“Smoke like incense”: sacrifice, Shakespeare and the Shoah

Abstract

Richard Marientras' book Le Proche et Le Lontain was misrepresented as a work of structuralist anthropology when its English translation was published in 1985 as New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World. In fact, it belonged to the post-structuralist deconstruction of the binarism of civilization and barbarism, and explored how “wildness can erupt at the heart of the civilized”. Its theme, that with moral monsters like Iago we see how “the near is more dangerous than the far”, has to be read in light of its disclaimer of objectivity and insistence that Shakespeare is our contemporary. Then its author's likening of his book to the witness heap of stones on a Jewish grave renders The Near and the Far a work of mourning for the “smoke like incense” arising from the Holocaust, and a deep meditation on Shakespeare and the Shoah. With the hindsight of Nazi Carl Schmitt's dictum that “sovereign is who decides on the exception”, Marienstras' scholarship on sacrifice and forest law becomes a traumatized response to the camps, and the book now emerges as being about the banality of evil in the criminal state, as personified by an Eichmann or Macbeth.