This formulation from Maurice Roche’s Codex will operate throughout this work as a guiding thread.1

On 20 June 1975 – the last day of the fifth International James Joyce Symposium – Jacques Lacan delivered his second lecture on the topic ‘Joyce the Symptom’ to the audience congregated at the Sorbonne in Paris. His first speech had inaugurated the event on Bloomsday four days before, but it is in his second that he comes to a definition of what it means to be ‘post-Joycean’.3 In effect it means realising what the other side – or, in French, l’envers – of the symptom is.