This study argues that James Joyce’sFinnegans Wake¹ can be read as a text that disrupts and reinscribes the philosophical understanding of the process ofmimēsis, a process of imitating (expressing, describing, representing, illustrating) a pre-existent ‘reality,’ whether that reality is understood as the thing itself or aneidosoridea.² In place of this process ofmimēsis, Finnegans Wakeproposes the problematic of the ‘immargination’ (4.19) – a sort of unlimited imagination – which tries to picture the ever-receding figure of Finnegan, who is lost in a past that has never been present or a future that never arrives.³ Thus, this...

Finnegans Wakecan be read as a text that puts the ‘Platonist’ order of appearance into question by displacing the value of presence on which it relies. In order to get a sense of what is at stake in theWake’s radical displacement and reinscription of both the ‘Platonist’ order of appearance and the privileged role it plays in the literary-philosophical understanding ofmimēsis, it is necessary to understand something of the various components that constitute it. According to Derrida in ‘The Double Session,’ Platonism acts as something of a privileged heading that can stand ‘more or less immediately for...

In this chapter I wish to consider in some detail how Vico’sThe New Scienceoffers the chance of readingFinnegans Wakenon-eidetically through what Vico callsauspicium, or augury. In particular, I will consider howauspiciumencapsulates the paradox inherent in the noneidetic scene of imaginary ‘production,’ where the model presented withdraws itself as model. I will also explore this scene of imaginary ‘production’ as it relates to section 1.5 ofFinnegans Wake, which presents this mode as a scene of writing in which a hen leaves behind a letter to be read (and imitated, written, etc.) by the...

As I argued in the previous chapter, both the ‘presence of the present’ and ‘self-presence’ is only possible through ‘the movement of a repetition’ and the ‘bending-back of a return’ reflection (SP 67–8). This repetition and spacing is ‘undermined ... by “time” to be conceived anew on the basis now of difference with identity, on the basis of identifying identity and non-identity’ within ‘sameness’ (68). This spacing, tracing, repetition,différance, and writing correspond with the mortal seed of dissemination and writing as remains/remainder of the textual preface that Hegelian philosophy wishes to do without (D 8–10). Thewake...

In this chapter I will explore how the bodily rhythms arrived at in the last chapter offer an opportunity to graftFinnegans Wakeonto Vico’s formulations of production and the topic. In so doing I will return to both Heidegger’s examination of production and Derrida’s consideration of metaphor in order to discuss how these formulations can be understood in the mode of non-presence. The textual body as I have been considering it thus far does not conform to the Hegelian operation that ‘would suspend and sublate what is outside discourse, logos, the concept, or the idea,’ since, as body-text, it...

In the previous chapter I argued thatFinnegans Wakeradicalizes Vico’s conceptions of the art of the topics and the bodily imagination. Because the scene of writing and reading in theWaketakes into account the death and mutilation of the reader-writer, it became necessary to seek out a more radical art of the topics beyond theamoreof simple self-preservation in Vico. Nietzsche’s will to power provided the framework for that radical extension of Vico’s topics. This extension of Vico via Nietzsche, however, should in no way be taken as a rejection of Vico’s text or the art of...

In this final chapter I want to compare the vicissitudes of time in bothFinnegans WakeandGlasin order to consider how ‘time’ or, more precisely, ‘temporalizing’ may be thought about in conjunction with the rhythm discussed in chapters 3 and 4. ‘Temporalization,’ as was argued in chapter 2, is that aspect of the imagination that corresponds to auto-affection as it is reworked by Derrida’s analyses of Husserl inSpeech and Phenomena, while rhythm inFinnegans Wake, as was argued in chapters 3 and 4, exploits both squeezing and the sphincter, drawing the reader into a scene of writing...