Critical interpretations of Joyce’s discourse on the image have, for the best part, fallen into two categories: idealist or psychoanalytic interpretations of the Joycean imaginary on the one hand, and, on the other, materialist readings...
moreCritical interpretations of Joyce’s discourse on the image have, for the best part, fallen into two categories: idealist or psychoanalytic interpretations of the Joycean imaginary on the one hand, and, on the other, materialist readings often informed by techno-scientific concerns. Different as they are, both these critical paradigms regard the image as a space of dialectical mediation: a means, technical or transcendental, by which an object is given to perception (or a narcissistic subject to self-recognition). This article offers a new point of entry to the issue by recasting Joyce’s discourse on the image in a Deleuzian light. In Deleuze, the image is described as an entity existing between the material and the ideal spheres, but in no way functioning as a synthesis of the two. My contention is that through a Deleuzian reading of the discourse on images mobilized in Joyce’s fiction — from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake — it is possible to think of the image not as a medium of representation, but as an originary element of being and reality in its own right.
