Shakespeare's Extremes

Wild Man, Monster, Beast

Julián Jiménez Heffernan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137523587
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare's Extremes is a controversial intervention in current critical debates on the status of the human in Shakespeare's work. By focusing on three flagrant cases of human exorbitance - Edgar, Caliban and Julius Caesar - this book seeks to limn out the domain of the human proper in Shakespeare.

1

Body

Impasse in Marlovian Drama: A Badiou Perspective

Für Nietzsche ist der Mensch das noch nicht festgestellte Tier.

Heidegger¹

Friendless passengers

In Faustus (‘B’ text 4.1) the ‘renowned magician’ puts on a little show to amuse the German emperor:

Enter at one [door] the Emperor ALEXANDER, at the other DARIUS. They meet; Darius is thrown down. Alexander kills him, takes off his crown, and, offering to go out, his Paramour meets him. He embraceth her and set Darious’s crown upon her head; and, coming back, both salute the [German] Emperor, who, leaving his state, offers to embrace them, which Faustus seeing suddenly stays him. (4.1.101)²

The emperor, suavely admonished by Faustus—‘My gracious lord, you do forget yourself / These are but shadows, not substantial’ (102–3)—obligingly retorts: ‘O, pardon me. My thoughts are so ravished / With sight of this renowed emperor / That in mine arms I would have compassed him’ (104–6). This scene enacts an apotheosis of limits. First, the limits of the heroic warriors’ interaction, ended without words by sudden killing. Second, the limits to Alexander’s erotic affection, deceitfully sublimated from genuine embrace to ritual crowning. Third, the limits to the emperor’s desire, wrongly lured by theatrical shadows. And finally, the limits of the show itself, marked by the ‘doors’ at which Alexander and Darious enter. During their farewell salutation, the Emperor tries to embrace Alexander—‘in mine arms I would have compassed him’ (emphasis added) but he is ‘suddenly’ detained by Faustus. Marked by suddenness, detention and retention, the scene is an overdetermined instance of impasse. Faustus’s plural ambition includes making a bridge ‘through the moving air / to pass the ocean’ (1.3.103–4), ‘[passing] with delight the stately town of Trier’ (3.1.2) or using the Tiber bridges ‘to make safe passage to each part of Rome’ (3.1.37): he seeks to bridge the gap of his desire and pass on to whatever beyond his new transgressive compass authorizes. Thus impasse spells four related interruptions: the failure of attempted passage, the detention of libidinal range, the shrinking time-frame—Faustus is trapped within the ever-narrowing ‘compass’ (3.1.68) of his supervened days—and the ideological obstruction to the theatrical sports Faustus is ‘content to compass’ (‘A’ text, 3.1.53). Other Marlowe characters are similarly compromised by the uncertainties—the virtual detention—of compassing and passing, all of them ‘poor friendless passengers’ (I Tamb.1.2.70) rushing to or escaping from their arrest: Aeneas seeking to ‘pass to Italy’ (5.1.100); Tamburlaine like a fiery exhalation ‘fighting for passage’ (I Tamb 4.2.45); the Guise wrongly predicting that ‘things shall come to pass’ (1.2.8) according to his plot; and Barabas forced ‘to steal, and compass more’ (1.2.131) while fearing that he seeks ‘for much, but cannot compass it’ (5.2.48).

Predictably, critics have identified the claustrophobic effects of the logic of limits arguably governing Marlovian drama. While Garber focused on figures of entrapment and incarceration, Greenblatt explored the predicament of characters deceived in their ‘desperate attempts at boundary and closure’ (198). Thus a rich implication of logical, spatial and temporal liminality is held to inform the ideological stance of a playwright whose work reads as a dramatization of impasse: Jonathan Dollimore sees an ‘impasse of despair’ rooting Faustus’ unliberating and masochistic act of transgression (112). In Guise’s attempt ‘To bring the will of our desires to end’ (MP 1.2.86), Michael Hattaway identifies a ‘Derridean impasse’ characteristic of Marlowe’s heroes: the boastful anticipation of ontological completion while ‘the fact of desire demonstrates its incompleteness’ (212). Finally, Richard Wilson detects in Tamburlaine’s final speech (II Tamb 5.3.224–48) an adept expression of ‘the impasse into which Marlovian drama was plunging’: the self-deceiving but prideful warning of a wounded artist who had refused ‘to please both the market and the court’ (‘Tragedy, Patronage and Power’ 217).

Thus an impasse of origination would appear to bedevil Marlovian drama. And what fails to originate, in the foregoing accounts, is a renovated mode of subjectivity. Dollimore reads the Faustian subject as abject: through ideological subjection, transgressive subjectivation becomes the abjection of ‘base subjects to the whip’ (MP 1.4.15). Hattaway (‘Christopher Marlowe’) sees Guise as a delinquent subject riddled by libidinal différance: subjection as infinitely deferred projection. For Wilson, the Marlovian subject is an abortive silhouette of authorial rejection. Subjectivation is thus variously inflected as subjection, abjection, projection and rejection. What these different categories have in common is their affiliation to the Heideggerian construal of improper subjectivity as de-jection (from dejicere, jacere, ‘throw’). Indeed Heidegger’s inauthentic subject is the outcome of falling (Verfallen) and thrownness (Geworfenheit), two existential determinations predicated on unbound greed, on ‘the calm presumption of possessing and obtaining everything’ (alles zu besitzen bzw. zu erreichen) (Sein 178). Thus the taint of impropriety (Uneigentlichkeit) is held to determine the failed subjectivation of possessive individuals like Guise, Barabas, Gaveston, Tamburlaine or Faustus. Improper subjectivation depends on the reifying enslavement of everything, subject or object, standing around its organizing centre: ‘As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords, / So shall the subjects of every element / Be always serviceable to us three’ (‘A’ text 1.1.123–5). This process Heidegger sees as aggravating the improper thrownness of the Dasein (subject) by way of the radical polarization between the possessing subject and the possessed object. It is indeed this polarity—whose Faustian short-circuit is ‘the reduction of soul to a commodity by means of its exchange for other material goods’ (Halpern, ‘Marlowe’s Theatre’ 460)—that Heideggerian philosophy calls into question.³

A late but resilient fruit of the metaphysical culture, the polarity subject–object underwrites both the ethics of possessive individualism and the aesthetic epistemology of representation variously co-opted by Western societies from the sixteenth century down to the present day: on this view, to perceive, know and desire is to pre-possess through representation, while full possession involves action.⁴ Placed at the dawn of this historical process, Marlovian drama, riddled by the ‘quenchless thirst’ (MP 1.1.50) of ‘representing appetite’ (vorstellenden Streben, Heidegger, Nietzsche 52), would enact both the promise and limitation of the metaphysical construction. Philosophically, this metaphysical vision extends from Plato to Nietzsche, who retained it under great stress. Its historical implementation, accelerated in early modernity, still unfolds in our neo-techno-imperialist age of ‘world picture’ (Weltbild). The pertinence, therefore, of going on reading Marlovian heroes as abject dissidents, failed projects, implosive rejects, or as indeed self-reified subjects, appears hardly questionable: we go on reading Marlowe metaphysically in terms of military, erotic, theatrical or rhetorical technicity, in terms of possessive subject and represented object, because we inhabit the metaphysical worldview that people like Marlowe helped bring into being, a worldview that facilitated the ‘mariage perpétuel de mimesis et de désir’ (Girard 86). To step out of this metaphysical frame of meaning-giving subjects over against objectified things seems an unlikely venture, but this is precisely what Heidegger attempted when he proposed a post-metaphysical—actually, pre-metaphysical—gearing of the philosophical project towards presentation rather than representation, and towards truth as propitious event (Ereignis) rather than truth as the property—the represented and possessed object, the ‘pleasing sports’ (Dido 2.1.302) and ‘dangerous gifts’ (MP 1.3.15), the ‘lascivious shows / and prodigal gifts’ (EII 2.2.157–8)—of a subject. Few thinkers have followed Heidegger down along the path of the destitution of the arch-metaphysical subject–object polarity. One such thinker is Alain Badiou.⁵ In his most important work to date, the sequel to L’être et l’evenement entitled Logiques des mondes (2006) Badiou states that the contemporary socio-political conjuncture of ‘democratic materialism’, based on sophistry and opinion, is inimical to truths. Articulated around signifiers like ‘teamwork’, ‘respect for the other’, ‘cultures’ and ‘ethics’, its dominant axiom is ‘There are only individuals and communities’. Badiou opposes this conjuncture with a ‘materialistic dialectic’ notionally made of being, appearing, truths and subjects. After condemning the propaganda war that democratic materialism wages against any attempt to rehabilitate a discourse on truth, he proposes two alternative maxims for a materialist-dialectic conjuncture: ‘The universality of truths rests on subjective forms that cannot be either individual or communitarian’; or ‘To the extent that it is the subject of a truth, a subject subtracts itself from every community and destroys every individuation’ (Logic 9).⁶

Since Marlovian criticism has invariably fluctuated from a liberal-democratic, tendentially ahistorical, emphasis on individuals (spanning from romantic overreachers to ritual scapegoats) to a neo-materialist, decidedly historical, stress on communities (communities of transgression, deviancy, situated alterity, and emergent enfranchisement), one may suggest that for Marlowe critics ‘there are only individuals and communities’. The aim of this chapter is to interrogate Marlovian drama from a post-metaphysical position articulated around ‘subjective forms that cannot be either individual or communitarian’. By construing the subject of truth as subject to truth and therefore by evading the subject–object polarization a contrastive clarification is provided of the tendency in Marlovian drama to precipitate into impasse. This is not the first time Badiou’s theoretical work is invoked in readings of early modern drama. Richard Wilson and Julia Lupton have greeted some of his notions—the reverential ‘universal’, the awe-inspiring ‘event’—with a passing and equivocal nod.⁷ This new reading hopes to become an inducement to a more systematic consideration of the pertinence of Badiou’s complex philosophical position to literary hermeneutics.

The standard critical account of the Marlovian impasse is to suggest that the subject fails to seize the object, either because the object is banned (orthodox reading) or because the subject is barred (heterodox reading). Of the two, only the latter reading seeks to overcome the metaphysical limitation. Indeed the concept of the liberal (unified, centred) subject has been exposed to a systematic dismantling at the hands both of neo-historicists and cultural materialists. Yet it is unclear whether they have actually managed to produce an alternative to the liberal subject which is still not a subject in the metaphysical sense, that is, a meaning-giving—representing, possessive—site of perception, reason, desire, expression and agency, characterized by its entitlement to rights. This is but one remove from ‘the Californian cult of self-invention’ (Wilson) to which admittedly Foucauldian theorists adhere. The need is thus felt to place the discussion before the subject–object nexus, in an area of occurrence (event) that makes both truth and being possible. This way subject effects (interiority, desire, possession, knowledge) and object effects (representation) would be subordinated to a prior realm of ontological eventality, and agency re-conceptualized no longer as necessity—the Kantian entitlement to active moral freedom—but as the contingent effect of an event. There are intellectuals within the metaphysical tradition who have in fact risked such alternative scenario, postulating a conception of life as spectacle and the world as representation, behind which there is either nothing (Nietzsche) or being (Bruno). Subject and object amount, in this worldview, to sham roles in the drama of existence. When the conditions of representation force a radicalization of their theatrical function—omnilibidinal subjects lured by multiplying but receding objects—the limits of the metaphysical model become fully apparent. Nowhere is this more evident than in Marlowe’s plays, already energized by the ‘logic of concupiscence and desire’ (History of Sexuality 78) to which Foucault angrily objected. In Badiou’s terms, then, the Marlovian stage would posit a world without presentation, without ontological possibility (event) and without the epistemological constructability (truth) requisite for genuine subjectivation (subject). Given these conditions, the only let-out would be to dramatize the limits of representation.⁸ Yet this remained for Marlowe an unreachable achievement.

Theories of the subject

Badiou’s programme is to wed ontological and epistemological principles in order to indict contemporary relativism. The result is a meta-ontology of truth procedures. At an ontological level, Badiou considers that mathematics, more particularly algebra, provides the inner articulation of ontology.⁹ But the outline of his theory of being and appearing is consistently Deleuzian: the foundation of being is in an infinite ontological multiplicity: ‘the multiple-without-one is the law of being’ (Ethics 25). Things in reality are sets or multiples of such multiplicity. A thing becomes a site when it is assigned a value of existence through transcendental indexation: a site testifies to the intrusion of being into appearing, thus becoming an enclave of potential ontological emergence. When the intensity of existence ascribed to the site becomes excessive, a singularity occurs. If the intensity is maximal, then a strong singularity or real change occurs. The name of this change is event, a crucial category in Badiou’s ontology. An event is first an ontological occurrence, because it amounts to a change that absolutizes the inexistent. As a ‘situated excess’ originating on the verge of a void, an event cannot be predicted by the state of the situation, a protocol of calculation and countability which Badiou bluntly calls the State (Being 93–111). In mathematical terms, an event takes place when a subset is larger than the set to which it belongs. But an event also produces epistemological effects. And this is where Badiou’s ontology becomes an epistemic meta-ontology. The key notion now is subject, defined by Badiou as a body that enters into a subjective formalism with regard to the production of a present. The subjective formalism is just a truth procedure: the subject becomes faithful to an event and seeks to track and organize the traces of the event. This faithful subject, whose search constitutes a truth procedure, is different from the reactive subject, who cynically questions his success, but also from the obscure subject, devoted to eradicating truth (Logics 54–62). Consequently, according to Badiou, a body only becomes a subject when it is formalized through a truth procedure in fidelity to an event. Truth, in this sense, is the set of all the productions of a faithfully subjectivated body. There are four possible truth procedures: love, politics, the arts and science. These are the four different realms in which truths may be produced by a subject. These realms are conditions for philosophy, whose task is to seize on, police and redescribe these truths. This is material: philosophy does not produce truths, but receives them already made. Its task is to recognize the universality of some of the truths obtained in so unpredictable a manner.

In the truth procedure of an emancipatory politics, the truths produced are universal because they are void: ‘truths have no sense’ (Conditions 165). The central category of the political truth is the idea of the same.¹⁰ While in the order of being there are only differences, in the order of truth there must be indifference to differences, whence the justice of the Same Badiou calls equality (Ethics 25; Conditions 172). This political epistemology is radically opposed to the multicultural defence of difference for the sake of difference, to the neo-humanitarian prescription of minority rights and to the ethics of the Other. The notion of community thus enters Badiou’s metapolitics under a negative sign.¹¹ The discovery of a truth is a chanceful occurrence: it takes place as a process of subjectivation which may be isolated or collective. When the material of the event is collective we confront a ‘political event’ (Metapolitics 141). Paradoxically, however, there is no consensual sharing of the event (Metapolitics 23). When philosophy seizes that truth, it is compossibilized as eternal and universal. Thus Badiou rather vertiginously moves from an aleatory ontology based on unpredictable chance to a Platonic epistemology based on eternal truth. In this oscillation there is no place for the particular, that is, for the communitarian:

The enemy of a true subjective fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Texts
• Introduction: A Sentimental Paradox
• Chapter: 1 Body
• Chapter: 2 Wild Man
• Chapter: 3 Monster
• Chapter: 4 Beast
• Notes and References
• Bibliography
• Index