Shakespeare as a Way of Life: Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness by James Kuzner (review)

“Presumption is our natural and original malady,” wrote Montaigne, who never ceased to be astonished by our epistemological arrogance. In typically Montaignean fashion, he implies both condemnation of and forgiveness for this mortal failing. Presumption is our “original” sin—eating from the tree of knowledge—but it is also “natural,” unavoidable.

James Kuzner cites this sentence from the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” in his ambitious and provocative new book, Shakespeare as a Way of Life (87). Shakespeare, suggests Kuzner, offers us ways to mitigate Montaigne’s “malady”—to embrace its more salutary effects. Kuzner argues that Shakespeare’s works—or at least the five works discussed here—promote a cognitive disorientation. This disorientation can be helpful in its unsettling or loosening of strictures upon conventional thought regarding love, freedom, selfhood, ethics: these works imply that an overconfidence in one’s assumptions about such matters can be disastrous. Kuzner posits that reading Shakespeare can help us to practice a profound epistemological humility, an acceptance, for example, of our inability to come down securely on one side or the other of the mind-body problem; to know what love is and how much self-mastery it entails; to codify systems of law and ethics based in sovereignty and self-identity; to decide what exactly freedom might mean and what metaphors it relies upon; or to read with anything approaching full hermeneutic confidence.

These five topics form the central arguments of the book’s five chapters, on Lucrece, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens. Kuzner’s critical methodology is similar in each case: the Shakespeare text is placed beside a comparison text (the central ones are Cicero, Descartes, Paul, and Montaigne) in order to provide cross-pollination. The method can feel schematic, but this sense is leavened both by the wide array of other tangential materials brought to bear on the interpretations and by some fine close readings. Chapter 1 places Lucrece beside Cicero’s works in order to open up the question of “whether the self is unified or split, monistic or dualistic” (26). Evincing different positions across his writing career, Cicero provides Kuzner with a model of a “flexible, potentially pragmatic skepticism” in these matters (31)—one that can be therapeutic. In Lucrece, “Shakespeare declines any final decision about whether minds and bodies are divided or unified” (46), a suspension of judgment that “allows us to imagine alterations that would improve [the poem’s] world and ours” (158).

A similar suspension of judgment is the subject of chapter 2, which places Othello beside Descartes in order to contrast their views of love with regard to self-mastery and to “whether we can master love even in a conceptual sense” (50). Here Kuzner argues that Shakespeare shows the tragic consequences of a desire for too much control in the realm of love, and (conversely) the benefits of pulling back from a sense that we can know what love is and what we can demand of it: “Othello suggests that the best way to stand in love is to admit that you do not know exactly where you stand, to acknowledge that the ground seems always to shift, and to hold onto love despite its disorientations and its disruptions of sovereign thinking” (79).

Chapter 3 uses Agamben’s and Badiou’s readings of Paul to argue that The Winter’s Tale “presents a Pauline, yet skeptical—and strikingly unsystematic—practice for the cultivation of virtue” (81) in order to enjoin a salutary unsettling of the law. Here in particular it is easy to see continuities with Kuzner’s fine earlier book, Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the Virtue of Vulnerability (2011), in which powerful works of literature are seen to embrace forms of weakness in order to promote new forms of life. What interests Kuzner throughout the new...