ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the extent of J. Lacan's change of theoretical direction, which was apparent from the first session of The Sinthome. It presents the last session of his Seminar alongside A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as some of J. Joyce's other works that preceded Ulysses, to trace the genesis of the Joycean symptom. Joyce associated the epiphany with beauty and with claritas, one of the qualities of beauty according to Saint Thomas Aquinas. The others are integrity and harmony. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Jacques Aubert called the first truly Joycean work, is a text written about the body. Writing about the body allowed Joyce, rather than identifying with the image of his body, to have a body, as Franz Kaltenbeck expressed it. Joyce gives substance to Lacan's thesis, initially announced in his lecture on Joyce and in the first session of the Si.
