"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).