Our starting-point was the idea that the attempt to read Joyce today is bedevilled by a sense of institutional exhaustion and interpretative redundancy. We should now, in the light of our double engagement with Joycean artifice and psychoanalytic aesthetics, be in a better position to grasp what might be at stake in this potential closure of reading – and to resist its becoming actual. We saw that Freud's first efforts to transfer his discovery of the unconscious to the aesthetic domain went together with a fantasy of redeeming the father as the guarantee of integral, truthful representation; and that this Hamlet-like ambition was visible in Freud's preoccupation with the ‘ghost not laid’ of the patriarch Moses. By contrast, Lacan's reading of Joyce's work began with what he considered its exposure of a démission paternelle, a ‘dereliction’ of paternity. Yet the effect of this catastrophic breach of the father's symbolic function was not necessarily, in Lacan's view, a disabling one; on the contrary, it could open on to an unspeakable new inventivity (as seen in Joyce's work, and then implicitly in Lacan's own topological ‘writing’). If the Joycean epiphany appealed to Lacan in particular, this was because he saw it as a pure écrit or ‘joussture’ (FW 535.3) – an act of writing that manifested itself as such, as untranslatable gesture, while simultaneously functioning through that act as a revitalisation of the paternal name (a confirmation of its ‘joyceture’, so to speak).