Shakespeare Between Past and Future: Political Freedom and The
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: ARENDT AND SHAKESPEARE: RETHINKING FOUR FUNDAMENTAL POLITICAL CONCEPTS Theodore Frederic Kaouk, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Dissertation directed by: Professor Theodore Leinwand Department of English Scholars have long noted the role Greek tragedy plays in the articulation of Arendt’s claims about what she calls the “anti-political” tradition in Western thought, but no one has explored the ways Shakespeare bears on her political philosophy. This is especially noticeable, given that Arendt recurs to Shakespeare in numerous books and essays, and in her personal correspondence. Nevertheless, political scientists have overlooked Shakespeare in Arendt studies and equally absent from Shakespeare criticism have been Arendtian theories of the political that have much to tell us about Shakespeare’s work. This dissertation makes visible the palimpsest-like quality of those Shakespearean texts whose anachronisms are conceptual rather than material. Their “rich and strange” pearls invite us to consider the history and transformation of some of the most fundamental concepts in Western political thought. By layering Christian and classical notions of freedom in The Rape of Lucrece, a poem whose subject concerns the foundation of Roman political freedom, or by constellating in Coriolanus classical and early modern notions of what it means to be a citizen, Shakespeare allows us to see, as if for the first time, the fate of the modern political world and the anti-political impulses that often drive its metamorphoses. My twin goals are to discover why Shakespeare and performance play such an important role in Arendt’s political philosophy, and to explore the saving power that the Shakespearean corpus might still have for our capacity to think politically today. ARENDT AND SHAKESPEARE: RETHINKING FOUR FUNDAMENTAL POLITICAL CONCEPTS by Theodore Frederic Kaouk Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2014 Advisory Committee: Professor Theodore Leinwand, Chair Professor Kent Cartwright Professor Theresa Coletti Professor Kimberly Coles Professor Samuel Kerstein ©Copyright by Theodore Frederic Kaouk 2014 Dedication To Sandra and to my parents, who never doubted. ii Acknowledgements The time I spent witnessing an unfolding dialogue between Arendt and Shakespeare has been enlivened by the presence of others who offered their insights, their support, and their gentle but much needed critiques. I want to thank my dissertation director, Ted Leinwand, for the expert attention he paid to numerous early fragments and chapter drafts, for his ability to allow me to find my own way, and for his course on Montaigne and Shakespeare, where this dissertation was born. It is rare to find in one person such a professional expertise, a diligence in attending to graduate student work, and a skill in encouraging independent thought, and I have been both honored and blessed to have had the opportunity to work with him on this project. I am also forever grateful to Kent Cartwright for his own readings of my work, which invariably encouraged me to think more carefully about what it was that I was writing, and for his generosity in agreeing to teach an individualized seminar on comedy to me while he shouldered the burden of chairing the department. Among my other readers, Theresa Coletti provided her own carefully considered comments and remained a positive and encouraging presence as teacher and professional mentor throughout my time at the iii university; Kim Coles introduced thought-provoking questions about my methodology and presentation. I also want to thank the other professors I interacted with during the time I spent completing my degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, especially Ralph Bauer, who offered his support in translating excerpts from Arendt's Denktagebuch, and Jonthan Auerbach, for his encouragement, for his reading of my chapter on Hamlet, and for his thoughtful email exchanges that helped me to think through the complicated business of friendship. I also want to thank Marshall Grossman, for his unforgettable humor and for the course on Lacan. I had hoped he would be able to read this, and I know it is all the more imperfect because he could not. Finally, this dissertation could not have been completed without the years of preparation my parents provided me and without an unwavering support system both they and Sandra provided me during these past few years. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………..................1 What is Political Freedom? Chapter 1. Between Political Freedom and the Freedom of the Will in The Rape of Lucrece and Julius Caesar...………………………………………..20 What is Political Action? Chapter 2: Homo Faber, Action Hero Manqué: Crafting the State in Coriolanus…………………………………………………………………………...76 What is Political Friendship? Chapter 3: Sovereign Fathers and Sovereign Friends in Hamlet……………123 What is Political Evil? Chapter 4: Beyond Shakespeare? Modernity and Thoughtlessness…...…..179 Afterword…….………………………………………………………..…...235 Bibliography....……………………………………………………………..243 v Introduction Paul Kottman observes in the introduction to his anthology Philosophers on Shakespeare that while the influence of Greek drama on philosophy (in particular, nineteenth century German idealism) has been thoroughly investigated, the significant influence of Shakespeare is just beginning to be charted. Given, for example, Hegel’s careful consideration of Macbeth in his early theological writings, might not Shakespeare have explained Sophocles to Hegel, rather than the other way round (5)? A similar situation exists in Arendt studies. Scholars have long noted the role Greek tragedy plays in the articulation of Arendt’s claims about necessity and contingency, thought and action, and unity and plurality—about what she calls the “anti-political” tradition in Western thought—but no one has explored the ways Shakespeare bears on her political philosophy.1 This is especially noticeable, given that Arendt recurs to Shakespeare in Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Life of the Mind, Between Past and Future, in numerous essays, and in her correspondence with W. H. Auden. Nevertheless, political theorists have overlooked Shakespeare in Arendt studies and, until quite recently, equally absent from Shakespeare criticism have been Arendtian theories of the political that have much to tell us about Shakespeare’s work.2 1 For the most comprehensive account of the role Greek tragedy plays in Arendt’s thought, see Robert Pirro, who makes the case that the theatrical metaphors that appear in Arendt “reflect the presence of a tragic framework” (37) and that the Greek polis represented for Arendt, “perhaps, the most compelling historical example of the public realm in its kinship with the theatrical stage” (38). For a more detailed summary of the critical commentary regarding the image of the ancient Greek polis in Arendt, see footnote 7. 2 To date, there has been no scholarly attempt to fully account for Arendt’s interest in Shakespeare. Richard Halpern engages with Arendt in two recent articles; although Halpern has spent much of his career writing about Shakespeare, his contribution to the conversation follows the trend of contemporary studies of Arendt’s thought regarding the influence of drama, focusing as it does on the influence of Greek tragedy rather than on Shakespeare. In “Theater and Democratic Thought: Arendt 1 When Auden reviewed Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition in 1959, he initiated an extended dialogue about politics and literature with Arendt, as well as a friendship, into which Shakespeare figured again and again.3 In his review, Auden proposes that we read Arendt’s book as if it were an etymological dictionary of political concepts. If Arendt is a political philosopher, Auden writes, she offers no “saving solutions.” Rather, “she merely asks us to think what we are doing [sic] which we can never manage unless we can first agree about the meaning of the words we think with, which, in its turn, requires that we all become aware of what these to Rancière,” Halpern provides a critical assessment of Arendt, asking of both Arendt and Rancière, “What are the theoretical consequences if Arendt’s and Rancière’s shared primal scene of democracy—and of theater—works otherwise than they claim?” (548). Halpern begins with a provocatively-entitled section, “Hannah Arendt’s Antitheatrical Prejudice,” to explore the tension between Arendt’s dual claims for Greek drama, as both a medium for representing spontaneous action and for recording and preserving the ephemeral quality of action. Halpern claims that Arendt’s distinctions between action (praxis) and work (poesis) attempt to produce absolute boundaries between the space of the political and the modern encroachments of the economic and the social, but he neglects to note the moments where Arendt acknowledges traffic between these domains, as I will explore in some detail in Chapter 2. More pertinent to my opening discussion here is that Halpern nowhere notes Arendt’s own engagement with Shakespeare. He has read Shakespeare alongside Arendt, however, in “Eclipse of Action: Hamlet and the Political Economy of Playing”; here he concludes, as in his article on Arendt and Rancière, that the “The ‘mixed’ or contaminated status of political economy is something that Arendt feels compelled to fend off as a way of protecting the purity