{"id":12333,"date":"2013-11-28T11:22:30","date_gmt":"2013-11-28T16:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=12333"},"modified":"2013-11-28T12:30:57","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T17:30:57","slug":"critchley-stay-illusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/11\/28\/critchley-stay-illusion\/","title":{"rendered":"critchley stay illusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Patr\u00edcia Vieira and Michael Marder In LA Times, review Stay, Illusion!<\/em> by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster<\/a><\/p>\n

According to the two authors, the tragedy of Hamlet (and that of the modern subject) is that he is trapped in an unsustainable situation.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, \u201cHamlet does not accept what is,\u201d including the death of his father, his mother\u2019s likely betrayal, and his uncle\u2019s usurpation of the throne. On the other hand, he is unwilling to act in order to change the rotten state of things.<\/p>\n

In a nihilistic dead-end<\/strong>, 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 \u201cpile of corpses.\u201d The entire play, then, unfolds in the delay between a de jure<\/em> death of the subject and the body\u2019s de facto<\/em> transformation into a corpse.<\/p>\n

Before going any further, we ought to ask, \u201cWhy Hamlet?<\/em>\u201d Why not, for instance, add an \u201cOedipus doctrine\u201d 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<\/em> (or recognition) is present from the beginning.<\/p>\n

In contrast to ancient tragedies, where action unfolds \u2014 whether consciously or not \u2014 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Nihilism is the outcome of Hamlet\u2019s collision with the unadorned, raw reality of his father\u2019s murder, which provokes an intense feeling of disgust in the son. As in Lacanian psychoanalysis<\/strong>, the Real<\/span> harbors a traumatic core, unmediated by subjective representations<\/span><\/strong>. If Hamlet is the typical (or prototypical) modern subject, then his nihilistic disgust cannot be explained away by an individual pathology.<\/p>\n

Even assuming that his violence, his response in kind to his clash with reality, is \u201cthe violence of failed mourning,\u201d the failure must be one we all share with the tragic character.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Angel of History, who sees \u201cone single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin\u201d instead of a mere succession of events.) What can we do before we are swept into the pile? How to respond to nihilism<\/strong>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Patr\u00edcia 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, \u201cHamlet does not accept what is,\u201d including the death of … Continue reading “critchley stay illusion”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-critchley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12333"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12338,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12333\/revisions\/12338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}