Z czaszką mu do twarzy: refleksje nad posthumanistyczną tożsamością Hamleta

• Authors: Monika Sosnowska

Title variants

EN

The skull becomes him: reflections on the post-humanist identity of Hamlet

Abstracts

EN

The purpose of my paper is to look at the dislocated world in Hamlet, the identity crisis of the title character, to accompany the anthropocentric Hamlet as he searches for ‘himself’ and attempts to reduce the dislocated joints and fractures in male anthropocentric subjectivity. In this paper, I advance the thesis that the plot of Hamlet is driven by a cultural fantasy of achieving organic unity and a state of homeostasis. To prove the thesis statement, I use the motif of out-of-jointness present in the drama and the graveyard scene in which I ‘look’ inside Yorick’s skull together with Hamlet in search of posthumanist masculinity. Looking at the skull and talking to it, the anthropocene Hamlet has a chance to discover several dimensions in it. Although head dissection will not be necessary for this, it will become necessary to dissect the masculine identity, being in humanist terms, a socio-cultural construct and a linguistic construction. The posthumanist vision of masculinity confronts the disembodied subject, the one that the humanist Hamlet should cope with and ‘embody’ according to the humanist pattern of masculinity. The impairment of its pillars is evident in Hamlet’s statements, provided one hears his holistic and organic vision of masculinity. The deconstruction of the anthropocentric order is a prerequisite for Hamlet’s identity crisis to be overcome, for him to reassemble himself and find his own place in the ‘broken’ skeleton of the world.

Keywords

EN

Hamlet; masculine identity; posthumanism; organicism; Shakespeare

• Publisher: Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego we Wrocławiu
• Journal: Didaskalia. Gazeta Teatralna
• Year: 2022
• Issue: 171
• Pages: 50-81

Dates

published

2022

Contributors

author

Monika Sosnowska

• Uniwersytet Łódzki

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.34762/3kw3-bp66

Biblioteka Nauki

2158941