Status Updates From William Shakespeare

[How to respect] abstract equivalences, the very foundation of justice and social stability, while escaping a condition of universal reification, [and] nurture a fertile surpassing of that measure without landing either in the self-destructive lavishness of the old order or the anarchy of capitalist production[:] these are the claims of justice and mercy, inherent and conferred value, law and humanity, art and Nature

(that this is shakespeare's preoccupation is the premise of the entire thesis, touching language, law, human construction of selfhood and value, etc.): How do you hold to a concept of measure which avoids excessive rigour, and to a concept of superfluity which avoids excessive freedom?

The 'resolutions' of the late comedies thus rest [upon] a reactionary mystification of Nature

To view nature as awesomely 'other' is just as ideological [...] as to treat is as a moral text in which one can trace, narcissistically, one's own subjective moods.

[Coriolanus prefigures the time when] a whole society will fall prey to the ideology of self-authorship, when all individuals will be only begetters of themselves, private entrepreneurs of their bodies and sole proprietors of a labour force. (i.e. death of concept of 'organic' feudal 'bonds')

[For Othello] the whole world becomes a signified obediently reflecting back the imperious signifier of the self. Even Desdemona becomes his ‘fair warrior’, as though he can grasp nothing which he has not first translated into his own military idiom. From this deceptively secure standpoint, Othello is then pitched violently into the ‘symbolic order’ of desire, where signifier and signified never quite coincide.

Law operates rather like money, language and desire: all of these systems involve exchange and equivalence, which is in itself a stabilizing factor; but because they are necessarily indifferent as systems to particular objects or uses, they tend to breed an anarchic state of affairs in which everything blurs indiscriminately into everything else, and the system appears to be engaging in transactions for its own sake.

Both aspects of Falstaff – reductive materialism and verbal licence – belong to the carnivalesque [...] but it is interesting to note their incongruity. Social order is subverted simultaneously from two opposed directions: by that which is purely and materially itself, the self-pleasuring body which refuses to be inscribed by social imperatives [, and by speech employing powerful unmoored signifiers shifting at will]

(a paraphrase) Shakespeare has reason to fear fluidity as it can easily end in the anarchy and arbitrariness of the bourgeois market-place

One exit-route from the tragedy of the play, in short, would be to have a different sort of body altogether, one which had escaped from singular identity into diffusion and plurality [...] But "Macbeth" fears this feminine fluidity as political anarchy, viewing diffusion as disruption.

Shakespeare feels the need to integrate a potentially overweening consciousness within the body's sure limits, a process which is for him inseparable from the integration of individuals into the body politics [cf the simple 'unity' of reporting soldier in Act 1 – his body (wounds) is in perfect alignment with his honourable words]

When language is cut loose from reality, signifiers split from signifieds, the result is a radical fissure between consciousness and material life. Macbeth will end up as a bundle of broken signifiers, his body reduced to a blind automaton of battle; his sleepwalking wife disintegrates into fragments of hallucinated speech and mindless physical action.

Lady Macbeth is akin to the three sisters in celebrating female power, but in modern parlance she is a 'bourgeois' feminist who strives to outdo in domination and virility the very male system which subordinates her.

Yet this liquidation of all 'fixed, fast-frozen relations' is, in the case of the bourgeoisie, finally self-destructive [...] Like Macbeth, the bourgeoisie will become entangled in its own excess

the "fruitful darkness of the witches" is contrasted with the barrenness of the macbeths' quest – "a nothing from which nothing can come"

There is a style of transgression which is play and poetic non-sense, a dark carnival in which all formal values are satirized and deranged; [and there is the] disruptiveness of bourgeois individualist appetite, which, in its ruthless drive to be all, sunders every constraint and lapses back into nothing.

The witches' subversiveness movies within cyclical time, centred on dance, the moon, pre-vision and verbal repetition, inimical to linear history and its imperial themes of sexual reproduction.

The witches signify a realm of non-meaning and poetic play which hovers at the work's margins (...) In this sense the witches figure as the 'unconscious' of the drama

The witches are exiles from that violent order, inhabiting their own sisterly community on its shadowy borderlands, refusing all truck with its tribal bickerings and military honours.

Putting on hold until I can buy my own copy to annotate because I’m loving this so much!

''Sevmek bir başkasıyla imgesel bir özdeşlik yaşamaktır, öyle ki özdeşlik her zaman aynı anda hem burada hem de başka yerdedir, buradadır çünkü
başka yerdedir; ama eğer benlik her zaman başka yerde ise, sizi öz-yabancılaşma içine sokacak bir biçimde, yanılabilir ve kötüye kullanılabilir.''