Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0003-5867-0373
Defense Date
2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Media, Art, and Text
First Advisor
Oliver Speck
Second Advisor
Adin Lears
Third Advisor
Massa Lemu
Fourth Advisor
Jennifer Rhee
Abstract
Between 1975 and 1976 Jacques Lacan delivered his 23rd Seminar, Le Sinthome, offering his most direct discussion of art, elaborated through a reading of James Joyce. Lacan (re)conceptualized ideas regarding perversion, representation, language, and the unconscious, from which two ideas appeared of note: lalangue and sinthome. For Lacan, lalangue figured as the excessive underside of language—a sort of a-linguistic, homophonic babbling, an endlessly flowing riverrun of letters without signification. The sinthome—a fourth ring in the 'Borromean link' of the psyche (Real–Symbolic–Imaginary)—figured as key to subverting the anticipated effects of foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, made of nothing more or less than the moteriality of lalangue. Joyce's art—especially Finnegans Wake (1939)—is central to Lacan's thinking on the sinthome precisely because of Joyce's literary-masochistic capacity for manipulating lalangue before it settles on the shores of signification.
Traversing discipline, from Black studies and psychoanalysis to literary criticism, art history, and media theory, this dissertation revisits the Lacanian uptake of Joyce to pose the question: how are we to understand the sinthome and lalangue if the exemplar of these concepts—Joyce—establishes his identification with the un-representable only by conjuring an anti-Black fantasy? In Finnegans Wake, Joyce writes his alter ego, Shem the Penman, as a desecrated artist described according to racist tropes about Black/African being. Lacan's reading of Joyce, which allows him to elaborate the end of psychoanalysis itself, lacks an overdue reckoning with how Joyce's lalangue attains theoretical-practical substance only through Joyce's rendering of Shem as Black.
The dissertation concludes by questioning whether art at the limits of the sayable might reckon with language as a closed system, tending less towards individuating genius and more to what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls 'difference without separability.'
Rights
© Dylan J. Lackey
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
4-29-2026
Included in
Aesthetics Commons, African American Studies Commons, Continental Philosophy Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Political Theory Commons, Queer Studies Commons, Theory and Criticism Commons, Theory and Philosophy Commons