Desire & the Symbolic (4)

From Slavoj Žižek's How to Read Lacan (First published in the UK by Granta Publications; page numbers here refer to the edition published in New York by W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), pp. 34-36:

Because of this gap, the subject cannot ever fully and immediately identify with his symbolic mask or title; the subject's questioning of his symbolic title is what hysteria is all about: 'Why am I what you are saying what I am? Or, to quote Shakespeare's Juliet: 'Why am I that name?' There is a truth in the wordplay between 'hysteria' and 'historia': the subject's symbolic identity is always historically determined, dependent upon a specific ideological context. We are dealing here with what Louis Althusser called 'ideological interpellation': the symbolic identity conferred on us is the result of the way the ruling ideology 'interpellates' us--as citizens, democrats, Christians. Hysteria emerges when a subject starts to question or to feel discomfort in his or her symbolic identity: 'You say I am your beloved--what is there in me that makes me that? What do you see in me that causes you to desire me in that way? Richard II is Shakespeare's ultimate play about hystericization (in contrast to Hamlet, the ultimate play about obsession). Its topic is the progressive questioning by the king of his own kingship--What is it that makes me a king? What remains of me if the symbolic title 'king' is taken away?

I have no name, no title

No, not that name was given me at the font,

But 'tis usurp'd: alack the heavy day,

That I have worn so many winters out,

And know not now what name to call myself!

O that I were a mockery king of snow,

Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,

To melt myself away in water-drops!

In the Slovene translation, the second line is translated as: 'Why am I what I am?' Although this clearly involves too much poetic license, it does convey the gist of the predicament: deprived of its symbolic titles, Richard's identity melts like a snowman's in the sun.

The problem for the hysteric is how to distinguish what he or she is (his true desire) from what others see and desire in him or her. This brings us to another of Lacan's formulas, that 'Man's desire is the other's desire.' For Lacan, the fundamental impasse of human desire is that it is the other's desire in both subjective and objective genitive: desire for the other, desire to be desired by the other, and, especially, desire for what the other desires.