Report on the Knottings Seminar of the NLS in Bruges – February 2014
by Joost Demuynck
Despina
Andropoulou, represented the Executive Committee of the NLS, to inaugurate this new edition of the ‘Knottings’ Seminar. Before she started her precious lecture, she asked some more attention for the
digital cartels in the School. These are a fast and easy possibility to get in
touch with colleagues from other groups and to work on the theme of the NLS.
Often, the cases presented in these cartels are the basis for interventions at
the NLS congress.
“Fiction
and structure of Hamlet’s desire”.
The
fictional character of what is said and its function
Despina
Andropoulou returns to Lacan’s Seminar La
relation d’objet in which Lacan puts that truth has a fictional structure. This
means that every expression of truth involves a structural necessity that is of
the same nature as fiction. Both for the child as for the adult, myths on the
one side deal with the semblant of what doesn’t exist, with what marks a hole
in the existence, and on the other side with the sexuation of the subject.
Still, no
myth solves the problem of what it means to be a father. In L’envers de la psychanalyse, Lacan will
articulate the Freudian questions to the real. Something that cannot be said remains
and therefore it is said in a mythical way. The mythical truth of a subject
approaches what we call a fiction. Despina refers to J.-A. Miller: ‘The fiction
in analysis, is an act based on speech’ (1). But in ‘Function and field of
speech and language’ Lacan suggests to rearrange past contingencies by giving
them a sense of future necessities. This rearrangement offers, following
Miller, a continuity, a sense, an intention, a wanting-to-say. This transformation
of a coincidence in a necessity is in psychoanalysis also called
‘rationalizing’.
Lacan
characterizes the Oedipus complex as a rationalization, as a myth. He distinguishes
it from the castration complex, forming the structural knot of the subject.
The
choice of Hamlet
The play of
Hamlet is the tragedy of desire in its relation to the desire of the Other. It’s
his encounter with death. The piece is not without effect on the spectator
because it questions the relation to our own desire. On the one hand there is
an equivalent structure to the oedipal and second there is an empty place in
which the spectator can place its own ignorance. Hamlet is the personification
of the unconscious, in this way that Hamlet is the discourse of the Other. The
hero appears as someone who doesn’t know what he wants, who has lost his way to
desire. This framework is displayed to regain himself.
An
equivalent structure to the oedipal doesn’t want to say that it is an oedipal
tragedy, a tragedy of fate, but a work upon the problem of desire. Man has to
situate and find his desire in an action that can only be completed in so far
as he is a mortal being. It is precisely by following the meanders of the
action that one participates to the drama of the hero. Lacan clarifies the
difference with Oedipus in stating that castration lacks. This achieves in a
slow process during the piece.
To be able
to comprehend the act, one must not search what doesn’t work at the side of the
father, but in his relation to the object. The relation that supports desire is the
fundamental fantasy.
A
difference that Lacan, following Despina, often mentions is that the father of
Oedipus has been killed by his ignorant son, committed by fate. Hamlet on the
other side knows his father was killed, he knows even by who and how. The drama
of Hamlet is that he knows about the crime of existence and that he can ask
himself whether ‘to be or not to be’. The betrayal of love doesn’t get an
answer. There is a lack in the Other, or in other words a fraction bar.
And here
begin the experiences of Hamlet. To accomplish his tasks, to kill his uncle and
murderer of his father, Despina says, Hamlet has to change his sexual position,
so that he could act as a subject. This change includes the loss of the object.
The desire of Hamlet and what malfunctions
Why does
Hamlet hesitate to kill his uncle Claudius? Lacan gives two reasons: Hamlet
remains tied down to the desire of his mother and secondly, Hamlet is always
dependent of the time of the other.
The pivot
of the drama of Hamlet is the desire of the mother, that is not regulated by
the phallus. But Hamlet doesn’t succeed in resisting the desire of his mother,
to follow his own desire and to act in accordance with it.
Hamlet
makes his act dependent of the time of others. His hour of truth, Lacan says,
is the hour of the funeral of Ophelia. Initially she was the sublime object
upon which he found his support, after which she became the bearer of children
and in this way bearer of all sins, as Hamlet’s mother. Lacan explains this as
the destruction of the object that is recuperated in the narcissistic frame of
the subject. In other words, it’s about the i(a) instead of the object a in the
fundamental fantasy. The instinctual voraciousness of the mother makes her a
subject of jouissance, emanating from the direct satisfaction of a need. This
makes Hamlet a neglected object of desire, as Lacan will put forward in his
tenth Seminar.
The hour
of others and the postponement of action
The loss of
Ophelia is necessary for Hamlet to rouse. As far as Ophelia becomes an
impossible object, she becomes Hamlet’s object of passion again, permitting him
to resume his desire. ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’, he says at her grave. There
he is, a divided subject before his object a. It is only in this way that he
can mourn the death of his father.
There is
still a last step necessary. Hamlet identifies with the signifier ‘foil’, the
deadly phallus. The murder of the phallus, signifier of the power that Claudius
incarnates, only becomes possible at the moment Hamlet is killed. Resigning to
narcissism allows the accomplishment of the act.
In this
period of his Seminar, Lacan thinks of castration as the focus of analysis and of
the fundamental fantasy as its product.
Related to
this, the “analyst” becomes a new name for the destiny of the drive.
Finally,
the fiction, the mythical truth of the neurotic becomes a tool for the subject
to find his fundamental fantasy. The tragedy of Hamlet, a tragedy of desire,
shows the encounter with the lack of the Other, and impels the subject to act
in one way or another; wanting to know the ‘why’ and ‘how’ something doesn’t
work is an ethical choice that can imply the start of an analysis.
In the
discussion the place of Ophelia as imaginary phallus and as object was further
examined. Despina stressed again how the object of Hamlet and i(a), the image
of the body, was integrated, and that for this reason Hamlet couldn’t pass over
to the act. He remains prisoner of the desire of the Other, in this case his
mother. Another remark in the discussion was that the father of Hamlet showed
no sin. He is a too ideal father. Something in the transmission is lacking, his
father has taken his wife as an object of love and not as an object of desire.
He lacks a certain perversion. Despina stressed that the sin of the father
remains enigmatic.
This
presentation was followed by three clinical cases.
(1) Miller
J.-A., Choses de finesse, lesson of 14.01.2009, unpublished.
Translated
by Abe Geldhof
