The Hamlet Doctrine - Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster

Has any work of literature been more written, talked and thought about than Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Philosopher Simon Critchley and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster take on the play, and our abiding preoccupation with it, in The Hamlet Doctrine via a series of classic interpretations, notably those of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hegel, Freud, Lacan and Nietzsche. ‘We write as outsiders’, they conclude, ‘for shame, about Shakespeare, with the added shame of doing so as husband and wife with the implicit intent of writing about love. Perhaps we have betrayed ourselves. Perhaps this book will be the undoing of our marriage. Perhaps it is written in vain, for no one and for nothing. In this rash lovers’ risk, this is essentially a book about nothing, for the love of nothing, for the nothing of love, for the love of Hamlet.’ The discussion will be chaired by Dr Shahidha Bari of Queen Mary, University of London.