Quarrelling Again

The ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy has, it seems, all but subsided and it has become widely accepted that the two disciplines can cohabitate fruitfully. In fact, a glut of work that dwells in the interdisciplinary space between philosophy and literature has been published in the last decade. Despite this, assumptions about the rapport between these two disciplines are taken to task surprisingly seldom, as we still struggle to establish a consensus of what constitutes rigorous interdisciplinary approaches and what these should be aiming to do. Philosophers may now no longer disagree that literature can at times be philosophically valuable, but they do, however, still quarrel about what constitutes literature’s usefulness for philosophy.

Nowhere is the unresolved status of the ancient quarrel felt more than in philosophy's attitudes towards Shakespeare. Historically, Shakespeare's plays have had an almost unparalleled grip on philosophers’ imaginations, yet philosophers have not been able to give a clear, let alone unanimous, account of what makes the plays such particularly fertile ground for philosophical rumination. Indeed, what seems to have made Shakespeare's plays worthy of philosophical attention has, perhaps, been the fact that they have been written by an undisputed literary genius. Shakespeare's role within the wider field of literature and philosophy is therefore neither simply exemplary nor exceptional; accentuating some of the widely acknowledged benefits that a serious consideration of literature can have for philosophy, it far exceeds others. We may celebrate Shakespeare as an example of what literature can do for philosophy, but it is the exceptional status of the work that leads philosophers to him in the first place. And yet, the alacrity with which some philosophers turn to Shakespeare might just be as suspect as the stubbornness with which many have insisted that philosophy has nothing to learn from literature.

When Derrida reads Shakespeare, he is, of course, in illustrious company.In this book, it is not my intention to argue that Derrida reads Shakespeare better than any other philosopher. More than most philosophical engagements with the Bard, however, Derrida's readings invite us to ponder the conditions of their own existence as philosophical readings.