MLN

In his new book Daemonic Figures, Ned Lukacher draws a remarkable philosophical-poetical history of conscience as it is fundamentally altered on its course from the ancient Greeks to late modernity by its passage through the irreducible, inexplicable fact of Shakespeare. Lukacher stages this history as the ongoing struggle between the Greek concept of the daemon—the uncanny experience of possession by the materiality of language that marks and disturbs the limits between the human and the divine—and the “Judeo-Christian” concept of the guilty conscience, which establishes the subject of moral certitude by stabilizing and institutionalizing the boundaries between good and evil, inside and outside, the self and the other. The daemonic figures that Lukacher reads backwards from Heidegger and forwards from Greek philosophy converge in Shakespeare, bringing with them an ethics of proximity, of “being near” the gap that language carves in Being, and of responding to the call to think beyond the sterile alternatives of onto-theology and nihilism. The history of the internalization of conscience involves the concomitant expulsion of the daemon, its demonization as the letter “that killeth” in the service of the interiorization of the spirit “that giveth life.” This daemonic letter time and again returns—returns, that is, as time: as the relationship of conscience to the uncanny temporality of language, an experience of proximity that undoes the certainty of conscience, and prevents the totalization of its history. Thus Lukacher’s project is not an attempt to historicize Shakespeare’s concept of conscience, but to point out, in Heidegger’s term, the “historicality” (Geschichtlichtkeit) of Shakespeare’s daemonic figures, in which the history of conscience is always conditioned by the temporality of the allegorical language that frames it.

Lukacher’s history of the return of the daemonic, then, will be subject to the law of the temporality it describes. In Chapter One Lukacher shows how Plato’s inaugural expulsion of daemonic poetry from his republic, the originary attempt to distinguish philosophical reason from the madness of mimetic art, already entails the residual recurrence of the poetic in the guise of the strange theatrical figures that trouble The Republic. Hence the daemon of the indeterminacy of poetic language remains to haunt the project of philosophy, despite Plato’s attempt to extinguish its flame and to transform it into the cool radiance of the internal eidic sun. In Lukacher’s genealogy of conscience, this transformation becomes culturally hegemonic through the [End Page 977] extension of Judaism and Christianity’s logic of guilt into a will to power that determines the western world as the ongoing attempt to suppress the figurations of the daemonic, from St. Paul’s formalization of the inside/ outside opposition in his theory of conscience as syneidesis to its secularization in Kant’s distinction between the pathologies of natural existence and the imperatives of moral Reason. Lukacher argues that the crucial turning point in the history of daemonic resurgence is Shakespeare, whose weird figures, embedded signatures, and phonetic ticks depsychologize the subject of practical reason by insisting on the inextricability of language and moral law. Shakespeare, that is, announces the modern de-demonization of the daemonic: a willingness to listen to a call beyond the call of conscience that will be most fully realized in Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, and above all, Heidegger.

Lukacher’s strong thesis is argued in chapters that chart the historicality of this history through extended readings of several of Shakespeare’s major plays and poems, including The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and Macbeth, as well as shorter accounts of King Lear, Measure for Measure, the sonnets, and the Roman plays. Lukacher’s argument passes through the twin lenses of the classical, Christian, and early modern history of conscience on the one hand, and the writings of Freud and Heidegger on the other. The acumen of Lukacher’s readings lies in this double vision, in which history and historicality illuminate each other as they cross over the enigmatic body of the Shakespearean text. Indeed, Lukacher’s project is not only to demonstrate Shakespeare’s reshaping of an earlier tradition of conscience, but perhaps more importantly, to show the effective history of Shakespeare in the modern theory of conscience. Hence Lukacher’s reading of St. Paul is perhaps most insightful for what it tells us about Freud’s strange late text, Moses and Monotheism. Lukacher argues that Saint Paul’s model of conscience “intensified its focus on what was most essential to the Jewish law, which was precisely the sense of guilt it inspired” and provided “a new cathartic mechanism for relieving the very burden it had so brilliantly redefined” (38). Lukacher demonstrates how Freud’s account of guilt and the drives in turn “reinvents” St. Paul’s Graeco-Judaic dialectic, criticizing it yet remaining within its horizon. Lukacher’s account of Judaism—the middle term in this dialectical history—is less than satisfactory, and at times seems to reify a Christian account of “Jewish guilt.” It is unfortunate that Lukacher depends only on St. Paul and Freud for his account of Judaism, neither reading back in the Hebrew Bible nor forward in the rabbinic tradition. Lukacher argues that Christianity manages its own Jewish guilt by transforming the guilt for murdering the primal father into the guilt of the unconverted Jews for having murdered the son, Jesus. But this is both to assume with Freud the originariness of this guilt as Jewish and to ignore the fact that most Christians entered the new faith not as Jews, but as Gentiles—not only a sociological fact but also an exegetical given, especially in St. Paul. [End Page 978]

The real strength of Daemonic Figures lies in Lukacher’s lucid articulation of the Heideggerian and Freudian matrix of conscience, the uncanny, and death. Heidegger and Freud are not, however, granted the same intimacy with the Shakespearean call to language. For Lukacher, although the model of temporality that emerges in Freud’s accounts of guilt and the drives resists the strictures of internalized conscience and makes possible its critique, Freud nevertheless remains indentured to the “Judeo-Christian” moral tradition he analyzes. It is only Heidegger, finally, who fully frees himself from metaphysics, and attends to the proximity of the daemonic. Lukacher argues, somewhat perversely, that even though Heidegger never refers to Shakespeare, he is nonetheless a better reader of Shakespeare than Freud: “Heidegger’s silence belies the profound affinity between his thinking (Denken) and Shakespeare’s poetic saying (Sage) of the words for Being, whereas Freud’s self-certain pronouncements belie his wide divergence from the poet’s fundamental orientation” (94). It is finally not Freud who approaches the uncanny heart of Shakespeare’s daemonic figures, but Heidegger, whose notion of “readiness” (Bereitschaft), Lukacher argues, echoes Hamlet’s realization that “the readiness is all” (147–8). This is bold reading and bolder theorization; indeed, it produces some of the most dazzling and original comments in the book. Can we suggest a corollary to it that would make its thesis even more readable? Perhaps the element of truth in Lukacher’s claim that Heidegger is a greater reader of Shakespeare than Freud only emerges as such in Heidegger’s great reader, Emmanuel Levinas. Throughout his oeuvre, Levinas insists on Shakespeare’s proximity to the question of being, not least of all in his references to both Hamlet and Macbeth on the first page of his most creative response to Heidegger’s thinking, Otherwise than Being. There, Levinas locates the Shakespearean question “to be or not to be” at the origin of his critique of ontology. For Levinas, Hamlet’s question is most ethical and most Shakespearean precisely insofar as it gestures beyond the question of ontology; “To be or not to be” is not a question of existing or not existing, but rather of Being or something otherwise than Being.