Hamlet With David Tennant And Patrick Stewart

Let’s get some concepts on the table while we watch Hamlet (BBC, 2009)

In her 1969 essay “On Violence” Hannah Arendt argues for a more rigorous distinction between violence and power in the discourse of political theory. She especially wants to challenge the conventional notion that violence somehow underwrites power. In her view, violence and power have a reciprocal inverse relation, since for her “power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert,” so someone “in power” by definition harnesses (“consensually” as it were) the strength of this group action. In the movie Miller’s Crossing Tom (Gabriel Byrne) says to Leo (Albert Finney) “you run this town because people think you run it; when they stop thinking it, you stop running it.” For Arendt, the conduit of any show of strength in response to a loss of power is inevitably violence of some kind. In the most fundamental Arendtian terms, violence is what individuals, interest groups and governments turn to when they can no longer derive enough strength through power.

Perhaps the most primordial violent impulse among humans is that of revenge. In communities where justice is (still) a moral/religious category unconnected to the polis, personal or familial revenge is what comes ready-to-hand. The problem, as Rene Girard points out in Violence and the Sacred, is that “Vengeance is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process,” one which “every time it turns up in some part of the community..threatens to involve the whole social body.” In such so-called “primitive” communities, ritual sacrifice, according to Girard, is what inevitably developed as a means of deflecting such “self-replicating” violence away from from the community and on to outside human (or animal) scapegoats. The great literary critic Tony Tanner, making clever use of Girard’s ideas, observes that Western tragedy begins with Orestes pausing momentarily before taking murderous vengeance on his own mother Clytemnestra who had killed his father Agamemnon for sacrificing his sister Iphigenia. The pause is very brief:

Orestes: What shall I do, Plyades? Be shamed to kill my mother?

Plyades: What becomes thereafter of the oracles declared by Loxias at Pytho? What of sworn oaths? Count all men hateful to you rather than the gods.

Orestes: I judge that you win. Your advice is good.

And so he kills her, and is later put on trial by the gods. Western tragedy recommences with Hamlet, in which, as Tanner inscribes in his preface, this pause of revenge has become the whole play. Ever since, our theater, and more lately cinema, has seen personal vengeance in terms of a conflict between justice as a moral category and justice as a political category, as a function of the state.

~~~~Musick Hund