voluntary display of generosity? Here we encounter the paradoxes of forced choice, of freedom to do what is necessary, at its most elementary: I have to do freely what I am expected to do. (If, upon receiving a gift, I immediately return it to the giver, this direct circulation would amount to an extremely aggressive gesture of humiliation, it would signal that I refused the other’s gift—recall those embarrassing moments when elderly people forget and give us last year’s present once again . . .) However, Bourdieu’s solution remains all too vulgar Marxist: he evokes hidden economic “interests.” It was Marshall Sahlins who proposed a different, more pertinent, solution: the reciprocity of exchange is in itself thoroughly ambiguous; at its most fundamental, it is destructive of the social bond, it is the logic of revenge, tit for tat.20 To cover this aspect of exchange, to make it benevolent and pacific, one has to pretend that each person’s gift is free and stands on its own. This brings us to potlatch as the “pre-economy of the economy,” its zero-level, that is, exchange as the reciprocal relation of two non-productive expenditures. If the gift belongs to Master and exchange to the Servant, potlatch is the paradoxical exchange between Masters. Potlatch is thus simultaneously the zero-level of civility, the paradoxical point at which restrained civility and obscene consumption overlap, the point at which it is polite to behave impolitely.
Ulysses’ realpolitik
The obscene underside that haunts the dignity of the Master-Signifier from its very inception, or the secret alliance between the dignity of the Law and its obscene transgression, was first clearly outlined by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, his most uncanny play, effectively a postmodern work avant la lettre. In his influential Shakespearean Tragedy, which set the coordinates of the traditional academic reading of Shakespeare, A.C. Bradley, the great English Hegelian, speaks of
a certain limitation, a partial suppression of that element in Shakespeare’s mind which unites him with the mystical poets and with the great musicians and philosophers. In one or two of his plays, notably in Troilus and Cressida, we are almost painfully conscious of this suppression; we feel an intense intellectual activity, but at the same time a certain coldness and hardness, as though some power in his soul, at once the highest and the sweetest, were for a time in abeyance. In other plays, notably in The Tempest, we are constantly aware of the presence of this power.21
There is truth in this perception: it is as if, in Troilus, there is no place for the redemptive quality of metaphysical pathos and bliss which somehow cancels the horrible and ridiculous events that took place. The first difficulty is how to categorize Troilus: although arguably the bleakest of Shakespeare’s plays, it is often listed as a comedy—correctly, since it lacks dignified tragic pathos.22 In other words, if Troilus is a comedy, then it is for the same reason that all good films about the Holocaust also are comedies: it is a blasphemy to claim that the predicament of prisoners in a concentration camp was tragic—their predicament was so terrifying that they were deprived of the very possibility of displaying tragic grandeur. Troilus plays the same structural role in Shakespeare’s opus as Cosί fan tutte among Mozart’s operas: its despair is so thoroughgoing that the only way to overcome it is through the retreat into fairy-tale magic (The Tempest and other late Shakespeare plays; Mozart’s Magic Flute).
Many of Shakespeare’s plays retell an already well-known great story (of Julius Caesar, of English kings); what makes Troilus the exception is that, in retelling the well-known story, it shifts the accent to what were in the original minor and marginal characters: Troilus is not primarily about Achilles and Hector, Priam and Agamemnon; its love couple is not Helen and Paris, but Cressida and Troilus. In this sense, Troilus can be said to prefigure one of the paradigmatic postmodern procedures, that of retelling a well-known classical story from the standpoint of a marginal character. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencranz and Gildenstern Are Dead does it with Hamlet, while here, Shakespeare himself carries out the move. This displacement also undermines Shakespeare’s standard procedure, from his royal chronicles, of supplementing the “big” royal scenes staged in a dignified way with scenes figuring common people who introduce a comic common-sense perspective. In the royal chronicles, these comic interludes strengthen the noble scenes through their contrast to them; in Troilus, everybody, even the noblest of warriors, is “contaminated” by the ridiculing perspective which makes us see them either as blind and stupidly pathetic or as involved in ruthless intrigues. The “operator” of this undoing of the tragic dimension, the single agent whose interventions systematically undermine tragic pathos, is Ulysses—this may sound surprising in view of Ulysses’ first intervention, at the Greek war council in Act I where the Greek (or “Grecian,” as Shakespeare put it, in what now may be called “Bush mode”) generals try to account for their failure to occupy and destroy Troy after eight years of fighting. Ulysses intervenes from a traditional “old values” position, locating the true cause of the Greeks’ failure in their neglect of the centralized hierarchical order where every individual is in his proper place:
The specialty of rule hath been neglected.
And look how many Grecian tents do stand
Hollow upon this plain: so many hollow factions.
[. . .] O when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick. How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows. Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead.
Force should be right—or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power [. . .]
(I, 3)
What, then, causes this disintegration which ends up in the democratic horror of everyone participating in power? Later in the play, when Ulysses wants to convince Achilles to rejoin the battle, he mobilizes the metaphor of time as the destructive force that gradually undermines the natural hierarchical order: in the course of time, your old heroic deeds will soon be forgotten, your glory will be eclipsed by the new heroes—so if you want to continue shining in your warrior glory, rejoin the battle:
Time hath, my lord,
A wallet at his back,
wherein he puts
Alms for oblivion,
a great-sized monster
Of ingratitudes.
Those
