La scommessa di Otello
Abstract
Comparing Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialist argument about the Other as the primary agent and cause of self-knowledge (Le regard de l’Autre, in L’Etre et le Néant) with Stanley Cavell’s challenging interpretation of Othello (in his The claim of reason) about the issue of a skeptical uncertainty concerning the knowledge of other people, this essay argues that the desire for acknowledgment but also the avoidance of it are the key to Othello’s and Desdemona’s predicament and tragic destiny. Othello’s stake on Desdemona’s integrity at the cost of his own life (“my life upon her faith”, 1.3.292) sets in motion the paradox of his relationship with the Other as prime mover of his own private and public identity, but also as a limit to self-knowledge. It presents him with the impossible acknowledgement of her desire, and, perhaps worse, with his own lack. In the play the condition of separateness is dramatized in the testing of the body as a paradigm of difference: an object of desire and an obstacle to the transparency of meaning.
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ISSN 0585-4733
ISSN DIGITALE 1825-8646
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