413-4; SE XVIII, p. 107.
' 3 cf. Juan-David Nasio, 'The Concept of the Subject of the Unconscious' in Disseminating
Lacafl , op. cit., pp. 301.

48
 On the other hand—and seemingly paradoxically—writing emerges as a priv-
ileged figure in psychosis, as was already clear to Lacan in his doctoral thesis. As
we have seen, Lacan understood psychosis as, in essence, a failure of symbolization:
something could not be metaphorically translated into the domain of the Other,
due to the originary lack of a key signifier, the Name-of-the-Father. But the in-
creasing theoretical importance of the 'barred' Other, the lacking or inconsistent
Other, inevitably shifted the status of this flaw in the symbolic from the level of an
individual history to that of a 'generalized' condition of subjectivity.' 37 If in the
1950s the Name-of-the-Father appears to be, in effect, the name of the Other, the
guarantee of symbolic structure, the Other is subsequently declared to be lacking a
signifier, unable to cohere or form a totalized set.' 38 This lack or inconsistency is
posited in 1973 as a matter of jouissance: 'a subject, as such, has little to do with
jouissance'—due to the presence of something (in the real of the body, in the 'aut-
istic' insistence of the drive) irreducible to symbolic mortification, incommensurable
with the alienating ex-sistence of the Other.139
This coincidence in the figure of writing—between the real of the psychotic
symptom and the trait unaire which provides the fundamental, pre-ontological basis
of the subject—points to transformations in Lacan's view of psychosis, bound up
with a larger reconceptualization of 'structure' in Lacanian theory. Does the struc-
ture which can be coherently theorized necessarily correspond exclusively to the
dit-mension of the subject's truth? In other words, is the jouissance which is 'ex-
timate' to the subject thus ipso facto beyond the reach of psychoanalytic concepts?
Lacan responds, in his late work, to such questions by developing topology as a
new mode of psychoanalytic theory.
The shift in Lacan's use of the Heideggerian trope 'ex-sistence' allows us to out-
line some of these changes. At the opening of the Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter',
strategically located as we have seen to announce the 'transcendental topology' of
the signifier (in Viderman's phrase), ex-sistence corresponds to the symbolic 'insist-
ence' which determines the subject as excentrique, ' de-centred'; in other words, the
term encapsulates the exteriority of an unconscious structured like a language. By
1975, Lacan's invocation of ex-sistence has taken on a more radical status: it now
designates a property of the real, figuring its 'sistence outside the symbolic and the
imaginary', beyond both meaning and the subject's discursive lack-of-being.'4°
At both these moments of Lacan's work, ex-sistence marks something irre-
ducible to the discursive space of traditional psychoanalytic teaching. We recall
Nasio's observation that the topology of surfaces introduced in the 1960s supple-
mented spatial representation with the temporal logic needed to figure the aphanisis
of the speaking subject; the more radical sense of ex-sistence, as the dimension of
an irreducible real, will lead Lacan to a very different exploration of topology in
the 1970s. Skriabine outlines this development:
137 For the 'generalization' of foreclosure, see the second part of Pierre Skriabine's article 'Clinique
et topologie', op. cit., pp. 127-31.
138 cf. 'The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious',
Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 316.
' 39 Seminar of 16th January 1973 (SXX), op. cit., p. 48.
' 4O Seminar of 16th December 1975 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, Ornicar? 7, 1976, p. 3.

49
 Lacan's topology in the 1960s takes the Other as its point of departure, to end
by bringing into effect the incompleteness of the Other, the structural position of
lack in the Other; beginning with A, it ends with , while the topology of the 1970s,
that of knots, is explicitly founded on 141

Writing, in its final definition for Lacan, is that which is founded on the barred
Other, that which reaches a level inaccessible to discourse, beyond meaning. The
letter, first deployed to figure the circulation of signifiers in the symbolic domain
of truth, is declared in 1974 to be 'the only starting-point from which we can gain
access to the real'.142

vi) Writing beyond discourse: the Borromean knot

If the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father designates the failure of a metaphorical

function, this results in the blockage of the movement of symbolic substitution which
produces the unconscious as a cluster of signifying chains. A psychotic, therefore—
and here Lacan was upholding a long-established view in clinical psychoanalysis—
was not caught up in the ciphering movement of the unconscious, or was so only
in a very restricted or idiosyncratic sense. Thus, psychotic behaviour could not
be interpreted according to the logic of the psychoanalytic symptom, 'resolved
entirely in an analysis of language', as Lacan had put it—echoing Freud's sense of
Lösung, the analytic resolution of the symptom—in 1953.' Was psychosis thus to
be rigorously excluded from the dit-mension of analytic interpretation, banished to
the outer darkness beyond analysis?
We have seen that the Lacanian subject is explicitly located in the philosophical
tradition inaugurated by Descartes, in its reformulation of the cogito as the strictly
linguistic enunciation of an existence, the subject's self-utterance. By making the
cogito the equivalent of a primordial affirmation—the moment where the subject
says 'Yes' to the Other, accepts its symbolic mediation, and thus avoids psychosis-
Lacanian theory aligned itself with a specific historical understanding of Cartesian
philosophy: as the moment when the modern subject is founded through the radical
exclusion—or 'foreclosure', we might say—of madness. Such an interpretation is
formulated in 1961 by Michel Foucault, who in Madness and Civilization claims that
the work of Descartes announced the 'advent of a ratio' based on the constitutive
exclusion of madness from the domain of the thinking subject. 144 If, for Lacan
in 1957, the cogito can be re-written to provide a formula for the split subject's
division between the symbolic and the real—'I think where I am not, therefore I
am where I do not think'—such topography, the socio-symbolic organization of a
modern subject, is what will break down in psychosis: the decisive ergo both linking
and separating language and being simply fails to operate, is foreclosed.' 45 We will
' 41 Pierre Skriabine, 'Clinique et topologie', op. cit., p. 119.
142 'La Troisiême', op. cit., p. 201.
143 'The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis', Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit.,
p. 59.
l44 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Aye of Reason,
tr. Richard Howard, New York: Pantheon, 1965, p. 53
145 'The agency of the letter in the unconscious', Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 166.

50
return to this question of modernity and the subject when we have developed our
interpretation of Lacan's last topology.
The phenomena of psychosis—exhilarating hallucinations or terrifying delu-
sions—are thus beyond metaphor. They cannot be inserted into the symbolic ma-
chine of the Lacanian unconscious, incorporated into the chains of signification
which give it interpretive coherence, constitute its subject. The jouissance 'ex-
pressed' in psychosis does not conform to the protocols of symbolic 'castration', the
'Law of desire' which Lacan had posited in 'The Subversion of the Subject' (1960)
as the transcendental condition of the Other as zone of inter-subjectivity: madness
bodies forth a traumatic real, resistant to any 'alienation' into subjective truth.'46
Foreclosure, then, comprises the failure of the symbolic logic encapsulated in
the cogito. Lacan articulates this in 1974, by completing the list of his reformula-
tions of the cogito with a 'foreclosed' version. 'Je pense, donc se jouit', he declares
in 'La Troisième', adding that 'this rejects the usual 'donc', the one which says
'je souis' The contrepet ('spoonerism') converts the Cartesian sum, the self-
declaration of existence, into the impersonal, 'acephalic' manifestation of jouissance
('it enjoys' or 'there is enjoyment'); it marks the return in the real—in the materi-
ality of language—of the foreclosed signifier (the existence which is 'sullied', souillé,
by this materiality).
Lacan's self-mocking word-play should not blind us to the significance of the
transformation at stake here: the very status of psychoanalytic theory and its
subject is in question. If 'I think' corresponds, not to the opening in the real of the
negative space constitutive of a subject but to the materialization of an unspeakable
jouissance—in other words, if foreclosure is to be generalized, made the basis of all
subjectivity—how are we to continue to think the subject according to a 'logic of
the signifier'? For that matter, how are we to think ( the subject) at all, if to say 'I
think' is merely to become caught up in the inert, opaque density of enjoyment?
We cannot begin to understand Lacan's last topology—that of the Borromean
knot—until we have grasped the special status of writing implied by this parodic
'foreclosure' of the cogito, and its relation to the earlier theorization of the uncon-
scious. The idea that writing is autonomous, which as we have seen Lacan stresses
in 1976, is not simply an extension of the structuralist formulations on the 'suprem-
acy' of the signifier, in which the symbolic order was constructed as automatic, its
chains of signification devoid of human agency. Indeed, the Saussurian signifier is,
rather, strictly heteronomous, essentially determined by diacritical effects (by the
Other, in Lacan's reformulation). The 'autonomy' of the écrit, that which distin-
guishes it radically from the signifier, lies in its literal status, its ex-sistence to the
economy of metaphor.
The renewal of Lacan's interest in psychosis in his late work is bound up with
this problematic of writing. In the case of 'radical foreclosure', the breakdown of
the entire representational field in which the speaking subject is able to emerge, the
psychotic symptom presents a unique instance of 'writing': the attempt to organize
or 'shape' the traumatic real in some way, without recourse to the metaphorical
' 46 cf. 'Subversion of the subject', Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 324.
147 'La Troisième', op. cit., p. 179.

51
dimension which provides for the non-psychotic subject an escape-route from 'aut-
istic' collapse. The psychotic experience is singular, deprived of the socio-symbolic
inheritance which governs the field of the Other, lays down the structural paramet-
ers of the unconscious; the symptomatic life of the psychotic thus has the potential
to realize a radical originality.
Writing in this non-metaphorical dimension is closely related to the act, in the
sense developed by Lacan in his seminar on Anxiety (SX, 1962-3). In the passage a
l'acte, the subject of the unconscious, located in the signifying circuit of the Other,
fails to operate: the act is a mute expression of jouissance, devoid of any potential
intentionality or meaning.' 48 Lacan's notion of the act, indeed, shares something
of the ambiguity surrounding his deployment of the term 'writing': in one sense,
'passing to the act', as shown in a psychotic episode, entails the abolition of the
symbolic register, the (possibly terrifying) turning away from the law of the Other;
in another, the act is the site of the ethical dimension in psychoanalysis, as Lacan
had brought out in his reading of Antigone in 1960. The jouissance of the heroine
in Sophocles' play, we recall, was revealed as autonomos, had 'turned its back on
the Other': the terrifying 'splendour' of her self-sacrifice carries reverberations of
the self-loss in the passage a 1 'acte, which also emerges ex nihilo.'49
Something emerges, Lacan implies, in both the phenomena of psychosis and the
ethical act, which is irreducible to the logic of the signifier, cannot be incorporated
into the theory of the subject. This 'impossible' instance, extimate to the field of
representation, can nevertheless—this is Lacan's claim in La Troisième—be written;
or rather it is writing, it co-incides with its non-metaphorical inscription.' 50 This
writing of the real, which is always traumatic, disruptive of symbolic structure,
finds its fullest realization for Lacan in his explorations of the Borromean knot.
Lacan's interest in a dialogue between psychoanalysis and mathematics had
begun in the 1950s. The mathematician Georges Guilbaud, a personal friend whom
Lacan would contact for assistance with ideas or problems arising in the seminar,
influenced him in particular by sharpening his appetite for, and comprehension of,
topological figures. In a curious way, Guilbaud came to 'authorize' the introduction
of the Borromean knot to the seminar. As Lacan puts it (in the seminar ... Ou
Pire) on 9th February 1972:
A strange thing—while I was puzzling yesterday evening over how I was going to
present to you today my tetradic geometry, it chanced that, having dinner with a
charming young lady who attends M. Guil-baud's classes, I was given something
which fitted me like a ring to my finger; which I now wish to show you—as I learned
yesterday night, it's nothing less than the coat-of-arms of the Borromi... 151
148 Seminar of 16th January 1963 (SX), Angoisse, unpublished (quoted in Dylan Evans, An
Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, op. cit., p. 137).
' 49 cf. Seminars in May and June 1960 (SVII), op. cit., pp. 243-87; (discussed on p. 16 above).
l5Ocf. 'La Troisième', op. cit., pp. 190-201.
151 Seminar of 9th February 1972 (SXIX) ... Ou Fire, unpublished (Version P. G., p. 59).

52
 Figure 1: The Borromean Knot

The young mathematician had told Lacan about the heraldic crest of a Milanese
family, devised in the sixteenth century to symbolize a triple alliance by showing
three intertwined rings. The three branches of the family were inextricably linked
by the coat-of-arms, so that if one ring were broken, the entire 'knot' would disin-
tegrate.' 52 Lacan's immediate gusto in embracing the figure perhaps came from his
delight in the coincidentia oppositorztrn it embodied: its ostensible representational
simplicity, the 'Borromean' quality of mutual interconnection, belying its mathem-
atical complexity, its difficulty as a topological object. Later in Lacan's seminar,
this 'antinomy' emerged as the troublesome discrepancy between the 'imaginary'
dimension of the knot—its misc a plat or inscription on the blackboard—and its
'real', three-dimensional 'knottedness', which is beyond human imagination, can
only be conceived mathematically.
'Mathematical formalisation is our goal, our ideal', Lacan told his seminar in
1973.153 If this theoretical ambition was, as Elisabeth Roudinesco writes, 'a final
attempt to save psychoanalysis from its origins in the occult and hypnotism'—to
translate analytic 'knowledge' from its location in the shifting, aleatory dimension
of speech to a place of clearly-defined, reliable formulae—its principal focus was the
teaching of psychoanalysis. The aim of 'formalisation', concludes Roudinesco, was
'to differentiate [psychoanalytic] from academic knowledge in a society where this,
according to Lacan, was beginning to replace religion'.'54
The Borromean knot is thus the final avatar of the Lacanian mathème (the
neologism coined in 1971 as a condensation of the Levi-Straussian mythème and
the Greek mathema, 'knowledge'; a matheme is 'that which is capable of integral
transmission'). The fact that the topology of manifolds, of which knot theory is
a sub-section, produces a necessarily counter-intuitive understanding of space, one
alien to the meaning-hungry register of the imaginary, gave the Borromean knot a
special privilege as a form of 'showing'.
' 52 Although 'Borromean knot' is the term used here, due to its place in the vocabulary of
Lacanian psychoanalysis, the figure is not, strictly speaking, a knot in topology (which defines a
knot as the homeomorphism in three-dimensional space of a single circle). By 1976, Lacan was
talking of une chalnoend borroméenne, 'a Borromean chain-knot' (Seminar of 13th January 1976
(SXXIII), Le Sinthome, in Ornicar? 7, p. 17). Topologists refer to the figure as the 'Borromean
rings'. See R.H.Crowell & R.H. Fox, Introduction to Knot Theory, New York: Springer,1963.
153 Seminar of 15th May 1973 (SXX), op. cit., p. 108.
l54 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, op. cit., pp. 449-50.

53
 The place of the knot in Lacan's thought is aptly illustrated by a moment
during his 1974 television broadcast, where what we could term the opening of a
gap between speech and writing occurs. Lacan is telling the watching public about
'the real', which
allows us to unknot effectively that which makes up the symptom, which is a knot
of signifiers. Knotting and un-knotting are not to be taken as metaphors here, but as
knots which are articulated in the real to make up the chain of signifying material.'55
The misc a plat of the Borromeazi knot appears on the television screen as
Lacan is speaking, although it is never named as such. Likewise, in the text pre-
pared by Jacques-Alain Miller shortly before the broadcast, the knot is set apart,
positioned in the margin of the discourse 'proper'. Miller explains in a foreword
to Télévision that the marginal annotations (couched in the 'mathemic' terms of
Lacanian formalisation) were added by him en guise de 'manuductio' ('as a brief
guide') after his request that Lacan should 'sift' (cribler), reduce to its essentials,
what he wished to say.'56
Whatever significance we may assign here to Miller's role (as 'formalising'
scribe, introducing 'mathemic' effects into Lacan's discourse) 157 , we cannot fail to
note the different positions of speech and writing which emerge in this misc en
scene of Lacanian theory. The Borromean knot occupies an estimate position in
the text of Télévision: it appears silently, shown but not given a name, as though
it entails something irreducible to the speaking voice (always, for Lacan, the dit-
mension of the subject's truth).' 58 It is not a metaphor, we are told—thus it is
not caught up in the differential weave of the symbolic order; but rather indicates
the real construction of signifying chains. 'These chains', Lacan continues, 'are
not of sens ('meaning') but of jouis-sens ('enjoy-meaning')'. The untranslatable
pun brings together Lacanian incompatibles—the opaque, 'autistic' substance of
jouissance and the virtual domain of meaning; it is 'to be written in conformity
with the equivocation which constitutes the law of the signifier'.' 59 Equivocation
(occluded by the speaking voice, rendered visible by a written text) encapsulates
something of the real matière signifi ante of language, something which is shown—
silently and literally—by the Borromean knot.
What becomes visible in Télévision, in the dramatic collision of speech and
writing, the gap which opens between Lacan's voice and the marginal criblage, is
the spectacle of a thought dominated by the axiomatic of a linguistic subject (the
symptom is still 'a knot of signifiers') striving to exceed itself, to extend its grasp
beyond (its own) 'structuralist' formulas—as far as the real which, Lacan had de-
155 Tdldvision, Paris: Seuil, 1974 , p. 22.
156 Ibid., Avertissement.
' 57 Miller has recently commented on this role: 'When I published Lacan's Television, which reads
like a highly contrived text with a great deal of difficult rhetoric, I included a number of schemas in
the margins to indicate that Lacan's rhetoric constitutes a commentary of a very precise nature'.
('An Introduction to Seminars I and II' (III), in Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan's Return to
Freud, op. cit., p. 30).
158' .. I have declared that truth is a dit-mension, the mention / mansion of speech'. Seminar
of 8th May 1973 (SXX), op. cit., p. 97.
159 Tdlévision, op. cit., p. 22 [my translationi.

54
clare.d in Lituraterre, creates 'furrows' in the conceptual domain of theory.' 6 ° The
uncanny monstration ('showing') of the knot is something 'unspeakable', heterogen-
eous to the law of the signifier. For a clearer idea of what this 'showing' constitutes,
we need to return to the (Jrszene of the Borromean knot—Lacan's enthusiastic dis-
covery of it in 1972. To what clinical and theoretical problems does the knot first
respond?
At its introduction in the 1971-2 seminar ... Ot Fire, the knot takes part
in the forrnalisation of speech. Lacan takes the spoken phrase je te dernande de
refuser ce que je t'offre, parce que c'est pas ça ('I ask you to refuse what I offer you,
because it's not that') as an 'enunciation of the impossible of the sexual relation'
(to cite Serge André's formulation). 16 ' His first schematization of the phrase is
a Tetrahedron, a four-sided figure inter-linking its pronouns and verbs but the
newly discovered knot is brought forward as a more perfect version, fitting Lacan
'like a ring to a finger'. Any two of the circles in the Borromean knot are only
held together due to the position of the third, so that all three are simultaneously
inter-connected—thus the knot embodies the inextricable verbs of the phrase, the
impossibility of any binary rapport it figures. 'When I have spoken of the signifying
chain,' comments Lacan, 'I have always implied that concatenation'. But more
importantly, he continues,
Demand, Refusal and Offer—it is clear that, in this knot which I have brought
forward for you today, each takes on meaning only from the others; but what results
from this knot ... is that it is the foundation, the root, of what belongs to the objet
a. 162

In later versions of the Borromean knot, objet a will be written in its central
intersection, at a point of anamorphic coin cage ('wedging') between real, symbolic
and imaginary.' 63 But already, on its first appearance here, the knot designates
something beyond the signifying chain, its signifying 'concatenation' somehow para-
doxically evoking the absolute negativity of the objet a (an object 'for which there
is no idea', as Lacan is to comment in 'La Troisième').' 64 The inextricable verbs
and pronouns of the phrase—'I ask you to refuse what I offer you'—are supplemen-
ted, crucially, by the final c'est pas ça, 'that's not it'. Lacan's next move is to link
this impossibility of rapport, this 'objectal' stumbling block, to problems in theory.
He begins by stating the uncanny proximity of signification and its unspeakable
obverse:
What I am leading you to is this—not how meaning arises, but how it is from a knot
of meaning that the object arises, the object itself. . . namely the objet a.165
160 'Lituraterre', op. cit., p. 7.
161 Serge André, 'Clinique et noeud borroméen', Actes de L'Ecole de La cause freudienne, Febru-
ary 1982, P. 90.
162 Seminar of 9th February 1972 (SXIX), op. cit., pp. 59-60.
l6SFor Lacan's discussion of anamorphosis see Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts
of psychoanalysis, op. cit., pp. 79-90; for an account of the 'extimate' place of objet a in the
Borromean knot, see Pierre Skriabine, 'Clinique et Topologie', op. cit., p. 127.
164'La Troisiême', op. cit., p. 183.
l655eminar of 9th February 1972 (SXIX), op. cit., p. 56.

55
 He goes on to name Wittgenstein as a thinker who concluded that 'we should
not speak about that which cannot be spoken' (the reference is to the concluding
statement of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). ' It is', Lacan continues,
precisely that which cannot be spoken of which is in question when I mark as the
'that's not it' the sole motivation of a demand such as 'to refuse what I offer you'.166
The objet a, as negative 'object' knotting together the three verbs, corres-
ponds to the logical limit of language designated as a place of silence, of the non-
theorizable, by Wittgenstein. It was Lacan's reading of Wittgenstein, writes Roud-
unesco, that was a key factor leading him to rethink the status of the discourse
of psychoanalysis, seeking its basis no longer in the 'fluctuations' of la parole but
instead in monst ration, in a form of 'showing' which aimed beyond the logical limits
of speech. 167 François Baudry has claimed, as we have seen, that in its status as
the 'purest' topological instance of this non-metaphorical showing, the Borromean
knot is equivalent to—even a form of—the objet a: the Lacanian definition of a as
that which is 'abandoned by the signifier', argues Baudry, applies equally to the
knot, the purest embodiment of litura to appear in Lacan's teaching.
From the moment of its introduction—as part of an attempt to inscribe, mark
out the 'impossible' as that which prevents rapport—the Borromean knot figures
something beyond the logic of a model, of metaphorical representation. It emerges
as a paradoxical co-incidence of the inseparable verbs in a phrase and the invisible
'object' embodying the impossible relation it expresses. Lacan's response in 1975
to a sceptical question—'despite what you say, in the end the knot is a simple
model'—is emphatic:
It does not constitute a model in so far as it comprises something before which the
imagination fails. And the mathematical approach to it in topology is inadequate.'68
Unlike the topological surfaces of the 1960s, the Borromean knot—as real nou-
age, irreducible even to its topological misc a plat—offers no representational equi-
valence to or of the subject. It is strictly identical to structure, not some meta-
phorical 'guide' to it, to paraphrase a remark in 'L'Etourdit'.169
Lacan addresses the central paradox of the Borromean knot—its non-meta-
phorical, 'acephalic' essence—in his most concentrated elaboration of it, the R.S.I.
seminar of 1974-5. Announcing the year's project—to try to think the real by first
'writing' the real, symbolic and imaginary as a Borromean knot—Lacan states the
initial theoretical problem: that of finding the 'common measure' of three terms
hitherto understood to be radically heterogeneous. 170
If the knot's definition as 'Borromean'—its intrication completely undone if any
one of its strands is severed—implies, as it were, the 'homogenization' of Lacan's
categories, their reconception as components of something 'larger', an immediate
question arises concerning the epistemic status of the knot itself. If there is not
166 Ibid.
167 ljsabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan,op. cit., pp. 469-70.
l68 Semjnar of 9th December 1975 (SXXIII), op. cit., p. 19.
169'L'Etourdit', op. cit., p. 40
ll °Seminar of 10th December 1974 (SXXII), R.S.I., in Ornicar? 2, p. 1

56
 S

Figure 2: the Borromean knot R.S.I.

a fourth 'register', something beyond the real, the symbolic and the imaginary,
in which category would the knot, and the theoretical discourse in which it is
'embedded', be situated?
In an opening session of the seminar R.S.I., Lacan asks himself this question:
'Does [the Borromean knot] belong to the symbolic, the imaginary or the real?'.
His response is characteristically defiant of expectations:
In so far as it is supported by the number three, the Borromean knot is of the register
of the imaginary.'7'

'The imaginary', he continues later in the session, 'always tends to reduce to a

mise a plat ('two-dimensional figure')" 72 ; so that the topological diagram, given
consistence by its three rings, remains caught in a realm of méconaissance which
the knot 'in itself', its mathematical nodalité, eludes.
Elsewhere in the same seminar, Lacan reserves a special place in the knot for
the symbolic, in terms which recall the privilege (or 'ethic') formerly associated
with the subject as site of desire, man que a étre:
the symbolic turns around an inviolate hole, without which the knot of three
would not be Borromean—for that is the meaning of the Borromean knot: that the
hole of the symbolic is inviolate.'73

If the preservation of a 'symbolic' void at its heart is not, it seems, in conflict with
the 'imaginary' mise a plat of the knot, both these aspects (the attributes, in former
times, of the lacking subject and the deluded ego) seem to be radically challenged
by Lacan's remarks on 17th December 1974:
it seems to me that I have accounted for why the Borromean knot can be written,
since it is a writing, a writing which supports a real. This already, in itself, indicates
the following: that not only can the real be supported by a writing, but that there
is no other perceptible idea of the real.'74
' 7 'Ibid, p. 9.
172 Ibid., pp. 10-12.
' 73 Seminar of 11th March 1975 (SXXII), R.S.I., in Ornicar? 4, p. 8.
' T4 Seminar of 17th December 1974 (SXXII), R.S.I., in Ornicar 2, p. 2.

57
This notion—to which Lacan most often returns—of the Borromean knot as the
real itself written non-metaphorically raises problems for our understanding of
how the 'inviolate' hole (the Kojevean subject) can nevertheless continue to ex-sist
non-ontologically (ie. in the chain of signifiers) within it. How is this return of
the subject—its symbolic 'nihilation' somehow now immanent to the structure of
the knot 175 —to be reconciled with the 'demotion' of the symbolic to one of three
elements? How can pure évidemerit 'cohere' in the same knot as the brute substance
of jo'uissance? As Jean Allouch writes,
to present a certain Borromean knotting of R, S and I as the support of the
subject as such is to resituate the subject in relation to three types of consistence,
and no longer only the symbolic—even if the symbolic was not alone. Henceforth the
three consistences would be equivalent in the event of a subjectification... ,176
One way of understanding or resolving the tension between the Lacanian sub-
ject, with its manifestly phonocentric character, and the real—as asemic writing,
given priority in the 1970s—has been to articulate the changes introduced by the
Borromean knot with the transformation in Lacan's thought of the symptom.
The psychoanalytic symptom, Lacan argued in 1955, cannot be separated from
the discourse of analysis: it functions as a signifier, in contrast to the symptom
conceived as 'natural index' in medicine.' 77 As such, the psychoanalytic symptom
is fully absorbed into the linguistic domain of the unconscious subject; Lacan de-
scribes it elsewhere as 'a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying
element'.' 78 The brisk copula linking 'flesh or function' to the domain of significa-
tion is, of course, what Lacan comes to re-problematize, not by simply falling back
upon a traditional figure of the body (as the site of some pre-discursive, 'aesthetic'
particular) but in an attempt to re-think some of the fundamental assumptions of
analysis, starting from a consideration of the psychotic experience of jottis-sens, the
condition of the body in language beyond the supposition of the subject.
Psychoanalysis makes the unconscious speak, and thus unavoidably teaches it
the rules of a syntax; at the end of his teaching, Lacan became fascinated with the
idea that it might be possible—in forms of 'writing' which would no longer consti-
tute simply new avenues of 'theory'—to bring within the reach of psychoanalytic
thought the real of that which was sometimes brought forth in symbolic form—in
the guise of the unconscious—by the analyst. Jacques-Alain Miller, discussing the
last period of Lacan's teaching, presents analysis as a special process of intervention
or fabrication:
if the unconscious is structured like a language, it is not immediately discourse
of the Other: it only becomes so through the artifice of the analytic experience.
Where there was ai always autistic jonissance, analysis causes effects of the signified
to come about; it operates on the symptom by introducing into it a special effect
of signification, known as the 'subject-supposed-to-know'; but in itself, the symptom
means nothing to anyone: it is ciphering, it is jouissance, the pure jouissance of a
writing-process. 179
l 7C cf. L'Etourdit, op. cit., p. 40 for the assimilation of trou and structure.
176 Jean Allouch, 'Tel 36 53 75', in Esquisses Psychanalytiques #15, Paris: CFRP 1991, p. 29.
' 77 'The Freudian Thing', Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 129.
178'The agency of the letter in the unconscious', Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 166.
17 J-A Miller, 'Preface', Joyce Avec Lacan, op. cit., p. 11.

58
 In this sense, the symptom became a new way for Lacan to think about the
subject, away from the 'transcendental topology' of his earlier work. If the idea
of the symptom as Ecriture is present, as Miller points out, from as early as 1957,
we have seen that it is only in the last period of his teaching that Lacan seeks to
re-invent the whole framework of subjectivity on the basis of writing.'80

vii) Introducing the Sinthome: Writing-Being

the instance of the knowledge [savoir] which Freud renews ... in the form of
the unconscious is something which in no sense necessarily implies the real that I
deploy.18'

These remarks of Lacan's in 1976 remind us that no effort to produce a 'synchron-

ous' reading of his work, one which sought to synthesize or reconcile its disparate
moments, could ever succeed, as Ziek notes.' 82 In his work with the topology of
knots, Lacan declares, he is not necessarily seeking to extend or develop the key
component of the Freudian discovery, its construction or renovation of a knowledge
designated (paradoxically, it seems) as the unconscious. The primary aim of the
famous 'return to Freud' announced in 1955 (in 'The Freudian Thing') had been, of
course, to 'revitalize' that knowledge by wedding it to the scientific methodology of
structural linguistics, combined with a rigorously-defined, 'calculable' subject.'83
The subject—as parlêtre, the evanescent but indubitable dit-mension of truth—
was to provide the basis for the 'knowledge' which Freud's genius had stumbled on
almost intuitively—to salvage that knowledge from any last trace of the mystical
or hypnotic by definitively founding it as modern.
By stating that his explorations of knots in the mid-1970s do not necessarily
form part of this attempt to revitalize psychoanalytic knowledge, Lacan raises a
complex set of questions. If the Borromean knot is first introduced as an essai de
formalisation, an attempt to ground some of the claims of the earlier theories at a
'mathemic' level (the level of transmissible formulae), it now appears as an essai
in a more radical sense. Topological 'writing' might—this is the force of Lacan's
'not... necessarily'—return us to the question of the unconscious; but this would
not be to clarify or reformulate Freudian knowledge, but to found it in the real—to
discover it beyond metaphor, no longer mediated by symbolic exchange (and thus
no longer theorizable 'knowledge'). The unconscious, Lacan tells an astonished
audience in 1976, might be not 'structured like a language' but a real structure, an
unthinkable, indubitable given. The Borromean knot is an assay or an attempt to
show whether or not this is the case—but one with no epistemological safety-net
('I used to quote Picasso and say I do not seek, I find', remarks Lacan wistfully;
'Nowadays, I have more trouble finding my way').'84
180 Ibid.; Miller's reference is to 'La psychanalyse et son enseignement', Ecrits, op. cit., p. 445.
' 81 Seminar of 13th April 1976 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, Ornicar? 10, p. 7.
l 82 cf. Slavoj iek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, op. cit.,
p. i73
183 Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 116.
l84Seminar of 17th February 1976 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, Ornicar? 10, 1977.

59
 Any serious attempt to interpret Lacan must undertake a certain periodization
of his teaching, of the kind set out by Philippe Julien, for instance.' 85 There are
of course different ways to approach this periodization, but it is broadly accepted
that the three registers of Lacanian theory—the real, symbolic and imaginary which
make up the Borromean knot in the seminar R.S.I.—are each given different 'prior-
ity' over three distinct phases of Lacan's teaching: the first (beginning in 1936 with
the first article on 'The Mirror-Stage') focused on the theorization of the imaginary;
the second (beginning, perhaps, in 1953 with the Discours de Rome) on that of the
symbolic; and the third (encapsulated in the very title of La Troisième of 1974) on
the exploration of the real as a theoretical limit, the point where psychoanalysis
encounters the untheorizable.
Lacan himself was not prone to explicit reflections on the evolution of his work
(and certainly not to publishing any he did make). We recall how in Lituraterre the
concept of writing, whose introduction radically alters the crucial question of the
'letter' in psychoanalysis, is simply placed alongside la parole as a second 'register'
of the subject (as if things had always been thus, and there had been no shift in
emphasis). 186 This tendancy of Lacan's teaching to re-write its own history as it
went along, to promote a certain idea of 'synchronicity', has different implications
at the various points of his work. In moving from the very early work on the
formation of the ego to the structuralist period centred on the speaking subject,
one can assume a certain 'development' or continuity of ideas; there is even a
'syntactical' continuity proposed by Lacanian theory between imaginary forms and
the symbolic 'punctuation' introduced in analysis (thus 'truth' is always reached
via 'fiction'). The real coupure or 'epistemic break' comes between the structuralist
period and the last phase, with its increasing preoccupation with the topology of
the Borromean knot.
The theoretical problem of seeking to place side-by-side the letter as presented
in Lituraterre—the 'littoral' trace or scar of jouissamce across the field of meaning—
and the letter invoked in la Lettre volée, the signifier constituting the subject in its
unerring destination, does not lie simply in Lacan's desire to efface the historical
truth of his thought, offering its disparate moments as if they formed part of the
same insight or discovery. What is 'disavowed' in this juxtaposition of the two
'letters', the act of placing them alongside one another as the complementary 're-
gisters' of the subject, is the theoretical antagonism between these moments of
Lacan's teaching.
The subject, we recall reading in Encore, 'has little to do with jouissance'. In
the context of Lacan's earlier formulations, such a statement must appear some-
thing of a rhetorical under-statement: as it was presented in 1960, the subject only
acceded to existence by accepting the symbolic castration which entailed an abso-
lute refusal of jouissance.' 87 A discourse—the site where the Lacanian subject's
desiring lack-of-being takes effect—always comprises a loss or sacrifice of the body's
autonomous particularity, its submission to the mortifying 'cut' of the Other. How,
185p . .Julien,
'Lacan, symptome de Freud', Esquisses psychanalytiques #15, op. cit., pp. 127-39.
186 Lituraterre, op. cit., p. 9 (cf. p. 45 above)
187 'Subversion of the subject', Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 324.

60
 then, can speech, the essential dimension of the subject's desire, be 'complemen-
ted' by the écrit which threatens to ruin that dimension, to traverse it with an
unspeakable jouissance autistique?
This returns us to Allouch's point about the 're-situation' of the subject. If the
Borromean knot aims to show the intrication of real, symbolic and imaginary as a
new way of thinking the subject, this amounts to a radical departure from Lacan's
earlier concept of the subject as aphanisis, as a 'punctual', non-saturated instance
in the register of speech. We could show this by taking up a remark of Lacan's in
La Troisième where, in an uncharacteristic move, he refers his current work back
to a former period of his teaching.
Lacan reminds the audience (gathered in Rome in 1974 to hear a second,
parodic 'Rome Discourse' whose self-mocking title now comprises, not the fonction
et champ, but the fiction et chant of language)' 88 that although to write RSI as
a Borromean knot might appear to be a new turn in his thought, it was not in
fact the first time he had inter-linked the three terms.' 89 A lecture entitled 'Le
symbolique, l'imaginaire et le reel' had in fact, twenty years before, served as a
preliminary outline of the conceptual field developed in the original Discours de
Rome. 190
Beyond the ostensible continuity of their terms (although the changed order of
those terms does seem to imply a shift in 'priority', as Lacan occasionally hints), a
comparison of these two texts reveals a series of stark contrasts. In 1953, symbolic,
imaginary and real, the three 'essential registers of human reality,' are conceived by
Lacan as 'sharply distinct' from one another. 19 ' The relation between the Imagin-
ary and the symbolic—by implication, the essential relation in analysis—is one of
syntax: the symbolic order intervenes in the disorderly cluster of imaginary form-
ations, introducing 'mediation' (and thus allowing 'properly human relations' to
be 'realized').' 92 In other words, the theoretical relation operates in favour of the
symbolic. As for the real, at this point it is barely distinguished from 'reality' (of the
'symbolically mediated' type present, say, in Freud). By ascribing theoretical (as
well as 'existential') pre-eminence to the symbolic, Lacan's early paper constructs
the relation between the three registers in accordance with the 'mathematics of the
signifier' discussed in 'Science and Truth'.' 93 The relation between the orders is
one of separation and difference, with the real and the imaginary governed by the
organisational force of the symbolic.
This privileging of the symbolic—and the concomitant 'ethical' privilege ac-
corded to the subject as site of lawful or truthful mediation—is, to say the least,
rendered problematic by the 'architecture' Lacan is working with by 1974. If the
definition of the Borromean knot is that no one of its elements is detachable from—
or has any priority over—the others, then its structuring principle cannot 'belong' to
any single register. The intrication of the knot amounts to the abandonment of the
188 La Troisième, op. cit., pp. 177-203; <L'Etourdit, op. cit., p. 18.
lSO La Troisième, op. cit., p. 182.
190 Le symbolique, l'imaginaire et le réelw, lecture given at the Société francaise de psychanalyse
on 8th July 1953, in Bulletin de l'Association freudienne, #1, 1982, PP. 4-13.
l9l Jbid., p. 5.
192 Ibid., pp. 13-14.
l934 Science and Truth', op. cit., p. 10; Ecrits, op. cit., p. 861.

61
 neatly organized grid of boundaries and divisions installed by symbolic evidement
('voidance', clearing space'), its replacement by strange, paradoxical forms of con-
tinuity and coalescence.
How, then, can the Borromean knot correspond to a return to the question
of subjectivation? If, during the seminar R.S.I., Lacan seeks various ways to ad-
dress this question—focusing, in turn, on the status of imaginary consistence, real
ex-sistence and the 'hole' of the symbolic—it is given a different emphasis, the fol-
lowing year, in Le Sinthome. There, in an extraordinary diversion of topological
'writing' into the reading of (literal) writing, Lacan explicitly seeks to re-invent the
psychoanalytic symptom as a different way to approach subjectivity.
Miller's remarks quoted above remind us that the interpretation of a symptom
always involves a certain 'subjectivation' (in analysis, the effect of the special sub-
ject suppose savoir produced in transference): the introduction or supposition of
the speaking subject as the opening of a signifying space within the mute, meaning-
less 'ciphering' of a 'writing-process'. To that extent, Lacan's 1957 definition of the
symptom as a metaphor implies a prior interpretive process: for the symptom to be
'flesh or function taken as a signifying element', a whole operation of symbolic 'alien-
ation' must already have taken effect. 194 By 1963, Lacan is prepared to acknowledge
that a symptom—any symptom, not only the phenomena of psychosis—might fail
to address the Other in this way, remaining a non-interpretable 'anamorphic' blur
(and thus not the attribute of a subject, as it had been defined).195
The term 'symptom' thus changes its status. Having been first transferred from
its medical origin to the realm of signification, the site of the subject 'supposed',
put in place during analysis, the symptom now comes to designate something prior
to that subjectivation: the illegible ciphering of jouissance. This writing-process, as
Lacan figures it, is irreducible to the domain of subjective truth, turned away from
the Other; but at the same time it is undeniably a trace or signature of a particular
existence (which Lacan would doubtless have written ex-sistence to distinguish it
from the immaterial symbolic existence of the speaking subject).
This is the sense for which Lacan invents a new term—sinthome—in 1975. 'An
old way of writing what has more recently been written symptôme', the sinthome
bears a relation to 'symptom' comparable to the relation between the two 'letters'—
signifier and litura—in Lacan's work (which Lituraterre, as we have seen, sought
to present as the two complementary 'registers' of the subject). If the analytic
symptom can ultimately never be dissociated from the speech where the uncon-
scious manifests itself, the sinthome forms part of a new vision of psychosis as the
production of an asemic 'writing', hors discours'96
Sinthome, then, figures something that takes place outside discourse, something
incommensurable with the auto-enunciation of the Cartesian subject that Lacan
situates at the foundation of psychoanalysis. The absence or foreclosure of the
symbolic existence of the parlêtre—in 1976 Lacan formulates a notion of 'radical
foreclosure' which results in a psychotic 'autism', a total dereliction of signifying
194 'The agency of the letter in the unconscious', Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 166.
' 95 Seminar of 23rd January 1963 (SX), Angoisse, unpublished; (quoted in Dylan Evans, An
Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, op. cit., p. 189).
' 96 Seminar of 18th November 1975 (SXXIII), La Sinthome, Ornicar? 6, 1976, p. 3.

62
order—can (sometimes) give rise to the formation of a sinthome. 197 The 'case'
explored at length by Lacan in 1975-6 is, of course, that of James Joyce.
Reading Joyce provides Lacan with an unique way to develop what he under-
stands by 'writing', which became the most important stake in the last period of
his teaching. Joyce is not a 'subject' for psychoanalysis: not simply because he
did not lie on an analyst's couch (having specifically refused the financial aid to
do so, much to Lacan's delight), but due to his being, Lacan claims, désabonné a
l'inconscient, 'disinvested from the unconscious'. 198 We will seek to clarify this rela-
tion or non-relation between the Joycean sinthome and the knowledge 'renewed' by
Freud as the unconscious, and explore how Lacan's work in the mid-1970s situates
itself on a strange 'littoral' edge between psychoanalysis and somewhere beyond it,
a place where its subject collapses, has to be re-invented through a new conception
of writing.
Lacan's work on Joyce is unlike most (perhaps all) 'applications' of psychoana-
lytic theory to aesthetic questions. When Freud approaches literature, argues Sarah
Kofman, it is to turn it into the 'infancy of psychoanalysis', thus partaking in 'the
gesture of mastery which is symptomatic of philososphy, and a gesture Aristotle
inaugurated by making myth the infancy of philosophy'. 199 If such an attempt to
master the domain of literature is equally Aristotelean in its desire to locate nous
as the 'essence' of art—and we could see Lacan's deployment of 'The Purloined Let-
ter' as an extension of the same gesture, with the doublet signifier/subject merely
standing in for the Aristotelean 'soul'—by the time Lacan comes to elaborate the
sinthome in the Joycean text it is precisely in order to put in question the 'loca-
tion' of the nous or psyche. What Joyce shows us the 'essence' of, for Lacan, is
the symptom; this is what allows him to develop a version of subjectivity founded
on writing. 200 We hope to show that this constitutes, if not the 'graphematics a
venir' Derrida dreams of, an encounter between psychoanalysis and writing whose
radical significance has yet to be fully understood.20'

197cf. Seminar of 11th May 1976 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, unpublished.

l9SThe phrase is from Lacan's opening address to the 5th International James Joyce Symposium
on 16th June 1975; published as 'Joyce le symptOme I' in Joyce Avec Lacan, op. cit., p. 24.
' 99 Sarah Kofman, Freud and Fiction, tr. Sarah Wykes, Polity: Cambridge, 1991, p. 8.
200'Joyce le symptOme I', op. cit., p. 25.
201'Freud and the Scene of Writing', Writing and Difference, op. cit., p. 220.

63
 III. Raiding Joycesens

How am / to sign myself?

I won't sign anything at all, because I don't know what to sign myself.
—James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 19041

So why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace
is a perfect signature of its own? (FW 115)

i) Ideareal Histories

IN HIS OPENING ADDRESS to the 5th International Joyce Symposium in Paris on

16th June 1975, Lacan returns to a familiar theme of his: that of human destin.
The fabric of occurrences we weave as our destiny through speaking is nevertheless,
Lacan states, essentially an effect of the fact that 'we are spoken' by others—
particularly, he adds, by our families. He introduces his 'homage' to Joyce with an
autobiographical anecdote re-woven as part of his own destiny: 'emerging from the
sordid milieu' of a Catholic education,
it happened that at the age of seventeen, due to the fact that I used to hang
around at Adrienne Monnier's, I met Joyce. In the same way, I was present, at the
age of twenty, at the first reading of the French translation which had come out of
Ulysses.2

Adrienne Monnier's was La Maison des Amis des Livres, at 7, rue de l'Odéon, a
bookshop and lending library frequented by writers as celebrated as Gide, Valery
and Claudel. Together with her friend Sylvia Beach, the owner of the nearby Eng-
lish bookshop Shakespeare & Co, Monnier played an important role in the destiny
of Joyce's work, helping to organize the publication and translation of Ulysses, as
well as enthusiastically promoting its author's following amongst the Parisian intel-
ligentsia. In what Joyce would later describe as the 'opening of [his] Paris career', on
the 7th December 1921, Monnier hosted an evening to launch Ulysses, two months
before the book's publication on its author's fortieth birthday. 3 Valery Larbaud,
who was to play a central part in the efforts to translate Joyce's book into French,
gave an introductory lecture, which was followed by some readings (an American
actor, the aptly-named Jimmy Light, was coached by Joyce through readings from
the 'Sirens' episode). Two hundred and fifty people crammed into Monnier's book-
shop (among them, presumably, the twenty-year-old Jacques Lacan); as Ellmann
writes, however, 'Joyce himself was hidden behind a screen, but was obliged, much
against his will, to come forward afterwards in response to enthusiastic applause'.4
We will return shortly to the place of the screen in this account, and to the
audience's demand to see Joyce, to have some evidence of this legendary character's
1 The Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed Richard Ellmann, London: Faber, 1957, p. 25.
2 'Joyce le symptOme I', op. cit., pp. 22-3.
3 Jean-Michel Rabatb, 'Joyce the Parisian', in The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed
Derek Attridge, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1990, p. 90.
4 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford: O.U.P., 1959, p. 523.

64
real presence amongst them. First, we should pause to consider the significance of
Lacan's anecdotal 'encounter' with Joyce, how the conventionally 'trivial' nature
of the anecdote might be seen to belie its 'quadrivial' position in relation to the
Lacanian category of the real.5
J'ai rencontr Joyce, declares Lacan to the Symposium. What historical status
can we ascribe to this encounter? Regarding the date in 1921 at Adrienne Monnier's
bookshop, we certainly have material evidence: Ellmann's biography, for instance,
reproduces the card sent out by Monnier announcing the evening (and warning
the public that they may be shocked by the hardiesse d'expréssion of some of the
readings from Joyce) •6 Lacan, by his own testimony, was amongst the crowd which
would not depart without seeing Joyce and thus 'encountering' him.
But what of the earlier encounter with Joyce, when Lacan was seventeen?
According to Ellmann, during the year in question (April 1918 to the following
April) Joyce was in Zurich, having moved there following the evacuation of Trieste
by officials of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the midst of the First World War;
it was not until June 1920 that, persuaded by Ezra Pound, Joyce moved to Paris
to begin the most famous period of his 'exile', finishing Vysses there and writing
most of Finnegans Wake as a celebrated 'paleoparisien' (FW 151). It may, of
course, seem highly plausible that Lacan's memory, reaching back almost sixty
years, should have blurred the historical edges slightly, perhaps muddling the dates
of two events in his youth. For his part, though, Joyce had a deeply superstitious
conviction about the significance of dates: they were not the accidental properties of
a subjective destiny, to be moved around between 'screen memories' or manipulated
by wishful fantasy; but were, rather, inscribed in the text of history, marking our
ineluctable involvement in the 'vicous cycles' (FW 134) of human fate. For Lacan
to begin his remarks in 1975 with talk of the trame, weave or texture, of destiny,
might suggest a similar sense of historical textuality: it was no mere accident, he
seems to imply, that the encounter took place at that point in his history.
Here it is not a question of seeking to expose the fallibility of Lacan's memory,
or how his capacity for self-invention could sometimes treat historical facts a little
freely; but rather of tracing the 'encounter' as the mark of a certain impossibility
in history. Responding to a question asked by a historian in his seminar at Yale in
1975, Lacan declares,
Without a written document, you know that you're in a dream. What the historian
demands is a text: a text or a bit of paper; at any rate, he must have somewhere, in
an archive, something which certifies things, and whose lack makes history impossible
That which cannot be certified in writing cannot be considered history.8
5 Frank Budgen reports that Joyce's 'studied riposte' to the accusation that some aspects of
his work were 'trivial' was that some were also 'quadrivial' (ie., located at a cross-roads); Frank
Budgen, 'James Joyce', in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed Seon Givens, New York,
1948, p. 24.
6 Ellmann, James Joyce, op. cit., Plate XXXIV.
7 cf. Rabaté, 'Joyce the Parisian', op. cit., p. 83.
8 Yale University, Kanzer Seminar, 24th November 1975, Scilicet 6/7, op. cit., p. 20; Lacan's
questioner is Lucille Ritvo.

65
 The questioner's response is to point to the historiography of oral traditions,
new technologies of recording and so on; as we have seen, though, by 1975 what
Lacan understands by 'writing' is not so much the simple act of tracing words
onto paper as a certain primal moment of the subject's inscription, the trait which
embodies the material support of its being.
In this perspective, then, Lacan's first encounter with Joyce takes place 'in a
dream': outside the text of history. We have to take Lacan's word for it (as does
Rabaté, who doesn't worry about the dates and locations); 9 for all we know, it
might be true—it is, of course, possilile that in 1918 Joyce did appear in Paris,
and that Ellmann's biographical research is faulty or incomplete. The space of
subjective experience (like the dream en soi, experienced when the dreamer is
asleep) is not fully commensurable with that of historical evidence; it is a zone
of supposition, of anecdote, of the uncertain. We could perhaps see this stated in
another way in Lacan's 'barring' of the Other, from 1957 onwards: as , the Other is
not total, it does not seal the subject into a seamless representational consistency,
a scene of visibility with no blind spots. We will see how the problem of this
'dream', this indeterminable anamorphic stain which disfigures, renders illegible,
the account of 'what really happened', is central to the 'encounter' between Joyce
and psychoanalysis.
The primary task of biography, of course, is to tackle this problem of the
'dream', the existential irreducibility of an individual life to concrete data. The
biographical narrative strives to absorb the lacunae in the historical evidence or
clarify its areas of uncertainty, supplying the suppositions necessary to secure the
semantic consistency, the plausibility, of its subject. Thus, for Lacan's biographer,
Elisabeth Roudinesco, the young student's encounter with the legendary writer
formed part of Lacan's own roman familial (his Freudian 'family romance'). At
the time—whenever it was: let's say, around 1921—that Lacan first saw Joyce,
he was, writes Roudinesco, 'in the midst of a serious crisis of depression [and]
violently rejected the family universe and the Christian values in which he had been
brought up'.'° Lacan was approximately half Joyce's age, a fact which, combined
with his youthful crisis concerning Catholicism and the relation to his father, must
have given his 'identification' with Joyce's fictional universe an inevitable shape:
the character of Stephen Dedalus. When in 1975 Lacan's return to Joyce's work
'plunges him once again into fantasmatic contemplation of his own history', as
Roudinesco puts it, 1 ' it is no surprise that, as we shall see, the book which most
interests him is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
As for Joyce himself, he could not have recognized this young man who would
retrospectively claim to have encountered him. Indeed, the theatrical screen behind
which he shelters might serve as an emblem for one of the strategies of Joyce's
relation to his audience: to deny them a full view or 'portrait' of the legendary artist,
to use concealment as a veil to further the myth of a figure beyond the everyday
world, somehow transcending the mundane condition of history, impossible to really
see.
9 Rabaté, 'Joyce the Parisian', op. cit., p. 97.
'°Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, op. cit., p. 31.
11 Ibid, p. 482.

66
 The historical problem of Joyce's 'encounter' with psychoanalysis is bound up
with the deployment of this self-fictionalizing screen, with the way it fostered effects
of rumour, supposition and anecdote which remain beyond the domain of material
evidence. Thus, the oft-raised question of Joyce's knowledge of Freudian doctrine
and the extent to which it influenced his work remains a speculative one, usually
referring to an anecdote (where Joyce is supposed to have 'disavowed' or dismissed,
though always obliquely or cryptically, psychoanalysis).'2
A very different set of questions is raised as soon as an encounter becomes
part of a historical document, is 'certified in writing', as Lacan puts it in his Yale
seminar. We can trace this transition—from the domain of the possible, let's say,
to that of public evidence—in the curious relation between Joyce and a figure he
bumped into 'in the real' of historical contingency: Carl Gustav Jung.
During his time in Trieste before the war, Joyce purchased a pamphlet by Jung
entitled Die Bedeut'ung des Vaters für das Shicksal des Einzelnen ('The Significance
of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual', 19O9).' Written at the time when
Jung was still an orthodox Freudian, the article used case-histories to build an
argument about the predominance of the father in the aetiology of neurosis; we will
see below how Jung's article can be linked to the question of paternity in Joyce,
and Lacan's elaboration of it.
In Zurich, Joyce came into contact with Jung in a very different sense. His
principle patroness at the time, Edith Rockerfeller McCormick, was a convinced
Jungian; she attempted in 1919 to persuade Joyce—so he told his friend Claud
Sykes—that he should enter analysis with Jung himself, at her expense. If Joyce's
blunt refusal (the idea, he declared, was 'unthinkable') piqued Mrs McCormick
into withdrawing her financial support, or if Jung advised her to do so, is not
known (Ellmann writes of the rich American's 'caprices', her sudden changes of
heart); but in October 1919 the bank in Zurich informed Joyce that his income
had been cut off. Having first put the blame for this change of fortunes on his
friend Ottocaro Weiss, who knew Jung, Joyce later came to suspect that Jung
himself had had a hand in it. It was, for Joyce, another instance of what he was
to describe, in a footnote to Herbert Gorman's biography in 1939, as the 'brusque
and unexplained' transformation of 'admiration' into 'hostility' which had plagued
his life as an artist.'4
In psychoanalytic terms, the triangular relation of Joyce, McCormick and Jung
clearly turns around the question of transference, which is always essentially a
matter of speculation and supposition. 'It cannot be said that Joyce was mordu
par l'analyse ('bitten' by, thought much of, analysis)', is Lacan's ironic remark to
the 1975 Symposium; 15 the absolute lack of any transferential opening will be one
of the preconditions Lacan will posit for the writing of the sinthome. It is easy to
imagine how in the tense transferential scenario being played out between Jung and
his analysand, with the special status which the giving and receiving of gifts could
have assumed there, Joyce's indifference might have seemed worthy of punishment.
' 2 Cf Ellmann, James Joyce, op. cit., pp. 436, 472, 510.
13 Thid, p. 340.
14 Ibid, pp. 467-9.
' 5 'Joyce le symptôme I', op. cit., pp. 23-4.

67
 Before the increased fame brought him by the publication of Ulysses in 1922,
then, Joyce's contact with Jung had been of an entirely theoretical or speculative
nature. Initially, he had read Jung's account of the figure of the father as understood
in psychoanalysis; subsequently, he had become unhappily entangled 'in the real'
of the transferential relation between Jung and McCormick, and felt he had been
betrayed. It was not until September 1930, by the time he had immersed himself
in the long struggle of 'Work in Progress', that Joyce received any indication that
Jung had ever read his work or had any 'psychological' wisdom to impart about it.
Earlier in 1930, Jung had been approached by Daniel Brody, a publisher with
the Zurich Rhein-Verlag, who was planning the launch of a literary review: he
wondered if Jung would write an article about Ulysses for its first edition. Jung
agreed; but the article he delivered a month later contained such harsh criticism
of Joyce's work that Brody felt obliged to send a copy to Joyce. The response
was characteristically enigmatic: Joyce sent Brody a telegram which simply quoted
Frederick the Great's famous command, on seeing a political placard attacking
him: Niedrigerhängen ( 'hang it lower').' 6 Ellmann understands Joyce's telegram
to have meant 'Ridicule it by making it public'; Brody could not immediately do
so, however, for he had to abandon his planned review due to increasing political
tensions in the region. Jung's article was not published until 1932, when it was
used—in a substantially revised form—as the preface to a German translation of
Stuart Gilbert's book on Ulysses, which Brody's press published as Das Riitsel
Ulysses('The Riddle of Ulysses').17
Jung's article, 'Ulysses: A Monologue', is an extraordinary moment in the
relation between psychological theory and literature, and a crucial one in any con-
sideration of a psychoanalytic approach to Joyce. By 1930, of course, Jung was no
longer the enthusiastic young Freudian whom Joyce had read in 1909 endorsing the
psychoanalytic account of sexuality and the human Shicksal ('destiny') it outlined;
he was even able to include Freud in his condemnation of Joyce, styling them both
the 'prophets of negation' thrown up by a benighted modernity.' 8 Jung writes
about Ulysses not as a psychoanalyst, but 'as a supposed authority on psycholo-
gical matters', as he tells Joyce in a letter in 1932; it is in effect as a psychiatrist
that Jung feels called upon to pass judgement on the work.'9 We will explore that
judgement and how it might relate to Lacan's reading of Joyce below.
It was also as a psychiatrist that Jung entered Joyce's world again, shortly
after the episode of his article on Ulysses. During the 1930s the mental troubles
of Joyce's daughter Lucia rapidly worsened, her behaviour becoming increasingly
unpredictable and even dangerous (in 1934, she set fire to her room in a Belgian
asylum). Maria Jolas, a member of the close circle around Joyce, recommended that
Lucia be transferred to the clinic where Jung worked; in September 1934, Joyce
accepted this suggestion, writing to a friend, 'I wouldn't go to him, but maybe
he can help her'. Recalling his earlier 'transferential' imbroglio with Jung, he felt
16 cf. Appendix to 'Ulysses: A Monologue' (1932), in The Collected Works of C.G.Jung, XV,
London: Routledge, 1966, p. 132.
17 Ellmann, James Joyce, op. cit., p. 628.
18 Ulysses: A Monologue', op. cit.,
p. 121.
' 9 lbid, p. 133

68
it necessary to state, with strange emphasis, that 'my daughter is not myself'.2°
We will return to this declaration when we have further explored the question of
paternity in Joyce.
A second triangle involving Jung, his patient and Joyce developed during the
next four months (before Lucia was moved yet again by her father), but this time
with very different 'transferential' stakes. If, in 1919, Joyce had been caught up
in some obscure 'trade-off' between McCormick and her analyst, Jung's major
challenge in approaching Lucia was to be able to intervene at all in her relation
to her father, to open a minimal space in which her desire could be caught in an
Uberträgung, be 'translated' away from its fixated, obsessive investment. Jung's
initial reports seemed to offer hope, and Joyce was encouraged enough to meet
with him to discuss Lucia's case. Ellmann's account shows how the discussion soon
turned to aesthetic speculation:
When the psychologist pointed out schizoid elements in poems Lucia had written,
Joyce, remembering Jung's comments on Ulysses, insisted they were anticipations of
a new literature, and said his daughter was an innovator not yet understood. Jung
granted that some of her portmanteau words and neologisms were remarkable, but
said they were random; she and her father, he commented later, were like two people
going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.2'
Lucia embodied, in Joyce's view, a creativity yet to be recognized by history,
too subtle to be deciphered by her contemporaries. Jung worked this into an elab-
oration of his own theories: there was, he decided, 'a kind of mystical identity or
participation' between Joyce and his daughter. In a letter to Patricia Hutchins,
Jung revealed how this fitted his model of the psyche:
If you know anything of my Anima theory, Joyce and his daughter are a classical
example of it. She was definitely his 'femme inspiratrice', which explains his obstinate
reluctance to have her certified. His own Anima, ie., unconscious psyche, was so
solidly identified with her that to have her certified would have been as much as an
admission that he himself had a latent psychosis.22
The antinomy between existential potential and that which is 'certified' by
the text of history—we might hear an uncanny pun linking the 'certification' or
institutionalization of the psychotic to the written document which certifies his-
tory for Lacan—reappears in Jung's theoretical speculations. What is 'latent', not
realized—'not yet understood', in Joyce's phrase—is the space of the possible, the
imagination's infinite creative capacity, which Finnegans Wake will dub the 'im-
marginable' (the imaginable, that which cannot be confined within margins, that
which is impossible to theorize or give marginal annotations) (FW 4).The 'mystical
identity' of Joyce and his daughter would thus appear to be an almost 'dialectical'
relation: if her father's writing is a realization of the 'new literature' that Lucia
might have been able to produce, she is an embodiment of the psychosis which
remains 'latent' in her father. Joyce's ''psychological' style', continues Jung,
20 Ellmann, James Joyce, op. cit., p. 676.
p. 679.
22 Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce's World, pp. 184-5; quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, op. cit.,
p. 679.

69
 is definitely schizophrenic, with this difference, however, that the ordinary patient
cannot help himself talking and thinking in such a way, while Joyce willed it and
moreover developed it with all his creative forces, which incidentally explains why he
himself did not go over the border. But his daughter did, because she was no genius
like her father, but merely a victim of her disease. In any other time of the past
Joyce's work would never have reached the printer, but in our blessed XXth century
it is a message, though not yet understood.23
As we will see, Jung's fleeting 'diagnostic' aside (beyond its facile invocation of
the traditional notion of 'genius') anticipates Lacan's elaboration of the sinthome
as a new way to approach psychosis.
Only a permissive modernity, Jung concludes, has allowed Joyce's 'schizophre-
nic' style to become an actual message, visible in reality if not yet assimilable to
the collective psyche. In the event, Lucia's fragile 'transferential' opening could
not be sustained, and Jung handed her back to her father, declaring, Joyce wrote,
that 'nobody could make any head of her but myself as she was a very excep-
tional case, and certainly not one for psychoanalytic treatment'. 24 Lucia remained
non-interpretable, impossible to draw forth from the nebulous domain of the an-
ima inspiratrix into the daylight world of the talking cure. 'To think that such
a big fat materialistic Swiss man should try to get hold of my soul!', exclaimed
Lucia, her expression clearly evoking the opposition we have outlined between pure
'immargibale' potential and grubby actuality.25
When Jung declares that Joyce's writing is a message yet to be understood,
he seems to echo the language of Joyce's defence of his daughter, his claim that
she was awaiting the interpretation of the future. This was no coincidence: we will
argue that Lucia was in a real sense bound up with Joyce's writing, and that an
equivalent illegibility is at the root of Jung's failure to 'get hold of' her soul and
what he described as his errant wanderings 'in the labyrinth of Ulysses' 26

ii) Finding the Self: Jung as Elijah

Just as Jung's attempts to analyze Lucia soon became implicated in aesthetic ques-
tions, so his discussion of Ulysses, two years before, had slipped from literary criti-
cism into the domain of clinical psychology. No doubt Brody's request that Jung
should write on Joyce derived partly from the fact that he had had some personal
contact with the legendary writer (in Zurich during the war, chiefly via Edith Mc-
Cormick); but it was also due to Jung's broad ambition to produce a psychological
theory which would be 'an object of public interest', which could be transferred
from the narrowly clinical to the wider social and cultural spheres.27
23 Hutchins, James Joyce's World, ibid; quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, op. cit., pp. 679-80.
p. 681.
25 Ibid, p. 679.
26 Ulysses: A Monologue', op. cit., p. 134; Ellmann implictly recognizes the equivalence here:
'A man who had so misconstrued Ulysses could scarcely be expected by Joyce to construe Lucia
correctly'; op. cit., p. 680.
27 See the Introduction to Jung's lecture 'Psychology arid Literature', which appeared, translated
by Eugene Jolas, in transition in 1930; The Collected Works of C.G.Jung, XV, London: Routledge,
1966, pp. 84-5.

70
 'Ulysses: A Monologue' is a strange document, whose ambivalence seems to be
the result of two quite distinct moments of writing—which also correspond, perhaps,
to two different attempts to read Joyce's work. The essay in its original form, which
Brody sent to Joyce in 1930 (and which he answered with the 'regal' telegram) is
lost; Jung rewrote it extensively for the preface to Gilbert's book (presumably
Brody had informed him of Joyce's cryptic response). In 1932, Jung must have
felt that the piece now showed sufficient respect for Joyce's literary achievement to
allow him to strike a note of strained cordiality in a letter to the author. 'Ulysses',
he tells Joyce,
proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not oniy to
most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from
the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble
and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into
it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful. 28
'To put myself into it': Jung's slightly awkward English gives a precise formula
for the relation to the 'labyrinth' of Ulysses he establishes in his efforts to get
through the book. The title he chooses—em Monolog—seems especially apt: the
'extravagant peregrinations' of Jung's reading are, as it were, 'acted out' in the
course of his essay, as though it were a dramatic monologue (and one which at
times recalls the 'ranting' tone of a monologue by Beckett).
The first 'act' of the monologue might be largely what remains of Jung's ori-
ginal article, before the revisions: the essay begins as a savage polemic, its opening
page denouncing Ulysses as a 'pitiless stream' of writing, with 'not a single blessed
island where the long-suffering reader may come to rest'. 29 Jung's footnotes ap-
provingly quote the extraordinary remarks of Ernst Curtius on Joyce's work, such
as that it 'reproduces the stream of consciousness without filtering it either ethically
or logically' (this concerning a book whose author was obliged to furnish 'schemas'
to help readers to tackle its 'encyclopedia' of cultural references) 30
If Jung relies on the critical authority of Curtius for this kind of literary judge-
ment, however, the main focus of his essay is on his own state of mind as a reader.
'Ulysses turns its back on me', he declares; and we are inevitably reminded that
Jung had been treated to a similar gesture on the part of its author (in the episode
of Joyce's rejection of McCormick's offer) which he may have found equally frustrat-
ing. The problem for Jung is that, like its author, the book (which is often playfully
anthropomorphized in the article) just isn't interested in his interpretation:
Yes, I admit I feel I have been made a fool of. The book would not meet me half
way, nothing in it made the least attempt to be agreeable, and that always gives the
reader an irritating sense of inferiority.3'
'Surely', continues Jung, 'a book has a content, represents something; but I
suspect that Joyce did not wish to 'represent' anything'. This idea of an aesthetic
beyond representation—which might have struck more of an chord with responses
28 Appendix to 'Ulysses: A Monologue', op. cit., p. 134.
29 Ulysses: A Monologue', op. cit., p. 110.
30 Ibid, p. 112; Curtius, James Joyce und sein Ulysses, p. 30.
31 Thid, p. 113.

71
to the 'Work in Progress' then being published by Eugene Jolas in transition, than
amongst the readers of Ulysses who were still striving to assimilate the book's
overwhelming semantic summ a—is linked by Jung to a broader conception of mod-
ernism: Joyce's art is 'cubistic' in the deepest sense because it resolves the picture
of reality into an immensely complex painting whose dominant note is the melan-
choly of abstract objectivity'. 32 So that while the 'portrait of the artist' in Joyce's
early work maintained a certain figurative coherence which offered the reader a
legible textual surface—invited him to meet it 'half way', in Jung's phrase—the
later writing had embraced a cubist aesthetic which 'turned its back' on the 'pic-
ture of reality' where the reader felt at home, by refusing to endorse, re-present, its
familiar self-evidence.
By situating his frustration as a reader of Joyce in the aesthetic context of
modernism, with its turn away from an idea of the artwork as 'agreeable' to an
audience (which will later be theorized by Roland Barthes as the turn from a
'readerly' to a 'writerly' aesthetic) 33 , Jung's argument begins to detach itself from
the sort of unthinking denunciation found in Curtius (for whom Ulysses is nothing
less than 'a work of the Antichrist'). 34 It nevertheless remains trapped by an
insistent psychologization of the aesthetic: modernism corresponds for Jung to a
special kind of affront to, or attack upon, the domain of the 'soul'; the 'abstract
objectivity' of cubism is 'melancholy' only because it leaves the subject, with his
craving for 'content', behind. Thus, in Joyce's writing, 'everything is desouled,
every particle of warm blood has been chilled'. 35 The reader is not engaged by this
writing: its icy stream rolls out before his eyes, not inviting him into its eddying
textual currents or interesting him in the bits of flotsam, like the insignificant
'crumpled throwaway', which float past.
So the reader gives up. This is the end of the first 'act' of Jung's 'Monologue':
the point where, overwhelmed by boredom, he falls asleep. Special mention is made
of 'the magic words that sent me to sleep', with page reference, in a footnote. They
occur in the 'Aeolus' episode, where Joyce divides the text up with newspaper-style
headlines (suiting the chapter's setting in the offices of the Freeman's Journal); the
words in question come under the headline 'A POLISHED PERIOD' and exemplify
the 'divine afflatus' or windy rhetoric being parodied at this point in the book
(U 115). For Jung to admit that he was left 'dizzy with sleep' by the awful long-
winded bombast of the sentence perhaps confirms Joyce's remark that 'he seems to
have read Ulysses from first to last without one smile': a book which laughs at its
reader, makes a fool of him by turning its back on him, can hardly afford Jung any
amusement. 36 But it is nevertheless surprising that Jung marks a line in 'Aeolus',
barely a fifth of the way into the book, as the point where his first attempt to
read Ulysses ran aground: the writing has not yet 'turned its back' on the reader
by presenting him with any real interpretive challenge (nothing, at least, like the
32 Ibid, p. 117.
33 cf. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans R.Miller, London: Cape, 1975, pp. 4-5.
Ulysses: A Monologue', op. cit., p. 110.
p. 114.
36 Ellmann, James Joyce, op. cit., p. 628.

72
exegetical problems he will encounter in the later episodes, notably in 'Circe'). It
is not true, on this evidence, that Jung has read the book 'from first to last' at all.
It is worth looking a little closer at the moment in 'Aeolus', where Jung's 'nar-
cotic' sentence occurs. It occurs in the episode which marks a significant turning-
point in Ulysses, as Joyce's book is read by Hugh Kenner—where the centring of
the narrative in Stephen's consciousness (which readers recall from the Portrait),
combined with a broadly 'realist' background, gives way to the foregrounding of
'syntactic artifice' which takes over in the later episodes. 37 In the lines immedi-
ately preceding the 'polished period' we learn that one of the characters 'took out
his matchbox thoughtfully and lit his cigar'; what follows presents the reader with
an enigma:
I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that
small act, trivial in itself, the striking of that match, that determined the whole
aftercourse of both our lives. (U, 115)
'Whose sentence?' asks Jeri Johnson in her notes, adding that it is 'certainly in
the manner of the Charles Dickens of David Copperfield or Great Expectations'.38
The enigmatic line might thus be read as the 'end of realism' in Joyce's art: the
Aeolean winds of rhetoric, fanning the little spark of the real into a kind of parodic
'final cause', enact the comic displacement of the stable 'reality' supposed in the
nineteenth-century novel by the stylistic extravagances of Modernism. Jung gives
up reading Ulysses, we might say, at precisely the point where the book marks the
transition from the Dickensian novel to fully-fledged Joycean writing.
Having awoken from his slumber, though, Jung feels able to begin another
reading—which we might term the second 'act' of his 'Monologue'—in a more play-
ful spirit: 'my views had undergone such a clarification', he writes, 'that I started
to read the book backwards'. 39 The Joycean 'paleographers' who appear in the
Wake will perhaps take Jung seriously when they indicate 'that the words which
follow may be taken in any order desired' (FW 121): indeed, Jung's claim that 'the
book ... has no back and no front, no top and no bottom' seems to be more of
a prophecy of Joyce's last work—the ultimate 'open work', according to Umberto
Eco—than a true description of Ulysses, with all its intricate structural patterns.40
To read backwards would be an appropriate way to approach 'an art in reverse',
as Jung now characterizes Joycean writing. If Ulysses had previously scandalized
the reader by turning its back on him, things get even worse when it reveals itself
to be 'the backside of art' (punning the Latin ars, as it were). In the absence of
any 'soul', the text sinks into a form of 'visceral thinking', extending its 'ganglionic
rope-ladder' into a fetid, subterranean world of unmentionable goings-on.4'
But if to read Ulysses in reverse means that Jung began with the famous 'Yes'
at the end of 'Penelope', this might suggest the possibility of a certain Bejahung,
or affirmative judgement, in a second moment of the reading. This returns us to
37 cf. Hugh Kenner, 'Ulysses', Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980, PP. 61-5
38 Jeri Johnson, Notes to 1922 edition of Ulysses, op. cit., p. 815.
Ulysses: A Monologue', op. cit., p. 111.
40 'Ulysses: A Monologue', ibid.; Umberto Eco, The Open Work (1962), Harvard University
Press, 1989.
41 'Ulysses: A Monologue', pp. 115-7.

73
the letter Jung writes to Joyce in 1932, where he acknowledges that after years of
infuriating 'peregrinations' in Ulysses he finally managed to 'put himself into it', to
establish some kind of identificatory relation to it (which was also a self-recognition).
In effect, the text of Joyce's that Jung does succeed in 'putting himself into' is of
course Finmegans Wake, with its sardonic footnote invoking the 'law of the jungerl'
(FW 268); but Ulysses offers him a portrait or mirror-image which might rescue
the book's 'detachment of consciousness' from unrelenting negativism, restore some
possibility of redemption:
Whenever I read Ulysses there comes into my mind a Chinese picture ... of a yogi
in meditation, with five human figures growing out of the top of his head and five
more figures growing out of the top of each of their heads. This picture portrays the
spiritual state of the yogi who is about to rid himself of his ego and to pass over into
the more complete, more objective state of the self.42
This portrait of the artist as a jung man, as Joyce might have described it, is
the other face of the 'abstract objectivity' which has 'desouled' the text, robbed
it of empathic warmth. In so far as the writing has freed itself, in Jung's view,
from any engagement in human interest, it embodies the possibility of a certain
self-transcendence, where the loss of immediate identity is counterbalanced by a
redemptive access to a higher level of being. Jung salvages this narrative of tran-
scendent Eastern wisdom, with its glimmer of hope, from the 'drunken madhouse'
of Joyce's text. This requires some carefully edited quotations (resembling the
Wake's 'quashed quotatoes' (FW 183). Jung turns first to the speech of Elijah
in 'Circe', picking out in italics a single line: 'You have that something within,
the higher self' (U 414). Whatever wisdom this might entail 'suffers an infernal
distortion', Jung claims, in the toils of Joyce's text; it nevertheless harbours the
'secret' of Ulysses, of how the 'detachment of human consciousness' it embodies
could potentially amount to an 'approximation to the divine'. 43 Although in Joyce
the speech is clearly intended as a mockery of such 'wisdom'—the prophet speaks in
the guise of a salesman, offering the crowd of listeners an unmissable chance to 'rub
shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll'—this in no way diminishes, for
Jung, its significance as an indication of the book's ultimate message: its implicit
lesson in the mystery of self-overcoming.
If Jung 'puts himself into' Ulysses, then, as the voice of Elijah, somehow disso-
ciated from its ad-man's patter, his next attempt to locate evidence of 'the treasures
of the spirit' in Joyce's book calls for still heavier editing. Further on in 'Circe',
he comes across signs of 'Buddhist, Shivaist and ... Gnostic' teaching: he quotes
the speech of Mananaun Maclir, the Irish god of the sea—but with all traces of
its humour expunged from it. So while the sea-god appears in Ulysses holding a
bicycle pump, and begins his speech with a mocking recital of the guttural sounds
which AE had proposed were the primal elements of speech, in Jung's version we
cut straight to 'White yoghin of the gods'. 44 Although the Joycean god mixes
42 Jbid, p. 126.
Ulysses: A Monologue', op. cit., p. 126.
44 cf. Jeri Johnson's notes to her edition of the original 1922 text of Ulysses, Oxford: O.U.P.,
1993, p. 933.

74
his Theosophy with advertising slogans ('I am the dreamery creamery butter'),
Jung is not deterred: 'Glad tidings', he declares resolutely—'when the eternal signs
have vanished from the heavens, the pig that hunts truffles finds them again in the
earth'. 45 Even though this Joycean 'pig' is not seeking, in some quasi-Hegelian
manner, to rediscover spiritual treasure in the form of its dialectal opposite—but
rather to subvert, through Rabelesian pastiche, the celestial authority of 'eternal
signs', Jung clings to his belief that the merest trace of the 'heavens' is enough to
bring a redemptive glimmer to the dark chasm of Joyce's work.
This narrative of self-transcendene 'put into' Ulysses by Jung—which he
serves with 'quotatoes' which if not quashed are at least washed and peeled—is
important because it anticipates one of the foremost critical problems raised by
modernist texts (and perhaps by Joyce's more than any other). The 'death of
the author', in Roland Barthes' celebrated slogan of 1968, poses special difficulties
for any 'psychological' approach to reading—including, as we shall see, Lacan's
reading of Joyce. 46 If modernist writing effected an unprecedented 'detachment of
consciousness', as Jung puts it—if it opens out into a multi-layered, many-voiced
textuality—is it still useful or even possible to invoke the traditional category of
'author'? Jung's answer is that although the work may be no longer signed by
an author—its familiar portrait of the artist shattering into indecipherable cubist
'objectivity'—we can at least re-inscribe this as a redemptive passage from the ego
to the 'self', a higher moment of existence which can only identify itself as outis
('noman', in the self-designation of Homer's Odysseus). 'Nayman of Noland' is in-
deed one of the characters at the Wake; but we hope to show that the 'death of
the author' can be radically reconceived if we relate it to the emergence of a very
different problematic of self-loss and self-invention in Lacan.
In one respect, however, Jung's 'Monologue' offers a striking anticipation of
Lacan's engagement with Joyce (although this was something never acknowledged—
perhaps never realized—by Lacan). It is true that in Jung's initial considera-
tion of the 'symptomatology' of Joyce's writing—whereby 'even the layman would
have no difficulty in tracing the analogies between Ulysses and the schizophrenic
mentality'—he outlines a position diametrically opposed to the one Lacan will con-
struct around the Joycean 'symptom':
The artist does not follow an individual impulse, but rather a current of collective
life which arises not directly from consciousness but from the collective unconscious
of the modern psyche.47
The 'collective' unconscious serves to differentiate art from the symptom by
positing a transindividual psychical energy which, with its stock of socio-cultural
images or 'archetypes', remains irreducible to any particular pathology. Recalling
Freud's sense of sublimation as an assimilation or 'domestication' of libido, in such
a view art is aufheben, 'raised up', from the intractable materiality of the body, into
the purer domain of collective existence and cultural tradition. Although for Jung,
then, on a first reading Joyce's work may look like a symptom of schizophrenia,
Ulysses: A Monologue', op. cit., p. 129.
46 Rold Barthes, 'The Death of the Author' (1968), in The Rustle of Language, trans Richard
Howard, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 49-55.
Ulysses: A Monologue', op. cit., p. 117.

75
 he finds its very status as art—as conscious, consistent representation—a sufficient
guarantee that it is not truly 'pathological'. For Lacan, as we will see, Joyce's
achievement was to have effected an unprecedented pursuit of 'individual impulse'
through his art, which went as far as to displace any stable opposition, of the kind
relied on by Jung, between 'individual' and 'collective'.
If, then, Ulysses is not simply to be discarded as the ravings of a lunatic,
however Jung remains uncertain how to situate its 'shadow-picture of the mind
and the world' in his psychology. 48 He admits that in Joyce he may have en-
countered a limit to his 'authority on pychological matters': if the writing is not
a straightforward symptom of schizophrenia, its author may be an 'insane person
of an uncommon sort'. 'But', continues Jung,
• . . the psychiatrist has no criteria for judging such a person. What seems to be
mental abnormality may be a kind of mental health which is inconceivable to the
average understanding; it may even be a disguise for superlative powers of mind.49

Lacan too will find in Joyce an 'insane person of an uncommon sort'. But if
Jung places such 'abnormality' beyond the purview of psychological concepts, in
some mysterious zone of 'genius', for Lacan it opens the way to a reconceptual-
ization of psychosis and of the 'border' separating it from other structures (such
as neurosis and perversion). If Jung would frame Joycean writing as an image of
self-transcendence, Lacan will see it as the pretext for a new way of thinking the
subject—where the predominance of writing will put into question the very instance
of 'thinking' in psychoanalytic theory. Our first approach to the sinthome will ex-
plore Lacan's response to the 'detachment of consciousness' observed by Jung in the
Joycean text, and the place he accords it in a reconceived approach to psychosis.

iii) Epiphany as 'crossexanimation'

We should first reconsider the significance of the two references to Joyce which we
have already noted in Lacan's teaching, which occur before the 1975 Symposium
where the figure of 'Joyce the Symptom' is first introduced. Both references entail
a curious kind of theoretical equivocation, whereby the invocation of Joyce at once
supports and obscurely challenges or unsettles the point Lacan is seeking to put
across.
We recall that in the 1966 text of the Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', Lacan
included a quotation from the Joycean Exagmination—the paronomasia 'a letter,
a litter'—in order to figure the double aspect of the letter in Poe's story, the fact
that its function as signifier was accompanied by a 'material support', the déchet
which 'did not answer' to the detectives' search. If the materiality of the letter,
the linguistic real beyond its effects of intersubjective exchange, is thus posited
by Lacan as irreducible to the Other, invisible to the examination which calls the
subject to its representational consistency, we noted an unintended irony in the
'lapsus' of Lacan's footnote: the very 'materiality' of the Wakean 'exagmination' is
erased by the mistaken use of a 'proper' word, as if the title were being returned
48
49Ibid.

76
to the 'examination' of the Other. At the moment when literature—in the shape
of Poe's story—is being invoked by Lacan as the supreme confirmation of a subject
conceived as the effect of the signifier, his parenthetical reference to Joyce at once
opens a space of equivocation or textual indeterminacy, something in writing which
might exceed or resist the supposition of such a subject—and immediately closes
down that space, reconfirming the supremacy of the 'letter' whose examination
yields up the subject.
By 1973, Lacan's theoretical terms have shifted considerably. He now wishes
to make, as one of the major themes of his seminar, a fundamental distinction
between the 'function of writing' and that of the signifier. Joyce is mentioned in
the context of a discussion of the limits of the 'readable':
I would rather Joyce were not readable—it certainly cannot be translated into Chinese.
What happens in Joyce? The signifier comes to 'riddle' [truffer] the signified. Due
to the fact that signifiers are stacked together, intersect, are concertina'd—read Fin-
negans Wake—something emerges which as signified may seem enigmatic, but which
clearly comes closest to what we analysts have to read, thanks to the analytic dis-
course —the lapsus. It is as a lapsus that it signifies something, in other words that
it can be read in an infinite number of different ways. But that is precisely why it
is read badly, read askew or not read at all. But is not this dimension of being read
enough to show us that we are in the register of analytic discourse?5°
The ostensible unreadability of the Joycean text here only masks its status—au
titre de lapsus, 'under the heading of' a parapractic symptom—as a pure illustration
of what is at stake in the discourse of the analyst. The disruption of stable or
univocal meaning in the Wake is an effect of the signifier, now presented not simply
as the unerring delivery of the subject's truth but as something to be read, an
enigmatic provocation of the analytic labour through which that truth will emerge.
Thus, the Wake would be 'a continuous lapsus', as Cohn MacCabe will put it, a
vast embodiment of the mechanism of a linguistic unconscious.51
Joyce's writing appears at these two moments of Lacan's teaching, then, in an
ambiguous, even paradoxical, light. If, on the one hand, it serves as a privileged
manifestation of the unconscious (until then, at least, always the site of a subject
for Lacan)—its polysemic 'lapse not leashed'(FW 63) bodying forth an enigmatic
ciphering which resembles the riddles of the analysand's speech—at the same time,
it realizes in a pure form the writing whose 'function' Lacan wishes to distinguish
from that of the signifier, with its unconscious subject.
We need to refer ahead to a seminar in 1976, which we have already touched on
briefly, to shed some light on these tensions in the earlier work. Towards the end of
the seminar Le Sinthome Lacan comes to claim, with characteristic hyperbole, that
his recent work with the topology of Borromean knots has 'completely changed
the meaning of writing'; this is true, of course, as regards his own use of the
term. Writing, as redefined by the knot, is distinct from the writing which had
emerged as the leitmotif of Derrida's thought—which is simply, Lacan now declares,
a 'precipitation of the signifier', and as such something in the end 'modulated by
50 Seminar of 9th January 1973 (SXX), Encore, op. cit., p. 37.
51 Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, op. cit., p. 143.

77
 the voice', part of the dit-mension of the subject. 52 On the one hand, there is
a 'writing' which is simply a hyperbolic or frenzied instance of the symbolic; on
the other, there is something quite distinct, an 'autonomous' writing which Lacan
begins to link directly to the real.
If we relate this distinction back to the comments on Joyce in Encore, we could
see in the 'riddling' of the domain of meaning by the signifier which Lacan reads
in the Wake, a version of the 'Derridean' precipitation of symbolic difference (or
différance). In other words, the infinite semiotic proliferation of the Joycean text—
taken au titre de lapsus—would ultimately fall into the category of the subject, or
the unconscious as effect of speech.
We can perhaps begin to unravel some of the confusions arising from different
senses of the term 'writing' here. The emphatic distinction made in 1976 between a
Derridean writing—the endless, undecidable play of the signifier—and a Lacanian
variety, an autonomous instance not subject to the laws of the symbolic order, sheds
new light on the old opposition of 'letter' and 'litter'; but this comes after a long
period of mutual entanglement. It is difficult to map out this evolution of Lacanian
theory because of the constant displacements of the sense and 'orientation' of its
terminology.
The 1971 article Lituraterre, we recall, associated writing—as litura—with the
particular modality of jouissance, an indecipherable trace scarring the cogitating
self-presentation of the subject's utterance. Litura was nevertheless recuperated as
a second 'register' of subjectivity, an anamorphic blot to be placed alongside the dit-
mension of truth—somehow without 'foreclosing' it or rendering it illegible. This
opening-and-closing in the theory of the subject—in which writing first emerges as
something extimate, radically other to the topology of the subject before being res-
ituated as its complement, a separate 'aspect' of its representational economy—can
be linked to Lacan's comments on Joyce in 1973. What first appears as the in-
transigent opacity of the Joycean text, with its untranslatable or illegible riddles, is
subsequently stated to be nothing but the effect of a particularly riotous instance de
la lettre: it is the signifier, always ultimately a representation of the subject, which
is the final cause of the textual enigma and its call for 'analytic' interpretation.
If the principal aim of the Borromean knot, in the guise it takes in the 1974-5
seminar R.S.I., was to articulate the indissociability or 'intrication' of the three
registers of Lacanian theory, we could see this precisely exemplified in these the-
oretical entanglements around 'writing'. Although the notion of the 'litter' as an
instance of jouissance is implicit for Lacan from very early on in his work, it is
a long time before he is willing to set up any rigid binary opposition between
such a 'material' instance and the agency of the signifier. The portmanteau term
which appears in Télévision next to the Borromean knot inscribed in the margin-
jouis-sens—encapsulates this nouage, the 'knottedness' of these registers: the real
of 'enjoyment' is bound up with the production of meaning, there is no way to
separate them out (without simply falling back on some traditional metaphysical
opposition).
52 Seminar of 11th May 1976 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, unpublished (version p. G.,p.2).

78
 In its first definition as 'precipitation of the symbolic', then, writing can be
invoked by psychoanalysis as a version of the same kind of signifying riddle it
confronts every day in its attempts to interpret the subject which it 'supposes' in
the speech of the analysand. Even Finnegans Wake, a text which maximizes the
'play' of the signifier, is finally something demanding to be read, soliciting analytic
interpretation: writing is like a symptom, to be situated in—linked to a subject
in—the symbolic order. In this sense, Lacan repeated an old Freudian gesture,
which had been raised to a new power in his Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter':
the translation or transference of the aesthetic instance into the conceptual matrix
of psychoanalysis.
The radical change in Lacan's understanding of 'writing' brought about by the
engagement with the topology of knots in R.S.I. inevitably recast the question of
the relation between the psychoanalytic subject and the literary text. If there had
still been a subject implicit in jouis-sens, Lacan now began to see writing not as
a confirmation of 'the register of analytic discourse' but as a way to gain access to
something 'foreclosed' from that register, to a jouissance beyond the subject. In
1975, Lacan's return to Joyce is entirely bound up with this new sense of writing:
the text is no longer to be entitled 'lapsus', translated into analytic signifiers, but
is to be read as indicative of the singular organization of an existence through the
unique incidence of Joyce's art.
How could psychoanalysis read literature without recourse to its category of
the subject? If the final 'justification' of the term 'subject' for Lacan is, as we
have seen, that it designates a primordial decision to exist which fails to occur in
psychosis, a first response to this question might be to invoke the psychoanalytic
approach to psychosis, as an interpretive procedure which seeks to suspend any
immediate reference to 'the signifier', 'the subject' and so on.
Psychosis is always, for the analyst, a challenge to established modes of un-
derstanding, and it is no surprise that Lacan's late work, with its radical mise
en cause of the whole of psychoanalytic theory and methodology, attached a new
importance to the psychotic experience as the privileged scene of an opaque, un-
translatable 'real'. In this context, though, the turn to Joyce in 1975 did not seek
merely to confirm the validity of diagnostic categories by pointing to psychotic phe-
nomena which lay beyond the 'topic' of the psychoanalytic subject, but rather to
isolate in Joyce's writing the foundation of a new kind of subjectivity, one which
might be irreducible to the clinical criteria of analysis.
This new kind of 'subject' was the sinthome. If Lacan's renewed interest in
Joyce focused on the question—an apparently outdated one after the 'death of
the author'—of the origins of writing and its special 'symptomatic' function in a
destiny, his attention consequently shifted from the conundrums of Finnegans Wake
to their 'primal scene': Joyce's early work, in particular his youthful theory of the
'epiphany'. These first texts, Lacan proposed, manifested with special clarity—
in its pure form, so to speak—a certain radically non-metaphorical relation to
language, which was the key to Joyce's originality as a writer and to his singular
kind of 'subjectivity'.
As we have seen, the Borromean knot yielded, by 1975, the real structure of the
three Lacanian registers (symbolic, imaginary and real). But what would happen,

79
Lacan asked his seminar on 11th May 1976, if there was an 'error' or faute (a term
deliberately chosen to echo 'sin') in the knot? It would, of course, come undone—
and the Joycean 'epiphany' testifies, for Lacan, to just such a disintegration: a
quasi-hallucinatory encounter which entails the unknotting of RSI, and which the
act of writing itself then 'makes up for', offers suppléance. Lacan refers to a moment
in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to illustrate this topological reading
of the epiphany: the hero Stephen, having been beaten by Heron and his friends
because of a disagreement (on the question of the literary merits of the 'heretic'
Byron), experiences a sudden loss of feeling, as if 'some power was divesting him
of that sudden-woven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel'
(P 82-3).
Lacan finds this image very striking: he reads it as a figure for the falling-away
from the knot of the imaginary—the sense of the body as bounded, consistent—
in the collision of the real and the symbolic, resulting in the complete evacuation
of meaning. The imaginary does not 'hold' in the knot: Lacan translates the
problematic of foreclosure into topological terms through the general notion of a
'fault' in the organization of RSI (a fault no longer restricted to the nom-du-pere).
Pierre Skriabine notes how the sinthome functions as suppléance, to 'make up for'
the Joycean 'fault':
It is now possible to locate the fault, to trace it on the knot of R, S and I, and it is
there, at the point where it takes place, that Lacan situates—this is how he formulates
matters in the case of Joyce—the ego as sinthome, as a corrective sewing-together.54

faute '1

R S R

Inconscient

Figure 3: Sinthome as reconstitution of the knot

This return of the ego to Lacanian theory, as the agency of the Joycean ar-
tifice which reconstitutes the knot, seems an astonishing sequel to the well-known
criticisms of ego-psychology made by Lacan earlier in his career. However, Lacan
is careful to avoid invoking the moi (the standard French term for the 'ego' of
53 Ibid, p. 7.
Pierre Skriabine, 'Clinique et topologie', op. cit., p. 131. The diagram on the left indicates
the 'fault' in the knot which causes the imaginary to drop out; its restoration through the agency
of the sinthome (marked as 'ego') corresponds to the re-opening of the unconscious in the subject
(as Skriabine indicates in the bottom right-hand corner).

80
Freud's second topography), using instead the Latin term ego, together with the
German Ich, to designate this agency of re-knotting: in the epiphany, the imagin-
ary falls away in the evacuation of meaning, only to be tied back into the knot
by a 'symptomatic' instance which is—somehow, this is the 'enigma' of Joyce—the
site of artistic identification, of the writer's signature. Thus the sinthome is the
fourth ring which holds the knot together, and the site of the 'I', of identification:
for Joyce, 'writing is absolutely essential to the ego', as Lacan puts it. 55 In the
absence of the psychological consistency offered by the imaginary, an identity or its
semblance is forged in a continual writing-process.

Figure 4: The Borromean knot

including the sinthome

'By an epiphany', wrote Joyce in the early manuscript Stephen Hero, 'he meant
a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or
in a memorable phase of the mind itself'. 56 If Lacan at first associates it with the
fanciful imagery of the Portrait (fruit 'divested of its soft ripe peel'), the epiphany
in its original form, carefully 'recorded' by Joyce in a note-book, remains resolutely
non-metaphorical, devoid of recognizable sense or emotional significance. Catherine
Millot notes, however, how this semantic evacuation can suddenly reverse to become
an 'overdetermination' of meaning. 57 This reversal occurs vividly in one of the most
dramatic of the epiphanies:
Mrs Joyce—( crimson, trembling, appears at the parlotir door) . . . Jim! Joyce—( at the
piano) . . . Yes?
Mrs Joyce—Do you know anything about the body ? ......What ought I do? There's
some matter coming away from the hole in Georgie's stomach . . . Did you ever hear
of that happening?
Joyce—(surprised) . . . I don't know...
Mrs Joyce—Ought I send for the doctor, do you think?
Joyce—I don't know ......What hole?
Mrs Joyce—(impatient) . . . The hole we all have ... here (points)
Joyce—(stands up)58
The mother's voice calls the young Joyce from his artistic self-absorption into a
crisis of interpretation provoked by bodily trauma (in question is Joyce's vocation:
at one point, he seriously contemplated a career as a doctor, even enrolling to
55 Seminar of 11th May 1976 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, unpublished (version P. G., p. 5)
56 ioyce, Stephen Hero, ed. T. Spencer, J. J. Slocum & H. Cahoon, London: Cape, 1969, P. 216.
57 Cathérine Millot, 'Epiphanies', in Joyce Avec Lacan, op. cit., p. 91.
58 Epiphany 19, March 1902; in Poems and Epiphanies, ed. R. Eliman & A. W. Litz, New York:
Viking, 1990.

81
 study medicine in Paris). 59 'The hole we all have ... here' evokes the desperate
conjunction of the body's self-evidence, the fact that it constitutes an obviously
shared condition of human existence, and the mysterious or unspeakable dimension
of its 'real'. At the same time, the pure tautology of the mother's anguished gesture
rebounds upon the Joycean text, so that the 'hole ... here' becomes the invisible
and traumatic centre of the writing itself, where its 'matter' disappears like the
umbilical vanishing-point of the Freudian dream. If the body contains a 'hole we
all have', its imaginary consistency looming too large to be questioned or call for
interpretation, we are equally immersed in the domain of signification, as embodied
'here', in this text. The bodily 'matter' which comes away from the traumatic
hole corresponds, in a Lacanian reading of the epiphany, to the falling-away of the
imaginary (and thus of any semantic 'matter') from the knot, its suppléance by the
textual instance of the sinthome.
So the sinthome—as shown in its minimal, originary form in the epiphany—
restores a certain coherence to the knot of real, symbolic and imaginary, prevents
its psychotic unravelling. It reconstitutes as an artistic fiction the subject which
has collapsed in 'radical foreclosure': like the hen in the Wakean 'storyaboot', the
epiphany 'starts from scratch' (FW 336), inscribes a non-metaphorical trait as the
tentative foundation of a subjectivity excluded from the Other, the field of con-
sistent symbolic representation. If the Other is in essence for Lacan a domain of
juridical examination, where the subject is called to account, made 'responsible',
interpellated to a place in the symbolic order—in the epiphany quoted above the
mother first hails 'Jim' before subjecting him to a cross-examination—the Joycean
text writes out the failure or breakdown of this mechanism of subjection. Thus,
what takes place in an epiphany is what will feature in the Wake as a 'crossexan-
imation': the psyche (or 'anima': we will return to the significance of this term, in
both its Aristotelean and Jungian senses, for Joyce) is externalized, returns in the
real of language as both the disfigurement of the signifier and the rupture of the
bounded psychology of any individual speaker.6°
We will seek to show that Lacan's approach to Joyce's work as an artistic
response to the lack in the Other—where 'crossexanimation' calls forth an appro-
priately 'quadrivial' art—allows us to give a new sense to the tired formula of the
'death of the author'; and might also open the way to a return to the question
raised in Jung's 'diagnostic' interpretation of Ulysses: how can Joyce's writing as
sinthome be situated in relation to the general theorization of psychosis and the
specific instance of Lucia Joyce's schizophrenia?

iv) 'Leave him to his Maker': Joycean père-version

Joyce is founded, according to Lacan, on an experience of foreclosure. 'Joyce' indic-

ates here both a body of writing and a 'man of letters', in an ambiguity Lacan plays
on and incorporates into his reading: the act of writing as sinthorne is essentially an
act of self-constitution, in which Joyce 'makes a name for himself', takes on a sub-
stantial existence in bookshops and (as an exam 'subject') in universities. How are
59 Cf. Ellmann, James Joyce, op. cit., pp. 106-9.
60 Ibid, p. 87.

82
we to relate the topological reformulation of foreclosure—as the disintegration of
the Borromean knot—together with the notion of sinthome as 'corrective' rabo'utage
(re-suturing, sewing-back-together) to Lacan's earlier theories of psychosis which
privileged paternity, situated the nom-du-père as the only protection against the
psychotic collapse of the Other?
We should first consider the vocational status of the Joycean epiphany. Firstly,
this vocation is literal: the 'vulgarity of speech' framed by the epiphany is almost
always, writes Millot, 'taken from the mouths of women'. 61 Feminine speech calls
the artist, with hallucinatory intensity, to the task of writing. The young Joyce
weaves this into an elaborate aesthetic theory, seeking to restate in the Scholastic
terms of Thomas Aquinas an amalgam of neo-Platonic and post-Romantic ideas
about art: the epiphany corresponds to the Thomistic notion of claritas, the 'ra-
diance' which illuminates an object when '[i]ts soul, its whatness, leaps to us from
the vestment of its appearance'.62
If the epiphany thus forms part of the confirmation of an artistic identity,
Joyce's self-recognition as 'man of letters', a second term he borrows from the
church liturgy points to a quite different aspect of this self-theorization. Joyce only
uses this term once, in a letter to his friend Constantine Curran. Having been
asked by George Russel to write a story for a newspaper in 1904, he announces
to Curran: 'I am writing a series of epicleti—ten—for a paper .. . I call the series
Dnbliners. ' 63 Joyce's reference is to epiclesis, a term used in the Eastern church
for the invocation of the Holy Spirit during the Eucharist, at the moment of the
consecration of bread and wine. If the artist will appear in the Portrait as 'a priest of
the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant
body of everliving life' (P 221), he has first to invoke the Paraclete—the one who
intervenes, as the Greek name indicates—to assist in his self-transfiguration. Thus,
as well as being a compulsive vocational act, Joyce's writing entails an invocation,
a plea for transformative intervention from some higher power: from a father.
If we take these two liturgical terms as moments in Joyce's early attempts to
nominate the quidditas, the 'soul' or 'whatness', of his art, we can begin to clarify
the 'symptomatic' dimension of the first writings. On the one hand, as epiphany the
text strains the verbal jouis.ance of feminine speech towards Joyce-sens, towards an
autonomous artistic self-inscription; on the other—at the same time—the text is an
epiclesis, a prayer to the Lord for a Eucharistic intervention—for the intervention,
that is, of metaphor. In the face of an impossible maternal demand—'Do you know
anything about the body?'—only an effect of metaphor, of signifying substitution,
could give the subject any respite, allow it the slightest opening as a space of
lack. In the absence of any signifier which might allow a response to the traumatic
encounter, Joyce can only answer his mother's desperate act of pointing with an
equally 'infant' gesture, a speechless self-presenting of the body.
Foreclosure, the key to the aetiology of psychosis, is for Lacan always a fail-
ure of metaphor. If the 'radical foreclosure' proposed in Le Sinthome introduced
61 Cathhrine Millot, 'Epiphanies', op. cit., p. 92.
62 Stephen Hero, op. cit., p. 218; see Jacques Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce, op. cit.,
pp. 100-11 for Joyce's sources.
63 The Selected Letters of James Joyce, op. cit., p. 22.

83
 a new way of understanding a figure which had first appeared in 1957, as part of
the 'Borromean' imperative to think the subject as an intrication of real, symbolic
and imaginary—the sense of foreclosure as a breakdown in the movement of meta-
phorical substitution is retained; indeed, it is amplified, raised to a new power, by
the notion of a radically 'autistic' moment in which the possibility of meaning, at
the interface of the symbolic and the imaginary, is overwhelmed, disabled by the
crushing force of jouissance.64
Serge André's interpretation of the orromean knot might enable us to link the
reconception of foreclosure as 'unknotting' back to Lacan's earlier formulations on
psychosis. André distinguishes between a 'Freudian' knot, the structure of 'Oedipal
normality', in which real, symbolic and imaginary are knotted together by a fourth
ring, the Name-of-the-Father; and a 'Lacanian' version, where a fault prevents
the three registers from forming a Borromean knot until they are 'repaired' by a
symptomatic fourth. In the first case, the infantile père-version (Lacan's punning
redefinition of 'perversion' as a 'turning to the father', an appeal for the intervention
of the paternal metaphor) has been met with success, has been answered; the
symbolic order, in its first definition as a regime of normalization governed by
paternal authority, has functioned to fix in place the subject, give consistency to
its desiring unconscious. Conversely, the fault which undoes the knot that André
designates as Lacanian would correspond to the foreclosure of the nom-du-père, the
mis-firing or 'irresponsible' outcome of the child's père-version.65
Joyce's early work shows with particular clarity how his writing is bound up
with the figure of the father and, indissociably, with the question of naming. A
certain crisis around paternity is already legible in the note telling Curran about
the 'epicleti': Joyce's signature is jokingly substituted by the initials S.D. (which
is then repeated with a confirmatory 'sic'). As Curran knew, Joyce had adopted
the pseudonym 'Stephen Daedalus' as his artistic signature: he was to write it
beneath his first story, 'The Sisters', when it was published in 1904 in the Irish
Homestead. 66 Joyce's self-invention as a literary character was coupled with the
practical need to avoid recognition (the 'uncle' in the story, with his boastful talk
of his youthful athleticism, is clearly a version of Joyce's father). The story's child
narrator, fascinated by the priest's strange vocabulary, cites 'the word gnomon
in the Euclid': the enigmatic term carries echoes of 'noman', the name Odysseus
adopts to elude detection by the Cyclops, and which will return in Ulysses and
Finnegans Wake. 67 If the playful ruse deploys fiction to avert danger in the real, at
the same time it is an act of self-authorization, the assumption of a certain power
to re-set the limits between the sphere of creative imagination and the hard reality
of the world.
64 cf. Seminar of 16th March 1976 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, op. cit., p. 34.
65 Serge André, 'Clinique et noeud borroméen', op. cit., pp. 92-3.
66 Ellmann, James Joyce, op. cit., p. 164.
67 Joyce, Dubliners (1914), ed Robert Scholes, London: Cape, 1967, p. 25; for the figure of outis,
'noman', in Joyce, see Maud Ellmann, 'Polytropic Man: Paternity, Identity and Naming in The
Odyssey and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', in James Joyce: New Perspectives, ed
Cohn MacCabe, London: Harvester, 1982, pp. 73-104.

84
 The character Stephen Dedalus 'himself', the central figure of A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, functions as a literary embodiment of the Joycean crisis
surrounding the Name-of-the-Father. One of the central episodes of this crisis is
enacted (appropriately as we shall see) in an 'anatomy theatre'—in a scene which
hinges around the inscription of Joyce's authorial pseudo-signature, S.D. Stephen
has accompanied his father to Queen's College, Cork, to be presented with a kind
of filial inheritance of the father's memories. The scene dramatizes the failure of
this act of symbolic transmission:
They passed into the anatomy theatre where Mr Dedalus, the porter aiding him,
searched the desk for his initials. Stephen remained in the background, depressed
more than ever by the darkness and silence of the theatre and by the air it wore of
jaded and formal study. On the desk he read the word Foetus cut several times in
the dark stained wood. The sudden legend startled his blood: he seemed to feel the
absent students of the college about him and to shrink from their company. A vision
of their life, which his father's words had been powerless to evoke, sprang up before
him out of the word cut in the desk (P 90).
Joyce's 'theatre' constructs a precise topography. The father seeks 'his' ini-
tials, while the son remains 'in the background'. Simon Dedalus, interested only
in rediscovering his own 'legend', cannot communicate any experience to his son:
his impotent, onanistic speech turns back on itself, caught up in the circularity of
its retrospection; while Stephen is suddenly trapped by an inscription which 'com-
municates' with hallucinatory force, on the level of the bodily real. If the father's
speech evaporates, unheeded, the writing is 'cut'—permanently, ineradicably—into
the material fabric of the anatomy theatre, as a cicatrice, the trace of an identity
beyond ephemeral speech (like the scar which identifies Odysseus) 68 The father
appears, briefly, as a possible refuge from the traumatic encounter:
Stephen's name was called. He hurried down the steps of the theatre so as to be as
far away from the vision as he could be and, peering closely at his father's initials,
hid his flushed face (P 90).
Although Stephen seems to be hailed as a subject, it is nevertheless 'his father's
initials'—S .D., but not the mark in turn of his own identity—that he is shown.
Rather than confirming his symbolic inheritance, the encounter with the Name-of-
the-Father merely serves as a pretext for the son to shrink away from the visible
domain of identification, of the Portrait which would frame his identity as artist.
The 'sudden legend' of Foetus which has such an impact on Stephen is a 'poor
trait of the artless', as the Wake will re-inscribe Joyce's title: its appearance disrupts
the representational economy of the Bildungsroman, the measured self-presentation
which that title seemed to promise. 69 Stephen's apprehension of the linguistic
real embodied by writing is figured as an 'exanimation', the breach of boundaries
between psyche and world:
It shocked him to find in the outer world a trace of what he had deemed till then
a brutish and individual malady of his own mind. His monstrous reveries came
68 cf. Maud Ellmann's figure of the 'scarletter' in 'Polytropic Man', op. cit., pp. 81-4.
69 Finnegans Wake, op. cit., p. 114.

85
 thronging into his memory. They too had sprung up before him, suddenly and
furiously, out of mere words (P 90).
Stephen's traumatic relation to language is interwoven with the vacuous, self-
addressed paternal voice, as Joyce's hero 'walked on at his father's side, listening
to stories he had heard before' (P 91). The father's vague, complacent notion
that he is giving his son a kind of 'birth' or initiation to manhood by passing
on his wisdom ('When you kick out for yourself, Stephen...') is countered by
the explicit evocation of abortion (or 'Abortisement' as it will be written in the
Wake (FW 181)) in the hallucinatory inscription which 'stared upon him'. The
père-version, which if answered would constitute the symbolic birth of the subject,
results in its miscarriage, as Stephen is cast into a linguistic real he cannot master—
where his self-recognition is overwhelmed, invaded by an inscription which seems
to name him: 'Foetus'. If Stephen's name is called by the father, it is the letters
cut in the desk which 'interpellate' him—not to the representational consistency
of a parlêtre but to an uncanny, 'exanimate' identification with the 'monstrous'
substance of language itself.
The Name-of-the-Father, in Lacan's final formulations, is that which guaran-
tees the normative organization of real, symbolic and imaginary: that which secures
the fixity and rationality of psychical boundaries. To that extent, we could situate
the paternal metaphor as the precondition of the representational frame of the 'Por-
trait', that which enables the auto-biographical consistency of the subject, secures
its place in the Other. 'It is ... not for nothing', declares Lacan in Seminar XI,
'that we have referred to as picture the function in which the subject has to map
himself as such'.7°
If the scene in the anatomy theatre has Stephen hiding his face, seeking to avoid
the gaze which would include him in the father's 'picture', later in the text Joyce
again figures 'vocation' as a question of the portrait. Addressed by the director of
Belvedere College about his possible religious 'calling', Stephen feels an incipient
self-recognition:
A flame began to flutter on Stephen's cheek as he heard in this proud address an
echo of his own proud musings. How often had he seen himself as a priest wielding
calmly and humbly the awful power of which angels and saints stood in reverence!
(P 158)
Becoming a priest might enable Stephen to enter the frame of a portrait: as-
sume a consistent place in the symbolic order, allow 'exanimation' to be gathered in
as a pacifying alienation into ecclesiastical speech (where he again hears an 'echo'
or trace of 'his own mind'), a full translation of his unruly linguistic existence to the
calm, formulaic order of the church. But it is immediately clear that this portrait
has to be set out in a special, idiosyncratic way:.
'...above all it had pleased him to fill the second place in those dim scenes of his
imagining. He shrank from the dignity of celebrant because it displeased him to
imagine that all the vague pomp should end in his own person or that the ritual
should assign to him so clear and final an office' (P 158-9).
T0 Seminar of 4th March 1964 (SXI), op. cit., p. 100.

86
 In one sense, Stephen wishes to vanish into the background, to become part
of a mechanism which will constrain or 'mortify' the particularity of his being.
He needs a formulaic pattern to structure his existence: 'In vague sacrificial or
sacramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality'. On
the train journey earlier with his father, Stephen has to mark 'the silent telegraph-
poles passing his window swiftly every four seconds': only a formal rhythm enables
him to recognize subjective experience, cut out its shape as his own 'reality'(P 87).
Stephen's eventual refusal to enter the 'chill and order' of the church—encap-
sulated in Ulysses by his desperate shout of 'Non serviam!' during the phant-
asmagoria of 'Circe' (U 475)—is ultimately the effect of an 'instinct ... stronger
than education or piety': the intransigence of the drive, the resistance of jouissance
to 'mortification'. Even his adolescent attempts to subject his bodily existence to
the rigours of ecclesiastical asceticism are transformed into opportunities for artistic
self-invention: 'To mortify his smell was more difficult as he found in himself no
instinctive repugnance to bad odours... But it was to the mortification of touch he
brought the most assiduous ingenuity of inventiveness'(P 151). If the church could
provide a consistent representational structure in answer to Stephen's père-version,
this would be at a high price: the sacrifice of his creative bodily and discursive
energy, the jouissance which is ineluctably bound up with Joyce's name, with the
presence of his 'legend'. This tangible, almost olfactory, 'real presence' could never
be consistent with the 'clear and final' office of priesthood, as is already apparent
in the sinful 'ingenuity' of Stephen's efforts to simulate self-negation.
Stephen, then, does not recognize himself in the book's 'portraits'—neither
as the initials S.D., nor as 'the Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S.J.'. The 'pride of
his spirit which had always made him conceive himself as a being apart in every
order'(P 161) prevents him from uttering the decisive Bejahung which would mark
his identification with one of these 'titles'. Joyce's phrasing, as so often, holds the
key to the character's problem—here, that of naming: Stephen's pride makes him
'conceive himself', engender arid give birth to his own identity as artist—as the
author, precisely, of the Portrait. Having been caught in the uncanny gaze of the
letters which 'stared upon him' and compelled his 'symptomatic' identification with
Foetus, with a misbegotten linguistic 'object', Stephen can at last assume the 'I' of
authorial mastery at the book's close (P 248).
It is this act—the signature of the Joycean work as a literary 'I'—which, for
Lacan, provides a suppléance for the absent paternal metaphor, allows the knot
to cohere. It is of course essential that the book does not include the signature
'Joyce'—that the 'old father, old artificer' invoked on its last page remains em-
bedded in the fictional world of the artist: just as Joyce signs a 'real' letter with
a fictional pseudonym, so the narrative 'I' who attains self-mastery and authorial
power can only be a character, a literary screen or sham (like the Shem who in the
Wake will be the protean semblance—the shemblance, as it were—of authorship).
If the real father dooms Joyce's père-version to failure, leaving the artist stranded
in an 'autistic' relation to language, the response can only be for Joyce to become a
'version of the father' by siring a fictional identity, transforming the infant 'foetus'
into 'the artist as a young man', a consistent self-authorizing figure.

87
 However, Joyce was also to become a real father. 'This was something not
included in the plan', comments Lacan; 71 in the event, Joyce's daughter Lucia was
to be caught up in the real of her father's 'symptom' in a kind of tragic, parodic
père-version (which was already visible in the 'transferential' triangle with Jung,
where Lucia soon moved into the background, as it were, during the search for
the paternal signature). Joyce's relation to his daughter was, Lacan concludes, 'a
prolongation of his symptom', which is to say that it constituted an 'extension'
of the fundamental crisis of his existence, the carence du peTe (radical absence of
the father). 72 As if in confirmation of Jung's 1909 remarks (read by Joyce, as we
know) on 'the predominating influence of the father's character in a family, often
lasting for centuries'—the radical foreclosure of the nom-du-père for Joyce returns,
in Lacan's view, to determine Lucia's destiny.73
How can we situate this 'prolongation' of the Joycean symptom? We have
characterized as the 'primal scene' of Joyce's writing an 'exanimation', the trau-
matic rupture of the psychical boundaries 'normally' maintained by the paternal
metaphor; a rupture which the writing itself then 'sutured', offered suppléance. We
can link this to a specific aspect of the 'symptomatic' relation between father and
daughter picked out by Lacan: that Joyce thinks Lucia is telepathic. 'Something
in the domain of speech is imposed on her', is Lacan's paraphrase of Joyce's 'de-
fence' of his daughter: a precise description, Lacan thinks, of what took place in
one of her father's 'epiphanies' (as we saw in Stephen's encounter with the mon-
strous Foetus in the anatomy theatre, Joyce's text embodies a powerful evocation
of 'verbal hallucination').
It is as if Lucia forms an integral part of Joyce's artistic self-invention—not in
any metaphorical sense, but in the real. Ellmann recounts Lucia's tragi-comic efforts
to promote her father's 'legend', inscribe his name in the real of visible history: in
1935, she travels to Dublin on a makebelieve mission 'to mend the relations of
Joyce and Ireland', and sends her father a telegram declaring 'You look like Bray
Head'—he looms as large, in her imagination, as the mountains dominating the Irish
skyline. 74 There is a direct continuity here with the writing of Finnegans Wake in
which Joyce was then immersed, where he carves out a 'landshape' mapping the
giant form of Finn MacCool onto the geography around Dublin (a 'topographical'
aspect of the text traced out in John Bishop's reading).75
In this sense, Jung's theorization of the relation as one of 'mystical identity'
had a core of truth in it: if to posit Lucia as Joyce's 'anima' was not to rely
on a metaphorical cliché (of the 'artistic muse') but implied an uncanny psychical
continuity, an 'intrication' of souls, then Jung's intuition touched on something
real. At the same time, the notion here of psychical continuity is, of course, itself
misleading: it implies a consistency in representation (recalling the portrait of the
T1 Seminar of 10th February 1976 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, op. cit., p. 10.
72 Seminar of 17th February 1976 (SXXIII), ibid, p. 4.
73 C.G.Jung, 'The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual' (1909), Collected
Works of C.G.Jung, Vol IV, London: Routledge, 1961, P. 303.
T4 Ellmann, James Joyce, op. cit., pp. 681-4.
75 John Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake, Madison: Wisconsin University,
1986, pp. 30-41; cf. especially the relief map on p. 34.

88
meditating yogi which appears in the middle of Jung's reading of Ulysses); the
attempt to avoid or overturn this imaginary economy was precisely the central
stake of Lacan's final topology.
The 'continuity' or entanglement of father and daughter is due not to tele-
pathy, but to telegraphy: Lucia's desperate effort to identify with Joycean writing
(itself, as sinthome, indissociable from her father's 'self', his constitutive artistic
identification)—her attempts to promote or extend, to participate in, his artistic
being elsewhere, on another scene. The 'exanimation' of Joycean foreclosure would
correspond, in this sense, to the 'anima' or imaginary in the knot falling out, into
the real, as Lucia—before it is bound back through the artifice of writing.
Jung had written in his 1909 article of 'the magic power of the parents to bind
their children to themselves, often for the whole of their lives'. 76 For Joyce, the
tragedy of Lucia's indissoluble bond to his existence may have seemed most acute
in the contrast it formed with his own escape, endlessly dramatized by his writing
(beginning with the Daedelan flight at the end of the Portrait), from the 'magic
power' of his own father. A vivid instance of the way Stephen's father seeks to bind
his son into a closed, 'symptomatic' circle comes, in the Portrait, in a conversation
during the nostalgic trip to Cork: an old friend of Mr Dedalus embarrasses the boy
by asking 'which were the prettier, the Dublin girls or the Cork girls'.
—He's not that way built, said Mr Dedalus. Leave him alone. He's a level-headed
thinking boy who doesn't bother his head about that kind of nonsense.
—Then he's not his father's son, said the little old man.
—I don't know, I'm sure, said Mr Dedalus, smiling complacently.
—Your father, said the little old man to Stephen, was the boldest flirt in the city of
Cork in his day. Do you know that?
Stephen looked down and studied the tiled floor of the bar into which they had
drifted.
—Now don't be putting ideas into his head, said Mr Dedalus. Leave him to his Maker
(P 94).
As in the anatomy theatre, Stephen's encounter with his father's 'legend' causes
him to shrink back from the visible scene of identification (of 'I'-contact, as it
were). Here, the possibility of Stephen being addressed as a subject of desire, of
the potential opening of lack in his being, is 'structurally' foreclosed by the father—
'He's not that way built'—as if the son's very existence is only fixed in place by a
hyperbolic 'Oedipal' prohibition. The father speaks for, in place of, a son who is
confined to infancy, to the 'level-headed' consistency of silence. 'Leave him to his
Maker' provides a clear formula for the father's self-appointed 'authorship': Stephen
is his creation, subject to his commentary—a commentary which jealously wards
off the incursion of any 'ideas' from outside.
As we have seen, Joyce's 'solution' to the paternal 'symptom'—his response to
the foreclosure which seeks to wall in his subjectivity, prevent him from assuming
the position of speaking subject—is to 'identify' as a writing-being, by turning away
76Jung, 'The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual', op. cit., p. 317.

89
from the scene of identification which is dominated by the father to an 'autistic'
experience of language (literally beyond the reach of the paternal voice and its
endless recital of clichés). Joyce thus becomes his own 'Maker', left to himself in a
radical, 'autistic' sense, in the breakdown of the Other: for him, language surges
forth in the real, becomes a bodily experience which can only be mastered in the
'exanimate' identification, the singular location of the 'I' in the (real: semiotic,
somatic) inscription itself.
The 'vicous cycle', the historical repetition, of foreclosure has to be situated
in relation to the Joycean sinthome. Lacan's Borromean topology allows us to
trace a certain 'prolongation' of a circular or cyclical effect: if, in the Portrait,
the empty speech of the 'foreclosed' father turns in on itself, with no opening to
the Other, the 'selfpenned' letter of the Joycean 'Autist'(FW 434) embodies a
jouissance outside symbolic alienation (as is indicated by the term 'autism', from
the Greek autos, 'self-same'). The knot which Lacan proposes in his work on Joyce,
writes Pierre Skriabine, 'corresponds to a sort of inflection, a renewal, of the status
of the symbolic itself'. 77 This is to interpret the Joycean knot as the embodiment
of a split between symbol and symptom in the field of language, in Jacques-Alain
Miller's terms: the function of representation (of the signifier/subject doublet, that
is) is supplemented by that of the sinthome, the radically illegible, 'autistic' trace
of jouissance. 78 The location of Joyce's 'identity' in the sinthome makes it literally
unrepeatable ('it can't be repeated!', yells the Wakean 'censor'(FW 179)), outside
the symbolic 'universal' of the Lacanian subject: in short, impossible to identify
with.
Finnegans Wake, where this unreadability attains its full 'paperspace', includes
in one of its lists a verbal object which we could interpret as an indication of
the impossible dimension of Joycean paternity: the 'hapaxle gomenon' (FW 116)
encapsulates the sinthome as something unique, unrepeatable (a hapax legomenon
is an expression in philology for 'a thing said once', an absolutely singular linguistic
event); the slice of Joyce's 'penstroke' separates 'hapaxle'—an axle, the support of
the cyclical motion of a wheel—from 'gomenon', an intriguing word in which the
Greek gomos ('bolt', 'fixture') blends anagrammatically with a cluster of Joycean
signifiers ('gnomon', 'noman', 'nemon') which echo throughout his work as versions
of the 'nego' he first introduces in one of his earliest writings, 'A Portrait of the
Artist'—the author as outis, 'nobodyatall'. 79 As 'hapaxle gomenon', Joyce's writing
fixes in place the symptomatic ring which binds or bolts together the knot, its unique
instance not forming part of any signifying chain which could represent the 'writer
complexus' (FW 114) of a subject or an author.
Symbolic identification, the instantiation of the subject as an effect of un-
conscious desire, is for Lacan always caught up in, determined by, a triangular
economy. The Name-of-the-Father intervenes as an effect of metaphorical substitu-
tion to open the diadic relation of mother and child to the Other, to prevent that
relation folding in on itself and stalling the emergence of the subject. We could
77 Pierre Skriabine, 'Clinique et topologie', op. cit., p. 130.
78 cf. Jacques-Alain Miller, Preface, Joyce Avec Lacan, op. cit., pp. 10-12.
79 Joyce, 'A Portrait of the Artist' (1904), Poems and Shorter Writings, op. cit., p. 218; Finneg-
ans Wake, op. cit., p. 73.

90
 revise our earlier discussion of the 'transferential' economy set up between Jung,
Joyce and Lucia by situating the topology of the sinthome as a singular catastrophe
or 'disarticulation' of the triangle (Oedipal, topological): the 'hapaxle gomenon' of
Joyce embodies a circularity, a topology with 'Doublends Jined' (FW 20) like the
textual stream of the Wake. Joyce's daughter Lucia is bound into this symptomatic
'cycle', completely absorbed by the flow of Joycean writing, closed off to any sym-
bolic 'triangulation' (thus Jung's correct diagnosis that there was little possibility
of Uberträgung in her case).
In the terms of Lacanian topology, Joyce's knot is not 'really' Borromean: it
is not tied properly, to form a balanced, ordered interrelation of real, symbolic and
imaginary, but is drastically 'skewed' by its reliance on the sinthorne for coherence.
The movement and 'play' of the Borromean knot, which for Lacan is the topological
equivalent of the subject as a space of signifying displacement, is radically hampered
by the 'prosthetic' fourth register in Joyce, which bolts in place the 'subject' as
'aspace of dumbillsilly' (espece d'imbécile, as Lacan translates: a kind of 'idiot',
doomed to symptomatic 'privacy' LGk idios, 'private', 'own'], to remain 'dumb,
ill, silly'). 8 ° On the other hand, the special 'bias' of the Joycean knot enabled
it to embody a level of poesis, a unique kind of aesthetic 'factification', which is
foreclosed or primordially repressed from the topology of the parlêtre, the subject
as speaking-being.

Figure 5: the sinthome prevents un-knotting

v) One eyegonblack': eye-trouble and i'-trouble

Symbolic exchange is what links human beings to each other, that is, it is speech,
and it makes it possible to identify the subject.81

Lacan's remarks of 1954, when read alongside the problematic of Joycean fore-
closure he explores twenty years later, give a clear sense of the transformation, but
also the underlying continuity, of his thought. Joyce's sinthome certainly 'links
80 cf. 'Joyce le symptome 1', in Joyce Avec Lacan, op. cit., p. 26.
81 Seminar of 31st March 1954 (SI), op. cit., p. 142.

91
human beings to each other', but in the case of Lucia, as we have seen, this bond is
not the result of any socio-symbolic 'exchange', but of abortive subjectivation. To
return to Lacan's early seminars is to gain a more sharply focused sense of what is
at stake in the topological reading of Joyce, especially around its repositioning of
the imaginary (in the ego's 'lapse' from the knot and its return as the Ich of the
'symptomatic' identification).
The imaginary, Lacan declares in Seminar I, is a moment de virage (a 'turning
point'—like the 'swerving' or 'banking' on the corner of a race-track) in which the
subject loses itself in a 'fundamental alienation'. 82 The subject of psychoanalysis
is, of course, 'decentred' in relation to the ego, as Lacan insists the following year,
1955. But the 'ideal of analysis'—to put in place a subject 'beyond the imaginary'—
'remains virtual': 'There is never a subject without an ego, a fully realised subject,
but that in fact is what one must aim to obtain.., in analysis'. 83 If this anticipates
the Borromean period in its emphasis on the indissociability of Lacan's theoretical
registers, by 1964 the unavoidable virage of imaginary alienation will be figured as
a kind of incurable 'blindness':
Psychoanalysis regards the consciousness as irremediably limited, and institutes it as
a principle, not only of idealization, but of rnéconnaissance, as—using a term that
takes on new value by being referred to a visible dornain—scotoma.84

The identificatory Urbild of the ego's genesis (the Mirror stage) sets up, Lacan
asserted, the entire horizon of consciousness as a 'principle' of scotomization (an
opthalmological term referring to retinal lesion which Charcot had borrowed for his
description of hysterical 'blindness') •85 The 'geometrical dimension of vision'—at
once ineluctable and 'scotomizing'—thus constitutes an economy of representation
(of self-representation) which takes analysis on a virage into the fictions of the
ego, its constitutive and symptomatic misrecognition. Lacan's work sets itself the
task, constantly re-invented over the course of his teaching, of thinking beyond
this 'geometry' (thus, ultimately, of thinking 'beyond' the limitations of conscious-
ness: something which Lacan feels he has achieved with the introduction of the
Borromean knot) 86
The 'split between the eye and the gaze' which Lacan presents in Seminar XI,
with reference to Holbein's anamorphic painting, is one version of this theoretical
ideal. This 'split' in the field of representation coincided, argues Lacan, with the
inaugural historical 'break' of modernity: 'at the very heart of the period in which
the subject emerged and geometrical optics was an object of research',
Holbein makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated—
annihilated in the form that is ... the imaged embodiment of the minus-phi of
82 Seminar of 7th April 1954 (SI), op. cit., p. 146.
83 Seminar of 25th May 1955 (SIT), op. cit., p. 246.
84 Seminar of 26th February 1964 (SXI), op. cit., pp. 82-3.
85 cf. Elisabeth Roudinesco, La Bataille de cent ans: Histoire de Ia psychanalyse en France
(Vol.1, 1885-1939), Paris: Seuil, 1986, pp. 388ff.
86 Cf. Lacan's seminar at Yale University on 24th November 1975: 'Borromean knots are not
easy either to show or to demonstrate, because one absolutely cannot represent them to oneself'.
Scilicet 6/7, op. cit., p. 35.

92
 castration, which for us, centres the whole organization of the desires through the
framework of the fundamental drives.87
What is revealed is the representational incommensurability between the 'geo-
metry' of consciousness and the absolute negativity of the Kojevean subject, the
symbolic annéantisation which organizes the real, sets in place a topological 'frame-
work'. The space beyond the perspectival virage of the imaginary can only be
glimpsed obliquely in the anamorphic 'rip' of representation: by definition, the 'an-
nihilated' subject is itself invisible, a space cut out of the field of signification (in
its status as 'transcendental condition' of that field).
The introduction of the Borromean knot, of course, alters the position of the
symbolic, in that it corresponds to the shift from a subject situated by the neat
economy of castration to one caught up in a complex topological intrication, the
unimaginable over—and under-crossings of nodalité. 'It is very difficult to think
about knots—this is something most commonly done with the eyes closed', com-
ments Lacan in 1975.88 The visible scene of conscious theoria (Gk. 'spectacle') is
a mere distraction from the task of thinking borromEenernent, in a 'Borromean'
manner. To this extent, Lacan's last topology is not an attempt to represent the
subject, to restore it to consistent visibility: it claims to have dispensed with the
fictional detours of 'truth' (the 'deception' which Lacan had set out in Seminar
XI as the paradoxical dimension of truth), to have cut through the virage of egoic
misrecognition to the real, non-metaphorical structure itself.89
The reformulation of foreclosure which was part of this re-writing of the sub-
ject entailed, as we have seen, a new problematic of denouement, ' unknotting'.
The Joycean epiphany thus constituted a foreclosure more radical than that cor-
responding to the psychotic breakdown of symbolic 'alienation': the 'fundamental
alienation' of the imaginary, the constitutive 'geometry' of the conscious ego, is
topologically excluded, unravelling the structural organization of the knot as it
falls away. If Lacan's own topological 'writing' entails une géornEtrie interdite a
l'imaginaire, an unimaginable geometry, there is clearly a rigorous equivalence in-
tended here between theory and its 'object' (in accordance with the 1960 formula
on the non-existence of a metalanguage). 9 ° Joyce's writing is literally a topological
'geometry' which, like Lacan's, does away with the alienation, the bounded psycho-
logy of the imaginary, becomes 'immarginable' (although Lacan is perplexed not to
be able to find the slightest trace of the Borromean knot in Joyce's work).
'The ineluctable modality of the visible' (U 31), in the famous formulation
made by Stephen Dedalus during his walk along the beach in Ulysses, is an enduring
topic of Joyce's writing. If the sinthome is part of a topology which, Lacan claimed,
could only be thought les yeux fermes—because it constitutes a break with the
representational limits of the imaginary—we might seek to trace this in the endless
preoccupation of the Joycean text with vision and blindness (which is also, as we
shall see, bound up with Joyce's own 'real' symptomatic eye-trouble).
87 Seminar of 26th February 1964 (SXI), op. cit., pp. 88-89.
88 Seminar of 9th December 1975 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, op. cit., p. 12.
89 cf. Seminar of 22nd April 1964 (SXI), op. cit., pp. 139-41.
90 cf. Lacan, 'Subversion of the Subject', Ecrits: A Selection, op. cit., p. 311.

93
 We have already noted how Joyce's early writing sets forth the question of
vocation (figured by Lacan as one of pere-version) in terms of the 'portrait', of a
consistent subjective self-presentation 'framed' by the paternal metaphor. We can
use an incident reported by Ellmann as a first gloss on the 'topology' of Joyce's
youthful portrait. During the period when Joyce was first establishing his artistic
'calling', he sought the opinion of an established authority: contriving, with a great
show of nonchalance, to encounter the well-known poet W.B.Yeats, Joyce read him
some of the epiphanies. Yeats' judgement, expressed to friends later, is alleged
to have been quite Swiftian: 'Such a colossal self-conceit with such a Lilliputian
literary genius I never saw combined in one person'.9'
The 'topology' of this Yeatsian 'portrait', its modernist flaunting of perspective,
perhaps gives us a first glimpse of the re-orientation of the imaginary which will
emerge in Joyce's writing. The best-known 'visual' passage in Joyce comes at
the beginning of 'Proteus', the third episode of Ulysses. The monologue intéricure
running through the mind of Stephen Dedalus as he walks along Sandymount Strand
takes him back to the first trip he (and the real Joyce) had made to Paris, and to
the philosophy he had read there: his thoughts drift from Aristotle ('Diaphane,
adiaphane') to Berkeley, the 'good bishop of Cloyne' for whom the 'veil of space'
was a pure product of the mind (which he took 'out of his shovel hat') (U 31-40).
If Stephen rejects this idealism, conceiving the visible as somehow 'out there'—
beyond the agency of the seeing subject—the visual field through which he moves
is nevertheless drastically 'centred', autoscopique (to cite Merleau-Ponty's term).
Stephen imagines 'Signatures of all things I am here to read': nature seems to offer
him a 'readerly' text, signed by some consistent authorial presence.
Here, Joyce's mocking self-portrait sets up a discrepancy between a theoretical
acknowledgement on the part of the character—of an ever-changing, 'protean' visu-
ality, structured by an 'ineluctable' alterity—and the representational consistence
of the scene: Stephen's 'brooding' gaze, together with his speculations 'thought
through my eyes', maintains a narrowly-focused, 'egoic' narrative. The field of
Stephen's vision is likewise littered with images of bodily containment—orifices,
slits (the bottle 'stogged to its waist' in the sand; the corpse with its 'buttoned
trouserfiy'): like the rhythm which gives structure to the train-journey in the Por-
trait, the bounded objects on the beach provide the narrative 'eye' with 'a refuge
from the gaze', to invoke the terms Lacan develops in Seminar XI—an identific-
atory structure which offers relief from scopic 'anonymity' or passivity. Stephen's
gestures towards philosophy, too, form part of his efforts to 'button' or suture an
imaginary field which he senses tearing open or slipping away: just as an 'avoidance
of the function of the gaze' is at work, according to Lacan, in 'that form of vision
which is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness', so 'the philosoph-
ical tradition represented by plenitude encountered by the subject in the mode of
contemplation' fails to grasp the essential dimension of visuality: its topological
incommensurability with the imaginary.92
91 ElImann, James Joyce, op. cit., p. 101.
92 Seminar of 19th February 1964 (SXI), op. cit., p. 74.

94
 If Stephen's experience of vision is structured by his efforts to theorize it as
a centred, bounded 'modality' (a philosophical term for the logical classification
of propositions), we are given a very different Schauplatz in 'Cyclops', the twelfth
episode of Ulysses. To cut from Stephen's 'thought through my eyes' straight to
the opening of the later episode is to recall Jung's description of Joyce's work as
'cubistic': 'Cyclops' begins with the outraged protest of its anonymous narrator
against 'a bloody sweep' who 'came along and ... near drove his gear into my eye'
(U 240). The assault on 'cycloptic' vision corresponds to the modernist shattering
of representational 'geometry' into abruptfy discontinuous perspectives and narrat-
ive voices (the Homeric Cyclops is, of course, Polyphemos, the 'many-voiced'). The
'I' of the narrative, appearing as a strained effort at egoic self-assertion (with its
repetition of 'Ay, says I'), cuts a comic figure in this fragmented scene: shorn of the
illusory visual and narrative control of 'Proteus', with its imagery of containment,
its legible 'signatures', the narrative 'eye' is now buffeted by violent switches of per-
spective, flung into a representational 'anonymity', a 'blind' textuality whose author
is outis ('noman', the pseudonym with which Odysseus beguiles the Cyclops).
If the narrator of 'Cyclops' embodies the outrage of the imaginary at being
'blinded' (one of the perennial figures of castration, of course, according to Freud),
Stephen's theoretical musings in 'Proteus' aim to contain the outbreak of anxiety
provoked by such a fracture of identity or loss of imaginary consistence. Finnegans
Wake will add to these ambivalent pictures, with their mixed anguish and humour,
a portrait of self-loss as black comedy:
It would have diverted, if ever seen, the shuddersome spectacle of this semidemen-
ted zany amid the inspissated grime of his glaucous den making believe to read his
usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles, edition de ténèbres. .. (FW 179)
The portrait, like the whole of the Wake, is set in the dark. It can only be read
in a make-believe edition de térièbres (which is precisely not an 'edition' because it
only puts forth darkness, unreadable obscurity); the spectator's imagination would
have to be 'diverted' from the visible domain where things are readable, where
signs have some representational function, to operate 'usylessly', if it is to enter
the 'glaucous den' of the book. The modernist breakdown of the 'portrait' and
its signifying economy (its legible, 'autoscopic' imaginary)—which in Ulysses first
begins to impinge upon, to fray the edges of, Stephen's theoretical 'modality', before
sweeping away the self-identity of the 'eye' in 'Cyclops'—is raised to a new power in
the carnivalesque (but nonetheless 'shuddersome') 'spectacle' of Finnegans Wake.
Here, we could read the intricate pun 'usylessly unreadable' as a kind of Joycean
prescription (as if this version of Ulysses could be written on the book's cover, in a
direct address to the reading public). If the reader is thus warned by its title that
the book is useless and unreadable, Joyce's jeu de mots also comprises, as Jacques
Derrida notes in his Memoirs d'aveugle, a pun on 'eye-less'. 'Use eye-lessly', the
book's cover instructs its reader: with no expectation of a consistent economy of
representation governed by an authorial 'I'.
93 jacques Derrida, Memoirs d'aveugle: L'autoportrait et autres mines, Paris: Editions de Ia
Reunion des musêes nationaux, 1990, p. 33.

95
 Joyce's writing engages with, presents, embodies, a rupture of the 'geometry'
or visuality organized in accordance with the imaginary limits of the ego's self-
representation. For Lacan, however, this is not simply to be noted as a feature of the
stylistic revolution accomplished by Joycean art, in a characteristically modernist
break with traditional protocols of representation; rather, it constitutes the essential
condition of the sinthome—in other words, of Joyce's very existence, his survival
as a special kind of subject. How are we to link the 'eye-less' economy of Joyce's
writing to the symptomatic real of Joycean biography?
Joyce suffered from real eye-trouble,which towards the end of his life became
very severe. An inflammation of his left iris and a glaucoma grew worse over time,
despite numerous painful operations; he eventually lost all sight in one eye (and
became effectively blind in both). A Lacanian analyst, Jean Guir, has linked this
eye-trouble to the theory of the Joycean sinthome:
Joyce was physically well when he was writing, anchoring his ideal ego (I) in the
words and rhythms that carried him along as a subject... When he was not writing,
he suffered from a severe glaucoma that disappeared spontaneously once he took up
the pen again.94
The 'glaucous den' of Finnegans Wake would thus be a scene where literary
and 'psychosomatic' modes of blindness are strangely knotted together. In Guir's
view, the structural rhythm of the sinthome salvages a certain topological coherence
by 'anchoring' the imaginary as an instance of writing, so that the interruption of
this effect of 'metaphor' would result in the 'shipwreck' of the subject, as it were,
in a traumatic storm of jouissance: the outbreak of the symptomatic real, with the
'lapse' of the ego corresponding to a real 'foreclosure' of the visible field where it
was installed. If Joyce's glaucoma disappears in 'One eyegonblack' (the Wakean
translation of the German em Augenblick, an 'eye-blink')(FW 16) once his pen
is in his hand, this would only confirm the scriptural status of his blindness, its
intransigent, unceasing writing as sinthome or symptom.
Does the 'literary' status of a symptom—the fact that its incidence on the body
is bound up with the rhythms of artistic creation—displace or subvert the distinc-
tion between the body as 'imaginary' and as 'real'? How can we situate Lacan's
hypothesis about Joyce—of an existence structurally wedded to the production of
a written text—in relation to the complex questions of authorship raised by Joyce's
work, and the broader aesthetic context of modernism in which they emerge?

vi) Portrait of the Autist

Let us return to the position of the sinthome within the 'algebra of letters' of
Lacanian topology. 95 In his seminar of 16th December 1975, Lacan outlines this
position with a simple schema: 96
94 Jean Guir, Psychosomatique et cancer, Paris: Points Hors Ligne, 1983, p. 17.
95 The phrase algèbre littérale, which I translate here as 'algebra of letters', is from L'Etourdit,
op. cit., p. 28.
96 Seminar of 16th December 1975 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, op. cit., p. 6.

96
 R S I
S I R
I R S
sinthome
The line (or 'bar') in Lacan's schemas always has a decisive significance: here,
a line separates the sinthome, the 'fourth element' in the knot, from the Borromean
combinatoire of R, S and I—thus indicating the improper or 'extimate' place of
the suppléance in the knot, its exteriority to the intricate Borromean mesh. The
sinthome is a 'litter' in an algebra of letters: it cannot be fully absorbed into the
economy of signification; it retains, bears the weight of, a symptomatic particularity
irreducible to theoretical 'alienation'.
We can use this schema to begin an attempt to draw together the different
strands in our reading of Lacan's Joycean knot. The status of the sinthorne, we
recall, is not that of a mere predicate, an attribute of 'Joyce the subject', something
he has: it is, rather, the site of a special kind of identification, of an 'I' which
inscribes itself in a 'selfpenned' literary signature. In other words, Joyce is the
sinthome, as Lacan already insisted in his address to the 1975 Symposium: the
fourth 'element' is the title of the knot (as the schema seems to indicate by placing it
below the line, outside the 'picture'), so that one of the knot's components coincides
paradoxically with the entire knot, the essential identity of its 'knottedness'.
If the Freudian knot, in Serge André's classification, is kept together by the
Name-of-the-Father (situated in the unconscious space of the subject: of Es written
as '5'), the Joycean knot is not guarantied by such a decisive instance of metaphor-
ical closure. The 'split between symbol and symptom' which marks a redefined
symbolic order is part of a general topological re-orientation, whose effect is to dis-
place the fundamental principles of the Freudian Topik: the act which embodies
Joyce's response to 'radical foreclosure', according to Lacan, through which the
lapsed 'I' is recuperated in the sinthomatique instance of writing, is a conscious
act: the artistic self-creation of an Ich which 'turns its back on' the Other. The
Joycean knot, then, is not secured by the heteronomous signifying instance of the
unconscious subject, but founded on a self-constitutive writing, an auto-graphy. In
the opening session of Le Sinthome, Lacan provides a topological rriise a plat which
gives a sense of how the Borromean knot is re-oriented according to 'the duplicity
of symbol and symptom':97

Figure 6: the split between

symbol and symptom

97 Seminar of 18th November 1975 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, in Joyce Avec Lacan, op. cit., pp. 45-
7. Diagram from Scilicet 6/7, p. 57.

97
 This returns us to a familiar notion in psychoanalysis: the idea that psychosis
is a condition outside (or at least in a radically singular position: on the edge of)
the economy of repression which sets in place the representational consistency of the
unconscious. If Joyce is désabonné a l'inconscient, has 'cancelled his subscription'
to the unconscious, this is because for Lacan his very existence is a 'symptom': an
attempt to write a 'selfpenned letter', beyond symbolic alienation, to body forth
the real of which only faint echoes ever reach the surface of analytic speech. It was
no surprise, Lacan thought, that this existence culminated in an effort to write a
'book of the dark', an edition de ténèbrei where the dream itself—the 'royal road'
which had led Freud to the unconscious—would wind forth on 'the broadest way
immarginable'(FW 489).
The Freudian term Verdrängung ('repression') marked, for Lacan, the place
where the signifier inscribed a 'hole' (trou) in the real. This was the instance of the
symbolic register in the 'ideal' Borromean knot: to support the evidement which
corresponds to the subject's lack-of-being, to allow desire to take place as a consist-
ent 'nihilation'. The 'impropriety' of the Joycean knot found its topological index
in a modification of this symbolic function: 'I'm the articulation of the symptom
to the symbol, there is only a false hole'. 98 The split in the symbolic order opens
up a space of trompe l'oeil in the topology of the knot, where the sinthome emerges
as a 'sham' symbol (as a 'ShemptOme', Lacan jokes in Joyce le symptôme) which
only seems to offer support to a subjective annEantisation, the symbolic abolition
of the real.99
The place of the faux trou thus introduced to the knot is radically ambiguous:
on the one hand, its function is to stand in for the absent paternal metaphor, which
would have opened a genuine 'hole' or subjectivation in the real; it thus serves
to keep the knot together, to salvage a certain coherence by binding back in the
'foreclosed' imaginary. At the same time, it fails to properly mortify the real, to
install an Uruerdränguny which would fix in place a symbolic régime (governed by a
'Rock of Gibraltar', in Fink's phrase) to regulate the unruly domain of jouissance.
So the sinthome achieves its 'shemblance' of subjectivity without fully sacrifi-
cing its jouissance, undergoing the 'symbolic castration' which Lacan had posited
as the indispensable precondition of the speaking-being. This was not to ima-
gine Joyce as some sublime mythical figure, like the Freudian Urvater, capable of
transcending any subjection to the symbolic order—but to conceive his work as
a paradoxical combination of different linguistic destinies: the failure, on the one
hand, of the paternal metaphor (making for the opaque, illegible quality of the
symptom); and on the other, the 'pursuit' or self-willed adoption of that failure,
of the 'autistic' experience of language it leaves behind, which Joyce takes as an
epiphany or revelation of his artistic vocation. The 'selfpenned letter' of Joyce's art
would thus be 'opened by mistake': its primal scene entailing a radical faute in the
knot, it avoids psychotic unravelling by adopting the faux trou, the 'sham' symbol,
as its self-designated truth, the basis for its own kind of subjectivity.
98 Seminar of 18th November 1975 (SXXIII), Le Sinthorne, op. cit., p. 8.
99 'Joyce le symptôme I', in Joyce Avec Lacan, op. cit., p. 24.

98
 The question of inadequate symbolic mortification—of the failure of the sym-
bol to function properly, according to the 1953 formula, as 'the murder of the
Thing'—provides us with a way of linking Lacan's topological reading of Joyce to
the 'death of the author' made famous by Roland Barthes: to the issue, that is,
of the representational position of the subject in the aesthetic field opened up by
modernism. How can we situate Lacan's notion of Joycean writing as a special
symptomatic self-constitution—which we might see dramatized in Finnegans Wake
as the identification with a 'polyphemous' textuality whose publication will make
its author's name and thus make him 'Whblyphamous' (FW 73)—in relation to the
general problematic outlined by Barthes of the dissolution of authorial presence in
the polysemic modernist text?
'The modern scriptor', declares Barthes,
having buried the author, can therefore no longer believe ... that his hand is slower
than his passion ...; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice
traces a field without origin —or at least with no origin but language itself, ie., the
very thing which ceaselessly calls any origin into question.'°°

As we shall see, what 'buries the author' in Lacan's view is not the depthless
field of the Other—the alienating, inhuman structures of the symbolic order—but
the traumatic real which is held at bay, given organization, by precisely those
structures.
If the 'death of the author' means nothing more than the prevalence of the
signifying unconscious over the illusory forms of the ego, Lacan would of course
recognize in this the principle theme of his work in the 1950s. By the 1970s,
however, Lacan had begun to insist on maintaining a sharp theoretical distinction
between the logic of speech and that of writing, and thus would have rejected
Barthes' notion of the text as 'a field without origin'. Such an idea of writing would
be simply another version of the 'precipitation of the signifier' Lacan ascribes to
Derrida in 1976: the hyperbolization of the symbolic function, at the expense of
the real dimension of writing, its irreducibility to mere semiotic difference.
Thus, Barthes' claim that 'the writer can only imitate an ever anterior, never
original gesture', his dispersal of authorial presence into an endless proliferation and
deferral of signifiance, would amount to a mere acknowledgement, in Lacan's view,
of the position of the subject caught up in the endless ciphering of a linguistic
unconscious. Freud had given this 'field without origin' a name with the term
Weiderholungszwang, 'repetition compulsion', whose principle Lacan had located,
as early as the Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', in 'the insistence of the signifying
chain'.'01 Writing, in its redefinition as the 'littoral' trace of jouissance in the field
of meaning, constituted for Lacan precisely the disruption of this well-oiled economy
of signifying repetition—the emergence of an 'originality', an uncanny anomaly or
anamorphic blot which de-rails the endless substitution of signifiers.
How can we link these questions to Joyce's theories of the artist and his relation
to his work? For Barthes, the 'death of the author' indicates a decisive historical
break between an illusory 'centred' subjective agency and a modernist 'scriptor',
'°°Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', op. cit., p. 52.
'°''The Death of the Author', op. cit., p. 53; Ecrits, op. cit., p. 11.

99
 the pure instance of liberated style realized in twentieth-century art. Jean-Michel
Rabate notes how in Joyce these questions turn around the ambiguity of 'subject', so
that the Joycean problem of the 'author' should be understood as bound up with a
central modernist aesthetic ideal—the attempt to produce an artwork whose style,
honed to an extreme density or purity, completely eclipses its 'content' (thus to
write 'a book about nothing', as Flaubert puts it).'°2
As we have indicated, this question of the erasure of the 'subject' in writing can
be understood in Lacanian terms as a failure or refusal of symbolic mortification. If
we return to the moment in the Portrait when Stephen is musing about his vocation,
we can locate a crucial feature of Joycean writing here: its resistance to a certain
effect of decision. In the 'dim scenes' of Stephen's imagination, where he pictures
himself as part of an ecclesiastical ritual combining a 'semblance of reality' with an
aesthetic 'distance' from the real world, he shrinks back from the 'clear and final
office' of the priest who celebrates Mass because 'it displeased him to imagine
that all the vague pomp should end in his person'(P 158-9). The 'clear and final'
position of celebrant would embody the closing punctuation in the aesthetic ritual,
its decisive act: like the Freudian Lösung of an artistic or symptomatic 'riddle', the
final situation or identification of the subject would close down the proliferating
substance of jouissance, install a mortifying effect of signification.
Stephen's self-proclaimed calling as an artist is initially framed as a deliberate
refusal to be subject to the degrading mechanism of symbolic identification. Joyce's
earliest artistic 'manifesto', 'A Portrait of the Artist', written in 1904, makes a clear
distinction between a worldly scene which 'recognises its acquaintance chiefly by
the characters of beard and inches' and the solitary band of true artists for whom
'a portrait is not an indentificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion'.103
The being of the artist is incommensurable with the mundane sphere of socio-
symbolic evidence, of the historically 'certified': his portrait is not a 'clear and
final' certificate of identity but the stream or trace of some aesthetic particularity:
something demanding endless interpretation.
It is thus as a refusal of symbolic mortification, a refusal to allow the aesthetic
'Thing' to be murdered or finished off by an act of interpretation, that Joyce's
writing first imagines itself. It soon became apparent, of course, that this fin
de siècle, quasi-Symbolist notion of the sanctity of art was hopelessly idealist; in
particular from the moment when Joyce began to try to get his work published. In
a letter to his brother Stanislaus, written during his long and anguished struggle to
see Dubliners in print, Joyce reports the suspicious questions asked by a publisher
about his text:
He asked me very narrowly, was there sodomy also in 'The Sisters' and what was
'simony' and if the priest was suspended oniy for the breaking of the chalice. He
asked me also was there more in 'The Dead' than appeared.'°4
lO2 JeanMichel Rabaté, James Joyce, Authorized Reader (1984), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,
1991, pp. 3-6.
'°'A Portrait of the Artist', op. cit., p. 211.
104 The Letters of James Joyce Vol 2, ed Richard Ellmann, New York: Viking 1966, pp. 305-6.

100
 The publisher thus reads Joyce's book precisely as an 'identificative paper', en-
tirely continuous with the everyday realm of event and supposition. Both 'sodomy'
and 'simony' seem to him to echo a similar kind of obscure sinfulness which might be
lurking in some recess at the back of the text. The possibility of there being 'more'
in a story 'than appeared', a sort of anamorphic distortion suggesting something
beyond the immediately legible surface, emerges as an ironic consequence of Joyce's
artistic refusal of any 'clear and final' subject-position: of course there is 'more in
'The Dead' than appeared'—not some further 'fact' whose revelation would dispel
the publisher's doubts, however, but the irreducible signature of Joyce's existence
as 'man of letters'.
In one sense, this 'narrow' reading of Dubliners by the publisher resembles
psychoanalytic reading, of the kind we saw exemplified in Freud's interpretation of
Hamlet. Freud, we recall, claimed to have 'translated into conscious terms what
was bound to remain unconscious in Hamlet's mind': the suspicion of something
'more than appeared' in the text itself, some obscure secret beyond its representa-
tional surface, was answered by supplying the play with a signifying finality: a set
of specifically 'Oedipal' fantasies grafted on to a character's supposed 'mind'. If
Joyce's publisher wishes to deal only with a fully legible text, one freed from any
anamorphic blur which might suggest something occult or dubious, we were able
to trace the same desire in Freud's reading of Hamlet as an uncanny repetition of
the play's abyssal 'Mousetrap': the attempt to dispel obscurity through the staging
of truth, to make the play fully 'extant' in a decisive moment of examination or
revelation.
The critical appeal to a 'final cause' of signification behind the surface of the
text was, of course, the main target of Barthes' polemic in 'The Death of the Au-
thor'. The 'psyche' invoked by Freudian interpretation was for Barthes just another
'hypostasis' of the Author, a way of perpetuating his pre-modernist tyranny in a
more subtle guise.'° 5 There is nothing more in the text than appears, Barthes
insists: the scene 'beyond' it, with all its metaphysical baggage ('society, history
freedom') ultimately the property of the defunct Author, is simply a trick of
perspective, an ideological ruse to divert the reader from an engagement with the
pure signifying surface of writing. However, it is significant that in Barthes' article
the 'clear and final office' (to return to Joyce's phrase for the decisive symbolic
instance) which is denied to the Author is not itself abolished, lost in the unmas-
terable dissemination of textuality: it is simply transferred to the reader—who is
now, Barthes declares, born as a new authority of signification.106
We saw how Lacan took up the reading of Hamlet in an attempt to reconceive
the psychoanalytic account of fantasy—focusing first on the prince's relation to
Ophelia—and were able to clarify this by referring it to the problematic of ana-
morphosis which Lacan introduced a year later, in Seminar VII. Thus, in turn, the
ghost of Hamlet's father could be read as a Shakespearian version of the anamorphic
blur, its 'questionable shape' disfiguring the scene of signification, threatening to
'dismantle' the representational space of the subject; which is what in effect takes
' °5 Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', op. cit., p. 53.
' 06 Ibid, p. 55.

101
 place with the performance of 'The Mousetrap', where the socio-symbolic organiz-
ation of the royal court is unravelled by the ghostly revelation.
In 'The Death of the Author', Barthes effectively wishes to abolish, to 'ex-
orcize', this anamorphic ghost from the scene of critical interpretation. What he
seeks to hand over at the close of his article to the newly-authorized reader is a
text purged of any trace of the real—purged, that is, not only of the kind of naive
realism shown by the Dublin publisher, but of anything irreducible to the free play
of the signifier. The 'undiscovered country' of Hamlet's soliloquy cannot corres-
pond, in Barthes' view, to any aspect of the text but an imaginary one, something
conjured up by an effect of trompe 1 'oeil which beguiles us, makes us overlook the
pure surface of writing.
Lacan's seminars on Hamlet mark the last point in his work where we might
be able to detect there any echo of the thesis of the 'death of the author'. (Shake-
speare's play was seen by Lacan in 1959 to dramatize, we recall, the subject's fate
'expressed in terms of a pure signifier'). The introduction of anamorphosis in 1960
begins the process of framing the aesthetic instance as set apart from, topologically
incommensurable with, the economy of subjectivation—a process which culminates
in the Joycean sinthome. For Lacan, Joyce's writing is 'founded on the void' (like
the world, in Stephen's declaration in 'Scylla and Charybdis') (U 170): in other
words, it begins 'from scratch' as an attempt to salvage a 'foreclosed' subjectivity.
The signifier, in Lacan's very 'Kojevean' statement of 1956, 'materializes the
agency of death [l'instance de la mort]'. 107 Foreclosure is, of course, the failure of
this instance, whereby something refuses to die: thus, the psychotic encounters,
suffers from, a real which imposes itself from beyond the domain of signification
and subjectivation. This predicament is subsequently 'generalized' by Lacan with
the matheme S (i), which posits a certain inherent or structural deficiency in the
symbolic order, a dEfatt dans l'univers in Lacan's phrase from L'Etourdit.'°8
The anamorphic ghost which appears in Hamlet constituted a 'hole in exist-
ence' which jeopardized the whole system of signifiers, according to Lacan's reading
of 1959.'° We saw how Shakespeare dramatized Hamlet's attempts to patch up
this hole, restore the symbolic consistency of the Other, which eventually lead to
'The Mousetrap', the symbolic 'murder' of the ghostly Thing (to invoke Lacan's
term from Seminar VII). After the players' performance has driven Claudius and
his semblance of royalty off-stage, Hamlet feels he has acheived a decisive 'solution'
(like a Freudian Losung) to the riddles of the play, dispelled its obscurity, made it
fully legible.
In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus sees himself adopting the role of Shakespeare's
prince, donning a 'Hamlet hat' and imagining Sandymount as Elsinore (U 40);
likewise, he has his own encounter with an uncanny, spectral Thing. Indeed, the first
'hole in existence' he confronts comes in the 'verbal hallucination' which overwhelms
him in the anatomy theatre of the Portrait—the inscription Foetus which 'startled
his blood'—opening a traumatic 'unworldly' space before which the metaphorical
' ° 7 Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', Ecrits, op. cit., p. 24; The Purloined Poe, op. cit., p. 38.
108 L'Etourdit, op. cit., p. 34; for Pierre Skriabine, this 'lack in the universe' is the fundamental
principle of Lacanian topology (cf. 'Clinique et Topologie', op. cit., pp. 119-20).
'°9 Seminar of 22nd April 1959 (SVI), 'Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet', op. cit.,
p. 38
102
effect of subjectivity buckles, breaks down. Similarly, in Ulysses, the ghost of
Stephen's mother appears as an extimate hole or defect in the field of symbolic
existence—she is even, when she finally emerges in the monstrous, phanta.smatic
real of 'Circe', taxed by her son with embodying the 'lack in the Other' in a very
literal sense: with harbouring its missing signifier, the mysterious 'word known to
all men', which she refuses to utter (U 474).
Like Hamlet, then, Stephen encounters a ghost; and the writing which consti-
tutes his response to that encountei entails, in the first instance, a spectral aesthet-
ics. 'He will have it that Hamlet is a ghoststory', as John Eglinton says wearily
in 'Scylla and Charybdis', the episode of Ulysses where Stephen expounds his the-
ory of the play. Having come across Nicholas Rowe's anecdote according to which
Shakespeare himself took the part of the ghost on the opening night of the first
production, Stephen deduces that the ghost is the mark in the text of the authorial
presence, and that Hamlet should thus be read as a quasi-autobiographical treat-
ment of betrayal and feminine infidelity, filled with the details of a troubled family
life (U 154-6). At first sight, perhaps, Stephen's theory of Hamlet recalls the naive
realism Joyce encountered in his publisher: a desire to resolve the literary enigma
by referring it to, 'dissolving' it in, the hard facts of everyday reality, so that the
possibility of 'something more than appeared' in the text can be ruled out, the
loose ends of the narrative tied up.
However, in this self-mocking 'theory' Joyce outlines a tension which is related
to a fundamental ambiguity of his work (one especially manifest in his early writ-
ings), which Jacques Aubert goes so far as to dub 'Joyce's paradox': that is, the
combination in Joycean writing of modernist innovation and a turn to established
authorities, what we might term a theoretical père-version. 11 ° Stephen's theory, by
treating Hamlet as a 'ghoststory', constitutes both an attempt to solve the riddle or
unearth the secret of the play (worthy, indeed, of Freud with his decisive Losung);
and at the same time, a re-invention of the author as a ghostly real, something
'out of joint' with the play's symbolic universe, an anamorphic blur disfiguring its
textual surface. We might re-read the Homeric title of Joyce's episode, 'Scylla and
Charybdis', as a version of this 'paradox'—with the rock-like biographical real on
one side, to which Stephen wishes to steer his reading and thus establish his name
as an 'authority' on Shakespeare, and on the other the textual whirlpool swirling
around the traumatic Thing, the real as absolute, unmasterable void.
In a broader sense, Stephen's 'spectral' aesthetics embody a similar kind of
coincidentia oppositorum. The epiphany marks an intensely private, 'spiritual' mo-
ment in which something is revealed—the quidditas or essence of an object suddenly
appears, as in the optical transposition of anamorphosis, to provide an overwhelm-
ing, unequivocal confirmation of Joyce's artistic destiny. However, when the ana-
morphic image emerges—as when, for Lacan in Seminar VII, the sublime lustre
of Antigone shines forth with blinding intensity—the field of everyday, mundane
representations appears 'decomposed', is rendered illegible. In the same way, the
pure eidetic self-revelation of the epiphany appears to coincide with an apparently
insignificant textual 'scrap', the record of some trivial, random occurence of speech
or thought.
110 Jacques Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992, p. 112.

103
 If, as Aubert shows, Joyce approached his readings in philosophy with a pre-
dominantly 'psychological' bias—when Stephen muses that the soul 'is in a manner
all that is' (U 21) he echoes Aristotle's De anima with its definition of 'soul' as
a harmonious synthesis of form and matter—it is precisely such an imaginary aes-
thetics which is undone, dispersed, by the Joycean text.11'
Ulysses gives a clear index of this 'fall'—from the plenitude and harmony of
the anima (its aesthetic consonantia and integritas, in the terms Joyce borrows
from Aquinas) to the uncontrollable materiality of the text—in a charcteristically
Joycean form: the telegram which Stephen receives in Paris, stating '—Nother
dying come home father' (U 35). The terrible directness of the father's message,
with its blunt imperative, is opened by the French telegraphist's error to a darkly
comic polysemy.
Joyce himself, of course, was to endure a long history of real printer's errors (in-
cluding, ironically, the 'correction' of this telegram in the unlimited edition finally
produced by Bodley Head in 1937);h12 a history which he takes up and incorpor-
ates into the 'telegraphy'—'writing at a distance'—of Finnegans Wake. The very
substance of Joyce's last text becomes essentially unreliable, an error-ridden 'lit-
ter': 'For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and
hints and misses in prints' (FW 20). Comically enacting what it is talking about
as it goes along, the Wakean 'lapse' is not 'leashed' to the psychical space of any
subject: its all-pervasive lapsus calami returns us to the 'autistic' moment we first
encountered in the Portrait—in the 'primal scene', as it were, of the Joycean 'lapse':
the dreamlike moment in the anatomy theatre where Stephen 'identifies' with the
inscribed 'foetus', with the unborn, the asymbolic: '0 foetal sleep! Ah, fatal slip!'
(FW 563).
If a Lacanian might be tempted to read 'Nother dying' as a direct reference to
lack in the Other, Joycean 'telegraphy' inscribes the lack of any originary meaning
or final closure in its very textuality. Beyond any semantic content, the writing
embodies in itself, 'tautaulogically', the aleatory dimension of signification: its
inescapable dimension of tuché, endlessly diverting and disfiguring the course or
destiny of a letter.113
Here, Joycean writing constitutes, again, an 'exanimation'—the transition from
a consistent imaginary to the real, 'autistic' stuff of language where semantic 'mat-
ter' is unravelled, disseminated. Aubert traces Joyce's 'spectral' theories of beauty
back to an Augustinian cogito, a precursor of the Cartesian foundation of the mod-
ern subject; 114 Finnegans Wake will write the cogito 'telegraphically' (according to
the 'rotary processus' named in the margin alongside) as 'cog it out, here goes a
sum' (FW 304). Any cogitation has to be 'out', beyond the sealed perfection of the
anima, in an alienating domain where the momentous 'dialectical' ergo becomes a
jokey colloquialism ('here goes!'), and the unshakeable certainty of sum is some-
111 cf. Aubert, ibid, pp. 85-8.
" 2 See Jeri Johnson's account of the Composition and Publication History of Ulysses in the
introduction to the 1922 edition, op. cit., pp. xlii—xlviii; for the 'amended' telegram, see Ulysses,
London: Bodley Head, 1937, p. 38.
' 13 For Lacan's interpretation of Aristotle's tuché, cf. seminar of 12th February 1964 (SXI),
op. cit., pp. 52-64.
" 4 Aubert, ibid, p. 88.

104
 thing to 'have a go at', a tricky little mathematical exercise like the one Stephen
helps his pupil to 'cog out' after his class (U 23-4).
As we outlined in our reading of the epiphany, 'crossexanimation' entails the
rupture of borders between speakers, the erasure of the decisive 'cut' which Lacan
posited as the principle of the cogito, its division of being and signification. The text
thus embodies a 'metempsychosis', the 'transmigration of souls' defined by Leopold
Bloom—or even a 'met him pike hoses', in Molly's version (U 52-3): the dissolution
of subjective distinctions corresponds to Wakean 'hearasay' (FW 263)—the collapse
of the difference between written text and speaking voice, the obliteration of the
definitive line separating feminine gossip from authorial or paternal signature (here,
'crossexanimation' could also be read as the opening of another kind of Lacanian
interpretation, like that of Annie Tardits, which would focus on the instance of
writing 'across-sex') •h15
The Joycean signature, which for Lacan is literally a sum—both an inscrip-
tion of identity and the solution of a topological problem—is thus caught up in the
'telegraphy' of the text—like Bloom's name when it appears in 'Eumaeus', amidst
the 'nonsensical howlers of misprints' in a newspaper report, as 'L. Boom' (U 529).
If the author's name is unique, unrepeatable, that of noman—like the Euclidian
gnomon, an element missing from the visible frame—it will be paradoxically in-
cluded in the Wake in the repetetive paranomasia of a signifying chain: 'First you
were Nomad, next you were Namar, now you're Numah and it's soon you'll be
Nomon' (FW 374). If we follow Jean-Guy Godin's reading, this returns us to the
distinction Lacan makes in 1976 between two kinds of 'writing': the trait unaire
which is situated in the real as the decisive foundation of identity, and the move-
ment of signifiers through which analysis operates to construct its effects of truth.
In Joyce's case, Godin writes, 'beginning with the lack of the trait, the writing
constantly aims to inscribe it...'; the sinthome will never undo the originary fault
in the knot, but can only ceaselessly renew its suppléance."6
The central irony of Joyce's work, in the Lacanian reading we have outlined,
is that it realizes both a literary artifice of self-constitution and an unparalleled
break with the representational economy of identity (whose literary avatar is the
figure of the author). The 'identification' with the sinthome—as our recourse to
the inverted commas Joyce banished from his writing already indicates—forms part
of a crisis of the imaginary, in Lacan's hypothesis: the 'I' which forms the basis,
the minimal precondition, of the subject is only able to emerge for Joyce as an act
of writing, of tracing out a singular relation to language outside the symbolic field
of subjectivation. The signature, the Joycean 'sum', is thus a forgery: it makes up
the 'I' as a fictional character, a literary screen or pseudonym.
Finnegans Wake is of course thronged with fabricators and forgers, among them
the notorious 'Jim the Penman'; and one of the text's major motifs is provided by
one Richard Piggott, who had become infamous in Ireland for attempting to implic-
ate Parnell in the Phoenix Park murders of 1882 through a series of forged letters.
The fatal flaw which led to the exposure of Piggott's forgery was that he had mis-
spelt 'hesitancy' as 'hesitency' in one of the letters: this allowed him to be trapped
" 5 cf. Annie Tardits, 'L'appensé, le renard et l'hérésie', in Joyce Avec Lacan, op. cit., pp. 107-58.
116 Jean-Guy Godin, 'Du symptôme a son épure: le sinthome', in Joyce Avec Lacan, op. cit.,
p. 186.
105
 in court by Parnell's defence." 7 '[T]he spell of hesitency' reverberates throughout
the Wake, in a 'hazeydency' of proliferating textual error—beginning with an er-
ror which was exposed as evidence of lawbreaking in a juridical examination, the
supreme mise en scene of the gaze of the Other—which unravels any semantic
or spatio-temporal consistency, ending as a question—'Hasitatense? '—addressed to
the text itself (FW 97, 296, 305).
If this question suspends the Wakean narrative in perpetual 'hesitancy' (if
it has no tense, when did its 'spell' elapse?) another Piggottian mis-spelling-
'hasitense?'—gives us a question addressed to the 'Autist' himself, whose 'poor
trait' is being hung—suspended—in a 'notional gullery' (not a National Gallery)
(FW 57). The Wake enacts a final version of Joyce's originary refusal to offer his
writing as an 'identificative paper', a document or piece of evidence to be referred
to a transcendent author-god: in this 'hesitation' (this 'sticking', as etymology
indicates—the word derives from Latin haerere, 'to stick', also the root of 'inherent')
the text puts in question its own relation to 'being'—'has it ens [Gk. being]?' In
other words, the fictive self-making of the Joycean sinthome is at the same time a
suspension of subjective being in the endlessly potential zone of the text, a kind of
ontological 'hasitence'.
Joyce craved an other—one possessed of an 'ideal insomnia', dwelling in the
timeless 'hasitatense' of an eternal 'slip'—who could participate in the textual mai-
eutic set up in his writing: the 'slow and dark birth' of the literary 'soul', as Stephen
puts it in the Portrait (P 203). Thus, the sinthome both demands and resists in-
terpretation: if the Joycean letter is carefully folded to prevent its being opened
by a hasty or excessively 'decisive' reading, it nonetheless requires reading—the
text can only 'exist', realize 'itself' (a 'self' which for Lacan is strictly identical
with its author) in the movement and creative intervention of a reading. One of
the strangest, most paradoxical threads of Finnegans Wake is its worry about not
being read, or not properly arriving at its destination—a destination it 'presents'
as simultaneously caught up in, inherently part of the 'spell of hesitency'. 'Has any
fellow,' asks the text, considering some of the various ways it might be misread,
'...ever looked sufficiently longly at a quite everydaylooking stamped addressed
envelope?' (FW 109).
Joyce's writing, declares Samuel Beckett in Our Exagmination 'is not about
something; it is that something itself'; thus, the Work in Progress is 'not to be
read—or rather it is not only to be read'." 8 The work would require a radical
alteration of our reading 'habits'—indeed, it would entail their 'retaling' or 're-
tailoring' to suit its singular 'fashionaping' ('fascinating' shaping or fashioning, and
'fashion-aping') of language. 119 The words of this Joycean 'factification', comments
Beckett, 'are alive': immune to the mortifying 'cut' of Lacan's symbolic order,
the text embodies an aesthetic instance 'not yet understood', in Jung's phrase—
essentially 'hesitant', always 'in progress'.

117 Cf. Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980, p. ix;
also James S.Atherton, The Books at the Wake, New York: Viking, 1960, P. 110.
118 Samuel Beckett, 'Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce', in Our Exagmination Round his Facti-
fication for Incamination of Work in Progress, op. cit., p. 14.
119 See John Bishop's chapter on 'How to Find a Good Tailor', Joyce's Book of the Dark: Fin-
neganS Wake, op. cit., pp. 126-30.
106
 iv. Dénouements

i) From Application to Implication

I am not attempting a philosophy of art. I am already too busy with the consequences
of my practice, which is absolutely punctiform—it is only at a limited number of
specific points that it touches on the domain of art. Freud tries to get involved in
something quite different and to see art as a sort of testimony to the unconscious.'
LACAN'S REMARKS of 1975 come in an exchange with historian Edward Casey
during a seminar at Yale. Casey wants to know how a psychoanalyst famous for
promoting a vision of the human subject founded on linguistic structure would
approach the question of 'the imaginary and the non-datable' in history. Lacan
responds by contrasting his own 'punctiform' version of psychoanalysis with the
'wild' variety which occasionally emerges in Freud. If Freud's assumption of a
general continuity between analysis and the cultural field allowed him to interpret
art as a variety of symptom (as a 'testimony to the unconscious'), Lacan seeks to
shift the terms of this Ubersetzung: he posits specific, real points of contact or
exchange, as opposed to the 'global', fantasmatic equivalencies dreamt by Freud.
The transformation of the psychoanalytic relation to the aesthetic between
Freud and Lacan is the starting-point of Phillipe Sollers' interview with Shoshana
Felman for Tel Quel in 1978. Freud's notion of an 'applied psychoanalysis', accord-
ing to Felman, is bound up with the limitations of his approach to literature:
'Application' implies a relation of exteriority between the field of application and the
applied science. Likewise, the method of application implies a one-way movement of
information: it is assumed that there is a knowledge given in advance, a possession
which will be used to illuminate a hitherto unknown field. A bridge is thus cast
from the known to the unknown, but ultimately all one does in this unknown filed is
rediscover, reconfirm what was already known: one discovers nothing new.2
With Lacan, Felman continues, things change. She cites the famous example
of the Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter', where the text of Poe is used by Lacan to
re-interpret Freudian concepts: the literary 'thing'—la chose littéraire, in Felman's
title, echoing Lacan's la chose freudienne with its etymological pun on the Latin
causa, 'cause'—is taken as the embodiment of a knowledge, one which might enter
into a certain 'exchange' with psychoanalytic knowledge. Thus, for Felman, 'what
Lacan does (without theorizing it, without explicitly thematizing the very meaning
of his act) is something which, rather than an application, is of the order of an
implication of psychoanalysis'.
If, in the first instance, we accept this narrative—the transition from theoretical
'application' to textual 'implication'—we are immediately struck by the contrast
between Felman's terms and those used by Lacan himself in 1975. For Lacan,
1 Yale University, Kanzer Seminar, Conferences et entretiens dans des universités nord-
américaines, Scilicet 6/7, p. 21.
2 'La Chose Littéraire, sa Folie, son Pouvoir', entretien de Philippe Sollers et Shoshana Felman,
Tel Quel 81 (Autumn 1979), p. 38.

107
 Freud's attempts to 'get involved' (s'engager) in the criticism of art were unfor-
tunate because they were too 'implicated' in the non-analytic field, so that they
effectively blurred the line between psychoanalysis and other forms of interpret-
ation. Lacanian psychoanalysis, by contrast, would remain 'punctiform', focused
on authentic analytic questions—which might, indeed, 'touch on' the domain of
aesthetics at specific points, but would not spread out, 'globally', under the vague
imperialistic banner of analogy.
Thus, Lacan rejects the 'transference' of psychoanalytic knowledge into other
interpretive spheres, seeing Freud's wish to 'get involved' with the criticism of art-
works as a distraction from genuine Freudian theory (we recall how in his seminar
on Hamlet Lacan had ridiculed 'the psychoanalytic wisdom of Polonius'). This
forms part of the essence of Felman's claim: that Lacan's rejection of Freudian
'application' went together with a desire to re-invent psychoanalytic knowledge as
a kind of textuality, to situate the Freudian discovery in the field of language—in
one sense, therefore, on the same plane as the literary text. Whereas the notion
of 'applied psychoanalysis' entailed a false scientistic distinction between a theor-
etical domain and the 'material' beyond it, in Felman's view Lacan's re-orientation
of Freud erases any such distinction, folding psychoanalytic theory back into the
general field of linguistic phenomena.
Can we find support for this narrative, of a move from 'application' to 'implic-
ation', in the readings we have explored in this thesis? In Part I, we focused on
the importance of the author in Freud's approach to the aesthetic: 'Applied psy-
choanalysis', comments Felman, '... always ends up with the unconscious of the
author'. 3 However, we discovered that in Freud's reading of Hamlet the question of
'the unconscious of the author' was not posed merely as a speculation about the bio-
graphical details 'behind' the Shakespearean text (of the kind imagined by Stephen
Dedalus in 'Scylla and Charybdis'); rather, the 'author' emerges as a special figure
of subjectivity in Freud's writing—the one who solves a riddle and thus ensures,
maintains, the opening of unconscious desire. When Lacan in 1959 characterizes
prince Hamlet as one who has 'lost the way of his desire', we can already begin
to make out a Lacanian sense of the aesthetic as a field apart from the Freudian
topic of the unconscious (a sense which will be fully realized in the reading of the
Joycean sint home).
The Freudian author provides a Lösung, a solution to the aesthetic riddle and
a 'dissolution' of its traumatic textuality. Just as Hamlet uses 'the Mousetrap'
to make 'extant' the unspeakable secrets of the 'ghoststory'—to convert the enig-
matic and uncanny voice into a readable text—so Freud dispels the obscurity of
Shakespeare's play by deploying the legible scenario of Oedipus (himself in turn, of
course, the archetypal riddle-solver).
In this sense, however, Freudian reading is also implicated in its textual 'ob-
ject'. We were able to grasp this implication most forcefully in Freud's encounter
with Michaelangelo's Moses—an uncanny encounter which Ernest Jones' biography
restored to legibility by linking it, on the basis of a 'pretty obvious' analogy, to the
contemporaneous power-struggles in the psychoanalytic movement. The dimension
3 lbid, p. 39.

108
of the uncanny here hinges on the unmasterable ambiguity of the 'identification' at
stake in Freud's interpretation: on the one hand, the aesthetic enigma is 'identi-
fied', given its proper name, and thus resolved by, returned to the mastery of, an
author; on the other, this very gesture of 'authority'—the restoration of legality
and legibility—is also an uncanny identification with the enigmatic text (as if the
interpretation were caught in the circular paradox of seeking to 'resolve' the riddle
of its own relation to, implication in, the aesthetic experience).
This uncanny ambiguity in the psychoanalytic relation to art is encapsulated
by the figure of another legendary riddle-solver mentioned by Freud in the essay on
the Moses: Morelli. Shifting, like Odysseus, between different names, this myster-
ious character nonetheless accomplished an interpretive 'revolution' in the field of
art by showing 'how to distinguish copies from originals', establishing a new—more
authoritative—framework for addressing the question of authorship. If Freud iden-
tifies with Morelli as a purveyor of authority—one who resolves aesthetic enigmas
by decisively identifying the author—he is simultaneously caught up or 'implicated'
in an identification with 'Lermonlieff', the pseudonym which 'concealed the iden-
tity' of Morelli: by withholding his own authorial signature, Freud leaves his text
in an enigmatic zone, a place where fraudulent copies cannot be distinguished from
authentic originals.
In Freud, the authorial signature is bound up with the question of the institu-
tion, of the political organization of knowledge. Even when Freud's 'understanding'
of Michaelangelo's statue 'dawned' on him, as he tells Edoardo Weiss in a letter, he
did not dare to sign the article: even at the moment when his masterly 'solution' of
the enigma revealed itself—when he identifies the very instance of authorship as the
maintenance of authority—Freud does not dare to cross the line dividing his own
field from that of academic knowledge, art history or criticism. To sign would be
to jeopardize the very position of balance, of maintenance, Freud sees dramatized
in the statue: in identifying the author of the article as 'Freud'—psychoanalytic
authority in person—the signature would threaten to undermine that authority, to
break its law-giving Tables by exposing them to the vociferous crowd of critics.
At this moment of Freud's work, then, identification emerges as a paradox:
the author is situated as the one who provides the Lösung, solves the riddle and
thus maintains a certain interpretive law; and, simultaneously, authorial identity
is suspended—as if it were part of the aesthetic riddle itself—to prevent it being
read and thus drawn into a field where its authority is open to question. The
very gesture which aims to safeguard Freudian authority by screening it off from
the realm of aesthetics—the asterisks which conceal the name, functioning like an
anamorphic blot in the field of legibility—at the same time implicates it in the
domain of artifice, of enigmatic artistry.
This paradox of authorial signature and identification is closely related to the
question of the Name-of-the-Father developed by Lacan. The intervention of the
paternal metaphor, we recall, was proposed in 1956 as the incidence of a certain
legibility in the child's relation to adult sexuality, whereby the Phallus came to
function as a 'signifier of jouissance' (in Serge André's reading). If the Freudian
author is a riddle-solver, one who subjects the enigmatic shape-shifting aesthetic
to the law of a symbolic regime—to the force of political organization—he is non-

109
etheless unable to extricate himself from the aesthetic, to undo fully the riddle of
his relation to it.
By writing the sinthome as a signifier of Joycesens, Lacan returns to the Freu-
dian problematic of the aesthetic 'riddle'. Indeed, a special significance is accorded
to riddles in the Lacanian account of Joycean authorship. In his seminar of 13th
January 1976, Lacan quotes the riddle which Stephen gives his class in Ulysses:
—This is the riddle, Stephen said.:
The cock crew,
The sky was blue:
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
'Tis time for this poor soul
To go to heaven.

What is that?
—What, sir?
—Again, sir. We didn't hear.
Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated. After a silence Cochrane said:
—What is it, sir? We give it up.
Stephen, his throat itching, answered:
—The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush (U, 22).
'Stephen', declares Lacan, 'is Joyce in so far as he deciphers his own riddle
[énigme'. 4 Yet the character emerges here as precisely a refusal to provide a 'Freu-
dian' solution, a decisive Losung which would make the riddle 'extant', fully legible.
Hêlène Cixous interprets Stephen's riddle as a special kind of abrogation of author-
ity: if, she writes, 'the very genre of the riddle ... assumes as a fundamental
convention that there should be a solution somewhere, the one who asks being
in theory the one who possesses the knowledge', Stephen's answer 'reveals not a
positive knowledge, but the gap in knowledge'. For Cixous, this amounts to 'the
author abandoning his rights over language', to Joyce staging his own refusal to be
identified as a Freudian 'author': the site of a final, transcendent legibility.5
This Joycean refusal—the 'gap in knowledge' which takes the place of the
authorial 'solution'—returns us to the relation between the Nom-du-Père and the
nom d 'auteur. Jacques Aubert shows, in his presentation during Lacan's seminar
Le Sinthorne, how the Joycean text deliberately involves authorship in 'a game of
hide-and-seek with the names of the father': just as the sinthome produces an
'improper' knot whose structure is not truly Borromea.n, so the name of the author
in Joyce is fully caught up in writing, played out at different levels, along disparate
strands, of the 'symptomatic' text. 6 It is this authorial 'hesitance' or 'hasitence'
4 Seminar of 13th January 1976 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, op.cit., p. 14.
5 Hélène Cixous, 'Joyce: the (r)use of writing', in Post-Structuratist Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge
& Daniel Ferrer, Cambridge: C.U.P., 1984, p. 20.
6 lntervention de Jacques Aubert, Seminar of 20th January 1976 (SXXIII), Joyce Avec Lacan,
op.cit., pp. 54-60.

110
 which, once again, reminds us that Joyce is an improper subject for psychoanalysis:
that it was only in so far as the Joycean text embodied a certain gap in Freudian
knowledge that Lacan chose to read it as a way of elaborating the sinthome.
'Joyce is what happens when you refuse analysis', comments Philippe Sollers
in a rough paraphrase of Lacan. 7 How, then, did psychoanalysis seek to 'implic-
ate' itself, knot itself together with, this moment where la chose littéraire turned
away from it so decisively? We need to return to our readings of Lacan's general
engagement with 'the letter' to attempt a final interpretation of this paradoxical
denouement.

ii) French Triangles

It is not only psychoanalysis which has tried to think about the madness in the literary
thing. ... [Y]ou have a kind of triangle, one of its three points being philosophical
discourse, which fights on two fronts, as it were—in relation to literature and also to
psychoanalysis; then analytic discourse, which is obliged to differentiate itself from
philosophy in the traditional sense, although it remains constantly racked by the
question of literature; and finally literature, the third point, which is interpellated at
once by philosophy and by analytic discourse.8
Philippe Sollers gives this sketch of the theoretical 'scene' in post-war France
during his interview with Shoshana Felman. By pointing to this antagonistic tri-
angle of discourses, Sollers reminds us that the stakes of Lacan's engagement with
literature were radically different from those of the 'applied psychoanalysis' which
interested Freud. If Lacan sought in certain explicit statements to echo Freud by
drawing a bold line separating psychoanalysis from philosophy, we have noted (in
Part II of the thesis) the massive and scarcely-veiled presence of philosophical ele-
ments in his thought, encapsulated by the 'Cartesian-Kantian problematic of the
subject qua pure, substanceless 'I think', in Slavoj Ziek's formulation. 9 Thus if
literature, as the third point in Sollers' triangle, is 'interpellated' by Lacanian the-
ory, this is so firstly according to the literal sense of this Althusserian term—in the
interests, that is, of producing a consistent subject.
For literature to constitute a mise en scene of psychoanalytic truth, in Lacan's
view, it had to be approached without any recourse to the semantic or the anec-
dotal. Freud, by taking art to be a 'testimony of the unconscious', as Lacan put
it in 1975, had failed to cut away truth from knowledge, the subject as 'nihilating'
instance from the positive contents of some supposed authorial fantasy—and thus
obscured the mechanism of signification (the true matrix of the unconscious). In
this sense, Lacan's sujet sans substance entailed a certain radicalization of the Freu-
dian Lösung, the analytic 'dissolution' of an aesthetic riddle: the very 'logic of the
signifier' was now the site of truth, a truth which was thus inherently incompatible
with—emerged as a 'nihilation' of—any particular contents in the artistic material.
We saw how the Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' attempted to isolate the
essential 'logic' of the Lacanian subject by cutting it away from both the semantic
7 'La Chose Littéraire, sa Folie, son Pouvoir', op.cit., p. 41.
8 lbid, pp. 43-4.
9 Slavoj iek, Tarrying with the Negative, London: Verso, 1993, p. 12.

111
 level of Poe's text (its characterization, incidental description, and so on) and that
of the 'litter', the signifier's 'material support' in the substance of writing itself. One
of the claims advanced in Derrida's critique of the seminar was that this decisive
double 'cut' was theoretically incoherent—that, firstly, any 'separation' of signifier
from textual 'support' was simply an idealization of the letter, which recalled the
most overtly 'phonocentric' manoeuvres of philosophy; and secondly, that no 'logic
of the signifier' could ever be put forward in a pure form, somehow divorced from
meaning. This second point led on to Derrida's observation that Lacan's dimension
of 'truth' is in fact, manifestly, a 'psychoanalytico-transendental semantics': its
'phallogocentric' economy of representation embodying a philosophical and political
dispositif at once peculiarly idiosyncratic and profoundly embedded in some of the
oldest, most widely dominant discursive regimes of Western thought.
The political implications of Lacan's theory of the subject are, inevitably, mul-
tiple and intricate. For Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen, however, the rhetorical complexity
of Lacan's thought masks an underlying logic whose political consequences are
unequivocal. The 'surreptitious restoration of the subject' as a force of unitary
self-representation in psychoanalysis is indissociable, argues Borch-Jakobsen, from
a politics which is made fully explicit in Freud's 1921 Massenpsychologie ( ' Group
Psychology'): there, Freud 'did not so much analyze... totalitarian fantasy as sub-
scribe to it'. 10 The very instance of the subject—which Lacan, of course, is the
first to give official currency in psychoanalysis—comprises, for Borch-Jakobsen, a
politics of identity which is imbricated with the historical traumas of modernity.
In adopting this position, it could be argued, Borch-Jakobsen himself runs the
risk of 'totalizing', reducing to a single 'logic', the complex weave of Lacan's thought
across its different phases and theoretical modes. 11 As we have sought to show in
this thesis, elements of that thought can be seen to open perspectives or offer
possibilities away from the 'empire' of the Lacanian subject, its 'phallogocentric'
closure: a new kind of subjectivity, not predicated on 'symbolic castration' and the
'mortification' of the body, begins to become visible at the end of Lacan's career
as part of a new approach to writing.
Nonetheless, for Bruce Fink to jovially dub the Name-of-the-Father 'our Rock
of Gibraltar' is perhaps indicative of certain political investments inherent (or in-
herited) in Lacanian psychoanalysis. A clear example is the theatrical ensemble of
the 'paternal metaphor' drawn up by Lacan in the late 1950s, where the Phallus
is unveiled as the signifier of the overall 'effects of the signified'—of meaning itself,
in other words—to be marshalled against the rebellious indigenous forces of the
maternal body. Indeed, the Phallus appears as the most obviously ideological sig-
nifier of this political scenario, its coincidence of pure asemic vacuity and ultimate
meaningfulness recalling the tried-and-tested manoeuvres of totalitarian discourse.
In what sense, then, does Lacan's engagement with writing—which reaches
its final 'destination' in Le Sinthome—unsettle or contest this political theatre?
'°Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen, 'The Freudian Subject, from Politics to Ethics', in Who Comes After
the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor & Jean-Luc Nancy, New York: Routledge, 1991,
p. 69.
"For instance, in Lacan: the Absolute Master, Borch-Jakobsen pays almost no attention to the
most important motif of the last decade of Lacan's work—the Borromean knot.

112
 His comments in 1966, justifying the recourse to non-discursive elements in his
teaching, point to a fundamental theoretical split in the Lacanian subject: without
topology, he tells the audience of philosophy students, 'it is impossible to grasp
anything of the real of [the subject's] economy'.' 2 If the subject is defined as
parlêtre, 'speaking-being', a certain level of its 'economy' is nevertheless unspeakable,
can only be attained through topological 'writing'. The real—ultimately identical
to the 'writing' which can non-metaphorically represent it—is thus the name Lacan
gives to the limit, the non-totality o'f the dit-mension of spoken truth.
Writing, then, comes to function where the Other does not 'hold', where sym-
bolic mortification fails. Having first been invoked (or 'interpellated', in the term
Sollers uses: 'called to subjectivation') by Lacan in the 1950s to stage analytic truth
as an 'odyssey of the letter', writing is finally called in to name precisely what fails
to appear in that mise en scene. The term 'writing', of course, does not emerge
unscathed—semantically consistent—from this change of fortunes. Poe's text, as
read in Lacan's seminar, is in no sense an écrit defined as a non-metaphorical 'mon-
stration' of the psychical real. If its 'litteral' character is fleetingly mentioned, this
does nothing to disqualify the story from serving as a pure illustration of the essen-
tial dimension of the Lacanian subject: the metaphorical circulation of the signifier.
As we saw, in the 1971 article Lituraterre Lacan sought to present the two 'sides'
of the letter, signifier and litura, as merely complementary aspects of the subject's
linguistic fate; however, he makes it clear elsewhere—notably a year later in the
seminar Encore—that the écrit can never 'cohabit' with the signifier in the field of
the subject's truth.
Lacan rediscovers Joyce in 1975 as the incarnation of this linguistic instance
which is impossible to re-absorb or 'interpellate' into a theory of the subject. If
Shoshana Felman's claim that 'it is literature which names the conceptual body
of psychoanalysis' finds confirmation here, this could only be through a certain
paradox: Lacan gives Joyce the name sinthome in a deliberate effort to 'traumatize'
the 'conceptual body' inherited from Freud and elaborated over the course of his
own teaching.'3

iii) The first riddle of the universe: the ethical real

If what I am saying necessitates not—as is said—a model, but the task of articulating
topologically the discourse [of psychoanalysis] itself, this springs from the lack [défaut]
in the universe—with the condition that what I say does not in turn offer to repair
it [le suppléer]. Jacques Lacan, 1973 14
Let us return to Lacan's remarks about history at Yale in 1975. 'That which
cannot be certified by writing [par l'écrit] cannot be considered history', he declares.
The apparent clarity of Lacan 's position here masks potential ambiguities stemming
from his idiosyncratic use of certain terms (here, the term 'writing'): does Lacan's
claim that the lack of a historical document 'makes history impossible' amount
12 'Reponses a des étudiants en philosophie sur l'objet de Ia psychanalyse', Cahiers pour
1'Ana1jse 3, op.cit., p. 7; for discussion of topological 'monstration', see above p. 55
13 'La Chose Littéraire, sa Folie, son Pouvoir', op.cit., p. 39.
14 L'Etourdit, op.cit., pp. 33-4.

113
merely to a commonsense insistence on the archival basis of history; or is it, rather,
a singular attempt to privilege the Ecrit as the ontological support of the subject,
to posit a primal moment of inscription as the precondition of all human history?
It is not clear whether Lacan is dismissing the 'dream' of elements irreducible to a
written text—the oral, the imaginary, the non-datable—in favour of the linguistic
protocols of the symbolic (as his audience seems to expect from someone who has
redefined the unconscious as a linguistic structure); or whether his insistence on
writing does not rather aim to support the real as the very opening of possible
history.
Joel Fineman has brought Lacan's categories to bear on these and related
historiographical questions. Defining the anecdote as 'the literary form or genre that
uniquely refers to the real', Fineman identifies it as the only 'genuinely historical
opening'—at once 'extimate' to the teleological narrative of history and its causal
precondition:
The anecdote produces the effect of the real, the occurrence of contingency, by estab-
lishing an event as an event within and yet without the framing context of historical
successivity, i.e., it does so only in so far as its narration both comprises and refracts
the narration it reports.'5
Thus the anecdote—that which is 'unpublished', according to etymology—is
what 'uniquely lets history happen', for Fineman. If an anecdote provides the
spark of contingency—the fact that a particular event took place—necessary to set
in motion a historical narrative, at the same time it has a traumatic effect on the
smooth 'whole' of that narrative, so that the anecdote is 'characteristically and
ahistorically plugged up', as Fineman puts it, by the teleological discourse which
frames it.16
In Part III of the thesis, we traced the outlines of the relation between Joyce
and psychoanalysis in a series of 'anecdotal' encounters: moments where what
emerges is both the mark of the 'real' in history and something impossible to
account for, irreducible to historical narration. The encounter between Joyce and
Jung has a particular importance here: it is at once fraught with 'anecdotal' effects
(rumour, hearsay, supposition) and an exemplary instance of the psychoanalytic
struggle to 'interpellate' literature, to bring it under theoretical mastery. If the
central gesture of Freudian 'aesthetics' was an effort to situate art in the mastery of
an author—thus rendering it legible for, commensurable with, the psychoanalytic
subject—Jung repeats the essence of this gesture, in a subtly altered form. His
double attempt to decipher Joyce—both the text of Ulysses and Lucia's psychosis,
implicated in the same 'knot'—brings Jung up against the limit of his 'authority
on psychological matters': having failed to generate any transferential interest in
Lucia, he has literally to hand her back to her father; and himself experiences the
other end of the same failure of Uberträgung when he falls asleep reading Ulysses.
When Joycean writing does eventually become legible to Jung, however, when he
15 Joel Fineman, 'The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction', in The Subjectivity Effect in
Western Literary Tradition: essays towards the release of Shakespeare's Will, Cambridge, Mass:
M.I.T., 1991, p. 72.
16Ibid.

114
 'succeeded to put [himself] into it', we might read his 'solution'—to find himself
in Ulysses as Elijah, a mystical spirit of self-transcendence—as another version, a
'transference', of Freud's narrative of self-mastery.
The question of the 'interpellation' of the aesthetic in psychoanalysis, of the
attempt to invoke literature, can be related to the problem of vocation as we have
traced it in Joyce's early writing. The Joycean artist is first introduced as a 'nego',
a deliberate refusal to compromise the purity of the aesthetic quidditas by offering
art as an 'identificative paper', partking in a facile, mundane legibility. We sought
to rethink this Joycean 'aestheticism' by linking it to Lacan's notion of a foreclosed
imaginary (in 'radical foreclosure'), to posit a 'primal scene' of Joyce's writing—or
rather, a primal destruction of 'scene'—in the 'autistic' act of turning-away from
identification, towards a phantasmatic verbal 'hallucination'. Thus, the Lacanian
'dream' or anecdotal real which tears open the text of history is at the heart of the
Joycean 'thing', the 'immarginable' aesthetic potential which firt discloses itself
in the epiphany as an overwhelming, unquestionable artistic vocation. Stephen's
rejection of the 'clear and final office' of priestly authority corresponds to a refusal
to offer up this 'thing' to the Other, where the domain of symbolic identification is
ruined by the narcissistic tyranny of the Joycean father.
For all Lacan's dismissal of Freud's 'involvements' with literature, his own
turn to Joyce at the end of his career—in sharp contrast to the Seminar on 'The
Purloined Letter'—raises some very 'Freudian' questions, around authorship and
the Ursprang of art. If Freud had been misguided in seeking to transfer the
unconscious—psychoanalytic truth, in other words—away from its essential domain
of analytic speech, for Lacan this move beyond analysis now appeared the ideal way
to engage with the limits of that truth. The symbolic order, which Lacan had made
the central stake in his redefinition of the truth of Freud's discovery, was not to
take on the features of a 'discourse of the Master'—dissimulating its structural
lack, its non-totality.' 7 Thus, the increasing importance of 'writing' in the 1970s,
with the Borromean knot the purest form, Lacan thought, of this response to the
impossibility of 'saying it all', of producing an all-inclusive discourse of truth.
The question of the Ursprung returns us to the problem of the primal trait,
the writing at the origin of the subject and its history. The notion of 'general-
ized foreclosure', which certain followers of Lacan have taken as the principle of
the last phase of his teaching (centred on the topology of knots)' 8 would posit a
non-metaphorical writing as the fundamental structure of the subject. Thus, the
crucial opposition between a substanceless dit-mension of subjectivity—installed,
essentially governed, by the Name-of-the-Father—and the phenomena of psychosis
in which the real 'wrote itself' beyond metaphor, appeared to break down.
It was to address the problem of this theoretical breakdown that Lacan in-
troduced the figure of the sinthome. The lack in the Other—not the result of a
contingent individual fate ('foreclosure'), but an irreparable given, a structural de-
ficit in signification—was the starting-point for the topological writing in which
' 7 cf. the chapter entitled 'L'impuissance de la vérité', in the seminar L 'envers de La psychanalyse
(SXVII,1969-70), ed J-A Miller, Paris: Seuil, 1991, pp. 191-208.
18 Pierre Skriabine adopts the notion of a 'generalized' foreclosure; see 'Clinique et Topologie',
op.cit., pp. 127-31.

115
Lacan aimed to present the real, figure its structure non-discursively. The revolu-
tionary aspect of this for Lacanian theory was the attempt to conceive this 'writing'
as the basis of a subject: a 'writing-being', one not securely fixed in an unconscious
existence by primordial repression—and thus living in the midst of the asymbolic
ex-sistence of an écriture. Such a being would somehow participate in the moment of
inscription which for the speaking-being is permanently consigned to a prehistoric
void.
We recall Jung's comment at the end of his reading of Ulysses, that 'superlat-
ive powers of mind' may be disguised as 'mental abnormality' in certain subjects.
With the sinthome, the Lacanian privileging of psychotic experience—as a 'royal
road' to the theorization of the real—is taken to a new level: Joyce, says Lacan,
gives us un petit soupçon, 'a little taste', of the linguistic 'cancer' which afflicts
us, but which 'a so-called normal man is not aware of'.' 9 If we are most radically
implicated in language in a way inaccessible to the truth of the subject, only a
'mental abnormality' could enable that implication to be bodied forth, realized in a
textual 'intraduction'—a singular event where language coalesces with jouissance.
It is this paradoxical coalescence of the symbolic and the real which prevents
the sinthome from ever being decisively interpreted, bound into another chain of
signifiers. In the same way, when Joyce defended his daughter Lucia against psy-
chiatric knowledge, he stressed that she was 'an innovator not yet understood': she
embodied an engagement with language which could not be 'translated', which was
in excess of the symbolic order. If Jung had betrayed his idealism in speaking of
the 'mystical identity' of father and daughter, the symptom knotting them together
was precisely the 'intraduction' of Joycean writing.
The final support of the subject, for Lacan, is ethical. In Seminar VII (1959-
60), an ethical position was outlined as full subjection to the Law of the symbolic:
the desire of the analyst emerged as in a pure desire, purged of all pathological
investments in its allegiance to the signifier. 2° As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe notes,
this 'ethic' is of course an esthetique, 'supported by' an aesthetic instance in the form
of Sophocles' Antigone. We could frame Lacan's reading of Joyce in Le Sinthome
as a second esthétique, now based not on the transcendental purity of the speaking
subject but on the 'fault in the universe', where the logic of signification gives way
to a moment of absolute singularity, an unrepeatable hapax. Lacan's last version of
the subject is situated at the point where the Other fails to function, the symbolic
Law cannot be sutained: the sinthome entails, in place of an ethic of pure desire,
one of aesthetic self-invention.

' 9 Seminar of 17th February 1976 (SXXIII), Le Sinthome, Ornicar? 8 (1976).

20 cf. Seminar of June 22nd 1960 (SVII), The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, op.cit., pp. 300-1.

116
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- Finnegans Wake, London: Faber & Faber, 1939.

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J. Whittier-Ferguson, London: Faber & Faber, 1991.

The Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, London: Faber &
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Jung, Carl Gustav; 'The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the
Individual' (1909), Collected Works of C.G.Jung, Vol IV, London:
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Kenner, Hugh; Joyce's Voices, London: Faber & Faber, 1978.

'Ulysses', Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980.

Kofman, Sarah; Freud and Fiction, trans Sarah Wykes, Polity: Cambridge, 1991.
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Lacan, Jacques; De la psychose paranoia que dans ses rapports avec la personalité
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Ecrits: A Selection, trans Alan Sheridan, London: Tavistock, 1977.

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Ziek, Slavoj; Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular

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 Appendix: Le Sinthome

Jacques Lacan 's Seminar XXIII, 1975-6.

Translated from the texte êtabli ed. i-A Miller, Ornicar? 6-11, 1976-7.
All footnotes and notes in brackets are by the translator.

1) 18th November 1975

Sinthome is an old way of spelling what has more recently been spelt symptom.
This orthographic modification clearly marks the date at which Greek was
injected into French, into my language. Likewise, in the first chapter of Ulysses,
Joyce expresses the wish that we should hellenize, that we should inject the hellenic
language into something—one is not sure into what, since it is not Gaelic; even
though Ireland is the subject, Joyce had to write in English. Joyce wrote in English
in such a way that—as someone who is, I hope, in this audience—Philip Sollers—has
remarked in Tel Quel—the English language no longer exists.
To be sure, it already had little consistency—which is not to say that it is
easy to write in that language. But the series of Joyce's works added something
which Sollers thinks should be written l'élangues, by which I suppose he aims to
indicate something like elation'; that elation said to be constitutive of whatever
sinthome we in psychiatry give the name mania, which is certainly what Joyce's
last work, Finn egans Wake, resembles—which he held back for so long to attract
public attention. At the request of Jacques Aubert, present (and also pressant)
here today, I was hauled up to inaugurate a Joyce symposium. That's why I've
allowed myself to be diverted from the title I had planned for this seminar, which
I announced last year as 4,5,6. I'm sticking to 4—and a good thing too, for 4, 5, 6
would surely have been too much for me. Which is not to say that the 4 at issue
is any less of a burden, for I am Freud's heir—despite myself—because I have set
forth over time what could be extracted logically from the babble of those he called
his group, that clique which frequented the Vienna meetings. Not one of them can
be said to have followed the path I describe as logical.

*
Nature, I would say, to be brief, is distinguished by not being one. Thus the
logical procedure for approaching it—to term nature that which one excludes in
the very act of taking interest in something, that something being distinguished
by bearing a name. By this procedure, nature only risks being characterized as a
hodgepodge of what lies outside nature [hors-nature].
The advantage of this last proposition is the following: if you find that what
bears a name is in conflict with what seems to be a law of nature—that, for instance,
in man there is no natural (this 'natural' with every possible reservation) sexual
relation—you have to conclude logically that this is not a privilege of man.
'Sollers' neologism plays on leslangues, the plural of Lacan's lalangue, and élan ('speed',
'surge'). cf. Philippe Sollers, 'Joyce & Co', in In the Wake of the Wake, ed David Hayman
and Elliott Anderson, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

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 Don't however conclude that there's nothing natural about sex. Rather, try to
see how it is in question in each case, from bacteria to birds—I've already referred
to both—because they have names. Let us note in passing that in so-called divine
creation—divine only in that it is a matter of naming—bacteria is not named. Nor
is it named when God, fooling around with what is supposed to be the first man,
suggests that he begin by saying the name of each little creature.
We have no clue about this first blunder unless we conclude that Adam was,
as his name indicates—I refer to the function of the index in Pierce—that Adam
was, in the joke made by Joyce, a Madam, and that he named the creatures in her
language. This can be safely assumed, because she whom I would call Evie2—the
Mother of the living, that's what it means in Hebrew, if Hebrew can be termed a
language—spoke this language straight away, since after the supposed naming by
Adam, she was the first person to make use of it: to speak to the serpent.
So-called 'divine' creation is thus copied by chitchat, by the speaking-being
[parlëtre}, with which Evie makes the serpent into what you must forgive me for
calling the serre-fesse ['scared stiff'], later termed flaw or even phallus, since it is
certainly a requisite necessary for going-astray, for sin. Original sin—my sinthome
has the advantage of beginning with that, the English sin. Thus the necessity that
the flaw never ceases, but always grows, unless it submits to the cease of castration
as possibility.
This possibility, as I have previously put it, is what ceases to write; but one
must add the comma which I myself omitted. It is what ceases—comma—to write.
Or rather would cease to go the right way if that discourse I have evoked, which
would not be a semblance, were to at last arrive.
Is it impossible for truth to become a product of savoir-faire? No; but then
it will be only half-said, embodied in the signifier S, where there must be at least
two. So Eve, the unique Woman, mythical in the sense that the myth makes her
one of a kind, the only Woman to have been possessed by the taste of the fruit of
the forbidden tree, the tree of Knowledge—Evie is therefore not mortal, no more
than Socrates. The woman in question is another name of God, which is why she
doesn't exist.
One observes the cunning side of Aristotle, who does not wish the singular to
play a role in his logic. But in opposition to what he claims in that logic, it must be
said that Socrates is not a man, for he is willing to die in order that the city should
live—he is willing, it's a fact. Moreover, on that occasion he does not wish to hear
his wife; thus my formula, which I pick out for your use, so to speak, drawing on
the thvtcç, which I picked out from the Organon where my daughter marked
it as the opposition in Aristotle to the universal of the pas—the woman is not all
except in the form whose equivocation gives its piquant to our language [lalangue
nOtre], in the form of the mais pas ça ['but not that'], as one says tout mais pas
ça. It was certainly the position of Socrates, the mais pas ça, and it's what I'm
introducing under this year's title as the sinthome.
In the present instance—in the in(si)stance of the letter such as it is at present
sketched out (and don't expect any better, as I've said; that which will be most
2 1'Evie—punning in French on les vies, 'lives'.

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effective will do nothing but displace the sinthome, or rather multiply it)—in the
present instance, we have the sinthomaquinas. As you know, Joyce had a thing
or two to say about this saintly man. One should state things clearly: as far as
philosophy goes, it has never been bettered. That is not even the whole truth. This
does not prevent the fact—consult Jacques Aubert's book on this—that Joyce does
not figure things out very well concerning that which he values highly, and which
he calls beauty.
In sinthomaquinas there is something termed claritas, for which Joyce substi-
tutes something like the splendour of Being—this is the weak point at issue. Is this
a personal weakness? I do not find the splendour of Being very striking. In this re-
spect Joyce displaces the saint homme from my madaquinisme, and thus, contrary
to what appears at first glance, given his detachment from politics, produces what
I would call sint'home rule.
Despite the way Joyce gnashed his teeth about Home Rule—which the Free-
man's Journal depicted rising like a sun behind the Bank of Ireland, which happened
to be in the north-west, rather an odd position for the sun to rise in—it is never-
theless sint'Home Rule, sinthome a roulettes ['on wheels', 'like clockwork'] which
Joyce brings together. These two terms could be given different names. I use these
names because of the two slopes they offered to Joyce's art, which will be our
concern this year, in accordance with what I said a moment ago—introducing the
sinthome and giving it a name which suits him, and displacing its orthography, for
the two spellings are important to him.
But it is a fact that he makes a choice. In doing so, he is like me a heretic,
for haeresis is exactly what defines the heretic. One must choose the way by
which truth is to be grasped, although once the choice has been made there is
nothing to prevent someone from subjecting it to confirmation, in other words
from being a thorough-going heretic—that is to say, having recognized the nature
of the sinthome, not depriving oneself of the logical use of it, until it reaches its
real, beyond which it has no wish to go.
He did this close-up, for there could be no worse point of departure—born in
Dublin with a boozing, practically good-for-nothing father, in other words a fanatic
with two families—for it is always thus for a son from two families, when one thinks
oneself masculine because one has a little prick. Naturally (excuse my use of this
word), it takes more than that. But since his prick was a bit limp, so to speak, his
art supplemented his phallic equipment, and that's always the way. The phallus
is the conjunction of this parasite, the little prick in question, and the function
of language [parole]. And it is thus that Joyce's art is the true guarantee of his
phallus. Beyond that, let us say that he was a poor heir, and even a poor heir-etic.
There are no Joyceans to enjoy his heresy outside the University. He himself
deliberately desired it, that this crowd should be interested in him, and the best
is that he succeeded beyond all measure. It still goes on, and it always will. He
wished it to last three hundred years, he said as much—I want academics to be kept
busy with me for three hundred years 3—and he will have his wish, so long as God
3 'I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries
arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality'; Ellman, James

126
doesn't atomize us.
This heir [...] is conceived as a hero, as is shown by the title he expressly
gave to the text which he reworked into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
Stephen Hero. [Text recommended by Lacan]
A portrait of the artist—the stress should be placed on the the, which in English
is not of course quite our own definite article, but one can have confidence in Joyce—
if he says the, it is because he thinks that of artists he is the only one, that there
he is singular.
As a young man is very suspicious. That is translated into French as comme,
in other words it's a question of comment [ ' how']. French is indicative of this—
when one says 'as' making use of an adverb, when one says réelment, mentalement,
héroiquement [really, mentally, heroically], one is lying [on rnent]. A lie is indicated
in all adverbs, and not by accident. When we interpret we should pay attention
to this. Somebody not too far from me made the remark that not only does the
tongue designate the instrument of speech, but that it also carries the taste-buds.
I replied to her that this is not for nothing—ce qu'on dit ment. 4 You have the
goodness to laugh, but it's not funny. In the end we have only that as a weapon
against the symptom—equivocation.
It happens that I allow myself the luxury of supervising [contrôler], as it is
termed, a certain number of people who authorize themselves, in my formula, to be
analysts. There are two stages. At stage one, they are like the rhinoceros, they do
more or less anything at all and I always approve them—they are effectively always
right. Stage two consists of bringing into play that equivocation which could free
one from the sinthome. For interpretation operates solely by equivocation.
There must be something in the signifier which resonates. It is surprising
that this has been in no way apparent to the English philosophers. I call them
philosophers because they are not psychoanalysts—they have a rock-solid belief
that language has no effect. They imagine that there are drives and so on, when
they don't translate drive [pulsion] as instinct,5 for they don't know what a drive
is: the echo in the body of the fact that there is speech [dire]; but for this speech
to resonate—for it to consonate, to use a word of sinthomaquinas—the body must
be sensitive to it. It is, that's a fact.
It is because the body has several orifices, of which the most important is the
ear—because it has no stop-gap—that what I have called the voice has a response
in the body. The trouble is, to be sure, that it is not only the ear. The gaze is a
vigorous competitor.
More geometrico—due to the form so dear to Plato, the individual presents
himself as he is fucked, as a body, and this body has a power of captivation which
is such that to a certain extent it is the blind one should envy. How could a blind
man, if he can manage braille, read Euclid? The astonishing thing is that form gives
nothing but the sack, or if you like the bubble. It is something which inflates, and
whose effects I have already described in discussing the obsessional, who is more
Joyce, op. cit., p. 521
4 'what is said, lies'; pun on ce condiment.
5 See seminar of 16th March 1976 (number 8 in my translation; p. 169 below), for another
reflection on the translation of Freud's Trieb, this time preferring derive to pulsion.

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keen on it than most. The obsessional, I've said somewhere, is of the same order as
the frog who wants to make himself as big as the bull—the effects are known from
a fable. It is particularly difficult, we know, to tear the obsessional from the power
[emprise] of the gaze.
The sack, such as it figures in set-theory as founded by Cantor, manifests itself
in (indeed—is shown in, if all showing is taken as a demonstration of the imaginary
it implies), and should be given the connotation of, the ambiguity of 1 and 0—
the only adequate supports of what is confined by the empty set featuring in this
theory. Thus our writing S index 1. It does not constitute one, but it indexes it as
an empty sack unable to contain anything.
An empty sack is nonetheless a sack, albeit one which can only be imagined as
a skin, in terms of the existence and consistence of the body. This ex-istence and
consistence should be held to be real, since the real is what holds them—thus the
word Begriff, which means precisely that.
The imaginary here demonstrates its homogeneity with the real. This homo-
geneity only holds because the number is binary, 1 or 0, ie. it only figures 2 because
1 is not 0, because it ex-ists at zero but does not consist in it. Thus Cantor's theory
should set out from the couple, but in that case the set makes a third. There is no
bridge between the first set and the rest.
This is why the symbol falling back into the imaginary has the index 2. In-
dexing the couple, it introduces division into the subject whatever is thus said as
fact. The fact remains suspended by the enigma of Enonciation, which is nothing
but the closing-in upon itself of fact—the fact of fact, as one might write it, or the
making [le faite] of fact, or the fact of 'things made', as it is said, the same in fact,
equivalent in equivocality, and as such the limit of speech.
What is incredible is that although men saw very well that the symbol could
be nothing but a broken fragment, for all time, they didn't see that this constitutes
the unity and the reciprocity of the signifier and the signified—and consequently
that the originary signified is without meaning, that it is a mere sign of the choice
between two signifiers (and thus not arbitrary in relation to their choice).
There can be no umpire, to say it in English as Joyce writes it, without talking
about empire, about the imperium on the body, of which all bear the mark from the
beginning. Here the 1 confirms its detachment from the 2. 3 can only be reached
by an imaginary forcing, which imposes the idea that the one wishes to interfere
with the other, without being linked to anything.
For the condition to be expressly posited that starting with three rings a chain
is produced, such that a break in any one ring renders the two others free from each
other, it had to be observed that this was already inscribed in the Borromean coat-
of-arms. The knot thus termed 'Borromean' was already there, without anyone
noticing its significance.
It is wrong to think that this knot is a norm for the interrelation of the three
functions which exist one-to-another in their exercise solely in the being who thus
thinks of himself as man. It is not the break between symbolic, imaginary and real
which defines perversion, but that they are already distinct.
The Borromean link must, then, be thought of as tetradic. The fourth term, it
happens, is the sinthome. It is just as surely the Father, in as much as perversion

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 means nothing other than 'turning to the father' [version vers le perel, and that,
in short, the Father is a symptom, or if you prefer, a sinthome. The ex-istence of
the symptom is implied by the very position, which supposes this enigmatic link
between the imaginary, the symbolic and the real.
If you find somewhere the drawing which schematizes the interrelation of the
imaginary, the symbolic and the real such that each is separate from the others—
you have already, in the previous figurations by which I set out their relations, the
possibility of their interlinking—by ,hat? By the sinthome. You must see this: it
is the folding back of the big S, that is to say that which maintains the consistence
of the symbolic, folding it back in the following manner [Figures].
If this diagram is correct—I mean that, sliding under the real, it [S] will clearly
also be under the imaginary, and will have to go over the sinthomatique—we have
the following position: starting from four the result is this [Figure].
You have the following interrelation: here, for instance, the imaginary, the
real, the sinthome, which I'm going to represent with a S, and the symbolic. Each
one of them is expressly interchangeable. 1 to 2 can be turned around into 2 to
1, 3 to 4 likewise into 4 to 3, in a manner which I hope appears simple. But thus
we find ourselves in the following situation: for 1 to 2, indeed for 2 to 1, to have
in its milieu, so to speak, the S and the S, must mean that the sinthome and the
symbol are positioned in such a way that there are four of them, as you see here,
caught in the big R, and here, the I is included in a certain way by passing above
the symbol and beneath the symptom. The link, which I have expressed here by
the opposition of R to I, always appears in this form. In other words: the pair
symbol and symptom emerge so that one of the terms encompasses them both,
while the other slides, let's say, over that which is above and under that which is
beneath. This is the diagram which you regularly end with in an attempt to make
a Borromean knot a quatre.
The Oedipus Complex is this kind of symptom. It is entirely maintained by
the fact that the Name-of-the-Father is also the Father of the name—which makes
the symptom no less necessary.
This other in question is that which in Joyce emerges because he is, to put it
briefly, burdened by a father. It turns out in Ulysses that Joyce has to support the
father's subsistence. Through his art—art is always something which from ancient
days comes to us as the product of the artisan—Joyce not only enables his family to
subsist, but illustrates it, and at the same time illustrates what he calls my country,
'the uncreated conscience of my race'. Thus ends the Portrait of the Artist, and he
gives himself this mission.
In this sense, I announce what will be this year my interrogation concerning
art—how is artifice able to target expressly, so to speak, what first appears as
symptom?—how can art, the artisan, deploy that which the symptom imposes, in
other words what I have figured in my two tetrads as 'truth'?
Where is it, truth? On this occasion, I said that it is somewhere in the discourse
of the Master, as it is supposed in the subject who, divided, is still the subject of
fantasy. Contrary to what I had stated before, it is at the level of truth that
we can consider the half-said [mi-dit]. Effectively, the subject in this state can
only represent itself in the signifier index 1, while the signifier index 2 represents

129
itself—to put it in the terms I have just been using—in the duplicity of symbol and
symptom. S 2 is where the artistry is, in that through the joining of two signifiers
it is able to produce the objet a , which I illustrated by the relation of the ear to
the eye, indeed, by evoking the stop-gap.
It is to the extent that the discourse of the Master predominates that the S 2 is
divided. This is the division of symbol and symptom. But it is, as it were, mirrored
by the subject's division. And it is the insistence of the subject, albeit that which
a signifier represents for another signifier, which obliges us to show that it is in the
symptom that one of these two signifiers in the symbolic finds its support. In this
sense, it could be said that in the articulation of the symptom and the symbol there
is only a false hole.
Supposing the consistence of any one of these functions, symbolic, imaginary
and real, as forming a circle is to suppose a hole. But concerning the symbol and
the symptom, it is the folding of the totality, the interlinking of these two circles,
which creates the hole.
To produce a true hole, as Soury has clearly shown, it must be framed by
something resembling a bubble, a torus, so that each one of these holes is outlined
by something which holds them together, for us to have something which could be
termed a true hole. That is to say, one has to imagine if these holes are to subsist,
maintain themselves.
If we simply suppose a straight line here—it will fulfil the same function so
long as it is infinite.
We shall have to come back to the definition of the infinite, as well as that
of the straight line—in what does it subsist, how is it related to a circle. I must
certainly come back to the circle—which has a function well known to the police,
that of allowing circulation [circitler, £traffic], and the police have a support for
this which is not new-fangled. Hegel saw very clearly what was its function, and he
saw it in a form utterly different to the one in question. For the police, it is quite
simply a matter of the turning-around continuing.
The addition of an infinite straight line to the false hole transforms it into a
hole of borromean subsistence—I wish to end on this point for today.

130
2) 9th December 1975
There are too many of you for me to hope to get from you what I got from the public
in the United States, where I've just been. I was there for a packed fortnight, and
was able to notice a certain amount of things—namely, if I understood properly, a
certain lassitude, principally felt by analysts. I can only say I was very well looked
after, but that's not saying much. I was sucked up into a sort of whirlwind there,
which can only find a guarantee in what I am bringing to light with my knot.

*
You have been able to follow each step of the way by which I have come to
use the functions of the knot to express what I had first advanced as the triplicity
of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. The knot is tied in the spirit of a
modern mos geometricus. We are in fact always captivated from the outset by a
geometry, which I described last time as comparable to the sack, in other words
to the surface, and it is very difficult—something which happens most often when
your eyes are shut—to think about knots.
Analysis is, in essence, the reduction of initiation to its reality. The reality of
initiation is that properly speaking there is no initiation. Every subject sets this up,
that it was always there and was never anything but a supposition. Nevertheless,
experience shows us that this supposition is always set up ambiguously, in as much
as the subject is as such not only double, but divided.
What must be accounted for is the real of that division. How did Freud, a
bourgeois, and one stuffed with middle-class prejudices, attain the force proper
to what he had to say, his aim to speak the truth about man? For my part, I
have added this correction, which has not been without difficulties for me—that no
truth can be spoken; like the subject which it comprises, it can only be half-spoken
(mi-dire).
My point of departure is to show man what Writing puts forth, not as an aid
for him, but as one against him. I am trying to situate myself in this condition.
And thus I have been led, and in a manner worth remarking, to the knot, to a
geometry barred from the imaginary, or at least one which can only be imagined
across all sorts of resistances. This barrier is properly speaking what the knot, in
so far as it is borromean, constitutes.

*
One of the things which struck me most when I was in America, was my
encounter—completely intentional on my part—with Chomsky. I was, properly
speaking, flabbergasted. I told him as much. What flabbergasted me was the
notion of language which, I realized, he held. I can't say that it can in any way be
refuted, as it's the commonest notion. His affirmation of it directly to me gave me
an immediate sense of the full distance which separates me from him. This notion—
a common notion then, and one which seems to me precarious—starts out from a
conception of the body as provided with organs. In this conception, the organ is
a tool, a tool for gripping, for apprehension, and there is no reason in principle

131
 why this tool should not apprehend itself as such. Chomsky is thus easily able to
consider language as determined by some genetic fact. In other words language, he
said to my face, is itself an organ.
That one should be able to turn language back upon itself as an organ, I find
very striking. How could its operations be accounted for, in the end, if one refused
to conceive language as making a hole in the real? It is not only difficult, it is
downright impossible. I cannot see how any method of observation could engage
with language without admitting as a principal truth that language emerges as
making a hole in what can be situated as the real. Language's hold on the real
operates through the function of the hole.
It is hard for me to bring home to you the full weight of this conviction. If it
seems to me unavoidable, this is because there is no truth as such possible but by
voiding this real.
When the genetic real, to use Chomsky's words, is approached in terms of signs
or messages emitted by the molecular gene, reducing it to the double helix which
brought fame to Crick and Watson—when the real is thus subtilized, in fact a veil
is drawn over that which has effects in language. For language is not in itself a
message. It can only sustain itself through the function of the hole in the real. To
approach it, we have the pathway offered by our modern mos geometricus, that is
to say the concrete result of the effects proper to language—the knot in which I
have faith, and which is entirely based on the equivalence of an infinite line and a
circle.

*
This schema shows a borromean knot just as well as my standard drawing.
Hence it is equally true that this [reference to figure], in which the pair of so-called
infinite lines has been substituted by a circle, also shows it.
This figure is the edge of the exigency proper to the knot. It is answered by this
extremely simple arrangement of three infinite lines in parallel. Where should we
place the infinity point [le point a 1 'infini] on each line so that their concentricity, as
we might call it, is not impeded? Let's put them here, for instance. We could just
as well invert their positions so that the first line envelopes the others instead of
being enveloped by them—the characteristic of the infinity point is that it cannot
be placed, so to speak, on any given side.
But starting from number 3, the following is required [reference to figure].
Each one of these three lines completed by their infinity points must be enveloped
by another and must envelope a third. This is what properly speaking constitutes
the borromean knot as such.
In this respect this diagram is exemplary; you normally see it in the form of
the armillary sphere, in which the blue circle is held back by the circle here coloured
green, while the red circle likewise revolves and is held back. Whereas if the blue
circle envelopes the green circle, it cannot be held back.
Here, even my hesitations are significant. They manifest the awkwardness [la
maladresse] with which the borromean knot, the essential knot, is handled.

132
 The triplicity which the knot allows to be illustrated results from a consistence
which is only feigned by the imaginary, a foundational hole which emerges in the
symbolic, and an ex-istence which belongs to the real, as its fundamental character-
istic. This method offers no hope of breaking the constitutive knot of the symbolic,
the imaginary and the real. This refusal amounts to a virtue, for it is thus that our
analytic grasp of the knot is the negative of religion.
We do not believe in the object as such. And we deny that the object can
be held by any organ thus conceived, as tool, separate tool—in other words, itself
object. In Chomsky's conception the object is approached by another object. By
contrast, it is as a restitution of the subject divided by the operations of language
that analysis circulates. It thus puts science as such in question, to the extent that
science makes an object into a subject, whereas the subject is in itself divided.
We do not believe in the object, but we observe desire. From this observation
of desire we infer that the cause is objectal [objectivée]. The desire for knowledge
encounters obstacles. As an embodiment of this obstacle I have invented the knot.
The knot must come undone. The knot is the only support conceivable for
a relation between something and something else. If on the one hand the knot is
abstract, it must at the same time be conceived as concrete.
This American ordeal, which is the reason I'm so weary today, has certainly
been worthwhile, because I was able with these diagrams to create some agitation,
some emotion. The sensed as mental, the senti-mental, is idiotic, because always by
some device reducible to the imaginary. The imagination of consistence immediately
extends to the impossibility of rupture [cassureJ, but it is in this that rupture can
always be the real, the real as impossible, which is no less compatible with the said
imagination, and even constitutes it.
In no way am I hoping to escape from what I have called the idiocy of this
debate. Like anyone else, I only escape from it in the measure of my means, in other
words by marking time, confident of no verifiable progress other than in the long
term. In a fabulatory manner I propose that the real, as I think it in my pan-se,6
is comprised really—the real effectively lying7—of the hole which subsists in that
its consistence is nothing more than the totality of the knot which ties it together
with the symbolic and the imaginary. The knot which may be termed borromean
cannot be cut without dissolving the myth it offers of the subject, as non-suppose,
in other words the subject as real, no more varied than each body which can be
given the sign speaking-being [parlêtre]. Only due to this knot can this body be
given a status that is respectable, in the everyday sense of the word.
After that exhausting attempt, which has done me in, I expect from you what
I got more easily in America than anywhere else—that is, for someone to ask me a
question.
Next time I will start by approaching this—that in his art Joyce, in a privileged
manner, aimed at the fourth term of the knot. How can art aim, in an expressly
divinatory mode, to embody in its consistence, and equally in its ex-istence, the
6 Playing between pensée (thought) and panser (to dress, bandage), Lacan's pun is untranslat-
able (except perhaps in a roundabout way, 'which I a-dress in my thought').
7 réellement—le reel mentant—cf. seminar of 18th November 1975 for this trope.

133
fourth essential term of the knot, how can it aim to render it as such, to the point
of approaching it as closely as possible? We will begin with that.
So now I'm waiting to hear a voice, anyone's.

*
MR X—It's a somewhat historical question. Who led you to believe that you
would get something you would find, useful from Chomsky? It is something that
would never have occurred to me.
DR LACAN—One always suffers from this kind of weakness, remnants of hope.
Since Chomsky is a linguist, I was hoping to find in him a point of contact with what
I have shown about the symbolic, that is, that it always has something to do with
holes, even when these are false holes. For instance, it is impossible not to describe
as 'false hole' the totality formed by the symptom and the symbolic. But from
another angle, the symptom subsists to the extent that it is hooked onto language,
at least if we believe that we can modify something by interpretive handling, in
other words by playing on the meaning. This assimilation in Chomsky is in my
view in the order of the symptom, that is, it confounds the symptom and the real.
It is precisely that which I found flabbergasting,
MR X—Perhaps it's an idle question ... [une question oisive]
DR LACAN—trivial? [oiseuse]
MR X—Thank you. As I'm American
DR LACAN—You are American? Once more I see that it is only an American
who will question me. I can't say how overwhelmed I was in America by people
who showed me in their ways that my discourse had not been in vain.

MR Y—There is something I'm having difficulty getting hold of in your dis-

course —that you talk for an hour and a half and then wish for a more direct
contact with somebody. I wonder if, in a more general sense, you don't speak in
your theory about language without considering the part which the body, too, plays
in exchange. There are moments where the organ can enable a very direct grasp of
the real, without discourse. Is there not an alternation between the two in the life
of a subject? It's a matter of the disembodiment of discourse from the body. At
times, you have no need of language, no need of using language to make a hole in
the real, because that hole doesn't exist due to a direct physical engagement with
the real—I mean in love and jouissance.
DR LAcAN—It is nevertheless very difficult not to consider the real at that
moment as a third. What I am able to seek as a response has to do with a call [appel]
to the real, not as linked to the body, but as different. At a distance from the body,
there is the possibility of something I termed last time resonance or consonance.
And it is at the level of the real that this consonance is situated. In relation to its
poles, the body and language, the real is what harmonizes [fait accord].
MR Z—You said a moment ago that Chomsky made language into an organ,
and you said that you found this flabbergasting. I was wondering if this might be
because what you, for your part, make into an organ is the libido—I refer to the

134
myth of the lamelle. And I wonder if this is not the way in which the question of
art should be addressed here...
DR LACAN—The libido, as its name indicates, cannot but participate in the
hole, just like the other modes in which the real appears. It is thus that I am trying
to link up with the function of art; it is implied by what is left blank as the fourth
term when I say that art can even reach the symptom. This is what I am going
to try to give substance. Your reference to the myth of the lamelle is to the point.
You're on the right track there.
MR A—When you speak of libido in this text, you note that it is distinguished
by a coming-and-going movement. Now, this image seems to me to function like that
of the chord, which is caught in a phenomenon of resonance and which undulates,
in other words dips and rises, which makes an antinode and knots.
DR LACAN—It is no accident that the metaphor of a chord comes from knots.
What I am trying to do is to find what this metaphor refers to. If there are antinodes
and knots in a vibrating chord, it is in as much as knots are being referred to.
The use of language always goes beyond what is actually said, but the bearing of
metaphor as such is always reduced—reduced to metonymy.
MR B—When you move from the borromean knot a trois to the knot a quatre
with the symptom, the borromean knot as such disappears.
DR LACAN—QUite right—it's no longer a knot, because the three terms are
only held together by the symptom.
MR B—From this point of view, the hope of a cure in analysis seems to pose
a problem...
DR LACAN—There is no radical reduction of the fourth term. Freud was
somehow able to propose an Urverdrangung, a repression which is never undone. It
is in the very nature of the symbolic to comprise a hole.
MR B—Isn't this knot, despite what you say, simply a model?
DR LAcAN—It does not constitute a model in that it comprises something
before which the imagination fails. And its mathematical approach in topology is
insufficient.
Let me tell you about my experiences this holiday. This (fig 9) constitutes
a knot—not a knot a deux, since there is only one cord, but a knot known as a
trefoil, which is the simplest of knots. It's the same as this one (fig 8 ), even though
they look different. I have discovered that with this knot it is easy to demonstrate
the existence of a borromean knot. It is sufficient to think that, on this double
surface without which we would not know how to write anything concerning knots,
on an underlying surface, then, you place the same knot. It is very easy to pass
an identical knot at each stage under the underlying knot and over the knot lying
above, and thus to produce a borromean knot.
Is it possible with this knot a trois to produce a borromean knot a quatre?
I spent about two months doing my head in, without successfully demonstrating
that there is a way of tying four trefoil knots in a borromean manner. That proves
nothing. It doesn't prove that this knot doesn't exist. Last night it was still all I
could think about. The worst is that I haven't found the demonstrative reason for
its non-existence--it's simply that I've failed. If I could show that it cannot exist,
why it is impossible, a real would be guarantied. To tell you what I think, it's that

135
it does exist—I mean that it is not there that we come up against a real. I don't
despair of finding it, but the fact is there's nothing I can do. From the moment of
its proof [démontré], it would be easy to show [montrer] you it, but I can show you
no such thing. The relation of showing to proving is one of sharp separation.
Ms X—You said just now that in Chomsky's view language would be an
organ, and that if so it would no longer be possible to understand its operations
[maniement]. Is it the word main [hand]...?
DR LACAN —What I am claiming is that, despite the existence of handshakes,
one hand does not know what the other is doing in the act of shaking hands.

136
3) 16th December 1975
If analysis was taken as seriously as I take the preparation of my seminar, it would
be so much the better, and would surely have better results. For this, one would
need in analysis the senti-ment (in the sense I spoke of the other day) of an absolute
risk.

*
I told you the other day that I had made a discovery concerning triple knots,
which I draw like this and which can be obtained from the borromean knot—that
they can be made into a triple borromean knot, and that I struggled for two months
to try to produce a knot which would tie them together a quatre. I also told you that
the fact that I couldn't do it didn't prove anything, apart from my clumsiness—and
that I was sure it must exist.
That same evening, to my delighted surprise, there appeared on my doorstep
the man called Thomé, who came to bring me the fruits of his collaboration with
Soury: the proof that a borromean knot consisting of four triple knots does in-
deed exist—which certainly justifies my obstinacy, but makes my incapacity no less
deplorable.
Nevertheless, I welcomed the news with feelings untainted by regrets for my
impotence. My feelings were of pure and simple enthusiasm, and I think I was able
to show them some of this when I saw them a few evenings later. They haven't
been able to give me an account of how they came to find it.
On the blackboard I have reproduced their discovery, textually: my drawing
takes a slightly different route, so that you can see perhaps a little better how it's
done. I would like to commemorate this little event—which, besides, I consider not
so little—and I'm going to tell you the reasons for my research.
What is the support of this research? Not what Sarah Kofman speaks of in
her remarkable article Vautour Rouge ('red vulture'), in which she refers to the
elixirs du diable Freud celebrates. But I recommend that you read the collection
entitled Mimesis which contains this article, which I think is worth reading. For
my part, I've only read the first, third and fifth articles; due to the preparation
of this seminar, I've had other things to worry about. The first article—about
Wittgensteiri and, so to speak, the noise made by his teaching—is the only one, to
tell the truth, that I've read right through.
I should say that the geometry of knots—a specific, original geometry—exor-
cises the so-called 'uncanny', which is unquestionably bound up with the imaginary.
But that there should be something which allows it to be exorcised is certainly in
itself strange.
The resistance experienced by the imagination to thinking anything concerning
this new geometry, is something which strikes me because I have experienced it. It is
certainly not pure chance that Soury and Thomé were fascinated by the conjunction
of imaginary, symbolic and real which was emerging in my teaching, that they
were quite especially attracted by the things I dream up. Let's say that they
are gifted in that line of things. The strange thing is—here I let myself betray
their confidences—that they make progress, they tell me, by discussing it together.

137
Thinking is certainly not usually done a deux. The fact is, they manage it, and for
a long time they have been producing things about the borromean knot which seem
to me more than interesting—indeed, an achievement. This discovery is certainly
not the crowning glory, they will make more.
I will not add what Soury has told me of his thoughts about teaching. In this
matter, I think that by following my example, which I described a moment ago, he
will certainly manage as well as I am able to; that is, in the same risky fashion.
But that dialogue should prove fertile, especially in this field, is a confirmation of
my need of it. For the two months I spent relentlessly looking for the fourth triple
knot and the way it could form a borromean knot with the three others, I was alone
in this search, I mean in this hopeful thinking-through. It is time for me to talk of
the significance this research has for me.

*
This research is extremely significant to me for the following reason. The three
circles of the borromean knot are all three, as circles, equivalent—I mean that they
are constituted by something which is reproduced across the three.
I situate the support of consistence in the imaginary. Likewise, I make the
essential constituent of the symbolic the hole. And I make the real the support of
what I term ex-sistence, in this sense: in its sistence outside of the imaginary and
the symbolic, it knocks up against them, its play is something precisely in the order
of limitation; the two others, from the moment when it is tied into a borromean
knot with them, offer it resistance. In other words, the real only has ex-sistence--in
rather an astonishing formulation of mine—in its encounter with the limits of the
symbolic and the imaginary.
To be sure, as much should be said of the two others—for example, it is to
the extent that it ex-sists in the real that the imaginary also encounters conflict,
which is here better felt. Why then do I place this ex-sistence precisely where it
can appear most paradoxical? Because I have to redistribute these three modes,
and it is exactly this ex-sistence which supports the thinking of the real.
But what is the result of this?—if not, that these three terms should be con-
ceived as linked to each other. If they are so analogous, to use this term, could one
not suppose that this is due to a certain continuity? And thus we are led directly to
tie the triple knot. Starting from the inter-balancing, inter-leaving of the three, it is
not a great step to link up the points and make their arrangement one of continuity.
But what is the result if what is of the order of subject, in as much as the
subject is always merely suppose, finds in the end its support in this knot? Is the
triple knot tied into a borromean knot enough? My question concerns this point.
In the diagram of a borromean chain, does it not seem that the minimum is
always constituted by a quadruple knot? Pull on the green cord and you will see
that the black cord, here knotted to the red cord, is pulled by the blue cord, giving
the perceived form of a borromean chain. It seems that the least one can expect
from the borromean chain is this relation of one to three others. And if we suppose
that the triple knots link up with one another in borromean knots, we will get to
this—that a fourth will always be propped upon [prendra appuij three supports,
which we will call here subjective—in other words, personal. You remember how I

138
introduced this fourth element. Each of the three others are supposed to constitute
something of the personal. In respect of these three, the fourth will be what this
year I am terming the sint home.

R S I
S I R
I R S
sinthome
There is a reason why I have written in a certain order RSI, SIR, IRS. Likewise
Soury and Thomé have highlighted, as I mentioned last year, that in relation to the
borromean knot there are two different types from the moment when it is given an
orientation and colours.
What does this difference put in place [que suppose-t-elle]? Not that the iden-
tity of either is marked by an initial letter. The distinction between them which
has effects in their orientation can only be traced in the way in which their differ-
ence is marked by colour—not the difference of one from another, but, as it were,
their absolute difference, difference common to all three. It is to the extent that
something which is one marks as such the difference between all three and not that
between any two, that the distinction between the two structures of the borromean
knot appears.
Which is the true one? Which is true in respect of the way the imaginary, the
symbolic and the real are knotted together into the support of the subject? This
is the question which should be posed. One should refer back to my preceding
comments on the duality of the borromean knot to gauge its importance, for I have
only been able to touch on it for a moment today. What is remarkable is that the
triple knot shows no trace of this difference. There is only one kind of this triple
knot, in which the imaginary, the symbolic and the real are in continuity, and which
is thus an homogenization of the borromean knot. Check this yourself.
However, it is well known that there are two triple knots, depending on whether
the knot turns to the left or to the right. What, then, is the link between the two
types of borromean knot and the two types of triple knot? Whatever it is, if the
triple knot is really the support of all kinds of subject, how can it be put in question?
How can it be put in question such that it really concerns a subject?

*
There was a time when my progress took a certain route, before I got onto that
of analysis, which is witnessed by my thesis—paranoiac psychosis and its relation,
as I put it, to the personality. If I have been opposed to the republication of this
book for so long, this is due to something simple: there is no relation between
paranoiac psychosis and the personality. Because it's the same thing. In so far as
a subject makes a triple knot of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, its only
support is their continuity; all three have one and the same consistence. And this
is what paranoiac psychosis consists of.
To understand correctly what I'm proposing today, one could deduce the fol-
lowing: a fourth term could be knotted as a symptom to the paranoiac three, a term

139
 which would be situated as personality, distinct from the three prior personalities,
and their symptom.
Is this to say that this too would be paranoiac? Nothing indicates this when it is
a matter of a borromean chain made up of an indefinite number of triple knots. Such
a chain no longer constitutes a paranoia, if only because it is common. The possible
terminal flocculation 8 of fourth terms in this braid, this tress of subjectivity, allows
us to suppose that there are certain chosen points in the totality of the texture
which function as the term 9 of this qu 'adruple knot. And this is exactly what the
sinthome consists in—not in so far as it is personality, but that in relation to the
three others it specifies itself as sinthome and neurotic.
Here we are given an insight into the nature of the unconscious. There is a
term which is particularly connected to it which has a privileged relation to the
sinthome. In this set of four, you see two couples are formed, red-green and blue-
red. I read that as a link between the sinthome and the unconscious, and between
the imaginary and the real. That is where the sinthome emerges.
These are difficult things I wanted to propose to you today. To complement
this, I should certainly speak of why I have now opened up the triple knot, and am
not giving it the usual circular form. I have already noted the field of J. This is
jouissance, and it is not that of the Other, because there is no Other of the Other;
in the symbolic, site of the Other as such, there are no oppositions.
The jouissance of the Other of the Other is impossible for the simple reason
that no such instance exists. All that remains, then, is what is produced in the
field of the intersection of the circle of the symbolic and the circle of the imaginary:
meaning.
Elsewhere there is so-called phallic jouissance, to be distinguished from any
jouissance of the penis. The jouissance of the double, of the specular image or
imaginary body, is the support of a certain number of bEances ['gaps/abeyances'],
which constitute its different objects. By contrast, the jouissance of the phallus,
J, is located at the conjunction of the symbolic and the real, and is experienced
as a parasite by the subject supported by the speaking-being [parlêtre] , in the sense
of what I designate as the unconscious. I mark it in balance over against meaning.
This is the site consciously designated as power by the speaking-being.
The similarity is that the three rings participate in the imaginary on the level
of consistence, in the symbolic as hole, and in the real as ex-sistent to these. The
three rings imitate one another.
The fact that they do not imitate each other in a simple way makes this so
much more difficult. In fact they make up a triple knot. Thus, after making the
discovery that triple knots can be tied into triple borromean knots, I took care to
note that if they are kept unconstrained, a triple knot exists whose plays extends
across its full texture; a knot which is well and truly a fourth term, and which is
called sinthome.

8 Lacan's metaphor refers to the idea of a subjective tresse (plait, braid), in which certain
strands cluster into tufts or clumps; under 'flocculate', Chambers has 'to aggregate in tufts, flakes
or cloudy masses'. For more on Lacanian flocculation, see SVII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
op. cit., p. 102.
9 se trouvent le terine implies 'set a limit, almost 'function as a terminus' (cf terminale two
lines above)

140
4) 13th January 1976
One's responsibility only goes as far as one's savoir-faire.
What is savoir-faire? Let's say it is what gives a remarkable value to one's
art. Why remarkable? Because there is no Other of the Other to pass the final
judgement. This means that there is something we cannot enjoy. Let us call it the
jouissance of God, including in this the sense of sexual joLissance.
Supposing that he exists, does our image of God indicate that he enjoys his
creation? To answer that he doesn't exist is to deal too briskly with the question,
if we take on the burden of a thought whose essence is to take its place in this
reality—a first approximation of the word real which has a different meaning in my
vocabulary—in this limited reality which testifies to the ex-sistence of sex.
These are the first truths I bring you this new year...
The very first outline of what is called thought, everything which produces
meaning from the moment of its first appearance, comprises a reference to, a grav-
itation towards, the sexual act—however little that act is in evidence. The very
word act implies the polarity active/passive, which is already to get caught in a
false sense. This is how knowledge is described, with the following ambiguity—that
what is active is that which we know, but because of the effort we make to know,
it is ourselves we imagine to be active.
So knowledge, from the outset, reveals its true nature—its deceptiveness. This
is why, from the outset, everything should be reconsidered in terms of the opaque-
ness of the sexual. I use the word 'opaqueness' because we do not see in the sexual
any relation, founded on anything at all. This implies, following the movement of
thought, that there is no responsibility—in the sense where 'responsibility' means
non-response side by side with response—there is no responsibility other than sexual
responsibility, something in the end everyone feels.
What I have termed savoir-faire goes far beyond this, adding artifice, which
we ascribe to God—absolutely gratuitously, as Joyce insists, because this is a point
which tickled (what we describe as) his thought. God is not the author of this thing
we call the universe. What we impute to God is the business of the artist. The first
model for this, as is well known, is the potter, who is said to have moulded (with
what, though?) this thing called, not by accident, the universe—which means only
one thing, that there is One.
There is One, but we do not know where. It is more than unlikely that this
One constitutes the universe. The real—that is, impossible—Other of the Other, is
our idea of artifice, in that it is an activity which escapes us, in other words which
far exceeds the enjoyment [jouissance] we can have of it. This absolutely slender
jouissance is what we call spirit [l'esprit].
All of this implies a notion of the real which we must distinguish from the
symbolic and the imaginary. The only trouble is that in this process the real is
given meaning, whereas in fact the real is founded to the extent that there is no
meaning, that it excludes meaning, or, more precisely, that it is deposited in this
exclusion.

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 There you are. I tell you this as I think it, for your knowledge. The form most
devoid of meaning, but which is nevertheless imagined, is consistence. Bear in mind
this: that nothing forces us to imagine consistence.
I have here a book by Robert M. Adams, called Surface and Symbol, whose
sub-title indicates what is at issue—The consistency of James Joyce's Ulysses.
This is a kind of presentiment of the distinction between the imaginary and the
symbolic. Thus there is a chapter which places a question-mark after Surface or
Symbol, surface or symbol.
What does consistence mean? It means what holds things together, and this
is certainly why it is symbolised here by the surface. Our only idea of consistence,
poor souls that we are, is what makes a bag or a cloth. We even feel the body as
merely skin holding in its bag a heap of organs.
To put it in other terms, this consistence reveals the cord. But the imagina-
tion's powers of abstraction are so weak that it excludes from this cord, the residue
of consistence, the knot.
It is on this point that I wish to add the only grain of salt I would perhaps accept
responsibility for—the knot is the only thing which ex-sists, properly speaking, in
the cord. It is not without hidden reason that I have had to provide you with
access to this knot by starting with the chain, whose elements are distinct. These
elements have their consistence in the form of the cord—or rather line, which we
must suppose to be infinite so that the knot doesn't come undone, or rope-loop,
in other words a cord which is tied together, or more exactly is spliced together.
The knot does not constitute the consistence, it ex-sists in the cord element, the
consistent cord.
So a knot can be tied. If I have taken the path of stitching-together the
elements, this is because I thought it more didactic, given the mentality proper to
the speaking-being [parletre], senti-mentality, because he feels it [ii la sent], he feels
the burden. It is also the mentality in so far as he lies [ii ment]. It is a fact that
he lies. What is a fact? It is precisely he who makes it [le fait]. There is no fact
without the fact that the speaking-being says so. There are no facts other than
those the speaking-being recognises as such by speaking about them. There is no
fact without artifice, and it is a fact that he lies, in other words that he accords
recognition to false facts; because he has mentality, in other words self-love [amour-
propre]. This is the principle of imagination. He adores his body. He adores it
because he thinks he possesses it. In reality he does not. But his body is his only—
mental, of course—consistence. His body is always buggering off. It's already fairly
miraculous that it subsists for a time, for the time of this consummation which in
fact—due to the fact of its being said—is inexorable, because nothing can be done,
it cannot be reduced. It is an observed fact even in animals that the body does
not evaporate, it is consistent. And this is what is disagreeable to the mentality,
entirely because it believes it has a body to adore. This is the root of the imaginary.
I think this—p-a-n-s-e—'° in other words, I make a bandage of it, thus I clean it
[l'essuie]. That's what this comes down to. It is the sexual which lies [ment]
in this due to too much talk about itself, without the above-mentioned imaginary
'°Punning on panser, 'to dress (a wound)'.

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abstraction, which boils down to consistence. What is concrete, all that we know, is
always sexual adoration, that is to say, misunderstanding [méprise], in other words
contempt Lmeprisl. The object of adoration is supposed, except in the case of God,
to have no mentality at all, which is only true of the body considered as such—I
mean adored, because that is the only relation of the speaking-being to his body;
so that it is always suspicious when he adores another body, for this entails the
same contempt, a true contempt, because it is a question of truth. What is truth
(as someone else said)? What is it, to say—as, when I started my bulishitting, they
reproached me for not saying—the truth about truth? It is to do no more than I
have effectively done—to follow the trace of the real, the real which only consists
and ex-sists in the knot.
Haste has a function—I must go hastily. Naturally I won't get to the end,
although I haven't dawdled. But tying the knot carelessly simply means going a
bit fast.
Let us stick to the principle that there is no sexual relation, which I was led to
by hysteria, in so far as it is, as Freud saw, the final perceptible reality concerning
the sexual relation, precisely the final usteron. From this Freud learned the b-a-ba,
which didn't stop him from posing the question WwdW—Was will das Weib? This
was a mistake. He thought that there was das Weib; there is only em Weib.
WwdW
WweW

*
Anyway, now I'm going to give you a little bit to get your teeth into. I would
like to illustrate this with something which supports it, and which is certainly what
is in question. I have already spoken at one point about enigma [énigme, also
griddle'], which I write Ee. It's a matter of Enonciation and énoncE. An enigma is
an énonciation whose énoncE cannot be located.
You will find in R. M. Adams' book something of value—that, in the opening
chapters of Ulysses, when he goes to teach at Trinity College 1 ' in front of that
diminutive nation which makes up a class, Stephen—in other words Joyce as he
imagines himself (and who, since he's not a fool, he's not in love with—on the
contrary, he need only mention Stephen and he starts giggling, which is not very
far from my position when I talk, at least about what I'm chattering on about to
you)...
What does the enigma consist in? In an art which I would term between-the-
lines, to refer to the cord. It is not clear why lines which are written should not be
knotted by a second cord.
Writing: it's an interest of mine. A certain Février has done a history of
it, another, Guelb, has theorised it. For my part, I only think historically—it is
through little bits of writing that we have entered into the real—that is, ceased to
"Actually, Stephen doesn't teach at Trinity, but at a rather less exalted academy—the village
Boys' School at Dalkey; Ulysses, op. cit., p. 20ff.

143
 imagine. The writing of little letters, little mathematical letters, is what supports
the real.
But how on earth does it do this?, I wondered. Truly, I said to myself, it must
be that writing always has something to do with the way we write the knot.

A knot is commonly
written like this:

This already gives us an S, in other words something which has a considerable

relation to the instance of the letter as I maintain it. And this gives us a likely
basis for beauty—if Hogarth is to be believed, beauty was always a matter of this
double inflection. Bullshit, of course, but in the end, at least this would imply that
beauty is connected to something other than the obscene, in other words the real.
There would be, in sum, nothing but beautiful writing—why not?
Let's get back to Stephen, who also starts with an S. Stephen is Joyce as he
solves his own riddle [ii dechiffre sa propre enigme]. He doesn't get very far because
he believes in all his symptoms. This is very striking. He begins with—well, he
began long before that, he scribbled some little bits, even some poems. His poems
are not what he did best. He believes in the uncreated conscience of my race—that
is the ending of the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it's clear that it
doesn't go very far. The end is better—Old father, old artificer, stand me now
and ever in good stead. It is to his father that he addresses this prayer—his father
whose precise characteristic is to be an unworthy, lacking father, and who Stephen
is to search for throughout Ulysses, in settings where he has no chance of finding
him. There is clearly a father somewhere—Bloom, a father in search of a son, but
Stephen places one in opposition to him—but not much of one, I would say, having
had so much father I was sick of him. It is peculiar that, throughout the novel, there
is a gravitational attraction between the thoughts of Bloom and Stephen. Adams,
whose name sounds more Jewish than Bloom, is very struck by the way Joyce
attributes to Bloom a knowledge of Shakespeare which is manifestly unlikely, and
which, moreover, is not necessarily favourable, like claiming that Shakespeare had
relations with a certain herbalist who lived near him in London. For such a thing to
occur to Bloom goes beyond what can rightly be imputed to him. This knowledge
belongs to Stephen. The entire Surface or Symbol chapter talks of nothing but this.
It culminates at the point in the text of Ulysses where Blephen and Stoom meet,
which shows that they are not only made of the same signifier, but truly of the
same material.
Ulysses bears witness to the way Joyce remains rooted in his father, even as
he denies him—and this is exactly his symptom. I have said that Joyce was himself

144
 the symptom. His whole oeuvre is one long testimony to this. Exiles is an approach
to what is for him the central symptom, that of the lack of the sexual relation. The
form taken by this lack is not arbitrary, but it must take one—for Joyce, this is
what binds him to his wife, the so-called Nora, during whose reign he dreams up
Exiles.' 2 There could be no better term to express non-relation than exile. Non-
relation means that there is no reason why he should take a woman, among others,
to be his. A woman among others is also one who has a relation to some other man,
and this 'some other man' is the character he imagines, and for whom he opens the
choice of 'a woman' in question, who as it happens is none other than Nora.
Concerning the uncreated conscience of my race he invokes the supreme arti-
ficer who would be his father. But it is he who is the artificer, he's the one who
knows what he has to do. However, he believes that there is a race which has an
uncreated conscience, which is a great illusion. He also believes that there is a book
of himself—the idea of making oneself into a book! The idea could only occur to a
damn stunted poet. Why doesn't he say, instead, that he's a knot?
Let's get to Ulysses. A certain Chechner, who because he has read lots of books
about analysis thinks that he's an analyst—it's an illusion that is fairly widespread,
especially amongst analysts—has wished to analyse Ulysses. The effect this creates
is absolutely terrifying, it truly gives the idea that the novelist's imagination, I mean
the imagination which reigns over Ulysses, is to be thrown in the dustbin. Unlike
Surface and Symbol, this analysis of Ulysses wishes to be exhaustive—naturally,
because one can't stop when one analyses a book. Freud, all the same, only wrote
some articles of this type, and moreover, he didn't, properly speaking, analyse the
novel, with the exception of Dostoyevsky. He made nothing but a little allusion
concerning Ibsen. He restrained himself!
Here is what our beloved Joyce, in the guise of Stephen, proposes to his pupils
as a riddle [enigme]. It's an Enonciation:

The cock crew

The sky was blue
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven
'Tis time for this poor soul
To go to heaven. (U, 22)

I'll tell you what the answer was. After the whole class gives up, Joyce provides
it— The fox burying his grandmother under the bush. This seems to amount to
nothing, but beside the coherence of the énonciation—note that it's in verse, it's a
poem, a consistent artefact—next to this, this little fox burying his grandmother
under a bush is truly a wretched thing. What echo can that have for—I won't say
for everyone in this room, but for those who are analysts? Analysis is that—the
answer to a riddle; and an answer, it must be said, which is quite exceptionally
stupid.
12 Lacan's parenthetical comment—'the translation is Les Exiles, but it could just as well mean
Les Exils'—perhaps suggests two senses of exiler: 'banishment' or 'self-imposed exile'.

145
 This is why one must hold on to the cord. If one has no notion of where the
cord ends up—that is, in the knot of the sexual non-relation—one runs the risk
of talking rubbish. Meaning is the result of an intersection between the imaginary
and the symbolic. And if we hold that there is no Other of the Other, at least
no jouissance of the Other of the Other, we must make a stitch [suture] or splice
[épissure] between the imaginary and the symbolic: unconscious knowledge. All
this to obtain a meaning—which is the object of the analyst's response to what the
analysand reveals over time about his symptom.
In making this splice, at the same time we make another between what consti-
tutes the symptom and the real. In some manner, we teach the analysand to splice
together his symptom and the parasitic real of jouissance. This is what character-
ises our procedure. To render this jouissance possible is the same thing as what I
would write as J'ouis sens [I hear sense'], to hear a meaning. Analysis is a matter
of suture and splicing.
But it must be said that we ought to consider the orders [instances] as in reality
separate. Imaginary, symbolic and real do not intermingle. Finding a meaning
entails a knowledge of the knot, and sewing it up with artifice. Tying a knot, with
what I would term a borromean chain-knot, is this not an abuse? Leaving that
question hanging, I must leave you.
I have not left any time for dear Jacques Aubert, who I had planned to give
the floor for the rest of the session, to speak to you now; but next time he will
talk to you about the Bloom in question—that is, about someone who is not badly
qualified to get the hang of analysis, since he's a Jew—about Bloom and how he
feels suspended between the sexes, which makes him wonder if he's a father or a
mother. Regarding his wife, he feels maternal, he thinks he carries her in his belly.
This really is the worst aberration one can experience vis-à-vis somebody one loves.
But why not? Love must be explained, and explaining it as a kind of madness is
the first thing which comes within reach.

146
5) 20th January 1976
You must be thinking that, when it comes to Joyce, I'm a fish out of water [lit
'like a fish with an apple']. This is obviously linked to my lack of practice, to my
inexperience of the language he writes in. It is not that I'm totally ignorant of
English, but rather that he writes with such peculiar subtlety in English, that he
disarticulates it. You would be wrong to think this only begins with Finnegans
Wake. Long before Finnegans Wake, he has a peculiar way of breaking up phrases,
notably in Ulysses; indeed, it's a process aiming to give language another use—and
one which is far from being ordinary. This is part of his savoir-faire. And on this
question, I have already quoted Sollers' article, whose pertinence you would do well
to sample.
So this morning I'm going to allow someone to speak whose practical exper-
ience, not only of the English language, but of Joyce in particular, is far superior
to mine. This is Jacques Aubert, and I'm going to let him speak straight away,
since he has kindly offered to take over from me. I will listen to him with the full
knowledge I have gathered of his experience of Joyce; I will listen to him, and hope
that my comments—brief as they will be, I don't ask him to abridge things, far
from it—the brief comments I will add will be made with all the respect I owe him
for having introduced me to what I have called Joyce-the-symptom.

*
JACQUES AUBERT—LaSt June, Dr Lacan announced that Joyce was to feature
on the path of his work. My presence here today in no way indicates that I feature
on that royal road. Let me say immediately that I am, rather, on its verges; and
you know why these are generally signposted: so what you are going to hear will
be a roadmender's words!13
I must thank Jacques Lacan for inviting me to produce some work; it is shoddy,
not at all well tied-up, and not very articulate concerning knots. From another
perspective, I would like to indicate that what I am going to say starts out from
a sense I had of something that was threading through the text, certain of Joyce's
texts at certain points—something woven in by Joyce. And this awareness of the
thread leads me, precisely, to insist that this is not, as it might otherwise have been,
a definitive statement.
To situate what happened to be my point of departure, I should specify—
putting it in a very didactic way—that it was a little bit of 'Circe', part of an
exchange from the episode in Ulysses which was given the name 'Circe' a posteriori,
and described as the hallucinatory episode, whose art would be magic and whose
category hallucination (according to a schema drawn up by Joyce for some friends).
Elements from preceding chapters, whose status cannot yet be determined, re-
appear—real or fictional characters, objects, or signifiers. But what is interesting
too, is the manner of this return, the way it is manifestly connected with speech [la
parole], with a speaking. From the beginning one is made aware of this—since the
13 Ce sont donc des propos a Ia cantonnier—Aubert re-plays one of Lacan's jokes, punning on

his name by claiming to speak a la can tonnade ('to everyone in general')

147
 first two characters, one might say, are the Call and the Answer, 14 clearly indicating
a dimension developed in the form of the chapter, in the ostensibly dramatic style—
the dimension of speech [la parole], and of the kind of institutions/ locations which
generate it [instaurations de lieux d'o?i ça parle].
What is important is that it speaks [ca parle], in all possible senses [sens],
and that everything can be impersonated there (to take up a term that we will
encounter shortly); everything can personate in this text, give rise to voice-effects
across a mask.
I think I've isolated one of these functions—a detail of one of these functions or
its mode of functioning—at the beginning of the chapter, in an exchange between
Bloom and Rudolph (who is supposed to be his father and has been dead for
eighteen years). I will read you the brief exchange in question.
Rudolph first appears as an elder of Zion. He has the appearance, according
to the stage-directions, of an elder of Zion. And after various reproaches to his son,
he says this:
What you making down this place? Have you no soul? [a native of Hungary, he is
supposed not to be able to manage English] (with feeble vulture talons he feels the
silent face of Bloom) Are you not my son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Are
you not my dear son Leopold who left the house of his father and left the god of his
fathers Abraham and Jacob? (U, 3 57-8)
At first glance, what is happening here, the reader of Ulysses thinks, is some-
thing described several times by Bloom himself with the expression retrospective
arrangement; the term recurs often enough in Bloom's thoughts throughout the
text. The reader cannot fail to be aware of this retrospective arrangement, nor
that it is arranged in relation to a favourite quotation of the father, from a literary
text which it would seem had a certain effect on him. This text is on page 62 in
the Gabler edition:
Nathan's voice! His son's voice! I hear the voice of Nathan who left his father to die
of grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of his father and left the God of
his father.
One sees here that what returns does so with a subtle difference. But be-
fore outlining that difference, I would like to point to the effects this return-with-
difference has on Bloom. What is his reply, in the 'Circe' episode? This:
Bloom (with precaution): I suppose so, father. Mosenthal. all that's left of him.
Precaution—this is certainly a quality of Bloom, who is described as prudent
throughout Ulysses. The prudent one is an aspect of Ulysses (but Ulysses is not
merely that). He is described several times, in slightly Masonic terms, as the prudent
member. The prudent member says I suppose so, I sous-pose so,' 5 I suppose some-
thing to reply to the question 'Are you not my son?'; 'I sous-pose something of the
kind', which in principle connects back to what the father said, but which suddenly,
14 cf Ulysses, op. cit., p. 350.
15 Literally, 'under-put'; Aubert puns on supposer by introducing sous as its first syllable.
This is then (see below) expanded into a play between suppOt ('underling') and sous-pot (-peau?)
('under-pot/-skin').

148
as soon as one is following the text, appears as another figure, for we immediately
have this moment of arrest marked by what the Anglo-saxons call a period, some-
thing which marks finality, a point not of suspension but of closure, and beyond
which Mosenthal appears, a new sentence, once again marked by a period.
It is precisely around this proper name that something relating to the declared
sous-position is simultaneously articulated and disarticulated. What, then, is this
supposition, this function of sub-pot/peau [see note 15] of Mosenthal?
Here, in this context, the function of this signifier is to refer the father's words
back to the author of a text, the text which has just been evoked by the father.
But in its abruptness the signifier obscures more than it illuminates, and the reader
is led to isolate it, search for the thoughts it connects back to, the displacements it
is implicated in.
One of these displacements is obvious: in the first text, from the 'Lotus Eaters'
(U, 62) the name in question, that of the author, features before the quotation; here,
it is in the position of signature, and also in the position of a response. It's very
charming, particularly so because it is about Moses. But if one calls to mind—as one
always does, because one spends one's time re-reading—the place Mosenthal held in
the first text, one realizes that there it was a displaced response to a question about
the existence of the true name; a question which itself could only be formulated
with eloquent vacillation. I must note here another phrase which is precisely the
question to which Mosenthal is supposed to be the answer:
What is this the right name is? By Mosenthal it is. Rachel is it? No.
For good measure I've included what follows, which maybe also has a certain
interest. Mosenthal, even if a German-speaker who knows slang understands some-
thing else, without the tréma is the name of the author of a play whose original
German title Bloom is trying to remember, to re-translate. In fact, it's a woman's
name, a Jewish name which had not been kept in English. It's a curious thing—that
a melodrama whose German title was Deborah was translated into English under
the name Leah; and this is what Bloom is trying to recall. He's therefore trying
to translate back to the original title (which is a woman's name), and this takes
the form of the search. One can clearly observe the game of hide-and-seek between
the author's name and that of his creation at the level of art, which brings into
play at once being—note the insistence of is—and the problematic of sexuality, a
patronymic supplanting a maiden-name.
Here, the reader, whom of course nothing in Ulysses has escaped, says that
this reminds him of something else, which has a connection with Bloom himself.
I'll give you the first passage (I'm sorry to do this in little pieces, but I'm
simply following the steps I went through) and its context:
Mr Bloom stood at the corner, his eyes wandering over the multicoloured hoardings.
Cantrell and Cochrane's Ginger Ale (Aromatic). Clery's Summer Sale. No, he's
going on straight. [someone he's just been talking to, and who he thinks might be
observing him] Hello. Leah tonight: [the play in question] Mrs Bandmann Palmer.
Like to see her again in that. Hamlet she played last night. Male impersonator. [and
here begins a little passage on the problematic of the sexes. Male impersonator—an
actress who has taken the male persona or mask. But this could just as well apply

149
 to one of the plays Hamlet, as the other, Leah; this is what everything turns on].
Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed suicide. .. (U, 62).
So at one level there is the fact that the role of Hamlet was very often played
by women. And an Anglo-Saxon critic had taken it into his head to analyze Hamlet
precisely in terms of cross-dressing [travesti], by in a sense taking it seriously, and
saying: Ophelia committed suicide because she realized that Hamlet was in fact
a woman. I do not refer to this critique at random, to show my Shakespearean
and Joycean knowledge, but simply because its implications re-appear elsewhere in
Ulysses. 'Why Ophelia committed suicide'.' 6 What do we read next?
Poor papa! How in used to talk of Kate Bateman in that. Outside the Adelphi in
London waited all the afternoon to get in. Year before I was born that was: sixtyfive.
And Ristori in Vienna. What is this the right name is? By Mosenthal it is. Rachel
is it? No. The scene he was always talking about where the old blind Abraham
recognises the voice and puts his fingers on his face.
—Nathan's voice! His son's voice! I hear the voice of Nathan who left his father to
die of grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of his father and left the God
of his father.
Every word is so deep, Leopold.
Poor papa! Poor man! I'm glad I didn't go into the room to look at his face. That
day! 0, dear! 0, dear! Ffoo! Well, perhaps it was best for him (U,62)
In this passage, then, a whole series of questions are in play. Questions of
existence—of being and names, of existence and suicide; the question of the name
(which I am going to come back to), the name which in fact—as well as the name
of the father, of his father—is that of the central character in the play; and finally
the question of personating sex, the cause of per-sonation.
Behind the question of the name is the suicide of the father, another of whose
characteristics is precisely to have changed his name: we see this in another passage,
where it is presented in a manner which is itself curious.
In a pub, some regulars are talking about Bloom. 'He's a perverted jew' says
one of them, 'from a place in Hungary and it was he drew up all the plans according
to the Hungarian system [Sinn Fein's political plans] [......] He changed [his name]
by deedpoll, the father did'.17
It seems, then, that the father has changed his name, in a way which is rather
interesting: according to a legal formula, deed poll—deed, or act (in all senses of
the term); poll evokes or describes the act from the point of view of the document,
a document which is 'polled' (evenly cut). And this poll which describes what has
been cut in fact describes something beheaded, headless (a pollard is a tree which
has been 'decapitated' and has grown back): poii in fact means 'crown' 'top of)
head' The deed poll only consists of one section, which is why it is 'by decree',
16 Aubert contrasts Valery Larbaud's translation—Est-ce pour ça qu 'Ophélie s 'est suicidde ?-
with the original English text of Ulysses (1922)—Why Ophelia committed suicide?—to suggest
that semantic possibilities are erased in translation. Gabler's 1984 edition omits the final question-
mark (perhaps making Bloom's thought into a less curious, more melancholy reflection?).
' 7 cf. Ulysses, op. cit., p. 276. Aubert has 'polled'(or 'indented') the quotation from 'Cyclops'
somewhat; but see below.

150
and it is opposed to an indenture, an act divided in two—each part, precisely,
indented—to be entrusted to two parties.
This is how, Joyce tells us, the father changed his name. But which name did
he change?
—Isn't he a cousin of Bloom the dentist? says Jack Power.
—Not at all, says Martin. Only namesakes. His name was Virag, the father's name
that poisoned himself (U, 276).
There could be a play on the genitive and the name of the father here, which
would allow another reading—that it is the name which has poisoned itself...
Virag re-appears; he is invoked in several places in Ulysses. He re-appears in
Circe, first as a Virago, that is, the name which in the Vulgate, the translation
of the Bible by Saint Jerome, serves to designate the woman from Adam's point
of view. In Genesis, man is told to name woman: 'You will name her woman
(Virago)'; although she is a woman, she is a little bit of man (vir).
Having got thus far in my imaginings, groping around between the lines of
Ulysses, I would like to isolate, in amongst this interlacing, what appears as a gap
[trou]. It is tempting, for interpretation, to make use of a schema involving the
suicide, the name-changing and Bloom's refusal to see the face of his dead father.
It would be very apt for all this to re-appear in Circe, in hallucination. But even if
there is some truth in this, it is perhaps not sufficient to put the text to work, for
example, to account for the 'Poor papa! Poor man!' passage: in the first passage,
after 'Every word is so deep, Leopold', with the father's comments on the play, he
says 'Poor papa! Poor man!', which was perhaps not very kind concerning what the
father had said. 'I'm glad I didn't go into the room to look at his face. That day!
0, dear!... Well, perhaps it was for the best for him'. In short, there is a whole
range of things which must be accounted for, and above all, effects produced in the
dramatic redistribution which is Circe. For it holds together, it works, and things
take place right up alongside what looks like a gap. Joyce's handiwork consists in,
among other things, exactly this moving around of what looks like a gap, in order
to allow certain effects.
For instance, in the quotation I have given, the voice of the son is not men-
tioned, nor is the death of the father. But on the other hand an effect is produced
by this filial voice, displaced in answer—but a filial voice precisely bearing a cer-
tain savoir-faire about the signifier. This precaution, this talent for supposing, for
sous-posing [cf note 15], can be seen to propagate itself according to a logic which
is completely eloquent. I have mentioned the eloquence of Mosenthal, the rhetoric
of the periods: Mosenthal. All that's left of him.
In 'Circe', Rudolph's question is: Are you not my dear son Leopold who left
the house of his father and left the god of his fathers, Abraham and Jacob?—All
that's left of him, all that remains of him, all of him that's been abandoned—but
also 'everything on the left of him'. If one recalls what the Credo indicates about
the respective places of the Father and the Son, on high, this says lots about their
relationship. Everything that remains of him, a name, an author's name; everything
on his left, thus something which is not in any case a true son. Let us pause there...

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 What is certain is that this gives Bloom pleasure, and that this is understood.
And how can this be seen? Because the father is far from happy. The reply which
follows begins with:
Rudolph: (severely) One night they bring you home drunk etc: please, no out-
of-place humour, let's talk about your transgressions. Bloom is jubilant—he has
prudently said what he had to say, and he makes everyone happy.
But in this series of effects, some of which have just been listed, there is a
sort of cascade: another effect emerges, which is in a sense structural in relation
to the others, a sort of result of the effects which precede it. The interaction with
the father seems to slide into an engagement with the mother. This father who is
challenged in different ways leads to a mother on the side of the imaginary.
Rudolph, then, refers to the transgression of the son, who came home drunk,
having spent his money, and who also came back covered with mud. Nice spectacles
for your poor mother! It's not me, it's her, who's unhappy!
But the way this happens, how things are referred back to the mother through
the mud, is quite funny: those of you who have read the Portrait in English may
have noticed that mud is also a familiar form for mother, and which is associated
with a pantomime (F, 67). It's a little, lightweight playlet, of the epiphanic kind (I
use the term slightly provocatively); Joyce has placed, in the opening chapters of
the Portrait, a series of little playlets, where the child, Stephen, is finding his way
about Dublin, starting from a certain number of points—scenes, places, houses.
He is sitting in a house (the scene generally starts like that), on a chair, in the
kitchen of his aunt, who is reading the evening paper, and admiring the picture of
an actress, the beautiful Mabel Hunter.
A ringletted girl stood on tiptoe to peer at the picture and said softly:
—What is she in, mud?
—In a pantomime, love (F, 67)
Now, the passage in 'Circe' I was discussing a moment ago slides through the
mud, since this signifier returns three or four times in the passage, slides through the
mud to where the mother emerges: Nice spectacles for your mother, says Rudolph,
and Bloom says Mamma! because she suddenly begins to appear. (As soon as
certain words, certain signifiers are introduced in Circe, the object surfaces, so to
speak). And how does she appear? In pantomime dame's stringed mobcap, widow
Twankey 's crinoline and bustle, and following the pattern of English pantomime,
that is, a man disguised as a woman (the pantomime plays referred to are performed
particularly at Christmas, and imply an overturning of dress-codes, a generalized
cross-dressing: pantomime).
Feminine clothing, then. But there is another echo here, for from the beginning
of Ulysses the mother has been invoked in connection with pantomime. After
evoking his dead mother, Stephen says:
'Where now? Her secrets: old featherfans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk,
a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window
of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the pantomime of
Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he sang:

152
 I am the boy
That can enjoy
Invisibility.

Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed' (U, 8-9).

A fantasmatic ensemble appears, linked to the mother, via Stephen, with a

radical ambiguity: what was she laughing at? At old Royce singing, at what he
said, at his funny voice, God knows what else.
So this problematic mother is dressed exactly like the pantomime mother of
Aladin, Widow Twankey. Widow Twankey's outfit is that of Aladin's mother in
pantomime, a mother who clearly has no idea what her son has been doing, apart
from that if you rub the lamp the Genie inside speaks...
I'll stop on that point, to pass on to another aspect of the way the text works.
Ellen Bloom, who has just appeared, is not at all like the father, on the side
of the sages of Zion, but gives the impression rather of being on the side of the
Roman, Catholic and Apostolic religion, for what does she say when she sees him all
covered in mud? 0 blessed Redeemer, what have they done to him! ... Sacred Heart
of Mary, where were you at all at all?( U, 358). This is, besides, rather curious,
for one would expect it to be the Sacred Heart of Jesus—a way of indicating her
narcissistic relation to religion; she is clearly catholic in the particular nineteenth-
century manner, and this is an aspect which should be highlighted as soon as one
speaks of Joyce, even if one has to look at the minor texts, Stephen Hero, Dubliners.
I would like to show this first in connection with the epiphany. The term
'epiphany' refers to fairly diverse things. Joyce only defined it in one place, in
Stephen Hero. And what he said has certainly been cheerftilly distorted. Here is
the definition: 'By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether
in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself'.'8
The definition is polished, didactic and thomas-a quinasante. But it occurs in a text
which in two pages takes us from a dialogue with the mother, where she reproaches
Stephen for his unbelief, continually invoking 'the priests'. Stephen at once breaks
with her on this topic and in another sense skirts round the problem; his discourse
slides to the relation between women and priests, and then on to the beloved; and
suddenly he says that he is wandering the streets, and that a Dublin scene moves
him—'a trivial incident set him composing some ardent verses'. 19 Then nothing
more about the poem, but he reports the dialogue he has overheard, between a
young lady and a youth, and one of the rare words which appear is the word
chapel: apart from that there is practically nothing but points of suspension in the
dialogue.
This dialogue of nothing, then, on the one hand makes him write a poem, on
the other, is baptised 'epiphany', and given a learned definition in the lines which
follow. This is what he wanted to do, he adds—to record these scenes, these realist
playlets of such eloquence. There is thus a sort of doubling of experience (let's say,
to simplify, into a realist aspect and an aspect which is in some way 'poetic'), and a
' 8 Stephen Hero, op. cit., p. 216.
19Ibid.

153
 kind of liquidation or censure of the poetic, in the text of Stephen Hero. Now, the
title of the elided poem is 'The Villanelle of the Temptress', and it emerges precisely
from a discourse which involves the mother and her relation to the priests.
This relation which I've roughly defined as an imaginary relation to religion
appears in different guises in the Portrait of the Artist. For instance, in the sermons
on Hell, which are interminable (at once Kantian and very sadistic) and aim to
represent in detail the horrible torments of Hell, to give an idea in presentia of
Hell. Or, in another manner, in the figure of the confessor, who listens but also
answers. What does he say in answer? this is precisely the central question of
Stephen's Easter mass, which should precede the confession of his sins. But for
Joyce, this function is connected to that of the artist. Here I would point to two
texts, one at the beginning of Stephen Hero, where Stephen says that in writing his
poems he was able to fulfil the double function of confessor and confessing subject.
The other passage comes at the end of Portait of the Artist; it's the moment when,
mortified to see the beloved hold her ear up with a smile, to a handsome young
priest, he says that for his part he has given up the priesthood, that the matter
is settled, it's not for him. He adds something like: 'To think that women place
their trust in fellows like that, and tell them secrets in the shadows, while I...'
(P, 220-1). He wishes to intervene before women gave birth to another of their
race, thinking that what would take place, the effects of his words, would lead to
some improvement of what he considers a deplorable race. This bears a relation to
the famous uncreated conscience of my race spoken of on the last page: it passes
through the ear (the well-known conception through the ear...), which is found
elsewhere in 'Circe'-
LACAN: —and to which great importance was ascribed by Jones; Jones, Freud's
pupil.
—Another essential point about this imaginary dimension of religion is high-
lighted in the famous passage in Ulysses which opposes the problematic, trinitary
conception of theology by opposition to an 'Italian' madonisante conception, which
fills all gaps with an image of the Virgin Mary: in the end, he seems to say, the
catholic church didn't do badly, placing the incertitude of the void at the founda-
tion of everything. 20 It seems to me that the names of the father are in play on
multiple levels in the working of these passages.
But in 'Circe', as in the whole of Ulysses, things move around, artifice is
created, when the names of the father are caught up in a game of hide-and-seek; in
other words, that alongside what looks like a gap, we have the displacement of the
gap, the displacement of the name of the father.
We have already picked out in passing, from the disorder, Abraham, Jacob,
Virag, and Dedalus—and there is another one, which is quite funny. In a central
episode, 'Cyclops', we meet a certain J. J., whom, if one has a good memory, one
recalls having met in an earlier episode under the name J. J. O'MolIoy, that is,
'descendant of Molloy', J. J., son of Molloy.
20 Aubert paraphrases a passage in 'Scylla and Charybdis' (U,170) on the 'mystical estate' of
fatherhood as foundation of the church (thus 'founded, like the world......upon the void').

154
 His situation is rather curious: he is, in principle, a lawyer, but a lawyer
who is—I wouldn't say absolutely in decline—but well on the way to it. Practice
dwindling, we are told. 2 ' And his practice is on the wane because he gambles. In
some way gaming has replaced practice.
This could evidently be elaborated on. I would simply like to point to the
function of this perfectly false father whose initials are at once those of James
Joyce and John Joyce, his father. Moreover it is striking that what J. J. O'Molloy
talks about is other fathers. In a passage which links back to the riddle quoted
in the last seminar by Dr Lacan (the episode is 'Aeolus', which takes place in a
newspaper office), it is he who turns to Stephen to give him a nice bit of rhetoric,
which is also interesting. We have learnt that O'Molloy, after turning to gambling,
has done literary work for the newspapers. Note, by the way, that this brings
to mind 'The Dead', the last story in Dubliners, where the hero, Gabriel Conroy,
writes reports and other things for newspapers (this appears in a different manner
in Exiles). What sort of literature? Is it literature which remains, deserves to
survive? Gabriel asks himself that, and we will see he's not the only one.
So O'Molloy, J. J., tells us that he turns to Stephen, in the editorial office, and
offers him a beautiful specimen of legal eloquence.
J. J. O'Molloy turned to Stephen and said quietly and slowly:
—One of the most polished periods I think I ever listened to in my life fell from the
lips of Seymour Bushe. It was in that case of fratricide, the Childs murder case.
Bushe defended him.
And in the porches of mine ear did pour. (interpolation
from Hamlet]
By the way how did he find that out? He died in his sleep. Or the other story, beast [Stephen's
with two backs? thoughts]

—What was that? the professor asked. [one of the

headlines
ITAUA MAGISTRA ARTIUM dividing up the
newspaper office
episode]
—He spoke on the law of evidence, J. J. O'Molloy said, of Roman justice as contrasted
(the law of
with the earlier Mosaic code, the lex tahonis. and he cited the Moses of Michaelangelo bearing-witness,
in the vatican. not only
bearing witness
—Ha. before the law]
—A few wellchosen words, Lenehan prefaced. [
J. J. O.Molloy resumed, moulding his words:
—He said of it: that stony effigy in frozen music, horned and terrible, of the human
form divine, that eternal symbol of wisdom and of prophecy which, if aught that the
imagination or the hand of sculptor has wrought in marble of soultransfigured and
soultransfiguring deserves to live, deserves to live. (U, 114-5).
So O'Molloy starts by making himself an echo-chamber for legal knowledge,
setting out the laws relating to evidence (also bearing witness), then has Bushe
(bush) speak, making him bear rhetorical witness to art as the foundation of the
right to exist (deserves to live), and the foundation of the right to exist of the work
21 Ulysses,op. cit., p. 103

155
 of art. One sees the resonance this has for the literature of newspapers: art is the
legal basis of the bearer of the law, Moses, because it will remain, as the Vatican
Moses (which is the name we give it, 'the Vatican Moses'): which is not without
interest when one bears in mind what the Vatican represents in Ulysses...
And this deserves to live that is so insistent (rhetorical repetition) is marked,
countersigned by its effects on the period's addressee, Stephen; J. J. O'Molloy has
turned towards him, and this happens: 'Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of
language and gesture, blushed' (U, 115). Oddly enough, this blush of Stephen's is
one of a series across other texts of Joyce. I am thinking in particular of the passage
in the Portrait which may have struck you, when during a trip to Cork with his
father, Stephen visits a classroom in the medical school where his father studied
for a while. The father looks for his initials. Stephen clearly does not notice
that these are also his initials (Simon Dedalus, also S.D.). But what he comes
across is the word 'Foetus', and this has a tremendous effect on him. He blushes,
pales, etc. Again, one finds in relation to the initials (but a different relation)
the 'right to exist'. I would add that this series could include another passage,
from Dubliners—again in the story I mentioned a moment ago, 'The Dead' (the
title does not necessarily indicate the plural). Gabriel Conroy is to make a speech,
the traditional speech of the family reunion; he is always around to write things
for the newspaper or make little speeches like this. And at table they have just
been discussing artists whose names have been forgotten, and those who have left
nothing but a name which is fraught with difficulties.'His name, said Aunt Kate,
was Parkinson. I heard him when he was in his prime and I think he had then
the purest tenor voice that was ever put into a man's throat'. 22 And this is what
Gabriel talks about in his speech, finishing one of his sentences on two things: an
echo of a song entitled Love 's old sweet song, which ends by evoking a lost paradise;
and a quotation of Milton (but not from Paradise Lost), which says more or less
this: 'I would like to be able to leave to future centuries an oeuvre which they will
not willingly let die'. 23 These questions, then—of the right to existence, of the
right to creation, of validity and also of certainty—are knotted together in Joyce's
discourse.
One more thing about the bush. The eloquent Bushe who talks of Moses, also
talks of a Holy Bush, the one in the Bible; God says to Moses that the ground
he walks on before the Burning Bush is Holy, a Holy Bush which shows itself to
have a certain relation to the fox. For when J. J. O'Molloy re-appears in Circe,
he 'assumes the ... foxy moustache and proboscidal eloquence of Seymour Bushe'
(ibid, p. 379); a fox is seen more than once in the Portrait: it appears there, of
course, because 'Fox' is one of the pseudonyms of Parnell, linked to his faults. But
it is also, very specifically, a kind of signifier of dissimulation: He was not foxing,
says young Stephen when he is in the infirmary and he's afraid of being accused
of skiving off. And then, a little later, when he comes to renounce holy orders,
he imagines a visiting card with 'The Reverend Stephen Dedalus,S.J.', and tries
to picture the face which would be on it—and one of the things he calls to mind
22 Dubliners, op. cit., p. 174
23 Not quite what Gabriel says; but see ibid, p. 177.

156
is, ah yes, the face of a Jesuit, called by some Lantern Jaws, and by others Foxy
Campbell.
There is thus a bush-fox series. But there is also an effect of wordplay which
functions around Molloy, Molly, and which links up with holy. We have holly, holy,
Molly, Molloy—and another word which is not present in Ulysses, but which Joyce
mentions; I rather take this from his pocket, or rather, from a letter—but he did,
after all, write his letters. There, he gives us the name of something supposed
to play a role in 'Circe', namely a plant, a kind of garlic, which Hermes gave
to Ulysses so that he could escape from Circe's clutches; and its name is moly.
Strangely enough, the only difference between the two—between moly and Molly—
is phonetic. Molly is 'pronounced' in Ulysses with a simple vowel, and moly with
a diphthong, or a 'ditongue', as it was once written, and the ditongue (di-tongue?)
produces consonance; at the moment the ditongue becomes a simple vowel, there
is a doubling of the consonant, producing double consonance, which appears in
Ulysses in the form of Molly...
About moly he says some curious things. Dr Lacan will analyse one of them,
I think; I will be content to point to the other. It is, he says, 'the gift of Hermes,
god of public highways, and its invisible influence (prayer, chance, agility, presence
of mind, power of recovery) saves you if an accident happens'. So it's something
which confirms the prudent role of Bloom. He is the Prudent Member. He answers
quite well to the definition one finds in a note in Lalande (which is quite deceptive
concerning prudence, doubtless because it is Saint Thomas who speaks of it). A
little note, without an author's name, says: 'Prudence: aptitude in choosing the
means to obtain the greatest well-being for the self'. And this is how one gets by,
Bloom seems to say.
The second thing I would like to stress is the continual question of certainty,
and the way in which it can be established.
Certainty re-appears concerning precisely the famous Virag, about whom I
have more to say ... I broke off in the famous quotation where they were talking
about, where O'Molloy was holding forth about Virag. 24 Page 275 in Ulysses.
His name was Virag, the father's name that poisoned himself. He changed it by
deedpoll, the father did.
—That's the new Messiah for Ireland! says the citizen. Island of saints and sages!
—Well, they're still waiting for their redeemer, says Martin. For that matter so are
we.
—Yes, says J. J., and every male that's born they think it may be their Messiah.
And every jew is in a tall state of excitement, I believe, till he knows if he's a father
or a mother (U, 275-6).

I would simply highlight what appears, perhaps, beyond the humour, which is
one of the effects of the 'Cyclops' passage. Bar-room humour, but which is non-
etheless humorous. This humour could, besides, be linked up with other problems
around anti-semitism in Joyce, but I do not have time to go into this here. The
imaginary identification raises another question: the problematic of the Messiah,
24 Martin Cunningham, not J. J. O'Molloy, is telling the company about Bloom's father.

157
and beyond it, that of succession. The problem of the king's word as the foundation
of legitimacy, the word which even if the mother's belly has lied, allows things to
be set right by legitimation. Legitimation, in other words the possibility of bearing
the mark of the king, the crown, stephanos; or again, of bearing that other mark
which appears in Circe, with Virag, the grandfather who falls down the chimney,
labelled basilicogrammate, with the king's gramme. The problematic of legitimacy
which shows itself to be that of legitimation takes a form here, perhaps, in the
imaginary dimension, and its recuperation.
As for the use Joyce makes of certainty, it seems to me that he brings it into
play in relation to effects of voice. Even if what they say is disputed, spoken words,
the words of a father, have effects, it seems to be suggested, in 'personation', in what
is behind personation, perhaps in phonetics, and for instance in whatever 'deserves
to live', in melody. Perhaps due precisely to this something which has effects on
the mother, through melody. The phantasmal mirth of the mother, evoked at the
beginning of Ulysses (U, 9), specifically concerns the pantomime, and old Royce
(Roi-Joyce) who sang in it. Something occurs through melody; and not only melody
as sentimentality. Of course, Irish culture at the turn of the century was filled with
melodies, above all those of Thomas Moore, which Joyce calls Moore's maladies in
Finnegans Wake. This was where Joyce's father, John Joyce, excelled. And for his
son, something different took place, was posed, in this art of the voice, of phonetics.
In brief, if certainty about what he makes is always related to the mirror, to
effects of mirroring which must be listed, it also has to do with the voice-effects
of the signifier. I would recall 'The Dead', with which Joyce tied up Dubliners,
at a crucial moment in his poetic production, a moment when things, in a way,
came unblocked; his dominant idea for 'The Dead' came to him when his brother
had spoken to him of a particular interpretation of one of Moore's melodies, about
ghosts and their dialogue with the living. Stanislaus had said to him: the man who
sang that sang it in an interesting way, in a way which really said something. And
one of the story's centres is the moment when the hero's wife is rooted to the spot,
frozen like the other Moses, as she hears a man's hoarse voice singing a melody.25
And what effect does this have on the hero? It symbolizes a woman, he says. He
sees her at this moment, and asks himself: 'what is a woman standing on the stairs
in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of'. He describes her in vaguely
realist terms, but at the same time says: what does that symbolise? It symbolises
a certain way of listening, amongst other things.
This certainty, and the problems of certainty in the way its foundation related
to the effects of voice on the signifier, Joyce wished to codify into rules in an
aesthetic science. But fairly quickly, he realized that it was not all that linked
to science, and that it was, precisely, a savoir-faire linked to a practice of the
signifier. What I find comes to mind very strongly here—across and beyond what
Aristotle said about praxis in the Poetics, which Joyce found so striking—is Lacan's
definition: 'A concerted action by man which puts into effect the treatment of the
real by the symbolic'. This question of action [la mesure] can be clearly seen at
work in 'Circe', at the moment when Bloom is seen entering the brothel by Stephen,
25 Dubliners, op. cit., p. 183

158
as he turns round (U, 353); and as if by chance there is also a quotation from the
Apocalyose. No doubt it would be best for me to stop before my discourse becomes
too apocalyptic...

*
LACAN—I would like to say a word in conclusion. I thank Jacques Aubert for
getting his feet wet, for it is clear that, to make use of the term used by the author of
Surface and Symbol to pin down Joyce's art, it is a matter of inconceivably private
jokes. In the same text there appears a word I had to look up in the dictionary,
eftsooneries (I don't know if the word is common); eftsooneries are things put off
for a while. That's what it all comes down to; not only are things put off for a
while, but the effect they have is most often disconcerting.
Obviously, all this does not go without founding something to which I am
trying to give a consistence in the knot. What is this sliding of Joyce's, which
I have realized I was referring to in my seminar Encore? Dumbstruck, I asked
Jacques Aubert if that was why he'd asked me to speak about Joyce; he told me
that at that point the seminar Encore had not yet been published, so that it cannot
be this which led him to offer me this hole which I won't risk myself in, no doubt
by some prudence such as he has defined it; but the hole of the knot nonetheless
begs the question.
I have of course realized that the knot rightly termed Borromean, which is
actually a chain rather than a knot, cannot be sketched in its doubleness, I mean
there are not two, unless the circles, the loops of thread, are coloured; but I owe
this comment to Soury and Thomé—that if they aren't coloured, in other words if
nothing distinguishes one loop from another, there is no distinction either between
the knots. You will say that in the diagram [mise a plat] there is one which turns
to the right, and another to the left; but that's exactly what constitutes the prob-
lematization of the diagram. The diagram implies a specified point of view, and
it is doubtless not an accident that the notions of left and right can in no way be
translated into the symbolic.
The knot only comes into existence beyond the triple relation. How is it that
this triple relation has such a privileged position? It is exactly there that I would
like to push myself to resolve the question.
There is something there which should relate to Jacques Aubert's isolation of
phonetic effects, precisely in the way they support the signifier. But this is the sharp
edge on which I am left in suspense, namely the point at which signification, in so
far as it is written, is distinct from simple effects of phonetics, is what transmits
the proper function of the name; and we will start with the proper name, I hope,
next time we meet.

159
6) 10th February 1976: The entanglements of truth [Les embrouilles du vrai]

It is not going well, and I'll tell you why. I spend my time trying to soak up the
enormous literature—for all Joyce's loathing of this term, it's nevertheless what he
brought about, and willingly so—the enormous blather around his work.
How does this come about? Jacques Aubert, who is down there in the front
row, from time to time sends me from Lyons a list of supplementary authors to
read. He is not innocent in this matter (but who is innocent?), having himself
produced things on Joyce. Why, then, am I engaged in this work of soaking-up?
Because I began it, for sure. But I am trying, as one does for all reflection, to ask
myself why I began.
The question is worth asking—at what point is one mad? Was Joyce mad?
Not being able to give an answer today does not prevent me from beginning to
orient myself according to the distinction I have proposed to you, between the true
and the real. In Freud—it is clear this is how he organised things—the true is what
gives pleasure, and this is just what distinguishes it from the real, which does not
necessarily give pleasure.
This is obviously a point where I am twisting something in Freud. I make the
observation that enjoyment [jouissancej is the real. This leads me into tremendous
difficulties. Why? Firstly, because jouissance which is real comprises masochism.
Masochism is the major form of enjoyment given by the real. Freud discovered this,
he did not immediately expect it. Once you have entered it, you are dragged into
this route.
For my part, I began by writing Ecrits inspires, which is why I should not be
too astonished to find myself confronting Joyce, and this is why I dare to ask the
question—was Joyce mad? What was it that inspired his writings?
Joyce left an enormous quantity of notes, scribblings, scribbledehobble—this is
the title given to one of Joyce's manuscripts 26 , published by a certain Connolly,
whom I knew once (is he still alive?).
It is no accident that he left his notes and drafts in this state, scribbled, he
had to watch over them, and even encouraged those known as researchers to look
through them. He wrote a vast number of letters. There are three great thick
volumes. Amongst these letters, there are some verging on the unpublishable-
which as you know, does not in the end stop someone publishing them. The priceless
Richard Ellmann has brought out a last edition, Selected Letters 27 , containing a
certain number of letters which had been thought unpublishable in the first volume.
I confess, I can't find my way round this jumble. I get hold of a few little
threads of course. I get a certain idea of his affair with Nora, based on my practice,
I mean on the confidences I receive, since I have dealings with people for whom I
arrange things so that speaking the truth gives them pleasure. Everyone says—well,
everyone!—Freud says that if I can do this, it is because they love me, and they
love me thanks to what I have tried to pinpoint as the transference, that is, that
they think I know. It is obvious that I don't know everything, and in particular, I
26 Connolly, Thomas E., ed., James Joyce's Scribbledehobble: The Ur- Workbook for 'Finnegans
Wake', Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961.
27 Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed., Richard Ellmann, op. cit.

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don't know, when I read Joyce—for that's what's frightful, I am reduced to having
to read him!—what he believed about himself. It is absolutely sure that I haven't
analysed him—and I regret it. But anyway, he was clearly not very disposed to it.
The names Tweedledum and Tweedledee, came naturally to his pen to designate
Freud and Jung respectively—which does not show that he was inclined to analysis.
Read, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the chat he reports he has
with a certain Cranly, his friend. He does not dare to state what it is he is entering
into. Cranly presses him, harasses him, pesters him, to know if he will draw any
conclusion from the fact that he says he has lost his faith, the faith in the teachings
of the church which have been his education. It is clear that he does not dare to
free himself from those teachings, because they are quite simply the armature of his
thought. He plainly will not take the step of affirming that he no longer believes,
he recoils from the cascade of consequences which would follow the act of rejecting
the whole huge apparatus which remains his support. Cranly invokes him, urges
him to take the step, and Stephen does not take it.
The question is the following: he writes that, and what he writes is the con-
sequence of what he is—but to what point does this go? How far did this go,
whose tricks—silence, exile and cunning—he gives, a means of navigation. I put
the question to Jacques Aubert—is there not some trace in his writings of his mak-
ing himself what he calls in his language a redeemer? Does he go so far as to
substitute himself for what he manifestly has faith in—this redeemer, the true re-
deemer whom the priests tell him about in their twaddle (which in my opinion is
what it is). Did he think he was the redeemer? I don't see why I shouldn't ask
Jacques Aubert, his feeling for these things is as good as mine, since we're reduced
to feeling [sentiment]—we are because Joyce has not spoken to us, he has written,
and when one writes one can access the real, but never the true. Well, Jacques
Aubert?
AUBERT—There are traces, yes.
LAcAN—That's why I'm asking the question, because there are traces.
AUBERT—In Stephen Hero, for instance, there are very clear traces of that.
LACAN—The annoying thing is, it's never clear. In the Portrait of the Artist,
it is not the Redeemer, but God himself, who is artificer, artist.
AUBERT—If I remember correctly, the passages in which he describes the ap-
peal of a false Christ, are equally those where he speaks of enigma of manner. This
seems to correspond to the well—known period when he was fascinated by Francis-
canism, in its two aspects, one concerning the imitation of Christ (we are all near
to the Son, we imitate him) and the other poetry, the Little Flowers. And one of
the texts which he looks through in Stephen Hero is not a theological, but a poetic
text, by Jacopone da Todi.
LACAN—YeS, exactly. But how can the extent of his belief be determined?
What kind of physics should be used? This is where I place my hope in my knots,
with which I operate, for lack of any other recourse. I didn't get there straight
away, but they provide me with things—things which tie things up for me, I should
certainly say.
Knots have a dynamics, which has no use me sert a rien], but rather binds
together [serre]. What can this bind together? Something one supposes to be stuck

161
in these knots. Only, if one thinks that these knots are all that is real, how can
there be space for something to be bound in? That there is, is certainly supposed
by the fact that I place a point there, and it is not unthinkable to see the reduced
notation of a cord, passing in there and out the other side.
Topology is based on this: that at the very least, without counting whatever
else there is, there is the torus. My good friends Soury and Thomé have resolved
the relations of the Borromean knot S and the torus. The infinite line, if made to
pass through here, makes the false hole into a true hole, in other words something
representable in a diagram.
In fact, the diagram still poses a question. In what way is it appropriate?
All we can say is that it is demanded by knots, as an artifice of representation,
which is only a perspective, since we must supplement this supposed continuity
at the moment when the infinite line is thought to emerge from the hole. What
is the function of this hole? That of a ring. But a ring is not, like the line of a
circle, a pure abstraction. We must give a body to the circle, in other words give
it consistence, it must be imagined as having some kind of physical support, for it
to become thinkable. Effectively, nothing thinks but the body.
Let us return now to the path of Joyce.
What is Joyce's relation to Nora? Oddly enough, I'd say it is a sexual relation,
even though I say there's no such thing. But it's a funny kind of sexual relation.
Something one seldom thinks of is to turn the left-hand glove inside out, and
put it on the right hand. This can be found lying around in Kant. But anyway,
who reads Kant? It is very pertinent in Kant, but there is one thing he didn't think
of, perhaps because in his day gloves didn't have buttons, which is that once the
glove is inside out, the button is on the inside. Apart from this, the comparison
would be completely satisfying. Well then, Joyce's inside-out glove is Nora—that
is his way of thinking that she fits him like a glove.
For Joyce, there is only one woman, she is always modelled the same, and he
only puts on his glove with the most intense revulsion. It is palpably only with
the greatest of depreciations that he makes Nora into a chosen woman. Not only
must she fit him like a glove, but she must be tight as a glove. She has absolutely
no use. And when they are in Trieste it even gets to a point where every time she
drops a sprog—I have to use these terms—there is a scene. It had rio place in the
programme. Things between Jim (as he is called when one writes about him in a
matey way, because his wife wrote to him under this name) and Nora start going
badly as soon as there is a kid. Each time, there is a scene.
The button may well have something to do with the name of an organ. The
clitoris is certainly the dark point in this business, metaphorical or not. This has,
besides, some echoes in the behaviour which is not observed enough of what is
known as a woman. It is very curious that a woman is so interested in, precisely,
dark points. The first thing she does to her boy is to take the dark bits off him—it's
a metaphoric expression of her wish that her own dark point should not take up so
much space. It's always the button of the inside-out glove. There are women who
sometimes have to go in for de-lousing, like monkeys, but one shouldn't muddle
things up—squidging a bug and extracting a dark point are not the same thing.

162
 Let's carry on with our journey. Imagining oneself to be the redeemer, at any
rate in our tradition, is the prototype of what I write as père-version. 28 It is to the
extent to which there is a relation of the son to the father, and since a long time
ago, that the barmy idea of the redeemer has emerged.
Freud tried to free himself from this sadomasochism, the only point where there
is a supposed relation between sadism and masochism—sadism is for the father,
masochism for the son—although these terms have strictly no relation between each
other. To imagine that sadomasochism 'is explained by a polarity, one must really
think an infinite line penetrates the torus, and believe in active and passive. Freud
clearly saw something which is much more ancient than this Christian mythology,
castration. The phallus is passed on from father to son, and it comprises something
which nullifies the father's phallus, before the son has the right to carry it. It is
essentially this symbolic transmission which is referred to in the idea of castration.
This is what has led me to pose the question of the relations between the
symbolic and the real. These are highly ambiguous, at least in Freud. And this is
where the question of the critique of the true is raised. What is the true, if not the
true real? And how can one distinguish—if not by using some metaphysical term,
Heidegger's Echt—the true from the false real? For Echt is after all on the side of
the real. There, Heidegger's metaphysics comes to a stop—in this little bit about
Echt he confesses, if I can put it thus, his defeat.
The real is situated in the entanglements of the true, and this is what led me
to the idea of the knot; which results from this—the true is interpenetrated, due to
the fact that its use creates meaning out of everything; and this because it slides,
it is sucked up by the image of the bodily hole which emits it, namely the sucking
mouth.
There is a dynamics of the gaze which is centrifugal, that is, which starts from
the seeing eye, but also a dynamics of the blind spot—it starts from the moment of
seeing, and takes it as a support. In fact, the eye sees instantaneously—this is what
is called intuition, which redoubles what is termed space in the image. There is
no real space. It is a purely verbal construction, which has been spelt out in three
dimensions according to the so-called laws of geometry, which are those of the ball
or the balloon imagined in kinaesthetics, in other words oral-anally.
The object I have termed a is in fact one and the same object. I have given it
back the name object because it is ob, an obstacle to the expansion of the concentric,
that is, engulfing, imaginary. Conceivable means can be grasped in the hand—it is
the notion of Begriff —like a weapon. And, to invoke some Germans who weren't
stupid, this weapon, far from being an extension of the arm, is from the beginning
a weapon to be thrown. We didn't wait for bullets to throw the boomerang.
What appears from all this is that, in sum, all that subsists in the sexual
relation is the geometry to which what we said about the glove made reference.
This is all that the human species has left to support this relation, and is why
it is from the beginning involved in the business of inflating [soufflure, lit. 'blowing
up', (e.g. balloons)], in which it has made the solid more or less fit. Nevertheless,
we should differentiate between the outline of this solid and the solid itself. Now,
28 Lacan's pun makes perversion into a 'turning to the father'.

163
 what has the most consistence in this inflated, concentric sphere, is the cord—the
cord which makes a circle, which turns round into a loop, unique in that it is part
of the diagram.
What proves, after all, that the spiral is not more real than the ring? In which
case nothing indicates that to join itself up, it has to make a knot, if it is not the
falsely named Borromean knot, that is, a chain-knot [chamnoe'ud] which naturally
produces the trefoil knot, which derives from the splices of the noeud bo.
What is no less striking is that when it is reversed like this (reference to figure),
it does not produce a trefoil knot.
It was immediately shrewdly observed that if you change something here in
the passage underneath on this side of the knot, the entire knot is undone.
The question I raise at the end of this little chat, is about whether or not Joyce
was mad. Why should he not have been? It's not a privilege. In most people, the
symbolic, the imaginary and the real are entangled to the point where they are
continuous, one to another, if it is true that there is no procedure to distinguish
them in the so-called Borromean knot—for the Borromean knot is not a knot, it is
a chain. Each of its loops is in continuity with the next in a non-differentiated way,
and at the same time this is not a privilege only available to the mad.
This, purely and simply a ring, when folded produces this 8. We can provide a
remedy for this schema by adding a loop to it, thanks to which the trefoil knot will
not come unravelled. Does the case of Joyce not amount to a way of making up
for this unknotting? Is Joyce's desire to be an artist who would occupy everyone,
or anyway as many people as possible, not an exact compensation for the fact that
his father had never been a father for him?
Not only did the latter teach him nothing, but he neglected just about every-
thing, except for falling back on the good Jesuit fathers, the diplomatic church—
the word diplomatic is from the text of Stephen Hero, but in the Portrait of the
Artist too, the father speaks of the church as a very good institution, and the word
diplomatic is likewise foregrounded.
Was it not in compensation for this paternal abdication, this Verwefung in fact,
that Joyce felt himself imperiously called—this is the very word, resulting from a
mass of things in his text—to valorize his proper name at the father's expense?
It was this name which he wished to be paid homage, the homage he had himself
refused to pay to anyone. The proper name makes every effort here to be greater
than the master-signifier.
A fiction which has been spread forever through history is that this subject
had two names which were proper to him. That Joyce was called James too, is
only followed on by the use of the nickname Dedalus. That in this way they can be
heaped up in piles leads to only one conclusion—bringing the proper name back to
the status of the common noun [nom commum].
That's where I've got to at this point. You must have had your fill [votre
claquel even your jaclaque, since I would also add an han!29 which would express
my relief at having got through this lot today. Thus, I reduce my proper name to
the commonest noun.

29 Joking about the audience having 'had it up to here', vous devez en avoir votre claque, Lacan
invents another pun on his name, by adding a han.

164
7) 17th February 1976: Imposed words

I had put some hope—don't think this is some coquetterie or titillation—in the fact
that it was the holidays. Lots of people go away. At least in my clientele, this is
striking. But not here. I see the doors are still bursting as ever, despite my hopes
for a smaller audience, in return for which I was hoping to become confidential, to
speak in a slightly more intimate manner. All the same, it would be nice if I could
get some response, some collaboration, some interest.
But it seems to me difficult to take an interest in what is becoming a (re)search
[recherchel. I mean that I am beginning to do what the word recherche implies—to
turn round and round. At one time, when I was a bit strident, I used to say, like
Picasso, I don't search, I find. Nowadays I have more trouble clearing my path.
The Borromean knot is no such thing; it is contradicted by its name, which like
all names reflects a meaning; its meaning allows the location of meaning somewhere
within the Borromean chain.
If we term this element of the chain the imaginary, this the real and that one
the symbolic, meaning will be there (reference to figure). We can have no hope of
placing it anywhere else, because every thought we have is imagined, in the end.
Only we don't think without words, contrary to what has been advanced by certain
psychologists, those of the school of Wurzburg.
Last time, I remarked that a single fault anywhere in the triple knot was
enough to reduce it to a simple ring. This does not happen automatically. For
instance, take the quintuple knot. As there is a well-known quadruple knot known
as Listing's knot, I've crazily named this one: Lacan's knot. If you make a mistake
at either of these two points, the whole thing comes apart and one is left with a
ring, as in the case of the triple knot. If, on the other hand, you go wrong at one
of these three points, it remains a knot, a triple knot. So it does not follow, then,
that an error at one point in a knot automatically dissolves the knot.
What I have defined for the first time as a sinthome is what allows the symbolic,
the imaginary and the real to be held together, although no one is any longer linked
to another, due to two faults. This does not make a triple knot, but it looks like
one.
What I proposed very gently last time was that Joyce has a symptom whose
origin is this: that his father was lacking, radically lacking—he speaks of nothing
but this. I centred things around the proper name, and in my opinion it was by
wanting to make a name for himself that Joyce compensated for the lacking father.
I said this, because I was unable to say better, and I will try to articulate it in a
clearer fashion. At any rate, Joyce's art is so particular that the term sinthome is
very fitting for it.
It happens that last Friday, at my presentation of what is generally known as
a 'case', I examined a case (of madness, certainly) which began with the sinthome
paroles imposées ['imposed words']. This, at least, was the articulation given by the
patient himself, and it seems to me the most sensible kind of articulation I could
describe as Lacanian. How is it that we do not all feel that the words on which we
are dependant are, in a sense, imposed on us? It's true that a so-called 'sick' man
sometimes sees more than what we call a normal person. Language [la parole] is

165
a parasite; it is a veneer; it is the form of cancer which afflicts the human being.
Why does the so-called normal man not notice this? There are some who go as far
as feeling it, and Joyce gives us a taste of it.
Last time, I didn't mention his daughter Lucia (he gave his children Italian
names), with the aim of not getting into storytelling. Well, she's still alive—in
England, in a hospital, because she is what is usually termed a schizophrenic.
The case I was presenting had suffered a deterioration. Having had the ex-
perience, which for my part I think snsible, of words being imposed on him, he
also had the feeling that he was affected by what he called telepathy—by which
he meant, not that he was aware of what others were thinking, but that every-
body else was aware of his thoughts, and in particular his reflections concerning
the above-mentioned imposed words.
For instance, he heard sale ass assinat politique ['dirty political assassination']
which he made the equivalent of sale assistanat politique ['dirty political assistant-
ship'. The signifier can be clearly seen reduced here to what it is—equivocation,
a twisting of speech. But in response to sale assistanat or sale assassinat, he said
something to himself which started with a 'but...', and which were his thoughts on
this subject. And what filled him with panic was the thought that any reflection he
made in addition to what he thought of as imposed words, was known by everybody
else.
He was, then, as he put it, a telepathic emitter, in other words he no longer
had any secrets, and this was what had led him to attempt to end it all, which was
another reason for him being there, and for my having to be concerned with him.
My reason for speaking to you today about Joyce's daughter Lucia is that
Joyce, who fiercely defended the daughter, labelled schizophrenic, against the con-
trol of the doctors, had only one thing to say about her: my daughter is telepathic.
In the letters he writes about this, he states that she is far more intelligent than
everyone else, that she informs him in a way that is miraculous—this is the word
he implies—about everything that happens to a certain number of people, and that
these people have no secrets from her. It's very striking. Not that I think that
Lucia was in reality telepathic; but Joyce attributes this quality to her on the basis
of certain signs, declarations which he understands in a special way. To defend his
daughter, he attributes to her something which is an extension of what I will call,
for the moment, his own symptom—namely that something was imposed on him
at the locus of speech [a l'endroit de la parole].
In fact, in the continuing progress of his art—namely, that speech [parole]
which comes to be written, to be broken, dislocated, so that in the end to read
him seems an encounter with a continuing progress, from his first efforts in the
critical essays, then in the Portrait of the Artist and in Ulysses, concluding with
Finnegans Wake—it is hard not to see that a certain relation to language [la parole]
is increasingly imposed on him, to the point where he ends up breaking or dissolving
language itself, by decomposing it, going beyond phonetic identity.
Doubtless there is a reflection here concerning writing. It is through the inter-
mediary of writing that language [la parole] breaks up at the moment of imposing
itself as such, in a deformation which is always ambiguous—is it a matter of break-

166
ing free from the verbal parasite [parasite parolier], or, rather, of being invaded by
its phonemic qualities, by the polyphony of language [la parole]?
At all events, the fact that Joyce declares Lucia to be telepathic seems to me,
because of this patient whose case I considered, certainly indicative of something
Joyce bears witness to at the same moment: the absence [carence] of the father.
My supposition is that what I am supporting with the sinthome—which is
shown here as a loop of string—is produced at the very place where an error occurs
in the knot's layout.
Now, the slip [lapsus] is certainly the foundation, in part, of the notion of the
unconscious. The joke is to be put under the same heading—it is not unthinkable
that it derives from a slip. This is at least how Freud himself constructs it, as a
short-circuit, an economy in relation to pleasure, to satisfaction.
So the sinthome is situated at the place where the knot slips, where there is a
lapsus of the knot.
A knot is something which fails. Likewise, it is due to the consistence of the
unconscious that there are heaps of failures. But is error [la faute], which is made
into sin by the conscience, of the order of a lapsus? The word's ambiguity allows
the passage from one meaning to the other. This original sin which Joyce makes so
much of—does it contain something of the lapsus?
This is to conjure up a whole imbroglio. But we are caught up in it, in the
knot, and by the same token in an entanglement [embrouille]. The lapsus occurs
at a single point; but its consequences can be seen at two other points. There is
thus an ambiguity concerning the way to correct it. What is left of the triple knot's
basic structure differs, according to whether the sinthome is positioned where the
lapsus occurs, or at the other two points in the knot.
What is extraordinary is that things have something in common in the way
they form knots, which is shown here by a certain direction or orientation—let's
say by the fact that compensation turns to the right. But it remains that the result
of compensation with the sinthome is different from what happens here and there
(reference to figure) (...).
The red 8 with the green ring is strictly equivalent to its inverse. Take one, and
you will easily get the other form. There is thus a strict equivalence. Now, after
the path I've opened about the sexual relation, it is not hard to suggest that when
there is equivalence, there is no relation. If we uphold the present equivalence—the
fact that in both sexes there has been a failure, a failure of the knot—the result
is that the two sexes are equivalent. Nevertheless, if the error is put right at the
place where it occurred, the two sexes (here symbolised by two colours) are no
longer equivalent. For if here you see what corresponds to what I have just termed
equivalence, what then corresponds is this (reference to figure), which is far from
being equivalent.
If one colour here can be replaced by the other there—there can be no equival-
ence. The green cord will never be able to cross the outer band of the red double
8.
At the level of the sinthome there is thus no equivalence in the relations between
green and red; there is no sexual equivalence—in other words there is a relation.
Effectively, if we say that non-relation is a function of equivalence, it is to the extent

167
that there is no equivalence that the relation is structured. There is no relation
except where there is .sinthome, It is the sinthorne which supports the other sex.
I would go so far as to say that the sinthome is the sex which I don't belong to,
that is, a woman. A woman is a sinthome for every man. Another name must
be found for whatever man is for a woman, as the sinthome is characterised by
non-equivalence. Man is anything you like for a woman, an affliction worse than a
sinthome, a devastation even.
That there should be no equivalence is the only basis for what is known as
the sexual relation in the human speaking-being [parlêtre]. Is this not what we see
demonstrated by what is termed clinical work, that is, in bed? When we see human
beings in bed, and not only in hospital beds, it is there, anyway, that we can get
an idea about this oft-mentioned relation.
Everything I hear on another bed, the famous couch where people tell me all
about it, shows that there is a slender link, to be defined, between the sinthome
and the real of the unconscious—if the unconscious is indeed real.
How can we know if the unconscious is real or imaginary? It takes part in an
ambiguity between the two. But thanks to Freud, we are involved in it, and this on
the basis of sinthome. Henceforth, we have to do with the sinthome in the sexual
relation, which Freud held to be natural (which is meaningless).

168
8) 16th March 1976

My only excuse—the truth is, I need an excuse, at least in my own eyes—my only
excuse for telling you something today is that it is going to be meaningful. In
exchange for this I will not achieve what I want.
What I want is to give you a bit of real [un bout de reel]. I come down to think-
ing that something meaningful could function provisionally. But this provisionality
is fragile. I mean that I'm not sure how Jong it will be able to function.
These days, I'm very preoccupied with Joyce. Joyce is stimulating. This
is what is suggested by him—but it remains only a suggestion, an easy way of
presenting him; in exchange for which, and this is certainly his importance, everyone
breaks a tooth there—even my friend Jacques Aubert, who in this is one of the most
distinguished, and before whom I feel unworthy.
Jacques Aubert cannot—no more than anyone else, no more than a certain
Adams, who has produced masterpieces in this genre—manage an easy way of
presenting him. I am going to show you what this is linked to, perhaps, in a
moment.
I, too, have dreamt of this easy way of presenting him. I dreamt about it
last night. Obviously [evidemment]—evidernent as one says30—you are my public,
but I'm not an actor. What I told you about was the way in which (not being
an actor—I'd call it a pen-pusher [scribouillard], rather) I judged characters other
than my own, in which obviously I departed from my own. Or rather, I had no role.
It was something in the genre of the psychodrama—which is an interpretation.
That Joyce caused me to dream of functioning in this way must have a value.
A value which is moreover not easy to define, since anyone can be subject to this
suggestion, that there should be a Joyce who can be managed. The suggestion is
based on the fact that psychoanalysis exists, and many folk go charging off down
that path. But it is not, all the same, because I am a psychoanalyst, and by that
token too interested, that I must refuse to envisage this today.
There is an objectivity about this. Joyce is an affreud. And he is an ajoyce.31
All objects—except the object I term a, which is an absolute—are linked to a
relation. The tedious thing is, there is language, and relations are expressed there
by epithets. Epithets force one to 'yes or no'. A certain Charles Sanders Pierce has
based his logic on this, which because of the emphasis he placed on the relation,
led him to a trinitary logic.
It is absolutely the same path that I follow, except that I call the things in
question by their names—symbolic, imaginary and real, in the right order. For to
be forced to 'yes or no' is to be forced to the couple; there is a relation between
language and sex—a relation which is certainly not yet completely defined, but
which I have, so to speak, broached.
There, you see that! I realize that by using the word broach I have used a
metaphor—and what does it mean, this metaphor? I can speak of metaphors in a
30 Lacan puns on évidement, 'scooping-out', 'hollowing-out'.
31 Tri-lingual punning: affreux in French means 'horrible', 'frightful'; Freud's name is a rough
'translation' in German of Joyce (freude, 'joy'); the prefix a—seems to imply negation (as in
'James Joyless', one of Joyce's versions of his name).

169
general sense. But what this one means, I will leave you the trouble of discovering.
Metaphor indicates only this: the sexual relation. Except that it proves in fact—
from the fact that it exists—what the sexual relation is: mistaking a bladder for a
lantern. 32 This is the best way to express a confusion—a bladder can be made into
a lantern provided a flame is placed inside it, but so long as there is no flame, it is
not a lantern.
Where does the flame come from? The flame is the real. The real sets fire to
everything. But it is a cold flame. The fire which burns is a mask, as it were, of the
real. The real is to be sought on the other side, on the side of the absolute zero.
It has, all the same, been reached. There is no limit to the high temperatures that
can be imagined, no limit that can for the moment be imagined. The only thing
belonging to the real is the lower limit. It is this that I term something which can
be orientated. Because that is what the real is.
There is an orientation. But this orientation is not a meaning [sens]. What
does this mean? It means that I am taking up what I said last time, by suggesting
that meaning is perhaps orientation, but orientation is not meaning, because it
excludes the sole fact in which meaning consists: the copulation of the symbolic
and the imaginary.
The orientation of the real, in my formula, forecloses meaning. I say this
because last night I was asked whether there were other kinds of foreclosure than
the one which results from the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father. Without
doubt, foreclosure is to some extent more radical, since the Name-of-the-Father
is, in the end, something quite light-weight. But it can certainly function there, in
place of the foreclosure of meaning by the orientation of the real, which we have not
yet reached. We must break through into a new imaginary in relation to meaning.
This is what I'm trying to establish with my language.
This language has the advantage of laying a wager on psychoanalysis, in that
I'm trying to set it up as discourse—that is, as the most realistic pretence [le
semblant le plus vraisemblable]. In sum, psychoanalysis is an example, nothing
more, of a short-circuit which passes through meaning—as I defined it a minute
ago: the copulation of language (as it is with this that I support the unconscious)
with our bodies.
I should tell you that in the meantime, I've got together with Jacques Aubert
somewhere, without you being invited, and there I made a few reflections on what
the English call the ego and the Germans the Ich.
The ego is a thing which I've been thinking about with a knot, a knot which
was thought up by a mathematician by the name of Milnor. He has invented an
idea of a chain: link (reference to figure).
This is a knot. You must see that it's knotted. But supposing, says Milnor,
you allow that in any chain, a particular element can traverse itself, you will then
have this, which immediately shows you that what went under here, in the centre,
goes over there—there is no longer a knot, a link.
32•• prendre une vessie pour une lanterne is a proverbial French expression for error, something
like, in English, 'to think the moon is made of green cheese'.

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 I propose to your sharp intellects the following observation: if you double each
of the elements in the first knot—so that instead of having one here, you have two
going in the same direction—it is (however unlikely this may seem to you—I hope
you will check this, I haven't brought my drawings, and I won't risk showing you
how this wriggles about) radically impossible to separate the four elements.
In the light of this, what does my argument mean—in the seminar Encore, it
would seem (because, of course, I never read the seminar; it is others who read
it)—against the equivalence proposed by some people—I've completely forgotten
who—between and the function —I don't say the little , but the big 4, which
is a function such that there exists an x for which that function is negative:
Of course, the ideal state of the matheme is that everything corresponds. In-
deed, this is exaggerated by the matheme for the real, for, contrary to what one
imagines (I don't know why), it is not the end of the real. As I said a moment ago,
we can only get hold of bits of real (bouts de reel).
The real, that which is in question in what is called my thought, is always a
bit, a core—around which, certainly, thought embroiders, but which is its cicatrice.
This real is not, as such, linked to anything. This, at least, is how I conceive of the
real and its little moments of historical emergence.
There was, one day, a certain Newton, who found a bit of real. This was bloody
frightening only for those who were thinkers, in particular one Kant. One could say
that Newton caused an illness. And moreover everyone, all the thinking beings of
the time, caused one, each in their own way. It rained down on not only men, but
also on women. Mme du Chätelet wrote a whole book on the Newtonian System,
which is utter rubbish. It is extraordinary, all the same, that when a bit of real is
reached, it has such an effect. But this should be the starting-point. It is the very
sign that the core has been reached.
I am trying to give you a bit of real, concerning this in which, in the skin of
which, we exist—in other words the skin of that implausible history, the human
species. And I say to you that there is no sexual relation. But it's embroidery. It
is embroidery because I take part in 'yes or no'. From the moment I say there is
no, it is already very likely not to be truly a bit of real, because the cicatrice of the
real is that it is linked to nothing.
One only recognizes oneself in what one has. One never recognizes oneself—
this is implied by what I advance, and by the fact recognized by Freud that there
is an unconscious—in what one is. This is the first step of psychoanalysis.
What one is is of the order, when one is a man, of copulation—that is, of what
redirects so-called copulation into the equally, and significantly, so-called copula
constituted by the verb to be. In its inflection by the copula, language is proved to
be a twisting path which is completely obscure. Obscure is only a metaphor there,
because if we had a bit of real, we would know that the light is no more obscure
than the shadows, and vice versa.
The metaphor copula is not in itself a proof. It is the way the unconscious pro-
ceeds. It gives only traces, and traces which not only efface themselves, but which
any use of discourse tends to efface, analytic discourse included. You yourselves
will oniy think of erasing the traces of my discourse, because it is I who began by
giving the discourse its status: starting from the disguising [faire semblant] of the

171
objet a. Man takes up the place of the filth that he is, at least in the eyes of a
psychoanalyst, who has good reason to know it, as he takes up that place himself.
This decided filth must be passed through, so that something in the order of the
real may perhaps be found [retrouverl.
You see, I use the word (re)find [retrouver]. (Re)find is already a slippage,
as if everything it concerns had already been found. This is the trap of history.
History is the greatest of fantasies. Behind history, the factual history historians
are interested in, there is myth, and myth is always captivating.
The proof is Joyce, who having borne careful witness to the sinthome of Dublin,
being oniy inspired by what is his own, does not fail to do something fabulous: to
fall into the myth of Vico which sustains Finnegans Wake. The only thing which
protects it is that Finnegans Wake is presented as a dream, and, moreover, portrays
Vico as a dream as well. In the end, so are the babblings of Mme Blavatsky, the
Mahanvantara and everything which comes with it, the idea of a rhythm which I
myself relapsed into with my retrouver above. We do not refind, or rather we only
ever turn in circles. We find.
The one advantage of this retrouver is to highlight my point: that no progress
is known, that we turn in circles. But there is perhaps another explanation, that
there is no progress but marked by death, which Freud underlines by triebing death,
by making it into a Trieb ['drive'J, which is translated in French (I don't know why)
by pulsion—what about the word derive?33 The death-drive is the real in so far
as it can only be thought of as impossible—that is to say, that every time it peeps
round the corner it is unthinkable.
We cannot hope to approach that impossibility, because it is unthinkable; it is
death, of which the foundation of the real is that it cannot be thought. What is
incredible is that Joyce, who had the greatest contempt for history (although in fact
his contempt was futile)—he described history as a nightmare,34 which unleashes
against us the great evils he stresses cause us so much harm—could find in the end
only this solution: to write Finnegans Wake, albeit as a dream, which like every
dream is a nightmare, even if it be a mild nightmare. Except that he says—and
this is how Finnegans Wake is made—that the dreamer is no particular character,
it is the dream itself. In this, Joyce slides towards Jung, towards the collective
unconscious. There is no better proof that the collective unconscious is a sint home
than Joyce, for one cannot say that, in his imagination, Finnegans Wake does not
form part of this sinthome.
The sign of my entanglement is indeed Joyce, in that what he advances in a
singular artistic manner—he knows how to—is the sint home, such that there is no
way it can be analysed.
I said this recently—a rock-solid catholic like Joyce, who could never say that
he wasn't well brought up by the Jesuits, a true catholic (but of course there are
33 As a translation for the Freudian Trieb, Lacan looks to the English term drive (itself avoided
by Strachey, who notoriously prefers instinct in the Standard Edition), which, subjected to a
Joycean 'pun', becomes derive ('drift'). This idea had appeared a long time before—for instance,
on January 13th1960 (SV1I), in the seminar L'Ethiqtie de La Psychanalyse, op. cit., p. 90.
34 'History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' Ulysses, op. cit.,
p. 28.

172
no true catholics here, you lot weren't brought up by the Jesuits)—can a catholic
be analysed?
On this question someone (Jacques-Alain Miller, of course, who did not waste
the chance) reminded me that I had said the same thing about the Japanese. I
stick to it. It is not for the same reason. Since that evening at Jacques Aubert's
you weren't invited to, I've seen a Japanese film. It was in a little cinema, you
couldn't have been invited to this either, and anyway I would not have wished to
give you bad ideas. I was, properly speaking, flabbergasted, because it was feminine
eroticism. From this, I've begun to understand the power of the Japanese. Feminine
eroticism seems to be taken to its extreme there, and this extreme is nether more
nor less than the fantasy of killing the man. But even that is not enough. After he
has been killed, one must go further. After—why after? That is what is in doubt.
The Japanese woman in question, who, it should be said, is the mistress of his
partner, cuts his cock off. One wonders why she didn't cut it off before. Because
it's a fantasy, nothing else—I don't know how it happens after death, but there is
a lot of blood in the film, I would prefer the erectile tissue to be staunched, but
after all I know nothing about it, this is something which I said a moment ago was
in doubt. Here, one clearly sees that castration is not a fantasy. It is not so easy
to situate its function in analysis, as it can be fantasmatized [fantasmatisée].
At which point I come back to my capital 4, which could also be the first
letter of the word fantasy. This letter situates the relations of what I will term a
phunction of phonation. Here, contrary to what is thought, is the essence of , a
phunction of phonation which is found substituting the male, said to be man, as
such. The signifier which I have only been able to support with a complicated letter
of mathematical notation, S(), is something else entirely. It is not this with which
man makes love. In the end, man makes love with his unconscious, and nothing
more. The woman's fantasy, if this is what the film shows us, is certainly something
which completely prevents the encounter. The intermediary—in other words the
instrument one uses for copulation—is, obviously, chucked in the bin. This is not
of the same order as what is at stake in my S(), which records that there is no
Other, apart from where there is supplying Lsupp leance], that is, the Other as the
site of the unconscious, that which I've said is how man makes love, in another
sense of the word with—that is the partner.
I am sorry to have found nothing but the bar for our purpose. There is one
bar which any woman knows how to cross, the bar between the signifier and the
signified, as the film I've just referred to showed you. But there is another bar,
which I place over the . I regret, moreover, not having made it in the same way
as the other, for like that it would have been more exemplary. It says: there is no
Other which would respond as a partner—the whole necessity of the human race
being that there should be an Other of the Other. This is what is generally called
God, but which analysis unveils as, quite simply, The woman.
The only thing which allows her to be called The—since I've told you that
The woman does not exist (and I have more and more reasons to believe so, espe-
cially after seeing that film)—is that, like God, she is fecund [pondeuse, produces
children']. Only, the progress which analysis leads us to make, is to perceive again
that the myth of The makes everything emerge from a single mother, namely Eve;

173
there are only particular women who are fecund. Concerning which I recalled, in
the seminar Encore it seems, the meaning of that complicated letter, the signifier
of this: there is no Other of the Other.
There you are. Everything I tell you there is nothing but meaningful, and
therefore full of risks of going-astray, as all history proves. This is all that has
ever been done. If I run the same risks, it is really rather to prepare you for what
else I could tell you, in an attempt to produce a folisophy less sinister than that
of the Book said to be of Wisdom of the Bible. I recommend you to read it. It
is sober, and of an excellent tone. Catholics rarely read it. It could even be said
that Catholicism has consisted over the centuries in preventing its followers from
reading the Bible. But in order to found wisdom on lack, which is the only way to
found it, it's really not bad at all, it's amazing.
Will I ever be able to tell you—this must not only be a dream—what would
be called a bit of real [bout de reel], in the true sense of the word bout I specified a
while ago?
For the moment, it could be said that Freud himself produced only things that
were meaningful, and that this deprives me of all hope. It is not, for all that, a
reason not that I should just hope to do it, but that I should not really achieve it
one day.

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9) 13th April 1976: The Real is without law

I should like today, since I have occasion—it's my birthday—to be able to verify

whether or not I know what I talk about.
Speech aims, despite everything, to be understood. I would like to verify
whether I am not content to talk for my own sake—as everyone does, of course, if
the unconscious has a meaning (I say again: if the unconscious has a meaning).
I would have liked someone to write something which would justify this labour
I have been putting myself through for around twenty-two years, a little more; for
someone to invent something which could be of use to me. I am convinced that
this is possible. Today, I ask you to ask me a question which pays me back.
I have invented what is written as the real.
Naturally, it is not enough to write it real, because quite a few folk have done
this before me. I have written this real in the form of the borromean knot which is
a chain. One of its three minimum elements I call real.
These three elements chained together produce metaphor. This is nothing more
than a metaphor of the chain. How can something which is nothing but number
produce metaphor?
This metaphor is called the figure [le chiffre]. There are a certain number of
ways to keep track of figures, The simplest is what I have termed the unary trait
[trait unaire]. Marking traits or points is enough to indicate a number.
Energetics is nothing but the manipulation of a certain number of numbers,
from which one isolates a constant number. Freud, taking his reference from science
such as it was conceived in his time, only produced from it a metaphor, which he
was not even able to maintain in a realistic manner. The notion of a constant,
for instance, linking stimulus to response, is impossible to uphold. The idea of an
energetics of the psyche has also never been given a true foundation.
In the metaphor of the Borromean chain, I claim to have invented something.
What does it mean to invent something? Is it an idea, this idea of the real? It is
not an idea which is sustainable.
What is an idea? Reduced to its analytic value at least, an idea is what comes
to you when you are on the couch. But whether one is lying on a couch or standing
upright, the chain-effect which is obtained by writing cannot be thought, cannot
be imagined, easily—at least in my experience. One does better to break off from
it beforehand, if one wishes to succeed in giving it written form—which you have
been able to witness a hundred times, in the slips of my pen as I have tried to
produce a writing to symbolize that chain.
I consider that having articulated the real in question in the form of a writing
has what is generally called a traumatic value.
Not that it has been my aim to traumatize anybody, certainly not my audience,
for whom I have no reason to wish this. Let's say that it is a forcing. The forcing
of a new writing which, through metaphor, has a bearing which must certainly be
termed symbolic; the forcing of ideas which are not the kind that bloom spontan-
eously, simply due to the production of meaning—that is, due to the imaginary.
This renders palpable, brings to the hand's grasp—but in a completely illusory
manner—what reminiscence may be. Concerning something which has the function

175
of an idea without being one, one imagines it is due to reminiscence, so to speak. In
this, reminiscence is distinct from memory [la remémoration]. Freud distinguished
these two functions, and it must be said that he had a sense for distinctions. But
memory is evidently something he forced, due to the term impression. His suppos-
ition was that things imprinted themselves on the nervous system. Why provide
them with letters? There is no reason for an impression to be represented by a
letter. There is a world of difference between a letter and a phonological symbol.
I have, in a sense, given the networks of the Project a new, more rigorous form;
I have made them into something which, instead of being simply woven together,
form a chain. But it is not easy to integrate them into what is already there, which
is called knowledge.
Effectively, I have attempted to be rigorous by revealing that what is upheld
by Freud as the unconscious always supposes a knowledge, and it is a spoken know-
ledge. The minimal supposition allowing the unconscious to be interpreted is that
it should be reducible to a knowledge.
Following this, it is clear that this knowledge requires at least two supports,
which one calls terms, symbolizing them with letters; thus the way I write know-
ledge as supported by S—not squared, but S supposed to be number 2, S 2 . The
supporting function of S index 1—S 1 —is to represent a subject as such, to repres-
ent it truly. Truly means, in this instance, in conformity with reality. The true is
speech which conforms to reality, which in this instance is what functions, what
functions truly.
Only, what functions truly has nothing to do with what I indicate as the real.
It is a precarious supposition that my real—I must indeed refer to it in my name—
conditions reality—for instance, the reality of your listening. There is a gulf there,
which we are far from confident of crossing. In different terms: the instance of
knowledge revived—I mean, renewed—by Freud in the form of the unconscious,
does not in any way necessarily suppose the real which I employ.
I have got lots of Freudian things going, I've even entitled one of the things
I've written 'The Freudian Thing'—but in what I term the real, I have invented
something which imposed itself on me.
To the imaginary and the symbolic, that is, to things which are quite alien to
each other, the real brings the element which is able to hold them together. This is
something which I can say I consider nothing more than my symptom. It is my own
way of taking what Freud dreamed up to the second degree—of taking the symptom
itself to the second degree. If Freud really made a discovery, and supposing that
it is true, it could be said that the real is my symptomatic response to it. But to
reduce it to something symptomatic is at the same time to reduce all invention to
a symptom.
Let's move on to something else. From the moment when one has a memory,
does one have a memory? By saying one has it, does one do more than imagine that
one has it, that it is at one's disposal? I would prefer to say 'at one's dire-sposal',
ie., that it has to be said [on a a dire].
Here, the English language has all sorts of resources. 'I have to tell'—the
translation, j'ai a dire is, moreover, an anglicism. But that not only 'have', but
'ought' can be said—'I ought to tell' causes the slippage. J'ai a dire becomes je dois

176
 dire. In this language, one can put the accent on the verb, and say 'I do make'—I
insist that this 'making' is only fabrication. One can also separate negation and
say 'I don't', je m'abstiens de faire. 'I don't talk', je ne choisis pas de parler. Don't
talk what? In Joyce's case, it's Gaelic.
This implies that one chooses to speak the language which one actually speaks.
In fact, one only imagines having chosen it. And what resolves the question is that,
in the end, one creates this language. One creates a language to the extent that
at each moment, one gives it meaning. At each moment one gives the language
which one speaks a little prod, without which it would not be living. It is only
living in so far as it creates itself at every instant. This is why there is no collective
unconscious, only particular unconsciouses.
It is a question for me, then, of knowing whether or not I know what I say
to be true. It is for each of you here to tell me how you understand it. It is not
certain that what I say about the real is any more than blathering on. To say
that the real is a symptom does not prevent this also being the case for energetics,
which I mentioned a moment ago. The privilege of energetics is that, providing
that one's manipulations of it conform to a certain mathematical teaching, one al-
ways deals with a constant number. But one realizes that this is a pre-established
requirement—the constant must be obtained, and this is what constitutes ener-
getics. The thing which allows the constant to be obtained is supposed to be in
conformity with reality. But I make a distinction between the supposed real of that
organ—which has nothing to do with a bodily organ, and by which the imaginary
and the symbolic are knotted together—and what functions as the foundation of
the science of reality.
In this knot on the board, I show a field distinct from the real, which is that
of meaning. In this respect, one could say that the real both has, and does not
have, a meaning. That the real has no meaning is what is illustrated by this—with
meaning here, and the real there, in distinct fields. Meaning is the Other of the
real. As for the symbolic, its quality is to be particularized as hole—but the true
hole is here, where it is shown that there is no Other of the Other. In the place of
the Other of the Other, there is no order of existence.
To sum up, what Freud dreamed up is antipathetic to energetics. And the
only concept which can fill the place of so-called energetics is that which I have put
forward with the term real.

Questions & Answers

I will read you what people have had the goodness to write to me, which is no worse
after what I've said—that the real is linked to writing.
¶ If psychoanalysis, the question is put to me, is a symptom—I never said that psy-
choanalysis was a symptom—is not what you are doing, with your knot and your
mathemes, deciphering it, with the consequence of dissolving its signification? I
do not think that psychoanalysis is a symptom. I think that psychoanalysis is a
practice whose efficacy, despite everything tangible, implies my knot-making. I am
not sure that the distinction between the real and reality is caught up with the
value I give to the term real. As the real is stripped of meaning, I'm not sure that

177
 the meaning of this real couldn't be illuminated by being thought of as no less than
a symptom.
To the question which I am asked, I respond—if I support the unconscious with
this rough topology, this is because I think I can state with certainty—because my
practice comprises it—that the function of the unconscious is not without reference
to the body, and this is why the function of the real can be differentiated from it.
¶ If, according to Genesis in André Chouraki 's translation, God creates for man a
help against him, what is the psychoanalyst a help against? I think that the
psychoanalyst can, effectively, only conceive of himself as a symptom. It is not
psychoanalysis which is a symptom, it is the psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis is, in
the end, a help which one could describe, in the terms of Genesis, as a turning-
back. That the Other of the Other, that little hole, can provide a help—it is in
this that the hypothesis of the unconscious finds its support. The hypothesis of
the unconscious, as Freud stresses, can only be sustained by supposing the Name-
of-the-Father. To suppose the Name-of-the-Father is God. In this psychoanalysis,
when it succeeds, proves that the Name-of-the-Father can just as well be by-passed,
as long as use is made of it.
¶ Is not every speech-act, the coup de force of a particular unconscious, a collectiviz-
ation of the unconscious? If every speech-act is the coup de force of a particular
unconscious, it is quite clear that every speech-act can hope to say something, and
this saying gives onto something theorised, theory being the support of all kinds of
revolution—a theory of contradiction. One can say things which are very diverse,
contradicting each other, and that from that a reality emerges which is presumed
to be revolutionary. But this is what has never been proved. It is not because there
is contradictory bustling-around that nothing has ever come out of it constituting
a reality. One can only hope.
¶ What limits do you set to the domain of metaphor?—This is a very good question.
It is not because the straight line is infinite that it has no limits. For, the question
continues—is it infinite, the domain of metaphor, like the straight line, for instance?
The status of the straight line certainly deserves reflection. The fact that a line
which is cut is finite as it has limits does not imply that an infinite line has no limits.
It is not because the finite has limits that a line which has what is called an infinite
point, ie., which forms a circle, is enough to provide a metaphor of the infinite. The
straight line is, actually, not straight. The ray of light seems to offer such an image,
but according to the latest news from Einstein, it is flexible, it curves. How can
a straight line which sometimes bends be conceived? My question about the real
implies that one can ask this. Lenin expressly declared that a straight line could
be bent, and he captured it in a metaphor—a baton, which is roughly an image of
a straight line, can be bent, and at the same time can be straightened out. What
could be the definition of the straight line outside the support of what is called, at
close range, the ray of light? There is none other than what is termed the shortest
path from one point to another. But how can the shortest route from one point to
another be known?

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¶ I always expect you to play on ambiguities. You have said: There is a one. You have
spoken to us of the real as impossible, you do not rely on a possible. Concerning
Joyce, you speak of imposed words. You do not rely on the Name-of-the-Father as
One posited [Un pose]. I don't set any special store by sacred ambiguities. It
seems to me that I demystify them. There is a One, and it is certain that this One
is a heavy load for me. I can only do things with it—since, as everyone knows, the
One is not a number. I speak of the real as impossible to the extent that I think,
precisely, that the real—if it's my symptom, tell me—must be said to be without
law. The true real implies the absence of law. The real has no order. This is what
I mean when I say that the only thing I will perhaps one day be able to articulate
before you is something concerning what I've called a bit of real.
¶ What do you think of the contradictory bustling-around which has been going on in
China for several years? I am waiting, but without any hope.
¶ The point is defined as the intersection of three planes. Can this be said to be
real? Writing, inscribing, as an alignment points—are they real in your sense?
There is no common point between everything in the chain which is consistent—it
certainly excludes the point of the real. That a figuration of the real can only be
maintained by the hypothesis that there is no common point, no connection, no Y
in writing, implies that the real does not comprise the point as such.
¶ Does the constant number you speak of have a relation to the phallus, or the phallic
function? I think—in so far as my thought is something more than a symptom—
that the phallus can absolutely not be a sufficient support for what Freud conceived
as energetics. What is striking is that he himself never saw this.
Someone has written to me in Japanese. I would like the person who sent me this
text to translate it for me.
¶ Are you an anarchist? Certainly not.
¶ What can be the status of a response made to something dreamed up, based on which
it would define itself as a symptom? It was a question, in my comments of a
moment ago, of the dreaming-up of the unconscious. You have certainly perceived
that I had to lower the symptom a notch to think of it as homogeneous to the
dreaming-up of the unconscious, and that it presents itself as knotted together with
it. I reduced the symptom in response, not to the dreaming-up of the unconscious,
but to the reality of the unconscious. Certainly, even in this form it implies a third
term to keep these two loops of thread separate. This third term could be anything.
But if the symptom is considered as the equivalent to the real, this third term could
only be, in this case, the imaginary. After all, one could produce a theory of Freud
by making this imaginary, namely the body, into what keeps separate the whole
constituted by the knotting-together of the symptom and the symbolic.
¶ Is your bent cigar a symptom of your real? Certainly. My bent cigar has the
closest relation to the question I raised about the straight line, which is likewise
bent.

179
10) 11th May 1976: Le Sinthome

[not published in Ornicar?]

Last time, I confessed to you that a strike would have suited me very well; because
I had no desire to tell you anything, being myself uneasy. It would be very easy for
me to find another excuse—that the mike isn't working, for instance—not that this
time I do not have something to say to you. But it is certainly true that last time I
was too tangled up with my knots and Joyce to have the least wish to talk to you.
I was uneasy. Now I am slightly less so, because I think I've found some things, in
the end some transmissible things. I have been rather active, clearly—! mean that
it provokes me, this difficulty, so that I spend every weekend desperately trying to
work out something which won't go. What won't go is the fact, having found what
is called, in the end, the Borromean knot, I am trying to force things, because Joyce
had absolutely no conception of the Borromean knot. Not that he didn't make use
of the circle and the cross. They talk of nothing else, in fact, and someone called
Clive Hart, an eminent scholar who has devoted himself to commentary on Joyce,
makes a great deal of this use of the circle and the cross in the book he has entitled
'Structure in James Joyce', and particularly concerning Finnegans Wake.
The first thing I can tell you, then, is this: I wish that the expression 'it
must be done', in current usage, had not been so over used, as it fits so naturally
the fabrication of the knot: it must be done. What does that mean? It comes
down to writing it. What is striking, curious, is that this knot which I describe as
Borromean—you should know why—is a support for thinking. I will allow myself
to illustrate this with a term which I must write:'support for un-thinking' [appti a
1 'appensée], allowing la pensée to be written differently. It is a support for thinking
which justifies the writing I have just put on that little piece of white paper for you,
it is a support for thinking, for 'un-thinking'. But it is curious that this 'support'
is necessary, that it has to be written to get anything from it, because it is quite
apparent that it is not easy to represent this chain—for it is a chain, not a knot, in
reality—it is not easy to see how this Borromean chain only functions in thinking
(now cutting la from pensée). It is not easy, even at the simplest level, and this
indicates what the knot brings with it. It must be written to see how it functions,
this noeud bo. Which makes one think of something mentioned somewhere in Joyce,
'on Mount Nebo the law was given to us'.
A writing is thus an act [un fairel which provides a support for thinking.
Properly speaking, the noend bo in question completely changes the meaning of
writing. It gives writing an autonomy, and an autonomy which is all the more
remarkable in that there is another writing, which is what Derrida has emphasised,
namely the result of what could be termed a precipitation of the signifier. Derrida
has laid emphasis on this, but it is quite clear that I showed him the way, for the
fact that I found no other means of supporting the signifier than writing it 'S'
is already a sufficient indication. But what remains is that the signifier, in other
words what is modulated in the voice, has nothing to do with writing. This, in any
case, is what is perfectly demonstrated by my noe'ud bo. It changes the meaning of
writing, it shows that there is something to which signifiers can be attached—and
how can these signifiers be attached? Through the intermediary of what I term

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dit-mension—in my way of writing it: the mention of speech. The advantage of
that way of writing it is that 'mention' can be extended to mensonge ['lie'], thus
indicating that what is said is not necessarily true.
In other words, the speech [dit] which results from what is called philosophy is
not without a certain lack, a lack which I am trying—trying—to fill [suppléer] with
recourse to what can only be written in the noeud bo, what can only be written
for something to be taken from it. It is no less true that what there is of fihia in
philosophy can take on a significance: that of time as it is thought. And what I
put forward is that writing in this instance changes the meaning, the mode of what
is at stake—and what is at stake is this fihia of wisdom. What is wisdom? It is
what is not very easy to support other than with the writing of the noe'nd bo itself.
So that in the end—forgive my infatuation—what I am doing, what I am trying to
do with my knot, is nothing less than the first philosophy which, it seems to me,
can be supported. This is simply the introduction of these noeud bos, of the idea
that they support a bone [os], a bone which is as it were a sufficient indication of
something I'll term os-bjet, which is certainly what characterises the letter which I
link to it, the letter a. And jf I reduce this os-bjet to a, it is precisely in order to
mark the fact that the letter here is nothing less than a testimony to the intrusion
of a writing as other—as 'other' with, precisely, a small a. The writing in question
comes from somewhere other than the signifier.
My interest in this business of writing does not date from yesterday—the first
time I put it forward was when I spoke about the unitary trait, the einziger Zug in
Freud. I have given this unitary trait another support through the Borromean knot,
which I haven't yet shown you—in my notes I have written it DI (droite infinie,
'straight line'). The straight line in question—it is not the first time you've heard
me talk of it—is something I characterize as equivalent to the circle. By combining
two straight lines and a circle, you have the essentials of the Borromean knot.
Why does the straight line have this quality? Because it is the best illustration
of the hole. Topology shows us that there is a hole in the middle of a circle, and
one even starts trying to imagine what its centre would be, which extends to all
sorts of expressions (the nervous centre, for instance, which no-one knows the exact
meaning of). The straight line has the quality of having the hole all around it. It
is the simplest support of the hole.
So what does this give us as a reference to analytic practice? That man,
and not God, is made up of a trinity of what we'll call elements. What is an
element? An element is that which makes One, in other words the unitary trait;
that which makes One, and which, because of this, sets in motion substitution.
The characteristic of an element is that it goes into a combinatory. Thus, Real,
Imaginary and Symbolic—which after all amounts, it seems to me, to the other
triad which, according to Aristotle, goes to make up man: 'oDç, 4ui j , Sp.cL (or
will, intelligence and affectivity). What I am trying to introduce with this writing
is nothing less than what I'll call a logic of the sack and the cord; because there
is obviously a sack whose myth, as it were, consists in the sphere. But nobody, it
seems, has sufficiently considered the consequences of the introduction of the cord,
that the cord proves that a sack is not closed unless it is tied, and that in every

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sphere we must imagine something, which is of course at every point of the sphere
and which knots it, making it something one can blow into, knots it with a cord.
People write their childhood memories. This has consequences: it is the pas-
sage from one writing to another. I will speak to you in a moment about Joyce's
childhood memories, because I clearly have to show how this so-called logic of sack
and cord is something which can help us to understand how Joyce functioned as a
writer.
Psychoanalysis is something .different. Psychoanalysis goes through a certain
number of utterances. No-one says that psychoanalysis puts one on the path to
writing. This is exactly what I'm trying to set before you with my language: that
it's worth looking long and hard when someone turns up asking, in the name of
some inhibition, to be put in the position of writing. For my part, I think carefully
when I'm asked that (it happens to me as to everyone), because it's not at all
clear that it can be achieved with psychoanalysis. This calls, properly speaking,
for an investigation into what it means to write. And what I am going to suggest
to you today concerns, very precisely, Joyce. It came to me all at once, as a whole
[dans la boule]—a bottle which here is far from being spherical as it is attached to
everything we know—that with Joyce something happened—in a way which I think
I can account for—so that what is generally called the ego played a quite different
role to the simple role it plays for the everyday mortal. With him, the ego fulfilled
a function which I can only account for with my mode of writing.
What put me on the track of this is worth indicating. It is that writing is
absolutely essential to his ego, which he illustrated when [...] someone went to
see him and asked him something about a picture, the reproduction of a view of
the town Cork. Joyce, who knew how to catch people out, answered that it was
Cork; to which the chap said, 'Yes, I know, it's obviously the main square in Cork,
I recognize it—but what is that around it?' To which Joyce replied, 'cork'. 35 This
is given as an illustration of the fact that in Joyce, in what he writes, there's always
more—you only have to read the little schema of Ulysses he gave to Stuart Gilbert
(and a rather different one he gave to Linati and Valery Larbaud). Every single
thing he brings together, everything he narrates to make up the work of art that
is Ulysses, is in a relation of homonymy, at least, with the way it is framed. That
each chapter of Ulysses is given as support a certain mode of framing, termed
for instance 'dialectical', 'rhetorical', theological', is for him linked to the very
materiality of what he narrates. And, of course, this does not fail to suggest my
little rings, which are also the support of a certain framing.
In question is the following: the consequences of an error [faute] not entirely
caused by chance. For psychoanalysis teaches us that an error is never the result of
chance, that behind every slip there is a signifying finality—in other words that the
error aims, if there is an unconscious, to express something; not simply something
that the subject knows, because the subject is situated in the division, the relation
of one signifier to another, that is the life of language, which is something completely
different to what is simply called life, for what signifies death for the somatic subject
35 cf. Ellmann, James Joyce, op. cit., p. 551.

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has its place in drives, which have to do with what I have just called the 'life of
language'
The drives in question have to do with the relation to the body, and the relation
to the body is not in anyone a simple relation. Not only does the body have holes,
this is even, so says Freud, what should have put mankind on the track of these
abstract holes which concern the utterance of anything at all. The something,
briefly, which is suggested by this reference, is what one should try to extricate
from an essentially muddled idea,that of eternity. It is an idea which is connected
to nothing but thought time, fihia, which I mentioned just now. One thinks, and
sometimes one even talks wildly, about an eternal love. One has truly no idea what
one says! Is it the other life, as it were, that is understood by that? You see how
everything gets involved, and where this idea of eternity, which nobody knows the
meaning of, leads you!
As for Joyce, I'd like to read you something here—but in fact you know it is
available, you can read it in French, A Portrait of the Arist as a Young Man.36
There Joyce tells us this: for some reason—connected with Tennyson, Byron, some
poet anyway—his friends tie him up against a fence and give him a beating. The
friend leading the gang was called Heron—not an indifferent term, this eron—who
beats him, helped by the others; and afterwards Joyce wonders why, now the thing
is over, he has nothing against him. Joyce expresses himself—as should be expected
from him—very aptly: I mean that he metaphorizes nothing less than his relation
to his body. He observes that the whole affair has emptied out; he expresses this
by saying that it's like a fruit being peeled. What does this tell us? It indicates
something which is so imperfect for all human beings, the relation to the body—
who is there who knows what goes on in his body? This is clearly something
extraordinarily suggestive and it is even, for some people, what gives meaning to
the unconscious. But if there is one thing that I have carefully articulated from the
beginning, it is precisely that the unconscious has nothing to do with the fact of
one's ignorance about many things concerning one's own body, and that what one
knows is of a quite different nature. One knows things to do with the signifier. The
ancient notion of the unconscious as Unbekannte was precisely something supported
by our ignorance of what went on in our bodies; but the Freudian unconscious—this
is something worth stressing here—is exactly what I have said, namely the relation
that exists between a body which is foreign to us and something which is a circle,
or rather a straight line (they are equivalent), which is the unconscious.
What meaning can we give to that which Joyce bears witness to, in other
words not simply the relation to his body but, as it were, the psychology of that
relation (for, after all, psychology is nothing but that—the confused image we
have of our own body). But this confused image is not without a component—
let us give it its name—of affects; in other words, if we imagine this psychical
relation, there is something in the psyche which is affected, which reacts, which is
not detached—as Joyce testifies, having been beaten up by his 4 or 5 friends, there
is something which simply slips away, like the skin of a fruit. This is striking, that
there should be people who have no affect when subjected to bodily violence. There
36 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, op. cit., pp. 82-3.

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is something, moreover, which is ambiguous about it: it gave him, perhaps, some
pleasure; masochism is in no way outside the possibilities of sexual stimulation for
Joyce, as he emphasized sufficiently in the case of Bloom. But I would say that
what is more striking is the metaphor he uses, the detachment of something like the
skin of a fruit. This shows that he did not experience jouissance, but rather—this
is something which is valid psychologically—he had a reaction of disgust, and this
disgust relates to his own body. It is like someone who expels a bad memory, puts
it in parenthesis. This is absolutely left as a possibility in the relation to his own
body as foreign [étranger}. And this is just what is expressed by the use of the
verb 'to have': one 'has' a body, one 'is' not it in any way; and this is what leads
to belief in the soul—there's no reason to stop there, so one ends up thinking one
has a soul, which is the last straw.
This kind of 'dropping out', the 'dropping out' of the relation to the body,
is highly suspicious to an analyst. This idea of the self, of the self as body, has
something of significance. This is what is termed the ego. If the ego is said to be
narcissistic, this is because something at a certain level supports the body as image.
But in the case of Joyce, is not the fact that this image is not here engaged—is
that not a sign that the ego has a quite particular function on this occasion? How
can that be written in my noeud bo?
So now I'm going to trace, go through something which you might not neces-
sarily follow. How far does peTe-version go, so to speak (written, as you know, in
my way)? The noeud bo does just that: it sanctions the fact that Freud makes
everything depend on the function of the father. The knot is nothing but the
translation of the fact, which I was reminded of last night, that love—and beyond
the marketplace, love one could describe as eternal—is what relates back to the
function of the father, addressing him in the name of this: the father is the bearer
of castration. At least, that is what Freud puts forward in Totem and Taboo, in
other words in referring to the primal horde: it is because the sons are deprived
of women that they love the father. It is actually something quite unique, quite
staggering, which only Freud's intuition sanctions. But I am trying to give that
intuition another body, with my noeud bo which is so apt to evoke Mount Nebo,
or, as is said, the Law—the Law which has absolutely nothing to do with the laws
of the real world (which are an entirely open question). The Law here is simply the
law of love, in other words perversion.
It is very curious that learning to write—to write my Borromean knot, at any
rate—has a function. And what I am about to illustrate is this: imagine that there
is somewhere, there for instance Ireference to mise a plat], a mistake, in other words
that the writing makes an error there, what will this lead to? You will certainly
not have imagined that the Borromean knot has, in its own nature, an imaginary
aspect; here, as you see, the ring I can simply take its leave. It slips away: exactly
in the manner of what Joyce feels after receiving his beating. It slips away, the
imaginary relation has no place. It has no place in this instance, and this makes
one wonder whether Joyce's intense interest in perversion had perhaps a different
signification. Maybe, after all, the beating did disgust him; maybe he was not a true
pervert. Because it is quite a task to imagine the reason why Joyce is so unreadable.
If he is so unreadable, it is perhaps because he arouses no sympathy in us. But

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could not something be suggested in all this by the fact—quite visible, actually—
that he has an ego of a totally different kind than the ego which does not function,
precisely at the moment of his revulsion, which fails to function immediately after
this revulsion? For he manages to become detached from himself—that's for sure—
but afterwards, I'd say, he no longer recognizes having suffered that beating.
So what I'm suggesting is this: that one supposes the correction of that error,
fault or lapsus here—I mark it on the board there, one passing over the other.
After all, nothing is simpler tci imagine: why should a knot not be Borromean,
why shouldn't it come undone? I have made thousands of mistakes drawing it on
the board. There is exactly what happens, when I embody the ego here as the
correction of the lacking relation, of what does not knot itself in a Borromean way,
as that which knots together the real and the unconscious in the case of Joyce.
Through this artifice of writing, I would say that the Borromean knot comes
to be restored. As you see, it is not a question of one of the faces of the Borromean
knot, but of a thread. Ordinary geometry is where we get the word 'face' from—
polyhedrons are full of faces, stops and summits—but the knot (actually a chain
here) presents us with a quite different dimension, which I would describe—in
contrast to the evident quality of a geometrical face—as 'voided' [évidé]. And
because it is voided, it is not 'evident'.
Someone once asked me why I didn't say the truth about the truth. I do not
say the truth about the truth, because the truth is that it is a lie. 'In-tension-al'
truth (allow me to write it 'in-tension', as distinct from 'ex-tension') can, from time
to time, touch on something of the real; but if it does, it is by chance. One can
never over-estimate the frequency of errors in writing. The lapsus calami has no
primacy over the lapsus linguae, but it can be conceived as touching the real. I
am quite clear that my knot is that by which—and uniquely by which—the real is
introduced as such. There's no point in getting worked up about that; it doesn't
amount to all that much. I am not the only one who handles it. Equally, I make use
of it because it serves me in explaining things to you. My fooling around, with the
feeble means I have, can certainly be tolerated—as that's exactly what you do. But
it is a way of articulating precisely this: that all human sexuality is perverse, if we
follow carefully what Freud says. He never succeeded in conceiving that sexuality
as other than perverse, and that is the very reason I question what could be termed
the fecundity of psychoanalysis. You have heard me very often declare this, that
psychoanalysis couldn't even be bothered to invent a new perversion. That's sad—
because, after all, if perversion is the essence of man, what a lack of fecundity in
this practice.
Well, I think that thanks to Joyce we are reaching something I had not ima-
gined. I had not immediately imagined it, but it came to me with time—to consider
Joyce's text, the way it is made. It is made exactly like a Borromean knot, and what
is striking, also, is that this totally escaped him, in other words there is no trace
of anything like it in his whole oeuvre. But that seems to me, however, a sign of
authenticity. Had I stopped there, what I would have found striking, when reading
the text and especially the commentaries on it, is that not only is the Joycean text
teeming with enigmas, but it could be said that he played on that, in the know-
ledge that there would be joyceans for two or three hundred years. These people

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are occupied uniquely with resolving the enigmas—namely, at least, why Joyce put
it in that way. Of course, they always find a reason—he put it in that way because
there's such-and-such a word right after it. In the end it's exactly like my tales of
os-bjet, mensionge or dit-mension just now. In my case, there are reasons, I wish
to express something, I equivocate. But with Joyce, one always loses what I could
call his Latin (especially as he knew a bit of Latin).
The enigma, then, is something in which luckily I took interest at one time. I
wrote it Ee—it being a question of the enunciation and the statement [énonce]-
and the enigma consists in the relation of the E to the e, in other words why the
hell a particular statement has been pronounced. The enunciation is the enigma.
When the enigma is taken to the power of writing, it is something worth pausing
over. Would this not be the result of the sewing-up which is so badly done by an
ego whose function is enigmatic and reparatory?
That Joyce is the writer of the enigma par excellence is what I urge upon
you—I could have given you dozens of examples if it wasn't so late—but I advise
you to go and verify this for yourselves. Ulysses exists in a French translation,
reprinted by Gallimard, if you don't have the old edition of Sylvia Beach's day.
I'm going to indicate a few small things which seem to me notable, before
leaving you. You must be aware of what I've told you about man's relations to his
body, which entirely consist—this is what I've told you—in the fact that man says
that he has a body, his body. To say 'his' is already to say that he possesses it, like
he possesses a piece of furniture, and this has nothing to do with anything allowing
a strict definition of the subject. The subject can only be defined correctly as a
signifier as it is represented for another signifier.
I would also like to say something which might perhaps even slow down a
little the gulf opening in what we are able to grasp of this perversion, by using the
Borromean knot. There is something which one is astonished to see is no longer of
any use to the body—not a body, but the body as such: that is dance. This would
allow me to write the term 'condansation' a little differently...
Is the real straightforward [droit]? That is the question I'd like to put to you
today. I'd also like to point out that in Freud's theory the real has nothing to do
with the world. Because what he explains, about something concerning precisely
the ego, namely the Lust-Ich, is that there is a stage of primary narcissism, and
that this stage is characterised, not by the absence of a subject, but by the absence
of a relation between interior and exterior. I will certainly have to come back to
this—not necessarily before you, because after all I am not certain at present that
next year I'll still have this amphitheatre.
I must say a few more words—it's something I've prepared—about the 'epi-
phany', the famous Joycean epihany, which one encounters at every turn. Please
note this, when he gives a list of his epiphanies: that they are always distinguished
by the same thing, that they are the result of a mistake, namely that the uncon-
scious is liked to the real. It's an amazing thing, which Joyce himself does not
describe otherwise. It is absolutely legible in Joyce that the epiphany is where, due
to a mistake, the unconscious and the real are knotted together.
There is something—today I have been a bit slow, but that's because I wanted
to be understood—there is something I want to draw for you here. If you have

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some idea of the meaning of a Borromean knot, I'll show you this: that, if this is
the ego as I drew it for you just now, we are situated to see the Borromean knot
reconstitute itself in the following way: here is the real; here is the imaginary; here
is the unconscious; and here is Joyce's ego. You can easily see on the schema that
the rupture of the ego sets the imaginary relation free. It is easy to imagine that
the imaginary will bugger off—if the unconscious allows it to, and it incontestably
does.
There you have what I wanted to point out in this last session. One thinks
against a signifier—that is the meaning I gave to the word appensé—one leans
against a signifier in order to think. There you go, you are free.

TEMFLEMA)4

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