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  • Committing to Illusion?The Critchley/Webster Doctrine – Stay, Illusion!
  • Mark Schaukowitch (bio)
Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster , Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine. Pantheon Books, 2013. US $25.00 (cloth). 288 pp. HC ISBN– 978-0-307-90761-5 EBK ISBN– 978-0-307-90762-2

The latest effort from Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster is an invitation into a giant maze of illusions. Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine is sewn with (dis)appearances, fade-ins and fade-outs – a performance of the limit of language to adequately and accurately describe the tragic; and, performative of the resulting affective disappointment with language at the failure to capture the tragic in words. Subjects can never completely distinguish between illusion and reality because they have no language to speak about tragedy; and, neither will the readers of this book.

Lost without words to express the experience of the tragic, Critchley and Webster evoke a profound sense of abandonment. In one register, they abandon very close academic citation in exchange for discussing what might be called meta-generalities. In another register, they abandon a certain tone of generosity that has characterized their previous work for a tone of rashness. And finally, they abandon the safety of long exegeses of complex and networked scholars in exchange for brief, short and pointed facts that appear to connect one claim to another. For the academic reader, this style may induce madness because it refuses the ground(ing) of knowledge in clear precise language. In turn, the imposition of this particular style is a refusal of the illusion that something (new) can be said about the tragic and tragedy in a way that doesn’t commit to a logic that is always already a product of the tragic and tragedy. The style presents readers with a play of illusions from which there is no escape, setting the stage for the question Critchley and Webster want to ask: What illusions are we willing to commit ourselves to and what are the consequences of those commitments?

The question cannot be answered, or at least not answered in the clear and rigorous language of academic prose that readers of Critchley and Webster’s prior work will be familiar with. The authors’ typical clarity is present, but only as an illusion to cover their own loss of (academic and philosophical) words. The loss of words appears as a lack of commitment to a number of philosopher’s ideas, including but not limited to the thoughts of: Plato, Gorgias, Hegel, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Friedrich Nietzsche. There is no commitment to any one of these philosophers, which suggests a performative logic is at play. In general, the question of tragedy and the tragic is too broad to address via a commitment to another’s thought. Too much has already been said about tragedy. A commitment to one philosopher would not add anything new. Further, the idioms and languages of each philosopher exclude experiences that fall under or become a result of the tragic. Language itself works to order and process tragedy, drawing lines that appear to be reality (however necessary to survive the tragedy), only to resist being totalized by the singularity of the tragic actors experience of tragedy’s repetition (however arbitrarily). The reader is invited to discover something new about tragedy through the performance and performativity of the book, almost echoing the Aristotelian tradition of rhetoric. Discoveries will change and oscillate from reader to reader because rhetoric is a groundless ground, one that constantly shifts with person to person and values with which they approach the tragic. The style of the book is absolutely critical to evoking and provoking that discovery by asking the reader to “let be” the illusion so that they think though acting upon it before madness sets in.

In this respect, there are two major clues that can potentially act as levers for the reader to hold onto throughout the book. The first lever can be thought of as a motivational force, a notion of how material affect that propels one to action regardless of the cause of the affect’s basis in reality. Reminiscent of Nietzsche, Critchley and Webster highlight how...

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