SHAKSPER 2000: Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 01/27/00 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0176  Thursday, 27 January 2000.

[1]     From:   Patrick Dolan <paddyd@ia.net>
        Date:   Wednesday, 26 Jan 2000 08:37:23 -0600
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0171 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[2]     From:   Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
        Date:   Wednesday, 26 Jan 2000 09:29:46 -0800
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0171 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Patrick Dolan <paddyd@ia.net>
Date:           Wednesday, 26 Jan 2000 08:37:23 -0600
Subject: 11.0171 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0171 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

>I would, though, be interested in an article which would argue that the
>Christians in the play are rendering material things like love or
>friendship, which aren't material, or at least, shouldn't be.  Such an
>argument would not have to start from a specific religious standpoint,
>but it would have to resist the attempts of recent criticism to
>understand everything in material, economic terms.

I'd probably be interested too, depending on where the "aren't material"
"shouldn't be" come from. If they come from your twentieth century
Christianity or my spirituality whatever it may be, then the article may
take its interest from its illumination of the spiritual, but I don't
think it would be very interested in a scholarly discussion of
Shakespeare.

On the other hand, if they come from an understanding of the cultural
and social standing of love and friendship in Shakespeare's culture and
the discourse(s) of the play then we may have (scholarly) gold. I hope
you'll agree, Sean, that love and friendship aren't and can't be
entirely divorced from materiality‹I think that's one of the things the
play encourages us to think through‹and certainly not in a culture in
which love and friendship were extremely crucial to economic and
political advantage. Now, I don't for a moment think that they're
transient froth on the socioeconomic waves. If you have me confused with
someone who thinks it's material "all the way down," Sean, you're
misreading me (I hope‹maybe I'm being opaque). But I do think that love,
friendship and religion are deeply implicated in economic and social
history and that it's our job (as scholars) to work out how and (as
humans) enable the life affirming bits as best we can.

I really think you're misreading the best of the socially and culturally
inflected contemporary criticism, if you haven't given up on reading it
altogether. To characterize it as the Bertrand Russell's clever
interlocutor is to reduce it to its more clumsy practitioners Trust me,
doing a dissertation on More will expose you to any number of clumsy
Catholic and C of E critics who make  spiritual criticisms look as
tendentious and totalizing as any Marxist or materialist. Mean-spirited
too. I know too much good criticism that comes from a Christian
perspective to mistake this for the whole deal.

This isn't the place for (my (mis)understanding of) Buddhism's take on
the spiritual nature of sentient beings.

I hope you're having as much fun with this as I am,
Pat

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
Date:           Wednesday, 26 Jan 2000 09:29:46 -0800
Subject: 11.0171 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0171 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Judith Matthews Craig writes, kindly,

>I like this elucidation of a difficult concept and its application to
>Othello and Iago, but in thinking about it (I missed the previous
>discussion on Othello I guess) I wonder why Othello would have married
>Desdemona.  It seems that he would have married someone who fit into his
>closed system.

I don't really know.  My example was Iago.  But basically, there are two
possibilities:  Othello sees Desdemona as spoils or as land, a
suggestion which I like on historical grounds, since traditionally
Venetian generals were given grants on the terra firma.  Or he may see
her as a sort of objective correlative for his arrival in white,
"Christian" society.  Or she may reflect back his own identity, admiring
and endorsing his narrative of himself.

The second possibility, is that Othello might be breaking with his own
closed system, recognizing someone as really transcendent to him.  In
other words, he's fallen in love, not just seized upon a prize or made a
sexual conquest.  What he fears about Desdemona is less her sexuality,
or supposed infidelity, as much as her alterity, the fact that she's
able to surprise him or contradict his views of her.  She might, in
principle, be having an affair with Cassio (problems of the timeline
notwithstanding), and there's no way for Othello to definitively
determine otherwise.  In love, writes Levinas some place, violence fails
and knowledge is frustrated.  Which is, I suppose, why pornography is so
seductive a facsimile.

Cheers,
Seán.


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