Abstract
In Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of the German Tragic Drama we learn that fate, in tragedy, is in a closed form that is expressed by myth and by the law. In the baroque drama, instead, this closed form comes to be disclosed and the inscrutability of fate is traversed to attempt the flight. The baroque drama is the experience of this inscrutability: from mourning to the intriguer’s plot, the play, appearance, and all its elements are the experience of the mystery made by the “naked creature” that, in this very experience, becomes the world.
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Notes
See Anselm Haverkamp, Shakespearean Genealogies of Power: A Whispering of Nothing in Hamlet, Richard II, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and The Winter’s Tale (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 73–86.
For an important, new reading of Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, see Massimo Palma, Benjamin e Niobe: Genealogia della ‘nuda vita’ (Napoli: Editoriale Scientifica, 2008).
See Jacques Derrida on Foucault, “Cogito and the history of madness,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 31–63.
On the difference, in Spinoza, between power and potentia, see Emilia Giancotti, Lexicon spinozanum, vol. 1, Archives Internationales d’histoire des Idées 28 (La Haye: M. Nijhoff, 1963), s.v. “potentia, potestas”; and “Sui concetti di potere e potenza in Spinoza,” Filosofia Politica 4, no. 1 (1990): pp. 103–18.
A knowledge sub specie aeternitatis is a “knowledge or concept (idea) which expresses the essence of a particular body, or the truth of things” (Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy [New York: City Lights Books, 1988], p. 67) in the way in which “essences have that eternity which derives from the cause through which they must necessarily be conceived” (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 67).
The structure of the play already tells us the parabola of this “productive imagination”: imagination moves from being an idea of contingency (lens on the present) to being knowledge sub specie aeternitatis. The rupture of the sight “sub specie aeternitatis” is a transversal cut that brings together the idea of transcendence—power as power—and that of immanence—the mask that laughs and makes power revolve into potentia. The rupture operates the “translation of temporal data into a spatial simultaneity” (Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama [London: Verso, 1998], p. 81), the constant production of planes of immanence. The death’s head at the beginning and at the end, the relation between Lady Macbeth and Macbeth in the figure of the snake, the body as emblem, and the equivocation of sovereign as value are all sequences of the working of time in its striving to produce further life as constituent potentia.
See Dmitri Nikulin, Matter, Imagination and Geometry. Ontology, Natural Philosophy and Mathematics in Plotinus, Proclus and Descartes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
On this see Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (New York: Routledge, 1999).
Jonathan Goldberg, James 1 and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Their Contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).
Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 100.
For this process of secularization, and the Jesuit Garnet, see the Arden edition of Macbeth edited by Kenneth Muir (London: Arden Shakespeare Second Series, 1997): “It may be, my Lord, he meant to equivocate” (xxi).
For brilliant and exhaustive discussions of the role of imagination in Spinoza I refer to Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings; Michele Bertrand, Spinoza et l’imaginaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983);
Paolo Cristofolini, La scienza intuitiva di Spinoza (Pisa: ETS, 2009); Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press);
and Ubaldo Fadini and Giammario Pascucci, Immagine-desiderio: Contributo ad una genealogia del modern (Milano: Mimesis, 1999).
I am not touching here all the implications of the sub specie aeternitatis, its debt from paolinism (P. Di Vona, A. Guzzo) and its importance to contemporary reflections on messianism. On messianism and Saint Paul, see Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003);
Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). But for me the most important influence of the theoretical link between Saint Paul and Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis is on Benjamin’s concept of messianic time. I think that the Benjaminian messianic time is the Spinozan sub specie aeternitatis.
The Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae (from now on quoted as Abregé), which appeared in Opera posthuma (1677), was written for a group of students and never completed. It presents an explanation of the Spinozan system of Ethics (above all the relation between substance and modes) according to the declination and conjugation of the noun. In the quoted passages I will use the beautiful French edition, Abregé de Grammaire Hebraique, ed. J. and J. Askenazi (Paris: Vrin, 1987).
Ibn Djanah, Le Livre des Parterres fleuris, trans. M. Metzger (Paris: E. Bouillon, 1889), pp. 25–26.
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© 2013 Margherita Pascucci
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Pascucci, M. (2013). Macbeth, Multitudinous Seas Incarnadine. In: Philosophical Readings of Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324580_4
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