The Tragedy of Tragedy: Levinas Reads Hamlet

Schonfeld, Eli

doi:10.5840/levinas20233132

Levinas Studies

Volume 16, 2022

"Between the Bible and Philosophers"

Eli Schonfeld

Pages 39-57

https://doi.org/10.5840/levinas20233132

The Tragedy of Tragedy
Levinas Reads Hamlet

The following paper analyzes the effect of the Shakespearean text—and Hamlet in particular—on Levinas’s thought. I argue that Levinas’s reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet played a decisive role in one of the most crucial phenomenological debates to be found in the Levinasian text, namely, the debate with Heidegger on the meaning of death and on the object of Angst (anguish). Analyzing Levinas’s remarks on Hamlet in his philosophical text, this article demonstrates how Shakespeare inspires Levinas’s anti-Heideggerian thesis about anguish being anguish before eternity (and not anguish before death). Moreover, this article analyzes the Hecuba scene from the perspective of Levinas’s philosophy of substitution (where again Shakespeare occupies a central role), and tries to understand the situation of Shakespeare’s tragedy as being “beyond tragedy.”

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