Abstract

Reflecting on the debts collected by Shoshana Felman's work, within the theoretical contexts of the time in which the 1977 Yale French Studies issue of ‘Psychoanalysis and Literature’ first appeared, this article takes as its point of departure Lacan's analysis of Hamlet's father as the barred Other, focusing on Hamlet's ‘complaint’. The nature of the complaint is then explored in relation to various writers and thinkers — Rilke, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, among others — and more specifically via a reading of François Roustang's La Fin de la plainte, and his own interpretations of Freudian narcissism. Scanning the wreckage for which the little narcissists are responsible, the article aims to give more insight into the structuring principles of those who whine incessantly.