1 Rodrigo Bueno Therezo CPLT 751 Professor Shoshana Felman March 10th, 2013.

Reading Hamlet catch Freud: Mimesis and Identification in Freuds Reading of Hamlet Shakespeares Hamlet poses and stages a scene. Which scene? The scene of the scene, a scene which references itself referencing ad infinitum. Such is Hamlets mise en abme, an abyssal movement of referrals which defers the referent, escaping a closure which philosophy would be more than happy to impose on a given chiasmatic structure. It would be as if philosophys essential arche and telos both consisted in cutting short the play of reference without referent, so that the latter can be exposed in its full nudity to the untroubled sight of the philosopher. If Hamlet marks an irreducible referral and deferral, Hamlet would escape the fundamental question of philosophy after the what-ness of its being or essence. Hamlet, as literature, would inscribe within its text philosophys ontological question rather than being a mere example of a putative generality of the fundamental question of philosophy according to Heidegger. Following Jacques Derridas suggestion that literary thinking involves a logic of the species swallowing the genus, I would like to mark a passage in Shakespeares Hamlet where the analytic scene is staged, in-scribed and pre-scribed to the reader of Hamlet, functioning as a part of a more powerful whole called literature, defined precisely by its essential deferral of the whole in its abyssal self-referentiality without end, without mastery. Such mastery over the text seems to be invited by the very text, as if the text dissimulated its resistance to being read in the form of a preprogramed self-truth it proclaims to deliver, illustrate, exemplify. The text begs the analytic reading because it contains it always already before the analyst does nothing more than double that reading. Throughout what follows, I will content myself with recognizing how Freuds reading of Hamlet is itself inscribed in the very text of Hamlet, which Freud thinks he can use as an example only to be caught and fooled by his illustration. By marking how Hamlet dissimulates itself into a perfect

2 example, as if hardly being able to wait for Freud to come along and unveil its concealed truth, we can perhaps begin to read Hamlet, going beyond the defense mechanism which that text deploys in order to avoid its dissolution into something else, an elsewhere or other of itself. Let us begin by turning to end of Hamlets Act II: () The spirit that I have seen May be the devil: and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds More relative than this: the plays the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. (Act II, Scene 2, lines 537-44) The mere fact that Hamlet needs a concrete proof or grounds more relative than this is already remarkable, for it underscores Hamlets religious conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism (only for a Protestant could the spirit be the devil, such possibility of deceit by a ghost is not a part of dogmatically accepted Catholic belief), a tension which was absolutely present in the historical context of the play. Hamlet stages a play within the play, with which he wishes to catch the conscience of the king. The play within the play is a trial of the kings conscience, which will be submitted to a test: I'll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks I'll tent him to the quick: if he but blench, I know my course. (Act II, Scene 2, lines 533-37) It is incredibly tempting to see a psycho-analytic scene being sketched out at this stage in the play. What is tested is the kings conscience insofar as this conscience speaks in spite of the king or in his stead. The lines just preceding the ones above in fact speak of a most miraculous organ by which the kings conscience will speak, even if without a tongue: () I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play

3 Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaim'd their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. () (Act II, Scene 2, lines 528-33) Why does the king speak? Why does he speak without speaking, with no tongue, with most miraculous organ? Why would he be struck so to the soul and proclaim his malefaction while sitting at a play? No doubt mimesis and a process of identification are at the heart of Hamlets plan which relies on the miraculous power of doubling- and simulacrum-like effects, able to overpower consciousness and make it reveal its secret guilt. Hamlet is counting on an inevitable identification between Denmarks new king, his murderous uncle, and the actor playing, unknowingly simulating, mimicking, doubling the crime once committed to the king, for the king, by the king. It is this process of identification which discloses a truth via the symptoms of the body, through looks and blenching, which will make the king speak what he most wishes not to speak, make him see, as Artaud would have it, what he wishes not to see. Relying on transference and its blunt manifestation, the psycho-analyst Hamlet brings his uncle to the couch and sets a mirror to his eyes of his guilt and criminal past. Hamlet lets guilt manifest itself simply by letting it re-sonate, echo back to the kings ears, doubling it in order to make it present and symptomatic. Now, what could be more heralding of Freuds reading of Hamlet? Freud, supposedly rejecting Goethes interpretation that Hamlet is paralyzed by an excessive development of his intellect, argued that the reason why Hamlet cannot bring himself to fulfill the promise he made to the ghost of his father to murder the murderous new king of Denmark, relies also on a process of identification, which, according to Freud, generates guilt in Hamlets conscience: The plot of the drama shows us, however, that Hamlet is far from being represented as a person incapable of taking action. We see him doing so on two occasions: first in a sudden outburst of temper, when he runs his sword through the eavesdropper behind the arras, and secondly in a premeditated and even crafty fashion, when, with all the callousness of a Renaissance prince, he sends the two courtiers to the death that had been planned for himself. What is it, then, that inhibits him in fulfilling the task set him by his fathers ghost? The answer, once again, is that it

4 is the peculiar nature of the task. Hamlet is able to anything except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that fathers place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized. Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish. (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 267) What is Freud doing? What is Freud doing, structurally speaking? How does Freud position himself, or better said, how is Freud positioned, in advance, by and in accordance with the structure of Hamlets text? My suggestion is that Freud is merely putting Hamlet on Hamlets couch, merely occupying Hamlets position and executing a similar plan. Just as Hamlets plan relied on a mimetic mirroring of a crime producing, via identification, manifest guilt in Hamlets uncle, Freud is traversed by the same thread, leading him to claim that Hamlet identifies with his uncle due to a mimetic process. The crime of Hamlets uncle serves as a mimetic mirror which reminds Hamlet, in Freuds words, that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish. Just as Hamlet sets a mimetic mirror to his uncle Claudius via the staging of a play which doubled Claudius crime and made it manifest itself, Freud sets a similar mimetic mirror to Hamlet via the figure of Claudius, whose crime doubles Hamlets crime as well, the latter in the form of a repressed childhood wish now becoming manifest to Freud via its inhibited consequences, that is to say, a guilt that speaks itself also with most miraculous organ, once the psycho-analytic patient neither knows what he or she is supposedly guilty of (the unconscious crime remains repressed) nor is this guilt exclusively vocalized, looks and blenching being as important for the psychoanalyst as they were for Hamlets plan. Along the lines of an impressive parallelism, Freuds plan is to rely on exactly the same structure of mimesisidentification-guilt, already found in Hamlet, surreptitiously waiting for its prey to play with. This structure uses and abuses Freud, catches and fools him just when he thinks he is using it in order to illustrate the Oedipus complex in the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 267). We can then say, only seeming to contradict what has been said above, that Freud is absolutely

5 right in suggesting Shakespeares Hamlet illustrates and exemplifies the psycho-analytic scene. If one can hardly imagine psychoanalysis without transference, mimetic mirrors, manifest guilt in the form of symptoms, what else is being staged on Hamlet than psychoanalysis itself? It is at this point, at this moment of recognizing finitude, margins, horizons, that we can begin to de-limit possibilities of reading, towards which I here can only gesture. Even if we are ready to admit that Hamlet comprehends and comprises the psycho-analytic scene, the play becomes all the more enigmatic and irremediably inexhaustible when we realize that Hamlet is not reducible to psychoanalysis for the simple reason that Hamlet produces psychoanalysis and not vice-versa. Thus, a reading worthy of the name is only broached when the borders of its apparatus, the junctures of its machinery are strictly demarcated along the axis of an invisible spacing called literature, responsible for imperceptibly making the wheel turn with the production of truths, complexes, triangles, symptoms, etc. By identifying this mimetic structure of identification in which readers of literature give up an encounter with the literary, by resisting and refusing to merely double the protective structures of a text, we might perhaps preserve the possibility of an original encounter with an abyss of referencing without referents, this chiasmatic machinery we call literature. The task would be to situate the structures in the literary text that repress the abyss in order to let it speak, perhaps, following both Hamlet and Freud, with most miraculous organ.

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