Thin(k)ging Shakespeare

This review article examines three recent books which offer philosophical reflections on Shakespeare's texts: Colin McGinn's Shakespeare's Philosophy, Anthony Nuttall's Shakespeare as Thinker, and Tzachi Zamir's Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama. Taking as its points of departure Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis and Heideggerean philosophy, as well as Shakespearean stylistics, the article argues that, whereas the books examined approach the Shakespearean text with a rationalist and thematic conception of thinking as conscious and cognitive content, this conception is precisely what the Shakespearean text - in its being primarily a poetic work of art - objects to. Thrusting forth its style as object to thematization, making cognitive content leak, the Shakespearean text calls forth not thinking but thin(k)ging, a rememoration of an object always already lost.