Loam, moles and l'homme

reversible Hamlet

Marie-Dominique Garnier

pp. 194-212

in: Stefan Herbrechter, Ivan Callus (eds), Posthumanist Shakespeares, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

Voltaire's arrogant claim that he was the first to point out to the French the "few pearls' in the "enormous dunghill of Gilles Shakespeare's plays' yields in retrospect the singular pearl of William Shakespeare's frenchified first name — a William warped into a Gilles. Jumping ahead of its time, Voltaire's reconfiguration of Shakespeare as a "Gilles dressed in ragged strips' (Voltaire, 1963, pp. 10–12; cit. in Wilson, 2007, pp. 268–9, nn. 34 and 40) productively resonates against the host of striped Gilles of late twentieth-century French philosophy — a Gilles Deleuze, a Jacques Derrida, a Foucault or a Félix. Voltaire's statement and the volte-face it invites to perform offer a proto-example of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have conceptualized as a line of flight, as a principle of transverse, a-historical connectivity.

Cited authors

Derrida Jacques

Deleuze Gilles

Foucault Michel

Shakespeare William

Guattari Félix

Voltaire