Summary: Philosopher professor Critchley and psychoanalyst Webster, a husband and wife team, study Shakespeare’s play alongside other writers, philosophers and psychoanalysts - from Nietzsche and Freud to Melville and Joyce. They've found that, like an insistent ghost, Hamlet only has more to reveal with each passing era. Hamlet discloses the modern paradox of our lives: how thought and action seem to pull against each other, the one annulling the possibility of the other. As a counterweight to Hamlet's melancholy paralysis, Ophelia emerges as the play's true hero. In her madness, she lives the love of which Hamlet is incapable. Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He also teaches at Tilburg University and the European Graduate School. His many books include "Very Little ... Almost Nothing," "The Faith of the Faithless," and "The Book of Dead Philosophers." He is the series moderator of The Stone, a philosophy column in The New York Times to which he is a frequent contributor. Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author of "The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and Its Sublimation" and has written for Apology, Cabinet, The New York Times, and many psychoanalytic publications. She teaches at Eugene Lang College at the New School and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at the City University of New York.
