ABSTRACT
Habermas’ contention that subjects capable of speech and action, who can be affected by reasons, “cannot not learn” reflects very inadequately on the epistemological structure of a play like Othello, as much a tragedy of misrecognition as a problem comedy of miscognition. Yet this inadequacy serves to throw into relief both the play’s anomalous investment in the equivocal notion of sense and its hidden reliance on an aberrantly productive imagination that lurks behind “common reason.” My reading, which draws heavily on Heidegger’s Kantbuch, privileges a dialectical—tendentially psychoanalytic—perspective (Adorno, Žižek) on the pragmatic dangers of unknowing one’s knowledge over the more traditionally empiricist conception of a knowledge that depends on “the ocular proof.”
