Derrida's Hamlet
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Abstract
Beyond all the sound and fury (which continues even now beyond the grave, in the crasser forms of obituary-speak), there are, at a very general level of reflection, three emphases in Derrida's work that have mattered to me, and which I still carry with me. The first has to do with the rebarbative notion of differance, the notion that being is never present to us, which I take to be first and foremost a reflection on the irreducible temporality not only of being, but also of our categories for thinking about being. The second turns on the view that everything human is problematic for the rest of human time. The third concerns the paradox of the notorious "undecidability" hypothesis, which, whatever it may be taken to mean, never meant exemption from the requirements of decision-making. These emphases have been glossed in numerous ways, none ever far from controversy. In this brief notice I would like to run them through a particular source, in which, in their own terms, they are all to be found: Hamlet, and the reading of Shakespeare's play that occupies the first part of Spectres of Marx. What is Hamlet doing in a book about Marx and ghosts--both Marx's ghosts (the famous spectre mentioned at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto) and the ghosts of Marx (broadly, what Derrida means by the "legacy" of Marx, as the constant returns of a kind of spectre in the midst of the contemporary neoliberal victory)? How is it that Derrida, citing an essay by Blanchot, in which Blanchot uses the expression "since Marx," can add that Blanchot's "since Marx" could easily have been "since Shakespeare"? Broadly speaking, the answers have to do with two interconnected, deep-structural and persistently recurring preoccupations of deconstruction: ontology (the philosophy of Being) and justice (the sphere of the politico-ethical); both these preoccupations assembled, or rather disassembled, in an overarching category that Derrida calls spectrality, the spectral nature of all our constructions (including the Marxist construction) of being and justice. Nietzsche claimed in The Birth of Tragedy that the essential point about Hamlet is not--as in the standard viewthat he thinks too much, but that he thinks too well; he is unable to act not because of a contingent psychological infirmity, but because the sheer lucidity of his thinking corrodes the ground of all possible action in a