ExcerptThe title of Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play enacts a complex collision between politics and aesthetics.1 The titular colon divides two oppositions from each other, thus producing a couple of couples. If the “either/or” of Hamlet or Hecuba mandates an absolute decision between opposed terms, a frame familiar to us from this theorist of the sovereign decision and the friend/enemy distinction, the logic of the “both/and” within The Intrusion of the Time into (...) the Play insists upon the messy fact of lived historical interpenetration between the seemingly disjunctive spheres of politics and…. (shrink)

Placing readings of early modern painting and literature in conversation with psychoanalytic theory and assemblage theory, this book argues that, far from isolating its sufferers, melancholy brings people together.