David Schalkwyk

Shakespeare, Love and Service by David Schalkwyk

Peter Laslett’s comment, in The World We Have Lost, that in the early modern period, “every relationship could be seen as a loverelationship” presents the governing idea of this book. In an analysis that includes Shakespeare’s sonnets and a wide range of his plays from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter’s Tale, David Schalkwyk looks at the ways in which the personal, affective relations of love are informed by the social, structural interactions of service. Showing that service is not a “class” concept but rather that it determined the fundamental conditions of identity across the whole society, the book explores the interpenetration of structure and affect in relationships as varied as monarch and subject, aristocrat and personal servant, master and slave, husband and wife, and lover and beloved in light of differences of rank, gender, and sexual identity.

What does Derrida mean by ‘the text’?

Abstract Few claims in the recent history of philosophy in its relation to literary studies are as notorious or have been as much misunderstood or misrepresented as Derridas assertion that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (Derrida, 1976, Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, p. 158). Like other, less remarked-upon but similar assertions, ‘the thing itself is a sign’ (Derrida, 1976, Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, p. 49) and ‘there never was any “perception”’ (Derrida, 1973, Speech and Phenomena, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, p. 103), it appears to commit Derrida, and deconstruction as whole, to a radical form of linguistic idealism in terms of which everything is dissolved into language. I want to argue that, contrary to common perceptions, this is not Derridas position. Derrida insists on neither the collapse of the world into language nor on language as untrammeled free play. He has said this unequivocally on numerous occasions. However, the truth of his denials needs to be demonstrated, not simply stated. In the following pages I therefore offer a brief analysis of some of Derridas early texts, in order to show that, from the very beginning, Derrida argues that language is essentially imbricated in the world, and that it is produced out of a set of very specific, even ‘historical’, determinations, even if his conception of such imbrication and determination is philosophically unorthodox, and therefore likely to be mistaken for the positions that he in fact attacks.

“A Lady's ‘Verily’ Is as Potent as a Lord's”: Women, Word and Witchcraft in The Winter's Tale

e are indebted to Jacques Derrida for the concept of the “transcendental signified.”’ It has a paradoxical status, since it was invoked by Derrida as part of a project to show that it isn’t-that it never was and never shall be. It is a chimera, both the enabling force and the elusive quest of what Derrida has called “logocentrism”: a sign that marks the end of interpretation, one that affirms truth, restores order, and by transcending the contingencies of place and time, regulates the play of signification. Although the concept, as Derrida uses it, has a negative import, it is a useful analytical tool to explore signification in Shakespearean tragedy and comedy. If the tragedies owe their being to the process of semiotic displacement that, Derrida has argued, marks the nature of the sign itself,2 comedy as a genre trades on a promise that somewhere interpretation (and therefore the possibility of doubt and uncertainty) stops. This is what makes the essential moment of comic unugnorisis possible. Some revelation, cast in signs that transcend present time and place-literally outside and beyond interpretation-is necessary for the renewal that defines Shakespearean comedy.

Shakespeare, Moral Experience and Historical Criticism

There has been a sudden interest in the conjunction of Shakespeare and philosophy recently. Colin McGinn’s Shakespeare’s Philosophy and A. D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker seek, in different ways, to explore the degree to which Shakespeare may himself be said to have been a philosopher insofar as his work illuminates the traditional, chiefly epistemological, problems of scepticism, human identity, and the relationship between dream and reality. Tzachi Zamir’s Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama follows neither McGinn’s anodyne attempts to reveal the philosophy ‘‘behind’’ the drama nor Nuttall’s more nuanced exploration of Shakespeare’s development as a thinker through dramatic interaction. Instead Zamir tackles the broader, ‘‘theoretical’’ question of the relation between philosophical criticism and literature in general. What can a philosophical approach to literature reveal about literary texts without reducing them to a mere branch of philosophy? His approach is only incidentally concerned with what Shakespeare might have though about issues now considered to be ‘‘philosophical,’’ but it does prompt a re-evaluation of the traditional separation of literature and philosophy and their relation to moral experience and history. Shakespeareans will find Zamir’s opening chapter fairly hard going, since it couches the problem of literature’s relationship to philosophy in technical terms, but they will be rewarded for pressing on, since he is both genuinely illuminating on the broad issues and also challenging and insightful in his analyses of Richard III, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear. Central to Zamir’s argument are (1) his desire to avoid the instrumentalizing of literature as the source of a reduced, propositional content in the service of a philosophical argument concerned only with a validly deductive truth; and (2) his view that literature engages with philosophy by offering a unique mode of moral understanding that cannot be reduced to the platitude that the former achieves ‘‘edifying elevation’’ (34). His emphasis on moral understanding allows Zamir to distinguish between literature’s peculiar mode of moral philosophy and moral education more generally, since the literary does not so much make those exposed to it better people, but rather invites reflection on the nature of moral value. Literature, in short, is a form of ‘‘non-valid yet rational reasoning’’. The ‘‘structuralization’’ of knowledge in the form of literary revelation is crucial to Zamir’s conception of literature’s rhetorical relation to understanding and persuasion. This concept refers to the fact that what a philosophy concerned only with ‘‘valid’’ reasoning (and thus dismissive of rhetoric) would overlook—namely, that propositional content can be embedded in human experience in a variety of different ways—is actively offered to us for contemplation and entertainment in literary experience. Inviting us to contemplate and experience the

From the globe to globalisation: Shakespeare and Disney in the postmodern world

Summary Both Disneyland and the New Globe Theatre in London, which purports to be a faithful copy of Shakespeares Globe, are informed by specific concepts of historical authenticity, reconstruction and entertainment. Using the chance conjunction of the Globe Theatre and Disneyland Paris during the authors holiday in Europe, this article offers a comparative study, in terms of both theory and personal experience, of the nature of these two cultural institutions in a postmodern world.

‘The Chronicles of Wasted Time'?: Shakespeare's Sonnets Revisited

Shakespeares Sonnets: Critical Essays, by James Schiffer (New York: Garland, 1999) The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets, by Helen Vendler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997) Shakespeares Sonnets, edited by Katherine Duncan‐Jones (The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1997)

Knowledge, ethics and the limits of language: Wittgenstein and Lyotard

Summary This article investigates the concepts of the unsayable, the unrepresentable, and the unpresentable in the early and the later Wittgenstein and in the work of Lyotard. It compares the ethics of Wittgensteins injunction in the Tractatus, that we must keep silent about that whereof we cannot speak, with Lyotards attempt to form an ethics around the unrepresentable through the “differend”. Taking Lyotards acknowledgement of his debt to the later Wittgensteins conception of the incommensurability of language‐games and his anti‐humanist critique of Wittgensteins “anthropomorphism” as its point of analysis, it argues that Lyotard fails to account for what Wittgenstein would call the “grammar” of the ethical by excluding the agency of the human subject through a dogmatic anti‐humanist theory. Lyotards reduction of the grammatical to the theoretical thus produces a differend at the heart of his own ethical project.

The meaning of the wor(l)d: Value, sense, and reference in Not Saussure by Raymond Tallis

Summary This article is a critical review of the major argument in favour of realism and the concomitant critique of poststructuralism in Raymond Talliss recent book, Not Saussure: A Critique of Post‐Saussurean Literary Theory. While it is generally sympathetic to Talliss aim to “refute once and for all the belief that there are logico‐linguistic grounds for denying the possibility of a valid realistic fiction”, it argues both that Tallis overlooks the central weakness of Saussurean theory and that the realism that he offers as an adjunct to his reading of Saussure is seriously flawed. It offers instead a Wittgensteinean view of the relationship between language and the world which, instead of setting out from the assumption that there is a gap between word and world which needs to be bridged, sees the “objects” of language as samples, or aspects of the world that are appropriated in historically and culturally variable ways as rules for the use of words. For Wittgenstein there is no gap between word an...