The Collapse of Public and Private Spheres in Shakespeare's _Coriolanus_

In Coriolanus-- a play preoccupied with posing the question, “what is political life?”—Shakespeare creates a portrait of a war-like civil state in which the public and private spheres are collapsed upon each other in unsettling ways. Coriolanus’ Rome is a realm where threats to the integrity of the state come from both external forces and internal strife, and where there appears to be no space for a separate domestic sphere. In the discordant juxtaposition of the public and private realms in I.iii and IV.v, the text implicitly calls into question the possibility of a successful integration of domestic and political life in a state obsessed with military honor.

A scene of exclusively female characters sewing within the private sphere in I.iii is constantly preoccupied with the military events that concern the political state . In a series of replacements and displacements, domestic life is invaded by the violent imagery associated with maintaining political power. During the scene’s opening exchange between Volumnia and Virgilia, there are two levels of replacement as Volumnia initially speaks of her son as if he were her husband, and then displaces the son-husband role for that of state soldier: “If my son were my/ husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence/ wherein he own honor than in the embracements of his/ love where he must show most love” (2-5). When Virgilia skeptically questions Volumnia’s preference for political honor over the life of her son, Coriolanus’ mother responds by, quite literally, replacing the role of son with the pride of military conquest: “ Then his good report should have been my/ son” (20-21).

At Valeria’s entrance at line 48, the domestic decorum with which the three ladies greet each other is starkly contrasted with the content of their subsequent conversation. While Valeria initially exchanges niceties (“ My ladies both, good day to you…How do both? You are manifest house-/keepers. What are you sewing here? A fine spot in good faith. How does your little son?” 48, 51-53), the conversation is immediately influenced by the violence of the war beyond the walls of the home. Volumnia describes Coriolanus son as preferring the “swords” and “drum” of the battlefield to his schooling (55-56), and Valeria likens the young boy to his father in relating the story of how he chased a butterfly before he “mammock’d” it, tearing it to pieces with his teeth (65). Here, the innocence normally associated with youth is displaced by violence, and in the likening of Coriolanus’ son to his father, we again see that the role of solider is superimposed on the domestic function of son. The remainder of the conversation as the women sew centers around news from the battlefield, and Volumnia and Valeria attempt to persuade Virgilia, “lay aside your stitchery” (69), in an effort to get Virgilia to leave the house with them. She ardently refuses, claiming, “ I’ll not over the/ threshold till my lord return from the wars” (74-75). Yet it is ironic that Virgillia rejects violating her domestic duty to observe events of the public realm, since it appears from the conversation of the three women in this scene that the private has already been invaded by the public, political sphere.





There is yet another level of replacement in I.iii that likewise conflates the domestic and martial domains. Volumnia and Valeria’s literary allusions, which implicitly compare Virgilia and to both Hecuba and Penelope, juxtapose motherhood and wifely duties with the violence of war. As Volumnia asserts the priority of military valor in a son, she cites the unsettling image of “Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood/ At Grecian sword” (42-43). While Volumnia seeks to convince and comfort Virgilia, this bloody image is instead disturbing, and it highlights the violence superimposed upon the domestic bonds of mother and son implied by Volumnia’s rationality. Valeria’s replacement of Virgilia for Penelope and the “yarn she spun in Ulysses absence” (83) also highlights that the private role of wife is encroached upon by the political demands of wars fought by one’s husband. Both allusions conflate the public and private in a way which underscores the collapse of the two spheres in this scene of the play.


In IV.v, the converse of this superimposition of the public over the private occurs at the camp of Aufidius’ troops. As Coriolanus approaches the camp he is warned to “avoid the house” (23), and the domestic is juxtaposed with the public as the hearth is simultaneously the physical site of a household feast and a martial outpost. More than this though, the interaction between Coriolanus and Aufidius unfolds as a displacement of the relationship between husband and wife. Aufidius greets Corilanous with a physical embrace, “Let me twine/ Mine arms around that body” (106-107), and then proceeds to describe his relationship with Coriolanus—less in terms of their mutual roles as soldiers—but more in comparing his relationship with the former to that of his love for his wife:“Know thou first/, I loved the maid I married; never a man/ Sigh’d truer breath; but that I see thee here,/ Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart/ Than when I first my wedded mistress saw/ Bestride my threshold” (113-118). When Aufidius relates his dreams of meeting Coriolanus in battle, the description is coded in sexual terms, as the Aufidius imagines the two warriors “Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat” (125).

The overt homoerotic undertones of Aufidius’ speech do not go unobserved by the servants still present on stage after Aufidius welcomes Coriolanus into the feast, and they complain, “Our general himself makes/ a mistress of him” (195). The scene ends in a similar conflation of sexual imagery and martial prowess that has been the subtext of the entire scene. As the servants discuss the advantages of war over those of peace, the second servant’s description of the advantages of war are imagined in terms of sexual potency: “as wars, in some sort, may be/ said to be a ravisher, so it cannot be denied but peace is/ a great maker of cuckholds” (227-229).

In both scenes, the public and private spheres become collapsed upon each other. In I.iii, conversations of the female characters are infiltrated by the war occurring outside the walls of the home. In a series of displacements, the domestic roles of husband, son, wife, and mother are constantly transposed on top of each other to reflect a preoccupation with the political valor of war. At the all-male battle camp of IV.v, a reverse superimposition occurs, as the roles of two soldiers are conflated with those of husband and wife in the speech of Aufidius. In these two scenes, the physical space of the play’s action, and what the audience expects to see occur, is contaminated by the pressures of a political life that does not allow for a separation of public and private spheres. This juxtaposition of domestic roles and the honor of military victory is related to the event that causes Coriolanus’ downfall and is the catalyst for the tragic ending of the play: Coriolanus’ subservience to his mother in V.iii. In this final conflation of domestic and political roles, because the two spheres have been mapped on top of each other, Coriolanus makes a political decision based on familial loyalty that ends in his own murder at the hands of the Volscian conspirators.

The text questions the relationship between the private sphere and political life and, in these examples, examines the consequences of a public realm in which the drive for military valor is conflated with familial duties and loyalty. If the body politic in Coriolanus is consistently figured as a diseased state, perhaps part of Coriolanus’ ultimate failure lies in Rome's continual conflation of domestic and political spheres in a political state that provides for no separation of public and private domains.

Notes on Derrida's _The Beast and the Sovereign: Vol I_

I have started wading through the recently published assemblage of lectures given by JD over the course of 2001-2002 collected in _The Beast and the Sovereign_ . The series of talks from this seminar mark a continuation of many questions Derrida had been probing in the final chapter of his career: questions of sovereignty, decision, animality, force, law, friendship, and –of course—the enterprise of a “deconstructive” reading and its (always tenuous, yet I think, always interesting) connection to the issue of the political. Even for a reader not convinced of some of Derrida’s more elusive ethical-political (non)concepts—for example the old “democracy to come” idea that makes critics such as Terry Eagleton cringe—I would find it hard for any careful reader not to appreciate the rigorous, intelligent and fascinating performance of close reading here (this, for my money, is what makes Derrida such an important thinker and keeps me coming back to his texts). Luckily, _TBATS _ is full of several of these moments. Derrida performs careful and enlightening readings of a constellation of texts that probe the relationship between “the beast” and “the sovereign”, and the animal and the human: from Arostotle’s _Politics_, to Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” to Hobbes’s _Leviathan_, Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, and Rousseau’s obsession with werewolves in _The Social Contract_.

Admittedly, I have only sampled about half of the lectures (the first, third, fourth, twelfth, and thirteenth sessions), but as is more generally the case, one can start to discern the general tenor of what JD is up to here. Beginning with La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb” in the first session, Derrida uses the figure of the wolf in this text to open a discussion about how in several early modern texts the wolf is a literary figure man uses to tell himself the “story” of the origin and nature of political life. The figure of this “beast,” or similar manifestations of this theme in Rousseau and Hobbes, leads Derrida to posit that “man” becomes the middle term in a triad with the “sovereign” and “beast.” Picking up on a common strand of questioning of these figures initiated by Carl Schmitt and Agamben, Derrida describes how both figures are positioned outside the law: the sovereign as “above” the juridical order via “decision” (think Schmitt here), and the beast remains excluded from the law since his life (here, we can think of Agamben’s “bare life” of the homo sacer that can be killed but not sacrificed) is not protected by the legal order. Derrida calls for a re-thinking of these terms that eschews the binary opposition between nature and culture, man and beast, and nature and law. Here, I think we can see a place where the deconstructive practice of breaking down binary oppositions has direct political implications, as Derrida uses this framework to make explicit comments in response to Chomsky’s recent (2000) Rouge States. In the same way that calling one a “beast” excludes them from legal right and the protection of human “justice,” to construct a political program that labels the Other in such a way, has devastating effects:

“the Unites States, which is so ready to accuse other states of being rouge states, is in fact allegedly them most rouge of all, and the one that most often violates international right…[it is] the most perverse or cynical armed trick…the most inhuman brutality” (19).

He highlights, only briefly, our country's recent involvements in the Middle East and asks (what he explicitly calls the “subject of our seminar”) what is the relationship between “war” and “terrorism”? With an identification of the other that follows this strict opposition of “just” and rouge states (in which the enemy is figured as “beast”) how can one ever discern the difference? What Derrida wants us to see, is that this supposed non-identification (something like, “this other, this enemy, is not like me, therefore is not protected by the same laws that protect me) is actually a manifestation of identification. That is ,while beast and sovereign appear to be diametrically opposed—the former being excluded from what is proper to man, the later being above this through his decision without ground—each need the other figure in order to constitute their identity, and both share the similar position of being beyond the legal sphere.

The third session contains a very interesting reading of Rousseau’s sort-of-obsession with imagining himself as a “werewolf,” because his intensive reading and intellectual pursuits leave him excluded from civil society. What JD is up to here, I think, is another way in which we see the figure of the beast figured as one excluded from human society, but implicitly and always tied to that society—it is the pursuit of knowledge (culture) that paradoxically leaves Rousseau rejected from human society. Here we see another instance of how Rousseau’s text (think here of Derrida’s laborious reading of Rousseau in _Grammatoloy_) evinces that a hierarchy of nature vs. culture is always fissured.

More interesting, perhaps, than this reading is the section in this session where Derrida complicates the distinction between dictatorship and democracy (via an explication of Schmitt’s “decision”), and makes explicit comments on why a political program based on “universal human rights” won’t work. It is worth quoting at some length:

“it is also in the name of man, the common humanity of man, the dignity of man, therefore a certain proper of man, that a certain modernity has begun to question, to undermine, to put into crises nation-state sovereignty…After having asserted that humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy at least in this planet. The concept of humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being…the concept of humanity cannot be a political concept or the concept for the basis of politics” (70-71).

What Derrida points out is the hypocrisy of imperialist missions (think, our own nation’s recent foreign affairs???) that operate under the umbrella philosophy of “spreading universal human rights,” which he sees an insidious act of cunning that allows “sovereign” states to treat the other as outlaw, in the name of a law only the former can enforce. I think the paradox is pretty clear: we treat men like “beasts” in a mission take them out of this “beastly-ness, ” in the name of a universal humanity. By identifying the other as less than human we claim to attempt to bring them up to the level of humanity, based on some universal humanity (which would ,in effect, be “natural”), though an imposition of specific cultural ideologies. Again, we see this dialectic between what is “nature” and “culture”—what is inside and outside—is ever-present. Derrida’s goal:

“a prudent deconstruction of this logic, and the dominant, classical concept of nation-state sovereignty…without ending up with a depoliticalization, a neutralization of the political, but with another politicalization, a repoliticalization that does not fall into the same ‘dishonest fiction’…a repoliticalizaton and therefore another conception of the political” (75).

Since a detailed explication of all of Derrida’s close readings and an elaboration of his major themes in these lectures ( I would suggest checking out JD’s ongoing critical dialogue with Lacan that he picks up in the Fourth Session) is far beyond the scope of this tiny blog, I would just also like to point out the (very fun) responses to Agamben that JD makes here (I think this is “fun” primarily because Agamben gives some--in my opinion of course—sloppy readings of Derrida and takes a few underhanded swipes at his corpus of work in _Homo Sacer_ and _State of Exception_, which I think belies the fact that he has simply not read JD carefully enough). In the third session, Derrida playfully remarks on Agamben’s constant desire to be or find “firsts” ( ie… “Schmitt was the first to do this”… “Arendt was the first who recognized that…”). We see Agamben complicit, then, in the tradition of a “metaphysics of presence” or a quest for an origin that we know Derrida will want to put into question. In the Twelfth Session, Derrida directly engages with the concept of “bare life” and the distinction Agamben famously draws between zoe and bios, and demonstrates how this strict binary that Agamben sets up will not hold. Gesturing back to his earlier comments on Agamben’s desire for “firsts,” Derrida points out how Agamben strangely omits Heidegger from his analysis. (We are not shocked, of course, that Derrida wants to bring ol’ Heideger into this discussion). Heidegger seems to avoid the strict dichotomy drawn between these two translations of “life” and what Derrida wants us to see is that Heidegger was on to the problem that an over- emphasis on rationality or biology (Kant’s nous and phenomena?) misses the humanity of man. The major issue Derrida takes with Agamben is his desire to term this “bio-politics” as a “modern” invention. For Derrida, this is the problem of metaphysics he has been throwing into question since the early writings—the problem with thinking the history of the event as a singular event, discreet and easily located on a linear temporal schema. While this aspect of Derridean thought is often difficult to get our heads around, what Derrida asks us to consider is that we need to re-think history as linear and that there can be one “founding decision.” In the experience of this doubt, then, we have a responsibility—a responsibility to question our own desire for this ground.

I might have more to say about this text later.

“Of inward selves make outward free ” : Hegel’s Beautiful Soul and Christ’s Non-Action in _Paradise Regained_

Since its first publication in 1671, critics have debated what exactly happens in Milton’s brief epic Paradise Regained. Scholars have especially found the poem’s climactic “pinnacle scene” problematic, in which Jesus refuses Satan’s temptation to prove his divine nature by risking his earthly body. At stake is the ambiguous relation between Jesus’ knowledge of his divinity and whether or not the hero’s action at the pinnacle reveals a truly human example of piety, or whether Jesus’ decision is informed by and guided by supernatural powers . Equally troubling for readers is the hero’s apparent non-action. That is, Jesus’ decision not to act throughout the poem has lead critics such as Northrop Frye to categorize Milton’s character as “a pusillanimous quietest in the temptation of Parthia, an inhuman snob in the temptation of Rome, a peevish obscuranist in the temptation of Athens.” Much critical attention lately has focused on offering possible solutions to this ambiguity of Milton’s treatment of Jesus as Theanthropos (“God-man”). Recent critical work has offered explanations of Jesus’ non-action in relation to Milton’s historical ties to the enthusiastic religious movements of the seventeenth century; his vexed affiliation with the defeated radicals after the collapse of the Good Old Cause; and Milton’s specific theological beliefs as evinced in religious tracts such as De Doctrine Christina. While these specific historical and theological relationships are of course important to bear in mind in any reading of Milton’s poetry, I would like to propose an alternate reading of Milton’s character of Jesus that situates the hero of Paradise Regained as a literary manifestation of Hegel’s concept of the “beautiful soul.”

Hegel introduces the concept of the “beautiful soul” in the final section of the “Morality” subheading in the Phenomenology’s description of “Spirit.” As a moment of the coming into existence of Absolute Spirit, the beautiful soul is a manifestation of the antithesis between thought and being, between immediate self-knowledge and external reality, and between pure internalized moral contemplation and its reciprocal actualization in the realm of finite human action. It is a form of moral consciousness that has absorbed a transcendental sense of duty into itself and it becomes a static and empty form of consciousness that refuses to commit to action. I read the conflict between internalized divinity and external action of Milton’s Jesus in Paradise Regained as one literary articulation of this phase of the emergence of Absolute Spirit. Such a reading is beneficial in both proposing a concrete articulation of Hegel’s concept the beautiful soul as he presents it in the Phenomenology , and in offering an original contribution to the ongoing conversation surrounding Jesus’ non-action in Milton’s ambiguous brief epic.

The beautiful soul is an articulation of “pure duty” that “retreats into itself, and is aware that being is its own self, in which what is actual is at the same time pure knowing and pure duty…and knows its immediate individuality to become pure knowing” (§632). In Hegel’s conceptualization, this is a “consciousness which thinks of duty and reality as contradictory” (§637). This “pure duty” is a wholly internal and solipsistic detachment from action in the world of external finite action. Hegel anthropomorphizes the beautiful soul as one who thinks, “ I act morally when I am conscious of performing only pure duty and nothing else than that; this means, in fact, when I do not act” (§ 637). As an “empty abstraction of pure thought” (§637),
“Its consciousness finds its truth in “the immediate certainity of itself” (§637), the beautiful soul divorces pure thought from being; or objective reality from subjective experience. As external reality and subjective relation to this finite world remain fissured, the “self does not attain to an actual existence. It lacks the power to make itself a Thing and to endure [mere] being. It lives in dread of besmirching the splendor or its inner being by action and an existence…it flees from contact with the actual world” (§658).

The internal condition of pure duty’s truth is an unmediated relationship to this mental law. As such, the beautiful soul’s attachment to pure duty is a “pure self-identical knowing…the absolute universal” (§639). As an abstract universal, the beautiful soul’s enslavement to pure duty is an articulation of its internal unity with a transcendent God: “The ‘beautiful soul’ is its own knowledge of itself in its pure, transparent unity—the self-consciousness that knows this pure knowledge as pure inwardness of Spirit. It is not only the intuition of the Divine but the Divine’s intuition of itself” (§795). However, the beautiful soul’s unmediated relationship with the Divine lacks the necessary antitheses attained through mutual recognition with another external to this self-consciousness. “Being-for-another”, or acting in the finite world of human action, would allow the beautiful soul to move out of the sphere of mere abstract universality by engaging with the human world of action (§640). Hegel writes that this moral consciousness requires a “moment of enduring reality, the moment of being recognized and acknowledged by others” (§ 640). For Hegel in the Phenomenology up to and including this section, we have seen that the dialectic of the emergence of self-consciousness moves from universal and unmediated identity, to a relation to and recognition in/of an external Other, followed by a return to that initial universality that now contains the previous moment of opposition and recognition in the Other. In the case of the moment of the beautiful soul, the infinite Divine has to recognize and be recognized by the finite world of human action in order to return to its universality in an experience that is no longer solipsistic and abstract.

This mediation between the finite sphere of human action and the beautiful soul’s abstract, immediate identification with the Divine is necessary in order for pure duty to actualize itself in reality. In order to complete the dialectic and move forward to a manifestation of Absolute Spirit, this moral consciousness must synthesize abstract dogma with practical moral action through the recognition of itself in the wholly Other. Yet the moment of the beautiful soul remains static:
Here, then, we see self-consciousness withdrawn into its innermost being, of which all externality as such, has vanished—withdrawn into the contemplation of the I = I, in which this ‘I’ is the whole of the essentiality and existence…what it is for itself, and what is for it intrinsic and what is for its existence, have evaporated into abstractions…consciousness exists in its poorest form, and the poverty which constitutes its sole possession is itself a vanishing. (§657)

For Hegel, the beautiful soul’s unwillingness to taint the purity of its immediate identification with the Divine leaves this manifestation of consciousness in a precarious position of possible total loss of self: “In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called ‘beautiful soul,’ its light dies away within it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air” (§658). Thus, in its refusal to tarry with external reality, the beautiful soul loses its being in- itself in its inability to enter into the fallen human realm of sin.






We see this moment of the beautiful soul in Paradise Regained, as Milton recounts the Biblically inspired story of Jesus’ temptation by Satan during his 40 days of fasting in the wilderness. The nature of Satan’s temptations continuously draw upon human weakness and natural impulses, especially the biological drive of hunger. However, Satan’s preoccupation with Jesus’ human needs and desires is in direct conflict with the hero’s habitual recourse to moral duty and an internalized direct relationship with Divine law. While Satan attempts to engage Jesus’ weakness as a human being, the real conflict remains in the realm of pure thought. From the initial invocation of Book I of the brief epic, Milton alerts his reader that the previous battle against evil manifest in his earlier Paradise Lost (1667), has now made a marked turn inward, shifting from the earthly world of Eden to “tell of deeds/ Above heroic” (I. 15-16). Jesus’ battle with Satan is not like the previous epic conflict of Paradise Lost, and the whole of the struggle is focused on the hero’s subjectivity, as in the real wilderness of the setting in Jesus’ conscience: “Into himself he descended” (II. 112).

The disparity between Jesus’ human and divine natures is continuously questioned by the infernal tempter. In Book I, Satan struggles to comprehend the dual nature of Jesus: “ Who is this we must learn, for man he seems/ In all his linaments, though in his face/ The glimpses of his Father’s glory shine” (91-93). In the poem’s final Book, Satan again skeptically questions the possibility that Jesus is singular in existing simultaneously as both man and God when he asks, “In what degree or meaning thou art call’d/ Son of God, which bears no single sense;/ The Son of God I also am or was” (IV. 316-318).

More than this though, Satan’s temptations and Jesus’ responses of non-action based on internalized moral duty evince this contradiction between the human and Divine. Capitalizing on his estimation of Jesus’ human hunger pains, Satan tempts Jesus, “ But if thou be the Son of God, Command/ That out of these hard stones be made thee bread” (I. 342-343). Jesus response negates his relationship to the fallen human world of biological instinct, and insists instead on a strict sense of duty to God’s law: “ Think’st thou such force in Bread? Is it not written/ …Man lives not by Bread only, but each Word/ Proceeding from the mouth of God” (I. 348-350). Similarly in Book II, Satan calls upon Jesus’ as a human subject “unknown, unfriended, low of birth,/ A Carpenter thy Father known, thy self/ Bred up in poverty/… Lost in a Desert here and hunger-bit” (413-416). After Satan tempts Jesus with wealth here, Jesus’ response again eschews the common human drive to garner riches--“ Extol not Riches then, the toyl of Fools” (II. 544)—and insists rather on a kingdom within, in congruence with his internalized and immediate faithfulness to moral duty:

…He who reigns within himself, and rules
Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King…
But to guide the nations in the way of truth
By saving Doctrine, and from errour lead
To know, and knowing worship God aright,
Is yet more Kingly, this attracts the Soul,
Governs the inner man, the nobler part,
That the other only ov’r the body reigns… II. 468-469, 674-679 [emphasis mine]

Here, and in other moments throughout the poem, Jesus evinces a direct, unmediated relationship with Divine law and a commitment to moral duty. He combats Satan’s temptations, “ The Law of God I read” (I. 207); consults only his own “ inward Oracle” in making his decisions (I. 463); completely abandons any human temptation of hunger when presented by Satan with a bounteous feast, because his “heart is set on high demands” (II.409); and decries the temptation of human knowledge as an “empty cloud” (IV. 321), because he has a immediate relation to the divine light of God’s knowledge, which transcends this fallen form of learning offered by the tempter.

Not only do Satan’s temptations highlight the disparity between Jesus’ as a human agent and his immediate sense of duty to himself as Divine, but the series of temptations leading up to the final enticement to prove his divinity through the sacrifice of his human body in the pinnacle scene are explicitly coded as temptations for Jesus to act. Whereas Jesus is continually represented as favoring passivity, temperance, and patience, Satan’s resolutions in the poem are specifically categorized by his decisive desire to act quickly and steadfastly. He advises his infernal counsel in Book I, “ And now too soon for us the circiling hours/ This dreaded time have compast, wherein we/ Must bide the stroke of that long threatn’d wound” (58-59). In Book II, he instructs (in marked contrast to the long debate with the fallen angels of PL Book II) that the fiendish angels have time for “no long debate” (95) and must act immediately, because “no time was then/For long indulgence to their fears or grief” (109-110).

Opposed to Satan’s repeated refusal of delay, Jesus’ responses to his tempter’s enticements highlight the hero’s refusal to act. Toward the climax of the poem, Satan questions Jesus’ repeated passivity and his refusal to be involved in the sphere of earthly action:

…thy Kingdom though foretold
By prophet or by Angel, unless thou
Endeavor, as thy Father David did,
Thou never shall obtain; prediction still
In all things, and all men, supposes means,
Without means us’d, what it predicts revokes. III.351-356 [emphasis mine]

Exasperated by the failure of each of his temptations, Satan grows more impatient as the poem reaches its close, and before his final attempt to force Jesus to act, demands proof that Jesus is the Theanthropos. He asserts that this final temptation will allow him, “Therefore to know what more thou art the man,/ Worth naming Son of God by voice of Heav’n” (IV. 539-540), and Satan’s conflation of “man” and “Son of God” here reinforces the ambiguity that runs throughout the poem and that will culminate in the climax to follow. His final enticement is for Jesus to prove that he is in fact the divine incarnation of God within an earthly body by destroying this human vessel, saving himself with his transcendent powers: “ Cast thyself down; safely if Son of God” (IV. 555-556). Milton describes Jesus immediate response: “ to whom thus Jesus: also it is written,/Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood” (IV. 561-562). Jesus replies by quoting the written word of God in his reiteration of one the Ten Commandments given to God’s chosen people. This response indicates his sense of duty and adherence to the strict letter of the law. But this seemingly external law, given to Moses in the Old Testament, I argue is evidence rather of his immediate Divine intuition, because when Jesus asserts, “Tempt not the Lord thy God,” it is unclear whether or not he refers to “God” as his father who has decreed this duty or to himself as the incarnation of the Divine in flesh. Like Hegel’s beautiful soul, Jesus refuses to enter the earthly realm of sin and will not act. He preserves his immediate relation to the Divine by refusing to taint his perfection through action in the fallen world. In the poem’s great paradox that has troubled critics for four hundred years, Jesus stands upon the pinnacle unmoved, and his ambiguous response does not prove either his humanity or divinity, because he refuses to engage with the Other in Satan. There is no mutual recognition or dialectic between the finite fallen world and the divine. Jesus remains unmoved and in strict opposition to Satan, who “smitten with amazement fell/…Throttl’d at length in the Air, expir’d and fell” (IV. 563,569).

In the Phenomenology, Hegel’s beautiful soul actualizes its purely internalized sense of duty through mutual recognition of its Other in external reality and the process of reconciliation and forgiveness. After this engagement with the Other through action in the finite world, the immediately divine returns to itself:

It returns from its external actual existence back into itself as essential being, and therein the universal consciousness thus recognizes itself. The forgiveness which it extends to the other is the renunciation of itself, of its unreal essential being which it put on a level with that other which was real action…Through this externalization, this knowledge which in its existence is self-discordant, returns to the unity of the self. It is the actual ‘I’, the universal knowledge of itself in its absolute opposite, in the knowledge which remains internal, and which, on account of the purity of its separated being-within-itself, is itself completely universal. (§670-671)

This “self-sundering or stepping- forth into existence” (§796) is the necessary step the beautiful soul must take in order to actualize what had previous remained merely abstract duty. Only in this way it “remains identical with itself, and, in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself; it is God manifest in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge” (§671) [emphasis mine]. Yet, in Paradise Regained this “self-sundering” does not yet occur. In the poem, Jesus remains static in the moment of moral consciousness Hegel calls the beautiful soul. This ultimate moment of God’s manifestation on earth in the Divine’s recognition of the fallen world of sin and the reconciliation of the two will only be possible in Jesus’ death on the cross which awaits. This is the crucifixion of Jesus foretold by the Father in Paradise Lost, Book XII as the culmination of synthesis between the transcendent and earthly that “Shall bruise the head of Satan”(430). It is only through the mutual recognition of the finite world of the flesh in Jesus’ death and his infinite divinity revealed through his resurrection that makes possible the ultimate act of forgiveness that Hegel describes as the appearance of Absolute Spirit.

However, for Hegel, all stages in the coming-to-be of Absolute Spirit are necessary, and I argue we can read this manifestation as Christ as “beautiful soul” as such a necessary moment that initiates the actual engagement with humanity that will culminate in the crucifixion and resurrection to come. After the fall of Satan from the pinnacle, Milton describes the subsequent actions of Jesus in specifically human terms. He descends to a bounteous feast which satisfies the hunger and thirst Satan attempted to exploit throughout the poem. Then, the celestial choir sings of Jesus’ humanity and his destiny to soon be fulfilled: “ Hail Son of the most High, heir of both worlds,/ Queller of Satan, on thy glorious work/ Now enter, and begin to save mankind” (IV. 633-635) [emphasis mine].

Thus even though the character of Jesus manifests an articulation of Hegel’s beautiful soul that remains static in its immediate unity with the divine and strict adherence to internalized duty in the action of the poem, Milton foreshadows the reconciliation of pure Divine thought and being that will occur in the reconciliation of mankind’s sins in the crucifixion. As a necessary phase in the emergence of God in Absolute Spirit, in the poem’s final lines Milton provides evidence that Jesus will exceed this static articulation of moral consciousness as he leaves the pinnacle to begin his work that will allow him to engage with the fallen world—not trough his divine intuition of abstract duty-- but trough his explicit humanity: “ hee unobserv’d/ Home to his Mother’s house private return’d” (IV. 638-639).

"To be or not to...Oh, what the hell..." : notes on divergent conceptions of death in Hamlet, V.i and V.ii

This basically an isolated close reading of certain lines from Hamlet V.i and V.ii, representing the VERY beginning phase of a longer project I am working on. I am interested in what I see as two competing conceptualizations of death as they are presented by Hamlet in the plays final act--death as conservative and linked to the earthly realm versus death as an absolute negation, the meaning of which falls completely in the transcendent dimension of the "beyond." I want to think about this juxtaposition within the larger framework of Hamlet criticism, but also in conjunction with some texts and ideas I have been thinking through lately: Hegel's distinction between "absolute" and "abstract" negation in the _Phenomenology_, Bataille's reading these points in Hegel in terms of "general versus restricted economy"; Derrida's reading of Bataille's reading of Hegel, and some thoughts on sovereignty and "decision" via Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Should be a breeze, right?...


I will refer to the understanding of death posited by Hamlet in V.i as conservative or regenerative, bound to the earthly order and preoccupied with sovereignty that is palpably human in nature. Following Hamlet and Horatio’s entrance upon the jovial debates of the gravediggers that opens the scene, the sight of Yorick’s skull incites a lengthy and somber meditation on the inevitably of death for every man, regardless of any individual’s terrestrial station in life. Musing on the inexorability of death each human faces, Hamlet puts down the skull of Yorick and addresses Horatio concerning the possibility of regeneration inherent in one’s death: “To what base uses do we return, Horatio!/ Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of / Alexander, till ‘a find it stopping a bunghole?” (V.i.202-204). While the sovereign station of kinship is debased in this juxtaposition with Alexander’s remains as filling a hole in a barrel, the emperor nevertheless is “conserved” as his earthly body returns to the earth to fill a present void (literally, the hole in the barrel is a concrete instance of lack or nullity). When Horatio protests that Hamlet is wasting time in considering this interpretation of death, Hamlet elaborates:

…Alex-
ander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth
to dust , the dust is earth, of earth we make loam,
and why for loam whereto he was converted might not
they stop a beer barrel? V.i.208-211

While Alexander’s kinship does not prevent him from escaping the natural force of death, the end of his earthly life does not thrust him into a state of absolute nothingness, but rather his remains are regenerative and actually supplement a hole, or figure of lack: the bunghole. Moreover, in whatever capacity the divine or non-corporeal soul of Alexander is severed from his earthly body, the body of the emperor itself returns back to the earth from which it came—“Alexander returneth/ to dust, the dust is earth”—and in this sense his death is both conservative and productive because “of earth we make loam.”

Hamlet continues:

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O that earth that kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall t’expel the [winter’s] flaw!
But soft, soft awhile, here comes the King,
The Queen and courtiers. V.i. 213-218

Another figure of earthly sovereignty is here invoked, that of Caesar, and again Hamlet imagines his corporeal body as replenishing a hole or void through that body’s conservative return to the realm of the terrestrial. It is significant that Hamlet has recourse to the heroic couplet form in this speech, as the structure of the verse in lines 213-215 mirrors the recursivity Hamlet attributes to death.

That is, the couplet form implies a sense of movement within bounds and a meticulous balancing of meter that is further regulated by the constraints of an aabb rhyme scheme. The second line of each couplet is thus dependent upon, and reminiscent of, the line that preceded it. The verse produces coherent meaning—and there is movement—but it is movement that plays upon the relationship of sameness and difference; it is a recursive movement, a conservative movement. As the body of the two earthly kings perish but return in a different state to fulfill new earthly functions, so too does the couplet form manifest this constrained and conservative movement that is balanced, yet contains variation within that very balance. This somewhat symmetrical description of the ways in which the earthly bodies of sovereigns are regenerated through the natural process of earthly decay and reproduction is broken off though, with the physical entrance of the actual kingly body that preoccupies Hamlet’s thought throughout the play—Claudius.




This version of death is sharply contrasted in the following scene, the concluding scene of the play, and once again is elucidated in a conversation between Hamlet and Horatio. After a messenger has delivered the news of the impending dual to be fought between the prince and Laertes, Horatio advises Hamlet to decline or postpone the battle, dissuading, “ You will lose, my lord” (V.ii.209). Hamlet’s response at first seems to evince that he has made a definitive decision to act and proceed with the dual:

Not a whit, we defy augury. There is a special
Providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be [now],
‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if
It not be now, yet it [will] come—the readiness is all.
Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what it is to
Leave betimes, let be. V.ii.219-224

As he speaks of the inevitability of death once again, Hamlet has shifted from an emphasis on the natural process of death, decay, and regeneration to an understanding of death that is linked with the realm outside of human consciousness and agency—death is now conceptualized in terms of “augury” and divine circumscription. Whereas the version of death centered on the return of the earthly kings Alexander and Caesar in terrestrial terms was juxtaposed with a conservation of matter, now Hamlet speaks if Divine kinship and the “special/ Providence” of a Christian God in his allusion to the New Testament parable in lines 219-220 . Again, death is associated with sovereignty, but this time, is an absolute kind of death, one left completely to the will of the divine that does not adduce any redemptive or regenerative effects.

Rather than a decision to act, what Hamlet actually posits is a resignation to a fate that rests solely in the will of the transcendent sovereign: “If it be [now],/ ‘tis not to come.” In other words, if the certainty of death is brought to full presence now, its possibility is collapsed and nothingness awaits. The next clause in line 221 at first appears to be the opposite of this pronouncement because of the syntactical arrangement of these repeated terms: “ if it be not to come, it will be now.” Yet, this attempted inverted parallelism does not produce any new meaning—the frustrated chiasmus only reiterates the previous point: if nothingness or non-action awaits, then the certainty of death is now. This jumbled syntactical “decision” is not a resolution of a thesis and its antithesis, but an iteration that conceals meaning rather than making sense present.

At the very end of this line, Hamlet does offer what can be seen as the antithesis to the duality between present certainty of death and future indeterminacy: “if/ it be not now, yet it will come.” If the present moment does not harbor this moment of certainty in death, then it will occur in the future. In the progression of these three statements, Hamlet has now mapped out an explicit dichotomy between the effects of death in the present moment and a future state that we saw was not marked by a distinction between being and nothingness in the regenerative and conservative treatment of death in the previous scene.Howeer, the syntactical arrangement of the verse is not exactly a progression per se; and the map is circuitous at best. The oscillation and repetitious (dis)symmetry of these lines plays out Hamlet’s indecisiveness and is marked by an excessive iteration of similar words that does not produce new meaning, in the same way that Hamlet’s “decision” to embrace the possibility of death in the dual with Laertes is not a decision at all. His resignation to divine determination of death is not a movement forward, but a compliant stasis, just as the convoluted verse arrests the reader’s movement through the lines and thwarts a manifestation of meaning.

This “absoluteness” of death—or a death characterized by complete nullity and negation—is confounded by Hamlet’s next enigmatic assertion to Horatio, “ Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is’t to/ leave betimes, let be.” Essentially, Hamlet argues that since at death, consciousness ceases, then no one will be cognizant of that which he has left behind, therefore there really is no decision to make; in the absolute annihilation of death, one has nothing to lose.

This version of death is divorced from the earthly regeneration inherent in bodily death that Hamlet suggested in V.i , and here an interpretation of death falls entirely beyond the realm of human understanding. Just as the form of the verse mirrored the content of death’s effects in the previous scene, here too we see a juxtaposition of the formal qualities of Hamlet’s speech mirroring the concept he posits: in the same way this absolute nullity of death is beyond human comprehension, the iterative repetition and consulted syntax of the verse conceals meaning rather than producing significance.

Evidence of Hamlet’s resignation to God’s control over death and his state of mental stasis is confounded in the final words of this short speech, “let be.” Here we have a pseudo-repetition—or a modified echo-- of the opening lines of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy of III.i. Hamlet begins at III.I.55, “To be or not to be, that is the question” and proceeds to ruminate about whether it is better to live in this harsh earthly world, or to die. At this earlier moment in the play, the possibilities inherent in the experience of death are a question, and a decision is on the line. He questions whether the soul reaches a new spiritual plane at death and fears “the dread of something after death” (III.i.77). Hamlet comes to the conclusion that no human would choose to live unless they feared the effects of death in the transcendent, spiritual realm. However, when Hamlet arrives at this final scene in the drama, the question has been answered, and no decision is to be made. Death is inevitable, controlled by divine will, and ends in an absolute negation of human consciousness in a state of certain indeterminacy. The lyrical movement of the inquisitive soliloquy collapses in this syntactically static speech that ends with the iterative “let be,” and this conception of death is the converse of the earthly, regenerative, and conservative function of death Hamlet posits in the previous scene.

"...That Dangerous Supplement..."

In his chapter from Of Grammatology entitled “…That Dangerous Supplement…”, Derrida derives this quasi-concept through his reading of Rousseau’s work, especially his “Essay on the Origin of Language.” In Derrida’s reading, he locates Rousseau as representative of a poignant articulation of the Western metaphysical obsession with the self-presence of the subject and investigates why, if speech is considered the fullest expression of presence, then Rousseau’s text continually condemns the written word while simultaneously relying on that same medium to elevate his speech. Derrida finds Rousseau’s relationship to the written word vexed, because while the latter is “straining toward the reconstruction of presence, he valorizes and disqualifies writing at the same time,” because language inherently “dislocates the subject that it constructs” (141,142). This continuing relationship between the oppositional states of presence and absence cannot be severed within Rousseau’s text, and it is this difference itself that Derrida claims produces the possibility if a “breathing space”(143)—the condition for the experience of a play between indeterminacy and determinacy.

Derrida introduces the term “supplement” to describe the paradoxical unanimity of these two experiences, because the term articulates that the supplementary figure (here figured as writing) completes the subject while simultaneously revealing that same subjects dependence upon it. Derrida contends, “ when speech fails to protect presence, writing becomes necessary. It must be added…it diverts immediate presence of thought to speech into representation…[it is] a sort of artificial and artful ruse to make speech present…a violence done to the natural destiny of the language” (144) [emphasis in original].

At the same time, it adds by enriching, expressing the “fullest measure of presence” and it “culminates and accumulates presence” (144) [emphasis in original]. However as the supplement adds to the subject, it elaborates the meaning of self-presence while forever maintaining its subsistence on difference, because the fact that something needs to be added to the original points up a pre-existing emptiness or lack. The supplement completes the self-presence of the subject while calling into question the possibility of an unmediated self-presence. In this way, the supplement “adds only to replace,” filling the void of “ what ought to lack nothing at all in itself” (145). The supplement is always “exterior” to the self and Derrida positions it as “compensatory and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes the place of” (145). It follows that the self is always constituted by a relationship to the other (the supplement) in a tenuous dialectic in which the subject has both the need to maintain and abolish the presence of the supplement to attain an unmediated subjectivity. Derrida proves that such absolute negation of the other by the subject is impossible: “ he cannot give up what immediately restores to him the other desired presence, no more than he can give up language” (153).

The link between supplementary and language is the touchstone for Derrida’s reading of
Rousseau because presence is always re-instituted through language. The substitution of the supplement “always has the form of the sign” (147), and Derrida equates Rousseau’s supplementary experience of masturbation (adding to and replacing sexual desire) with his need to employ the written word to perfect his speech, because both are “symbolic and immediate” (153). This cause immeasurable frustration for the subject who seeks a subjectivity for- and in-itself. Yet, as we saw, the subject simultaneously “ holds it [the supplement] at a distance and maintains it…its economy exposes and protects us at the same time according to the play of forces and the difference of forces” (155). This is why the supplement is “dangerous” and why both Rousseau and any human subject desires to abolish the supplementarity of the other through language.

Bhabha's "subaltern agent" and Derrida's "Before the Law"

In my ever-engaged effort to resist readings of the early Derrida as "apolitical" or "nihilistic," I had some thoughts about the resonances I hear echoing through (and sometimes being stifled) in Homi Bhabha's work (I must note that my reading if Bhabha comes from a very isolated selection below--primarily Chapter 9 of The Location of Culture ). Even with the intellectual backlash something called "deconstruction" has suffered in the last twenty years, I have become interested in the ways in which theorists with definite political agendas have extrapolated ideas offered in Derrida’s writings about language to serve their interest, though often without making the connection explicit anywhere in their own language. Bhabha’s post-colonialism in The Location of Culture (1994) implicitly draws upon Derridan thought. While Bhabha never positions his argument this way, it will become evident below how we can trace a similar continuity of intellectual thought from Derrida’s early writings on language and specific foundational concepts proffered by Bhabha. But because he has a political motive he must necessarily make Derrida’s (non)concepts prescriptive, rather than descriptive, and in the process his program must distort the terms of the very practice he borrows from Derrida. Drawing upon Derrida’s discussion of the structure of language, Bhabha’s project is engaged in an effort to de-center the origin of identity, through a re-interpretation of time that makes temporality a series of contingencies, rather than linear sequence of causal relations. From these procedures he is able to present an interpretation of identity that is not static or fixed, but rather a relationship of differences, that can be read as an expression of Derridean différance. However, Bhabha is extrapolating from Derrida’s discussion of language, he needs to introduce terms that are never a part of Derrida’s reading: for Bhabha it is “freedom,” and as agency is necessarily an influential aspect in any political program, he must grapple with the issue of “identity” in a way that Derrida does not.

We can see specific ways in which Bhabha’s post-colonial project is engaged in a similar project that implicitly draws upon and distorts certain ideas suggested by Derrida’s description of the structural functions of language, while in this chapter of Location he never overtly cites their appropriation of Derridan thought. Because Bhabha’s motive is the potentiality for political action, his appropriation of these terms necessitates an elaboration of agency, therefore he attempts to use the (non)concepts of Derrida’s non-causal temporality and différance as a prescriptive method, when for Derrida both time and différance are merely effects of being in the world.

While Bhabha’s “time lag” draws on the Derridan emphasis on time as contingent and the potential for self-consciousness that is imbedded in experiences of indeterminacy, Bhabha conflates the experience of indeterminacy with “freedom”, in a way that remains abstract and thus requires no active engagement with the present moment—the antithesis of Derrida’s way of reading. In the epigraph that heads his chapter, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern,” Bhabha cites Derrida: “For some of us the principle of indeterminism is what makes the conscious freedom of man fathomable” (245). Yet, Derrida does not de-center binary oppositions in order to re-inscribe new ones, and in his thinking “indeterminism” is not opposed to “determinism” in the way in which Bhabha posits the former as a weapon against the later. Rather than positing indeterminate time as the occasion through with self-consciousness emerges (as Derrida does), Bhabha suggests a “subaltern agency” that acquires agency by maintaining a state of indeterminacy. The agency afforded to the subaltern in this schematic is defined by this subversion of reason/determinism in favor of un-reason/indeterminacy as well as a “rebel consciousness,” a self-consciousness is self-affirming in the complete negation of the Other and enables the subaltern subject to remain in a state of absolute alterity and unintelligibility.

For Derrida, self-consciousness involves the play of differences between the two states, emphasizing the relationality of one to the other as the condition through which self-consciousness is possible. Bhabha misconstrues this notion in his citation of Derrida, because he uses indeterminacy as a tool to negate determinacy, and in privileging indeterminacy. He equates the experience with “freedom,” where for Derrida not only is “freedom” not likened to a political project as Bhabha expropriates the term, but also exists as a potentiality in the experience of the relationality of the terms, which is the exact opposite of the antagonistic dichotomy Bhabha sets up between the terms within the essay. For Derrida, self-consciousness necessarily involves a period of unintelligibility that lags behind the determinacy, because time is a part of human experience.

While Bhabha presumes to use these deconstructionist principles to abolish binary oppositions (in the case the opposition between the dominant and subjugated, or master/slave hierarchy inherited from the Western tradition)—“the disjunctive present of utterance enables the historian to get away from defining subaltern consciousness as binary” (277). But, because at this point in his argument agency has become synonymous with indeterminacy, as time has become an instrument rather than just a condition of experience, Bhabha ends up re-inscribing the same binary opposition he attempted to dismantle, and he puts the subaltern agent back into the position of subjugated in Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.

While Hegel’s account of this dialectical relationship necessitates a much more exhaustive explication, for the sake of brevity, I will briefly outline the process to demonstrate how Bhabha’s distortion of Derridean “indeterminacy” undermines the motive of his political program. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel contends that “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another” (111). That is the emergence of self-consciousness is a process which is predicated on an encounter with another, in which each agent desires to become “in and for itself” initially through the domination of the other. They “mutually recognize themselves as recognizing one another” and since each is “certain of its own self, but not of the other,” its own being “in and for itself” still has not truth (112-113). In this indeterminacy of self, each desires to be the subject and so “each seeks the death of the other” (113). Yet, in this process another awareness arises when the subject risking his life, realizes that his highest expression of freedom is the risking of his own life, because only he has agency over this action. This is the realization that “there is nothing present in it [life] which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment , that is only pure being-in-itself”( 114). In the case of the master and slave, mastery is self-defeating because the master recognizes the slave as the truth of his identity, since it is his dominant relation to the slave upon which his conscious identity depends. While the master’s identity is dependent on the recognition of the slave, the slave’s realization of self is independent of the master since he does not require domination over the master to be in-himself. In this process, the slave inhabits a “consciousness forced back into itself” which withdraws back into itself and become “transformed into a truly independent consciousness” (117). Thus, the slave is truly the one who experiences the possibility of true liberation. While he first sees the overthrow of the master as truth, he has experienced the fear of death and “absolute negativity” and “pure-being-for-itself” (117). He realizes “through his service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail” (117), because he realizes that he has power over nature by virtue of his own labor, while the master only has power over nature through his dependence on the slave’s labor. It is through his active engagement in his own labor that the slave can become liberated in a consciousness that is for-itself, but often he eschews this labor for the continuation of the abstract desire to replace the master. This state of indeterminacy and abstract relationality rather than active agency in one’s own work keeps the slave a slave, and this is the position in which the subaltern agent is left at the end of Bhabha’s essay.

While Bhabha’s subaltern agent is left in a perpetual state of indeterminacy, like the slave of Hegel’s dialectic, Derrida calls for a subjective agency that is in a constant relation between self and other in a form of decision making that cannot abandon responsibility to the real world in “Before the Law (1992).” In his reading of Kafka’s parable in The Trial, Derrida explores the problem of the man from the country who comes before the door of the “Law”: the petitioner comes before the gatekeeper with the assumption that the law should be universal, and in his attempt to enter into the law, he forgets his own particularity. This is because “there is a singularity about the relationship to the law, a law of singularity which must come into contact with the general or universal essence of the law without ever being able to do so” (187). This is the same problem faced by Bhabha’s subaltern agent. According to Derrida, the petitioner’s failure is that when he comes to this space of indeterminacy, the tension between his singularity and the laws supposed universality, he abandons his particularity and abdicates his engagement in his own life. Kafka writes, “ During these many years [that the man attempts entrance into the law] the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper…He becomes childish…At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him” (184). In forgetting himself, he loses his rationality and his humanity fades, until he has abdicated his place in history, much like Hegel’s slave who fails to achieve self-consciousness through his work in the world.

Rather than remaining static in this state of indeterminacy, Derrida advocates an experience that is attentive to each successive moment in time; a call for continued engagement through thought in the face off that which we misconstrue.. As he asks “what is the law?” and “what is literature?” in the essay, Derrida contends that no answer emerges, but the posing of the question only reveals “an essential structure of referentiality” (213). That is, the experience of the petitioner, of the singular agent engaging with law, and in the reader who interprets a text, “answers” or “meaning” do not emerge, but only “movements of framing and referentiality” that makes the subject keenly aware of context. Rather than abdicating his own particularity before the law, the petitioner should have maintained a relationality with the universal: “ one cannot reach the law, and in order to have a rapport of respect with it, one must not have a rapport with it, one must interpret the relation” (203-204) [emphasis in original]. If the petitioner had interpreted the structure of referentiality linking himself and the law, he would have realized that is his own exercise of agency that excludes his passage into the law—“he must forbid himself from entering” (203)—and this realization of his own autonomous particularity in relation to the indeterminate would have been freedom. He would then realize that “he is both subject of the law and an outlaw” (204).Thus the potentiality for self-determination and agency—the “freedom” that Bhabha misconstrues as indeterminacy—is the constant re-interpretation between the un-readable and the readable as always in relation, and never oppositional. True agency exists in a space not limited by such binary oppositions, and is an authority that recognizes the necessary relationship between self (the petitioner) and other (the doorkeeper/the Law).