Writing: a question of doubling the absent

Writing is bound by two silences: the one from which it emerges, and the one towards which it tends. Thus the writing process entails a dialectic between the absent and the double: the love object and its imaginative recuperation, the absent bearer of the law and its imaginative creation, the ego and its alter ego, or indeed the defective ego and its symbolic avatar. But what is writing? This paper seeks answers to this Mallarmean question in the teachings of psychoanalysis. It focuses on Lacan's seminar on Joyce (2005 [1975-76]) to show that although writing may be an uninterrupted work of mourning, it may also be a structural necessity. Lacan indeed suggests that Joyce avoided psychosis by deploying his art.