Hamlet between knowledge and truth

Abstract

From Lacan’s seven lessons on Hamlet in Seminar 6: desire and its interpretation and his elaborations on the question that raises the Shakespearean character throughout his teaching, the proposal is to follow Lacan’s investigation on the dramatic impasse that affects Hamlet named by Lacan “the tragedy of desire” that makes action, the act, impossible. Lacan will weave a counterpoint between the tragedy of Oedipus Rex and that of the prince of Denmark. If the first is marked by parricide in ignorance of his act, Hamlet from the beginning of his saga knows about his father’s murder and what he needs to do. But neither the revenge ordered by the paternal specter, nor the love of a woman, Ophelia, make him act. Knowledge does not vectorize the act stagnated by the angst of a truth that holds it back. What are the joyful elements that entangle Hamlet in the space “between”, so that his desiring action can only coincide with death itself? In the light of the melancholic disbelief in which Hamlet succumbs, a question arises: what knowledge, what truth, can make desire pass into action?