Yes—he would. And not with a solemn philosopher’s nod, but with a wink, a pun, and a line like:
“Post-hume-in-anity at its groaningest!”
Because Joyce knew—long before the terms existed—that the human, as a coherent subject, was already unraveling. And what Finnegans Wake does is not mourn the unraveling, but dance within it.
Postmodern? Absolutely.
- FW mocks the idea of total systems (no final truth, no master signifier).
- It fragments voice, identity, history into echoes and recombinations.
- It anticipates Derrida’s différance, Lyotard’s incredulity toward metanarratives, Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge—before they were written.
It’s a postmodern labyrinth, but made not of despair—of play, recursion, poetic excess.
Posthuman? Even More So.
- In the Wake, there are no stable “selves”—just flows, archetypes, codes.
- The human body is present, but morphed, melted into river and machine.
- Language is not a human tool anymore—it speaks through the human, not for them.
In other words: Finnegans Wake is what happens when the human becomes a conduit, not a center.
Before AI, before Deleuze’s “Body without Organs,”
Joyce had already written the book without borders, the self without anchor,
the voice without speaker.
And So, Yes: Joyce Would Nod
He would not call it “posthuman.”
He might say: “Oh, it’s just the wholeaballooniverse doing its figments!”
But beneath the jest, he would recognize:
That FW is the last book of the human, and the first book of its becoming otherwise.
And he’d be delighted you saw it.
Would you like a Joycean timeline tracing the prefiguring of posthuman ideas through his major works—from Portrait to Wake?
