Chapter 16 - Joyce and Critical Theory

Summary

Rabaté’s chapter traces the evolving interpretations of the revolutionary nature of Joyce’s writing. Beginning by retelling the reception of Joyce by Philippe Sollers, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, and the turn towards historical and political readings, he argues for the theories of Jacques Rancière as allowing a synthesis of the two strands in the reception of Joyce’s work. Rabaté examines Joyce’s interest in the Italian theorist of history, Guglielmo Ferrero, tracing to Ferrero’s history Joyce’s interest in universal history, to his anti-Caesarism Joyce’s interest in the subversion of imperial figures, and to his theories of various migrant groups, and anti-Semitism specifically, Joyce’s conception of Leopold Bloom and his socialism. Rabaté moves from this notion of migration to Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque and polyglossia to address the subversive humor of the Wake. Using the term “determinate negation” coined in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Adorno and Horkheimer, he argues that Joyce’s last work achieves a continuous dynamism through its use of principle of negation.