Primrose Road

There is a Shakespeare and Derrida conference going on at Cardiff University today; I'm curious to know what ideas will come out of this conference, which apparently will look at how Shakespeare might have influenced Derrida and how Derrida would have thought Shakespeare.

Towards the end of his life Jacques Derrida wrote how he would have liked to have ‘become (alas, it’s pretty late) a “Shakespeare expert”,’ and that his desire would remain ‘to read and write in the space or heritage of Shakespeare, in relation to whom I have infinite admiration and gratitude.’ The aims of this conference are to commemorate the elective affinity between the French philosopher and English dramatist, to consider the importance of Shakespeare for Derrida’s thinking, and to project ways in which Derrida’s work might influence the future understanding of Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare critics have been slow to acknowledge the implications for Hamlet studies of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, while a recent highly-regarded biography of the philosopher never once mentions Shakespeare.

Courtney Lehmann has examined the "hauntological" possibilities for Hamlet on stage and on film, and I think the Shakespeare-Derrida "affinity" is worth further exploration -- especially here in the US, where it seems that a number of grad students new to the game are still mobilizing Derrida for the purpose of "deconstructing" colonizer/colonized, male/female, empowered/disempowered binaries in Shakespeare's plays. My eternal love and respect will go to anyone working on a Shakespeare-Derrida thesis or dissertation that does not mention the word "binary."