az- Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama -by Tzachi Zamir
.. Chapter: Doing Nothing ..
p172 Cavell [1987 Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare new edition released 2003 with new essay so, "in seven plays"] has read Hamlet in terms of a resistance to enter the world, attempt to 'hold back from existence'..relation delay & non-agent-oriented sense of self yes .. death wish linked w opposite wish to be internalized & met.
in resistance to taking on role of avenging son, Hamlet discloses a wish to remain undetermined, open-ended, unorganized. this resistance occurs in a maturing man -- one who, like Hamlet, is precisely at the stage of being pressed into moving from primarily potential agency (a prince, a student) yes my seven colleges Sylvia Plath's plums at end of branchs: to row at Oxford or to... to being this or that. We encounter an awareness of the residual pre-formed "that within" that Desdemona picket out and loved in Othello, and that Hamlet - will not - give up on.
Being or not being, rather than living or not living, is how he articulates his thoughts. Nothing is less determined than just being. well~. this marks the difference btw this solioquy and other despair literature of the time ~int (the Duke's exchange with Claudio in Measure for Measure, or Spencer's Despair).
Hamlet's father too is no father but a god there to be worshiped rather than loved - this indicates repulsion from actualized personalities. hm.
Hamlet's dying request that his story be only "more or less" related to Fortinbras ... "the rest is silence." ~Wittgenstein tractatus ends in ~ what we cannot speak about we must

p178 Genuine mourning should put a stop to life stop all the clocks, sweep up the wood - for nothing now can come to any good; deautomate and destabilize the move to action. Grief is a state that opens up and justifies lingering between being & acting, a state to which Hamlet is drawn. Taking revenge is to transform sorrow into actions. In a way it is like crying (Hamlet never cries). Modifying grief into action is to avoid a deeper form of mourning. The *refusal* to reorganize life yes around a powerful new state is a recognition & respect of that state. In Hamlet, lingering in this state also opens up the problematic nature of the very idea yes of an active organized life, the awkward relations between life and its regulating structures. We cannot know whether a preexisting Didion, On Keeping a Notebook ~ ppl keep notes are ppl w presentiment of loss philosophical fascination with the loss involved in becoming an agent yes. what are you afraid of? 'I don't want to be a person.' *a person.* causes Hamlet to use grief, or whether it is the other way around: his bereavement bringing out the philosophical experience. ~first, the loss. attachment, separation.
abstract concerns that underlie the play: that self-exposure and communication require an assent to be merely partially perceived catatonia ~ stop talking ~ very concerned with 'that is not it, that is not what I meant, at all.' ~ Maus: "Beckett said 'every word is a stain on silence.' ... Still, he *said* it." We become an object of reference it not thou for others thr being reduced to some of our roles as performing (acting) agents. Trying to remain undisclosed, doing nothing, is an attempt to resist this reduction. Hamlet is a play about such an attempt.
The reasons underlying the resistance escape the person involved and, the play suggests, must escape him because of what he regards as the essential defects of language the rest is silence - must be passed over in silence. Words reduce self into collection of descriptions that supposedly capture & stabilize what one is, enabling reference, signification, evaluation my upset at reading profiles online.
Hamlet's fantasy is Othello's nightmare: the former wants to remain undefined and be contacted as such, while for the latter such contact is too much, annihilating his established personality okay. his 'defenses.' One is a play about the wish to be rather than to be an agent, while the other is about the desire to be identified as an agent rather than to just be. okay, right. one protagonist embodies the loss experienced in moving from being to being an agent *what* is lost? (me). my life looks pleasant. but *I* don't want to do it. animate it.; the other the opposite loss: the pain of perception that penetrates beyond one's agency.