Abstract
This chapter examines the political praxis of a major Italian theorist, Massimo Cacciari, in the mirror of his analysis of Shakespeare. After surveying his Cacciari’s political career and philosophical trajectory, I analyze his essay on Hamlet and read it in the light of Luisa Accati’s book Beauty and the Monster, whose argument is that Catholicism in Italy is less a religious institution or belief than an anthropological situation that has produced a seemingly paradoxical patriarchal society with weak fathers. Her theory helps us to contextualize the uncanny analogies between Cacciari’s interpretation of Ophelia, and the feminine ideal still promoted by Catholic Italy: this simultaneous idealization and marginalization of women may be a blind spot of mainstream Italian theory.
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Notes
- 1.
“Di Amleto, proprio di Amleto, personaggio dell’omonima tragedia di Shakespeare, con riferimento al suo carattere irresoluto e pieno di contrasti”, Vocabolario della Lingua Italiana. Il Conciso (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, 1998), 67.
- 2.
As Paul Kottman and Julia Lupton argue: “In recent years, the writings of Giorgio Agamben on sovereignty, bare life, and states of exception have become a touchstone in recent Shakespeare criticism. In a different quarter, Italian neo-Marxists such as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno identify life with the generative capacities, the ‘constituting power,’ of creative social arrangements that emerge from ‘the multitude’—understood as a protean, increasingly globalized collectivity that overlaps with but is not fully identical with the sovereign ‘people’ of the modern nation-state. The term multitude itself stems from Machiavelli’s Discorsi, which traveled north via Hobbes and Spinoza, and then returned to Italy in the past century through Gramsci. Thus, Machiavellian inquiry, born in the permanent emergency of the Italian city-states, loops through northern Europe—coloring both the republicanism of England and Holland and the authoritarian liberalism of Hobbes—in order to find its way to a uniquely Italian modernity. Reversing this itinerary invites us to review the traditions of republicanism and civic humanism associated with Venice and Florence through the frameworks of both biopower (Agamben) and constituent power (Negri). By emphasizing the extent to which these intellectual imports from contemporary thought are in fact built from materials native to the Renaissance itself, we hope to suggest an approach to Shakespeare and Italy that is both responsive to contemporary concerns and fully oriented by the landmarks and neighborhoods of the plays themselves.” Paul Kottman and Julia Lupton, “Shakespeare’s Italy, from Machiavelli to the Present”, Panel proposal to the International Shakespeare Association, Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, Prague, 2011.
- 3.
David Bevington, Murder Most Foul. Hamlet Through the Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), viii. Cf. Margreta de Grazia: “one of the great sources of Hamlet’s cultural prominence is his free-standing autonomy. Existing independently of the play in which he appears, he glides freely into other texts, both fictional and theoretical”, “Hamlet” without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4.
- 4.
Massimo Cacciari, Hamletica (Milano: Adelphi, 2009). All subsequent quotes, in my translation, are from this edition.
- 5.
Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano, eds., The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 5.
- 6.
Paul Kottman, ed., Philosophers on Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 8.
- 7.
An excellent introduction to and selection of Cacciari’s work is to be found in Massimo Cacciari, The Unpolitical: on the Radical Critique of Political Reason, edited and with an introduction by Alessandro Carrera, translated by Massimo Verdicchio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).
- 8.
These fringes were the breeding ground of Italian theory, producing many influential intellectuals and politicians still active today.
- 9.
Massimo Cacciari, Krisis. Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negativo da Nietzsche a Wittgenstein (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1977). Cf. Cacciari, The Unpolitical.
- 10.
Since the 1980s all the most important works by Cacciari have been published by Adelphi press in Milan. As their double publication dates indicate, he frequently revisits and revises them.
- 11.
The institution itself, singlehandedly created by a charismatic Catholic priest and entrepreneur, was shaken by a major embezzlement scandal at his death in 2011.
- 12.
Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play, trans. David Pan and Jennifer R. Rust (New York: Telos Press, 2009).
- 13.
Cacciari, who has always been interested in Renaissance philosophy, draws here on Gilberto Sacerdoti’s pathbreaking, post-Yatesean inquiry into the relationship between Shakespeare and Bruno, Sacrificio e sovranità. Teologia e politica nell’Europa di Shakespeare e Bruno (Torino: Einaudi, 2002). See Chap. 7 of this book.
- 14.
See Alessandro Carrera’s excellent introduction in Cacciari, The Unpolitical, 1–43.
- 15.
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
- 16.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Michael Tanner (London: Penguin, 1994), 39.
- 17.
Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Hamlet Prince, Tragedy, Citizenship, and Political Theology,” in Alternative Shakespeares 3, edited by Diana E. Henderson (New York: Routledge, 2007), 185.
- 18.
Borrowing Auden’s definition, Cacciari believes that for Hamlet the only option is “to play at possibilities” (W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000], 164), always finding his own performance insufficient. “What I play cannot be what I am and what I do. As much as he struggles, Hamlet cannot identify with his roles to the point of making of them his own life” (Cacciari, Hamletica, 34).
- 19.
Luisa Accati, Beauty and the Monster: Discursive and Figurative Representations of the Parental Couple from Giotto to Tiepolo (Florence: European Press Academic Publishing, 2006), 9–15.
- 20.
This may also explain why major Italian feminists extol the papal views on gender and the happy life of mystics and nuns, and radical theorists favor St. Francis over Marx. In Accati’s opinion, this tenuous paternal authority invites always negative identifications and it is a well-documented fact that Italian ideological configurations, from progressive antifascism to old and new forms of anticommunism, have been the only effective ideological cement.
- 21.
Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams, “Introduction: the Afterlives of Ophelia.” In The Afterlife of Ophelia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2.
- 22.
Adriana Cavarero. Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender, translated by Robert de Lucca and Deanna Shemek (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
- 23.
Cavarero, Stately Bodies, 155, 122.
- 24.
Stately Bodies, 149.
- 25.
Stately Bodies, 152.
- 26.
Stately Bodies, 152–153.
- 27.
Stately Bodies, 158–159. For a feminist reading of Ophelia’s death and burial, especially in film adaptations, see Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 27–56.
- 28.
Massimo Cacciari, “Considerazioni ‘impolitiche’ sul Re Lear.” In Thinking with Shakespeare, edited by Rosy Colombo and Nadia Fusini, Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies 1 (2014): 129–138, http://ojs.uniroma1.it/index.php/MemShakespeare/article/view/11789, accessed 3 September 2015). Reginald Foakes reminds us that Hamlet and Lear have vied throughout the twentieth century for Shakespeare’s “most topical play”. Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- 29.
Julia Reinhard Lupton. “Tragedy and Psychoanalysis.” In A Companion to Tragedy, edited by Rebecca Bushnell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 102.
- 30.
Chiesa and Toscano, The Italian Difference, 5.
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Bassi, S. (2016). Hamlet in Venice. In: Shakespeare’s Italy and Italy’s Shakespeare. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49170-1_7
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