The Sensual Philosophy offers a richly illuminating reading of James Joyce's canon, placing his texts in the context of the medieval mystical tradition that had influenced and interested Joyce since his school days. In exploring Joyce's indebtedness to the artistic and theological culture of the Middle Ages, Colleen Jaurretche also identifies the origins of modernist aesthetics in medieval forms of representation.

Jaurretche traces the development of Joyce's mystical aesthetic through a critical examination of his novels, culminating in the supreme negative mystical aestheticism of Finnegans Wake. In this novel, Joyce's "sensual philosophy" - the subjective epistemological foundation of art - establishes the construction of personality, representation, and art, surmounting the divisions of psychology and physiology, of subject and object, in the "night" of the negative mystical tradition.