Dismember Me: Shakespeare, Paranoia, and the Logic of Mass Culture

Author(s): Linda Charnes

Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 1-16
Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library
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 Dismember Me: Shakespeare, Paranoia, and
the Logic of Mass Culture
LINDA CHARNES

Whatever we may be, for better or for worse, we are thus initially and "naturally"
"idiots of the family."
Peter Sloterdijk

Be thy intents wicked or charitable,

Thou com'st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee.
Hamlet, 1.4.21-231

IN ENJOY YOUR SYMPTOM!JACQUES LACAN IN HOLLYWOOD AND OUT, Slavoj

Zizek makes an intriguing link between a change that occurs in modern
detective fiction and the emergence of film noir. In a chapter entitled "Why
Are There Always Two Fathers?" Zizek defines the difference between the
"classical (logic-and-deduction) detective novel" and the "hard-boiled
novel" largely as a change in the subjective universe of the detective:

. . . the logic-and-deduction novel still relies on the consistent big Other: the
moment, at the novel's end, when the flow of events is integrated into the sym-
bolic universe, narrativized, told in the form of a linear story (the last pages of the
novel when, upon identifying the murderer, the detective reconstructs the true
course of events), brings about an effect of pacification, order and consistency are
reinstated, whereas the noir universe is characterized by a radical split, a kind of
structural imbalance, as to the possibility of narrativization: the integration of the
subject's position into the field of the big Other, the narrativizatidn of his fate,
becomes possible only when the subject is in a sense already dead, although still
alive, when 'the game is already over,' in short: when the subject finds himself at
the place baptized by Lacan 'the in-between-two-deaths' (l'entre-deux-morts).2

This big Other, as Lacan defines it in his second Seminar, is that fantasmatic
(non) Entity that doesn't " ex-sist" separately from the subject but nevertheless
calls the subject into "the being of the other," into identification within the
symbolic order.3 It is that hypostatized phantom to whom we all address the

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1994 annual meeting of the Shakespeare
Association of America in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and at Wayne State University, Detroit,
Michigan, in November 1994.
1 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique-ofCynicalReason,trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: U of Minne-
sota P, 1987), 73. Quotations of Hamletfollow the Oxford Shakespeare Hamlet,ed. G. R. Hibbard
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
2 Slavoj Ziiek, Enjoy YourSymptom! JacquesLacan in Hollywoodand out (New York and London:
Routledge, 1992), 151.
3Jacques Lacan, TheEgo in Freud'sTheoryand in the Techniqueof Psychoanalysis1954-1955, Book
 2 SHAKESPEARE
QUARTERLY

constitutive question: " Chevuoi?" or "What is it that you want of me?"4 Purely
structural-that is to say, devoid of any particular content-the big Other is
effective only when misrecognized as an essential "being" that guarantees the
existence of subjective and social formations. In patriarchal culture the place
of the big Other may be occupied by God, King, Pope, Lord, Father-
placeholders who quilt a paternal allegory over a fundamentally antagonistic
social formation and call things to order and account within it.5 Such inter-
pellations, however, can operate successfully only if the paternal metaphor
remains neutral, or "in the background," as Zizek puts it. By holding itself in
reserve, the big Other allows the subject to fantasize a site-always else-
where-of absolute knowledge, authority, and control which organizes the
subject's narrative integration into the social order, assigning him or her, as
it were, a place in the story.
Against this "neutral" structuring paradigm, Zizek aligns the emergence of
the noir universe with a disturbance in the field of the big Other, one that
makes the mandates of identification ambiguous. This disturbance is brought
about by the revelation of another father, a figure who emerges as "the
obscene, uncanny, shadowy double of the Name of the Father":
... insteadof the traditionalfather-guarantor of the rule of Law,i.e., the father
who exerts his power as fundamentallyabsent,whose fundamentalfeature is not
an open displayof power but the threat of potential power-we obtain an ex-
fatherwho, as such, cannotbe reducedto the bearerof a symbolic
cessivelypresent
function.6

Whereas the classic (logic-and-deduction) detective may be worldly-wise and

even cynical (Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, for example), he still
sustains belief in the abstraction called "Law," and therefore can sustain our
identification with his identification with the "paternal metaphor." The hard-
boiled detective, however (represented by a figure such as Dashiell Ham-
mett's Ned Beaumont), is a kind of blank page, offering the reader no stable
point of affective entry because his universe is organized according to a dif-
ferent logic: the logic of noir. At the origin of noir, Zizek points out, is the
"humiliated father," "the paranoic Other," a figure who has sustained ir-
reparable damage to his integrity and can no longer function as the guarantor
of the symbolic and, consequently, of all the juridical, ethical, filial, and sexual
organizations that derive from it.7 The nature of this "mutation in the pater-
nal figure" is one of prurient pleasure, the obscene enjoyment that Lacan
would claim always underwrites paternal Law. This second father-the "ob-
scene father"-is first and foremost a "fatherwho knows," and whose knowl-
edge specifically is of the libidinal enjoyment that Law must disavow in order
to maintain its unquestionable shape.8

II of The SeminarofJacquesLacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York
and London: W. W. Norton, 1988), 155 and 72.
4 Cf. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire:Lacan Against the Historicists(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1994), 28.
5 Cf. Ziiek, The SublimeObjectof Ideology(New York and London: Verso, 1989), 97-101 and
passim.
6 Ziiek,
Enjoy YourSymptom.!, 158.
7 Ziiek discusses these terms in Enjoy YourSymptom!I,
149.
8
Ziiek, Enjoy YourSymptom!,158-59. In the chapter "Why Are There Always Two Fathers?"
Ziiek mentions Hamlet only elliptically before returning to his discussion of Wagner's Parsifal.
 SHAKESPEARE,PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 3

The bifurcation of detective fiction into two genres-classic and noir-

forces the reader/audience to choose between contradictory relationships to
symbolic authority and Law. The former offers a pragmatic or rationalist
ethos, in which what matters most is thefact that a crime has been committed
and a law breached, a condition of social anomaly which requires only detec-
tion and punishment to set things right. The latter offers a paranoiac ethos,
in which the fact of a particular crime is insufficient to explain what's really
gone wrong and draws attention to a more pervasive social problem precisely
by virtue of its lack of criminological "critical mass."
Although Zizek suggests that the elements of classic and noir detective fic-
tions are mutually incompatible (presumably because, like oil and water, their
foundational structures cannot bind), both forms, I wish to argue, descend
from a single, even earlier genre: the revenge tragedy, a form of drama in
which a revenger/detective discovers that a crime has been committed (usu-
ally but not always against a father figure), uncovers the details, and sets out
to bring the offender to justice. The nature of that justice may be harsh-the
Law of the Father to which the classical revenger subscribes doesn't yet have
to efface its foundational violence in Enlightenment notions of disinterested-
ness. But in revenge tragedy (as in classic detective fiction) the authority of
the paternal metaphor remains intact regardless of the violence loosed in its
name, for it is underwritten by the patriarchal power encoded in every aspect
of ancient and early modern life and therefore is not (overtly at least) called
into question. The classical revenge play-whether Greek or Roman revenge
tragedy, Heywood's translations of Senecan tragedy, or early modern trans-
lations of the Oresteia- tends to offer a logic-and-deduction rationale that, no
matter how violent or passionate, ultimately seeks to restore an ethical system
based on structural checks and balances. And Renaissance revengers, despite
the contradictions and incursions of Christian philosophy, are expected in
the last instance to cease whining and get the job done.
The play that has for centuries most famously represented the revenge-
tragedy "tradition" is, of course, Shakespeare's Hamlet,which, in terms of its
popular or mass-cultural reception, has long been regarded as the classicRe-
naissance revenge play. The play clearly inherits, deploys, and satirizes certain
elements of Senecan and classical tragedy. At the same time, Hamlethas been
read through centuries of critical reception as breaking with that tradition-
indeed, as breaking with an already-established tradition of specifically En-
glish revenge tragedy. Since among extant English plays that precede Hamlet
(not including Gorboduc)there is only one-Kyd's Spanish Tragedy-that fits
into the subgenre we call revenge tragedy, we are presented with an intriguing
paradox. Did Shakespeare mean the play to depart from a logic-and-
deduction formula that he presumed already existed for his audience? Or was
he attempting something more radical: namely, to launch and simultaneously
critique a logic-and-deduction tradition precisely by staging an epistemologi-
cal break with it?9 What we can see is that, while there are few logic-

This seems to me to be a symptomatic near-oversight: Ziiek notices that the Ghost's knowledge
"concerns a dark, licentious side of the father-king who is otherwise presented as an ideal figure"
(159); yet, like Prince Hamlet himself, Ziiek proceeds to ignore the implications of this, arguing
as he does that paranoiac noir emerges as a postwar phenomenon of the twentieth century (cf.
149-52 and passim).
9 In addition to her superb editorial suggestions, I am very grateful to Barbara Mowat for
4 SHAKESPEAREQUARTERLY

and-deduction revengers running around on the Renaissance stage before

Shakespeare's Hamlet appears, the play acts as if there are, constructs the sub-
jectivity of its protagonist as if there are, and constitutes an audience-
ingenuously or disingenuously-that must consent (to paraphrase Frank Ker-
mode) to "the sense of a tradition" in order to identify with the anguish of
the protagonist.
Given the impossibility of determining exactly what the nature of audience
expectation would be with regard to an already-existing revenge ethos, it
would be more accurate to say that the play deliberately generates a tradition
effect by counterposing Hamlet against other revengers within the play (For-
tinbras; Laertes; and, in The Mousetrap, Lucianus) who do conform to a
logic-and-deduction model. Presenting itself, then, as both prototype and
changeling, Shakespeare's Hamlet stages exactly the kind of epistemological
mortification that Lacan would argue necessarily vexes any tradition based on
the unquestioned authority of patriarchal Law. In short, the history of the
play's construction as a "classic" revenge tragedy within a "tradition"-in
terms of both critical and popular reception-replicates the dilemma that
Hamlet is forced to face within the play itself, and that is: where do we locate
the origin of a problem that needs to be redressed? For in asking whether 'tis
better to suffer the requirements of a paternal mandate to revenge a particu-
lar crime or to take no arms against a more pervasive sea of troubles, Hamlet
is asking no less a question than what kind of detective he is to be or not
to be.
Which leads us back to the noir. If we accept Zizek's description of the noir
universe, then we must conclude that Hamlet-and not Hammett-offers the
first fully noir text in Western literature, and Prince Hamlet the first noir
detective. Or, rather, the first noir revenger. Situating a plot-driven classical
revenge tragedy within the recursive circularity and ethical indeterminacy
that characterize noir, Shakespeare's Hamlet is modernity's inaugural paranoid
text.'0 By "paranoia," however, I don't mean an individual pathology in
which someone imagines conspiracies or has delusions of persecution but,

questioning my tacit assumption, in an earlier version of this essay, that there was on the English
Renaissance stage a "tradition" of logic-and-deduction revenge drama which Hamletbroke with.
Rather, as Mowat pointed out to me, very little textual evidence of a specifically English subgenre
of revenge tragedy exists, apart from Kyd's play and the purported Ur-Hamlet.In our conversa-
tions about this matter, we became fascinated that, in the light of this slim "tradition," not only
readers and audiences but centuries of critics (myself included) had been convinced that Hamlet
was breaking with a longstanding tradition, not because of anything much already out there on
the English stage but because the play encourages us to identify so fully with Hamlet's own sense
that he's not living up to established expectations. I hasten here to add that Mowat and I are in
complete agreement that there was for Shakespeare, as for Kyd, a classical and Latin (Senecan)
tradition of revenge tragedy that obviously made its presence felt on the Renaissance stage. But
it seems at least as much a function of the play's legerdemain that we feel Hamletto be diverging
from a tradition of English revenge tragedy rather than inaugurating one.
For a thorough and useful discussion/analysis of the Western tradition of revenging, see John
Kerrigan's rich study RevengeTragedy:Aeschylusto Armageddon(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996),
esp. chaps. 5-7. See also Louise Schleiner, "Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare's Writing of
Hamlet," ShakespeareQuarterly41 (1990): 29-48; and Fredson Thayer Bowers, ElizabethanRevenge
Tragedy1587-1642 (1940; rpt. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959).
10 Terence Hawkes sheds brilliant light on the strange and layered recursivity or backward
narratologic of Hamlet in " Telmah"in Shakespeareand the Questionof Theory,Patricia Parker and
Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 310-32.
 SHAKESPEARE,PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 5

rather, paranoia in the literal Greek sense as a form of "overknowing," of

surplus knowledge that leads, paradoxically, not to discovery but to undecid-
ability. In the noir universe the paranoid is a man who always-already"knows
too much" about what's really going on. The noir detective is less concerned
with historical events-with what happened-than he is with ontologies-with
the way things are. If the classic detective wants "just the facts," for the noir
detective "the facts" are always less relevant than the sinister effects of a re-
ality that acquires paranoid dimensions precisely the more one learns about
"the facts."
In Shakespeare's Hamletthe Ghost is a "fatherwhoknows"and whose knowl-
edge threatens the status of the symbolic mandate he imposes upon his son.
The content of this knowledge consists not only of the "harrow[ing]" secrets
of his purgatorial prison-house but, more disturbingly, of his "enjoyment" of
the "blossoms" of his sin, for which, he tells Hamlet, he is "confined to fast
in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and
purged away" (1.5.16, 76, 11-13). At once delivering the injunction to "Re-
venge his foul and most unnatural murder" and revealing his own shadowy
"double," the Ghost commands Hamlet to "Remember me" even as he
makes the task impossible, speaking the paternal mandate from a corrupted
enunciatory site that splits the integrity of the Law open to reveal its kernel of
obscene enjoyment (11.25, 91). "This," Zizek argues, "is what is ultimately at
stake in the noir universe: the failure of the paternal metaphor ... the emer-
gence of the obscene father who supplants the father living up to his symbolic
function. al
This disclosure, incommensurable with the idealized image Hamlet wishes
to sustain of his father, makes identification with the paternal figure impos-
sible. Sensing an excessively obscene presence in the surround before he even
encounters the Ghost, Hamlet is casting about for a local habitation, a con-
crete cause. His ontological despair, already legible in his affective withdrawal
from the "stale, flat, and unprofitable . . . uses of this world" (1.2.133-34),
signals his inability to integrate himself into the symbolic order, into the
"intersubjective, 'public' . . . space" that gives the subject his "ideal ego, the
place from which he can see himself as someone 'who belongs.' "12 Hamlet
attempts to respond to the Ghost's disclosure as a classic revenger, to gather
facts in logic-and-deduction style. But the more he seeks to confirm the knowl-
edge he alreadyhas of Claudius's guilt, the more he is paralyzed by the gravi-
tational pull of another crime scene. For when the Ghost reveals the lurid
details of his murder, he also makes "excessively present" to his son's imagi-
nation images of his own lascivious body, taken in postprandial concupis-
cence, "grossly, full of bread," and "barked about. . . with vile and loathsome
crust" (3.3.80; 1.5.71-72). Hamlet's subsequent disavowal of this "second"
father fuels, I would argue, his compulsive commitment to a logic-and-
deduction style that the Ghost's disclosure should have rendered unnecessary.
In other words, Hamlet now has "the facts," at least insofar as he knows
that Claudius has committed regicide, fratricide, usurpation, and "damned
incest" (1. 83). But Hamlet cannot act on this knowledge because action is
impossible in a noir universe where what is at stake is not a local crime but

I Ziiek, Enjoy YourSymptom!,159 - 60.

12
Ziiek, Enjoy YourSymptom!I,
152.
6 SHAKESPEARE
QUARTERLY

rather the very status of the paternal logos itself. Unable to assume the sym-
bolic existence that paternal identification confers but not yet physically dead,
Hamlet (like the noir detective) finds himself entre-deux-morts, in the place
"between two deaths." Incapable of narrativizing himself, of finding his place
in the story, Hamlet literally "lack[s] advancement" (3.2.322). "The time is
out of joint," he says, "0 cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!"
(1.5.196-97). The shift from the classical to the noir universe instantiates a
vertiginous jolt out of the sequential and into the synchronic. Within this
multiplicitous miasma in which time cannot be accounted for, the whole
meaning of solving a crime changes.
The figure of Claudius provides Hamlet with a temporary respite from the
lassitude of noir, serving as the supplement who will embody the obscene
enjoyment of the anal father. Like all good Derridean supplements, however,
Claudius cannot contain everything he is supposed to stand for. There must
be other sites of displacement. As Zizek points out,
The failure of the paternalmetaphor... renders impossiblea viable, temperate
relationwith a woman;as a result,womanfinds herself occupyingthe impossible
place of the traumaticThing. The femmefatale is nothing but a lure whose fasci-
nating presence masksthe true traumaticaxis of the noir universe,the relation-
ship to the obscene father, i.e., the default of the paternal metaphor.... The
crucial point not to be missed here is that the femmefatale and the obscene-
knowingfathercannot appearsimultaneously,within the same narrativespace.'3
As long as the real obscene father hovers unacknowledged in the noir back-
ground, Gertrude, as well as Ophelia, can take on for Hamlet the function of
"traumatic Thing." With a circuit of disavowal which runs from the obscene
father to Claudius to Gertrude to Ophelia to Gertrude and finally back to
Claudius, we see Hamlet's desperate efforts to construct himself as a classic
revenger in a world where corruption, crime, licentiousness, and decay can be
seen everywhere but in the place of the Father.
For in Shakespeare's play, the King may be a thing that demands, but the
King must not be a thing that enjoys.If he enjoys, he becomes a different kind
of thing, something that produces noir paranoia because his authority is no
longer guaranteed by disinterestedness. It is, therefore, no accident that in
Shakespeare's play the only cure for the noir must come from outside the
social formation, in the form of exogenous rule. Fortinbras (a true logic-and-
deduction type) enters after the occupants of the noir universe are all dead.
And his way will be paved not by Hamlet's "election" (5.2.66) but by Hora-
tio's mediation. Charged by Hamlet with the task of telling Fortinbras "the
occurrents, more and less, / Which have solicited" (11.310-11), Horatio-
the literally nominated voice-of-reason(s)-has an impossible task. In the
noir universe the story exists only in the gaps between causes and effects-a
space that Horatio's philosophy cannot cope withal. Hamlet's story, such as it
is, takes place in the interstices of an intersubjectivity that the play always
already debars.'4 No one in this play "knows" anyone else; and it is precisely
this missing "intersubjective" knowledge, and not "occurrents" or events,

Ziiek, Enjoy YourSymptom!,159- 60.

13

I have discussed constructions of modernity and the role of Habermassian mediation in

14

Hamlet and the Henriad in "William's Excellent Adventure: Shakespeare in the Age of Virtual
History," presented at the 1996 World Shakespeare Congress in Los Angeles, California.
 SHAKESPEARE,PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 7

that constitutes Hamlet as a noir tragedy. While Hamlet would, perhaps, have
been better served by Habermas than by Horatio, the state of Denmark is best
served by the latter, whose efforts can result only in a crude translation of a
noir tragedy into a "classical" detective fiction-into a story of what "really"
happened, both "more and less." By presenting us in Hamletwith two-fathers-
in-one, Shakespeare undermines the structure of the social by making it
impossible to separate the excrescences of paternal Law from those of state
politics. There can be in Shakespeare's world no decay of the paternal logos
which does not also dismember the body politic and erode the foundational
authority of the state. With Horatio's "translation," then, the humiliated
father may be erased, along with the subjectively mortified son, and paternal
Law can be reinstated for a more suitable defender.

II
A letter alwaysreaches its destination.
JacquesLacan
A letter sometimes (never) doesn't reach its destination.
JacquesDerrida15
If Shakespeare's Hamletmaps out the social and subjective indeterminacies
of noir paranoia long before Ned Beaumont is even a gleam in Dashiell
Hammett's eye, Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 film version attempts to return the
play to the world of classical revenge, plucking out the heart of the play's
mystery by restoring the father to his proper place through the "classical"
psychoanalytic logic of Oedipus. The very casting of the film initiates the
oedipal feint before its action even begins, performing what Barbara Klinger
has called the "inferential walk." Urging the inclusion of all of a film's "di-
gressive" production processes in our interpretation of its significance as a
cultural product, Klinger argues that "films circulate as products, not in a
semantic vacuum, but in a mass cultural environment teeming with related
commercial significations." This "adjacent territory," as Klinger calls it, is
constituted by epiphenomena-promotion, advertisements, star interviews,
and spin-off product lines-that "create not only a commercial life-support
system for a film, but also a socially meaningful network of relations around
it which enter into reception. "16 The territory also includes what I call the
cultural logic of commodity casting: celebrities who already exist in the cul-
ture as signifying products, beyond the formal boundaries of their respective
"texts." This is how commodity casting instantiates the "inferential walk," a
term Klinger borrows from Umberto Eco's semiotic theory of intertextuality.
According to Eco, such "walks" occur when "the reader digresses to gather
the intertextual support necessary to decipher a moment within the narra-
tive."17 Within the narrative of Zeffirelli's Hamlet, the oedipalism is literally
encrypted in the film's opening scenes in the family tomb, a moment that

15
Lacan, 205; and Jacques Derrida, The Postcard:FromSocratesto Freud and Beyond,trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987).
16 Barbara Klinger, "Digressions at the Cinema: Commodification and Reception in Mass
Culture" in Modernityand Mass Culture,James Naremore and Patrick Brandinger, eds. (Bloom-
ington: Indiana UP, 1991), 117-34, esp. 119. I am indebted to Courtney Lehmann for bringing
Klinger's article to my attention.
17
Klinger in Naremore and Brandinger, eds., 130.
 8 SHAKESPEAREQUARTERLY

becomes instantly legible in mass-cultural terms as oedipalized solely on the

basis of the audience's inferences about the stars' prior filmic incarnations as
oedipally signifying products.
Mel Gibson, already familiar to cult audiences as Mad Max and to mass
audiences as Lethal Weapon'sSergeant Riggs, has built a career playing char-
acters "made ... mad" by marriages: in Road Warriorhe's a postapocalyptic
policeman out to revenge the murder of his wife. In the Lethal Weaponseries
he plays yet another policeman who has lost his wife to murder. Riggs is
considered mad because his gonzo police methods suggest a "fatal attrac-
tion" to suicide. By the time Gibson makes it into Zeffirelli's Hamlet,he is used
to playing characters who curse spite for bearing him to set things right.18 And
Glenn Close's roles, first as the "radiant angel" mother in The WorldAccording
to Garp,TheNatural, and TheBig Chilland then as the sexual predator Alex in
Fatal Attraction,more than insures her "inferential walk" to Elsinore as Ger-
trude."9 Zeffirelli's choice of actors to play the roles of Hamlet and Gertrude
effects a cinematic intertextuality which guarantees that the audience will see
through the lens of what Deleuze and Guattarihave called "holy familialism."20
In their complex argument, which I cannot do justice to here, Deleuze and
Guattari contend that the psychoanalytic implementation of the oedipal tri-
angle-"daddy-mommy-me"-has generated a dogma that has become tan-
tamount to a kind of imperialism, one in which every form of cultural desire
can and, in their argument, must, for the logic of capitalism to work, be
forced into the restraints of a simultaneously desirous and renunciatory struc-
ture. Their case against psychoanalytic theory-made on the basis of its re-
striction/constriction of forms of desire to an oedipally overdetermined set of
limits-is crucial to my discussion less for its critique of psychoanalysis within
the "holy family" than for the way it uncovers how "holy familialism" sup-
ports not only modes of capitalist production but, more important, its relations
of reproduction.By telling us what it is we "really" want and then insisting that
we must renounce it for a simulacrum that will forever be "not it," psycho-

18
Gibson continues this pattern in the recent Braveheart,a film in which the character he plays,
William Wallace, is spurred by the slaughter of his Scottish bride to lead a suicidal rebellion
against English occupiers.
19Barbara Hodgdon has made a similar observation about the cultural logic of the film's
casting, in which she reads Gibson's body from the point of view of a female spectator/consumer;
for a wonderful meditation on the commercial uses and visual deployments of male bodies, see
her "The Critic, the Poor Player, Prince Hamlet, and the Lady in the Dark" in Shakespeare Reread:
The Texts in New Contexts,Russ McDonald, ed. (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1994),
259-93, esp. 282-88.
20 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:Capitalismand Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P, 1983), chap. 2 and passim. For several brilliant, psychoanalytically oriented
discussions of Hamlet which avoid the rigid limitations outlined by Deleuze and Guattari's cri-
tique, see Janet Adelman, SuffocatingMothers:Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays,
Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Roudedge, 1992), 11-37; Marjorie Garber,
Shakespeare's GhostWriters:Literatureas uncanny causality(New York and London: Methuen, 1987),
124-76; and Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes:Literature,Philosophy,Psychoanalysis(Ithaca, NY, and
London: Cornell UP, 1986), 178-235. To this list I would also add Jacques Derrida, whose
meditation on Hamlet and Shakespeare in chapter 1 of spectersof marx is far more Lacanian in
spirit than perhaps he would wish to admit ("specters of Lacan," we might even say, given that
Lacan's name appears nowhere in the text while Freud's is often invoked); see Derrida, specters
of marx:thestate of the debt,the workof mourning,and the new international,trans. Peggy Kamuf (New
York and London: Roudedge, 1994), 3-48, esp. 18-42.
 SHAKESPEARE,PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 9

analysis underwrites late capitalism by guaranteeing the perpetual inadequacy

of the very substitutive or fetishistic objects it offers, insuring that in the
process of "satisfying" desires, the underlying "universal" structure of desire
remains based on a lack or "castration." Thus the desiring subject, in the
repetition-compulsion that capitalist production depends on, is forever seek-
ing to find what it is he or she "really" wants while remaining permanently
debarred from the possibility of ever attaining it.
This is precisely the materially systemic oedipalism to which Zeffirelli's
Hamlet subscribes. Through the cultural logic of commodity casting, his film
propagates the particular form of "desiring production" which most success-
fully underwrites late capitalism:21 one in which we are all "initially and
'naturally' 'idiots of the family.' " To begin with, Zeffirelli cuts the play's
crucial opening scene, eliminating Marcellus's question about why the "strict
and most observant watch / So nightly toils the subject of the land" (1.1.71-
72) and Horatio's answer about Fortinbras and the threat of war. In fact,
Fortinbras drops out of Zeffirelli's version altogether. The action, therefore,
will portend not "strange eruption[s]" to the "state" (1. 69) but strange
eruptions in the family romance. While Shakespeare's play opens, in murky
and amorphous darkness, with a sentinel asking the classic paranoid ques-
tion-"Who's there?"-Zeffirelli's film begins with a scene of his own devis-
ing, one almost orificial in its constriction, within a womblike sepulchre, of
Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude around the open casket of the dead king. As
all three stand contemplating the corpse, the first words in the film are
spoken by Claudius directly to the young prince: "think of us / As of a father"
(1.2.107-8). There is no court in Zeffirelli's version to witness Claudius's
words, no sense that they are being performed for a social audience and for
politic reasons. The effect of such privatizing is to render the scene claustro-
phobically oedipal, with Claudius (played by a sanguine and overfed Alan
Bates) looming as the "excessively present" obscene father.
In Shakespeare's play we see the king only as ghost, never as corpse. How-
ever, by "producing the body" of the deacdking in the casket, Zeffirelli him-
self operates like a classical detective.22 As Zizek notes, in detective fiction the
corpse functions as a link among individuals, uniting them as a group.23 In
Zeffirelli's film the corpse constitutes a nuclear-family-from-Hell, efficiently
scored by Claudius's like-a-father refrain. Although Hamlet will, much later in
the film, encounter the Ghost on the battlements, the effect here of displaying
the corpse is to neatly separate the gross materiality of the king from its
spectral remainder. While in the play we first encounter the Ghost upright in
his "fair and warlike form," terrifyingly mobile and dressed in armor "cap-
a-pie" (1.1.47; 1.2.200), in Zeffirelli we get the father first as mere "mat-
ter"-horizontal and inert-a body without desire, without any trace of "vile
and loathsome crust," and clearly incapable of "foul crimes." Zeffirelli cin-
ematically redistributes the "two fathers"-which in the noir bifurcate from
the same figure-between the Ghost, who becomes the in-reserve, withdrawn
father, guarantor of paternal Law, and Claudius, who becomes the "obscene-
knowing father."

21 See Deleuze and Guattari, chap. 2 and passim.

22
I am indebted to Courtney Lehmann for this brilliant observation.
23 Cf. Copjec, Shadesof Noir: A Reader(London: Verso, 1993), 167-97.
10 QUARTERLY
SHAKESPEARE

By cleaning up the king's body and downloading the "other" father into
Claudius, Zeffirelli offers Oedipus as the logic-and-deduction answer to what
in Shakespeare's play is a noirquestion. In Zeffirelli's version it is Claudius who
looks "grossly ... full of bread" and not the Ghost (played with St. Thomas
More-like probity by Paul Scofield), who appears wan, gaunt, and elderly.
Taking Hamlet's words literally- "My father, in his habit as he lived!"
(3.4.130)-Zeffirelli's Ghost is dressed austerely in a monk's habit. In this way
the film defenestrates the obscene-knowing aspect of the Father, retaining
only an ascetic hologram that diverts our attention from the contradiction
inherent in the paternal signifier.
By offering up Claudius as the anal father manque, Zeffirelli underwrites
Hamlet's own "necessary route through misrecognition."24 The "question-
able shape" of the Ghost in Shakespeare's play becomes in Zeffirelli's film the
unquestionable shape of Claudius's desire, as he-and not the Ghost-is
assigned the role of "Master of Enjoyment." In Shakespeare's play, Claudius
functions as Hamlet's identifiedsymptom-the site at which the knowledge of
"fenjoyment," or the unseemly pleasure of "foul crimes," can be imagined
without the subjective destitution of disidentification with the paternal. But in
literalizing this symptomology, Zeffirelli falls for Shakespeare's own oedipal
feint, taking it for the truth of Hamlet's desire by crudely parading it in the
vaudevillian winks, heated glances, passionate kisses, and lubricious encoun-
ters between Gibson's Hamlet and Close's Gertrude.
Encouraged by Zeffirelli to cast our lot with the lad, we too can direct our
loathing toward a corrupt Claudius because, while he may be lewd, he doesn't
inspire paranoia, since (after all) he doesn't know anything that we don't
know. His obscenity-predicated on the readily comprehensible and ulti-
mately banal motivations of ambition, lust, and envy- can be contained within
the confines of his overblown body. Neither spectral nor noir,it doesn't threat-
en the integrity of the symbolic order because we know what his enjoyment is
about. We can attribute it, as Hamlet does, to a corrupt individual, leaving the
paternal metaphor, the symbolic order, and by extension the state respectfully
intact. Reassuring the audience by getting us to "enjoy" Hamlet's symptom as
our own, Zeffirelli instructs us about what everyone in the play "really" wants.
By substituting oedipal organization for the terrifying ontological indetermi-
nacy of noir, Zeffirelli eliminates the paranoia induced precisely when Oedi-
pus fails to overdetermine the subject-positions of its "members." As Deleuze
and Guattari have put it,
Oedipus is ... only the represented,insofar as it is induced by repression.Re-
pressioncannot act without displacingdesire, withoutgiving rise to a consequent
desire,all ready,all warmfor punishment,and without putting this desire in the
place of the antecedentdesireon which repressioncomes to bear in principleor in
reality ["Ah, so that'swhat it was!"I]Y
25

In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet's "consequentdesire"-"all ready, all warm for

punishment"-is to kill Claudius and get him out of his mother's bed. But his
"antecedentdesire," repressed under the sign of Oedipus, is to ask the one
question that sits, unenunciated but brooding, over the vast abyss:and that is,

24 ZiMek,The SublimeObjectof Ideology,63.

25 Deleuze and Guattari, 115.
 SHAKESPEARE,PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 1I1

what, exactly, werethose "foul crimes" committed in your days of nature?

Whatdid Daddy do?
Looking for lack in all the wrong places, Zeffirelli sutures what Shake-
speare's play has rent asunder, curing the paranoia of noir with the more
secure discomforts of Oedipus, which can themselves be cured by returning
subjects to their proper relation to "desiring production." As Deleuze and
Guattari claim, "Oedipus is completely useless, except for tying off the un-
conscious on both sides."26 But this, of course, is everything-if what's at
stake is tying the tourniquet of paternal Law on the pulsive sites of the sub-
ject's resistant body. Consequently, the recursiveness of Hamlet, like that of
noir,is corrected in Zeffirelli's version by the orthopedic telos of Oedipus; and
Hamlet is transformed into an "orthopsychic subject," "straightened out" by
his acceptance of what it was he "really" wanted.27

III

"Old dad dead?"

TheRevenger's
Tragedy,
5.1.11228

Thus Zeffirelli's Hamlet reinstalls the father at the top of a hierarchy that
guarantees the stability of the paternal metaphor and the unquestionable
nature of paternal Law. But there is another, comedic version of Hamlet,also
produced for mass culture in 1990, that doesn't take the name of Shake-
speare's play. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the "something in Hamlet more
than Hamlet"29and is, in its particular form of meconnaissance,more true to
the noir spirit of Shakespeare's Hamlet than Zeffirelli's "tragic" version. This
is Steve Martin's L.A. Story,a film that is arguably the paradigmatic postmod-
ern Hamlet.The movie begins with the edited words of another Shakespear-
ean father, John of Gaunt (from RichardII), who is soon to join the ranks of
the dead:

This royalthrone of kings, this sceptredisle,

This earth of majesty,this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This happybreed of men, this little world,

26
Deleuze and Guattari, 81. i
27
According to Copjec, the orthopsychic subject is "the scientific subject ... constructed by
the institution of science, . . . it is always thereby obliged to survey itself, its own thinking, not
subjectively, not through a process of introspection to which the subject has privileged access, but
from the position of the scientific institution" (Read My Desire, 27).
objectively,
Initially posited by Bachelard, this "objective relation to the self" is precisely what gives rise to
the sense of something hidden or secret to the self/observing subject, an uneasy (guilty?) sus-
picion that there is something else that the subject always "really" wants that hovers just beyond
the ken of the scientific institution's instruments of surveillance. Oedipus, then, in Deleuze and
Guattari's formulation, provides this something else, this secret desire that the orthopsychic
subject can then renounce in order to achieve its "proper" consistency.
28 Cyril Tourneur, TheRevenger'sTragedy(1607), reprinted in Drama of theEnglishRenaissanceII:
TheStuartPeriod,Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin, eds. (New York:Macmillan, 1976), 21-54,
esp. 51. Gravest thanks to Bryan Loughrey for this reference.
29
Cf. Ziiek, The SublimeObjectof Ideology,76-84, esp. 76.
 12 SHAKESPEARE
QUARTERLY

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Los Angeles.

Narrated against the image of a fitness park, these lines celebrate a utopian
Los Angeles that is, in its luminosity, the opposite of a rank and rotten Den-
mark. Of course, the "original" dramatic context of these lines is one of
admonishment, asJohn of Gaunt addresses an unruly "son" (Richard II) who
is bankrupting the kingdom. Richard's response to the dying Gaunt, who uses
his own name in a series of grim puns on the starving state of England, is
contemptuous: "can sick men play so nicely with their names?" This son has
no wish to be bothered by the injunctions of fathers.
In L.A. Story the lines are imported while their site of enunciation (a dying
father predicting disaster for the state) is jettisoned. The protagonist of the
film, Martin's character Harris K. Telemacher, isn't bothered by parents-he
has no father in the film, and his mother, whom we never see or hear, exists
only telephonically as a number programmed into his automatic voice-dial
machine. And yet, even without the burden of parents, Harris finds himself
brooding over his condition. In one of his many soliloquies, he tells us: "I was
deeply unhappy, but I didn't know it because I was so happy all the time."
Like Hamlet, Harris lacks advancement. Overeducated and philosophically
inclined (he has a Ph.D. in "Arts and Humanities"), he works as a television
weatherman, reporting the- "wacky weekend weather." Humiliated by the
need to put on an "antic disposition" to keep ratings up, his life, he says
(momentarily lapsing into Macbeth), is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury, signifying nothing."
In other words, Harris suffers from the postmodern equivalent of Hamlet's
ontological despair: he is, he writes in boldface on his living-room window,
"Bored Beyond Belief." One night as he drives home from yet another shal-
low social event with his vain girlfriend, his car stalls on the side of the freeway.
As he checks under the hood, he is "hailed" by a huge electronic signpost
that normally broadcasts traffic bulletins:

SIGNPOST HIYA.
I SAID HIYA....
RUOK? ...
HARRS Who are you ?
SIGNPOST I'M A SIGNPOST...
I C PEOPLE N TROUBLE & I STOP THEM ...
L.A. WANTS 2 HELP U ...
U WILL KNOW WHAT 2 DO
WHEN U UNSCRAMBLE...
HOW DADDY IS DOING...
ITS A RIDDLE ...
HARRIS Whose Daddy? Who's Daddy?

Like Hamlet, Harris knows he has been given a wakeup call to change his life;
but he is unable to make any sense out of the signpost's riddle because he
literally cannot rememberDaddy ("Who's Daddy?"). So he procrastinates and
attempts to ignore the injunction.
It isn't until later in the film, in an almost verbatim replay of the gravedig-
ger's scene, that the Hamlet motif openly emerges to remind him (and us) that
there is something to be, or not to be, re-membered. Harris and his new,
suitably British love, Sarah, are strolling through a cemetery, where they
 SHAKESPEARE,PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 13

happen on a gravedigger (fittingly played by Rick Moranis, of Ghostbusters and

Honey I Shrunk the Kids fame). Hard upon an exchange of questions and
answers that come (with slight modernizing) from Hamlet, 5.1, the gravedig-
ger produces a Yorick-like skull. Harris asks whose it is and is told "the
magician, the Great Blunderman." "The Great Blunderman," Harris says, "I
knew him. He was a funny guy." Sarah quickly and gamely enters into the
Hamlet scenario, reciting the proper lines and playing Horatio to Harris's
Hamlet. It is her ability to "remember" the play at this moment that leads
Harris to realize that he is in love with her.30 At the end of the film, after all
the comedic obstacles to their love have been magically removed, they are
ineluctably drawn back to the signpost, for its riddle remains to be solved.
While Harris is perplexed, Sarah takes one look at "HOW DADDY IS DO-
ING" and recognizes it as a word scramble, or "jumble." She rearranges the
order of the letters until a new message materializes: "I know what it is," she
says, " 'Sing Doo Wah Diddy.' "
Reversing the ordinary logic of a "jumble," which usually begins with a
nonsense statement that unscrambles into sense, solving this riddle literally
means making nonsense of the question of how Daddy is doing. Indeed, it
means dissolving Daddy altogether, not only at the level of the signified
("Whose Daddy? Who's Daddy?") but at the level of the signifier: Daddy
becomes Diddy. "Hailed" by an injunction from a sign that is ghostly yet no
ghost (since it isn't the spectral remainder of a particular person), Harris is
interpellated by a big Other that is entirely benevolent: "L.A. WANTS 2 HELP
U." While it poses a question about the father, it is neither from nor of the
father, since the question is never meant to be answered. In this way Hamlet's
ontological dilemma-how to reassemble a particular father who is in fact
two fathers-one a "Hyperion" and the other an obscene Thing-becomes,
in Steve Martin's postmodern version, a categorical dilemma (Who is Daddy?)
solved by eliminating the paternal signifier altogether.
"Remember me" becomes "Dismember me" as the film celebrates a post-
modern subjectivity that requires nothing from the father; and, more impor-
tant, the father requires nothing from the subject because he's no longer
there. Neither noir nor classical, spectral nor oedipal, this big Other makes no
demands (apart, that is, from the signpost's demand for a HUG). Purely
structural, it has no content, no message, and consequently offers a kind of
benignparanoia, in the sense that something is still watching over you but its
answer to the " Chevuoi?" or "What is it that you want of me?" is utterly banal.
When Harris asks the signpost if there's anything he can do for it by way of
thanks, it replies, "I'D LIKE TO GET CABLE TV."
In L.A. Story,Harris isn't faced with what kind of detective to be because if
Daddy is Diddy, he needn't ask either what did Daddy do or how Daddy is
doing. The oedipal logic-and-deduction approach that characterizes Zeffirel-
li's "cure" of Hamletis in L.A. Storyirrelevant because there is nothing to find
out and no one to find it out about. Harris himself seems baffled by it all at
the end, as he says to the signpost: "Sing Doo Wah Diddy? That's the mystery

30
H. R. Coursen has made a similar point about the romantic effect of this moment in Martin's
film in his discussion of different film and videotape treatments of the gravedigger's scene from
Hamlet; see "Alas, Poor Yorick!" in WatchingShakespeareon Television(Rutherford, Madison, and
Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993),
57-69, esp. 67-68. I am grateful to Coursen for bringing his work to my attention.
14 QUARTERLY
SHAKESPEARE

of the ages?" The signpost replies, "THERE ARE MORE THINGS N

HEAVEN AND EARTH, HARRIS, THAN ARE DREAMT OF N YOUR PHI-
LOSOPHY." But as Deleuze has remarked in Differenceand Repetition,
On the one hand a philosophyought to be a veryparticularkind of crime story,
and on the other hand it should resemblescience fiction. By crime story (roman
policier)we mean that conceptsshould intervene,drivenby a zone of presence,in
order to resolvea local situation.31
In the "philosophy" of Steve Martin's postmodern Hamlet, the particular
crime is not the murder of the father but the dismemberment, and subse-
quent disbursal, of the Name of the Father. But unlike the noir of Shake-
speare's Hamlet,the "concept" of L.A. Storyis driven not by an obscene "zone
of presence" but by a conspicuous zone of absence, one that does, it turns
out, "resemble science fiction" insofar as its efforts to disavow its own "local
situation" represent a fantasy that will soon lead to an intervention on an-
other stage.
Beginning with the elegiac words of a dying father, L.A. Storyends, like
Shakespeare's John of Gaunt, by playing nicely with the name. The solution
to the signpost's riddle lays bare the fact that the symbolic itself is based on
nonsense: on an arbitraryimposition of power that has no essential or original
foundation. This elimination of what Terence Hawkes has called "paternal
overkill' '32 has several advantages, not the least of which is that it permits a
fantasy of romantic love to triumph. While Hamlet's disavowal of his own
obscene father launches a great chain of displacement that leads to Ophelia's
death, in L.A. StoryHarris gets to have his Ophelia and keep her, too. Unlike
the noir universe, in which "the failure of the paternal metaphor ... renders
impossible a viable, temperate relation with a woman," in L.A. Storywe have
not paternal failure but foreclosure; consequently, romance supplants the
political as the structuring principle of this imaginary universe, organized not
by the demands of the symbolic but by the atemporal logic of the mirror stage
("Harris" and "Sarah" are phonetic reversals of each other, almost a palin-
drome).
I want to emphasize, however, that the problem Shakespeare's Hamlet
poses-the revelation of obscene enjoyment at the heart of paternal Law-
cannot be cured by Steve Martin's translation of noir to blanc. For it is no
accident that the racial and socioeconomic world represented in L.A. Storyis
almost entirely white and upper-middle class. Its "science-fiction" fantasy of
a social order blissfully united by singing "Doo Wah Diddy" is also one of a
world without the need for police. In it the subject is not accountable to any
Law other than that, perhaps, of the fascist maitred' of the restaurant L'Idiot,
who insists on seeing a bank statement before he'll take your dinner reserva-
tion; and crime, stripped of its racial and class antagonisms, seamlessly con-
verges with the middle-class "lifestyle" as customers and muggers line up at
the Ready Teller Machine-"Hi, my name is Bob, I'll be your robber."
Meanwhile, the real Los Angeles occupies the "space-off," to use Teresa de
Lauretis's term, of L.A. Story:what the film points to, by excluding, just beyond

31
Deleuze, quoted in Avital Ronell, CrackWars:LiteratureAddictionMania (Lincoln and Lon-
don: U of Nebraska P, 1992), 64.
32 Hawkes in Parker and Hartman, eds., 316.
 SHAKESPEARE,PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 15

its cinematic frame.33 The film's vision of a white, prosperous L.A. that op-
erates "on its own" is based on a denial of the fundamental antagonisms (and
their obscene enjoyments) that constitutivelyfracture the social formation.34
However "light" Martin's version of Hamlet may seem, its relief is apotro-
paic-a bulwark against the racial and class conflicts that in 1990 were mak-
ing Los Angeles, and American culture more generally, a pressure cooker
ready to explode.
Ultimately, Martin's film offers a fantasy of unaccountability-both to the
Law and, most importantly, of the Law. It is also no accident that L.A. Storywas
released virtually on the eve of the Rodney King beating.35 The film may
eliminate the problem of the two fathers by replacing Daddy with Diddy, but
the enjoyment that underwrites paternal Law reappears with a vengeance
outside its frame, in Stacy Koon and the other "law-enforcement officers"
who clearly took obscene pleasure in showing Rodney who was really King. As
Zizek puts it, "we fear the policeman insofar as he is not just himself ... that
is to say, insofar as he is experienced as the stand-in for the big Other, for the
social order."36
The moment that the stand-ins for the big Other reveal their enjoyment is
the moment we enter the noir.And in the noiruniverse the personal is always
the political. As Shakespeare clearly demonstrates in Hamlet (and as Zeffirelli
and Martin refuse to acknowledge in their versions), every "idiot of the fam-
ily" is also an idiot of the state. Noir paranoia may infect individuals, but it
originates in the structure of the symbolic and its articulation of the social. If
there are always two fathers, then the noir paranoid is always right. By substi-
tuting a comedic narrative that ends in nonsense for the destitution inflicted
by the obscene father's "terms compulsative," L.A. Storyanswers Hamlet's
"To be or not to be" with "Don't worry, be happy." But Martin's upbeat
Hamlet exhibits the same fetishistic disavowal that will lead, a few years later,
to the acquittal of the policemen who brutalized Rodney King and to the

' 33 I am deeply indebted to Carolyn A. Mitchell for conversations about the racial implications
of L.A. Story,which were instrumental in helping me formulate my conclusions about the mass-
cultural symptomology that underwrites Martin's postmodern Hamlet.I also thank her for bring-
ing Teresa de Lauretis's concept of the "space-off" to my attention. See Mitchell's sharp analysis
of the televisual choreography of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings in "Choicelessness as
Choice: The Conflation of Racism and Sexism" in DiscoveringDifference:Contemporary Essays in
AmericanCulture,Christoph K. Lohmann, ed. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993),
189-201, esp. 190-91; and de Lauretis, Technologiesof Gender:Essays on Theory,Film and Fiction
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987), 26.
34 Ziiek's claim that "Society doesn't exist" derives from the work of Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe, who argue that the social formation doesn't transcend or exist in despite of
fractures and antagonisms but, rather, is constituted precisely by these "fundamental antago-
nisms"; see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemonyand SocialistStrategy:Towardsa RadicalDemocraticPolitics
(London and New York:Verso, 1985), passim.
35 I refer here of course to the notorious 1990 incident in which four Los Angeles police

officers savagely beat Rodney King, an African American whom they had chased and stopped for
erratic driving. Unbeknownst to the police, a witness made a videotape of the beating, which,
when broadcast on television, horrified the nation and the world. Two years later, when the
officers were finally brought to trial on a charge of excessive force, an all-whitejury in Simi Valley,
a suburb of Los Angeles (in the "space-off" of Los Angeles, we might say), acquitted them. This
triggered the worst racial riots in Los Angeles since those of the 1960s. In the aftermath the two
main offenders were convicted of violating King's civil rights.
36 Ziiek, Tarryingwith the Negative:Kant, Hegel, and the Critiqueof Ideology(Durham, NC: Duke
UP, 1993), 234.
 16 SHAKESPEARE
QUARTERLY

subsequent L.A. riots: a logic that attempts to ignore the debts that the social
subject cannot-without disastrous consequences-avoid. If Shakespeare's
Hamletmakes us ask what Daddy did before telling us that the rest is silence,
L.A. Storyasks us how Daddy is doing before trying to convince us that the rest
is nonsense.
Finally, if the "beyond-reproach" paternal metaphor always contains its
own obscene double, we must ask what happens when a culture no longer
believes, however fetishistically, in the integrity of the paternal logos. To raise
this question is not to nostalgize for a time when we all believed (if we ever
believed) that father knows best. Rather, it is to observe the increasing diffi-
culty the placeholders of paternal authority have in hiding their own obscene
doubles, whether they are presidents of nations, of savings-and-loans, junk-
bond kings, supreme-court justices, political-party leaders (or strategists), fed-
eral judges, angst-ridden filmmakers, priests, police officers, or football he-
roes. It is not for nothing that currently the most famous fathers in American
mass culture are both absurd "masters" of enjoyment: the crude Al Bundy of
"Married With Children" and the moronic Homer Simpson. Perhaps even
more alarming than Zizek's notion of two fathers is the possibility that there
might be only one left-the obscene father, the excrescence of a paternal
logos that has deconstructed itself from the inside out.
One thing, however, seems clear: the paternal metaphor can no longer
proclaim itself the guarantor of Law because it cannot sustain the fiction of its
own disinterestedness. It cannot help but reveal the pleasure it takes in its
experience of arbitrary entitlement at the very sites where it proclaims itself
"beyond reproach." The noir,detective learns to his disgust that the local
crimes he uncovers originate in the very law that authorizes his actions-that
the Name of the Father covers over a metastatic corruption that reproduces
its crimes at precisely the same moment and in precisely the same way that it
reproduces its authority. To wit, a preposterously illuminating anecdote: On
9 September 1994 Vladimir Zhirinovsky announced to the Russian news
agency Interfax that he had a plan "to combat Russia's declining birth rate:
He personally will father a child in every region of Russia in the coming year.
Zhirinovsky, the fax stated, had given orders "to ensure that at least one child
by the chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia personally [that is,
himself] be born in each regional branch of the LDPR in 1995." It seems
natural that, having posed naked in the shower for photographers, spread-
eagled in the sauna, leering at strippers and cavorting with prostitutes (see the
Sunday New YorkTimesMagazine, 19 June 1994), Zhirinovsky should offer to
repopulate Russia "himself." Crudely conflating the personal with the politi-
cal by eliding the metaphoricity of political office -the fact that all politicians
are placeholders-Zhirinovsky gives new meaning to the concept of the Fa-
therland. At a time when such a figure stands poised, among others to be sure,
as a New World Master of fascist enjoyment, we cannot rope him off as merely
an individual aberration. Rather, he should be seen as the obscene double of
our own leaders, whose "terms compulsative" mandate a new world order
structured as a forced choice. If we accept the proposition that therearealways
two fathers, then we can discern within postmodern diplomacy's paternalistic
insistence on global free enterprise what Shakespeare's prophetic soul fore-
shadowed in Hamlet: the emergence of the Noir World Order.