Love and the Ethics of Subaltern Subjectivity in James Joyce's Ulysses
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Durham E-Theses Love and the Ethics of Subaltern Subjectivity in James Joyce's Ulysses HSU, CHING-YING How to cite: HSU, CHING-YING (2014) Love and the Ethics of Subaltern Subjectivity in James Joyce's Ulysses, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10736/ Use policy This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND) Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk Love and the Ethics of Subaltern Subjectivity in James Joyce’s Ulysses Ching-ying Hsu Thesis Submitted for the qualification of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Studies Durham University 2014 Dedicated to My Parents Acknowledgements I would like to take the opportunity to express my deep gratitude for many people who have helped me in various ways during the process of my pursuing the doctorate degree. First of all, my sincerest thanks go to my supervisors, Dr. John Nash and Dr. Samuel Thomas. Dr. Nash’s solid scholarship and erudition in Joyce criticism offered indispensable guidance and valuable instruction in my study and research on Joyce. His unfailing, kind support, encouraging attitude and open-minded approach in supervision have given me the greatest intellectual freedom and pleasure that can be imagined during the long process of developing my ideas and writing my thesis. With his keen advises on my work, our meetings and discussions in the past few years have always been extremely rich and rewarding. Dr. Thomas with his speciality in contemporary theories also contributes hugely to the process of developing and writing my thesis. He has provided numerous valuable comments and up-to-date, impressive insights in our discussions of psychoanalysis and contemporary critical theories. The meetings with him have always been pleasant and inspiring experiences. The current form of this thesis benefits significantly from Dr. Nash’s and Dr. Thomas’s careful reading and insightful comments. I really appreciate their patience, kind support, rigorous scholarship and excellent minds. It is indeed a priviledge to be under their supervision. Many thanks are also due to my viva committee, Dr. Luke Thurston and Dr. Daniel Grausam. I thank for the friendly and encouring atmosphere at the viva, and more important, the careful reading of my thesis, and the focused, deep questions. I have learned a lot and found the viva impressively rewarding. I would also like to thank Professor Stephen Regan for chairng my viva; his organization made the viva particularly pleasant. My true thanks are also directed to Professor Chaoyang Liao and Professor Li-Ling Tseng for their time and encouragements in our meetings during my visits to Taiwan in the past few years. I genuinely thank Professor Liao for his kind regards, his sharing of his recent work, our always intellectually-stimulating discussions, and his simply brilliant self. Most important of all, my work and life have been enormously indebted to each of my beloved family, escpecially my parents and my brother. Without their unconditional love and constant support, this thesis would be impossible. One of the luckies things in my life is to be part of the family. No words can be adequate to convey my deepest gratitude. I dedicate this thesis to my parents. Last but not the last, to my friends in Durham, I hope to express my thanks in person for the company and friendship. Finally, I also thank the beautiful English countryside. Countless walks by the river and in the woods have marked my years in Durham. Abstract This thesis explores Joyce’s aesthetic enterprise in Ulysses from the perspective of ethics, arguing that my psychoanalytic study necessarily points to the entwinement of ontology, epistemology and ethics. Joyce’s literary experimentation not only revolutionised western literature, writing his name into world history, but also inaugurated an emergent subjectivity in modernity. In answering Spivak’s question, ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’, one of my main theses is that the subaltern can speak through the process of self-naming, through the self-invention of a new subjectivity and a New Symbolic. In Chapter One, I critically review Lacan’s theorisation of the ethical models in his long career, engaging in the current debates among Lacanians regarding the definition and efficacy of Lacan’s theory of the (ethical) act and the interconnected ethico-political theories in the contemparay landscape. I evaluate Lacanians’ diverse stances toward Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan centered on the emphasis of negativity and Badiou’s theory of event and truth-procedures. After offering my own theoretical evaluation and intervention into the above-mentioned debates, I also seek to foreground the place of love in Lacanian psychoanalysis and to elucidate how love manifests itself ethically. In my reading of ‘Scylla and Charybdis,’ I argue that Joyce, through Stephen’s idiosyncratic theory of Shakespeare, articulates his artistic ambition as a work of/for a singular universal, endeavouring to transform the human subject by way of writing a book of himself, and of making a self out of writing. I take Joyce’s literary experiment in ‘Cyclops’ as an arrangement deployed through the narrative by the Nameless One that juxtaposes with the rhetorical excess of interpolated digressions. Drawing on Lacan’s theorization of the look and the gaze, I contend that Joyce conducts a literary traversal of fantasy, a working through of symptomatic nationalism. The interpretation of ‘fantasmatic’ working offers an alternative reading to the historicist approaches and critiques of Gibson and Nolan. I also argue that neighbour love has already prefigured in ‘Cyclops,’ in Bloom’s proclamation of the ideal of universal love and in the poetic justice of Bloom’s escape from his xenophobic, Cyclopean neighbours. The psychoanalytically-inspired theory of ‘de-activation of the law’ and Badiou’s conception of ideological ‘subtraction’ are enlisted in my interpretation of neighbour love. I read ‘Circe’ as Joyce’s experiment with a sinthomatic construction of subjectivity, contending that there is a constant process of unknotting and reknotting in the construction of textual subjectivity. I examine whether the sinthomatic construction of subjectivity, as it is evidenced in the fantasmatic episodes, truly invents a new structural stratification of subjectivity and alternative libidinal organization. By way of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Žižek’s theory, I argue that masochism in ‘Circe’ is not necessarily ethical but can function as a preparatory step towards the true ethical act. Pseudo-messianism and masochism are opposed to the true messianism manifested through neighbour love as a genuine ethical act. Enlightened by Lacan’s complex theory of the psychoanalytic act and Badiou’s idea of new neighbourhood, I try to capture the ethical impact of genuine messianism. I interpret Joyce’s modern version of ‘Penelope’ as a sinthomatic writing as well, finding this female countersign to be problematic by way of an ethical evaluation of the sinthome as a (singularised) sexual relation and an investigation of Joyce’s belief in his sinthome. Furthermore, my ethical reading is also explored through the productive tension between what I term ‘sinthomatic eroticism’ and love. I invoke both Lacan’s idea of love as ‘compensaiton’ of the non-existence of sexual relationship, and Badiou’s work on love as a way of creatively carving out what I term ‘the ethical space of love’ as a space (not entirely disengaged from but) distinct from the psychoanalytic domain of sexual desires or eros. i Table of Contents Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ i Abbreviations ............................................................................................................... iii List of Figures ............................................................................................................. ivv List of Graphs ............................................................................................................. ivv Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................................. 12 Love and Self-Naming for/in the Ethics of Subaltern Subjectivity Chapter Two ............................................................................................................... 125 My Own Private Shakespeare: Toward the Possibility of a Singular Universal in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ Chapter Three ............................................................................................................. 167 Laughter in the Dungeon: Symptomatic Nationalism and Ethical Ideals in ‘Cyclops’ Chapter Four .............................................................................................................. 243 Subjectivity Under Construction: Messianism and Masochism in ‘Circe’ Chapter Five ............................................................................................................... 320 The Problematic Countersign: On Love and Sinthomatic Eroticism in ‘Penelope’ Conclusion ................................................................................................................