Vatikanska Milosnica’s Reviews > William Shakespeare > Status Update

[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

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]