ABSTRACT
J. Lacan's hypothesis is that of an error from the start, of a primary fault in James Joyce's knot, which through this fact is not Borromean: the rings of the symbolic and the real have been knotted directly to each other. The term "epiphany" was used by Joyce as a concept intended to describe an aesthetic literary experience. Joyce associated the epiphanies with the beautiful and with claritas, one of the three qualities of the beautiful according to St. Thomas Aquinas. If the ego is said to be narcissistic, it is because at a certain level something supports the body as an image. The ego, constituted by the identification with the image of the body in the mirror, appears in a position of mastery at a moment of great feebleness and dependence at which the child cannot walk or speak. In Joyce's case it concerns letting the image of the body drop, as pathology of the mirror stage.
