Shirley Zisser

MA Seminar

Lacan’s Hamlet

In his sixth seminar, Desire and its Interpretation, Lacan devotes seven lessons to a close reading of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. This is followed by more remarks in the course of Lacan’s tnth seminar, on Anxiety. Unlike its predecessors in psychoanalytic theory, most notably Ernest Jones’s Hamlet and Oedipus and Freud’s own “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage,” or his description of Hamlet as a more repressed version of Sophocles’s  Oedipus Rex in his letter to Fliess that first mentions the Oedipus complex, Lacan’s reading of Hamlet does not regard the play as a subdued redramatization of the impulses towards parricide and incest. Instead, he reads the play as a “turning plate” that enables one to examine the different facets and components of the structure of neurosis, specifically the phantasm, the phallus as signifier of desire, and the modes of the phallus’s apparition in art, which Lacan dubs “phallophanies.” In the seminar, we will read Lacan’s chapters on the seminar alongside the play, paying special attention to the question of how literature vehicles desire.

Requirements: Attendance, participation, in-clas presentation, referat or seminar paper.