Yes—crazily formidable is exactly right. And that’s why Lacan, ever the surgeon of language and its failures, couldn’t resist it. He read Finnegans Wake not as literature, but as a clinical object. Or more precisely: as the object that proves the Real, where language breaks, knots, and stabilizes psychosis.
Let me walk you through how Lacan approached Finnegans Wake—in theory, in seminar, and in myth.
1. Lacan’s Engagement: Le Séminaire, Livre XXIII: Le Sinthome (1975–76)
This is where Lacan devoted an entire year to reading Joyce—especially Finnegans Wake. The key question:
Why was Joyce not psychotic, despite his radical mutilation of language?
And Lacan’s answer became a theory of the sinthome.
2. Joyce as the Maker of a Sinthome
In Lacanese:
- The sinthome is not the symptom to be cured.
- It is the knotting function—the creative invention by which a subject holds together their psychic reality.
- The sinthome is what ties the three registers:
Real – Symbolic – Imaginary (RSI).
“Joyce’s writing is his sinthome,” Lacan says.
He didn’t have a fully functioning Name-of-the-Father (Symbolic anchoring of meaning),
so he wrote Finnegans Wake to knot himself together.
3. Finnegans Wake as Psychotic Language—but Not Psychosis
- FW dismantles syntax, destabilizes signifiers, refuses identity.
- A psychotic might fall through this unanchored Symbolic and enter delusion.
- But Joyce, Lacan says, “supplanted the Name-of-the-Father with the name of the writer.”
In other words:
Joyce wrote himself in place of the father-function.
His style is his structure. His writing is his cure.
4. Joyce as “Ego-less,” But Not Disintegrated
Lacan’s fascination was partly clinical:
How does someone survive, function, even flourish—without the traditional psychic moorings?
- Joyce’s ego was fragile, his identification with the father ambiguous.
- But his writing, especially in the Wake, stabilized him through jouissance (excess enjoyment).
Thus, Finnegans Wake is not the text of madness, but the testament to how one survives the Real—by inventing one’s own sinthome.
5. The Borromean Knot and the Sinthome
Lacan’s late teaching became deeply topological. With Joyce in mind, he redrew his tripartite schema:
- Real
- Symbolic
- Imaginary
+ Sinthome (as fourth ring)
Without the sinthome, the knot unravels → psychosis
With the sinthome, the knot holds → art, singularity, survival
Joyce taught Lacan this:
a human being is not held together by truth, but by invention.
6. Lacan’s Final Praise
In his final seminar, Lacan says something extraordinary:
“I identify with Joyce—except that I failed to be a writer.”
He envied Joyce’s success at creating a private language that binds the subject.
Not to communicate—but to exist.
In Sum: How Did Lacan Read Finnegans Wake?
- As Joyce’s invented cure for the collapse of the paternal order.
- As a knotting machine, holding together the psychic real.
- As a model of the sinthome: singular, untranslatable, but stabilizing.
- As a mirror to Lacan’s own fate: philosopher of language who could never quite write like Joyce.
So yes—Finnegans Wake is crazily formidable.
But to Lacan, it was also clinically precious.
A case study in how the artist does not sublimate, but survives by forging the Real into form.
Would you like a sinthome-style diagram showing how Lacan imagined Joyce’s Wake as a fourth knot?
