Myth or Knowledge?

Reading Carl Schmitt’s

Hamlet or Hecuba

Carsten Strathausen

Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba (1956) is a peculiar text. For one, it stands
out as the only detailed interpretation of a literary work that Schmitt ever
produced. This is not to deny Schmitt’s overall erudition and familiarity
with Western literature nor his particular interest in the intricate relation-
ship between aesthetics and politics, all of which can be traced throughout
his writings from the 1910s to the 1950s. But the fact remains that apart
from Hamlet or Hecuba, Schmitt did not employ close readings of literary
texts as a means to elaborate on his politico-philosophical ideas. Hamlet
or Hecuba is also quite unique with regard to its fractured organizational
structure. Originally delivered as a public lecture in Düsseldorf in 1955,
the barely sixty pages of text feature not only a preface and an introduc-
tion, but also a conclusion as well as two appendices evidently added for
its subsequent publication one year later. Of its three main chapters, the
first two succinctly address the two historical intrusions that, in Schmitt’s
view, are responsible for the uniqueness—and genuinely tragic nature—of
Shakespeare’s play: Mary Stuart’s 1566 scandalous marriage with Earl
Bothwell, the murderer of her husband, and the hapless reign of James I,
starting in 1603.
The third chapter, by contrast, is less coherent. Considerably longer
than the other two and divided into several subsections, it advances the

*   This essay has greatly benefitted from discussions held at the Leslie Center for the
Humanities at Dartmouth College in Spring 2009. I want to thank all of the participants,
especially Klaus Mladek and George Edmondson, for organizing and contributing to this
event.


Telos 153 (Winter 2010): 7–29.
doi:10.3817/1210153007
www.telospress.com
   Carsten Strathausen

core of Schmitt’s argument about the essence of tragedy and myth. Tragic
play, Schmitt contends, is marked by “a kind of surplus value” that distin-
guishes it from pure play: “This surplus value lies in the objective reality
of the tragic action itself”—an “ineluctable” and “unalterable” reality
“that no human mind has conceived—a reality externally given, imposed,
and unavoidable. This unalterable reality is the mute rock upon which
the play founders, sending the foam of genuine tragedy rushing to the
surface.”
Although impressive, this metaphorical image is clearly at odds with
Schmitt’s claim about the “unalterable reality” at the core of tragic play.
Like all geological formations, rocks are historical phenomena, subject to
the natural powers of the sun, wind, water, and minerals that created them
in the first place. Taking Schmitt’s metaphor seriously leads us to conclude
that the aesthetic waves smashing upon the rock of reality will sooner or
later have worn it away, at which point the erstwhile violent encounter
between these forces will no longer send the “foam of genuine tragedy
rushing to the surface” (45). Both tragedy and myth, in other words, are
subject to time. They are historical phenomena based on the unpredictable
encounter between the constantly shifting waves of aesthetic tradition and
the slowly transforming rock of historical reality. There is no unalterable
or objective reality given as such. Reality is always mediated by (aes-
thetic) history.
As this passage indicates, my essay primarily concerns the art of read-
ing. I will ask not only how we can or should read Schmitt’s texts, but also
how Schmitt himself reads Shakespeare’s Hamlet and how this reading
exemplifies what critics call “Schmitt’s aesthetic theory” (David Pan) or,
quite simply, a “Schmittian hermeneutics” (Carlo Galli). Ironically, this
will be a difficult task, precisely because Hamlet or Hecuba seems to be

.  Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play, trans.
David Pan and Jennifer Rust (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2009), p. 45. All subse-
quent references will appear parenthetically within the text.
.  Carlo Galli examines this “Schmittian hermeneutics” in contrast to Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s Truth and Method, while David Pan develops “Schmitt’s aesthetic theory” as
distinct from Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. See Carlo Galli, “Hamlet: Represen-
tation and the Concrete,” trans. Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze, in Points of Departure:
Political Theology on the Scene of Early Modernity, ed. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Gra-
ham Hammill (under review at Univ. of Chicago Press), p. 13; David Pan, “Afterword:
Historical Event and Mythic Meaning in Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba,” in Schmitt,
Hamlet or Hecuba, pp. 69–119.
 Myth Or Knowledge?   

a rather simple text. This apparent naïveté, however, hides a more pro-
found epistemological dilemma that lies at the center of Schmitt’s political
thinking. This dilemma is characterized by the tension between Schmitt’s
longing for pre-modern social homogeneity and normative univocity, on
the one hand, and his analytical insight into modern fragmentation and
normative relativism as irrepressible by-products of European rational-
ism, on the other. Schmitt’s texts are marked by this tension insofar as
they advance analytical distinctions and abstract concepts whose concrete,
empirical applicability proves far more complex and contentious than the
concepts themselves would seem to imply. This tension between Sein and
Sinn, between reality and idea, in Schmitt’s writings often gives rise to
conceptual inconsistencies and self-contradictions.
Hamlet or Hecuba, for example, oscillates between the simultaneous
confirmation and disavowal of the categorical distinction between aesthetic
play and political reality. On the one hand, Schmitt advances a series of
conceptual binaries—Trauerspiel vs. tragedy (38), tragedy vs. play (40),
play vs. the critical situation (Ernstfall) (40), tragic action vs. poetic inven-
tion (49), poetry vs. drama (34)—that culminate in his overall conclusion
that “[h]istorical reality is stronger than every aesthetic, stronger also than
the most ingenious subject” (30). On the other hand, however, Schmitt
explicitly claims that his reading of Hamlet aims to transcend the tradi-
tional separation of art and politics, and he does, after all, define tragedy
.  Critics have repeatedly emphasized the deceptively “easy” or “naïve” (Galli)
nature of Schmitt’s text, its seemingly “naïve or essentialist . . . division between art and
history, text and context” (Rust and Lupton), along with Schmitt’s apparent “blindness to
the aesthetic dimension . . . of early modern texts” (Kahn). See Galli, “Hamlet: Representa-
tion and the Concrete,” pp. 6, 7; Jennifer R. Rust and Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Introduction:
Schmitt and Shakespeare,” in Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, p. xxiii; Victoria Kahn, “Hamlet
or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision,” Representations 83 (Summer 2003): 69.
.  These inconsistencies have frequently been noted by critics. The following state-
ment by Kam Shapiro is exemplary in this regard: “Rather than a consistent position or a
linear progression, Schmitt’s political and theoretical arguments display recurrent, at times
sharp vacillations. These inconsistencies are treated here as symptoms of conceptual and
political aporias more than psychological or biographical idiosyncrasies.” See Kam Shap-
iro, Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of Politics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008),
p. xvii. My personal favorite is this comment made by a Professor Hepp during a German
symposium on Schmitt almost twenty-five years ago: “Who among us would claim to be
unfamiliar with the odd feeling when reading this author that you are being fooled by a
pseudo-lucid argument?” Cf. Helmut Quaritsch, ed., Complexio Oppositorum: Über Carl
Schmitt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988), p. 258.
.  Cf. Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, p. 33.
10   Carsten Strathausen

precisely as the intrusion of historical reality into dramatic play. This

oscillation may help explain the disagreement among recent critics about
the relation between art and reality in this text.
Rather than taking sides in this debate, however, one should recognize
that “genuine” tragedy is able to transcend the alleged dichotomy between
play and reality only because this dichotomy itself was a conceptual fic-
tion from the very beginning. Put differently, it is precisely because art is
never “pure” and reality never “objective” that Schmitt is forced to rely
on attributive qualifiers (“pure,” “objective,” “genuine,” “absolute,” “radi-
cal,” etc.) to elevate empirical phenomena from the muddled realm of lived
reality into the purified realm of conceptual thought. What is at stake in
Hamlet or Hecuba is thus more than just Schmitt’s specific understanding
of aesthetic concepts (e.g., play, myth, tragedy, etc.). At stake is something
more abstract and more profound, namely, the epistemological power of
literary readings to identify the objective core of historical reality. My
overall argument is that Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet—a dramatic play
allegedly marked by the intrusion of concrete reality—is meant to banish
the specter of modern relativism that haunts Schmitt’s thinking. Insofar as
this reading fails, Hamlet or Hecuba inadvertently pushes the underlying
epistemological questions onto an ontological terrain: from the text into
the world, so to speak. What is at stake in Schmitt’s hermeneutics, then, is
nothing less than the objective “core” of reality as such.
To support this claim, I shall proceed in several steps. I begin by
examining Schmitt’s understanding of authorial intention in Hamlet or
Hecuba. I focus in particular on how Schmitt tries—and fails—to rec-
oncile the poet’s personal (subjective) interests in writing Hamlet with
the impersonal (objective) forces of history that allegedly “distort” the
play above and beyond the poet’s control. In the next three sections, I
demonstrate that the conceptual criteria Schmitt employs to characterize
“genuine intrusions” as the “highest kind of [historical] influence” (25) are
structural-aesthetic criteria, in particular his unquestioned classification of
Hamlet as a “distorted” revenge play. Aesthetic configurations, however,
.  Kahn, for example, posits a radical “opposition between aesthetic play and politi-
cal seriousness,” because she closely links the aesthetic with the neutralization of politics
in Romanticism-period bourgeois liberalism (Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba,” p. 86). Johannes
Türk, by contrast, contends that Hamlet or Hecuba demonstrates that “playfulness contains
and excludes its opposite, the serious situation” and thus “endows art with a political power
lacking in Benjamin.” See Johannes Türk, “The Intrusion: Carl Schmitt’s Non-Mimetic
Logic of Art,” Telos 142 (Spring 2008): 83.
 Myth Or Knowledge?   11

are contingent and subject to historical change. They cannot by definition

provide insight into the “objective reality” of a given historical situation. It
follows that Schmitt’s assessment of what he qualifies as (the absent pres-
ence of) objective reality in Hamlet is a contingent, normative act. Finally,
the last part of this essay situates this reading of Hamlet or Hecuba within a
larger epistemological framework. I contend that Schmitt’s (correct) claim
regarding the historical nature of conceptual knowledge contradicts his
(incorrect) claim to be able to determine the “real” core of historical reality.
Although Schmitt himself would hardly ever endorse this thesis, his own
reading of Hamlet nonetheless demonstrates that there is no “objective
situation” as such, because our understanding of reality is always based on
a metaphysics of communal beliefs. Conceptual knowledge is not opposed
to myth but is itself mythical to the core.

The Play Between Author and History

Let me begin by recapitulating some of Schmitt’s central arguments in
Hamlet or Hecuba. Unlike later audiences, the London public around 1600
was united in its strongly held view of the world as a stage, a Theatrum
Mundi. Shakespeare’s audience not only tolerated but fully expected to
see a “primal theater . . . intensely integrated into its current reality” (41).
Given this common “public sphere . . . that encompasses the author, the
director, the actors, and the audience itself and incorporates them all”
(35), James I was “immediately recognizable to the spectators” (37) as
the historical figure standing behind Hamlet, precisely because “[s]ociety
too was on stage” (41) during Shakespeare’s time. This “knowledge of the
audience is an essential factor of [Elizabethan] theater” (36), in Schmitt’s
view, because it “places a strict limit on the creative freedom of the play-
wright” (35). This restriction is evident, above all, in the “Hamletization of
the avenger,” for “it remains clear that the distortion of the avenger figure
can only be explained by the historical presence of King James” (30, my
emphasis).
Schmitt further contends that London’s communal public sphere and
the shared knowledge of Shakespeare’s audience ensure that the intru-
sion of historical reality into the play exceeds the subjective ingenuity or
conscious control of the playwright. Nobody, not even Shakespeare, can
coax tragedy to step forward and manifest itself in art. Instead, the “Ham-
letization of the avenger” is caused by the historical presence of empirical,
objective facts and forces. Genuine tragedy, in other words, testifies to the
12   Carsten Strathausen

“incontrovertible reality” (45) of some “concrete,” “objective,” and “real”

historical event, as opposed to the subjective whim of a single individual.
This last point is crucial. For if Hamlet were solely attributable to
Shakespeare’s individual genius as playwright, Schmitt’s understanding of
tragedy as the “genuine intrusion” of “objective” reality into play would
become groundless. Instead of giving rise to authentic myth, Hamlet would
be just another Trauerspiel subject to the relativism and subjectivism of the
modern age. Schmitt’s claim to the contrary could easily be dismissed as
just another interpretation based upon his own subjective—that is, histori-
cally situated and thus utterly contingent—point of view. The latter would
then be as (in)valid as the “psychological interpretation” or the “strict his-
torical approach” (7) that Schmitt explicitly rejects in his introduction.
Given this necessity to inoculate Hamlet against the malaise of modern
individualism, it is all the more astounding that Schmitt remains ambigu-
ous on the question of authorial intention. Discussing the taboo of the
queen in the first chapter, he leaves no doubt about Shakespeare’s aware-
ness that “the question of guilt had to be carefully avoided” (18) in order
to respect both the feelings of James I about his mother and the historical
awareness of his London audience. Here, Schmitt explicitly attributes the
decision “to exclude the question of the guilt or innocence of the mother”
to “the author of the play” (15). Whether it was Shakespeare’s “concern
for factual considerations or out of tact or due to some inhibition” (15), the
crucial fact remains that the sole reason why the “terrible reality” of Mary
Stuart’s scandal “shimmers through the masks and costumes of the play”
is Shakespeare’s conscious decision to avoid any explicit reference to the
guilt of the queen.
Nevertheless, in the second chapter of Hamlet or Hecuba, Schmitt
dismisses the poet’s authorial intention as “a question of its own” and thus
irrelevant for his overall argument:

Whether the poet here could not bring something to light or whether,
intentionally or instinctively, due to whatever consideration, he did not
want to, is a question of its own. It remains indisputable that for some
reason something is left open here. . . . In other words, the stage character
Hamlet is not completely subsumed by the mask. Intentionally or instinc-
tively the conditions and forms of the original context within which the
play was written have been brought into the play, and, behind the stage
character Hamlet, another figure has remained standing. (20–21)
 Myth Or Knowledge?   13

This other figure is, of course, the “contemporary historical figure” (20)
of James I, and Schmitt’s subsequent references to “James-Hamlet” (25)
and “Hamlet-James” (37, 44) clarify the “incontrovertible” connection
between these two figures. Yet Schmitt’s concession that Shakespeare
might have acted “instinctively” when drafting his protagonist along the
lines of James I also renders Shakespeare’s personal intentions far less
important than they seemed to be in the first chapter of Hamlet or Hecuba.
Instead, the second chapter presents the poet as a mere conduit, a passive
medium through which the reality of James’s historical presence irrepress-
ibly intrudes into the play. Thus, the stage is set for the third and final
chapter, in which the power of historical reality to imprint itself into the
aesthetic structure of the play becomes absolute and entirely independent
from the poet: “A writer can and should invent a great deal, but he cannot
invent the realistic core of a tragic action. . . . The core of tragic action, the
source of the tragic authenticity, is something so irrevocable that no mortal
can invent it, no genius can produce it out of thin air” (45). The emergence
of tragic play is now depicted as a process without an author; it is literally
an objective and subject-less event caused by history itself. It is only after
Schmitt has thus dismissed the poet’s intention and creativity as irrelevant
to the play that he returns to and expands his central thesis, according to
which genuine tragedy results from the intrusion of objective reality into
aesthetic play. This intrusion, Schmitt argues, is represented by the present
absence of King James I.

The Irreducible Mediation of (Literary) History

In order to further develop Schmitt’s argument, it will again be helpful to
summarize its major steps. In contrast to the Baroque Trauerspiel and later
dramatic plays on the continent, Shakespeare’s Hamlet was conceived and
performed on the basis of a “common public sphere” that causes play and
reality to “interact” with each other. Given the shared historical knowledge
of all participants in the play, it follows that “references to contemporary
events and persons arose quite naturally, whether as mere allusions or true
mirrorings” (35). These allusions and mirrorings consist exclusively of
“occasional and incidental references to contemporary historical events
and persons” (22). In addition to such allusions, however, Shakespeare’s
play is also marked by “structurally determining, genuine intrusions [Ein-
brüche]” (25). The two major intrusions of this kind are “the guilt of the
queen and . . . the figure of the avenger” (32), because “their consequences
14   Carsten Strathausen

are that much stronger and deeper” (25) than those caused by other histori-
cal references within the play. Schmitt supports this assertion with two
specific claims: he contends, first, that “Shakespeare’s Hamlet is struc-
tured as a revenge drama” (21), and second, that the genuine intrusion
of the historical figures of Mary Stuart and James I forces Shakespeare
to refrain from letting Hamlet act out his revenge against Gertrude and
Claudius for fear of offending James I. The historical presence of the latter
thus “bestows on the actual revenge drama the special character that we
associate with the name of Hamlet today” (25). This “Hamletization of the
avenger”—that is, the idea that Hamlet both stands within, yet nonetheless
breaks with, the tradition of the ancient revenge drama insofar as the hero
fails to enact his revenge—constitutes Shakespeare’s play as “genuine
tragedy” and “authentic myth.”
It is immediately apparent that Schmitt’s categorical distinction
between the play’s historical allusions and mirrorings, on the one hand,
and the genuine intrusion of historical reality into the play, on the other,
requires that the “play Hamlet retains its arrangement as a revenge
play” (25) under all possible circumstances. Why? Because the decisive
criterion for distinguishing between “mere” allusion and “genuine” intru-
sion is whether or not Shakespeare’s (implicit or explicit, conscious or
unconscious) reference to real historical figures did, indeed, cause major
structural changes within the play. Such structural changes can only be
determined with reference to a given aesthetic tradition—in Hamlet’s case,
the revenge play. In other words, the “historical reality” that Schmitt claims
to recognize as a genuine intrusion into Hamlet is based upon a prior nor-
mative judgment about the play’s aesthetic essence. Hamlet must first and
foremost be categorized as a revenge play in order to provide Schmitt with
the necessary aesthetic criterion by which to judge the historical intrusion
of Mary and James I as more decisive for Hamlet’s narrative and dramatic
structure than the play’s mere allusion to other historical figures (e.g., the
Earl of Essex). This, however, means that Schmitt’s interpretation of Ham-
let as a genuine tragedy and modern myth is relative rather than absolute.
For the absent presence of the “objective reality” that allegedly intrudes
into Shakespeare’s play takes shape only as the structural distortion of a

.  Schmitt repeatedly refers to “the murder of the father of Hamlet-James and the
marriage of his mother to the murderer” as the two events that constitute “a core of histori-
cal actuality and historical presence” (44; see also 50, 52).
 Myth Or Knowledge?   15

previously established aesthetic tradition. Carlo Galli rightly contends that

the “tragic, for Schmitt, is not then a substantial concept. It is a relational
concept.” Schmitt’s own argument implicitly acknowledges that histori-
cal reality always contains an irreducible aesthetic component.
Aesthetic categories, however, are highly malleable. They depend
upon scholars’ changing perspectives and the different theoretical frame-
works applied to art. Unlike the historical facts of Mary Stuart’s marriage
or the reign of James I, Schmitt’s aesthetic categorization of Hamlet as a
revenge drama is by no means “objective”—otherwise, our understanding
and evaluation of previous cultures, works of art, and traditions would
have to remain fixed once and for all. This is obviously not the case, since
the meaning of aesthetic concepts like “art,” “structure,” or “genre” is con-
stantly being renegotiated in scholarly and popular discourse alike. Every
society understands “art” differently at different periods, and there exist
countless possibilities for critics to construct a literary history along any
number of different criteria. Schmitt’s own aesthetic taxonomy provides a
case in point. Contrasting lyric poem and dramatic play, Schmitt contends
that the former “has no source; it finds its occasion in a subjective experi-
ence” (34), whereas the latter is subject to “the common public sphere” that
the playwright inevitably shares with his contemporary audience (35).
My point is that Schmitt’s generalized account of literary forms could
easily be challenged. Theodor W. Adorno’s entire aesthetic theory, for
example, operates on the exact opposite premise. In fact, Schmitt sup-
ports his view of the sublimated nature of lyric poetry with nothing more
than a single reference to Stefan George’s self-mythologizing account of
his own poetry.10 But he neglects to mention the fact that Romantic poetry
written during Germany’s wars of liberation against Napoleon was as
much influenced by the concrete historical events of its time as Gryphius’s
sonnets and Brecht’s poems were influenced by the events of their time.
Similar problems undermine Schmitt’s ad hoc and arbitrary distinctions

.  Galli, “Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete,” p. 20.

.  See Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric and Society,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia UP, 1991). David
Pan provides an excellent comparison between Schmitt’s and Adorno’s understandings of
art and society. See Pan, “Afterword,” pp. 73–86.
10.  For a detailed critique of George’s poetry, see Carsten Strathausen, The Look
of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press,
2003).
16   Carsten Strathausen

between Hamlet and other forms of dramatic play throughout history.

Thus, he contrasts Hamlet and the Baroque period in England not only
to the ancient tragedies of the Greeks (49) and the medieval tradition of
the Nordic revenge drama, but also to the continental Trauerspiel of the
Baroque and later European dramas of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
tury (35), specifically mentioning Schiller’s historical dramas (47) and the
“socialist actor’s play” (albeit without direct reference to Brecht), but not
Lessing’s Bürgerliches Trauerspiel or any of the avant-garde movements
of the early twentieth century.
In short: Hamlet or Hecuba situates Shakespeare’s play within a highly
idiosyncratic literary history that could easily be challenged. One might
dismiss this critique by saying that Schmitt could hardly be expected to
develop a convincing and comprehensive history of dramatic theater to
support his reading of Hamlet. But that is precisely my point. Given the
inevitability of historical change and its unpredictable effects on literary
theory, Schmitt’s focus on the “Hamletization of the avenger” cannot
possibly serve as a stable foundation from which to deduce (the absent
presence of) objective reality in Shakespeare’s play. There are many rea-
sons why Schmitt’s view of Hamlet as “essentially” a revenge play might
be challenged: literary critics, for example, might discover other, hitherto
forgotten revenge plays that are structurally similar to Hamlet, or they
might conceive of “revenge” as a psychological fantasy rather than a phys-
ical act, or they might situate Hamlet within a different aesthetic tradition
altogether that de-emphasizes the revenge motif in favor of other liter-
ary motifs. In each of these cases, Schmitt’s thesis—according to which
genuine historical intrusions cause manifest structural distortions within
the play—would become untenable, because it provides no objective cri-
teria by which to identify the play’s structural distortions in the first place.
Instead, the meaning of the phrase “structural distortion” becomes entirely
arbitrary. It can now be identified with any number of aesthetic phenom-
ena in Shakespeare’s play, as long as the critic can reasonably argue that
these phenomena constitute the “uniqueness” of Hamlet within the specific
historical tradition that the critic has chosen to construct. Given this prem-
ise, the play’s imprint of historical reality, as defined by Schmitt, loses its
objective character. Instead, it becomes subject to numerous interpreta-
tions—as does Schmitt’s categorical distinction between mere historical
allusions and genuine intrusion.
 Myth Or Knowledge?   17

The Play Between Audience and History

Schmitt, of course, is well aware of the fact that social and cultural trans-
formations, including the change of aesthetic categories, are inevitable
by-products of history. He certainly does “not expect anyone [today] to
think of James I when Hamlet is on stage,” because it “would be absurd,
after viewing a well-played performance of Hamlet, to be distracted from
the play by historical reminiscences” (38). In fact, it is precisely this wan-
ing of a shared historical knowledge over time that legitimizes Schmitt’s
interpretation of Hamlet as a genuine contribution to Shakespeare schol-
arship. If today we still shared the same public sphere once shared by
Hamlet’s contemporary audience, there would be no reason for Schmitt
(or anybody else) to remind us of the historical intrusions of objective real-
ity into Shakespeare’s play, because this intrusion would be as blatantly
obvious to us as it was to the London public around 1600.
However, the obvious disparity between Shakespeare’s contemporary
audience and “us” today further undermines Schmitt’s claim about “objec-
tive reality” intruding into the play. For apart from literary genre, Schmitt
also bases his crucial distinction between “several degrees and kinds of
historical influences” (22) upon a temporal criterion:

Without a doubt, there are thousands of allusions and innuendos in

Shakespeare’s work, of which many are hardly understood and also
need not be understood. They are occasional and incidental references to
contemporary historical events and persons, accommodations and con-
siderations that contemporaries would have immediately understood, but
were already no longer noticed a few years later. (22)

Contrary to genuine intrusions, then, historical allusions are incidental.

They will remain obvious to or remembered by a given community only for
“a few years.” But we also know—and Schmitt himself acknowledges—
that today’s audiences have forgotten much more than just these incidental
allusions. They have also forgotten those genuine intrusions—“the taboo
of the Queen” and the “Hamletization of the avenger”—that, according
to Schmitt, constitute the tragic core of Hamlet. If, however, both allu-
sions and intrusions will inevitably be forgotten sooner or later, then what
exactly constitutes the categorical difference between them?
There are only two ways to answer this question. We can either focus,
once again, on the manifest structural changes caused by the intrusion of
reality into the play, which leads us back to the previous discussion about
18   Carsten Strathausen

the revenge play and its aesthetic tradition. Or we can focus on how long
the historical memory contained within the play remains recognizable to
ever-new audiences throughout history. In this case, the difference between
mere allusions and genuine intrusions comes down to the resilience and
longevity of Hamlet’s historical references across time and space. But this
longevity, of course, cannot possibly be measured empirically. In order
to pursue this argument further, we must assume that the quantitative
difference between “a few years” and “a few hundred years” of cultural
memory does, at some point, give rise to a qualitative difference. For only
such an objective, qualitative difference could possibly enable Schmitt to
distinguish between mere allusions to and genuine intrusions of history in
Shakespeare’s play. So, the question becomes: What is the nature of this
qualitative change that separates allusions from intrusions? Which histori-
cal event distinguishes a few years during Shakespeare’s lifetime from the
few hundred years that separate Hamlet from our own time?

The Real Core of Reality

The answer seems simple. What happened was modernity, in particular
the birth of the state and the emergence of the jus publicum europaeum
after 1648. According to Schmitt, both phenomena contribute to the spiri-
tual neutralization of Europe and the reign of modern positivist thinking
exemplified in the abstract universalism of economic principles. As people
no longer share a common public space, the Romantic ideal of aesthetic
autonomy finally proclaims the total separation of art from reality. This
renders it virtually impossible for modern audiences to recognize the gen-
uine intrusion of historical reality into Shakespeare’s play. In this sense,
Schmitt’s contribution to literary history consists in re-establishing the
crucial connection between the historical King James and Shakespeare’s
fictional protagonist Hamlet—“Hamlet-James.”
At this point, however, it also becomes evident that Schmitt’s reading
of Hamlet operates with two quite different concepts of “historical real-
ity.” The first two chapters of Hamlet or Hecuba identify this reality as two
precise historical facts—i.e., Mary’s marriage with Bothwell in 1566 and
James’s rising political power, leading to his coronation in 1603. These
facts cause Shakespeare, either “intentionally or instinctively,” to adapt
his play accordingly. By contrast, the third chapter identifies this reality
as the gradual epochal transition that, in Schmitt’s view, characterizes the
“century of the English revolution (1588–1688)” (63) in general. Whereas
 Myth Or Knowledge?   19

before, Schmitt had argued that James’s “impotent will” (28) stood behind
Hamlet’s melancholic inability to avenge the murder of his father, he now
considers King James I merely the representative—in the sense of what
Schmitt calls “personae publicae” or “great man”11—of a gradual, cen-
tury-long shift that leads from England’s “barbaric,” “pre-state condition”
to the jus publicum europaeum during the later seventeenth century. In
other words, the “Hamletization of the avenger” is no longer simply due
to James’s buffoonish personality intruding into the play. Rather, James
himself is now reconceptualized as a symbolic figure that literally embod-
ies the “fate of the European religious schisms” at the time (52). As such,
King James I represents—embodies, symbolizes, signifies—the inability
of the entire Stuart dynasty to understand the rise of “the sovereign state
of the European continent [and] the transition to a maritime existence that
England had achieved during their reign” (65). Ultimately, what “stands
behind” Hamlet’s melancholy is not just King James I but the monumental
dawn of the entire modern era as such.
It is interesting to note that today’s critics seem poised to embrace
Schmitt’s interpretative shift from objective, historical facts to their contin-
gent interpretation as indicators of epochal change.12 Indeed, there exists a
broad consensus that “the real remains the source of the tragic in Schmitt’s
reading of the play.”13 Yet Schmitt himself actually never uses the term “the
real” (das Wirkliche). Instead, he variably calls that which intrudes into
Shakespeare’s play “historical reality” (geschichtliche Wirklichkeit) (19),
the “objective situation” (objektive Situation) (20), the “historical pres-
ent” (25) and “present history” (zeitgeschichtliche Gegenwart) (26), as
well as some “unalterable reality” (unumstößliche Wirklichkeit) (45), and
“objective reality” (objektive Wirklichkeit) (51).14 This terminological dif-
ference seems significant primarily because “the real” evokes a Lacanian
connotation and thus serves to bolster the psychoanalytic bent of recent
interpretations of Schmitt.15 Schmitt himself, of course, explicitly rejected

11.  Cf. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Pub-
licum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2003), p. 146.
12.  See Galli, “Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete,” p. 13.
13.  Rust and Lupton, “Introduction,” p. xxvii. Cf. Türk “The Intrusion,” p. 80; and
Galli, “Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete,” p. 15.
14.  References to the German original are taken from Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder
Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2008).
15.  Cf. Rust and Lupton, “Introduction,” p. xxi; Türk, “The Intrusion,” p. 79; and
Galli, “Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete,” p. 15.
20   Carsten Strathausen

any kind of “psychologism,” which he, being unfamiliar with Lacanian

structuralism, associated exclusively with Freudian subjectivism and a
narrow focus on “the single human individual” (9). Nonetheless, Schmitt’s
own metaphorical language—according to which historical reality consti-
tutes the “mute rock upon which the play founders” (45)—clearly resonates
with a Lacanian understanding of the “real” as that which cannot be sym-
bolized and always returns to its place.16 But regardless of how one feels
about a Lacanian reading of Hamlet or Hecuba, it seems clear that critics’
interpretative shift from “reality” to the “real” is symptomatic of Schmitt’s
own underhanded transition from reading Hamlet in the situational con-
text of two concrete historical events (i.e., Mary Stuart’s marriage and
James I’s reign as king) to a metaphysical reading of Hamlet as a timeless
tragedy marked by the absent presence of the real.
This interpretative shift, however, raises serious epistemological ques-
tions. For who exactly gets to define this real “reality” that Schmitt evokes?
Schmitt himself emphasizes that nobody in Shakespeare’s time—neither
the poet nor his audience nor the “unhappy Stuart” James I himself (30)—
was aware of the large epochal shift from a medieval to a modern age, the
intrusion of which into dramatic play allegedly gave rise to genuine trag-
edy. This lack of insight, moreover, is not limited to the cultural sphere and
hence cannot be dismissed as just an aesthetic effect. According to Schmitt,
even Thomas Hobbes, the author of the Leviathan, failed to recognize that
“the future energies of [British] sea power were concentrated on the side of
revolution,” meaning that the “English Leviathan did not become State.”17
The crucial point, however, is that Hobbes’s objective “mistake”—insofar
as he misdiagnosed the future development of British sea power—could
only be recognized retrospectively by later historians like Schmitt himself.
Nobody during the seventeenth century “knew” that British imperialism
would differ substantially from its continental counterpart.
Again, I do not object to Schmitt’s historical insights regarding the
gradual rise of the modern state. I merely insist that it is hermeneutically
16.  In the words of Slavoj Žižek: “The real is of course in a first approach that
which cannot be inscribed, which ‘doesn’t cease not to inscribe itself’ (ne cesse pas de
ne pas s’écrire)—the rock upon which every formalization stumbles.” See Slavoj Žižek,
“The Lacanian Real: Television,” The Symptom 9, available online at http://www.lacan.
com/symptom/?p=38.
17.  Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: Sinn und
Fehlschlag eines politischen Symbols (Cologne: Hohenheim Verlag, 1982), p. 120 (my
translation).
 Myth Or Knowledge?   21

unwarranted to “read” this “historical reality” as a present absence in

Shakespeare’s play. Unlike the historical facts of Mary’s marriage and
James’s coronation, the gradual rise of the modern state cannot objec-
tively be identified as a singular event. It is not part of the publicly shared
“knowledge” of Shakespeare’s contemporary audience. Let us recall that
this knowledge was absolutely crucial for Schmitt’s previous argument,
namely, that James I was “immediately recognizable to the spectators”
(37) as the historical figure standing behind Hamlet. But this is no lon-
ger the case if we interpret James I as the representative—or literally the
embodiment—of a century-long epochal change that culminated in the rise
of the nation-state. And since nobody at the time was able to recognize this
change as such, the alleged influence of this epochal change upon Hamlet
remains a pure conjecture on Schmitt’s part, because the representational
power of James I takes shape only retrospectively in and through Schmitt’s
distant, historical perspective and his own conceptual framework. For who
else “knew” of this “historical reality” before Schmitt conceptualized its
contours? Who, if not Schmitt himself, decided that James I personally
incarnated (the failure to implement) the idea of British statehood?
Rather than assuming responsibility for this decisive reading of Ham-
let, Schmitt grafts the historical intrusion onto the play itself. Hamlet is said
to register the distorting impact of epochal change all on its own, a process
controlled neither by the poet nor by the play’s audience or readers, but
by history itself: “The core of historical reality is not invented, cannot be
invented, and must be respected as given” (48). The task of Shakespeare’s
audience, according to Schmitt, is thus simply to rediscover the objec-
tive core of historical reality as originally captured and preserved within
the play. It is fairly obvious, however, that this hermeneutic approach to
literary texts comes dangerously close to the positivist understanding of
juridical norms that Schmitt so vehemently rejects throughout his work.
In both cases, readers denounce their own interpretative power in favor of
some objective meaning allegedly inherent within the text itself. Schmitt’s
critique of normative positivism—that is, the positivists’ denial of both
the hermeneutic process and the sovereign decision required to determine
the meaning of (juridical) texts—actually applies to his own interpreta-
tion of Hamlet. For there simply is no objective hermeneutic criterion that
justifies Schmitt’s reading of King James I as the “true representative” of
“historical reality” and the rise of the modern state in Shakespeare’s play.
The meaning of texts, much like our understanding of historical reality, is
22   Carsten Strathausen

based on subjective, contingent, and historical acts of interpretation—in

short: on a decision. So, the question remains: “Who decides?”

Myth as the True Core of Historical Knowledge

As I tried to demonstrate above, Schmitt’s answer to this question in Hamlet
or Hecuba is rather un-Schmittian: nobody decides, because the (discov-
ery of the) objective core of historical reality cannot, and must not, be due
to the arbitrary and subjective decisions of individual authors and read-
ers. Instead, this reality emerges sui generis as a necessary truth naturally
inscribed and preserved in the timelessness of modern myth—even though
the specific nature of this process is never made clear. By sidestepping
the decisive moment of reading, Schmitt thus postulates—but does not
convincingly demonstrate—the existence of objective, historical knowl-
edge, because he neither explains the (production) process by which truth
originally develops and sediments into myth nor the (reception) process by
which truth can be re-extracted again from myth in subsequent time peri-
ods. Instead, Schmitt autocratically declares myth to be an aesthetic effect
of real historical forces. Hence, its mere existence testifies to its inherent
truth and objectivity. Myth, in other words, is not only self-generative,
but also self-authenticating. As such, it is not opposed to knowledge, but
constitutes its inner core. For “no train of thought, however lucid, is able to
compete against the power of true, mythical images,” Schmitt insists.18
Myth, for Schmitt, is the de-historicized and incontestable core of
human knowledge. It is stronger than knowledge not only because it oper-
ates intuitively rather than intellectually, but, most importantly, because it
can no longer be proven true or false, right or wrong. The power of myth
is neither rational nor rooted in any epistemological principles whatsoever.
On the contrary: epistemological principles are rooted in myth. For his-
torical knowledge always arrives on the scene too late and after the fact.
Such knowledge is simply unavailable to those who live through a time
of profound change, precisely because this change necessarily alters the
epistemological framework by which a given society produces knowledge
in the first place: “A political judgment—a decision—is called for pre-
cisely at the moment where ‘knowledge’ fails,” as William Rasch rightly
summarizes Schmitt’s position.19

18.  Ibid., p. 123 (my translation).

19.  William Rasch, “Conflict as Vocation: Carl Schmitt and the Possibility of Poli-
tics,” Theory, Culture, and Society 17, no. 6 (2000): 9.
 Myth Or Knowledge?   23

Schmitt’s infamous—and often misunderstood—claim that “the deci-

sion emanates from nothingness”20 means exactly this: a political decision
cannot logically be deduced from an already existing normative frame-
work. It is never based on the objective knowledge of a given situation nor
is it guided by a purely rational and quasi-scientific application of already
existing laws. Instead, a decision requires the sovereign’s subjective inter-
pretation of such laws. And this interpretation reflects, by necessity, the
metaphysical beliefs and cultural customs of a given society. In this sense,
we might say that decisions are not based on knowledge but on myth—
myth understood as an ancient kind of knowledge that is no longer subject
to empirical or logical verification or revision. Hence, from a Schmittian
perspective, the erstwhile discussion among German scholars regard-
ing the abstract “truth” or “falsity” of Schmitt’s epistemology is simply
nonsensical. Hepp’s insistence that “beyond the particularity of a given
historical period . . . a statement is either right or wrong” and Böckenförde’s
claim that “the decisive question remains whether the exhibited criterion
of the political is correct or incorrect” fatally misconstrue Schmitt’s epis-
temological questions as purely logical questions.21 But Schmitt’s crucial
point is that epistemological questions are essentially moral-metaphysical
questions. As such, they cannot be answered in the abstract; they can only
be answered by locating them within the concrete historical situation of a
given people and their particular way of life.
The recurrent charge that Schmitt’s political theory amounts to
an empty formalism—“a decision in favor of decisiveness” and thus a
“decision for the formal principle of order as such”22—disregards what
David Pan and Russell Berman aptly call the “mythic-theological-cul-
tural dimension” situated “at the heart” of Schmitt’s work.23 Although the
sovereign decision is normatively ungrounded, the decision is not—nor
could it possibly be—metaphysically ungrounded or completely severed

20.  Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty,
ed. and trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 31f.
21.  See Quaritsch, Complexio Oppositorum, pp. 258 and 255 (my translation).
22.  Karl Löwith, quoted in Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba,” pp. 68f.; Slavoj Žižek, “Carl
Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics,” in Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt
(New York: Verso, 1999), p. 18.
23.  David Pan and Russell A. Berman, “Introduction,” Telos 142 (Spring 2008): 3.
David Pan’s excellent essay in the same volume makes this point abundantly clear. See
David Pan, “Carl Schmitt on Culture and Violence in the Political Decision,” Telos 142
(Spring 2008): 49–72.
24   Carsten Strathausen

from the concrete life-world of a given society. No decision is absolutely

groundless in this strong sense. Because, like everything else, a deci-
sion requires an intention and a medium in order to become a decision
in the first place—unless, of course, it is a decision made in heaven. But
even Schmitt does not equate the political sovereign with God. In fact,
he explicitly states: “Looked at normatively, the decision emanates from
nothingness.”24 I suspect that critics’ continuous misreading of this phrase
might at least partially be due to the quotation’s customary truncation to
its main clause, in lieu of the complete sentence.

Schmitt’s Ontological Relativism

“All law is ‘situational law’,”25 Schmitt states unambiguously in 1922. It
is well known that Schmitt consistently maintained this socio-historical
embeddedness of juridical norms throughout his oeuvre—most notably,
of course, in his 1934 text On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, which
develops Schmitt’s theory of “concrete-order thinking” as one of the
major juridical principles besides normativism and decisionism,26 and in
his 1950 The Nomos of the Earth, which paradigmatically demonstrates
the constitutive bond between Ortung and Ordnung with reference to
the ancient concept of nomos: “nomos is the immediate form in which
the political and social order of a people becomes spatially visible.”27
What might be less obvious is that Schmitt extends this relational bond
between order and orientation not only across the juridical but also
across the entire epistemological order of a given society. The validity
of all human concepts—be they theological, political, moral, juristic, or
aesthetic—remains bound to a particular time in space and a particular
community of people. Not only juridical laws but all (conceptual) knowl-
edge is relational rather than absolute. In this sense, all human knowledge
is “spiritual” knowledge:

That all historical knowledge is knowledge of the present, that such

knowledge obtains its light and intensity from the present and in the most
profound sense only serves the present, because all spirit is only spirit of
the present, has been said by many since Hegel, best of all by Benedetto

24.  Schmitt, Political Theology, pp. 31–32 (emphasis added).

25.  Ibid., p. 13.
26.  Carl Schmitt, On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, trans. Joseph W. Bendersky
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).
27.  Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p. 70.
 Myth Or Knowledge?   25

Croce. . . . All concepts of the spiritual sphere, including the concept of

spirit, are pluralistic in themselves and can only be understood in terms
of concrete political existence.28

Schmitt’s overall point is that a society’s conceptual understanding of

itself and its previous history necessarily changes in accordance with the
underlying metaphysical beliefs that define this society’s particular way
of life. Schmitt’s vehement rejection of Hans Kelsen’s normative positiv-
ism is directed precisely against the distinctly modern understanding of
conceptual knowledge—which includes political and juridical norms, but
is not limited to them—as ahistorical, quasi-scientific, and thus politically
neutral “laws” severed from the particular social order that they help to
maintain. By contrast, Schmitt’s own “sociology of concepts” aims to dis-
cover a society’s “basic, radically systematic structure and to compare this
conceptual structure with the conceptually represented social structure of
a certain epoch”:29

The presupposition of this kind of sociology of juristic concepts is thus

a radical conceptualization, a consistent thinking that is pushed into
metaphysics and theology. The metaphysical image that a definite epoch
forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately
understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization. . . .
 [M]etaphysics is the most intensive and the clearest expression of an
epoch.30

For Schmitt, metaphysics stands higher—or goes deeper—than conceptual

knowledge, precisely “because no society can discover an order without
a concept of what is normal and what is right,”31 and these fundamen-
tal concepts of “normality” and “rightness” are, of course, metaphysical
concepts. Conceptual knowledge in Schmitt’s sense is thus anything but
objective, scientific, neutral, or “technological.” It becomes meaningful
only in relation to a communal way of living. Concepts are enacted; they

28.  Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” trans. Matthias
Konzen and John P. McCormick, in Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 80f., 85. Similarly in Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-
cal, p. 30.
29.  Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 45.
30.  Ibid., p. 46.
31.  Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1991), p. 161.
26   Carsten Strathausen

literally intervene into the world not only on a cognitive-mental level but
also on a physical-material level as well. This is Schmitt’s key thesis in
The Nomos of the Earth: “In its original sense,” Schmitt notes, “nomos is
precisely the full immediacy of a legal power not mediated by laws; it is a
constitutive historical event—an act of legitimacy, whereby the legality of
a mere law first is made meaningful.”32 The crucial point is that not only
juridical or political concepts, but all socially relevant concepts constitute
a “historical event” rooted in metaphysics.
In recognition of this relational (mythical) core of Schmitt’s politi-
cal theory, critics have recently begun to situate his work in the context
of French structuralist and post-structuralist theory, in particular Lacan,
Foucault, and Derrida.33 Although it makes sense to read Schmitt’s con-
ceptual inconsistencies as symptoms of what Derrida calls the aporia of
thinking,34 this comparison fails to acknowledge the ontological priority
Schmitt grants to material, empirical reality. For Schmitt, human concepts
are quasi-physical tools that literally interact with—and thus empirically
alter—the concrete historical situation in which they emerge. They are
always already operative outside the text and its semiotic laws of significa-
tion. In this sense, we might say that human concepts are “objective”—not
because they are epistemologically true, but because they are ontologi-
cally productive.
In order to properly assess this ontological dimension in Schmitt’s
thinking, it seems more apt to situate his work within the scientific-ana-
lytical context of its time. Schmitt himself, unfortunately, never extended
his sociology of concepts to the realm of the natural sciences. Instead, he
simply accepted the self-proclaimed neutrality and objectivity of modern
science as a means to highlight the fundamental difference between sci-
entific-technological rationality, on the one hand, and conceptual-spiritual
rationality, on the other. His political goal always remained to protect the

32.  Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p. 73.

33.  Apart from the Lacanian readings discussed above, see also Shapiro, Carl Schmitt
and the Intensification of Politics; and Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, “On the Concept of the
Political in Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt,” Telos 142 (Spring 2008): 135–61.
34.  Benjamin Arditi, for example, argues that Schmitt comes close to the Derridian
view “that the center is part of the play of the structure and not a transcendental referent
that governs it from the outside,” but that he “ultimately pulls back from acknowledging
the full consequences of this” insight. See Benjamin Arditi, “On the Political: Schmitt
contra Schmitt,” Telos 142 (Spring 2008): 7–28.
 Myth Or Knowledge?   27

latter from being assimilated by the former. Yet Schmitt’s juxtaposition

of scientific neutrality and concrete-order thinking is unfounded. It is
based on his erroneous equation of the “value neutrality” of sociologi-
cal concepts—famously advocated by his teacher Max Weber—with both
scientific objectivity and moral relativism. In doing so, Schmitt disregards
the scientific-philosophical tradition in which the term relativism origi-
nally emerged and where it continues to play an increasingly central role
since the beginning of the twentieth century. Einstein’s relativity theory
from 1905 simply does not concern moral values. It merely demonstrates,
among other things, that our concept of time is dependent upon—and thus
relative to—the spatial location and movement of the person measuring
it. Likewise, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle proves the impossibility
for a human observer to provide accurate measurements of both the posi-
tion and the momentum of a single particle, since, at any given point, the
increased accuracy of one value will cause a decreased accuracy of the
other. The scientific determination of the position and momentum of a
particle are indirectly proportional, and thus relational, to each other.
I contend that this scientific version of relativism is fully compatible
with Schmitt’s “sociology of concepts.” This is not to say that Schmitt
ever embraced relativism. On the contrary, he emphatically rejected it as
inherently nihilistic, while, at the same time, he struggled with the recog-
nition of its historical inevitability. Driven by the analytical rigor of his
own sociology of concepts, Schmitt comes close to admitting that humans
not only think and act differently at different times in different places, but
also perceive and conceptually enact their life-world differently. He aptly
sensed that, in the modern era, epistemology and ontology have become
intertwined to such a degree that different faiths bestow different con-
cepts, which in turn engender different life-worlds. Schmitt’s “sociology
of concepts” acknowledges not only the existence of different (political)
cultures, but also implicitly recognizes the degree to which these cultures
give rise to different historical “realities.”
This, of course, is a Romantic idea and fundamentally at odds with
Schmitt’s avowed realism and anti-subjectivism. Schmitt despises Roman-
ticism precisely because he understood it as a period in which “[o]ntological
thought no longer existed”:35 “In the romantic, everything—society and
history, the cosmos and humanity—serves only the productivity of the

35.  Schmitt, Political Romanticism, p. 78.

28   Carsten Strathausen

romantic ego.”36 But Schmitt is either unable or unwilling to develop a

comprehensive philosophical critique of German Romanticism. Instead,
he rejects the movement for political reasons, in particular for its codepen-
dency with bourgeois liberalism: “The bearer of the romantic movement
is the new bourgeoisie.”37 Like liberalism, Romanticism undermines the
political unity of a people and thus invites external foreign forces to influ-
ence and, ultimately, to assimilate this weakened community into their
own: “Everything that is romantic is at the disposal of other energies that
are unromantic, and the sublime elevation above definition and decision
is transformed into a subservient attendance upon alien power and alien
decision.”38
Romanticism, in short, is politically dangerous, because its passive
aestheticism invites foreign rule and political alienation. But this is not an
epistemological argument against the internal coherence of the Romantic
worldview. On the contrary, Schmitt correctly identified the metaphysical
problem underlying both Romantic aestheticism and scientific rational-
ity, namely, the unbridgeable gap between a first-person (subjective)
experience and the third-person (objective) description of that experi-
ence. Painfully aware of the contradictions of modern existence, Schmitt
remains committed to a kind of “knowledge” inextricably connected to
a community of people and their shared, metaphysical belief of what
constitutes right and wrong. The political governability of a people rests
precisely upon such beliefs, for they alone can give rise to the “great men”
(like King James I) who are able to function as true representatives of a
given historical reality.

Conclusion
I hope to have shown that Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba wrestles with more
than just aesthetic concepts or the epistemological difference between
medieval faith and modern rationality, ancient myth and scientific knowl-
edge. The political choice within this alternative has always been easy for
Schmitt. Rather, his reading of Hamlet implicitly recognizes—yet explic-
itly denies—the deep ontological dimension inherent in people’s ethical

36.  Ibid., p. 75.

37.  Ibid., p. 3. As Guy Oakes puts it in his introduction: “This means that romantic
passivity cannot be apolitical: Romanticism depends upon liberalism” (Oakes, “Transla-
tor’s Introduction,” in Schmitt, Political Romanticism, p. xix).
38.  Schmitt, Political Romanticism, p. 162.
 Myth Or Knowledge?   29

beliefs and cultural norms. The modern age is not only haunted by the rise
of normative relativism, as Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and other conservative
thinkers consistently argued. It is also, and more fundamentally, haunted
by the ontological relativity that arises concomitantly with this relativism
and goes straight to the core of reality as such. This insight, I submit, con-
stitutes the “real” absent presence that Schmitt encounters in his reading
of Hamlet.