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(All parts in English)

HAMLET (6)

HAMLET, as we have said, cannot endure the appointment.
The appointment is always too soon for him, and he postpones it.

This element of procrastination cannot, in any way…
though certain authors, in a literature I have delved into more deeply over the course of this study…
…be dismissed. Procrastination remains one of the essential dimensions of HAMLET’s tragedy.

When he acts, on the other hand, it is always with haste. He acts when, all of a sudden, it seems an opportunity arises, when some call of the event beyond himself, beyond his resolution, beyond his decision, seems to present him with some ambiguous opening. This is, strictly speaking, what introduces into the dimension of accomplishment the perspective we analysts call flight. Nothing is clearer than the moment when he rushes upon something stirring behind the tapestry and kills POLONIUS.

At other moments as well, there is an almost mysterious manner…
I would almost say in a second state, as when he awakens in the night aboard the ship in the storm…
…in which he inspects the messages, breaks the seals of the letters GUILDENSTERN and ROSENCRANTZ carry, and the almost automatic manner in which he substitutes one message for another, recreates the royal seal with his ring, and also encounters that prodigious opportunity to be abducted by pirates, thus escaping his guards, who unknowingly head toward their own execution.

Here we have something resembling a true phenomenology – since we must call things by their names – whose accent we recognize easily, even familiarly, from both our experience and our conceptions regarding the life of the neurotic. This is what I attempted to convey to you last time, beyond these so vivid characteristics, within this structural reference running through the entire play:
HAMLET is always on the time of the Other.

Of course, this is merely a mirage, for the time of the Other…
and this is also what I explained to you when I referred to the final response within the signifier of the barred Other:
there is not – as I told you – an Other of the Other. There is no guarantee within the signifier itself of the dimension of truth established by the signifier…
there is only his own time, and there is also but one time: it is the time of his loss.

And the entire tragedy of HAMLET is to show us the inexorable journey of HAMLET toward this time.
What specifies his destiny? What makes it so profoundly problematic? What is it?

For this appointment with the time of his loss is not merely the common fate that is significant for all human destiny. HAMLET’s fatality bears a particular mark, for it would not otherwise possess for us this eminent value.
And so, here we are. This is where we left off at the end of our discussion last time.

What is missing in HAMLET? And to what extent does the design of HAMLET’s tragedy as SHAKESPEARE composed it permit us to articulate and pinpoint this lack, which goes beyond the approximations we always content ourselves with and which, as we content ourselves with their being approximate, also produce vagueness, not just in our language but in our behavior, in our suggestions – let it be said – toward the patient?

Let us begin nevertheless with this approximation in question.

It can be said that what is missing in HAMLET at every moment…
what we might call, in everyday communicative language…
…is this kind of fixation on a goal, an object in his action, which always involves somewhere what is called arbitrariness.

HAMLET, as we have seen and even begun to explore why, is someone – as the old women say – who “doesn’t know what he wants.”

And in some sense, this first dimension is made present in him, through the discourse SHAKESPEARE gives him. It is made present at a certain turning point, which is, moreover, quite significant.
It is the turning point of his eclipse in his tragedy. I mean during the brief moment when he will not be there,
when he embarks on the maritime journey from which he will return exceedingly quickly, barely out of port, when he takes this trip to England on the king’s orders, always obedient.

He crosses paths with FORTINBRAS’s troops, who linger in the background of the tragedy, evoked from the very beginning and who, at the end, clean up the stage, collect the dead, and restore order to the wreckage. And here is how our HAMLET speaks of this FORTINBRAS. He is struck by seeing these valiant troops going to conquer a few acres of Polish land in the name of a more or less futile pretext for war, which serves as an occasion for him to turn inward upon himself.

– “The least occasion accuses me;
It spurs my revenge which grows sluggish!
What is a man if his supreme happiness, if the use of his time, is merely to eat and sleep? A beast, no more.
He who placed in us that eye of reason…”

In English, it is:

– “Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused.”

The translator renders it as: “…reason…
is the great discourse, the fundamental discourse, which I shall call here the concrete discourse…
…which makes us see before and behind, and gives us this capacity – here the word reason falls into its rightful place – certainly did not give us this divine gift to rot unused in us.

– Or – says HAMLET – either bestial oblivion,
bestial oblivion…
which is one of the key terms of the dimension of his being in the tragedy…
…or craven scruple,
craven scruple,
which, too meticulous, foresees the outcome – a thought that, divided into four, holds one part wisdom against three parts cowardice – I live saying, I don’t know too well why, “this thing’s to do,” “This thing’s to do,” when I am better able and can do it,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means,
To do’t.
When I have the reason, the cause, the will, the strength, and the means to do it.
Examples as large as the world invite me to it, like those vast and costly armies led by a tender and delicate prince, whose spirit, under the breath of a divine ambition, mocks invisible outcomes, exposing his feeble and mortal weakness to the daring of fortune, danger, and death,
even for an egg-shell, for an empty shell.
To be great, no doubt, is not to stir without great argument,
it is to find this great argument in a straw when honor is at stake.
Rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake.
What am I, then, if my father murdered and my mother defiled – two motives, my reason and my blood – leave everything dormant, when I see to my shame the imminent death of over twenty thousand men who for a phantom of glory go to their graves as if to their beds, fighting for a patch of land their numbers cannot contest, which as a grave cannot hold the slain?
Which is not tomb enough and continent to hide the slain?
And from now on, may my thoughts be bloody, or they be worth nothing.
O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.” [IV, 4, 32–66]

Such is HAMLET’s meditation on what I would call “the object of human action,” this object which here leaves the door open to what I would call all the particularizations upon which we dwell.

We shall call this oblativitiy: shedding one’s blood for a noble cause, honor.
Honor is also designated: being bound by one’s word. We shall call this the gift.
As analysts, indeed, we cannot fail to encounter these concrete determinations, nor can we fail to be struck by their weight, whether of flesh or of commitment. What I am trying to show you here is something that of all this is not merely the common form, the smallest common denominator.

It is not merely a position, an articulation that could be characterized as a formalism,
when I write for you the formula $◊a at the conclusion of this question the subject asks in the Other,
which, addressing him, is called “What do you want?”

This question, which is the “Che vuoi?” where the subject seeks his final word, has no chance:

– outside the exploration of the unconscious chain as it traverses the circuit of the higher signifying chain, but which – outside the special conditions we call analytic – is nothing that is effectively open to investigation,

– outside this recourse to the unconscious chain as it has been discovered by the analyst, through Freudian experience.

What we are dealing with is something that can align, in a short-circuit of the imaginary, with the halfway relation of this circuit of desire [d] and what is opposite it, namely the fantasy [$◊a] and the structure of the fantasy…
its general structure, as I express it…
namely, a certain relationship between the subject and the signifier. This is expressed by:
– The $, which is the subject as irreducibly affected by the signifier, with all the consequences this entails,
– In a specific relationship with an imaginary conjuncture in its essence: a, not as the object of desire, but as the object within desire.

It is this function of the object within desire that we aim to approach.
It is to the extent that HAMLET’s tragedy allows us to approach it and articulate it in an exemplary manner that we examine SHAKESPEARE’s work with this insistent interest in its structure.

Let us come closer. $◊a, as such, signifies this:
– It is inasmuch as the subject is deprived of something of himself that has assumed the value of the very signifier of his alienation (this “something” is the phallus).
– It is, therefore, insofar as the subject is deprived of something tied to his very life, because this has taken on the value of what connects him to the signifier.
– It is inasmuch as he is in this position that a particular object becomes an object of desire.

To be an object of desire is essentially different from being the object of a need.

It is from this persistence of the object as such, as the object within desire, that over time it comes to occupy the place of what, by its nature, remains masked to the subject. This sacrifice of himself, this “pound of flesh” engaged in his relation to the signifier—because something comes to occupy that place—this “something” becomes the object within desire.

And this, which is so profoundly enigmatic in being fundamentally a relation to what is hidden, to the occulted,
is so precisely because…
if you will permit me a formula, one that surfaces in my notes and comes back to me now—do not make of it a doctrinal statement, take it at most as an image—
…it is inasmuch as human life could be defined as a calculation in which zero would be irrational.

This formula is only a mathematical metaphor, and we must give “irrational” its mathematical meaning here. I am not referring to some unfathomable emotionality but to something manifesting within mathematics itself in the equivalent form of what is called an imaginary number, √−1.

For there is something that cannot correspond to anything intuitable, and yet it demands to retain its full function. This is the relationship, I say, of the object with this hidden element of the living support of the subject,
inasmuch as, taking on the function of the signifier, it cannot be subjectivity as such. It is because this is so that this structure, in the same way, in the same relationship as we are with √−1…
…which is something that, in itself, cannot correspond to anything real, in the mathematical sense of the term,
…this is precisely why we can only grasp the true function of the object by navigating through a series of its possible relations to $, that is, to $ which, at the precise point where (a) takes on its maximum value, can only be hidden. And it is precisely this exploration of the object’s functions—though it would be an exaggeration to say that HAMLET’s tragedy completes it for us—it undoubtedly allows us to go much further than any other path has ever gone.

Let us start from the end, from the point of encounter, from the moment of the appointment, from that act where, ultimately,
you must realize that the terminal act—the one where, at last, he throws the entire weight of his life as the price for his accomplished action—
this act deserves to be called an act that he activates and that he undergoes.

There is, surrounding this act, a certain element of the “hallali” (the hunted stag at bay). At the moment his gesture is completed, he is also the stag cornered by DIANA. He is the one around whom tightens the plot, woven—I don’t know if you realize—with incredible cynicism and malice by CLAUDIUS and LAERTES, whatever the reasons of either may be, likely also involving that kind of tarantula, the ridiculous courtier who came to propose to him the duel in which the plot is concealed.

Such is the structure, and it is among the clearest: the duel proposed to him positions him as a champion for another.
I have already emphasized this. He becomes the holder of the wager, the stake, for his uncle and stepfather, CLAUDIUS.

Something occurs here that I stressed last time: namely, for stakes, objects (a) that are characterized there in all their brilliance. Like all objects and all stakes, they are essentially, in the realm of human desire, first characterized by what religious tradition, in exemplary representations, teaches us to name as vanitas, a kind of finely embroidered tapestry.
It is the accumulation of all prized objects, placed on one side of a scale opposite death.

He has wagered with LAERTES six Barbary horses against six French rapiers and daggers, a complete duelist’s kit, including all the accouterments such as the items used to hang them, their scabbards, I suppose [V,2,141]. Notably, three of them are described as having what the text calls “carriages.”
The word “carriage” is a particularly refined way to describe a sort of loop in which the sword must hang. It is a collector’s term, ambiguous with the notion of a cannon mount, establishing an entire dialogue between HAMLET and the one delivering the duel’s conditions.

During a rather long exchange, everything is done to dazzle us with the quality, number, and variety of these objects, highlighting the paradoxical, even absurd nature of the duel being proposed to HAMLET.
And yet, once again, HAMLET seems ready to step forward, as if nothing within him can resist a sort of fundamental availability.
His response is highly significant:

– “Sir, I will walk here in the hall if it pleases his Majesty. It is the hour of my relaxation; let the foils be brought, according to the gentleman’s pleasure. And if the king persists in his decision, I will try to let him win if I can; otherwise, I shall win nothing but my brief shame and the stabs I receive.” [V,2,164-68]

Thus, in the terminal act, we see the very structure of the fantasy:
at the moment when he is at the height of his resolution, as always on the verge of that resolution,
he literally hires himself out to another, and for nothing—most gratuitously. This other is precisely his enemy, the one he must destroy. He balances this against worldly things, which interest him least of all at this moment—not the collection of objects that are by no means his major concern—but which he strives to win for someone else.

Undoubtedly, on a lower level, there is something the others believe will captivate him,
and to which he is not entirely indifferent—not as they think, but still on the same level where they situate him:
that he is interested in honor.
That is to say, on the level of what HEGEL calls “the struggle for pure prestige,”
he is interested in honor in what will pit him against a rival whom he also admires.

We cannot fail to pause for a moment to acknowledge the precision of this connection, driven forward by SHAKESPEARE. You recognize here something familiar from our discussions: namely, the mirror stage.

That LAERTES is, at this level, his counterpart is explicitly articulated in the text.
It is articulated indirectly, in the form of a parody. This occurs when HAMLET responds to the obtuse courtier named OSRIC, who comes to propose the duel and speak of his opponent, beginning by extolling the eminent qualities of the rival before whom HAMLET will need to prove his worth.

HAMLET interrupts him, going one step further:

– “Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you. If, as I know, dividing his merits to make an inventory exceeds the arithmetic of memory and yet cannot diminish him, so wondrously swift are his sails.” [V,2,110]

This is an extremely refined speech that HAMLET continues, elaborate and convoluted, parodying in a way his interlocutor’s style. He concludes with the following:

– “I take him to be a soul of great article. I hold his soul to be of great value and that such rarity and worth are infused in him that to truly describe him, his equal could only be his mirror. Who else could paint his portrait but as his own shadow and nothing more?” [V,2,113-117]

In short, the reference to the image of the other i(a), as that which can only entirely absorb the one contemplating it, is certainly presented in relation to the merits of LAERTES, inflated in a very Gongoric manner. The concetti have their full value at this moment.

Even more so because, as you will see, it is in this posture that HAMLET approaches LAERTES before the duel. It is on this footing that he addresses him, making it even more significant that at this peak of formally articulated imaginary absorption, as a specular relationship, a mirror reaction, the playwright also situates the overt point of aggressiveness.

The one most admired is the one most fiercely opposed.
The one who is the Ideal of the ego is also, as per Hegel’s formula of the impossibility of coexistences, the one who must be killed.
HAMLET only undertakes this on a level we might call disinterested, on the level of the duel.
He enters into it in a manner that can be described as formal, even fictitious. Yet, unbeknownst to him, he steps into the most serious of games. What does this mean?

It means that he does not enter into it, so to speak, “with his phallus.” It means that what presents itself to him in this aggressive relationship is an illusion, a mirage—that against his will, he will lose his life there, that unknowingly, at that precise moment, he will simultaneously encounter:
– the accomplishment of his act,
– and his own death, which will coincide with it just moments later.

He did not enter into it with his phallus. This is one way of expressing what we are currently investigating: where the lack is located, where the specificity of HAMLET’s position as the subject in the drama lies. Yet he entered all the same, for even though the foils are blunted, this is but an illusion.

In reality, there is at least one foil that is not blunted and that, at the moment the swords are distributed, has already been carefully prepared in advance to be handed to LAERTES. That foil is sharp, and, moreover, it is poisoned.

What is striking is that here the unbridled audacity of the scriptwriter aligns with what could be called the playwright’s formidable intuition. By this, I mean that no great effort is made to explain how this poisoned weapon passes—God knows how! (a staging challenge, to be sure)—from the hand of one adversary to the other.

You know it happens in a kind of hand-to-hand struggle after LAERTES delivers the blow from which HAMLET cannot recover and must perish. In mere moments, that same poisoned foil ends up in HAMLET’s hand. No one bothers to explain such an astonishing turn of events.

Nor does anyone need to bother because the point is precisely this: to show that here, the instrument of death—
on this occasion, the most veiled instrument of the drama, the one HAMLET can only receive from the other—
the instrument of death lies elsewhere than in what is materially represented.

Here, one cannot help but be struck by something that appears literally in the text.
It is clear that what I am saying is that beyond this spectacle of the duel…
beyond the rivalry with one who is his counterpart, but more beautiful, the self he could love…
beyond this, the drama of HAMLET’s desire is playing out. Beyond this, the phallus is present.

Ultimately, it is in this encounter with the other that HAMLET will finally identify with the fatal signifier. And curiously enough, this is in the text itself. When the foils are mentioned at the moment of distribution:

– “King: Give them the foils, young OSRIC; give them the foils.
Cousin HAMLET, you know the wager?”

Earlier, HAMLET says: “Give us the foils.” Between these two mentions of foils, HAMLET makes a pun:

– “I’ll be your foil, LAERTES. In mine ignorance,
Your skill shall, like a star i’th’darkest night,
Stick fiery off indeed.”

This has been translated into French as best as possible:
“LAERTES, my foil will only be a trinket compared to yours.”

In the context, foil means a fencing foil. But here, foil cannot carry that meaning and instead takes on a perfectly recognizable sense, one well-attested at the time and even frequently used. Foil, from the same root as the French word feuille (leaf), was used in a refined manner to describe the leaf in which something precious is wrapped—essentially, a “case” or “setting.”

Here, it is used to convey:
– “I will only be here to highlight your brilliance, as a star shines all the more brightly against the darkness of the night, by dueling with you.”

Moreover, the very conditions under which the duel is undertaken make it clear that HAMLET has no real chance of winning, as he will have done sufficiently well if the other only scores three hits out of twelve against him. The wager is set at nine against twelve, meaning HAMLET is given a handicap. I would say that in this pun on foil we can legitimately discern what lies beneath the wordplay. I mean that one of HAMLET’s recurring functions is to constantly play with words, puns, double meanings, and ambiguities.

This pun is not incidental. When he says, “I’ll be your foil,” he uses the same word that ties in with the object at play in this moment—the distribution of the swords. And very specifically in HAMLET’s pun, there is, ultimately, an identification of the subject with the deadly phallus, for as long as it is present. He says to LAERTES, “I’ll be your foil to set off your merit,” but what is about to occur is precisely the arrival of LAERTES’ sword—the one that wounds HAMLET fatally. And it is also the same sword that will end up in HAMLET’s hand, allowing him to complete his path and kill, at the same time, both his adversary and the ultimate target of his mission, the king, whom he must destroy immediately afterward.

This verbal reference, this play on the signifier, is certainly no accident. It is legitimate to bring it into play because it is not a textual fluke but one of the dimensions through which HAMLET presents himself. Indeed, this texture runs throughout SHAKESPEARE’s text and, in itself, deserves a dedicated exploration.

You can see how essential a role is played by these various characters—the clowns and the court fools—those who, with their freedom of speech, are able to unveil the most hidden motives and personality traits, which politeness forbids addressing directly. This is not merely cynicism or a more-or-less insulting style of discourse; it is essentially through ambiguity, metaphor, wordplay, a certain use of concetti, and refined language that these substitutions of signifiers—on which I insist here for their essential function—give SHAKESPEARE’s entire theater a distinctive style and psychological depth that is absolutely characteristic.

The fact that HAMLET is a more anxiety-inducing character than others should not obscure the point that his tragedy—at least in some respects, quite literally—elevates this fool, this clown, this wordsmith to the level of zero. As someone observed, if, for any reason, this dimension of HAMLET were removed from SHAKESPEARE’s play, more than four-fifths of the work would vanish.

One of the dimensions in which HAMLET’s tension is enacted is this perpetual ambiguity, concealed to some extent by what I might call the masked nature of the affair. I mean that what unfolds between CLAUDIUS—the tyrant, usurper, and murderer—and HAMLET is the unveiling of HAMLET’s intentions, specifically why he plays the fool.

But what must not be overlooked is how he plays the fool—the way he imbues his speech with a quasi-manic quality, catching ideas on the fly, seizing upon moments of ambiguity, creating fleeting flashes of meaning in front of his adversaries.

There are moments in the play where the text itself reflects this dynamic—moments where others begin to construct narratives or even fabricate interpretations. What strikes them is not a sense of discord but the strangeness of HAMLET’s words, marked by a peculiar relevance. This is not merely a game of concealment but a game of wit, operating at the level of the signifiers, in the realm of meaning. It is in this interplay that we find what can be called the very spirit of the play.

Within this ambiguous framework, which renders all of HAMLET’s remarks—and, consequently, the reactions of those around him—a continuous puzzle that confounds and provokes unceasing questioning in the spectator or listener, lies the foundation of the play’s significance. I recall this here only to emphasize that there is nothing arbitrary or excessive in assigning full weight to this final pun on the foil.

Thus, we see the distinctive constellation in which the final act unfolds—the duel between HAMLET and his rival, a kind of peer or a more beautiful double of himself. We have emphasized this element, which corresponds, in a sense, to the lower level of our schema: i(a), representing what, for HAMLET, momentarily takes shape anew. Here, he—
for whom neither man nor woman is anything more than a putrid and insubstantial shadow—
finds a rival who matches his measure.

Let us say it outright: this “remodeled” counterpart, who allows him at least for a moment to sustain in his presence the human wager of being also a man, is not a starting point but a consequence. I mean it is a consequence of what manifests in the situation—namely, the subject’s position in the presence of the other as the object of desire, the immanent presence of the phallus, which here can appear in its formal function only with the disappearance of the subject himself. What makes it possible for the subject to succumb before even seizing the phallus to become the murderer himself?

We return once again to our crossroads. That singular crossroads, of which I have spoken and marked the essential nature in HAMLET:
– Namely, what happens in the graveyard,
– Namely, something that should indeed interest one of our colleagues who, in his work, has eminently dealt with both jealousy and mourning.

This is one of the most striking points of the tragedy: the jealousy of mourning.
I urge you to refer to the scene that ends the graveyard act, the one I have brought you back to three times during my exposition.

What is absolutely characteristic here is that HAMLET cannot tolerate the parade or ostentation, and he articulates what is unbearable about LAERTES’ behavior during his sister’s burial. This ostentation of mourning by his counterpart tears him away from himself, shakes him to his core, to the point where he cannot tolerate it as such. The first rivalry—far more authentic than the duel—occurs here. While HAMLET approaches the duel with all the pomp of courtesy and a blunted foil, he leaps at LAERTES’ throat in the grave where OPHELIA’s body has just been lowered, saying:

“Show me what you will do. Will you weep, fight, fast? […] I will do it. Have you come here to whine, to mock me by leaping into her grave? Be buried alive with her; I will do so too. And if you prattle about mountains, let millions of acres be thrown upon us, until this mound scorches its peak in the fire zone and Ossa appears as a wart! And if you shout, I will bellow!” [V,1,263-272]

At this, everyone is scandalized, rushing in to separate these warring brothers who are choking each other.
HAMLET continues, addressing his rival:

– “And, sir, what compels you to treat me this way? I have always loved you. It does not matter.
Hercules may do what he will, but the cat will mew, and the dog will have his day.” [V,1,276]

This proverbial element here seems to me to take on full significance, suggesting connections some of you might discern, though I cannot dwell on them. The essential point is that when he speaks to HORATIO, he explains:
“I could not bear to see such a display of his mourning.” [V,2,78-79]

We are drawn here to the heart of something that opens up an entire problematic. What is the relationship between what we have introduced in the form of $◊a, concerning the constitution of the object in desire, and mourning? Let us observe this and approach it through its most manifest characteristics, which may seem furthest from the core of what we are seeking here.

HAMLET’s behavior toward OPHELIA has been more than contemptible and cruel. I have emphasized the aggressive, demeaning nature of his treatment, the continual humiliation inflicted upon her, who suddenly became the very symbol of the rejection of his desire as such.

We cannot help but be struck by something that once again completes, in another form and with another feature, the structure for HAMLET. Suddenly, this object regains its presence and value for him. He declares:

– “I loved OPHELIA. Forty thousand brothers, with all their love, could not match the sum of mine. What will you do for her?” [V,1,257]

Thus begins his challenge to LAERTES. In some sense, it is precisely because the object of his desire has become an impossible object that it reemerges as the object of his desire. Once again, we feel we are approaching familiar territory—one of the characteristics of the obsessive’s desire. But let us not too hastily settle for these obvious appearances.

The obsessive is not characterized so much by the impossibility of the object of his desire—
inasmuch as, by the very structure of desire,
there is always an element of impossibility in the object of desire—
but rather by his emphasis on the encounter with this impossibility.

In other words, he arranges for the object of his desire to acquire the essential value of a signifier of this impossibility. This is one of the clues by which we can begin to approach this form. But something deeper compels our attention.

Mourning is something that our theory, tradition, and Freudian formulations have already taught us to conceptualize in terms of object relations. Is it not striking, from a certain perspective, that the object of mourning—
an object FREUD was the first to valorize,
since the advent of psychologists who think—
has been brought into such focus?

The object of mourning, in a certain relationship of identification—
and which FREUD attempted to define more precisely as a relationship of incorporation with the subject—
takes on its significance as the manifestations of mourning are grouped and organized around it.
So, can we not attempt to rearticulate, more precisely, in the vocabulary we have learned to handle here, what this identification in mourning might be? What is the function of mourning?

If we advance along this path, we will see—
and only through the symbolic apparatus we employ in this exploration—
consequences of the function of mourning that, I believe, are new and eminently suggestive for you.
I mean consequences that will provide you with effective and fertile insights that could not be accessed through any other path.
The question of what identification is must be illuminated by the categories I have promoted here before you for years:
those of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.

What is this incorporation of the lost object? What does the work of mourning consist of?
We remain vague, which explains the halt of speculation around this path, first opened by FREUD in relation to mourning and melancholy, because the question is not properly articulated.
Let us stay with the first, most evident aspects of the experience of mourning.
The subject sinks into the vertigo of grief and enters into a certain relationship—here illustrated in the most manifest way by what we see unfold in the graveyard scene:
the leap of LAERTES into the grave and his embrace,
in a state of anguish, of the object whose disappearance is the cause of his pain—
which, in that moment of embrace, manifests a kind of existence all the more absolute for no longer corresponding to anything real.

In other words, the hole in the real created by a loss—a true loss—this kind of loss intolerable to human beings that gives rise to mourning, this hole in the real is addressed by this very function, in a relationship that is the inverse of what I promote before you under the name Verwerfung (foreclosure).

Just as “what is rejected from the symbolic reappears in the real” (a formula that must be taken literally), so too does Verwerfung create a hole in the real through the loss of something:
– that constitutes the dimension that is, properly speaking, intolerable in human experience,
– not the experience of one’s own death, which no one has, but that of the death of another, who is for us an essential being—this constitutes a hole in the real.

This hole in the real, by this fact, becomes…
and due to the same correspondence I articulate in Verwerfung…
the space where precisely:
– this missing signifier,
– this essential signifier, as such,
– to the structure of the Other,
– this signifier whose absence renders the Other powerless to provide you with your answer,
– this signifier you can only pay for with your flesh and blood,
– this signifier which is essentially the veiled phallus,
is projected.

It is because this signifier finds its place there…
and at the same time cannot find its place because this signifier cannot be articulated at the level of the Other…
that, as in psychosis—and this is where mourning resembles psychosis—
there proliferate, in its place, all the images that underpin the phenomena of mourning…
and the most prominent of these phenomena, those that do not merely manifest a particular madness but one of the most essential collective madnesses of human communities, are precisely what take center stage in the tragedy of HAMLET:
namely, the ghost, the phantom, that image capable of haunting the soul of anyone and everyone.

If, on the side of the deceased, of the one who has just disappeared, something has not been accomplished—
something called the rites.

What are these rites ultimately intended for? What are funerary rites?
The rites through which we fulfill what is called the memory of the dead—what are they, if not the total, massive intervention of the symbolic, encompassing everything from hell to heaven?

I wish I had time to give you a few seminars on the subject of funerary rites through an ethnological investigation. I recall, many years ago, spending considerable time on a book that provides a truly admirable illustration of this topic and takes on exemplary value for us by belonging to a civilization sufficiently distant from ours to make the outlines of this function appear strikingly vivid.
It is the Lǐjīng (禮經), one of the classical Chinese texts.

The macrocosmic nature of funerary rites—
namely, the fact that nothing can fill the hole in the real with signifiers except the totality of the symbolic—
the work accomplished at the level of logos…
I say this rather than “the level of the group or community,” though of course it is the group and community, culturally organized, that serve as its supports…
the work of mourning first presents itself as a satisfaction granted to the disorder caused by the insufficiency of all signifying elements to address the hole created in existence, through the total engagement of the entire signifying system around even the smallest instance of mourning.

And this explains why all folklore belief places the closest relation between the failure, omission, or refusal to provide this satisfaction to the deceased, and the emergence of phenomena corresponding to the power, intervention, or activation of ghosts and larvae, taking the space left vacant by the absence of signifying rites.

And here a new dimension of HAMLET’s tragedy reveals itself.
As I mentioned at the outset, it is a tragedy of the underworld: the ghost emerges from an unatoned offense.

OPHELIA appears, from this perspective, as neutral—nothing more than a victim offered up to this primordial offense.
The murder of POLONIUS and the grotesque dragging of his corpse by the foot, by a HAMLET who suddenly becomes literally unhinged, mocking everyone who asks him where the body is, and amusing himself by proposing a series of crude riddles, culminating in the phrase:

“Hide fox, and all after.” [IV, 2, 29]

This is, of course, a reference to a kind of hide-and-seek game. It means: “The fox is hidden; let’s all chase after!”
The murder of POLONIUS and this extraordinary scene of the hidden corpse—mocking the sensitivities and anxieties of everyone around him—are nothing but a derision of what is really at stake: an unsatisfied mourning.

Here we have, in something I still cannot fully articulate for you today, this perspective—this relationship between the formula $◊a, the fantasy, and something seemingly paradoxically distant from it: the object relation as illuminated by mourning.

Next time, we will pursue this further in detail, retracing the twists and turns of HAMLET to better grasp the economy tightly intertwined here between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic.

Perhaps along the way, many preconceived ideas you hold will be stalled—or, as I certainly hope, shattered. But I trust you are prepared for this, since we are analyzing a tragedy that spares no corpses. These purely intellectual “casualties” will surely seem insignificant compared to the trail of literal carnage left behind by HAMLET.

To sum up, I think you will console yourselves for the perhaps challenging path I am leading you down with this Hamletian formula:

“You can’t make a HAMLET without breaking some eggs!”