You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“Our purpose,” states Jacques Lacan (1977a) in the seminar on Hamlet, “is to show the tragedy of desire as it appears in Hamlet, human desire, that is, such as we are concerned with in psychoanalysis” (p. 11).1 Hamlet as a latter-day Oedipus Rex? But this is an insight so thoroughly explored since Freud first famously relegated it to a footnote in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) that we cannot help but wonder: Is there even a little
patch of ground that has not been crisscrossed many times over? What might it possibly mean “to show the tragedy of desire” in Hamlet?
The question discounts Lacan's showmanship. “I'll be as good as my word,” says Lacan—and he is. In a series of seven lectures, or what he calls “excursions and embroideries” (O, 24, p. 10), Lacan provides an innovative interpretation that remains, at the same time, scrupulously attentive to the initial Freudian insight and the details of Shakespeare's play. Far as he might range in his reading, Lacan never actually st