For Jacques Lacan, the 'sinthome'—a meaningless psychic reinforcement shaped in contingent relation to one's idiosyncratic experience of enjoyment [jouissance]—can, in certain instances, be identified with in a way that allows an Artist to sidestep the Name-of-the-Father (a castrating invitation into language) on behalf of a self-naming capacity. Such identification is reserved for the most radical creators (such as James Joyce) who are able to externalize and manipulate the sinthome's non-signifying jouissant materiality—what Lacan terms 'lalangue' (abstract, excessive, homophonic, and non-representable pre-linguistic substrate)—in the production of art that is alienating in its meaninglessness and infamous in its indigestibility. In doing so, sinthomatic art allows the Artist to break with the usual mechanics of the signifier (with its racialized, colonial, and patriarchal baggage) and to instate themselves as the progenitor of their own symbolic universe (hence the era of 'Joyceans' following from the publication of ‘Finnegans Wake').

This paper will comment on the possibility of engaging in creative play with 'lalangue' in a way that refuses the urge to liberal-individual self-nomination. Should radical, sinthomatic artistic practice—as antagonism against existing linguistic/representational systems—necessitate only the Artist's liberation (beyond symbolic rule), while everyone else is left to discover their own idiosyncratic means of coping with oppression and loss? Or is it possible to theorize a creative praxis of 'lalangue' that could—in inspiring not hyper-individual experiences of infamy but collective encounters with shared precarity within a phallogocentric order—dethrone once and for all the often violent enforcement of boundaries between signification and its others?