in

Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba: An Exchange with David Pan

By Nicole Burgoyne · Wednesday, December 9, 2009

ShareCarl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play is now
available in English translation from Telos Press. Nicole Burgoyne recently discussed some of
the book’s central arguments with translator David Pan.

Nicole Burgoyne: Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time

into the Play represents a bit of a departure from Schmitt’s usual
juristic theoretical work. At the beginning of the book he makes
quite clear that he means to appeal to the literary lover of
Shakespeare and to provide a new understanding of the text.
How important was literature to Schmitt? Is literature simply
another vehicle to explore Schmitt’s other key concepts, such as
his definition of the sovereign, the exception, the friend/enemy
dichotomy, etc.?

David Pan: Literature was important to Schmitt from very early in his career; one of
his first publications was a book of literary criticism on the Expressionist
poem Nordlicht,by Theodor Däubler. This interest was linked to his political theory
to the extent that this theory began with the assumption that politics was based in
theology. Though his Roman Catholicism and Political Form theorizes this link in
terms of the Catholic Church, his nationalist attitudes brought his interest in
theology back to an engagement with the kinds of literary texts, such as Hamlet for
England, that make up a national culture.

Burgoyne: Schmitt goes to great lengths to clear what he sees as King James I of
England’s undeservedly tarnished image. What does Schmitt value in this particular
sovereign? Could he be a historical example of Schmitt’s theories on sovereignty?

Pan: Though Schmitt does want to rehabilitate his image, he also insists that
James’s defense of the divine right of kings was in some sense anachronistic and
doomed to failure. Here, it is important to note the relative importance of Hamlet for
Schmitt’s notion of political representation as compared with King James. Even
though the argument is that James provides the hidden model for Hamlet, it is
actually Hamlet and not James that then attains a mythic status in English culture.
This focus on the literary rather than the political figures indicates how important the
issue of representation is for Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty.

Burgoyne: Three of Schmitt’s basic points concern the ambiguities left open
in Hamlet. Schmitt claims that these ambiguities are a consequence of the political
taboos created by Shakespeare’s historical context. The ambiguities left open are
the guilt of the mother, whether Hamlet only feigns madness or is, in fact, insane,
and Hamlet’s ambiguous religion. One traditional approach to these ambiguities is
to ascribe them to artistry, thereby neglecting the historical context: “To relate a
great work of art to the actual politics of the time in which it was created would
presumably obscure its purely aesthetic beauty and debase the intrinsic worth of
artistic form. The source of the tragic then lies in the free and sovereign creative
power of the poet” (33). Might one see Schmitt’s argument for politically imposed
taboos as an attempt to quash the view of the artist as a sovereign in his own
created world?

Pan: This question goes to the heart of Schmitt’s unique view of the relationship
between art and politics. While he is opposed to the exclusion of historical and
political considerations from literary analysis, he also does not see the artist as
simply following a particular political line. Instead, the focus on the spaces of
ambiguity in the text indicates a concern for the ways in which a literary text should,
on the one hand, respond to real concerns on the part of the audience and thereby
heighten its political significance and, on the other hand, approach these concerns
in such a way that the decisions are not pre-judged but are in fact left up to the
audience for a final determination. This ceding of final meanings to the audience
does limit the sovereignty of the artist, but not in a way that gives this sovereignty to
a political ruler but rather to a politicized audience. This desire to emphasize
popular sovereignty is perhaps one of the most consistently recurring themes in
Schmitt’s work. This focus is one of the main reasons for continuing to engage with
it today, even though this same focus was perhaps what made Schmitt so
susceptible to joining in the nationalist enthusiasm that greeted the initial rise of the
Nazis to power.
Burgoyne: One of the first issues that Schmitt addresses, despite having sworn off
Freud and psychological approaches, is the taboo of the mother. How does
Schmitt’s discussion of gender relations here differ from or amplify his work in other
places?

Pan: The discussion of the taboo of the mother is anti-Freudian to the extent to
which it rejects psychological explanations of this relationship in order to provide
one that reflects political exigencies that seem to exist independently of their
gender-political implications. In fact, this approach to gender relations is consistent
with the way in which they play a remarkably small role in Schmitt’s work in general,
and his subjects tend not to be marked by any obvious gender identifications.

Burgoyne: This book, published in 1956, has a decisively German outlook, by which
I mean that Schmitt spends a great deal of time outlining the importance
of Hamlet to German literary and political tradition, and even associates himself
with a German mindset. Aside from the rationale that the text originated as a lecture
for a local audience, are there any hints of Schmitt’s outlook on the contemporary
political situation in Germany in this text?

Pan: There are hardly any references to contemporary German politics in the book.
The most direct polemic is against different approaches in literary criticism at the
time, most notably the trend towards “immanent” text criticism that leaves all
political considerations out of the analysis. The implicit critique of contemporary
politics is that West Germany was acceding too quickly to an unpolitical role in
which it was giving up sovereignty to U.S. political hegemony.