Personation

Personation, as it appears in Jacques Aubert's intervention in Seminar 23, names the logic by which a textual or subjective position is occupied through a process of signifying substitution — specifically, the way in which the proper name functions not as a stable identity-anchor but as a "sup-position" that both holds a place and displaces the very thing it names. In Joyce's Circe episode, this manifests as the assumption of sexual identity through the signifier: to "personate" a sex is not to be or to have that sex in any natural or biological sense, but to be installed in a position by a chain of signifying substitutions. The portmanteau "per-sonnation" (from the French per-sonne, meaning both "person" and "nobody," compounded with son, sound/voice) points to how the sonorous dimension of the signifier — its material, acoustic body — is what produces the effect of personhood and sexual positioning. Identity is not prior to the signifier; it is an effect of it.

The theoretical move thus connects personation to the Name-of-the-Father in its most literal phonemic sense: the nom (name) that names through sound, and through naming retroactively arranges a position — in this case, a gendered, sexuated position — in the symbolic order. Sexual identity is not given but "personated," which is to say, performed and installed through a chain of displacements in which no term is original or ultimate. The question "which sex personates?" is not answered by biology but by the structure of the signifying chain itself, where the subject is an effect of the chain's movement rather than its author.

In jacques-lacan-seminar-23-cormac-gallagher, Seminar 23 is organized around the figure of Joyce as a limit-case for psychoanalytic theory — specifically for the question of how a subject can stabilize the three registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) without the standard paternal metaphor, substituting instead the sinthome as a supplementary knotting. Personation enters this argument at a precise juncture: it is the textual mechanism by which Joyce's writing enacts the paternal function's ambiguity. Rather than the Name-of-the-Father anchoring identity securely, the proper name (here Mosenthal) functions as a shifting "sup-position," and sexual identity emerges only through a retrospective arrangement of signifying substitutions — which is displacement in its structural-Lacanian sense (metonymic sliding of desire along the chain).

The concept thus sits at the intersection of several canonical cross-references. From Displacement, it borrows the logic of affective and signifying mobility: no term fixes meaning definitively; identity is always an effect of a chain. From the Name of the Father and Paternal Function, it inherits the question of how nomination produces sexuation and subjective positioning — but personation marks a point where that function is unstable, where the name simultaneously anchors and disarticulates. The resonance with Repetition is structural: each "personation" is a re-occupation of a position that was never originally filled, circling a missed encounter. And the link to the Sinthome is decisive for Seminar 23 specifically: where the Name-of-the-Father fails to suture identity, Joyce's textual practice — his personation — functions as a substitute knotting, a symptomatic but stabilizing performance of sexuation through the material body of the signifier.

Seminar XXIII · The SinthomeJacques Lacan · 1975 (p.76)

the question about the sex that personates, which is what within, causes per-sonnation.

The split orthography "per-sonnation" is theoretically loaded because it visibly decomposes the word into its constituent operators: per (through), son (sound/voice in French), and nation/nommer (naming/founding) — thereby inscribing within the very term the Lacanian thesis that identity (the "person") is constituted through the sonorous, material dimension of the signifier, not through any pre-linguistic essence. The phrase "which is what within, causes" further marks the operation as one of internal causation by the signifying chain itself, positioning sexuation as a structural effect rather than a natural given.