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5. The Discourse of Desire and the Registers in Hamlet
- State University of New York Press
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Lacan’s pointed statement of the symbolic register evokes Hamlet directly: “Everything comes back to to be or not to be,” he remarks (Sem II 192). For Lacan, as for Freud and for the analysts who followed Freud, the archetypal subject of the unconscious is Hamlet. Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” punctuates the seminars on the “Purloined Letter.” Moreover, Lacan concludes his discussion of Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus with a return to Hamlet’s soliloquy (Sem II 233). This “to be or not to be” is “an entirely verbal story” (233), an alternative statement of “the primordial couple of plus or minus” (192) offering Lacan the prototypical instance of the signifier. Thus in Seminar III, where the structure of the subject is at issue, Lacan again discusses the “Other of speech” as the locus from which the subject “recognizes himself and gets himself recognized ” (168), pointing out that this locus is “the level of the signifier, of the to be or not to be . . . the level of [the subject’s] being” (168). Since references to Hamlet pervade the early Seminars in which Lacan formulates his register theory, it is not surprising that the registers ground Lacan’s discussion of desire and his interpretation of Hamlet. After putting at issue the reading of Freud, Seminar I explicates the imaginary and Seminar II relates the imaginary to the symbolic. Seminar III (1955–56) develops the crucial connections between register theory and language with particular emphasis on the dominance of the signifier. Seminar IV (1956–57) on object relations and Freudian structures initiates a discussion of desire; here, the general notion of the signifier is 89 5 The Discourse of Desire and the Registers in Hamlet replaced by the specific concept of the phallic signifier. Consequently, the Oedipus complex, reproductive difference, and castration redefine the language of register theory. Seminar V (1957–58) on unconscious formations elaborates these themes stressing the role of the symbolic Name-of-the-Father and its connection with the signifying phallus.1 Having labored to merge register theory’s structure of subjectivity with a narratology of desire in the first five Seminars, Lacan concludes this project with his Seminar on desire, on desire’s interpretation, and on the exemplary instance of desire in Hamlet.2 His choice of Hamlet as the archetypal desiring subject is far from serendipitous, since Lacan’s lengthy battle to put the decentering of the subject rather than the centering of the ego foremost among Freud’s psychoanalytic discoveries implicates Hamlet. From his 1953 “Discourse of Rome” through his first Seminars, Lacan’s “return to Freud” has been an explicit polemic against variant—or, notoriously deviant—interpretations of Freudian doctrine. Thus, he disputes the analytic practice of the ego psychologists, especially ego psychology as it is practiced in America, and though he grudgingly respects Melanie Klein, he resists the maternal orientation of object relations as well. Lacan’s constant emphasis on the decentering of the subject as it is expressed by the gap between the imaginary and symbolic registers leads him to oppose theories grounded in a good object/bad object or a good breast/bad breast dichotomy, just as he opposes any analytic practice based on a weak ego/strong ego epistemological foundation. Recapitulating as it does Lacan’s break from the International Psychoanalytical Association, Lacan’s Hamlet may be taken as a politics of praxis. Thus, William Kerrigan characterizes the Hamlet seminars as Lacan’s own “revenge play in the theater of psychoanalytic thought,” arguing that the territory of an English play ruled by Freud’s English heir apparent suggests a signifying chain that “moves from Hamlet and Claudius to [Ernest] Jones to Anna Freud of Hampstead, the International Psycho-Analytical Congress, and the famous wound Lacan suffered in 1953.”3 Though Kerrigan’s analysis is characteristically witty, his emphasis on Lacan’s feelings toward the man Lacan once termed “this master’s brat” (Sem III 316) misdirects attention from the very significant differences between Jacques Lacan and Ernest Jones on the interpretation of the Oedipus complex, the phallus, and castration—differences Hamlet brings into sharp focus. In surveying the ruptures between Lacanian analytic reading and Jones’s application of psychoThe other Side of Desire 90 [54.211.203.45] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:10 GMT) analysis to Hamlet’s text, I will emphasize the distinctions between Lacan and Jones in order to illustrate the controversy over the practice of “applied analysis,” the relationship between the...