Carol Loeb Shloss’s radical attempt to invalidate the presumed diagnoses of
Lucia Joyce’s schizophrenia in To Dance in the Wake has attracted criticism that
questions her medical expertise. With no intention to endorse Shloss’s denial of
Lucia’s mental illness, this paper, however, aims to trace the flaws intrinsic to Emil
Kraepelin’s conception of dementia praecox through a Foucauldian archaeology and
expose how his troubled legacy continues to haunt Eugen Bleuler’s nosology of
schizophrenia and its modern incarnation. The intriguing fact that C. G. Jung
(Bleuler’s supervisee at the Burghölzli) readily diagnosed Lucia with schizophrenia
(whose etiology remains unknown and whose cure is yet to be found) invites this
paper to further investigate the latent collusion between Jungian psychoanalysis and
Nazi thanatopolitics—both of which cast a shadow over Lucia’s precarious life and
manifest in the Wakean phrase “Sexophonologistic Schizophrenesis.
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Thanatopolitics, as the dark side of Foucault’s biopolitics, is a political technology
that deprives those who fail to conform to nomos (law and normality) of the right
to proper life. By simulating Lucia’s symptomatic language and writing her into the
Wakean circularity, James Joyce resists the thanatopolitical tendency to remove
write-offs and indicates an ethical possibility to live with abnormality: a community
free of excessive immunity.