Sanford Budick

This essay proposes that the key element in Hamlet’s experience of a self “within that passes show” is his systematic achievement of a transformed temporality. His instrument for achieving this other temporality is recurrent representation of a chiasmus of theatricalization—an interminable interchange between kinds of role playing—that propels the imagination’s quest for authenticity. Harnessing the power of that chiasmus momentarily brackets or suspends external reality and transforms time into an internal “now” or “presence” where inward being is disclosed. Husserl’s meditative model of the epoché and Kant’s account of the sublime are levied upon to aid in explaining the achievement of this temporal transformation and the meaning of the resultant inward “now.”

On one manuscript page of the Opus postumum Kant twice recurs to a passage from Paradise Lost that, seven years earlier, he had cited to exemplify aesthetic ideas and the concept of succession.1 Now he calls on these same verses to perform an additional function, namely, to represent the a priori idea of a community of reciprocity. For Kant, the “insertion” of this idea serves as an “actus of cognition” that can enable experience of the “subjectively actual”.2In the cited passage from Paradise Lost, Raphael instructs Adam about the “reciprocal … Male and Female Light” of the “two great Sexes” that “animate the World”. On the Opus postumum page, Kant names Milton...