Daemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the Question of Conscience.

Like his previous book, Primal Scenes (1986), Ned Lukacher's new work on Shakespeare and conscience interweaves literary and historical analysis with theoretical reflection and conceptual genealogy. Lukacher pairs Freud and Heidegger as the two most important heirs of Shakespeare's staging of conscience, which is itself situated between the Judeo-Christian tradition of conscience as an internalized moral law and the Greek (pagan and pre-Socratic) "daemon" that figures conscience as the call of language in its radical externality and materiality. In the larger scheme of Daemonic Figures, Freud is the consummate analyst and inheritor of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and Heidegger is the modern philosopher who recovers the daemonic side of Being from its Platonic dissimulations. Lukacher's mapping of the theoretical field places Heidegger as the more profound and insightful thinker for a …