ABSTRACT
In the unfolding of the seminar on James Joyce – concerning his being as a supplementation sinthome – the authors discern two layers in Jacques Lacan's demonstration. The first layer concerns the name Joyce gave to himself; the second concerns his art. In the Borromean knot that knots the three consistencies, the ego is not the fourth that knots, but one of the three that is knotted, for it is specifically based on the Imaginary of the body with which everyone is infatuated. In Joyce, something of meaning remains, even something quite invasive: enigma. Joyce is the 'writer of the enigma par excellence' and this is what allows Lacan to say that his art is Borromean without his knowing it, a mark of its authenticity. All epiphanies are fragments of things perceived; as such, they would be homologous to the elementary phenomena of mental automatism, specifically verbal hallucination, once again pointing us towards a hypothesis of psychosis.
