WELL GRUBBED, OLD MOLE: MARX, HAMLET, AND THE (UN)FIXING OF REPRESENTATION

Abstract

In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx pursues a double strategy: history is represented, on the one hand, as a catastrophic decline from Napoleon to Louis Bonaparte; while on the other, this ‘debased’ repetition is depicted as unsettling the notion of a heroic past. Napoleon I can now be read back through his nephew: his ghost is reawakened, but as a caricature. Yet caricature, parody, satire, and farce were far from negative forms for Marx. They were indeed the necessary forms of representation in a society where ‘an epic … can no longer be written’. In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx developed a brilliant if unsystematic account of literary and political representation and of repetition as the unsettling of origins. He did this, above all, through a direct and indirect rereading of Hamlet as parody or farce, in which the dead father is rewritten as an ‘old mole’.

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