Dismember Me: Shakespeare, Paranoia, and the Logic of Mass CultureAuthor(s): Linda CharnesSource: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 1-16Published by: Folger Shakespeare LibraryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2871398Accessed: 14/11/2008 13:55

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Dismember Me: Shakespeare, Paranoia, and the Logic of Mass Culture

LINDA CHARNES

Whatever we may be, for better or for worse, we are thus initially and "naturally" "idiots of the family."

Peter Sloterdijk

Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com'st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee.

Hamlet, 1.4.21-231

IN ENJOY YOUR SYMPTOM!JACQUES LACAN IN HOLLYWOOD AND OUT, Slavoj Zizek makes an intriguing link between a change that occurs in modern

detective fiction and the emergence of film noir. In a chapter entitled "Why Are There Always Two Fathers?" Zizek defines the difference between the "classical (logic-and-deduction) detective novel" and the "hard-boiled novel" largely as a change in the subjective universe of the detective:

. . . the logic-and-deduction novel still relies on the consistent big Other: the moment, at the novel's end, when the flow of events is integrated into the sym- bolic universe, narrativized, told in the form of a linear story (the last pages of the novel when, upon identifying the murderer, the detective reconstructs the true course of events), brings about an effect of pacification, order and consistency are reinstated, whereas the noir universe is characterized by a radical split, a kind of structural imbalance, as to the possibility of narrativization: the integration of the subject's position into the field of the big Other, the narrativizatidn of his fate, becomes possible only when the subject is in a sense already dead, although still alive, when 'the game is already over,' in short: when the subject finds himself at the place baptized by Lacan 'the in-between-two-deaths' (l'entre-deux-morts).2

This big Other, as Lacan defines it in his second Seminar, is that fantasmatic (non) Entity that doesn't " ex-sist" separately from the subject but nevertheless calls the subject into "the being of the other," into identification within the

symbolic order.3 It is that hypostatized phantom to whom we all address the

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1994 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, in November 1994.

1 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique-of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: U of Minne- sota P, 1987), 73. Quotations of Hamlet follow the Oxford Shakespeare Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

2 Slavoj Ziiek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 151.

3Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, Book

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constitutive question: " Che vuoi?" or "What is it that you want of me?"4 Purely structural-that is to say, devoid of any particular content-the big Other is effective only when misrecognized as an essential "being" that guarantees the existence of subjective and social formations. In patriarchal culture the place of the big Other may be occupied by God, King, Pope, Lord, Father- placeholders who quilt a paternal allegory over a fundamentally antagonistic social formation and call things to order and account within it.5 Such inter- pellations, however, can operate successfully only if the paternal metaphor remains neutral, or "in the background," as Zizek puts it. By holding itself in reserve, the big Other allows the subject to fantasize a site-always else- where-of absolute knowledge, authority, and control which organizes the subject's narrative integration into the social order, assigning him or her, as it were, a place in the story.

Against this "neutral" structuring paradigm, Zizek aligns the emergence of the noir universe with a disturbance in the field of the big Other, one that makes the mandates of identification ambiguous. This disturbance is brought about by the revelation of another father, a figure who emerges as "the obscene, uncanny, shadowy double of the Name of the Father":

... instead of the traditional father-guarantor of the rule of Law, i.e., the father who exerts his power as fundamentally absent, whose fundamental feature is not an open display of power but the threat of potential power-we obtain an ex- cessively present father who, as such, cannot be reduced to the bearer of a symbolic function.6

Whereas the classic (logic-and-deduction) detective may be worldly-wise and even cynical (Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, for example), he still sustains belief in the abstraction called "Law," and therefore can sustain our identification with his identification with the "paternal metaphor." The hard- boiled detective, however (represented by a figure such as Dashiell Ham- mett's Ned Beaumont), is a kind of blank page, offering the reader no stable point of affective entry because his universe is organized according to a dif- ferent logic: the logic of noir. At the origin of noir, Zizek points out, is the "humiliated father," "the paranoic Other," a figure who has sustained ir- reparable damage to his integrity and can no longer function as the guarantor of the symbolic and, consequently, of all the juridical, ethical, filial, and sexual organizations that derive from it.7 The nature of this "mutation in the pater- nal figure" is one of prurient pleasure, the obscene enjoyment that Lacan would claim always underwrites paternal Law. This second father-the "ob- scene father"-is first and foremost a "father who knows," and whose knowl- edge specifically is of the libidinal enjoyment that Law must disavow in order to maintain its unquestionable shape.8

II of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988), 155 and 72.

4 Cf. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 28.

5 Cf. Ziiek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York and London: Verso, 1989), 97-101 and passim.

6 Ziiek, Enjoy Your Symptom.!, 158. 7 Ziiek discusses these terms in Enjoy Your Symptom!I, 149. 8 Ziiek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 158-59. In the chapter "Why Are There Always Two Fathers?"

Ziiek mentions Hamlet only elliptically before returning to his discussion of Wagner's Parsifal.

SHAKESPEARE, PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 3

The bifurcation of detective fiction into two genres-classic and noir- forces the reader/audience to choose between contradictory relationships to symbolic authority and Law. The former offers a pragmatic or rationalist ethos, in which what matters most is the fact that a crime has been committed and a law breached, a condition of social anomaly which requires only detec- tion and punishment to set things right. The latter offers a paranoiac ethos, in which the fact of a particular crime is insufficient to explain what's really gone wrong and draws attention to a more pervasive social problem precisely by virtue of its lack of criminological "critical mass."

Although Zizek suggests that the elements of classic and noir detective fic- tions are mutually incompatible (presumably because, like oil and water, their foundational structures cannot bind), both forms, I wish to argue, descend from a single, even earlier genre: the revenge tragedy, a form of drama in which a revenger/detective discovers that a crime has been committed (usu- ally but not always against a father figure), uncovers the details, and sets out to bring the offender to justice. The nature of that justice may be harsh-the Law of the Father to which the classical revenger subscribes doesn't yet have to efface its foundational violence in Enlightenment notions of disinterested- ness. But in revenge tragedy (as in classic detective fiction) the authority of the paternal metaphor remains intact regardless of the violence loosed in its name, for it is underwritten by the patriarchal power encoded in every aspect of ancient and early modern life and therefore is not (overtly at least) called into question. The classical revenge play-whether Greek or Roman revenge tragedy, Heywood's translations of Senecan tragedy, or early modern trans- lations of the Oresteia- tends to offer a logic-and-deduction rationale that, no matter how violent or passionate, ultimately seeks to restore an ethical system based on structural checks and balances. And Renaissance revengers, despite the contradictions and incursions of Christian philosophy, are expected in the last instance to cease whining and get the job done.

The play that has for centuries most famously represented the revenge- tragedy "tradition" is, of course, Shakespeare's Hamlet, which, in terms of its popular or mass-cultural reception, has long been regarded as the classic Re- naissance revenge play. The play clearly inherits, deploys, and satirizes certain elements of Senecan and classical tragedy. At the same time, Hamlet has been read through centuries of critical reception as breaking with that tradition- indeed, as breaking with an already-established tradition of specifically En- glish revenge tragedy. Since among extant English plays that precede Hamlet (not including Gorboduc) there is only one-Kyd's Spanish Tragedy-that fits into the subgenre we call revenge tragedy, we are presented with an intriguing paradox. Did Shakespeare mean the play to depart from a logic-and- deduction formula that he presumed already existed for his audience? Or was he attempting something more radical: namely, to launch and simultaneously critique a logic-and-deduction tradition precisely by staging an epistemologi- cal break with it?9 What we can see is that, while there are few logic-

This seems to me to be a symptomatic near-oversight: Ziiek notices that the Ghost's knowledge "concerns a dark, licentious side of the father-king who is otherwise presented as an ideal figure" (159); yet, like Prince Hamlet himself, Ziiek proceeds to ignore the implications of this, arguing as he does that paranoiac noir emerges as a postwar phenomenon of the twentieth century (cf. 149-52 and passim).

9 In addition to her superb editorial suggestions, I am very grateful to Barbara Mowat for

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and-deduction revengers running around on the Renaissance stage before Shakespeare's Hamlet appears, the play acts as if there are, constructs the sub- jectivity of its protagonist as if there are, and constitutes an audience- ingenuously or disingenuously-that must consent (to paraphrase Frank Ker- mode) to "the sense of a tradition" in order to identify with the anguish of the protagonist.

Given the impossibility of determining exactly what the nature of audience expectation would be with regard to an already-existing revenge ethos, it would be more accurate to say that the play deliberately generates a tradition effect by counterposing Hamlet against other revengers within the play (For- tinbras; Laertes; and, in The Mousetrap, Lucianus) who do conform to a logic-and-deduction model. Presenting itself, then, as both prototype and changeling, Shakespeare's Hamlet stages exactly the kind of epistemological mortification that Lacan would argue necessarily vexes any tradition based on the unquestioned authority of patriarchal Law. In short, the history of the play's construction as a "classic" revenge tragedy within a "tradition" -in terms of both critical and popular reception-replicates the dilemma that Hamlet is forced to face within the play itself, and that is: where do we locate the origin of a problem that needs to be redressed? For in asking whether 'tis better to suffer the requirements of a paternal mandate to revenge a particu- lar crime or to take no arms against a more pervasive sea of troubles, Hamlet is asking no less a question than what kind of detective he is to be or not to be.

Which leads us back to the noir. If we accept Zizek's description of the noir universe, then we must conclude that Hamlet-and not Hammett-offers the first fully noir text in Western literature, and Prince Hamlet the first noir detective. Or, rather, the first noir revenger. Situating a plot-driven classical revenge tragedy within the recursive circularity and ethical indeterminacy that characterize noir, Shakespeare's Hamlet is modernity's inaugural paranoid text.'0 By "paranoia," however, I don't mean an individual pathology in which someone imagines conspiracies or has delusions of persecution but,

questioning my tacit assumption, in an earlier version of this essay, that there was on the English Renaissance stage a "tradition" of logic-and-deduction revenge drama which Hamlet broke with. Rather, as Mowat pointed out to me, very little textual evidence of a specifically English subgenre of revenge tragedy exists, apart from Kyd's play and the purported Ur-Hamlet. In our conversa- tions about this matter, we became fascinated that, in the light of this slim "tradition," not only readers and audiences but centuries of critics (myself included) had been convinced that Hamlet was breaking with a longstanding tradition, not because of anything much already out there on the English stage but because the play encourages us to identify so fully with Hamlet's own sense that he's not living up to established expectations. I hasten here to add that Mowat and I are in complete agreement that there was for Shakespeare, as for Kyd, a classical and Latin (Senecan) tradition of revenge tragedy that obviously made its presence felt on the Renaissance stage. But it seems at least as much a function of the play's legerdemain that we feel Hamlet to be diverging from a tradition of English revenge tragedy rather than inaugurating one.

For a thorough and useful discussion/analysis of the Western tradition of revenging, see John Kerrigan's rich study Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. chaps. 5-7. See also Louise Schleiner, "Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare's Writing of Hamlet," Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 29-48; and Fredson Thayer Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642 (1940; rpt. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959).

10 Terence Hawkes sheds brilliant light on the strange and layered recursivity or backward narratologic of Hamlet in " Telmah" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 310-32.

SHAKESPEARE, PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 5

rather, paranoia in the literal Greek sense as a form of "overknowing," of surplus knowledge that leads, paradoxically, not to discovery but to undecid- ability. In the noir universe the paranoid is a man who always-already "knows too much" about what's really going on. The noir detective is less concerned with historical events-with what happened-than he is with ontologies-with the way things are. If the classic detective wants "just the facts," for the noir detective "the facts" are always less relevant than the sinister effects of a re- ality that acquires paranoid dimensions precisely the more one learns about "the facts."

In Shakespeare's Hamlet the Ghost is a "father who knows" and whose knowl- edge threatens the status of the symbolic mandate he imposes upon his son. The content of this knowledge consists not only of the "harrow[ing]" secrets of his purgatorial prison-house but, more disturbingly, of his "enjoyment" of the "blossoms" of his sin, for which, he tells Hamlet, he is "confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away" (1.5.16, 76, 11-13). At once delivering the injunction to "Re- venge his foul and most unnatural murder" and revealing his own shadowy "double," the Ghost commands Hamlet to "Remember me" even as he makes the task impossible, speaking the paternal mandate from a corrupted enunciatory site that splits the integrity of the Law open to reveal its kernel of obscene enjoyment (11. 25, 91). "This," Zizek argues, "is what is ultimately at stake in the noir universe: the failure of the paternal metaphor ... the emer- gence of the obscene father who supplants the father living up to his symbolic function. al

This disclosure, incommensurable with the idealized image Hamlet wishes to sustain of his father, makes identification with the paternal figure impos- sible. Sensing an excessively obscene presence in the surround before he even encounters the Ghost, Hamlet is casting about for a local habitation, a con- crete cause. His ontological despair, already legible in his affective withdrawal from the "stale, flat, and unprofitable . . . uses of this world" (1.2.133-34), signals his inability to integrate himself into the symbolic order, into the "intersubjective, 'public' . . . space" that gives the subject his "ideal ego, the place from which he can see himself as someone 'who belongs.' "12 Hamlet attempts to respond to the Ghost's disclosure as a classic revenger, to gather facts in logic-and-deduction style. But the more he seeks to confirm the knowl- edge he already has of Claudius's guilt, the more he is paralyzed by the gravi- tational pull of another crime scene. For when the Ghost reveals the lurid details of his murder, he also makes "excessively present" to his son's imagi- nation images of his own lascivious body, taken in postprandial concupis- cence, "grossly, full of bread," and "barked about. . . with vile and loathsome crust" (3.3.80; 1.5.71-72). Hamlet's subsequent disavowal of this "second" father fuels, I would argue, his compulsive commitment to a logic-and- deduction style that the Ghost's disclosure should have rendered unnecessary.

In other words, Hamlet now has "the facts," at least insofar as he knows that Claudius has committed regicide, fratricide, usurpation, and "damned incest" (1. 83). But Hamlet cannot act on this knowledge because action is impossible in a noir universe where what is at stake is not a local crime but

I Ziiek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 159 - 60. 12 Ziiek, Enjoy Your Symptom!I, 152.

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rather the very status of the paternal logos itself. Unable to assume the sym- bolic existence that paternal identification confers but not yet physically dead, Hamlet (like the noir detective) finds himself entre-deux-morts, in the place "between two deaths." Incapable of narrativizing himself, of finding his place in the story, Hamlet literally "lack[s] advancement" (3.2.322). "The time is out of joint," he says, "0 cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!" (1.5.196-97). The shift from the classical to the noir universe instantiates a vertiginous jolt out of the sequential and into the synchronic. Within this multiplicitous miasma in which time cannot be accounted for, the whole meaning of solving a crime changes.

The figure of Claudius provides Hamlet with a temporary respite from the lassitude of noir, serving as the supplement who will embody the obscene enjoyment of the anal father. Like all good Derridean supplements, however, Claudius cannot contain everything he is supposed to stand for. There must be other sites of displacement. As Zizek points out,

The failure of the paternal metaphor ... renders impossible a viable, temperate relation with a woman; as a result, woman finds herself occupying the impossible place of the traumatic Thing. The femme fatale is nothing but a lure whose fasci- nating presence masks the true traumatic axis of the noir universe, the relation- ship to the obscene father, i.e., the default of the paternal metaphor.... The crucial point not to be missed here is that the femme fatale and the obscene- knowing father cannot appear simultaneously, within the same narrative space.'3

As long as the real obscene father hovers unacknowledged in the noir back- ground, Gertrude, as well as Ophelia, can take on for Hamlet the function of "traumatic Thing." With a circuit of disavowal which runs from the obscene father to Claudius to Gertrude to Ophelia to Gertrude and finally back to Claudius, we see Hamlet's desperate efforts to construct himself as a classic revenger in a world where corruption, crime, licentiousness, and decay can be seen everywhere but in the place of the Father.

For in Shakespeare's play, the King may be a thing that demands, but the King must not be a thing that enjoys. If he enjoys, he becomes a different kind of thing, something that produces noir paranoia because his authority is no longer guaranteed by disinterestedness. It is, therefore, no accident that in Shakespeare's play the only cure for the noir must come from outside the social formation, in the form of exogenous rule. Fortinbras (a true logic-and- deduction type) enters after the occupants of the noir universe are all dead. And his way will be paved not by Hamlet's "election" (5.2.66) but by Hora- tio's mediation. Charged by Hamlet with the task of telling Fortinbras "the occurrents, more and less, / Which have solicited" (11. 310-11), Horatio- the literally nominated voice-of-reason(s)-has an impossible task. In the noir universe the story exists only in the gaps between causes and effects-a space that Horatio's philosophy cannot cope withal. Hamlet's story, such as it is, takes place in the interstices of an intersubjectivity that the play always already debars.'4 No one in this play "knows" anyone else; and it is precisely this missing "intersubjective" knowledge, and not "occurrents" or events,

13 Ziiek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 159- 60. 14 I have discussed constructions of modernity and the role of Habermassian mediation in

Hamlet and the Henriad in "William's Excellent Adventure: Shakespeare in the Age of Virtual History," presented at the 1996 World Shakespeare Congress in Los Angeles, California.

SHAKESPEARE, PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 7

that constitutes Hamlet as a noir tragedy. While Hamlet would, perhaps, have been better served by Habermas than by Horatio, the state of Denmark is best served by the latter, whose efforts can result only in a crude translation of a noir tragedy into a "classical" detective fiction-into a story of what "really" happened, both "more and less." By presenting us in Hamletwith two-fathers- in-one, Shakespeare undermines the structure of the social by making it impossible to separate the excrescences of paternal Law from those of state politics. There can be in Shakespeare's world no decay of the paternal logos which does not also dismember the body politic and erode the foundational authority of the state. With Horatio's "translation," then, the humiliated father may be erased, along with the subjectively mortified son, and paternal Law can be reinstated for a more suitable defender.

II

A letter always reaches its destination. Jacques Lacan

A letter sometimes (never) doesn't reach its destination. Jacques Derrida15

If Shakespeare's Hamlet maps out the social and subjective indeterminacies of noir paranoia long before Ned Beaumont is even a gleam in Dashiell Hammett's eye, Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 film version attempts to return the play to the world of classical revenge, plucking out the heart of the play's mystery by restoring the father to his proper place through the "classical" psychoanalytic logic of Oedipus. The very casting of the film initiates the oedipal feint before its action even begins, performing what Barbara Klinger has called the "inferential walk." Urging the inclusion of all of a film's "di- gressive" production processes in our interpretation of its significance as a cultural product, Klinger argues that "films circulate as products, not in a semantic vacuum, but in a mass cultural environment teeming with related commercial significations." This "adjacent territory," as Klinger calls it, is constituted by epiphenomena-promotion, advertisements, star interviews, and spin-off product lines-that "create not only a commercial life-support system for a film, but also a socially meaningful network of relations around it which enter into reception. "16 The territory also includes what I call the cultural logic of commodity casting: celebrities who already exist in the cul- ture as signifying products, beyond the formal boundaries of their respective "texts." This is how commodity casting instantiates the "inferential walk," a term Klinger borrows from Umberto Eco's semiotic theory of intertextuality. According to Eco, such "walks" occur when "the reader digresses to gather the intertextual support necessary to decipher a moment within the narra- tive."17 Within the narrative of Zeffirelli's Hamlet, the oedipalism is literally encrypted in the film's opening scenes in the family tomb, a moment that

15 Lacan, 205; and Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987).

16 Barbara Klinger, "Digressions at the Cinema: Commodification and Reception in Mass Culture" in Modernity and Mass Culture, James Naremore and Patrick Brandinger, eds. (Bloom- ington: Indiana UP, 1991), 117-34, esp. 119. I am indebted to Courtney Lehmann for bringing Klinger's article to my attention.

17 Klinger in Naremore and Brandinger, eds., 130.

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becomes instantly legible in mass-cultural terms as oedipalized solely on the basis of the audience's inferences about the stars' prior filmic incarnations as oedipally signifying products.

Mel Gibson, already familiar to cult audiences as Mad Max and to mass audiences as Lethal Weapon's Sergeant Riggs, has built a career playing char- acters "made ... mad" by marriages: in Road Warrior he's a postapocalyptic policeman out to revenge the murder of his wife. In the Lethal Weapon series he plays yet another policeman who has lost his wife to murder. Riggs is considered mad because his gonzo police methods suggest a "fatal attrac- tion" to suicide. By the time Gibson makes it into Zeffirelli's Hamlet, he is used to playing characters who curse spite for bearing him to set things right.18 And Glenn Close's roles, first as the "radiant angel" mother in The World According to Garp, The Natural, and The Big Chill and then as the sexual predator Alex in Fatal Attraction, more than insures her "inferential walk" to Elsinore as Ger- trude."9 Zeffirelli's choice of actors to play the roles of Hamlet and Gertrude effects a cinematic intertextuality which guarantees that the audience will see through the lens of what Deleuze and Guattari have called "holy familialism."20

In their complex argument, which I cannot do justice to here, Deleuze and Guattari contend that the psychoanalytic implementation of the oedipal tri- angle-"daddy-mommy-me"-has generated a dogma that has become tan- tamount to a kind of imperialism, one in which every form of cultural desire can and, in their argument, must, for the logic of capitalism to work, be forced into the restraints of a simultaneously desirous and renunciatory struc- ture. Their case against psychoanalytic theory-made on the basis of its re- striction/constriction of forms of desire to an oedipally overdetermined set of limits-is crucial to my discussion less for its critique of psychoanalysis within the "holy family" than for the way it uncovers how "holy familialism" sup- ports not only modes of capitalist production but, more important, its relations of reproduction. By telling us what it is we "really" want and then insisting that we must renounce it for a simulacrum that will forever be "not it," psycho-

18 Gibson continues this pattern in the recent Braveheart, a film in which the character he plays, William Wallace, is spurred by the slaughter of his Scottish bride to lead a suicidal rebellion against English occupiers.

19 Barbara Hodgdon has made a similar observation about the cultural logic of the film's casting, in which she reads Gibson's body from the point of view of a female spectator/consumer; for a wonderful meditation on the commercial uses and visual deployments of male bodies, see her "The Critic, the Poor Player, Prince Hamlet, and the Lady in the Dark" in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, Russ McDonald, ed. (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1994), 259-93, esp. 282-88.

20 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), chap. 2 and passim. For several brilliant, psychoanalytically oriented discussions of Hamlet which avoid the rigid limitations outlined by Deleuze and Guattari's cri- tique, see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Roudedge, 1992), 11-37; Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as uncanny causality (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 124-76; and Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1986), 178-235. To this list I would also add Jacques Derrida, whose meditation on Hamlet and Shakespeare in chapter 1 of specters of marx is far more Lacanian in spirit than perhaps he would wish to admit ("specters of Lacan," we might even say, given that Lacan's name appears nowhere in the text while Freud's is often invoked); see Derrida, specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Roudedge, 1994), 3-48, esp. 18-42.

SHAKESPEARE, PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 9

analysis underwrites late capitalism by guaranteeing the perpetual inadequacy of the very substitutive or fetishistic objects it offers, insuring that in the process of "satisfying" desires, the underlying "universal" structure of desire remains based on a lack or "castration." Thus the desiring subject, in the repetition-compulsion that capitalist production depends on, is forever seek- ing to find what it is he or she "really" wants while remaining permanently debarred from the possibility of ever attaining it.

This is precisely the materially systemic oedipalism to which Zeffirelli's Hamlet subscribes. Through the cultural logic of commodity casting, his film propagates the particular form of "desiring production" which most success- fully underwrites late capitalism:21 one in which we are all "initially and 'naturally' 'idiots of the family.' " To begin with, Zeffirelli cuts the play's crucial opening scene, eliminating Marcellus's question about why the "strict and most observant watch / So nightly toils the subject of the land" (1.1.71- 72) and Horatio's answer about Fortinbras and the threat of war. In fact, Fortinbras drops out of Zeffirelli's version altogether. The action, therefore, will portend not "strange eruption[s]" to the "state" (1. 69) but strange eruptions in the family romance. While Shakespeare's play opens, in murky and amorphous darkness, with a sentinel asking the classic paranoid ques- tion-"Who's there?"-Zeffirelli's film begins with a scene of his own devis- ing, one almost orificial in its constriction, within a womblike sepulchre, of Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude around the open casket of the dead king. As all three stand contemplating the corpse, the first words in the film are spoken by Claudius directly to the young prince: "think of us / As of a father" (1.2.107-8). There is no court in Zeffirelli's version to witness Claudius's words, no sense that they are being performed for a social audience and for politic reasons. The effect of such privatizing is to render the scene claustro- phobically oedipal, with Claudius (played by a sanguine and overfed Alan Bates) looming as the "excessively present" obscene father.

In Shakespeare's play we see the king only as ghost, never as corpse. How- ever, by "producing the body" of the deacd king in the casket, Zeffirelli him- self operates like a classical detective.22 As Zizek notes, in detective fiction the corpse functions as a link among individuals, uniting them as a group.23 In Zeffirelli's film the corpse constitutes a nuclear-family-from-Hell, efficiently scored by Claudius's like-a-father refrain. Although Hamlet will, much later in the film, encounter the Ghost on the battlements, the effect here of displaying the corpse is to neatly separate the gross materiality of the king from its spectral remainder. While in the play we first encounter the Ghost upright in his "fair and warlike form," terrifyingly mobile and dressed in armor "cap- a-pie" (1.1.47; 1.2.200), in Zeffirelli we get the father first as mere "mat- ter" -horizontal and inert-a body without desire, without any trace of "vile and loathsome crust," and clearly incapable of "foul crimes." Zeffirelli cin- ematically redistributes the "two fathers"-which in the noir bifurcate from the same figure-between the Ghost, who becomes the in-reserve, withdrawn father, guarantor of paternal Law, and Claudius, who becomes the "obscene- knowing father."

21 See Deleuze and Guattari, chap. 2 and passim. 22 I am indebted to Courtney Lehmann for this brilliant observation. 23 Cf. Copjec, Shades of Noir: A Reader (London: Verso, 1993), 167-97.

10 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

By cleaning up the king's body and downloading the "other" father into Claudius, Zeffirelli offers Oedipus as the logic-and-deduction answer to what in Shakespeare's play is a noir question. In Zeffirelli's version it is Claudius who looks "grossly ... full of bread" and not the Ghost (played with St. Thomas More-like probity by Paul Scofield), who appears wan, gaunt, and elderly. Taking Hamlet's words literally- "My father, in his habit as he lived!" (3.4.130)-Zeffirelli's Ghost is dressed austerely in a monk's habit. In this way the film defenestrates the obscene-knowing aspect of the Father, retaining only an ascetic hologram that diverts our attention from the contradiction inherent in the paternal signifier.

By offering up Claudius as the anal father manque, Zeffirelli underwrites Hamlet's own "necessary route through misrecognition."24 The "question- able shape" of the Ghost in Shakespeare's play becomes in Zeffirelli's film the unquestionable shape of Claudius's desire, as he-and not the Ghost-is assigned the role of "Master of Enjoyment." In Shakespeare's play, Claudius functions as Hamlet's identified symptom-the site at which the knowledge of "fenjoyment," or the unseemly pleasure of "foul crimes," can be imagined without the subjective destitution of disidentification with the paternal. But in literalizing this symptomology, Zeffirelli falls for Shakespeare's own oedipal feint, taking it for the truth of Hamlet's desire by crudely parading it in the vaudevillian winks, heated glances, passionate kisses, and lubricious encoun- ters between Gibson's Hamlet and Close's Gertrude.

Encouraged by Zeffirelli to cast our lot with the lad, we too can direct our loathing toward a corrupt Claudius because, while he may be lewd, he doesn't inspire paranoia, since (after all) he doesn't know anything that we don't know. His obscenity-predicated on the readily comprehensible and ulti- mately banal motivations of ambition, lust, and envy- can be contained within the confines of his overblown body. Neither spectral nor noir, it doesn't threat- en the integrity of the symbolic order because we know what his enjoyment is about. We can attribute it, as Hamlet does, to a corrupt individual, leaving the paternal metaphor, the symbolic order, and by extension the state respectfully intact. Reassuring the audience by getting us to "enjoy" Hamlet's symptom as our own, Zeffirelli instructs us about what everyone in the play "really" wants. By substituting oedipal organization for the terrifying ontological indetermi- nacy of noir, Zeffirelli eliminates the paranoia induced precisely when Oedi- pus fails to overdetermine the subject-positions of its "members." As Deleuze and Guattari have put it,

Oedipus is ... only the represented, insofar as it is induced by repression. Re- pression cannot act without displacing desire, without giving rise to a consequent desire, all ready, all warm for punishment, and without putting this desire in the place of the antecedent desire on which repression comes to bear in principle or in reality ["Ah, so that's what it was! "I]Y 25

In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet's "consequent desire" -"all ready, all warm for punishment"-is to kill Claudius and get him out of his mother's bed. But his "antecedent desire," repressed under the sign of Oedipus, is to ask the one question that sits, unenunciated but brooding, over the vast abyss: and that is,

24 ZiMek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 63. 25 Deleuze and Guattari, 115.

SHAKESPEARE, PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 1I1

what, exactly, were those "foul crimes" committed in your days of nature? What did Daddy do?

Looking for lack in all the wrong places, Zeffirelli sutures what Shake- speare's play has rent asunder, curing the paranoia of noir with the more secure discomforts of Oedipus, which can themselves be cured by returning subjects to their proper relation to "desiring production." As Deleuze and Guattari claim, "Oedipus is completely useless, except for tying off the un- conscious on both sides."26 But this, of course, is everything-if what's at stake is tying the tourniquet of paternal Law on the pulsive sites of the sub- ject's resistant body. Consequently, the recursiveness of Hamlet, like that of noir, is corrected in Zeffirelli's version by the orthopedic telos of Oedipus; and Hamlet is transformed into an "orthopsychic subject," "straightened out" by his acceptance of what it was he "really" wanted.27

III

"Old dad dead?" The Revenger's Tragedy, 5.1.11228

Thus Zeffirelli's Hamlet reinstalls the father at the top of a hierarchy that guarantees the stability of the paternal metaphor and the unquestionable nature of paternal Law. But there is another, comedic version of Hamlet, also produced for mass culture in 1990, that doesn't take the name of Shake- speare's play. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the "something in Hamlet more than Hamlet"29 and is, in its particular form of meconnaissance, more true to the noir spirit of Shakespeare's Hamlet than Zeffirelli's "tragic" version. This is Steve Martin's L.A. Story, a film that is arguably the paradigmatic postmod- ern Hamlet. The movie begins with the edited words of another Shakespear- ean father, John of Gaunt (from Richard II), who is soon to join the ranks of the dead:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This happy breed of men, this little world,

26 Deleuze and Guattari, 81. i 27 According to Copjec, the orthopsychic subject is "the scientific subject ... constructed by

the institution of science, . . . it is always thereby obliged to survey itself, its own thinking, not subjectively, not through a process of introspection to which the subject has privileged access, but objectively, from the position of the scientific institution" (Read My Desire, 27).

Initially posited by Bachelard, this "objective relation to the self" is precisely what gives rise to the sense of something hidden or secret to the self/observing subject, an uneasy (guilty?) sus- picion that there is something else that the subject always "really" wants that hovers just beyond the ken of the scientific institution's instruments of surveillance. Oedipus, then, in Deleuze and Guattari's formulation, provides this something else, this secret desire that the orthopsychic subject can then renounce in order to achieve its "proper" consistency.

28 Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), reprinted in Drama of the English Renaissance II: The Stuart Period, Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin, eds. (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 21-54, esp. 51. Gravest thanks to Bryan Loughrey for this reference.

29 Cf. Ziiek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 76-84, esp. 76.

12 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

This precious stone set in the silver sea, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Los Angeles.

Narrated against the image of a fitness park, these lines celebrate a utopian Los Angeles that is, in its luminosity, the opposite of a rank and rotten Den- mark. Of course, the "original" dramatic context of these lines is one of admonishment, asJohn of Gaunt addresses an unruly "son" (Richard II) who is bankrupting the kingdom. Richard's response to the dying Gaunt, who uses his own name in a series of grim puns on the starving state of England, is contemptuous: "can sick men play so nicely with their names?" This son has no wish to be bothered by the injunctions of fathers.

In L.A. Story the lines are imported while their site of enunciation (a dying father predicting disaster for the state) is jettisoned. The protagonist of the film, Martin's character Harris K. Telemacher, isn't bothered by parents-he has no father in the film, and his mother, whom we never see or hear, exists only telephonically as a number programmed into his automatic voice-dial machine. And yet, even without the burden of parents, Harris finds himself brooding over his condition. In one of his many soliloquies, he tells us: "I was deeply unhappy, but I didn't know it because I was so happy all the time." Like Hamlet, Harris lacks advancement. Overeducated and philosophically inclined (he has a Ph.D. in "Arts and Humanities"), he works as a television weatherman, reporting the- "wacky weekend weather." Humiliated by the need to put on an "antic disposition" to keep ratings up, his life, he says (momentarily lapsing into Macbeth), is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

In other words, Harris suffers from the postmodern equivalent of Hamlet's ontological despair: he is, he writes in boldface on his living-room window, "Bored Beyond Belief." One night as he drives home from yet another shal- low social event with his vain girlfriend, his car stalls on the side of the freeway. As he checks under the hood, he is "hailed" by a huge electronic signpost that normally broadcasts traffic bulletins:

SIGNPOST HIYA. I SAID HIYA. ... RUOK? ...

HARRS Who are you ? SIGNPOST I'M A SIGNPOST...

I C PEOPLE N TROUBLE & I STOP THEM ... L.A. WANTS 2 HELP U ... U WILL KNOW WHAT 2 DO WHEN U UNSCRAMBLE... HOW DADDY IS DOING... ITS A RIDDLE ...

HARRIS Whose Daddy? Who's Daddy?

Like Hamlet, Harris knows he has been given a wakeup call to change his life; but he is unable to make any sense out of the signpost's riddle because he literally cannot remember Daddy ("Who's Daddy?"). So he procrastinates and attempts to ignore the injunction.

It isn't until later in the film, in an almost verbatim replay of the gravedig- ger's scene, that the Hamlet motif openly emerges to remind him (and us) that there is something to be, or not to be, re-membered. Harris and his new, suitably British love, Sarah, are strolling through a cemetery, where they

SHAKESPEARE, PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 13

happen on a gravedigger (fittingly played by Rick Moranis, of Ghostbusters and Honey I Shrunk the Kids fame). Hard upon an exchange of questions and answers that come (with slight modernizing) from Hamlet, 5.1, the gravedig- ger produces a Yorick-like skull. Harris asks whose it is and is told "the magician, the Great Blunderman." "The Great Blunderman," Harris says, "I knew him. He was a funny guy." Sarah quickly and gamely enters into the Hamlet scenario, reciting the proper lines and playing Horatio to Harris's Hamlet. It is her ability to "remember" the play at this moment that leads Harris to realize that he is in love with her.30 At the end of the film, after all the comedic obstacles to their love have been magically removed, they are ineluctably drawn back to the signpost, for its riddle remains to be solved. While Harris is perplexed, Sarah takes one look at "HOW DADDY IS DO- ING" and recognizes it as a word scramble, or "jumble." She rearranges the order of the letters until a new message materializes: "I know what it is," she says, " 'Sing Doo Wah Diddy.' "

Reversing the ordinary logic of a "jumble," which usually begins with a nonsense statement that unscrambles into sense, solving this riddle literally means making nonsense of the question of how Daddy is doing. Indeed, it means dissolving Daddy altogether, not only at the level of the signified ("Whose Daddy? Who's Daddy?") but at the level of the signifier: Daddy becomes Diddy. "Hailed" by an injunction from a sign that is ghostly yet no ghost (since it isn't the spectral remainder of a particular person), Harris is interpellated by a big Other that is entirely benevolent: "L.A. WANTS 2 HELP U." While it poses a question about the father, it is neither from nor of the father, since the question is never meant to be answered. In this way Hamlet's ontological dilemma-how to reassemble a particular father who is in fact two fathers-one a "Hyperion" and the other an obscene Thing-becomes, in Steve Martin's postmodern version, a categorical dilemma (Who is Daddy?) solved by eliminating the paternal signifier altogether.

"Remember me" becomes "Dismember me" as the film celebrates a post- modern subjectivity that requires nothing from the father; and, more impor- tant, the father requires nothing from the subject because he's no longer there. Neither noir nor classical, spectral nor oedipal, this big Other makes no demands (apart, that is, from the signpost's demand for a HUG). Purely structural, it has no content, no message, and consequently offers a kind of benign paranoia, in the sense that something is still watching over you but its answer to the " Che vuoi ?" or "What is it that you want of me?" is utterly banal. When Harris asks the signpost if there's anything he can do for it by way of thanks, it replies, "I'D LIKE TO GET CABLE TV."

In L.A. Story, Harris isn't faced with what kind of detective to be because if Daddy is Diddy, he needn't ask either what did Daddy do or how Daddy is doing. The oedipal logic-and-deduction approach that characterizes Zeffirel- li's "cure" of Hamlet is in L.A. Story irrelevant because there is nothing to find out and no one to find it out about. Harris himself seems baffled by it all at the end, as he says to the signpost: "Sing Doo Wah Diddy? That's the mystery

30 H. R. Coursen has made a similar point about the romantic effect of this moment in Martin's film in his discussion of different film and videotape treatments of the gravedigger's scene from Hamlet; see "Alas, Poor Yorick!" in Watching Shakespeare on Television (Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993), 57-69, esp. 67-68. I am grateful to Coursen for bringing his work to my attention.

14 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

of the ages?" The signpost replies, "THERE ARE MORE THINGS N HEAVEN AND EARTH, HARRIS, THAN ARE DREAMT OF N YOUR PHI- LOSOPHY." But as Deleuze has remarked in Difference and Repetition,

On the one hand a philosophy ought to be a very particular kind of crime story, and on the other hand it should resemble science fiction. By crime story (roman policier) we mean that concepts should intervene, driven by a zone of presence, in order to resolve a local situation.31

In the "philosophy" of Steve Martin's postmodern Hamlet, the particular crime is not the murder of the father but the dismemberment, and subse- quent disbursal, of the Name of the Father. But unlike the noir of Shake- speare's Hamlet, the "concept" of L.A. Story is driven not by an obscene "zone of presence" but by a conspicuous zone of absence, one that does, it turns out, "resemble science fiction" insofar as its efforts to disavow its own "local situation" represent a fantasy that will soon lead to an intervention on an- other stage.

Beginning with the elegiac words of a dying father, L.A. Story ends, like Shakespeare's John of Gaunt, by playing nicely with the name. The solution to the signpost's riddle lays bare the fact that the symbolic itself is based on nonsense: on an arbitrary imposition of power that has no essential or original foundation. This elimination of what Terence Hawkes has called "paternal overkill' '32 has several advantages, not the least of which is that it permits a fantasy of romantic love to triumph. While Hamlet's disavowal of his own obscene father launches a great chain of displacement that leads to Ophelia's death, in L.A. Story Harris gets to have his Ophelia and keep her, too. Unlike the noir universe, in which "the failure of the paternal metaphor ... renders impossible a viable, temperate relation with a woman," in L.A. Story we have not paternal failure but foreclosure; consequently, romance supplants the political as the structuring principle of this imaginary universe, organized not by the demands of the symbolic but by the atemporal logic of the mirror stage ("Harris" and "Sarah" are phonetic reversals of each other, almost a palin- drome).

I want to emphasize, however, that the problem Shakespeare's Hamlet poses-the revelation of obscene enjoyment at the heart of paternal Law- cannot be cured by Steve Martin's translation of noir to blanc. For it is no accident that the racial and socioeconomic world represented in L.A. Story is almost entirely white and upper-middle class. Its "science-fiction" fantasy of a social order blissfully united by singing "Doo Wah Diddy" is also one of a world without the need for police. In it the subject is not accountable to any Law other than that, perhaps, of the fascist maitre d' of the restaurant L'Idiot, who insists on seeing a bank statement before he'll take your dinner reserva- tion; and crime, stripped of its racial and class antagonisms, seamlessly con- verges with the middle-class "lifestyle" as customers and muggers line up at the Ready Teller Machine-"Hi, my name is Bob, I'll be your robber."

Meanwhile, the real Los Angeles occupies the "space-off," to use Teresa de Lauretis's term, of L.A. Story: what the film points to, by excluding, just beyond

31 Deleuze, quoted in Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania (Lincoln and Lon- don: U of Nebraska P, 1992), 64.

32 Hawkes in Parker and Hartman, eds., 316.

SHAKESPEARE, PARANOIA, AND THE LOGIC OF MASS CULTURE 15

its cinematic frame.33 The film's vision of a white, prosperous L.A. that op- erates "on its own" is based on a denial of the fundamental antagonisms (and their obscene enjoyments) that constitutively fracture the social formation.34 However "light" Martin's version of Hamlet may seem, its relief is apotro- paic-a bulwark against the racial and class conflicts that in 1990 were mak- ing Los Angeles, and American culture more generally, a pressure cooker ready to explode.

Ultimately, Martin's film offers a fantasy of unaccountability-both to the Law and, most importantly, of the Law. It is also no accident that L.A. Story was released virtually on the eve of the Rodney King beating.35 The film may eliminate the problem of the two fathers by replacing Daddy with Diddy, but the enjoyment that underwrites paternal Law reappears with a vengeance outside its frame, in Stacy Koon and the other "law-enforcement officers" who clearly took obscene pleasure in showing Rodney who was really King. As Zizek puts it, "we fear the policeman insofar as he is not just himself ... that is to say, insofar as he is experienced as the stand-in for the big Other, for the social order."36

The moment that the stand-ins for the big Other reveal their enjoyment is the moment we enter the noir. And in the noir universe the personal is always the political. As Shakespeare clearly demonstrates in Hamlet (and as Zeffirelli and Martin refuse to acknowledge in their versions), every "idiot of the fam- ily" is also an idiot of the state. Noir paranoia may infect individuals, but it originates in the structure of the symbolic and its articulation of the social. If there are always two fathers, then the noir paranoid is always right. By substi- tuting a comedic narrative that ends in nonsense for the destitution inflicted by the obscene father's "terms compulsative," L.A. Story answers Hamlet's "To be or not to be" with "Don't worry, be happy." But Martin's upbeat Hamlet exhibits the same fetishistic disavowal that will lead, a few years later, to the acquittal of the policemen who brutalized Rodney King and to the

' 33 I am deeply indebted to Carolyn A. Mitchell for conversations about the racial implications of L.A. Story, which were instrumental in helping me formulate my conclusions about the mass- cultural symptomology that underwrites Martin's postmodern Hamlet. I also thank her for bring- ing Teresa de Lauretis's concept of the "space-off" to my attention. See Mitchell's sharp analysis of the televisual choreography of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings in "Choicelessness as Choice: The Conflation of Racism and Sexism" in Discovering Difference: Contemporary Essays in American Culture, Christoph K. Lohmann, ed. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993), 189-201, esp. 190-91; and de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987), 26.

34 Ziiek's claim that "Society doesn't exist" derives from the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who argue that the social formation doesn't transcend or exist in despite of fractures and antagonisms but, rather, is constituted precisely by these "fundamental antago- nisms"; see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1985), passim.

35 I refer here of course to the notorious 1990 incident in which four Los Angeles police officers savagely beat Rodney King, an African American whom they had chased and stopped for erratic driving. Unbeknownst to the police, a witness made a videotape of the beating, which, when broadcast on television, horrified the nation and the world. Two years later, when the officers were finally brought to trial on a charge of excessive force, an all-white jury in Simi Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles (in the "space-off" of Los Angeles, we might say), acquitted them. This triggered the worst racial riots in Los Angeles since those of the 1960s. In the aftermath the two main offenders were convicted of violating King's civil rights.

36 Ziiek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993), 234.

16 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

subsequent L.A. riots: a logic that attempts to ignore the debts that the social subject cannot-without disastrous consequences-avoid. If Shakespeare's Hamlet makes us ask what Daddy did before telling us that the rest is silence, L.A. Story asks us how Daddy is doing before trying to convince us that the rest is nonsense.

Finally, if the "beyond-reproach" paternal metaphor always contains its own obscene double, we must ask what happens when a culture no longer believes, however fetishistically, in the integrity of the paternal logos. To raise this question is not to nostalgize for a time when we all believed (if we ever believed) that father knows best. Rather, it is to observe the increasing diffi- culty the placeholders of paternal authority have in hiding their own obscene doubles, whether they are presidents of nations, of savings-and-loans, junk- bond kings, supreme-court justices, political-party leaders (or strategists), fed- eral judges, angst-ridden filmmakers, priests, police officers, or football he- roes. It is not for nothing that currently the most famous fathers in American mass culture are both absurd "masters" of enjoyment: the crude Al Bundy of "Married With Children" and the moronic Homer Simpson. Perhaps even more alarming than Zizek's notion of two fathers is the possibility that there might be only one left-the obscene father, the excrescence of a paternal logos that has deconstructed itself from the inside out.

One thing, however, seems clear: the paternal metaphor can no longer proclaim itself the guarantor of Law because it cannot sustain the fiction of its own disinterestedness. It cannot help but reveal the pleasure it takes in its experience of arbitrary entitlement at the very sites where it proclaims itself "beyond reproach." The noir, detective learns to his disgust that the local crimes he uncovers originate in the very law that authorizes his actions-that the Name of the Father covers over a metastatic corruption that reproduces its crimes at precisely the same moment and in precisely the same way that it reproduces its authority. To wit, a preposterously illuminating anecdote: On 9 September 1994 Vladimir Zhirinovsky announced to the Russian news agency Interfax that he had a plan "to combat Russia's declining birth rate: He personally will father a child in every region of Russia in the coming year. Zhirinovsky, the fax stated, had given orders "to ensure that at least one child by the chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia personally [that is, himself] be born in each regional branch of the LDPR in 1995." It seems natural that, having posed naked in the shower for photographers, spread- eagled in the sauna, leering at strippers and cavorting with prostitutes (see the Sunday New York Times Magazine, 19 June 1994), Zhirinovsky should offer to repopulate Russia "himself." Crudely conflating the personal with the politi- cal by eliding the metaphoricity of political office -the fact that all politicians are placeholders-Zhirinovsky gives new meaning to the concept of the Fa- therland. At a time when such a figure stands poised, among others to be sure, as a New World Master of fascist enjoyment, we cannot rope him off as merely an individual aberration. Rather, he should be seen as the obscene double of our own leaders, whose "terms compulsative" mandate a new world order structured as a forced choice. If we accept the proposition that there are always two fathers, then we can discern within postmodern diplomacy's paternalistic insistence on global free enterprise what Shakespeare's prophetic soul fore- shadowed in Hamlet: the emergence of the Noir World Order.