『베니스의 상인』과 바울이 정치신학
This paper was written with the recent interest of political philosophers, Alain Badiou and Georgio Agamben who called back St. Paul as revolutionary thinker providing the new possibility in the interrogation of alternatives to the crucial issues of contemporary politics. Besides, it was set down with an awareness that Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, though the literary representation of the conflict between the Christian and the Jew in Shakespeare times, needs to be reinterpreted to understand the incessantly repetitive religious dissension and violence even in the contemporary global world and to contrive the ethical practice in resistance to it. Badiou, in Saint Paul-The Foundation of Universalism, tries to attest the subject’s pursuit of the truth termed as ‘universal singularity’, severing from both the abstract homogeneity of the capital and the relativism of the fragmentation into closed identities. Agamben, in The Time That Remains-A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, regarding Paul’s ‘remaining time’ as messianic times, remarks on the ‘remnant’, the existence like the non-non-Jews who cannot be defined either as the Jews or as the non-Jews. The ‘remnant’ represent the impossibility of the Jews and the non-Jews to coincide with themselves; they are beings like the remnant between every people and itself, between every identity and itself. Badiou and Agamben’s understanding of the subject and the community has in common with Paul’s consideration of them as shown in Paul’s argument on the question of ‘circumcision’. Paul emphasizes the circumcision of the heart instead of the circumcision of the body which was used to divide the non-Jews from the Jews as grasped doctrinally, against the Jew-Christians who persisted in the traditional law of physical circumcision and insisted the circumcision of the body on the side of non-Jews. This circumcision reveals in various forms connoting several indications in The Merchant of Venice, starting with the contract between Shylock and Antonio, that is, Shylock’s cutting away of Antonio’s flesh as Antonio fails to pay back three thousand ducats within three months. But most of all, The Merchant of Venice has fruitful meaning as illuminated from the perspective of Paul’s circumcision of the heart, especially in relation with the implication of Antonio’s melancholy, his following masochism, and Shylock’s conversion into the Christian at the ending scene of the court.
Converting Cruelty and Constituting Community in Shakespeare's Venice: A Response to Drew Daniel
This brief essay responds to Drew Daniel's account of masochism and melancholia in The Merchant of Venice. Reading Daniel's account in the context of Venetian republicanism helps us see the political stakes of his argument and helps to uncover masochism's antipatriarchal and constitutive elements. It also helps us to understand interrelations between the sexual and political plots of Shakespeare's Venetian plays.
Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling
In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":