2017/12/11 by Tatjana Jukić, Jukić, Tatjana
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Cavell #Film #Modernity #Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism #Political Theology and Sovereignty #Psychoanalysis. #Samuel Beckett and Modernism #Shakespeare #Tragedy
paper · pdf · doi:10.6093/1593-7178/5347
openalex publication_date 2017/12/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/07
Stanley Cavell’s philosophical interest in Shakespeare is so consistent that Shakespeare appears to have pre-organized, for Cavell, the intellectual situation from which to launch the ideation of modernity. I propose to discuss Cavell with a view to similar constellations in Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, but careful of the fact that, unlike Schmitt or Benjamin, Cavell does not privilege Hamlet as a text to which Shakespeare appears reducible. Instead, Cavell’s Shakespeare is collective and paratactic, with the implication that tragedy, taken in isolation (even as it morphs into mourning play), fails to capture the truth of modernity. What emerges in Cavell is a Shakespeare whose tragedy works from within a Lockean social contract with other genres – a condition crucial to Cavell’s philosophical concerns.