Abstract
Framed as a series of staged exchanges between Ulysses and Sigmund Freud's writings on forms of sexual dysfunction, this essay theorizes the narrative effects and hermeneutic disturbances of "detotalized details" in both. By tarrying slowly and at dizzyingly close proximity with these tiny details and their textual milieus, I illuminate in these artificial accessories or capricious beauty spots the emergence of differential forms threaded together by their pleasurable referential emptiness, diegetic short-circuiting, and the spotting with glitches the seamlessly draped fantasy of textual totality. I examine these interstices of formal lack and hermeneutic hollowing through the lens of three undercut conceptual webs: femininity, uselessness, and failure. In conversation with theorists of aesthetic mediation and subjectivity in modernism (Emily Apter, Walter Benjamin, Adolf Loos, Naomi Schor, and Georg Simmel), this essay dwells on the productive discursive dysfunctions of form in Joyce's novel and of psychoanalytic theory, fashioning through stretchy garters, snug stockings, and overdetermined panties what their mutual discursive imbrication can teach us about the uses and uselessnesses of interpretation.
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