ABSTRACT
What might it mean to speak of an ontology of stone in Shakespeare? Stanley Cavell suggests one approach in his substantial chapter on Othello in The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, and Tragedy:
So they are there, on their bridal and death sheets. A statue, a stone, is something whose existence is fundamentally open to the ocular proof. A human being is not. The two bodies lying together form an emblem of this fact, the truth of skepticism.
(Cavell 1979: 496) This description of the memorable tableau of Othello’s final act serves as a conceit of Cavell’s substantial elaboration on the argument of his earlier well-known essay about the failure to acknowledge love in King Lear. In reading Othello and King Lear, Cavell equates tragedy with the hermeneutic problem of skepticism - the inability of characters, especially Othello himself, to inhabit and be inhabited by the Other, to know or be known by the Other. “Tragedy,” he writes, “is the place we are not allowed to escape the consequences, or price, of this cover: that the failure to acknowledge a best case of the other is a denial of that other, presaging the death of the other, say by stoning, or by hanging” (Cavell 1979: 493). Stones and statues represent in Cavell’s discourse both the objects of representation and the crisis of subjectivity inherent to tragedy - left to their own devices, subjects will inevitably be blinded by their narcissistic quests for ontological certainty. In the process of dramatic identification, the hermeneutic failure of characters is said to be doubled by the mimetic response of spectators. When acknowledging such failure, the Shakespearean spectator is faced with but one consequence: “the death of our capacity to acknowledge as such, the turning of our hearts to stone, or their bursting” (Cavell 1979: 493). The occasion of tragedy might be described, then, as a ritual... of getting stoned.