Hamletics – Shakespeare, Kafka, Beckett

One of Italy's best-known contemporary philosophers and leftists offers a literature-informed take on our contemporary political situation.

During the dramatic course of the twentieth century, amid the clash of the titans which marked that era, humanity could still think in terms of partisan struggles in which large masses took sides against one another. The new millennium, by contrast, appears to have opened under the guise of generalized insecurity, which pertains not only to the historical and social situation, or to one’s personal psychological predicament, but to our very being.

The Earth’s current faltering and the twilight of every convention that might govern it—where roles, images, and languages become confused by a lack of direction and distance—were already powerfully prophesied in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and later in the works of Kafka and Beckett. In Hamletics, Massimo Cacciari, one of Italy’s foremost philosophers and leftist political figures, establishes a dialogue between these fateful authors, exploring the relationship between European nihilism and the aporias of action in the present.