IntroductionThe Art of Our Necessities

Responsibility remains a task of responsiveness.

—Stanley Cavell

In an interview, Joni Mitchell once said: “I’m a fool for love. I make the same mistake over and over.” The interview quickly became philosophical. Asked about her former life with love, she laughingly said of her younger self: “I did not have a concept of love.”¹ Many of us might say the same about our younger selves, at least when it comes to romantic love. Joni Mitchell was saying that although she was propelled by strong impulses and intense desires, she did not ask herself whether they counted as love. Perhaps she assumed that all her desires were loves. To see whether they counted as love, she would have had to think about her criteria for love, her history with it, including how her culture counted or discounted it, and her growth or frustration in its impasses and pathways. In thinking about what she counted as love she would have had to have thought about when and why she might use the word love and whether this counted as an instance of it. She would have had to develop her concept of love in her life with it. Her idea of love—like our own—will (and did) grow and change. Although she knew the word love as part of her inheritance, she was saying that she had never considered her criteria for loving.²

Such an inquiry would be “work on oneself.” “Working in philosophy—like work in architecture in many respects—is really more like a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things,” says Ludwig Wittgenstein.³ This is a perpetual ever renewing education, a more-or-less continuous scrutiny of how we came to learn, say, to love, and what counts as an extension of loving.⁴ Is this what my culture calls love? Does it fit with my understanding? With my experience and imagination, I call out my culture but only when I take the full measure of my inheritances.

I have no more insight than anyone else into Joni Mitchell's love life beyond what she offers us in her gorgeous songs. I invoke her because I find her comment a striking example of how we habitually live with concepts in the forms of life that occasion our need for them and our use of them. Joni Mitchell's words show us that philosophy is pervasively active in our ordinary lives.

Some years ago, I read an article by Cora Diamond that gripped my imagination. It was called “Losing Your Concepts.”⁵ In this seminal essay, Diamond describes the manifold ways we can lose touch with even the most basic concepts we think we know or live by. I might say, for example, that if you can defend the practice of bearing arms on a university campus, you have lost the concept of teaching and learning. Or that if you think all learning is vocational training or that teachers are “content providers,” you have lost the concept of a university. To take another example, you might reproach me: “Have you lost all sense of responsibility?” or protest “aren’t you obliged in this case to do what he asked?” In these instances, we can see the practical problem of what counts in each particular instance as responsibility or obligation. Or consider this. You declare you love me when you do not, and not because you are lying. Lacking self-knowledge or a fitting sense of your actual relation to me, your opacity to yourself has momentarily obscured the concept of love. Perhaps, like Joni Mitchell in her later years, you will look back at your romantic history, and as you realize what love is, a clearer self-understanding might come into view, along with a realization of the way you mistook yourself and others. This is living with concepts, in life's myriad scenes of recognition.

We might already be able to see that the idea of how we count something as something (what we call something, how we use a word) is not a question of selecting notions that fit in with a preconceived idea of the concept in question as if they are decided in advance and fixed independently of us. It is instead a complex question of our cultural inheritances, self-understanding (our ability to place ourselves in the world) and moral vision and imagination.⁶

In this book, I explore the loss of a set of key binding concepts in a group of tragic plays by Shakespeare. These particular losses define the preoccupations and form that these tragedies take and constitute them as a group. I begin with Hamlet, but the remaining group of plays I address come after Shakespeare's devastating discoveries of undoing in King Lear and include the following tragic plays: Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. After Hamlet (1600–1601) this group of plays dates from roughly 1604–1608.⁷ I call them late tragedies to distinguish them from Shakespeare's earlier experimentations in the form (Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar) and because I believe Hamlet marks a decisive break in the trajectory of Shakespearean tragedy. I call these plays tragedies of exile for reasons I will explain.

In this group of plays, I argue that some of the most fundamental forms of understanding that seem to bind human communities become dangerously, lethally obscure. Grieving (Hamlet); loving (King Lear); giving (Timon of Athens); acting and doing (Macbeth); speaking and being human (Coriolanus); and marrying, conversing, and judging (Antony and Cleopatra) all come under scrutiny in this book as I argue they do in Shakespeare's plays. These binding concepts are interconnected and often at work in all the plays I examine, but I focus on each play's concentrated, protracted, and intense scrutiny of one concept, understanding that each is complexly, delicately, and inevitably interwoven with the others.⁸

In these late great tragedies of Shakespeare, the binding concepts in our lives come to be seen as precious, and as vital through the realization of their loss. “I cannot but remember such things were / That were most precious to me,” as Macduff says in Macbeth. ⁹

In chapter 1, I show how Hamlet explores a culture in which the recognition of grief, a primordial kind of loss, is stifled and distorted. To lose the forms for the expression of loss is to be deprived of a basic grammar of recognition. The play decisively ends as it puts under scrutiny one kind of heroic idiom—revenge tragedy—to explore Hamlet's vital and difficult new task of bearing witness to loss.

King Lear thinks that his language is identical to his will. He does not see that language bears a necessity of its own that is outside his control. He occludes the responses of others, and he imagines that he is the very source of all that can be given (“I gave you all”).¹⁰ Until the advent of grace in this play, he will harp on ingratitude. Lear's ceremony of flattery in the first scene of the play is a denial that others exist in his world, and when he banishes love, he banishes truth and his grip on reality, for love, as Iris Murdoch says, is disclosive of reality.¹¹ Love is honed in the use of words, and Lear learns what it is as a matter of painful biography. Although King Lear explores the language of the social outcast more systematically than any other play, the exile from sense is where the play devastates most utterly, stripping us of all our lendings.

Timon and his wider culture (in Athens and London) have gotten into a tragic muddle about how to give and receive. Timon of Athens is a violent response to a radical confusion about gift and debt. Timon's passage from extravagant magnanimity to universal hatred is a path toward the loss of meaningful distinctions. His all-pervasive and exceptionless hatred makes him a skeptic in relation to language. For him now all words must fail, must lead to mistrust and scorn. His fully generalized distrust will defend him preemptively from all others and from the risk of any and all relations. To refuse a relationship with all humankind is to refuse a relationship with any human being; it is to discount even the possibility of a claim. The sheerly hyperbolic quality of Timon's hatred gets him off the hook of the need to single himself out in response to others, and so from the responsibilities entailed in such responses.

Macbeth stupefies himself to what he knows is the logic of action. His wish is to eradicate thought altogether, to remove the very possibility that the question “Why are you doing that?” could have a conceivable answer. In this self-stupefaction he conceives and disavows his murderous acts. The logic of action is recovered in the play's astonishing exploration of remorse. The obliterated other now comes into partial focus through the terrible, nightmarish realizations of remorse: “My God, What have I done?” in Lady Macbeth's nightwalking.¹²

In the most overtly political play about whose voice counts, Coriolanus tries to shape a world solely out of his assertion by structuring his relations with others on a refusal of the natural exposures of human form, human language, and human feeling. He is, I explain, a type of Wittgenstein's “private linguist,” and Wittgenstein's influential fantasies about the figure of the private linguist turns out to be vital to all these tragedies of the excluding and excluded self.¹³

In the final play I examine, Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare breaks open the sovereign models of lonely masculine preeminence to provide us a new model of relationship, offering profound ways of testing Rome's coming hegemony, modeling the “marriage” between Antony and Cleopatra as a novel social and aesthetic order. In Cleopatra's late insistence that her suicide is a marriage to Antony (“Husband, I come!”), Shakespeare stakes new aesthetic ground.¹⁴ Antony and Cleopatra, I argue, is Shakespeare's critique of judgment, anticipating Kant's third critique and the brilliant extension of it in the work of Stanley Cavell and Hannah Arendt.

In this unprecedented and searing run of tragedies written between 1604 and 1608, Shakespeare both begins a new form of tragedy and exhausts its form. Shakespeare's late tragedies feature protagonists who are driven out—or drive themselves out—of the social groups, the families, the friends, and the acquaintances, with whom they had kept company. Castaways from political or polite society, they seek or are banished to the edgelands of civilization, to heaths, wastelands, and enemy camps. Timon grubs for roots away from Athens; Coriolanus seeks out his bitterest enemies in Corioles; Lear rages on a desolate heathland in the company of fools and madmen.

What kinds of exile are these? I argue that the exile of these protagonists is linguistic; they are exiled from sense and intelligibility and the exile shows the loss of vital concepts of human bonding—such as loving, grieving, and giving.

Is it possible to actually lose the concept of loving, grieving, or giving in one's life? Doesn’t Diamond's article describe a perfectly common understanding for anyone who works with old materials? Concepts become obsolete as certain forms of life change, develop, or fade—feudalism, for example, or courtly love, the practice of wergild, dueling, or private property. New concepts enter the mix—mercantilism, emancipation, revolution, industrialization, republicanism, and so on. Whole branches of intellectual history already have been devoted to that idea—surely no historicist worth her salt would dare to dispute so unexceptional a claim.¹⁵ More intimately, provocatively, and presciently than that, Diamond describes the way in which you or I might at any point lose concepts as seemingly intrinsic to human living as gratitude, care, or grief—and not once and for all but again and again, frequently, minutely. This kind of conceptual loss does not refer only then to the kind of large-scale historical and cultural transformations that historians and literary historians chart. In the kinds of instances I examine, to recover or remember how to grieve, how to care or thank, might require work on oneself as well as a further investigation of the world we thought we knew. It might require a new form of ethical criticism, and a new understanding of the relationship of words to world.

In 1978, G. K. Hunter wrote an important yet overlooked essay, “Shakespeare's Last Tragic Heroes.” His local quarry among the Shakespeare critics was a predominant habit of making King Lear the lead into the last plays, tracing themes of reconciliation in that play as if they were a direct line to the so-called romances, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. One of the many objections to this trajectory, he argues, is that it treats Timon, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra as if they “had sunk without trace from the Shakespearean horizon.”¹⁶ The tragedies following Lear are all in some senses plays of exile.

I would like to extend, even radicalize, Hunter's understanding of these plays. The protagonists of these plays are homeless not in the sense that they lack shelter. They cannot find their way home because they no longer know what home is, or what it is to be at home. They seek or are driven to find “worlds elsewhere” in terrible acts of repudiation and mad isolation. They are not simply exiled from places but from themselves and sometimes from a home in language—straining at the verge of sense, struggling for intelligibility, not knowing who they are. I will describe the kinds of exile at stake in these plays as linguistic.¹⁷

It is Wittgenstein's vision of language as understood by Cavell and Diamond that allows us to perceive the nature of this linguistic exile, the state of transcendental homelessness that this group of plays confronts. Diamond and Cavell's understanding of concepts is vitally dependent on their revolutionary readings of Wittgenstein. Cavell's critical reevaluation of the role of criteria in the Philosophical Investigations shows how concepts are, as he puts it, “of anything.” Cavell begins his analysis of the Investigations with the idea that criteria in Wittgenstein are invoked not so much for, say, entrance qualifications or dog competitions, which have specific guidelines and rules set by experts and umpires, but rather for things such as sitting on a chair, having a toothache, reading, thinking, or pointing to something. These are things we are all in a position to know, things that need no expertise. How do we learn pain then? Well, we learn how to talk, says Wittgenstein—suggesting that our learning is not best described as a process of attaching a name to a thing, but rather as an initiation into all the complex modes of life, habits, practices, and ways of doing things that give us a world at all. “You learned the concept pain when you learned language” (PI, ¶384, Wittgenstein's italics). Wittgensteinian criteria elucidate what things are (PI, ¶371 and ¶373) as Wittgensteinian grammar shows us what kind of object anything is. In Cavell's revolutionary understanding of criteria in the Investigations, however, criteria can only tell us of the identity of something, not whether it actually exists. They are criteria for things being so, but not for their being so as Cavell so felicitously puts it.¹⁸ (This is why skepticism is a permanently available possibility, and why criteria are fully open to skepticism). Criteria are disappointing in this respect: They cannot tell us whether that man over there is only feigning pain or actually having it, only that it is pain at issue. Criteria are doubly disappointing because they depend on our voicing them to do the work they actually do, on our counting this as something here and now in this instance, for this occasion.

In language, we make commitments, avowals, and promises to each other, and we enter agreements with each other: “Agreements we do not know and do not want to know we have entered, agreements we were always in, that were in effect before our participation in them. Our relation to our language—to the fact that we are subject to expression and comprehension, victims of meaning—is accordingly the key to our sense of our distance from our lives, of our sense of the alien, of ourselves as alien to ourselves, thus alienated.”¹⁹ We bind ourselves in our words in ways we do not know or understand, and our words bind us not simply to each other but to the world. Language “words the world” and binds us to it and not by reference alone: We are bound by the challenge and difficulty of reality even when correspondence and reference are out of play.²⁰ Thus, Diamond and Cavell give us a vision of language in which our adequacy to reality is central, but such adequation is now extended to the full play of language, and it is no longer restricted to reference.²¹

This group of tragedies centers on the fatedness of the protagonists’ use of words.²² A usage of a particular term entitles us to draw certain inferences; this is a question of the normativity of language, an implication that is obscured when rules are understood as imperatives or commands. This is what the learning of language comes to: We are responsible for the implications of our speech. We are responsible for those implications even when we may not know what we are saying and doing. We may not, often cannot, sometimes do not, foresee how our words will go out into the world. What Hannah Arendt said of human action is true of speech acts: They are irreversible, unpredictable, and boundless. What is done cannot be undone.²³ Like other forms of action, the effects of our speech are “irreversible”—we can recant, abjure, revoke, and retract, but we cannot unsay what we have said; unpredictable, for if we must understand what we are doing in certain explicit performatives for them to do the work they do, even in those cases where what follows is unforeseen—we know that the judge's verdict will result in a prison sentence but not how that verdict will resound in the defendant's life or those of his loved ones; they are boundless in their effects. We can begin to see some implications of implication here: inference, imputation, indication, or suggestion; implication as involvement, connection, and entanglement in bonds, as Kent puts it in Lear, “too intrince to unloose,” and lastly implication in the quasi-legal sense as bearing guilt, hence responsibility.²⁴

Wittgenstein claims that a philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about” (PI, ¶122).²⁵ I have lost my direction and a sense of myself, my fundamental orientation in the world, my very understanding, even my sense of my relations with other people: Where am I? That is the sense of a bewildering homelessness. No map can help me find my way home, so how can I possibly get there? But also: Who am I? I do not know who I am anymore. This is Lear's haunting question: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”²⁶ The therapeutic task of the Investigations is “to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (PI, ¶116 and ¶132). The sense of lostness in the exile I call linguistic is tied to the loss of concepts that is Diamond's theme. How did these men become so lost and their cultural resources so vitiated that they forget how to grieve, to love, to act, or to speak with—rather than to—others? How do Shakespeare's plays “lead” words home, and to what end? When we are lost, when, in Wittgenstein's understanding, we cannot find our way about, it is because we are in flight from the ordinary, the conditions of necessity by which we are able to speak at all.²⁷ We flee into illusions of sense while evading the responsibility of meaning what we say, the necessary implications of our speech.

This is why these late tragedies border on madness and unintelligibility: The protagonists speak in a fantasy of sense, mistaking flattery for love, or evading their actions, or ignoring that others are necessary in any act of speech, or that we cannot give what we do not have. That is why they mistake both themselves and the world in the tragic collapse of such binding concepts.

But wait, someone might object, what can Wittgenstein possibly contribute to any understanding of Shakespeare as an artist who brings our ethical lives into lucid focus? Wittgenstein finds his plays “dashed off” and he was “deeply suspicious of Shakespeare's admirers.” ²⁸ Shakespeare was overpraised and for “specious reasons by a thousand professors of literature.”²⁹ He was a “creator of language rather than a poet.”³⁰ Moreover, apart from the Lectures on Ethics, Wittgenstein rarely explicitly addresses the question of ethics.³¹ What an inauspicious start. But this is to look in the wrong place. Ethics are in fact all pervasive in Wittgenstein's thinking, from early to late: They shape his philosophy. We must look rather to his vision of language than to any explicit statements he makes on either ethics or Shakespeare.

It is the understanding of language use in the wake of Austin and Wittgenstein that makes possible a different kind of ethical criticism.³² This vision of language understands the words we speak as action, event, and expression. We are responsible for our words even if we do not know what we mean, and we are fated to expression, exposed in them even as we try so hard to obliterate or deny our exposure. This vision of language is perennially open to tragic implication. The work of its major practitioners (Cavell, Raimond Gaita, and Diamond) is marked by its appreciation of humanity's tragic predicaments and for its profound contestation of a midcentury moral philosophy that arguably obliterated ethics. When Stanley Cavell takes issue with the received traditions of moral philosophy in part 3 of The Claim of Reason, when Diamond expands on Iris Murdoch's essays on The Sovereignty of Good, when Raimond Gaita reflects on the tragic landscapes of his father in Romulus My Father, it is because they are haunted by what Gaita calls “the estrangement from morality of morally serious people,” which is a consequence of the fact/value dichotomy and the hold of scientism.³³ Their Wittgensteinian vision of language shows that no particular domain of affairs—deliberation over what should be done, the vocabulary of “good” or “ought,” duty and obligation—was a marked-off preserve of moral thinking. There is no particular subject matter of moral judgments—no especial range of utterances, no distinctively moral concepts set aside and marked moral. No such moral concepts are necessary for ethical thought. The problem is, after all, to recognize moral claims at all—what morally appalls me might be business as usual for you. Moral questions arise as questions of what and how we see, how we take or get things. This makes any use of language potentially and pervasively ethical. Ethics is simply an aspect of all our language, of what we do in speaking with each other and thus our moral sensibility pervades all our lives, and as Diamond asserts: “We are perpetually moralists.”³⁴

Each assertion may be a moral act, says Cavell, “intrusive or not, magnanimous or not, heartfelt or not, kind or cutting, faithful or treacherous, promising cheer or chagrin, acknowledging or denying.”³⁵ Judgment is precisely not backed by moral law but “fronted by the character of the judger.”³⁶ Thus, without imperatives and oughts, without an extrinsic standard of moral judgment, moral questions arise not in the decisions about a particular choice of action among others, but rather in the understanding that in the middle of your life (or at any point in it) you have lost your way and do not know how to go on. You need leading and direction out of moral chaos. You need to find your way. That is why Shakespeare's late tragedies are ethical inquiries and why they chart paths lost and found.

Shakespeare, Cavell suggests, is the most “responsive” of playwrights. In Wittgenstein's vision of language, our sense of responsibility is crucially tied to our responsiveness to the world and to each other; the kind of criticism I write begins with my responses to the plays in question as it invites the responses of others. So each chapter stages an encounter with the play, and the play's signal concept under examination. Like any aesthetic judgment, it must be subjective, but strive for and reach toward universal validity because I am not content to simply let it be a matter of different “opinions.” This is what I see. Do you see it too? A reading can be “close” without touching on this kind of “work on oneself” at all. This book, although it is based on my readings, is neither a defense nor even an instance of close reading or of new-formalist practices of the kind that have been championed in response to the new historicist hegemony. For one thing, my readings are through and through historical in the sense that my focus is always on language use—an inevitably historical (although not necessarily historicist) practice. In so far as close readings or new formalism ignores use, it will continue the evacuation of linguistic agency that has been a hallmark of the structuralist and poststructuralist paradigm. It will thus lack the diagnostic skills to show the tragic implication of such evacuation that is my main topic.

Contemporary criticism sometimes escapes to theory and is dominated by what one critic has called “interpretative skepticism.”³⁷ In other words, questions of interpretation are treated as problems that can be settled by theoretical know-how and expertise and moreover solved in advance of the experience of reading. One important implication of Wittgenstein's idea of a criterion is that no separate expert position exists when it comes to ordinary language, no final, decisive, and expert judgment.³⁸ The “rough ground” of reading and sense-making, as Ingeborg Lofgren puts it, is the place where our concerns with literature live.³⁹ In writing this book, I return to an ancient delight in the practice of reading and criticism, seeing criticism as an extension of conversation and the “making of a work of art available to just response.”⁴⁰

Wittgenstein has no theory of language. He does not map out in advance what falls under his concepts. The diagnostic and therapeutic work of what Toril Moi calls the “revolution of ordinary language” is retrospective.⁴¹ The need for it emerges when we are lost and when our human bonds—and our words as our bonds—are in need of repair. The work is to return us to the “rough ground”of where the concepts we need have a sense and point. The work of Shakespearean theater and the work of ordinary language philosophy, in fact, have a kinship. This is what actors and directors have found in their practice.

This mode of practice puts paying attention to details—and to language use—above the formulation of theories. It is no surprise that Austin and Cavell were lovers of the theater. Both practices root themselves into the intricacies and intimacies of address—who is saying what to whom, right here and right now, for what purpose, and with what intention and effect, calculable and incalculable? This is first not last word philosophy, rooted in response, relationship and connection, perpetually dissolving the lie of the sovereign self. In this practice, the first person is not separable from the second. “I” comes into the picture in a practice of interlocution.

The idea of speech as action is explored in an actor's technique used in rehearsals. I mention this idea of speech here because it is an exemplary practice, a reminder of returning the character's words to their concrete occasion of use.

Pioneered at the Joint Stock Theatre Company in the 1970s, and associated with the work of Bill Gaskill and Max Stafford Clark, this technique starts not with method but with a close parsing out of each line of dialogue, not moving inward to the psychology of the character but staying with the lines as speech acts.⁴² The idea is that actors and directors decide what any one piece of dialogue is doing. The verb must be transitive—so insulting, encouraging, provoking rather than musing or ruminating, and so there are now thesauruses of action verbs to aid the actor's work of “actioning.” The result is clarity because playing actions has a lucidity that playing feelings does not. Actors may together change their mind about what any stretch of speech is doing, but at every point, they are natural ordinary language philosophers. Betting they can articulate what they are saying on the basis of what they are doing, they live out the full implications of Austin's idea: You will not know the meaning of something unless you know what you are doing by virtue of speaking those words. (And it is not entirely up to you to decide!) This is an excellent way of reading Shakespeare's plays as well, and it reveals the sympathy of theater with moral discourse, not in advocacy for the right action, but in enacting what Cavell has suggested is the basis of moral argument: working out the positions you take in relation to the others around you.⁴³ This technique of actioning in the theater hardly restricts the working out of a position you are prepared to take, what you might be prepared to be responsible for, to explicit performatives.

Let's try it out on the opening lines of Hamlet.⁴⁴ I have deliberately omitted the dramatis personae in the following citations and italicized Shakespeare's lines for clarity:

Who's there?

Nay, answer me! Stand, and unfold yourself.

Long Live the King.

Bernardo?

He.

We might “action” these lines with the following options, which clearly are not exhaustive:

Who's there? (question, demand; nervous, uncertain, or defensive/aggressive)

Nay, answer me! (counterdemand. The implication is that I won’t answer your question, declare or expose myself until I know who you are—especially if the actor puts the emphasis on me.)

Stand, and unfold yourself! (order, command, or plea, entreaty, request; but unfold surely cannot be done in a sentence or a name. It suggests layers and covers and creases that need unraveling and invites the work of time in revelation.)

Long Live the King! (declaration of loyalty and allegiance. The revelation of identity comes not from announcing yourself but only by virtue of declaring which side you are on, suggesting a highly combative and hypervigilant frame of mind in which it may not be clear who is friend and who is foe and that this will be the most important thing to know about them, the primary way of unfolding themselves.)

Barnado? (a guess! A hopeful one in which the speaker is on the verge of relief.)

He! (the confirmation of the guess, with the ironic result that he never had to announce himself after all.)

Call it, as some have, a minirecognition scene, but only with the understanding that not a great deal has yet been revealed or recognized. The men have declared only their allegiance to the king, which is to say both everything that is currently to the point and also not much. The atmosphere of uncertainty and indeed fear shows the extent to which any discovery of who is actually there, and the very ability to declare, reveal, or unfold yourself will require certain conditions. The revelation of who you are will not be the revelation of an identity known independently of just such and other interactions but will be emergent only through them. It is misty. Approaching from different directions and from exactly where it is not clear; these men do not know the positions they are occupying in relation to each other. All that is to be discovered. This minirecognition scene can show that neither man is sovereign over his identity.⁴⁵

The following chapters show in more detail, and across a wider tragic terrain, how human persons are bound by these and other recognitions.