CONVERSATIONS 11.

3. Existence, Contingency and

Mourning in Cavell’s Hamlet
ELI FRIEDLANDER

Shakespeare’s Hamlet has fascinated philosophers, from Hegel to Nietzsche, from

Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, and more recently taken up in French thought by Derrida
and Deleuze. It is the play that Freud sets as the modern correlate of his interpreta-
tion of Oedipus. Cavell’s short essay ‘Hamlet’s Burden of Proof’ is far less discussed
than his other readings of Shakespeare’s plays such as ‘The Avoidance of Love in King
Lear’ and “Othello or the Stake of the Other.” It centers on the implications to be
drawn from the play within the play, performed “to catch the conscience of the King.”

1. Play and Fantasy

The first important thing to remark about the play within the play is that it is per-
formed twice, once as a dumb show and once with words. The interpretative problem
arising from this repetition is that the king does not react with recognition to the
dumb show. Several possible explanations may be ruled out: It is not proof that the
King did not murder his brother, since he confesses to it in the church scene. Nor is
the King merely distracted or hiding his feelings. So, the lack of recognition turns on
the fact that the King did not murder in the way that is shown in the dumb show.
Since Hamlet is the one who ‘directed’ the players, this further means that there is
something in the play which is the expression of how Hamlet imagines the murder of
his father to have taken place.
This raises for Cavell the question of what sort of fantasy is being played out by
Hamlet’s stage directions. Some features of the setting of the play suggest an answer.
First, and foremost there is the obscene character of Hamlet’s remarks and ‘commen-
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 39

tary’ (while ‘interpreting’ the play for the king), which is evident in the way he speaks
to Ophelia (“I could interpret between you and your love if I could see the puppets
dallying”).1 This suggests that precisely something obscene, something that ought to
remain behind the scenes is played out and exhibited as Hamlet’s ‘fantasy’ of the
murder. We know that the play within the play aims to catch the conscience of the
King, but also that it is to test the veracity of the ghost. Or put differently, the King’s
reaction would serve as a test whether the ghost is real or a figment of Hamlet’s imag-
ination. But the sexual character of Hamlet’s remarks introduces another figure who
becomes central to the laying out of the fantasy, namely Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother.
Cavell notes how Hamlet speaks of chasing from his imagination foul pictures of
Claudius as lover of his mother. But maybe even these are screens for a more funda-
mental fantasy.
As Cavell draws the connection between this obscene character and the play
within the play, he turns to the psychoanalytic conception of the most fundamental
fantasy in the constitution of the individual, as it were a fantasy of origins, which fol-
lowing Freud he calls the ‘primal scene’: “[I am] proposing to look at the dumb show
as Hamlet’s invention, let me say his fantasy, and in particular a fantasy that deci-
phers into the memory of a primal scene, a scene of parental intercourse.”2 In other
words, if the play within the play enacts the primal scene, then the main figures are
not so much Hamlet’s father and his brother Claudius, but rather Hamlet’s father and
Queen Gertrude, his mother. Cavell quotes Laplanche and Pontalis, who developed
after Freud this concept of the primal fantasy: “whatever appears to the subject as
something needing an explanation or theory is dramatized as a moment of emer-
gence, the beginning of a history.” And he adds: “Laplanche and Pontalis specify the
primary fantasies as of “the origin of the individual, of the upsurge of sexuality, and
of the difference between the sexes” in sum “of the origin of the subject himself.”3 The
primal scene specifically concerns the first of these fantasies, namely the origin of the
individual (of the subject as individual).

1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. J. D. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), III,
ii, 245-46.
2. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), 182-83. All references to Cavell’s essay ‘Hamlet’s Burden of Proof’ in Disowning Knowledge in
Seven Plays of Shakespeare are abbreviated as DK followed by page numbers.
3. Ibid., 187.
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 40

For sure, the staging of the primal fantasy involves certain distortions that
hide its true nature, not unlike the kind of reversals that Freud suggests in his discus-
sion of the case of the primal scene of the wolf-man. First, a reversal of gender (the
figure supposed to represent Claudius stands for Gertrude in the fantasy). Secondly, a
reversal of active and passive: not pouring something into the ear of the father but
having something poured into her — the fantasy of intercourse. At first this might
sound merely perverse, but recall that the paradigmatic ancient tragedy precisely has
to do with the question of incest and murder in the triangular relation of father,
mother and son. It is of course important to reflect both on the connection to the
Oedipal triangle and on the difference of modern tragedy from ancient tragedy, that
is on the way Shakespeare takes on himself the inheritance of the tragic form and the
transformation of the primal scene.
An important connection between the primal scene and the form of the tragic
is suggested in aligning the former with the character of the mythical: “Like myths,
they [these primal fantasies] claim to provide a representation of, and a solution to,
the major enigmas which confront the child.”4
Before further commenting on Cavell’s complex account, I would like to make
a short detour through the question of myth and tragedy in antiquity as well as the
transformation of their relation in modernity.

2. Myth and Tragedy

I will briefly develop the relation between myth and tragedy initially by way of Walter
Benjamin’s account of the tragic in the first part of his book The Origin of German
Trauerspiel. As he describes it, tragedy is closely bound to myth or legend, which the
performance periodically reshapes. In performing that legend, the community,
through its heroic representative, recognizes anew its historical destiny. The dramatic
performance is the medium that gathers a community and imparts a fundamental
orientation to its existence.
This orientation can further be characterized as the overcoming of the condi-
tion of fate, or of a burden of guilt pertaining to unformed life. By gathering and con-

4. Ibid., 186-87.
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 41

centrating fate in his person, the tragic hero reveals the contradiction that underlies
collective existence. Tragedy ‘concentrates’ fate and ‘reflects’ it in the person of the
hero so that this very reflection is the arrest of fate’s pernicious ambiguity. Tragedy
transforms a space ruled by demonic ambiguity into one in which decisive measures
can be taken. It involves a decisive moment. The state in which, through his terrible
suffering, all possibilities end for the tragic hero shows, concentrated in his person,
the paradoxical condition of existence of the community. It allows the community to
envisage the order that will be raised beyond the violence of unformed life. Thus,
Benjamin writes: “[the tragic sacrifice] is the representative action, in which new cir-
cumstances in the life of the people are announced.”5
For Benjamin, the concentration of guilt in the person of the tragic hero is key
to recognizing the redeeming character of tragedy, its way of addressing the ‘natural
guilt’ that is part of the very existence in the field of life. The tragic hero makes the
contradiction of a form of life visible but does not resolve it in speech. His position is
characterized by silence. The tragic hero’s silence is correlative with the rejection of
the community of the present, and it calls for a future community that will make this
yet-unexpressed word heard. It is a silence that Benjamin therefore identifies with
the muteness of infancy, of that which does not yet know how to speak what he shows
in his own person.
The word belongs to community to come. For the hero, the arrest of ambiguity
in mute defiance is his recognition of an inalienable core of solitary existence. The
tragic is at the same time a trial of the Olympians by humanity. It marks the emer-
gence of the infinity of morality in which man senses, without being able to express in
any other way than defiance, that he is “better than is god.” This, for Benjamin, is the
“birth of genius in moral speechlessness.”6
Now, the important question for Benjamin, as well as for Cavell, is what ele-
ments of the tragic are retained and how are they transformed in modern Shakespeare-
an tragedy. Specifically, how does this transformation manifest itself in Hamlet. Can we
still read Hamlet according to this paradigm of Greek tragedy, and in what way can the

5. Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. H. Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2019), 100.
6. Benjamin, Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, vol. 1, ed. M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (Cam-
bridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 203.
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 42

recasting of the myth serve the unity of the community in the face of the historically
specific circumstances of its present? Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion
of History into Play is precisely an attempt to read Hamlet along those lines.7
The title of Schmitt’s book suggests the fundamental contrast he wishes to estab-
lish between play and the tragic. The reference to Hecuba alludes to the first interaction
of Hamlet with the actors, when they show their talent by playing for him the scene of
Hecuba weeping over the death of her husband Priam. This mere play, reflected in the
‘turning on and off’ at will of pathos, is contrasted to the seriousness of the tragic, mea-
sured by the way in which tragedy is capable of showing through its constitutive myth,
the present historical situation in its most decisive features. In other words, Hamlet
must be understood, according to Schmitt, as the tragic reworking of a legend for the
present of Shakespeare’s England. That present decisively illuminated by the tragic
myth is that of King James, whose father, Lord Darnley, was murdered and whose
mother, Mary Queen of the Scotts, remarried with one suspected of the murder.
How is this reading affecting our understanding of the ‘play withing the play’
in Hamlet? According to Schmitt, the ‘Mousetrap’ must contain a kernel of the myth
as well as a reference to the utterly serious concrete historical situation addressed by
Hamlet. As Schmitt writes, “the play within the play in Act Three of Hamlet is not
only no look behind the scenes, but, on the contrary, it is the real play itself repeated
before the curtains. This presupposes a realistic core of the most intense contempo-
rary significance and timeliness. Otherwise the doubling would simply make the play
more playful, more unlikely and artificial –more untrue as a play, until finally it
would become a “parody of itself.” Only a strong core of reality could stand up the
double exposure of the stage upon the stage. It is possible to have a play within a play,
but not a tragedy within a tragedy. The play within the play in Act Three is thus a
consummate test of the hypothesis that a core of historical actuality and historical
presence — the murder of the father of Hamlet — James and the marriage of the
mother to the murder — has the power to intensify the play as play without destroy-
ing the sense of the tragic.”8

7. For a thought provoking analysis of Cavell’s reading of Hamlet in relation to Benjamin and Schmitt,
see Tatjana Jukić, “Cavell’s Shakespeare, or the Insufficiency of Tragedy for Modernity,” Bollettino
Filosofico 32 (2017).
8. Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Irruption of History into Play, trans. D. Pan and J. Rust
(Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2009), 43-44.
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 43

It is in many ways surprising to find Schmitt taking up the figure of Hamlet.

For Hamlet appears to be precisely the polar opposite of the figure of the sovereign
whose highest virtue is the decision in the state of emergency. Hamlet is utterly inca-
pable of being decisive. Indeed, Schmitt refers to the ‘Hamletization’ of the sovereign
that would result from the attempt to construe the urgency of decision merely upon
the events of the present. It is precisely this insufficiency of the contingent that re-
quires the recognition of the organizing character of myth in putting the present in
the sharpest light. Tragedy is what can hold both the primal past of myth and the
present situation so as to eventuate in a decision. Tragedy is therefore not mere play
but borders on the seriousness of history. The problem of Schmitt is how to relate
Hamlet on the one hand to the utmost actuality of the historical situation of Shake-
speare’s time, and on the other hand to the primal or original ground that fills this
situation with the highest significance, the ground of myth.9

3. Haunting and Play-Acting

These last considerations bring us back to the specificity of Cavell’s reading. On the
face of it, Cavell also turns to the idea of a mythical core that gives the play within a
play its true meaning. But we should note initially two fundamental differences be-
tween the way the primal scene functions in Cavell’s interpretation and how myth is,
according to Schmitt, the tragic kernel of Hamlet. In the first place, the primal or
mythical is identified in the constitution of the subject (not the historical
community). Indeed, what is at play in the primal fantasy is precisely what one might

9. Schmitt laments how the rhetoric of play has overcome the modern conception of the work of art.
He relates this legacy to Friedrich Schiller’s elaboration of the play drive in his On the Aesthetic Educa-
tion of Man, trans. Keith Tribe (London: Penguin, 2016), itself taking up Kant’s account of aesthetic
judgment in terms of the free play of the faculties in the “Third Critique.” (A related attack on the con-
cept of the play in aesthetics and politics can be found in Schmitt’s Political Romanticism, trans. G.
Oakes, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986). Schmitt understands the aesthetics of play as the con-
ception that art creates an autonomous sphere apart from the struggles and seriousness of authentic
historical life, through which humanity can be seemingly fulfilled. In his view: “Art for [Schiller] is a
realm of autonomous representation. Only in play does one become human, does one transcend self-
alienation and find true dignity. In such philosophy play must become superior to seriousness. Life is
serious, and art is jovial; indeed, but the serious reality of the man of action is the ultimately only
“miserable reality,” and seriousness is always on the verge of becoming an animal brutality.” (Schmitt,
Hamlet or Hecuba, 47). This ideology of play leads, according to Schmitt, to the dissociation of art
from history.
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 44

call facing the contingency of one’s individual existence: “Now I propose, prompted
by Hamlet, to take the fantasy of this origin to be represented by the question: Why of
all the ones I might have been am I just this one and no other, given this world and
no other, possessed of exactly this mother and this father?”10
Secondly, it is a fantasy that more than anything shows what is to be faced in
achieving one’s concrete historical individuality. It is not what immediately determines
the unity of significance. The fantasy, one might say, expresses the burden against
which the proof of one’s existence is to be enacted. To clarify, consider the way Cavell
relates the fantasy and the burden that is laid on Hamlet to avenge his father. In the tri-
angular relation enacted, we recognize not just the demand to avenge the murder: “The
ghost asks initially for revenge for his murder, a task the son evidently accepts as his to
perform […]. But after telling his story of death, what the Ghost asks Hamlet ‘not to
bear’ is something distinctly different — that ‘the royal bed of Denmark be/ a couch for
luxury and damned incest.’ But is this the son’s business not to bear?”11
In other words, the son is tasked with acting in the face of the impotence of his
father. Hamlet the father appears as a ghost, and in that sense is structurally speak-
ing impotent since he cannot act in the world of the living. But the impotence that
Hamlet must remedy is of another kind. It is played out in the primal fantasy of his
own origins and to be set out not against the threat of castration of the father, but
against the sense of the annihilating power of the mother. We do not have here the
Oedipal triangle in which the child is threatened by the father to renounce his narcis-
sistic attachment to the mother. Rather, the mother is the one who annihilates the
father and the son is hopelessly attempting to act in the face of the father’s impo-
tence: “What I claim is rather that Hamlet feels [Gertrude’s] power as annihilating of
his own […]. Moreover, my claim is that Hamlet divines that his father experienced
Gertrude’s annihilating power before him.”12 The play stages a man collapsing upon
something being poured into him: this is a reversal of intercourse, which retains the
idea of the collapse of the father.
If we take Hamlet to share the kind of impotence of his father which he fan-
tasized in the play within the play, it must be reflected in his own existence. Cavell’s

10. Cavell, DK, 187.

11. Ibid., 188.
12. Ibid., 185.
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 45

reading in effect reinterprets one of the most famous characteristics of Hamlet,

namely his incapacity to act. But it receives a completely different meaning in terms
of the primal fantasy. If it is a fantasy of origin, then, assuming this impotence
would mean that Hamlet refuses to be born, he refuses to enter life. His identifica-
tion with the impotence of the father can be described therefore as a sense of him-
self haunting the world: “His bar — his lack of ‘advancement’ into the world — is
expressed in one’s sense (my sense) of him as the Ghost of the play that bears his
and his father’s name, a sense that his refusal of participation in the world is his
haunting of the world.”13
This brings out a further dimension of the play within the play. Hamlet stages
his own fantasy, that is, he conceives of himself as an actor, an actor in his own play.
Added then, or related to the idea of haunting the world is another characterization of
what not really acting in the world comes to: it is to play-act. Haunting the world is
behaving “as if he is a figure in a play.” So that the setting of a play within a play is for
Hamlet yet another way of expressing his being in the world as an actor rather than
an agent. Indeed, this would suggest that Cavell further reinterprets through this
scene one of the recurring questions about Hamlet, whether he is truly mad or play
acting. One could say that his madness is not something that should be identified
solely in terms of the bouts of what seems to his surrounding as incoherence. But nor
is he merely play-acting being mad. If anything, his madness is in assuming in his life
the position of an actor.

4. Repetition and Enacting Existence

What would it be to conceive of Hamlet as offering not just the vision of the curse but
also articulating the character of what it is to redeem existence in these conditions?

13. Cavell, DK, 188. One should conceive of this idea of haunting as a figure of refusing to be born into
the world as a characteristic of modern tragedy. Indeed, there are no ghosts in ancient tragedy. For
sure, it constitutes a variation on the words of the chorus in Oedipus at Colonus: “Not to be born is
best / when all is reckoned in, but once a man has seen the light / the next best thing, by far, is to go
back / where he came from” (1388-91) In modern tragedy haunting is expressing the refusal of enter-
ing the world. (Compare to Cavell’s reading of Coleridge’s “Ballad of the Ancient Mariner,” in In Quest
of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1988, chapter 2).
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 46

And would that manifest itself as a passage to “real” action? One must take into ac-
count the kinds of reversal we find between the active and the passive throughout the
play, starting from the reversal of the usual figuration of the feminine as passive and
the masculine as active (in the fantasy of the primal scene). This reversal must also
characterize the character of the solution. In other words, it is not an overcoming of
the passivity of impotence by decisive action, or the emergence from the space of play
into ‘real’ life that is at issue. One must conceive of the work internal to passivity as
the transformation of play-acting into what Cavell calls ‘enacting’ one’s existence.14
If acting becomes enacting, then the idea of play would be itself split between
what we might call mere play (more or less corresponding to Schmitt’s conception) and
the enacting of one’s existence for which theater serves as a model. If passivity must be
transformed, it would be by turning mere impotence into work: the work of suffering,
of passivity is not action but mourning. It is these two aspects that are foreclosed by
Hamlet’s acting out the primal fantasy: “It is the bequest of a beloved father that de-
prives the son of his identity, of enacting his own existence — it curses, as if spitefully,
his being born of this father. Put otherwise, the father’s dictation of the way he wishes
to be remembered — by having his revenge taken for him — exactly deprives the son,
with his powers of mourning, of the right to mourn him, to let him pass.”15
What would it be to ‘enact’ existence rather than refuse birth? This question
leads to a further important theme in Cavell’s essay, namely the traumatic character
of existence and the deferred character of the trauma. Recall that the primal fantasy
is not an event that has been witnessed but rather it is constructed “deferred, read
back (nachträglich)”16 as an account of what one could not have witnessed — one’s
own coming to existence. This duality and the structure of deferment is characteristic
of Freud’s account of trauma in general. Freud famously begins by seeking a real
event of sexual abuse underlying hysteria. He then suggests that it is the witnessing of
parental intercourse that is something like a traumatic irruption of sexuality into the
mind of the child unable to grasp it, something whose meaning is given retroactively.

14. For an insightful discussion of the idea of enacting in the context of the broader context of com-
mitment, wittnessing and performative utterance, see David Rudrum, “The Action to the Word, The
Word to Action: Reading Hamlet with Cavell and Derrida,” Angelaki 21, no. 2 (2016). Rudrum brings
out how Derrida’s reflections on Hamlet that elaborate on his critique of the performative in Austin
converge with Cavell’s reading of the play.
15. Cavell, DK, 187.
16. Ibid., 187.
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 47

But this too need not be taken as a real event. Rather, Freud conceives of the retroac-
tive formation of a primal fantasy as what answers to the questionable emergence of
a human subject into existence.
At issue then is the precise difference between merely being caught in that fan-
tasy (as it were acting it out repeatedly), and the repetition that would count as enact-
ing one’s existence. Cavell clarifies the dual structure of enacting existence in philos-
ophy by reference to Emerson’s recasting of Descartes’ cogito: “In philosophy I take it
to have been expressed in Descartes, a point perfectly understood and deeply elabo-
rated by Emerson, that to exist the human being has the burden of proving that he or
she exists, and that this burden is discharged in thinking your existence, which comes
in Descartes (though this is controversial) to finding how to say, ‘I am, I exist’; not of
course to say it just once, but at every instant of your existence; to preserve your exis-
tence, originate it. To exist is to take your existence upon you to enact it, as if the ba-
sis of human existence is theater, even melodrama. To refuse this burden is to con-
demn yourself to skepticism — to a denial of the existence, hence of the value, of the
world.”17
Hamlet’s famous monologue is reinterpreted by Cavell in these terms. ‘To be or
not to be’ is not a question of whether or not to stay alive or end his life (like Ophelia). It
is the question of the affirmation of one’s concrete existence in the face of the impo-
tence and annihilating power played out in the original fantasy that blocks one’s being
(re)born into the world as the concrete existing individual one is: “On this deciphering
of the dumb show as primal scene — enciphering young Hamlet’s delayed sense of
Gertrude’s power to annihilate all Hamlet’s — I see Hamlet’s question whether to be or
not to be, as asking first of all not why he stays alive, but first of all how he or anyone
lets himself be born as the one he is.”18 The primal fantasy imagines what led to one’s
birth and also retroactively how it is that I am the one I am.
In reflecting further on the nature of ‘enacting’ one’s existence, we can recog-
nize another important feature of the play within a play. As Cavell argues, a play with-

17. Ibid., 187. Cavell suggests other political and religious contexts that share this same fundamental
form (an original state and the necessity of reaffirming one’s relation to that origin): “As if human
birth, the birth of the human, proposes the question of birth. That human existence has two stages —
call these birth and the acceptance of birth — is expressed in religion as baptism, in politics as
consent.” (Ibid., 187).
18. Ibid., 187.
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 48

in a play is also for Shakespeare an occasion to reflect on the power of theater as

such. Cavell’s interpretation provides a further reading of the duality of pantomime
and words. Indeed, the fact that the play within a play has itself a dual structure is re-
flecting the dual character of enacting existence. It would be as if the pantomime, a
scene which is without words, is that fantasy which must be recognized and enacted
in meaning, with words. It is that whose meaning is to be retroactively determined by
the scene played out in words. Indeed, it suggests that part of the question is that of
the relation of action, or drama, to its articulated meaning, which might follow, or
even be retroactively determined. We must think here of the relation between show-
ing, which is something that has to do with the dramatic action, and saying, namely
recognizing the meaning of the action: “I assume the discussion of theater proposed
by [the repetitive dumb show] is of the relation or argument in theater between the
eye and the ear, between representation by action and by words, showing and
saying.”19
The idea of a deferred recognition of the meaning of an action characterizes
the form of ancient tragedy. Indeed, one cannot conceive of the actions of Oedipus as
having their meaning through the conscious intention he has in committing them. It
is only retrospectively that Oedipus recognizes his actions as having killed his father
and conceived children with his mother. One could say that this is what tragic irony
comes to, in which there is much more meaning to articulate in an action than the
hero can encompass (until the moment of recognition).
We have discussed this moment in laying out briefly Benjamin’s idea of the
concentration of fate and its expression through the catastrophe that befalls the tragic
hero. But there would still be an important difference between the moment of recog-
nition and the incorporation of fate in ancient tragedy. Even the failure of the play
within the play points to that: the King does not recognize his actions in the pan-
tomime and his reaction to the play with words is not what Hamlet has in mind as
constituting a decisive proof. For Hamlet’s additional ‘commentary’ and interpreta-
tion during the performance amounts practically to a direct accusation. No wonder
the King would react to that! So that we can say that there is no moment of closure of

19. Ibid., 181. For an analysis of Cavell’s understanding of the therapeutic force of tragedy specifically
in the context of Hamlet, see William Franke, “Acknowledging Unknowing: Stanley Cavell and the
Philosophical Criticism of Literature,” Philosophy and Literature 39, no. 1 (2015).
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 49

meaning, no moment of recognition in Hamlet. There is no paradoxical concentration

of fate in the figure of a hero that arrests the tragic irony. What then is the form of
meaning that enacts existence in the face of the primal fantasy? In order to answer
this last question, it is necessary to bring out a further important aspect of modern
tragedy, namely the irreducible contingency inherent to the existence depicted in it.

5. Mourning and the Contingency of Existence

Recall that the question that is played out in the primal fantasy is why I am this spe-
cific individual with these specific parents, born into this world. This radical contin-
gency of existence is a further distinguishing trait between ancient and modern
tragedy. Indeed, with ancient tragedy, the hero is an exemplary individual and every-
thing in his existence receives its meaning out of the necessary outcome, out of the
limit of death. But, as Hegel has pointed out in his Lectures on Fine Art, contingency
rules everywhere in Hamlet: “the tragic denouement is also displayed as purely the
effect of unfortunate circumstances and external accidents which might have turned
out otherwise and produced a happy ending. In this case the sole spectacle offered to
us is that the modern individual with the non-universal nature of his character, his
circumstances, and the complications in which he is involved, is necessarily surren-
dered to the fragility of all that is mundane and must endure the fate of finitude. But
this mere affliction is empty, and, in particular, we are confronted by a purely horri-
ble external necessity when we see fine minds, noble in themselves, perishing in such
a barrel against the misfortune of entirely external circumstances. Such a history may
touch us acutely, and yet it seems only dreadful and we feel a pressing demand for a
necessary correspondence between the external circumstances and what the inner
nature of these fine characters really is. It is only from this point of view that we can
feel ourselves reconciled in e.g. the fate of Hamlet or Juliet. Looked at from outside,
Hamlet’s death seems brought about accidentally owing to the fight with Laertes and
the exchange of rapiers. But death lay from the beginning in the background of Ham-
let’s mind. The sands of time do not content him. In his melancholy and weakness,
his worry, his disgust at all the affairs of life, we sense from the start that in all his
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 50

terrible surroundings he is a lost man, almost consumed already by inner disgust be-
fore death comes to him from outside.”20
This is to say that the form of necessity internal to ancient tragedy, in which
life is as it were gathered and one’s identity determined through the catastrophic
recognition, is unavailable to the modern form in which contingency rules. Appealing
to a primal fantasy to unify that utter contingency is, as we saw, being cursed with
haunting the world. But altogether giving up on that dimension of fantasy is just as
destructive.
Cavell clarifies what the refusal of fantasy would come to. It is the death of the
world, that is the curse of seeing into people, call it the skeletal character of Hamlet’s
sense of the world. This is expressed by his famous line, “I know not seems.” It is also
Cavell’s interpretation of the grave diggers scene. Not a reflection on the transience of
existence, but rather the predicament of one who has foregone the ‘veil’ of fantasy:
“Hamlet is making claim to, or laying hold of, a power of perception that curses him,
as Cassandra’s cursed her, one that makes him unable to stop at seems, a fate to know
nothing but what people are, nothing but the truth of them. His later staring at the
skull would accordingly be the occasion not, as traditionally imagined of some special
more moment of remembering and meditation, but an emblem of the everyday,
skeletal manner in which human beings present themselves to him.”21 Seeing the
deadness of the world is a condition in which the world cannot involve you. There
emerges a world devoid of hope for the serious realization of any higher purpose. It is
the world of Hamlet’s melancholy.

20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988), 1231-32.
21. Cavell, DK, 186. This is in effect Nietzsche’s understanding of Hamlet’s incapacity to act. He has
seen “too deeply into the nature of things.” “For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation
of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all
personal experiences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of
everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness,
it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will negating mood is the fruit of these states. In this
sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things,
they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in
the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set
right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the
doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of the Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it
were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no true knowledge,
an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the
Dionysian man.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. W.
Kaufmann, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2010, 59-60, my emphasis).
CONVERSATIONS 11.1 51

Melancholy, after Freud, is to be contrasted with the work of mourning. The

refusal to be born into existence is the incapacity to mourn.22 But mourning is also to
be characterized as a form of meaning that is correlative with recognizing the con-
creteness of one’s life. It would be understanding the work of concrete individuation
as a work of mourning. “Hence the play interprets the taking of one’s place in the
world as a process of mourning, as if there is a taking up of the world that is humanly
a question of giving it up.”23
What is it that makes mourning the work of contingency? As Freud puts it, it
would be the release of one’s attachments, as it were one by one. Death as a limit is
not incorporated into life as the recognition of a moment of closure to which all living
ambiguity leads. The contrast between the concentration of fate on the figure of the
hero in ancient tragedy, and the kind of multiplicity that is inherent to the ‘complete-
ness’ of contingency means that the latter can only be conceived as the completeness
of everything passing away, released from the myriad of fixations of the present on
the past. Completeness is never positive, but rather only in the passing away of doubt.
This multiplicity of detachments is, I take it, figured by the way the final scene re-
hearses the situation of a play within a play. This time it is supposedly the perfor-
mance of dueling between Laertes and Hamlet. While in the first performance there
was nothing that could be called a tragic closure, here closure means that no one is
left, or everyone dies. It is the “summation” of the many deaths of characters already
taking place in the play: Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are joined
by Claudius, Gertrud, Laertes and Hamlet himself. Fate is not concentrated but dis-
persed over all characters and through Hamlet’s reflection of this court, it disappears,
as this whole world passes away, so that “the rest is silence.”

22. Note the connection between revenge and melancholy. It is implicit in Freud’s essay insofar as the
melancholic is bent on attacking the internalized lost object, and it is this aggression (revenge) turned
inward that blocks the melancholic from acting in the world.
23. Cavell, DK, 189.