🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

HAMLET (5)

I announced, after all, that today, as a lure, I would speak about that lure which is OPHELIA. And I believe I will keep my word. This object, this theme, this character, comes here as an element in our discussion, the one we have been following for four of our sessions already, which is to demonstrate in HAMLET the tragedy of desire.

To demonstrate that if it can properly be called thus, it is precisely because desire as such—human desire, the desire we engage with in analysis, the desire we are positioned to influence or even confuse with other terms according to the mode of our approach—is only conceivable and locatable in relation to fixed coordinates in subjectivity. Freud demonstrated that these coordinates establish a certain distance between the subject and the signifier, placing the subject in a particular dependence on the signifier as such.

This means that we cannot account for the analytical experience by starting from the idea that the signifier, for instance, would simply be a pure and straightforward reflection or product of what are commonly called “interhuman relations.” And it is not merely an instrument; it is one of the essential initial components of a topology. Without this topology, we see all phenomena flatten out in a way that prevents us, as analysts, from explaining what we might call the presuppositions of our experience.

I embarked on this path, taking HAMLET as an example of something that vividly reveals the dramatic sense of the coordinates of this topology. This is what we attribute to the exceptional captivating power of HAMLET, leading us to say:

• That if the tragedy of HAMLET holds this prevalent role in the preferences of the critical public,
• That if it remains continually alluring to those who approach it, …it is due to something that shows the poet embedded, by some means, glimpses of his own experience.

Everything points to this in the kind of turning point HAMLET represents within Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and indeed, in the fact that his poetic experience, in the technical sense of the term, gradually revealed these paths to him. It is through certain detours, which we think we can interpret here in terms of some of our own reference points—those articulated within our schema—that we can grasp the significance of this certainly very fundamental study. A turning point is marked in a way that distinguishes Shakespeare’s play from the earlier works or the accounts by Saxo Grammaticus, Belleforest, or the fragmentary insights we have into other plays.

This detour concerns the character of OPHELIA, who is undoubtedly present in the story from the beginning: OPHELIA, as I have said, is the trap—present from the very origin of the legend of HAMLET—the trap into which HAMLET does not fall. First, because he has been warned, and second, because the bait itself, namely the OPHELIA of Saxo Grammaticus, is not conducive to it, being already in love, as Belleforest’s text tells us, with Prince HAMLET.

This OPHELIA, SHAKESPEARE turned into something entirely different. In the plot, perhaps, he simply deepened this function, this role OPHELIA plays in the legend, destined as she is to capture, to ensnare, to uncover HAMLET’s secret. She becomes perhaps one of the most intimate elements of the drama of HAMLET as Shakespeare rendered it, HAMLET who has lost the path, the way to his desire. She is an essential element of articulation in this trajectory that leads HAMLET to what I previously called “the hour of his mortal rendezvous,” to the completion of an act he carries out almost in spite of himself.

Today, we will see even more clearly to what extent HAMLET is indeed the image of that level of the subject where one can say that destiny is articulated in terms of pure signifiers, and that the subject is, in a sense, merely the reverse side of a message that is not even his own. The first step we took in this direction was to articulate how much the play, which is the drama of desire in relation to the desire of the Other, is dominated by this Other, who here is the desire—in the least ambiguous way—of the mother, that is to say, the primordial subject of demand.

This subject, which I have shown you is the true all-powerful subject that we always discuss in analysis.
It is not the […] of the woman who possesses within her this dimension, said to be omnipotence, the so-called omnipotence of thought. It is about the omnipotence of the subject as the subject of the first demand, and this omnipotence must always be referred to her. I mentioned this to you in our initial steps.

It concerns something, at the level of this desire of the Other, that presents itself to Prince HAMLET—
that is, to the principal subject of the play—
…so much as a tragedy, the drama of a subjectivity. HAMLET is always there, and one could say eminently more so than in any other drama. The drama unfolds in a manner that is always dual, its elements being simultaneously inter-subjective and intra-subjective.
Thus, from the very perspective of the subject, of Prince HAMLET, this desire of the Other, this desire of the mother, presents itself essentially as a desire that:

• Lies between an eminent object, this idealized, exalted object that is his father,
• And this devalued, contemptible object that is CLAUDIUS, the criminal and adulterous brother,
  …makes no choice.

She does not choose because of something that exists within her as an order of instinctual voracity, which makes the sacrosanct genital object of our recent terminology appear as nothing more than an object of enjoyment, one that is truly the direct satisfaction of a need.

This dimension is essential; it forms one of the poles between which HAMLET’s adjuration to his mother wavers. I showed you this in the scene where, confronting her, he calls upon her to abstain at the moment when, in the crudest and most cruel terms, he delivers the essential message with which the ghost—his father—entrusted him. Suddenly, this appeal fails and turns back on itself: he returns her to CLAUDIUS’s bed, to the caresses of the man that will inevitably make her, once again, yield.

In this kind of collapse, this abandonment at the end of HAMLET’s adjuration, we find the very term, the model that allows us to conceive of how his own desire, his impulse toward an action he burns to accomplish—
the entire world becomes for him a living reproach for never being equal to his own will—
…this action falls back in the same way as the adjuration he addresses to his mother.

It is essentially in this dependence of the subject’s desire on the desire of the Other that the central focus, the very accent of HAMLET’s drama, resides—what one could call its enduring dimension.

It is a matter of seeing how…
in a more articulated manner, by delving into a psychological detail that, I must say, would remain fundamentally enigmatic if this detail were not subjected to the overarching perspective that gives meaning to the tragedy of HAMLET…
…how this resonates on the very nerve of HAMLET’s will, on that something which, in my graph, is the hook, the question mark of the “Che vuoi?” of the subjectivity constituted in the Other and articulated within the Other.

This is the meaning of what I have to say today: what one might call “the imaginary adjustment”:

• Of what constitutes the support of desire,
• Of that which, opposite an indeterminate point, a variable point—here at the origin of the curve—represents the subject’s assumption of their essential will,
• Of that which aligns itself with something that exists somewhere opposite and, in a sense—let us state it immediately—on the level of the unconscious subject, the endpoint, the limit, the final term of what constitutes the subject’s question,
• Of that something we symbolize by this $◊a and which we call the phantasy,
• Of that which, in the psychic economy, represents something you are familiar with, something as ambiguous in consciousness as it is, in fact, when we approach it through a certain phase, a final term. This term underpins all human passion insofar as it is marked by some of those traits we call traits of perversion.

The mystery of the phantasy, insofar as it is in a sense the ultimate term of a desire, is that it always, more or less, appears in a form sufficiently paradoxical to have, strictly speaking, motivated the ancient rejection of its dimension as belonging to the order of the absurd. And the essential step, made in the modern era when psychoanalysis formed the initial turning point in attempting to interpret and conceive of this phantasy—as perverse—is:

• That it could only be conceived insofar as it was ordered within an unconscious economy,
• That if it appears at the limit of its final term, in its enigma, it can be understood in terms of an unconscious circuit, which is articulated through another signifying chain profoundly distinct from the chain commanded by the subject, this latter being the one beneath the first.

And at the level, primarily, of the demand, if this phantasy intervenes—or indeed does not intervene—it is to the extent that something ($◊a) that normally does not reach this path ($◊a → s(A)) does not return to the level of the message…
of the signified of the Other (s(A)), which is the module, the sum of all meanings as they are acquired by the subject in interhuman exchange and complete discourse…
it is insofar as this phantasy ($◊a) does or does not pass to reach the message (s(A)) that we find ourselves in a normal or an atypical situation.

It is normal for it not to pass through this path, for it to remain unconscious, to be separated. It is also essential that at certain phases—phases inscribed more or less in the pathological order—it does indeed cross this passage.
We will give names to these moments of crossing, these moments of communication, which can only occur, as the diagram indicates, in one direction. I point out this essential articulation because we are here, essentially, to advance in the handling of this apparatus we call the gramme.

For now, we will simply examine what it means and how it functions in Shakespearean tragedy—what I have called the moment of HAMLET’s desire being thrown into confusion, insofar as it is appropriate to relate it to this imaginary adjustment.

In this framework, OPHELIA is situated at the level of the letter a, the letter as it is inscribed in this symbolization of a phantasy, the phantasy being the support, the imaginary substratum of something that is, properly speaking, called desire, insofar as it is distinct from demand and also distinct from need.

This a corresponds to that something toward which the entire modern articulation of analysis is directed when it seeks to articulate the object and the relation to the object. There is some accuracy in this pursuit, in the sense that the role of this object is undoubtedly decisive, as commonly articulated—in other words, the notion of object relations—when it is articulated as that which fundamentally structures the mode of apprehension of the world.

Simply put, in the theory of object relations as it is most commonly explained today in the majority of works that give it varying degrees of importance—whether it is a recent volume I allude to as the most caricatural example, or more developed works such as those of FEDERN or others—the error and confusion lie in theorizing the object as such, which is referred to as the pre-genital object. A genital object is also explicitly classified within the various forms of the pre-genital object, including various forms of the anal object, etc. This is precisely what is materialized for you in this schema: it conflates the dialectic of the object with the dialectic of demand.

This confusion is understandable because in both cases, the subject finds itself in a moment, in a posture within its relationship to the signifier, which is the same. The subject is in a position of eclipse.

In these two points of our graph, whether it concerns the code at the level of the unconscious ($◊D)—
that is, the series of relationships the subject has with a certain apparatus of demand—
or whether it concerns the imaginary relationship that constitutes the subject in a specific posture defined by its relationship to the signifier before an object (a) ($◊a),
in both cases, the subject is in a position of eclipse.

This is the position I began to articulate last time under the term fading. I chose this term for various philological reasons and also because it has become quite familiar in the context of communication devices we commonly use. Fading is exactly what happens in a communication or voice reproduction device when the voice disappears, collapses, vanishes, only to reappear according to certain variations in the medium itself, in the transmission.

Thus, the subject finds itself in a state of oscillation, characteristic of what we will later provide with its support and real coordinates—what for now remains a metaphor—fading before both demand and the object. This is where confusion can occur, leading to the observation that what is called the object relation is always, in fact, the subject’s relationship, in this privileged moment described as the fading of the subject, to—not “objects” as the term implies—but rather signifiers of demand. To the extent that demand remains fixed, it is within the mode, the signifying apparatus corresponding to the different types—oral, anal, and others—that something can indeed be articulated as having a kind of clinical correspondence.

However, there is a significant drawback to conflating:

• The relationship to the signifier,
• With the relationship to the object.

For this object is other; this object, as the object of desire, has a different meaning. It is critical to recognize that—even if we assign full primal determinative value to the signifiers of demand, as is commonly done, recognizing them as oral, anal, and inclusive of all subdivisions and polarizations the object itself can take in relation to the subject—the theory of object relations as currently articulated overlooks precisely this correlation to the subject, expressed by the fact that the subject is marked by the bar.

This is what explains why, even when we consider the subject in the most primitive stages of the oral phase—as articulated, for example, with far greater rigor and accuracy by Melanie KLEIN—we find ourselves, as evidenced in KLEIN’s text itself, confronted with certain paradoxes. These paradoxes are not inherent to the straightforward articulation of the subject as facing an object corresponding to a need, such as the nipple or the breast in this context.

The paradox appears in that, from the very beginning, another enigmatic signifier emerges on the horizon of this relationship. This is clearly highlighted in Melanie KLEIN’s work, where her singular merit is her boldness in embracing what she encounters in clinical experience. In the absence of explanations, she relies on extremely limited explanations. Nonetheless, she demonstrates that the phallus is already present as such, and indeed as a properly destructive element in relation to the subject.

From the outset, she identifies this as the primordial object, simultaneously the best and the worst, the center around which all the developments of the paranoid and depressive phases revolve. Here, I merely indicate and recall this notion.

What I can further articulate regarding this $, and insofar as it concerns us—not as it is confronted or related to demand, but rather in connection with the element we will attempt to closely examine this year, represented by a.

The a, the essential object, is the object around which the dialectic of desire revolves as such, the object around which the subject experiences itself in an imaginary alterity, facing an element that constitutes alterity on the imaginary level, as we have repeatedly articulated and defined. It is image, and it is pathos.

And it is through this other, the object of desire, that a function is fulfilled, defining desire within this dual coordinate, which ensures that it does not aim—certainly not!—at an object as such in the sense of satisfying a need, but rather at an object insofar as it is already itself relativized, meaning placed in relation to the subject, the subject who is present within the phantasy. This is a phenomenological evidence, and I will return to it further on.

The subject is present in the phantasy. And the function of the object—
which is the object of desire solely because it is the term of the phantasy—
is that the object takes the place, I would say, of what the subject is symbolically deprived of.

This might seem a bit abstract to those who have not followed all the preceding discussions with us. For them, let us say that in the articulation of the phantasy, the object takes the place of what the subject is deprived of. What is that? It is the phallus from which the object derives the function it has in the phantasy, and it is with the phantasy as its support that desire is constituted. I think it is difficult to go further in clarifying what we must properly call desire and its relationship with the phantasy.

It is in this sense, and insofar as this formulation—the object of the phantasy is this alterity, image, and pathos through which another takes the place of what the subject is symbolically deprived of—you see, it is in this direction that this imaginary object is positioned, as it were, to condense upon itself what we may call the virtues or the dimension of being. It can become this true lure of being, which is the object of human desire.

This is what Simone WEIL pauses before, when she highlights the most dense, the most opaque relationship that can be presented to us between man and the object of his desire—the miser’s relationship with his treasure chest. Here, the fetishistic character of the object of human desire culminates for us in the most evident way, a character that is also one of the facets of all these objects.

It is rather comical to witness—as I recently did—a man explaining the relationship between the theory of meaning and Marxism. He claimed that one could not approach the theory of meaning without starting from interhuman relations. This went quite far! Within three minutes, we were told that the signifier was the instrument through which man transmitted his private thoughts to his fellow man… This was literally stated by someone who invoked MARX. Supposedly, if we do not relate these things to the foundation of interhuman relations, we run the risk of fetishizing what is at stake in the domain of language!

Certainly, I agree that we do encounter something very much resembling the fetish. But I wonder if this so-called fetish is not, in fact, one of the very dimensions of the human world, and precisely the one that must be accounted for.

If we root everything in the basis of interhuman relations, we arrive at only one conclusion: that the fetishization of human objects results from some undefined interhuman misunderstanding. This misunderstanding itself would refer back to meanings, much like the private thoughts in question. I am speaking in a genealogical sense, and these “private thoughts” are here to make you smile because, if private thoughts are already there, why bother going further?

In short, it is surprising that this relationship—not to human praxis but to a human subjectivity presented as essentially primitive—is upheld within a doctrine that claims to be Marxist. It seems to me that simply opening the first volume of Capital reveals that Marx’s first analytical step is, quite literally, to address the fetishistic nature of commodities. He tackles the problem precisely and, though the term itself is not explicitly stated, does so on the proper level, the level of the signifier.

The relations of signifiers, the relations of value, are presented first, and all subjectivity—including the potential fetishization—is inscribed within this signifying dialectic. There is no doubt about this. This is simply an aside, a reflection I pour into your ear from my occasional indignations and the frustration I feel at having wasted my time.

Now, let us try to use this relation $◊a, which is for us the phantasmatic support of desire. We must articulate it clearly, because a, this imaginary other—what does it mean?

It means that something larger than a person can be included within it: an entire chain, an entire scenario. I need not revisit here what I discussed last year regarding the analysis of Le Balcon by Jean GENET. To clarify what I mean in this context, it suffices to refer to what we might call the diffuse brothel, insofar as it becomes the cause of what we refer to in our circles as the sacrosanct genital.

What is important in this element, properly speaking structural, of the imaginary phantasy, as it is situated at the level of a, is, on the one hand, its opaque character. This character defines it in its most accentuated forms as the pole of perverse desire—in other words, it constitutes the structural element of perversions and shows us that perversion is characterized by this: that the entire focus of the phantasy is placed on the properly imaginary correlative of the other, a, or within the parentheses in which something that is (a+b+c…) represents the entire combination of the most elaborated objects that may be gathered there according to the adventure, the consequences, the residues where the function of a phantasy crystallizes within a perverse desire.

Nevertheless, what is essential—and this is the phenomenological element I referenced earlier—is to remind you that, however strange or bizarre the phantasy of perverse desire may appear in its aspects, desire is always, in some way, implicated. It is implicated in a relationship that is always linked to pathos, to the suffering of existence as such, of pure existence, or of existence as a sexual term. Evidently, the sadistic phantasy persists only insofar as the one who suffers the injury within the phantasy matters to the subject, inasmuch as the subject themselves may be subjected to such an injury.

Of this dimension, one can say only one thing: it is surprising that, even for a moment, it could have been thought that sadistic tendencies might be something unrelated to a purely and simply primitive aggression. I dwell on this too much, but I do so to emphasize what must now be articulated: the true opposition between perversion and neurosis.

If perversion is therefore something articulated—of course—and at exactly the same level, as you will see, as neurosis…
something interpretable, analyzable…
to the extent that within imaginary elements, there is an essential relationship between the subject and its being, in a form essentially localized, fixed, as it has always been described…
then neurosis is situated by the emphasis placed on the other term of the phantasy, that is, at the level of $.

I have told you that this phantasy, as such, is situated at the extreme, at the peak, at the limit of the reflection of subjective questioning. This is where the subject attempts to recover themselves beyond demand, within the very dimension of the discourse of the Other, where they must rediscover what was lost by entering the discourse of the Other.

I told you that ultimately, it is not a matter of the level of truth but of the hour of truth. This is essentially what shows us, what allows us to designate the profound distinction between the phantasy of neurosis and the phantasy of perversion. The phantasy of perversion, I told you, is summonable; it exists in a space, suspending an essential relationship of some kind. It is not, strictly speaking, timeless; it is outside time. The relationship between the subject and time in neurosis is precisely something that is too rarely discussed, yet it is the very basis of the relationship between the subject and their object at the level of the phantasy.

In neurosis, the object is charged with a significance that must be sought in what I call the hour of truth. The object is always at the hour before or the hour after:

• If hysteria is characterized by the foundation of a desire as unsatisfied,
• Obsession is characterized by the function of an impossible desire.

But beyond these two terms is something with a dual and inverse relationship…
in one case and the other…
with the phenomenon that surfaces, that manifests itself permanently in, for example, the procrastination of the obsessive subject, founded on the fact that they always anticipate too late. Similarly, in the hysteric, there is a repetition of the initial aspect of their trauma—namely, a certain “too early,” a fundamental immaturity.

It is here—in the fact that the foundation of neurotic behavior, in its most general form, and in its object, is that the subject always seeks to read their hour. Even if one might say they learn to read the hour, it is at this point that we rediscover our HAMLET.

You will see why HAMLET can be assigned, as one wishes, all forms of neurotic behavior, extending as far as character neurosis. But equally, and just as legitimately, there is a reason for this, a reason that pervades the entire plot and becomes one of the common factors of HAMLET’s structure:

• Just as the first term, the first factor, was dependence on the desire of the Other, on the desire of the mother,
• Here is the second common characteristic that I now invite you to identify in your reading or re-reading of HAMLET: HAMLET is always suspended at the hour of the Other, and this continues until the end.

Do you remember one of the key turning points I emphasized when beginning to decipher the text of HAMLET? This moment comes after the play scene, the scene with the players where the king is visibly shaken and, in front of everyone, reveals his guilt regarding the crime portrayed on stage—a crime he cannot bear to witness.

HAMLET triumphs, exults, and mocks the one who has thus exposed himself. On his way to the rendezvous already arranged before the play scene—the meeting with his mother, which everyone around her urges her to expedite—on his way to this encounter, where the grand scene that I have already emphasized so many times will unfold, HAMLET comes upon his stepfather, CLAUDIUS, in prayer. CLAUDIUS, shaken to his very core by what he has just witnessed, faces the mirrored image of his own actions. HAMLET finds himself before his uncle, who, it seems, is not only unprepared to defend himself but is also entirely unaware of the threat hanging over him. And yet, HAMLET pauses, because it is not the hour.

It is not the hour of the other. It is not the time for the other to render accounts before the Eternal. It would be too convenient on the one hand, or too lenient on the other. It would not sufficiently avenge his father, because, perhaps, in this act of repentance that is prayer, a path to salvation might open for him.

Whatever the case, one thing is certain: HAMLET, who has just achieved his capture of the king’s conscience—
“The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”—
HAMLET hesitates. He does not for a moment think that now is his time. Regardless of what may follow, it is not the hour of the other, and he holds back his action. In fact, nothing HAMLET ever does is undertaken at his own hour; it is always at the hour of the other.

He accepts everything. Let us not forget that, from the very beginning and in the disgust he already felt—even before his encounter with the ghost and the revelation of the crime’s full scope, from the simple remarriage of his mother—HAMLET only had one thought: to leave for Wittenberg.

As someone recently illustrated in commenting on a certain practical tendency that seems to be settling into contemporary behavior, they pointed out that HAMLET is the finest example of how “many dramas can be avoided by issuing passports on time.” If HAMLET had been given his passport to Wittenberg, there would have been no drama.

• It is at his parents’ hour that he remains.
• It is at the hour of the others that he delays his crime.
• It is at his stepfather’s hour that he embarks for England.
• It is at the hour of ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN that, with an ease that so delighted FREUD, he sends them to their deaths through a sleight of hand performed quite skillfully.
• And, ultimately, it is also at OPHELIA’s hour, at the hour of her suicide, that this tragedy finds its conclusion—in a moment where HAMLET, it seems, has just realized that killing someone is not difficult: “the time it takes to say ‘one,’” he will not have time to “say ‘ouch.’”

Yet, at this moment, he has been presented with something far from an opportunity to kill CLAUDIUS. Instead, he has been invited to a carefully orchestrated tournament, every detail meticulously prepared, the stakes consisting of what we might call, in a collector’s sense, a series of objects—all valuable, all collectibles.

The text should be revisited; there are refinements here. We enter the realm of collection. The objects at stake are swords, tassels, and items valuable solely as luxury objects. These serve as the stakes for a joust, in which HAMLET is essentially provoked on the basis of a supposed inferiority, granting him the benefit of the challenge.

It is a complex ceremony, a tournament that, for us, is clearly the trap into which he is meant to fall—a plot hatched by his stepfather and his friend LAERTES. But for HAMLET, let us not forget, it is nothing more than accepting yet another diversion. It is as if he thinks, “This will be fun.”

Still, he feels a faint warning in his heart. Something stirs him. At this moment, the hero’s foreboding gives the drama a fleeting accent.

But even so, essentially, it is still “at the hour of the other,” and, in an even grander way, to uphold the wager of the other…
for it is not his own stakes at risk; it is on behalf of his stepfather, and he himself stands as his stepfather’s champion…
that he enters this fight, ostensibly courteous, against one presumed to be his superior in fencing. As such, this provokes in HAMLET the sentiments of rivalry and honor—the very bait calculated to ensnare him.

Thus, he rushes into the trap. I would say that what is new at this moment is only the energy, the fervor with which he leaps into it. To the very last moment, to the final hour—an hour so determinative that it will be his own…
wherein he will be mortally wounded before he can strike his enemy—
it is “at the hour of the other” that the tragedy continuously unfolds and is fulfilled. This framework is absolutely essential for understanding the matter at hand.

This is where the resonance of the character and drama of HAMLET lies: it is the very metaphysical resonance of the question of the modern hero, insofar as something in his relationship to his destiny has indeed changed. I have told you, what distinguishes HAMLET from ŒDIPUS is that HAMLET knows. And this, above all, explains the surface traits we have just identified.

For example, HAMLET’s madness.
There are tragic heroes in ancient tragedy who are mad, but to my knowledge, there are none—
I speak of tragedy, not of legendary texts—
who pretend to be mad as such.

Can we say that HAMLET’s madness consists entirely in pretending to be mad?
This is a question we will now examine. But he pretends to be mad because he knows he is the weaker party.
And it is worth pointing this out—not because it takes us further in our discussion, but because, though superficial, it is secondary.

It is not secondary, however, in this regard:
we must reflect on this if we want to understand what SHAKESPEARE intended in HAMLET—
this is the essential feature of the original legend, as found in SAXO GRAMMATICUS and BELLEFOREST.
SHAKESPEARE chose the subject of a hero compelled, in order to follow the path leading him to the conclusion of his action, to feign madness. This is a distinctly modern dimension.
The one who knows finds himself in such a dangerous position, so marked for failure and sacrifice, that his path must be—as PASCAL writes somewhere—“to be mad with the others.”

This pretense of madness, which is one of the lessons and dimensions of what I might call the politics of the modern hero, deserves not to be overlooked if we consider that this is what SHAKESPEARE seized upon when he set out to craft the tragedy of HAMLET. What his sources offer him is essentially this. And it revolves entirely around knowing what this madman has behind his mask of madness. The fact that SHAKESPEARE chose his subject from within this framework is absolutely essential.

We now arrive at the point where OPHELIA must fulfill her role. If the play truly possesses all the structural elements I have outlined, what, ultimately, is the purpose of OPHELIA’s character?
I recall something I have been reproached for advancing with what some consider undue timidity—
I do not believe I have been especially timid.

I do not wish to encourage the kind of farcical interpretation with which psychoanalytic texts are literally brimming. I am merely surprised that no one has suggested OPHELIA as the ὀμϕαλός (omphalos), given that equally extravagant claims can be found in psychoanalytic literature. One need only glance at the Unfinished Papers on Hamlet that Ella SHARPE perhaps regrettably left incomplete before her death, which, in hindsight, perhaps should not have been published. Yet OPHELIA is clearly essential. She corresponds to that, and she is inextricably linked, for the ages, to the figure of HAMLET.

I wish merely—since it is now too late to fully address OPHELIA today—to sketch out for you what unfolds throughout the play. OPHELIA is first introduced as the supposed cause of HAMLET’s troubled state. This is the “psychoanalytic wisdom” of POLONIUS:

• “He is sad because he is not happy. He is not happy because of my daughter.
  You don’t know her? She’s the finest flower, and, of course, as her father, I won’t allow it!”

She appears in connection with something that already makes her a remarkable figure, namely, a clinical observation: she was the first person HAMLET encountered after his meeting with the ghost. That is to say, immediately after that profoundly unsettling encounter, he met OPHELIA. And his behavior toward her is, I believe, worth recounting:

“My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,
HAMLET, his doublet all unbraced,
No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled,
Ungartered, and down-gyved to his ankle;
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other;
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors—he comes before me […].

He took me by the wrist and held me hard;
Then goes he to the length of all his arm,
And with his other hand thus o’er his brow,
He falls to such perusal of my face
As he would draw it. Long stayed he so;
At last, a little shaking of mine arm,
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
He raised a sigh so piteous and profound
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk
And end his being. That done, he lets me go;
And with his head over his shoulder turned,
He seemed to find his way without his eyes;
For out o’ doors he went without their help,
And to the last bended their light on me.” [II, 1, 87-100]

At this point, POLONIUS exclaims: “It’s love!”

This observation, and, I believe, this questioning—this distancing from the object as though to carry out some identification now rendered difficult—this wavering before what has until then been the supreme object of exaltation, gives us the first movement, an estrangement, so to speak. We cannot say more than this. Nevertheless, I believe, to some extent, that we are not overreaching in identifying as pathological what occurs in this moment, which reveals a great disarray in HAMLET’s demeanor, associating it with those periods of subjective disorganization, whatever their nature.

What occurs is that something wavers within the phantasy, revealing its components and manifesting them in symptoms akin to what is termed an experience of depersonalization. This is where the imaginary boundaries between the subject and the object shift—in the true sense of the word—into the realm of what is called the fantastic.

It is precisely when something in the imaginary structure of the phantasy reconnects and communicates with what more easily reaches the level of the message—namely, what lies beneath, at that point corresponding to the image of the other, where the image of the other is my own self.

This is what authors like FEDERN insightfully describe as the necessary correlations between the feeling of one’s own body and the strangeness that emerges during certain crises, certain ruptures, certain encounters with the object as such, at a specified level we find here.

Perhaps I am pushing things somewhat to capture your interest, by which I mean to demonstrate how this relates to the selective experiences of our clinical work. We will undoubtedly return to this.

Understand that it is impossible, in any case, without referencing this pathological framework, this drama, to fully grasp what FREUD first introduced analytically under the name of Unheimliche (the uncanny). It is not, as some have believed, linked to all kinds of irruptions of the unconscious. It is tied to this kind of imbalance within the phantasy, insofar as the phantasy, crossing the boundaries initially assigned to it, disintegrates and reconnects with what it shares with the image of the other. In truth, this is merely a touchpoint.

In HAMLET’s case, what we find thereafter is that OPHELIA is entirely dissolved as an object of love.

“I did love you once. Je vous aimais autrefois.” [III, 1], says HAMLET.

The interactions with OPHELIA then shift into a mode of cruel aggression, of sarcasms pushed to an extreme. These scenes are among the most peculiar in all classical literature. While extreme plays might have toyed with similar themes, there is something uniquely central and essential about this moment in the tragic structure of HAMLET. A scene like the one between HAMLET and OPHELIA is anything but ordinary.

This characterizes the attitude that leaves traces of what I earlier described as an imbalance in the phantasmatic relationship, tipping toward the perverse side of the object. This is one aspect of this relationship. Another is that the object in question is no longer treated at all as it once was, as a woman. She becomes, for HAMLET, the bearer of children, of all sins—the one designated to bring forth sinners and, later, the one destined to succumb to all slanders. She becomes the pure and simple vessel of a life which, in its essence, is, for HAMLET, condemned.

In short, what occurs at this moment is the destruction or loss of the object, reintegrated into its narcissistic framework. For the subject, it appears, as I might put it, externalized. What it becomes equivalent to, according to the formula I used earlier, what it replaces, and what can only be given to the subject at the moment when he literally sacrifices himself—when he is no longer himself, when he rejects it with all his being—is nothing other than the phallus.

In what way is OPHELIA the phallus at this moment? It is in this: insofar as the subject externalizes the phallus as the signifying symbol of life and, as such, rejects it. This is the second phase of the relationship to the object.

The limited time compels me to avoid detailing all the coordinates, but I will return to them later. That this is indeed the issue at hand—a transformation of the formula $◊ϕ (ϕ: the phallus), under the form of rejection—is demonstrated by something entirely apart from the etymology of OPHELIA. First, because the issue here is solely that of fertility.

• “Conception is a blessing…,” says HAMLET to POLONIUS,
  “…but look to your daughter.” [II, 2]

And the entire dialogue with OPHELIA portrays woman conceived solely as the bearer of this vital turgescence, which HAMLET seeks to curse and dry up. The term “nunnery” at the time could also mean a brothel [III, 1, 121-141], as semantic usage shows.

Furthermore, HAMLET’s behavior toward OPHELIA during the play scene also illustrates this relationship between the phallus and the object.

There, explicitly because he is in front of his mother, and precisely because he is in her presence, he says:
“…there is a metal more attractive to me than you.” [III, 2]
He then positions his head between OPHELIA’s legs—“Lady, shall I lie in your lap?” [III, 2]—asking her directly.

The phallic relationship with the object of desire is also clearly indicated at this level. It is not irrelevant to note—since the iconography has so prominently depicted this—that among the flowers with which OPHELIA drowns herself, the “dead men’s fingers” are expressly mentioned, a term that common folk designate more crudely.

This plant referred to is the orchis mascula. It has a certain connection to the mandrake, linking it to the phallic element. I searched for this in the New English Dictionary, but I was very disappointed. Although the term finger references it, there is no mention of what SHAKESPEARE alludes to with this name.

The third phase, which I have repeatedly drawn your attention to and will once again leave you with, is the phase of the graveyard scene. This involves the connection in significance between something presented as the reintegration of a and HAMLET’s ultimate ability to complete the loop—finally propelling himself toward his destiny.

This third phase, though entirely gratuitous, is absolutely pivotal. The entire graveyard scene exists for this moment to occur—something SHAKESPEARE found nowhere else: that furious battle at the bottom of a grave, on which I have already insisted.

This designation, as a pinnacle of the function of the object, being reclaimed here only at the price of mourning and death, is where I believe I can finally conclude next time.