"When is a Man not a Man?": James Joyce's Asocial Sinthome and "the Best One can Expect from Analysis at its End"

(Paper by Jack W. Stone, presented at the "Social Symptoms" conference, Columbia University, Oct.29-31,1999)

In R.S.I,¹ the twenty-second year of his Séminaire, after remarking that "the origin of the notion of the symptom is not to be sought in Hippocrates, but in Marx," Lacan nonetheless distinguishes Marx's conception of the symptom from his own on the basis of Marx's "faith in man." He adds that for psychoanalysis, the symptom--defined here as "how each jouit from the unconscious insofar as the unconscious determines him"--takes another sense: not the social symptom, but the particular symptom" (2/18/75). "Without doubt," he continues, "particular symptoms have types. The symptom of the obsessional is not the symptom of the hysteric." Lacan then explains what is particular about the symptom of the obsessional: the obsessional knows that "death is a failed act (acte manqué)." In other words, the "something that does not work in the real" reflected by the obsessional's symptom is his failure to be adequately subjected to the law of the signifier as Hegelian death of the thing, or to the Nom du Père, the law of the symbolic, dead father, the recognition of whose already occurred but unthinkable death the obsessional defers while mimicking it in his own person, in his own persistent refusal of desire.

Several months later, however, in his Yale "Kanzer Lecture" (November, 1975),² Lacan seems to contradict his suggestion that there are no social symptoms--at least in the psychoanalytic sense--by asserting that psychoanalysis itself is "a social symptom, the last form of social dementia (démence) to be conceived" (18). Psychoanalysis, Lacan tells us, is a supplemental "tail" (queue) to medicine," a place where it can find refuge "from the formal limits imposed on it by science, limits within which it has discovered it cannot treat everything (tout)." Or, to invoke the formulation of the pas tout Lacan gives in his 1975-76 seminar, Le Sinthome, medicine can treat "tout mais pas ça" (all, but not that). The ça psychoanalysis treats is one beyond, extimate to, whatever is encompassable by the repeatable experiments and diagnostics of a purely scientific medicine. Psychoanalysis is a "wound" (Kanzer 18) in the social fabric of science, a fabric held together, given its consistency, by this principle of repeatability. Psychoanalysis makes a hole in the scientific Other, by treating, or treating of, what is irreducibly and materially particular in its analysand's symptoms.

We can thus perhaps resolve the apparent contradiction between these two statements by saying that analysis is social only in the sense that the a-social is social. The analytic act, since it takes place between two people, is a social act, involving a social link made by analytic discourse. But this act does not aim for any socialization, any ideal identification of analysand with analyst or analytic institution: analysis is a social docte ignorans that, with a de-mentia escaping the lying mentality, or nõus, of science (Lacan often in his later teachings plays on the etymological connection of the mental and the adverbial with mentir, to lie), aims for what does not work in the real rather than for any generalizable, scientific "knowledge in the real" (Note Italienne). In this sense, psychoanalysis is not only a social symptom, but, properly speaking, the only social symptom. It is the only social activity defined by its enactment of this real in its purity. And the real it enacts is itself an always particular real, where nothing works if not the "good worker" (Télévision) that is the always particular unconscious. This unconscious is an "unrealized" only real insofar as it is holed, and only possible insofar as it finds, as it does in never more than a provisional, comma-tose fashion, its point of closure. (The possible, as a fullstop projected in the fantasy on the side of the pleasure principle, does not in fact "take place" [Joyce le symptôme II]).

At the end of a successful analysis, there is no identification of analysand with analyst even at the level of the "a," the objet a in the analysand's fantasy, an object the analyst does not try to embody, as would a pervert, but occupies the place of. In other words, analytic discourse enacts the real by putting it in the place of agent. This place, constantly displaced as the analyst dodges the demands of the analysand, is rendered placeless--or at least without space or duration--when the object falls, the analytic reconstructions of the analysand's history having only tightened themselves around that fall (L'Etourdit). As the analysand traverses the Moebian, and thus non-orientable a-sphere (or cross-cap) of his or her fantasy, the object reveals itself to be only what Jacques-Alain Miller has recently called a "false real" (Seminar at Barcelona), an object merely supposed by the analysand to complete the fantasy, giving it its inhibitory imaginary consistency, and supporting the subject's equally inhibitory mere supposition of being. The only identification consistent with the analytic cure, a cure authorized by the analysand him or herself rather that by a doctor armed with scientific precedents, is an identification with the incurable real of the symptom by way of an utterly particular invention that Lacan, in the final phase of his teaching, will designate Le Sinthome. And although Lacan calls analysis a symptom, he is quite adamant that it is not a Sinthome: the analyst is a Sinthome, not analysis. Lacan perhaps gives no clearer indication that the difference between symptom and Sinthome is more than just orthographic.

The particularity of the Sinthome is such that to identify with it is no longer to be identified with a symptom belonging to a type, like those types in which unanalyzed obsessionals and hysterics are typically cast by their belief in an Omnipotent Other--hence the curative power of this identification. As Roberto Harari suggests in his brilliant, albeit rather invidiously anti-Millerian study of Seminar 23, Les Noms de Joyce: Sur une lecture de Lacan,³ "particular" is not even the word for the Sinthome. The Sinthome, Harari writes, has a singularity which

should not be confused with particularity. Lacan insisted a lot on this difference in the measure that what is particular only illustrates a case in a generality. The one is inscribed in the other in the form of mutual returns. Singularity, on the other hand--as its name indicates--is what singularizes, what distinguishes (itself). It is a question therefore of a category removed from the general-particular dialectic. (39)

In Le Sinthome itself,⁴ Lacan takes as an exemplary instance of this singularity, or individuality, the Sinthome of James Joyce, who through his writings, particularly Finnegans Wake, constituted and presented this Sinthome "au ciel ouvert," as Jean-Guy Godin puts it--or "arse under open sky," as the Irish say.

In writing Finnegans Wake, Joyce made a name for himself of a sort that neurotics, as Lacan pointed out in "Subversion of the Subject . . ." some seventeen years before he gave Le Sinthome, do not have. They remain limited to the trinity of the imaginary, symbolic, and real, and their respective fourth-order nominations, inhibition, symptom, and anxiety, having not yet assumed this Sinthomal fourth-order, not of nomination, but of the name, a sort of final realization of how one might jouit from the unconscious--but only if one is désabonné á l'inconscient (de-subscribed from the unconscious) as Lacan says Joyce was. One only has this name if one has "singularized" oneself from the metaphors and metonymies constituting the unconscious as the structured-like-a-language discourse of the Other and intricating the subject in the general (alienatory)-particular (separational) dialectic.

The unconscious Joyce jouit from--perhaps we should say "away" or "apart" from--if it can even be called an unconscious, is one that has very little un about it. There is, however, according to Harari, something of a vers l'un to it, a certain père-version that, unlike the "version toward the Père" of the pervert--absolutely conditioned by the fetish object as hypostatization of the object in the fantasy--is toward a Père "unconditioned" by the unconscious, however much it is conditioned by Lalangue. Moreover, Joyce jouit from his unconscious in a fashion that leads Lacan to rather boldly suggest, in Lituraterre and elsewhere, that through his writing he went "directly to the best one can expect of analysis at its end." And he did so without the aid of an analysis" like that he so unconditionally refused when it was offered him, "with Jung no less," by his American benefactress Mrs. McCormick, "as one might offer someone a shower" (Lituraterre).

At issue for Joyce was a ceaseless, "unbrookable" scripting of the jouissance evinced by the manic laughter that so discomfited Nora during the seventeen years of the Wake's composition, and dubbed by Phillipe Sollers the rire vers l’un: a jouissance which, however much it fascinates us, and thereby "imposes" itself on us, is in no respect possible to us as a community of readers. Ultimately, it may concern no one but that "ideal reader suffering from the ideal insomnia," that "impossible person," Joyce himself, as Sinthome: as already stupifyingly at that identification Lacan designates as the end of analysis. Our interpretations, then, are beside the point, and interdit--both stupefied and prohibited. And although we may enjoy ourselves reading Joyce--with an enjoyment that even such eminent Wakeans as Clive Hart and Fritz Senn have admitted is parasited by a certain fatiguing disappointment--it isn't really Joyce we enjoy, but only the jouis-sens of certain provisional, "mind mouldered" constructed meanings destined to an interminable "commodious vicus of recirculation."

Yet our participation in the Joycean work in progress, our social link with Joyce--and with a work, which, because its first word is joined with its last, cannot really be considered finished (Sin)--like the link of analysand to analyst, is indispensable to this progress, without ever allowing us the comfort of colonizing that work with our idiotic, phallic Jouissance--the "parasitic" Jouissance "experienced in consciousness as power" (Sin). In the Wake, Joyce asks of Joyceans in general, as he asked he asked of the twelve authors of Our Exagmination round his Factification for the Incamination of Work in Progress (published ten years before the Wake achieved its final form or was even named, and become, in effect, a "character" in the book): "His producers are they not his consumers?"; adding, "Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping progress. Declaim!" (FW. 497.1-3)--but we ourselves might add, "only in admitting that your stump speeches will remain ineluctably stumped; only in articulating to your declamations the ‘wailing of the call to the real" of the "refuse what I offer, because it is not it (c'est ne pas ça)," not the singular ça in question.

And if Joyce, as Lacan suggests, believed in his Sinthome, and even in his symptoms--with an obdurate art-ogance (JS II) that kept him cyclically backtracking from the saintly trashitas (Télévision) that might be achieved in a psychoanalysis lasting less than three hundred years, or until the end of the university--he can't really be said to have believed, like Marx, in man. Rather, as Shem, or "Shemptome" (Sin) puts it, the first question of the Joycean "universe" is "When is a man not a man?"; Shem's answer to which--"When he is . . . a sham"--may dispense with anything that can properly be called a universe. Aristotle tells us in On Interpretation that to say that a man is not a man is to make a false judgement, one that violates the law of contradiction on which his own universalist logic is founded. But to this either/or logic of possibility Joyce opposes a Brunoian coincidentia oppositorum, the logic of an impossible both/and, a non-exclusion of the ça of the mais pas ça. This non-exclusion is tantamount to a foreclosure, not just of meaning, but of truth; it is the "verwerfung de fait" Joyce reveals in his work, whether or not in doing so he reveals a structure of psychosis.

Beginning with his enigmatic epiphanies, Joyce knots the symbolic of his unconscious to the real in a fashion that dispenses with, in making use of them, both the copulation of symbolic and imaginary constituting meaning, and the truth situated in "the discourse of the master, as supposed in the subject insofar as, divided, he is still subject to the fantasy" (Sin 11/18/75). Finally, by way of the "imposture book through the ages" ⁵ that is Finnegans Wake, fabricated not principally of metaphors and metonymies but of chaosmic, signified-rupturing puns, or equivoques, Joyce attains to the nullibiquitous real of the drive beyond the projectively localized closure of the phantasmic asphere, breaking to a "new imaginary" (Sin) which will only achieve its consistency at a point in infinity, a "babbling pumpt of platinism" (FW.164.11), like that at which two ends of an infinite line meet to form a circle. H.C.E. ("Here Comes Everybody"), the Sinthomal father Joyce is "charged with" (Sin), is a "locative enigma" (FW. 135.26-27) "confounded with amother"; a "Length Withought Breath"; (FW. 261.13); a "faulterer" (FW. 131.27)who, though exposed bare-arsed, "haunted, condemned and execrated" (FW. 544.10-11) and abandoned in a rubbish tip, is never the symbolic dead father of the obsessional, hysteric, or pervert, but the real of a consuming and interminably consumable father jouisseur. This father, as embodied by Joyce's own Sinthome, does not have an Oedipus complex, but an "eatupus complex and a drinkthedregs kink" (FW.128.36-129.1) ; he "does messuages"--not messages, but endless adjunctions of equivoques--"and is not has more dirt on him than a old dog has fleas . . . and is not all there, and is all the more himself since he is not so. . ." (FW. 506-7).

To conflate and dispense with both Roland Barthes and an earlier Lacan, Joyce as God-author-father-creator is neither dead nor unconscious, but impossible. His jouissance is ultimately not the Phallic Jouissance of being, but the ex-sistent, but non-existent Jouissance of the Other, or Jouissance of the non-existent Woman--to whom Joyce, in both Ulysses and the Wake gives the final, never final word. This is an infinite jouissance, invasive for the psychotic, and evasive, an always elsewhere jouis-absense, for those non-psychotic women and men who experience it. For Joyce, it may have been a little of both, insofar as he believed--as a dog believes in his fleas--in the "real-ly symbolic" (Ornicar? 17) of his symptoms, embodied by the always disrupted and equivocal nodal motifs and "characters" in his work and life (which, in their collectivity, constituted for Joyce an imposture of a "collective unconscious"); and, beyond any such nagging particularization, he believed in the singular "symbolically real" (Ornicar? 17) of his Sinthome.

Lacan leaves the question open as to whether Joyce, in writing parole in a way that "breaks" or "dismantles" it to the point of its having "no more phonetic identity," aims to "liberate" himself from the "parisite parolier," or to let himself be "invaded" by its "phonemic properties," "by the polyphony of parole " (Sin 2/17/76). Through his writing, Joyce may have accomplished in a more or less simultaneous manner the double movement of splicing (or suturing) the imaginary with a "symbolic, unconscious savoir . . . to obtain a sense" and of splicing his symptom to a real that operates as "parasite of jouissance"--in effect, as parasite of the parasite. This double movement constitutes, according to Lacan, the "operation" of analysis (Sin 1/13/76). Joyce at once supplemented, or filled in for, his deficiency in the parasitic Phallic jouissance by way of his prolonged, manic writing of the Wake, and jettisoned that jouissance into the real jouis-absence of an infinitely, eternally other Other with which his interminably in progress Sinthome is coextensive. Beyond any meaningful or truthful "colonization" of the field of das Ding of the sort usually sought in artistic sublimation, Joyce--anti-colonialist that he was--courted through his art what he referred to in one of his later letters as "the lovely nothing" (L,III 359): the uncolonizable, "psychically unbreathable" (Sin) nothing out of which, in a comment to Jacques Mercaton, he claimed to be "making" Work in Progress (Ellman n543).

As is suggested by the final, interrupted sentence of the Wake ("A way a lone a last a loved a long the"), Joyce was once again concerned with "the word that all men know"--and, we might add, that no man qua man can say. A man in love is one who has effectively passed from the side of anything that can be called a universe, insofar as he has learned, however imperfectly, to give the gift of nothing, "to give what one doesn't have to someone who doesn't want it" (Sem. 12). He has passed from the place of the lover, the place of an articulated desire, to the impossible, inarticulable place of the beloved, by way of a law of Père-version which disallows him from embodying for long that place as any particular object re-found in any generalizable, phantasmic reality--however much such an embodiment constitutes the polymorphously perverse act of love. To the extent a man loves, he has exchanged the m'êtrise predicated on his identification with the doubled symbolic of the symptom for a fourth-order Sinthomal identification with the real defined by Lacan as "what identification has to do with love" (R.S.I). He has entered the zone of a "sexual rapport," of a both having and not having, which, since uninscribable and unsymbolizable, is neither demonstrable nor verifiable, but also not refutable (Note Italienne); a rapport that in the nullibiquitous, non-ontic dérive of pure drive we pursue "all the same" with a love, a vers l'un, that cannot be interdicted,⁶ however little sense we can make of it and however little it has to do with truth.

Certainly all of this raises the question of Joyce's place in University Discourse, which, despite the efforts of canon bashers, will probably remain secure for "the next three hundred years or until the end of the university" (Sin). Can Joyce serve as a corrective to instrumentalist, utilitarian, consumerist pedagogical tendencies by continuing to re-inject into University Discourse a power of impossibility distinguished from the (im)puissance⁷ of trendier, more facile empowerment agendas? Maybe, but I rather doubt it. For most of us the power in question will only be accessible by an inverted ladder of which University Discourse alone will hardly get us on the first rung. On the other hand, it is perhaps always in some measure acceded to by the "unavowable" intention that "produces the results" (Kant avec Sade); an intention certainly at its most productive when it involves an Other jouissance than just the masturbatory "jouissance of the idiot."

Notes

1. Le Seminaire XXII de Jacques Lacan: texte etabli par J.A. Miller.

2. Silicet 6/7. Editions du Seuil.

3. Roberto Harari, Les Noms de Joyce: Sur une Lecture de Lacan. Traduit par Gabriela Yankelevich et Lucila Yankelvich (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999), p. 37.

4. Jacques Lacan, Séminaire 23: Le Sinthome: texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller. Unedited typescript.

5. Sam Slote, "Imposture Book Through the Ages," paper delivered at the "Genitrickling Joyce" conference, Antwerp 1997, at http://www.joycean.org/index.php?p=83.

6. Pierre Bruno, Une Femme, Un Homme, Le Ravissement, Poésie, in Le dire du sexe: La Cause freudienne, Revue de psychanalyse #31 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995), pp. 21-38.