• Name: Shakespeare's Political Ontology (FFI2016-79341-P)
• Duration: 1 January 2017-31 December 2019
• Main researcher: Julián Jiménez Heffernan
• Researchers: Julián Jiménez Heffernan (one-person project)

Description:

The aim of this project is to describe in some detail what I call the "political ontology" underwriting Shakespeare's poetic and dramatic texts. Although ultimately derived from Bourdieu's use of the term, "political ontology" here designates a down-top organization of reality that, rooted in the lexical resources of Scholastic metaphysics, is available in the surface of the standard Shakespeare text. Only by examining in depth the logic that connects a handful of basic notions like "unity", "singularity", "nature", "change", "decay", "creature", "substance", "accident" or "multiplicity" can we place ourselves in a position to adjudicate on the vexed issue of Shakespeare's political vision. There have been several attempts at pinpointing the ground logic—the DNA, the ur-myth, or sociological condition--that gives a sense of unity to the entire Shakespeare textual corpus. My project, inspired in work by Lupton, Wilson, and post-Heideggerian philosophers, proposes a version of this logic that is not incompatible with some of the existing versions. In fact, I draw indistinctly on the work of critics as different as Hughes and Wilson in order to substantiate some of my points. By moving down-top from ontology to politics, I endeavor to run the gamut of fields (ontology-psychology-ethics-politics) that organize the standard reading of a Shakespeare play/poem. The novelty of my approach lies in its primary grip on ontology. Four basic concepts (singularity, creativity, fatality, community) articulate my reading. They are logically connected and move down-top towards higher degrees of formalization. Although only the fourth, community, is a decidedly political notion, Shakespeare's construal of creativity (based on language-or-money-mediated desire) and fatality (based often on mimetic triangulation) presuppose the political; singularity (the potestas of the unrepeatable creature) is moreover both the condition and the impossibility of the political.