Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Carsten Strathausen
Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba (1956) is a peculiar text. For one, it stands
out as the only detailed interpretation of a literary work that Schmitt ever
produced. This is not to deny Schmitt’s overall erudition and familiarity
with Western literature nor his particular interest in the intricate relation-
ship between aesthetics and politics, all of which can be traced throughout
his writings from the 1910s to the 1950s. But the fact remains that apart
from Hamlet or Hecuba, Schmitt did not employ close readings of literary
texts as a means to elaborate on his politico-philosophical ideas. Hamlet
or Hecuba is also quite unique with regard to its fractured organizational
structure. Originally delivered as a public lecture in Düsseldorf in 1955,
the barely sixty pages of text feature not only a preface and an introduc-
tion, but also a conclusion as well as two appendices evidently added for
its subsequent publication one year later. Of its three main chapters, the
first two succinctly address the two historical intrusions that, in Schmitt’s
view, are responsible for the uniqueness—and genuinely tragic nature—of
Shakespeare’s play: Mary Stuart’s 1566 scandalous marriage with Earl
Bothwell, the murderer of her husband, and the hapless reign of James I,
starting in 1603.
The third chapter, by contrast, is less coherent. Considerably longer
than the other two and divided into several subsections, it advances the
* This essay has greatly benefitted from discussions held at the Leslie Center for the
Humanities at Dartmouth College in Spring 2009. I want to thank all of the participants,
especially Klaus Mladek and George Edmondson, for organizing and contributing to this
event.
Telos 153 (Winter 2010): 7–29.
doi:10.3817/1210153007
www.telospress.com
Carsten Strathausen
core of Schmitt’s argument about the essence of tragedy and myth. Tragic
play, Schmitt contends, is marked by “a kind of surplus value” that distin-
guishes it from pure play: “This surplus value lies in the objective reality
of the tragic action itself”—an “ineluctable” and “unalterable” reality
“that no human mind has conceived—a reality externally given, imposed,
and unavoidable. This unalterable reality is the mute rock upon which
the play founders, sending the foam of genuine tragedy rushing to the
surface.”
Although impressive, this metaphorical image is clearly at odds with
Schmitt’s claim about the “unalterable reality” at the core of tragic play.
Like all geological formations, rocks are historical phenomena, subject to
the natural powers of the sun, wind, water, and minerals that created them
in the first place. Taking Schmitt’s metaphor seriously leads us to conclude
that the aesthetic waves smashing upon the rock of reality will sooner or
later have worn it away, at which point the erstwhile violent encounter
between these forces will no longer send the “foam of genuine tragedy
rushing to the surface” (45). Both tragedy and myth, in other words, are
subject to time. They are historical phenomena based on the unpredictable
encounter between the constantly shifting waves of aesthetic tradition and
the slowly transforming rock of historical reality. There is no unalterable
or objective reality given as such. Reality is always mediated by (aes-
thetic) history.
As this passage indicates, my essay primarily concerns the art of read-
ing. I will ask not only how we can or should read Schmitt’s texts, but also
how Schmitt himself reads Shakespeare’s Hamlet and how this reading
exemplifies what critics call “Schmitt’s aesthetic theory” (David Pan) or,
quite simply, a “Schmittian hermeneutics” (Carlo Galli). Ironically, this
will be a difficult task, precisely because Hamlet or Hecuba seems to be
. Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play, trans.
David Pan and Jennifer Rust (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2009), p. 45. All subse-
quent references will appear parenthetically within the text.
. Carlo Galli examines this “Schmittian hermeneutics” in contrast to Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s Truth and Method, while David Pan develops “Schmitt’s aesthetic theory” as
distinct from Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. See Carlo Galli, “Hamlet: Represen-
tation and the Concrete,” trans. Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze, in Points of Departure:
Political Theology on the Scene of Early Modernity, ed. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Gra-
ham Hammill (under review at Univ. of Chicago Press), p. 13; David Pan, “Afterword:
Historical Event and Mythic Meaning in Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba,” in Schmitt,
Hamlet or Hecuba, pp. 69–119.
Myth Or Knowledge?
a rather simple text. This apparent naïveté, however, hides a more pro-
found epistemological dilemma that lies at the center of Schmitt’s political
thinking. This dilemma is characterized by the tension between Schmitt’s
longing for pre-modern social homogeneity and normative univocity, on
the one hand, and his analytical insight into modern fragmentation and
normative relativism as irrepressible by-products of European rational-
ism, on the other. Schmitt’s texts are marked by this tension insofar as
they advance analytical distinctions and abstract concepts whose concrete,
empirical applicability proves far more complex and contentious than the
concepts themselves would seem to imply. This tension between Sein and
Sinn, between reality and idea, in Schmitt’s writings often gives rise to
conceptual inconsistencies and self-contradictions.
Hamlet or Hecuba, for example, oscillates between the simultaneous
confirmation and disavowal of the categorical distinction between aesthetic
play and political reality. On the one hand, Schmitt advances a series of
conceptual binaries—Trauerspiel vs. tragedy (38), tragedy vs. play (40),
play vs. the critical situation (Ernstfall) (40), tragic action vs. poetic inven-
tion (49), poetry vs. drama (34)—that culminate in his overall conclusion
that “[h]istorical reality is stronger than every aesthetic, stronger also than
the most ingenious subject” (30). On the other hand, however, Schmitt
explicitly claims that his reading of Hamlet aims to transcend the tradi-
tional separation of art and politics, and he does, after all, define tragedy
. Critics have repeatedly emphasized the deceptively “easy” or “naïve” (Galli)
nature of Schmitt’s text, its seemingly “naïve or essentialist . . . division between art and
history, text and context” (Rust and Lupton), along with Schmitt’s apparent “blindness to
the aesthetic dimension . . . of early modern texts” (Kahn). See Galli, “Hamlet: Representa-
tion and the Concrete,” pp. 6, 7; Jennifer R. Rust and Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Introduction:
Schmitt and Shakespeare,” in Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, p. xxiii; Victoria Kahn, “Hamlet
or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision,” Representations 83 (Summer 2003): 69.
. These inconsistencies have frequently been noted by critics. The following state-
ment by Kam Shapiro is exemplary in this regard: “Rather than a consistent position or a
linear progression, Schmitt’s political and theoretical arguments display recurrent, at times
sharp vacillations. These inconsistencies are treated here as symptoms of conceptual and
political aporias more than psychological or biographical idiosyncrasies.” See Kam Shap-
iro, Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of Politics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008),
p. xvii. My personal favorite is this comment made by a Professor Hepp during a German
symposium on Schmitt almost twenty-five years ago: “Who among us would claim to be
unfamiliar with the odd feeling when reading this author that you are being fooled by a
pseudo-lucid argument?” Cf. Helmut Quaritsch, ed., Complexio Oppositorum: Über Carl
Schmitt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988), p. 258.
. Cf. Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, p. 33.
10 Carsten Strathausen
Whether the poet here could not bring something to light or whether,
intentionally or instinctively, due to whatever consideration, he did not
want to, is a question of its own. It remains indisputable that for some
reason something is left open here. . . . In other words, the stage character
Hamlet is not completely subsumed by the mask. Intentionally or instinc-
tively the conditions and forms of the original context within which the
play was written have been brought into the play, and, behind the stage
character Hamlet, another figure has remained standing. (20–21)
Myth Or Knowledge? 13
This other figure is, of course, the “contemporary historical figure” (20)
of James I, and Schmitt’s subsequent references to “James-Hamlet” (25)
and “Hamlet-James” (37, 44) clarify the “incontrovertible” connection
between these two figures. Yet Schmitt’s concession that Shakespeare
might have acted “instinctively” when drafting his protagonist along the
lines of James I also renders Shakespeare’s personal intentions far less
important than they seemed to be in the first chapter of Hamlet or Hecuba.
Instead, the second chapter presents the poet as a mere conduit, a passive
medium through which the reality of James’s historical presence irrepress-
ibly intrudes into the play. Thus, the stage is set for the third and final
chapter, in which the power of historical reality to imprint itself into the
aesthetic structure of the play becomes absolute and entirely independent
from the poet: “A writer can and should invent a great deal, but he cannot
invent the realistic core of a tragic action. . . . The core of tragic action, the
source of the tragic authenticity, is something so irrevocable that no mortal
can invent it, no genius can produce it out of thin air” (45). The emergence
of tragic play is now depicted as a process without an author; it is literally
an objective and subject-less event caused by history itself. It is only after
Schmitt has thus dismissed the poet’s intention and creativity as irrelevant
to the play that he returns to and expands his central thesis, according to
which genuine tragedy results from the intrusion of objective reality into
aesthetic play. This intrusion, Schmitt argues, is represented by the present
absence of King James I.
are that much stronger and deeper” (25) than those caused by other histori-
cal references within the play. Schmitt supports this assertion with two
specific claims: he contends, first, that “Shakespeare’s Hamlet is struc-
tured as a revenge drama” (21), and second, that the genuine intrusion
of the historical figures of Mary Stuart and James I forces Shakespeare
to refrain from letting Hamlet act out his revenge against Gertrude and
Claudius for fear of offending James I. The historical presence of the latter
thus “bestows on the actual revenge drama the special character that we
associate with the name of Hamlet today” (25). This “Hamletization of the
avenger”—that is, the idea that Hamlet both stands within, yet nonetheless
breaks with, the tradition of the ancient revenge drama insofar as the hero
fails to enact his revenge—constitutes Shakespeare’s play as “genuine
tragedy” and “authentic myth.”
It is immediately apparent that Schmitt’s categorical distinction
between the play’s historical allusions and mirrorings, on the one hand,
and the genuine intrusion of historical reality into the play, on the other,
requires that the “play Hamlet retains its arrangement as a revenge
play” (25) under all possible circumstances. Why? Because the decisive
criterion for distinguishing between “mere” allusion and “genuine” intru-
sion is whether or not Shakespeare’s (implicit or explicit, conscious or
unconscious) reference to real historical figures did, indeed, cause major
structural changes within the play. Such structural changes can only be
determined with reference to a given aesthetic tradition—in Hamlet’s case,
the revenge play. In other words, the “historical reality” that Schmitt claims
to recognize as a genuine intrusion into Hamlet is based upon a prior nor-
mative judgment about the play’s aesthetic essence. Hamlet must first and
foremost be categorized as a revenge play in order to provide Schmitt with
the necessary aesthetic criterion by which to judge the historical intrusion
of Mary and James I as more decisive for Hamlet’s narrative and dramatic
structure than the play’s mere allusion to other historical figures (e.g., the
Earl of Essex). This, however, means that Schmitt’s interpretation of Ham-
let as a genuine tragedy and modern myth is relative rather than absolute.
For the absent presence of the “objective reality” that allegedly intrudes
into Shakespeare’s play takes shape only as the structural distortion of a
. Schmitt repeatedly refers to “the murder of the father of Hamlet-James and the
marriage of his mother to the murderer” as the two events that constitute “a core of histori-
cal actuality and historical presence” (44; see also 50, 52).
Myth Or Knowledge? 15
the revenge play and its aesthetic tradition. Or we can focus on how long
the historical memory contained within the play remains recognizable to
ever-new audiences throughout history. In this case, the difference between
mere allusions and genuine intrusions comes down to the resilience and
longevity of Hamlet’s historical references across time and space. But this
longevity, of course, cannot possibly be measured empirically. In order
to pursue this argument further, we must assume that the quantitative
difference between “a few years” and “a few hundred years” of cultural
memory does, at some point, give rise to a qualitative difference. For only
such an objective, qualitative difference could possibly enable Schmitt to
distinguish between mere allusions to and genuine intrusions of history in
Shakespeare’s play. So, the question becomes: What is the nature of this
qualitative change that separates allusions from intrusions? Which histori-
cal event distinguishes a few years during Shakespeare’s lifetime from the
few hundred years that separate Hamlet from our own time?
before, Schmitt had argued that James’s “impotent will” (28) stood behind
Hamlet’s melancholic inability to avenge the murder of his father, he now
considers King James I merely the representative—in the sense of what
Schmitt calls “personae publicae” or “great man”11—of a gradual, cen-
tury-long shift that leads from England’s “barbaric,” “pre-state condition”
to the jus publicum europaeum during the later seventeenth century. In
other words, the “Hamletization of the avenger” is no longer simply due
to James’s buffoonish personality intruding into the play. Rather, James
himself is now reconceptualized as a symbolic figure that literally embod-
ies the “fate of the European religious schisms” at the time (52). As such,
King James I represents—embodies, symbolizes, signifies—the inability
of the entire Stuart dynasty to understand the rise of “the sovereign state
of the European continent [and] the transition to a maritime existence that
England had achieved during their reign” (65). Ultimately, what “stands
behind” Hamlet’s melancholy is not just King James I but the monumental
dawn of the entire modern era as such.
It is interesting to note that today’s critics seem poised to embrace
Schmitt’s interpretative shift from objective, historical facts to their contin-
gent interpretation as indicators of epochal change.12 Indeed, there exists a
broad consensus that “the real remains the source of the tragic in Schmitt’s
reading of the play.”13 Yet Schmitt himself actually never uses the term “the
real” (das Wirkliche). Instead, he variably calls that which intrudes into
Shakespeare’s play “historical reality” (geschichtliche Wirklichkeit) (19),
the “objective situation” (objektive Situation) (20), the “historical pres-
ent” (25) and “present history” (zeitgeschichtliche Gegenwart) (26), as
well as some “unalterable reality” (unumstößliche Wirklichkeit) (45), and
“objective reality” (objektive Wirklichkeit) (51).14 This terminological dif-
ference seems significant primarily because “the real” evokes a Lacanian
connotation and thus serves to bolster the psychoanalytic bent of recent
interpretations of Schmitt.15 Schmitt himself, of course, explicitly rejected
11. Cf. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Pub-
licum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2003), p. 146.
12. See Galli, “Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete,” p. 13.
13. Rust and Lupton, “Introduction,” p. xxvii. Cf. Türk “The Intrusion,” p. 80; and
Galli, “Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete,” p. 15.
14. References to the German original are taken from Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder
Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2008).
15. Cf. Rust and Lupton, “Introduction,” p. xxi; Türk, “The Intrusion,” p. 79; and
Galli, “Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete,” p. 15.
20 Carsten Strathausen
20. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty,
ed. and trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 31f.
21. See Quaritsch, Complexio Oppositorum, pp. 258 and 255 (my translation).
22. Karl Löwith, quoted in Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba,” pp. 68f.; Slavoj Žižek, “Carl
Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics,” in Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt
(New York: Verso, 1999), p. 18.
23. David Pan and Russell A. Berman, “Introduction,” Telos 142 (Spring 2008): 3.
David Pan’s excellent essay in the same volume makes this point abundantly clear. See
David Pan, “Carl Schmitt on Culture and Violence in the Political Decision,” Telos 142
(Spring 2008): 49–72.
24 Carsten Strathausen
28. Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” trans. Matthias
Konzen and John P. McCormick, in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 80f., 85. Similarly in Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-
cal, p. 30.
29. Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 45.
30. Ibid., p. 46.
31. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1991), p. 161.
26 Carsten Strathausen
literally intervene into the world not only on a cognitive-mental level but
also on a physical-material level as well. This is Schmitt’s key thesis in
The Nomos of the Earth: “In its original sense,” Schmitt notes, “nomos is
precisely the full immediacy of a legal power not mediated by laws; it is a
constitutive historical event—an act of legitimacy, whereby the legality of
a mere law first is made meaningful.”32 The crucial point is that not only
juridical or political concepts, but all socially relevant concepts constitute
a “historical event” rooted in metaphysics.
In recognition of this relational (mythical) core of Schmitt’s politi-
cal theory, critics have recently begun to situate his work in the context
of French structuralist and post-structuralist theory, in particular Lacan,
Foucault, and Derrida.33 Although it makes sense to read Schmitt’s con-
ceptual inconsistencies as symptoms of what Derrida calls the aporia of
thinking,34 this comparison fails to acknowledge the ontological priority
Schmitt grants to material, empirical reality. For Schmitt, human concepts
are quasi-physical tools that literally interact with—and thus empirically
alter—the concrete historical situation in which they emerge. They are
always already operative outside the text and its semiotic laws of significa-
tion. In this sense, we might say that human concepts are “objective”—not
because they are epistemologically true, but because they are ontologi-
cally productive.
In order to properly assess this ontological dimension in Schmitt’s
thinking, it seems more apt to situate his work within the scientific-ana-
lytical context of its time. Schmitt himself, unfortunately, never extended
his sociology of concepts to the realm of the natural sciences. Instead, he
simply accepted the self-proclaimed neutrality and objectivity of modern
science as a means to highlight the fundamental difference between sci-
entific-technological rationality, on the one hand, and conceptual-spiritual
rationality, on the other. His political goal always remained to protect the
Conclusion
I hope to have shown that Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba wrestles with more
than just aesthetic concepts or the epistemological difference between
medieval faith and modern rationality, ancient myth and scientific knowl-
edge. The political choice within this alternative has always been easy for
Schmitt. Rather, his reading of Hamlet implicitly recognizes—yet explic-
itly denies—the deep ontological dimension inherent in people’s ethical
beliefs and cultural norms. The modern age is not only haunted by the rise
of normative relativism, as Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and other conservative
thinkers consistently argued. It is also, and more fundamentally, haunted
by the ontological relativity that arises concomitantly with this relativism
and goes straight to the core of reality as such. This insight, I submit, con-
stitutes the “real” absent presence that Schmitt encounters in his reading
of Hamlet.