A deed Without a Name
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Veeser, H. Aram (ed.) (1989) The New Historicism, London: Routledge Vekerdy, Tamás (ed.) (1986) Arany János: Kisebb költemények [János Arany: Shorter poems], Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó. Verity, A. W. (ed.) (1952 [1902]). Macbeth. The Pitt Press Shakespeare. Cambridge: At the University Press. Vickers, Brian (2002) Shakespeare Co-Author. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. von Rosador, K. Tetzeli (1985) “‘Supernatural Soliciting’: Temptation and Imagination in Doctor Faustus and Macbeth”, in Honigman, E. A. (ed.) (1985) Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Essays in Comparison. The Revels Plays Company Library, 1985 Manchester: Manchester University Press, 42-59. von Wright, Georg Henrik (1982) Wittgenstein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wain, John (ed.) (1971) Shakespeare: Othello. A Casebook. London: Macmillan. Wain, John (ed.) (1990). Shakespeare: Macbeth. A Casebook. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Warnock, G. J. (1969). English Philosophy Since 1900. Second ed. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press Publishers. Weingartner, Rudolph H. (1973) The Unity of the Platonic Dialogue, Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs –Merrill Company, Inc. Wells, Stanley (ed.) (1986) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells, Stanley and Gary Taylor (1987) William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Meredith (2004) “Nonsense and Cosmic Exile: the austere reading of the Tractatus” in Max Kölbel and Bernhard Weiss eds., Wittgenstein’s Lasting Significance. London and New York: Routledge, 2004, 6-31. Williams, Raymond (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilshire, Bruce (1969) Metaphysics. An Introduction to Philosophy. New York: Pegasus. Wilshire, Bruce (1982) Role-Playing and Identity: the Limits of the Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wilson, John Dover (1959) What Happens in Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, John Dover (ed.) (1970 [1947]). Macbeth. The New Shakespeare. Cambridge: At the University Press. Winch, Peter (1983). “Im Anfang war die Tat” in Irving Block (ed.) (1983) Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983, 159-178. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2001 [1953, 1958]), Philosophical Investigations, The German Text, with a Revised English Translation, 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition, transl. by G. E. M. Anscombe, Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1963 [1921] [1922]) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The German Text of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Logisch-philosophishe Abhandlung with a new Translation by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York: The Humanities Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1970) Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief Complied from Notes [sic!] taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees and James Taylor, ed. by Cyrill Barett, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1979). Notebooks 1914-1916. Second ed., eds. by G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, tranls. by G. E. M. Anscombe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1980) Culture and Value. Ed. by Georg Henrik Von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nymam. Transl. by Peter Winch. Oxford: Basil Blackwell and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1993) Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951, eds. by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Zamir, Tzachi (2014) Acts. Theatre, Philosophy and the Preforming Self. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 1 All references to Macbeth, unless otherwise noted, are to the following edition: Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (eds.) (2015), The Arden Shakespeare. Macbeth, Third Series, General Editors: Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, David Scott Kastan and H. R. Woudhuysen, London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury. 2 Throughout this book, double “quotation marks” are used when I verbatim quote from a source with an author; ‘single quotation marks’ signal all other cases. 3 Instead of post-modern, or post-postmodern, and especially instead of post-human(ism), I am using meta-modern (meta: ‘after’, ‘by means of’, ‘higher’) indicating not only the aspect of being ‘after’ (‘post-’) the ‘modern’ and the ‘post-modern’ age: meta is also supposed to include three features that are, I think, significant in our times. 1) there is a prevailing nostalgia for the past, in the form of e.g. ‘re-livig the 1970s’, ‘quoting the 1920s’, etc. See all the ‘retro’-phenomena, carrying an ‘about-ness’, an ‘after-ness’ as regards the relevance of the past to the present and the future. We no longer seem to look ‘back’ on the past but view its phenomena from ‘above’; we look ‘on’ them, as it were. 2) The media (the means of communication) are in the centre of attention but not only as a mere instrument, a carrier-as-form but as an integral constituent of what it is being carried, the ‘content’ 3) There is a growing and renewed interest in phenomena that are already meta-: metaphor, metaphysics, meta-philosophy, meta-theatre, etc. 4 For example, in a recent, excellent introduction to the play, Emma Smith starts her interpretation with the sentence: “Macbeth’s downfall is his inability to read” (Smith xiv). 5 I have relied on the glosses of Clark and Mason 169. 6 The verbs in medial sentences are sometimes called “middle”, or “ergative” or “inchoative” verbs in linguistics and there is great variety in the uses of these terms, see Kemmer (1993) and Roeper (1984). 7 Cf. Maynard Mack’s observation in his classic study, “The Many Faces of Macbeth”: “The suggestiveness of Shakespeare's play in this larger sense is inexhaustible. Every element it contains lives with a double life, one physical, one metaphysical” (Mack 191). 8 Coleridge’s fist sentence in his commentary on Macbeth is: “ ‘Macbeth’ stands in contrast throughout with Hamlet” (Coleridge 229). The most detailed study I know of with the comparison of Hamlet and Macbeth in its focus is Calderwood (1986) and Balázs Szigeti’s excellent, highly original PhD Dissertation (Szigeti 2015). 9 Cf. Crystal and Crystal 401 and with the gloss in Clark and Mason: “ ‘Single’ could mean ‘slight, poor, trivial’” (OED adj. 12b). Macbeth is concerned with the radical effect of an imagined act on his being” (148). Kenneth Muir has “weak” and “indivisible” and he claims that “the phrase [“my single state of man”] as a whole [means] ‘my composite nature – body, spirts, etc., made one by the soul” and he concludes that it contains reference to the ‘microcosm’ (Muir 21). “Microcosm”, according to Early Modern thinking, meant the ‘household’ but also the human being whose organs, capabilities and soul was a miniature version of (a ‘mirror held up to’) the macrocosm, the whole universe (cf. Lewalski 619). Barbara K. Lewalski (2002) “Literature and the Household” in: David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (eds.) The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 603-629). Kenneth Muir [1962] (1979) The Arden Shakespeare. Macbeth, Second Series, General Editors: Harold F. Brooks, Harold Jenkins, and Brian Morris, London: Methuen. Nicholas Brooke, in the Oxford Shakespeare series agrees with Muir that the word “alludes to the microcosm, the body, spirits, etc., unified by an undivided soul”. Therefore, he gives the meaning of single as ‘undivided, unbroken, absolute’ and adds: “Macbeth is threatened with self-division and disintegration: the nearest modern equivalent would be ‘integrity’” (Brooke 107). Nicholas Brooke (1990), The Oxford Shakespeare. The Tragedy of Macbeth, General Editor: Stanley Wells, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10 Braunmuller also accepts “weak condition” as a possible meaning and remarks: “ ‘State’ probably evokes analogies with the human body, the body politic, and the macrocosm” (Braunmuller 2008: 133). 11 Tzachi Zamir (2014) Acts. Theatre, Philosophy and the Preforming Self. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 12 G. Wilson Knight (2005) [1930, 1949] The Wheel of Fire. Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy. London and New York: Routledge 13 ‘How many plays did Shakespeare write?’ is just as vexed a question as ’How many children had Lady Macbeth?’ As it is well-known, the Shakespeare-canon has accepted Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, which are not among the thirty-six plays of the First Folio of 1623. Yet the lost Cardenio, as well as Sir Thomas More and especially Edward III (written by many authors but the manuscript perhaps containing Shakespeare’s handwriting) present several problems (the latter two were eventually included in the Oxford Shakespeare, Jon Jowett et al. ed. 2005). Further, the fact that more and more plays attributed for a long time solely to Shakespeare: Timon of Athens, Measure for Measure, and Macbeth itself, seem to be products of collaboration with Thomas Middleton, have brought about further complications. There are Shakespeare-scholars who would put the First and the Third Part of Henry VI, as well as Titus Andronicus on the list of co-authorship. Excellent books on the matter include Taylor and Jowett (1993) and Wells and Taylor (1987). See also Vickers (2002). 14 Right now, I know of nineteen individual books (monographs and collections of essays) on Cavell (this number indeed exceeds Cavell’s eighteen books so far, by one) and seventy-eight articles (some of these overlapping with essays in collections) in various journals. The first monograph on Cavell’s work was Mulhall (1994) a pioneering piece of work, yet very much debatable. Mulhall is also the editor The Cavell Reader (Cavell 1996), where, in the introductory essays, he does a much better job. After 2000 (when Cavell was seventy-four) interest growing in his work is palpable: see e.g. Hammer (2002) and Rhu (2006). The most useful collection of essays from the present point of view is Eldridge (2003), Crary and Shieth (2006), Eldridge and Rhie (2011) and Loxley and Taylor (2011). 15 See, for example, Kripke (2013: 6, 19, and passim) and Everett (2013: 34, 62 and passim). 16 In M. O’C. Drury’s Conversations with Wittgenstein we read the following: “Wittgenstein: No. I don’t think I would get on with Hegel. Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in shewing [sic!] that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear ‘I’ll teach you differences’. Then laughing [i.e. Wittgenstein then added laughing]: the remark ‘you’d be surprised’ wouldn’t be a bad motto, either” (Rhees 1981: 171). 17 “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori” (Kant 1933: A11–12/B25). A priori roughly means that I know certain things ‘without experience through the senses (seeing, hearing, etc.)’, e.g. I know a priori that a triangle has three sides, if I am familiar with the meaning of the word ‘triangle’, whereas perceptive experience must be there (called by Kant a posteriori understanding) when I wish to identify a chair. Here is an explanatory note by Sebastian Gardner: “Transcendental [in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason] is thus not to be confused with transcendent, which does precisely mean ‘passing beyond all experience’. […] Transcendental enquiry is therefore enquiry into the cognitive constitution of the subject to which objects must conform; its product, transcendental knowledge, is at one removed from objects, and concerns only what makes objects, and […] knowledge of them, possible” (Gardner 30). Cf. also Andre Bowie: “the fact that Kant refers to what he is writing as ‘transcendental philosophy’ is enough to make many people think that he is concerned with something incomprehensible beyond the everyday world. However, what he means by ‘transcendental’ has nothing to do with anything otherworldly. Something is transcendental if it is, in Kant’s phrase, the ‘condition of possibility’ of something. Thus it might be said that sex, at least until the advent of in-vitro fertilization, was transcendental to pregnancy.” (Bowie 2003:14) 18 On the relationship between Kant and Wittgenstein with respect to the transcendental, see the detailed study of Robert Hanna (http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/paper_hanna_kant_wittgenstein_and_transcendental_philosophy_may11.pdf, (accessed 1 June, 2015). 19 Golub – drawing on Cavell (1979) – characterises Wittgenstein’ attitude to knowledge and self-knowledge this way, further noting that this attitude “constitutes the aphoristic lesson-plan template of the Tractatus and carries over as the premise, structure, and first object lesson of the Philosophical Investigations” (Golub 2014: 21). Golub’s book is an extra-ordinary document about the ordinary: sometimes provokingly strange but with highly original insight, analysing the theatricality and the performativity of Wittgenstein’s works. 20 As Bertrand Russell put it: “In one sense it must be admitted that we can never prove the existence of things other than ourselves and our experiences. No logical absurdity results from the hypothesis that the world consists of myself and my thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that everything else is mere fancy. […] There is no logical impossibility in the supposition that the whole life is a dream” (Russell 1971: 10, emphasis original). Nominalsm’ is precisely the conception that certain phenomena have only ‘linguistic existence’ and thus they are not ‘real’ (e.g. unicorns, the golden mountain – to quote some favourite examples of analytic philosophers). 21 Cf. with Rudolf Carnap’s position: “An existential statement does not have the form ‘a exists’ (as in ‘I am,’ i.e. ‘I exist’), but ‘there exists something of such and such a kind.’ […] If from the statement ‘P(a)’ (‘a has the property of P’) an existential statement is to be deduced, then the latter can assert existence only with respect to the predicate P, not with respect to the subject a of the premise. What follows from ‘I am a European’ is not ‘I exist,’ but ‘a European exists’” (Carnap 1960: 74). 22 For example, Heidegger starts the discussion of phenomenon this way: “The Greek expression phainomenon, form which the term ’phenomenon’ derives, comes from the verb phainesthai, meaning ’to show itself’. Thus phenomenon means what shows itself, the self-showing, the manifest. Phainesthai itself is a ’middle voice’ [medial verb] construction of phainō, to bring into daylight, to place in brightness. Phainō belongs to the root pha-, like phōs, light or brightness, that is, that within which something can become manifest, visible in itself. Thus the meaning of the expression ‘phenomenon’ is established as what shows itself in itself, what is manifest. The phainomena, ’phenomena,’ are thus the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to light” (Heidegger 1996: 25). 23 Cf. „Just like the [….] examples ‘principle’ and ‘God,’ most of the other specifically metaphysical terms are devoid of meaning, e.g. ‘the Idea,’ ‘the Absolute,’ ‘the Unconditioned’, […] ‘the being of being,’ ‘non-being,’ […] ‘absolute spirit,’ ‘objective spirit,’ ‘essence,’ […] ‘being-in-and-or-itself,’ […] etc. The metaphysician tells us that empirical truth-conditions cannot be specified; if he adds that nevertheless he ‘means’ something, we know that this is merely an allusion to associated images and feelings, which, however, do not bestow a meaning on this word” (Carnap 1960: 67, emphasis original). 24 From Foucault’s immensely large output in French and English, it seems that it was Madness and Civilisation (Foucault 1965) that first influenced literary and cultural studies considerably. The English translation is a short version of Foucault’s Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961). The full English translation is Foucault (2006), but that was done based on Foucault’s revised and extended French version: Foucault (1972). For an excellent summary of Foucault’s relevance to the New Historicism see Neema Parvini’s “Michel Foucault: Power relations and discourse analysis” in Parvini 2012: 78-96. 25 It was the “New Aestheticism”, initiated chiefly by John Joughin, Simon Malpas as Shakespeare-scholars, as well as philosopher Andrew Bowie and literary theorist Robert Eaglestone, with many others that tried to revive the aesthetics of Adorno and the Frankfurt School to challenge especially new-historical Cultural Materialism. In Joughin and Malpas, the editors write in their Preface (1-19) to The New Aestheticism: “The very notion of the ‘aesthetic’ could be said to have fallen victim to the recent developments within literary theory. […] Notion such as aesthetic independence, artistic genius, the cultural and historical universality of a text or work, and the humanist assumption of art’s intrinsic spiritual value have been successfully challenged by successive investigations into the historical and political bases of art’s material production and transmission. Theories of textuality, subjectivity, ideology, class, race, and gender have shown notions of universal human value to be without foundation, and even to act as repressive means of safeguarding the beliefs and values of an elitist culture from challenge and transformation. […] What has frequently been lost in this process, however, is the sense of art’s specificity as an object of analysis […] In the rush to diagnose art’s contamination by politics and culture, theoretical analysis has tended always to posit a prior order that grounds or determines a work’s aesthetic impact, whether this is history, ideology or theories of subjectivity. […] Theoretical criticism is in continual danger here of throwing out the aesthetic baby with the humanist bathwater.” (Joughin and Malpas 2003: 1). 26 In 1989, the ’Father of New Historicism’, Stephen Greenblatt wrote: “Certainly, the presence of Michel Foucault on the Berkeley campus for extended visits during the last five or six years of his life, and more generally the influence in America of European (and especially French) anthropological and social theorists, has helped to shape my own literary critical practice. On the other hand the historicist critics have on the whole been unwilling to enrol themselves in one or the other of the dominant theoretical camps.” (Greenblatt 1989: 1). It is hard to know what exactly Greenblatt meant by “dominant theoretical camps”. It is also certain that New Historicism, in Greenblatt’s case, was influenced not only by Foucault but also by Clifford Geertz (especially Geertz 1993) and Raymond Williams (especially Williams 1977), as well. 27 I came across this simile first in Otto Neurath’s “Protocol Sentences”, originally published in German in 1934, in the 4th volume of the journal of the Vienna Circle, Erkenntnis: “No tabula rasa exists. We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials.” (Neurath 1960: 201). Both the social science and the ‘Physikalismus’ Neurath advocates are very close to the interpretation of history and society New Historicism and Cultural Materialism represent. For an excellent discussion of the later use of the simile, especially in W. O. Quine’s philosophy, see Roth (1984). 28 Henceforth PI, following this edition: Ludwig Wittgenstein (2001 [1953, 1958]), Philosophical Investigations, The German Text, with a Revised English Translation, 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition, transl. by G. E. M. Anscombe, Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing. I will refer (following the usual practice) to what is called “Part I” of the Investigations by the editors (Rush Rhees and G. E, M. Anscombe), according to the “paragraph numbers” (§) and not according to page numbers. Almost 1500 pages of Wittgenstein’s works are freely downloadable at http://bookos-z1.org/s/?q=Wittgenstein+2015&t=0 (reached 13 February 2014). 29 It was Stanley Cavell who called my attention to this (cf. in print: Cavell 2005:114). 30 In the so-called “Big Typescript” written in 1933, in the section entitle “Philosophy”, Wittgenstein remarks: “Again and again there is the attempt to define the world in language [abzugrenzen: literally: ‘to put the world between borders’] and to display [hervorzuheben] it – but that doesn’t work. The self-evidence of the world is expressed in the very fact that language means [bedeutet] only it, and can only mean it. As language gets its way of meaning from what it means, from the world, no language is thinkable which doesn’t represent [darstellt] this world.” (Wittgenstein 1993: 193). This is an extreme way of insisting on the referential function of language, and Wittgenstein’s views changed considerably by the time of Philosophical Investigations but he never gave up on the referential function of language as one of its (main) functions. 31 Especially Cavell (1987) (2007) Stanley Cavell (1987) Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavell (2007) Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare [second edition of Cavell 1987, enlarged by an essay on Macbeth, “Macbeth Apalled”]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 32 Henceforth TLP, following this edition: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1963 [1921] [1922]) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The German Text of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Logisch-philosophishe Abhandlung with a new Translation by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York: The Humanities Press. 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