Derrida's Hamlet

Derrida's Hamlet Christopher Prendergast (bio) Beyond all the sound and fury (which continues even now beyond the grave, in the crasser forms of obituary-speak), there are, at a very general level of reflection, three emphases in Derrida's work that have mattered to me, and which I still carry with me. The first has to do with the rebarbative notion of différance, the notion that being is never present to us, which I take to be first and foremost a reflection on the irreducible temporality not only of being, but also of our categories for thinking about being. The second turns on the view that everything human is problematic for the rest of human time. The third concerns the paradox of the notorious "undecidability" hypothesis, which, whatever it may be taken to mean, never meant exemption from the requirements of decision-making. These emphases have been glossed in numerous ways, none ever far from controversy. In this brief notice I would like to run them through a particular source, in which, in their own terms, they are all to be found: Hamlet, and the reading of Shakespeare's play that occupies the first part of Spectres of Marx. What is Hamlet doing in a book about Marx and ghosts—both Marx's ghosts (the famous spectre mentioned at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto) and the ghosts of Marx (broadly, what Derrida means by the "legacy" of Marx, as the constant returns of a kind of spectre in the midst of the contemporary neoliberal victory)? How is it that Derrida, citing an essay by Blanchot, in which Blanchot uses the expression "since Marx," can add that Blanchot's "since Marx" could easily have been "since Shakespeare"? Broadly speaking, the answers have to do with two interconnected, deep-structural and persistently recurring preoccupations of decon-struction: ontology (the philosophy of Being) and justice (the sphere of the politico-ethical); both these preoccupations assembled, or rather disassembled, in an overarching category that Derrida calls spectrality, the spectral nature of all our constructions (including the Marxist construction) of being and justice. Nietzsche claimed in The Birth of Tragedy that the essential point about Hamlet is not—as in the standard view—that he thinks too much, but that he thinks too well; he is unable to act not because of a contingent psychological infirmity, but because the sheer lucidity of his thinking corrodes the ground of all possible action in a End Page 44 world dominated by an instrumental logic of ends and means. Hamlet, according to Nietzsche, sees into the nature of things, beyond local manifestations of injustice, some particular crime (Claudius's) or form of corruption ("something is rotten in the state of Denmark"), to something askew in the world itself, something radically and incorrigibly out of joint. How then might we carry this over to Derrida's Spectres of Marx? What, from the point of view of deconstruction, would it mean to think too well? What is it about Hamlet that lends itself to a Derridean model of lucidity? This is certainly not the point of view of philosophy as classically conceived, or, in the terms of the play itself (a point Derrida makes much of), the point of view of the "scholar" ("Horatio, thou art a scholar. Speak to it"), that is, the regime of conceptual enclosure or grasping (in the dual sense of German Begriff, meaning both concept and grasp, active in, for example, Hegel and Heidegger). We can get a handle on what this means, on why Hamlet is exemplary for Derrida, by way of two aspects, or two motifs of the play. They are, first, the "figure" of the Ghost, and second, the notion of Disjointure, the image of a world out of joint: "The time is out of joint, O cursed spite that ever I was set to put it right." Both these motifs converge on the ontological and the ethico-political, the metaphysical realm of being and the historical realm of justice. The figure of the Ghost is the principal focus of the first of these two categories. The Ghost in Hamlet is distinctly Shakespearean. There is no ghost in the...