(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
Private Body was an attempt to historicise the sense of an inner self by applying Jacques Lacan's updated Freudian psychoanalysis to texts such as Hamlet. In the extract Barker develops Lacan's bad French pun that Hamlet is an hommelette, rather than a fully-rounded homme, whose identity is a vacuum waiting to be filled with modern interiority. Although the external role to be acted out in a Renaissance , court is a sham, the Prince of Denmark is not provided with the autonomy and unity which will constitute the inner life of a bourgeois subject. That will emerge after the English Revolution, in the coded and guilt-stricken secret diary of a Pepys. Shakespeare's tragedy therefore straddles a world dying, where status was signified through the body, and one yet powerless to be born, where the body will be repressed to sanctify the soul. This is a reading that locates Elizabethan drama in a, cultural continuum of which we are products, and it has been influential for the Cultural Materialist reading of the Renaissance as the 'history of the present'.
Hamlet's first argument with his stepfather takes place in the crowded council chamber marks off this spectacular, corporeal sovereignty from the polity which is to succeed it. There is, however, no difficulty in []ing, even from the present, the scene of the state. The language and the costume may not be that of our own day, but nor are we - on the []ace - without sure points of reference here. Conducted under a 157 a different historical form, but clearly identifiable as such even from the contemporary standpoint of a very different experience of the political, central affairs of state are centrally enacted: the succession of rule, and the emergency of war. Claudius's opening disquisition on the haste with which his marriage to Gertrude has followed on the death of the former king her husband, by way of a nicely turned contrast between mourning and celebration, manages to sound at once sorrowing and festive. It is the accomplished palliative speech of an adept politician reassuring anxieties at home. He is convincing, genial, magnanimous, clearly adroit in managing councils of state. The next item of business touches foreign policy: Fortinbras has sharked up his list of lawless resolutes in the marches and now challenges for the control of disputed territory. Old rights are involved, not least the honour of the dead king, which Claudius does not fail to mention, skillfully linking the external threat to the internal problem, subtly buttressing his legitimacy by establishing himself as a []me foreign invader. War grows out of such things, and Denmark's armourers and shipwrights are already preparing for the conflict, but Claudius will pursue the options of diplomacy before unleashing the violence of this warlike state against the mercenaries. A certain political circumspection governs his instructions to the ambassadors who are fiercely ordered not to overstep the limits of their commission. In this, the primal scene of the play, the fully political concerns of the internal and external security of the realm itself are dramatized. Written at a moment in England's political history when both press heavily on the real kingdom, the scene delineates process of government with a clarity that is as economical as it is essential. The destiny of an entire society is gathered into these few lines and placed before audiences who will themselves participate at a drama of historical crisis. Denmark and England each stand on a threshold of change: by the end a certain greatness will have gone out of one; revolution will transform the other.
But there is an anachronistic temptation to read back from the present and identify, in the next business of the scene, as it shifts from the empowering of the ambassadors to the matter of Laertes's departure from court, with a caesura dividing off the political state from the more intimate textures of family life. Hardly high policy on a level with what has already been transacted in this busy hall, does this episode not serve to reformulate the scene, and to manage a transition from the public space to the personal and domestic argument with Hamlet that is to follow? To think so would be to commit a signal historical mistake. At most the items on this agenda are organized according to a descending order of importance, and even that is questionable in view of the subsequent unfolding of the action. The narrative of the drama (which should not, in any event, be confused with the form of the social situation it discloses) will foreground the particular 158 trajectories of Hamlet substantially, and Laertes to an extent; but this must not be allowed to occlude its location of these destinies within the menace of the wider crisis, and more p[]dly, within a density and order of being that defers the modern division. In sharp contrast to the separations which the Pepysian text describes, in this polity, Laertes's departure is fully in place in the business of state. The king's permission - sued for in full council- doubles, complements, sanctions and completes the reluctant permission of the biological father.
The scene inscribes within itself not a separation of spheres but that ;:_ relation of subordinate correspondence, theorized with varying degrees of . 'c" mysticism at the time, between the father who is as a king in the family and the king who is as a father in the state. Nor should this similitude be thought as pallid analogy or distant likeness. It is stricter than homology, and constitutes an essential link in a chain of ideal connections that ground sociality itself in a theory of kingship and kinship which was practised in an array of political, juridical and cultural institutions, and which the general form of hierarchy, sanctioned in practice by force and metaphysically by God the King and God the Father whose just order it reflects, the single realm describes a full place, tense with patterns of fealty, reciprocity, obligation and command. The figure of the king guarantees, as locus and source of power and as master-signifier, a network of subsidiary relations which constitute the real practice and intelligibility of the lives of subjects.
If the body of the Passion is the foundation of this world's signifying, at the same time the body of the king is its coherent temporal instance, the body that encompasses all mundane bodies within its build. But the 1 subjection at work here is not that modern form for which the ambitiously inappropriate name of 'consciousness' is frequently used. Pre-bourgeois subjection does not properly involve subjectivity at all, but a condition of dependent membership in which place and articulation are defined not by an interiorized self-recognition - complete or partial, percipient or unknowing, efficient or rebellious - (of none the less socially constituted subject-positions), but by incorporation in the body politic which is the king's body in its social form. With a clarity now hard to recapture, the social plenum is the body of the king, and membership of this anatomy is the deep structural form of all being in the secular realm. Where post-Pepysian subjection will distance the external world in order to construct subjectivity as the (imaginary) property of inner selfhood, this sovereignty achieves its domination by other means, across an articulated but single ground. It establishes a constitution within which subjects are profoundly implicated not because they 'know their place' (as in the modern form when it is effective) but because alterity of placement is always-already encoded as unthinkable. Or at least no more
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conceivable than the absurd proposition that the arm could take the place of the spleen. This did not prevent rebellion, but the heavy price legitimacy extracts for such an act is the burden of dismembering the frame of place and sense itself.
In this scene, in Hamlet, the king and the biological father happen to be different people. But not far away in the oeuvre, in a significantly more conservative text, they are identical. When Lear sets his tragic action in motion by dividing the indivisible kingdom, there are a number of different registers to his error (one of the glories of the Renaissance is the pre-Rationalist complexity of its error). The historical register involves regression across a century of painful development. Under the Tudor dynasty England had emerged from internal wars to lay the groundwork of a nation state. The Crown, in breaking the authority of the feudal magnates and in rearticulating under its own sovereignty that of the Church, acquired the national monopoly of the means of both [].1 manipulation of class and factional alliances both with and over the heads of the lords ecclesiastical and temporal, it reorganized the power previously vested in them. The imposition of a professional central bureaucracy, and of local administrative and judicial government staffed increasingly by royal appointees, appeared to disseminate control at the same time as it effectively gathered it to the writ of the Crown. But Lear, in his historical folly, refragments the realm by dividing it among his daughters and reestablishing, under a nominal and ineffectual monarch, powerful and competitive baronial factions, whose gender only seryes to underline their monstrous character.
If today an effort of retrospective imagination is needed in order to perceive the catastrophic enormity of this, to contemporaries its implications were plain and fearsome. And not simply because of the threat posed by this dismemberment of the integrity of the realm. For in another register, but at the identical moment and not as a consequential effect, Lear's action - which is already close to that madness that will soon bear down on him - also disarticulates the order of the family. If Hamlet's first argument with Claudius takes place in state, in the first scene of Lear the fusion (of what is in any case not yet separate) is also total. Even without that signal blindness which permeates the playas a terrible instance of debility in the spectacular kingdom and whose first act is to misrecognize Cordelia and cast her, rather than her sisters, in the role of rebellious daughter-subject, the king's original intention of a tripartite division of the realm and the family violates an essential coherence between them both. Its intention threatens to disassemble authority relations fundamental to this patriarchal sovereignty, and to the family or state, as if it were the public office of a later polity. In this 160 settlement, soon to be unsettled and surrendered to lawlessness because the place of the king-father from which the law is uttered is soon to be emptied, subjects are located in places not by the apparently auxiliary contingency of the later constitution, but by an essential fit, by necessary bonds of nature articulating the political anatomy of the king's body.
Although disorder in the family, in the state and in the faculties of the soul- and, indeed, in cosmic nature - can act as metaphors for each other, their substantial interrelation is more profound than poetic artifice: they are all grounded at once in the same inner correspondence whose transgression risks the disarticulation of reality itself. It is with the same gesture of division that Lear fissures his kingdom, his family and his reason, for on this scene the state, kinship and sense repeat and extend into each other without break.
Thus Laertes's suit for permission to travel and the fourth item on the agenda which is much more problematic from the standpoint of the [holic] excess of mourning and the Oedipal drama that begins to speak itself there - are heard in the [] chamber. What would appear under the new regime as private matters exist in an as yet undivided continuum with the succession and the gathering war. The public and the private as strong, mutually defining, mutually exclusive categories, each describing separate terrains with distinct contents, practices and discourses, are not yet extant. In Hamlet and in Lear, and in the wider sovereignty they disclose, the space of being, the society, the world - what you will- is ordered along different lines from those that fissure our own situation. This is not to insist that there is no aloneness there. Ophelia's lonely epithet for Hamlet himself 'The glass of fashion and the mould of form,/The observ'd of all
observers' (Hamlet, ed. H. Jenkins London, 1982], IV,i,156-7) - certainly marks out around the prince, in significantly specular language, a penumbra of solitude. But this is not a private condition. The keynote is the very visibility with which the space is delineated: it is the pertinent metaphor, as concrete as any could be, for the indivisibility of the plenum. The sovereignty that governs this space - however insecure it is growing as it registers in the resort to the figure of the spy, or in Lear's and Gloucester's blindness, its progressive failure to see - is represented by the all-pervading access which the spectacle provides. This is why so many stand around, paying attention or not, near the action at the throne, in the centre of the kingdom and of the family. They and we are attentive or indifferent, but necessary spectators here, not because the action only acquires its meaning when it is apprehended by an audience for whom it is played out, but because no other conditions are extant. In the same way as what is seen does not take place in public, so what is not seen by all
What is secret in this world - the conspiracies of the night, two figures who stand together on an empty 161 beach - does not correspond to that modern condition of privacy in which the Pepysian subject is incarcerated. Here even solitude, while it may be a form of torture, is a figure of the whole, contingent on the local and momentary situation, but not a rent in the social fabric as such.
And yet, to return to the great hall, which has been named with an aptness that is uncanny the presence chamber (for everything in this sovereignty is exactingly present, sanctioned by the real or in principle proximity of the body of the king), we must take the measure of the one great exception to the rule of this world: beside the throne, slightly apart from the others, his head bowed in thought, stands the Oedipal prince. In what are almost the first words we hear him speak, a claim is made for modem depth, for qualitative distinction from the corporeal order of the spectacle:
Seems, madam! nay it is, I know not 'seems'.
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, modes, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play,
But I have that within that passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
(I, ii, 75-86)
Hamlet asserts against the devices of the world an essential interiority. If the 'forms, modes, shapes' fail to denote him truly it is because in him a separation has already opened up between the inner reality of the subject, living itself, as 'that within that passes show', and an inauthentic exterior. and in that opening there begins to insist, however prematurely, the figure that is to dominate and organize bourgeois culture. Seen from the viewpoint of this speech, the narrative of Hamlet is nothing but the prince's evasion of a series of positionalities offered to him by the social setting. From the moment when the ghost of his father lays on him the burden of vengeance, his passage through the drama is the refusal of or, at most, the parodic and uncommitted participation in - the roles of courtier, lover, son, politician, swordsman, and so on. Even the central task of revenge provides, in its deferral, no more than a major axis of the play's duration. But in dismissing these modes, or 'actions' as he calls them, Hamlet utters, against the substance of the spectacular plenum which is now reduced in his eyes to a factitious artificiality 'that a man might play', a first demand for the modem subject. In the name, now, 162 not of the reign of the body but of the secular soul, an interior subjectivity begins to speak here - one which, if it encounters the world in anything more than a quizzical and contemplative manner, must alienate itself into an environment which inevitably traduces the richness of the subject by its mute and resistant externality. An early embarrassment for bourgeois ideology, and one of which Hamlet is in part an early victim, was that even as it had to legitimize the active appropriation of the world, it also had to encode its subject as an individual, privatized and largely passive 'consciousness' systematically detached from a world which is thus beyond its grasp: for all its insistence on the world as tractable raw object it none the less constructs a subjectivity whose form is that of the unique and intuitive soul centred in meanings which are apparently its alone.
But this interiority remains, in Hamlet, gestural. 'The heart of my mystery’ (II, iii, 368-9), as he describes it to Guildenstern in another place, is the real opacity of the text. Unlike those other obscurities of seeming which are proper to the spectacle, the truth and density of this mystery can never be apprehended. The deceptions of the plenum which surrounds Hamlet are always ultimately identifiable as such, and therefore only obscure for a few or within some tactical situation of the drama as it unfolds: the [] never beyond the reach of its epistemology. But Hamlet's inner mystery' not of this order. Neither those who seek it out in the play, who try to discover whether he is mad in reality or 'in craft', nor the audience who overhear so many examples of the rhetorical form proper to this isolated subjectivity, the soliloquy, are ever placed by the text in a position from which it can be grasped. It endures as a central obscurity which cannot be dramatized. The historic prematurity of this subjectivity places it outside the limits of the text-world in which it is as yet emergent only in a promissory form. The text continually offers to fulfill the claim of that first speech, whenever it appears that the claimed core of that within which passes the show of the spectacle will be 'substantially articulated, Hamlet's riddling, antic language shifts its ground and the text slides away from essence into a further deferral of the 'mystery. But if the text cannot dramatize this subjectivity, it can at least display its impossibility, when Hamlet offers a metaphor of himself, of his
If, to Guildenstern who is an instrument, purely, of the king, and, signally lacking any form of interiority, challenging Guildenstern to 'pluck out the heart' of his mystery - in language sufficiently corporeal to point the failure - Hamlet gives him the recorder which he cannot play, "though he would, in Hamlet's conceit, 'sound' the 'compass' of the prince. The hollow pipe is the refutation of the metaphysic of soul which he play signals but cannot realize for Hamlet, in a sense doubtless own to him, is truly this hollow reed which will 'discourse most eloquent music' but is none the less vacuous for that. At the centre of 163 Hamlet, in the interior of his mystery, there is, in short, nothing. The promised essence remains beyond the scope of the text's signification: or other, signals the limit of the signification of this world by marking out the site of an absence it cannot fill. It gestures towards a place for objectivity, but both are anachronistic and belong to a historical order whose outline has so far only been sketched out.
It is into this breach in Hamlet that successive generations of criticism - especially Romantic and post-Romantic variants - have stepped I order to fill the vacuum and, in explaining Hamlet, to explain him away. His effort to dissipate the challenge he represents is partly explained by [] to remake the Jacobean settlement in the eternal image of the bourgeois world and partly by a more subversive potential in the prince.
Accounts of his unresolved Oedipus complex, his paranoia - both clinical and vulgar - his melancholic nobility of soul in a world made petty by [] have all served the purposes of bourgeois criticism's self-recognition. In erasing the alterity of this other world it has sought to discover there the same preoccupations and structures as those which vem its own discourse. Politically liberal versions of this unconscious and ideologically loaded modernization of the pre-revolutionary sovereignty, articulating what is either a mild criticism or simply the inheritance of a soured Cartesianism, have even discovered in the prince - fully fledged - that alienated modern individual dejected in the market-place of inauthentic values. Each has found it necessary to discover in him one recension or another of the subjectivity which defines the modern soul. But in so doing they have [] overstated the fullness of the consciousness actually dramatized by the []. The lack of closure in its relentless scepticism, its relativizing, unstable discourse, have been locked and frozen in order to provide the fixity necessary to recuperate it [] conception of essential subjectivity fully realized. In place of the text's pattern of offer and refusal of this interiority, strung out along the chain of Hamlet's rich but fleeting language, single 'problem', or knot of problems, is diagnosed, and is then said to denote him truly. The startling effect has been to reproduce the text as the great tragedy of bourgeois culture.
But the point is not to supply this absence, to make whole what is lacking, but to aggravate its historical significance. Hamlet is a contradictory, transitional text, and one not yet fully assimilated into the discursive order which has claimed it: the promise of essential subjectivity remains unfulfilled from its point of vantage on the threshold of the modern but not yet within it, the text scandalously reveals the emptiness at the heart of that bourgeois trope. Rather than the plenitude of an individual presence, the text dramatizes its impossibility.
Not only is the myth by which the autonomous individual is made [] an 154 undetermined unit of being, in contrast to an inert social world, alien to this dramatic regime, but even when, in a later settlement, the philosophical legislation and discursive underpinning necessary to support the device have been provided, it will achieve a success whose stability, as the example of Pepys shows, is at best fragile. When it does emerge in the discourse of Descartes or a Pepys, in a different kind of writing from that of the Jacobean spectacle as its substantial and founding mode, it will immediately begin to be naturalized as the figure under which the social conditions of another sovereignty will be wed. Itself socially constructed none the less, and not in any event identical with those, or any, social conditions themselves - for in dividing the subject from the outer world it enacts an imaginary desocialization of subjectivity - it will take up its place as the central figure in which bourgeois society will be experienced in interiority and subjection. Its dramatic impossibility in Hamlet is, therefore, the more critically valuable
Still live it out. Rather than a gap to filled, the vacuity in Hamlet is a 'failure' to be celebrated against tie more systematically vacuous dominion of the order of subjectivity it both []als and resists.
But if Hamlet's promised but unfulfilled interiority in its sharpest form is unacceptable to bourgeois ideology because it is not sufficiently fixated, it is equally intolerable to the plenum which surrounds him because it has already moved too far in that direction. The text, toq effects its own closure of the fissure that the prince opens in its fabric, and averts the challenge to its order which the prince rep[] This is why it mobilizes so many simulacra of him. Fortinbras, Laertes, even semi-mythical Pyrrhus of the First Player's speech whose sword also hesitates above the head of a king - are each interference repetitions of Hamlet by which the text disperses across its surface (in a distribution fitted to the spatial dimension of the spectacle) other, external versions of the prince, in order to fend off the insistence of his unique essentiality. And it is why, in order that the play may end, a second Hamlet must be introduced. For rather than the maturation or development of 'character' that we have been taught to look for in Shakespeare, there is a semi-Brechtian []tion between the figure who is deported to England and the figure who returns having suffered a sea-change agnostic melancholy is replaced by the man of action who does battle with the pirates, and who devises an effective stratagem against the king's agents which he sardonically reports to Horatio: 'So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't'. 'Why, man, they did make love to this employment' (V, ii, 56-7). The Hamlet who delays (and whose delaying is but the linear deployment of the 'vertical' absence within is replaced by one who simply waits[] 'it will be short, the interim is mine' (V, ii, 74): and who is soon dead; by one whose first appearance, at Ophelia's graveside, is signalled
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by the fact that riddling, sliding language of the first Hamlet has now migrated to the mouth of the gravedigger from whom, ironically, the second must now try to elicit simple answers to simple questions; and, finally, by one who goes to his death inserted into the traditional Christian values - the 'special providence in the fall of a sparrow' (V, ii, 217-18) and the 'divinity that shapes our ends,/Rough-hew them how we will' (V, ii, 1_11) - that were so profoundly questioned by the figure he supplants. By these devices, arbitrarily and theatrically secured, the challenge of Hamlet's incipient modernity is extinguished - for a time and the prince recuperated to the order of the spectacle which his opacity had troubled.
Reprinted from The Tremulous Private Body: Essays in Subjection (London: Methuen, ), pp. 29-40.