عنوان

Shakespeare's Citizen-Subject:

Number

LA5cz750n2

Title Proper

Shakespeare's Citizen-Subject:

General Material Designation

[Article]

First Statement of Responsibility

Lupton, Julia Reinhard

Title Proper by Another Author

Distracting the Gaze, Contracting the City: A Response to Christopher Pye

Text of Note

In an essay whose expansive conceptual vistas are brought to earth by a series of exquisite and pointed close readings, Christopher Pye argues that in Othello, we witness the twin births of "aesthetic ideology" (above, 425)-an art that takes itself as its own ground, without reference to an authorizing reality or prior Scripture-and the state as a formal entity, constituted on the rational autonomy of law rather than on the sovereign body-politic, conceived in organic and substantial terms. Both the modern state and the modern work of art share "circumscribed and unbounded form" (440): they stake their claims on the borders between their own territories and the world outside, not in order to limit but rather to infinitize their self-referential, self-grounding energies. Such systems, argues Pye (building on his fine book, The Vanishing 1) require a vanishing point, a punctual "nothing" that generates whole worlds of visibility and meaning around its negative vortex. In Othello, that vanishing point is occupied by the Moor himself, who becomes in Pye's brilliant reading of the disembarking at Cyprus "an indistinct regard" (Othello, 2.1.41), a figure who dissolves into the horizon anxiously scanned by those awaiting him on the shore, a vanishing repeated in the "bloody period" (5.2.356) that brings Othello's life to a close. 2 Othello's constitution as a subject depends on his simultaneous appearance within and eclipse by a grid of lateral relationships: ensign, lieutenant, and officer; senators and consuls; place and occupation, all "sequent messengers" (1.2.41) of citizenship's procedural flatlands. The citizen subject becomes universal, insofar as the particularities of his embodied and acculturated identity, the accreted insignia of kinship, cult, and culture, are translated into, and sometimes cancelled by, the protocols of legal belonging.

Date of Publication

2009

Title

UC Irvine

Electronic name

[Article]

277020

a

Y