Zizek's points can and sometimes should be understood even if he has misread or misremembered the example which carries the point. There's an instance where Zizek cites a 'strawberry cake' dream from Freud in order to illustrate a point about fantasy. Turns out he slightly misremembered the dream, but the point stands nonetheless.. the example is just instrumental.
I was, however, wondering about this ‘instrumental’ use of examples, in relation to this:
“Hamlet himself, the very embodiment of obsessive procrastination.. becomes capable of acting at the exact moment when, in the last act of the play, he answers the rhetorical question ‘Who Am I?’: ‘What is he whose grief/ Bears such an emphasis../ .. This is I, Hamlet the Dane’. It is the split between ‘I’ and ‘Hamlet the Dane’, between the vanishing point of the subject of the enunciation and his support in symbolic identification, which is primordial: the moment of ‘passage to the act’ is nothing but an illusory moment of decision when the subject’s being seems to coincide without remainder with his symbolic mandate’.”
Zizek refers to this example on a few occasions. The point is the same : Hamlet acts when he assumes his Symbolic Mandate and makes the imaginary move of conflating ‘I’ with his Symbolic title. This point, though intelligible in itself, is completely wide of the mark as regards Hamlet.
A few things:
Hamlet has already entered the field of ‘action’ well before this point, perhaps starting with the chance death of Polonius. This ‘accidental slaughter’ seems to have precipitated H. from the world of potentiality to that of the deed/ act. He is thrown into a scene he had hitherto observed. Despite the fact that his Act (killing Polonius) is ‘meaningless’, an almost motorial reaction to a noise, it almost immediately accumulates meanings and importance which H. cannot pre-empt, predict, control.
By the time we encounter H. in the burial scene he has already dispatched R & G to their deaths. He has done this, you remember, by using the royal seal (on his father's signet ring) to ‘authorise’ a counterfeit letter. The Symbolic here is thus the instrument of a kind of dark joke, the punchline of which is ‘R & G are dead’. It is the efficacy of the Symbolic insignia, unattached to a bearer, manipulated by H., which delivers the two gulls to their execution. H. thus demonstrates (in the most practical sense of that word) how authority and force are effects of the Symbolic. But he does this not by ‘assuming’ symbolic authority, but by cynically employing it.
Immediately preceding the burial scene, moreover, there is H.’s now all too familiar banter with the gravedigger, which of course mocks symbolic Gradations and Names with the hollow laughter of the Death’s head. It is impossible to imagine that H., after eloquently deriding and debunking Symbolic titles could then simply adopt one
Hamlet’s declaration of ‘identity’ is in fact a self-parodic and consciously bombastic intervention. His ‘I, Hamlet the Dane’ has something of the irony of Lear’s ‘Aye, every inch a king’.
Here it is again, along with the subsequent address to Leartes:
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
Note the suggestion of rhetorical deliberation – ‘bears such an emphasis’ ‘phrase of sorrow’. And then, to Leartes:
‘Does thou come here to whine,
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
[…]
I’ll rant as well as thou’
H. cannot see Leartes’ grief as anything but affection, designed to ‘upstage’ H. Hamlet will prove equal to Leartes’ 'performance'.
It is as if any symbolic act can only be gestural, as if the Symbolic itself has been systematically reperceived as bombastic theatre – shapes, symbols, pre-agreed signals. Hamlet’s phoney assumption of his Symbolic title is in mockery of the empty symbolic rituals everywhere around him.
Indeed, one further point overlooked by Z. is that this very title ('Hamlet the Dane') is ordinarily that assumed by the King of Denmark. From this point of view, Hamlet’s ‘assumption’ of it is the illegitimate, mocking arrogation of a title not his.
Hamlet acts, then, when he realises the necessary hyperbole of the Symbolic, and its radical non-coincidence with the 'I'. To enter the Symbolic is to engage, willi-nilli, in theatrical posturing.
If one has to translate all this into Lacanese, it would be more accurate to say that Hamlet acts when he ceases to be troubled by the ‘too much’ of the Symbolic mandate foisted upon him, the traumatic excess of the ghost’s demand. He does this by an (enforced, partly) distantiation from the Symbolic Order as such.
To come to such an interpretation is surely to rethink the relation between Symbolic mandates and Acts, not just to venture another view of Hamlet. In the end, then, it does matter that Zizek’s use of examples is often purely instrumental. Not out of some abstract ‘fidelity to the integrity of the text’. No. It’s because, as in the present example, attending to the text actually produces a more theoretically suggestive result.
Theory is not only the Interrogator but the interrogatee; or, rather, if it is not also interrogated is it not theory at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment