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All for Nothing: Hamlet's Negativity (Short Circuits)
All for Nothing Hamlet's Negativity - Short Circuits Author:Andrew Cutrofello Entering from stage left: the philosopher's Hamlet. The philosopher's Hamlet is a conceptual character, played by philosophers rather than actors. He performs not on the stage but in the space of philosophical positions. In All for Nothing, Andrew Cutrofello critically examines the performance history of this unique role by looking closely at wh... more »at philosophers have said about Hamlet. The philosopher's Hamlet, Cutrofello tells us, personifies negativity. In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet's speech and action are characteristically negative; he is the melancholy Dane. Most would agree that he has nothing to be cheerful about. Philosophers have taken Hamlet to embody specific forms of negativity that first came into view in modernity. What the figure of the Sophist represented for Plato, Cutrofello argues, Hamlet has represented for modern philosophers. Mirroring both the five-act structure of the play and the history of modern philosophy, All for Nothing examines five aspects of Hamlet's negativity in turn: Hamlet's melancholy, Hamlet's negative faith, Hamlet's nihilism, Hamlet's tarrying (which Cutrofello distinguishes from "delaying"), and Hamlet's nonexistence. Along the way, we meet Hamlet in the texts of Kant, Coleridge, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Benjamin, Arendt, Schmitt, Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Badiou, ?i?ek, and other philosophers. Whirling across a kingdom of infinite space, the philosopher's Hamlet is nothing if not thought-provoking.« less