Hamlet’s Ressentiment

As Hamlet is contemplating how to use an impromptu play to “catch the conscience of the King,” he wonders out loud why actors are able to manufacture authentic emotions out of nothing:

… And all for nothing!
And Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the queue for passion
That I have? (II.ii 568-72)

These lines echo a passage from 1 Corinthians 7, which also seeks a nothingness at the heart of mourning:

What I mean, brothers and sisters, is that the time [kairos] is short. From now on those who are married should live as if they were not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away. (7:29-31)

In both passages, mourning is treated as not mourning, and changes in the nature of time frame both situations. For Hamlet, time is out of joint; for Paul, time is passing away. However, the flow of time is different for each, and this is where I’d like to put my attention in this meditation. For Hamlet, actors have already accomplished the skill of negation and are able to manufacture motivation out of nothing: “And all for nothing! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba…” An actor has mastered the art of negating personal motivation so that it can be created out of nothing and a compelling play can be staged. It is important to note that Hamlet does not think that the emotion is simulated or fake. It is a real emotion that turns Hecuba from nothing into something for the actor.

For Paul, the negation is not the transformation of mourning into happiness. He does not have a concept of moving from one state to another, which we see in the Synoptic Gospels and in Hamlet’s desire for motivation. It is the negation of mourning that remains mourning. In his lectures on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Giorgio Agamben undertakes a very close reading of this passage from 1 Corinthians 7, and I want to cite it here because it is crucial to understanding the temporality of ressentiment that I will be focusing on this meditation. Agamben emphasizes that Paul’s language here is not “as if,” it is “as not” (the Greek is hos me):

The Pauline hos me seems to be a special type of tensor, for it does not push a concept’s semantic field toward that of another concept. Instead, it sets it against itself in the form of the as not: weeping [mourning] as not weeping. The messianic tension does not tend toward an elsewhere, nor does it exhaust itself in the indifference between one thing and its opposite. The apostle does not say, “weeping as rejoicing”… (The Time that Remains, 24).

There are plenty of examples in the Gospels of the latter type of opposition that creates a transition from one state to another: “We should take note that in the Synoptic Gospels the particle hos serves an important function as an introductory term for messianic comparisons (for example, in Matt. 18:3 ‘unless you [man] … become as the children [hos ta paidia]’; or in the negative, in Matt. 6:5: ‘thou shalt not be as the hypocrites’)” (24). Comparisons set stable identities against each other, but that is not what is happening in Paul’s hos me. Mourning remains mourning, but there is a negation of its socially given content that Paul seeks to undo.

In the character of Hamlet, Shakespeare does not present us with the movement from one self to another, but with the problematic suspension of a self unable to accept the terms on which he would reunify himself. Hamlet is stuck in a circularity of time that is out of joint — he wants to avenge the murder of his father because he is a faithful son, but he can’t muster the motivation to do so. Ressentiment reigns in his soul as it struggles in a cycle that admits of no alternative to vengeance. To be clear, Hamlet is not looking for alternatives. We do not have a deliberating subject who is rationally weighing the pros and cons of revenge. Nor is he actively seeking alternative actions that would set time right. The “To be or not to be” monologue is not about seeking alternatives within time, but whether or not to exit time because this world — “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” — has become Gnostic.

This is Hamlet’s temporality of ressentiment, and it is quite different than Paul’s Corinthians. Certainly for both, the negation does not create a passage from one state of being to another. For Paul, the calling (klesis) is mourning that negates the given content of mourning. For Hamlet, the negation has already happened, and he is struggling with how to coincide with himself by closing the cycle of vengeance that has become disjointed. Much ink has been expended on the non-coincidence of selves in Shakespeare’s plays. But we have to be careful with this: non-coincidence is not always the same condition. The non-coincidence of Paul’s Corinthians is an active effort to treat given social situations as empty of any inherent meaning — this is Nietzsche’s forefront movement of ressentiment as “denaturalization” and negation. Hamlet’s non-coincidence with himself is in motion as an attempt to close a cycle that Old Hamlet set in motion. Shakespeare’s question for anyone in Hamlet’s situation is “What now?” We should not confuse these two motions as essentially the same thing.

We need to look closely at the actual text of Hamlet’s monologues to see this difference. Hamlet wonders why he cannot muster the motivation to set time right when it seems so easy for a well-trained actor to conjure up real emotions for fake situations. He believes that he has a compelling reason to act, but he cannot find the will to do so. We must understand the importance of emptiness at the heart of Hamlet and the actors, which is what they all have in common. Unlike the actors, however, Hamlet cannot invest the negation — “all for nothing!” — with enough meaning to create the desire to avenge the death of his father. This is critical to understand: Hamlet is not in conflict with an authentic self that is actively holding him back from vengeance. He is pure emptiness of motivation, not the collision of conflicting motivations. He is not Matthew’s man who should become “as a child.” Nowhere do we hear Hamlet oppose an authentic self against his inherited mission. Quite the contrary, we have only his expressions of the disinhibition to muster motivation out of emptiness:

O, vengeance!
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words
And fall a-cursing like a very drab [prostitute]… (II.ii 593-98)

We must follow the flow of these lines to see how the self is in motion from one state of being to itself. The whore and the drab are transition states that, through the outpouring of words, Hamlet seeks to overcome to get back to being a vengeful son. The problem is that Hamlet gets stuck, and there are not enough words — not even four hours worth — to close the cycle back on itself. Whore and drab also send us back to what we have just seen with the actors, who are able to create emotion out of nothingness (568-72). Both actors and prostitutes in this scene represent the same condition of the self: they are professions that require the manufacture of emotion out of nothingness. So, Hamlet is moving from one state of being to another, but the passage is one of negation of the original role of son. He still remains the son of the father murdered, but it is empty of its socially given imperative to avenge his death. That negation is not just the negation of the role but of its clear set of responsibilities — “O, vengeance!”

What can I conclude from the foregoing? Hamlet’s resistance to accept the mission of avenging his father’s death does not arise from a positive disagreement with the mission. In other words, there is no stable self that is resisting the mission. Hamlet is not caught between one self and another. He is caught between an emptied out self-as-son and the responsibility of revenge as the only option to set right a time that is out of joint. This is ressentiment as a weakened desire for revenge, but it is still holding onto revenge as the proper action. No alternatives are graspable.

In the rest of this meditation, I want to begin to develop my understanding of Hamlet’s ressentiment because I believe that there is something important to learn about time as practice. My argument will be that Hamlet’s ressentiment is not all bad. Rather, Hamlet’s ressentiment shows us time-as-practice and that the need to find oneself on the other side of ressentiment’s initial negation is the Gnostic danger we should avoid. It will be my contention that Hamlet’s monologues in particular play out a temporality of ressentiment that moves from negation as interruption of time to what happens on the other side of trying to overcome the negation — to smooth out a time that is out of joint. What happens after the interruption is of interest to Shakespeare and to me.

Ressentiment as Time Out of Joint

When Hamlet says, “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right,” we have to take seriously the possibility that setting time right is not what Shakespeare wants him to do. A too easy reading of the second part of this line would make the play about motivation — how can Hamlet find the will to act? This is not the point. Do we really think that Shakespeare wants Hamlet to resolve his situation with vengeance? Do we really think that lowly of Shakespeare? Shakespeare doesn’t want Hamlet to act because the act required is violent revenge. The genre of the revenge play, however, doesn’t allow for an alternative. As Rene Girard pointed out, this is the genius of the play. “To read Hamlet against revenge is anachronistic, some people say, because it goes against the conventions of the revenge genre. No doubt, but could not Shakespeare be playing according to the rules of the game at one level and undermine these same rules at another?” (A Theater of Envy, 286-7)

The readings of the play have historically been plagued by the frustration of professional readers: why can’t Hamlet just get on with the business of setting time right?

Almost all critics today stick to the ethics of revenge. The psychiatrist sees the very thought of its abandonment as an illness he must cure, and the traditional critic sees revenge as a literary rule he must respect…. It is no accident if the sanctity of revenge provides a perfect vehicle for all the masks of modern ressentiment. (288)

Such readings stretch Hamlet’s character between two authentic selves. For the psychoanalytic reading, there is an authentic Oedipus Complex as the foundation of the self. The drama is thus understood as the ability, or inability, for this Complex to work itself to a conclusion. Hamlet must overcome his sick authenticity to pass over to the a healthy authenticity, which of course would be evidenced only by confidently killing everyone involved in Old Hamlet’s murder. Throughout the history of literary criticism of this play, the desire for Hamlet “to get on with it” is driven by a desire to move him across a well-defined passage from a sick state of being to a healed one.

I agree with Girard that this is not what Shakespeare was up to with this play. That reading makes zero sense. These readings ignore the crucial temporality of ressentiment that structures the very movement of the play. I share, in part, Girard’s temporal reading of ressentiment as “a no-man’s-land between revenge and no revenge.” (The substitution of a spatial metaphor — “no man’s land” — for a concept of time is a typical move that we all make. But we do need to realize Girard expresses a flow of time in his spatial metaphor of the no-man’s-land.) I will go a step further to see ressentiment as a potential condition of the mimetic cycle even if traditional vengeance is not at stake. Ressentiment can occur anytime we find ourselves with a responsibility to set time right but we cannot or will not act. Setting time right may not require vengeance in all situations. For plenty of us, any kind of conflict may feel like violence. But if we believe that is what is required to set time right in any given situation, then ressentiment is on the doorstep even if throwing a punch is not required.

Why do I see ressentiment as a conditioning of time rather than space? First, I believe that is how Nietzsche intended it when he used it, and I believe that is also how Girard used it. Ressentiment is not always the same thing for Nietzsche. It has phases, but those phases are not essential or inexorable. Ressentiment does not always have to end up in decadence as a state of being. In Aphorism 24 of Anti-Christ, Nietzsche differentiates the relationship between ressentiment and decadence using ends and means:

They [the Jews] are the opposite of all decadents: they had to portray the latter to the point of illusion, with a non plus ultra of a thespian genius they managed to place themselves at the forefront of all decadence-movements (—as the Christianity of Paul —), in order to create something out of them that is stronger than any Yes-saying part of life. (Anti-Christ 24)

We shall have to come back to the role of the thespian in this passage as it bears directly on the importance of the use of actors as professionalized self-negators. Nietzsche’s use of non plus ultra also has echoes of Paul’s hos me (“as not”) in 1 Corinthians 7:29-31. For the moment, I want to concentrate on the temporality of ressentiment at issue in this passage. When Nietzsche emphasizes “the Jews” being at “the forefront of all decadence-movements” and that this forefront movement is more powerful than the Yes-saying noble morality it sought to denaturalize, he is telling us that ressentiment has no essence. Ressentiment — and its effect as decadence — only exist as a flow of time. It is therefore a conditioning of the mimetic cycle that can harden into an essence when its power of negation and denaturalization becomes an end in itself. This, of course, he lays at the doorstep of Paul, but not necessarily “the Jews.”

As Nietzsche tells the tale, ressentiment’s initial powerful interruption of time turned tragic, just as it does in Hamlet when it resolves as either vengeance or decadence as the desirable end states. The Jews go from being “the most remarkable people in world history” to “the most disastrous.” Nietzsche makes the Hamlet connection explicit as he traces the temporality of ressentiment from a powerful interruption of time to its becoming tragedy:

When presented with the question to be or not to be [my emphasis], they preferred to be, at any cost and with a completely uncanny mindfulness: this cost was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality of the whole inner world as well as the outer. They defined themselves against all conditions under which a people had hitherto been able to live, or been allowed to live:, they created in themselves a counterconcept to natural conditions — one by one they irredeemably turned religion, cult worship, morality, history, psychology into the contrary of their natural values. (154)

In this passage, we see Nietzsche emphasizing the temporal nature of ressentiment-as-decadence. But he reveals his bias that would clearly put him on the “get on with it” side of Hamlet’s critics. What is negated and interrupted in Nietzsche’s view are the very values that he wants us to embrace. “What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; misfortune besmirched with the concept of ‘sin’; well-being as danger, as ‘temptation’; physiological indisposition poisoned by the worm of conscience…” (Anti-Christ 25, 156). Here we see once again a form of ressentiment that moves through its initial negation only to be resolvable as the closing of the interrupted cycle.

Again, do we really want to see Hamlet as sick revenge whose only sign of a cure is to execute violence? Do we really think that Shakespeare wants Hamlet to violently fix a time that is out of joint? That is utterly implausible. We have to stop seeing ressentiment as only negative because we think that its essence is hesitation in the face of seemingly necessary action. Ressentiment interrupts the need to fix time out of joint. We are under no obligation to see it as negation for its own sake. Interruption, rather than negation, allows us to see ressentiment within a temporal flow. A flow of time is what I believe Nietzsche is really describing, even though he thought the target of the interruption was wrong.

We therefore should see the forefront movement of ressentiment as the condition of a mimetic cycle that is interrupted at any of its critical inflection points — scandal, rivalry, contagion, scapegoating. The interruption can come from anywhere, but it must first be experienced as the interruption of an existing flow of time.

Kairos, Chronos, Ressentiment

With ressentiment as time out of joint established, I would like to return to Hamlet as whore (II.ii 593ff). We have no clearer indication that Hamlet is passing through ressentiment’s initial forefront movement than these lines. His inherited role as vengeful son of a father murdered has been suspended, but no alternative is emerging as he continues to “like a whore, unpack my heart with words.” Once on the other side — once negation is established in Hamlet — the rest of the play focuses on the challenges of overcoming the negation as Hamlet struggles with his cursed spite that is forcing him to set time right. But Shakespeare is playing with his audience. As a revenge play, he must fulfill the genre and provide the audience with satisfaction. The audience wants time to no longer be out of joint; they want the revenge to happen. But Shakespeare delays their satisfaction for the next four hours.

Time is kairos and chronos simultaneously. What do I mean by this? The Greeks had two terms for time, and both are crucial in the orchestration of tragedy. Chronos is the standard understanding of time as its inexorable forward march. Kairos is often understood as the experience of contracted chronos. Kairos is a “critical occasion” or “crisis” or an “opportune moment” that demands decisive action. As Agamben put it: “what we take hold of when we seize kairos is not another time, but a contracted and abridged chronos” (The Time that Remains, 69). In fact, Paul tends to use kairos more than chronos when describing time: ho nyn kairos (“the time of the now”) is his phrase. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We must stick with Hamlet’s time for the moment.

Shakespeare’s audience experiences the excruciating drawing out of chronological time only because kairos contracts time into the imperative for Hamlet to act on his responsibilities and oath of revenge. Hamlet’s delay in acting within kairos drivesthe tragedy, and thus temporality is crucial to the way the play does its work. Chronos is emphasized as it is drawn out as the other side of ressentiment’s negation — as ressentiment not wanting to resolve into decadence or vengeance. But Hamlet’s ressentiment does not start from a positive assessment of a better way. It starts as negation — he doesn’t want the mission. “O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.” He doesn’t say, “I’m really a better person than this. Certainly there must be an alternative to killing my Uncle?” He simply expresses an emptiness of motivation.

If Hamlet’s story unfolds on the backside of ressentiment, Paul’s mission is on the frontside. There are no professional actors in Paul’s world, yet we must become like actors who mourn as not mourning, who rejoice as not rejoicing. Shakespeare’s actors are crucial to his worldview because they activate the temporality of negation as a professional skill, but they don’t seem to be bothered by it. It’s all self-fashioning to use Greenblat’s characterization. Paul, on the contrary, is asking for negation as the interruption of time. “Time is contracting itself” (1 Corinthians 7:29) and his ekklesiae should start to develop practices that interrupt the given temporalities of their lives: mourning as not mourning, marrying as not marrying, rejoicing as not rejoicing, buying possessions as not actually possessing them. Like Hamlet, however, the temporality of the Pauline self is not spread across opposing poles. Hamlet is not trying to reconcile one state of being with another, and neither is Paul. Both authors surround their audiences with a temporality that interrupts given states of being without definitively knowing what the other state is or should be. This is the positive power of ressentiment. Paul shows us the early stages and how to get it started while Shakespeare shows us the dangers of what happens when negation cannot be resolved by anything other than vengeance.

On the backside of ressentiment, Hamlet turns to envy when he finds his mimetic motivation in Laertes:

‘Swounds, show me what thou’lt do.
Woo’t weep? Woo’t fight? Woo’t fast? Woo’t tear thyself?
Woo’t drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile?
I’ll do’t. Dost thou come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I.” (V.i. 274-279)

Again, we hear the echoes of Paul. Mourning (Woo’t weep?) and other states of being are initially empty but Hamlet needs Laertes to show him how to fill them up again with authenticity, which should trigger his motivation to act. We’re on the temporal backside of ressentiment wanting its resolution in vengeance, and it seeks envy to close the deal and thus fashion the self.