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We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence,
For it is as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.
Hamlet, 1.1.143-461
If the "I" in these poems is so difficult to locate, then how wary you and I-or you, I, and they-should be in presuming to say "we."2
AT THE END OF HIS ESSAY, Lee Edelman poses a challenge to pedagogy. "Could any pedagogy renounce the sublimation inherent in acts of reading, taking seriously the status of teaching as an impossible profession and seeing ourselves in relation to our students as agents of a radical queerness whose assault on meaning, understanding, and value would take from them much more than it could ever give?" (169). If, as Edelman argues, Hamlet represents "the prototype of the modern subject as Child, the subject who attempts, through an infinite future, to make present a ghostly past" (167), our vocation replicates that attempt, and our practices-of teaching literature, of teaching Shakespeare, of teaching Hamlet-instantiate, again and again, the present moment in which the past lays its hand on the future.
When Edelman writes of Hamlet, "He establishes thereby the contours of a reproductive futurism bringing archive and anamnesis together in an ideology whose complicity with aesthetic education and therefore with the violence of aesthetic education not only shapes the text of Hamlet but also contributes to its privileged position as the paradigmatic literary work of modern Western culture" (155-56), he returns us to the questions of ideology and canonicity that preoccupied, or more aptly haunted, the professional self-interrogations of the 1980s. His scrutiny of influence and inheritance recalls Alan Sinfield's critique of the English educational system: "Shakespeare is always there as the final instance of the validity of Literature. Then, because it is such a profound and universal experience, Literature must be taught to school pupils, whereupon it becomes an instrument within the whole apparatus of filtering whereby schools adjust young people to an unjust social order."3 Edelman's dissection of order evokes Jacqueline Rose's analysis of the link between psychoanalytic and literary criticism: "Writing which proclaims its integrity, and literary theory which demands such integrity (objectivity/correlation) of writing, merely repeat that moment of repression when language and sexuality were first ordered...