Synopses & Reviews
The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the ghost haunts Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane. Arguably, no literary work is more familiar to us. Everyone knows at least six words from
Hamlet, and most people know many more. Yet the play—Shakespeare’s longest—is more than “passing strange,” and it becomes even more complex when considered closely.
Reading Hamlet alongside other writers, philosophers, and psychoanalysts—Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Melville, and Joyce—Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster go in search of a particularly modern drama that is as much about ourselves as it is a product of Shakespeare’s imagination. They also offer a startling interpretation of the action onstage: it is structured around “nothing”—or, in the enigmatic words of the player queen, “it nothing must.”
From the illusion of theater and the spectacle of statecraft to the psychological interplay of inhibition and emotion, Hamlet discloses the modern paradox of our lives: how thought and action seem to pull against each other, the one annulling the possibility of the other. As a counterweight to Hamlet’s melancholy paralysis, Ophelia emerges as the play’s true hero. In her madness, she lives the love of which Hamlet is incapable.
Avoiding the customary clichés about the timelessness of the Bard, Critchley and Webster show the timely power of Hamlet to cast light on the intractable dilemmas of human existence in a world that is rotten and out of joint.
Synopsis
The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the Ghost haunts him. Arguably, no literary work, not even the Bible, is more familiar to us than Shakespeare's
Hamlet. Everyone knows at least six words from the play; often people know many more. Yet the play—Shakespeare's longest—is more than ”passing strange” and becomes deeply unfamiliar when considered closely.
Stay, Illusion! is a passionate encounter with the play that affords an original look at this work of literature and the prismatic quality of the play to project meaning. Along the way, Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster consider the political context and stakes of Shakespeare's play, its relation to religion, the movement of desire, and the incapacity to love.
About the Author
SIMON CRITCHLEY is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He also teaches at Tilburg University and the European Graduate School. His many books include
Very Little...Almost Nothing, The Faith of the Faithless, and
The Book of Dead Philosophers (Vintage 2009), which made
The New York Times extended bestseller list. He is series moderator of “The Stone,” a philosophy column in
The New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor. In the fall of 2012 he ran an “On Truth and Lies” talk series at BAM.
JAMIESON WEBSTER is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and its Sublimation (Karnac, 2011) and has written for Cabinet Magazine, The New York Times, and many psychoanalytic publications. She teaches at Eugene Lang College and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at the City University of New York.