"I ain't afraid of no ghosts": My reading of Derrida's _Specters of Marx_

Why is Derrida’s then-highly-anticipated official comment on something called “Marxism” and his statement about the future of politics in the age of global capitalism haunted by the specter of the fictional character Hamlet? That Marx himself was an avid admirer of Shakespeare is no secret and that Derrida’s quasi-philosophical explorations often draw from various works of literary fiction is something we have come to expect. I think, though, that not only does a cross-reading Shakespeare’s text allow Derrida an entry point for introducing/expanding a number of concepts that will be fleshed out in his meditation of Marx, but—more than this—I think the simultaneous discussion of the themes of non-temporal time, “hauntology,” undeciability, and justice in the differing texts allows Derrida to make an implicit connection between literature and “the political”; between “deconstruction” and politics. While I would argue that already in the “early” Derrida (I think here of _Of Grammatology_) language and literature are always inherently political, the stakes become much higher when Derrida is confronted with answering the specific questions of his relationship to the Marxian tradition and the political import of his methods of reading as it relates to the world-wide political turmoil of our age. Let’s see how Derrida approaches these questions.

The text of _Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International_ grew out of Derrida’s lectures a 1993 conference “Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective” held at University of California, Riverside. Scholars and critics across national and disciplinary boundaries gathered to approach the question—essentially—“What do we do with Marx now?” That is, in the aftermath of the crumbling of the Berlin wall in 1989, the economic incorporation of Europe a few years later, the ongoing economic growth of Eastern markets, and Francis Fukuyama’s prediction the eventual global triumph of political and economic liberalism and the “end of history” (_The End of History and the Last Man_,1992), scholars who did ,and did not, claim to be followers of Marx found themselves pressed with answering how relevant Marx’s theories remained in this economic/political landscape so different from Marx’s. The question is rephrased in Derrida’s opening address at the conference, “what have we inherited from Marx?” The term “inheritance” is a loaded one for Derrida, along with words and phrases like “the gift,” “the proper name,” “friendship,” and “hospitality,” themes that Derrida continues to revisit and complicate in this period of his writings. For my purposes here, I will not expand at length on Derrida’s conception of what it means to inherit (other than to note, for Derrida it will mean the call to a certain “responsibility”)—but rather I’d like to touch on a few relevant themes that run through the lectures, before gesturing towards some of the most vehement responses of critics to this text.




“The time is out of joint,” declares the melancholy prince in I.v of _Hamlet_, after swearing his commitment to “remember” at the foot of his father’s ghost. Derrida uses the motif of a disjointed temporality to introduce both the relationship of us “heirs” of Marx as well the necessary condition for justice—one will notice that these two themes, the possibilities of “Marx” and justice today, are never separate in Derrida’s reading. Hamlet laments, and curses, the fact that his father’s ghost has called him to put time back into joint by avenging his death. This is because “revenge” would call for Hamlet to inherit, in one way or another, the crimes of the past, and to bring that cycle of crime and punishment into the future. The weight of the call for Hamlet’s revenge, while pondered in the present diegetic world of the play, rests firmly in the relationship between the past event and the murder to be committed in the future; the decision that Hamlet wrestles with throughout is the gap between these two temporal sites. He is called to fix the history that came before, and this, claims Derrdia, is the position of the heirs of Marx. But readers of revenge tragedy will recognize the strange temporality of the act of vengeance—something I think Derrida would liken to a “general” rather than “restricted” economy—which per force is not entirely compensatory. Rather than putting “time back in joint,” the act of revenge in such dramas can never really compensate for the crime; the dead are not made present again, and a whole new cycle of crimes and punishments is engendered. It is, in fact, two articulations of absence, that of what has passed and that of what is to come. Hamlet curses because in this case justice is born of vengeance, and Derrida interrogates such a notion calling for instead an “incalculable” justice that exceeds the law of retribution, an understanding of justice that goes beyond “faults” of the past. As developed elsewhere (Cf. _Politics of Friendship_, _The Gift of Death_) we see Derrida’s notion of a type of “gift without restitution”: “ Beyond right, and still more beyond jurididicism, beyond morality, and still more beyond moralism” (27). One of Derrida’ s major threads here is that we need to re-evaluate our conception of justice as an articulation of presence, because as we have seen, justice is intimately tied to the past and the future: “Otherwise justice risks being reduced once again to juridical-moral rules, norms or representations, within an inevitably totalizing horizon” (28).

In order to understand this very strange temporality, we will need to (at least attempt) to understand what Derrida calls “hauntology” or “spectral logic.” “Hauntology” emphasizes what is NOT present, like the ghost of King Hamlet and Marx for us today. A ghost is never (really,that is corporally) present and it never dies, and therefore it is BEYOND essence as we are accustomed to imagine it. It is both singular in its appearance and multiple in its repeating (through the visitation) since it is the trace of something once present. These are not unfamiliar ideas once we have made acquaintance with Derrida’s lifelong interrogation of a “metaphysics of presence.” This attention to what is not present allows for an interaction with the completely other or total alterity. In short, Derrida wants to replace “ontology” (Being as presence) with “hauntology,” an experience that is open to what is not present, rather what was and what perhaps WILL be. In a characteristic rhetorical flourish, Derrida writes, “ No différance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without the here-and-now” (30). This one sentence would take pages to unpack, but I take it to mean that both the deconstructive way of reading and this particular formulation of justice (that we will hear more about below) calls for an opening to the altogether other that is not merely a moment of delay, but an instant promise of singularity, and what makes this promise truly of the “here-and-now” is that is not made based on adherence to reified a priori laws.



And this brings us to a third major thread woven throughout the text: the relationship between undecidability and justice. What draws Hamlet, our inheritance from Marx, and the practice of deconstructive reading together is the question of NOT knowing, through which the possible is related to the impossible through the injunction of “perhaps.” This is the type of phrase, emphasizing “undecidability,” that I think really puts pressure on the possibility for change—if we are not reading careful enough. Derrida writes, “Needless to spell it out here, therefore, still lest to insist on it too heavily: it [both “deconstruction” and Derrida’s proposed notion of justice] is not a taste for the void or for destruction…On the contrary, it is a matter therefore of an ethical and political imperative, an appeal as unconditional as the appeal from which it is not separated” ( 30).

One way to approach this ambiguity in Derrida’s logic is to think about this moment of undeciabliity similar to other “failures” of reason/knowledge that point to something beyond that we see in other philosophical paradigms. I am thinking here, foremost, about the Platonic dialectic, which per force begins with what is “unknown” (better, “not yet known” or not yet made intelligible by Socrates)and proceeds through the process of attaining new knowledge. Speaking of dialectics, there is Hegel, in which the moment of mis-recognition in the coming to be of self-consciousness yields true recognition of oneself and one’s relation to external reality in the _Phenomenology_. The experience of the Kantian sublime is yet another experience in which reason fails, but only to point beyond its own limits to bring the subject a greater encounter of subjectivity. Finally, I think of Freud, for whom it is not understanding of the conscious, rational mind that leads to the uncovering of man’s motivations, but rather that which resists one’s reasonable faculties, the unconscious. My point here is simply that the concept that the failure of certainty or knowledge can lead to something greater, or the idea that through a relationship to what one can’t know one can move beyond to new knowledge, does not start with Derrida.



The text has many very intelligent things to say, that for the sake of brevity, I won’t address here. For instance, Derrida’s close reading of and response to Fukuyama(Chapter 2, which we should note also, this becomes an implicit critique of Kojeve) is well-worth the read and his attentive explication of Marx’s _Capital_ in Chapter 5 (especially on Marx’s “dancing tables” ) is truly a pleasure. Rather, I’d like to take a glance at what become the two related and most controversial elements of these lectures, and some of the criticisms leveled against them, before attempting to see if we still can find any merit in what Derrida is proposing here. These two ideas, which go hand-in-hand, are Derrida’s call for a “mesianism without a messiah” and his proposal of the “New International.”
What exactly is a “messianism without a messiah”? It sure sounds like maintaining a state of constant waiting for something that won’t come, because it doesn’t exist. Essentially, a state of interminable stasis. But, before we judge, let’s listen to Derrida speak:

Now, if there is a spirit of Marxism which I will never be ready to renounce, it is not only the critical idea or the questioning stance…It is even more a certain emancatory an messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any metaphysico-religious determination, from any messianism…To break with the “party form” or with some form of the State or International does not mean to give up every form of practical or effective organization. It is exactly the contrary that matters to us here…The critique belongs to the movement of an experience open to the absolute future of what is coming, that is to say , a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and for the event. (89-90)

I take this to mean that “messianism without a messiah” amounts to a constant, vigilant, and radical critique of a way of thinking that is never static because it is always in the process of its own questioning, and never merely a replication of established dogma. A page or so later Derrida calls deconstruction a “radicalization” of a “certain spirit of Marxism” (92), because he is attempting here to radicalize, or free from reified concepts a system of thought that now appears without a future. That is, if we are haunted by the “ghost” of Marx, we are not only inheriting the “crimes of the past” (the failures of Marxist regimes, the mis-reads of Marx throughout the ages), like young Hamlet, BUT we also have a RESPONSIBILTY to the future—a future we cannot make a concrete prediction for when/if it will come, in the same way Hamlet and Horatio cannot be sure the Ghost will return the following night. This too, I think, of what we are to do with our concepts of “democracy” and the “State.” We need to re-configure our conceptions of time and space in order to allow for a “democracy-to-come” and the potential for true justice : “This messianic hesitation does not paralyze any decision, any affirmation, any responsibility. On the contrary, it grants them their elementary condition. It is their very experience” (169). This is facing indeterminacy--and the responsibility--to keep thinking and keep striving for something beyond. Recall that Hamlet’s preservation of indeterminacy is what creates the actual space of the drama.

As anyone can surely imagine, these “political” ideas did not sit well with many, especially many Marxists, who viewed Derrida as proposing something closer to nihilism or his own quasi-transcendentalism, rather than a “radicalization of Marxism.” As a result, Michael Sprinkler pulled together various responses that had appeared in the aftermath of the “Whither Marxism” conference and collected them in one text, under the heading _Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’_. In Terry Eagleton’s essay, “Marxism Without Marx,” he essentially asks, “where was Derrida when we needed him” and claims that whether it is through Derrida himself, or any of his “followers”, deconstruction is nothing like Marxism. He claims that Derrida exhibits a “postmodern” desire to never take a stand, rather than a true and effective strategy that could ever apply to reality or history. In, “Reconciling Derrida,” Aijaz Ahmed dubs the politics of deconstruction an “anti-politics” and takes issue with the fact that Derrida’s text is not an analysis, but “performance” (90). Ahmed also claims that Derrida ignores the issue of “class” in his conception of the New International. I think, perhaps, looking briefly at how Derrida responds to these accusations in his essay (the final of the collection) will help shed some light on what we ultimately make of the import of these ideas. [Note that the most of the other essays in this collection are worth a read because of the rich conversation they continue, and Jameson’s contribution—for my money—is very intelligent and does the most “justice” (now such a loaded term!) to Derrida’s text]

Derrida admits, “ In _Specters of Marx_, the presentation of the hypothesis does not present itself, in the proper sense”, but , like Marx’s _Manifesto_ it calls for interpretation and responsibility: “ Without presenting itself in the present, it nevertheless takes a position…that is, the ‘responsibility’ thus assumed- as a transformation” (219). And this responsibility is to commit oneself to PERFORM. This is why we can say that, yes, Ahmed is correct, _Specters_ is a performative text. But his is NOT a negative thing for Derrida; quite the opposite, as this welding together of form and content is the space for change opened up by thinking. This allows then for the “paradoxical transposition” of the famous 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, so that this performative interpretation is “an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets” (219). Performativity questions the notion of Being as presence. Against charges that Derrida proposes something anti-political or ventures to ignore issues of class struggle, he responds that after “putting the question into question” (meaning questioning ontology as a measure of self-presence) that “what should come after this deconstruction of Marxist ‘ontology’, in my view, is exactly the opposite of a depoliticization…rather the point, as I see it, of radically re-examining the premises” of any theory of “Marxist” principles, democracy, and the State (221). Derrida does not recommend that one never “takes a stand” on issues of class inequality, but rather that we be ever attentive to what words like “class” and “inequality” mean, and how these meanings shift in every context: “ All this depends, at every instant, on what is urgent in, first and foremost, singular situations and their structural implications. For such assessment, there is, by definition, no pre-existing criterion or absolute calculability” (239). If one wants to champion Marx’s cry for constant attention to “material reality” versus some form of abstract idealism, then what else is Derrida’s suggestion for such an vigilant attention to the real world? This is why messianicity cannot be construed as some abstract, metaphysical Utopia, but “ it refers, in every here and now, to the coming of an eminately real, concrete event” ( 248).

Let’s recall Marx on “estranged labor” in _Capital_. The problem, he says, is that each individual laborer gets grouped into some collective idea of “labor power,” and in the process the particular struggles and material life of each and every man becomes congealed into a giant mass of some ABSTRACT idea of “labor.” How do we change this? By throwing into question the concept of “labor” as such. By re-examining each singular instance as something unique that has ties to a larger overall structure, the structure from which we have accepted our concepts, and our abstract concept of “labor”. This is exactly what Derrida is attempting to do. The idea is not to ignore, eliminate, or sweep under the rug issues of class, but to resist substituting REAL issues under the concept “class.” When “labor” became an abstract concept used to define a certain group of people, something got left out. This too is what has happened to our concepts of “class,” “the State,” and—of course—“Marx.”

Why are we still haunted by Marx? Why do we need to reassess his ideas now? We will recall that the reason so many Marxisms (plural), so many differing opinions on how to read Marx in political, philosophical, and economic terms, exists is because Marx’s prediction for a future stateless, classless society did not have a codified, step-by-step plan. This is why we need to consider a “New” International. When we remained tied to reified ways of thinking that do not adapt to new contexts, temporal shifts, changes in landscapes of all kinds, that is when we are static in a state where true decisions cannot be made. We are like the protagonists of revenge tragedies, stuck in an endless cycle of retribution for a problem that is never solved. Derrida, too, refuses to give us a concrete plan. But we have only to look at texts like _Ghostly Demarcations_ to find evidence that we are talking about these ideas, evaluating and re-evaluating them. And in these conversations about that which we disagree or don’t yet understand, exists the possibility to change the way we think. And by extension, the way we live.

“Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.”

Part II of Notes on Derrida's _Dissemination_

Part 2 : Plato’s Pharmacy
Section I: Derrida “begins” (a loaded term we see, because even the space between the “Outwork” and the start of the explication of Plato is occupied by an epigram, and unnamed sort or mini preface, followed by another prefatory note before the first section) with the claim that Plato’s text is fissured not only through each individual reading ,which produces different interpretations, but from within the words of the text themselves. The entry point for this exploration of linguistic ambiguity: pharmakon, I word I mentioned above simultaneously means “remedy” and “poison.” While the word itself already harbors polysemy within it, we note that any attempt to translate the word “erases” these “resources of ambiguity” and makes “more difficult, if not impossible, and understanding of the context” (97). Derrida highlights the “irreducible difficulty of translation” and makes the claim, “with this problem of translation we will thus be dealing with nothing less than the very problem of the passage into philosophy” (72). What does he mean by this? Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics will hinge on a questioning of a “metaphysics of presence”—the belief in the primacy of presence over absence and the desire for (and possibility of) immediate access to meaning. So when we look at the process of translation, we see that the translator must make an either/or decision about the “meaning” of a word following a binary logic that neutralizes the play of differences already built into each word. A translation should make us aware of the ABSENCE of the so-called “original” word, and thus the impossibility of such unity in the word itself, but instead translation masquerades as the presence of some unified meaning. This is the problem of Western metaphysics according to Derrida.

Importantly, in the _Phaedrus_, Socrates compares Phaedrus’ written texts to a drug (pharmakon) as we see in Derrida’s reading of the myth of Thoth that Socrates uses to respond to Phaedrus. I won’t recount the myth here (it would be worthwhile to check out this section of _Phaedrus_ or even Derrida’s inclusion of some parts), but an important aspect to become familiar with is that Thoth, the god of writing, brings written letters to the King, and the King denounces writing as inferior to speech, in that speech is the “living” word and is the mechanism of true “memory”, while writing is more like witchcraft and gives only the appearance of true knowledge. Thoth introduces difference into language and “it is to him that the origin of the plurality of languages is attributed” (88). Derrida then traces how the myths surrounding Thoth make him the god of substitution, as when he is called forth to “substitute” or “stand in” for the god Ra. But this process of substitution or supplementation is always one touched by violence: “ Thoth also frequently participates in plots, perfidious intrigues, conspiracies to usurp the throne. He helps the sons do away with the father, the brothers do away with the brother that has become the king” (89). What Derrida sketches out for us, is that—the the act of writing that he presides over as god—Thoth has no essence; he is total supplementarity in both senses that Derrida employs the term: “ The figure of Thoth is thus opposed to its other (father, sun, life, speech, origin, orient etc) but as that which at once supplements and supplants it. Thoth extends or opposes, by repeating or replacing. By the same token, the figure takes shape and takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for. But it thereby opposes itself, passes into its other, and this messenger-god is truly a god of the absolute passage between opposites” (92-3). It is worth noting that Derrida reminds us writing, as opposed to the “living word” of speech, also becomes associated with death, as Thoth is not only the King’s Master of Books but the keeper of the records of the dead.

The fourth section of Part I, in which Derrida explores the vast web of meanings of the word pharmakon is helpful in approaching the question of author’s intent and agency that has long been a question in “deconstructive” readings. What Derrida makes clear, is that Plato’s “intent” is immaterial because the word pharmakon (and every word for that matter) is part of a complex and diverse system, “among diverse strata and regions of culture” (95). Because all reality is constituted by language, and Plato is of course a member of this reality, then we are simply not able to ask questions about whether the differences implied by the word pharmakon are “involuntary” or “voluntary.” To ask what is the “cause” of these differences or in what “place” they happen actually only points to a problem in the question itself: the question follows a metaphysics of presence that seeks immediate unified meaning and effaces the play of differences inherent in the system of language, of which we are all apart, whether we are conscious of it or not.

In a discussion of “memory” vs. “memorial” (visa vis Plato’s _The Sophist_), Derrida points out that while speech is supposed to be the mechanism of true knowledge via memory, versus the writing of the Sophist who only “mimes” true knowledge in writing, memory itself is already the manifestation—not of presence—but absence: “ memory therefore already needs a sign in order to recall the non-present, with which it is necessarily in relation” (109). That is, memory (read: speech) is already a trace. So why is the idea of memorial or of the supplement so “dangerous” (109)? We will recognize a similar discussion to this one from the explication of Rousseau in _Grammatology_: “ It’s slidings slip in and out of the simple alternative presence/absence. That is the danger” (109). Once the supplement is introduced, the “inside” opens up and a whole chain of replacements is introduced; the unity of the whole is destroyed. And writing, the supplement par excellance, is especially dangerous because it is “the supplement of a supplement, the signifier, the representative of a representative” (109; note, this seems to be Plato’s argument against the 3 times removed truth of poetry in the _Republic_). Derrida notes that “Platonism” is built then on the distinction between signifier and signified and from this opposition constitutes itself as contrary to sophistics, so that “ philosophy and dialectics are determined in the act of determining the other” (112). Here again we see the logic of supplementarity at work.



Section 2
We often make a distinction between “early” Derrida that is more interested in language so to speak, and the “later” Derrida that seems to make a move toward more political issues, though of course this distinction is tenuous at best ,since Derrida never really gives us a concrete political program. However, I would argue that language/writing is ALWAYS political for Derrida, and we see glimmers of this in _Dissemination_. In Plato, Derrida claims, the pharmakon or writing threatens unity, because of its supplementary nature discussed above. Writing, which should have been just an accessory or “excess” has to be put back outside of the system (speech as full presence) that it ruptures. The remedy for Plato is the logos, or dialectics. However, and this is key, dialectics must “call upon the very thing it is expelling, the very surplus it is putting out” (128). What Derrida is getting to here, and what he will show in this section, is that while condemning “myth” or writing as opposed to the true knowledge Plato must always use writing; not in the obvious sense that the dialogues have been recorded and passed down in written form, but that Plato needs poetic language along with the dialectic. He needs metaphor. Derrida does not mention this in his discussion of _Republic_ in this text, but I think we can use this idea to understand why Book X ends in myth, the myth of Er. Plato needs to re-write myth, and this myth blots out the intellectual dialogue that has brought the reader to the end of the text, only to bring her—essentially—back to the beginning . In order for the dialectic to point beyond itself as Plato wishes, it must have recourse to its “opposite” in myth, but in this relationship we see that there is no real opposition between them. Derrida’s reading of _Phaedrus_ could apply to the end of Book X in the _Republic_:
“Socrates ties up into a system all the counts of indictment against the pharmakon of writing at the point at which he adopts his own, in order to uphold it, interpret it, make it explicit, the divine, royal, paternal solar word…Transforming mythos to logos” (134).

But back to politics. In the same way that dialectics needs its other of myth to secure its identity, the city must banish that what threatens its unity, and specifically in this section, we are talking about Socrates’ trial and death. This discussion will remind of the later writings of Agamben in _Homo Sacer_, in which the homo sacer is he who can be killed but not sacrificed, who is completely outside of the law yet constituted by it, and he who through his exclusion allows the state to affirm is identity by contrast. The city’s “body proper thus reconstitutes its unity…by violently excluding from its territory the representative of an external threat or aggression” (133). This sort of sounds like Nazi Germany, doesn’t it? Yet while the city needs to violently oppose the outsider in order to reaffirm its own laws and thus unity, “the representative of the outside is nonetheless constituted, regularly granted its place, by the community…the very heart of the inside” (133). It is also worth noting that Derrida points out that the invective against writing is implicitly a directive against democracy. He cites J.P. Vernant who claims that the development of writing is contemporaneous with the mobilization of democracy, because writing allowed the masses access to knowledge. Plato calls democracy “ orgy debauchery, flea market, a ‘bazaar of constitutions where one can choose the one to make one’s own” (145). The fear of democracy is that it allows for excess not hierarchy, and has no real “essence” of truth but rather allows for “free” choice.

Contra Plato and the Enlightenment/rationalist view, we see that while dialectics is always directed toward truth itself, the truth must always come to terms with its own relation to non-truth: “ The disappearance of truth as presence, the withdraw of the present origin of presence, is the condition for the manifestation of truth. Non-truth is the truth. Nonpresence is presence. Différance, the disappearance of any originary presence, is at once the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of truth” (168). Because of this supplementarity, this failure of the ability to retain a unified original presence, the binaries between inside and outside the system cannot hold. Pharamakon really does “mean” both “poison” and “remedy” simultaneously.

As I noted above, it is interesting that at the end of Book X of _Republic_ Plato has recourse to myth. Here, at the end of this section, Derrida too tells his own myth: an imagined scene of Socrates before his death. Why? I can’t be sure, but I would argue that part of the function of this textual addition shows how easily dialectic and myth can slide into each other. Derrida uses an imagined narrative, interwoven with—what looks like—moments of a Platonic dialogue, and notes several times that Socrates “tries to distinguish between two repetitions”, which we are not sure are coming from inside or outside of his cell. Socrates monologue (is it spoken or just thought?) is stammering, following an almost incoherent string of etymologically- related words. The brief narrative ends with “knocks from without…” (171), which I think points this text beyond itself—the goal of Platonic dialogue as well as the re-inaugurated myth that ends Book X. I would argue that Derrida includes this strange textual moment, one that we can not pin-point as either dialogue or myth, or true (based on a true event) or false (but is there evidence this happened? It could have, right?) to demonstrate the ideas he has been describing up unto this point. And this takes us beyond the text, points to that which we don’t know. This, ironically, is also the project of the Plato whom Derrida has just critiqued.

Part I of Notes on Derrida's _Dissemination_

So to round out my block of reading Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus, I decided to pick up Derrida’s incredibly elucidating 1981 text _Dissemination_ since here JD engages with Plato’s infamous condemnation of writing in _Pheadrus_. In short, Plato idealizes speech as the only authentic manifestation of truth, in a turn of logic that assumes there is no gap between signified and signifier. This is the beginning of the idealization of the logos, which will come to belong only to “God.” Derrida builds his engagement with Plato’s text(s) on the paradox that this claim can only be made through the medium of writing, which it must pretend doesn’t exist. Language is always already constituted by the difference it seeks to overcome: a familiar jumping -off point for those of us familiar with the early thrust of JD’s writing. The reading of this ambiguity Derrida sees woven throughout the “Platonic text” (in scare quotes, because later we shall see Derrida demonstrates how one such unified or closed text that can be designated as the text of “Plato” is impossible) hinges on the translation of the word pharmakon, which in the Greek is used to delineate the antipodal terms of both “remedy” and “poison.” Here we come to the internal and external problematics of this term: firstly, the word in and of itself is not in and of ONE self--it literally means two oppositional things; and secondly this highlights the problem of translation inherent in the transmission of any text. For any attempt at translation must operate under the logic of binary oppositions in choosing one or the other meaning, thus effacing the difference built into the “original.” It is not that translation “adds” difference to the master text, but that the difference is already there; only now what is entirely undecidable (i.e., is pharmakon properly a remedy or a poison—note that Derrida will later use lateral associations to connect this term to an entire diverse web of meanings) now becomes “decided.” We should observe that the fact that such meaning, or truth, even needs to be decided—that is it not self-evident—points to the impossibly of the existence of any original, unified text.


To truly appreciate the meticulous attention Derrida gives the texts he is engaging with, it is worthwhile to look closer at the twists and turns of his readings here.

1. Working out the “Outwork”
From the gate, we know Derrida is saying to us, “whatever you expect this preface to be, dear reader, you will not be getting.” I said from the gate, but –and this question underlies the entire inquiry that will be this “preface”—where exactly is the gate? Is it the title, which is actually a series of titles: “ Hors Livre,” “Outwork,” “Hours D’Oeuvere,” “Extratext,” “Foreplay,” Bookend,” “Facing,” “Prefacing.” These terms do not mean quite the same thing, are not of the same “language” (French/English), and they are a mix of nouns and verbs—of name and movement. From the very outset (ha!) of “Outwork” our sense of textual origin is dismembered.

JD’s first sentence: “ This (therefore) will not have been a book” (3). There is no present (tense) in this statement: there is the past (been), and future (will not), both disguised as the present. There is no “moment” in this sentence, no manifestation of present temporality, but it is the space of the drawing together of past and future. This masquerading of a present manifestation of truth that comes to be only through the tension of a collision of past and future—this—is the problem of Western metaphysics that Derrida will spend the rest of this text (rather all of his texts) highlighting for us.

If we’ve read our Hegel (and our Marx!) we know the vexed relationship that occurs between preface and philosophical master text. Here Derrida’s preface at once prefaces and deconstructs its own logic, in what JD will term the text’s “systematic double mark.” This is a repetition without an identity, a mark that is both inside and outside the system of which it is related. This is NOT what some have termed a nihilistic negation of meaning (something like stating “there is no preface”) or some reckless “free play” that makes all terms up for grabs. It is quite the opposite-- it is true bricolage, questioning the system from within. What the double mark of this preface shows us, in its simultaneous act of prefacing and dismantling of that same logic, is that there is no real “outside” of this text that follows; no transcendental text- proper. Like a true “supplement” it is outside this so-called master text only to enhance/prepare/complete what should be able to stand on its own.


Derrida looks to Hegel’s disqualification of his own Preface in the _Phenomenology_and questions the relationship of this prefatory material to the body of the text: “ Isn’t the preface both negated and internalized in the presentation of philosophy by itself, in the self-production and self-determination of the concept” (11). What JD is calling for here is a reinterpretation of this relationship between the two texts, and an understanding why—if the philosophical inquiry is “truth” and should be able to stand on its own—does Hegel NEED to use his Preface. It’s not just that Hegel “negates” his pretext, but that it becomes both “folded in” to the text that follows and made useless by Hegel’s own simultaneous condemnation of it. It is the supplement, in both senses of Derrida’s use of this term, that which adds to as it replaces. In an interesting move, Derrida shows how the _Phenomenology_ and the _Science of Logic_ are in dialectic( “Shall it be said—this is the traditional problem—that the entire _Phenomenology of Spirt_ is in fact a preface for the _Logic_?”), and the “endless circle” (13) Derrida sees these texts engaged in demonstrates the non-distinction of any kind of “closed” master text. What is perhaps the most salient facet of this reading is Derrida’s explanation that we cannot understand the relationship between pre-text and text according to the logic of binary oppositions : “ If one sets out from the oppositions form/content, signifier/signified, sensible/intelligible, one cannot comprehend the writing of a preface” (16). Yes, Hegel’s preface is a critique of formalism that mobilizes the formal property of the prefatory apparatus at the same time. Yes, this is a paradox. But it is only a paradox if we view these texts as representative of opposition binary categories, only if we look at it through the lens of the formalist. If instead we see this as a relationship that cannot be subsumed under binary logic, then “the contradiction is rather the very movement of speculative dialectics in its discursive progression” (20). The temporality of the preface—both prescriptive and an after-effect (remember our first sentence of this preface)--is thus not a manifestation of linear time. In enacts the dialectic itself. Therefore it is both inside the text proper but always outside; it is already a moment of the text. [On a side note, I’d like to point out this textual site as a rebuttal to critics and readers who think JD is interested in simply dismantling binary oppositions and leaving things in a state of chaos or free play, where anything goes. What we see here in the treatment of Hegel’s preface is the exact opposite (for lack of a better term) because what JD makes us attentive to is that awareness of the incommensurability of binary thinking forces us to note the structure of this thinking; to appreciate the relationship between the two texts as they are constituted by the constructs of the system of language. I would argue that rather than some willy-nilly nihilism divorced from responsibility, we are made more attuned to the structure from which we read and encouraged to reinterpret it, not destroy it.]





This process which Derrida has been enacting/performing is “dissemination,” that which “interrupts the circulation that transforms into origin what is actually an after-effect of meaning” (21). Dissemination exposes the double mark and points up its dual place as both inside and outside the system. Like différance, it “opens up a snag in writing that cannot longer be mended, a spot where neither meaning, however plural, nor any form of presence can pin/pen down the trace” (26).

I used the word “performing” just above to categorize the way of reading/writing that JD provides us with here, and to that effect, I want to point out another textual apparatus that seems to fit both in/outside the “master text” that Derrida does not engage with here: the foot note. Just as he is describing the exteriority of the “postface”, the word is footnoted, drawing the reader to a two-and a half page explication of the term, where the word is defined as “adding an extra text” or an “appendix”(27). By the time the reader finally returns to the larger text –at- hand she returns to the words “ recapitulation and recurrent anticipation” (27-8), which seems to me to be the description of the process of reading the footnote that has just occurred, and the phrase simultaneously has a different function in the sentence from the “master text” to which we return. This brief slice of text seems to operate on two different registers at once. What then is the function of the footnote, another textual appendage both inside (literally, sits just below) and outside (additional information that is only placed below but yet does not fit into the trajectory of the text proper)? If he text -proper were self-sufficient, why would one need the supplement of the footnote? Derrida does not mention this as such, but I would argue here he performs again for us the same problem of constructing a binary opposition between pre-text and text, another level at which every text is thus fractured, and an example of how the structure of supplementarity he describes pervades all textual components and all writing in general.

Why is there no outside of the text ( a question begged by scholars, usually in reference to this infamous claim of Derrida’s used in his explication of Rousseau in _Grammatology_)? Because there is no inside either. Or rather, no inside that is closed off from its outside. Derrida:


“ To allege that there is no absolute outside of the text is not to postulate some ideal immanence, the incessant reconstitution of writing’s relation to itself…the text affirms the outside…if there is nothing outside the text this implies, with the transformation of the concept of text in general, that the text is no longer the snug airtight inside of an interiority or identity-to-itself…but rather a different placement of the effects of opening and closing” (36-7)


Perhaps, this sounds to some like a sort of trifling meticulousness, a sort of sly reversal of words that gives us a more “liberal” way of looking at texts. Perhaps. Until we remember that the other reason “there is nothing outside the text” is because reality is constituted by language—reality IS text: “This is the protocol indispensible to any elaboration of the problem of ‘ideology’, of the specific inscription of each text, within the fields commonly referred to as fields of ‘real’ causality (history, economics, politics, sexuality, etc)” (43). Materialism, gender studies, right or left wing politics—none of these areas are opposed to linguistics or philosophy, none offers a “cause” of ideological explanation that is not already coded by language. They are all constituted by the same system. Language is already and always political.

“Outwork” is rich with perhaps some of the most lucid and practical demonstrations of Derrida's method of reading/writing I have come across in the whole corpus of his work. And the text becomes even more valuable when we examine it in relationship to the so-called (but no longer able to be called) “master text” in the first section of the book “Plato’s Pharmacy, ” which I will dive into in my next post.

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.