I think it is worthwhile to return as many times as it may be necessary the suicide of Ophelia in Hamlet Shakespeare. First, because this piece is commissioned works that tell us much about our existence. But also because Lacan has made a long comment in his seminar Anxiety in 1958.
The famous Ophelia drowns under a willow tree. His death was first presented as an accident, she slipped from the tree while she wove a garland. But worms [1] following maintain any ambiguity about the reality of his suicide:
"His clothes were opened
And like a siren for a time they reach;
But she sang flanges old tunes,
Insensitive to his own distress,
Or like a creature born in this element
And made to live. But soon
His clothes, heavy with what they had been drinking,
drew the unfortunate these melodious songs
To muddy death. "
Ophelia was "insensitive to his own distress, she did nothing out of the water. Ophelia, the prototype of femininity which the substance is passivity? Ophelia is left she sink? This has the appearance of an accident. But the common interpretation is to say that this is a suicide. In its negativity, do nothing, it remains a voluntary act. It is a positive act, is nothing to make the act of doing. An active abstention that reverses the appearance of passivity. Wrong track, then. Which indicates a false passivity rather a real act.
is the classic example of Durkheim about the proxy in suicide. Is a suicide, the act of the person who allows himself condemned to death. It is not the executor, but he committed suicide anyway. This recall only that the agent can to sever the action.
Doubt settled soon. "Or" as belonging to water, Ophelia sang? Water, the element for which Ophelia is naturally formed. Ophelia had a destiny for which "we" had formed. Water.
Like a fish whose natural environment is to breathe in water or any marine animal that can not live without water. Ophelia was a stranger on earth. She returned with his family. Ophelia was not home at the court of Hamlet. She was not there as ambassadors of those countries abroad visiting his neighbor. The diplomatic visit ended, she returned. Rather
ambassador, Ophelia is a new siren. A fish whose body and appearance is that of a woman. A fish that sings elsewhere, this is the case of Ophelia.
A quick glance at Wikipedia can immediately rectify the meaning of that term. A mermaid is a fish whose natural environment is water! It's a bird!
The siren is a creature half bird, half woman, who sings lead for the sailors to drown. In mythology Greek, they are several, three or more.
One of them is Leucosia , the white, like Ophelia's poem Rimbaud [2] . In this poem, Ophelia is even more obviously a siren and ghostly floating:
"White Ophelia floats like a lily, Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils ... - We hear in the distant woods mort.
more than a thousand years sad Ophelia Has passed, ghost white, long black river, over a thousand years her sweet madness Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze. "
Odysseus goes into the house of Hades, death, to give burial to his friend Elpenor. In doing so, the troop "dies twice while the other men to die once." They die like all men by losing a body, the imaginary death. They also die in oblivion, they are deleted from the spirit and memory of men, symbolic death. For it is impossible to revive the dead. It's suicide to try to live what died.
On the way back, Ulysses will encounter sirens that can prevent it from returning with his family, among the living, "around a large pile of bones and skins of men rotting . That is to say in a grave, a heap of garbage, what he and his friends can become. They face real death, dislocation in pieces scattered. The "desert of the real" Matrix [3] .
Odysseus does not want its sailors know what the sirens sing and their ears. Ulysses is doing an anti Antigone. It acts like her to give sepulture to be dead. But he refuses to take the consequence. He refuses to know what this means unlike Antigone who bears the consequences of his act. Both face the masters. Ulysses was madness to think he can escape.
sirens sing the promise to teach them what life ("We know, indeed, all that the Achaeans and the Trojans have suffered at the great Troy by the will of the gods, and we also know everything that happens on Foodland "). At the end of his journey, Odysseus has lost all his fellow sailors.
There is an adult interpretation of the text of Homer which claims that it is the equivalent veiled prostitutes who stand on the shore. This would subsequently, in the folklore that the sirens would become fish, remaining halves of women. Then they are immortal. For two centuries, they have fun in the water. Then, bored, they feel alone and trying to seduce a human being to be loved.
More interestingly, in West Africa or India, the siren is a god almighty, creator of the human world. Mami Watta , the mother-water, water-mother of all things, is represented as a beautiful woman brandishing snakes. 
Very interesting, exciting even for a psychoanalyst. Let us recall the comment of Freud's Medusa's head, the head of a woman surrounded by snakes which represents castration. Well, the sirens too!
In the Odyssey of Ulysses, this figure exists, but is separated from the sirens. It Skylla "which roars and whose voice is as strong as a lion. It is a prodigious monster, and no one is happy to have seen, not even God. She has twelve feet misshapen, and six necks out at length his body, and every neck is attached a horrid head, and every mouth full of black death there is a triple row of teeth thick and numerous. "
Ophelia returns the siren to know that mortal men should not know without dying once. She is the incarnate mystery of that knowledge. The mystery as to why she sings. Let us remember, "or" insensitive to his own distress, "or" as a creature naturally formed for water, an essentially floating in the eternal and the immortality of the sirens. Suicide, Ophelia is reduced to singing like sirens. It is pure object representing the voice castration closely associated with the second death. The real death in which everything dissociates, where what is assembled and scattered falls apart.
Lacan showed that object which had been hitherto poorly preview. In the seminar "anxiety", he comments on the practice of shofar. The pure materiality of the voice of the real father, the God of vengeance Moses ordered the latter to kill his son for no reason other than his own will. The superego in what he real. For
sirens, the object voice is seductive, it leads immediately to the person who hears the second death. It is a fact that tells us the clinical psychosis. The subject feels haunted "already dead". He who hears a voice has already been drawn into the second death by sirens.
But another question remains for small Ophelia: her death is a "muddy death". Or muddy depending fangieuse translations ...
Following the next issue!
[1] - Shakespeare, Hamlet, Tragedy , NRF Gallimard, Paris, 2002 929
[2] - Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - 1891), Poems (1895), Ophelia (1870)
[3] - the term used early in the film when the characters come out of the womb, that is to say the symbolic life to be discarded as Odysseus in a spectral world. S. Zizek, Welcome to the desert of the real! , Paris, Flammarion, 2005
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