Hamlet the Dane

In the comments to a previous post (which I suggest you read before continuing) Jodi of I Cite has raised a couple of questions about my reading of Hamlet and Zizek. I thought I’d use another post to reflect on those questions:

The symbolic mandate given to Hamlet by his father (also ‘Hamlet’ of course), complete with superego blackmail - ‘if thou did thy dear father love’, is one he initially accepts: ‘Thy commandment all alone shall live in the book and volume of my brain.’ This position – making the self into a pure instrument of a Mandate – is of course impossible. It produces only a kind of castrating over-proximity, a ‘too much of address.’). It’s only when Hamlet adopts a parodic, ludic relation to his Father’s Name that he is able to act. (This is hardly an orthodox interpretation, I know).

Two things, though:

1. Is this ludic mockery of the Symbolic, of his father’s name and mandate, simply equivalent to ‘not taking it seriously’ or is it something more radical. I’m really not sure. Perhaps a bad analogy, but imagine a student using with bravado and parodic gravitas his father’s credit and business cards – is this reverence or mockery, or both? And suppose the use of the credit card is animated by a disgust with consumption as such?*

2.Again, it seems to me that Hamlet is first entangled or precipitated into the world of action and then is able slough off or gain distance from his Symbolic mandate. One interpretation here would be that Fate seems to have grabbed him by the throat, and to some extent he can now ‘resign’ himself to that. So the Big Other, in the form of Destiny, has wrested some of the initiative from him. Paradoxically, this awareness of Fate, the sense that part of you is apportioned to some dark power over which you exercise little control, actually licences/ enables action - you can act only against such an irrevocable/ inscrutable background, to which you can entrust a portion of yourself. On the infrastructure of necessity is raised the superstructure of free decision.

*Actually not helpful at all, I think, but do try and see the point!