Shakespeare's Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (review)

David Hillman's focus upon insides and outsides in Shakespeare leads him into murky waters. He brings with him some powerful analytic tools to navigate this territory. His applications of psychoanalysis, in particular, are often brilliant without ever seeming doctrinaire; readers who imagine there is nothing more to say about orality and aggression in Hamlet, for example, will be educated by Hillman's chapter on that inexhaustible text. Hillman's theoretical grasp is extensive; he is as comfortable with Descartes, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell as he is with Freud, Lacan, Klein, and Kristeva. Nor does he neglect the twentieth-century tradition of professional Shakespeare criticism, as some philosophically minded writers are occasionally inclined to do. Hillman's finest moments emerge from this skillful juggling of various intellectual sources. For instance, the last four pages of his chapter on Troilus and Cressida begin with an epigraph from Karl Kraus, bounce confidently between Montaigne and Michel de Certeau, offer a tip of the hat to A. P. Rossiter, briefly riff on the significance of Antenor's silence, and finally close the interpretive deal with a pun worthy of Lacan: Cressida's "'wide unclasp[ed]' (4.5.61) body," we are told, "becomes the misogynistic 'whore-text' to Antenor's 'hors-texte'—'right great exchange' (3.3.21) indeed" (79). Hillman's analytic energy in such passages is engaging and exciting.

Hillman's high-wire displays of intellectual speculation are strung between the poles of a larger historical argument about changing body concepts, language, and subjectivity. His book adds to the extensive literature on the origins of what is widely regarded as a distinctively modern form of selfhood emerging in the sixteenth century—a self marked by interiority, separateness, and perhaps an essential mysteriousness, for it remains in part always unavailable, even to itself. Previous scholars have discovered the wellspring of this new mode of subjectivity in the politics of liberal humanism, the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of commodity capitalism. Hillman thinks that the distinctive features of the modern subject derive from historical transformations in the conception of the human body. I find some aspects of his argument persuasive—and others very intriguing—but at least one (central and oft-repeated) formulation of Hillman's strikes me as either inadequately argued or simply wrong.

For Hillman, the sixteenth-century body is the focus of a conceptual crisis, giving rise to a complex cultural counterpoint or double movement. On the one hand, words and concepts which derive from bodily experience (such as "crisis," which in the sixteenth century referred primarily to the turning point in an illness [5]) gradually become unmoored from the body and take on more abstract meanings. Most significantly, the self gradually withdraws from the body—at least in terms of our favored self-descriptive metaphors—to be relocated somewhere above or beyond our increasingly mechanical-seeming biological systems, within the apparently immaterial space of the mind. On the other hand, this conceptual downgrading of the body generates compensatory rhetoric, marked by excessive focus on the experience of embodiment, and particularly upon the bodily interior. Hillman writes: "The body was losing its ontological standing of primacy and having to struggle, as it were, in the realms of epistemology. . . . One could almost say that, gradually forfeiting its aura of presence or givenness, the body now had to defend itself . . . through recourse to fantasies of a clearly defined boundary between the 'inside' and the 'outside'" (5).

When it comes to subjectivity, Hillman's arguments to this point are illuminating about the imbrications of history, rhetoric, and ontology; it seems plausible that changes in the conception of bodily function would lead to changes in the language that in turn shape the imaginative conditions of possibility within which the self is articulated. But Hillman is not content to stop here. He finds evidence for a new species of subject—using Norbert Elias's...