ABSTRACT
A strange, creationist takeover of John Joyce's Irish patriotism, which itself was too ineffectual to be anything but derisory. Thus, without knowing it, but through sound logic, Joyce will have demonstrated the necessity of the function of exception that is required for any discourse to stay in place. Joyce acutely illustrates Jacques Lacan's formulation when, at the end of The Sinthome, he states that one can 'just as well bypass, on the condition that one make use of it'. Lacan's commentary on the Schreber case is entirely constructed on a presupposition excluded by the Borromean knot: the presupposition of the Imaginary's subordination to the Symbolic and the 'induction' effects of the signifier on the Imaginary. In short, he stigmatises the portraits of those supposedly unworthy fathers by returning them to the register of the Imaginary conceived as non-causal, whereas the agency of the Name-of-the-Father, purely symbolic, is causal.
