Accountability and Responsibility of the Self:The Practices of Presentation and Representation in Shakespeare's Othello

Abstract

Prompted by the so-called Senate scene in which Othello tries to defend himself against Brabantio's accusation of stealing Desdomona, this article tries to trace how Othello activates the dynamics of representation and the represented past in his re-citational presentation of courting, and thereby attempts to identify accountability and responsibility of the self as the central concern of the play. This paper would argue that the play's investment in self-presentation is closely tied with its metatheatrical speculation on the presentational and representational power of dramatic text. A comparison of the Senate scene with others in the play, for example, reveals the fact that self-presentation is almost always a process of reflecting itself upon the other and thus refers itself to the fictionality of identity or the self in the making. Therefore, the gap becomes perceptible in between the process of representing and its product, which in turn calls into question the ways in which we legitimize the rationale of focusing on the self as a foundational idea. What is revealed in the discussion is that the issue of knowing one's self or the knowledge of self is inevitably contingent on the danger of méconnaissance in presentation and representation. Against this rather demystifying portrait of the self, the play seems to propose that what is central from the ethical perspective is not the authenticity of self but rather the responsibility of self. On this ground, this paper defines Othello as a tragedy about the danger and cost of knowing one's self which is always caught between the dynamics of presentation and representation and thus of recognition and misrecognition.