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(All parts in English)

HAMLET (7)

If the tragedy of HAMLET is the tragedy of desire, it is time to note…
this is where I brought you at the end of my last talk, at the moment we were reaching the end of our session…
what is always noticed last, namely, what is most obvious.
I am not aware, in fact, that any author has lingered over this observation…
difficult as it may be to overlook once it is formulated…
that from one end to the other of HAMLET, the play speaks only of mourning.

The first remark in HAMLET concerns this scandal, the premature marriage of his mother: this marriage that the mother herself, in her anxiety…
her anxiety about what torments her beloved son…
herself calls “our over-hasty marriage”:

– “I doubt it is no other but the main, his father’s death and our o’er-hasty marriage.”
[For me, I suspect no other than the death of his father and our precipitate marriage. (II, 2, 56)]

There is no need to remind you of these words from HAMLET about the remnants of the funeral meal being used for the wedding feast: “Economy! Economy! Thrift, thrift, Horatio!” [I, 2, 180]
indicating with this term something that reminds us that in our exploration of the world of the object…
in this articulation that defines modern society…
between what we call “use values” and “exchange values,” along with all the notions that emerge from this, there is perhaps something that analysis overlooks…
I mean Marxist, economic analysis, insofar as it dominates the thought of our time…
and whose force and scope we feel at every moment: ritual values.
Even though we continually point to them in our experience, it may be useful for us to isolate them, to articulate them as essential.

I have already alluded, the penultimate time [actually on 22-04-1959], to this function of the rite in mourning.
It is through this mediation that the rite introduces the opening created by mourning somewhere, more precisely the way it coincides, placing at the center of an essential gap, the symbolic gap, the major lack, the symbolic lack—the X point, in short, about which one could say that somewhere, when FREUD alludes to “the navel of the dream,”
perhaps he is precisely evoking the psychological counterpart of this lack.

Likewise, on the subject of mourning, we cannot fail to be struck by the fact that in all the major instances of mourning questioned in HAMLET, the same theme recurs: the rites have been abbreviated, clandestine.
POLONIUS is buried without ceremony, secretly, hastily, for political reasons.

And you remember everything that revolves around OPHELIA’s burial, the discussion about how it happened that most likely, having died by her own will, having drowned herself deliberately…
at least that is the opinion of the people…
nevertheless, she is buried in consecrated ground, in Christian ground, and something of the Christian rite is accorded to her—the gravediggers have no doubt about it.

Had she not been a person of such high rank, she would have been treated differently, as the priest articulates
it should have been, for he does not believe she deserves these funeral honors. She would have been thrown into unconsecrated ground, with shards and refuse piled upon her, the curse and darkness.
The priest consented only to abbreviated rites as well.

All this is strongly emphasized at the end of the graveyard scene. We cannot ignore all these elements, especially if we add many other things to them.

The father’s ghost is a shadow with an inexpiable grievance, a shadow that was taken—he tells us—offended in an eternal way,
that was taken—this is one of the lesser mysteries of the meaning of this tragedy—“in the blossom of his sins…” [Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin… (I, 5, 76)].
He had no time to gather, before his death, that something which would have put him in a state to appear before the Last Judgment.

We have here a sort of trace, or clues as they are called in English, elements that are too ordered, too convergent in an eminently significant way for us not to pause on them…
for us not to ask, as we began to do last time…
about the relationship between the drama of desire and everything revolving around mourning and the demands of mourning.

This is the point I would like to pause on today to attempt to delve deeper into how this, for us, raises a question:
– insofar as this question concerns the object,
– and the object as we approach it in analysis in various forms.

We approach it in the sense of the object of desire. And there is also a simple relationship of the object to desire, as in a meeting that could be articulated as though it were a mere appointment, while perhaps it is something else.
We also approach the question of the object from a completely different angle when we speak of the object as that with which the subject identifies in mourning, which, it is said, they may reintegrate into their ego. What is this?

Are there not two phases here that, in analysis, are not articulated, are not harmonized?
Does something not demand of us that we attempt to penetrate further into this problem?

Of course, what I have just said about mourning in Hamlet does not allow us to obscure:
– that the foundation of this mourning is—in Hamlet as in Oedipus—a crime,
– that to a certain extent, all these instances of mourning cascade one after another as the aftermath, the sequels, the consequences of the crime from which the drama originates.

And this is equally what makes Hamlet, as we say, an Oedipal drama, which allows us to equate it,
to place it on the same functional level, in the tragic genealogy, as Oedipus.
This is what led FREUD, and his disciples after him, to recognize the importance of HAMLET for us.

But at the same time, this must be an opportunity for us to address this subject…
– since HAMLET, in the analytic tradition, occupies the center of a meditation on origins,
– since we are accustomed to recognizing in the crime of OEDIPUS the most essential thread in the subject’s relationship to what we call here the Other, namely, the locus where the law is inscribed
…to recall a few essential terms of how, for us, these relationships between the subject and what might be called the original crime have so far been articulated.

It is quite clear that we must distinguish…
instead of doing as we always do, leaving things in a sort of confusion and vagueness
that does not facilitate the speculations about the matters we have to address on this subject
…that we are confronted with two levels. There is the Freudian myth, which deserves to be called as such…
the construction of the totem, established as it organizes what can properly be called a myth.
I have already touched on this problem on occasion: how it may even be said that the Freudian construction is perhaps here the unique example of a formed myth that has emerged in our historical era.
…there is this myth that somehow indicates to us the primitive, essential link, of absolute necessity,
which makes it impossible for us to conceive of the order of the law except on the basis of something more primordial,
which presents itself as what?

This is the meaning of FREUD’s myth of Oedipus. It is too obvious that this crime, the primal murder of the father…
which is, for him, required to always reappear as forming the horizon, the ultimate boundary of the problem of origins in every analytic matter—let us note this, for he always rediscovers it, and nothing seems exhausted to him until it returns to this ultimate point…
…the primal murder of the father, whether he places it at the origin of the horde or at the origin of the Jewish tradition,
obviously has a mythical necessity.

Another level is where this something unfolds and is embodied in a formative drama. Something else
is the relationship of the primal law to the primal crime, and what happens when the tragic hero, who is OEDIPUS,
who also, in some part of their being, virtually represents each of us when we reproduce the Oedipal drama—when, in killing the father, one unites with the mother, when, in some way, one renews on the tragic level, in a sort of purifying bath, the rebirth of the law.

Here, we can see the asymmetries between the tragedy of OEDIPUS and the tragedy of HAMLET.

OEDIPUS strictly corresponds to this definition I have just given of the ritual reproduction of the myth.

ŒDIPUS, in short, is completely innocent, unconscious, acting as if in a dream, which is his life…
Life is a dream…
…unknowingly enacting the renewal of the transitions that move from crime to the restoration of order
and to the punishment he takes upon himself, which, in the end, reveals him to us as castrated. For this is indeed the element we must consider essential, and which remains veiled if we adhere solely to the genetic level of the primal murder.

This is ultimately the meaning of what emerges, of what is significant: namely, this punishment, this sanction, this castration in which something remains enclosed, locked away—a result that is, strictly speaking, the humanization of sexuality in man, and which is also the key by which we customarily interpret, through our experience, all the accidents in the evolution of desire.

It is here that the asymmetries between the drama of HAMLET and the drama of ŒDIPUS are not without importance.
To pursue these asymmetries in detail would be an almost dazzling exercise. Nevertheless, let us point out that:
– the crime occurs in Œdipus at the level of the hero’s generation,
– in Hamlet, it has already occurred at the level of the previous generation,
– in Œdipus, it happens with the hero unaware of what he is doing, as if guided by fate,
– whereas in Hamlet, the crime is committed deliberately, even treacherously. It takes the victim, the father, by surprise in a kind of sleep, even a very real sleep. There is in this sleep something that is not entirely integrated.

One could say that ŒDIPUS played out the drama as each of us reenacts it in our dreams. But here the hero is genuinely—this is where our references may help—taken by surprise in a way completely alien to the thread of his thoughts at that moment. He indicates this: “I was taken in the blossom of my sins.” A blow strikes him,
coming from a place he did not expect it, a true intrusion of the real, a true rupture of the thread of destiny.
He dies on a bed of flowers, as the Shakespearean text tells us, and the actors’ scene even reproduces, in the preliminary pantomime, this bed of flowers on stage.

There is undoubtedly some mystery here, one which, as I indicated from the beginning, contrasts with the singular fact that this—what is the most alien eruption into the subject in the crime—seems paradoxically compensated or contrasted by the fact that here, the subject knows. I mean that HAMLET is informed by his father, who knows what has happened, and this is not one of the lesser enigmas either.

The drama of HAMLET, unlike that of ŒDIPUS, does not begin with the question:
– What is happening?
– Where is the crime?
– Who is the culprit?
It begins with the denunciation of the crime—the crime brought to light in the subject’s ear—and unfolds from
the revelation of the crime.

Thus, we shall see here both the ambiguity and the contrast of something that can be inscribed
in the form we use to inscribe the message of the unconscious, namely: the signifier of the barred A, S(Ⱥ).
In the normal form, so to speak, of Œdipus, the S(Ⱥ) bears an incarnation, that of the Other, the father, precisely as he is expected and called upon to provide the sanction from the locus of the Other, the truth of truth:

– insofar as he must be the author of the law,
– and yet insofar as he is never more than the one who endures it,
– the one who, like anyone else, cannot guarantee it,
– the one who must also endure the bar,
– the one who, to the extent that he is the real father, is made into a castrated father.

Completely different, though it may be symbolized in the same way, is the position at the end of HAMLET,
or more precisely at its beginning, since it is the message that opens the drama of HAMLET.

Here we also see the Other appear in its most significant form as a barred A, Ⱥ.

It is not only from the surface of the living that he has been erased, but from his rightful reward.
He has entered, along with the crime, into the domain of hell, meaning a debt he was unable to pay, an inexpiable debt, as he says.
And this is indeed the most terrifying and distressing aspect of his revelation to his son.

ŒDIPUS has paid; he presents himself as the one who carries, in the destiny of the hero, the burden of a fulfilled, repaid debt.
What HAMLET’s father complains of for all eternity is having been, in that thread, interrupted, taken by surprise, broken—
the fact that he will never again be able to answer for it.

You see, as our investigation progresses, it leads us to what is at stake in retribution, in punishment, in castration, in the relationship to the phallic signifier, since it is in this sense that we began to articulate it.

And an ambiguity arises in what FREUD himself pointed out to us…
perhaps in a somewhat “fin de siècle” fashion…
…namely, this something that would make us fated to live out the Oedipus only in a form that is, in some way, distorted—something that certainly echoes in HAMLET.

One of the first cries at the end of HAMLET’s first act is this:

– “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right!
Time is out of its hinges. O cursed…—I can translate “spite” no other way—spite.” [I, 5, 188]

“Spite” appears everywhere in SHAKESPEARE’s Sonnets; “spite” has, for us, taken on a subjective meaning.

Our first step in introducing an understanding of the Elizabethans would be, regarding a certain number of words, to see how we might restore their ability to pivot back on their hinges—in other words, to locate “spite” somewhere
between objective spite and subjective spite, in something for which we seem to have lost the reference point: namely, what occurs at the level of order, that is, in terms that can fall between the two, between the objective and the subjective.

“O cursed spite”—it is this that causes his resentment; it is this in which time also wrongs him…
we can no longer articulate these words, which are at the center of the subject’s experience…
…nor all that he might designate as the injustice in the world. Perhaps, in passing, you recognize here the misguidance of the “beautiful soul,” from which we have not escaped, far from it, despite all our efforts,
but which SHAKESPEARE’s vocabulary transcends.

And it is not for nothing that I have so casually alluded here to the Sonnets. So:

– “O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right!” [I, 5, 188]

And thus, at once justified but deepened, we see what in HAMLET may appear to illustrate a decadent form of the Oedipus. [Cf. Œdipus at Colonus: μή ϕῦναι (mè phunai)] A kind of total Untergang that establishes an ambiguity with what I would now like to draw your attention to for a moment—namely, what FREUD thus calls, in each individual life, what he described under this title in 1924, drawing attention himself to what is ultimately the enigma of the Oedipus. It is not simply that the subject wished or desired the murder of his father and the violation of his mother, but that this exists in the unconscious.

The question is how this comes to be in the unconscious and how it comes to exist there to the extent that the subject, during an important period of his life—the latency period…
the source of the points of construction in the human being for his entire objective world…
…comes to pay no attention to it at all.

To such an extent does he stop paying attention to it that, as you well know, FREUD admits—at least at the outset of his doctrinal articulation—that in an ideal case, ceasing to pay attention to it becomes something happily definitive.

I refer you to this text, which is not long, and which you will find in Volume XIII of the Gesammelte Werke.
What does FREUD tell us?

Let us begin with what FREUD tells us, and we shall then see how this might provide insight for our discussion.

FREUD tells us: the Oedipus complex enters its Untergang—its descent, its decline, its fall—during a decisive turning point for all subsequent development of the subject, as a result of the following:
– insofar as, he says, the Oedipus complex has been experienced on both sides of its triangular structure,
– insofar as the subject, rival to the father, finds himself confronted with a specific threat—none other than castration—that is, insofar as he desires to take the father’s place, he will be castrated,
– insofar as he takes the mother’s place—this is literally what FREUD says—he will also lose the phallus, since the culmination and maturity of the Oedipus complex includes the full discovery of the fact that the woman is castrated.

It is precisely because the subject is trapped in this closed alternative, which offers no escape, that we find ourselves at the level of something we can articulate as the relationship we aim to explore further: this thing called the phallus, which is the key to the situation. At this moment, it forms the core of the essential drama of the Oedipus complex. I would say that the Oedipus complex, precisely for the subject, marks the pivot and turning point that shifts him from the plane of demand to that of desire.

It is in this “thing”—
for I leave open the question of its qualification, and we will see what it must represent for us—
I did not say “object.” By saying “thing,” I imply something real, not yet symbolized, but somehow in the potentiality of being: something that, to put it plainly, we may call a signifier with a diffuse meaning.

The phallus is what FREUD presents to us as the key to the Untergang, the descent, the decline of the Oedipus complex. And in the Freudian articulation, we see something gathered together that does not place the girl in a position—
I will not say asymmetrical—but not so entirely asymmetrical either.

– It is inasmuch as the subject enters into a relationship with this “thing,” which we may call one of weariness—this is in FREUD’s text—regarding gratification,
– it is inasmuch as the boy renounces rising to the challenge—this is even more articulated for the girl—that no gratification can be expected on this plane,
– it is, to sum up, because something does not emerge clearly articulated at this moment, that the subject must mourn the phallus, and the Oedipus complex enters its decline.

This becomes so evident that it revolves around mourning. We cannot avoid making the connection here, realizing that this is where we can shed light on the subsequent function of this moment of decline, its decisive role, which, let us not forget, is not merely—
cannot merely be, for us—
…the fact that the fragments, the more or less incompletely repressed remnants of the Oedipus complex, will resurface during puberty in the form of neurotic symptoms. Rather, it is also…
what we have always acknowledged as common experience among analysts:
…it is that something depends on this in the economy not only of the unconscious but also in the imaginary economy of the subject, which can only be described as their normalization at the genital level.

That is to say, there is no successful maturation of the genital stage unless the Oedipus complex is completed as fully as possible. The Oedipus complex must leave, as its consequence, the mark of the castration complex in both men and women.

It is here, perhaps…
by drawing connections, by synthesizing what we have been given in FREUD’s work concerning the mechanism of mourning…
…that we may realize this is what can illuminate, for us, the fact that mourning occurs in the subject. This mourning is certainly particular, as the phallus is not an object like the others.

But here, too, we can pause, for after all, if I were to ask you: “What defines the scope and boundaries of the objects for which we can mourn?”—this has not yet been clearly articulated either. We can well suspect that the phallus, among the objects we can mourn, is not like the others.
Here, as everywhere, it must hold a special place, but precisely, this is what we need to clarify.
And as in many cases when something needs to be clarified, it involves placing something against a background:
…it is by clarifying it against this background that the precision of the background itself appears, through retroaction.

We are now in entirely new territory.

Let us attempt to advance further, for this is what our analysis of HAMLET will ultimately serve:
to remind us of this question, which I bring before you through a series of concentric touches, emphasizing it, presenting it to you in ways that resonate differently, and which I hope to make increasingly precise—
namely, what I call the place of the object in desire. What does FREUD tell us about this mourning of the phallus?

He tells us that what is tied to it, what constitutes one of its fundamental springs, what gives it its value—for this is what we are seeking—is a narcissistic demand of the subject. Here we have the connection to this critical moment where the subject, in any case, sees himself as castrated or deprived of the “thing,” the phallus. FREUD introduces here, as always without the slightest caution—I mean, he disrupts us as usual, and, thank God, he did so throughout his life, for he would never have achieved all that he did in his field otherwise—he tells us it is a narcissistic demand.

In the face of the ultimate outcome of his Oedipal demands, the subject prefers, so to speak, to abandon an entire part of himself, the subject—something that will henceforth be forever forbidden to him—namely, within the punctuated signifying chain, what constitutes the uppermost point of our graph. The whole affair is nothing other than the fundamental matter of the love relation as it was presented to him in the parental dialectic and the way in which he could enter into it.

He will let all this sink away because of—FREUD tells us—something related to this phallus…
already so enigmatically introduced from the very beginning, and yet so clearly throughout the entire experience…
in a narcissistic relationship with this term.

What can this mean for us, in our vocabulary, insofar as our vocabulary can be something illuminating, something more enlightening, something through which we attempt to respond to this demand that FREUD, as I just said, must set aside because he needs to go directly to the core, to the cutting edge of the subject, and cannot linger long over the premises. Indeed, this is generally how all action is founded, and even more so true action—that is to say, the action that is our concern here, or at least should be.

Well then, translated into our discourse, into our references, “narcissistic” implies a certain relationship with the imaginary.
“Narcissistic” here explains this: that very precisely in mourning, insofar as in this mourning nothing is satisfied…
and here, nothing can satisfy, since the loss of the phallus, experienced as such, is the very outcome of the entire process by which the subject relates to what occurs at the locus of the Other—that is, in the organized field of the symbolic relation where his demand for love first began to be expressed…
…he reaches the end, and his loss in this matter is radical.

What then occurs is precisely something I have already indicated to be related to a psychotic mechanism, inasmuch as it is through its imaginary texture, and only through that, that the subject can respond to it.
What FREUD presents to us, in a veiled form, as the narcissistic bond of the subject to the situation represents this:
something that allows us at this point to identify it with something in him, on the imaginary level, that represents this lack as such. This lack, so to speak, renders null or places in reserve within him all that will later form the mold from which his assumption of his position in the genital function will be reshaped.

But here, are we perhaps moving too quickly past what is truly at stake?
Is it to suggest—as is commonly believed—that the relationship to the genital object is a relationship of positive to negative?
You will see that it is not, and this is why our notations are better, because they allow us to articulate how the problem will truly present itself. What is at stake, in fact, is something that, for us, must be connoted in the following form, insofar as it has brought us to address something we have already approached when we distinguished the functions of castration, frustration, and deprivation:

Agent	Lack	Object
	Castration: symbolic debt	Imaginary
Symbolic mother	Frustration: imaginary dam	real
	Deprivation: real hole	symbolic

If you remember, I previously wrote for you:
– castration as a symbolic action,
– frustration as an imaginary term,
– and privation as a real term.

I provided the connotations of their relationships to objects. I told you that castration is related to the imaginary phallic object, and I wrote that frustration, imaginary in its nature, always relates to a good or a real term, while privation, being real, relates to a symbolic term. At that time, I added that there is no kind of phase or fissure in reality. Every lack is “a lack in its place,” but a lack in its place is a symbolic lack.

There is a column here, corresponding to the agent, tied to these actions with their object-term, which I touched upon at that moment in only one aspect: at the level of the agent of frustration, the mother. I explained that it is because the mother, as such, is the locus of the demand for love—symbolized first in the dual register of presence and absence—that she assumes the position of initiating the genetic dialectic. As a real mother, she turns what the subject is deprived of in reality, such as the breast, into a symbol of her love.

And I left it there. You will notice that the boxes corresponding to the term “agent” in the other two relationships remained unfilled. It is only now that we can properly articulate what is at stake here.

The term “agent” refers, in its place, to the subject. At that time, we could not clearly articulate the different levels of this subject. Now we can, and now we can designate, at the level where we placed the mother’s actual locus, the term by which everything resulting from her actions gains its value—that is, the A of the Other, where the demand is articulated.

Agent	Lack	Object
Real father	Castration: symbolic debt	Imaginary phallus
Symbolic mother	Frustration: imaginary dam	Real breast
Imaginary father	Privation: real hole	Symbolic phallus

At the level of castration, we have a subject as real, but in the form we have since learned to articulate and discover: the speaking subject, the concrete subject, marked by the sign of speech.

Certainly, you will see this immediately. It seems to me that, for some time now, philosophers have been attempting to articulate something concerning the peculiar nature of human action. It is impossible to approach the theme of human action without realizing that there is something off about the illusion of some absolute beginning that might serve as the ultimate point of the notion of the agent.

This “something off” has been addressed throughout time through various speculations on freedom, which is also necessity. Philosophers have reached a final articulation of this idea, suggesting that there is no true action other than aligning oneself, in a sense, with divine wills.

It seems to us that here we can at least claim to bring something entirely different to the table through the particular quality of its articulation. When we say that the subject, as real, is something that maintains a particular relationship with speech, this conditions within them an eclipse, a fundamental lack that structures them as such at the symbolic level in relation to castration.

This is not a gold ingot, a magic key, or something that opens everything, but it begins to articulate something—and something that has never been said before. Surely, it is worth emphasizing this.

So, what will appear here at the level of privation—namely, what the subject becomes insofar as they have been symbolically castrated? They have been symbolically castrated at the level of their position as a speaking subject, not at the level of their being. This being must mourn something it must offer in sacrifice, as a holocaust, to its function as a missing signifier.

This becomes much clearer and much easier to grasp once we frame the problem in terms of mourning. In terms of mourning, we situate the issue on the plane where the subject is identical to the biological images that guide him, images that carve for him the prepared path of his behavior, attracting him through all channels of voracity and coupling. On this plane, something is taken, marked, and removed, making the subject as such truly deprived.

This privation cannot be identified or located anywhere in reality because reality, as such, is always defined as full. Here we find, albeit in a different form and with a different emphasis, a reflection of the existentialist idea—rightly or wrongly so named—that it is the living human subject who introduces what they call “negation.” However, we call it something else. This “negation,” which philosophers use to embellish their reflections, even their so-called Sundays of life [Cf. note 22 of 10-12-1958], is unsatisfying for us.

We are not satisfied with the more artful uses of this concept in modern dialectical sleight of hand. What we call it is –ϕ, which FREUD identified as the essential mark of man’s relationship to λόγος (logos), that is, castration, here indeed assumed on the imaginary plane.

You will later see how this notation –ϕ serves us. It will help define what we are discussing—namely, the object (a) of desire, as it appears in our formulation of the fantasy. This object will be situated relative to the categories, main concepts, and registers that are central to our analytical framework.

The object (a) of desire—we are going to define it, articulate it as we have done before, and repeat it once again here—is the object that supports the subject’s relationship to what it is not. Up to this point, we advance somewhat—but not entirely—beyond what traditional and existentialist philosophy has expressed in terms of the negativity or negation of the existing subject. However, we add: it is not what the subject is, insofar as it is not the phallus.

It is the object that sustains the subject in that privileged position it is brought to occupy in certain situations: the position of not being the phallus. The object (a), as we attempt to define it—
because we now find it necessary to arrive at an accurate definition of the object, or at least to make an attempt at a definition we consider just—
allows us to see how what we call the object is organized and differentiated from other elements we have articulated in our experience.

Of course, what we will explore here is whether this object, insofar as it is the object (a), can be defined as the genital object. If this were the case, it would imply that all pregenital objects are not objects at all. I will not answer this question yet but merely state that it will arise as soon as we begin framing the problem in this way.

It is clear that the answer cannot be simple. One immediate advantage of this framing is that it allows us to distinguish between the so-called phallic phase—and here I follow the strict tradition of our accepted experience—and the genital phase.

The relationship between these phases, particularly the phallic phase’s role in the formation and maturation of the object, is what has eluded us for years. It is only now, as we confront this hidden position that only appears in flashes or glimpses—its manifestation tied to having or not having—that we can discern the radical position at the heart of the matter.

This radical position concerns the subject at the level of privation, the subject as the subject of desire as such. It is the position of not being the phallus, of being, if I may put it this way, a negative object. You see how far I go with this assertion.

The three forms in which the subject appears at the levels of castration, frustration, and privation are three forms we can indeed call alienated. However, our articulation of alienation differs significantly, being more nuanced and diverse. By this, I mean:
– At the level of castration, the subject appears in a syncope of the signifier.
– This is different from how the subject appears at the level of the Other, where it is subject to the universal law.
– And it is again different from how the subject situates itself within desire, where its disappearance takes on a singular originality compared to the other two, prompting us to articulate it further.

This is precisely what we encounter in our experience and what the unfolding of HAMLET’s tragedy draws us toward.

The “something rotten” that poor HAMLET must set right is something intimately tied to his position concerning the phallus. Throughout the play, we sense this term’s pervasive presence in the manifest disorder that defines HAMLET whenever he approaches the critical points of his action. Today, I can only highlight the key points that allow us to trace it.

There is something very peculiar about the way HAMLET speaks of his father. There is an idealizing exaltation of his deceased father, which essentially amounts to an inability to find words adequate to express what he wishes to say about him. He stumbles and chokes on his words, concluding with something that takes the form of a specific type of signifier, referred to in English as pregnant [laden with meaning]—something that carries a meaning beyond its immediate sense.

He could find nothing else to say about his father except, as he put it, that he was a man like any other. What he obviously means is quite the opposite, a first indication of the trail I wish to follow with you. There are many other terms that deserve attention. The rejection, depreciation, and contempt heaped on CLAUDIUS seem to take the form of a denial.

That is to say, in the torrent of insults HAMLET directs at CLAUDIUS—particularly in front of his mother—he climaxes with the phrase: “A king of shreds and patches,” a king made of assembled scraps and debris. This description cannot help but point to something problematic. We cannot ignore its connection to a striking fact: in comparison to the Oedipal tragedy, what stands out in HAMLET is that after the father’s murder, the phallus remains present.

It is there, unmistakably, and it is CLAUDIUS who embodies it. The real phallus of CLAUDIUS is constantly at issue, and, ultimately, HAMLET has no greater grievance against his mother than that—barely after his father’s death—she has “filled herself” with it. In his discouraged words and gestures, he rejects her to that fatal and fateful object, which here is undeniably real and appears to be the central axis around which the drama revolves.

Concerning this woman…
who does not seem to us, in her nature, to be so fundamentally different from others in the play…
…there is, given all the human feelings she demonstrates, something very powerful that must bind her to her partner. This seems to be the focal point around which HAMLET’s action hesitates and falters—the point where, if we may say so, “his astonished genius” trembles before something entirely unexpected. The phallus occupies a completely ectopic position relative to our analysis of the Oedipal framework.

The phallus is undeniably real, and it is precisely as such that it must be struck. But HAMLET hesitates every time. He declares, “I could kill him,” at the moment he finds CLAUDIUS at prayer.

This hesitation before the object to be struck, this uncertainty about the target, is the very mechanism that constantly diverts HAMLET’s arm. It reflects the narcissistic bond FREUD describes in his text The Decline of the Oedipus Complex. One cannot strike the phallus, because even when it is undeniably real, it is still a shadow.

I invite you to meditate on this point, particularly concerning various paradoxical phenomena, including the question: why, despite everything, was it so clear that no one assassinated HITLER?

HITLER, who so well represents the object FREUD illustrates as central to the homogenization of the crowd through identification with an object on the horizon—an object X, an object unlike any other—does this not allow us to reconnect with the topic we are now addressing?

The entirely enigmatic manifestation of the signifier of power as such—that is what is at stake here. The Oedipus complex…
when it appears in a particularly striking form in reality, as it does in HAMLET, where the criminal and usurper are installed as such…
…diverts HAMLET’s hand not because he fears this character, whom he despises, but because he knows that what he must strike is something other than what is there. This is so true that just minutes later, when he reaches his mother’s chamber and begins to shake her very soul, he hears a noise behind the tapestry and rushes in without looking.

I no longer recall which astute author pointed out that it is impossible for HAMLET to believe it is Claudius, as he has just left him in the next room. Yet, when he has gutted and disemboweled the unfortunate POLONIUS, he makes this remark:

– “Poor old fool, I thought it was something better.”

Everyone assumes he intended to kill the king, but in front of the king—I mean CLAUDIUS, the real king, the usurper—
HAMLET ultimately stops because he wants something better, meaning he too wants to have him in the flower of his sin. The Claudius who stood before him was not the right one; he wasn’t “good enough.”

What is at stake here is precisely the phallus, and that is why HAMLET can never reach it until the moment he has completely sacrificed—albeit unwillingly—all his narcissistic attachment. That moment comes when he is mortally wounded and knows it. Only then can he perform the act that strikes CLAUDIUS. This is peculiar, evident, striking, and, I would say, embedded in the many riddles and nuances of HAMLET’s style.

When this sort of character, who is to HAMLET merely a “calf,” a sacrificial offering to the spirit of his father—for HAMLET is hardly affected by the murder of POLONIUS—when HAMLET hides POLONIUS’s body under the stairs and is questioned about it everywhere, he responds with a few of those little jokes of his that are so disorienting to his adversaries.

Everyone wonders—this is the crux of the matter—whether what he says is what he means,
for his words strike everyone where it hurts most. Yet, for him to say such things, he must know so much that it seems impossible to believe, and so on. This is a position quite familiar to us from the perspective of the phenomenon of the subject’s confession. HAMLET says these words, which have remained rather obscure to authors:

– “The body is with the king…
(he does not use the word ‘corpse’; he says ‘body’ here, which I ask you to note)
…but the king is not with the body.” [IV, 2, 25]

I simply ask you to replace the word “king” with “phallus” to see that this is precisely the issue. The body is undeniably involved in the matter of the phallus—oh, how much so!—but the phallus itself is involved in nothing. It always slips through your fingers. Immediately after, HAMLET adds:

– “The King is a thing, the King is a thing.”

“A thing?” the completely stunned, bewildered characters respond, as they always do when HAMLET delivers one of his customary aphorisms: “A thing, my lord?”

– HAMLET: “Of nothing, a thing of nothing.”

From this point, people often comfort themselves with some vague citation from the Psalmist, where it is said that man is indeed a “thing of nothing.” But I believe it is better to refer to the Shakespearean texts themselves.

SHAKESPEARE, upon a close reading of his Sonnets, appears to me to have singularly illustrated, in his very person, a point of desire that is entirely extreme and unique.

Somewhere in one of his sonnets, the audacity of which is almost unimaginable—
I am surprised anyone could speak of ambiguity in this context—
SHAKESPEARE addresses the object of his love, who, as everyone knows, was of his own sex and apparently a very charming young man, seemingly the Earl of Essex. He tells him that he possesses all the traits that satisfy love, in that he resembles a woman in every way, except for one small thing that nature has chosen to bestow upon him—God knows why! This small thing, SHAKESPEARE laments, is of no use to him and is instead destined to bring pleasure to women. He says to him:

– “So be it, as long as your love remains, let this be their delight.”

The terms thing and nothing are used here in their strict sense, leaving no doubt that this was part of SHAKESPEARE’s familiar vocabulary. This familiar vocabulary, after all, is secondary. What is important is whether we can, by going further, penetrate into what constitutes SHAKESPEARE’s own creative position—a position which I believe can undoubtedly be described as “inverted” on the sexual plane, but perhaps not so perverted on the plane of love.

If we delve into the path of the Sonnets, which will allow us to more precisely articulate this dialectic between the subject and the object of his desire, we can advance further into what I would call those moments when the object, through one channel or another—the primary channel being mourning—disappears, gradually fades away, and, for a brief time…
a time that can only persist in the flash of a single moment…
…reveals the true nature of what it represents in the subject: what I would call appearances of the phallus, or phallophanies.

This is where I will leave you for today.