WHY IS OPHELIA FOR HAMLET PHALLUS?

Hamlet acts mad because he knows; Ophelia is really mad because she doesn't know.

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(Image: Shepherd and Shepherdess Reposing - François Boucher, 1761)

Critics of Hamlet from Goethe onwards perceive Hamlet as a modern intellectual who, instead of passing directly to (a required) act, endlessly procrastinates and ponders the pro et contra. Hamlet himself, however, makes it clear repeatedly why he postpones his act: it is not simply that Claudius has committed a sin and now, to restore balance to the kingdom, the sin must be punished. Hamlet's father returns as a ghost because he was murdered by Claudius "in the blossoms of my sin":

"I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night and for the day confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away."

The "foul crimes" mentioned here are the father's own crimes, and the retributive justice demanded by the ghost is here a very strange one: since I was murdered in the blossoms of my sin, without finding peace in confessing my sins to God, Claudius should be killed in the same way, in the blossoms of his sin. That's why, later in the play, when Hamlet observes Claudius in a moment of spiritual reflection, fully aware of his sins, he doesn't kill him although he could have done it easily: if he were to do it at that moment, Claudius would not be condemned to wander around as a ghost; he would rejoin God instantly. Recall the title of Kurosawa's version of Hamlet from 1962, set in contemporary Japan: "The Bad Sleep Well" – Shakespeare's Claudius certainly doesn't sleep well – which means that, with the performance of the play within the play, Hamlet is not just trying to prove Claudius's guilt; he also presumes that Claudius is not a thoroughly bad person but is haunted by his conscience.

As Lacan explains, this oscillation is grounded in the fact that Hamlet is never able to live in his own time: the "time out of joint" is ultimately his own time; he is "constantly suspended in the time of the Other, throughout the entire story until the very end," never able to define the coordinates of his own time. It is only towards the end of the play, when he refers to himself as "Hamlet the Dane," that he fully assumes his symbolic identity and is thus able to act. (Incidentally, one should note that when Hamlet first encounters his father's ghost, he says: "I'll call thee 'Hamlet,' 'King,' 'Father,' 'Royal Dane'" – exactly the same terms in which he refers to himself at the play's end when he subjects himself to the name-of-the-Father.) But even as "Hamlet the Dane" he fails in his act:

"When he [Hamlet] does it [act], it is too late; his act no longer means anything, it no longer has its ethical edge. The murder of Claudius is an afterthought, which Hamlet, as Lacan said, can only accomplish when he is dying, when he will not have to bear responsibility for his act. Even more important is the fact that Hamlet acts when he learns that the wretched Claudius is responsible for Hamlet's impending death. Hamlet can avenge himself because he is an egoist to the end, especially at the end. With his dying breath, he asks Horatio to tell his story. [...] Hamlet is clearly a failure—he cannot act on his desire; he can only perform the act he is obliged to perform when it is no longer his desire—and his success is to convince the audience that it is no failure at all, that we can still love him."

The final duel is effectively weird: in it, Hamlet fights Laertes, not Claudius, who even supports him, and there is no real hate between Hamlet and Laertes - just prior to their deaths they are even reconciled. Hamlet kills Claudius later, not in a fair duel but when he is already dying of poison. So Hamlet is not only not a good hero who tragically fails; to put it in naïve moral terms, he is a really bad guy – just recall how he treats Ophelia, whom he associates weirdly with his mother. What really bothers him is neither Claudius's crime nor his mother's guilt but the enigma of her desire – what does she want?

Lacan is right again: Hamlet's problem is not his desire for his mother (incest) but the desire OF his mother, the "Che vuoi?" (what does the Other want from me?) at its purest, which resists getting caught in a fantasy. In Hamlet's perception, Gertrude not just wants to have sex with Claudius; she doesn't choose Claudius against Hamlet's father, her choice is not the one between a noble husband and evil Claudius – in a kind of general voraciousness, it doesn't matter who it is, she craves enjoyment, or, as Lacan renders her stance: "I'm the kind of woman who needs to be getting it all the time, I'm a true genital personality; I know nothing of mourning." The enigma is thus the one of the (m)Other's desire to which Hamlet is enslaved (more precisely, not so much desire as gluttony), i.e., which he is not able to exchange-substitute for the Name-of-the-Father. There is a vulgar Serbian phrase "What for a prick is fucking you?" ("Koji kurac te jebe?") which perhaps best encapsulates Hamlet's question to Gertrude – not concretely which penis is penetrating her (now it is obviously Claudius's) but a more general disoriented gluttony. One should go to the end here: ultimately it is not Claudius's murder of the old Hamlet that throws time out of joint; it is his mother's formless desire that does it. But how do we pass here to Ophelia? We shouldn't be surprised that this focus on Gertrude and Ophelia in Lacan's reading of Hamlet enrages many feminist critics – here is a typical case:

"When Lacan in Seminar VI makes the following statement 'to be or not to be...the phallus,' this sounds like an obscene gesture, especially for people not already deeply in love with psychoanalysis. My first gut reaction was also a kind of violent refusal, please, come on... It sounds like the typical libidinal reductionism, now simply without any tact for the greatest work of literature and its most famous phrase. We can almost hear the typical literary critics: 'Couldn't he at least leave Hamlet alone...?'"

As a card-carrying Lacanian, I want to add some qualifications here. Lacan is one of the few interpreters of Hamlet for whom the true focus of the play is neither revenge for his father's murder nor the desire of his mother but Ophelia herself. So why is Ophelia phallus? One should note that Ophelia does not have a phallus, she is phallus, plus Lacan doesn't yet use the term "phallus" in his later fully elaborated sense (the signifier of castration) but in an almost opposite sense (Ophelia as a bearer of all sins, as a generator of new and new sinful lives). Plus – a crucial detail – this characterization is not an "objective" description of Ophelia, it is clearly presented as Hamlet's depreciating fantasy of Ophelia, i.e., it is the way Ophelia appears to Hamlet after he learns of his father's murder by Claudius. (After Ophelia dies, she changes into an idealized love object.)

So what is the difference between Gertrude and Ophelia in terms of libidinal economy? For Hamlet, Gertrude is a Thing and Ophelia objet a – although in his Seminar VI where he deals with Hamlet he had not yet fully elaborated either his classic notion of phallic signifier as the signifier of castration or his notion of objet a as the object-cause of desire which gives body to a lack. (One should also note that, after Ophelia's death, Gertrude no longer traumatizes Hamlet; he is indifferent towards her.) Lacan sometimes even almost confuses objet a and phallus, identifying Ophelia with both. Let's try to clarify this confusion by shifting attention to another detail: why does Ophelia, at a key moment in the play, start to sing? What shift in her subjective stance is signaled by her singing? Are we following here the standard feminist line? Not quite - the standard feminist reading of Ophelia was summarized by James Marinaro:

"Every great theory is founded on a problem it cannot solve. For psychoanalytic criticism, that problem is Ophelia. [...] While psychoanalytic reading objectifies all of Hamlet's supporting characters, Ophelia is not even allowed to be an object in her own right. Insistently demoted to a secondary or surrogate object, Ophelia becomes mysteriously superfluous, like a symptom unconnected from its cause. Ophelia is the foundational problem, the nagging flaw in psychoanalytic criticism's cornerstone. The play becomes very different if Ophelia is decoupled from the Queen and read as an independent and structurally central character, as a primary object of desire, and even as a desiring subject in her own right."

This reading was best presented by Elaine Showalter, for whom Ophelia is "an absence, a voice with no sense and therefore no selfhood. When Ophelia first appears on-stage, her speech is purely reactive; she replies to questioning. Ophelia is more than a blank canvas; but her selfhood is imperiled by the insistence of others on ignoring, defining or denying her speech. If her speech is denied (Gertrude: 'I will not speak with her!' IV.v.1) or dismissed as unintelligible ('her speech is nothing' IV.v.7) then she lies dangerously open to interpretation by her audience, both on-stage and off." So the very fact that she remains enigmatic and solicits interpretation is held against the play – interpretation is implicitly identified with (male) domination.

Following this line, some feminist critics see Ophelia's descent into madness as a form of empowerment, with Ophelia at last finding her own authentic voice. Maurice Charney and Hanna Charney (1977) argue that "her madness... enables her to assert her being; she is no longer forced to keep silent and play the dutiful daughter." Rutter also notes how Ophelia's journey mirrors that of Hamlet: Ophelia "performs... the psychic journey of Prince Hamlet and the big themes of the play. Hamlet is thinking about madness; Ophelia plays it for real.... Hamlet toys with the idea of suicide; ...Ophelia commits suicide." Ophelia is bullied and betrayed by every person in the play: her father and brother, Claudius, and Hamlet. Along these lines, Simonetta Falchi proposes a Jungian reading of "the central function ascribed to Ophelia's madness in Heiner Müller's destruction and reconstruction of Shakespeare's Hamlet":

"The new Ophelia ('the one the river didn't keep') refuses Yorick's grave to accept his role as the Fool 'who' – to say it with the words of Jungian analyst W. Willeford – 'violate[s] the human image and who come[s] to a modus vivendi with society by making a show of that violation.' Consequently, Ophelia will 'demolish the instruments of [her] captivity' and 'go out on to the streets, dressed in blood.' Society's attempt to inhibit her irrational power (secluding her in a mental hospital) will fail: Ophelia/the Fool will disown her old Self to turn into Elektra – mythical heroine of logic and revenge – thus obtaining the power to merge extremes ('long live [...] death') and to silently communicate with everyone's archetypal side through images. From the analysis of the text, supported by categories from depth psychology, I demonstrate that Hamletmaschine promotes Ophelia's madness as a revolutionary gesture against the logic of oppression: a means to trigger chaos on stage in order to generate a new cosmos in the audience's world of conventions.

With all my admiration for Heiner Müller, I think he totally misses the point here. Ophelia's madness is not an act of empowerment and resistance, of finding her own voice – on the contrary, at that moment even her unconscious is ruined and turns chaotic, identifying her father and Hamlet. When Ophelia sings in madness, she is a living dead, not as a ghost or vampire but as biologically alive with a disintegrated psyche, which is why after her death she will definitely not be returning as a ghost. After Ophelia dies,

"Hamlet's love, because completed, can be considered perfect. And again, as Hamlet moves physically onstage toward Ophelia's body, his language identifies him with his father's spirit: 'This is I, / Hamlet the Dane', using his spectral father's royal title."

So, again, why is Ophelia singing? We have to introduce here sexual difference. In an opera, man's aria functions as a call to the big Other to break the law, to do something out of joint. Woman sings as a sign of madness, when she is lost, when her self is disintegrating, when she is unable to subjectively endure contradiction. All madness arias in operas are feminine, the most famous being the one from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Why was the story of Orpheus THE opera topic in the first century of its history, when there are recorded almost one hundred versions of it? The figure of Orpheus asking Gods to bring him back his Eurydice stands for an intersubjective constellation which provides, as it were, the elementary matrix of the opera, more precisely, of the operatic aria: the relationship of the subject (in both senses of the term: autonomous agent as well as the subject of legal power) to his Master (Divinity, King, or the Lady of the courtly love) is revealed through the hero's song (the counterpoint to the collectivity embodied in the chorus), which is basically a supplication addressed to the Master, a call to him to show mercy, to make an exception, or otherwise forgive the hero his trespass. The first, rudimentary form of subjectivity is this voice of the subject beseeching the Master to suspend, for a brief moment, his own Law. A dramatic tension in subjectivity arises from the ambiguity between power and impotence that pertains to the gesture of grace by means of which the Master answers the subject's entreaty. As to the official ideology, grace expresses the Master's supreme power, the power to rise above one's own law: only a really powerful Master can afford to distribute mercy. There is nothing like this in a typical feminine aria: no appeal to a master for mercy, just joy or despair about unfortunate love which can occasionally lapse into madness.

Does Ophelia really access her desire in her madness, does she formulate what she wants? Is she a hysteric who wants a master? Does she want to get married? Obey her father who blocks this? I think she is just an average young woman, deeply "normal" with regard to her social position: she has sexual desires but wants to get married to satisfy them, she is subordinated to her father but at the same time disturbed by how he manipulates her, and after her father's death she breaks down in madness because she no longer can cope with all the pressures on her.

Yes, Ophelia is "mysteriously superfluous" - it is easy to imagine Hamlet without Ophelia as a perfectly consistent shorter play: a father-ghost appears to Hamlet ordering him to revenge his death; to test Claudius's conscience, Hamlet uses the group of actors who stage the scene of murder in front of Claudius who loses nerves; Hamlet visits his mother and has the big confrontation with her; Claudius orders Hamlet observed and Hamlet stabs Polonius to death behind a curtain, which provokes Laertes, Polonius's son, to challenge Hamlet to a duel, and then we get the same denouement as in Shakespeare's Hamlet… no place for Ophelia here. (Ophelia is present in other earlier versions of the story, reduced to a marginal role.)

But the opposite also doesn't work: recall Ophelia (2018, directed by Claire McCarthy and based on the novel by Lisa Klein) which retells the story of Hamlet from Ophelia's perspective. It introduces another person, the healer Mechtild who lives alone deep in the forest. Ophelia learns that Mechtild is not only Gertrude's twin sister but also Claudius's former lover - he ruined her by accusing her of witchcraft when she miscarried their son, but she escapes persecution by faking her own death with a special poison. A further change: Hamlet and Ophelia secretly marry, and she is pregnant with his child. Ophelia escapes the castle but returns just before the final duel, and Hamlet is overjoyed to see his beloved alive and well. Ophelia pleads with him to leave with her, but he is still consumed by vengeance, though promises to follow her to the convent. Ophelia sadly bids him goodbye and leaves Elsinore for good. Both Hamlet and Laertes are killed, wounded by the poisoned sword. Enraged and grief-stricken, Gertrude grabs Hamlet's sword and kills Claudius, just as the Norwegians storm the castle, accompanied by Mechtild who poisons herself with Claudius' venom and dies in her sister's arms. The film closes with Ophelia living peacefully in exile with her daughter, fathered by Hamlet.

This movie is a noble attempt to give Ophelia full presence and to assert her as an active agent, telling the story from her standpoint. However, all the despair and even oppression of women takes a secondary place; the situation is normalized in a misguided feminist way. What gets lost is the fact that "Ophelia is very obviously one of the most fascinating creations which has been proposed to human imagination. Something which we can call the drama of the feminine object, the drama of desire."

What Hamlet "brings into play before the very eyes of Ophelia is all the possibilities of degradation, of variation, of corruption, which are linked to the evolution of a woman's very life insofar as she allows herself to be drawn into all the actions which little by little make a mother of her. It is in the name of this that Hamlet rejects Ophelia in a fashion that appears in the play extremely sarcastic and extremely cruel."

When Laertes jumps into the grave to embrace the dead Ophelia one last time, "Hamlet, literally, not only cannot tolerate this manifestation towards a girl whom, as you know, he had very badly mistreated up to then, but he precipitates himself after Laertes after having given a great roar, a war cry." When conflict with Laertes explodes, "Hamlet the Dane" assumes his desire; procrastination is over. Although after Ophelia's death Hamlet is ready to enact the ghost's order, "the father's ghost has a rather strange injunction. First, he says, 'avenge me,' and Hamlet says he is ready to do so. Then the father adds a strange surplus, namely that whatever Hamlet does, he should not concern himself with his mother, and that she should be left alone with her own repulsive desire. This strikes Hamlet as rather odd. Let's imagine that old Hamlet (the ghost) had not given him this surplus. If so, we would just have a rather classical revenge tragedy."

The same reversal occurs towards the end of Hamlet's long conversation with his mother in Act III, in the course of which Hamlet addresses his mother with a demand which is obviously made "in the name of something which is the order not simply of the law, but of dignity, and which is delivered with a force, a vigor, even a cruelty, of which the least one can say is that it causes some embarrassment." At this very point, the father's ghost appears again with an ambiguous message: yes, put pressure on your mother, but not too much. This is followed by Hamlet's "sudden collapse which makes him say: And then after all, now that I have said all that to you, do whatever you want" – in short, go on as usual.

Furthermore, one has to raise an obvious question regarding the father-ghost's first appearance to Hamlet: how did the ghost-father know how he was murdered (by Claudius who poured poison in his ear) if he was deeply asleep while it happened? He could have learned this only in the Beyond, after his death. We are dealing here with an impossible knowledge which occupies the place of the Other of the Other.

Regarding Ophelia, Lacan makes a crucial remark: "No one has ever yet been able to declare if she is innocence itself, who speaks about or who alludes to her most carnal movements with the simplicity of a purity which does not know modesty, or if on the contrary she is a shameless hussy who is ready for anything. Hamlet behaves towards her with quite exceptional cruelty, which is embarrassing, which people describe as painful, and which makes a victim of her; on the other hand, one senses that she is not at all, and far from being, the disincarnated or uncarnal creature of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings."

It is of no real interest whether Ophelia was "really" a virgin or not. Hamlet twice sends her to a nunnery, a word which in Elizabethan times designated a secluded place for nuns (monastery); however, in everyday language, it also functioned as an ironic term for a whorehouse, and this ambiguity perfectly fits Hamlet's figure of Ophelia as both whore and asexual saint.

"If Hamlet is sexually indifferent, his disgust for sexuality—and contempt for women who display it—seems like a logical (if unforgivable) outlet of that frustration. Hamlet fears that his sexual indifference makes him worthless, so he cruelly punishes Gertrude and Ophelia for their lack of indifference." More precisely, in Hamlet's eyes, Ophelia stands for the vision of "life ready to blossom, and of life which carries all lives." It is thus that Hamlet qualifies it, situates it, in order to reject it: 'you will be the mother of sinners'" – Girl as Phallus, but in the standard pre-Lacanian sense of phallus. Perhaps she is a little bit like Bobby Peru in Lynch's Wild at Heart. How can such an ugly, properly repulsive figure like Bobby Peru stir up Laura Dern's fantasy? We touch here the motif of the ugly: Bobby Peru is ugly and repulsive insofar as he embodies the dream of the non-castrated phallic vitality in all its power - his whole body evokes a gigantic phallus, with his head the head of a penis... Even his final moments bear witness to a kind of raw energy which ignores the threat of death: after the bank robbery goes wrong, he blows off his own head not in despair, but with merry laughter... (although we should recall here Groucho Marx's saying that the only real laughter comes from despair).

After seeing the Ghost, Hamlet stumbles upon Ophelia and vacillates in his relation to her – more precisely, his fantasy vacillates because she now appears to him as a Bobby-Peru-like monstrosity:

"It is linked to this sort of disequilibrium which is produced in the fantasy, and insofar as the fantasy, breaking through the limits which are first of all assigned to it, is decomposed."

Ophelia becomes a symbol of the rejection of desire as such by Hamlet, an object of disgust at sexuality: Ophelia "is no longer treated as she should be, as a woman. She becomes for him the bearer of children and of every sin, the one who is designated to engender sinners, and the one who is designated afterwards as having to succumb to all sorts of calumnies."

She becomes the pure and simple support of a life which in its essence is condemned by Hamlet. "Ophelia is completely dissolved qua love-object. 'I did love you once,' says Hamlet, and a little bit later: 'I never loved you.'" Here Hamlet undergoes the disintegration of the fantasy which sustained his desire – the space of fantasy is still here, but its elements fall apart and block his capacity to desire. Once Ophelia dies, she is restored to a full object - but not an object of sexual love or hatred but as an idealized point of reference – as they say in Latin, De mortuis nihil nisi bonum dicendum est, "Of the dead nothing but good is to be said."

The subtle paradox is that, after Hamlet kills Ophelia's father, her fantasy also disintegrates and she regresses into madness, but a madness different from Hamlet's. Hamlet acts mad because he knows; Ophelia is really mad because she doesn't know. In her last appearance after her father's death, Ophelia sings – again, how are we to interpret her singing? Here are a couple of passages which advocate the standard anti-patriarchal feminist reading:

"Ophelia's next appearance, after her father's death, she has gone mad, due to what the other characters interpret as grief for her father. She talks in riddles and rhymes, and sings some 'mad' and bawdy songs about death and a maiden losing her virginity." / "Ophelia laments about patriarchal society and the way she had been controlled and used. In her first song, Ophelia addresses her mourning and a recent loss, singing, 'He is dead and gone, lady, / He is dead and gone, / At his head a grass-green turf, / At his heels a stone.'" "She's a fallen character, she gave herself to Hamlet and thus lost her standing. When Hamlet kills her father, insanity and death are the only options left to her as a character in those times."

Ophelia was brutally manipulated and used by three men around her: Hamlet, Polonius, and Claudius (maybe also by Gertrude and Laertes). At the level of humiliation, Hamlet is the worst, and at the level of manipulation, the primacy goes to Polonius: "A daughter helping her father deceive her lover rather than the other way around is a shocking perversion of theatrical convention. It simply is not done." Was Ophelia's death a suicide or not? This is not a key point – the most probable version is that she did not intend to kill herself, but she put herself into a dangerous situation, passively exposing herself to the possibility of drowning, i.e., her stance was something like "if it has to happen, let it happen..."

It is a commonplace shared by many commentators to claim that the famous Millais's Pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia singing just before drowning in a stream is false, presenting a very traumatic event as a moment of sublime beauty – even Lacan expresses his dissatisfaction with the painting. But I think there is much more in Pre-Raphaelites than meets the eye: their work deserves a closer look (which, in this case, is meant literally). We should remember that Millais was working on his Ophelia at the same time that his friend William Holman Hunt was finishing his Hireling Shepherd. Hunt is usually dismissed as the first Pre-Raphaelite to sell out to the establishment, becoming a well-paid producer of sweetish religious paintings (The Triumph of the Innocents, etc.). However, a closer look unmistakably confronts us with an uncanny, deeply disturbing dimension of his work; his paintings produce a kind of uneasiness or indeterminate feeling that, in spite of their idyllic and elevated "official" content, there is something amiss. "Hireling Shepherd" appears as a simple pastoral idyll depicting a shepherd engaged in seducing a country girl, and for that reason neglecting to care for a flock of sheep (an obvious allegory of the Church neglecting its lambs). The longer we observe the painting, the more we become aware of a great number of details that bear witness to Hunt's intense relationship to enjoyment, to life-substance, i.e., to his disgust at sexuality. The shepherd is muscular, dull, crude, and rudely voluptuous; the cunning gaze of the girl indicates a sly, vulgarly manipulative exploitation of one's own sexual attraction; the all-too-vivacious reds and greens mark the entire painting with a repulsive tone, as if we were dealing with turgid, overripe, putrid nature. The sexuality radiated by the painting is damp, "unwholesome," and permeated with the decay of death. Perhaps this is how we should also de-sublimate the figure of Ophelia.

Ophelia's singing is an exception - not even a full song, just some fragments intercepted by talk. What she says and sings is not anything deep; what is important is the fact of singing, which signals her total mental breakdown. When she sings, she definitely does not regain power and speak for herself: her singing bears witness to a total subjective disintegration; it is just confused babbling, a mixture of ideas and wishes. If, before her fall into madness, she was a victim of multiple interpellations which imposed conflicting subjective identities, she is now a subject without a symbolic identity provided by some form of big Other. In this sense, she is now more than just a victim of feminine oppression: she is deprived of the very X of subjectivity which could be experienced as a victim of oppression. All forms of authority that exerted pressure on her are now cancelled, not in the sense of liberation but in a much more terrifying sense of her Self transformed into a selfless space in which confused phantasmagorias circulate – something that Hegel, following the German mystic tradition, described in the following often-quoted passage:

"The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity - an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him - or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here - pure self - in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head - there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye - into a night that becomes awful."

One can argue that this experience of the "night of the world" is the moment of madness that precedes reason: reason is "magic power that converts the negative into being." This is what neither Ophelia nor Hamlet is able to do – yes, he tarries (procrastinates), but he is not able to convert the negative into being. Even when he assumes his symbolic identity (as "Hamlet, the Dane"), he overtakes himself and gets caught in a wrong duel (with Laertes, not with Claudius).

And what about Ophelia? Paradoxically, although she is much more disintegrated than Hamlet, practically selfless in her madness, I think she is closer to the act of liberation called by Lacan "traversing the fantasy." To see this, it is crucial to distinguish between disintegration of fantasy and traversing fantasy. The disintegration of fantasy incapacitates our ability to desire, and in Hamlet this happens in two ways: either as a confused mixture of fragments in which a selfless subject floats (Ophelia) or as an unbearable self-sabotaging tension (Hamlet). The reason is that Hamlet remains in the Oedipal domain: as we have already seen, the ghost-father emphasizes in his injunction to revenge his death that this revenge does not encompass Gertrude - mother remains untouchable.

Traversing fantasy has nothing whatsoever to do with the naïve idea of getting rid of fantasies and gaining direct access to reality the way it is: in traversing the fantasy, we are even more in its space; we traverse it when we over-identify with it in the sense of explicitly formulating it, bringing it out. This is the key point missed by Leftist critics of Rammstein's music like Thomas Blaser:

"The German metal band Rammstein's video for 'Ausländer' wants it both ways: a critique of colonialism and sex tourism, but right-wing neo-Nazis can also enjoy the fascist iconography [...] even though the meaning is ironic. In a mass-consumer democracy, the audience makes their own interpretations. Far-right neo-Nazis are reportedly equally attracted to the martial, neo-fascist mise-en-scène as are those who 'simply' enjoy the spectacle. Real fascists can ignore the ironic subtlety of the show and lyrics yet indulge in the spectacle that celebrates fascist aesthetics, including black people as happy, naïve savages. In this role as spectators of black ridicule, mainstream audiences join neo-Nazi, alt-right extremists."

The mistake of this reading is obvious: when Rammstein stage totalitarian rituals, the viewer doesn't need to detect any "ironic subtlety": these rituals are "extraneated" in their very ridiculous over-presence, in the very disgusting/disturbing excess of enjoyment. As for the obvious fact that in the Auslander video clip, blacks are portrayed in the mode of white racist clichés: of course, because Auslander is not about real Blacks but about Blacks as part of White racist fantasies – the point is to ruin these fantasies from within, displaying their disgusting ridiculousness.

A couple of decades ago in Carinthia (Kärnten), Austria's southern province which borders Slovenia, German nationalists organized a campaign against the alleged Slovene "threat" under the motto "Kärnten bleibt deutsch!" Austrian Leftists found a perfect answer. Instead of rational counter-argumentation, they printed paid advertisements in the main newspapers with obscene, disgusting-sounding variations of the nationalists' motto: "Kärnten deibt bleutsch! Kärnten leibt beutsch! Kärnten beibt dleutsch!" Isn't this procedure worthy of the obscene, "anal," meaningless speech spoken by Hynkel, the Hitler figure in Chaplin's The Great Dictator?

This is what Rammstein does to totalitarian ideology: it de-semanticizes it and brings forward its obscene babble in its intrusive materiality. Does Rammstein's music not perfectly exemplify the distinction between sense and presence, the tension in a work of art between the hermeneutic dimension and the dimension of presence "this side of hermeneutics," a dimension which Lacan indicated by the term sinthom (formula-knot of jouissance) as opposed to symptom (bearer of meaning)? The identification with Rammstein is a direct over-identification with sinthoms which undermines ideological identification. We should not fear this direct over-identification – what we should fear is the articulation of this chaotic field of energy into a (Fascist) universe of meaning. No wonder Rammstein's music is violent, materially present, invading, and intrusive with its strong volume and deep vibrations – its materiality is in constant tension with its meaning, undermining it.

Rammstein thus de-semanticizes totalitarian ideology: it brings forward its obscene babble in its intrusive materiality. No wonder Rammstein's music is violent, materially present, invading, and intrusive with its strong volume and deep vibrations – its materiality is in constant tension with its meaning, undermining it. In short, Rammstein liberates Nazi sinthoms from their Nazi articulation: they are offered to be enjoyed in their pre-ideological status of "knots" of libidinal investment. So when, while watching a Rammstein video clip depicting a blonde girl in a cage and dark uniforms evoking Nordic warriors, some Leftist liberals fear that the uneducated public will miss the irony (if there is any) and directly identify with the proto-Fascist sensibility displayed here, one should counter it with the good old motto: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

This brings us to Lacan: it is interesting to note which example of traversing the fantasy Lacan elaborates in more detail. According to him, none other than Marquis de Sade gave us a traversal of the fantasy:

"He did not present this fantasy in his work, of course. Basically, in his work, he comments on his fantasy, he puts it on the stage, he multiplies it, and at the same time he gives us a schema. 'It is in his life,' Lacan said, 'that Sade passed beyond his fantasy'; he adds 'that is what permits him to give us a reading of his fantasy in his work,' which is coherent with his idea that Sade, definitively, was not the dupe of his fantasy. He was not the dupe of his fantasy and he tried very little to literally realize his fantasy. We do not mean, then, that he dedicated himself to realizing his fantasy. On the contrary, his life obeys a comparable structure, but he himself is in another place than his fantasy."

In contrast to Sade (and Rammstein), when Hamlet refers to himself as "Hamlet, the Dane," he again assumes his fantasy, falls back into it, or, as Lacan put it, he becomes again the dupe of his fantasy. Another detail is worth noting here: Hamlet acts not just when he learns that Ophelia is dead but at a more precise moment: when he sees that her brother Laertes overtakes him in mourning and jumps into her grave to embrace her – Hamlet jumps after him and starts a fight. Is this not a clear case of imaginary competition sustained by envious rage? Ophelia, on the contrary, is in her mad babble and singing very close to traversing her fantasy by way of staging her sinthoms – all she needed to get there would have been just a barely perceptible act of subjectively assuming the flow of her sinthoms.

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Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero, Cambridge: Harvard UP 1983, p. 153-4.

Hamlet and the invention of the inhuman | by Psychotic's guide to memes | Medium.

See Ophelia's Desire (Youtube).

See Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilites of Feminist Criticism,” in Hamlet: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, edited by Susanne L Wolford, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's 1994.

Microsoft Word - HOBBS OPHELIA.doc.

“Maddening Endurance”1 Post-modern Images of Ophelia’s Madness.

THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-VI_desir_et_interp-.pdf. All non-attributed quotes that follow are from this source.

Resumed from Ophelia (2018 film) - Wikipedia.

Hamlet Was a Bro Who Didn’t Even Like Sex ‹ Literary Hub.

See Michel Chion, David Lynch, London: BFI 1995.

G.W.F. Hegel, "Jenaer Realphilosophie," in Fruehe politische Systeme, Frankfurt: Ullstein 1974, p. 204; translation quoted from Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel's Recollection, Albany: Suny Press 1985, pp. 7-8.

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1966, p. 19.

Quoted from Is Rammstein racist? (africasacountry.com).

From Symptom to Fantasy and Back Jacques-Alain Miller.