S.D. (sic)

Lionel Trilling reports that when Freud was greeted, on his seventieth birthday, as the ‘discoverer of the unconscious’ his response was to disclaim that title, remarking that ‘the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious’. This was to return ‘discovery’ to its literal sense: an act of making visible, of unveiling. So the unconscious had previously been revealed, Freud implied, but anonymously, without the involvement of a self-theorising ego like himself: its alethia had, paradoxically enough, been blind. The many questions immediately raised by Freud's ambiguous tribute to poets and philosophers – to do with how we might locate the unconscious subject thus posited, how we can identify the source and end of this alleged participation in Freudian truth – have continued to bedevil psychoanalysis, above all in its repetitive attempts to shed light on the artistic object and its creation.

Lacan's reading of Joyce as sinthome might, however, provide us with ways to rethink and clarify certain aspects of this artistic dis-covery; above all, the question of how art can embody or conjure up the fantasmatic enjoyment that is excluded – or foreclosed, to use Lacan's term – from reality.