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.
Lacan Reading Joyce follows the seminar Jacques Lacan devoted to James Joyce in 1975 and 1976, the one he titled Le Sinthome. Colette Soler works through how Lacan reads Joyce's writing as a symptom that holds a life together rather than one to be deciphered and dissolved. She traces the move from the symptom that speaks to the sinthome that Joyce fashions from his writing.
Soler is as interested in what Lacan takes from Joyce as in what he says about him, setting the seminar against his earlier claim that the unconscious writes. The chapters turn on diagnosis, the letter, and the Borromean knot, keeping close to Lacan's own terms.
For a clinician the book offers a careful account of the sinthome as a category for reading symptoms that a subject relies on to stay standing, and of what a Lacanian diagnosis attends to. Devra Simiu's translation brought Soler's text to English readers in 2018.
About the author
Colette Soler
Colette Soler is a French psychoanalyst who trained with Jacques Lacan and practises and teaches in Paris. A member of the Ecole freudienne de Paris until its dissolution, she later became a founding figure of the Forums of the Lacanian Field and its School of Psychoanalysis, established after the 1998 split in the Lacanian movement. She works within the Lacanian tradition and is known for writing on affect, the clinic, and Lacan's later teaching, including Lacan Reading Joyce and Lacan: The Unconscious Reinvented.
Details
- 2018
- 2018
- French
- Devra Simiu
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 142
- 9781138327252