ABSTRACT
Iago's hatred is "motiveless," they say, because he gives too many reasons, and the reasons contradict. That's why Robert Heilman, for example, looks at Iago's speeches and is not convinced by what he sees. Iago says that he is personally slighted by Othello because of Othello's choice of Cassio as lieutenant. Iago's lines could be mere dissimulation, but as Parker's article suggests, patience and delay turn out to be central to Iago's strategy. Jean-Paul Sartre joins Aristotle in excluding hatred from the category of rashness. Hatred cannot be a momentary experience. One can indeed experience a sudden flash of anger, or a momentary enchantment of rage. Hatred's passivity comes from its "relativity," and its relativity comes from the fact that it still relates to that original "reflective" consciousness. Emotions for Sartre are ways of refusing to see the world as governed by actual deterministic processes. Bloom's account of Iago's nihilism sounds more like Stavrogin in Dostoevsky than an audience's perception.
