Agora Talk by Dr P. Kishore Saval

Abstract

Ophelia calls Hamlet “Th’observed of all observers” (3. 1. 156). Ophelia’s line may mean that Hamlet is the most observed of all those who observe. Or it may mean that all observers observe him. But this remark interests me because of a phenomenological problem: that all observers are observed, even when they are alone. In fact, it is more precise to say that there is no such thing as observation at all, if by “observation” we mean a neutral, disinterested form of attention that does not partly constitute, and is not partly affected by, that upon which it attends. This simultaneous capacity to affect and be affected is actually a kind of divergence that opens the observer in two. In Hamlet, observers are divided from themselves because they are tangible from where they touch, visible from where they see, and hearable from where they speak. Although these reversible dimensions of our experience necessarily envelop one another, they can never coincide with one another. In this regard, Hamlet has an unexpected affinity with the thinking of Merleau-Ponty, whose entire later philosophy is dedicated to exploring “the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relationship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass.” In my talk, Merleau-Ponty reads Hamlet, and reversibly, Hamlet reads Merleau-Ponty, in order to explore what it means to make seeing visible. 

Bio

Kishore Saval is Senior Lecturer in the Western Civilisation Program at Australian Catholic University. Formerly, among other things, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He has a J.D. in law from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, and a Ph.D in English Literature from Harvard University. Among other things, he is the author of two books: Reading Shakespeare through Philosophy (Routledge, 2014), and Shakespeare in Hate (Routledge, 2016).