A Joycean Interface: Re-Territorializing between Deleuze and Lacan

Abstract

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