Humor or Dying Voice—Hamlet between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt

Abstract

In spite of the indeterminacy of Shakespeare's religiosity, Benjamin and Schmitt respectively identify his most famous protagonist Hamlet as Christian and as non-Christian. By virtue of this contradistinction, readers may gain a clear perspective of the difference between Benjamin's historico-philosophical project and Schmitt's theologico-political thinking. It is the play within the play in/of Hamlet from which Benjamin and Schmitt both take cues that reveal Hamlet's true color. For Benjamin, Hamlet is a plotter of contingency who yearns to suffer martyrdom by accident, whereas Schmitt sees Hamlet as a sovereign on the basis of the fact that Hamlet gives his “dying voice.” It is as if Benjamin made a retort to Schmitt when Benjamin speaks of the despot as the ideal subject of humor that is supposed to deactivate sovereignty. Through Hamlet, readers can observe that a confrontation between Benjamin and Schmitt emerged that may shed light on the issue of sovereignty.

Keywords:

• Benjamin
• dying voice
• Hamlet
• humor
• the play within the play
• Schmitt

Notes

Heinrich Heine, “Ludwig Börne: A Memorial,” in The Romantic School and Other Essays, ed. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York: Continuum, 1985), 271.

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 391. Shakespeare in Hamlet could have recognized the triumph of Protestantism without sympathizing with it. Notwithstanding Bloom's prudent remark, there have been not a few attempts to define Shakespeare's religiosity in a resolute manner. Whereas some scholars find in Hamlet much evidence of the ascendency of Puritan Protestantism, to be more exact, Calvinism, others discern a number of clear vestiges of the old belief of England and Europe. As for the first group, see, for example, John E. Curran Jr., Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency: Not to Be (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006); as for the latter, see David N. Beauregard, Catholic Theology in Shakespeare's Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007).

In respect to this puzzling trait of Shakespeare's plays, Anselm Haverkamp, while critically accepting “opacity,” the term suggested by other scholars, opts to call this trait latency of Shakespeare. “Opacity is a good name for the appearance of energy and force on Shakespeare's stage in general, but there is more to its efficacy than meets—or, rather, in all its opaqueness escapes—the eye of the beholder. The law of Shakespeare's stage is counter-determined by, and thus prevails on, the unexplained premises of a latency far before the law, whose threat the law is barely able to keep at bay, and whose transgressive nature has been only precariously mastered in classical myth.” Haverkamp, Shakespearean Genealogies of Power (London: Routledge, 2011), 13–14.

See Carl Schmitt, “Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History,” trans. Mario Wenning, Telos 147 (Summer 2009): 167–170.

Samuel Weber, Targets of Opportunity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 27.

Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3.

Agnes Heller, The Time Is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 8.

See Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003), 97.

See Salvador de Madariaga, On Hamlet (London: Hollis & Carter, 1948), 12. “He acts, thinks, feels, not in the Danish, or the English, but in the Hamletian way.”

Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 391.

Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 2003), 158. Cited hereafter as OG.

Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, trans. David Pan and Jennifer R. Rust (New York: Telos Press, 2009), 61. Cited hereafter as HH.

Yet it is beyond doubt that Benjamin was well aware of the religious confrontation between Catholicism and Protestantism. On this point Rainer Nägele comments as follows: “Splitting and unity determine the theological rhetoric and its presentation. The opposition of Lutheran Protestantism and Catholic Counter-Reformation is presented by Benjamin as an opposition between a certain unity of life and faith in the Catholic permeation of life by faith and the radical separation of life and faith in the Lutheran devaluation of ‘good works.’” Nägele, Theater, Theory, Speculation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 186.

Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature Think? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 112.

See Jennifer R. Rust and Julia Lupton, “Introduction: Schmitt and Shakespeare,” in Schmitt, HH, xxix.

Ibid.

Indira Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 158.

As concerns transcendence in/of Hamlet, Bloom mentions “a purely secular transcendence” that contrasts with “the spirit's survival in more traditional modes.” See Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 420.

de Madariaga, On Hamlet, 11 and 12.

Eric Santner insightfully names this imperfectness “scandal or trauma,” commenting as follows: “What makes Hamlet Hamlet―and for Schmitt that also means what makes Hamlet a genuine tragedy rather than a baroque Trauerspiel―turns out to be something that is in Hamlet that is more than Hamlet, some unnamed cause, some scandal or trauma that can only be reconstructed on the basis not of allusions or mirrorings but of what appears as peculiar swerves or torsions in the work.” Eric Santner, “The Royal Remains,” Telos 153 (Winter 2010): 33–34.

Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014), 37.

Ibid. It would be instructive to make reference to a passage of Samuel Weber: “When an event or series of events takes place without reducing the place ‘taken’ to a purely neutral site, then that place reveals itself to be a ‘stage,’ and those events become theatrical happenings. … They take place, which means in a particular place, and yet simultaneously also pass away—not simply to disappear but to happen somewhere else.” Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 7.

Andreas Höfele suggests an alternative translation of the German Einbruch: irruption. “‘Irruption,’” Höfele writes, “would be closer in meaning to the German word Schmitt uses, Einbruch, which conveys a violent breaking or bursting into. In its most common use the word denotes the offence of breaking and entering. Compounds with the verb brechen (break, rupture) and its concomitant noun Bruch abound in writings of the late 1940s and 50s.” Höfele, “Hamlet in Plettenberg: Carl Schmitt's Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Survey 65 (2012): 388. To be sure, the translation of Einbruch has room for further discussion. In his response to the earlier version of this article, Samuel Weber suggested that “incursion” would be a better rendition of the term.

As concerns understanding of myth, Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink plausibly contrasts Schmitt's concept with that of Blumenberg, who attributes the fundamental role of banishing the terrors of reality to aesthetic play. See Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, “Between Terror and Play: The Intellectual Encounter of Hans Blumenberg and Jacob Taubes,” Telos 158 (Spring 2012): 130.

In this respect, it seems significant that Schmitt mentions the need of King James I: “James needed to be disguised as Hamlet and hidden behind the saga, pretending to be about something very different from what is really at stake in Shakespeare's drama, in order to preserve the temporal immediacy before the naked panopticon of the politics of the time.” Carl Schmitt, “Foreword to the German Edition of Lilian Winstanley's Hamlet and the Scottish Succession,” trans. Kurt R. Buhanan, Telos 153 (Winter 2010): 172 (my emphasis).

Heller, The Time Is Out of Joint, 368.

Ibid., 369.

Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 420.

Unlike Schmitt, Stephen Greenblatt, while focusing on the ignitable issue at that time, Purgatory, and its influence on the plays of Shakespeare, finds in Hamlet “the startling Shakespearean shift from vengeance to remembrance.” Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 229.

Gourgouris incisively refutes this assertion of Schmitt by arguing, in a quite reminiscent way of Kahn's argument, that it is the very Athenian tragedy that constitutes the Greek polis. “The knowledge of myth as source text, which the community possesses, is invested in the performance not as origin but as reality, as present-tense mythic thought that will then enable the judgment (krisis) of the given tragedy as a specific performative instance of myth. To put it otherwise, in tragedy myth does not preside as origin but is enacted as drōmenon, beyond the boundaries of the stage, for the simple reason that the entire polis is reminded by the theatrical experience that its political substance is predicated on its own theatricality. The political community is constituted not only in but as theatron; it is theater as such.” Gourgouris, Does Literature Think?, 110.

In terms of Hamlet's theological thinking, Greenblatt spots the implication of the phrase “Hic et ubique” (1.5.158) that alludes the atmosphere of violence and insecurity at that time. It refers, according to him, “to the divine power to violate the laws of physics, a power that became an issue in the Reformation in a dispute over the Lutheran doctrine of Christ's Ubiquity.” Behind Hamlet's bizarre words, however, some irresoluble problem lurks. “Traditional Catholic ritual in England,” Greenblatt goes on to say, “included a prayer … to be recited for the dead who had been laid to rest in the churchyard. God's mercy and forgiveness of sin are begged on behalf of all of those souls here and everywhere (hic et ubique) who rest in Christ. The point is not only that such pleas for the dead make use of the key phrase hic et ubique but also that they are specifically connected to a belief in Purgatory” (Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 234–35). Such a belief that was, as is well known, linked to the system of papal indulgences, could not avoid evoking animosity from secular governors and politicians. In a similar vein, Samuel Weber observes in Hamlet's words a shift from grace to security in terms of political transition: “Such conflicts thus cannot be resolved definitively, but only responded to case by case, insofar as both state and politics are assigned a task that, from a Christian perspective, at least, cannot be accomplished with worldly means alone, since it ultimately involves the question of grace: which is to say, the relation of finite beings to their ‘end,’ that is, to mortality. As a result, compromises have to be struck, of which the most familiar and perhaps most important for modern politics has been the translation of ‘grace’ into ‘security’ and its derivatives, ‘law and order’” (Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 190).

Jane O. Newman, “Benjamin's Trauerspiel Book and Its Sources,” in Benjamin-Studien 1, ed. Daniel Weidner and Sigrid Weigel (Frankfurt am Main.: Wilhelm Fink, 2008), 188.

See, for example, Norman Gelb, Herod the Great: Statesman, Visionary, Tyrant (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

Schmitt, “Foreword to the German Edition of Lilian Winstanley's Hamlet and the Scottish Succession,” 117.

See Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 431.

de Madariaga, On Hamlet, 82.

Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 422.

It is helpful to take note of Weber's comments on Hamlet's act: “As has often been observed, Hamlet does not act in the purposive, effective way commanded by the ghost of his father: rather, he acts as an actor, while observing as spectator and staging as director. He does not so much accomplish his mission as stage it” (Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 193).

As Eric Santner rightly observes, the “dying voice” Schmitt conceives here, paradoxically, can be considered as signifying “the dying of the dying voice.” Santner, “The Royal Remains,” 49.

See Friedrich Gundolf, Shakespeare und Der deutsche Geist (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1927), 1–2.

Schmitt would doubtlessly allege that Hamlet still be considered as a legitimate king even though his “dying voice” is always already dying.

Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften VI (Frankfurt am Main.: Suhrkamp, 1991), 130. Translation is mine. For reference, we can find in Baudelaire's essay “On the Essence of Laughter” (1855) a clue with respect to humor that Benjamin might have borne in mind while he wrote this fragment. See Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 140: “Laughter is satanic: it is thus profoundly human. It is the consequence in man of the idea of his own superiority. And since laughter is essentially human, it is, in fact, essentially contradictory; that is to say that it is at once a token of an infinite grandeur and an infinite misery.”