ABSTRACT
Not for Hamlet and not for us, for there is a sense in which the Prince who would originate his own existence also originates ours:
Harold Bloom's celebration of the proleptic power of Shakespearean representation finds its most compelling example in the figure of Hamlet. Certainly the Prince has few rivals (and even these, as Bloom suggests, would be Shakespearean) in terms of the influence he has exerted on the construction and representation of subjectivity, in determining our position within what Foucault calls "l'aventure de l'individualite": "Et si depuis Ie fond du Moyen Age jusqu'aujourd'hui "l'aventure" est bien Ie recit de l'individualite, Ie passage de l'epique au romanesque, du haut fait a la secrete singularite, des longs exils a la recherche interieure de l'enfance ... " (Surveiller et punir 195). The passage "de l'epique au romanesque" might here read from drama to novel, as drama, at least in its Aristotelian form, is predicated on the priority of action to character, praxis to ethos, "the noble deed" to the "secret singularity":
Hamlet, who is something of a character in search of a different generic dispensation, resists these Aristotelian priorities, and thus anticipates, more or less avant la lettre, a novelistic or discursive mode of subjectivity, which the novel, in its turn, would be only too pleased to grant him. But what the novel would belatedly grant the Prince, the play itself refuses: against the incipient modernity of Hamlet's claim to a theatrically inaccessible interiority, Hamlet insists on a properly theatrical life for its eponymous hero. And if this is to make of Shakespeare something other than a harbinger of our modernity - or to make of Hamlet something other than the mirror in which we find an idealized reflection of our interiority - it is precisely the celebration of "Shakespeare-ourcontemporary" that I intend to challenge.
