2026 Woodman Lecture Series

Kristina Mendicino: “Unseen Blusher in an Obscene Coalhole”: On the Subject of Knowledge and Jouissance in Joyce and Shelley” 

Time: Tuesday, September 29, 5:00 – 6:30 PM
Location: University College 3105 Board Room

In his session on “Lituraterre” from Seminar XVIII (1971), French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan asks: “Isn’t the letter littoral, strictly speaking? Isn’t that what the letter traces out—the edge of the hole in the kind of knowledge that psychoanalysis designates when it approaches it?” For Lacan, not only psychoanalysis but also literary writing and mathematical formalizations demarcate this limit. Whether the formulae of physics or the “vocable scriptsigns” of Finnegans Wake, the letter marks a rupture in the ‘knowledge’ constituted by the signifier. Yet whereas letters used in science dismiss the “jouissance that stems from” this rupture, literature and psychoanalysis support a different relation to jouissance – which also means a different relation of the subject to the signifier and knowledge. This lecture addresses how the literary writings of James Joyce and Percy Shelley articulate the relation of the subject to knowledge and jouissance, focusing on the words “fading coal” from Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, a central phrase in Joyce’s fiction.

Kristina Mendicino is Professor of German Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism ( 2016), Announcements: On Novelty and Passive Voices (2021), and On the Subject of Phenomenology, and Other Figures of Speech (2023). She is also the editor of several volumes and special issues on topics ranging from German Idealism to modernist poetry and the literary character of phenomenology. She has just completed a monograph on the intersections and disjunctions between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Heideggerian thought, titled Of Logos: On Speaking Being in Heidegger and Lacan. In her current project, she aims to unfold the consequences of a Lacanian approach to the letter for literary studies, focusing on writers such as James Joyce, Georg Trakl, and Robert Walser.