The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern CultureDuke University Press, 2000 - 199 pages In The Vanishing Christopher Pye combines psychoanalytic and cultural theory to advance an innovative interpretation of Renaissance history and subjectivity. Locating the emergence of the modern subject in the era's transition from feudalism to a modern societal state, Pye supports his argument with interpretations of diverse cultural and literary phenomena, including Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear, witchcraft and demonism, anatomy theaters, and the paintings of Michelangelo. Pye explores the emergence of the early modern subject in terms of a range of subjectivizing mechanisms tied to the birth of a modern conception of history, one that is structured around a spatial and temporal horizon--a vanishing point. He also discusses the distinctly economic character of early modern subjectivity and how this, too, is implicated in our own modern modes of historical understanding. After explaining how the aims of New Historicist and Foucauldian approaches to the Renaissance are inseparably linked to such a historical conception, Pye demonstrates how the early modern subject can be understood in terms of a Lacanian and Zizekian account of the emerging social sphere. By focusing on the Renaissance as a period of remarkable artistic and cultural production, he is able to illustrate his points with discussions of a number of uniquely fascinating topics--for instance, how demonism was intimately related to a significant shift in law and symbolic order and how there existed at the time a "demonic" preoccupation with certain erotic dimensions of the emergent social subject. Highly sophisticated and elegantly crafted, The Vanishing will be of interest to students of Shakespeare and early modern culture, Renaissance visual art, and cultural and psychoanalytic theory. |
Contents
The Theater the Market and the Subject of History | 17 |
Demonism Sexuality and the Early Modern Subject | 38 |
Vanishing Point | 65 |
Dumb Hamlet | 105 |
Subject Matter | 130 |
Notes | 153 |
181 | |
193 | |
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advent amounts anamorphic anatomy Andreas Vesalius Annunciation articulated association body Cambridge castration Claude Lefort constituted Cornell University Press dead demonic desire discourse domain drama dumb show early modern subject economy Edgar effect emergence empty erotic exchange fact fantasy fascination fetish figure Fra Angelico Freud function gaze Ghost Hamlet historicizing homosocial identification inscribed inscription insofar instance interpellation Ithaca Jacques Lacan ject Johann Weyer King King Lear Last Judgment Lear Lear's limit London matter Metallotheca Michelangelo's nature negation object oedipal one's Oxford paradox passage phallic phantasmatic play play's political precisely Psychoanalysis pure radical relation Renaissance representation Reproduced with permission revenge Routledge Salisbury scene sense sexual Shakespeare sight signifier Slavoj Žižek social society sovereign space speak spectacle specular stage Stephen Greenblatt structure suggests symbolic Talbot theater theatrical thing thou tion trans transformation William Shakespeare witch witchcraft wonder cabinet York Žižek