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What does Lacan's thesis on "Joyce-the-symptom" aim at? Joyce's famous statement that he wrote Finnegans Wake in order to keep literary historians busy for the next 400 years has to be read against the background of Lacan's assertion that, within a psychoanalytic cure, a symptom is always addressed at the analyst and as such points forward towards its interpretation. The "modernism" of Joyce resides in the fact that his works, at least Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, are not simply external to their interpretation but, as it were, in advance take into account their possible interpretations and enter into dialogue with them. Insofar as an interpretation or theoretical explanation of a work of art endeavours to "frame" its object, one can say that this modernist dialectics provides another example of how the frame is always included in, is a part of, the framed content: in modernism, theory about the work is comprised in the work, the work is a kind of preemptive strike at possible theories about itself. On that account, it is inappropriate to reproach Joyce for no longer writing for a naive reader capable of an immediate consumption of his works, but for a reflected reader, who is only able to read with an eye on possible theoretical interpretations of what he is reading, in short, for a literary scientist: such a "reflected" approach in no way diminishes our enjoyment in the work — quite the contrary, it supplements our reading with a surplus-enjoyment which is one of the trademarks of true modernism.

One could also say that this scene renders the symptom of Power: the grotesque excess by means of which, in a unique short-circuit, attitudes which are officially opposed and mutually exclusive reveal their uncanny complicity, where the solemn agent of Power suddenly starts to wink at us across the table in a gesture of obscene solidarity, letting us know that the thing (i.e. his orders) is not to be taken too seriously and thereby consolidating his power. The aim of the "critique of ideology", of the analysis of an ideological edifice, is to extract this symptomal kernel which the official, public ideological text simultaneously disavows and needs for its undisturbed functioning.

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