This book argues the cultural-historical importance of James Joyce's Irish modernity. His projection of a traumatized discursivity encapsulating the life-in-death of Irish experience, his syncretic manner of representation, his paradoxical approach to Irish nationalism, his complex attitude to language and cultural memory anticipate insights which we are only beginning to grasp at the end of the century. Joyce, an Irish Catholic born in 1882, grappled with the realities of colonial experience and the hegemony of the English language; and this struggle entailed an engagement with the evaporation of the presence of the material, and the devaluation or dissolution of art and truth — problems besetting contemporary culture. Not surprisingly, Joyce's writing has had an informative impact on contemporary theory: Joyce's presence in the texts of Derrida, Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek is pronounced; and the simplest way of describing this book is as a study in the informative presence of what Freud called the “death instinct,” and what I see as the peculiarly traumatizing and uncanny effect of Irish historical experience in the rivalry for truth of three disciplines: deconstructive philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Joycean Irish modernist literature.