ABSTRACT
In “A Crumpled Note or Purloined Letter? Sublime and Feminine Creativity in Destruction in Jung and Lacan”, C.G. Jung’s essay on James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is compared to Jacques Lacan on E.A. Poe’s The Purloined Letter. Both psychologists offer a feminine sublime of contiguity that arises in relation to a sublime in the destruction of transcendence. Here “contiguity” is taken from Lacan’s depiction of what he calls jouissance, a feminine desire not denied to men yet significantly not organized around the phallus (Lacan, 1982, p. 97). Jouissance can be sublime when its playfulness in language evokes possibilities beyond the capacity of representation. Out of such destruction of meaning both psychologists discern a sublime feminine creativity, although only Jung posits the cooperative contiguity of nonhuman nature. More so than Lacan, and aided by his notion of archetype, Jung suggests a bodily and animal strata to human beings that is productive of reforming subjectivity. He calls it finding the Self in a new relation to creativity and history. We all become citizens of Catholic Ireland in reading Ulysses because its ability to evoke abjection remakes our sense of transcendence as a possibility for the psyche.
