Joyce, the Hegelian

DIALECTICAL THINKING IN THE HUMANITIES

Speaker: Jensen Suther, Harvard University Society of Fellows

A widely shared intuition about Joyce’s Ulysses is that it is somehow a “Hegelian” work, despite Joyce’s relative disinterest in Hegel compared to thinkers like Aristotle and Vico. This paper attempts to both vindicate and challenge this intuition. While Joyce should be read as the preeminent Hegelian novelist, his Hegelianism has nothing to do with the “encyclopedic” quality of his work or a tendency towards “totalization,” as has often been supposed. Joyce’s Hegelian bona fides rather derive from an unexpected source: his radicalization in Ulysses of Aristotelian ideas of form and self-knowledge. The larger stakes of framing Joyce’s modernism in terms of a rethinking of Aristotle along Hegelian lines can be brought out by considering the deepest anti-Hegelian approach to the oeuvre: Jacques Lacan’s late reading of Joyce as “the Symptom.”

This event is co-sponsored by Psychoanalytic Practices.