Language is a sometimes surprisingly flexible regime. Joyce is clearly both exemplary and representative for Lacan for how we can do new things with words; and this has something to do with aliveness. ‘One chooses to speak the language that one effectively speaks,’ Lacan writes. ‘One creates a language in so far as one at every instance gives it a sense, one gives it a little nudge, without which language would not be alive.’ A little nudge seems a minimal thing; choosing and creating a language seems rather grandiose in its ambitions. And notably it is the idea of aliveness that Lacan has
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