Patrícia Vieira and Michael Marder In LA Times, review Stay, Illusion! by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster
According to the two authors, the tragedy of Hamlet (and that of the modern subject) is that he is trapped in an unsustainable situation.
On the one hand, “Hamlet does not accept what is,” including the death of his father, his mother’s likely betrayal, and his uncle’s usurpation of the throne. On the other hand, he is unwilling to act in order to change the rotten state of things.
In a nihilistic dead-end, he loses his foothold in the present and forfeits a different future. That is why he announces his death thrice before he actually joins the “pile of corpses.” The entire play, then, unfolds in the delay between a de jure death of the subject and the body’s de facto transformation into a corpse.
Before going any further, we ought to ask, “Why Hamlet?” Why not, for instance, add an “Oedipus doctrine” to the Oedipus complex? The key difference between ancient and modern tragedies is that in the former tragic heroes recognize the catastrophic nature of their condition belatedly, while in the latter anagnorisis (or recognition) is present from the beginning.
In contrast to ancient tragedies, where action unfolds — whether consciously or not — in pursuit of knowledge, modern drama evinces the paralysis of action by an excess of knowledge. The more one knows the worse off one fares, realizing one’s impotence to change the current state of things. Knowledge and its pursuit are devoid of meaning because they do not lead anywhere, or better, they lead to a nihilistic Nowhere.
Nihilism is the outcome of Hamlet’s collision with the unadorned, raw reality of his father’s murder, which provokes an intense feeling of disgust in the son. As in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Real harbors a traumatic core, unmediated by subjective representations. If Hamlet is the typical (or prototypical) modern subject, then his nihilistic disgust cannot be explained away by an individual pathology.
Even assuming that his violence, his response in kind to his clash with reality, is “the violence of failed mourning,” the failure must be one we all share with the tragic character.
What would successful mourning look like in a place where the very possibility of working through trauma is precluded by a sober view of history as a pile of corpses? (Just think of Benjamin’s Angel of History, who sees “one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin” instead of a mere succession of events.) What can we do before we are swept into the pile? How to respond to nihilism?