"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.”

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.

"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.