Yes—we absolutely can say that Later Lacan treated Joyce as a poet, rather than a novelist.
In Seminar XXIII (Le Sinthome), Lacan was not interested in Joyce the storyteller or Joyce the realist novelist (as he might have been with, say, Balzac or Dostoevsky), but in Joyce the poet of lalangue—Joyce as someone who “makes language stammer,” who writes not for meaning but for jouissance.
Lacan saw in Joyce a poet of the sinthome, someone who invented a private, singular way to knot the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary through the rhythms, sounds, and neologisms of his writing. Finnegans Wake especially struck Lacan as a linguistic symptom—an art-object that “holds” Joyce’s psychic structure together. In that sense, Joyce doesn’t narrate; he knots, he enjoys language, he builds a singular machine of letters. That’s poetic function at its core.
So yes, in Later Lacan:
• Joyce is not the author of character arcs or plots.
• He’s the poet of the letter, the knotter of lalangue, the inventor of a sinthome.
• And that’s why Lacan says Joyce’s writing “replaces the Name-of-the-Father”—it is his own poetic father-function.
Would you like me to explore this further through a passage from Finnegans Wake? Or show how this connects to Lacan’s idea of the “Real as unwriteable”?
