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The Hamlet Doctrine
by Simon Critchley, Jamieson Webster
The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the ghost haunts Shakespeare's melancholy Dane. Arguably, no literary work is more familiar to us. Everyone knows at least six words from Hamlet, and most people know many more. Yet the play—Shakespeare's longest—is more than "passing strange," and it becomes even more complex when considered closely.
Reading Hamlet alongside other writers, philosophers, and psychoanalysts—Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Melville, and Joyce—Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster go in search of a particularly modern drama that is as much about ourselves as it is a product of Shakespeare's imagination. They also offer a startling interpretation of the action onstage: it is structured around "nothing" - or, in the enigmatic words of the player queen, "it nothing must."
From the illusion of theater and the spectacle of statecraft to the psychological interplay of inhibition and emotion, Hamlet discloses the modern paradox of our lives: how thought and action seem to pull against each other, the one annulling the possibility of the other. As a counterweight to Hamlet's melancholy paralysis, Ophelia emerges as the play's true hero. In her madness, she lives the love of which Hamlet is incapable.
Avoiding the customary clichés about the timelessness of the Bard, Critchley and Webster show the timely power of Hamlet to cast light on the intractable dilemmas of human existence in a world that is rotten and out of joint.
"Insightful...The authors' passion for the play and its questions are clearly evident." - Publishers Weekly
"Critchley and Webster advance a daring commentary on the Bard's Hamlet. ... A spirited literary foray by audacious interlopers." - Booklist
"This book is different, aiming not for literary but cultural and psychological analysis; the authors bring a different perspective to the work. Are you ready, Shakespearians? That is the question." - Library Journal
"It won't be the last word on the play, but Critchley and Webster provide plenty of food for thought and fuel for obsession." - Kirkus Reviews
"The authors have an impressive mastery of all the factual details of the play . . . their discussions of such thinkers as Hegel and Nietzsche or Freud and Lacan are at once pithy and perceptive." - The Wall Street Journal
"Critchley and Webster's fierce, witty exploration of Hamlet makes most other writing about Shakespeare seem simple-minded." - Hari Kunzru, author of Gods Without Men
"I had no time to read Stay, Illusion!, and yet I found myself ravenously turning pages. I absolutely love the book...this almost impossibly aphoristic book penetrates to the center of this paradox. A thrilling performance." - David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
"The gap between thought and action has rarely been contemplated with so much intellectual excitement and energy as it is in this book...But the great pleasure it holds in store for most readers has to do with its profound understanding of reflection, and its discontents." - Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love
"A brilliant set of readings of a work that, like an insistent ghost, seems to have more to tell us with each passing era." - Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder
This information about Stay, Illusion! was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He also teaches at Tilburg University and the European Graduate School. His many books include Very Little . . . Almost Nothing, The Faith of the Faithless, and The Book of Dead Philosophers. He is the series moderator of The Stone, a philosophy column in The New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and Its Sublimation and has written for Apology, Cabinet, The New York Times, and many psychoanalytic publications. She teaches at Eugene Lang College at the New School and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at the City University of New York.
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