By reading Freud’s metapsychological papers in tandem with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this essay strives both to

caution against the boomerang effects inherent in the psychically volatile act of remembering, effects that are
oftentimes slighted or completely overlooked by the currently proliferating positivistic discourses of remember-
ing, and to offer thereof a corrective to many previous psychoanalytic diagnoses of Shakespeare’s most worked-
over play.

Remembering Forbidding
Mourning: Repetition,
Indifference, Melanxiety, Hamlet
NOURI GANA

HAMLET: I am most dreadfully attended.

POLONIUS: Thus it remains, and the remainder thus.

Perpend.

n contemporary debates about

I
the dynamics of remembering
and mourning, Freud’s clini-
cally and analytically informed theoretical heritage is still of unsurpassable validity.
Two essays, in particular, articulate quite fully Freud’s stance on these two inextricably
bound questions: “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” and “Mourning
and Melancholia.” The broad strokes of Freud’s assumptions can be elicited by means
of a simple exercise of reshuffling and repartitioning of the words that constitute the
titles of both essays. Accordingly, we can state that the act of remembering can either
devolve into fragmentary cycles of “compulsive repeating” and pathological “melancho-
lia,” or build up toward a therapeutic process of “working-through” and “mourning.”
In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud distinguishes mourning from melancho-
lia all the while attributing both of them to a common origin: loss. Freud contends

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60 Mosaic 37/2 (June 2004)

that, although both affects originate in (a reaction to) loss, they diverge in their ways
of dealing with it. While mourning is a normal affect that is accomplished once all
object-cathexes are withdrawn from the lost object and displaced onto a new object,
melancholia results from an unfaltering fixation on the lost object and culminates in
a regressive process of incorporating, if not devouring, the lost other—a process that
might eventually enact a primary narcissism, and that Freud suspects of being of a
pathological disposition. Thus, whereas in mourning the lost object is remembered so as
to be consciously knitted, in accordance with the commands of reality, into the texture of
the psyche, in melancholia the object is unconsciously engraved within the psyche. In
“The Ego and the Id,” Freud maintains that the ego fraudulently “assumes the features
of [the lost] object” (369) and forces itself upon the id as its (lost/regained) love-object
in order not only to confiscate its entire libido but also to retouch base with an infan-
tile experience of narcissism. What is worthy of note here is that, in melancholia,
remembering (the lost love-object) emerges, in Freud’s common idiom, in the form
of a regression of the ego into an earlier cannibalistic oral phase. In this respect, the
outbreak of melancholia can be seen, as I demonstrate here, as the product of a com-
pulsion to repeat an infantile (primary) ego-narcissism.
Freud’s engagement with the pitfalls of remembering, however, should be seen as
clinical attempts to ensure the firm seal of mourning over all ruminated material. In
“Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” he points out that the role of the
analyst lies precisely in his ability “to keep in the psychical sphere all the impulses
which the patient would like to direct into the motor sphere” (153). The analyst must,
in other words, have the transferential wherewithal to participate in the memories of
the analysand in such a way as to preclude their outward enactment. At the heart of
this contention is Freud’s unwavering counter-Nietzschean assumption that forget-
ting, far from being productive, is in fact the handmaiden of repression: “Forgetting
impressions, scenes or experiences nearly always reduces itself to shutting them off ”
(148). Small wonder, then, that Freud deems it a triumph worthy of celebration if the
analyst “can bring it about that something that the patient wishes to discharge in
action is disposed of through the work of remembering” (153). The analyst has, in
other words, to turn the compulsion to repeat into a “motive for remembering” (154)
or, more precisely, into an “impulsion to remember” (151). Remembering becomes
thus the sine qua non for the success of the treatment, on which depends not only the
cure of the analysand but also the acknowledgement of the role of the analyst and of
psychoanalysis writ large.
Yet remembering—which has now forcefully become a cult ethics of post-holocaust,
post-apartheid, and post-colonial studies—does not, as Freud himself cautions us,
 Nouri Gana 61

proffer a failsafe algorithm for negotiating and working through the layers of in-
delible and disquieting (historical, individual, or collective) memories. In other words,
remembering might technically help us “come to terms” with our painful memories
as much as it can go awry—in the direction of compulsive repeating and/or melan-
cholia. While much work has been done on what I elsewhere (34) conceptualized as a
mournfulfilling remembering (literally, a remembering that seeks to fulfill the task of
mourning), much less has been devoted to exploring the mournfilling remembering
(the kind of remembering that ultimately foments the affect of mourning and/or
melancholia rather than mollifies them) precisely because it strikes, I think, terribly
human, all too human!
A widening circle of post-Freudians, including Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok,
and Dominick LaCapra, among many others (for recent accounts, see: Eng et al.;
Simon et al.; Bal et al.), have dwelled almost exclusively on the means whereby a “suc-
cessful” mourning can be achieved, and have impatiently banished melancholia,
interminable mourning and the compulsion-repetition to the sanctuary of the patho-
logical. While I am here adopting an attitude neither of “objective cynicism” (Zizekˇˇ
695) nor of praise (Butler 162) vis-à-vis melancholia, I nonetheless think that it is
time we interrogated the as-yet argumentum ad hominem: one can remember (the lost
love-object) and can still accomplish the task of mourning. One is, whenever within
the moulds of remembering, already within the contours of a gnomic mourning. To
break out of the moulds of mourning—to accomplish mourning—one has, perhaps,
to start by excoriating one’s memory, by laying to rest the clinical myth of curative
remembering. One has, in the words of Derek Walcott, to “return through a darkness
whose terminus is amnesia” (5). Hamlet himself knows only too well the palliative
magic of forgetting: “Most necessary ’tis to forget / To pay ourselves what to ourselves
is debt” (3.2.92).

ince remembering qua remembering is not an Aladdin-like magical lamp that can
S instantaneously concretize recovery-promises, the tendency has been since Freud
to supplement it with a process of working-through, ‘Durcharbeiten,’ that would,
given time, culminate in an achieved mourning. Yet, what is precisely most disquiet-
ing, if not abusive, about the act of remembering itself is that it suspends sine die the
process of withdrawal and displacement of cathexes, that is, the process of affective
closure that mourning is said to effect. Thus, while the act of remembering is based
on the premise of remembering for-bidding mourning—that is, for (the sake of) bid-
ding (farewell to) mourning—it tends exceedingly to mutate into an act of remem-
bering (totally) forbidding mourning. By relying on the dormant equivocalness of the
62 Mosaic 37/2 (June 2004)

word for-bidding itself, I would like to capture the uncompromising nature of the
business of remembering. It is, however, on the remembering forbidding mourning—
the mournfilling remembering, in which the wedge is opened up for melancholia and
compulsion repetition to take control of the psychic apparatus—that I would like to
reflect henceforth.
Let me state from the beginning that a remembering forbidding mourning has
more than one corollary. For the sake of the economy of my argument, I delineate
only three corollaries, and I explore their manifestations and implications in variable
depths by recourse to one of Shakespeare’s most complex characters: Hamlet. These
three corollaries can be grouped under two headings: (1) the affective corollaries,
which pertain to what Freud calls the “psychical sphere,” and (2) the actantial corol-
laries, which pertain in turn to what he calls the “motor sphere.” I believe that a work
of mourning predicated on an unstinting—ultimately, plural and repetitive—effort at
remembering tends to be paradoxically debilitated and flattened by too much thought
attended to the lost (person, object, idea) and becomes therefore burdensome, mechan-
ical, and dull before it freezes gradually into indifference. Mourning is, by virtue of
being weaned on remembering, perforce forbidden, but it can pulverize into fragmen-
tary states of emotional numbness (indifference) or other, no less fragmentary but
more taxing, states of emotional overflow (melanxiety—a composite emotional cur-
rent that yokes together a melancholic fixation on the past and an anxious prescience
of the future).
The actantial corollary, which is my focus for the time being, stems, like the affec-
tive corollaries, from a state of forbidden mourning. Unlike them, however, this corol-
lary is by far the more lethal. The actantial corollary marks an affective state in which
a need for mourning has presented itself but remained unfulfilled. Mourning is for-
bidden, not because it is uncalled for (whether by the analyst or the analysand) but
because remembering—the motor force of mourning—takes oftentimes a troubling
and confusing path that converges with acting out. As Freud explains, the analysand’s
“way of remembering” is frequently caught within the loop of compulsion-repetition:
he “does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out.
He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course,
knowing that he is repeating it” (“Remembering” 150, emph. Freud’s). This kind of
behaviour might still be understood within the contours of the pleasure principle but
cannot be limited to its confines: it surpasses the need for pleasure.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud seeks to pry apart the demand for pleas-
ure as such and the compulsive repeating of the unpleasurable. The fulcrum of his
theoretical acumen in this move beyond the pleasure principle is rendered through a
 Nouri Gana 63

child’s game of disappearance and return—fort/da. The child is said to compensate

for the painful absence of his mother from home “by staging the disappearance and
return of objects within his reach” (285). Although the child could not have possibly
extracted any pleasure from his mother’s departure, his active and indefatigable par-
ticipation in repeating it beggars the imagination. Freud exclaims, “How then does this
repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle?”
(285). Freud had, in answer to this question, to lay to rest the pleasure principle alto-
gether and to conjecture that “there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat
which over-rides the pleasure principle” (293). In an earlier essay, “The ‘Uncanny,’” it
turns out that Freud had already rehearsed his answer to such a question by advanc-
ing the above thesis in a more straightforward but also more alarming manner: the
compulsion to repeat is “a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure
principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their demonic character” (238, emph.
mine). It is the italicized part of this statement that is most dreadful and shocking a
discovery.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet presents us with two instances of the compulsion to repeat:
in the first, he stages the death of his father; in the second, he repeats it under the ban-
ner of revenge and in the name of justice. The first instance will refer us to “The Mouse-
trap” and the second to the cycle of revenge that underpins the whole play. Although the
play within the play, “The Mouse-trap,” is “the thing / Wherein [Hamlet]’ll catch the
conscience of the king” (3.1.79), it is equally the thing whereby Hamlet will free his
chained conscience from the horrors of an unjust revenge. More particularly, the play
within the play bears witness to Hamlet’s unwitting but active participation in the rep-
etition of an experience that cannot be understood under the aegis of the pleasure prin-
ciple. While it follows a lawful and truth-seeking logic, this trap-play is nonetheless
strikingly similar to the fort/da game described earlier. Like the child who remembers
the unpleasurable departure of his mother by staging it (through a game of disappear-
ance and return), Hamlet abides by the same Janus-faced logic. He, likewise, attempts
to stage the scene of his father’s assassination, not only because he is in search of a fail-
safe evidence of his uncle’s culpability, but also because enacting and repeating have
potentially become the only possible modes of remembering and of taking stock of his
father’s death. The next move—carrying out the task of revenge—would mean noth-
ing more than the materialization of the compulsion to repeat, the compulsion that
bedevils any act of remembering.
It hardly requires any further argument here to stress the implicit kinship
between the commandments of the ghost (to remember and to seek revenge) and
Freud’s own analytical insight into the confluence of remembering and acting out.
64 Mosaic 37/2 (June 2004)

Although the trap-play is actually a “false fire” (94), it unfolds not only a repetition of
an already accomplished act but also a rehearsal of another repetition, yet to come,
affirming thus the tight hold of the repetition compulsion. More disconcerting still, it
seems to me that the repetition compulsion has such an actantial leverage because—
by virtue of having moved Hamlet as well as the child in Freud’s essay from a state of
passivity (in front of his father’s death or his mother’s departure respectively) into one
of active engagement—it feeds on the powerful illusion of mastery over a situation to
which one is normally forced to submit.
At the end of Hamlet, the engine of repetition is set running at full entropic
throttle: Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes all die poisoned in just the same
manner that King Hamlet met his death. The litany of killings, while attesting to the
lethal handiwork of the mournfilling remembering and of the repetition compulsion,
becomes by the end of the play so ubiquitous that it hammers home homicide.
Instead of jolting us wide awake, the unremitting repetition of killings can, to use
Hartman’s succinct remark, shade off into a neighbouring “desensitizing trend, one
that keeps raising the threshold at which we start to respond” (qtd. in Zelizer 204).
Repetition leads to weariness and ultimately to indifference. Thus, from the actantial
level, we find ourselves right away at the level of affects.
Hamlet is incessantly exhorted by the ghost of his father to remember and to
wreak vengeance: he is repeatedly asked to repeat. In other words, he is confronted,
through the persistent uprisings of the ghost, not only with the tiresome reiteration of
the task he has to accomplish but especially with the fact that the task itself is but a
repetition—a killing that is to be enlisted within the abysmal and immuring gyre of
revenge. In the grips of these two sets of repetitions, Hamlet has oscillated dramati-
cally and quite erratically from indifference to melancholy to anxiety. First I explore
how repetition (here understood as the re-iteration of the task of revenge) freezes
emotional response (indifference), and, second, I account for the ways in which rep-
etition (here understood as an act of revenge) arouses melancholy and anxiety—two
disparate affects that I find strikingly fused in Hamlet and that I therefore blend under
the composite affect of melanxiety.

omewhat like Hamlet, who is repeatedly reminded by the ghost of the crime com-
S mitted against his father, we nowadays are—albeit in no need for a ghost to come
and tell us about the crimes of yore—all the more dependent on a ghostly complex
network of global communication implemented to ensure coverage and all types of
reminding of what might otherwise be consigned to oblivion. Everyday television
broadcasts of scenes of violence reminding us of present and past atrocities seem,
 Nouri Gana 65

however, when shown diurnally and untiringly, to numb our affective response.
Walter Benjamin has already warned against the “mechanical reproduction” of histor-
ical memory since it readily surrenders the “aura” and “authenticity” of the memory
reproduced: “The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and, of course,
not only technical—reproducibility” (220). The loss of aura, in Benjaminian terms,
would for those of us concerned with affects translate into the dissipation of affect—
the disposition to indifference, if not to affective foreclosure altogether.
No longer are we jolted wide awake, moved compassionately, or upset empathet-
ically by “the scrapbooks that are cluttered with snapshots of horror”; on the contrary,
like inebriates, we seem to have imbibed all intoxication of violence through the visual
until, after a prolonged diurnal sipping, we have become quite sapless and indifferent
to pain. Moreover, instead of virtually approximating the distance between us and the
scenes of horror, the screen seems to be like a veil interposed between us and what is
really going on in reality, thus emptying the real of its aural enormity. As such, “our
response to pictures of horror often produces [. . .] helplessness and indifference” as if
“the barrage of snapshots of atrocity [were] desensitizing us to the pain of others”
(Zelizer 203, emph. mine).
Frederic Jameson’s theoretical insights, in the first pages of his essay entitled “The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” are very much in synch with this desensitizing
effect of the visual outlined above. The loss of the “hermeneutic model of depth,” the
“waning of affect,” the “waning of historicity,” the waning of “durée and memory,”“the
disappearance of the individual subject,” and so on and so forth, are corollaries that
must be understood in the context of what Guy Debord had called the society of the
spectacle. Jameson would agree that the uncomfortable findings he reaches follow from
this age’s obsession with and overuse of photos and images as vehicles, not of remem-
bering, but of what Zelizer calls a “remembering to forget” (213). Because the visual
medium used to depict and broadcast horrors is precisely incompatible (“incompossi-
ble,” Derrida would interject) with the enormity of the reality portrayed, we can safely
ratify Jameson’s conclusion that we end up with images of a “deathly quality” diluted
of any effect or affect. Eventually, as Hartman has subtly put it, we keep raising the
threshold at which we start to respond.
The inability to respond is characterological of the indifferent. Response is
understood here in terms of the ability to take measures and to implement them: this
is effective response. Affective response, however, does not proceed by the same logic.
No response, while not being always an effective response, latches on as an affective
response. In special cases and particular places, indifference might be subsumed
under effective response—a response-less response—and it can be effective. In other
66 Mosaic 37/2 (June 2004)

words, indifference might precisely be a cloaked response there where response is (to
be) searched for and not (to be) found. The mask of indifference is the mask of
response that is the mask of affect. But to speak of indifference as a disguised response
has to do with strategic or tactical indifference, which is a minor concern of ours here.
We propose, however, to think about indifference as the locus of affect, as a masked
affect. One can posit that, in relation to Hamlet, indifference is an indifference to what
is to be done; it does not want in affect, however it might lack in effect. To be indif-
ferent is precisely to be “unpregnant of [one’s] cause” (3.1.78).
Indifference seems, if subsequently understood as a stupefied inaction, which is
more often the case, to have beset Hamlet intermittently during the procrastination
period. After all, to self-reflexively avow to be “unpregnant of [one’s] cause” testifies,
ironically, to being pregnant with manifest emotional latencies. Perhaps the discus-
sion sketched earlier around the visual has to be recast in a new light: perhaps the
visual—our modern adaptation of Hamlet’s ghost—has the tendency to unpregnate
us of, rather than to impregnate us with, our causes. By screening horrors for every-
body, the screen does not impregnate anyone with the cause(s); by resurging and
returning in its disembodied attire, the ghost forces a wedge of distrust in Hamlet’s
purpose or duty at the very same time it contracts him to it. In both cases, actantial
response melts into affective indifference. How can we now rethink indifference as an
affect in relation to Hamlet?
Two types of indifference can be traced in Hamlet: one relates to Hamlet and the
other to Claudius. In front of the resurgences of the ghost reminding him of the dou-
bly binding task—to remember and to seek revenge—Hamlet finds in intellection an
ally to indifference as much as he will temporally find in it an outlet to melanxiety. We
often come across a number of references similar to the conjecture that “the native
hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (3.1.82). These refer-
ences give indifference a negative connotation; it is deemed to bring thought to a halt.
Unlike melanxiety, which provokes thought, indifference seems to frustrate what
melanxiety is likely to instigate. By thinking too much on the event, Hamlet becomes
indifferent to it. Repetition is thought-provoking, but not when it grows murderously
assimilatory and casts its shadow on, or becomes cobbled together with, the act of
thinking itself. The repetitive re-visits of the ghost and the subsequent interpretative
entanglements with those re-visits have congealed the incipient melanxiety—origina-
tor of thought in the first place. Yet this does not lead one to think that indifference
stagnates and neutralizes the permanent flow of emotion; it only reduces its velocity.
In the face of the impossibility of taking action, response migrates to the stultifying
and muffling fog of indifference. Indifference becomes the habitat of a yet-to-be-born
 Nouri Gana 67

effective response. The incipient actantial response is an affective response.

In the case of Claudius, indifference attests—rather than to the waning of affect
—to a flight from affect, all the while being imprisoned in it. It is a self-conscious way
of regulating his responses to the lethal play of repetitions. Being himself a player in
the spiralling chain reactions of homicidal repetitions, Claudius discreetly cloaks
homicide in the veneer of natural death: “But you must know your father lost a father, /
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound” (1.2.37). Claudius is the exemplar of
someone who does not repeat because he represses (Freud, “Remembering” 150) but
who represses because he repeats (Deleuze, Difference 105). Trading on the “natural”
course of repetition (“whose common theme / Is death of fathers”), Claudius attempts
to pass over in silence his meddling with this perpetually repetitive course of nature.
Self-regulated and self-regulating, the perpetrator is most often the characterological
of the indifferent, the one who stymies the insurgence of affect so that the course of
sanctioned repetitions might trail one another. Indifference becomes then an instance
not of an absent but of a repressed, or disabled, emotion.
Unlike Claudius, who readily endorses and adjusts himself to the logic of repeti-
tion, Hamlet revolts against repetition: the whole inaction period is a mulling over the
uncanny nature of repetition: “What may this mean, / That thou dead corse, again in
complete steel” (1.4.48). Generations of Hamlet’s critics have reproached Hamlet for
his inaction while they should have reprimanded him for having to act at all. Worse
still, some have even been disturbed by the “intellectual inability to act” while they
should have delighted in those moments in which Hamlet questions the veracity of
the ghost—instances that could have potentially led to the questioning of the very
premises of revenge.

y virtue of its temporal hold, indifference is likely to segue into a more power-
B ful and composite affect—melanxiety. In the course leading to revenge, Hamlet
has oscillated between indifference and melanxiety. While indifference constitutes
the affective apparatus that has sustained the procrastination of revenge, melanxiety
offers Hamlet the occasion to fend off the tyranny of the task at hand by giving in
to a runaway intellection on such vexing issues as time, memory, the ghost, and her-
itage—all of which constitute multiple entries to and sustaining elements of
melanxiety.
Hamlet does not reckon with physical time. He finds it hard to determine
whether his father has been dead for “two months,” “a month,” “a little month,” or
simply “within’s two hours”:
68 Mosaic 37/2 (June 2004)

HAMLET: But two months dead, nay, not so much, not two.
[. . .]
Must I remember? Why, she should hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on, and yet, within a month—
[. . .]
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body. (1.2.38, emph. mine)

Followed later by: “Hamlet: What should a man do but be merry, for look how cheer-
fully my mother looks, and my father died within’s two hours” (3.2.89, emph. mine).
At face value, Hamlet is calculating how much time has elapsed since his father’s
death. Deep down, he is turning the screw of time: he moves from “two months,” “a
month,”“a little month,” to “two hours,” and is thus absorbed in a psychic activity that
distends and closes recessively, blurring the shreds of physical time in the process. It
becomes more appropriate to say that Hamlet is emotionally feeling the time span
between his father’s death and the present moment. He lives in the event-lag, in that
liminal arena in which one is suspended at the threshold of reality and under the
shadow of the past.
Hamlet’s inability to live in physical time—and to locate the past in its anterior-
ity to the present, or in what Jean-Paul Sartre calls “static temporality”—is buoyed by
his willingness to selectively remember and to selectively forget. James Hammersmith
rightly points out that Hamlet’s “cult of remembrance abolishes time, or, rather, what
we ordinarily call time becomes measured in events, not in minutes and hours and
days. Past and present become one in memory” (598):

Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records
[Here Hamlet’s politics of memory is indissociable from a politics of amnesia]
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix’d with baser matter. (1.5.53)

The act of remembering distends and contracts elastically such that the past in question
becomes virtually the here and now. While one might concede that, given time, every-
thing fades and slips out of the net of memory into the maw of oblivion, one should
by the same token remember that memory is potentially what makes time fadeless.
Memory is at the origin of the impasse of a past that will not pass. In Bergsonism, Gilles
 Nouri Gana 69

Deleuze articulates this potentiality, or eventuality, of memory in a very compelling

way: “How would a new present come about if the old present did not pass at the same
time that it is present? [. . .] The past would never be constituted if it did not coexist
with the present whose past it is” (58–59, emph. Deleuze’s).
Thanks to the elasticity and flexibility of memory, the past cannot be precluded
from stretching its shadows at will on the rack of the present. Hamlet is constantly
perturbed and befuddled by the ruses of memory, by “how long” it takes for the mem-
ory of someone to consummate and exhaust itself—to melt away into Lethe: “So long?
Nay then let the dev’l wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables. O heavens, die two months
ago, and not forgotten? Then there is hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half
a year” (3.2.90, emph. mine). If the act of remembering implies, as Deleuze argues, re-
living “immediately” the past in the present, and, if “each present goes back to itself as
past” (Bergsonism 95), would it ever be possible for Hamlet to work through his
father’s death? More precisely, would it still be possible to speak of mourning once the
engine of remembering is running at full throttle?
The injunction to remember and the exhortation to mourn both feel, in the final
analysis, very abusive. The behest to recall the past and the necessity to wrench one-
self free from its clutches are two incommensurably unsettling tasks. They have always
been so for Hamlet, even before the resurgence of the ghost:

QUEEN: Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off,

And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy father in the dust.
Thou know’st ’tis common, all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
HAMLET: Ay, madam, it is common.
QUEEN: if it be,
Why seems it so particular with thee?
HAMLET: Seems, madam? Nay, it is, I know not “seems.” (1.2.36, emph. mine)

This exchange between Hamlet and his mother attests to Hamlet’s bracketing of the
“common” and ritualistic “mourning duties” that his mother and his uncle incited him
to perform wisely and moderately. Trading on his taming tactics, Claudius leaves no
stone unturned to shy Hamlet away from a “peevish opposition” to reason, to nature
and to heaven, “whose common theme / Is death of fathers” (1.2.37). What is more,
Claudius hastens to urge Hamlet, in a now quasi-Freudian therapeutic gesture, to with-
draw his cathexes from his father and to lavish them on him: “think of us / As father”
(1.2.37).
70 Mosaic 37/2 (June 2004)

The act of remembering does not guarantee, as Freud prudently shows, the ful-
fillment of mourning, since mourners oftentimes “abuse the licence to be ill”
(“Remembering” 152) and find, in the otherwise temporary aggravation of mourn-
ing, “a welcome excuse for luxuriating in their symptoms” (153). The phrase “luxuri-
ating in their symptoms” can be understood as a prescient allusion to Hamlet in
whom Freud sees, in a later essay (“Mourning and Melancholia”), the exemplar of the
melancholic. Yet, while mourning has started its work prior to the resurgence of the
ghost, the process of luxuriating in it becomes explicit mostly after the return of the
ghost. This is, perhaps, the ghost effect. For the return of the ghost is also a return of
memory rather than a willed return to memory.
While the return to memory is a deliberate process of bringing back what is past
and reliving it contemporaneously with the present, the return of memory is quite an
external and uncontrollable process that interrupts the course of what might other-
wise be a normal process of mourning. How can Hamlet host the ghost of his father?
How can he host a return of memory while he is in the midst of a return to memory?
But, first, what is a ghost? Marjorie Garber postulates that a ghost is “a cultural marker
of absence, a reminder of loss” (300, emph. mine). In his “Notes on the Phantom: A
Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” Nicolas Abraham argues that the phantom
is but the “invention of the living” and is therefore a marker not of the dead or the
absent but of “the gaps left within us by the secrets of others” (171).
While Garber associates the ghost with a trans-historical absence, Abraham sees
in it the symptom, as well as the effect, of the sedimentation of a transgenerational
family secret. According to Abraham, the secret has to be decrypted before full exor-
cism of the ghost can be fulfilled, since the ghost is but the encryption of that—the
secret—of which it is the symptom. In the same vein, LaCapra proposes a therapeu-
tic strategy that proceeds by circling the downspout of absence. For LaCapra, while
absence pertains to “an absolute that should not be fetishized such that it becomes an
object of fixation, and absorbs, mystifies, or downgrades the significance of particu-
lar historical losses” (702), loss pertains to a “historical past,” to the “losses that may
be narrated as well as [to the] specific possibilities that may conceivably be reactivat-
ed, reconfigured and transformed in the present or future” (700). LaCapra delivers
cautionary advice against the unwitting conflation of absence and loss since such a
tendency might lead, if it bleeds over into an act of hypostatizing particular historical
losses and converting them into constitutive absences, to the aporia of interminable
mourning and infinite melancholy. Meanwhile, LaCapra encourages the conversion
of absence into loss whenever loss returns as a phantom, masquerading as absence:
“Specific phantoms that possess the self or the community can be laid to rest through
 Nouri Gana 71

mourning only when they are specified and named as historically lost others” (712–
13). LaCapra is clearly proposing a treatment based on a verbal or linguistic remapping
of phantomatic upsurges, whereby phantoms are nailed down as specific objects or
persons before they are compromised through mourning.
Yet how can we convert an ontological absence into a suffered loss? What is
absent cannot be lost, because it has never been possessed in the first place unless in
ˇ ˇ points out, “what we never possessed can also never be
its very loss. As Slavoj Zizek
lost, so the melancholic, in his unconditional fixation on the lost object, in a way pos-
sesses it in its very loss” (660). Thus, while LaCapra tries to find a way to surpass the
impasse of interminable mourning by urging us to convert absence into loss, Zizek ˇˇ
contends that not only is that impossible, but also that the commitment to loss is an
ennobling melancholic attachment.
The ghost, however, is neither absence nor loss but repetition without origin. The
ghost’s first coming coincides with a coming back; its first appearance is a reappearance
and its very first apparition is a repetition. Moreover, since its first coming is a second
coming, and so will be every subsequent coming, one might be warranted to relate it
to what LaCapra calls “historically lost others” to specific dead beings. Yet to confer on
the ghost the quality of “being” might open up the wedge to the suspicion that there is
“being” there where no “being” could be found. “Being,” then, becomes nothing less
than a prospect or potentiality for “non-being.” If every being moves incessantly toward
non-being, what is so special, then, about the resurgence of the ghost of Hamlet the
father? Why is Hamlet the son startled by the sight of the non-being while it structures
his being as such? Here we cannot overlook Freud’s breakthrough into the question of
the uncanny. The uncanny, for Freud, is an effect of a long-standing process of repres-
sion of and alienation from that which defines who we are, be they desires, drives, or
non-beings.
The sudden resurgence of non-being can be understood, then, in terms of a will-
to-the-uncanny, a will to distance ourselves gradually but steadily from what is other-
wise constitutive of our being writ large. Sartre is very explicit on this issue: “The
bond between being and non-being can be only internal. It is within being qua being
that non-being must arise, and within non-being that being must spring up; and this
relation cannot be a fact, a natural law, but an upsurge of the being which is its own
nothingness of being” (172). From this perspective, Hamlet’s recoil in the face of the
ghost attests to his alienation from the non-being inside his being. This is under-
standable since to ponder on the non-being inside being rouses, whether in Heidegger
or Freud, anxiety, and calls for immediate repression.
Hamlet’s endless mourning and seamless attachment to his dead father—the
72 Mosaic 37/2 (June 2004)

being that is no longer one—has not at first been compounded by the horror of bodily
dissolution and ghostly returns. It was not until the return of the ghost that his melan-
cholic attachment to his dead father came to be infused by doses of anxiety. Melan-
choly as a constant and loyal attachment to non-being, to what no longer is, harbours
within it the psychic seeds of anxiety inasmuch as any person’s melancholy attach-
ment to non-being, to loss, is ineluctably supplemented by a certain measure of angst
at the prospect of him or her becoming the non-being, the being-into-loss.
The ghost comes as the lack, the vacuous, the incorporeal air, and the void that
recuperates and salvages loss, only that it comes back bereft of, rather than carrying,
the lost object. If the ghost’s primordial act is to convert loss into absence—to recap-
ture, as it were, a lost body through its shadow—then this disembodied body is ulti-
mately what fills the reservoir of memory. Memory becomes, thus, to borrow Beckett’s
priceless insight, the place where “there is no lack of void” (42). Although Hamlet’s mem-
ory suffers no lack of void, Hamlet himself threatens to become the engineer of void:
“Still am I call’d. Unhand me, gentlemen / By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets
[hinders] me!” (1.5.50, emph. mine). The gravedigger scene is a revelatory occasion
where Hamlet, in the words of Hammersmith, creates a “verbal ghost” out of the skull
of Yorick. Yet the statement “I will make a ghost of him” is filled with devotion to
ghosts as much as with a lurking horror at the ineluctable modality of ghostliness
under which one must return after bodily dissolution. Killing is not so much a nulli-
fying act as a re-play, a repetition of an impossible ending—a function of iterability.
It is this awareness on the part of Hamlet that has resulted in the procrastination of
the act of revenge. If to die is to pass to the “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
[boundary] / No traveller returns,” then, it must not have escaped Hamlet’s “mind’s
eye” that the ghost, this being that is not one, this nothing, is so far the only traveller
who keeps returning.
Whether it is a reminder of loss, a marker of absence, or a sheer repetition, the
nothing is all there is for the melancholic to hold on to. It is the only way of ever pos-
sessing the lost object that the ghost dissimulates—the only way of not killing it again,
were that possible at all, in the name of mourning. Yet this melancholic and persist-
ent attachment to the nothing, which exceeds the desire of recovering (from) it, can-
not fail to evoke the latent threat that inhabits melancholy: by virtue of his fixation
on the nothing, the melancholic enters into his own nothingness, and sees his own
dissolution materialize before his eyes. It is this latter realization that translates into
anxiety, thus leaving the subject labouring under the composite affective modality of
melanxiety. Melancholic attachments to loss serve to reveal the latent structure of
anxiety that must always accompany, or supplement, those attachments. Anxiety
 Nouri Gana 73

reveals the excesses of melancholy and brings to the limelight the ambivalence (attrac-
tion/repulsion) of the survivor’s relation to the lost love-object. As Martin Heidegger
states, “the nothing itself does not attract; it is essentially repelling”; and “Da-sein
means: being held out into the nothing” (103).
Hamlet becomes anxious in the face of the ghost, this nothing whose first appari-
tion is a re-apparition, a coming back—a repetition. Subsequently, anxiety becomes
also anxiety in the face of repetition, in the face of the task at hand—killing and engi-
neering ghosts. Before concretization, if at all, repetition rouses anxiety and fear over
an immanent as much as an imminent recurrence, because killing Claudius will not
result so much in ending his life as in interrupting it, consigning it thus to a repetitive
ending, a perpetual ghostly recurrence. The fear to repeat is, moreover, precisely the
fear of repeating oneself as a ghost, not only in Abraham’s sense of becoming the tar-
get of a runaway transgenerational chain of killings but also in the sense of becoming
the ghost. It is this same fear that structures Paul de Man’s definition of prosopopoeia
as a trope whose symmetrical logic plays off the personification of the dead against
the reification of the living.
Bringing back the dead to life “cannot fail,” in de Man’s idiom, “to evoke the latent
threat that inhabits prosopopoeia, namely that by making the dumb speak, the sym-
metrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck
dumb, frozen in their own death” (78, emph. mine). If the ghost is to be seen as an oper-
ative prosopopoeia, a conferment of a voice and a face upon an absent entity, then such
an operation must also be seen as taking place to the detriment of the living.
Prosopopoeia is the figure of melanxiety par excellence. It blends neatly the melan-
cholic look back on death and the anxious anticipation of one’s own death, that is, it
merges neatly the melancholic orphic gaze and the anxious neck-craning, sheep-like
stare at the unknown. Prosopopoeia is an open invitation to the Hamletian crucible.
Melanxiety, as an affective dynamic, is, it bears repeating, anchored in the har-
bour of memory and is set in full throttle by a combination of factors: an emotional
conception of time, the return of the ghost, and the weight of inheritance. Of course,
Hamlet’s tragedy would not have been a tragedy were it not to have taken place before
his coming to the world. It is as if the heritage is there, already in place, waiting for
Hamlet to come and carry it on his shoulders. Or, is it rather that the heritage is
passed over directly from the old to the young? Here, it is very apt to remind ourselves
of what King Lear has to say on the subject: “’tis our first intent / To shake all cares
and business off our state, / Confirming them on younger years” (1.1.102). Since King
Lear wants to crawl toward death unburdened by regrets for not having finalized
some of his projects, he consoles himself by the self-deceptive contention that he
74 Mosaic 37/2 (June 2004)

would do that for the sake of the “younger years” who are badly in need of a chance
opportunity to prove themselves. On the other hand, Lear’s words give the impression
that the elders are so jealous of the young that they want to flood them with as much
unfinished business as to sap their strength overnight. In short, the predecessors seem
to be always in search of ways to trick posterity.
King Hamlet himself is not, if we adopt Abraham’s “The Phantom of Hamlet,”
exempt from this general transgenerational plotting. Indeed, Abraham’s sequel to
Hamlet presents the ghost of the dead king as a malicious spirit that “returns to haunt
the witnesses and to entrap them in fatal snares” (201). In his “Notes on the Phantom,”
Abraham propounds that, while “all departed may return, [. . .] some are destined to
haunt: the dead who were shamed during their lifetime or those who took unspeak-
able secrets to the grave.” Accordingly, “what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left
within us by the secrets of others” (171). These postulations suggest that the younger
generations have to answer to a sphinx, to the warden of the secrets that their pre-
decessors have unconsciously transmitted to them. Only those who manage to expose
the unspeakable secrets of their predecessors will be able to dispel into forgetfulness
the phantomatic haunting that will otherwise plague their lives. Like Freud’s primal
scene, one might want to add here, such exposition of secrets will have to proceed by
constructing them in the first place. And such a construction is anchored in the
dynamic of melanxiety precisely because it involves not only the melancholic attach-
ment to phantoms of lost others but also the anxious reflection on the repercussions
of “violating,” perchance, “a parent’s or a family’s guarded secret” (174).
If, as King Lear intimates, every old generation wants to crawl unburdened
toward its death by plaguing the younger generation with a weighty burden, then
Hamlet’s burden is his as much as it is everybody’s. One is always belated to one’s
predecessors and as such irrecoverably destined to live within that condition. One is
thrown into the world and has thus to cope with the harsh realities preceding and fol-
lowing such a birth-throw. Worse still, one cannot possibly overcome one’s belated-
ness: as long as one remembers, one cannot but live in a “time out of joint”: a time in
which, as Derrida argues in Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourn-
ing, and the New International, “Anachrony makes the law” (7) and “the future is its
memory” (37).
All boils down to the aporia of mournfilling remembrance. It is in this spirit that
we should understand Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. Saddled by an oner-
ous heritage, Hamlet curses the elements and entertains suicide (“O cursed spite /
That ever I was born to set it right” [1.5.56]). Having survived the end of his father’s
life, an end that has not been one since the ghost has come to interrupt it, Hamlet is
 Nouri Gana 75

bathed in melanxiety about the fact that while everything is ending (precisely while
everything keeps ending), no end seems to be conceivable at all. Committing suicide itself,
rather than offering Hamlet the opportunity to end his life, will only toss him in an
undiscovered country from whose boundaries travellers keep returning. While he melan-
cholically craves for a sleep-like death, he anxiously recoils in the face of the unknown,
the event and its aftermath, namely the return as ghost that he might succumb to:

HAMLET: To be, or not to be, that is the question . . .

To die, to sleep—
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. (3.1.82)

If we abide by Freud’s conclusions in “The Ego and the Id” that the melancholic tem-
perament verges on suicidal intents, then Hamlet is here within the grips of melancholy:
his identification with his dead father is such that it has veered into a consuming desire
to join him in his death.

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of? (3.1.82)

The melancholic yearning for death is not a pure affective state since it encom-
passes an insurgent and therefore incapacitating structure of anxiety. The shift from
entertaining death to apprehending it, that is, from melancholy to anxiety, is so subtle
and seamless (as will be better demonstrated in the following quote), that it might go
unnoticed, with the result that, while some critics would speak about anxiety, others
would speak only about melancholy. For us, the affective modality of melanxiety, as a
transactive emotional dynamic, cannot be overstated:

HAMLET: O that this too too sallied flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst [self-]slaughter! (1.2.38)
76 Mosaic 37/2 (June 2004)

Melancholy and anxiety are here presented as two yoked-together emotions, part and
parcel of a structure of affects in which melancholy is conditioned by, as much as it
conditions, anxiety. While melancholy is the shrinking back into the past, anxiety is the
leap into the future, and, while melancholy is marked by the immanence of non-being
inside our being, anxiety is dominated by the imminent certainty of death. These two
disparate affects codetermine Hamlet’s constant interrogation of the task of revenge at
hand: his loyalty to the dead, to accomplishing their commandments, is constantly
scrutinized and measured against the prospects awaiting him. To wreak vengeance is,
as I have argued earlier, precisely to re-produce a ghost. Once we re-produce a ghost,
how can we be sure of our immunity from ghostliness? Indeed, Hamlet himself has
apparently entered into his own lack, his own ghostliness. Ophelia’s portrayal of
Hamlet draws him close to the ghost: “Pale [. . .] As if he had been loosed from hell”
(2.1.59).

ather than transforming lack and absence into loss, the melanxious, assisted by
R ghosts, is weaned on absence. The loved object is not lost; on the contrary, it is pre-
served and salvaged in the reservoir of memory, the repertoire of lack itself. Rather
than, as it were, emptying lack by striking an attachment with another object, the
melanxious is as much unwilling to relinquish an aboriginal and ontological af-filiation
with the already lacking object of desire as afraid of experiencing another lack. In
other words, the melanxious is not someone who is devoted to lack (melancholic), but
also afraid of it (anxious). This combination of attraction and repulsion, of loyalty
and dread of loyalty, is the quintessence of the melanxious. On the other hand, the lost
ˇ ˇ goes on
object is not only originally lacking before it is translated into loss, as Zizek
to say, but it also returns as an incarnation of lack, as presence in its very absence. For
the melancholic, to convert or translate the phantom (i.e., absence) into loss is one
step, as LaCapra argues, toward working through, yet the re-emergence of loss as lack
undermines any hope of recovery, and condemns the survivor to a state of forbidden
mourning.
Small wonder, then, that Hamlet’s imagination quailed before the apparition, the
nothing, in horror at the prospect of becoming it, of dying and returning as a ghost.
The melanxious is someone who embraces nothingness all the while dreading it. This
ambivalence, native to Hamlet, has always been overlooked, as the tendency has been
to see Hamlet either as melancholic or anxious, which itself attests to a misunder-
standing of the fluidity constitutive of emotions. Melanxiety is a combination of a
pensive mood with an overwhelming sense of apprehension, fear, and angst at the
threat of repetition and at the self-doubt about one’s capacity to cope with it. Hamlet
 Nouri Gana 77

is not only contemplative, meditative, and pensive (i.e., melancholic), but he is also
apprehensive (i.e., anxious) over an impending or anticipated disaster of revenge. He
is held out into the dynamic of melanxiety.
In the grips of the onerous double bind—to remember and to take revenge—
Hamlet becomes a receptacle of contending forces: a plaything of the compulsion to
repeat, of affective indifference, at times, and of the tightening hold of melanxiety, at
some other times. Most dreadfully attended, thus he remains, and the remainder thus.

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NOURI GANA is working on Narrative Mourning, a book-length study of the question of mourn-
ing at the intersection of modernism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. His
most recent publications—on such diverse figures as Joyce, Freud, Derrida, Gadamer, Dworkin,
Said, Kristeva, and on such interdisciplinary subjects as literature, psychoanalysis, deconstruction,
law, hermeneutics—have appeared in such journals as American Imago, Études Irlandaises, Law and
Literature, Theory and Event, and College Literature.