8 - Psychoanalysis

Summary

Joyce est un affreud: with a characteristically untranslatable pun Jacques Lacan, speaking to his seminar on 16 March 1976, took up an old notion which had been recently re-echoed by some writers at the journal Tel Quel: the notion that the supposed semiotic ‘equivalence’ of the names of Joyce and Freud – both names, of course, enciphering ‘joy’ – marks the two figures as exemplars of revolutionary modernity, purveyors of disruptive écriture. Lacan's prefix, however, would seem to turn his punning point against the kind of ‘link’ which had been celebrated by writers like Sollers and Kristeva: for if Joyce were an affreud, he would not so much be ‘a Freud’ as an anti-Freud, the very opposite of what Freud stood for; and as such perhaps affreux, ‘frightful’ or even ‘joyless’ (a sense Lacan underlines by adding ‘Et il est un ajoyce’).

Now, Lacan was undoubtedly aware that in jocoseriously raising the question of the ‘freudful’ status of Joyce he was revisiting one of the lieux communs of Joycean criticism. It is usually the antagonism or incompatibility of Joyce and Freud that provides a starting-point for a critical account of the relations, whether actual or potential, between Joyce's work and psychoanalysis (conceived of either as a set of ideas or as an interpretive practice).