Humanities Research Seminar: Adorno, Hamlet, Protestant, Animal

This paper examines some of Theodor Adorno’s remarks on Shakespeare’s Hamlet with two aims in mind. First, these remarks help the paper adapt and defend Adorno’s larger arguments about willed action’s somatic component and about the emphatic claim of suffering, human and animal. They thus refine Adorno's account of the normative resources for his negativity. In this connection, the Hamlet comments can also interpret some theological motifs in Adorno’s critique of society and ‘rationalized’ reason. Secondly, the paper will more briefly develop what such themes and strategies, and the speculative, long-range history they imply and bear upon, might bring to the reading of Hamlet and to Shakespeare – to a reading going beyond theory’s search for illustrations.

Host or Publisher College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, UoW