Adieu: 'Hamlet' remembered in the thoughts of Benjamin, Lacan, Levinas, and Derrida

Since the commentary on Hamlet offered by Hegel, and its subsequent introduction to English literary criticism via Andrew Cecil Bradley, the play has often been thought to be the privileged instance of modern tragedy, an instance whose privilege derives from the accent it places on character, or, as is more commonly said today, subjectivity. In recent years, the theory of the subjectum that stands in the background of Hegel's reading of Hamlet (and his dialectical philosophy more generally) has been an object of scrutiny from a variety of critical perspectives (phenomenological, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and new historical). These perspectives have in turn proved influential for considerations of subjectivity in literary studies. The Hegelian reading of Hamlet as it was mediated to Shakespeare's scholarly readership through Bradley has been no less an object of scrutiny. That scrutiny has issued from a spectrum of critical perspectives similar to those that have informed the criticism of Hegel's theory of the subject. Notwithstanding these critical responses to both Hegel and Bradley's readings of Hamlet, the broad perception that this play in some way illustrates the psychic dilemmas faced by modern individuals persists, even and especially in those interpretations informed by post-Hegelian perspectives on the subject and its history. With that in mind, this thesis asks in what sense Hamlet may still be thought as a “tragedy of subjectivity.” The vehicle for this examination is the readings of the play to be found in the work of four twentieth century thinkers whose interpretation of the subject is explicitly undertaken in critical response to Hegel, and whose thought has been decisive for current considerations of subjectivity in the literary context: Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. All four see in Hamlet a Shakespearean affirmation of an ethical attitude in which the most primitive gesture of the subject is not closure upon itself, but opening unto the Other. For Benjamin, Lacan, Levinas, and Derrida, this opening is in the first instance temporal; it concerns the imminence of the future in the present. Providence is the name of that imminence in the theological framework that dominates Hamlet, just as God is the name for that Other to which Benjamin, Lacan, Levinas, and Derrida each in their own way attest. This dissertation will examine the thematics of “providence” as they become consequential in the readings of the play offered by Benjamin, Lacan, Levinas, and Derrida.