Lacan Reading Joyce (Colette Sole, Routledge, 2018-10-17)

This book discusses Jacques Lacan’s contribution to understanding the life and work of James Joyce, introducing Colette Soler’s influential reading to English readers for the first time. Focusing on Lacan’s famous Seminar on Joyce, the reader will no doubt learn much from Lacan, but also, as Soler shows, what Lacan learned from Joyce and what perhaps, without him, he would not have approached with so much confidence.

Le Sinthome. This is the title Jacques Lacan chose for his seminar devoted to Joyce in 1975–76. He wrote the word 'sinthome' in its original spelling, from the Greek, and thus used the technique so dear to Joyce: the equivocation between the sound that is heard and the graphic representation that is seen. Is it surprising that the author who recognised in 1956 with 'The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious' that the Freudian practice of speech revealed an unconscious that writes – something Jacques Derrida found quite remarkable – would end in 1975–76 with Joyce? (amazon) (kindle 2018-10-28) 

The literary stake is certain and Lacan does not recoil from formulating his hypothesis about the writing of Joyce, new master of the unreadable: he put an end, Lacan said, to the dream of literature (J/L, p. 36). This is a double thesis, about literature, as distinct from poetry, and about Joyce. Dream! This term provides sufficient indication that the literary stake is being measured against the yardstick of psychoanalysis. This is not a paradox, given that literature and psychoanalysis both share the same question: how far can one go, what can one obtain, with the word as sole instrument, be it spoken or written?

Soler, Colette. Lacan Reading Joyce (p. 1). Taylor and Francis. Kindle edition.