The concept of the unconscious in Joyce: Lacan’s last teaching

Abstract

This paper starts with a question: to what extent does James Joyce’s writing style disrupts the axiomatic of Lacan’s teaching, centered on linguistic structuralism? The text seeks therefore to pinpoint the relevance of resorting to Joyce when reformulating the concept of the unconscious. By means of a conceptual survey on the definition of the unconscious in Lacan’s teaching, we problematized the validity of using structural linguistics to define such concept, inquiring about the displacement of this theoretical resource to Joyce’s work. Our hypothesis posits that the clinical evidence of imposed speech, on a psychiatric patient and in Joyce’s own experience, imposed on Lacan the epistemological work of problematizing the status of the signifier as representative of the subject of the unconscious, thus elaborating the concept of the unconscious in its relation to the experience of enjoyment rather than the signifier.