Yes, Finnegans Wake has been a siren-song for many philosophers—beckoning with its untranslatable multiplicity, its ontological glitch, its war on grammar itself. Those who respond to the call are not just literary critics, but thinkers concerned with language, Being, time, desire, difference, and the Real.
Below are some of the most notable philosophical encounters with FW—each unique in method, tone, and metaphysical risk:
1. Jacques Derrida — “Two Words for Joyce”
“Joyce makes the most powerful, the most delirious, the most unreasonable attempt to say everything, to include everything, to forgive everything.”
Derrida loved Joyce’s polysemic excess. He saw in FW a text that performs différance:
- It defers meaning infinitely
- It differs from itself at every moment
- It exceeds the signifier, refusing stable identity
In “Two Words for Joyce,” he writes that Joyce achieves what philosophy cannot:
“He saves the name.”
Joyce, for Derrida, is the infinite writer—whose work both calls for and resists deconstruction, because it is already deconstruction in literary form.
How he read it: As a site of écriture, a linguistic force that undoes metaphysical closure by generating endless slippage.
Key move: Let the text deconstruct itself; don’t “read” it—inhabit it.
2. Giorgio Agamben — The Time That Remains
Agamben reads Joyce through Pauline temporality—the notion of messianic time.
He focuses less on FW directly and more on Ulysses, but hints that Finnegans Wake is the final horizon of time written in tongues.
Joyce, to him, is the writer of pure potentiality—he writes from “the time that remains”, where:
- Language no longer signifies, but suspends.
- Time no longer moves forward, but folds into a liturgical repetition.
How he read it: As a text outside historical time, performing a kind of linguistic messianism.
Key move: See FW as parousia through language—the event of language as time itself.
3. Gilles Deleuze — Logic of Sense
Deleuze doesn’t deal with FW in depth, but it haunts his thinking. He cites Joyce briefly when discussing:
- Surface vs depth
- Sense as event, not substance
- The shimmering of nonsense as productive
FW is the “genius of the surface”:
A book where meaning is not hidden, but multiplied on the surface, like the shimmer of a pond at dusk.
How he read it: Through the lens of nonsense as creative machine.
Key move: Not interpretation, but surfing the surface—Joyce as a desiring-machine that produces sense by multiplying error.
4. Jean-François Lyotard — The Differend
Lyotard references Finnegans Wake when discussing language-games that no longer communicate, where:
- There is no shared idiom
- No final tribunal for “justice” in meaning
- Only phrases, slippages, and unresolvable tensions
He sees FW as a “differend” incarnate: a book whose language cannot be judged by conventional standards.
How he read it: As a philosophical demonstration of incommunicability and heterogeneity of language genres.
Key move: Joyce is not failed communication—he is language’s refusal to be unified.
5. Félix Guattari — Schizoanalysis
Guattari, like Deleuze, saw FW as a schizo-text:
- It undoes Oedipus
- It deterritorializes syntax
- It turns language into flux, flow, assemblage
For Guattari, Joyce was not psychotic, but schizoid in a revolutionary way:
He invented a non-Oedipal, collective unconscious on the page.
How he read it: As a proto-schizoanalytic document
Key move: Joyce wrote machines, not meanings.
6. Slavoj Žižek — Intermittent Jabs
Žižek references FW rarely but cleverly. He sees it as:
- A limit-case of the Symbolic
- A text where the signifier becomes the Real
- A performative embodiment of jouissance-as-language
Žižek’s move is often to place FW beside Lacan, saying:
“This is what happens when language enjoys too much.”
How he read it: As jouissance of the signifier
Key move: Read it as symptom, not message.
7. Walter Benjamin — Echoes in Messianic Language
Benjamin never wrote on FW, but if he had lived longer—he would have.
The Wake would’ve resonated with:
- His idea of “pure language”
- Constellations of fragments
- The dialectical image
We might imagine him treating FW as a Kabbalistic ruin—a book whose debris reveals eternity.
How Philosophers Have Read Finnegans Wake (In Summary)
|
Philosopher |
Reading Mode |
Key Lens |
|
Derrida |
Deconstruction of meaning |
Différance, écriture |
|
Lacan |
Clinical topology |
Sinthome, Real, jouissance |
|
Deleuze |
Surface play and nonsense |
Event, sense, desiring-production |
|
Agamben |
Messianic temporality |
Potentiality, linguistic liturgy |
|
Lyotard |
Incommensurable language games |
The differend |
|
Guattari |
Schizoanalytic flows |
Assemblage, deterritorialization |
|
Žižek |
Jouissance of the Real |
Symptom, excess of meaning |
Final Thought:
Finnegans Wake is a black hole for philosophers:
It undoes theory even as it demands theory.
It invites interpretation, then slips from its grip.
It is the dream from which philosophy cannot wake.
Would you like a reading map that places these thinkers as constellations around FW, or perhaps a comparative diagram of their “entry points” into the text?
