ABSTRACT
It is the cause, it is the cause. Let me not name it to you. Perhaps the fi rst thing which should be said on this occasion is that the invite to speak today by Maria Margaroni, Antonis Balasopoulos and Marios Constantinou2 puts me in something of an awkward position, that of another character in Shakespeare, Horatio in Hamlet, who as a scholar is called upon by Marcellus to talk to the ghost and to explain to him, as a scholar, what Marcellus can see before him with his own eyes. ‘Thou art a scholar, speak to it Horatio!’ Thus the native Marcellus has his own experience of what stands, or walks, before him mediated through the sovereign interpretation of the scholar from the University of Wittenberg. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida of course calls this desire to have our world explained to us by the scholar or by theory the ‘Marcellus Complex’.3 However, Marcellus’s response to the ghost that resolutely chooses to ignore him seems to me to
be a matter of perfect common sense. Unfamiliar with ghosts, unnerved by the uncanny, he calls in an expert (a ‘ghostbuster’). As a humble guardsman his life, indeed his soul, may be at risk, so he passes the problem up the chain of command. In other words, he reports it to management. Horatio is paid more than he is, he has greater authority at court than Marcellus does, once reported it’s his problem. Thus, Horatio, the scholar, is called upon to take responsibility for the thing he sees and while the ghost will not speak to Horatio either and ultimately Horatio passes the problem on to the heir apparent, the fact that he attempts to speak to the ghost raises more questions than it might answer. Perhaps we should speak of Horatio’s desire to communicate with the ghost, or at least Horatio’s understanding that he should attempt to speak to the ghost at Marcellus’s invitation if not on Marcellus’s behalf. Let us call it the Horatio complex. It is no doubt a complex of considerable complexity. Having graciously invited me to the University of Nicosia in 2006 to give a talk on crimes of universal jurisdiction, Maria then pointed out the ghost line, the Green Line, the Nekri Zoni, the dead zone, which runs through, or walks through or maybe now just stands there across the old walls of Nicosia and across the battlements of Cyprus. Thou art a scholar, speak to it. My Horatio complex is well developed, somewhere between a monstrous egotism and an overweening super-ego. One cannot take part in an international gathering of philosophers and literary theorists in Cyprus without speaking about this. By this calculation it would be the only thing worth speaking about: it is the gorilla in the room, the elephant on the table. ‘You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!’ says Othello, who imagines himself to have been cuckolded on Cyprus. Perhaps he could have done with a Horatio, a scholar, rather than an Iago, a special adviser. IAPL, Iago, I go to Marcellus, Maria, Marios, Martin, Marx. This island is marred in one way or another. It is the cause, it is the cause let me not name it to you least the scholarly complex be cuckolded by the complexity of Cyprus.
