ABSTRACT
Laurent Milesi broadens a Lacanian psychoanalytical framework by working on “auto-fiction,” these recent texts playing with exhibitionism and confession. Studying the author who calls herself “Chloé Delaume,” what interests Milesi is less her reluctance to “psychoanalyze herself” than her creation of a virtual self. Milesi coins the term of “virtuareal” to account for her remarkable trajectory. Given the importance of the name invented by the writer, her reiterated “Chloé Delhomme” presents her as stemming “ de l’homme ” (“of man”). Her fictional proper name functions like a sinthome, the term coined by Lacan to analyze how Joyce became his own writing: both Joyce and Delaune re-knot the three registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. To these three interlocking realms, Milesi has to add a fourth one that he calls the Virtureal, to refer to a “cyberization” of the self, in tune with the techniques of self-fashioning provided by the plastic reality of our digital age.
