The Intrusion of Slavery into the Time of Schmitt and Shakespeare

Abstract

“A lot turns on the specific interpretation of the intrusions into the purity of the play that Schmitt describes,” write David Pan and Julia Reinhard Lupton in their introduction to Carl Schmitt’s fecund yet puzzling text Hamlet or Hecuba (1956).1 What is “a lot”—this almost everything, but not quite? A lot turns on the interpretation of intrusion, yes, and not simply for our understanding of the internal integrity of Schmitt’s essay, or his corpus, but also for our hermeneutic horizon. Pan and Lupton’s short appraisal quoted here inaugurates the 2010 Telos special issue encompassing a range of takes on “the time” that intrudes into Schmitt’s theorization of the play; it is my intention to discern the difference in these perspectives on the relationship between the historical and mythic by augmenting the stakes of Schmitt’s genealogical critique and by offering another figure, both alongside and in place of Schmitt’s concrete context, as the ghostly form whose effacement prefigures the sovereign elaboration of representation and the public sphere.