The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory

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Humor or Dying VoiceHamlet between Walter

Benjamin and Carl Schmitt

Hyowon Cho

To cite this article: Hyowon Cho (2016) Humor or Dying VoiceHamlet between Walter Benjamin
and Carl Schmitt, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 91:3, 258-276, DOI:
10.1080/00168890.2016.1190626

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 The Germanic Review, 91: 258276, 2016
Copyright 
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ISSN: 0016-8890 print / 1930-6962 online

DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2016.1190626

Humor or Dying VoiceHamlet between

Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt

Hyowon Cho
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In spite of the indeterminacy of Shakespeares religiosity, Benjamin and Schmitt respec-

tively identify his most famous protagonist Hamlet as Christian and as non-Christian.
By virtue of this contradistinction, readers may gain a clear perspective of the difference
between Benjamins historico-philosophical project and Schmitts theologico-political
thinking. It is the play within the play in/of Hamlet from which Benjamin and Schmitt
both take cues that reveal Hamlets true color. For Benjamin, Hamlet is a plotter of con-
tingency who yearns to suffer martyrdom by accident, whereas Schmitt sees Hamlet as a
sovereign on the basis of the fact that Hamlet gives his dying voice. It is as if Benjamin
made a retort to Schmitt when Benjamin speaks of the despot as the ideal subject of
humor that is supposed to deactivate sovereignty. Through Hamlet, readers can observe
that a confrontation between Benjamin and Schmitt emerged that may shed light on the
issue of sovereignty.

Keywords: Benjamin, dying voice, Hamlet, humor, the play within the play, Schmitt

1. SHAKESPEARE AND HAMLET BETWEEN COINCIDENTIA AND COMPLEXIO

OPPOSITORUM
he German-Jewish nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine once said: Shakespeare is
T at once Jew and Greek; or rather, both elements, spiritualism and art, prevail and are
reconciled in him, and unfold in higher unity.1 But everyone knows that Shakespeare is
(equal to) England, not just English. How then could he be (considered) at once Jewish and
Greek? To find the answer to this question in Shakespeares genius is, needless to say, too
easy a way out; the contemporary American-Jewish critic Harold Bloom is more cautious:
It seems likely that no one ever will establish Shakespeares religious sentiments, whether

1
Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Borne: A Memorial, in The Romantic School and Other Essays, ed. Jost
Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York: Continuum, 1985), 271.

258
 CHO  HUMOR OR DYING VOICE 259

early in his life or late. Unlike his father, who died a Catholic, Shakespeare maintained his
usual ambiguity in this dangerous area, and Hamlet is neither a Protestant nor a Catholic
work.2 Given that Shakespeare adhered, if perfunctorily, to the Church of England, which is
distinct both from Roman Catholicism and continental Protestantism, it is almost pleonastic
to assert that Hamlet is neither Protestant nor Catholic. At any rate, I would argue that the
coexistence of the two religious sentiments suggested by Heine as well as the neither-nor
of Bloom both constitute a crucial part of the universe constituted of in(de)finite opposites,
in which the works of Shakespeare have their origin, and which they reflect, redouble, and
magnify.
To define one of the main characters of the Shakespearean world as the continuum of
in(de)finite opposition leads us to think of two seemingly similar terminologies: coincidentia
oppositorum and complexio oppositorum.3 Yet the latter, a weird and artful syntagma coined
by Carl Schmitt, as Samuel Weber points out, should be recognized as entirely distinct from
the former, a technical term of Nicholas of Cusa that has long since been established in the
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realm of philosophical discourses: the Schmittian neologism, unlike the medieval invention
of philosophy, which reveals a tendency toward systematic understanding of the universe and
its order that is supposed to be in tune with and under the guidance of the transcendental and
infinite God, seems to be entangled in the endless uniqueness [unendliche Einmaligkeit]4
of historical events to which Schmitt attaches almost exclusive importance. There is, however,
at least one thing to emphasize regarding Schmittian complexio oppositorum: it is, accord-
ing to Weber, resolutely this-worldly and is conceived strictly with respect to the finite
world of phenomena.5 It seems to depend on ones point of view to whichcoincidentia
or complexio oppositorumShakespeare and Hamlet have greater affinity. (Heine would

2
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 391.
Shakespeare in Hamlet could have recognized the triumph of Protestantism without sympathizing with
it. Notwithstanding Blooms prudent remark, there have been not a few attempts to define Shakespeares
religiosity in a resolute manner. Whereas some scholars find in Hamlet much evidence of the ascendency
of Puritan Protestantism, to be more exact, Calvinism, others discern a number of clear vestiges of the
old belief of England and Europe. As for the first group, see, for example, John E. Curran Jr., Hamlet,
Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency: Not to Be (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006); as for the
latter, see David N. Beauregard, Catholic Theology in Shakespeares Plays (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2007).
3
In respect to this puzzling trait of Shakespeares plays, Anselm Haverkamp, while critically accepting
opacity, the term suggested by other scholars, opts to call this trait latency of Shakespeare. Opacity
is a good name for the appearance of energy and force on Shakespeares stage in general, but there is
more to its efficacy than meetsor, rather, in all its opaqueness escapesthe eye of the beholder. The
law of Shakespeares stage is counter-determined by, and thus prevails on, the unexplained premises of
a latency far before the law, whose threat the law is barely able to keep at bay, and whose transgressive
nature has been only precariously mastered in classical myth. Haverkamp, Shakespearean Genealogies
of Power (London: Routledge, 2011), 1314.
4
See Carl Schmitt, Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History, trans. Mario Wenning,
Telos 147 (Summer 2009): 167170.
5
Samuel Weber, Targets of Opportunity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 27.
 260 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 91, NUMBER 3 / 2016

have gladly chosen the former; Bloom would probably opt, if reluctantly, for the
latter.)
Yet the state of affairs becomes more complicated if we add two further arguments that
are pertinent to our concern here. One being that of the late historian Amos Funkenstein:

A new and unique approach to matters divine, a secular theology of sorts,

emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to a short career. It was
secular in that it was conceived by laymen for laymen. Galileo and Descartes,
Leibniz and Newton, Hobbes and Vico were either not clergymen at all or did
not acquire an advanced degree in divinity.6

Although Funkenstein does not mention Shakespeare, it is only natural to interpolate his
name into the genealogy of secular theology, which Funkenstein seemed to want to introduce
into the domain of historiography. Shakespeare was not only one of their contemporaries,
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but also contributed to launching secular theology to a great extent by deftly grafting many
diverse, even contradictory religious discourses onto the profane world of theater.
The other is Agnes Hellers: Shakespeare lived in the world of Machiavelli, but he
also lived in the world of Montaigne. We know that he read some Montaigne. One can
hardly miss the very concrete allusions to Montaignes essay on friendship in Shakespeares
portrayal of Horatio and of the Horatio-Hamlet relationship.7 Adopting a line similar to
that of Heller, Bloom also renders Hamlet exemplary to skeptics by pairing him with Jesus,
who is the exemplary figure to believers: What Jesus still is to many believers, Hamlet still
is to many skeptics: the exemplary figure.8 For Bloom, in other words, Hamlet appears as
the skeptic Jesus. In the in-between world of Shakespeare and Hamlet, anyone can therefore
behold any figure as being a Jew, a Greek, a Catholic, a Protestant, a secular theologian, and
even a skeptic. Thus, paraphrasing the words of Salvador de Madariaga, we can speak of
Hamlet: He acts, thinks, feels, not in the Jewish-Greek, or the Catholic/Protestant, or the
secular skeptic, but in the Hamletian way.9
Yet the fact that Hamlet follows only the Hamletian way means that Hamlet is always
marking time in between coincidentia and complexio oppositorum. This may be the reason
why Bloom, while taking a step back from his own statement, has delivered the following
verdict: It seems to me indeed neither Christian nor non-Christian, since Hamlets skepticism
does not merely exceed its possible origin in Montaigne but passes into something very rich
and strange in Act V, something for which we have no name.10 In this nameless thing are
two puzzling questions involved that shall later turn out to be decisive: (1) Why does Hamlet

6
Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986), 3.
7
Agnes Heller, The Time Is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2002), 8.
8
See Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003), 97.
9
See Salvador de Madariaga, On Hamlet (London: Hollis & Carter, 1948), 12. He acts, thinks, feels,
not in the Danish, or the English, but in the Hamletian way.
10
Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 391.
 CHO  HUMOR OR DYING VOICE 261

want to go back to Wittenberg after having reluctantly seen his mother marrying Claudius
who (is said to have) killed Hamlets father?; and (2) Why does the ghost of Hamlets father
arm himself from top to toe, rather than wear kings attire as he supposedly did when he
was murdered in the garden by his brother? In this respect, it is quite remarkable that in Act
I, Hamlet double-checks with Horatio his fathers arming and even ruminates over it after
Horatio and others have left.
That something with no name in/of Hamlet, I would suggest, marks the ignition
point of the argument between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, who have disputed over
Hamlet with a long time-lag. In what follows, I will make an attempt at a metacritique
of their critiques, arguing that Hamlets humor, which Benjamin took note of, and his
dying voice, which preoccupied Schmitt, respectively, lead into the core of their politico-
theological thinking. Both Benjamin and Schmitt, strangely enough, have no qualms to
name that something in/of Hamlet as Christian and non-Christian, respectively. In The
Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), Benjamin affirms that unlike German authors of
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baroque tragic dramas, Only Shakespeare was capable of striking Christian sparks from the
baroque rigidity of the melancholic, un-stoic as it is un-Christian, pseudo-antique as it is
pseudo-pietistic.11 Almost thirty years later, Schmitt in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956) retorts:
Hamlet is not Christian in any specific sense, and even the famous passage concerning
providence and the fall of the sparrow (5.2.227228) that Benjamin invokes does not alter this
fact.12
Revealing alike a savor of, say, reductionism, they strive to break through the riddle of
Hamlet. Benjamin never suggests a clear and distinct definition of Christianity with which
he endows Hamlet, as if he knew nothing about coincidentia or complexio oppositorum of
the Shakespearean world (not to mention those of Christianity).13 All we know from his
description of Hamlet is that Hamlets religiosity distances itself from and even transcends
blind faith; by deliberately nullifying the implication of the biblical passage quoted in the
play, Schmitt almost exclusively places emphasis on the concrete realities of the historically
given, which he believes irrupt into Hamlet. It is as if Schmitt regarded the biblical passage
as irrelevant to complexio oppositorum in/of Hamlet. Thus, Stathis Gourgouris writes,
Schmitt reads Benjamins explanation of Hamlets malaise as the outcome of religious
crisis and not as a deeply historical meditation on the hopelessness of a worldly history that
has emerged victorious over religion.14

11
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso,
2003), 158. Cited hereafter as OG.
12
Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, trans. David Pan and Jennifer R. Rust (New York: Telos Press,
2009), 61. Cited hereafter as HH.
13
Yet it is beyond doubt that Benjamin was well aware of the religious confrontation between Catholi-
cism and Protestantism. On this point Rainer Nagele comments as follows: Splitting and unity de-
termine the theological rhetoric and its presentation. The opposition of Lutheran Protestantism and
Catholic Counter-Reformation is presented by Benjamin as an opposition between a certain unity of
life and faith in the Catholic permeation of life by faith and the radical separation of life and faith in
the Lutheran devaluation of good works. Nagele, Theater, Theory, Speculation (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991), 186.
14
Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature Think? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 112.
 262 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 91, NUMBER 3 / 2016

Accordingly, neither Benjamin nor Schmitt does justice to Hamlet; instead, they strate-
gically misappropriate and invert it.15 For what they are interested in is not interpreting and
commenting on the play as such, but gaining some backing for their own polemics, that is
to say, by reading over Hamlet, they sought to think through the problem of the politico-
theological that comes to light first and foremost in the most enigmatic figure among all
earthly creatures: the sovereign. And, significantly, where Benjamin and Schmitt alike find
a primary clue to their own arguments is in the play within the play of Hamlet. For both,
Jennifer R. Rust and Julia Lupton write, the exceptional instance of the play within the play
proves the rule of the representation of sovereignty in the drama at large.16

2. THE PLAY WITHIN THE PLAY: INTRUSION OR INVERSION

In this singular baroque drama, Benjamin observes the merging of history into the setting,
while Schmitt delineates the moment of intrusion of history into the play. Merging and
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intrusion, however, are one and the same: the play within the play. In this respect, we may
have to keep in mind that in Elizabethan England, there already existed a meta-theatrical
consciousness. Men of action in this epoch, Schmitt writes, saw themselves on center stage
before spectators and understood themselves and their activities in terms of the theatricality
of their roles (HH, 41). The Elizabethan public, as Indira Ghose also points out,

was clearly fascinated by the idea of theatricality. The theatrum mundi metaphor
was continually recycled, the dark implications of Protean shifts of identity
were explored in plays about Machiavellian overreachers and warned against in
homiletic writing. But it is above all the Shakespearean comedies, shot through
with sparkling moments of metatheatricality, that flaunt the pleasure of illusion.17

Hamlet, of course, is not a comedy, yet it contains something more meta-theatrical than
Shakespeares comedies do. For Benjamin, first of all, it consists of the fact that through the
play within the play, Hamlet himself becomes the only spectator of the play that epitomizes the
history of all earthly affairs. Thus, to become such a spectator, according to Benjamin, means
to exeunt theatrum mundi. In the drama the play-element was demonstratively emphasized,
and transcendence was allowed its final word in the worldly disguise of a play within a play
(OG, 82).18

15
See Jennifer R. Rust and Julia Lupton, Introduction: Schmitt and Shakespeare, in Schmitt, HH,
xxix.
16
Ibid.
17
Indira Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2008), 158.
18
As concerns transcendence in/of Hamlet, Bloom mentions a purely secular transcendence that
contrasts with the spirits survival in more traditional modes. See Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention
of the Human, 420.
 CHO  HUMOR OR DYING VOICE 263

Benjamin in this respect stands opposite to de Madariaga, who sees Hamlet in sharp
contrast with Don Quixote. Hamlet and Don Quixote, de Madariaga asserts, stand watch
on the two roads by which society and man stray from the royal road of senseone, over
which Hamlet broods, leads to tyranny through too much order; the other one, over which
Don Quixote dreams, leads to anarchy through no order at all. The royal road between the
two. He seems to hold his ground in that Hamlet and Don Quixote lived in completely
different social atmospheres from one another: Since the Spanish knight, alone in the empty
spaces of La Mancha, lost his mental balance for lack of pressure in the social atmosphere,
the Danish Prince may well have lost his because the social pressure round him was too high.
For this reason, he asserts that Hamlet was the observed of all observers, i.e., the recipient
of the utmost pressure.19 What is of concern to Benjamin, however, is not so much the royal
road in this immanent world as grace of the at once infinitely distant and close God by dint of
which the possibility of redemption can be given. In other words, Benjamin aspires to seize
the moment of inversion of the observed of all observers into the only observer. Hence
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For Trauerspiel Hamlet alone is a spectator by the grace of God (OG, 158). For Benjamin,
the play within the play, so to speak, functions as the door through which the grace of God
enters.
Where Benjamin finds the transcending spectator begins the real play for Schmitt,
who, on antithetic grounds to Benjamins, counters the psychological explanation of de
Madariaga (see HH, 89). Yet the real play Schmitt brings to mind, paradoxically, turns
out to be an imperfect one. But Schmitt, strangely enough, considers most important its very
imperfection, which he, in a similar vein, calls shadows and dark areas.20

It is then all the more crucial to recognize that this drama, which never ceases
to fascinate as play, does not completely exhaust itself as play. It contains
components that do not belong to the play and, in this sense, it is imperfect as
play. There is no closed unity of time, place, and action, no pure internal process
sufficient unto itself. It has two major openings through which historical time
breaks into the time of the play, and through which this unpredictable current
of ever-new interpretive possibilities, of ever-new, yet ultimately unsolvable,
riddles flows into the otherwise so genuine play. Both intrusionsthe taboo
surrounding the guilt of the queen and the distortion of the avenger that leads to
the Hamletization of the heroare shadows, two dark areas. (HH, 44)

Taking issue with this controversial argument, Victoria Kahn gives attention to Thomas
Hobbes, who is one of the figures of Schmitts main concern. As Hobbes instructs us, Kahn

19
de Madariaga, On Hamlet, 11 and 12.
20
Eric Santner insightfully names this imperfectness scandal or trauma, commenting as follows:
What makes Hamlet Hamletand for Schmitt that also means what makes Hamlet a genuine tragedy
rather than a baroque Trauerspielturns out to be something that is in Hamlet that is more than Hamlet,
some unnamed cause, some scandal or trauma that can only be reconstructed on the basis not of allusions
or mirrorings but of what appears as peculiar swerves or torsions in the work. Eric Santner, The Royal
Remains, Telos 153 (Winter 2010): 3334.
 264 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 91, NUMBER 3 / 2016

goes to say, acting is something natural persons do, as well as artificial persons. The natural
is always already a representation.21 If acting itself is natural, if the natural itself is a
representation, then there can be no difference between aesthetic play and real play. Here
Kahn deploys the Hobbesian concept of theatricality in order to deprive Schmitts argument of
its plausibility. [I]n contrast to Schmitt, Hobbes views this theatrical notion of representation
as a source of political strength rather than weakness.22 For Schmitt, weakness equates with
evil and at the same time lurks in mere aesthetics, for aesthetic thinking blurs the border
between the real and illusory. To keep a safe distance from the danger of aesthetics, Schmitt in
his own way deploys, or to be more exact, invents a brand-new concept of the anti-aesthetic:
intrusion [Einbruch].23 This concept seems to constitute an antithesis to mimesis that has
been said to form the basis of Western aesthetics in the traditional sense of the term.
Although one might find it quite bizarre, it is, in any case, through intrusion that
Schmitt identifies the prince in the play with James I, the real king of England at that time,
after whom Hamlet is modeled. Schmitt, of course, would object to singling out the verb
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identify, which is used among others. Admittedly, his argument is far from straightforward,
unlike the way it appears at first glance and its tone urging us to think so. This is also the case
for the concept of intrusion he himself has invented and deployed. In other words, Hamlet,
for Schmitt, is a figure created not by mimesis of aesthetic imagination but by intrusion of a
historical core of reality.

Intentionally or instinctively the conditions and forms of the original context

within which the play was written have been brought into the play, and, behind
the stage character Hamlet, another figure has remained standing. The spectators
of that time also saw this figure when they saw Hamlet. Otherwise Hamlet, the
longest and most difficult of Shakespeares works, would not also have been
simultaneously his most popular play. We too can recognize this other figure
today if we are not blinded by the dogmas of a particular philosophy of art. (HH,
2021)

21
Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2014), 37.
22
Ibid. It would be instructive to make reference to a passage of Samuel Weber: When an event or
series of events takes place without reducing the place taken to a purely neutral site, then that place
reveals itself to be a stage, and those events become theatrical happenings. . . . They take place,
which means in a particular place, and yet simultaneously also pass awaynot simply to disappear but
to happen somewhere else. Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press,
2004), 7.
23
Andreas Hofele suggests an alternative translation of the German Einbruch: irruption. Irruption,
Hofele writes, would be closer in meaning to the German word Schmitt uses, Einbruch, which
conveys a violent breaking or bursting into. In its most common use the word denotes the offence of
breaking and entering. Compounds with the verb brechen (break, rupture) and its concomitant noun
Bruch abound in writings of the late 1940s and 50s. Hofele, Hamlet in Plettenberg: Carl Schmitts
Shakespeare, Shakespeare Survey 65 (2012): 388. To be sure, the translation of Einbruch has room for
further discussion. In his response to the earlier version of this article, Samuel Weber suggested that
incursion would be a better rendition of the term.
 CHO  HUMOR OR DYING VOICE 265

We, too, can regard Schmitts objection as in vain if we are not blinded by the rhetoric
of his idiosyncratic philosophy of anti-art. The intrusion of the real sovereign, the shadow
of the gist of the historically given, does not restrict itself to an aesthetic category but rather
should be elevated to myth that Schmitt believes is worth paying attention to much more
than any other mimetic works. Here historical reality, quite astonishingly to a common-sense
view, identifies itself with myth.24 For Schmitt, namely, only what can be elevated to myth
is to be named historical reality. The rest is nothing. However, in contrast to Schmitts own
argument, it is not through intrusion but rather through embracing aesthetics that sundries of
the historically given can be crystallized into myth.
A king who in his fate and character was the product of the strife of his age itself
stood before the eyes of the writer of the tragedy in his own existence (HH, 30). Here, the
real king is merely material, however formidable his effect is, and it is rather the writer who
exerts the genuine force that could and did create the myth of Hamlet.25 By dint of the genius
of Shakespeare, The figure of Hamlet had entered into the world and its history, and the
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myth began its journey (HH, 31). What matters for Schmitt, however, is not so much the
genius of Shakespeare as the myth of Hamlet itself. Here Schmitt, oddly enough, appears to
stand quite close to Agnes Heller, who believes in the revelatory truth of artwork. It speaks
for itself. Nothing can be added or taken away in the present time, when we are sitting in
the theater and when the truth is going to be revealed.26 The truth of Hamlet must and can
be revelatory if we, no matter who we are, are sitting in the theater not being blinded by
any other dogmas no matter what they are. All we have to see in Hamlet is the intrusion of
the genuine reality of history. The play within the play in Act Three of Hamlet is not only
no look behind the scenes, but, on the contrary, it is the real play itself repeated before the
curtains (HH, 43). Thus the journey of the myth, as it were, is going to keep going as long
as the revelation of Hamlet can repeat itself in the ever-present time.

The repetition of revelation is the presentation of revelatory truth. That is, truth
of the past is truth of the present; it is constantly presencing. Jesus is born every
Christmas, although he was born two thousand years ago. We know that he was
born roughly two thousand year ago, just how we know when Augustus Caesar
was born or when he became the first man of Rome.27

24
As concerns understanding of myth, Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink plausibly contrasts Schmitts con-
cept with that of Blumenberg, who attributes the fundamental role of banishing the terrors of reality to
aesthetic play. See Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, Between Terror and Play: The Intellectual Encounter
of Hans Blumenberg and Jacob Taubes, Telos 158 (Spring 2012): 130.
25
In this respect, it seems significant that Schmitt mentions the need of King James I: James needed
to be disguised as Hamlet and hidden behind the saga, pretending to be about something very different
from what is really at stake in Shakespeares drama, in order to preserve the temporal immediacy before
the naked panopticon of the politics of the time. Carl Schmitt, Foreword to the German Edition of
Lilian Winstanleys Hamlet and the Scottish Succession, trans. Kurt R. Buhanan, Telos 153 (Winter
2010): 172 (my emphasis).
26
Heller, The Time Is Out of Joint, 368.
27
Ibid., 369.
 266 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 91, NUMBER 3 / 2016

So, too, Hamlet, the intellectuals Christ.28

As a mark of the imperfection of Hamlet, the play within the play, according to Schmitt,
plays a role in turning it from a revenge drama into a life and death struggle between
Hamlet and King Claudius (HH, 24).29 It functions as a placeholder for the intrusion by
which the play itself is disunited into a revenge drama and a drama of the royal succession.
For Schmitt, as we will see later, this disunion is but necessary in order to pinpoint the dying
voice of Hamlet the sovereign that holds the exceptional, if not transcendental, position
within the frame of the antithesis between the barbaric and the political (HH, 62). The play
within the play is no less necessary for Benjamin, yet not as a placeholder for the intrusion
but as a lever for inversion of the play itself. For him, as is already shown, Hamlet is the
sole observer of theatrum mundi or theatrum historicum. In this regard, it is remarkable
that, as Schmitt suggests toward the end of his essay, Hamlet is oddly enough [a] reader of
books (HH, 52) along with Don Quixote and Faust. Benjamin also seems to bear in mind
that Hamlet is not only the spectator but also the reader when he writes as follows: When,
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as is the case in the Trauerspiel, history becomes part of the setting, it does so as script
(OG, 177). This insight, above all, goes for Shakespeare and Hamlet if we pay attention to
one of Hamlets final words: Tell my story. His story, indeed, at the hands of Shakespeare,
becomes both the setting and the script weagain, no matter who we are herewatch and
read. If this is the case, then the recipient of Hamlets testament should be Shakespeare
himself, not Horatio. Furthermore, in Benjamins view, the Trauerspiel, unlike tragedy,
has to be understood from the point of view of the onlooker (OG, 119)that is to say,
from the point of view of Hamlet. Through the play within the play, Hamlet not only inverts
his position from actor onto spectator but, more crucially, he does at once view and read
theatrum mundi and theatrum historicum. In line with Hamlets inversion, history as such
inverts itself into the theater and thereafter, or rather simultaneously, theater also transforms
itself into legible history. And The sovereign is the representative of history (OG, 65).
Schmitts intrusion into and Benjamins inversion of Hamlet, consequently, involves nothing
less than the enigma of sovereignty in/of Hamlet.

3. TRAUER: HAMLET OR HEROD

The question of weeping or mourning [Trauer] would be a stepping stone to approach the
riddle at issue here. After auditioning the players for the theater he himself directs, Hamlet,
while reproaching himself, wonders about how the player could so rightly weep for Hecuba,
one of the mere figures in an old myth.

Now I am alone.
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!

28
Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 420.
29
Unlike Schmitt, Stephen Greenblatt, while focusing on the ignitable issue at that time, Purgatory,
and its influence on the plays of Shakespeare, finds in Hamlet the startling Shakespearean shift from
vengeance to remembrance. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2013), 229.
 CHO  HUMOR OR DYING VOICE 267

Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wannd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, an his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing,
For Hecuba!
Whats Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
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Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed

The very faculties of eyes and ears. (2.2.549566)

Schmitt must have been inspired by these lines when he conceived the title of his
book. It is needless to say that the title implies the aforementioned dichotomy between mere
play and real play. Again, he seems to have no qualms about rendering Hecuba as belonging
to the first category and Hamlet to the second, although, as he later acknowledges, Hecuba
obviously is one of the figures of the myth of classical tragedy that is one of two ways
and two sources, by virtue of which the core of historical reality can enter into tragedy
(HH, 48). What he introduces here as a fundamental difference is the immediacy of historical
reality. The myth of Hamlet, unlike that of classical tragedy,

is the immediately available historical reality that encompasses the playwright,

the actors, and the audience. While ancient tragedy is simply faced with myth
and creates the tragic action from it, in the case of Hamlet we encounter the rare
(but typically modern) case of a playwright who establishes a myth from the
reality that he immediately faces. (HH, 4849)

However, we then cannot but wonder how to differentiate Schmitts concept of imme-
diacy from the ideal of the realism or naturalism of art and literature in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century. We may be able to see, I would suggest, the difference between
them only if we take account of the radicality of Schmitts strategic stance that always allows
him to remain on the very brink of being absorbed by any dogmas other than his own. As the
primary and, indeed, ultimate trait of the myth that Schmitt conceives, immediacy, in point of
fact, can be considered nothing other than the radicalized, even inverted mimesis. It is also the
case in terms of the concept of intrusion he deftly invented. Intrusion is almost indistinguish-
able from inversion and, for this reason, stands always already on the verge of bankruptcy
and self-betrayal. It lends support to this inference that Schmitt himself unexpectedly praises
Shakespeare as a great author, if not a genius.
 268 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 91, NUMBER 3 / 2016

Shakespeares incomparable greatness lies in the fact that, moved by reserve

and consideration, led by tact and respect, he was capable of extracting from the
confusing richness of his contemporary political situation the form that could
be intensified to the level of myth. His success in grasping the core of a tragedy
and achieving myth was the reward for that reserve and respect that honored the
taboo and transformed the figure of an avenger into Hamlet. Thus, the myth of
Hamlet was born. (HH, 49)

For Schmitt, the myth of classical tragedy, in the end, is not myth in the proper sense
of the term but a mere aesthetic category.30 Hence weeping for Hecuba signifies nothing
but being blinded by the evil dogmas of the philosophy of art. The actor who declaims
the death of Priam weeps for Hecuba. Hamlet, however, does not weep for Hecuba (HH,
42). This is why Hamlet is significant for Schmitt. Hamlet, in point of fact, cannot weep
for anyone since he has to maintain his focus on the actual existence and situation around
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him. Hereby Hamlet perfectly distances himself from the actor who weeps for Hecuba. In
Schmitts view, so does Shakespeare. The author of this seamless drama feared neither
allusions nor mirrorings, but he allowed genuine historical intrusions to stand as they are
(HH, 48). Therefore, Shakespeares achievement for Schmitt lies in extracting the form that
could be intensified to the level of myth. This, according to Schmitt, allows the genuine
historical intrusions to stand as they are. Both are one and the same. However, Schmitt never
clearly explains what the form and the intrusion are and who is supposed, or rather deserves,
to define and decide them.
Schmitts Hamlet does not weep for anyone and only strives to take his lost crown
back. Hence he is, as it were, a not-yet-sovereign. Benjamin, on the contrary, presupposes that
somehow Hamlet is already the sovereign. And it is on the basis of this presupposition that
he finds in Hamlet an exemplary figure of the melancholic. For The prince is the paradigm
of the melancholy man. Nothing demonstrates the frailty of the creature so drastically as the
fact that even he is subject to it (OG, 142). At this point, the fact that Hamlet was a student
at the University of Wittenberg emerges as an important reference. In the Trauerspiel book,
Benjamin reads Hamlets soliloquy in relation to Luther.

What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.

30
Gourgouris incisively refutes this assertion of Schmitt by arguing, in a quite reminiscent way of
Kahns argument, that it is the very Athenian tragedy that constitutes the Greek polis. The knowledge
of myth as source text, which the community possesses, is invested in the performance not as origin
but as reality, as present-tense mythic thought that will then enable the judgment (krisis) of the given
tragedy as a specific performative instance of myth. To put it otherwise, in tragedy myth does not preside
as origin but is enacted as dromenon, beyond the boundaries of the stage, for the simple reason that the
entire polis is reminded by the theatrical experience that its political substance is predicated on its own
theatricality. The political community is constituted not only in but as theatron; it is theater as such.
Gourgouris, Does Literature Think?, 110.
 CHO  HUMOR OR DYING VOICE 269

Sure He that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unusd. (4.4.3339) (OG, 138)

Hereupon Benjamin comments quite vaguely: these words of Hamlet contain both
the philosophy of Wittenberg and a protest against it (OG, 138).31 Of course, we can
easily observe the creaturely perspective of Lutheran theology. But what does it mean to
protest against it? It may help us to make reference to Jane O. Newmans insightful remark:
Lutheran and Saturnine melancholy intersect and overlap in Benjamins Hamlet.32 But we
may need to revise it as follows: Lutheran piety and Hamletian melancholy, if not collide,
confront each other. Lutheran theology renders all creaturely beings meaningless, but at the
same time endows them with the hope that by virtue of belief, they can finally enter the
heavenly kingdom of God. By contrast, Hamletian melancholy makes no room for such
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promise of salvation. Nonetheless, what both have in common is that they dispute over the
predestinarian doctrine of Calvinism, though admittedly in almost opposite ways. Unlike
Luther, what Hamlet believes in is contingency, not the will of the merciful God. Or, to be
more precise, he keeps standing on the very verge of believing without falling prey to it.
Hamlet, as Benjamin has rightly grasped, wants to die by some accident (OG, 137).
In terms of such a bizarre belief in accident, Hamlet appears as an antithesis to the
tyrant who cannot but materialize all the dangers of sovereignty, and thereby should be
considered as the typical figure of sovereign. Unlike Schmitt, who establishes the polarity
between Hamlet and Hecuba, Benjamin constitutes a trinity of the sovereign system in the

31
In terms of Hamlets theological thinking, Greenblatt spots the implication of the phrase Hic et
ubique (1.5.158) that alludes the atmosphere of violence and insecurity at that time. It refers, according
to him, to the divine power to violate the laws of physics, a power that became an issue in the
Reformation in a dispute over the Lutheran doctrine of Christs Ubiquity. Behind Hamlets bizarre
words, however, some irresoluble problem lurks. Traditional Catholic ritual in England, Greenblatt
goes on to say, included a prayer . . . to be recited for the dead who had been laid to rest in the
churchyard. Gods mercy and forgiveness of sin are begged on behalf of all of those souls here and
everywhere (hic et ubique) who rest in Christ. The point is not only that such pleas for the dead make
use of the key phrase hic et ubique but also that they are specifically connected to a belief in Purgatory
(Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 23435). Such a belief that was, as is well known, linked to the
system of papal indulgences, could not avoid evoking animosity from secular governors and politicians.
In a similar vein, Samuel Weber observes in Hamlets words a shift from grace to security in terms of
political transition: Such conflicts thus cannot be resolved definitively, but only responded to case by
case, insofar as both state and politics are assigned a task that, from a Christian perspective, at least,
cannot be accomplished with worldly means alone, since it ultimately involves the question of grace:
which is to say, the relation of finite beings to their end, that is, to mortality. As a result, compromises
have to be struck, of which the most familiar and perhaps most important for modern politics has been
the translation of grace into security and its derivatives, law and order (Weber, Theatricality as
Medium, 190).
32
Jane O. Newman, Benjamins Trauerspiel Book and Its Sources, in Benjamin-Studien 1, ed. Daniel
Weidner and Sigrid Weigel (Frankfurt am Main.: Wilhelm Fink, 2008), 188.
 270 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 91, NUMBER 3 / 2016

baroque Trauerspiel that consists of tyrant, martyr, and intriguer. In the final chapter, we will
turn to the last. It suffices here to point out the difference of the (in)compatibility between
tyrant and martyr from Schmitts polarity. In the baroque, Benjamin asserts, the tyrant
and the martyr are but the two faces of the monarch (OG, 69). But, to my knowledge, it
has been hardly observed thus far that Benjamin places Herod in the antithetical position to
Hamlet. To put it simply, Herod is a tyrant and Hamlet a martyr. As we have seen, Hamlet is
considered a Christ-like figure, and, given that Jesus is doubtless the paragon of martyrdom,
it is a far cry from being a figment of my imagination to regard Hamlet as a martyr. Herod,
by contrast, has been considered an exemplary figure of the cruel tyrant, no matter how much
the latest historical evaluations of him object to this prejudice.33 Benjamin also relies on this
stereotype without any attempt to reassess Herod. For what, in fact, matters for Benjamin is
not so much the real Herod as the image of him.

Above all it is the figure of Herod, as he was presented throughout the European
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theatre at this time, which is characteristic of the idea of the tyrant. It was
his story which lent the depiction of the hubris of kings its most powerful
features. Even before this period a terrifying mystery had been woven around
this king. Before being seen as a mad autocrat and a symbol of disordered
creation, he had appeared in an even crueler guise to early Christianity, as the
Antichrist. Tertullianand in this he is not alonespeaks of a sect of Herodians,
who worshipped Herod as the Messiah. (OG, 70)

Whereas Schmitts polarity between Hamlet and Hecuba cannot yet be situated within
the frame of sovereignty, the conflictual relation of Herod and Hamlet fits into it, as Benjamin
conceives it. Benjamin must have taken note of the instruction Hamlet gives to the players
in Act 3. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a
passion to totters, to very rags, to spleet the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are
capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipt
for oerdoing Termagant. It out-Herods Herod, pray you avoid it (3.2.814). One might
even go further to assert that such composition paradigmatically reveals the configuration of
Benjamins historico-philosophical insights that have a close affinity with Schmitts politico-
theological thoughts. That is to say, both grapple with the mystery of sovereignty that is
fundamentally involved with the Katechon, which Schmitt always bears in mind, as well as
with the Messiah Benjamin makes reference to here and there in his writings.
By contrasting Hamlet with Hecuba, Schmitt tries to show the tragic, that is, the
incomplete or shattered sovereignty. Nevertheless, he still aspires to grab the faded glory of
the sovereign. Shakespeares Hamlet, Schmitt declares, is a singular appeal, directed at
James I, not to expend the divine right of kings in reflections and discussions;34 by contriving
a confrontation between Hamlet and Herod, Benjamin suggests that the sovereign, by nature,

33
See, for example, Norman Gelb, Herod the Great: Statesman, Visionary, Tyrant (Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2013).
34
Schmitt, Foreword to the German Edition of Lilian Winstanleys Hamlet and the Scottish Succes-
sion, 117.
 CHO  HUMOR OR DYING VOICE 271

is doomed to be dislodged from his own position, and thereby cannot but be melancholic.
But Herod, the most famous tyrant, is saturated with jealousy, not melancholy. Through
jealousy Herod is subject to fate (OG, 133). Hamlets extraordinariness, in contrast to Herod,
consists in the fact that he does not elude melancholy, but rather penetrates through it to the
bottom. This is why he cannot find satisfaction in what he sees enacted, only in his own fate
(OG, 158). This is also why Benjamin finds in Hamlet an idiosyncratic kind of Christianity.
Only in a princely life such as this is melancholy redeemed, by being confronted with
itself. . . . It is only in this prince that melancholic self-absorption attains to Christianity
(ibid.). As aforementioned, Hamlet wants to die by accident, and this very bizarre yearning
leads him to keep standing on the verge of becoming a (Christian) saint, for if he is truly a
martyr, he should die for the sake of belief in God who must have some plan for redemption.
Trauerspiel thus is on the way to the tragedy of the saint that Franz Rosenzweig has regarded
as the highest form of theaterwith him Benjamin agreedjust as Hamlet is to that of the
martyr. The Trauerspiel is confirmed as a form of the tragedy of the saint by means of the
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martyr-drama (OG, 113). Now it is time to hear the dying voice of this unique martyr.

4. HUMOR OR DYING VOICE

Given Benjaminian Hamlets will to dedicate himself to accident, it is quite intriguing that
Bloom defines Claudius as a mere accident, irrespective of what he intends by that definition.35
Indeed, Hamlet dies from the venom that Claudius together with Laertes set up. So Hamlets
will is done even if we cannot properly judge whether it is in accordance with the way he
wanted it or not. In Schmitts frame of interpretation, on the other hand, this would be the
core of the second part of Hamlet where a life and death struggle between Hamlet and King
Claudius takes place. In line with Schmitt, de Madariaga, though on different grounds, sees
in Claudius the anti-Hamlet. While Hamlet seems to absorb the play and drown it in his
emotions, the King leads the events. He is the head of the state, and he has usurped Hamlets
place; but the reasons are plain: he can lead and Hamlet cannot.36 Following Benjamins
point of view on Hamlet, we can eclectically pull together both arguments of Schmitt and de
Madariaga so that the riddle of sovereignty in/of Hamlet reveals itself: Hamlet and Claudius
compete against one another, unlike Schmitts conception, not for the throne but for the plot
of theatrum historicum. In other words, both are, in effect, intriguers. Claudius can lead the
events but cannot escape from the fate of tyrant. Thus he cannot but face the death of Herod;
in the final analysis, it is Hamlet who absorbed the play as a whole and thereby could and
did overthrow the plot Claudius initiates against him.
Besides tyrant and martyr, Benjamin takes account of intrigue as concerns his historico-
philosophical insights into sovereignty. The intriguer stands as a third type alongside the
despot and the martyr (OG, 95). Although Benjamin explicitly introduces Polonius as an
exemplar of the intrigue in Hamlet, we may assert against Benjamin that Hamlet himself fits
the type much better. For, first of all, Hamlet is not the sovereign yetat least, seen from the

35
See Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 431.
36
de Madariaga, On Hamlet, 82.
 272 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 91, NUMBER 3 / 2016

strict legal perspectiveand, more importantly, Benjamin himself implies, if unbeknownst

to himself, that Hamlet is the intrigue when he writes:

With the intriguer comedy is introduced into the Trauerspiel. But not as an
episode. Comedyor more precisely: the pure jokeis the essential inner side
of mourning which from time to time, like the lining of a dress at the hem or
lapel, makes its presence felt. Its representative is linked to the representative of
mourning. (OG, 12526)

We cannot look forward to see in Polonius the moment at which the representative
of comedy coincides with the one of mourning. It is rather Hamlet who represents the
coincidentia oppositorum of joke and mourning. It might be useful to delve into the aspects
of Hamlet as the intriguer before we ponder the problem of humor and the dying voice in
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terms of sovereignty. But, as intriguer, Hamlet is also quite idiosyncratic, that is to say, he is
the intriguer of accident. In Act 5 Scene 2, we read the most mysterious words of Hamlet:

And praisd be rashness for itlet us know

Our indiscretion sometime serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall, and that should teach us
Theres a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will (5.2.711)
Theres a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, tis not
to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now,
yet it will comethe readiness is all. Since no man, of aught
he leaves, knows aught, what ist to leave betimes? Let be. (5.2.219224)

On the surface, Hamlet seems to make room for the providence of God. But what really
matters for him here are the rashness and indiscretion of human beings. Far from believing
in Gods will, in other words, Hamlet articulates his piety toward accident: Let be. Let
be, as Bloom says, is a setting aside, neither denial nor affirmation.37 In this regard,
the readiness Hamlet highly values just comes up to waiting for a happenstance. It actually
occurs to Hamlet at least three times: twice by Claudius, and one time by Fortinbras, who is
supposed to take Hamlets dying voice.
First, by virtue of The Mousetrap, the play within the play, Hamlet could initiate
his plot to catch the conscience of the King (2.2.605). It was Claudius who has in the first
place invited the tragedians of the city. Hamlet did not know that they came to offer him
service. He has just used their service as a trap.38

37
Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 422.
38
It is helpful to take note of Webers comments on Hamlets act: As has often been observed, Hamlet
does not act in the purposive, effective way commanded by the ghost of his father: rather, he acts as an
actor, while observing as spectator and staging as director. He does not so much accomplish his mission
as stage it (Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 193).
 CHO  HUMOR OR DYING VOICE 273

Second, Claudius also offers Hamletthis is far more important than the firstanother
chance, as it were, to overthrow himself: he sends Hamlet to England or, more precisely, to
sea. Indeed, it is on the sea that Hamlets indiscretion plays a decisive role in overthrowing the
plot of the king: he unwittingly unseals the kings commission and thereby notices the kings
conspiracy against him. Motivated by this happenstance, Hamlet forges a new commission
against the king. (It is, incidentally, noteworthy that Hamlet describes as the play of the
brains what he did at that moment. In the case of The Mousetrap, Hamlet is close to a stage
director, while here he plays for himself, or to be precise, unbeknownst to his consciousness.)
Then Horatio raises a most critical question of how Hamlet could rightly seal the forged
commission. Here, Hamlets answer uncovers his identity as the intriguer of accident. Why,
even in that was heaven ordinant. I had my fathers signet in my purse, Which was the model
of that Danish seal; Folded the writ up in form of th other, Subscribed it, gave the impression,
placed it safely, The changeling never known (5.2.4853). The Danish monarchy was not
hereditary but elective. Yet it must be pointed out that what happened between the death of
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Hamlets father and the enthronement of Claudius is shrouded in obscurity. In this regard,
the fact that Hamlet has kept the signet of his father cannot be considered marginal. It can be
interpreted at least (or, in a sense, at best) in two ways. Had, on the one hand, the late king
given Hamlet the signet as a token of succession in advance, Hamlet indeed could claim the
legitimacy of his succession. (It seems uncanny that Schmitt does not take note of Hamlets
signet at all, given that he gives so much emphasis on the life-and-death struggle between
Hamlet and Claudius for the throne.) However, if this is the case, we cannot but wonder why
he did not protest against the king before he is finally banished from Denmark to England.
We can, on the other hand, assume that Hamlet got it by chance because he never seems to
have stolen it considering his intense self-reflections, which, more or less, signal his integrity
and honesty. If this is true, it is legitimate to define him as the intriguer of contingency. By
keeping the signet secretly, one might say, Hamlet has cultivated the readiness for accident.
When concerning the sea, it has been well known that Schmitt regarded as quite
problematic the transition from a terrestrial to a maritime existence initiated by England
(HH, 47). After having criticized Benjamin on somewhat vague groundsBenjamin would
surely regard it as irrelevantSchmitt introduces another antithesis between the barbaric
and the political (HH, 62). This second antithesis forms the ground of his fundamental
judgment on Hamlet. He argues that Hamlet reflects the situation of the Stuart dynasty that
was not fated to foresee the emergence of a modern sovereign state like France and was
thus unable to extricate itself from the religious and feudal Middle Ages. Therein lies the
hopelessness of the intellectual and spiritual position that James occupied in his arguments
for the divine right of kings (HH, 65). From Schmitts point of view, Hamlet neither has
any traces of Christian themes with respect to the motif of the murder of the heirin reality,
however, the references he mentions, Matthew 21:38, Mark 12:112, Luke 20:919, Acts
7:52, do not fit the motif at allnor does he prefigure any notion of the political that is supposed
to be one of the preconditions for the formation of (modern) sovereign state as conceived by
Hobbes. Hamlet, in short, still appears to be barbaric, that is, in a pre-condition (HH, 65).
Nonetheless, Hamlet gives his dying voice to Fortinbras. This has an obviously
political implication that functions as an acclamation before the accession of James to the
throne in 1603 and as an act of homage to James after the accession, and was also understood
 274 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 91, NUMBER 3 / 2016

as such (HH, 25). Schmitt might well disregard doubts concerning the plausibility of his
interpretation. However, we have to point out that there exists a discrepancy between his
identification of Hamlet and James and the political implication of the dying voice that is
reckoned to be an acclamation and homage. Because, if the latter is the case, Fortinbras, not
Hamlet, should be identified with James. Furthermore, as Schmitt himself implicitly admits,
the dying voice is just one of the events such as the ceremonial crowning, homage, and
acclamation that constitute a unitary whole that can only be correctly understood within the
context of its own time period and its own people (HH, 57). Why then is Schmitt particularly
obsessed with the dying voice? One might surmise that it is the only trace left in Hamlet
that can be linked with the political.39 This faint clue astonishingly renders Schmitt so
blind that he cannot or will not see that, like Hamlet, Fortinbras also is the not-yet-sovereign
of the enemy state and the fact that it is Hamlets father who killed the father of Fortinbras.
Moreover, even if Schmitt could take account of the fact that the ghost of Hamlets father is
wholly armed as he had killed his enemy, he still might not admit that Hamlets dying voice
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is nothing but a peripeteia by accident. Rather, he would somehow forge a link between the
armed ghost and the image of Leviathan.
For Benjamin, by contrast, Fortinbras is a mere accident in which Hamlet believesso
are the coming of the troop and his own banishment. What these three elements have in
common with one another is that they all suddenly intrude into the situation. Hamlet never
can foresee them. It is as if Hamlet had never thought about the problem of succession before
the interruption of warlike noise by Fortinbras. Rather, Hamlet to the last seems to be
preoccupied with his own story and wounded name. Therefore, Benjamin would doubtless
reject Schmitts interpretation that gives an exceptional status to the dying voice. Instead,
as I have already implied, Benjamin tries to seize the moment of inversion of sovereignty in
Hamlet as the intriguer. The intriguer in Trauerspiel, however, fulfills himself not so much
through plot as through comedy. It is significant that Benjamin promptly corrects the word
comedy. What he actually conceives as the intriguers mission in Trauerspiel is to introduce
the pure joke, not comedy in a usual sense of the term. Who is, then, able to crack a pure
joke? Benjamin would reply that children are. Not normal ones, but the ones who laugh
in a horrible situation. Who has not seen children laugh where adults are shocked? The
alternation of the sadist between such childlike laughter and such adult shock can be seen in
the intriguer (OG, 126). The pure joke Benjamin pictures here seems to be identical with
accident, and thereby is able to avoid the trap set by the tensions between Calvinistic hostility
against laugh and the public interest in comedies in Elizabethan England. The pure joke, in
other words, transforms itself into shock as soon as it takes place. In short, the purity of joke
means the cruelty of it. Pure is cruel.

The cruel joke is just as original as harmless mirth; originally the two are close
to each other; and it is precisely through the figure of the intriguer that theso
frequently high-flownTrauerspiel derives its contact with the solid ground of
wonderfully profound experiences. If the mourning of a prince and the mirth of

39
As Eric Santner rightly observes, the dying voice Schmitt conceives here, paradoxically, can be
considered as signifying the dying of the dying voice. Santner, The Royal Remains, 49.
 CHO  HUMOR OR DYING VOICE 275

his adviser are so close to each other this is, in the least analysis, only because
the two provinces of the satanic realm were represented in them. (OG, 127)

Here the second constituent of the sovereign system, the martyr, is missing. This very
absence may expose how and why Hamlet can and must be the martyr. It is because Hamlet
is a synthesis not so much in the sense of a peace as a treuga dei between the tyrant and
the intriguer (OG, 177). The martyr should be regarded as the synthesis of the tyrant and
the intrigue. And the two provinces of the satanic realm both, respectively, represent the
absolute spirituality and the purely material (OG 230). Hamlet the martyr represents the
treuga dei between the absolute spirituality and the purely material. By contrast, according
to Benjamin, it is the consciousness that forms the antithesis to that genuine synthesis.
The consciousness is their illusory synthesis, in which the genuine synthesis, that of life, is
imitated (OG, 230). (The antithesis between these two syntheses, by the way, appears parallel
to that between symbol and allegory. In this respect, Benjamin would definitely dismiss the
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remark of Friedrich Gundolf, who makes symbol belong to the total life [Gesamtleben] in
contrast with allegory that expresses nothing but mere relation40 ).
Yet Benjamin seems to think of life as a cataract, whereas Gundolf and Schmitt (would)
insist that life must go on land. While land always is and stays the counterpart of the sea, the
cataract by necessity flows down and at the same time breaks through the land and, in doing
so, fulfills and annihilates itself at once when it finally reaches the sea.

The religious man of the baroque era clings so tightly to the world because of
the feeling that he is being driven along to a cataract with it. The baroque knows
no eschatology; and for that very reason it possesses no mechanism by which
all earthly things are gathered in together and exalted before being consigned
to their end. The hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest
breath of this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things which
customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation and, at its high point, brings
them violently into the light of day, in order to clear an ultimate heaven, enabling
it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world with catastrophic violence. (OG,
66)

As a result, the baroque life that for Benjamin functions as the paradigm of life as such
is operating by the mechanism of passion on the verge of its expiration. Just as life must
be voided by being consumed to the bottom, so does the mourning of the tyrant by being
countervailed. This can be proven by Hamlets cruel joke in Act 5:

No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with

modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it. As thus:
Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust, the dust
is earth, of earth we make loam, and

40
See Friedrich Gundolf, Shakespeare und Der deutsche Geist (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1927), 12.
 276 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 91, NUMBER 3 / 2016

why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
(5.1.207212)

These words of Hamlet contain both the philosophy of Schmitt and a protest against it.
The sovereign is fundamental in every respect, however, not through but only in his dying
voice. This means the sovereign is always already dying (voice).41 Thus sovereignty, too,
or above all, cannot be anything but transitory. But if the sovereign dies a martyr, some
inversion must take place. In it transitoriness is not signified or allegorically represented, so
much as, in its own significance, displayed as allegory. As the allegory of resurrection (OG,
232). Indeed, Alexander might be born again as a beer-barrel. Even if this is true, we cannot
simply judge his fate nor mourn for him. For it is possible that as a beer-barrel, he is happier
than he was an emperor. Instead, as humblest creatures of all, we can still burst into laughter
and promptly be shocked. For a beer-barrel sounds funny and yet awful. This is doubtless a
paragon of humor Benjamin must have had in mind when he wrote a fragment under the title
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of Der Humor [Humor] in which we read:

Humor is the adjudication without judgment, that is, without word. Whereas
wit essentially bears on wordhence its affinity with mysticism that Friedrich
Schlegel has stressedhumor bears on execution. A humorous act is an act of
a judgeless execution. [ . . . ] The despot is the ideal subject of humor for in him
judgment and execution are united.

[Der Humor ist die Rechtsprechung ohne Urteil, d.h. ohne Wort. Wahrend Witz
essentiell auf dem Wort beruhtdaher seine von Schlegel betonte Verwandschaft
mit der Mystikberuht der Humor auf der Vollstreckung. Der humorvolle Akt ist
der Akt einer urteilslosen Vollstreckung. [ . . . ] Der Despot ist das ideale Subjekt
des Humors weil bei ihm Urteil und Vollstreckung vereint liegen.]42

New York University

41
Schmitt would doubtlessly allege that Hamlet still be considered as a legitimate king even though
his dying voice is always already dying.
42
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften VI (Frankfurt am Main.: Suhrkamp, 1991), 130. Translation
is mine. For reference, we can find in Baudelaires essay On the Essence of Laughter (1855) a clue
with respect to humor that Benjamin might have borne in mind while he wrote this fragment. See
Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books,
1956), 140: Laughter is satanic: it is thus profoundly human. It is the consequence in man of the idea
of his own superiority. And since laughter is essentially human, it is, in fact, essentially contradictory;
that is to say that it is at once a token of an infinite grandeur and an infinite misery.