Hamlet and Posthumanist Politics
Hamlet and Posthumanist Politics

Summary/Abstract: This essay explores the connection between early and late modernity, and thus between proto- and posthumanism, through Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It argues that a rereading of the play and Derrida’s interpretation of it in Specters of Marx are helpful for addressing some of the pressing concerns raised by the current ‘spectre’ of the posthuman. In this context, a critical posthumanist politics – derived from such a rereading – takes as a starting point the rift that appears in the play between the individual human and the Renaissance concept of humanity. Shakespeare’s play and Derrida’s reading of it prefigure, echo and arguably pre-empt the contemporary call for a ‘postanthropocentric’ world picture. Based on a redrawing of the boundaries between humans and nonhuman ‘others’, a posthumanist politics could do worse than reengage with the beginnings of an emerging humanism it believes to have left behind.

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