If language, as we have seen, is constitutive of reality and meaning, it is desire which is its permanent condition. Desire emerges, as Lacan says, at the moment of its incarnation into speech.1 And yet its fate is never to be incarnate in speech; it always passes beyond. 'Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing namable.' Flowing through the signifying chain, it flows beneath it as well, in the unconscious, and always either exceeds or falls short of its (linguistic) mark. It is, as Lacan's most famous definition puts it, 'a relation of being to lack' (Seminar 2: 223), the fundamental condition of human existence.
Although Lacan liked to argue that in this as in other respects he was following Freud, that 'Desidero is the Freudian cogito" (Four Fundamental Concepts 154), it is hard to believe that Freud would have agreed with him. Desire was not a term Freud used in any central way.
For him, it was a matter of libido, or of the 'instinct' or 'drive7 (as the German Trieb is variously translated),2 that psychical, semi-bodily force which appears in his work as either (in the early phase) measurable biological energy or (later) a more figurative concept of relationships among forces.3 But Freud prepared the ground for Lacan's definition of desire by his insistence that the object of the drive/instinct, what it aims at, is ultimately contingent or arbitrary. As he put it in 'Instincts and their Vicissitudes': 'It [the object] is what is most variable about an instinct and is not originally connected with it, but becomes assigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possible' (PF 11: 119). This original disparity between the drive/instinct and its object forms the basis of the Lacanian definition of desire.
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Freud was more comfortable with the concept of 'pleasure' {Lust or Wunsch) than with that of desire (Begierde, as used by Hegel before him). The pleasure principle, as opposed to the reality principle, was for him (at least initially) a quantifiable ('economic') force, related to the increase or decrease of instinctual tension. 'Unpleasure' was caused by an increase in tension which the subject early learns to discharge by hallucinating satisfaction. Reality only takes over with ego development, and yet the subject is incessantly drawn to pleasure -or, rather, to the avoidance of unpleasure.
As a Victorian, Freud had regarded the harnessing of pleasure by reality as proper and necessary, if costly. For Lacan, two generations later, pleasure or enjoyment (jouissance) was a libidinal imperative, whose frustration, however, lies at the heart of human suffering. The subject, he wrote, 'does not simply satisfy a desire, he enjoys \jouit]
desiring' (qtd in Evans 5). In lacking the satisfying object, desire endlessly pursues a phantom satisfaction, deriving jouissance only from the pursuit.4 In his development of Freud's analysis of pleasure, Lacan chose to follow the direction mapped out by Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', which led towards a 'beyond' or surplus that had more to do with death than with pleasure. Desire, propelled towards a jouissance that it can not have, is synonymous with lack. In jouissance, Kristeva writes, 'the object of desire, known as object a [in Lacan's terminology] bursts with the shattered mirror where the ego gives up its image in order to contemplate itself in the Other' (Powers 9).
By the time Roland Barthes came to use the word jouissance in the 1970s, libidinal pleasure is redefined to suggest an orgasmic abandon-ment as a positive good. In his seminar for 1972-3, Lacan had argued that it is the signifier which is the cause of jouissance (Seminar 20: 24).
In The Pleasure of the Text, also of 1973, Barthes set about experi-menting with ways in which desire can be written, in what he called 'the science of the various blisses of language' (6). 'How can the signifier cause bliss? Barthes' answer reveals his indebtedness to both Freud (on fetishism) and Lacan (on desire):
The text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me. The text chooses me, by a whole disposition of invisible screens, selective baffles:
vocabulary references, readability, etc.: and, lost in the midst of a text (not behind it, like a deus ex machina) there is always the other, the author.
As institution, the author is dead: his civil status, his biographical person have disappeared . . . but in the text, in a way, / desire the author: I need his figure (which is neither his representation nor his projection), as he needs mine . . . (27)
Having banished the author from the front door in T h e Death of the Author' a few years earlier, Barthes here brings him in through the back door in the form of the other. Just as for Lacan what we desire is 7<? desirant dans Vautre\ the desire both of and for the other, the desire for ourselves by the other, so for Barthes, an erotics of reading involves an experience of the ways in which the texts we construct 'choose' us, that is, reflect and give back to us our own desiring impulses. Uncomplicated by Lacanian death and lack, Barthes' jouis-sance of language was an experiment of its time, when it almost seemed possible to remove repression. A stricter psychoanalytic agenda, however, would quickly reintroduce prohibition as the con-trolling force behind both language and desire.
OEDIPAL TEXTUALITY:5 HAMLET
Arbitrary and undirected as it may seem, desire, for all its shifting definitions, is far from untethered. Its bedrock, most contemporary schools of psychoanalysis would agree, is the Oedipus complex,6 even though you are just as likely nowadays to meet the term with a qualifying prefix (the pre-Oedipal, Anti-Oedipus, 'Beyond Oedipus').
It is not always remembered that while Lacan's most well-known definition of desire is that it is 'the desire of the Other' (Ecrits 264), the necessary complement to this postulate is that the Other, 'strictly speaking, is the Oedipus complex' (Four Fundamental Concepts 204).
In making this claim, Lacan was simply taking Freud's theory of the Oedipal to its logical (Lacanian) conclusion.
Analysis of the origins of the Oedipus complex must inevitably begin with that famous letter, a hundred years ago (in October 1897), in which Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess about what he had discovered during his experimental self-analysis: 'I have found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now believe it to be a general phenomenon of early childhood' (Freud, The Origins of Psycho-Analysis 223). In a characteristic move, Freud then transposed this observation from the autobiographical to the mythical level, drawing on his knowledge of literature both ancient and modern:
If that is the case, the gripping power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the rational objections to the inexorable fate that the story presupposes, becomes intelligible . . . Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in phantasy, and this dream-fulfilment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his present state.
The idea has passed through my head that the same thing may lie I at the root of Hamlet. .^How better [to explain Hamlet's hesitation to avenge his father's murder] than by the torment roused in him by n
the obscure memory that he himself had meditated the same deed ' r against his father because of passion for his motheT/- • • ? (223-24) ;' It was a move (from the personal to the mythical/literary) which was to characterize his theoretical work throughout the next forty years.
For Freud, the dramatic dilemma of tragedy, with its underlying history and its inevitable consequences, was a model of the clinical situation. Like the analyst, we as spectators are confronted with a mysterious crisis in both Oedipus Rex (the plague in Thebes) and in Hamlet (Hamlet's inability to act), and are called on to wonder about its causes as well as participate in the anguish of its development. The action of Sophocles' tragedy, Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams, 'consists in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement - a process that can be likened to the work of a psycho-analysis.' (PF 4: 363) Oedipus, like the analysand, is made to suffer in ignorance of his responsibility. His every effort has been to avoid the oracle's prediction that he will murder his father and marry his mother. Having committed these crimes unwittingly, he can only stand back and watch in horror the appalling but inevitable outcome of his unrepressed desire.
With Hamlet, we are presented with a different, modern version of the trauma that was exposed and realized in Oedipus. In Freud's view, 'the changed treatment of the same material reveals the whole difference in the mental life of these two widely separated epochs of civilization: the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind.' (PF 4: 366) The repression of basic drives, in Freud's opinion, is the hallmark of our modern age. It is what makes of Hamlet an hysteric, so that the source of his 'madness', feigned and unfeigned, becomes the dominant interest in the play. The necessary repression of the Oedipal, culture's refusal of our basic drives,
incestuous and parricidal, could be (and has been) called the elemen-tary alienating structure of the modern personality.
Freud's view of the Oedipal was to deepen as well as diversify in the decades that followed. By mid-late career (as in T h e Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex' in 1924), he was talking about it as if it were a universal in the unconscious itself, a phylogenetic phenomenon laid down by heredity, which crucially affects our social as well as our individual psychic structures. As we shall see shortly, in the discussion of Totem and Taboo, Freud's later excursions into psychoanalytic anthropology were dominated by this conviction that the Oedipus complex in the individual is of such a fundamental nature that it cannot help but overtake all forms of social behaviour and organiza-tion as well.
When he spoke of the 'dissolution' of the Oedipal, Freud meant what he saw as its necessary dispersal after its peak during the 'phallic' phase of childhood (ages 3-5). Failure to dissolve the Oedipal results in its repression, a repression, as Hamlet demonstrates, which has serious psychic consequences. In the traditional Freudian reading of Shakespeare's play, outlined at length by Freud's English disciple Ernest Jones in his Hamlet and Oedipus (1949), Hamlet's Oedipus complex has not only not dissolved, but has been given a violent boost first by the death of his father, which he had unconsciously desired all along, and second by his replacement by his uncle in his mother's bed.
The intense misogyny of Hamlet's treatment of his mother and, by extension, of Ophelia, is part of his ambivalent and necessarily thwarted passion for her. The expression of love for Ophelia at her graveside has seemed to some commentators far in excess of his response to her earlier in the play: 'Forty thousand brothers/Could not with all their quantity of love/Make up my sum' (V, i). But this hyperbole has a logic of its own. Similarly, as Jones points out, Hamlet's aggression towards his mother Gertrude takes surprising precedence over that towards his uncle Claudius, who may seem to have done him a far greater wrong. From the start, his overwhelming grievance is his mother's misdirected sexuality.
THE FEMININE OEDIPAL
The classical Freudian reading of the play has been challenged from two different quarters within psychoanalytic criticism, each stemming
from modifications to the Oedipal suggested by Freud himself in his later writings. The first can be broadly classified as the feminist reaction. For a long time Freud assumed that his model of the Oedipal, based on the little boy, could be applied with a simple sexual reversal to the little girl. Finally, however, under the pressure of persuasive evidence for a /?re-Oedipal bond between mother and child demonstrated in particular by Klein in the 1920s and '30s, Freud came to admit that the maternal influence had been under-rated in his work and that for girls in particular, there is an 'original exclusive attach-ment' to the mother (PF 7: 389). As Jacqueline Rose argues, it is at this point, the point where the girl's desire for the father can no longer be taken for granted, that 'psychoanalysis can become of interest to feminism' {Sexuality in the Field of Vision 135). The full extent of feminism's challenge to Freud will be examined in Chapter 7.
For Oedipus to enter Thebes, as the Sophoclean version of the myth has it, he had to solve the riddle of then kill the sphinx, that powerful feminine principle barring access to desire. For feminist criticism, the traditional Freudian version of the Oedipus complex involves a crucial suppression or bypassing of femininity. Matricide, as Jean-Jacques Goux argues in Oedipus, Philosopher, is 'the great unthought element of Freudian doctrine' (Goux 27). In his influential study of Hamlet of 1919, T. S. Eliot argued that Hamlet's revulsion against his mother's behaviour exceeds its ostensible object. His disgust, he writes, does not have an 'adequate equivalent' in his mother, whose 'character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing'. Being 'a feeling which he cannot understand', it thus 'remains to poison life and obstruct action' ('Hamlet' 145-46). The feeling not understood here, we could say, is Eliot's own refusal to recognize not only the primacy of Hamlet's maternal orientation, but also the complexity (that terrifying 'excess') of the implications of femininity within masculinity itself.
Freud's patients were to prove to him increasingly over the years that the Oedipal myth in its simple triangular form needed to be revised to accommodate a varied complex of multiple identifications.
The little girl is emphatically mother- as well as father-directed; the boy's rivalry with his father is complicated by a ('feminine') identifica-tion with him as well. As Freud put it in 'The Ego and the Id' (1923):
a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude towards his father and an affectionate object-choice towards his mother, but at the same
time he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine attitude to his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother. (PF 11: 372)
Freud's 'Wolf Man' case gives a striking example of the variety and multiplicity of a young boy's sexual identifications and object choices.
Freud's patient, a Russian in his twenties, had as a young boy been terrified by a dream of wolves in a tree, which Freud interpreted as a fear of castration in association with a fixation on his father. The perversions of his adult sexuality took the form of a complex of rebirth and womb phantasies which Freud separated out into an incestuous desire for the mother (to be 'in' the womb again) combined with that for the father (the desire to be in the womb in order to replace the mother during intercourse with the father) (PF 9: 342-43). An unresolved conflict between the two incestuous wishes can result in neurosis. Most of us achieve some precarious resolution, but in all of us femininity and masculinity, homo- and heterosexuality, take shape then dissolve in an endless sequence of realignments.
Both the masculine and the feminine Oedipus complexes, then, are not a matter of separate, symmetrical triangles but rather the inter-section of the masculine by the feminine and the feminine by the masculine, a lifelong reassertion of primary bisexuality and a recogni-tion of the fluidity of gender identity. Freud's writing on the masculine and the feminine Oedipal, at its most intricate (especially in the famous case studies), provides a crucial model for the early challenge to stable sexual identity. Perhaps, in this light, it is not too far-fetched to restore at least metaphorical validity to the notorious suspicion among some Shakespeare scholars that, all along, 'Hamlet was a woman'!7
PHALLIC DESIRE: LACAN READS HAMLET
If feminism, in particular, has excavated beneath the Oedipal to discover its pre-Oedipal strata, others, feminist or otherwise, have attempted to move 'beyond' Oedipus, via Lacan.8 To move beyond is not to lose sight of. The Oedipal in Lacanian terms looms large but in a different form: that of the hugely inflated phallus.
Freud had initiated this development, too, with his argument in the 1923 essay on 'The Infantile Genital Organization' that for both sexes
in the Oedipal stage there is only one organ, the phallus. Until a relatively late stage, the antithesis between maleness and femaleness does not exist in children. Gender antithesis for both sexes, as we have seen, is established on the basis of whether one has male genitalia or has lost them (has been castrated) (PF 7: 312). This 'phallic primacy (310), still highly controversial in psychoanalytic theory today,9
became the cornerstone of Lacan's view not only of the Oedipal but of all psychic organization.
Lacan's reading of Hamlet is, as we might expect, a highly provo-cative one. It has particularly irritated feminist readers such as Elaine Showalter, who complains that when Lacan promises to speak about Ophelia he does nothing of the sort, except to refer to her as 'O-phallus', bait/object of Hamlet's desire (Showalter, 'Representing Ophelia' 77 and 92). For Lacan, above all in his work in the late 1950s when the Hamlet essay was written, the primacy of the phallus had to do with its signifying rather than its biological function. The phallic signifier is the mark of desire, that which is lacking or threatened. The tragedy of human love, he writes in T h e Signification of the Phallus' (1958), is that
The demand for love can only suffer from a desire whose signifier is alien to it. If the desire of the mother is the phallus, the child wishes to be the phallus in order to satisfy that desire. (Ecrits 289) Thus,
man [people?] cannot aim at being whole (the 'total personality' is another of the deviant premises of modern psychotherapy), while ever the play of displacement and condensation to which he is doomed in the exercise of his functions marks his relation as a subject to the signifier.
The phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire. (287)
In some ways, Lacan's reading of Hamlet is consonant with the tradition of object-relations theory discussed in Chapter 2. Indeed, in T h e Signification of the Phallus' he refers to Klein as his source in investigating fcthe fact that the child apprehends from the outset that the mother "contains" the phallus' (288-89). More specifically, he focuses on mourning as the central preoccupation of the play, asking
the question 'What is the connection between mourning and the constitution of the object in desire?' ('Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet' 36). The answer he gives is that 'only insofar as the object of Hamlet's desire has become an impossible object can it become once more the object of his desire' (36). It is the gap or hole that results from this loss which 'calls forth' mourning on the part of the subject.
With the decline of the Oedipal the phallus, the original lost object,
With the decline of the Oedipal the phallus, the original lost object,