297
 

Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy, and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here transplanted into reality, with the full quantity of repression which separates his infantile state from his present one.
 

…a real event stimulated the poet to his representation, in that his unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero.
 

How does he explain his irresolution in avenging his father by the murder of his uncle – the same man who sends his courtiers to their death without a scruple and who is positively precipitate in murdering Laertes?
 

…torment roused in him by the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his father out of passion for his mother, and – “use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?”
 

…sexual alienation in his conversation with Ophelia typically hysterical? And his rejection of the instinct that seeks to beget children?
 

…transferal of the deed from his own father to Ophelia’s…does he not in the end, in the same marvelous way as my hysterical patients do, bring down punishment on himself by suffering the same fate as his father of being poisoned by the same rival? (Freud 1897)
 

298
 

The Ghost is only the most explicit marker of uncanniness, the ultimate articulation of  “uncertainty whether something is dead or alive” (Freud, “The Uncanny” 30)
 

…in a time of canon expansion and critique of canonical literature does Shakespeare not only remain unchallenged, but in fact emerge newly canonized…
 

…relation between Hamlet and its readers – lies not only the castration complex but also the compulsion to repeat. “Whatever reminds us of this inner repetition-compulsion is perceived as uncanny” (Freud, “The Uncanny” 44)
 

“Look here upon this picture, and on this,/The counterfeit presentment of two brothers” [3.4.53-54]; in the double murder of fathers, Hamlet’s father killed by Claudius, Laertes’ father killed by Hamlet.
 

299
 

“…the decomposing of the original villain into at least three father figures, the ghost, Polonius, and Claudius”; “The splitting of the hero into a number of brother figures: Fortinbras, Horatio, Laertes, and Rosencrantz- and-Guildenstern” [Holland 165]
 

(1) The ghost of old Hamlet appears to young Hamlet and urges him to revenge; (2) the ghost of young Hamlet, “pale as his shirt,” “with a look so piteous in purport/As if he had been loosed out of hell/To speak of horrors” (2.1.78-91)
 

…sigh both “piteous and profound,”…
 

What, indeed, is revenge but the dramatization and acculturation of the repetition compulsion?
 

THE ANAMORPHIC GHOST
 

…ghost? It is a memory trace. It is the sign of something missing, something omitted, something undone.
 

“…this portentous figure/Comes armed through our watch so like the King/That was and is the question of these wars” (1.1.109-11).
 

…ghost is the concretization of a missing presence, the sign of what is there by not being there. “’Tis here! “’Tis here!” “’Tis gone!” cry the sentries (1.1.141-42).
 

Lacan:

The hole in the real that results from loss, sets the signifier in motion. This hole provides the place for the projection of the missing signifier, which is essential to the structure of the Other. This is the signifier whose absence leaves the Other incapable of responding to your question, the signifier that can be purchased only with your own flesh and blood, the signifier that is essentially the veiled phallus…swarms of images, from which the phenomena of mourning rise, assume the place of the phallus: not only the phenomena in which each individual instance of madness manifests itself, but also those which attest to one or another of the most remarkable collective madnesses of the community of men, an example of which is brought to the fore in Hamlet, i.e., the ghost, that image which can catch the soul of one and all unawares when someone’s departure from this life has not been accompanied by the rites that it calls for (Lacan, Four concepts 38).
 

The ghost – itself traditionally often veiled, sheeted, or shadowy in form – is a cultural marker of absence, a reminder of loss.
 

…one cannot strike the phallus, because the phallus, event the real phallus, is a ghost” (Lacan, “Desire” 50).
 

Freud:
 

…the object-cathexes are given up and replaced by identification. The authority of the father or of the parents is introjected into the ego and there forms the kernel of the super-ego, which takes its severity from the father, perpetuates his prohibition against incest, and so insures the ego against a recurrence of the libidinal object cathexis. (Freud, “The Passing” 179)
 

301
 

The Ghost is incompletely a representative of the Law, because both he and the tale he tells allow the son to doubt. He puts in question his own being as well as his message. Is he a spirit of health or goblin damn’d? Is this the real Law? Is this the truth? As long as the Law of the father is doubted or put in question, it cannot be (or is not) internalized, not assimilated into the symbolic, and therefore blocks rather than facilitates Hamlet’s own passage into the symbolic, where he will find his desire.
 

Doubt thou the stars are fire,

 

(2.2.116-19)
 

The meaning of “doubt” is itself in doubt as the phrase is repeated, shifting form something like “dispute” or “challenge” to “suspect” or “fear”…
 

302
 

…”the stars are fire” and “the sun doth move – both presumptions put in question by Renaissance science…
 

…undermines…certainty with every gesture.
 

…Lacan…”the drama of Hamlet as the man who has lost the way of his desire”.
 

Holbein’s portrait of 1533…The Ambassadors.
 

“Begin by walking out of the room, in which no doubt it has long held your attention. It is then that, turning around as you leave – as the author of the Anamorphoses describes it – you apprehend in this form…What? A skull. (Lacan, Four Concepts **)
 

…the skull, cannot fail to remind us of the skull in Hamlet—
 

303
 

This picture is simply what any picture is, a trap for the gaze. In any picture, it is precisely in seeking the gaze in each of its points that you will see it disappear...
 

What is this but the play within, the “mouse-trap,”…
 

…dramatic presentation that encodes misdirection, putting the real play in the audience, setting up Claudius and Gertrude as the real Player King and Player Queen…
 

…appropriates the gaze and makes it the function of the play.
 

Lacan:
 

“…turning around, we see what the magical floating object signifies. It reflects our own nothingness, in the figure of the death’s head….simply the subject as annihilated…”
 

…Hamlet, a play situated on the cusp of the emergence of what has come to by known as the modern subject.
 

What then is being caught in the trap Hamlet sets for the King, the King who’s a thing of nothing? Is it Claudius who is caught in the “Mouse-trap,” or Hamlet as the signifier of the modern subject, already marked by negation, already dressed in black?
 

Lacan:
 

Imagine a tattoo traced on the sexual organ ad hoc in the state of repose and assuming its, if I may say so, developed form in another state.
 

“My father, in his habit as he lived!” (3.4.135) “My father spirit – in arms!” (1.2.254) “Thou, dead corse, again in complete steel” (1.4.52). the anamorphic ghost of Old Hamlet, erected to full form by the gaze, contrasts sharply with the same figure in the “state of repose,” recumbent, passive, “Sleeping within my orchard” (1.5.35), who receives the poison in the ear…
 

…the murder empowers the Ghost…
 

The Hyperion-father who obsesses Hamlet in his soliloquies and in his conversations with this mother is erected from this moment, from the moment of the father’s absence and death, half-guiltily acknowledged as the son’s desire.
 

305

Lacan:

“…not to want to desire and to desire are the same thing…Not wanting to desire is wanting not to desire.”
 

…Hamlet for much of the play, the condition of desiring not to desire…
 

He walks out of Ophelia’s closet and into Gertrude’s.
 

Hamlet’s accusation of his mother catches her in the trap set for the gaze: “O Hamlet, speak no more!/Thou turn’st my [eyes into my very] soul,/And there I see such black and [grained] spots/As will [not] leave their tinct” (3.4.88-91)
 

WHAT WOULD YOUR GRACIOUS FIGURE?
 

…prosopopoeia as the “fiction of the voice from-beyond-the-grave,” Paul de Man writes: “It is the figure of prosopopoeia, the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply, and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face…
 

Prosopopoeia is the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name, as in the Milton poem, is made as intelligible and memorable as a face…
 

306
 

...but in the case of the Stratford monument (or indeed, though less neatly, the Droeshout portrait), this exchange of properties has already taken place. The voice of the dead Shakespeare pictured on the tomb (and in the sonnet) speaks through the plays that succeed them in the Folio.
 

The question of whether the Ghost will speak is a central preoccupation of the whole first act of Hamlet…
 

307
 

Horatio, as a “scholar,” is asked to do the job.
 

“A ghost has not the power to speak till it has been first spoken to; so that, notwithstanding the urgency of the business on which it may come, everything must stand still till the person visited can find sufficient courage to speak to it”
 

“This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him”
 

308
 

Hamlet chooses to name the Ghost with those names which are for him most problematical: King, father, royal Dane.
 

309
 

Hamlet addresses the “questionable shape” and brings it to speech, and therefore to a kind of life.
 

…de Man’s dire prophecy: “the latent threat that inhabits prosopopoeia, namely that by making the dead speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death?” In the fiction of address, what Jonathan Culler suggestively terms “this sinister reciprocity” is always present as a threat.
 

…the unremitting demand of the Ghost, leading to Hamlet’s final paradoxical declaration. “I am dead.”
 

De Man:
 

“..apostrophe is only addressed in terms of the activity that it provokes in the addressing subject” (de Man, Allegories)
 

…attention is focused on the speaker.
 

Culler…”apostrophe involves a drama of ‘the one mind’s modifications’”
 

…Hamlet constructs his own Ghost, makes use of the “gracious figure” of his father by utilizing the equally gracious figure of prosopopoeia. Since apostrophe and prosopopoeia so often involve a sensation of loss…in the post-Enlightenment lyric as observed by commentators like de Man, Culler, and Hartman…in the elegiac tradition and the epitaphic texts of the Renaissance…
 

…”I am dead”’ it instates that which it mourns, makes present that which it declares absent…
 

“The poem,” says Culler, “denies temporality in the very phrases – recollections – that acknowledge its claims…”
 

“I am dead” and “I am alive to contemplate and mourn – and avenge – the dead” coexist in the same sensibility, in the same moment of naming.
 

…”Apostrophe is not the representation of an event”
 

In Hamlet…the effect of the dramatic mode is to dis-figure the trope of address to a dead or inanimate object, and ventriloquize its response…
 

310
 

BEGGING THE QUESTION
 

Uncanny reciprocity is thus created by the transference of death to the living and voice to the dead.
 

The Ghost’s commandment comes in the form of a double imperative: “Remember me!” and “revenge!”
 

Hamlet is indeed a play obsessively concerned with remembering and forgetting.
 

312
 

Paul de Man… “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics”
 

Erinnerung, (“recollection”) as de Man defines it, after Hegel, is “the inner gathering and preserving of experience” (“Sign and Symbol” 771), while Gedachtnis (“memory”) is “the learning by rote of names, or of words considered as names…
 

314
 

Jacques Derrida…writing in memory of and in mourning for Paul de Man, suggests that Gedachtnis and Erinnerung are central to “the possibility of mourning,” and that “the inscription of memory” is “an effacement of interiorizing recollection” (Derrida, Memoires 56).
 

315

Hamlet’s writing is thus already a copy, a substitution, a revision of an original that does not show its face in the text. Whether it be the revisionary “tables,” the interpolated “dozen or sixteen lines,” or the redirected “new commission” signed with a usurped signature, Hamlet’s writing is always, in fact, ghost writing.
 

FORGETTING THE HOBBYHORSE
 

What, then, are we to make of the reminders of remembering, the cautions against forgetting, of which the Ghost’s two visitations are the benchmarks?
 

Rather than facilitating action, remembering seems to block it, by becoming itself an obsessive concern, in effect fetishizing the remembered persons, events, or commands so that they become virtually impossible to renounce or relinquish.
 

316
 

Remember and revenge. But these two injunctions are not only different from one another, they are functionally at odds. For the more Hamlet remembers, the more he mediates the “word” that he takes as the Ghost’s “commandment” and inscribes on his tables, the more he is trapped in a round of obsessive speculation. Far from goading him to action, the Ghost’s twice iterated instruction, “Remember me,” “do not forget,” impedes that action, impedes revenge. What Hamlet needs to do is not to remember, but to forget.
 

Nietzsche:
 

To determine…the boundary at which the past has to be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, one would have to know exactly how great the plastic power of a man, a people, or a culture is: I mean by plastic power the capacity to develop out of oneself in one’s own way, to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds.
 

317
 

Arden Hamlet:
 

...what matters is that when Hamlet came into the world a man began to dig graves and has now been at it for a lifetime…As Hamlet’s talk with the grave-digger thus links the grave-digger’s occupation with the terms of Hamlet’s life, will it not seem to us that the hero has come face to face with his own destiny?
 

Nietzsche:
 

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for a man to see…A human being may well ask an animal: “Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?” The animal would like to answer, and say: “The reason is I always forget what I was going to say” – but then he forgot this answer, too, and stayed silent: so that the human being was left wondering. But he also wonders at himself, that he cannot learn to forget but clings relentlessly to the past: however far and fast he may run, this chain runs with him. And it is a matter for wonder: a moment, now here and then gone, nothing before it came, again nothing after it has gone, nonetheless returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a later moment.
 

“’Tis here.” “’Tis here.” “’Tis gone.”Nietzsche’s meditation, Nietzsche’s revenge, incorporates (or “incorpses”) Hamlet as a manifestation of the haunting presentness of the past.
 

319
 

…we may wonder whether Nietzsche’s complex of ideas, from revenge to the ghost to the beast to the grave-digger, does not derive in some way from Shakespeare’s...
 

How all occasions do inform against me,

 

…Nietzsche’s meditation on revenge and forgetting situates itself as a rewriting of Hamlet.
 

…the play that articulates, or represents, the construction of the modern subject.
 

320
 

…without) the primal scene at which it is constantly hinting, and which we are constantly on the brink of remembering, falsely, fictively. The ghost Hamlet – the ghost in Hamlet – is denial, our own conviction that what Freud, in speaking of dreams, called “the spot where it reaches down to the unknown” can be plumbed, even if it is found to be a hollow voice. Hamlet is the play of undecidability.
 

Hence, once again, forgetting and remembering. And revenge. In other words, transference.
 

321
 

…the play within-the-play does exhibit many of the symptoms of transference-neurosis, as in fact do the soliloquies that problematize the activity of others (Fortinbras, the First Player, Pyrrhus, even Laertes) as contrasted with the ruminative passivity of Hamlet.
 

…”the compulsion to repeat must be ascribed to the unconscious repressed” and comments on the odd but undeniable fact that people often compulsively repeat things that are not, and seem never to have been pleasurable. ow then is the compulsion to repeat related to the pleasure principle?
 

322
 

…the compulsion to repeat which repression substitutes for remembering. Confronted with the Ghost’s command, "Remember me!” Hamlet remembers that he is commanded to remember, but displaces that which he is unable to remember into compulsive behavior of a kind that translates him into a daemon, into a ghost. Thus he appears as a silent spectacle in Ophelia’s closet, pale, sighing, as if “loosed out of hell” (2.1.80). The passivity of Hamlet, his apparent position of being acted on rather than acting…
 

TURNING THE TABLES
 

…for Hamlet the Ghost is – or at least, is supposed to be – what Lacan calls the sujet suppose savoir, the subject who is supposed to know. “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere,” says Lacan, “there is transference” (Four Concepts 232).
 

323
 

“O my prophetic soul,” cries Hamlet (1.5.40). the Ghost is supposed to know – that is confirm – what Hamlet did not know he knew.
 

The Ghost that comes “in such a questionable shape” (1.4.43) is…the shape or sign of putting things in question.
 

…Hamlet a wish to name, to pin upon his sujet suppose savoir the signifier Lacan has called “le nom-du-pere”...
 

Lacan:
 

…there is no need of a signifier to be a father, any more than to be dead, but without a signifier, no one would ever know anything about either state of being.
 

…“non-du-pere” – “no” of the father. The father – the dead father, the symbolic father – is the Law. For Freud, of course, this symbolic father is not the Christian father but the father of Jewish law. And the law commands, “thou shalt not”: “If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not,/Let not the royal bed of Denmark be/A couch for luxury and damned incest./But howsomever thou pursues this act,/Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive/Against thy mother aught” (1.5.81-86); “Do not forget” (3.4.110).
 

325
 

There may therefore be a connection between Freud’s interpretation of Hamlet and the death not only of Shakespeare’s father but also of Freud’s father.
 

…Philip, called “Uncle” by Freud’s niece and nephew, and represented in Freud’s own dream associations in such a way as to suggest some real or imagined sexual relationship between Philip and his mother.”
 

327
 

…differences between Oedipus and Hamlet, Freud… “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” (Interpretation of Dreams 298). What Oedipus does (kills his father, marries his mother), Hamlet fantasizes but represses, so that “we only learn of [this fantasy’s] existence from its inhibiting consequences”...
 

328
 

Hamlet looks like a repressed version of he Oedipus story but in being a story of repression, it may in fact be closer to the story of “modern” man.
 

329
 

the Ghost is Shakespeare…
 

Shakespeare is for us the superego of literature...