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saddude69 · 5 days

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Death and Repetition: An Anarchist Analysis of Hamlet (rough draft 3)

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to develop an anarchist critique of Hamlet, weighing how authoritarian or anti-authoritarian the play is, through various philosophers and psychoanalysts. Anarchy is a word which means an- (no) + -archy (rulers), as opposed to hierarchy, or hier (holy) + archy (rulers). It was actually a term that, according to anarchist historian Zoe Baker in her PhD thesis Means and Ends, was used against anarchists. This paper is written from the perspective of a libertarian socialist, which is what any anarchist who believes in social development, as opposed to ones who do not believe in social development, such as some more extreme versions of individualist anarchism. When I say anarchy in this paper, I do not mean a universal word, but rather the non-fixity of things in general, and the non-fixity of “human nature” and the ability to construct a more equitable society, which Zoe Baker admits is not supposed to be perfect. As for Hamlet, his behavior is at once Oedipalized and anti-Oedipalized, under both anarchy and hierarchy; at times Hamlet himself will say he’s not mad, “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw,” or he will say he is mad, and that the cause of his madness is because of Ophelia: “Go to, I'll no more on't! it hath made me mad” (Act 3 Scene 1 line 1835). It is noteworthy that when he says he is mad, it is because of Ophelia, but when he says he is not mad, he is talking to his male “friends” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Drawing on theory from anti-authoritarian author Gilles Deleuze, this paper hopes to address this quasi-psychosis, and this quasi-neurosis, with Derrida’s notion of différance. Differance describes an impossible duality that escapes any particular fixed representation, but instead is what happens when you cannot hold opposing dichotomies at once and what you are left with is something which is both familiar and unfamiliar.

This paper will take place in several interconnected sections. First, I will establish what the difference of Hamlet’s desire is, and why he cannot be classified as a psychotic or neurotic, because he says and does contradictory things which do not make one fall neatly into a representational dichotomy of psychotic and neurotic, but instead is better represented by Derrida’s concept of difference. I read difference as synonymous with Lacan’s real, and Heidegger’s “possibility of impossibility” in death, which is synonymous with Lacan’s Das Ding. I will show how through the impossible, which is represented by the ghost, Hamlet reaches a point where he is de-Oedipalized from the kingdom, to the point where he can perform an insurrection to overthrow the king, but he is still Oedipalized by patriarchy. Then I will explain how Hamlet is deterritorialized from the Oedipal order of the kingdom through the partial object, in the hauntological repetition of his father’s ghost; connected to the bits and pieces of his father, which is why the ghost is not part of the Oedipal machinic order of what Fredy Perlman calls the “Leviathan,” the polity of Denmark and its kingdom. Finally, I will explain why Hamlet’s sacrifice is not comparable to an act of what “Walter Benjamin” called “divine violence,” who I attribute to Arron Bushnell, who this paper is dedicated to, for sacrificing his life for the people in Palastine.

Death, anxiety, Das Ding, the Death Drive, and Divine Violence: Is Hamlet an authoritarian?

The notion of death in this paper comes from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, which is what I refer to when I speak of the “possibility of impossibility” (310), meaning that one recognizes one’s possibilities of no longer being a possible thing. Hamlet witnesses his own father’s ghost; it speaks to him and says, “mark me,” like how one marks something in their memory; let me leave a mark, the ghost says, which is an impossible act for a ghost (Act 1 Scene 5 Line 1). Unlike for Heidegger, death represents itself as a literal figure in Hamlet’s father to show the way that death appears as a repetition of the death drive. This point about repetition has already been made by the theorist James Martell, but he had not attempted to make the point connected to Hamlet’s de-Oedipalization, or explored the potential anarchist implications of the text. I will also be drawing on the notion of the “crack,” drawn from the book Deleuze and Lacan, a Dysjunctive Synthesis. The crack is the idea that instincts congregate around the crack’s negativity, and it is synonymous with the death drive, or repetition compulsion. This paper applies this notion of the crack to Hamlet’s heart, which at the end of the play, it is declared, is broken (V. 2.361). This paper will attempt to use this theory to express the Deleuze and Guattarian elements of Hamlet, to try to make an interpretation of the play that neither fully rejects nor fully embraces Hamlet as an anti-authoritarian figure. Hamlet takes down the monarchy, but it appears he does it for selfish reasons, simply for revenge for his father’s death.

Hamlet, as a play, has a protagonist who is pretty much just a rogue monarch. It is hard to make an anti-authoritarian argument about a guy who abuses his friends and family , especially the one who he occasionally says he does or does not love. At first in the play Hamlet appears to not be interested in Ophelia saying “I did love you once” and “I loved you not” (Act 3, Scene 1, Line 108); but then as soon as she dies, he begins to show that he had feelings for her “I lov’d Ophelia” (Act 5, Scene 1, 276). His treatment of Ophelia is not critical of his power over her; therefore, Hamlet cannot be looked at as an anarchist role model. He is rather someone who performed an insurrection; but it was not an act of what Walter Benjamin would call divine violence, an act which does not uphold the law of the state (as the state’s violence is termed mythical violence) and expresses a will to sacrifice oneself. Divine violence is akin to a religious ritual in that it expresses a profound belief, and it does not uphold or reinforce systems of power. Hamlet did sacrifice himself, though he may have been on a suicide mission, as he expresses early on that he wishes to dissolve himself (I.2.127-130). Even if his mission was to dissolve himself, he says explicitly that he is doing this for the ghost of his father. Previous author James Martell expresses that Hamlet has multiplicities of people inside of himself, like Deleuze and Guattari express that they are a group bigger than two because they have many multiplicities inside of themselves. Hamlet’s father is one of these multiplicities. It repeats in him, returning as a ghost of the past.

The crack in Hamlet’s heart: A split between the global person, and the partial object voice.

The crack that is difference itself forms a web of negativity around which instincts congregate, representing the death drive - this is the crack in Hamlet's heart which Horatio speaks of, however, it is not in time like that which whips and scorns Hamlet (I.2.127-130). It is rather in the immemorial time of difference, which is the crack of Hamlet's heart which was already formed when he began to desire the possibility of impossibility, and experienced as though it were his own words, words from his own memory. It is différance, unable to express neuroticism or psychoticism, but still representing a monarchy which has its roots in patriarchal norms, which Hamlet nonetheless embodies. Hamlet's desire is différance, or an impossible duality between insanity and sanity. He expresses many schizoanalytic symptoms of insurrectionary behavior, de-Oedipalized by himself as his father the ghost.

Hamlet is his father; his father is an impossibility, which appears to Hamlet as the horizon of his own possibility. He replaces the memories of his past with that of his father (I.5.98-103); this is an act of Hamlet’s. Max Stirner has the notion of a spook in The Unique and Its Property, and if one is spooked, then one is inauthentic in a Heideggerian sense. Hamlet saw his father speak to him, and he replaces the memories of his father with his own. Yet, the memories of his father are his own; but Hamlet seems to take them as something other than himself. If you take a ghost as something other than yourself, then you are spooked, because it is scary to think that such a phenomenon came from something other than you. But if you realize that ghosts are not real, then you are not spooked. Hamlet seems spooked by the ghost of his father; he cries out “dear god!” when his own father speaks to him (Act 1, Scene 5, Line 24). His father warns him that he cannot tell him things about where he has been, as they would drive Hamlet mad. This shows that the anti-Oedipal authentic self, negotiates among social norms, and directs the pathways of one’s desire, which is unconscious and prior to conscious perception through the semiotics of the recording surface on Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs which is the recording surface of the flows and partial objects that make the first synthesis. The partial object, which comes from within Hamlet as a voice, from within the caverns of hell, as his father’s voice does appear disembodied as a partial object in several moments in the play, during the scene where they swear the oath to the dead king and the ghost yells “swear” (1.5.155). Kenneth Brannagh interprets this voice as literally coming up out of the ground, as a sort of explosion in his uncut film adaptation of Hamlet. This voice is the partial object, and flow, of the global person of the father, repeating itself through Hamlet, but it is not connected to a global person who is composed of a multiplicity of machines at all times.

This is not a Hegelian negativity, in which oppositions form out of a dialectic of negation and the negation of negation, forming a sublation in a progression; but rather a negativity which forms out of difference, on which rhizomatic and arborescent intensities form.

Anti Oedipalization and Hamlet’s phenomenological mood

Hamlet's de-Oedipalized actions may be looked at as his authentic attempts at overturning the monarchy, but he procrastinates like a neurotic procrastinates. He could have killed the king at many points. There is a sort of dignity in the whole thing; Hamlet and Laertes end up drawing swords, but beneath the veneer once again there is trickery. There is trickery, assumedly, from the ghost. There is ambiguity which comes with the father; such is the role of the superego, the big other, and neuroticization in general. The father comes from the land of the dead; it is the id which forms the superego from past experience, as a reaction formation to offensive stimuli. The signifier comes with both Oedipalization and the death drive, to which the dead perform their repetition. The jaws which open up (Act 1, Scene 4, Line 50), could represent how the father comes from within as a sort of verbal authority, ambiguous in its character, which in its proximity to the uncanny “das ding” brings with it a mood of anxiety which shapes the disposition, both in being, and towards the father and death. Das Ding can be thought of as several things - the real, jouissance, proximity to the mother – the closer psychologically one is, the more anxiety there is – this is due to the mother being the fantasy of full enjoyment, or the thing that the baby thinks it would have that would make it stop crying. For Hamlet, das ding, since it is synonymous with the real, is this différance which is an impossible duality of the familiarity of the father, with the haunting and uncanny unfamiliarity of the ghostly partial object of his father’s voice. The anxiety he receives from the proximity of his father’s ghost is because it brings him into close proximity with the fantasy he has of the full enjoyment of the monarchical, patriarchal family structure.

There is a stain on Hamlet’s conscience, caused by the father’s voice; a stain in the scopic field, which is the split between the eye and the gaze, the gaze coming from the father, not from the superego, but from a partial object, not fully coupled to the global person of the leviathan, and its family structure, and its hierarchical structure and capture of the wealth of society. The ghost of Hamlet’s father, itself, is not a global person. This is what causes Hamlet to become detached from the seemingly normal social order. He says that he hopes to postulate a speech about “what majesty should be” (2.2.86) – Polonius implies that Hamlet is not driven by himself, noticing that Hamlet is not corresponding 1-to-1 with the given social order, which constitutes the inauthentic they-self of the big other of the kingdom, constituted by the discourses and facticity of the time. Hamlet does actually use the word discourse to discuss reason, and this is in line with a Lacanian reading of authenticity in the sense that Hamlet is making mistakes by not corresponding with the social order, as opposed to looking at Hamlet as saying yes to difference, and no to the given social order, which is what Hamlet is doing. Polonius says things like how Hamlet “a happiness that often hits on, which reason and sanity could not prosperously be delivered of.” Basically, because being a part of society’s coherent discourse means that one is a part of the subject, in a Lacanian sense, what is outside of the subject, is individuality, uniqueness. Polonius gives the reason that sounds a lot like the diagnosis of melancholia, saying that he descended into madness because of his grief (Act 2, Scene 2, 156-160).

Fredy Perlman describes a leviathan, based on Hobbes’ Leviathan, as a worm, excreted from those in power, whose entrails is the means of production, that expands via war and conquest, and conquers people via internalization of societal masks and armors; the alienation in which we cover up our potentiality, and in turn we are nothing and captured by the corpse of the leviathan. Hamlet is what Perlman would have probably called an “armored man.” Hamlet seems to affirm that he thinks the king is a “thing of nothing” (act 4, scene 2), implying that the king’s potentiality has been ceased, and is now part of the armor of the Leviathan, which has captured libidinal flows, and directed them towards its ends, as people under the Leviathan are nothing in a Sartrean sense. Hamlet represents someone who is part of society’s machinery, but this hauntology, as Martell describes it, is a recurrence of the past, not through ontology but through hauntology. Hamlet is haunted, or “spooked” as Stirner would say, by the kingdom; his potentiality of living outside of life captured by a machine, has been ceased by the impossibility, in his own mind, of living beyond the Oedipal relationship and simply not caring about the monarchy anymore. His entire project is driven by monarchy, not a desire to end domination over others, but for revenge as Hamlet professes is his intention (act 1 scene 5 line 30).

Hamlet's mood is shaped by the loss of his father, circumspectively speaking. He is lamenting the loss of his father. He looks at the world in a mood in which the world unfolds itself to Hamlet as not for opportunities for peace, but opportunities for revenge. He sees the attunement of the world in terms of a garden with weeds to be rid. He feels this way towards his uncle. In the mood of anxiety, in which Hamlet withdraws from the they, into the impossible duality of psychotic and neurotic. Madness for Horatio is desiring without reason (1.4.76). The sovereignty of reason is something which breaks down for Ophelia, while Hamlet seems to say he is both sane and insane at differing moments. This shows how in Hamlet, desire, and its pathways are not Oedipalized under monarchy, although Hamlet, with his own institutional reason, transposes a template of the rational woman, as one who grieves for enough time, onto his own mother. He calls her a “beast a beast that wants discourse of reason, would have mourn’d longer” (1.2.150). Hamlet, in spite of the différance of his desire, acts as an anti-Oedipal deterritorialization of the incestuous order of the kingdom.

Law and majesty, Medieval Machines

Majesty upholds the law, while madness is a tautology, madness is madness (II.2.92), for Polonius. Polonius is Laertes and Ophelia's dad, whom Hamlet kills. Polonius's words represent the words of a father who Oedipalizes his children into the ways of the monarchy. His verbal commands contain the instrumental, and mechanical quota, by which libidinal energy is paid, through the territorialized, not yet deterritorialized flow of capital under capitalism. Hamlet, though represents something of a subversion of reason, a subversion of monarchist, kingly style desire orientations. Machines for Guattari, still can form in times long past, as he says in his book on Schizoanalytic cartographies. So we can look at the monarchy as a sort of territorialized despotic signifier. Hamlet, even though he is deterritorialized by the crack in his heart, and the différance of his impossible, coherent, yet psychotic desire, is still neuroticized by patriarchal norms, and he is still a figure of monarchy. He carries out his father's deed because he is still Oedipalized under the previous king, but he questions this.

But consider the impossibility of Hamlet's father's existence. For Heidegger, when we die, we face the possibility of our own impossibility. Hamlet's father's ghost was an impossible occurrence, a group fantasy for Horatio, Hamlet, and Marcellus, and the lack of restraint in Hamlet's actions could literally be interpreted as Hamlet's lack of prohibition in killing Laertes, Claudius, and Polonius – this translates to the name of the father being usurped. In being himself his father, the group fantasy of Horatio and Mercutio, he has taken his own prescription that of himself as father, without the prohibition of the state, or the authority of the present monarchs. So on the one hand, Hamlet says yes to his own father, he says yes to the impossible, a projection of himself, onto himself, of his father, as himself. I do not mean to imply that somehow there is an ontological father in Hamlet, rather that Hamlet's desire comes from nowhere, nothing, death as the possibility of impossibility. Hamlet's circumspective being towards death makes his words “to be or not to be,” an expression of the revolution of modernity. Impossible being, as a question, différance, being which cannot be contained in a nutshell, but must expand, having no boundaries inside or outside of the nutshell. Hamlet says that his ambition cannot be contained in a “nutshell” (II.2.256-258)

Hamlet's ambition cannot be territorialized, because of his "bad dreams." Dreams are a window into the ID. If he is speaking about his encounter with his father, then he is speaking about the repetition of the death drive, the eternal return. If we take a Freudian reading of

the play, what is unfolding in the hallucination scene is an Oedipal fight for the mother, Das Ding. He chooses to sacrifice desire, hope, ambition, for his father's revenge. Hamlet replaces all memories of a peaceful past with the thought of revenge for his father. Ophelia mistakes this desire in Hamlet, which has driven him to a state of emergency, in which the garden in which the incestuous seed has been planted, needs desperately to be weeded (1.2.135). He flies into a rage at this garden, which emerges from the crack in his heart, on which instincts congregate. Hamlets instincts are telling him, in what Lacan calls a battle of pure prestige, ripping off Kojeve's interpretation of the master slave dialectic, to battle with Laerties and show, as one must know if one has read the Master Slave section of the PoS, that the battle was to show that one cares about one's life less than the other. They are more willing to risk it, in the fight to the death. But there is no dialectic which progresses past the initial battle of master slave, we do not progress into stoicism, skepticism, and the unhappy consciousness, but rather we are in a conflict with the other.

Conclusion

The other, for Hamlet, in Lacan's view, is Ophelia. The object petit a, which appears at one moment as one thing, and then as another thing at another moment. The barrier to full enjoyment. Ophelia seems to show real symptoms of a melancholic, as she succumbs to her withdraw, she feels numb to the world, whereas Hamlet is exuberant, he is not a melancholic. He is someone who, driven not by a dialectical core, not one which forms something new after it passes the master slave, but rather the immemorial time, which is the pure difference of sense which precedes logical, representational time. It is in this time in which Hamlet has been thrown, it is this différance, in which Hamlet's desire embodies the psychotic and the neurotic, undermining the monarchy, only to have a different monarchy come and take over. Hamlet is at once an authoritarian in the way he imposes his will on Ophelia, and he is someone who if it were not for the death of his own father at the hands of another monarch, it is not clear that he would not have become a monarch himself. His act of destined revenge seems to have landed him only with an unfortunate end in death, and with Fortinbras and his army coming to re-Oedipalize the play. From an anarchist perspective, of equality, unity, and fraternity, Hamlet does not come close.

When it comes to tearing down a whole family for its incestuous marriage and murderous deeds, Hamlet can be seen as a sort of anti hero, who neither embodies someone who in his acts of murder attacked someone who in anarchist terms may be someone good to target – the monarchy, yet on the other hand he is doing it because of a king who literally came too him from hell, and said soon he will be cast back to the flames (Act 1 Scene 5 Line 3). Hamlet, like his character expresses with his madness and non madness, shows someone who is not in any way a clear cut “good guy” or “bad guy” or authoritarian or anti authoritarian. That is why it is no surprise to this writer that Hamlet has not been written about very often in terms of anarchism, as he represents, for the most part, I’d say he’s a patriarchal, likely future monarch had it not been for his father’s murder, and I see no reason to believe that Hamlet could someone represent an anti authoritarian figure, let alone someone who would represent “good praxis” as putting on a play for someone to show them you’d suspicious of an act they did is not exactly a subtle way to savatage the bourgeoisie. Nonetheless, Hamlet represents a moment in time, when the monarchy was able to be overthrown via play, but it shows that the play could scarcely imagine a world beyond hierarchy, as the past monarchy was replaced with Fortinbras and his army of Britain.

This paper is Dedicated to Aaron Bushnell. Aaron Bushnell’s act of divine violence challenged the American and Israeli leviathans and believed that we could envision a better future. Hamlet is not comparable to someone who lights himself on fire to end a war, Aaron Bushnell yelled out “free Palestine” when he died which is more than Hamlet ever did. Divine violence is when one challenges the law but does not reinforce it. What Hamlet is doing reinforces suppression over others. It is not an act which frees people, it is an act which not only ends people’s lives, it devalues his own. Aaron Bushnell did sacrifice himself, but that’s what divine violence is, is potentially self-sacrificing. Hamlet sacrificed himself for revenge, Bushnell sacrificed himself to end a war. That’s the fundamental difference between Hamlet and someone who is doing things for a cause.

#philosophy #existential #existentialism #atheism #society #morality #deleuze #max stirner #egoism #ideology

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