『햄릿』의 유령과 데리다

Abstract

By drawing on Derrida’s Specters of Marx, a book in which he meticulously reads Shakespearean creativity into the critique of the capitalist world of today, this essay addresses what the Ghost in Hamlet signifies, as it relates to the question of justice and language. The first part of the essay, following and reconstructing Derrida’s both explicit and implicit supposition on the Ghost, argues for the inextricable interdependence between the apparition of the Ghost and the idea of justice, while the second part examines the ways in which the Ghost's statement of his own identity implicates the ghostly nature of language. All in all, the essay makes two major points. First, Hamlet's fundamental problem is structured by the originary and necessary spacing between his idea of justice prompted by the Ghost and justice itself. Hamlet is the one that thinks over the ultimate impossibility of bringing justice to the world of corruption due to the paradoxical fact that he can justly act only by acting unjustly. He thinks and acts only in anguish, which stems from the fact that he is born homo ethicus. Second, language, especially in its function of calling for something or somebody into an identifiable being, sets the stage for the interplay between the present and the absent. Put another way, the difference between beings and non-beings begins to collapse, insofar as the mediation of language comes into play. It is in this aporetic moment that any statement, including the one that made by the Ghost, becomes ghostly; one ought to come up with meanings out of it in his or her own terms. This is what precisely Hamlet does, as he accepts the Ghost as his father's spirit, and subsequently verifies his statement. The ghost, something that always already exceeds any ontological determination, in other words, is what Hamlet lives and dies for. Hamlet is a tragedy of language-so much so that it is the one that simultaneously dramatizes the triumph and scandal of reason.